My friends Francis and Francis

mars 11, 2009 
Filed under: Francis Bacon
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Francis Bacon the painter and Francis Giacobetti the photographer. At one time when I introduced them to each other, the latter was roaming around the world on a quest for a rather unusual Grail: to take three large format photographs of personalities of every origin and nationality, from the Dalai Lama to Federico Fellini, along with Mstislav Rostropovich, Akira Kurosawa, Lawrence Durrell and many other great world figures. Three photographs – always the same, yet never the same: one of a face and one of a pair of hands in black and white, framing a third featuring the sitter’s irises – the latter, of course, in colour. This ensemble of triptychs is now well known; a lavish publication and exhibitions have made it famous around the world. Quite apart from the technical quality of such a series, (Francis Giacobetti is, as we know, one of the top-ranking photographers of today), one also admires the originality of the concept.

A face (sometimes a half-length portrait), eyes and hands. Thus the photographer sets himself this challenge of art in general and of painting in particular. A challenge is perhaps the best definition of the reiteration of a theme and its variations. Here, other names rush to mind: Rembrandt, Hokusai, Monet, van Gogh, Cézanne to name but a few. Bacon too, without doubt, whose portraits, self-portraits and triptychs constitute, on the whole, themes of infinite variations. Bacon, who, in the mould-breaking twentieth century, revealed himself a little more each day as the heir to the great Western pictorial tradition – a painter of discord, violence, and blazing vitality. He, who with just a handful of others, managed through renewal to communicate painting at a time when many wanted to convince us that it had had its day. That Bacon took up this challenge of renewal is sufficient evidence of his determination and daring.
Thus the photographer of triptychs met the painter of triptychs in the latter’s studio, and the visitor to the exhibition at the Marlborough Gallery can observe how fruitful this meeting must have been for Giacobetti. Firstly, these remarkable large format black and white colour prints, and then some unique urane silver gelatin prints, which show us the artist’s face, “his closely-set, steely-blue eyes, with their tense, hypnotic stare” – this incomparable predatory look that all creators share. For once Francis Bacon had found his way, painting was all that mattered to him. Here one thinks of Monet painting his wife Camille on her death bed, ‘surprised to find himself using the diluted colours that death had just brought to her still face”, and also of Picasso, “this admirable murderer”, to cite René Char. All of them imperial eagles, wheeling overhead in heights unknown to common mortals. Birds of prey, without doubt, but whose company was never just that of some threatening demiurge – at least, not Francis Bacon, whom I had the luck to meet. On the contrary, he was a man to whom nothing human was foreign.

To return to what surrounds us here, not only would these large format photographs by themselves justify this exhibition, but also the extraordinary ensemble of spontaneous photographs taken during exchanges of conversation, which go far beyond the usual kind of gossipy reportage. Photographs in which, as Paul Eluard remarks in another context, “the virtual objet blossoming from the real object is what in turn becomes the real, the combination of the two making an image from reality to reality.” Reality beyond reality, where the photographer, thanks to his talent and through the miracle of his technique, leads us onto the path of the dead painter, beyond the mirror, in a proliferation of images as inventive as they are moving. For this I thank him.

Michel Archimbaud
Paris, March 2003

A compelling photographic collaboration

mars 11, 2009 
Filed under: Francis Bacon
Tagged: ,

Francis Giacobetti entered in 1991 into an exceptional and highly productive pact with Francis Bacon. For the painter had sensed that this man, an artist whose medium was the camera, could be a worthy partner in a collaborative exploration of photographic picture making. Giacobetti, the gently spoken Corsican, with his mix of shy reserve and sure vision, his sparkle and his subtle sensuality, his charm that revealed a highly sensitive intuition – one might say a strongly developed ‘feminine’ sensibility – was someone with whom Bacon clearly felt at ease, whom he could trust and whose company he would enjoy.

Giacobetti had long admired Bacon, and had studied and knew his work in surprising detail. But he had never found an opportunity to meet him. They eventually came together at the outset of an unprecedented portrait project that the photographer had devised. It was his intention to make an extended series of tightly prescribed triptych portraits of a pantheon of the most distinguished figures in the world – his objective was to photograph the head, the hands, and, in colour, the irises of his subjects. He prepared a straightforward, mobile set-up that would enable him to capture in a controlled and consistent way the unique colour field that is in each individual’s iris – as personal as a fingerprint, as near abstract and as transcendental as a NASA image of remote constellations. Giacobetti’s aim as a photographer has always been to proceed beyond the factual and to use camera and film in search of the fullest aesthetic, symbolic and magical potential of the medium.

Bacon gave his assent to be photographed in this way. And so began the friendship that was to lead to an extended photographic collaboration – arguably the most intense and meaningful in the artist’s career. Bacon had been photographed frequently, though most usually with some wariness in the conventional set piece images, while certain masterful photographers, of the calibre of Bill Brandt or Richard Avedon, had made forceful pictures that nonetheless subordinated Bacon’s presence to their own highly subjective signature approaches. Perhaps, as he entered the ninth decade of his life, Bacon felt ready to entrust himself into the partnership of a mature and deftly intuitive photographer with whom he could create images that engaged with issues of spirituality, time, and gesture, of the essence of being, and of mortality.

Over a period of months, from their first sitting in the autumn of 1991 to their last early in 1992, Bacon gave himself up to Giacobetti’s direction as he developed a series of powerful visual ideas. A few props were sued within particular image sequences, notably a striped mattress, a naked light bulb and a large shank of meat on a hook, cross-references to specific Bacon works, and the latter, albeit unwittingly, to a certain convention of Surrealist photography. But for the most part Giacobetti’s lens concentrated on the artist, isolated in a neutral space. The subject matter was the force, the emotional register and the presence of this exceptional man, revealed through gesture and further expressed through the values of a tightly controlled palette of blacks and charcoal, turquoise, deep golden amber and oranges, and insistent flashes of red. Giacobetti was pushing to the limits of all the lessons he had learned through four decades, his senses guiding him to capture on film the elusive qualities that define the state of human existence, and that conventional portrait photography can so rarely transcribe.

Giacobetti worked intensively with both black and white negative and colour transparency film. At the close of a productive cycle that included an long and frank interview with Bacon, Giacobetti felt that he had succeeded in coming close to the complex core of the artists being. Bacon died in April 1992, and for the best part of a decade the photographer postponed working with this wealth of material. Only recently he has felt ready to confront the issues of the scale and of process that need to be addressed in order to translate what he had captured on film into objects of substantial physical power whose compelling presence would be consistent with the ambition of his original concept. The resulting artefacts effectively meld the personalities of the two men whose creative lives have, in quite different ways, been inextricably linked with the singular power of the medium of photography.

Francis Bacon had a life-long fascination with photographic images. This intense, often ambiguous and generally private fixation with the tenacious authority peculiar to photographs is now emerging central to his creative process and is currently the subject of a detailed investigation, notably by the historian Martin Harrison, working closely with the Bacon estate. While it is not within the remit of the present text to develop this line of enquiry, certain facts and suggestions demand nonetheless to be sketched in if the artist’s relationship with Giacobetti is to be set in context. It is evident and generally acknowledged that photographs, assimilated in various forms – from film stills to newspaper cuttings – triggered and fuelled Bacon’s imagination. Bacon has confessed to the powerful impact of specific images, by Muybridge, Eisenstein or anonymous press or medical photographers, but has been more reticent in conceding quite the extent to which he has co-habited with the photographic image as both a troublesome enigma and a key visual resource.

Bacon’s is an art of raw energy, of skill and experience thrown at the mercy of the spontaneous. His was a singularly intense and visceral involvement with paint and process, and one contingent upon the unpredictable drama of chance and the inspired gesture. His canvasses succeed through an explosive synthesis of the image and the physical object.

The flat and slick surface perfection of professional photographic papers can, by comparison, appear curiously at odds with the dynamic force of the image within, and Bacon’s involvement with photographers and photographs regularly demonstrated his ambivalent yet relentless questioning of the relationships between artist, medium and content. He accumulated countless images, a crucial photo memory bank within which he would frequently intervene with his own vigorous gestures of paint or scoring. He would literally wrestle with the images to create a relationship with their subjects through his own markings, breaking through the remote and frozen stillness of photographic reality. Bacon would then allowed these scarred fragments to compost amidst the strata of detritus that was his studio. One might question in this context his preference for containing his own canvases, with all the rich, tactile gusto of their technique, behind smooth and reflective glass, akin to the glaze of a photographic print burnished on a drying drum.

Specific images and connections leave us with telling clues as to the nature of Bacon’s developing perceptions towards photographers. One of the earliest traces of his engagement with creative portrait photography dates to his time in Berlin in the late 1920s. He was depicted by Helmar Lerski in a highly wrought Expressionistic studio study, his head sculptured as a structure of intersecting slashes of light – a precocious instance of Bacon’s submission to directed photo-theatrics. From the 1940s, the dark years of war and its aftermath, there survive a few tantalising threads of a friendship and of the exchange of ideas between Bacon and British photographer-painter Peter Rose Pulham, who admired Man Ray’s ‘wilful abuse of the medium’, and who ‘always wished to show what the eye and mind, not the lens, showed’. Pulham’s prints, seemingly coaxed from the edge of darkness, gave one critic an impression of having been’ developed in a particularly virulent poison’. They are laden with a sombre melancholy. Pulham would do ‘anything to kill the slickness which modern chemicals force upon one’ – surely a sentiment closely aligned to Bacon’s attitude to the medium.

Distain for the conventions of professional photography characterised the posture of the photographer most closely associated with Bacon and his Soho circle through the fifties, the querulous John Deakin. He made many portraits of Bacon and his associates, including subjects – such as his nudes of Henrietta Moraes – that were used by Bacon as a basis for his paintings. Deakin’s work has a rawness, a kind of bare containment of violence that bacon recognised as uncommon and very special characteristics, and although he treated many prints he owned with typical carelessness. Deakin’s oeuvre survives largely thanks to Bacon’s and friend Bruce Bernard’s instincts as photo-archaeologists.

In photographer-adventurist-diarist Peter Beard, Bacon encountered in the 1970s another practitioner determined to subsume photographic conventions within his own idiosyncratic creative impulses. Bacon and Beard made a series of portraits of one another. Beard used slow exposures to trace his subject in movement and to express time and extended presence, seizing something of the painter’s aura. He then wrote on the prints in blood-red ink. Bacon was once again implicated in a provocative subversion of photography through physical intervention.

Francis Giacobetti’s approach to the process of making a photograph has been of another order. Technical simplicity, optical clarity, and a flawless image and print are his standards, and have been since he started to work as a professional in the 1960s. His passion, his creative eye, his curiosity and sensuality mark his choice and refinement of subject. Giacobetti would not use his camera merely to record fact and detail. His commitment is to structuring the elements within his viewfinder into a picture that distils the essence of an idea.

Giacobetti was born in 1939 in Marseille. He is of Corsican origin and carries in him the love of the intense light of the Mediterranean that he knew from his first years. He has a Latin sensibility that elegantly and unselfconsciously balances the carnal and the poetic. Giacobetti is an aesthete with a compassionate regard for others. He is focussed, determined, yet gentle and quietly in harmony with the rhythms of life. A natural reserve allied with a relentless curiosity make the camera with perfect tool for Giacobetti, who admits to hiding behind it and using it as an excuse for getting closer to people and things.

He started to take pictures after his father gave him his first camera in his mid teens. This was to determine his destiny. Introduced into Paris Match, he worked as a photographic assistant, soon being promoted to undertake reportage assignments. But he had no interest in photojournalism. He wanted to conceive and control the making of his images. In 1964, he was invited by Daniel Filipacci to join the founding team of a new magazine, Lui. The aim was the creation of a chic style magazine for men – a counterpoint to Elle that would present a monthly mix of consumer goods, stars, fashion, interviews and, crucially, nudes. Giacobetti became the principal contributing photographer. His territory was the female body. In his editorial, advertising and personal work he explored endlessly the subtleties of light as it hit harshly or softly caressed the contours of his models. He explored the extreme tactile magnetism of skin and the intense potency of the bared body, and exploited to considerable effect the graphic and emotive characteristics of the tightly controlled, usually deeply saturated colours that he deployed. His approach was directorial. He choreographed his subjects with care, and with a relaxed manner that translated into pictures infused with a mood of complicity. This was to be his intuitive approach with Bacon.

Such was Giacobetti’s stock in trade for twenty years as he steadily earned the respect of his peers, while typically rejecting any cult of personality. As he pursued his curiosity he refined his natural skills as an art director, characteristically achieving striking results through a great economy of means. And he extended his subject range, exploring imperfect flesh, a contrast and balance to the perfectionism of his cosmetic or beauty images. In Bacon he found the key to confronting a darker subject matter, the angst of existence and of the constant shadow of death. Giacobetti sensed in Bacon the deep inner conflicts that were the ever-present energy source of his creativity. Through their extended collaboration, Giacobetti gently coaxed from the artist a powerful final photo-performance.

We see Bacon’s head as a spectral trace, hovering on the edge of darkness. Other images give the sense of a nebulous but fraught apparition mutating somewhere between physicality and the ectoplasmic. Bacon becomes a blur, a fluid, vibrant mark, his presence traced in time through a slow exposure, his features or gestures spread by Giacobetti across the photographic emulsions, as the painter might spread his pigments across the canvas. Several series of images grouped in sequence – an echo of Muybridge – and pulsating in rich, hot monochromes breathe the vitality of Bacon’s presence through this literal and metaphorical animation. Further images present Bacon’s face, taught and contorted in a helpless primal cry. Is it the grimace of pain or of death? Another sequence shows him slumped in weariness, or despair, his wrists together – the rigor mortis posture of trussed cadavers in the Roman tombs of the Capuchin monks.

Drawing with considerable artistry and sensitivity from the spirit of his subject, Francis Giacobetti, has found strong visual metaphors for the physical and metaphysical mysteries that ultimately define all human existence.

Philippe Garner
London, March 2003