Martin Pover

Carceri

LIZ WELLS

The camera, and its optical predecessor the camera obscura, articulate views for the spectator; perspective organises imagery around a single viewing position. This ego-centric system is not exclusive to the visual arts; the fourth wall viewpoint offered by the proscenium arch stage, also common in the nineteenth century, similarly ‘plays’ to the audience. Zoological gardens, likewise, are constructed in terms of the theatre of exhibition.

In Carceri (literally, ‘prisons’), an ongoing series of pictures from Europe, America and China, Martin Pover investigates the space of the contemporary zoo. Although purporting to offer insights into nature, zoos isolate species from one another, disrupting any normal interaction between different groups of animals, reptiles, fish and birds. Animals are caged, or confined in glasshouses or pits – incarcerated, disenfranchised, and disempowered.

Photography was implicated in Colonialism: European travellers’ photographs of people and places, in distant reaches of the world, offered glimpses of that otherwise unseen. Not only were images brought back; people, objects and animals were also imported. This was not new; established menageries included non-native animals, and indigenous people were transported along with foods and spices gathered by explorers and traders (Roman, Elizabethan...). Influenced by nineteenth century imperial and technological developments and related social changes, empiricist philosophers became particularly interested in taxonomies, typologies, and classification. The London Zoo was founded in 1828, and many national and municipal museums date from the mid-Victorian era. British public collections presented cabinets of curiosities and, with the invention of the steam train, people were able to get to exhibitions more easily. If, on the grounds of class, cost or time, individuals could not travel abroad, they could still participate in the delights of the tourist gaze through visiting pleasure gardens, galleries, museums, circuses and zoos.

As John Berger has remarked, industrialisation served to distance us from animals. Previously, within agrarian culture, a homogeneous relation with animals existed whereby animals, as he puts it ‘constituted the first circle of what surrounded man’¹.

Technological development fostered urbanisation and introduced a food chain; this ruptured the previous direct relation between humans and animals reared for food, clothing, physical work and transport. Berger also reminds us of the mythological and spiritual properties invested in animals historically and theologically whereby people may be extolled for animalistic qualities (feline, monkey, viper...) and animal life may be likened anthropomorphically to human characteristics and social structures (‘king’ of the jungle). Tensions between animals viewed as other, anthropomorphism, and the animalistic in us, are complexly reflected in the spaces we construct for them.

Pits and cages, baroque stages tailored according to type of animal, pander to a human imaginary. In Pover’s photographs, at first glance, we note a seascape or a tree, but on closer inspection this is a painted backdrop, with concrete or polystyrene furnishings resembling forestry. The colours may be earthy, but the smells and textures of nature are missing; coastal creatures cannot actually swim in this sea! The classic painted landscape, with river flowing centrally from the vanishing point, is of no interest to the animal confined in front of it. In this example, not only is the cage empty – perhaps the animals are hiding – but the rolling grassy hills are so pictorially conventionalised that wildlife activity is masked. The backdrop functions as extended illustration: here is an animal, and here is the sort of setting within it might live. The romantic painterly idyll distracts from actual physical bestiality; also from the cruelty of caging. In the monkey house, ropes substitute for tree branches, a thick wire mesh limits any sense of space and sky, and the vista of trees along which the animals might hope to swing is merely another cyclorama. Animals in captivity become, like domestic pets, dependent on their keeper for shelter and sustenance. The floor of one enclosure may be made of sand, but plastic curtaining on the exterior doorway substitutes oddly for the no doubt rough-hewn mouth of a cave within which shelter might be sought.

Why look at animals now? Carceri draws attention to viewpoints and angles of vision constructed for the visitor. Protected from actual animals, we look through metal bars, or down onto an indoor ‘room’; our relative power is enhanced, and safety is assured. That these places are photographed when there is no animal present draws attention to their artificiality. Ultimately the pictures invite us to question such spaces in terms that reflect human fears of containment. Zoos persist despite – or perhaps because of - such ambiguities.

The topographic method and formal visual geometry, (typical of Pover’s eye), emphasise containment and display. In effect, we are exposed to a double layering of Western aesthetics – that of the camera, and that of the set design. In the gallery the pictures are 40 inches square, mounted on aluminium, not framed, offering direct encounter. There is a paradoxical justice in photography being used to draw attention to such staged phantasms. That they are straight shots, made on site, neither digitally assembled nor enhanced, returns us to the realist credibility and empiricist interests that characterised both the foundation of zoos and the facilities initially accorded to photography.

1. John Berger (1971), ‘Why Look at Animals?’ in About Looking, London: Writers and Readers, 1980