Mick Hartley

It's not a good sign, in my experience, when photographers mess around with their pictures. You'd think the world as captured on camera would be endlessly fascinating as it is, without the need to add or subtract or enhance.

At the Photographers' Gallery there's an exhibition, Cast, by Dryden Goodwin. What Goodwin does, he takes portraits of anonymous Londoners, "people travelling through the public spaces of London’s West End", and draws scratchy doodles all over their heads. Sometimes it's red scratches, as in the photo in the link, and sometimes it's white scratches:

Physically intervening with the image through animation and drawing, the artist disrupts the stalled nature of the photograph, which he describes as a way of ‘thinking into the photograph’.

The portraits are, I think, rather fine. What he does with them, less so. But this is the kind of pretension that so many galleries seem to like nowadays. Dryden Goodwin is clearly a man who knows how to play the game. A decent portraitist he may be, but that's not enough. To appeal to the people who run these galleries you need an extra twist, something to allow them the opportunity to do what they do best: indulge in some of that good old art-speak. As the quality of the work goes down, the verbosity of the explanatory notes goes up:

The title Cast suggests a plurality of meanings, all of which have resonances with the work, from casting a line to casting a shadow, from casting a film role to casting a sculpture, from casting suspicion to casting a spell.

Goodwin uses a variety of media in his work, and in this show he explores, in particular, a relationship between photography and drawing. Concerning his mark making over the people in his images, the artist has said: "it's an ambiguous gesture, it can suggest empathy or hostility, it can be a caress or an imposition."

In the series Cradle (white scratches), we have this:

As Goodwin inscibes into the print, as if to reach back to the moment of the photograph's original exposure and to his subjects' pensive moments of reflection, the title Cradle takes on a literal tone. The work becoming a site of nurturing in which he wonders about these strangers, imagining an affinity and even an intimacy with them. Nevertheless, within the scratchings of the print's surface, a sense of violation also lingers, as does the subjects' vulnerability to a less than benign form of voyeurism.

Good stuff, eh? - "a site of nurturing". But they're right; yes, a sense of violation does linger. The portraits themselves, of people quietly going about their business unaware that they were being photographed, would have made an absorbing show. But the photographer didn't trust the pictures to speak for themselves. He had to scrawl all over them: to add to the imposition of taking their portraits unasked the obscenity of defacing them, of taking away their dignity for the sake of a spurious "message", which the artistically educated could then impart to the rest of us in the approved didactic manner of the modern expert.

But hey, that's art…..right?