Burning Issues

Brian Duffy (a.k.a. 'The Man Who Shot the 60s') is a bluff curmudgeon who, at the height of his fame as a photographer, had a reputation for being a bit 'difficult'. This week's profile of him on BBC 4 showed him in all his grumpy glory making new pictures of some of his old sitters, joshing on a sofa with David Bailey and delivering a selection of terse observations on photography. It was a bit of fresh air, really.

The programme, the press surrounding it and the show of his work at the Chris Beetles Gallery in Mayfair (his first ever show of prints) was partly down to an interfering official from Camden council. By 1979, Duffy had reached a dead end. Increasingly bored with the kind of work he was doing and the clients that generated it, he took all his negatives out of his studio and set fire to them in a brazier. The intervention of the jobsworth official meant that the fire had to be put out before it could totally destroy the work, and enough was left for Duffy's son Chris to dig out of a shoe box many years later.

Among Duffy's observations in the programme were his thoughts on photography as an art form. As an advertising photographer, his equating his work with that of plumbers was understandable and accurate - up to a point anyway. The best commercial photographers realise the ideas in a brief by solving a succession of technical problems (something that Bailey declared Duffy to be particularly good at) to produce an image that works. But an image doesn't 'work' in the way that a cistern or a boiler does. Yes, it shows the product in the way the client wants it shown, but it has to have something else, something less tangible, to actually make it 'work'. That something might be emotion or style or even pixie dust, but it's not something that comes out of a toolbox.

The story of him burning his negatives put me in mind of another photographer who did the same thing, but for rather more refined (or pretentious) reasons than a feeling that everything he was doing was shit. In the early 80s, Brett Weston, son of Edward Weston and a photographer of immaculately printed Californian landscapes, declared that he would burn his life's work just as soon as he turned 80. In 1992, with friends and family gathered round, he did just that.

Weston stated clearly that he had destroyed his negatives because he felt that no one else could do them justice in the printing. This position contrasted with that of his friend Ansel Adams who famously likened his negatives to musical scores that were open to different interpretations by different printers.

It would be interesting to know what, if anything, Duffy would have to say about Brett Weston's stance. I imagine some kind of Jurassic, get-me-out-of-here island populated by famous photographers from the ages who spend their time eating maggots and engaging in earnest debate. Duffy and Weston would get on like an album on fire and I'd like to think the Sun would not be slow in dubbing them the Plumber and the Prima Donna.