Perspectives, Polaroids 82-84

Started in 1982, David Sylvian developed himself a form of Polaroid montage photography which took him two years to master and complete. A result of this was an exhibition at the Hamilton Gallery in London (June 18-30, 1984). Further exhibitions followed in Tokyo, Milan and Turin.

"The Polaroids came out of a period when I stopped writing and were kind of an extension of the drawing and painting I was doing. And I don't place that much importance on all that at all, other than it being some kind of exorcism for myself, it was necessary for me to do that at the time I wasn't writing."
(from Progressive Alternatives by Kathleen Galgano 4/91)

Although a lot of visitors came to the exhibition, most of them were fans of David. The so-called art-critics, whatever they may be, were less enthusiastic and even called it a rip-off because of it's more than average similarity with David Hockney's "Cameraworks" exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in London a year before.
A big difference between the works of both artists was that David's montages were less price and often with pastels added.

David always claimed that he was very sorry that his work was displayed. Why?
Maybe because of that criticisms or maybe it's that he felt that he wasn't ready yet for such an exposure of an art form that was not his usual area. Take into account that the time of the Polaroids exhibition was almost simultaneously with the release of Brilliant Trees. The latter did cost a lot of money to complete and David was short of cash. The extra money was welcome.
Other parties were so eager to publish/display anything from David, supporting the release of Brilliant Trees and he just couldn't say no at that time! He later tells that he was a bit naive and weak at that time.
Nevertheless, if David didn't display his work in the UK and therefor we wouldn't have the marvelous Perspectives book, the Japanese version of this book, the collages, me looking for both a collage and japanese Perspectives book for a life time, and the Preparations For a Journey video/laserdisc with the soundtrack that later became Steel Cathedrals. Still one his best tracks ever!

Now here's the full story, starting with an article from Smash Yearbook 1985, by Ian Birch:

It all began back in 1982 when David Sylvian was on a visit to Japan to see his brother Steve play with Yukihiro Takahashi. Backstage after the concert he couldn't help noticing how everyone seemed to have a Polaroid camera and would take pictures of everyone else taking pictures. He was fascinated.
Japan the group had decided to break up at the end of the year and David was anxious to find a new outlet for his energies. The Polaroid suddenly seemed a perfect solution. It was easy to operate, exciting and produced immediate results. It was also a logical step on from the drawing and painting he had been dabbling in over the previous months.
"I was always very lazy as far as taking pictures was concerned," he smiles, "and after having filled a roll of film with pictures of friends and places, I invariably failed to have the film developed. So the Polaroid camera appeared to be well suited to me".
He became hooked. During Japan's farewell tour, he whiled away those long hours of boredom in hotel rooms experimenting with the camera. "I would take self-portraits and then distort the pictures by various means to find a variety of different effects. After tiring of using myself, the room, the TV etc. as subject matter, I would turn to the view from the hotel window." But he quickly discovered that Polaroid aren't that well suited to landscapes. Not only are the pictures themselves small but you also cannot zero in on one focal point. He hit on the idea of Polaroid montages -a collection of separate polaroids that gradually build up a complete view. What interested him now was not just what you see but also how you take it. He started photographing a stately old church that faced his top-floor London flat. He did it from different angles, at different times of day and in different lights. He ended up with six montages that can be seen in his book, Perspectives: Polaroids '82-84 (published by his own company Opium (Arts) Ltd). After buildings he naturally enough moved on to people, working with close associates like Steve Jansen, Riuichi Sakamoto (with whom he wrote the "Forbidden Colours" single) and his girlfriend Yuka Fujii. His montage of Steve and David's cat Oppi is an ideal example of the whole procedure. "It took about two hours and was done in my home," explains David. "I moved the camera up and down his body, starting at the top and then moving down from the right to the left and so forth. The idea of the picture is to make it very flat so you get everything in natural perspective. It looks like a miniature version of the real thing!
"That's something the eye doesn't do," he continues. "By nature you see something that's smaller -like the feet are smaller than the head. In a magazine you look at a picture as a whole and see it very quickly. "But with this montage you don't look at it as one whole picture, instead you tend to move around it and look at each section like a separate picture. I like that idea. I like the idea of taking a portrait of somebody's hands and arms and chest and then putting the whole thing together, giving you a valuable document of the person."
And that's not all. David also wants his pictures to give an idea of What the photographer is like. He wants his own "physical presence" to be there. Consequently a good montage should tell us what the person in the picture is like, what the atmosphere of the session was like and what the feelings of the photographer were. If all this is achieved, the montage should be completely "individual and unrepeatable".
"People are very wary about buying a photograph," reckons David, "because they don't feel it's a one-off or anything special and they can't feel the photographer's presence. But in mine you can. You can feel I was there and that slightly narrows the border between painting and photography because you can feel the presence of the photographer."
"But we've forgotten one crucial extra. What about Oppi? "Actually she was on top of my piano at the time so I thought it would be fun to include her," he laughs. "Most of all it shows how casual Steve was."
A selection of David's work was shown earlier this year in June at London's Hamilton Gallery (13 Carlos Place, W.1). Wherever possible the gallery owner asks the artist exhibiting there for something for his private collection. David agreed to do him a montage and decided to do part of the gallery itself. You can see the result blow. "The aim was to create the impossible! -what the eye can't see in one go and what the camera can't do in one go. I took the brightest section of the room because I don't like to use flash and I just tried to make it the broadest picture possible. Once again the perspective is all-important. That's what the whole thing is about.
Unfortunately I only had three boxes of Polaroids at the time so I didn't get as much as I wanted. But I think it works!'

 

The making of the Hamiltons Gallery polaroid montage
David in Hamiltons Gallery (before the invasion)	David in Hamiltons Gallery (during the invasion)	Polaroids taken. David hunkers down and starts selecting which ones to use.
The next step is to put the Polaroids into some sort of order to create the montage.	The end result: Hamiltons Gallery, 18 june 1984

In the summer of 1983, a year of photographing a lot of buildings in the UK and friends in the UK and Berlin (Steve Jansen, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Holger Czukay) was finished and the recordings for the Brilliant Trees album was just completed. Now, Yuka and David went to Switzerland, the middle- and south of France, were they stopped to meet Pierre Barouh. The collage that was made at Barouh's house did not appear in the UK version of the Perspectives book but was included in the Japanese book. The original collage was displayed for a long time in the hall of the Opium (Arts) building in London, before it was replaced by the Russell Mills painting that became the cover artwork of Gone To Earth.
After this stop they went to Japan (visited the farewell concert of the Yellow Magic Orchestra) and further on they went to India and Nepal. During all these visits, David made a lot of polaroids and quite a lot them made it on the exhibition and in the book Perspectives, limited to 5000 copies and produced and distributed by his own company Opium (Arts) Ltd. The  Japanese version of the book was limited to only 500 pieces!
In the autumn of 1984 the exhibition was in Tokyo and a TV company suggested the possibility of making a documentary about himself. Not very enthusiastic with the idea, but short of money, David went to Japan where he got all the freedom of writing and producing the video. With director Yasuyuki Yamaguchi he shot some video where he parted it up in two parts. The first, a sort of documentary about the process of making a montage and the second part mainly built up of footages filmed in the industrial area of Tokyo supported by a piece of David and Ryuichi Sakamoto called Showing The Wound (A Will To Health) which became after treatment Steel Cathedrals.
The video was released on VHS and laserdisc as Preparations For A Journey. In between the above mentioned filmed chapter, there are shots of montages in the Tokyo exhibition and the last part of the movie became known as Steel Cathedrals, which was released on it's own in the UK.

This page is under construction!

This chapter shows the artwork project in which David Sylvian was involved.
Although we know that he does a lot of painting, no work has been sighted yet.