With his new exhibition, award-winning film-maker Anthony Byrne returns to photography, his first love
YOU CAN ALWAYS tell when an audience has particularly enjoyed a film: there is no scramble for coats and hats, no dash to the aisles and exit the moment the action ends. Instead, as one, you wait, trying to extract every last moment from your experience, listening to the closing music, and watching the credits roll. Sometimes you’re rewarded for your faithful waiting with a final snippet of something, an unexpected treat for staying to the very end. But all films do eventually end, and what you take with you, when you leave the cinema, are memories of movement, snatches of dialogue, and feeling – yes, when you have particularly enjoyed a film, you are left with so much feeling.
So how different is photography, where nothing moves, and there is no dialogue? Everything is revealed at once, so there are no surprise rewards for lingering longer, and yet, when you have particularly enjoyed an exhibition, you might possibly bring an image home with you and not just in the imagination, but physically, by buying one. Of course, you can also purchase a DVD of a favourite movie, but the immediacy of a photograph comes from the way it may capture, in a single frame, an entire story, all at once.
Anthony Byrne has explored both these ways of capturing feeling and telling stories – as a film-maker, and as a photographer. Photography was his first love, but one thing led to another: “I started as a film-maker through photography. I didn’t have a film camera or a digital camera, so I was creating stories from still images and letting my imagination do the rest.”
Byrne was born in Dublin and now divides his time between Dublin and London. His short film Short Order had a cast including Vanessa Redgrave, Jack Dee and John Hurt, and was nominated for eight Ifta awards, winning one. When we meet, he is putting finishing touches to Wild Decembers, based on the Edna O’Brien novel, while this Easter, another instalment of his crime drama, Single-Handed, will be shown on RTÉ. He describes the period after concluding a film as a “vacuum”, but this time, he is filling that vacuum with an exhibition of his photography.
But first, I am curious how a film-maker, just starting out, can get the likes of Redgrave and Hurt to appear in a short? “I knew John Hurt from my short film Meeting Che Guevara, and that had come about when he was in a play at the Gate. I contacted him through a friend of a friend. Then Rade Serbedzija, who was in Short Order, is friends with Vanessa Redgrave, and I asked him if he could call her, and she phoned me the next day – it was pretty bizarre.”
As a director, Byrne can tell his actors where to stand, what to do. Even before the actors have stepped on set, the lighting has been set up, and the camera angles planned. There is a whole team there to make the film happen. As a photographer, on the other hand, he is pretty much alone with his subject, and that is where his exhibition’s title, No Direction, comes from. “I enjoy collaborating with people,” he says, “but from time to time you have to go back to yourself to ask why you’re doing it, and where you want to go next. That’s probably where this has come from; it was to go back to doing something solely, that was just from me.”
Nevertheless, some images look as if they are film sets, waiting for the actors to engage. Station, taken in Madrid, is one such example. “I remember that very well,” says Byrne. “I was waiting for a train. I looked over the railing and saw these people, I didn’t know what the story was, or what was going on, but it looked like the photograph already. They were standing in a way that, if it was on a set, you’d say to the assistant director: ‘don’t move, keep them as they are’.”
None of Byrne’s photographs have been set up. The girl in the garden in Wicklow in Wonderland had walked ahead, bored with waiting for Byrne to try to capture the right light on a leaf; and seeing her framed ahead of him, he got the shot. Not being able to control the shot has its drawbacks, though. To get the NYC diner image, he recalls a long wait. “I stood outside in the freezing cold for an hour, waiting for the right light, the red hand on the traffic lights, and no cars or people in the window. But I quite like being on my own. I went back over two nights to get it right. And I was wrapped up in layers. It was so cold, I couldn’t feel my fingers.”
Byrne agrees that the story in a photograph is reached differently to the story in a film. “For me, there are two stages with photography: there’s the immediate reaction, where I look and think, ‘that’s a cool image’, then I look for longer to see what’s going on, then I can project whatever I want to on it. And it’s the same for people who come to see this exhibition. While I have complete control over the image with photography, I’m not imposing something on the viewer. I’ve left it open.”
It’s clear that Byrne’s work in film and in photography comes from a strong visual and storytelling sense, but while we have no problem with the idea of people having a visual or creative talent, we do seem to have issues with people who cross between different forms. Singers who act, actors who paint, painters who want to make movies, are often dismissed as dilettantes and dabblers – and this isn’t helped by promoters equating fame in one area with talent in another. Why, for example, should an artwork be worth more because Ronnie Wood painted it? It’s not as if he’s going to come to your house and chat in the evenings as you look at it (thankfully, perhaps).
On the other hand, remembering the success of painter Julian Schnabel’s films – Basquiat and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, reminds us to allow truly creative people to explore their talents, in whatever direction their inspiration may take.
No Direction is at The Back Loft, 7-11 Augustine Street, off Thomas Street, Dublin 8, from March 26th to April 1st, and then at Maison Bertaux in London from April 22nd until the end of May. A raffle of work on the opening night in Dublin will be held in support of CARI children’s foundation. See anthonybyrne.net.
EXHIBITION
WORDS GEMMA TIPTON
PORTRAIT DAVID SLEATOR