eleni mouzakiti

In Limbo, Ian Jeffrey

In the old days, in the 1950s at least, we gave up our images more willingly to the camera. We were still participants in a great collective venture, and somehow it showed. But as time wore on, we became more sceptical about the idea of a collective destiny. Photographers too became more sceptical and began to show us at times when we were at a loss… as we are on the kind of rail journeys which are Eleni Mouzakiti’s subject in this book.

Why persist as a People’s portraitist in these changed conditions?

For several good reasons. The other who had once been primarily a representative of humanity has become, in the new scheme of things, altogether more of a mystery. At a glance we can distinguish relatively little, and especially in the heterogenous circumstances of the big city. One of the disappointments of the mobile phone is that it breaks the spell. Revealing far more of the humdrum life of the other than we want to know. Almost all of these pictures project encounters as minor melodramas, involving tension and suspicion. They re-enchant the world or re-phrase it as a tale told about people who harbour deep secrets. Secondly, the photographer herself leads an altogether more precarious life in these changed circumstances. In the old days it was a fully justified role, but that can no longer be said of it. In the absence of any good social reason the photographer lies open to challenge and even to threat, and it is easy to imagine that some of the dramatis personae in this collection were less than happy to appear on Mouzakiti’s stage. The photographer under these terms I now a hunter, someone who runs a risk, and whose mettle is tested, So, what we are also asked to attend to is her own predicament as a taker of images.

Mouzakiti is a late modernist in so far as she draws attention to her own viewpoint, and to her own existence as a kind of secret agent. Robert Frank did something like this with The Americans in the 1950’s as did Rene Burri with the Germans a few years later. The difference is that both of those photographers were interested in the culture at large with all its apparatus. Here, on the other hand, you can learn little about London in general. What happened from the 1970’s onwards was that we became more and more aware of ourselves as solitaries. The old modernism involved us physically in workshops and on dance-floors. The new postmodern culture , on the other hand, tends to pass directly from screen to mind. Because of this we have developed an idea of the body as somehow underused and problematic. The body, with all its expressive capacities, has been left to one side or in a kind of limbo. Where better to realise this disconnecting vision than in what the English call variously ‘the tube’ or ‘the underground’, the very epitome of limbo.

Ian Jeffrey, Art Historian and Photography Critic