Steve Pyke - Photographer

"For me, photography is an investigation into the nature of being."

The aim of the website is to offer the public a stimulating cross-section of the photographic work of Steve Pyke, which fully demonstrates its immediacy, richness and diversity. This site of 150 images, will combine the incisive portraits of celebrities and ordinary people which have become Pyke’s trademark with a range of other work in which his distinctive and highly graphic sensibility is amply displayed.

Increasingly recognised as a leading photographer of our time, Steve Pyke deals in his work with central issues of contemporary culture and society. As a mode of representation the portrait allows its practitioners a more detailed exploration of identity and personality than other forms. Pyke exploits this aspect of the genre to bring the viewer — sometimes frighteningly — close to his subjects in a way which lays bare their presentations of self. In seeking to visualise revealing aspects of human existence, which include such disregarded clues to a person’s individuality as the possessions they have abandoned, or the land and buildings they have occupied, he creates photographs in which the camera’s lens has been as carefully honed as a scalpel. It is through such a sharpened sensibility that his images isolate revealing elements of the scene.

Much of the drive behind Pyke’s work comes from a taxonomic urge — a profound fascination with the collection and classification of images. His portrait work displays this strong organising objective, comprising projects on philosophers, film directors, first war veterans and, more personally, his growing children. It is equally evident in the strong landscape studies he has made in Ireland, America, Australia and elsewhere, and in the still lives (some really natures mortes) which punctuate his oeuvre. Alongside this work runs yet another stream of material, more photo-journalistic in terms of its subject matter, which has seen him make telling studies of marginal people — the homeless, delinquent, ravaged individuals cast aside by a society driven by selfish individualism.

"The contents of a photograph are not facts, nor reality, nor truth. They are a means that we have created to extend our way of seeing in our search for ‘truth’"

The classificatory urge to envision the nature of being has its complement in Pyke’s other characteristic as an artist, the strongly graphic quality of his imagery: as he has said, "I do not want my work to be about like or dislike but about ‘what do you see?’"

With a marked predilection for the black and white photograph, Pyke offers the viewer a palette of greys edited down to an almost minimalist spareness, coupled with a tight framing in which all attention is brought to bear on the subject. Composing within the square offered by the viewfinder of the Rolleiflex cameras which he favours, his vision is rigorous and all-embracing.

The creativity evidenced by Pyke’s work has received perhaps its most intriguing manifestation in the multiple and composite images he has created throughout his career. His Triptychs, Diptychs, collages and other assembled works seek to overcome the limits of the camera eye, and its fixed perspective or viewpoint. They present a visualisation of the world far richer in both time and space than a single photograph can achieve.

The website is divided into sections which represent central themes in the development of Steve Pyke’s photography.

FACES OF OUR TIME

"For some people a photograph is an affirmation of existence. For others it questions existence. On a most fundamental level one may question a likeness. ‘How is that me? ... It does not look like me ... but it is there in front of me."

Steve Pyke’s best-known portrait work has sought to provide a conspectus of the "faces of our time", to record those who have made a contribution to the history of the age. Although many of those photographed would admit (some with reluctance, others with delight) to the appellation "celebrity", Pyke’s approach makes no concession to such a meretricious notion. They are recorded with exactly the same care as that devoted to those whose names will never figure in the tabloids or Who’s Who, the unremembered, ordinary folk who survived wars, scratched livings from the street, or put on their uniforms with pride so that they could be immortalised on the film wound through an old Rolleiflex.

Conceived with a few nods in the direction of major figures in the history of art and photography such as Van Dyke, Dürer, August Sander and Irving Penn, Pyke’s portraits derive their coherence from the fact that they form part of a great task of classification. The only way out of the conundrum — so many faces, so little time — is to construct a big grid where each portrait can find its natural slot. So Pyke has his collections — philosophers, veterans, film directors, writers, prisoners, itinerants, and so on. They are ways of making sense of a vast enterprise: "faces of our time".

STILL LIVES

Steve Pyke takes the view that "The contents of a photograph are not facts, nor reality, nor truth. They are a means that we have created to extend our way of seeing in our search for ‘truth’". In his photographs of the objects and beings represented as "stilled lives", Pyke plays with the idea of the photograph as document, as a source of revealed truth.

He makes these images as ways of classifying the things which create identity and a sense of belonging, as records of our transitory grip on objective certainty. In classical European painting, the still life generally contains intimations of mortality. So it is with a Pyke photograph. Nothing perhaps seems more grounded than a pair of shoes, nothing more prosaic than a well-used garden tool. But these photographs belie their documentary appearance, for they are simply abstractions, the cast off evidence of lives we can never know.

Nowhere is the abstracted quality of Pyke’s "stilled lives" more clearly presented than in the flattened frogs and desiccated rabbits of his "road-kill" series, memento mori appropriate to our time.

LANDSCAPES

The face of the land has been of absorbing interest to Steve Pyke, and it is a genre to which he has returned on many occasions.

It has been conventional for photographers working in black and white to expand the tonality of their images in representing landscape. Pyke’s approach runs totally counter to this tradition. It is distinctive and highly graphic: he reduces the land to a few shades of grey between the extremes of pure white and deepest black.

As in his other work, Pyke’s approach seeks to capture and order the land forms within his visual grasp. He wants to classify revealing aspects of human existence, to collect abandoned or forgotten cues to personality and culture: the shape of a field, the way a building copes with its location, the marks men and women have left upon the land they occupied

COMPOSITES

The remarkable similarity of a Pyke composite to the order displayed in a Victorian museum’s specimen drawer is far from accidental. Taxonomy favours symmetry and formal elegance, for it both orders being and contextualises it within both time and space.

Steve Pyke’s multiple images offer an intriguing view of his passions for form and order, for they play with some defining characteristics of the photograph. The one-eyed, paralysed vision of the camera can only be surmounted by assemblages of images which seek, like a painting, to create an overlapping set of representations, a sort of layering effect which reproduces the experience of seeing. Hockney developed his own distinctive approach to the form: Pyke has created another, which takes off from his deft use of the square 6x6cm format. In his collages time can pass and space can move.

VIEWS FROM THE STREET

Steve Pyke’s oeuvre contains many images where he has adopted the perspective of the photo-journalist, treating the street as his studio, and making images which are underpinned by his social concerns.

This work provides a fascinating counterbalance to his images of celebrities and savants, for it alludes to his fascination with recording the faces of those marked by the darker side of contemporary society. For each face radiating success, achievement, prosperity, there are many which reflect unemployment, deprivation, abuse. In his projects on the homeless, on young offenders, on prostitutes and women’s prison we see Pyke’s humanism come to the fore.

All street photographers are drawn to markets, and Steve Pyke is no exception. His images of Brick Lane, for instance, reflect the symbolic divide between celebrity and anonymity, much as the market itself is situated on the boundary between respectability and criminality.

Markets, like the street itself, are also the site of popular amusement, a theme which Pyke has explored from the beginning of his career with fascinating results. His images of circuses, fairs, and the people who inhabit them fix on their bitter-sweet, illusionary character - rather sad and lonely places where the spectacle of the moment chases away, but only for an instant, the cares and worries of the world.

© Peter Hamilton