I. Introduction

The work, once performed, disappears forever. The only memory which one can preserve is that of the spectator’s more or less distracted perception.[1]

Theatre is a ritualistic and collaborative creative process that has long accompanied human history. It is a storytelling medium that verges upon notions of art and behavioural science in anthropological and other heuristic pursuits, and it serves as a constantly wielded metaphor for literary conventions of all ages. Axiomatically, theatre is a compound of meanings physically materialized into gestures, words and traditions within a community of individuals. In every case, two most essential elements that comprise theatre are people (e.g. the actor and the audience) and action (i.e. physical manifestation of scripted or unscripted form of a story) framed within a set time and space. Unlike film, a recent rival in the arts and entertainment arena, theatre is ephemeral; it exists only within the premise that it never really exists when it is not in play, and through repetition it constantly re-creates itself through the memory reservoir. This zombie-like quality of theatre verging on the mortal and immortal has been the key subject area for theatre studies, as exemplified by Marvin Carlson:

All theatre is as a cultural activity deeply involved with memory and haunted by repetition. Moreover, as an ongoing social institution it almost invariably reinforces this involvement and haunting by bringing together on repeated occasions and in the same spaces the same bodies (onstage and in the audience) and the same physical material…Just as one might say that every play might be called Ghosts, so, with equal justification, one might argue that every play is a memory play.[2]

Memory, thus produced and re-produced, allows theatre to seem immortal, always ghosted within different contexts, performances, and social occasions. The plurality of the audience creates varying bodies of spectatorial memories; one may remember a pair of red heels whereas another may remember a pair of purple. These different memories altogether formulated a certain mythology, which, until the advent of visual recording, played the major part of promoting theatre; before ‘seeing is believing’ became literally possible due to the invention of photography, the only way to validate theatre was to hear or read about it, look at promotional drawings and paintings, and ultimately witness it in person to in order to authenticate these external references. When George Eastman’s Kodak cameras first started to be popularized in 1888 and photographs soon became ‘as common as a box of matches’,[3] the myth of indirect memories in theatre started to be demystified by photographic images; performance shots, portraits of actors in their costumes, pictures taken on and offstage during rehearsals, backstage shots, and promotional picture posters now replaced words of mouth and paintings with its direct visual still shots of what supposedly ‘really happened’, for the particular momentums freeze-framed, inside the theatre.[4]

Photography henceforth changed the dynamics of memory and its functions within the theatrical realm; the primitive form of subjective and individual memory, once reigned as the singular source of remembered history after a performance, has been demystified and dominated by the powerful and authoritative visual aid of photography. One’s remembrance of the colours of shoes can no longer stay uninfluenced, let alone replaced, by the production shots printed on programmes, posters, and on the internet. Whereas the veracity of the photograph has always been questioned since its very naissance, theatre stayed a sanctuary where photographs were taken at their surface value in which the Wordsworthian perspective of insight ruling over sight[5] was largely dismissed. This triumph of vision is largely due to the limited expectation of photography used in theatre, commonly referred to as theatre photography or stage photography[6], only to faithfully document the action that has actually happened; although manipulation and artificial rendering of the photograph were immediately popularized alongside candid photography in the theatrical realm[7], performance shots have mostly served the singular purpose of attesting that what they portray have been real.

This thesis aims to explore the relationship between photography, used in theatre primarily as a means to preserve, and theatre, unlive yet undead in its very essence. The reason photography is to be discussed instead of film, a technologically more recent form of visual recording, pertains to the fact that the overarching theme of this thesis is a static and momentous visual memory – memory as images that are processed during and remnant after a performance, and memory as images that photographs evoke and possibly alter – which is more imminent in the single photographic image than a series of moving images.[8] In-depth analysis of photographs will ensue after every theoretical assertion, using respectively three examples from the photographic works of Angus McBean, a British theatre photographer, and three from Diane Arbus, an American photographer whose works do not pertain to the theatre locale, per se, but are often assessed as ‘theatrical’ by photography scholars. By discussing the attributes of particular photographs and positioning the styles and meanings of the two photographers’ works within the context of the theatre, this thesis aims to examine the nature of the relationship between theatre and photography, redefine theatricality and the function of theatre photography, and attempts a symbiosis between the two memory-making media.

[1] Patrice Pavis, ‘Theatre and the Media: Specificity and Interference’, in Theatre at the Crossroads of Culture (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 67
[2] Marvin Carlson, The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2001), pp. 2, 11
[3] Alvin Langdon Coburn, ‘The Future of Pictorial Photography, 1916’, in Essays and Images: Illustrated Readings in the History of Photography, ed. by Beaumont Newhall (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1980)
[4] Aoife Monks distinguishes between the photographs of a particular moment of performance and the performance itself as she discusses a production shot of The National Theatre of Scotland’s production of the Bacchae: ‘Of course, this is a photograph, not a performance, and as such, it can’t be taken as a representative of “what really happened” in the production. The photograph might instead be seen as a faulty memory of the performance, and its stillness allows us to artificially slow down the moment, and to look at it in isolation, in order to imagine its possible meanings.’ From Aoife Monks, The Actor in Costume (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p.4
[5] In “Insight and Oversight: Reading ‘Tintern Abbey’”, Marjorie Levinson claims that Wordsworth’s language harbors a depth of meanings embedded beneath the surface of the written words, thereby ascertaining the notion that the poet-observer goes beyond the sight on surface to recognize the insight underneath it. This allegory is adopted by Sigfried Kracauer in his argument that the photograph does not merely copy nature but that it ‘metamorphoses’ it, thereby transcending its role as a literal documentarian. From Marjorie Levinson, Wordsworth’s Great Period Poems (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986), pp. 14-57; Siegfried Kracauer and Thomas Y. Levin, ‘Photography’, in Critical Inquiry 19.3 (1993), pp. 421-36
[6] The two terms are interchangeably used among theatre scholars and critics alike as general reference to photography used within the theatre locale. However, neither of them is an academically appropriated denomination and a further clarification of the definition itself needs yet to be established. This thesis henceforth employs ‘theatre photography’ to designate the aforementioned generic meaning as used by Richard Traubner in his introduction to Angus McBean’s works in The Theatrical World of Angus McBean (Boston: David R Godine, 2009)
[7] Examples of manipulated photography in theatre include Angus McBean’s ‘surrealized’ portraits of famous actors and Zoe Dominic’s dress rehearsal photographing sessions where the performances never took place but the actors posed still in mid-motion wearing full costumes on the stage.
[8] Roland Barthes speculates on the fundamental difference between photography and film in Camera Lucida, arguing that this difference is an ontological one: ‘Looking at a photograph, I inevitably include in my scrutiny the thought of that instant, however brief, in which a real thing happened to be motionless in front of the eye… This explains why the Photograph's noeme deteriorates when this Photograph is animated and becomes cinema: in the Photograph, something has posed in front of the tiny hole and has remained there forever (that is my feeling); but in cinema, something has passed in front of this same tiny hole: the pose is swept away and denied by the continuous series of images: it is a different phenomenology, and therefore a different art which begins here, though derived from the first one.’ From Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1981; repr. London: Vintage, 2000), p.78

As every other night, I had a dream last night. A peculiar dream that I rarely have, which makes my legs itch all over and is incredibly sexual without inducing any other physical or emotional response. A platonic, breezy little love-dream. But it leaves a lingering taste in my mouth. The taste is not pungent at all, as it is when you wake up after a typical wet dream. It is a docile, funny little one that, as disgusting as it may sound, is a crossover between bergamot and Marmite - writing of which makes me realize that it may be the feeling of a taste, or even a smell that dreams don't filter. Dreams, as much as I love them for being how they are and what they are, never filter sensual responses; I vaguely remember a feeling of a smell or a touch, but I never can recall what smell or touch it "really" was. My dreams are visceral, they are brutal and utterly cruel to the point of intolerability, primarily because they are intensely visual. Dreams don't allow photographs and they sadly never will. Which is why I need to write this before it fades away into the shelf among those many others I recall only to have been beautiful.

He wanted to have brandy but the cafe did not have it. We had no other choice but to stay at the cafe because the sea rolled in and no land was left to tread on. We were completely isolated by water. He told me he woke up at eight in the morning to come sit with me. Then he asked if wine would be all right. We drank Merlot because they did not have Shiraz. I couldn't care less of what we drank, because he was breathtakingly beautiful. We sat for awhile in silence. Then he confessed that he'd been numbed by antidepressants since he wanted to take it easy while he's serving our country. He was an officer in the Republic of Korea Air Force. He had started to take Zoloft right before he started, because it "made him appreciate the far sounds of emptiness." I asked him if feeling anything real was ever possible in his state. He looked into my eyes and said, "I highly doubt it." That's when I leapt up and bit into his lips, gradually, then suddenly. I bit into his lips until I tasted a little bit of iron.

If only he could feel what I felt right then, my benumbed little officer. I told him I wanted to embalm his scent - by then I knew this was only a dream. I took him to a horrific bed table where I let him lie naked and poured salt on his body. He just lied there, unspoken, eyes void and aloft, enclosed in his own sadness. I told him I would murder his smell and take it away. I rubbed the earthy concoction I had made and started on the embalming process. Vinegar. Salt crystals. His eyelids started to vapor. I wrapped him up in white mineral until he told me he wished he could feel anything genuine. I leaned over to face my ordeal. Only the eyes. I rubbed my muslin cloth gently over the lids to take off the remains of my infatuation. I had to hide my tears because I could not comprehend, oh how could you not feel this beauty we're immersed in, so tragic yet so painfully real? But how could I tell it to a face that wouldn't recognize itself or how it has touched my restless hands with a softness I have never known?

That's when he grabbed me and slipped me off my feet. I was pulled on top of him as he grabbed my face with both hands and forced me to look into his eyes. They were brilliantly burning with a hollow, rootless desire. I groped for his arms and buried my hair in his ribcage. Nothing mattered now that I had finished locking up the scent of someone I so loved, a scent I cannot even smell, something I will never be able to appreciate except by listening to some unknown voice inside of me arguing its preciousness. We were captivated in a solitary solicitude of how our naked bodies seemed to acknowledge the impossibility of what took place. In the middle of hell, we became lovers. But only for the fleeting while that it lasted. I woke up into sunshine pouring into my window like a brute obscene ghost. I was lying on my bed, engulfed in the sweetness of roses I had forgotten to put away in a vase.

That is how it ended.

Ann Meejung Kim is probably my most devoted critic who happens to be my best friend. We go out together, get drunk on cheap wine together, steal things from shops together [cf. I steal and she watches] and sit in cafes not speaking for hours to write together. Of course I am joking except for the last segment. The point is that she and I have been writing together for nine years now and we keep on astonishing each other with insanely romantic and utterly impracticable ideas [cf. mostly mine] and full-witted, concise and snobbishly articulate doctrines [cf. mostly Ann's]. We may not share beds, cats, and lovers, but we share writing like we shared all of those things.

She loves it when I write things my own style. I like to write two paragraphs of insanely long sentences on topics that rid me of my sleep. She likes to write two hundred paragraphs of precisely clean-cut sentences on topics that stop her from sitting in her bathtub. I like to write an essay in five minutes and never revise it. She likes to write an essay in five weeks and religiously revises it. We compete - like all girls do, we compete words and paragraphs and syntax and topics like we compare the same shoes we bought at different prices. We bomb each other with conceited brilliant one-liners that steal the entire point of our writings. The last time I went to visit Ann in a remote island south of Korea, I snuck into her computer to read one of her essays. When I confessed my crime, she punished me by forcing me to read two sequels to the one I read.

This is just an outline of what I intend to write. I stop here because Ann may want to kill me for what I've writ, or she may be overjoyed to be the heroine of my thoughts, the latter of which will stir the volition inside of me to stop writing this anyway. [cf. to be continued]

If television – a device that has come to define our time – has created a global village where anywhere around the globe can be watched by those who inhabit anywhere else, it has definitely given birth to a new definition of audienceship; other people’s suffering has become tableaus of footages that can be observed, appreciated, and even enjoyed, all within a couple of clicks on a remote control. Information has lost its dignity as it is flooded through countless channels. The audience holds the power to choose which channel to watch, stop watching it within seconds, shuffle through one catastrophe onto another, and turn off the set when the interest wears off. Sontag’s take on this audienceship holds compassion towards the televiewer; upon witnessing a disastrous event on the screen, he is “coerced” into a feeling of inevitability as he realizes that there is nothing he can do to stop it; because it is simply of no use to feel remorse, he turns off the television. The truth is, however, that this feeling lasts for a split second; an experienced televiewer is not only fully aware of the futility of having any kind of emotional response to what happens on the screen, but is also a virtuoso in turning off the information quicker than it can even draw out an emotional response.

Greenland at the National Theatre reminded me of such audienceship. Not that the audience was able to walk out of the theatre like they would turn off the television, but that the two-hour show was a mix-match of tableau after tableau, picturesque and flamboyant but discursive as if flipping through four different channels on a loosely relevant topic. The tagline of the play was that it was written by a committee of four writers: Moira Buffini, Matt Charman, Penelope Skinner and Jack Thorne. What they intended to show was an omnibus story of four different narratives, each of which tells a story of manifold characters that share a common concern for global warming.

The whole point of going to see a polemical play on ecological crisis is to be edified and emotionally moved so that what the play exerts can be practiced in real life. In order for a polemical play to work, it must first outline what the incentive is by developing a story that makes the audience understand the problem, how serious the problem is, and how it can be resolved. Greenland, however, was a collaged exposition of facts after facts without a coherent conclusion, resolution, or even a motivating suggestion for the audience to immediately go back to real life and start contributing to stop the global warming. Everyone knows that using plastic bottles and driving cars leads to ecological destruction, but that it is also close to impossible to stop using them altogether. Polar bears are dying and the icebergs are melting, but these are all what everyone already knows by watching television. In the end, the omnibus narrative did not work as each of its components failed to produce a compelling conclusion. But the channels kept on flipping through, showing how different characters in different situations faced global warming. After two hours of flipping back and forth, the situations led to no resolution.

Despite the baffling narrative, the staging of Greenland was, in every sense of the word, compelling. Director Beijan Shebani made ample use of cutting-edge technology to make the theatrical experience a visual, auditory, and even tactile one; over three different layers of lighting scheme thundered down the stage, snow machines and fans blew paper confetti throughout the two hours, a bonfire was lit from under the floor, various projections and media kits were used for the background, chains hung and flew around a shopping cart into the air Peter-Pan style, and even a life-like polar bear walked in to surprise the audience. By using an impressive array of technical support possible in theatre, Greenland established the fragility and horror of being disconnected from electricity with a powerful blackout in the end where everything is extinguished, silenced and stopped into pitch-black darkness. The abundance of technology used in the production cumulated into delivering a powerful message that theatre cannot exist in a state of complete lack of electrical energy, and hence, so cannot the world.

But such compelling stage work only seemed to make up for the absence of an equally compelling narrative. Sitting through scene after scene of florid technological celebration was exactly like, if not better than, flipping through the Technicolor channels of a state-of-the-art home theatre. By the time paper confetti was blown towards the audience in the last scene before blackout, the audience was too benumbed by the consistent bombardment of sensory stimuli to appreciate its apparent message that “this disaster does not limit itself to the stage; it also concerns you in your seats.” Yet the show failed to alert people that the ecological issue at hand concerns everyone, not “the others” busily running around the stage; the only point made clear that evening was that it was a relief to be an audience so that everything that happens on stage can be watched in a safe distance, detached from its turmoil.

Next came Sarah Kane. Violence in Kane’s texts was much more psychological than in Marlowe or Shakespeare, much more introspective, more complex in its brutality than a mere spectacle. Plays like Cleansed challenged the idea of staging and performing; mouths of the performers needed to be cut out and replaced by one another so to visualize the idea that they were physically unable to say “I love you” with their own lips. Whereas fake blood sufficed to stage violence in Marlowe and Shakespeare, only real amputation or dismemberment could logically make sense in the context of Kane’s texts. Even in a visually non-violent scene, the language was violent. To stage our final projects based on our own texts and responses from Kane, contemplations went on for weeks regarding how language constructs violence even from a non-violent narrative or a visually non-violent setting, where and how visual metaphor can be used to implement stage violence as opposed to real violence. With Kane it was a two-way retribution; violence between text and performers, violence between performance and audience.

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At the core of staging violence is the idea that violence is one of the main attractions in a performance. Theatre is a safe environment where all kinds of violence are legitimately show-cased, where people go to audit and witness what is sub-real or out of limits from reality. It is the only place where violence is not only condoned but is celebrated in the names of art, culture and entertainment. Violence in theatre is particularly titillating because it verges upon the realms of the personal, the political, and the performative.

In the strictly personal realm, violence takes place in private lives and remains a traumatic experience for the person that undergoes it. There is nothing in the least meritorious about violence that happens within one’s private life. But when it leaks into the ‘polis,’ the community where people inhabit same social spheres, violence becomes an interest, a phenomenon, a subject for table talks. When it leaves the personal realm and enters the political, it becomes an amusement for those that are third party to its destructiveness. Unlike wars and natural disasters, violence that started within the strictly personal and enters the political becomes a tacit, insinuated form of entertainment that interests and fascinates its bystanders.

The ultimate turning point for violence takes place in the performative realm. Theatre is a place where violence is staged, i.e., produced as an imitation of life, and thus becomes a spectacle and a legitimate form of entertainment. No matter how realistically it is visualized, violence on stage remains a visualization, something that “happened” but “did not actually happen.” As Henri Bergson articulates in Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, it becomes something grotesquely comical, a subject for communal enjoyment. The popularity of Grand Guignols in early twentieth century demonstrates how even the most gruesome spectacle to watch becomes a titillating entertainment when it is acted out strictly within the premise of mimesis.

Contemporary performance artists Franko-B and Guillermo Habacuc Vargas deliberately break these boundaries by breaching the ethical and moral postulation of violence within the performative realm. The spectacles they create by drawing real human blood or killing a dog by starving it in the performance space brings out political responses and creates controversy because they defy the traditional notion of theatre being an imitation of life. Art has traditionally been appreciated within the supposition that it is distanced from reality, and watching real physical pain or witnessing actual death in the audience’s seat disturbs or agonizes one instead of offering entertainment or inspiration. Watching Franko-B drawing out his own blood for fourteen minutes might be a novelty that has immediate shock value, but in the strictest sense it does not “qualify” as art because it fails to keep the distance between separate realities. Debates on audience participation are bound to rise when a performance thus breaches the implicated pact that art does not pertain to the same reality outside the performance space. It is only when the audience realizes that they are not enjoying what takes place in the theatre that they begin to perceive auditing as a coercion or obligation to “keep quiet, sit through and watch.”

For centuries, violence in performance has provided the most highly valued means of artistic expressions, as exemplified by ancient Greek to Elizabethan and Jacobean tragedies that are revived and celebrated around the world year after year. When practiced within recognized artistic definitions as established by age-old traditions, violence thrives as high art form. When stripped of the most essential terms and conditions that endorse it as a means of artistic expression, however, violence degenerates into nothing more than a primal and brute shocker. For violence to be appreciated in the performative sphere, as is with every other form of expression, it should not cross the fundamental ethical and moral boundaries, aka politics, upon which the society is built. New forms of violence are introduced from the personal into the political and performative realms more often than one can follow, but not all of them last after the initial shock wears out. To evolve from a mere novelty or unconformity to settle as a new genre of tradition, violence needs to be cultured, stylized, and appropriately formulated.

Twelve years after the writer’s death, Kane’s five plays still remain a rather convenient mystery. They are efficaciously interpreted as a loosely connected series of the writer’s exploration from the exterior to the interior of her psyche, 4.48 Psychosis reaching the innermost. And most readers, it seems, read Kane’s last work as her suicide note without doubt. It is not an overstatement to say that Kane criticism, as underdeveloped as it is, is “case closed” with current speculations and interpretations. The primary reason for this is that Kane’s five plays simply do not suffice to be considered an “oeuvre” in their number and the span of time during which they are written, which makes Kane a disqualifying subject for a comprehensive literary criticism. Another reason should be the fact that Kane did not provide any commentary or author’s notes to her works to facilitate debates, analyses, or other forms of in-depth reading of her works. In her last interview with Vicky Featherstone published in 1999, however, Kane provides a significant reason for having written what she had written:

I do not feel a responsibility towards the audience or to other women. What I always do when I write is to think: how does the play affect myself? If you are very specific in what you try to achieve, and it affects yourself, then it may affect other people too. On the other hand, if you have a target group in mind, and you think, ‘I want to affect the eleven million people watching ITV on Sunday,’ then everything becomes bland. So for me I am quite happy to aim at the smallest audience possible, which is myself, because I am the only person who is definitely going to see this play anyway. That’s why I try to please myself.[1] (Kane, 1999)

The idea of audienceship Kane gives in this short excerpt best explains the nature of her works, especially 4.48 Psychosis. Be it a transcript of real events or a lyrical suicide note, both in form and content, Kane’s last work is probably the single most self-immersed play in modern British theatre; bereft of any kind of contextualization fit for the stage, the play allows immense freedom and challenge to the notion of performing and auditing a play. It could be played by three characters as it was premiered at the Royal Court Upstairs, or it could be simply read by a narrator from beginning to end. Unlike Kane’s first four plays that “had to” follow the format of a modern play because they were either commissioned or written with a specific cast or set in mind, 4.48 Psychosis aims for no other audience than the writer herself, for her “own pleasure” as she denotes. In a fundamentalist sense, the only reason 4.48 Psychosis is regarded a playscript is because Kane, a playwright, willed it to be performed. And of course, the most self-indulgent element of the play is that Kane is the one and only person who will ever have read, understood, or "seen" the play as she conceived it. If it is the playwright’s share to provide a meaning-making script to both performers and audiences, Kane either arbitrarily or deliberately fails to do so in 4.48 Psychosis.

Kane’s 1999 interview suggests that this disconnection is an intentional one. The idea of audienceship that Kane prescribes is a definitive clue to interpreting both 4.48 Psychosis and her five plays as a whole. Instead of simply starting with the idea of external reality into the inner self, Kane’s small repertoire of works can be seen as a journey from a more open and readily accessible form of writing (Blasted, Phaedra’s Love) to those that are more experimental and therefore more demanding to stage and accept (Cleansed, Crave) to finally the utterly self-contained and impossible to connect, if at all (4.48 Psychosis). More than anything else, Kane’s journey begins by forcing her introspective self to share, bare herself out, and expose as much as she can, and ends with a willful decision to stop sharing altogether. But why would a writer, a playwright of all writers, deliberately write something devoid of a desire to communicate? Is interpreting 4.48 Psychosis as a statement – therefore, a suicide note – the only sensible answer to this question? And if 4.48 Psychosis was indeed written as a suicide note, is it possible to conclude that perhaps Kane wanted the play to be performed, in any way possible, to give the people an idea of what she “really was” inside by mapping out the grounds upon which her then upcoming suicide was built?

Things are nebulous and there always will be questions regarding Kane and her plays that cannot be answered. Interpretations will remain speculations, and attempts at making connections between Kane’s plays and her death will never end. As Kenyon mentioned in Nightwaves,[2] what is imperative for future generations of Kane scholars to keep in mind is to avoid making the mistake of dismissing the literary value of Kane’s plays in light of her psychological illness, or of ordaining her death the inevitable and overarching theme of all her works.

[1] Thielemans, Johan. Interview with Sarah Kane and Vicky Featherstone, in ‘Rehearsing the Future’: 4 European Directors Forum. Strategies for the Emerging Director in Europe (London: Directors Guild of Great Britain, 1999) 14
[2] “I hope that people won’t kind of sit there with their head in their hands saying, oh poor girl.” Mel Kenyon on Nightwaves, BBC Radio 3, 23 June 2000. Broadcast the day before the opening of 4.48 Psychosis.

Ironically, the ideal of the personal has waned with the arrival of personalization. The convenient world problematizes one for not sharing. Phone calls are made with an expectation to be taken, and being away from any kind of networking device is perceived as an aberrant behavior. In fact, staying away from any kind of networking device has become virtually impossible for the social animal; would anyone refuse to join social networks to miss examination dates and family announcements? Insisting that technology has bridged the gap between personal and social is effete; it has come to define social ostracism. The possibility to share a piece of your mind has turned into a means to stay informed, tuned, integral to the society you belong to. What started out as an attractive solution to feeling less lonely has turned out to be a euphemized political survival scheme. In the end, personalization has depersonalized its proponents as private information has become legitimately promiscuous.

There is a world, a time, a space, and an infrastructure in between its fragile covers. There are stories, histories, and mysteries in the folds between every page clad. Each page may be two-dimensional but the synergic compilation of those pages create something three-dimensional and beyond. One may spot a beautiful bag and be disappointed at its innards, the way it is compartmented or the fabric that builds it, within seconds of seeing it. A book, however, is not easy to tell. Some books take three hundred pages of narrative to tell a simple story about two people falling in love. Some take three thousand. Since every book is different, not every book is inspiring, enlightening, helping, or even interesting enough to read through. But the book itself does not take blames. It is not a performance you feel obligated to sit through; it is just a book that does not coerce or urge the reader to read it. It only lies there, remote and ready, for someone to open it and hold it in his hands. Most of all, the book does not tell stories; it shows. A good book is like an old friend who silently befriends, ages together, stays gold.

This photograph really brings me to wonder what it is that makes the audience uneasy or excited to see the actors rehearsing; there is a charm in seeing the actors not pretending to be real - regarding theatre as the only art form in which people pretend to be real - and are human beings, not "acting," not being superstars, not doing all of these at the same time, not doing what we are used to see them doing. And this is where I realize that I, too, have just taken the alleged "content" of the photograph as the image's main value; without questioning the veracity, the beauty, or any other merit of the image, I have taken the photograph by its face value; capturing a casual  moment between Judi Dench and Ian McKellen.

I suspect that this is not mainly my fault, for Zoe Dominic's photographs are mostly about preserving moments, both onstage and backstage, where the actors are at ease so that the audience could "see that they're human"; unlike Nobby Clark's "posed," and therefore staged, photographs, Zoe Dominic's objects are seemingly not self-conscious of the camera at all. This is not that Dominic's photographs are voyeuristic. Everyone knew that the photographer was embalming their faces in the room at the time. The casual atmosphere in Dominic's work, in the strictest sense, is a created facade that only appears natural. It may even be more stylized and embellished than Nobby Clark's images where the objects stare directly into the camera.

As Gilbert notes in Dominic's obituary, the photographer had an amount of "trust" with her subjects so that the objects were free to come up with their own naturalistic poses. The seemingly casual Ian McKellen in the rehearsal set of Too True to be Good, 1975, is an example of such camaraderie between the photographer and the object. As documents, Dominic's photographs tell stories behind the scenes of a bygone past. As stories, however, the photographs tell a different tale from the original story that is reality; people now look into her photographs to "see" how it was in 1975, but the photographs actually create a different reality where, just by looking into them, the outsiders cannot distinguish between pose and candid, facade and fact, staged and unstaged.

In stage photography as a whole, one cannot distinguish between fiction and reality. Portraits are apparently highly staged but even the photographs where not a single actor looks into the camera are highly stylized as well. No stage photography can be absolutely candid, primarily because no photographer is able to take candid photographs of any part of a production without agreeing to the intellectual property rights. Stage photography, in a sense, is defined by such consciousness. It is wrapped up, dolled up, and distributed in style. In short, it s theatrical.

(Identical twins, Roselle, N.J., 1967: Photographed by Diane Arbus)

Just in terms of theatricality, Diane Arbus's renowned portraits of what she called "freaks" also display such theatrical elements. The objects in the photograph are always looking straight into the camera, often confident and honest with emotions. Arbus was known to befriend her objects so that they could "perform" their most natural state without being stiff or uneasy in front of the camera. If Arbus's objects were almost "vaudevillian" in their weird traits, photography was their theatre.

According to Susan Sontag, photography is also an "elegiac art" that depicts the ideal of memento mori; the photograph can never retain the present, everything is a transcript of what happened in the past. But it is also the power of photography to induce imagination and, consequentially, an understanding or an interpretation of an event; in On Photography Susan Sontag denotes that photographs can never themselves explain anything. Rather, she pinpoints, they are "inexhaustible invitations to deduction, speculation, and fantasy." (Sontag 23)

Sontag's argumentation is that photographs give only information, not political messages or emotional responses that people read into them. Hence, a photograph may be a clue or an inciting incident for a thought or an interpretation. But it can never be a theory in itself; for the photograph to be "understood" in any way, one has to have a pre-existent meaning-making logic or an ideology. Without a certain political view, for example, a photograph on the atrocities of wars cannot generate emotional responses. 

In this light, photography is a giver of information rather than a teacher of didactic knowledge. And photography used in theatre, in particular, focuses on serving this purpose. To those who are unfamiliar with his name, Nobby Clark's photograph of Ian McKellen in 1976 (see below) gives out information of what the actor "looked like" within that specific temporal and spatial frame. If one sees the photograph and immediately thinks that he is charming, it is an interpretation that the photograph does not entail.

(Ian McKellen in Romeo and Juliet, 1976: Photographed by Nobby Clark)

A photograph not only confirms a past event but also raises questions; is McKellen posing for the picture trying to be silly and dancing a jig with a mischievous face, or is this a still shot from the actual performance of Romeo and Juliet? As someone who has not seen the show forty years ago, this is a legitimate question the photograph brings about and quite righteously so; what is the photograph trying to tell? My personal conclusion is that this is a staged, posed photograph took in a studio where McKellen is dressed up as Romeo. In this case, the primary raison d'etre of the image would be publicity for both the actor and the production.

Such thought process immediately generated after looking at the photograph is, most importantly, personal. That is, the imagined "reasons" behind the photograph of McKellen is actually my personal concern that is, in the strictest sense, unrelated to the photograph itself. It is both the power and the limitation of photography to generate feelings, thoughts, or viewpoints, below its two-dimensional surface. The perfunctory title "Ian McKellen in Romeo and Juliet, 1976" only contributes to my personal interpretation of the image as a promotional one.

Sontag also talks about how photographs are bestowed upon meanings as documetations of a particular time or place; "Aesthetics distance seems built into the very experience of looking at photographs if not right away, then certainly with the passage of time. Time eventually positions most photographs, even the most amateurish, at the level of art." (Sontag 21) This is a quintessential concept in theatre where everything is ephemeral and lasts only during a couple of hours the performance is put onstage. Photography has widely been used in theatre as a tool that serves two major functions: first, to promote the production and familiarize the potential audience with the actors; second, to record or document what "actually happens" during the performance. It is not an overstatement to say that all photographs within the theatre arts exist to serve these two purposes.

(Philip Bretherton and Ifan Huw Dafydd in Blackthorn, 2010: Photographed by Nobby Clark)

This image, for example, displays one of the most common traits of the use of photography in theatre; it shows what happens onstage during the performance. It freeze-frames the ephemeral and taxidermizes it into a two-dimensional image. Since the two actors are apparently in the midst of acting, the photograph serves to depict a small portion of "what it would be like" to physically be present to experience the performance. Most promotional images of new performances are photographs taken during dress rehearsals. After all, celebrity actors - perhaps much more than the words or name values of playwrights - are often the most important reason why people decide to go see plays.

The image below is a close-up depiction of a famous actor. The artistic merit of the photograph can be discussed according to different viewpoints from various people, but the photograph is first and foremost a documentation of how the actor looked like in 1976. Preserving a face among many that belong to the actor, the image manifests how "photography is the inventory of mortality." (Sontag, 70) In theatre, the most common type of portraits are headshots; these images are essentially both archival and promotional, since their primary purpose is to "sell" the actor to theatre companies. Portraits in theatre is a whole new field of photography that is closely knit with commerce, and will be of interesting material to ruminate upon.

(Ian McKellen, Portrait 1976: Photographed by Nobby Clark)