The
Just Press Their Button exhibition
is comprised of three separate but related parts. This room
has original comics artwork by three Vancouver artists, David
Boswell, Robin Konstabaris and Colin Upton. The comics by
Robin Konstabaris and Colin Upton were especially created
for this exhibition. David Boswell’s ‘pages’
are taken from chapters in the life of Reid Fleming, World’s
Toughest Milkman that he has been creating over the past twenty-plus
years. The east room contains pre-comics graphic material,
mainly from the 19th century, depicting the trials and tribulations
of photographers and their subjects in the first sixty years
after photography’s invention. The west room contains
examples of comics that depict cameras and photographs in
the lives of comics characters, and those characters operating
as photographers. The origin of this exhibition lies in an
article that Vancouver photographer Denes Devenyi published
in the August 1989 issue of Photo Life magazine. In that article
Devenyi explored not only the wide range of photo-related
material in comics history, but introduced a key idea raised
by this exhibition – that photography’s popularity
might rest, in part, on its depiction in the comics.
Comics
have been analyzed in many ways and the value systems that
they portray are as varied as life itself. And life itself
has again become a key topic, not only in Vancouver comics
art, but in the work of thousands of comics artists around
the world. The past decade has seen an explosion of interest
in comics and several large exhibitions have been devoted
to the influence of comics on contemporary art, including
the Comic Release exhibition that has just ended its run in
Bellingham. This upsurge of interest has involved cinema,
such as the film of the graphic novel Ghost World and the
biographical documentary on the life of comics artist Harvey
Pekar depicted in the film American Splendor. Theorists have
explored many facets of comics culture over the past thirty
years, probing everything from the impact of commercialism
in mainstream comics to the nature of gender roles as portrayed
in publications that are often intended for young people.
However, even with all the attention recently given to the
various subject areas within the comics, it would appear that
the pervasive presence of photography in the comics has never
previously been explored in an exhibition.
This exhibition’s title borrows Kodak’s marketing
phraseology – “you press the button, we do the
rest” was Kodak’s sales pitch starting in the
late 19th century. Was the marketing of cameras to young people
a business experiment in which the pleasures of image reproduction
became a seductive and easily achievable activity for “the
whole family”? Just by ‘pressing a button’
photographic magic could be achieved and by removing the messy
chemical procedures that photographers had to contend with,
Kodak began the process of selling consumers on appliances
that “did the work for you”. The complexity of
the relation between comics and photography stems in part
from the ways the two forms have influenced each other. Kodak
may have started the current phase of this interaction by
“pressing our collective button” through its marketing
efforts, but the commentary on photography clearly began as
early as the 1840s.
Comics art, however defined, can be argued to have existed
for many centuries if we accept that picture-stories have
been around since at least Hogarth’s time and much longer
if we include narratives in, to take one example, Mayan codices
and sculpture. The definition of ‘comics’ proposed
by Scott McCloud in his Understanding Comics is concise and
to the point: “Juxtaposed pictorial and other images
in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or
to produce an aesthetic response in the viewer.” McCloud
proposes that we call single panel comics such as The Far
Side or comic book covers, “cartoons” or “comic
art” and reserve “comics” for sequential
material.
Whether the case can be made that ‘photography in the
comics’ established the normalcy of ‘picture taking’
for generations of youth remains to be seen. What is somewhat
surprising is the frequency with which cameras, photographers
and photographs in photo albums appear in the history of comics.
It might be stretching it to say that the camera was a comics’
‘superhero’, but photography was certainly seen
as a ‘super tool’ in comics, not only for expected
uses such as surveillance, but also as a ‘product’
conveniently ‘placed’ with comics characters,
thereby becoming a normal component of their lives, as it
is of ours.
The idea that comics can have an impact on society is taken
for granted now, especially with the extraordinary presence
that ‘anime’ and ‘manga’ have had
in Japanese culture. If comics art has become a universe parallel
to our own it should come as no surprise that most of our
preoccupations make an appearance in the comics, just as photography
clearly has. Comics help us to suspend disbelief, not only
when action heroes accomplish impossible feats, but also when
we see our favourite anthropomorphised animal characters from
childhood, such as Donald Duck, manage their cameras with
either consummate skill or fall prey to hilarious ‘photographic’
gaffes. The ‘toy’ cameras shown here, beginning
with the Brownies from around 1905, seem to be using comics
characters to sell a product, but looking at them one has
to wonder if the comics are not in fact also promoting a medium.
Photography is a medium capable of mirroring the world back
to us in myriad ways, as well as a practice capable of being
taken seriously or lightly; here it is mirrored back to viewers
as a wide-ranging cultural phenomenon. This graphic commentary
‘on photography’ in the comics presents an alternate,
and very subjective history of the reception of the medium
that is the core of this gallery’s mandate.
Bill
Jeffries
Click
here for wall text on historical material
