EXETER, UK.- The Spacex Gallery presents "Buster Keaton by Steven Tynan," on view through February 15, 2003. Photographer, Steven Tynan has been working on the personal project, Buster Keaton, for nearly five years. Shot as one-off prints on large-format Polaroid, this on-going series (of now more than 150 images) presents the, often naked or partially clothed, body of the photographer in a variety of domestic and outdoor locations. Uncompromisingly frank, and often funny, these self-portraits are described by the artist as exploring ”feelings of awkwardness, vulnerability, sexuality and the responsibilities that one faces” as a middle-aged man in modern times. Occasionally accompanied by his children or their two dogs, the subject’s emotionless, deadpan manner (hence the allusion to Buster Keaton) and the abject defenselessness of his exposed, overweight body, seems to lay the work open to interpretation, allowing the viewer to invest the images with their own narratives and associations. Thus, despite its perfectly innocent subject matter, the work becomes a screen for some of Middle England’s most hyper-sensitive stories, touching on issues around the family, sexuality and the male body.
By turning the camera on himself, making himself “the victim” of the photographer’s gaze and thus of a myriad social projections, Tynan’s self-portraits reveal how actively complicit we all are in the social policing of the body. Of all the body types on view in contemporary visual culture, the plump white middle-aged male body is one of the least visible, despite its privileged position of power in the social hierarchy. By exposing himself, Tynan cuts through the surface ‘display mode’ of much contemporary photography, with its veneer of invulnerability, to address the underlying issues, and feelings, that shape our sense of self. In this way, the work is reminiscent of Peter Land and Vito Acconci. At the same time, the images make subtle reference to a range of art historical and media conventions: the reclining nude, the domestic interior, pornography, Catholic iconography (St Sebastian, St Christopher) and different approaches to documentary photography (Martin Parr, Wolfgang Tillmans).
Tynan grew up in Manchester, in an Irish Catholic family. Based in London, he worked in the world of magazine editorial and documentary photography for many years, as a regular contributor to titles such as The Face and the Sunday Times, until he realized that he could no longer justify feeding off or “robbing” images from other people. The defining moment came when the tearful daughter of one of his subjects, in an exhibition of portraits of the elderly, complained that the woman in question had died only a matter of days earlier. From then on he resolved to make himself “the victim”. The resulting Buster Keaton series is shot mostly in and around his isolated home in the Cornish countryside, where he moved with his wife and two young sons in 1997.
Tynan has recently had one-person exhibitions at the University of California Berkeley, the Valokuvagalleria Hippolyte and the Pohjoinen Valokuvakeskus in Finland, Kulturhuse in Stockholm and Metronom in Barcelona. This will be his first one-person exhibition in the UK.
Buster Keaton is supported by Falmouth College of Arts. A reading room has been facilitated by the University of Plymouth. Spacex is financially assisted by South West Arts, Exeter City Council and Devon County Council.
