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| Between Ourselves - The Photographs of Mari Mahr was published by Serpent's Tail, 1998. |
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| Other articles by Richard West |
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| Life Chances |
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| My daughter, my darling... |
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| Between Ourselves - The Photographs of Mari Mahr |
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| When looking through my pockets I frequently find old tickets, for a Paris cinema or a London bus, that return me to the occasion for which they were purchased. They once allowed me to see a film or travel a city and now they are tokens that allow me to remember. This might equally be said of the things around me; that if I were to pause and reflect, I might recall who had previously owned them, where they were made and what they were for. Some objects are more evocative than others and few make claims on our memories quite like photographs. |
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| Mari Mahr constructs her photographs from artefacts of her past life and that of her family. She was born in Chile, grew up in Hungary and moved to London in 1972. Her father was an architect but died when she was twenty four. Her mother was a translator; work that brought her into contact with Che Guevara and Pablo Neruda. The family had friends in Paris and Brassai, a friend of her grandmother, photographed her parent's wedding in 1938. These diverse origins are represented in her work by an equally diverse selection of objects; a map of the Andes, a Russian novel, and photographs of people and places. |
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| Mahr takes as her subject her life before she arrived in London and the lives of her female predecessors. The difficulty for her work is in finding the means to represent personal memories. Most memories, if we were to try and share them, would prove banal and incomprehensible; decontextualized fragments of the archaeology of our past experience. To overcome this difficulty she uses a strategy whereby photographs are used to either define the background to the work or its characters in a way analogous to theatre. This is played out explicitly in a series of pictures for her daughter: 'My daughter , my darling...'. |
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| "The stage is set up against a Chilean landscape... I feel I am here to pass on to my daughter all that has been passed on to me in this long line of female descendants." |
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| This series of nine pictures all use the same stage and the same backdrop; the only variations being in the lighting and in what is displayed. This simplicity is her strength, for she needs little to tell her stories; leaves for the time of year, but also for her memories (they are pressed leaves, as if from a book) and a metaphor for the passing of her relatives (as seen in the photographs). There is also an implied narrative through the series, like the acts of a play, the seasons of the year, the stages in life's way. The story is told as if it were a myth or nursery rhyme combining an epic landscape and objects that carry a symbolic meaning; like a South American novel. |
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| Her photographs are therefore both imitations of remembrances and completely artificial. This is clear in her use of old photographs, they have the feeling of age about them like the contents of a museum display cabinet but they are also part of the elaborate stage machinery of her theatre. A photograph vies with our memories because it is so close to the way we remember; it would have you believe that it represents the way a scene should really be remembered. Mahr uses photographs in her compositions as if they were the dreams of her theatre director and therefore destined to become part of a larger memory. |
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| Mahr has been living in London for twenty five years but this book contains images that almost exclusively deal with her life before she arrived. At the end of the book, described as a postscript, are five images that suggest that her life in England is beginning to generate memories of its own. |
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| "...I take a walk on Wimbledon Common amongst birch trees so familiar from the Russian classics that made up our compulsory reading back at school..." |
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| This leaves us with a tantalizing glimpse of how her work may develop in the future. Let us hope she still gives us the same insights. |
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| Richard West |
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