Image and Event in Luke Willis Thompson’s ‘Autoportrait’

Luke Willis Thompson: Autoportrait
Chisenhale Gallery, London
23.06.17 – 27.08.17

Luke Willis Thompson’s recent project, Autoportrait ( 2017 ), starts not with making images but with looking at them. In an interview with the Guardian, published just after his show opened, the New Zealand-born, London-based artist explained that the impetus for his new work, a short film portrait of Diamond Reynolds, was a decision to view images online. He said he made ‘a conscious decision to start watching videos of police violence. I felt there was some duty to look at these things. It was important.’

The video Reynolds made is one of the most significant, most recognised, and most piercing of these videos of police violence – which have now become a recognisable form on the internet, a story told and shared, and still painful. Reynolds’s video of the aftermath of the shooting of her partner, Philando Castile, was broadcast on Facebook Live on 6 July 2016. Just trying to describe the video will send shivers down anyone’s spine: It’s Reynolds, a young black woman sitting in the driver’s seat in a car; she’s interacting with the police officer who just shot her boyfriend while they were stopped at a red light. She’s yelling ‘Tell me he’s not dead!’ She tries to explain what happened, what follows. ‘He just shot him!’ she cries out. ‘Baby’, she calls her boyfriend. She cries.

Castile died from multiple gunshots to the chest at a nearby hospital about twenty minutes after the event. The police officer who shot him, Jeronimo Yanez, was charged with manslaughter and found not guilty. The trial ended a year after the event, around the very time of the opening of Thompson’s exhibition, which was dedicated to a single work: a large, black and white, 35mm portrait of Reynolds. The space is darkened, the film projector visible in the back, and Reynolds’s image fills the room. It’s two four-minute shots. In the first, her hair is braided in two braids and she looks away from the camera, which dwells on her face patiently. In the other, Reynolds sings, her voice strong yet not overbearing. The work is called Autoportrait, and it was filmed in Minneapolis, in full collaboration with Reynolds. It’s meant to be a sister image to that Facebook Live video, a record that doesn’t represent the worst day in Reynolds’s life. A film for her, made with her, that allows her not to be undone by what happened to her.

Thompson has made two videos in the past, with Londoners whose families were the victims of police violence. Like Autoportraits, these two films ( Cemetery of Uniforms and Liveries, shown at Galerie Nagel Draxler in Berlin in 2016 ) echo Warhol’s Screen Tests, examining his sitters’ presence as a way of sharing their trauma, as a way to suggest intimacy and empathy. But Reynolds feels different: she feels different because her image was already public; she feels different because she had a sense of agency in a situation that was impossible to control, to comprehend, or ever fully to grasp. The complexity of Thompson’s work is rooted in the question of his relationship with Reynolds. At first, there is the question of exploitation: What could this artwork ever give to Reynolds, a woman from whom so much had been taken away? And then, there is the film itself: What could it add, if it used the same form as the image Reynolds had already produced herself? The answer is in the medium. There is, of course, a difference in content and intent between the 35mm film Autoportrait and the digital video Reynolds had made, but much of the meaning of Thompson’s work is in its transmission. Autoportrait is not meant to be viewed online. It’s meant to be slow, to be impossible to share, to be the opposite of Facebook Live.

In July 2016, when Reynolds recorded the aftermath of the Minneapolis police officer shooting her partner, Facebook Live was a pretty new platform. Launched in August 2015, it was initially restricted to celebrities, and then quickly after opened up to journalists and people with verified accounts. It became available to all US iPhone users in January 2016, and globally the next month. Facebook is investing a huge amount of money and energy into live broadcasting, because video is becoming increasingly important on the platform. Watching Reynolds’s video would invoke the idea that the platform is meant to empower users, but it’s mainly used to entrap them, to gain that all-important online currency: attention. When Live was initially rolled out, Facebook was paying media partners to produce live content for the platform. One of the first memorable examples: on a Friday afternoon in April 2016, BuzzFeed reporters blew up a watermelon by putting rubber bands around it, broadcasting it live on Facebook. It took about 45 minutes. At peak, the broadcast attracted over 800,000 viewers. Here’s from a report on Nieman Lab, the Harvard University think tank focused on understanding journalism’s future in the digital age: ‘Five of us waited for the grand climax, baffled by our own interest, along with 81,000 other viewers.’

Facebook has pushed Live as a responsive form – the comments are part of the experience. In October 2016 I found myself watching war live on Facebook, when Channel 4 was live-streaming the battle to liberate Mosul. The comments were pretty much to be expected: ‘Maybe the battle isn’t happening today!’ ‘There was blood earlier?’ Another comment: ‘Live coverage of a war. We are doomed as a world!’ But I wonder if maybe it’s the opposite? If the experience of watching the duration and slowness of the real image of war – tractors and press conferences and people slowly walking across the screen, so far from Black Hawk Down, could make war seem more relatable, could create a new form of empathy? It is with this in mind that I go back to Thompson’s comment: ‘I felt there was some duty to look at these things. It was important.’ There is a cynical element, of course, to Channel 4 live-streaming war, to Facebook’s stake in that, but we should also argue that viewing is not inherently bad. That rather, it could be a possible meeting point around an event: the photograph or the live stream that affects the viewer literally or emotionally, that allows for a visual that may spark what photography theorist Ariella Azoulay describes as ‘political imagination’ – the ability to imagine a political state that is different, that deviates from the prevailing state of affairs.

When people talk about filter bubbles on the internet and blame social media, I think about the images I see: so many of them are things I just can’t look away from – they’re weird or familiar, they demand an emotional response or they seem to require examination or explanation. With the internet and our constant exposure to images via screens in our pockets, on our desks or in public spaces, our relationship to images is endlessly reshaped. But we get used to everything – and then we look away. Art – obviously – means engaging with images. And the kind of visual literacy that has developed in the contemporary art context is translated into the way we think about the flow of imagery through the media. Visual analysis can be a strong tool for thinking through the representation of political issues, and the consequent implications. It’s a way of determining that authority is asserted visually.

And in the case of Thompson’s work? This will sound quite optimistic, but art makes new images, and we should ask for that, and hope for that. When Thompson says he wanted to create an image of Reynolds that isn’t associated with the worst day of her life, there’s something sweet and kind and empathetic about it, but there’s also something transformative about it. This work allows Reynolds to regain control of her own image. And then it invites us to come together and witness that. To bear witness is such a complex idea in photo theory – it implies non-intervention, and has political potential; it’s loaded with sacrifice, but also with a sense of coming together. Thus the choice to film this portrait in 35mm, to take it away from the Web, not only means the creation of a new image for Reynolds, but enables the viewer to relate to the present in a new way – a way that is social, that is shared. In real life, in a space, with other people.