Ian Jeffrey, Universal Pictures

Privately published, Ipswich, 2003

we spent the early dusk of the afternoon gathering
materials from the nearest houses; and there was plenty:
a great flock mattress; two carved chairs; cement; chicken-wire;
tarpaulin; a smashed barrel; lead piping; leather of all kinds; and
many small things.

In the evening we sat late, and discussed how we could best use
them. Our tree was to be very beautiful.

Roy Fisher, Starting to Make a Tree


Ian Jeffreys Universal Pictures is subtitled a directory. Between them,
title and subtitle suggest both universality and functionality, a project
simultaneously all-inclusive and rational. One is put in mind of other
heroic attempts at introducing order into the world, whether intellectual,
like those of Linnaeus and dAlembert, or photographic, like those of
Atget, Blossfeldt and Sander. Universal Pictures, which includes no text
beyond the bibliographic equivalent of name, rank and serial number,
consists of a parade of full-page vertical and horizontal colour
photographs. In the absence of endpapers, title page and even margins,
the readers exposure to the imagery is immediate and unmediated.
Ian Jeffrey being Ian Jeffrey, words do sneak by, in the form of a separate
foldout containing laconic descriptions of the photographs, as well as a short
text on yet another A3 sheet. The descriptions are simultaneously dead-pan
and cryptic. Seeking information about the image of a poster fragment turned
blue through long exposure to sunlight, one comes across the following: A
Tiger. Athens, Greece. The tiger looks out from a shop window in the
commercial area. Adhesive tape torn to a variety of lengths holds together a
number of breakages. An air of scholarly inconsequence sometimes
obtrudes, for instance in the apparently irrelevant note appended to the image
of a stuffed or reconstituted rhinoceros in a Polish museum, to the effect that
Copernicus lived in Cracow and carried out studies of the stars. On the other
hand, Jeffreys brief descriptions do not shrink from occasional aesthetic
judgements, as in the next photograph along, of a pair of boxers crudely
painted on a glass panel in a Suffolk betting shop, elegantly shattered by a
heavy blow.
As should be evident from these examples, Jeffreys Directory presents
us with a typology not of the world, nor of things in the world, but of
representations of things or their simulacra: paintings of tools from a home-
made advertisement in Zakopane, Poland; a Red Indian chief riding through a
landscape of torn posters in Berlin; a model elephant in a toy village at Great
Yarmouth; fish painted across an Albanian shop front; mysterious markings in
a small Suffolk church (in some lights they are hard to make out). The few
landscapes are almost all simulacra, too: the Great Wall of China is a
transparency in a Nagasaki takeaway, a scene of Alpine crags the background
to a crude electronic shootout game. The only authentic landscape in the
book, a view of the Ouse Valley in Sussex, looks just as unreal as the others
(Jeffrey once remarked upon the absence of horizons in post-modern
photography).
Of his subjects, the photographer notes that [they] are things which
were poorly made in the first place, because the process wasnt thought
through or because the skill wasnt to hand. All these ruined and poorly
realised things accrue a poignancy of their own. Jeffrey proposes a Platonic
descent from a prelapsarian collective of originary images not quite beyond
recall for his photographs, and the technique adopted, flat and matter-of-
fact, is correspondingly appropriate - almost a of degree zero of
photography, whose results, however, are oddly fascinating. Universal Pictures
has a kind of awkward dignity; it is simultaneously a lesson on how to view
the world (perhaps also on how to read its representations) and a muted elegy
for that western culture whose remnants, like fragments sinking down to
benthic ooze, are here so tenderly privileged.

2005 John Stathatos

European Photography 77, Spring/Summer 2005