The Firm & Pleasure Island | Jocelyn Bain Hogg

“Although primarily a documentary photographer, portraiture plays a strong role in his output. Portrait projects include Women and White Room. The former, a series of close-up images of friends and family, is a retort to today’s cosmetically enhanced and packaged beauty industry which adapts British writer J. G. Ballard’s premise that real beauty is the one square inch of skin first seen on waking up next to the one you love. White Room is an occasional foray into non-environmental portraiture. A white bed sheet, tacked onto a convenient wall and lit with portable flash-heads at gigs, parties and nightclubs acts as a studio. Punters, pop-stars and party-goers are democratized by virtue of a speedy performance in a contained, white space.” (Jocelynbainhogg.com)Through his exploration of the criminal underworld in ‘The Firm’, Jocelyn's work as a photographer remains consistently aloof from the violence which “permeates every level” (Bain Hogg, 2007) of his subject, but this separation belies the true observational power of his work. For while the subjects he photographs are immersed in violence, Jocelyn's entanglement within the photographic moment lends a sense of a bridge being built between the disconnected viewer and the sometimes alien world we find ourselves immersed in. Hence, the extremities of place and mood portrayed in 'The Firm' are relayed through a sense of perforation in the image, a translation of feeling identifiable in every aspect of the picture. Indeed, Jocelyn has no compunction in admitting it is his conspicuity which allowed him such a boundless acceptance into the dark underbelly of the London mafiosi.Ultimately, Jocelyn is a photographer rooted in his trade, and at every turn he questions and re-examines the role of the photographer in the digital era. Like his stubborn reluctance to give up his Leica M6, his photographs have an overt tendency towards an intimacy necessarily overlooked by paparazzi and press photography. Instead, Jocelyn’s images of celebrities have an over-reaching explicity which is challenged in the rough cross-section of portraits (which serve more as intimate glimpses) in ‘Idols & Believers’.‘Pleasure Island’ continues much in the same vein, wherein Jocelyn allows the same hedonistic lack of restraint found around him to affect his photography. In fact, it is the affected character of Jocelyn’s approach to any of his projects which is the centre of their sincerity. When talking about his work on ‘The Firm’, a certain nostalgia becomes apparent – when ‘Mick’ went on the run to Tenerife, Jocelyn saw no choice but to follow, camera in hand, prepared and focused by a “duty to show what happens” (Bain Hogg, 2008). Upon closer inspection, Jocelyn’s involvement becomes a central part of it all, and while he can speak about the funerals of gangsters gunned down and violently killed as “cohesive events” (Bain Hogg, 2008), his affection is totally palpable in the images. Similarly, the unavoidable shock factor contained in the close-portraits of the bruised and beaten faces of London’s ‘soldiers’ can be clearly linked to the truth of their representation; it is this undaunted commitment to true documentation that allows Jocelyn’s photographs a simple and striking honesty.The violence of the images in ‘The Firm’ come not from overt signals such as the traditional images of gangsters posing with their weaponry; the shocking beauty of the diamond-plated knuckle duster speaks volumes in its indisputable charm. Although a sense of infamy is always enjoyed in the documentation of criminality, Jocelyn has the talent of not allowing his photographs to become exercises in the congratulation evident in press photographs of mobsters in the 1930’s, or even the notorious coverage of street-gangs in the favelasof Brazil (upon which the film City of Godis based).While superficially a jaunt into the ‘rock’n’roll’ culture which has seen Western abandon dominate Ibiza, the photographs in ‘Pleasure Island’ also become as absorbed in the culture of pleasure as their subjects. Whether it be the naked bodies of transvestites or the sunburnt rock-stars suffering hangovers, every shot has a sense of a slipping grasp on the objective distance between photographer and subject – a symptom made clear by the lucid and exaggerated strain of reality found on the ‘party island’. A far call from the holiday photographs they distantly allude to, 'Pleasure Island' is a slurred and distorted cacophony of sex and excess.Drug-addled and confused, the individual portraits of ‘Pleasure Island’ have a warped and (sometimes literally) skewed quality. Somewhere in the half-opened eyes of the narcissistic youth picked out of the crowd, somewhere between the bodies of the ironically named ‘Lovers’, there is a rapturous, saintly property which upon detection reminds us of the intoxicating property of true hedonism.Bain Hogg’s work reflects a growing need for sincerity in the documentation of our society, a sense of personality lost in the “panoply” (Bain Hogg, 2007) of mass media. Juxtaposing stark black-and-white images of those at the fringes of the “machinery” of celebrity culture with saturated colour photos of the abstract paraphernalia of Hollywood, Bain Hogg creates a tension underlying the Foucaultian sense of the ‘gaze’ subverted, the documented subject decorated with the vast and decentered apparatus of the ‘machine’.From the hooded and life-sized Oscar statues reminiscent of the iconic images of torture in Iraq to the behind-the-scenes glimpses of porn sets, Jocelyn leaves no stone unturned in the search for the true, sometimes grotesque face of the silver screen. In Jocelyn’s exploration of fame as an entity, there is a clear refusal to allow the abstracting power of Hollywood to hold any sway. The growing pornography industry of the San Fernando valley is well documented, and even the paparazzi-style shot of Angelina Jolie inside the back of her limousine has a ghostly, ephemeral quality which allows the observer a chance to perforate the illusion of ’celebrity’.In a society obsessed with appearance, the photographic image is in danger of becoming stale and insignificant. Jocelyn’s work reminds us of a sense of authorship, a ruthless pursuit of the incipient moment, free of contrivance or aesthetic deliberation. His documentation of a subject revolves around the spontaneous portrayal of it – the empty staircase adorned with the red carpet is captured in the same split-second precision as the backstage portrait of Delilah Sampson, third runner-up in the Erotic awards, London. In his own words, “you’re never going to get a faster camera than a Leica – so at least I have a fighting chance.” (Bain Hogg, 2008)Dominic Apa