New Page — Paul Duke

‘Grain and Truth’ by Martin Barnes, Senior Curator, Photographs, Victoria and Albert Museum, London

(This essay was written for the publication of No Ruined Stone, Hartmann Books, 2018)

Countless photographs are created each day, documenting millions of peoples’ lives in places all over the world. Most of these are thought of simply as documents, with no aspiration of being artworks. The majority of such photographs are now rarely printed on paper. They exist instead as digital images, transient and adaptable, viewed and shared on screen immediately, or stored for the future like a rarely opened diary. We are all familiar with the various reasons we take photographs: perhaps to remind us of a place we have visited and to show others, or to recall a loved one when we are apart. Yet photography is now so commonplace that we forget how profound it can be. Behind these simple documents lies an urge to reach out to others without words and to consider our position in the world. Taking photographs is also an attempt to arrest time and fathom our existence against its tide.

Paul Duke draws upon these associations, and references within the history of photography, to create a moving and sensitive portrait of the people and townscape that make up the Scottish community in which he was raised. Muirhouse, an estate near Edinburgh, was developed with new social housing from the 1950s. By the 1980s, it had become infamous as a place plagued by antisocial behaviour and drug dependency. The writer Irvine Welsh grew up here too and used his experiences of Muirhouse at this time as the basis for his shocking and acclaimed novel Trainspotting(1993). The book gained international fame after its adaptation as a film in 1996 by director Danny Boyle. Through these gritty interpretations, defined by poverty, hardship and inertia, the place has gained a forbidding impression in popular culture. In reality as well as fiction, its characters’ lives are negatively impacted as a result of tough social conditions. However, despite the despair and brutality, cohesion and hope are created through bonds of friendship, black humour, and shared histories of places and events.

Paul Duke’s photographs expand the cultural mythology surrounding Muirhouse but carry a more tender kind of observation and interpretation. They follow in a distinguished tradition of photography in Scotland that references the pioneering work of David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson. In the 1840s, they made pictures of the fishing community at Newhaven, just three miles from Muirhouse. Their pictures inspired the great American photographer Paul Strand, whose photographs made in the 1950s of the residents and environments of the Outer Hebrides have in turn been a touchstone for Paul Duke.

As in Strand’s work, the stillness and melancholy within Duke’s No Ruined Stone leaves the viewer room to empathize despite the bleak appearances. Amid the ravaged urban landscape, bittersweet signs and symbols of struggle and aspiration are evident. The most recurrent and recognizable of these is the form of a cross, seen for example outside a church (p.97) and repeated in the cruciform shape of ruined girders (p.61). These are reminders of a once large Catholic community, and the rapid demise of churchgoing and adherence to Christian tradition. In Duke’s photographs, little seems to grow in the barren streets apart from what might be thought of as weeds. The trees are blasted, broken and wintry. Yet plants and trees find a foothold to grow between the fences and along roadside verges. Scrubland is reclaimed by nature. In one image, the branches of a leafless tree echo the forms of a high-rise building beyond (p.57). Superimposed onto the surface of the tower, the tree breaks the geometry of the grid, implying the varied and organic social structures of all the individuals who live within. There are no photographs showing domestic interiors in Duke’s project. His viewpoint is partly that of an outsider – or perhaps more correctly, that of one who respectfully does not wish to intrude beyond what can be seen from outside. The prospects from the outside seem dim, but the light in Duke’s images is often lambent. Hope is the very tenuous but wiry thread that connects these images.

The so-called ‘brutalist’ architects who originally designed the buildings and environments of this town did so with good intentions. They were inspired by the international architectural style of Modernism that had high ideals. Modernists envisioned a design utopia: clean lines, contemporary materials of glass, steel and concrete, and functional spaces based on industrial design made fit for communal living. It was a bold experiment that was carried out in towns throughout the country as part of a drive to rebuild rapidly after the Second World War. Building upwards maximized space and sparing decorative details reduced expense. Yet the designs are often impersonal and are poorly adapted to local needs and specificities such as climate and social structure. In Muirhouse, subsequent years of neglect of repair, coupled with a decline in employment, meant that high-rise living fragmented communities and largely failed to deliver its noble ambitions. In recent times, large-scale demolition, rebuilding and social regeneration programmes have been implemented. Medium and low-rise buildings have replaced some of the high-rise blocks. But after many attempts at renewal, residents have become jaded, witnessing successive governments and local politicians appearing to give up. New housing alone cannot solve a cycle of decline when employment is scarce. Duke’s images reflect an anxiety about how yet further structural and social changes will impact upon an already disenfranchised community.

Paul Duke’s sequence of quiet images deliberately repeats similar non-descript and lonely-looking places. As a result, time appears to pass at a slower pace in this hinterland – or to be frozen altogether. In fact, some of the images are indeed repeats: mirror images printed from the same negative in reverse, or the same scene depicted twice with only a minimal shift in the camera’s position. Signs of security and surveillance are everywhere: in protective fences and shutters and doors bolted or padlocked shut. In one photograph, the dystopian shadow of surveillance is quite literally cast over the scene in the form of a security camera (p.66). While all else around seems derelict the elevated security cameras are maintained. They act as much as a menacing reminder of potential threat as an assurance of protection (p.67). Words occasionally appear among the images: a street sign gives a name to an otherwise featureless location; slogans on clothing show brand allegiance; graffiti acts as the basic human need to make a mark and indicate a presence; and the community shop neatly displays its food packaging. A rare note of optimism shines through on its handwritten chalkboard counter: ‘We’ve got Sunshine on a Cloudy Day’, and in emphatic capitals, ‘WHEN LIFE THROWS YOU LEMONS MAKE LEMONADE’. These humble displays of creativity and positive sentiment all are the more heartbreaking because of the surroundings that overwhelm them.

The dignified portraits that punctuate this book give a face to the community. Duke presents these individuals without pretension. They appear variously wary, uncertain or stoic. There is a balanced spectrum of ages and gender. Duke works carefully and slowly, using a camera making 5x4 inch negatives, taking an average of four or five exposures. Since his subjects are fully aware of his presence and his intentions to photograph them they carry a natural demeanor. Some look caught for a moment while going about their daily business and intent to move on; others seem more able to give of their time. Duke is attuned to their body language and attitudes. He knows many of them by name, and some of their stories. There is Jimmy, ‘the archetypal hard-man’, Duke observes, ‘the kind of person I’d have been be terrified of when I was growing up there’. And, by contrast Betty, a black woman in her eighties, awarded an MBE for service to the community. Each individual stands for themselves, but also as a symbol for the many other lives that comprise this town. Duke’s view of Muirhouse is both as an insider, and as an outsider, as he explains: ‘as Paul the former inhabitant, and Paul the photographer’. After enlightened schooling in Scotland, Duke gained a place at the prestigious Royal College of Art in London. His subsequent career as a photographer and teacher located him elsewhere. Returning only recently to Muirhouse to work on this project has pressed him to renegotiate his relationship with a place that he once called home.

The house where Duke lived has been demolished, and even the street is no longer there. In its place are some mid-rise apartments. Other sites of buildings in which the lives of thousands of families were played are now just fields. That is why so many of these photographs seem to be about the task of articulating emptiness. There is a kind of veiled cartography of this town in Duke’s waking memory, ‘the place I used to get my hair cut’ … ‘journeys to the nearby coast to find a place of solace’. He is the returning eyewitness, mapping invisible traces of decades past onto the surface of his photographs of today. The viewer sees the grain and truth of the present, yet the cumulative effect of these images is of a haunted, otherworldly place.

Duke’s challenge has been to balance the needs of an objective documentary approach with a subjective and personal project. He has striven and found a way to depict the neglected, the invisible and that which lives only in memory. His experience of the social injustice inflicted on his subject brings a note of controlled and justified anger to these photographs. But the overwhelming tone is one of empathy for these predominantly loveless places and the individuals who carry out their daily lives there. Duke manages to shoulder the weight of history and memory and align it with the immediacy of the present. No Ruined Stone is a poignant excavation of memory and place, and a powerful meditation on those themes. These images ultimately transcend their specific location and the documentary tradition of photography in which they are rooted. Parallel communities like these can be found all over the world; but few will have been photographed so perceptively and with such grace.