David HerktManly Affections: The Photographs of Robert Gant 1885–1915, Chris Brickell, (Genre Books, 2012), 208 pp. $50.
Time is the final mystery. Although space has been repeatedly reconceived over the last millennia by physics, technology, and culture, our concept of the one-way flow of time has remained relatively consistent and undisturbed. We exist on a wave-front of the present; the past has departed, the future yet to be.
Photographs are images of gone light, caught and preserved. They are our most extensive exact visual record of past moments. Chris Brickell’s Manly Affections: The Photographs of Robert Gant 1885-1915 recovers a particular slice of lost time as captured within the surviving images of a photographer based in Masterton, in the Wairarapa.
Photographs are images of gone light, caught and preserved. They are our most extensive exact visual record of past moments. Chris Brickell’s Manly Affections: The Photographs of Robert Gant 1885-1915 recovers a particular slice of lost time as captured within the surviving images of a photographer based in Masterton, in the Wairarapa.
Robert Gant was a pharmacist and photography was a hobby. The majority of his surviving dry-plate images date from the late 1880s and very early 1890s: 465 images in two albums, now in the Alexander Turnbull Library. There is also a scattering of copies made in the 1970s of later photographs removed from a now-missing album belonging to the Haigh family.
These images mark that transitional period between a complex technology used by professional photographers with formal subjects (often designed to appeal to authorised taste and public prescription) and the comparative vagrancy of images that came as a consequence of mass-produced photographic equipment, easily utilised for private purposes. Gant’s photographs were not made to be sold or to present an image of New Zealand to a purchasing-market or to record significant political or social events. They were taken by an individual for his own reasons and to be shared within a small social group.
Gant’s photographs have a number of distinctive characteristics. Their subjects are almost entirely male, in both portrait and group shot. They often feature groups of men friends in poses of easy intimacy. They include a number of photographs from amateur and quasi-professional theatrical productions in Masterton and some with males in female garb. They also contain a proportion of what could possibly be described as ‘historical re-enactments’, frequently costumed, and often focused, somewhat startlingly, on beheadings.
Gant’s photographs first came to public notice when writer Peter Wells was approached by Mike Crashaw, a descendant of Charles Blackburn to whom Gant had given two albums of photographs. A subsequent November 2003 Listener article by Wells examined their import. The photographs, according to Wells, showed ‘male affection in the colonial period sliding easily and seemingly guiltlessly into sexual contact’. They provided a ‘provocative redefinition of Kiwi sexuality’ and were of ‘international importance’.
At the time of writing, Wells did not know the identity of the photographer and the albums were relatively without context. Deductions, however, were made. A mouth-to-mouth kiss between two men, for instance, was described as ‘passionate’. It is a relative commonplace of our current time for historic images to be placed in a ‘gay’ context. There are books and curated online collections of historic photographs devoted to photographs of men (particularly those of soldiers) in attitudes that are now construed in a context of same-sex desire. Men embrace, kiss, hold hands, swim naked, but the significance of these gestures has changed. Past images serve present needs. Homosocial becomes homosexual. Generally though, Wells’ is cautious with his judgement; Gant’s photographs ‘hint at a wider range of acceptable male intimacy.’
Wells’ article in the Listener was followed by Chris Brickell’s book, Mates & Lovers: A History of Gay New Zealand in 2008, where the photographer was first named and revealed as Robert Gant. Gant had been born in London in 1854, immigrated to New Zealand in 1876, lived and worked as a chemist in Masterton and Greytown, finally residing in Seatoun in Wellington. From 1908 until Gant’s death in 1936, he had also shared the Seatoun residence with Charlie Haigh, a man 33 years his junior. Haigh himself died in 1941. Neither man had married.
Gant was contextualised by Mates & Lovers within a wide-ranging ‘history of gay New Zealand’, as the cover proclaimed, in a book which outlined a clear course of definition and delimitation of masculine same-sex desire. Brickell’s 2012 book Manly Affections enlarges upon Mates & Lovers, focusing entirely on Gant. It is richly illustrated from the available archive. These photographs alone are a unique record and worthy of attention, but Brickell has also researched Gant’s life in detail through relevant newspapers and magazines, official documents, and a scatter of interviews. The photographer and his works are firmly situated in a historic and local context.
It is a dense recovery of a particular moment in New Zealand time. The men in Gant’s photographs are identified by name, their careers outlined and summarised neatly, particularly in the book’s ‘Dramatis Personae’ section. The clerks, drapers and schoolmasters of Masterton are revealed in their fashions and activities. Along with more relaxed moments, New Zealand small-town life is shown in its intense and organised sociality: the Masterton Football Club, the Masterton Amateur Operatic Society, the Masterton Cricket Club, the Masterton Philharmonic Society, and the Masterton Amateur Theatrical Society, amongst others.
Manly Affectionsis both a biography and a populated snap-shot of a town and a time, where characters are rounded from flat images, and the shapes of individual lives shown. The photographs are fully-fleshed out with background detail. The book is also a unique record in that it widens considerably a whole area of masculine same-sex relationships only previously touched upon by New Zealand historians, most notably by Brickell himself and Jock Phillips in A Man’s Country? — A History of the Pakeha Male. Brickell, by virtue of Gant’s photographs in Manly Affections, can take Phillips’ arguments much deeper into the psyche and sexuality of late Colonial New Zealand.
Therein lies the first problem; how much can we infer and interpret from the images and the bald facts? Brickell is intensely aware of the issue, and this awareness can be detected in his careful phrasing of the finer points of social and sexual behaviour. It also goes to the heart of his arguments. On occasion, phrases like ‘Gant and his lover travelled over the Rimutakas…’ present a jarring moment to the reader. No matter how tempting and how ‘right’ it might feel to see Gant, our protagonist, as the ‘lover’ of handsome, curly-haired Charlie Haigh, the extrapolation from known fact is a problematic deduction, and strangely ignores the variety of human experience Brickell has previously taken pains to elucidate.
Gant and Haigh present a ready-made mould for a myth: older man/younger male living happily ever after until death do them part, imaged in the sepia tones. It is a myth for our time as same-sex relations move out of the realm of ‘unhappy ever after’ to connubial bliss. However, the allure of this myth can overbalance Brickell’s care with evidence in what is generally a scrupulous and thorough examination of the historic record.
Manly Affectionsalso presents an enigmatic conundrum: do we read photographs or do photographs read us? Roland Barthes in ‘Camera Lucida’ (1980) outlines a schema of relationship to photographs which is useful when faced with Gant’s images. Barthes posits photographs as possessing a studium ( ‘a kind of general, enthusiastic commitment… without special acuity’) and a punctum (‘the accident that pricks me’).
The images chosen and reproduced by Brickell present any number of extraordinarily sharp sexual punctum to contemporary sensibilities, especially with our comparatively tense views of personal space and presentation. Relaxed men sprawl, embrace, hug, loll, and even seem to flirt with the photographer and, by proxy, the viewer. Angles lead us between thighs. Embraces reveal tense spaces between bowed heads and lips. Shoes are flashed coquettishly. The penis seems extraordinarily visible beneath clothing. Cloth stretches tightly. Legs thrust. Buttocks are outlined. Indolent males stretch.
Our eye seems inevitably drawn to the male as a sexual object in these images. As Barthes remarks: ‘the punctum while remaining a detail, fills the whole picture.’ It seems impossible to avoid the sexuality of the photographer’s gaze, especially if we consider the careful positioning of the subjects. Gant’s stagey transvestism also takes us further than we would perhaps prefer, especially in a frothy yet intensely-posed tea-party sequence featuring three men ‘dragged up’ in dresses. If we should have forgotten ourselves, Gant’s female persona in one photograph provocatively dangles a book entitled Photographyfrom his hand in such a way as to be deliberately read. The self-awareness is beguiling.
It is hard to ignore the charge of these photographs. Gant’s albumen and silver nitrate images are pregnant with much more than their superficial reading. They position us in his space and time. They are uncannily able to transmute the photographer’s eye into ours. We might read the photographs but they also read and reveal us, through the agency of staged desire. Brickell effectively provides the evidence whereby we might see freshly and reassess this photographic archive. He grants us access to one of the great nineteenth century New Zealand photographic examinations of masculine interaction, whether between subjects, or the subject and the photographer/viewer. It seems impossible not to read a sexual predilection in the Gant’s images, coupled now with that great erotic stimulus — nostalgia.
As if to emphasise that the past is truly another country where things are done differently, Gant’s images take us into surprising places. The historical re-enactments of beheadings might seem a natural extension of his images of Masterton theatrical productions, but there is also something deeper here. These photographs of executions, as Brickell points out, seem ‘erotic’. They hold tensions that are still palpable. ‘During the 1880’s,’ Brickell writes of these particular images, ‘pretty young men with long eye-lashes leaned in for the chop. Their eyes lock with their viewers; they draw forth a combination of discomfort and desire.’
Nothing better indicates the time-bound status of desire than these depictions. The nineteenth century was a century of Christian missionary martyrdom. Any formal schooling in history included images of Charles the First baring his neck for his executioner and Lady Jane Grey going nobly to the block. Engravings and etchings for household décor or children’s elucidation featured guillotining, hanging, and beheadings with frequency. Gant uses these contemporaneous tropes in the scenes he re-enacts in Masterton back yards and front-rooms, and a later series features Charley Haigh, his hands bound behind his back en route to the scaffold or his head already on the block waiting in anticipation for the masked axeman’s blow.
These particular images are extraordinarily revealing of a vanished lexicon where the workings of a culture are made manifest in erotic scenarios that no longer operate to any great degree in our psyche. They are as historically important as any of Gant’s other photographs. They are tight evocations of an era’s sexual sprawl.
Brickell also climactically introduces, in a perfectly-timed quod erat demonstrandum,Gant’s only known foray into fiction, a story entitled ‘At The End of A Holiday’ from Sharland’s Trade Journal in 1894. With its Wairarapa country home séance, clairvoyance, temporal playings, and beheading of a young New Zealand man by Chinese rebels, it adds immense weight to Brickell’s argument.
Manly Affectionsis a near-essential book both for academic and general readers. It is also a rebuke and a lamentable commentary of the state of major publishing in New Zealand that Brickell’s revelatory and handsome book was rejected for publication by Random House New Zealand, the publisher of Mates & Lovers, and has had to be brought out by a new imprint initiated by Brickell.
Brickell’s conclusions from this trove of images fundamentally alter our idea of New Zealand and New Zealanders. They recover, stretch and extend our concept of our past. They are of international importance. These photographs will provide essential material for future histories. While conclusions will multiply and differ, lost time and our relations with it are revived and renewed. We now see things differently.
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