Hello, my name is Kemal Kushtjo, I am a psychiatrist and systemic psychotherapist.
Right now we are in Ethnograph. Ethnograph is an institute where we bring ethnography,
systemic work and design together. We run several workshops and training programs in our institute.
As part of our activity, Simon Bray was with us talking on his new book on psychoanalysis and
photography. So first of all welcome back to Ethnograph, Stephen. It's nice to be here.
So just to start, I mean how do you relate with photograph or what is your own story about photography?
I've been taking photographs since I was about eight and the story goes back to my father
who had this strange box in his garage in his workshop and he would never let me look in it
and I became more and more curious about what was inside and asked him lots and lots of questions
and the more he said he wouldn't you know we should be doing something else the more curious
I became and then in the box it turned out there were some chemicals and there was an old printing
frame and one day he gave in and there was this magic of seeing a picture coming up through the
chemical on this old photographic paper and he became converted in a sense because then
he bought some new chemicals and some new paper and we got it in larger and we started to process
our own black and white pictures at home. And what did it bring you back then? I mean after years
though this was when you were eight and now after a quite I mean after your career now you're back
to photography and psychoanalysis what did it bring you back to photography? Well I've never
really entirely left the world of photography I mean in Manchester I used to belong to a
publishing cooperative and we used to produce this magazine and I took quite a lot of pictures in
those days of various different events and people like Bruce Kent who was at the time the president
of the CND and they went along with various articles that I'd written for that magazine so
and then later when I moved to Dorset I opened a private counselling practice back in my original
hometown and of course I didn't have any clients didn't have anybody to pay the rent so I went to
work for the local newspaper on the back of the work that I'd done for the publishing cooperative
so then I used to do car reviews and interviews and various things so I actually work professionally
within the photographic industry I've done some fashion shoots and I've done some
yeah cars and products and you know generally I've done quite a lot of work at different times
and I also study photography formally after I studied social work so in fact last was it three
years ago I did an exhibition with my old tutor so and he came to Marmaris and we put on a show
of her called Trees and Skype which is about trees and skies and keeping your head up and
looking at the horizon so I understand that you are you're still actively part of photography
so I mean you are actively taking photographs yeah I take photographs most days I still regard
myself as a jobbing photographer you know rather than an artist it came as a surprise when I put
on the exhibition in Marmaris and suddenly Marmaris TV was saying you know this is this artist
who's got this collection of photographs coming and I thought well I'd never really thought about
myself as an artist I always thought about myself as a photographer so it was quite an
interesting eye opener to see how other people were regarding what I was doing so just going back
when you just started your I mean for your first experience with photography when you were eight
uh so what's the common thing you know what is the common team since this that time I mean
what is the common team for you in photography since you are I mean the time when you are
I mean I think photography has grown into something different from what it was originally and I think
as an individual you grow as you mature as well so when I started to take pictures I would take
pictures of a tree or a girl jumping over a hurdle or whatever happened to be there and you know one
hope, press the shutter and hope for the best later on in adolescent times of course there was the
cache of being a photographer you know you were somebody with a camera and a and a big lens who
could throw the background out of focus and make girls look beautiful you know and that was almost
as good as only good guitar and being able to play it and then after that when I was working
with the cooperative it was more a question of trying to reflect something of the person I was
interviewing or the article that I was writing it was much more of a documentary bent so things
change over time and the recent exhibition with Michael Eldridge the return to really exploring
the sort of power of nature and the ability of nature to be able to heal and to release people
from the sort of everyday tyranny of time that most people find themselves under particularly
since the cell phones come into being and you know it keeps going off and making people work
24 hours a day all those years in photography magic it's magic you know it doesn't matter how
what technical explanations you have as you know this chemicals working on this
paper or this fixative is being used in order to you know create this grain or this is a digital
medium and you know the actual I don't really want to use the word capture but you know the
actual ability to take a moment in time and to represent it in some form often today on a computer
screen but you know I still like paper prints best it's just magic as far as I'm concerned
and how does magic relate to psychoanalysis well I think magic relates to psychoanalysis in the
sense that you know as children we we tend to think in term in magical ways you know there's
been a lot written about that although I don't cover it in the book but you know there is this
period of time when children go through what they call magical thinking you know they think
that they they think something and it happens and then they feel responsible for it that can
be very good or very bad depending what's happened so somebody who has an angry thought about their
brother for example and he falls out of a tree and breaks his arm there is a period in time when
the person will actually feel that they've caused it in some way and of course in traditional
societies there are people that really take advantage of this I mean there are various
different shamans and witch doctors and so on and as you know in family therapy as well there's
the whole question of ritual I know when I was working at Maudsley there was somebody that had
a sort of very negative association with their previous psychiatrist in fact you know and I said
to them well you know sometimes people do a kind of a ritual they think about the person perhaps they
perhaps they draw a picture of them you know and screw the piece of paper up and throw it in the
bin you know and the following week the person came back and said well we've dealt with it you
know we've thank you we've solved the problem with this psychiatrist that gave us all this awful
advice and I saw really and they said yes they said we wrote his name down very small on a sheet
of A4 paper and then we went to the library we photocopied it 50 times and then we cut the name
up into little strips and then we boiled the strips we fried them in the chip fryer until
they were black and then we took the content of the chip fryer out and we put it in hot where
there was some earth and we buried it in the earth of the flower pot and then we took it down the
municipal dump and threw it away you know that's magical thinking so even in terms of adulthood
there's something about magical thinking that also stays with us and has the ability to
both damage and to heal depending upon how you use it and I think in photography it has the
ability to heal and if it's approached sensibly but equally it's neutral I mean it's a bit like
it's a bit like the x-ray machine in a sense the x-ray machine is a camera you get too many x-rays
you damage the tissue but you can use it in order to diagnose and to heal so who's the magic for
because if you're looking the camera there are two people one was pausing or before the camera
and the other one is the one behind the camera who's is the man I mean and as you mentioned
in your talk then there's the third object which is the camera it serves who's the magic
for I mean well I don't think the magic's for the camera I mean the camera is an extension of
some sort of consciousness I think but I do think people actually project different things onto the
camera they see it as something that can be potentially intrusive you know when you see
people walk through shopping centers or these cameras in the streets I guess people are used
to them now but you know in the old days you used to see people looking around even if they
hadn't done anything wrong because they felt some sort of intrusion simply because of the machine
but it's not the machine it's what's behind the machine that really they weren't concerned about
and what they think is behind the machine of course because it's all and I would really like
to come back to this issue but before that and you know you worked as a systemic therapist
yeah as a systemic family therapist yeah and it was funny actually because our office was
situated below the Department of Psychotherapy that did psychoanalytical dynamic therapy and we
used to get sent the people that either had failed or were considered unsuitable for dynamic therapy
so that was quite that was quite interesting and for me the interesting part is that actually
how come I mean I mean you're back to psychoanalysis I mean why did you choose to
relate photography to with psychoanalysis so all the first generation of family therapists
knew about psychoanalysis I mean Palazzo knew about psychotherapy all of her team Luigi Boscola
Kuccin they all knew family therapy actually evolved out of psychoanalytical ideas so it was
there within systemic therapy although it was actually sort of seen as something rather that
should be shunned or denied or or otherwise ignored and you know like that first generation of
people when I was originally training before I trained as a family therapist you know I trained
in something called psychodynamic casework which involved going to see a tutor once or twice a
week and they would say things like well you know you're on this placement now how does that make
you feel so there was a lot of kind of analytical technique within that so in that sense I knew
quite a lot about psychoanalysis beforehand but the second reason is because both photography
and psychoanalysis have matured at the same time and although there's been an influence of systemic
ideas within photography over the past sort of 50 years it would be true to say that there's been
that sort of influence within psychoanalysis over the past 50 years as well you know with the ideas
of sort of intersubjective psychoanalysis for example so it made sense to go to ideas about
defense mechanisms and projections and those kind of things that the idea that in psychoanalysis
one is looking to bring into the light of consciousness material and within photography
one is seeking to use light in order to create some sort of new view or new reality
that wasn't so evident before so really that's the basic reason why I chose psychoanalysis
rather than systems theory although we do get into systemic ideas within the book
what is the common thing about light and consciousness I mean you said that
bringing a new team or a new perspective into light this is one of the things that
photography is trying to achieve actually and that you're related with the exploration of
unconsciousness in psychoanalysis so what do we do when we take a photograph you think I mean
what are we really doing well I mean I think Artie Bresson put it at its best you know a good
photograph is when the two worlds collide you know the outer world of the scene of whatever
is occurring in the inner psychological world of the person and the two things come together
and they're expressed in his artifact which we call a photograph and in some way that artifact
has the capability of being able to transmit the original experience in some form to the people
that are going to see it and for you as a therapist because you are bored as a therapist
and a photographer yes so what are you doing when you are taking a photograph you think
at the moment what I'm doing when I'm taking a photograph is sort of a bit of self-exploration
but it changes over time I mean it depends also on the purpose that
that I've originally charged with taking the photograph so for example a friend of mine
asked me to take a picture of some jewellery the other day for his shop and that was really quite
interesting but I wasn't trying to put you know explore myself particularly through it although
various things came out for example when you take a picture of a diamond you can see all
the flaws in it when it's you know magnified to a to a great scale and the decision is you know
what you do about that do you polish them out in Photoshop or do you keep them in or
magic psychoanalysis and persuasion okay well I think I spoke about the magic I think the
original magic is actually seeing the photograph emerge in chemicals I mean lots of people don't
see that now but it's a pretty good metaphor for something form coming out of darkness
and being there for the first time in terms of persuasion we have to go back to Freud's
early history in studying psychology and this experiment that he conducted with
Edward Lightburn in France in which a number of people were hypnotized and then they were told
that when they came out of the trance they were going to open an umbrella indoors which isn't a
normal thing to do in fact there's taboos against it in some places and of all the people that
opened the umbrella when they were asked why they did this they made up some reason they said they
were wanting to look at how the mechanism worked or who the umbrella belonged to or whether the
fabric of the umbrella was in good condition but none of them actually said they'd been hypnotized
and the result of this was that Freud concluded that we carry out actions in life but
we don't actually know why we're carrying them out having said that we will we're perfectly happy
to make up stories to explain what we're doing and then we live out our life according to the
stories so what advertisers attempt to do is to create a story that we feel that we can live
out in some way and what branding does also is to create this kind of totem you know so there's the
there's the hill figure totem and the benetton totem and in some way this totem is going to
prescribe our actions because we've connected to the story that goes behind that particular
lifestyle the lifestyle that's that's signified by that totem so in the book we cover quite a lot
of the work of a photographer called olivera tuskerning who created the benetton campaigns
and his technique was very very simple what he did was he identified this group of people as
potential benetton customers and they were the people that were proud enough to think that
they couldn't really be convinced of things by being shown pictures of sexual objects or
that kind of thing but rather saw themselves as thinkers and people that associated themselves
with the arts and with the kind of the abrasiveness if you like of everyday life and he took pictures
like that he put benetton on them united colors of benetton and of course people did associate
with that brand pictures some people thought they were shocking but you know it became a totem for
that particular group of people and one could guess that you know those people that were wearing
the benetton t-shirts were also taking their kids to the early learning center and buying them wooden
toys and they so there was this there was this group and the tuskerning actually provided them
with a totem that would work for the early learning center provided them with a totem that went with
that sort of lifestyle and you know there there would be other parts of that lifestyle as well
so it um tuskani really wasn't a black magician in the sense that some advertisers are we also
look at the cigarette industry and how people sold tobacco products on the back of chocolate
products that's really kind of black magic where where did the social politics steps in in creating
in mass persuasion because i mean we related with the psychoanalysis and magic magic of
photography or magic or the magical thinking and how we build stories or personal stories
through those magical thinking but where does this social uh politics or everyday politics
steps in well it steps in in roundabout turn of the century really the turn of the last century
not this century the 20th century because that was the time when this man Freud's nephew Edward
Bernays was on a boat um going from Europe into into America by the time Bernays was in his early
20s the world was at war but America wasn't in the war and there was this huge problem which was
how to get America into the war because Woodrow Wilson the president of the US had
campaigned on the ticket to keep America out of the war and then six months later he wanted to get
America into the war so Bernays had to find a way of justifying this and he came out with a defense
of democracy American was coming to Europe in order to defend democracy and therefore offer some
sort of freedoms to the relatives of people that were the American migrants who'd come from Europe
in the first case in order to escape from various kind of oppression so he invented this idea about
defending democracy and then in 1928 he wrote a book called Propaganda in which he said that um
and I can't quote him exactly but he said to the event the effect that democracy was far too
dangerous to be left in the hands of the masses and actually there needed to be an invisible
government that would direct how people felt and thought about both purchasing and about
and about politics and some of those ideas were then taken up by Goebbels and Hitler and used
in order to develop their propaganda for the Third Reich so in terms of politics and psychoanalysis
certainly there's there's a very direct connection you see I think what had happened was that
psychoanalytic researchers had said look people do various things they they'll do things in groups
that they wouldn't possibly do as individuals there is this kind of group behavior and they did
this in order to understand individuals and to understand you know how they could help them
come to terms with perhaps things that they'd done that they were ashamed of what Bernays and
the advertising people and the public relations school did was to turn that totally on its head
and say ah if people will do things in groups that they wouldn't do normally perhaps if we
can influence group thinking in some way we can get more and more people to do something for example
perhaps we can get women to smoke and increase the number of people consuming cigarettes every year
just I mean because you went back to the Second World War and I was quite curious about if Bernay
was able to see predict the future what was coming up actually while he was writing no I don't think
Bernays did wrote in his biography the fact that he knew that Goebbels had a copy of his book on
his bookshelves because somebody told him he actually mentions that in his biography the person
that actually saw what was coming up was Freud of course because he wrote this book civilization
and it's malcontents you know in which he he warned people about the dangers of using unconscious
drives for mass persuasion but by that time it's too late but Freud saw what was coming
you know curiously enough he saw what was coming on a global scale he didn't actually see it personally
it wasn't until his daughter Anna was arrested by the Gestapo and grilled one day that he decided
that it was time to to get out of Austria and then migrate to London he was he felt that you know
he was going to be okay until then so you said that Freud was able to see or at least predicted
what was coming up as a as a as a as a person or a psychoanalyst analyst but what about camera can
the camera see the future well some people say it can some people can't say it is nonsense I think
the camera sometimes can see the future but I think really it's the it's something about the
person behind the camera that sees the the future but the person that behind the camera
probably doesn't see it consciously they see bits of it and then the photograph reveals the future
in some way so I think you know I was was talking both in in the presentation and also I write about
in the book this photograph by Henri Cartier-Bresson which was taken behind a French railway station
in the same month that Hitler came to power and it's a photograph of a man leaping off of a flat
ladder into what looks like a big puddle but we don't know how deep it is and it has various
symbols in it like a broken broken wheels and gravestones and a clock that says 20 past 12 and
a sign that says Raelowski which sounds like a Jewish rail transportee and that photograph can
be interpreted as a warning for what in fact is saying it's it's too late you know we've gone too
far already that there is there is trouble ahead for Europe and the world and people connect that
with a dream that Jung had in which he saw fields of red blood and a voice saying to him you know
this is real this is going to happen being a predictor of the first world war so you mentioned
that actually it's not the camera but the person who uses the camera behind the camera yeah and what
do you I would say a recommendation but what do you suggest what do you need to be able to see
see the see the see the future as someone who's taking a photograph well your question actually
goes back to something else I mean but in one of my interludes away from photography I have to
wonder what were the conditions that would be necessary in order to create or see a synchronicity
and it's quite interesting because I once went to a workshop called deep body work and religious
experience and it was a Jungian sort of based workshop and there were synchronicities going
off all the time within that workshop it was really really very very bizarre somebody had a
calvary experience where they had stigmata in their hands somebody was sort of having a kind
of a spiritual awakening and a peacock came to the window it opened its tail and tapped on the window
somebody was expressing frustration with something and there was this huge thump from the ceiling
thump thump thump on the ceiling indicating that they needed to make more more noise so I think the
first thing is you have to be prepared to answer your question you you actually have to be prepared
either for a synchronicity to take place or for a photo you want to take a photograph that's going
to reveal the future I mean the night that Cartier Bresson went out to take this photograph in
France he said I am going to take an important photograph you know this is in his biography
no he didn't know that he was going to take a photograph that might predict the future
he might have thought he was going to take a popular photograph but I mean he had this intention
in some way and some way the connection seems to have taken place at that time so that has to be
it has to be a willingness to do something like that now of course there are people that have
taken photographs that have predicted the future and they've been
have predicted bad futures for the photographers there was one of the members of the Bang Bang
Club I can't remember what his name is but the Bang Bang Club is this group of four photographers
from South Africa who documented a lot of apartheid and Incarta activity and he took a photograph
that won the prize and it's a picture of a emaciated girl who's trying to get to a refugee
station to get fed and there's a vulture behind the girl and
it won this wonderful prize he was elated about it but then he got a lot of criticism they said
well you know what did you do about the vulture and did you help the girl to get to the to the
refugee station and he kind of fudged the answers to these questions well of course I you know
scared off the vulture and I don't know what happened to the girl but he died he killed
himself and sometime later you know this image and this thing had haunted him in some way and
so in a sense you know he was the girl and the vulture was on his back
by predicting the future I understand by predicting the future yeah thank you very
much and thank you well thank you for being an ethnographer again so nasipal
you
