six for gold
In 2017 I wrote the essay ‘Young men bathed in golden light’ for Jake Mein’s book Six for Gold published by Bad News Books. Read the essay below:
Young men bathed in golden light
What is it to be young? To have your whole life, the whole world, open as a possibility before you? What is it to be fit, healthy and live a life exploring the corners of the physical world? To fall, and bleed, and get back up again? What is it to travel and explore, to seek out the places tourists don’t go?
We live in a world of travel. We are at every stage of life encouraged to get up from our comfortable chairs and venture forth into the world. There is no time of life more likely for this to happen than when we are in our twenties, the world is ours we are told, go and take it. Six for Gold was made over the decade after Jake Mein finished university, and encompasses his travels in that time, far and near.
Some photographic essays are tightly structured around a single subject, stories unfold in a recognisable narrative. But in Six for Gold we see three or four genres of photography combined together to draw less certain conclusions. Or perhaps there are no conclusions, only a series of questions. The work is centred around images of young men at rest just before or after activity. Hanging around, waiting, mopping up blood. The people here are constantly in motion, beings who seem to be still only for a second. The photographs speak of a youthful feeling of urgency, of a new experience being just around the corner with the next trick, or the next sunset. There is a depth of feeling that the current moment is not being taken for granted, but at the same time that the following moment will be even better. They are hopeful and optimistic, yet still grounded in reality.
We are privy to group activities that bond young men, moments we don’t usually get to see. We know these ‘boys’, we know their tribe, their comradery, their friendship; if only from the outside. This project carries the connection between subject and photographer, he is one of them and he travels alongside them. We see private jokes and shared laughs, moments of contemplation and resignation. And most of all we see the beauty of youth; faces and bodies fit and shining before age has made them cautious.
The male gaze is a concept that has become synonymous with negativity – of older men leering at younger women. But if celebrating the female gaze is one way of watering down this stereotype another would be to recognise that the photographic gaze of men is often constructively turned on themselves. This is a consideration of the photographer’s own social group; it feels like an exploration for meaning in his own life. It is centred largely around place, both at home in Aotearoa and abroad in unnamed countries. Where is home for a young person in today’s world? We are told we live in a global community but here at the bottom of the world we understand that we are physical beings, and physical distance matters.
Juxtaposed against other portraits, the images of the young men suggest they are experiencing their world differently. These boys seek places they can occupy in a distinctive way; physically, bodily. They make themselves closer to the countries they are travelling in by literally scraping their skin against them. They are acting out the age-old story for New Zealanders; to experience the world away from here so that we can feel more comfortable in our own skin. But it is also the classic rite of passage for young men, to test themselves out in the world.
Yet the photographer’s peers aren’t the only people depicted here, we see a cross section of people. All the people who find themselves in front of Mein’s camera are depicted in a positive, yet real way. He is an excellent portrait photographer, he makes people comfortable enough to just be themselves.
In these photographs we watch strangers, friends and family experience the world both alone and through group activities. Tourists lean through windows on boats, a young girl rides her bike on a sports field. There is play with representation; we watch a tourist photographing a view during a sunset; we get to see both the view and it being photographed. We are being shown how ubiquitous the photographic image is, how intertwined in both our world and our view of it. In the same way that our childhood photos become our childhood memories, so our holidays photos become our memories of our holiday. I wonder if increasingly in the age of social media our random Instagram photos become our memories of our life. The thought makes me rather sad.
Yet in the end we see that life ‘there’ is much the same as life ‘here’. What is gained by going away to find that out? Cliché’s become so because there is truth in them – must we go somewhere else to find value in what is here? There are photos of Aotearoa here too; are the photos of Aotearoa ‘nowhere’, the overseas photos ‘somewhere’? Is that what we expect we will feel? For some people that remains the truth, yet these photographs feel to me like a young man turning back towards home. There are places here I am personally familiar with (I am particularly tickled to see the old Coaltown building which brings back memories for me of how bone chillingly cold that building always was inside). Yet the other photos of Aotearoa feel familiar too, and then I start to wonder if some images are ‘here’ or ‘there’ and all the places seem to slide and bleed into each other.
The world we are being shown here is beautifully observed. Trees are old and gnarled and twisted into unexpected shapes, or moulded into rounded peaks on a terrace. A shard of rock sits isolated on a beach; grey stone worn away by the grey sea into grey sand. Giant rhododendron walls direct traffic down a driveway, lumpy conifers seem to melt and spill over the confines of their garden bed. A magnificent wisteria crushes a trellis fence under its weight. Cats, dogs and horses live their own interior lives. The built environment on the other hand often seems absurd architectural follies are noticed and displayed for our wonder. A building’s cross beams become an ‘x’ that marks nothing in particular, another building leers over us seeming to defy gravity, yet another is shaped like a grenade painted in pastel colours. Portaloo’s sit forlorn on a field, and a giant sculpture of Neptune is conquered.
Mein celebrates elements of the everyday that many of us would rather ignore. Scenes that might be ugly or absurd in real life are noticed with a friendly, interested eye and framed accordingly. Perhaps it is a kind of visual mindfulness, an encouragement to see the good in the mundane. Perhaps the structure of the environment is judged differently when you live a life so out of doors, when you interact with it so bodily. Six for Gold is a series of fleeting experiences, of often heightened emotion. Pulled together they suggest an attempt to make sense of the world, of a life. This is an exercise in noticing, in watching; we watch the photographer watching. Perhaps that’s all photography ever is?
The grandeur of nature emerges too, through clouds, mountains, rivers and trees. But mostly through light, through illumination. The skill of the photographer shines through here too – in some of the backlit images the lit object is featured, in others the light blows out and we get to explore the shadows. Due to photography’s limitations when the world is backlit there is always part of the image where we struggle to catch the detail. Or are we always just facing the wrong way? Is that the mistake of youth, trying to look directly into the light even though we know it will blind us? Would we not be better to turn around and see what is being illuminated, rather than search for the source, like a moth. Perhaps this is the condition of youth, to push back against the wall, to stare into the sun. With the resignation of age, we might turn our back to the light, and in doing so lose its heat.
And then we see light falling on a young woman. It is dark, and she is mostly in shadow, but a rectangle of golden light illuminates her face. We are allowed to gaze on her fleetingly while she appears to be in a moment of contemplation. Is her aloneness, her place in the dark while the boys play in the light meaningful? She is not backlit. The gaze of the photographer finally falls fully onto her, she is the object the light is illuminating. Is she what is being searched for? Is she home? Or perhaps that’s a pipe dream too; a fleeting thought that crosses your mind for a moment in the darkness. But what are we if not a series of moments? Together they become a string of memories we turn over in our hands like beads on a rosary, getting longer and longer as we move through our life. Six for Gold is a series of those beads, moments from Jake Mein’s life. How fortunate we are to be invited along for the ride.
Caroline McQuarrie