Henry Bond, FHEA (born 13 June 1966) is an English writer, photographer, and visual artist. In his Lacan at the Scene (2009), Bond made contributions to theoretical psychoanalysis and forensics.
In 1990, with Sarah Lucas, Bond organised the art exhibition East Country Yard Show, which was influential in the formation and development of the Young British Artists movement; together with Damien Hirst, Angela Bulloch, and Liam Gillick, the two were "the earliest of the YBAs."Archer, Michael, "Overlapping Figures. " In How To Improve the World: 60 Years of British Art, London: Hayward Gallery, 2006, p. 50, i.e., "Then later still there is the generation of Damien Hirst, Sarah Lucas, Angela Bulloch, Henry Bond and Liam Gillick, the earliest of the yBas (young British artists)."
Bond's visual art tends to appropriation and pastiche; he has exhibited work made collaboratively with YBA artists including a photograph made with Sam Taylor-Wood and the Documents Series, made with Liam Gillick. In the 1990s, Bond was a photojournalist working for British fashion, music, and youth culture magazine The Face. In 1998, his photobook of street fashions in London The Cult of the Street was published. His Point and Shoot (Cantz, 2000), explored the photo-genres of surveillance, voyeurism and paparazzi photojournalism.
In 2007, Bond completed his doctoral research; in 2009, he was appointed Senior Lecturer in Photography at Kingston University.
Life and career
Early life and education
Henry Bond was born in Forest Gate in East London in 1966.Henry Bond The Cult of the Street (London: Emily Tsingou Gallery, 1998) Unpag. He attended Goldsmiths at the University of London, graduating in 1988, from the Department of Art,Ana Finel Honigman "Henry Bond in Conversation with Ana Finel Honigman," Saatchi Gallery, 10 July 2007. with fellow alumni Angela Bulloch, Ian Davenport, Anya Gallaccio, Gary Hume, and Michael Landy—each of whom was to participate in the YBA art scene.
Bond attended Middlesex University in Hendon studying for an MA in Psychoanalysis, where he was taught by Lacan scholar Bernard Burgoyne.Henry Bond, Lacan at the Scene (Cambridge, Mass. : The MIT Press, 2009), p. 200, footnote 31; p.220. footnote 20. A snippet view is available on Google books.
Critical writing
Lacan at the Scene
Lacan at the Scene is a work of non-fiction by Bond, published in 2009 by MIT Press. The book consists of interpretations of forensic photographs from twenty-one crime scenes from 1950s and 1960s England.Andrea Walker Jacques Lacan: Detective and Cyborg The New Yorker, 19 June 2009. The thesis put forward in the book is that homicide can be considered in terms of Jacques Lacan's tripartite psychological model, thus any murder can be classified as either neurotic, psychotic, or perverse.Henry Bond, Introduction to Lacan at the Scene (Cambridge: MIT, 2009) p. 1.pdf available from MIT. Retrieved, 13 January 2012. Bond's approach is closely linked to Walter Benjamin's assertion that, "photography, with its devices of slow motion and enlargement, reveals the secret. It is through photography that we first discover the existence of the optical unconscious, just as we discover the instinctual unconscious through psychoanalysis."Henry Bond, 'Hard Evidence' in Lacan at the Scene (Cambridge: MIT, 2009) p. 23 pdf available from MIT.
Lacan at the Scene is an interdisciplinary study which is simultaneously an application of the theories of Jacques Lacan in relation to offender profiling and an inquiry into the nature and essence of photography.Emily Nonko The Exquisite Corpse? Bomblog, 5 February 2010.
Bond's book considers the effects of photography on the spectator, the photographer and the photographic subject. He refers to a wide range of contextual material including "J.G. Ballard, William Burroughs, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean-Paul Sartre and Slavoj Žižek ... and the films of Alfred Hitchcock, Michael Powell, Michelangelo Antonioni, David Lynch and Christopher Nolan, among many others."Josej Braun, Vue Weekly, Issue 745, 28 January 2010. The book contains a foreword essay The Camera's Posthuman Eye by the Slovenian philosopher and critical theorist Slavoj Žižek.
Many of the photographs reproduced in the book are sexually explicit—they depict murder victims who were raped or tortured before the killing.Parul Sehgal "Book Review: Lacan at the Scene," Time Out New York, Issue 738, 19–25 Nov 2009
Describing his research, in a 2007 interview, Bond said, "the press reporter's access to a crime scene is restricted, it is literally blocked by the ubiquitous black and yellow tape emblazoned with the exhortation: CRIME SCENE DO NOT CROSS. The photographs that I have worked with are documents made in a place that the press photographer or reporter cannot go."Ana Finel Honigman, "Henry Bond in Conversation with Ana Finel Honigman," Saatchi Online, 10 July 2007
Critical reception
The critical reception of Lacan at the Scene was positive including reviewers commending the book as 'insightful', 'ground-breaking', 'audacious' and 'enthralling' – writing in the peer-reviewed journal The European Legacy, Viola Brisolin said, 'Lacan at the Scene is a brilliant, ground-breaking work that will appeal to cultural practitioners and theorists, and to everybody interested in the dialogue between psychoanalysis and visual studies."Viola Brisolin, "Lacan at the Scene" in The European Legacy, Volume 16, Issue 5, August 2011. Writing in the peer-reviewed academic journal Philosophy of Photography, Margaret Kinsman said "Bond's exploration ... reminds us of just how used to order we are and how shocking and easy its dissolution is ... his approach evokes a kind of aesthetic pleasure, which unsettles even as it satisfies."Margaret Kinsman, "The lure of the crime scene", Philosophy of Photography, London, Volume 1. Number 1, 2010., p. 116.
Emily Nonko's review said, "Lacan at the Scene ultimately presents a complex dynamic between both psychoanalysis and medium of the camera, the way that photography permits the viewer to delve into both the murder's mind and the victim's corpse, the psychological as well as the corporeal."Emily Nonko "the Exquisite Corpse?" Bomb Magazine/Bomblog, 5 February 2010
Reviewing the book for Time Out New York Parul Sehgal said: "While Bond's interpretations occasionally strain credulity, his sensibility enthralls. His goal isn't police work per se, but to reveal how humble objects at the margins of crime scenes become powerfully allusive and lend themselves to a narrative."Parul Sehgal, "Book review: Lacan at the Scene," Time Out New York, Issue 738, 19–25 November 2009.
Daniel Hourigan, writing for Metapsychology Online Reviews said, "for the vast majority of the discussions in the more applied third, fourth, and fifth chapters, Lacan at the Scene enjoys a lucid and precise execution. The early chapters help to bring together the theoretical, discursive, and political elements that make these later chapters capable of pursuing such a rigorous and insightful project."Daniel Hourigan "Henry Bond: Lacan at the Scene," Metapsychology Online Reviews, posted 2 March 2010.
The Gaze of the Lens In July 2011, Bond's second book on the theory and philosophy of photography, The Gaze of the Lens, was self-published using the Kindle direct publishing format; the book consists of one hundred "concise observations and statements on photography."Unattributed, "MIT Published Author Switches to Kindle Direct Publishing-Platform", Artdaily, 19 August 2011. In the book, Bond "activates, reconfigures, qualifies, and occasionally contradicts assertions made a diverse range of thinkers and practitioners including Rankin, Stieg Larsson, Antonioni, Charles Baudelaire, J.G. Ballard, Raymond Chandler, Walter Benjamin, Jacques Lacan, Georg Hegel and Slavoj Žižek."
Street photography A characteristic of Bond's style is his pastiche and appropriation of familiar types of photograph, for example, writing in Frieze, Ben Seymour said, "Bond carries on producing images of a homogenised, outside-less culture in a perpetual present of consumption which may be just ahead of, or self-consciously behind – but always deliberately in between – the conventions of advertising, fashion, surveillance or family photographs."Ben Seymour, "Review: Henry Bond" Frieze, Issue 54, October 2000 Bond has also considered his work in relation to the dérive – literally: "drifting" – theorised by Guy Debord and the city walks of the flâneur or psychogeographer.Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen, Henry Bond in Conversation with Museum Director Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen. In, Henry Bond: The Cult of the Street. London: Emily Tsingou Gallery, 1998, unpaginated.
Characterizing his conception of street photography, in a 1998 interview, Bond said: "[For me street photography] is parallel to the psychoanalytic session, in that anything can be mentioned." Bond began his street photography in the late-1990s and continued for approximately ten years concluding with his Interiors in 2005. Monograph books of Bond's street photography include two published in Germany – Point and Shoot (Ostfildern: Cantz) and La vie quotidienne (Essen: 20/21).
The Cult of the Street
Bond's large book, The Cult of the Street, was published in 1998 by "posh West End gallery",Jonathan Jones, Keith Coventry: Emily Tsingou Gallery, The Guardian, 26 September 2000. Emily Tsingou Gallery, London. The 274 photographs included in the book depict daily life in London in the mid-1990s. Many of the photographs included in the book were originally taken by Bond whilst shooting commissioned features for the style and culture monthly The Face—during the period that the magazine was art directed by Lee Swillingham and Stuart Spalding, 1995–1999.See, for example: Tony Naylor, "Thieves Like Us", [a story on anarchist group Decadent Action] The Face, 9/1997, p. 124–28. Facsimile available of p. 124–25 ; Siân Pattenden, "Fitter, happier, more productive?" The Face, 3/1998, p. 170–74. Facsimile available of p. 170–71 . The book includes a foreword essay, "A Response to the Photographs", by psychoanalyst and author Darian Leader. It has been suggested that the title of the book is a reference to the 1926 Siegfried Kracauer essay The Cult of Distraction.Stallabrass (1999)p.134.
In 2002, a group of large-scale printed examples from The Cult of the Street were included in the Barbican Centre survey Rapture: Art's Seduction by Fashion Since 1970Chris Townsend (ed.) Rapture: Art's Seduction by Fashion Since 1970 (London: Barbican Art Gallery/Thames and Hudson, 2002). Overview on Google books and these were shown again, in 2004, at the Museum of London, in an exhibition titled, The London Look: Fashion from Street to Catwalk.Chris Breward & Edwina Ehrman (ed.) The London Look: Fashion from Street to Catwalk (Newhaven: Yale University Press, 2004); Overview on Google books
Critical response
Reviewing the book for the British newspaper The Independent, fashion writer Tamsin Blanchard described the book as, "a rich social document of the way we dress—rather than the way fashion designers like to imagine we dress".
Writing in his commentary on the influence of the Young British Artists, High Art Lite, the art historian Julian Stallabrass said, "The Cult of the Street is telling of many characteristics of High Art Lite and its engagement with mass culture and the media. It takes as its subject not just the conventions of the street but youth and their modes of display in shops, clubs, parties, restaurants and even private homes ... they don't do much, Bond's people; they shop, of course, persistently, and present themselves to each other and the camera, dance sometimes, but the book is composed above all of an intricate fabric of exchanged glances and gazes."Julian Stallabrass, High Art Lite (London: Verso, 1999), p.133. The complete section in Stallabrass is on Google Books here