‘Billy Monk’ 2012
for 1000 words magazine, 2012
In Lin Sampson’s romanticizing essay that introduces the publication of Billy Monk’s black and white photographs, first exhibited in the UK at Brighton Biennale in 2011, we are offered a profile of the artist as a Renaissance figure; alternately, rough diamond, lover, crook, unreconstructed intellectual, of his mood swings, and unpredictability and violence.
Yet, if there is violence in this book, it is contained within the shadows of Monk’s playground, The Catacombs Club, a seemingly dank nocturnal arena in late 1960’s Cape Town, seen here as a hellish stew of escapist noir with bottles of Coke and bottles of rum scattered amongst the debris of the night.
Monk’s flash is key to this work as it summons all variety of spectacle; sparking through the cavernous space, revealing complex fragments of an exotic nether world and unexpected groupings of disparate individuals seeking company and solace.
Fresh-faced Russian sailors, raging Medusae, siblings; a mother-in-law emerging from beneath the table, spirit-like, her daughter ignoring the sodden materfamilias in preference to clinging onto her composure for the benefit of the photographer. Later, mascared and predatory twins eye Monk with apparent sexual interest, equally ready to kick his camera away in a second. Many of Monk’s players appear to have wandered in from elsewhere, a Diane Arbus photograph maybe, after having already been accosted earlier in the day.
What amazes always, is the untrained eye. Richard Billingham’s original prints from ‘Ray’s a Laugh’ were small paper prints from Boots, used as guides for paintings; their lack of formal photographic design was extraordinary to see. This selection of Monk’s work has a similar singularity, yet an absolute knowing, exists alongside considerable emotional distance.
In this sense, the edit is finely attuned and democratic in representational terms, his subject’s are neither reviled nor glorified. Monk is clearly on his own turf. The apparent acceptance of mixed-race and gay couples contradicts much of what we assume of this period, but what do we really know of Monk’s intentions with this work? Jac de Villiers’s discussion of her own input to the edit is welcome and helpful to a point, and here we might make other comparisons with ‘Ray’s a Laugh’ and the manner in which that work was co-opted into the photographic canon via a supervisory edit of opportunistic gallerists.
Many questions remain unanswered; whose work did Monk know? Had he seen Arbus, Frank, or Mary Ellen Mark even? Did he know Christer Strömholm? Or Ernest Cole?
The photographer’s early death a few weeks before the first significant exhibition of his work in 1982 offers us a window on the world he inhabited outside of The Catacombs, a world ever present, but untouched by his vision, and one all of his subjects were no doubt glad to retreat from, at least for the night.
for 1000 words magazine, 2012
In Lin Sampson’s romanticizing essay that introduces the publication of Billy Monk’s black and white photographs, first exhibited in the UK at Brighton Biennale in 2011, we are offered a profile of the artist as a Renaissance figure; alternately, rough diamond, lover, crook, unreconstructed intellectual, of his mood swings, and unpredictability and violence.
Yet, if there is violence in this book, it is contained within the shadows of Monk’s playground, The Catacombs Club, a seemingly dank nocturnal arena in late 1960’s Cape Town, seen here as a hellish stew of escapist noir with bottles of Coke and bottles of rum scattered amongst the debris of the night.
Monk’s flash is key to this work as it summons all variety of spectacle; sparking through the cavernous space, revealing complex fragments of an exotic nether world and unexpected groupings of disparate individuals seeking company and solace.
Fresh-faced Russian sailors, raging Medusae, siblings; a mother-in-law emerging from beneath the table, spirit-like, her daughter ignoring the sodden materfamilias in preference to clinging onto her composure for the benefit of the photographer. Later, mascared and predatory twins eye Monk with apparent sexual interest, equally ready to kick his camera away in a second. Many of Monk’s players appear to have wandered in from elsewhere, a Diane Arbus photograph maybe, after having already been accosted earlier in the day.
What amazes always, is the untrained eye. Richard Billingham’s original prints from ‘Ray’s a Laugh’ were small paper prints from Boots, used as guides for paintings; their lack of formal photographic design was extraordinary to see. This selection of Monk’s work has a similar singularity, yet an absolute knowing, exists alongside considerable emotional distance.
In this sense, the edit is finely attuned and democratic in representational terms, his subject’s are neither reviled nor glorified. Monk is clearly on his own turf. The apparent acceptance of mixed-race and gay couples contradicts much of what we assume of this period, but what do we really know of Monk’s intentions with this work? Jac de Villiers’s discussion of her own input to the edit is welcome and helpful to a point, and here we might make other comparisons with ‘Ray’s a Laugh’ and the manner in which that work was co-opted into the photographic canon via a supervisory edit of opportunistic gallerists.
Many questions remain unanswered; whose work did Monk know? Had he seen Arbus, Frank, or Mary Ellen Mark even? Did he know Christer Strömholm? Or Ernest Cole?
The photographer’s early death a few weeks before the first significant exhibition of his work in 1982 offers us a window on the world he inhabited outside of The Catacombs, a world ever present, but untouched by his vision, and one all of his subjects were no doubt glad to retreat from, at least for the night.