Book Review: Ken. To be destroyed
Ken. To be destroyed by Sara Davidmann
Review by Stephen Clarke
Most letters are addressed to a named reader, an intended recipient of the writer’s message. Many of these communications are private. Love letters in particular demand intimacy, and so unauthorized reading becomes an act of trespass. This discretionary principle can also be applied to photographs. Sara Davidmann’s project began with the discovery of two large envelopes and a brown bag that were in a chest of drawers in her mother’s garage. Marked on both of the envelopes was the directive: ‘To be destroyed’. Contained inside were the private correspondence between Davidmann’s mother, aunt and uncle. Authority, through inheritance, passed to the daughter to question the contents and interpret the instruction.
Davidmann, Senior Research Fellow in Photography at the London College of Communication, is a member of the Photography and the Archive Research Centre (PARC). Within the remit of the Centre’s academic concern the Davidmann family’s archive became appropriate material for sympathetic scrutiny by the artist/researcher. In a brief section towards the end of the book titled History of a Project, Davidmann guides the reader through the evolution of her exploration. From the artist inheriting the family archive in 2011, through to working alongside Val Williams (Director of PARC) and Robin Christian (PARC’s then Project Manager), to publishing a selection of letters and images in Fieldstudy 19 (2014), the Research Centre’s own publication. Following this Sara Davidmann and Val Williams began work on the book Ken. To be destroyed (2016) that has been published by Schilt Publishing.
Williams, credited as the editor of the book, provides the opening essay Secrets and Scraps. The secrets that this collection holds are revealed through the unraveling history of the troubled relationship between Hazel Houston – Davidmann’s aunt on her mother’s side – and her husband Ken Houston, as Hazel comes to terms with Ken’s self-identity as transgender. Letters and ephemera are the scraps that Davidmann uses to piece together this story. The correspondence between Hazel and her sister Audrey, and between Hazel and Ken, is the script for this narrative, as well as a point of reference for Williams’ essay. As Williams notes it is unclear what is left out of this archive and so what the reader is presented with is inconclusive. It is this fracturing of Sara Davidmann’s familial identity that gives moral context to public exposure of this material. The story is not just about Ken and Hazel but also the family as a whole. Davidmann’s family extends beyond that of her blood relations. The antecedent to Ken. To be destroyed is her work with the UK transgender and queer communities during the last fifteen years. In the essay included in Fieldstudy 19 Davidmann argues that her responsibilities to Ken lie with this other ‘family’ that her uncle was naturally a part.
Images in this extensive project are organized into series and fabricated using existing photographs. Davidmann adopts an approach to this material that is common amongst contemporary artists working with archives; using a combination of physical and digital processes she has altered the original photographs. An early series, The Dress, draws attention to a dress worn by Hazel. In these pictures the head of Davidmann’s aunt is erased by a covering of ink, chalk, magic markers and correction fluid. The headless dress stands in for a traumatized Hazel or perhaps, potentially, a transformed Ken. The physicality of the photographs is emphasized in the series Closer that enlarges the actual skin of the photograph noting its imperfections, hinting at what lies beneath the images of Ken and Hazel as a couple. The series Looking for K/Finding K visualizes Ken in the feminine role. These hand-tinted montages are the rose-tinted dream of transformation from man to the woman he may have wanted to become. In the melancholic series For K Davidmann’s uncle seemingly dissolves in the fluid alterations of her chemigram processes. The most recent part of the project is a collaboration with Graham Goldwater simply titled Archive. Images of the found papers in their bundles tied with string or bands show the viewer the physical substance that Davidmann is wrestling meaning from.
Throughout this book are reproductions of personal letters, family photographs and ephemera, such as envelopes and dance cards; these are interspersed among Davidmann’s explanatory comments and her artworks. The book closes with transcripts of selected letters, some of which are love letters, that Ken Houston sent to Hazel. Reading such intimate correspondence provokes unease in the understanding that this dialogue was not meant for anyone else but Hazel. It is from this juncture, where the private becomes public, that the project derives its tension. The letters, photographs and ephemera belong to Davidmann and her family – these are her family’s heirlooms. As a sibling Sara Davidmann came to an agreement with her brother and sister in relation to the exhibition and publication of the material. Whilst they were unhappy that Ken’s transgender identity would become publically known they gave their permission for the archive to be displayed, however, this was on condition that they themselves would remain unnamed and would not be included in the photographs. This agreement gives Davidmann the authority to explore and expose the archive but one question stays unanswered: Would Ken have wanted his – and Hazel’s – story told or would he have preferred the archive ‘to be destroyed’?
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Ken. To be destroyed. by Sara Davidmann (2016) is published by Schilt Publishing.
Hardcover with dustjacket, 120 pages, 113 images, £35.00 retail
ISBN 978 90 5330 861 5
The exhibition Ken. To be Destroyed is showing at the Schwules Museum, Berlin until October 2016.
The author Stephen Clarke is an artist, writer and lecturer based in the North West.
The article Alien Resident: Searching for San Diego by Julia García Hernández and Stephen Clarke on Clarke’s 1980s photographs of Southern California was published in The Royal Photographic Society’s Contemporary Journal No. 63, Spring 2016, pp 12-15. It is available to view at: https://issuu.com/bjsdesign/docs/spring_2016_journal_final__for_issu
Stephen Clarke’s photobook a strange field produced in collaboration with book artist Elizabeth Kealy-Morris (Sequential Press) was on show at Impressions Book Art 2016, Ireland from July 11- 24 2016. See Issue 105 of UWE’s Book Art Newsletter p.60: www.bookarts.uwe.ac.uk/newsletters.html