Three Stories showcases Ruben Buhagiar’s recent photographic work, a body of three coherent photo essays which, in many ways, gives the viewer a visual manifesto of Buhagiar’s approach to his creative practice.

Three Stories:
Ruben Buhagiar.
EDE Publishers, 2016.

Buhagiar prioritises narrative over experimentation. His idiom references both the humanists of photography, more specifically Brassai, Homer Sykes and Cartier-Bresson and their contemporary grandchildren, street photographers Ray-Jones and Martin Parr.

In this book, the viewer is treated to well-composed photo-graphy with an occasional touch of quirkiness, which does not indicate any significant deviation from Buhagiar’s previous work.

There seems to be a reluctance to take risks which, combined with Buhagiar’s technical competence, might have produced work of real brilliance.

In this work, Buhagiar rarely gets close to his subjects. One suspects a shyness even when the photographer is drawn in the action as, with some of the pictures in The Sardana. Distance frames most of the shots in the essay. Portobello Bello makes a virtue out of this distance to create a series of work which verges on the voyeuristic with none of the subjects ever looking at the camera. The photographer is not part of their life.

In this essay, the lack of intimacy is made up for with colour. There is a dab of red in each and every one of the 10 photos in this series. This, together with the clutter of objects, graffiti and text-based signs, present a visual cue which in itself creates a vocabulary that insists, as it were, on telling the viewer that this is the same hand at work here.

The viewer is treated to wellcomposed photography with an occasional touch of quirkiness

This cue certainly lends coherence to the series but does not upstage the drama. For example, the red handbag in the background does not diminish the effect of the woman’s gaze in focus in the foreground mirrored by the portrait in the newspaper she has in her lap. If anything, it adds depth and drama to the picture even though the two are physically close in the composition.

Cabalcor and The Sardana, both essays in black and white, show a less candid, perhaps more studied, approach than Portobello Bello. Two photos stand out of these essays, which confirm Buhagiar’s mastery of composition and storytelling. The strongest of the two is the tenth and last photo of the Cabalcor series: horse’s head in the foreground, out of focus, jockey’s face framed by the horse’s ears looking down straight into the lens.

The second one is photo 29 from The Sardana series – a picture bursting with primal tensions and awkwardness as a young lady is squashed between three young men, two of them looking straight at each other.

In Buhagiar’s work with horses and dancers, we still get some movement, on occasion much more than in the street scenes of the latter series, ironically perhaps because one expects more movement in street photo-graphy, but there is a quiet restraint in that movement.

In the third photo of Cabalcor, for example, we get a shot of a horse’s and a man’s legs mirroring each other’s stride. The viewer knows that they are walking but there are no cues that confirm it, no flying dust, no further suggestion of motion. In fact, we only get such cues in photos six and seven of the series. It seems as though movement has been really flattened to an unlikely, if not impossible, pose.

This arrested movement is felt in the rest of the horse-man compositions of the series as well as in the last section where, ironically, the viewer gets a whole series of photos of dancers who seem to be frozen still.

This feeling is broken by the very last picture of the book and the last photo presented in ‘The Sardana’ essay. A slight raising of the heel imbues the dancers’ bodies with a sense of precarious equilibrium even when their posture is nice and straight. Is this Buhagiar’s sublimated wish to portray potential energy or a failed attempt at capturing movement?

Three Stories is a dry and stark title which in itself conjures very little. Calling a book Three Stories is almost as good as not calling it anything and that is perhaps Buhagiar’s first statement about his practice. On reading the title one expects to experience narratives, which indeed one does and one also expects to find a book which lets the pictures do the talking. This is not the case with Three Stories, as each essay is introduced with a short commentary by Buhagiar himself.

These commentaries may give one the impression that the photographic work in itself was not trusted enough to stand on its own and that it needed contextualising. In this respect, Three Stories would have made a stronger publication if the essays were left to speak to the reader without the mediation of the written word.

Glen Calleja is a creative working with text, storytelling and artistbooks.

www.glencalleja.com

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