Jim Naughten
Re-enactors
Back to the Front
Bill Kouwenhoven
Classic photographic portraiture, at least since the days of
August Sander, usually represents the straightforward image
of a specific, named, person and is said to reveal something of
the soul of that person, or, in the case of Sander, to represent
a stereotype of a profession—pastry chef, postman, artist, etc.
Jim Naughten’s portraits of ‘re-enactors’ invert this equation.
Naughten deliberately provides us with almost nothing of the
real lives of the persons he photographs, but rather he presents
us with images of people pretending to be soldiers or sailors
who have just re-staged various battles. These people are
playing their chosen characters in the mock wargames ‘fought’
by ‘re-enactors’. As a result, Naughten’s portraits, shot against
a neutral backdrop like Richard Avedon used in his nowlegendary series, In the American West, strip all context away
from his subjects and leave us with only their uniforms and
their expressions. Naughten invites us to ask “Who are these
people?” and “What makes them tick?”
As Avedon wrote in his Afterword to In the American West,
“A portrait is not a likeness. The moment an emotion or fact is
transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an
opinion. There is no such thing as inaccuracy in a photograph.
All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.”
This is equally valid for Naughten’s subjects. We know what his
subjects represent, but we don’t know who his people are. As in
the nursery song, “Tinker, tailor, every mother’s son, butcher,
baker, shouldering a gun…” they could be anyone. Is that also
not a metaphor for war, where, at least under the draft, we are
yanked from our putative lives and re-cast as ‘warriors’? “Rich
man, poor man, every man in line…,” the song continues in a
particularly militant version.
The Face out of Time
Mark Rappolt
Unlike the fantasy characters invoked in James Thurber’s
famous short story, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, Naughten’s
‘re-enactors’ maintain their mystery. Nothing of their real lives
is revealed in his portraits. Who chooses to play a Cossack or
a Nazi-era naval rating? Why would one want to play a Spitfire
pilot, a WRAC, an SS-officer, or an American tanker? What kind
of fantasies are at work here—nostalgia, the sense of power a
uniform evokes? Is it just an escape from the everyday grind?
Naughten’s protagonists are the stars of their own inner dramas
acted out on a grand scale—many ‘re-enactments’ involve
hundreds, even thousands of people and weeks of preparation,
yet although we are seduced by all the meticulous preparation,
the palpable authenticity of the uniforms and expressions of
the ‘re-enactors’, we are left on the hook. Naughten’s ‘inverted
portraits’ do not let us in on their secret, real, lives. He provokes
us with the mysteries behind the surface and commands us to
dig deeper. The measure of a photographic portrait is not in its
superficial qualities or even verisimilitude, but rather its power
to make the viewer wonder just who it really is in front of the
camera. In this, Jim Naughten’s Re-enactors succeeds mightily:
we are compelled to look and to wonder. There is no better
compliment to artist and sitter alike.
‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there,’
wrote the novelist L.P. Hartley back in 1953. He probably never
saw a military re-enactment. Otherwise he might have noticed
that the past is often happening in our own country, played
out by the butchers and bakers from down the road, and with
an obsessive approach to ensuring that they do things exactly
the same.
Where August Sander published Face of our Time (1929),
80 years later, Jim Naughten, capturing a broad cross-section
of ages and genders, presents the face out of time. Naughten’s
portraits, featuring costumes from both World Wars and
beyond, document a group of people who balance a fetish for
historical accuracy with the kind of appetite for fantasy that
allows a person to take on the guise of someone else. And,
of course, their collective attempts to keep history alive.
What follows is a series of ‘action scenes’ that look like
toned-down versions of Jake and Dinos Chapman’s Hell (2000)
—although there’s no morality here—and objective portraits
(you could almost be flicking through a catalogue of Tamiya
military models—a sensation enhanced by the photographer’s
use of post-production techniques) captioned only with details
that describe nationality, unit and rank (but interestingly,
given the fact that these portraits are, on one level, about
people with a kink for history, rarely any precise dates). But if,
as it seems, these people are what they wear (and look how
wonderfully clean and well-kept that clothing is), then perhaps
in that alone they stand out as icons for a contemporary age.
One in which everything is surface, everyone can be a celebrity
and everyone can belong to a tribe as long as they have the
right hair and they’re wearing the right kind of clothes.
Cover: Corporal, German Navy
Previous pages: WW2 German and US forces engage
Soviet Cossack
Soviet Soldier with Telogreika
US Master Sergeant
Post-War British Tank Crewman
Lieutenant-Colonel of the 101st Airborne
WW1 Germans surrender to British forces
Norland Panzer Grenadier
US Infantryman
Civilian with black fox fur
SS Oberscharführer
Evacuee girl with Teddy
Evacuee boy with tank top
WW2 Red Army advance
Luftwaffe Fallschirmjäger
SS Private, 2SS Panzer Division
US Boy Scout
Deutsche Jugend ‘Pimpf’
Panzer Grenadier Medic
US Naval Petty Officer 1st Class
Russian Tank Heavy KV1B
German Sturmgeschutz
RAF personnel
Panzerman 11th Panzer Division
Red Cross Nurse
Civilian in white suit
Panzerman SS Panzer Division
SS Helferin Radio Operator
M24 Light battle tank
M3 Sturt Light tank
1917 Royal Flying Corps Ground Crew
WW1 Tunnelling Company Officer
Evacuee girl in blue coat
Evacuee boy in green coat
British Private
8th Army ‘Desert Rat’
WW2 US forces advance
British Infantryman
WW1 German Soldier with Pickelhaube helmet
US Medic, 101st Airborne
US Pathfinder, 82nd Airborne
British WW1 Soldier
British WW2 Private with Tam O’Shanter
WW1 German advance
East German Grenzertruppen
East German NVA Soldiers
Imperial Japanese Soldier
Finnish Jagen, 4th Battalion
Evacuee with Mickey Mouse gas mask
Hitler Jugend
WW1 Tank Mark 1V ( Male )
German Sd.Kfz half track
OBR 43 Soviet Soldier
Soviet Red Army Soldier
Girl in US military uniform
Bund Deutscher Mädel (League of German Maidens)
British WW1 Gunner
British WW1 Private Essex Regiment
German KDF wagen staff car
Pink Panther desert Land Rover
1940s Civilian girl with mink fur
1940s Civilian girl in brown suit
Brigadeführer, 1SS Panzer Division
Deutsches Rotes Kreuze (German Red Cross)
Soviet child soldier
Soviet child soldier
WW2 US forces held at beach
British Soldier in tropical uniform (‘Jungle greens’)
Post-War French Soldier
British Home Guard
SS Mann with M40 sidecap
Panzerman, 1st SS Pz Div LAH
Post-War Bundeswehr
WW2 German forces ambushed
German Soldier in Eastern Europe snow camouflage
Luftwaffe Personnel in tropical uniform
RAF Air Chief Marshall
Italian Private
Long Range Desert Group Major
Based in London, Jim Naughten (1969, Horsham,
Sussex ) was awarded a painting scholarship to
Lancing College and later studied photography at
the Arts Institute at Bournemouth. He began photographing portraits of remote tribes in Namibia
and the circuses of India before adopting a more
narrative approach in his work. Re-enactors heralds
a return to documentary portraiture, this time using
post-production techniques to create a powerful
collusion with his subjects and composite images
mixing landscapes with action scenes.
Naughten has had three solo exhibitions (at the
Coningsby and HotShoe galleries) and group shows
at The Mall Galleries, The Poole Museum and the
AOP Gallery. He has won numerous awards from the
Association of Photography and been commended
in AI-AP 24, Creative Review Photography Annual
and The National Portrait Gallery’s Taylor Wessing
Photographic Portrait Prize.
Published by
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Designed by Allon Kaye
Set in ff Legato
Printed in Italy by Graphicom
First edition
© 2009 Jim Naughten
jimnaughten.com
All rights reserved. No part of this
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isbn 978–0–9557465–5-0
Jim Naughten would like to thank the re-enactors,
Paul Dalby and AFRA, Nick and Micky Beardshaw,
Allon Kaye, Mark Rappolt, Ubald Rutar, Stephanie
Keelan, Lisa Dredge Fenwick, Martin Konrad,
Shizuka Hata, Annick Wolfers, Becky Callis and
Claire Pelliccia. Special thanks to Tim Ashton at
Happy Finish for his hard work, dedication and
creativity.