The Stigmatisation Of Dwarfs In Art (Full Documentary) | Perspective

[Music] dwarves in art you probably can't think of any but they are there and a lot of them in relics from the ancient world in your garden and most of all in paint and ink dwarfs have also been the stuff of folklore fairy tales and myths for thousands of years seven-year-old comes up to me and says i thought there were seven dwarves mate they're more than seven here's it you're mind blown what can our greatest works of art and our most deeply embedded myths reveal about society's shifting attitudes to dwarfism and can they tell us anything about the lives of dwarves themselves we have gi we have fear we have sex we're just little throughout history dwarves have been shown as royal pets creatures from a separate race figures of fun and freaks making it all but impossible for people with dwarfism to simply get on with their everyday lives but are we getting any closer to dwarves being represented like everybody else and can artists with dwarfism offer us a glimpse of the world from their perspective in this film i'm going to be uncovering a hidden chapter in both the history of art and the history of disability [Music] when i was a child i caught polio which was kind of unfortunate because it had been pretty much eradicated everywhere apart from where i was i caught it before i was old enough to be vaccinated and it left me with this withered arm which i like and a twisted spine now i spent many months in hospital with doctors trying to fix me and they couldn't i've also had a lifelong tussle with mental health issues so whatever discomfort or difficulties my disabilities have caused me both physically and emotionally the one thing they have done is they've left me with a distinctive perspective on the world i've always been intrigued by the way that people with disabilities have been portrayed in art and culture and surprisingly it's people with dwarfism that you see the most i suppose it's because it's a condition that can't be hidden and can't be denied [Music] we're looking at each other making judgments about each other all the time if you look different and let's face it dwarves look very different people stare even more excuse me if i flash anybody it's always the danger of little legs on a chair as a stage and screen performer actress karina stamel is used to being looked at it's what she does for a living today she's being stare at in a different way sitting for a portrait for the first time with artist tanya raba weber do you feel you need to look back at someone who looks at you or do you just ignore it when or i'm walking down the street they're people that have never met somebody that looks like me so you kind of get the oh my god eyes or you'll get the the double take and so you become aware that you're being looked at people who are ignorant will often make a show of their looking at me and there's a little bit of a power trip involved of haha you're different i'm looking at you it's sort of that same feeling sometimes of being pointed at we rarely meet people with dwarfism in day-to-day life so we can't help but be conditioned by the images of dwarves we've absorbed through centuries of representation in art and culture representations that go back to the founding of european society it's in ancient greece and rome that the insidious idea of dwarf spectacle first reared its ugly head the ashmolean museum in oxford has some of the earliest evidence of the dwarf's image being harnessed by society for its own gratification hi marian how are you marion bergeron is curator of the classical greek collections dwarves were portrayed as caricatures they're seen as lesser people as novelties and they're depicted as such here is a shirt from a stemless cup depicting a dwarf dancing on a podium this feels like the beginning of a dwarf being comic entertainer a tool for entertainment what we have here is a wine jug would you like to hold it i would i'd like not to drop it as well we have a dwarf portrayed as a satire satires are associated with debauchery and drunkenness and wild sex a satire chases after women who have consumed lots of alcohol chases drunk girls yeah that's kind of what you're saying really here so yes except that satires never catch their object of desire and so they are always left unfulfilled now this is uh much later than the other pieces it's definitely a dwarf it's got the proportions it's got the achondroplasic kind of look to it enormous penis i must add that goes with the whole idea of caricature grotesque you emphasize the elements that would make someone ungreek so we're saying that most greeks had small penises so therefore all the non-greeks must have to have huge penises in order to delineate them from the normal greeks i feel sorry for the greeks but that that was their ideal so they portrayed this figurine of dwarf to have large gentles in order to show that it was not a proper person yeah yeah he was less of a person than um the ideal greek exactly rome was famous for public spectacles the coliseum the circus i mean were dwarves used in this context we hear of them battling women who we think were probably representing amazons that created the the comedy for spectators in the arena overall the message that i'm picking up here is that people with dwarfism in both classical greece and rome were exploited absolutely um they were considered less than normal less than human almost and were there to please this depiction of dwarves for comedy and spectacle is evidence of the negative attitude towards disability at the heart of european civilization i think these representations say more about society than they do about dwarves but they've left us in the western world at least with a distorted perception of people with dwarfism but was this ridicule inevitable was life any better for dwarves in that other go-to civilization ancient egypt egypt was a more catch-all society for people with disability and i'm interested to find out if this extended to people with dwarfism so this is a an ivory figurine of a dwarf from the site of hierokompolis in the south of egypt about 5 000 years old this is actually made of hippopotamus ivory this would have been a very very expensive and prestigious material so the fact that we have a dwarf statuette carved out of this material i think demonstrates the respect and reverence given to these individuals in egyptian society weren't then treated like the comics figures that they were in ancient rome no absolutely not they were very much part of the elite society and they could be anything from scribes to priests they occasionally held very high court titles in later periods um dwarves were so integrated in into egyptian society that certain gods took on the form of of dwarfs and here we have the god bess bess was um a protector god of um pregnant women during childbirth and used to ward off evils this is an amulet representing the dwarf god he was another guardian god i think it's quite nice to think that you know people with autism at least in one society were so highly revered that they ended up gods it's a very different approach to the approach taken by classical greece and rome from the earliest period the the egyptians integrated all different types of people into their society for me the most dignified depiction of a dwarf in the ancient world is of ceneb a high-ranking court official of ancient egypt four and a half thousand years ago thought to be the first portrait of anybody let alone a dwarf it shows him with his loving family by his side egyptian society's attitude towards people with dwarfism was much more open-minded they portrayed dwarves as ordinary people but sadly it seems it's the greek and roman ideas that we've chosen to follow but it's made the lives of people with dwarfism a hell of a lot tougher as a child there was no real positive image in the media um you know i think the only time we saw some dwarfism was in sort of fantasy films quite often there will be jokes or roles that are made to continue stereotypes that ridicule and humiliate people one of the oldest cliches is that of the evil dwarf with its roots grounded in european folklore from albert and wagner's ring cycle to the seven dwarfs of the brothers grimm in the original fairy tales and in these myths dwarves are depicted not only as evil but as not even human professor diane perkus has the delightful pleasure of studying fairy tales for a living what can you tell me about the mythology that's built up around dwarfism that typically in folklore not just small humans but a separate race from humans as different from humans as lions um in that they're not understood as disabled humans virtually as soon as grimm's fairy tales uh start to be published for children they start being published in illustrated editions one of the most influential illustrators um at the turn of the 19th century is arthur rackham partly because he's utterly brilliant but he also is the one who re-envisages dwarf characters with the characteristic cap with the tassel the big nose the long white beard over here we've got the seven dwarves is this right yeah i just find it fascinating that these characters are universally male universally evil and universally have the same characteristics with the beards and they're very careful yeah it's deeply creepy actually because it is very dehumanizing and estranging is there any example in any of these stories anywhere of for lack of a better word a good dwarf not really dwarves just like fairies and elves and leprechauns really represent the darkness at the heart of human beings it's like we want to hive off the darkness in ourselves and give it to some other group of people we can't acknowledge or bear the fact that we're greedy or that we're immoral or that we're conniving again we represent dwarves to disguise flaws in ourselves do you think the mythology has an effect on how people perceive real people with dwarfism i think it makes us a little bit inverted commas special which when you're an ordinary human you want to walk down the street and you don't necessarily want to feel special you want to get from a to b and be able to mind your own business i likened the dwarves of fairy tales in the same way that i'd sort of seen actually gollywogs in fairy tales you've got a representation of a certain look that exists in the real world and then you've abstracted it and turned it into a magical fairy creature when i go grocery shopping i'm not shopping dwarfishly you know what i mean it's not magical or special that i'm shopping there isn't enough representation of people with dwarfism uh being ordinary as the ordinary lives of people with dwarfism are shown so rarely it's the mythical images which predominate and you don't have to be a dwarf to be impacted by this christina gray never thoughts about this issue until her son samuel was diagnosed with the form of dwarfism known as achondroplasia and since his birth she has been alarmed by the impact of fictional representations of dwarves on her and her family when he was a toddler i was in a shopping mall pregnant with my youngest child and some guy said something oh if you bought his six brothers you'd get a good deal when he was six weeks old and i went for the six week check for the doctors with my beautiful baby boy in my arms the doctor said to me oh he'll probably get a job in the entertainment industry or the circus and i was shocked i said well actually he could be a teacher he could be an accountant he could be a doctor so when he started school i wanted a positive book that he could read himself share with his friends even for his siblings to be able to explain their brother's condition i searched for positive stories out there about children with dwarfism and i couldn't see any everything i saw was either fictional fairy tale not real or true to life for somebody living with the condition so christina wrote her own book strong and mighty max basing the central character on samuel what do you think about this book it's really cool you want to go through it with me um that's me i'm dreaming but i can be a superhero i want to fly i want to climb a walk i want to swim to the deepest part of the ocean what would you find there gold gold you reckon that would be useful the doctor's putting a special thing around my mum's tummy and the doctor is saying that it's a special occasion it's not some kind of superpower it but eyeball a corner pleasure what kind of plays here and what's that um it makes my bones both shorter than others people it's very important what do you want to do when you grow up good stuff like police iron man flying in the airplane it's been a pleasure to meet you you are quite marvelous you shake my hand do you wanna arm wrestle okay this arm you're gonna win ah he went straight away that was rubbish right now there are no limits to samuel's ambitions his mum's book has taught him to dream big and that's how it should be historically there are images of real dwarves out there but as with the myths they're deeply loaded from the 1500s dwarves were collected by royalty and are frequently shown with an aristocratic hand on their heads aggrandizing their new masters the images are saying i'm protecting you because you belong to me in this era dwarves were brought into the very epicenter of high society but they were kept quite literally at arm's length [Music] i've met with historian dr john wolfe at lancaster house in london to view a rarely seen painting attributed to the flemish baroque painter hendrik vansteenwick the younger it features jeffrey hudson one of the earliest caught dwarfs in england who are we looking at in this painting so in the door frame there we've got king charles the first and his wife queen henrietta maria and of course in the center to the left there we have jeffrey hudson the court dwarf for me this this painting really breaks from the tradition of depicting dwarves as creatures of mythology seeped in symbolism here we have a natural portrait so realistic in fact that it almost appears to be a snapshot into court lights this was probably painted in charles the first palace theobolds near enfield jeffrey he's in the inner sanctum uh yet he's separate yet he's a part dwarves were there as entertainers they were there as curiosities jeffrey hudson's story reveals a lot about the place of these prized curiosities in the royal palace in hudson's case he was very much a cherished possession of queen henrietta maria [Music] behind this watergate was york house and it was in york house that jeffrey first met the queen footmen bring in a massive pie it's about two feet high and two feet wide what comes out the pie good old geoffrey jeffrey jumps out of this pie he was in this miniature suit of armor and he had a little flag and he started like marching up and down this banqueting table waving this flag he then kind of returns to the queen looks at her and takes a low deep bow and she's in love with jeffrey she's besotted i mean a lot of people might think that that was it's quite a demeaning thing to do to sort of serve someone with dwarfism up in a pie how do you think that was meant i think you probably could see it uh akin to dwarf tossing or even that unscrupulous dwarf theme park in china and you know within the court the the dwarf was very much like a loved pet jeffrey moved in with queen henrietta maria to denmark house where somerset house now stands and he's pictured here in an engraving by george glover called three prodigies it shows him with the oldest man in britain and one of the tallest men who lived with him here like denmark house there were three other people with dwarfism in the court but as a proportionate dwarf jeffrey hudson was prized above all of them the engraving shows the fascination that the society of the time had with abnormal bodies outside the court dwarves were displayed alongside bearded ladies and other so-called monstrosities for public spectacle in an early incarnation of the freak show jeffrey fought for his country in the english civil war but his lasting memorial will be as part of this oil painting of queen henrietta maria by flemish artist anthony van dyke a leading painter of british royalty hudson is shown with a monkey called pug two pets of the royal household dwarves are pictured with dogs and monkeys in dozens of paintings the implication they're little higher in status than the animals that share their household [Music] within the royal palaces of europe dwarves had become ubiquitous and nowhere more so than in madrid under the reign of king philip iv dwarves would gain a much more prominent role in court life how many dwarves did philip iv have in the court along his whole reign we know of over 100 dollars and gestures where did they find them we hear of court members who would go over to a hospital to look for a darf with a donation right so they basically bought them from the hospital yes yes so what was life like outside the fact that that they are in court is is is a better life for them because what was the alternative for them to to be on the roadside or to be kept in cages to be shown in fairs so what was the court like for the dwarves they are present in everyday life with royal children or with a queen they would sometimes criticize you tells the story about the the parsley sauce and the mustard the king is having a meal in the company of adar a messenger comes in with with bad news that the city has been lost and the king remains impassive and continues eating with a parsley sauce and the gesture he swears he says for goodness sake get some mustard so that it would put a bit of temper in your nose and no nobody could say that no of course not of course not that i think you you you don't have your your head chopped off if you if you said that being a duke but if you're a jester you're allowed within the court of king philip iv was diego velasquez a painter of rare skill who in a radical break with art tradition would make dwarves the subjects of his paintings and not the decorative figures on the fringes i've seen these paintings many times in reproductions but here at the prado gallery i'm seeing the originals for the very first time las meninas it's this painting that first got me thinking about the place of dwarves in aunt on the surface it's a portrait of the royal family but it includes marie barbola a woman with achondroplasia and nicolasio pertusato a proportionate dwarf as you stare at the painting the painting looks back at you it draws you in and as it does so your mind begins to play tricks on you it's as if velazquez is staring out of the image and it's you who is being painted that's what conventional art history says and it's true but the really fascinating thing for me about this painting is that while at one level it appears to be a portrait of the infanta the young princess lit up in the middle at another level it kind of just dispenses with royalty all together the infanta is just a small girl visiting her mother and father the king and queen as they're having their portrait painted but the king and queen are relegated to mere reflections in a mirror on the far wall the real centerpiece of this painting is the german dwarf marie barbola she completely dominates the right hand side of the painting and no matter where you look your gaze is always pulled back to her and then she stares out at you as if to say what are you looking at she has an aura of self-contained gravitas her hands mirroring those of velazquez in the painting in a radical departure from royal portraits of the era velazquez presents marie as a real person and not as an object or a thing this painting is a recognized landmark in the history of art but for me it's also a standout moment in the history of disability the mercedes what can you tell me about the two dwarves in les minas nicolasillo is a younger he's well proportioned he was forever doing pranks and somersaults you know that sort of thing marie barbola is dressed exactly like a court lady and she is given four pounds of snow a day snow yes snow snow was important because it kept you your drinks cold you know in the summer that shows that she was important yes absolutely as well as las meninas velasquez made at least 10 portraits of dwarves this must surely have reflected a personal mission this is thought to be a portrait of sebastian de mora servant to prince balthazar carlos here velazquez portrays one of the court dwarves with all the humanity and all the sensitivity that he would a pope or a king he's done it without any sense of scale so you don't really notice the stature and he's portrayed his anguish and his despair it's probably the first time since the ancient egyptians that someone had started portraying dwarves with any kind of dignity this portrait from 1644 is of don diego de cedo in this painting velasquez has portrayed the man with a vast book which does emphasize his small stature but what he's also saying and i think it's much more important is that the man is clever that he can read that he can write that he's erudite and that's the most important thing about this person as befits his station as keeper of the king's seal he's dressed as a gentleman his eyes and a high forehead emphasize his intelligence whether speaking truth unto power or keeping the king's accounts these dwarves were valued as individuals with something rich to offer court society and velazquez captured their uniqueness alaska's painted these doors with real feelings there's obviously you know a feeling of of a family friendship almost he's somebody warm-hearted but really the bellafke is a great artist not only in drawing or light or whatever but he's also a great artist in in the deepest sense in the sense of of bringing back to you a human being a character i think when you see the velasquez paintings in real life they're quite astounding his images of dwarfs are the most touching i've ever seen i mean he conveys the humanity of his subjects the depth the personality it was really interesting listening to mercedes talk to me about the role of dwarves at least they had a position of privilege in some respects and free snow i want free snow velazquez showed the world what should have been blindingly obvious that people with dwarfism deserved more than to be treated as loved pets or monarchs play things they possessed deep intelligence and a profound humanity [Music] back in the uk another singular milestone was about to be reached for the first time a person with dwarfism was on the cusp of recognition as an artist in their own right his name was richard gibson and i've been given a rare glimpse of this portrait of him made by the studio of his friend sir peter leli as it undergoes conservation work here at the national portrait gallery gibson learnt his trade at the mort lake tapestry works and with the restoration of king charles ii he entered the royal palace as an official court painter in a reversal of the status quo a dwarf was now the one casting his gaze on average height people it seems somewhat ironic but when richard gibson finally made a name for himself as an artist it was through painting miniature portraits but in the 1600s there was nothing diminutive about miniatures i'm meeting art consultant emma rutherford to find out how richard gibson was regarded as an artist remember what light can you shed on the life of richard gibson we think he had a very thriving practice we have letters that say i'm trying to get my portrait painted by gibson but he's he's just too busy and i'm basically in a queue [Music] these are quite remarkable they are painted in watercolor things like the shine on the hair would be really really difficult to achieve i mean the detail is amazing and this sounds ridiculous but did they have like tiny little miniature brushes and magnifiers they had small brushes which were quite fat and came down to a single a single hair point so that's barbara villas who was one of the most famous mistresses of charles ii being a dwarf allowed gibson access to circles which other miniature painters didn't necessarily have access to gibson's personality and his social skills would have been really really important so this miniature has always traditionally thought to have been a self-portrait of richard gibson but uh we're not 100 sure it looks exactly like all the other portraits of him there are definite physical similarities but we don't have anything else to support it do you know that's ridiculous don't you not so historian as far as we can tell gibson wasn't viewed as either a slave or as an object and he didn't have to jump out of a pie what gibson did prove was that a dwarf could carve out a career as a highly successful and skilled artist and not just be some curious inspiration to others in sweden another artist with dwarfism andreas von ben was making waves with his own acclaimed miniatures while in germany artist calligrapher and magician matthew buckinger born without hands or feet was achieving a claim for his illustrations specializing in mycography he's pictured here in a self-portrait with intricately drawn psalms forming the curls of his hair it's thought he created them with a quill pen held between his arms but for dwarves there was no great turning point the battle for acceptance was just beginning it's in the 18th century that we get the first real clue of how it felt to be a court dwarf from writer and performer joseph borowski after being expelled from the polish court for marrying an average height woman borowski traveled across the salons of europe as a writer and performer he's portrayed here in great finery suggesting a rather privileged life but he's also pictured by a full-sized chair appearing to be defined by his size so which sums him up best his frank autobiography reveals a man who longed to be accepted as a gentleman but always felt looked down upon those will be much mistaken who should imagine that seduced by the repeated kindness bestowed on me i did not labor under painful feelings i only looked upon by others as a doll and if you're more perfect it is true but however only has an animated toy historian simon webb has brought me to durham town hall to see a life-size sculpture of borovusky i really quite like this statue actually i think it's quite a warm representation you notice that this button is undone the sign of a gentleman you don't do everything absolutely right he wanted to be respected as a civilized person he's thinking well are people charmed by me just because i'm a tiny guy or is there something about me that they can see that can shine out some talent some personality throughout his life borovsky was on exhibition as a dancer a violinist and even gorped at in his home for the price of his shilling he was told by the french ambassador you must needs give up pride or choose misery and if you do not intend to lead the most unhappy life it is indispensable you resolve to make exhibition of yourself [Music] but borovsky rose in stature through a combination of charm and considerable talent he traveled across europe as a dancer and musician finally ending up in england he yearned to be accepted by the highest echelons of society and did eventually gain an audience with the british royal family towards the end of his life here in durham borowski was living an independent and self-reliant existence and was recognized as the gentleman he'd always strive to be so simon this is where borowski is buried is it yep 1837. he died at the age of 97. the prince regent said if he had 12 sons he would introduce all of them to borrow because he was such an example of a talented entertaining gentleman prior to that he was basically a performing dwarf yeah um however you want to dress it up on the final page of his autobiography borowski offers these reflections my statutes irrevocably excluded me from the common circle of society a few people seem to take notice of me being a man an honest man a man of feeling how painful are these reflections orovasky revealed through his writing that although painted as a gentleman he was ultimately defined by his size an ornament of the upper classes [Music] as the fashion for court wars faded they became ornaments in the literal sense instead of paying their shilling to see a dwarf on display the english aristocracy began to keep porcelain dwarves in their own homes and eventually their gardens twigs what have we got here these are little porcelain figures made by crown darby um 18th and 19th century they're based on a very famous set of engravings by jacques callow he did a whole series of grotesques as he called them modeled on real dwarfs and in the 18th century they become the models for these crown derby mansion house dwarfs why are they called mansion house dwarves believers or not they used to have real dwarfs with signs usually on their hats and they used to stand outside the mansion house in the city of london advertising things how do we end up with gnomes in gardens when it's the charles eisen created his very large rockery at lamport hall he looks around for something that will look in scale with what he is attempting to show as a real mountain what does he find a series of porcelain figures it's as if the aristocracy needed to reassert the idea that a dwarf's natural place was on display in germany dwarf figurines designed specifically for the garden were already popular inspired not by real dwarves but by the little helpers of germanic folklore so in 1847 sir charles brought 21 of them to england and there's one surviving example lampe there he is the oldest gnome in england still got a smile on his face charles eisen in notes on gnomes and remarks on rock gardens talks about the fact that he would not ever allowed gnomes or fairies or dwarves into the rock garden if he said they hadn't existed seeing and hearing must no longer be indicative of mental delusion but rather extension of faculty which is quite remarkable for this like well-educated member of the aristocracy to believe these things were real but while the victorian aristocracy was playing around with its gnomes what was happening to real people with dwarfism no longer prized by the upper classes dwarves would be ogled at by the masses in the victorian freak show [Music] early photography provided a new lens through which to view these freak show performers who were promoted through postcards known as cart divisit it wasn't enough that these people were small showmen like american pt barnum dressed them up in grand outfits to exaggerate their difference still further this was taken by quite a famous photographer matthew brady this is the same matthew brady that photographed the american civil war yes those intense images of the civil war and then he does this kind of of photography as well taken in brady's studio these photographs were staged weeks before the ceremony selling for 25 cents each dwarfs had become a commodity are there any english examples yes this is harold piatt tiny tim the way that they photograph the characters in these cards they deliberately emphasize their their smallness often children were used passed off as adults growth was restricted through consumption of gin they were more valuable to a family potentially as a performer than they were just you know as another mouth to feed tom thumb it didn't really matter because every postcard sold made you money but if you were like a five-year-old girl in a victorian freak show he's being dressed up like an adult and fed gin then you know it was pretty bloody awful as well as these images being used for commercial purposes they were also used in medical textbooks this is quite obviously a cart division underneath there are heights and sometimes weights as well the medical profession can't cure them so they want to look at them measure them and understand them but of course it wasn't until the 1990s that they identified chromosome 4 as the point at where dwarf is well we're talking 25 years ago i mean that's astonishing it's that's so recent measured for medical textbooks and dressed up for postcards dwarves were viewed as deviants and freaks it goes to show history doesn't always move in a positive direction by the 50s the freak show had faded but dwarves continued to be displayed in the circus artist peter blake remembers seeing them as a young man did you ever come across any people mocking people with disabilities i'm sure it happened i mean they were there to be mocked certainly galt and dwarves can do incredibly funny things in the circus i mean the way they fall down for instance don't have far to fall so the way they can just kind of kick their feet away and fall onto their bottom is very funny you but but then that's what they're trying to be you've quite often featured those kind of marginal characters in your work i've got an enormous collection of postcards i mean this is this is probably the tense of it and they're from your personal collection all those cards yeah i actually saw this one okay in the goose fairy nottingham he's probably the last dwarf that actually kind of exhibited this was in the 60s so i have an infection for him i bought the postcard from him peter blake incorporated this collection of cart divisite into a set of alphabet prints calling it d for dwarfs and midgets the title reflects a generational shift today people with dwarfism are no longer given alienating titles like midgets leprechauns or freaks now the dwarf community don't use the word misery no no i imagine not and i'm beginning to accept that i mustn't use the word free whereas i thought look this is what it's always been i refuse to bow to political correctness but suddenly it doesn't seem right to use it my interest has always been the difference is important and usually beautiful so that's always been my approach to differences you to to celebrate them rather than be nervous of them everybody's different but one should find beauty in the difference rather than be frightened of it [Music] it's heartening to see that peter blake has changed his mind about how he refers to people with disability as an artist peter blake saw something to be celebrated in all of these performers but i'm not sure his reaction was really typical i think for each person who celebrated these performers there were many many more who jeered and mocked them today the different bodies of people with dwarfism are still a commoditized form of entertainment so what impact does that have on their everyday lives there's definitely a misconception that people with dwarfism are to be put on display for public entertainment and ridicule rather than to be engaged with and actually given an opportunity to use their voice even just the concept that we're all working in circus and those kinds of stereotypes i mean they're still out there you know like there's nothing freakish about me it's not like you know people with dwarfism are creepy and magical we're just people you know and bits of us are smaller and and our bones didn't grow as long um people very rarely meet someone with dwarfism in real life so all they see are the clown stereotypes they don't sort of ever see the human everydayness of being a person in a body that's different [Music] and for me the person who really captures this human everydayness is photographer ricardo gill at three foot nine he captures images of the world from his unique viewpoint forcing you to look at the world in an inherently different way even mundane details feel utterly fresh be it a paper bag or the counter of a coffee shop and they appear to break conventional rules of photography cutting off the heads of average height people ricardo's agreed to talk to me from his local cafe in puerto rico did you have a particular ethos when you did these photographs of kind of torsos and legs well i i i can't help but photograph from that viewpoint i i can't shoot down at my subject i can only shoot up or shoot across you know it's like this or up here and sometimes down here it's just my perspective it's like when i hung a show in california i requested the curator hang all my photographs at my eye level uh okay well i wanted to see my work yeah how did normal-sized people react to that fact that pictures were hung not their eye level well i wanted to see my work and i could care less what the people thought but i i mean i mean let them come down a little bit i just wanted my photographs at a level that myself the dwarf and my dwarf friends and family could enjoy it's not just from a dwarf perspective but from human perspective i was documenting my family as we were growing up growing up and growing for me the most moving of these photographs is the one of his then wife holding their daughter in her arms to me it's a madonna and child how are we the same how are we not to say i guess that's my ongoing question oh i'm the same as you but i'm not yeah i get that where do you see the art movement at the moment for people with restricted growth and where do you see it going i mean do you think it's getting better worse staying the same i really don't know and i really don't care [Laughter] [Music] why don't you care a teacher a long time ago told me just work just work don't worry about the exhibition i can't help but love ricardo his photographs clearly stem from a singular personal vision and that's surely the mark of any great artist with dwarfism or not tom shakespeare has created a triptych that stems from an equally unique intellectual perspective engaging with some of the big issues affecting us all tom tell us the history of this piece of work i believe it's called incarna that goes birth life and death impairment and death really this is based on a painting by henry fosley and it's of the nightmare when i saw it i thought wow this lady could be pregnant she could be fantasizing or worrying about having a disabled child this goblin that's sitting on her chest is actually her fears we recreated it as exactly as we could so she's got a hospital band on on the night table of folate tablets which stop you having a a child with uh spina bifida so i wanted to do a piece that was really about anxiety and pressure this is an image of a painting by mantegna called dead christ and mantegna is experimenting with perspectives and if you look at the original it's very very foreshortened so look at some of that it could be some with electron plates here i thought wouldn't that be interesting if i put myself in and recreated as a personal econoplasia and made myself look tall and what i want to play with is the perspective and not sure whether it's tall or short so tell me about the middleware obviously francis bacon influenced it's called figure with me um this is the pope in the original it's just it's just a piece of meat like everybody else i became paralyzed in 2008 and so actually i'm in a wheelchair here being in this huge wheelchair when i'd always been mobile was like being imprisoned and you feel very powerless you feel very angry you feel very unhappy it's a cry of rage and despair really because when i was first paralyzed i wanted to kill myself i was miserable as hell this is trying to express that difficulty that i had so it's very personal piece but i hope they they're not just about disability they're about anybody all bodies we're all vulnerable to this uh every woman's pregnancy is affected by this so yeah i wanted them to be shocking tom shakespeare has taken control over how he represents himself but more significantly both he and ricardo gill have taken us inside their heads revealing the universal concerns that we all share we've been so bombarded with loaded images of dwarves through history that i think frequently artists have failed to see any common ground underneath the physical differences so people sitting for portraits don't know for certain if they're being looked at with an exploitative gaze how does the experience feel being painted being looked at i felt really comfortable with it but i'm gonna say that was specifically because tanya is also disabled and that actually made a really big difference to how i felt she was looking at me it is remarkable that you and i and every other disabled artist goes on despite the prejudice you know getting out of bed in the morning and facing other people's bollocks literally in my case or you know their their metaphorically bullocky behavior like that is amazing it is easier for artists with disabilities to see through the stereotypes but are people with dwarfism being fairly represented by society at large we are considered to be socially acceptable to poke fun at i think the depiction of dwarfism is improving but i think it's very slow but um i think with enough encouragement i think we will certainly get there yes 20 30 years ago we wouldn't have had a black news presenter a black weather forecaster and i think the more we see people with dwarfism in in the media in popular roles whatever they might be doing something that is not related to their height i think that will normalize the condition i would like to see in art and in entertainment and in storytelling the truth and the truth is people who are bent broken a bit disfigured disabled who are different are everywhere and they've got stories that are as rich and interesting and and worthy of telling as anybody else [Music] there's a tendency to see disabled people as separate from society are somehow other and nothing shows this more clearly than the way that dwarves have been and are represented but every time we see a strong work by or about a person with dwarfism that chips away at those stereotypes because of course people with disabilities aren't other they're just part of society like you just a bit different that's all

Channel: Perspective

Views: 30,570

Keywords: Arts, The Arts, Theatre, Music, Full EPisode, Full documentary, documentary, performing arts, dwarfs in art a new perspective, dwarfs in art, a new perspective, dwarfs documentary, dwarfs in art documentary, dwarfs documentary bbc

Id: ki5hc5Myq-s

Length: 49min 53sec (2993 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 19 2021