While working on reconstructing A Bar In Paris, looking at the other photographs taken in the bar at the same time, I realised that I had enough material to construct another picture, the result of which is Scene in a Bar in Paris in the Early 1990s. By necessity, given the source material, the picture has an appropriately informal feel (the original photographs were taken by placing my camera on a bag on the table, with the self-timer for the long exposures needed, and so I couldn't really see what I was photographing), which belies the work that went into its realisation. The two foreground figures are in fact the same woman, a fact referred to by a couple of the pictures on the wall, which I altered to make these a more pointed commentary. Through neccessity, artists in the past occaisionally used the same model for different figures in the same composition, and in the right hand side of the background, there hangs Guido Cagnacci's The Death Of Cleopatra from 1658, cut off by the right hand edge of the picture, and Augustus Leopold Egg's The Travelling Companions, 1862. The former painting is used by Hockney to illustrate his thesis in Secret Knowledge, and is printed in black and white as well as colour, in order to emphasise the 'photographic' look of the picture, which, combined with the use of one model for all the figures, is cited as evidence for the use of optics in its creation. The Egg painting shows two identically dressed women, who look pretty identical too, in a railway carriage. One surmises that the two are intended to be seen as sisters, chaperoning one another; something similar might be inferred in my picture, if one sees the facial similarity.

Also included in the background of the picture are Philip Hermogenes Calderon's Broken Vows, from 1856, and William Powell Frith's The Sleeping Model, his Diploma work from 1853. There is a good reason for including these deeply unfashionable Victorian painters as references, beyond Egg's use of the same model for different figures. It seems to me that there is a certain trend in recent photography towards fiction, for want of a better term to describe work as diverse as Jeff Wall, Hannah Starkey, Sam Taylor Wood, et al, meticulously constructed tableaus, which has something in common with the Victorians' taste for the literary in pictorial matters, not just in painting, but photography also, with such exponents as Henry Peach Robinson and Oskar Reijlander.While there is perhaps a parallel to something Peter Ackroyd has written about novelists being obliged to tell the truth, while biographers are obliged to lie, there is a danger in such photographic tableau towards the worst excesses of the anecdotal in art, which can in turn condemn a picture to being located too much in the taste of its time and its conditions of production. Therefore, with perhaps a smirk of disingenousness, I have included as a warning and, by extension, implicit criticism of the form of this picture within the picture itself: Frith is the epitome of Victorian anecdotalism, with such masterpieces as Derby Day, The Railway Station, and The Private View of The Royal Academy, 1881; meanwhile the Calderon painting Broken Vows is a perfect example of a winningly Victorian sentimental attitude, guaranteed to be please the picture-going public. Next to it however is a Manet painting, Blonde With Bare Breasts from 1878, not exactly contemporaneous to the Victorian pictures included, but this was one of the repoductions which actually adorned the walls of the bar, and it adds to the evocation of the bohemian mileu in the conjunction of picture and title. Considering the various references encouraged the long-winded title, Scene in a Bar in Paris in the Early 1990s, which itself refers to the tableau as a form ('Scene'), implied bohemianism in its mise en scene (a bar in Paris), and by referring to its location in a definite period this enforces the notion of the anecdote.