Identifying the Story: Sequencing isn't narrative

           image from the All Quiet film #3 - see it on bjp-online.com next week

In photobooks there are so many elements used in editing, sequencing and creating a narrative.

It's really difficult. For All Quiet on the Home Front, we went through the lot of them. Sequencing by chronology,  geography, family, resemblance, art history, season, colour, form, tone, flora, expression, dress, climate, mood, symbolism, material, and so on.

The sequencing was a gradual process that was embedded into the editing with voice, mode, person, text, the basic best picture edit and much more besides.

You can sequence in a multitude of ways in  other words. But none of that made a narrative. What made the narrative was actually identifying what the story was about. Do that and then you can create all the structures through which the story can flow - and that, structures plus story, creates the narrative.

Ania Nalecka does a thing in workshops where she asks in three words what your story is about. Other people do the same in writing workshops, or life skills or whatever. It's very simple but very effective. It's also very difficult. It's a common strategy but it works because it identifies what the story is really about? And if I really can't come up with those three words (or whatever) then it might be I don't have a story.

What it's really about is not the sequencing, because the sequencing doesn't make the narrative; it can detract from or add to the narrative but it doesn't make it. It's not the same, in the same way the frame of a picture doesn't make a picture.

So my wife Katherine asked me what the story was about and when I gave the wrong answer (and the wrong answer is anything above 3 words especially when it's heading to the 10,000 word mark - "but what is really essential is bla bla bla..." ) she told me. She told me first in three words, and then in more than three words.

It's the story of me going out into these environments with Isabel, it's my identification with these places, it's me forming a relationship in these places, and the sense of loss that I experienced as Isabel grew up.

It was obvious to her because she'd seen it on a daily basis, and it was obvious to her because it was in the photographs in a way it wasn't for me. But once it was obvious to her, it was obvious to me. It was like having a tutorial where you tell someone what is staring you, and everybody else, in the face.

And so that made the story. The other option had been a kind of stream of consciousness slightly detached version of events with the great pictures linking through sequencing that hopefully created a story in the eyes of the viewer. But with some ambiguity so it wasn't too obvious.

But every time we went back to that, we saw how weak  it was in comparison. It had no depth or emotion, it ticked press any buttons, it didn't actually say very much. It wasn't a story, it was a sequence. And to go with it would be to mistake sequence for story, sequence for narrative,
stream-of-consciousness, or a flow of images, or a blocked out series. They are related but are not the same.

There's more of a commitment when you build elements (text, paper,symbolism, sequence...) that add to the story. That was the idea of All Quiet on the Home Front. It would be multi-layered and talk of something that went beyond the images.

The strange thing is that was what I intended and I fully expected it to work. And it does work. Because people are talking to me about the book in really personal ways about their father, about their childhood, about fatherhood, about motherhood, about bonding and not bonding with their children, about the places they played when they were children.

I was asked yesterday if this surprised me. And I said yes it did because even though on a cognitive level we thought this would work, on an emotional level it's something quite different when people respond to the book that direct way.

It takes the book out of our hands and into the world at large. It's terrifying really, I have book fear.

Anyway, you can buy the book here. 

Pre-order prices end in two days so get your orders in here for the discounted price and (if you order the Subscriber's Edition) to get your name in the first edition.


And after that it's print preparation and we're getting closer to actually making the book, thank God!

Positive Film: Looks great on a lightbox

I'm putting up pictures of my All Quiet on the Home Front on my Instagram Account as part of the relentless, unforgiving promotion of the book - showing the editing process from having the pictures on the lightbox, to scanning, to dummy making to printing.

All Quiet was all shot on slide film (all on Provia 100). It's much more difficult in some ways because if you get the exposure wrong, you really get it wrong.

I like to pretend I am one of those people who always gets the exposure right - without using a light meter, but evidence proves otherwise.

One reason for shooting on slide is it makes for better reproduction and amazing prints.

Another reason you can buy a second hand camera medium format camera and even though it will break (which can have its own advantages) eventually, it is much cheaper than an equivalent quality digital camera. I seriously don't care about film versus digital. I simply have never been able to afford even medium end digital and all the associated acoutrements.

The final reason is really simple. They look great on a lightbox and they are really easy to look at. Which is a bit too simple and a bit too indexical. But it is a real reason I and lots of other people photograph on slide. There is no pleasure like flipping over a sheet full of film strips ready to view.

LAST CHANCE TO BUY ALL QUIET ON THE HOME FRONT AT SPECIAL PRE-ORDER PRICE

BUY HERE

Ticking all the Rant Boxes: Airport Terminal Photography

                   (image from Bolshevik Tom)

Julani Palaasmaa wrote about ocular bias in architecture, that's the overemphasis on the purely visual. Tied into this bias is a stripping of other sensory, and so emotional elements from consideration in the architectural process. So rather than being an organic entity which is fully experienced as part of a wider whole, the building is stripped from its environmental, political and economic roots. The story of where it belongs is lost because it doesn't belong anywhere. And so you end up with the absurdity and the horror of airport terminals or fascist-funded arts complexes being held up as wonders of architectural functionality and design.

You get the same in photography, a kind of affectless bias where images are stripped of meaning and then value is assigned to the fact that this meaning is stripped. The fact that images don't have any aesthetic or political or social value, the fact that they float in some kind of miasma of nothingness is what gives them value.

   
      image from How the Pioneer Hans Saved the Strike Committee

It's airport terminal photography! It's the opposite of ocular bias, it's a kind of cognitive bias where the image is distanced through a range of layerings that make the actual image the secondary or tertiary of point of contact in a work.

This kind of photography is partly due to an aversion to the kind of literal photojournalism and documentary (and I understand fully why people have an aversion to this. It can get really boring and repetitive), but I also think it's due to a fear to confront things head on, it's the fear to have an opinion on something, to show some crack of vulnerability by showing that you care about something. Because if you do have an opinion about something, you're going to upset people and you're going to have to defend yourself. It's not easy.

In that sense I know why people are so scared of having an opinion. We all like to pretend to be progressive and all the rest of it, but it's a bit more difficult when you get down to the knuckle end of stating your case. It's not very nice having to fight your corner. It's far easier to present something abstract or metaphorical, something stripped of emotion and intent than so something that really engages with a subject and drills down hard into its core. And that is what people do.

Another reason for this is the history of photographic criticism that places photography in this kind of hairshirt and millet world of pleasure-aversive photocritics where you really aren't allowed to either make anything beautiful or doing anything with a social intent. I really enjoy reading Allan Sekula for example, but I share Lucy Soutter's misgivings about him as expressed in this interview on 1,000 words.

Allan Sekula was one of the most inspiring intellectuals I ever met, but it bewildered me that he was so uncomfortable with visual pleasure. It was partly because I disagreed so strongly with Allan about aesthetics that I began to suspect that I might have something to contribute to the field, that there might be a position for me.

On the one hand you have this aversion to anything that is beautiful and on the other you have the massive distrust of anything that does have a heart and soul, and all the places (no, most of the places. You don't want to bite the hand that feeds you) where that might be published. Almost all the theoretical reading students do is about how wrong photography is, how wrong it is to show people, how wrong it is to look, and how wrong it is to make something visually compelling.

So you are left with this kind of affectless bias in photography that combines with a race for new ways of showing - here's a graph, here's some data, here's some modelling, here's some blue backlighting, here's an artifact. But where's the story? It's all the frameworks around the image that become the way of showing.

It reminds me of the episode of Black Books (this is a comedy featuring the world's most bad-tempered drunken bookshop owner, Bernard Black) where Bernard and Manny decide to write a children's book.

And so Bernard writes this 1,000 page epic about an academic who survives the Stalinist purges, a lens grinder in Omsk and an investigative journalist who's fallen in love with the academic's daughter. this is Bernard's story.

Bernard: It couldn't be simpler. You've got the academic who survived the Stalinist purges and is now having flashbacks to that time. There's his daughter whose long bitter marriage is falling apart around her and the journalist who's investigating the academic because he suspects he was never in Russia at the time and then he falls obsessively in love with the daughter and sacrifices his career to become a lense grinder in Omsk.


He reads the script to Manny, they make a few adjustments and end up with a story about an elephant who loses his balloon. It goes something like this.

Manny: Well, instead of the? um? academic and the journalist's daughter? um? perhaps it could be about an elephant?
Bernard: An elephant?
Manny: That's right.
Bernard: I see. What's your other suggestion?
Manny: Well? um? instead of the Stalinist purges and the divorce and the investigation, um? it could be about losing a balloon.
Bernard: An elephant who loses his balloon?
Manny: That's it.
Bernard: But, but it would still be my story in essence?
Manny: Oh, yeah.
Bernard: My vision?
Manny: Completely.
Bernard: Yes, all right! Let's do that, then!

Basically a lot of photography is like Bernard Black trying to write a children's story but instead of having someone like Manny to help them out, they've got another Bernard Black helping them out. It's people making stories about lens grinders in Omsk for people who on a metaphorical level want books about elephants losing balloons.

Photography is really a child's game after all, but in a good way. There's nothing quite so sophisticated as communicating clearly to children, or to adults even. Look through something like The Soviet Photobook or go to an exhibition like the New Childhood one on Soviet children's books (or look at this resource of Soviet children's books )and you'll see there's nothing simplistic about communicating effectively and clearly - especially if you get a bit more ambitious that an elephant who's lost his balloon.

Because if you are communicating to children, or people who struggle with literacy, then any short cuts you take will be found out instantly. If your message is obscure or goes the readers's heads they will know about it very quickly and you will know about very quickly in turn. I'm speaking from experience here, oh happy days.

In fact it's far more difficult to do something simple and clear than it is to make a rambling mess of images about something that you don't really have a clue about and hoping that the obtuseness of your images, sequencing and supporting statement (none of which anyone really understands anyway) will blur .

Not that there's anything to criticise, because you're avoiding making a statement and are hiding any kind of commitment in your obtuseness.

Oh my goodness, I saw the picture at the top at the weekend. I think this post is ending up being a number 3, or maybe a number 5. I'd better stop here before I become a number 6. Or is this a number 1. Or a number 2....

Thresholds: Ocular Bias and the Need for the senses

I really enjoyed reading this interview with Juhani Pallasmaa. He's an architect and writer who believes that architecture should engage more fully with the a full sensory spectrum.

Rachel Hurst: For people who don’t know your work, the central theme is that put forward in your book The Eyes of the Skin – that architecture should be a true collaboration of the five senses and, by engaging fully with the sensory world in that way, architecture can foster a deeply ethical and existential experience of life. You argue in that book, numerous essays and most recently in The Thinking Hand that we have increasingly become an ocular-centric society, disembodied from the authentic multi-sensorial perception of architecture, and are dominated by “a rainfall of images” to the detriment of our built world. How has this come about?

Read the whole article here.

The idea of this ocular bias is that if we overfocus on the purely visual in our appreciation of architecture we end up with a world covered by a superficial skin of construction, the kind of facadism that is recognisable in the skylines of most of the world's major cities.

You get the same kind of sentiments in photography, the idea that photography can go beyond the purely visual (and that's what Sound, Word, Landscape was all about). But it can go beyond the purely visual in so many ways.

Matt Collishaw's Thresholds is just one way in which photography goes beyond the ocular; by adding a virtual dimensionality to it, by using motion sensors and skeueomorphism (yep, me neither until two days ago) to reframe the first ever photography exhibition as a Virtual Reality exhibition.

I saw it in Birmingham at the site of the original exhibition, and it's now showing at Lacock Abbey, home of Fox Talbot, the inventor of photography until October 29th.

The basic deal is you enter an empty room with some 3-dimentsional white painted furniture (it doesn't have to be white but it looks better in installation pictures if it's white), you're given a pair of goggles that deal with head movement and visualisation and a backpack for body movement. And then you walk around the room and look at a VR version of the original exhibition.

So you're in this white cube but the above is what you 'see'. The original exhibition was a bit ropey, but it was a landmark and the same goes for Thresholds. It's a slightly shaky VR interpretation of a slightly shaky photography exhibition. So all in all, it's a bit shaky, but actually really good and really important. It's a gimmick but then so was the original! That matters. There's a beautiful symetry in that it mirrors the original 1839 photography exhibition in some ways.

It might not be the future in photography, but this is the future in all sorts of other ways - starting with war and porn and gaming and then keep on going from there. You get about 10 minutes with the goggles but it's definitely, definitely worth going out of your way for.

What's interesting is there is a sense of interactivity inasmuch as you move around and you can 'lift' objects virtually to near your hands. There's a fire as well (which is hot) and a mouse which runs around the floor, as well as Chartist demonstrations going on outside the window.

So it goes beyond the merely ocular in this sense. At the same time it erases the ocular by turning something with physical substance and material dimensions into something virtual, with all the failings that the virtual has. And that's interesting in itself because the ocular isn't simply the ocular, it comes with all kinds of conditions attached. There's a stripping back of the ocular then, a removal of those sensory elements that creep into the periphery and affect what we see.

And all that is considered in the programming that makes up the software/hardware through which we experience Thresholds. Which is extra interesting, because by stripping back the visual, and rebuilding it in virtual form, you really experience the absence of our usual visual experience, by not seeing you see what you take for granted.

Thresholds is on at Lacock Abbey until 29th October. Booking is essential. Don't miss it.

It's World Photobook Week!

This is the last week for orders of All Quiet on the Home Front at the special price of £100 for the Subscriber's Edition and £33 for the regular edition. 

We go to the printers on October 23rd and after that the Subscriber's Edition will be £140 and the regular edition £40. 

So get your orders in now. The book is looking beautiful and the Subscriber's Edition comes with a limited edition print and a box with a linocut by Isabel. In addition, order this week and you get your name printed in the book; which is the first in a series on family, memory, environment and history. 

Order your copy of the Subscriber's Edition here.

Order your copy of the Regular Edition here. 

Another reason to buy it is it's World Photobook Week! 

Which is also a reason to buy from these fabulous people! See more images of Photographer's Worlds here. 

Valentina Abenavoli: Harvest 

Rocco Venezia: Nekyia

Carolyn Drake: Internat

Matthieu Asselin: Monsanto

Paul Gaffney: Perigee

Colin Pantall: All Quiet on the Home Front

Refresh-pulling, like-chasing, endorphin-sniffing monkeys

If you lack control over your social media and smartphone habits, Paul Lewis' article on how Our Minds can be hijacked is essential reading.

The article features various social media engineers who have manufactured the apps that help make us the like-chasing, refresh-pulling, attention-seeking endorphin-loving monkeys that we really are.

Justin Rosenstein is the guy who invented the like button on Facebook. He's fully aware of the dangers of social media though and uses apps to limit both his children's and his own use of social media and its associated apps. This is what Lewis says about him;


'He was particularly aware of the allure of Facebook “likes”, which he describes as “bright dings of pseudo-pleasure” that can be as hollow as they are seductive. 

....Rosenstein appears most concerned about the psychological effects on people who, research shows, touch, swipe or tap their phone 2,617 times a day.

There is growing concern that as well as addicting users, technology is contributing toward so-called “continuous partial attention”, severely limiting people’s ability to focus, and possibly lowering IQ. One recent study showed that the mere presence of smartphones damages cognitive capacity – even when the device is turned off. “Everyone is distracted,” Rosenstein says. “All of the time.”


That 2,617 times is a shocking number but when I started to think about that I wondered if it wasn't also a bit of a target. Maybe there should be an app to count how many refresh pulls you do.

Instagram is especially bad for me for refresh-swiping. I am basically like a monkey scratching an itch on there. But the refreshing thing is pretty much everyone who is active on social media is like a monkey scratching an itch, constantly, repeatedly, except the itch is a phone and not a real itch because if it was real it would be stripped of skin and raw to the touch.

We are all itch-scratching monkeys in other words, chasing likes and employing the politics of the schoolground in who to follow and who to like and what to do on the fecking things. Social media is a democracy then, a democracy of dunces.

One key thing about the article was the Facebook like-notification button was originally going to be blue, low-key blue, but nobody used it. So they changed it to red - and everybody used it.

That's the fundamental level at which our minds work, and social media has tapped into it. In photography, so many people think of themselves as above and beyond these little social manipulations, but really we're not.

We're all itch-scratching algorithm-led monkeys, there's no escaping it. If you have ever pulled down a refresh button or checked a notification ping for no apparent reason, sorry, that's what you are. That's what I am! That's what I've become!

Embedded within that world of apparent positivity that liking and following and checking who likes and who follows is another world; one of infantile competition and envies, of people who follow to get followers, who don't like anything by somebody who doesn't like what they like, of people who live out their cheapness and their insecurities through the like buttons of social media. It's something so many of us do and it really is quite pathetic. But still we do it. I'm trying not to do it, but it's hard!

Anyway, back to my book, All Quiet on the Home Front. We have a date now for the book launch. It's Saturday 11th November at the Tipi stand on the Polycopies Boat at Paris Photo.

All Quiet is available until 23rd October at the pre-order price of £100 for the Subscriber's Edition or £33 for the regular edition. These prices go back to the normal price of £140 and £40 respectively after 23rd October.

Press the button and buy the book below.

Anyway, here are some of the places All Quiet has been featured. The latest is on Thisonthat I answer questions on fatherhood - which was challenging but revealing for me at least because even though All Quiet is about fatherhood, I don't really think of it in that way.  And thanks to Giulia Bianchi for talking about it at MAST Bologna.

Read about All Quiet on the Home Front here:

BJP

Drool - Tony Fouhse

Vogue

Thisonthat

Oh and you can read all the endorsements from some really wonderful people here .

And All Quiet is really fantastic, both as a project and, thanks to Alejandro Acin, as a book. The more I talk about it, the more I read myself talking about it, the more fabulous it becomes. And the more fabulous it becomes, the more fabulous the wider body of work it belongs to becomes - and I mean that sincerely. And the more I believe that and say that, the more others believe it and say it. Which feeds back to me and elevates my self-belief. Which becomes virus like and infects other people - who then spread it on for me. Passion and enthusiasm is contagious. And Love is a bug.

It is really interesting to see how that process works and the extent to which there is an interplay between something of substance (the book in and of itself) and the promotion that works in the land of smoke and mirrors. The whole promotional element is endorphin-based propaganda, part of an imaginary world comparable to the social media feedback loops of likes and refresh pulls, with everything always super positive and happy and successful and self-referential within this strange self-enclosed world.

But, in the same way there is a flip side of infantile behaviour behind the liking buttons of social media (which really define the supposedly positive side of those likes) underneath every book campaign there is the flip side of hatred, insecurity, neurosis, resentment and grudge. Social media pre-order campaigns are like the rock that is all smooth and cultured on the surface. Roll it over and it's a festering lizard-brain world of vengeance and hatred and survival of the fittest.

I wonder if it wouldn't be more interesting focus on that sometime, to lay bare on the page your insecurity, inadequacy, resentment and hate. Because everybody, no matter how accomplished, has those inadequacies, those failings, those limitations, those setbacks that stick in the craw. Talk to anyone in photography and they'll have that dark side where their eyes go black and the voice enters a monotone where those secret lists of enemies, those accusations in others of careerism, arrogance, incompetence, lameness, venality, tightfistedness, cruelty and envy that inundate our darker moments.

It would be like the opposite of the refresh button or the like button. It would be a hate button, and that's why I'm not going to do it here. Because hatred never sells books. And look what hate has done to Twitter. We don't need hate.

So it's love that won, even if it's imaginary. Buy the book here. Or better still, press the red button and buy the book there.

Broken Camera Pictures: 100% Awesome!

My brain has completely melted this week but luckily I've got Everypixel Aesthetics to tell me that my Broken Camera Pictures (you can see more here) are 100% awesome!

Or not, the bastards!