This is a picture of Mahsa Amini. She died yesterday after being arrested by Iranian morality police for for '...allegedly violating the country’s strict hijab law' - a symbol of the tightening of that law is the annual 'Hijab and Chastity Day' that was implemented in July this year.
She died after (allegedly) being beaten in the back of a police van. The police say she suffered a heart attack. It's murder whichever way you look at it, the arrest and oppression of a young woman who chooses to exercise a tiny degree of freedom of choice leading to her death.
I don't know much about this image, but it touched me deeply. It reminds me of the awful pictures that were released by the parents of Emmett Till after he was murdered. They stood heartbroken behind his bloated, decomposing body staring out at the camera accusing not just the murderers but the entirety of white supremacy that enabled the crime to happen.
Here the picture is also evidence and there is also an accusation. Where the picture of Emmett Till accused white supremacy and its supporting institutions, this accuses male supremacy - which is a global affair and a growth bigotry.
You have no right, it seems to state, to judge, to control, to contain this woman's body. You have no right to project the psychodrama of your male inadequacy onto a religion and onto the body of this young woman.
It's a picture that says that her hair, her body, her skin are inalienably hers. They are not subject to laws invented from the pits of male neurosis, they are not obscene, indecent or an affront to civilised society. Rather, the efforts to control this woman's body and its appearance is what is obscene, the ongoing violence this body has undergone over the years is what is obscene. And that can be extended to the control of women's bodies everywhere, the ways in which male desires, neuroses, and general fear and hatred of women are used as an excuse to oppress and control women and the way they appear, behave, and dress in every country in the world, from Iran to France, Britain, India, you name a country and it happens there.
Well it might say that. I don't really know. Often we say that pictures mean one thing and we don't really know. Often as in all the time. Everyone, everywhere.
It's a terrible picture. It was a very brave thing to release the pictures.
I remember
watching TV after school and when I was ill, I really loved watching TV when I was little.
When I was
very young, I watched Pingu, and the Teletubbies, Bill and Ben, the Flowerpot
Men. Obviously I loved Winnie the Poo. And then films like the Jungle Book.
Mostly I watched them because they werequite comforting because I had a tendency to rewatch programs again and
again and I was little. So when I was 6 I'd watched about 10 or 20 movies, but
I’d watched each of them about like 30 times, 40 times.
Loads of
kids do that because it's comforting. So you watch something again and again,
and you know what's going to happen. There are no surprises. There's like
stress or anxiety. And it didn’t take much to stress me out. I remember
watching a Winnie the Poo movie where they’re in a dark cave wen they went to skull island. That creeped me
out. I couldn’t watch that. There was probably definitely stuff that I didn't
like watching, but I can't remember it,
but there was definitely stuff that freaked me out.
Weirdly, I
also have a lot of memory of watching the news in the evenings, but whilst you
were watching it, but I don't think that happened that often. I think it's just
one of those memories that's kind of exaggerated in my mind. I mostly just remember
the Iraq war and Madeline McCan and the 911 memorials they had every September.
I watched TV when I was tired or when I was ill, it was a comfort and the sofa
was like a place of comfort. It’s the same as watching television, it's
soothing being somewhere comfortable and being able to like lie down. It's like
a second bed. It was a second bed. It was like Tracey Emin’s bed but for kids,
with all the toys and drawing stuff of childhood scattered around.
I liked
watching it on my own, I was more engrossed in the TV than what was happening
around me. And there were different moods. There still are. Now, for example, I'll
watch something when I’m super tired and need to go to sleep but I can't or when I’m not going to fall asleep, but I need
to basically do the closest thing to falling asleep, which is watching something
on television or watching something for comfort, or watching something new,
because you want to watch something new and engage with the content.
I watched TV when I was tired or when I was ill, it was a comfort and the sofa was like a place of comfort. It’s the same as watching television, it's soothing being somewhere comfortable and being able to like lie down. It's like a second bed. It was a second bed. It was like Tracey Emin’s bed but for kids, with all the toys and drawing stuff of childhood scattered around.
I watched the film Navalny the other day. It details Navalny and Bellingcat's attempts to trace the people who poisoned Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny on a flight in Russia.
One thing I love about it is it has a real life Crazy Wall (or Evidence Board etc if you prefer) on it. And on that wall, at the head of the board, you have a picture of Putin as the suspect-in-chief. But it's not just any portrait, but the portrait made by Platon. It's a great portrait - Putin at his most reptilian. It's a well-curated Crazy Wall then.
It's the first time I've seen that.
Below is the extended wall.
But anyway, the Crazy Wall, it seems is a bit of a cinematic exaggeration. Detectives who have served on hundreds of murder cases swear to God that they have never used a Crazy Wall - there's no room for a start. And then there's the chance the suspect will get to see the board - which is referenced in Dr Strangelove...
So all those boards you see in Se7en, The Killing, A Beautiful Mind etc etc might be at least a bit of a fiction. You get the idea Navalny was doing it for the visual effects as well, as a family album of FSB stupidity.
Top of the stupidity list goes Alexander Bortnikov - pictured below.
Navalny called him Moscow4.
.
Why Moscow Four?
Well, he's the top Security Agent in Russia, Director of the FSB. His computer password was Moscow1.
He got hacked. He changed the password to Moscow2.
He got hacked again. He changed the password to Moscow3.
He got hacked again. You get the picture.
And I haven't even mentioned Navalny pranking the FSB agent who poisoned him.
"What colour were the underpants?"
He was second on the stupidity list. You can die from stupidity.
I love it when people write about photographs in novels. It so often reads like an example of photographic theory put into a real world/fictional setting with the moralising removed.
This is Abdulrazak Gurnah writing in Gravel Heart about how locals regard the new camera-wielding flock of tourists coming to his native island of Zanzibar.
'At
that time, respectable women did not allow themselves to be photographed tor
fear of the dishonour to their husbands if other men saw their image. But this
fear was not the only reason to refuse as some men were also resistant. In both
cases it was from suspicion that the production of, the image would take
something of their being and hold it captive. Even when I was a child, athough
that was later than the time of Maalim Yahya's photograph, if a tourist from
the cruise ships wandered the streets with a camera, people watched warily for
the moment when the foreigner lifted it to take a shot and then several voices
screamed in a frenzy of prohibition, to frighten him or her off. Behind the
tourist an argument would start between those who feared for the loss of their
souls and those who scoffed at such nonsense. For these kinds of reasons, I had
not seen a photograph of my father's mother and so could not tell for certain
if he did take after her.'
I don't know. It reads incredibly close to the irresolvable polarities that pass for theory in photography, that gulf between the people who fear 'for the loss of their souls' (or have inordinate concern for the souls of others) and those who 'scoff at such nonsense.'
That's a Diane Arbus picture up top, one of my favourite. I reduce it to his legs v the first two fingers of her left hand. I don't think it's a wholely accurate reduction.
This is Susan Sontag writing about Diane Arbus. 'To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves.'
Nonsense to scoff at or have they lost their souls.
A little bit of both is not an option because it's the right answer - most of the time, or some of the time.
Go read the novel anyway - it's beautifully written, crystal clear and direct and transparent. And there is more on photography including a great little passage which reminds me of Annette Kuhn's The Child I never Was.
The people and the behaviour in the illustrations of Bedwyr Williams are instantly recognisable. Just look in the mirror and that is who he is talking about.
He mocks people who are constantly 'honoured,' 'inspired' or 'moved' by the inanities of Instagram. He points the finger at the constantly sycophancy of the art world. He mocks the strange rituals of the art world, its narcissism, its money-grubbing adulation of those who have, and much more beside.
He also talks about class and second-home ownership (he lives in Wales), which are things that almost nobody talks about because being an artist and responsible for homelessness and unaffordable housing is not a comfortable thing to talk about. Or renting someone's holiday home or airbnb, because that's part of the problem too.
It runs close to the bone, and if you don't recognise yourself in there, ha ha ha, who are you kidding?
'I started looking at what artists were going on about on Instagram. I realised there was this really weird fakeness (in their reactions), this blowing smoke up each other’s arses: ‘Love this!’; ‘Hoping to catch the last day of your show!’; ‘Beautifully installed’ - all this hyperbolic praise. Or liking pictures of curators’ children you’ve never met. What’s weird is, I’d never thought of artists as being that way. My experience of artists is to be quite mean. You have to have a fighting personality to do it in the first place. Nobody wanted you to be an artist. It’s either you’re up the arse of a curator or he’s up yours – metaphorically, of course. It’s a competitive world. I know in the back channels they’re as horrible about each other as they ever were. If that’s not ripe for having fun with, I don’t know what is. My thing is that I never make it about actual individuals. There are people I’ve met or who have my worst qualities injected into them. I consider myself no better than them.”
So it's time for a best-of-list. And again, it's not really a best list, it's a favourites list or a list of books that I really enjoyed or appreciated for one reason or another.
I want to squeeze a film in here as well. The most enjoyable film by a mile that I've seen for many, many years was Summer of Soul. Go see it, and don't leave till the very, very end.
This had amazing photography and was combined politics, fashion, protest, and loads of style. Strangely, very few people (even those who are really into music in a way I wish I was but aren't) have seen it. But when they have and you say to them, Have you seen Summer of Soul, the response is always the same - their eyes light up and they get all excited, and you get excited back. That's how good it is. And the photography is amazing.
And so on to my favourite photobooks. Again, it's not a best-of list because I feel like I have barely seen anything of what's been published year. Has anyone? But it's all work that I've enjoyed, really enjoyed, that has some integrity to it.
Unprofessional by Matilda Soes-Rasmussen
This is a fun book in a dark kind of way, filled with unreliable narration on being a model in Asia. The text is great. It starts on the back with a poem.
Age Poem
At age 12 I tell my mom I hate museums
At age 21 I become very interested in photography
At age 22 I become very interested in cooking and cocaine
At age 27 I become very interested in sex
At age 28 I suddenly develop an interest in poetry
Maddock messes with the copies he sends out, so it's a messy, continually evolving publication, a slap in the face to the platonic idea of the perfect book. Fuck that nonsense!
‘The book
was a swansong for me,” says Maddock. “It was my farewell to England. I knew that I wanted to get out
after Brexit and the 2019 election. I remember where I was when it happened. I
was living in Lisbon at the time and the results came in. I couldn’t believe
it. I decided to celebrate with the most French meal possible. I didn’t know
the country as well as I thought I did – otherwise I would have seen the result
coming.”
I got this just before my daughter Isabel went to university. I wrote about that here and then I wrote about Somersault. It's a soulful look at the emergence of a distance of age, geography, and life. But with that distance comes a new closeness.
I just got this as a christmas present. This is the blurb...
'The project was photographed in the early 90s when Cammie Toloui was working as a stripper at the Lusty Lady Theater in San Francisco to fund her photojournalism degree at San Francisco State University....
“I smuggled my camera into work and got up the courage to ask my first customer if I could take his picture, offering him a free dildo show in exchange. He didn’t seem at all hesitant, and in fact I was shocked when he came back the following week, asking if I would take his picture again. This was an important lesson in the workings of the male ego and served me well for the next two years as a stripper, and the rest of my career as a photographer.”
I remember Pete Brook of Prison Photography talking about this project a few years ago, and now here it is in print. Wonderful collaborative practice that sheds light on how visual literacy can have a direct effect on how we see and experience the world. And that ties back to how we see images, archives, power, and impression. And then back to the world again...
Photography: A Feminist History - edited by Emma Lewis
I ordered this for a university library and the following week students were taking it out. It covers everything from performance, body image, and violence against women to the rhetoric of challenging the male gaze, and the linking Instagram Culture to the feminist avant-garde. This book gives accessible and intelligent (hitting both those spots is the difficult thing) entry points into key topics with aglobal and historical perspective.
A really beautiful but simple layout of historical found images laid out to tell a story of contemporary China. This is from a review of it....
'The images in History of Life sweep through the great epochs of Liberation, of the Great Leap Forward, of the Cultural Revolution, of the great economic reopening in images that might allude to these periods but never quite settle. Instead, the pictures used are often quietly personal, giving a glimpse into the hopes and dreams of ordinary Chinese, the people who lived through the political turmoil. It’s a quite beautiful combination of images where the pairings, the sequencing, the occasional flashes of the political and the violent hint at the life that lies beneath the conventional compositions and poses.'
Ok, Mack did loads of great catalogues and retrospectives and this is perhaps the best of them. It shows work that isn't really available even in facsimile form, and the accompanying essays are great and get into the idea of creating collaborative spaces through the act of photographing. And Hosoe collaborated with some amazing people. Here's a snippet from a review.
‘Instead of
simply photographing a subject, he began to view himself as involved in the
collaborative creation of a distinct space and time,’ writes Yasufumi Nakamori.
‘Armed with his camera, Hosoe created a rupture in the conventional time and
space of reality, which Hijikata and Mishima could enter and perform within.’
.png)
.png)
.png)
