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.’
Are you looking to develop your own practice? Do you want to understand what photography is or can be? This 8-week course will introduce you to the contemporary practice of photography through examples that link the historical, the contemporary, and the theoretical in a way that is dynamic, visual, and accessible to everybody.
Touching on major photographic genres such as landscape photography, portraiture, and conflict, it will look at some of the key photographers and ideas that have shaped how we see the world today and will also present a global, pluralist outlook on both the wonderful expressive and artistic qualities of the photographic image, as well as its darker side.
The lecture series is the first of two standalone eight-week courses. The first will look at the origins of key photographic genres, where they came from, how they affect the images we make and see today, and how those genres are influenced by different global theories and practices.
The second will look at how social and cultural change in the post-war era influenced photographic practice around the world.
This series of lectures is ideal for anybody who wants to learn how images are made and understood. It will enrich your understanding of the multiple ways in which images can be read, and will also add layers to how you make images and how you communicate those images to a broader audience. If you have never studied photography, these lectures will give you a fast track introduction to the history of photography and its theory. And if you have studied photography, it will refresh old ideas and present new possibilities that will refresh your understanding of what photography is and what it can be.
It has been a delight to be involved in the Birds of a Feather publication. BIRDS OF A FEATHER is a publication that gives an insight into the organisation and functioning of OpStap, a group-based program for people with drug addictions and people in recovery. The focus lays on the guests of OpStap, who are given a meaningful use of time and meaning through meetings, activities and voluntary work.
And the book is a consideration of the people who come to Opstap, their lives, their thoughts, their creativity, their humanity. It's a book that has evolved through a collaboration between the organisation and people of OpStap, photographer Vincen Beeckman, , designer Lien Van Leemput, publisher Art Paper Editions (APE) & the city of Ghent - and myself a little bit.
I worked at a distance but loved the evolving process, the thoughts, and the insights.
"The past is like a shelf in a library. There are parts of me that are on that shelf that I will never go to or reopen. But they are there and I know they are there." Lisette
BIRDS OF A FEATHER contains stories that are worth being told, faces that should not be forgotten, is a book that deserves to be printed.
And I also love the ongoing editing process, and seeing how people viewed (and edited pictures).
What do you think about the pictures?
- I do like them, but I also know the
people who are in the pictures, and sometimes it us confronting to see them in the
pictures. Because we see the people as we know them, but if you see some
pictures, you see the people with they eyes of someone who does not know them.
It sounds strange maybe, but you know what I mean?
Yes, I understand. But it is probably the
same for the places, no?
- Yes the places too. …And some are really nice pictures as well.
You know, a person who might have a more macho appearance looks really innocent
in the picture. And that’s really nice. … Yes, I like them.
What do you think of the pictures and the
project?
- It’s funny to see the things you see,
every day, in another way.
You mean that you are used to see things in
a certain way, and then you discover it can change?
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