Did Casie and Dresie Dance?

Did Casie and Dresie Dance?

One of the interesting things about seeing Roger Ballen's video of I fink u freeky by Die Antwoord is how it changes the way one sees his previous work.

Ballen started in documentary and moved into apparently darker psychological corners as he progressed, adding layers of wire, animals, graffiti, masks and cardboard boxes into ever weirder concoctions. He played up to this with his entertaining talks, a psychodramas which mixed performance with  hypothesis and a claim to the subconscious.

I always remember seeing the Chapman Brothers on TV talking about their Hell dioramas and saying how they were dives into the subconscious and what could be more subconscious than Nazis and kids with penis-faces. Well, the ultimate conclusion I came to was what could be more conscious than that.

Sam Taylor-Wood once gave a commentary on The Chapman Brothers when they were altering £20 at Frieze (or something like that). The Chapman Brothers  claimed the currency defacing undermines something or other and challenges this or that and subverts the rest. "But does it though?" said Taylor-Wood when appraised of this claim.

Indeed. Does it though? The retort to fit virtually every artist statement.

The same can be said of Roger Ballen's work. It's funny seeing the video, because it's a funny video. I've shown it a few disparate groups of people over the last few days and everyone seems to like it - they watch it with a smile on their face and leave humming the words to the song. I watch it with a smile on my face. I laugh and dance and what could be better than that. And roachs in the omelette. Yuk! Disgusting! Fabulous!!

So it seems that Ballen, who used to inhabit a world where the discourse of sobriety and pretension held sway, has entered a new discourse, that of entertainment.

And in a strange way, that alters everything he has ever done. There is always the temptation to use a shorthand critique of his work that can essentially be boiled down to weird with a beard and, having seen the video, it seems that is exactly what it is. Forget about race, costume, torture, exploitation or anything remotely to do with levels of consciousness, first and foremost he made his work to be weird and weird is entertainment. Because that's what he did with the video.

Or maybe not. Maybe we can get into the discourse of South African music and culture. And then we have to redefine our thoughts in that way. Did Die Antwoord  rip the music off, are they racist  and homophobic, are they really poor Afrikaans, are they Blackface?

 Oh my God, we're back into the same territory of wondering exactly what Ballen was doing making his pictures in the first place, of how and where it all fits into a global scheme of things. As for a South African scheme of things, I am just too ignorant of the cultural subtleties and projectings one's national racial stereotypes onto another country just doesn't work wherever you are talking about, wherever you come from.

Personally, I'm happy to see Ballen moving up and away from the dark world of his still wonderful (but are they though?) but increasingly self-consciously made photographs. I'll laugh at the video and do the same I do with pretty much all music I like that has sentiments I might not fully agree with. I'll pretend I didn't hear the words and that even if I did, then it doesn't really matter. And if I do think of it too much, then I'll do as Baloo did in the Jungle Book, when him and Bagheera are about to rescue Mowgli from King Louie and the monkeys. Baloo's mad, but as the music plays, Baloo weakens. "I'll tear him limb from limb, I'll beat him. I'll... I'll... Well, Man what a beat I'm gone man, solid gone."



Some quotes Roger Ballen gave (from an old blog post).


"I have created a Roger Ballen World."

"The meaning comes from the eyes."

"What are we trying to protect when we make our walls white and clean?"

"We are scared of nature. We are scared of animals."

"The relationship between people and animals is adverserial and usually one way. People who think differently are fooling themselves."

"What if I told you after I took this picture, the man took the puppy outside and strangled it? Would you believe me?"

"Modern life has blocked the relationship between man and animal. That's why people go out and buy a dog or a bunch of flowers."

"The horns may be plastic but they still mean something."

"Work done subconsciously is most important - don't walk away from your footprints."

"The eyes only reach you because they have the same emotion you have. Blankness."

"I did everything. You can't take photographs like me."

I

South African Culture

Roger Ballen directed this video by Die Antwoord, South Africa's finest and it shows just a little, just a few hints in there. There's a PHD in here somewhere, but at the same time it's kind of fun. Grand Guignol meets the Adams Family.

Atget and Terrain Vague

I was looking at pictures by Mohamed Bourouissa  and was wondering about the Parisian banlieues in which they were set. What is the story there because that kind of beyond the Pale environment is something that we don't have in the same way in the  UK. Not quite and not yet - with the current economic cleansing of London, we will start having something along these lines in the next few years.

So I was wondering about this and then I got a copy of City Gorged with Dreams. It's by Ian Walker and  interweaves Paris, surrealism, documentary photography. And it directly connects tot he work of Bourousisa as well as the idea of Terrain Vague, that ending of one landscape and beginning of another. He explains the idea Terrain Vague is connected to the area outside the  fortifications of Paris. Walker quotes a passage from Victor Hugo's Les Miserables.

To wander in a kind of reverie, to take a stroll as they call it, is a good way for a philosopher to spend his time; particularly in that kind of bastard countryside, somewhat ugly but bizarre, made up of two different natures, whih surrounds certain great cities, notably Paris. To observe the banlieue is to observe an amphibian. End of trees, beginning of roofs, end of grass, beginning of paving stones, end of ploughed fields, beginning of shops, the end of the beaten track, the beginning of the passions, the end of the murmur of all things divine, the beginning of the noise of humankind - all of this holds an extraordinary interest. And thus, in these unattractive places, forever marked by the passer-by with the epithet sad, the promenades, apparently aimless, of the dreamer.

Walker notes the fascination of the surrealists with this terrain vague. "The most extensive of these derelict spaces lay between the Parisian fortifications and the banlieue;  the Zone. This was a strip of land about 250 metres wide immediately in front of the fortifications where builiding had been forbidden for defensive purposes. But the Zone outlived such practicalities and by the late nineteenth century it was inhabited by gypsies, ragpickers, , itinerants - known collectively as zoniers - whose presence had become integral to the myth of the city itself."

Eugene Atget photographed the Zoniers, so did Man Ray - who bought seven of Atget's chaos ridden prints.of the Zone. The Zone came to an end in 1973 when the boulevard periperique was completed, making for a new and very different Terrain Vague.

Which puts Bourouissa's work into a much wider historical and photographic context, replete with ides of ethnic, social, economic and planning histories.

There is so much photography based on different kinds of Edgelands and terrains vagues, where walls, borders and boundaries of some kind or other create a buffer zone and different environments, architectures or cultures can mingle and mix. I'm not sure how much of a shelf life some of this work has, but where the histories are clearly delineated to make apparent the specific differences, and where the social histories are brought out, it can be absolutely fascinating. The problem here of course is that the picture on its own don't always tell the story on their own; instead social and cultural backdrops form the narrative drive with which the images build and intertwine. Sometimes, the pictures on their own just aren't enough.. There is a symbiotic relationship between text and supporting material - the one without the other is really of no use whatsoever.


Gallery of Eugene Atget Zone pictures


Tim Atherton On Atget with links to other articles.

Death and Deceit

 

   

I enjoyed reading Joerg Colberg's musings on the defiance of death. It fits right in with internet discourse which is so different and less formal to that of other media, but at the same time, if you are selective and discerning to some extent, richer, more informative, thought-provoking and fun. And it can be lots of bad things too, but then so can everything.

Back to death and a link in to the previous post. From the top, we have Alexander Gardner, W.Willoughby Hooper's famine pictures from Madras, Memento Mori pictures, death by dismemberment from 1890 in China, an Indiana lynching from 1930, World War II deaths including Dimitri Baltermants Ukrainian mothers, Lee Miller's river corpse and the Nuremburg executions, the body of Che Guevara, Eddie Adams' Vietcong suspect getting shot, Jeffrey Silverthorne's morgue lady, the body of Mao, Joel Peter Witkin's kiss, an Andres Serrano morgue picture, Paul Watson's Mogadishu picture, a Sally Mann, Walter Schels' Nochmalleben, Saddam Hussein and Colonel Gaddafi. And just to bring things round full circle, I could have added some contemporary memento mori from Now I Lay Me Down to Slee.

It's death all the way in other words but over a range of uses, formats and connotations, with readings that shift and shimmer and remain unfixed. Death is used to inform, to sensationalise, to memorialise,  sentimentalise, to portray as primitive, to villify, to justify and to glorify. It's a sign of community, a symbol of shame, of power corrupted and a chance to gloat. Death is used to warn, to remember, to spiritualise and  to signify and end to the old and the beginning of something new. It's used persuasively as evidence, unwittingly as a witness, a sign of our essential mortality and our attempt to defy that, to defy and deify. For Witkin, death is Grand Guignol, for Serrano  it's money. Death in Mogadishu comes packed with different meanings, collapse and chaos, hatred, humiliation as well as an embedded one of vengeance. Sally Mann reminds us of  the fluidity of life, of our organic core, how we  melt back into the ground. Saddam is a picture of chickens coming home to roost, of the thing that goes around has come around, and will go around and come around again. Gaddafi is vengeance, humiliation and hypocrisy.

At the heart of all death is some form of deceit, a grey area where the uncertainty of what lies beyond meets with our own attempts to change our fate, to shift the goalposts, to defy the end that awaits us all. Most obviously, we can see this with the Victorian memento mori, where corpses are propped up and eyes painted into to a facsimile of a family snapshot, only with one member as dead and stiff as a board. In the near dead famine pictures of Willoughby, the deceit isone of general humanity, of how, after taking the photos, he would send the famine victims on his way without giving them treatment, food or help.

The embalming of Mao, or Lenin, or Ho, was an attempt to sanctify and deify, to prevent death even as incompetent embalming collapses in on itself. Sally Mann's pictures of death do the opposite, allowing the flesh to melt back into the ground from which it once grew, as if it had never existed, as if it had never been part of a living body and soul, with a mind and a heart, part of a memory, a consciousness that still lingers somehow, somewhere in someone's heart

And Paul Watson's pictures of David Cleveland are inundated with deceit. For Somalis, the lie is that this was any kind of victory, that anything but bad came of it, and for the US - well it's not too far different really but with more contemporary resonances.

And what of Saddam and Gaddafi. These are desecrations, a humiliation of a figure and a regime, but desecrations that in their cruelty and inhumanity, bring back to life the very figures they seek to destroy. These pictures don't signify endings, only a return to the same beginning. That's their deceit.

But in real life, outside the photograph, isn't that what we do with death - we fear it, we cheat it, we glorify it and deny it. We do all those things because what do we really know in the end. And so in that respect, aren't these pictures as truthful as you can get, reflections of the human condition in all its ignorance uncertainty. It's not propaganda. It's just the way we are.

And that, dear readers, is the discourse of the internet. Notebook style. .

Nigerian Nostalgia

The previous post on Narrators Photo led me to Pop Africana which led to Nigerian Nostalgia, a Facebook group dedicated to Nigerian Nostalgia. I'm currently enjoying Half a Yellow Sun by  Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie; Nigerian Nostalgia adds a visual edge to it, a kind of detached illustration of a particular way of life, a story board to Adichie's organic picturisations. Her characters resonate with me and remind of the time when I lived in a shared house with a Nigerian guy who simply loved telling me that if I was living in his country then I would be doing the washing up, the cleaning and every other household chore which I could care to imagine - and I never doubted him for one second. And when he wasn't telling me that, he was reluctantly middle-manning sugar deals for his relatives in Lagos, something he hated doing but couldn't avoid for family reasons. 

Much of Narrators Photo is dedicated to old celebrities, domestic products and group photos. It's a fascinating mix of what makes up our memories, a Nigerian equivalent of people of a certain age reminiscing about Angel's Delight, Z-Cars, Ford Anglias and the three day week.

However, the pictures that jumped out at me were these of public executions, in the top case the death by firing squad of the Oyenusi Gang.






This was an event witnessed by Ken Udoibok, one that he regards as an affront to human dignity. He writes:


I was 13 years old on a Saturday morning in 1973. While my parents were at work, I sneaked away from my home in Lagos, Nigeria. I was going to the beach. Not for fun or frolicking in the sun, but for a far more serious reason: I was going to witness an execution.

The sun beat down furiously that morning, but by 1 that afternoon, a dark cloud had formed over the beach. A large crowd stood by somberly as two army trucks and a black van drove onto the beach. I squeezed my way through the crowd to catch a glimpse of the infamous man being transported in the black van. Oyenusi, a notorious armed robber, had robbed banks and businesses in Nigeria for many years.

Three soldiers walked up to the black van and stood at attention. One of them yelled a command. Suddenly, the door of the vehicle was flung open. Slowly, Oyenusi appeared, his hands tied behind his back. He wore a dark long-sleeved shirt, dark loafers and wrinkled trousers. He was sweating profusely, his glance furtive as if he expected to see someone. He continued to scan the crowd as the soldiers tied him to a stick.

"Who's he looking for?" one of the spectators whispered to a friend.

Seven soldiers formed a line facing Oyenusi. An officer yelled a command and, in unison, the soldiers took aim at Oyenusi.

"Fire!"
 
Oyenusi shuddered as the bullets riddled his body. Moments later, his lifeless body slumped over the rope that held him to the stick.


The events were shown on TV  - one comment on Facebook says, "These executions were shown on NBC back then. Some of the criminals would shout out ( only saw their mouth action). Probably, shouting obscenes of abuse at the executors. Some refused the religious priest blessing, some looked dead terrified before shots were fired. The camera would pan on everyone of them. Then there is a command, the rambles of shot fired and to slumped bodies tied to the stake infront of the drums. It was a family viewing show. Everyone gathered around to watch the telly while there were also live viewing. Some of these accused were defiant vocally until you see them slump."

It all seems so dreadful and exotic and distant but then I wondered at what the British equivalent of this kind of nostalgia is; what shared bloody memories do we have of the last 50 years, and the memories came thick and fast. 

Back to Kenneth Odoibok, who also witnessed a family member being executed ( and who wrote this at a when Timothy McVeigh was about to be executed).

If those who support public executions were to experience the horror of actually witnessing an execution, they would forever question the rationale of state-sponsored killings. Next, there will be live television broadcasts of executions. Too extreme, you think? The trend has already started with the decision to broadcast McVeigh's execution by closed circuit. It is a mistake. So long as governments by example show disregard for life by executing criminals, private individuals will display similar disregard for life. In the end, there will be more killings and the value of all of our lives will be diminished.

A Congo Road Trip

The above picture is by Kiripi Katembo - it's from a project on flooding in Kinshasa. I saw it on  Narrators Photo,  a blog started by Vicky Cheape that is dedicated to providing a wider platform for African photographers. The video below is also by Katembo; it's his mobile phone tied to a kid's cardboard car then pulled through the streets of Kinshasa.

You can see more of Katembo's work from Bamako 2011.


Anyway, I thought the Narrators Photo was such a great idea that I fired off a few questions to Vicky which she very kindly answered. 

Who and what is the Narrators Photo?  

Narrators started for the purpose of opening up some lines of communication between photographers based in Africa and a UK (Europe and the West) audience.  It is currently a very basic website. However, the main site should be online soon as will it's first physical exhibition in Glasgow.

How and why did you get started?

I noticed an increasing number of images, especially in photojournalism but also in the contemporary art field, being produced about Africa but from non-African photographers. To me, this seemed to be quite absurd.  I don't object to people photographing countries other than their own but there seems to be an enormous imbalance when it comes to Africa.  There is no lack of good photographers from every country in Africa but there does seem to be something stopping these projects and artists having presence over here. That is something Narrators is looking to help with.  

How do you find photographers?  Do you have connections with African photographers/curators?

I started from the most obvious photographers who were getting quite a lot of attention, such as Pieter Hugo and Zanele Muholi and worked through networks.  African networks are not dissimilar to our own in the UK; everyone knows everyone.  Facebook was actually a real help in finding photographers with no website or contact details.  

I have made some good connections with photographers based in and around Africa and the response has been terrific. I am hoping to get some curators onboard for the web exhibitions and perhaps to start some discussion.  I am acutely aware that I am not African! So I can only curate and exhibit in so many ways.

What are the differences in perspective between African photographers and non-African photographers?

I think when it comes to African photographers representing their own countries the viewpoints are much more different and complex than say a Westerner who visits for a few weeks.  As a side note I don't think there is such a thing as an 'African' photographer when it comes to content, the idea that there can be one homogeneous view of a continent.   

Who are the major influences on African photographers? Has the recent focus on African portrait photographers/South African photographers had an effect?

When speaking to a recent photographer, whose work deals with political unrest in Cameroon, he told me one of his influences was Nan Goldin!  Yes I can see a lot of Zwelethu Mthethwa influence in some portrait work and also some of Ryan McGinley's style as well.  There is a lot of experimentation as well and mixed art, photographers incorporating sculpture sometimes.

What are some major themes that African photographers are looking at?

Without trying to sound too cliched, 'identity' is a big theme I have noticed. However, that may be because the forthcoming exhibition features young photographers dealing with that exact issue and also being young myself I tend to pick up on that theme more.

What events have you got planned at narrators.com?

Our first exhibition will be held in Glasgow from the 12th April for two weeks but details have yet to be finalised.  We should hopefully have some interesting talks in the gallery and online.  I would love to hear feedback or suggestions so please e-mail info@narratorsphoto.com

Leo Maguire and Telling the Story

I was so blown away by Leo Maguire’s (a Newport graduate)  Gypsy Blood that I decided to interview him. He was kind enough to talk. Here are his views on getting into a project, story telling, motivation and the huge reaction to the programme. 

Leo is supremely talented, brave and driven. If I'd worked this hard, and with this intensity, I would be so up for putting my feet up and having a bit of a rest. Not Leo. He's up and away and setting to work on more projects that build on some of the themes you can see in Gypsy Blood. We'll all be hearing a lot more of Leo in the years to come. 

Watch the full film here.

"It took me more than a year just to shoot one photograph. I talked to so many people and they just didn’t want to know. They weren’t interested. It was very closed off. Then I found some people and started hanging out with them. Fred Butcher was such a larger than life character that he stood out. That helped me get in.

So I started shooting stills, but there was so much texture I was missing. I couldn’t get the dialogue, the humour, the warmth. So I started taking more and more video.

Then there was the awful night when Fred nearly got killed. I showed James Reed, an editor in Bristol, the footage and he really encouraged me to make a documentary so together we cut a teaser of what I had and I began showing it around to try and get some interest in what I was doing.

A girlfriend of mine who lived in the same building as Tim Hetherington, the co-director of Restrepo who was killed in Libya last year, showed the footage to him and he was so encouraging. He told me that I had something really special, something unique. His belief and encouragement gave me the confidence to pursue the project and try and make a film..

The first production companies I showed it to weren’t so keen. I would show the trailer and they’d say, “Oh no, not another Gypsy Wedding,” but then when I did get interest, the commissioning process was so quick it almost happened overnight.

Now I see myself as a photographer and a film-maker. I’m a storyteller and you can tell stories in so many ways. But I love film because there are so many possibilities. Film has taught me so much about story-telling because when you make a film you’re always thinking and analysing and reflecting. I didn’t always do that with my photography because I would just be thinking about taking a great picture.

There are quiet moments in the film, times when you don’t really know what is happening. There’s no voiceover to tell you what is going to happen or what just happened. I think that can really diminish a film because it’s important for there to be some mystery in the film. It’s more magical if you don’t understand what you’re seeing, if you have to discover the meaning for yourself.

The reactions to the film have been amazing. First of all the travelling community and the people in the film love it because it’s a true representation of their lives. They laugh at the funny scenes and they appreciate the tender scenes. They like that I don’t stitch them up. They’re really happy with it and that matters so much to me.

Gypsy Blood is about the travelling community but it is also about other things. There are so many layers to it. It’s about coming-of-age, fatherhood, masculinities, about a different way of life, about fathers being with their sons, it’s about love.

That’s why it there has been such a huge response to the programme. It was the second most talked about topic on Twitter the night it was shown and there were all kinds of comments – there was prejudice and racism, outrage about the scenes with animals and the children fighting.

But so many people understood the central message of the film. I was there for 2 years and the thing that struck me was how much the fathers loved their children, how much time they spent with them, how much energy they put into being a parent. There is an outcry about the children fighting but all the time I was there I never saw anyone abusing their children. Sure, the kids have to be tough because honour is such an important thing in the community. But at the same time, they have to be tough because if you aren’t you are going to suffer. Taking kids out hunting every day might seem alien to some people, but for them it is a  part of growing up and a way to be close and together in a natural environment.

That sense of honour and how important that is also came through in the film. I had an incredible email from a teacher who teaches travellers’ children and she was in tears because suddenly she understood how difficult it was for them. They were in school and they wanted to stay in school and learn, but they were torn because sometimes they’d get into fights. And if they wanted to stay in school, they had to back down or lose face, which is something that goes against that code of honour. She saw the film and hoped it would open the minds of other teachers and help them understand just how difficult life in school could be for the children.

The film was very personal for me, but it had to be. To do something as intense as that for 2 years, you have to have a personal interest. This was the culmination of a five-year dream.

Now I am working in film, but I still want to use photography as well. The problem is there is not the money around for long-term editorial photography projects anymore. There’s more money in film-making but at the same time, it is so intense. There are so many people you work with and it is about man management, time management, project management. But photography is hard and it’s not regular. With a film commission, you might have a year if you’re very lucky make a film, so for a year your income is stable. And if you make a good one, then you can make another and move up the film ladder."