Italy: Crass, Cheap and Nasty!

all pictures by Simone Donati from Hotel Immagine

You sold me to an old man, father
May god destroy your home; I was your daughter


Making love to an old man
Is like fucking a shrivelled cornstalk black with mould

When sisters sit together, they always praise their brothers.
When brothers sit together, they sell their sisters to others.

These are landays, 2-line poems from Afghanistan that 'have long been used by Afghan women as a secretive form of rebellion' (read more about landays here). The ones above don't hold back and provide a view of life that is harsh, uncensored without the involvement of the self-justifying male filtering mechanism (of the 'actually, women have a lot of informal power, bla bla bla' kind).

The landays hit the spot and they're brutal. After reading those poems, the reality of being fucked by a 'shrivelled cornstalk black with mould' has been made a little bit more real to me. It's a terrible image and the poem is drawing the big picture without flinching or worrying about anyone's sensibilities being hurt. There is no consideration for whoever might get upset by these poems, because however upset they get, their pain is but a pinprick compared to those women sold by their fathers, uncles and brothers into sexual bondage with 'cornstalks black with mould'.

After reading about the landays on Saturday morning, I got Simone Donati's Hotel Imagine in the post. It's a book about the popular iconography of contemporary Italy melting into their equivalents in politics.



So one way of looking at is is as a project about Italian identity in the new millennium. The starting points were two projects, 'Welcome to Berlusconistan' and 'Padre Pio Cult' that Donati did as individual editorial projects. But once these were done, Donati started to think about Italian society as a whole, what it had become and how it could be represented.

So there are images from fascist marches, pictures of fans at the Napoli training ground. and contestants queuing up to audition for 'Grande Fratello' (Big Brother), as well as images showing Italian crooners ('melodic singers'), race fans, and election night celebrations.

Individually the pictures are a survey of the collective Italian crowd mentality and they are straightforward a documentary/step-backs from a photojournalist approach, the opening up of the mise-en-scene that is repeated throughout the book.

So we see priests preparing for a prayer meeting at a football stadium attended by Mariya Pavlovic, a visionary who sees the Virgin Mary. Mixed in with that a stripper performs at a Grand Prix meeting, and we see Karima El Mahroug (Berlusconi was convicted for having sex with here when she was underaged), sitting sad-faced in the private are of the 'Paradiso Club'.



So it's fascism, politics, music, soaps, reality TV, and religion. There's sex and corruption and once you start adding it all together it ends up being an extreme cynical idealisation of Italian life. This is stupid Italy and maybe it's my imagination, or maybe it's me projecting the disgust you repeatedly hear Italians express for aspects of Italian life, but after a couple of viewings, it's almost as though Donati is spitting the pictures out.

There seems to be a disgust in there; at the triteness of it all, the easy fall into adulation, the upsurge of fascism, the seduction by a twinkly smile or a pair of breasts, the dumb populism, It's a book that answers the question, How Crass is Italy? And the answer is This Crass! And This Stupid!

Donati nails, in a very direct way what is wrong with Italy. Hotel Immagine is a book that could be paired nicely with Frederico Clavarino's more allegorical Italia O Italia, a book I describe as '...a deeply pessimistic book, one that uses the symbols of the past to relate the slow tragedy of a dying present. And in the end that isn’t just the story of Italy, it is the story of everywhere.'


Of course you could do the same thing for other countries. How Shit is the USA, France, China, Nigeria, Brazil, Australia, the UK?

Ah, the UK! It should be like shooting fish in a barrel. We do crap with a small c-, and without the compensations the Italians have (food, art, weather, architecture - we lose) But the cultural depictions of this country's crassness are constrained by a certain affection for its popular pastimes and traditions. Go to Only in England, the Tony Ray-Jones and Martin Parr show and there's a rooting of the images (which are Fantastic fantastic!) in the history of Pagan history, Wakes Week, Mass Observation and American street. It's kind and not savage at all in comparison.

It would be nice if it were savage. There is a lot to be savage about. We currently have a government that is dismantling the welfare state, employment laws, and human rights in a manner that rides roughshod over 150 years of campaigning and progress. The British people have bought into the dehumanising of the poor, the sick and the disenfranchised and embraced the values of a commodified, property-centred culture that is built on a bubble of imported corruption, greed and venality.

You can speak to pretty much anyone who works in photography and there is a recognition that this state of affairs is not represented. Nobody is doing those broad brush strokes on what it is to be British or English, on the snobbery, self-interest and cruelty that is devastating this country.

You can see this at all levels. Every year Source puts out its annual survey of student work. There are some great projects in there (from the University of South Wales where I teachs, Mira Andres, Sebastian Bruno and Isaac Blease have done some great work), but you can go through the different universities and colleges and there is virtually nothing on what is happening in the UK on a larger scale.

I appreciate that not everybody is interested in doing this kind of work, but when the absence is on such a scale, one wonders if there isn't some kind of systemic blindness to the world around us. There is little that is passionate, angry or concerned. And on such a scale it's a Roger Irrelevance in photographic form.

It's the kind of irrelevance that Tom Wolfe wrote about in his introduction to Bonfire of the Vanities, He talked about how back in the seventies he waited and waited for somebody to write the great American novel dealing with great American problems; the decline of the cities, social conflict, racial strife, the political class.

But nobody wrote it. American novelists were too busy dealing with the death of the novel, the death of the realism and their response was to come up with different kinds of novels - 'Absurdist novels, Magical Realist novels, and novels of Radical Disjunction'.

Wolfe waited and waited for somebody to write the great realist novel but it never came. So he wrote it and that's how Bonfire of the Vanities was born. It's a story in which story-telling and realism come together perfectly. It's entertaining, savagely funny, but comes with a bitter heart of cynicism and a cold gimlet eye.

Hotel Immagine has a similar bitter heart and so do the poems featured at the top of this post. So that's Italy and Afghanistan covered. But what about Britain? There's plenty of bitterness here, we're drowning in it. But what about the photography? Where are our landays, our Bonfire of the Vanities, our Hotel Immagines? You get the feeling it to is wallowing in its visual equivalents of  'Absurdist novels, Magical Realist novels, and novels of Radical Disjunction'. Which is all well and good but of little interest to anybody beyond the photographers themselves and the photo-world of which they are part.

I think if we want to get an audience and have a voice as mentioned in last week's posts on the Golden Age of Photobooks, then we need to think about the grand narratives and what is actually happening in our world. Donati and others are doing that for Italy. It would be nice for people to do it in the UK (and thank you Zed Nelson for your piece on property in London). And maybe think about it a bit. And get angry about it a bit. And have an opinion about it a bit. And not be afraid to do so.



Buy Hotel Immagine here.

William Klein, New York and doing something new

The White Tiger and Slumdog Millionaire nod towards a more 'real' India, a break from the romantic, colonial and magic realist depictions of the country we are more familiar with. In the same way, Bonfire of the Vanities was Tom Wolfe's realist New York epic.

In the foreword to the current edition, Wolfe writes about the disdain held in the 1960s and 1970sfor the realist novels. Instead, there were Absurdist Novels, Magical Realist Novels, novels of Radical Disjunction and Puppet Master novels.

"The Puppet Masters were in love with the theory that the novel was, first and foremost, a literary game, words on a page being manipulated by an author. Ronald Sukenick, author of a highly praised 1968 novel called Up, would tell you what he looked like while he was writing the words you were at that moment reading. At one point you are informed that he is stark naked. Sometimes he tells you he's crossing out what you've just read and changing it. Then he gives you the new version. Ina story called The Death of the Novel, he keeps saying, a la Samuel Beckett, 'I can't go on'.Then he exhorts himself, 'Go on,' and on he goes. At the end of Up he tells you that none of the characters was real: 'I just make it up as I go along."

Wolfe says many of these people were wonderful writers, but that realist fiction provided a wealth of material that had the ability to move the reader in a way the non-realist material could. Realism in the novel gave Wolfe the ability to get all the currents of New York into one book, to get the big picture.

Reading that made me think of photography and getting the big picture. For New York, William Klein's pictures give the feeling of the city (which I have never been to, so what do I know?) in a very dynamic way - there's energy there. I don't think there is any photography of London or England that encompasses the city/country in anything like as satisfying a manner.

Perhaps that's because there is so much about photography that avoids the big picture, the basic truisms of life. There is little real imagery of childhood that conveys what it is to be a child with any depth - though Klein hits the spot. That is why I photograph my daughter, because photographing her involves a huge theme that is close to home and enables my photographic work to my family than it would be. It's a labour of love in other words.

A lot of people photograph their children for similar reasons as me. But what about other things? People say everything has been done, but it hasn't. I featured a football ticket a couple of posts ago; where is the convincing photography that conveys either what it is like to support a team or what it is like to play for a team. There isn't any. Or how about migration? Books like New Londoners or Promised Land provide a nice perspective to it, but how about something that has a sense of purpose and place, of being and not being in a place.

I think photography has really limited itself in what it can photograph, what it is permissible or cool or hip to shoot. We have endless images of flyovers and water towers, endless cliched portrayals of the homeless or addicted, but what about images that show what school is like or motherhood or commuting, that get under the skin and have the feeling and emotion that accompany all those things.

At the same time, I also think that people will loosen up in the coming year, and that new subjects and ways of portraying them will open up. Pleasing the editorial, art or commercial markets doesn't make so much sense if there is no light at the end of the tunnel. People will either stop shooting altogether or start shooting what they really want - whatever that might be.





not quite the same in photography, so why not

Car Crash everything

Back to J.G. Ballard's Miracles of Life where he writes about the birth of his book, Crash. In 1970, Ballard came up with the idea that there was "a strong connection between sexuality and the car crash". In Miracles of life, he cites the deaths of Kennedy (a special kind of car crash), Grace Kelly and Diana as examples.

Back in 1970, Ballard was still not entirely convinced, so he decided "...to test the unconscious links between sex and the car crash by putting on an exhibition of crashed cars."

Three crashed cars were delivered to the gallery, closed circuit TVs were installed, and a young woman was hired to perform topless. And so to the opening.

"During the month they were on show the cars were ceaselessly attacked, daubed with white paint by a Hare Krishna group, overturned and stripped of wing mirrors and licence plates. ... My exhibition had in fact been a psychological test disguised as an art show, which is probably true of Hirst's shark and Emin's bed."

Ballard wrote the book, which was then made into a film which caused a huge controversy in the UK at least and as far as he was concerned, his case was proven.

Car crashes recur in literature and if there is a sexuality about them, then it is a very dark and violent one, in which the car symbolises economic power and much, much more besides. In White Tiger, the excellent booker-winning novel by Aravind Adiga, the crash involves a poor young street girl getting run down by the wealthy and corrupt Pinky Madam - who is driving the car on a drunken whim of fate. The murder sums up the relationship between rich and poor in India, in particular on the streets of Delhi and serves as a stimulus for all kind of dramatic plot developments.

A similar thing happens in Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities, in which a young, black teenager, Henry Lamb, is run down by Sherman McCoy's Mercedes ( though his lover, Maria Ruskin, is driving on a whim of fate). Sherman McCoy is a bond trader (jump you fucker, jump!) and the story of both the hit-and-run and his misguided financial investments still seem relevant during the current financial crisis - a car crash of epic proportions if there was one.

If Bonfire of the Vanities is the ultimate economic disaster novel ( and if, like me, you are completely clueless and want to understand the background of both the deals in the book and how the current spate of bank crashes came to be, watch Evan Davies' excellent BBC series, The City Uncovered, in particular Tricks with Risk.).

If we are on the theme of car crashes, oh dear, I have to mention Manchester City, now the richest club in the world, and a disaster that just never seems to stop. It wasn't always that way. I was looking around some old things the other day, and chanced upon this ticket. Yes, 1976, the last time City won anything, The League Cup Final, Man City V Newcastle, 2-1, Dennis Tueart's overhead kick, it must be on youtube or something.

So the image for the day - my League Cup Final ticket from 1976. The Glory Days and I was there. And it only cost £1.50!