Liverpool Look/15: Don't Take Boring Pictures

There is some really great work on show in Liverpool at Look/15 Festival. Most important historically is Alice Seeley Harris's pictures from the Congo. These are a benchmark of early campaigning photography that show the brutalities of  a region that was effectively turned into a private slave labour camp for the King of Belgium.

This is what is says on the website of the  International Slavery Museum , the place where the show is being held.

Alice Seeley Harris' photographs revealed to the world the shocking truth of exploitation, murder and slavery in the Congo. The campaign gained public and political attention through the Harris Lantern Slide Show that toured Europe and the US. These shows were accompanied with powerful narrations which attempted to stir the audiences' sense of duty and responsibility, and can be seen as a significant milestone in shifting public perceptions on the impact of colonial rule in the Congo.  

Seeley Harris used one of the world’s first portable cameras, a Kodak Brownie, to take images of both Congolese life as well as 'atrocity photographs' used in one if the first human rights campaigns. In 1905, Mark Twain published King Leopold's Soliloquy, an imagined set of musings in which Leopold cited the "incorruptible Kodak" camera as the only witness he had encountered in his long career that he could not bribe. 

From the International Slavery Museum, it was a short walk to Open Eye where Richard Ross's Juvenile In Justice project showed pictures of  the imprisonment of children in the USA was a breath-taking reminder of the power of documentary that tells a story in the most direct manner possible. Sometimes you wonder if the most noticeable effect of the conceptualisation of photography is to remind us of the essential pointlessness and impotence of that conceptualisation. Rather than circling around an issue introspectivelywondering at the process, the promulgation and the involvement of self in the story, Russell gets to the heart of the matter with very simple pictures that combine with short captions that are heartbreaking in their peeling back the heartbreak, sorrow and fear that children, parents (and prison guards) experience in the American Justice system.

There were so many sad stories in there, but the one I remember most was that of a child who was sitting in a holding cell waiting for his mother to get him out, but she couldn't leave her job for fear of losing it. So he had to sit and wait

picture by Richard Ross

I’m waiting for my mom to come get me. Is she in there? She’s at work today. I want to go home. I got in trouble at school today. —R.T., age 10 Jan Evans Juvenile Justice Center, Reno, Nevada. R.T. was brought in from school by a policeman. He stabbed a schoolmate, but it is unclear what the tool was, a pencil, knife, fork . . . He was waiting to be picked up by his mom, who couldn’t come get him until she got off work for fear of losing her job. He was checked on every five minutes. The director of the facility recalled an eight-year-old being brought in for taking a bagel and stated, “This is not the place for these offenses.”

Look 15 does have a theme. Actually it has 3 themes and they are big ones; Women, Migration and Memory. That's two themes too many, but even with the three themes it's difficult to see where the Ross fits. Maybe it would be better just to have Look as an unthemed 'Month of Photography' kind of event, or make a choice and have a real focus and curate it that way. Because otherwise you're left guessing how things fit together, when actually they don't fit together at all. 

The big show in town is Martin Parr and Tony Ray Jones in Only in England at the Walker Art Gallery. It's familiar work but great to see the beautiful, beautiful prints and the link between the history of the British holiday and American street photography. 

And of course you get the great Tony Ray-Jones Photography Checklist and its top tip, Don't Take Boring Pictures. 

Indeed! Which brings us to the last and best of Liverpool Look/15, Max Pinckers' Will They Sing like Raindrops or Leave me Thirsty at St George's Hall. Now I'm biased with this because I love the book and Tadhg Devlin, who curated the show on a really small budget is a good friend. 

But really! Max Pinckers doesn't take boring pictures. Well, he probably does take loads of them, but they're not the ones we get to see. We get to see exciting pictures of horses, lovers, the city and the sea.



If you're not familiar with Max Pinckers' work, here's my review of the book from which the show came. But even though I love the book, it was fantastic to see the prints blown up close to the size they deserve and wonderfully printed by McCoy Wynne. The show was a mix of the simple and the complex - simple because it told the story of the book in a pared down, economical manner with an emphasis on the visual grandeur of Pinckers' staged documentary, but complex because of the range of print sizes, papers and pairings. 

The only shame was the show was barely signposted so only the most dedicated viewer is going to find it. The lack of signposting was a bit of an issue this year (and a real contrast to Format where there were signs and lovely people always available to point the way). And though it was great for Liverpool to host Pinckers' first UK show, he really deserves a couple of floors somewhere with fabulous light and brilliant signposting and food, music and dance to complete the Bollywood fantasy/reality theming. It will happen but I'm surprised it hasn't happened yet. 

Let's Get More Immigrants in Here. They're good for the place

So it's getting to that end of year graduation show time of year, so for starters here is Laura Book from Newport's Documentary Photography Course at the University of South Wales (I work there).

This project is called Pujasjarvi, a town where there are more reindeer than people, where the town has set the goal for more than one in ten of the local population to be immigrants by the year 2018. To that end, the town invited in refugees living in dangerous citcumstances. The Boukono family were one such group, and Book interlaces her pictures of life in this Finnish town with archive images that the Boukonos managed to preserve.

This openness to migration goes very much against what you hear about in most of the European news at present. Perhaps that's because the vast majority of  people in Europe are less small-minded than the media and political establishment would have us believe. And perhaps the protest votes (in the UK especially) are more to do with the failure of those political establishments to engage with people on any level than with an essential racism.

I like to think Book's work captures that ability to live together and get on with life no matter what the surface expectations - and a Congolese family living in one of the more isolated corners of Finland provides some pretty good surface expectations.

Here's the full statement. And look at more images here.

The journey started by a river. The Congo river is the second largest river in the world, but outside the Boukono family's house in Brazzaville, it is so small you can wave to the other side. When civil war was raging in Brazzaville in 1998, the family escaped their home and crossed the river to neighboring DR Congo and the harsh conditions of life in a refugee camp. Fifteen years later their journey ended by another river when the family moved into a house facing the Iijoki river in Finland, so far north you can walk on its frozen waters in wintertime.

The Boukono family came to Finland through a UNHCR program that resettles refugees living in particularly vulnerable conditions with no possibility of returning to their countries of origin. Pudasjärvi, the family's new hometown, has an aging and rapidly shrinking population. In order to keep the town alive, the council has set a goal that in 2018, one of ten residents would be an immigrant.

The series follows the Boukono family as their first winter in Finland is coming to an end. Interlaced in the story are photographs that have made a long and improbable journey together with the family. They too have barely escaped a war and some bear their own scars. The oldest images began their journey in Studio Papa Photo Josky in Brazzaville, where Flavien Boukono started working as a photographer in the 1970's. Later photographs record daily life and important celebrations in the refugee camp, shared with friends who are now far away. Some images carry memories too painful to recall.

As days become longer and the light finds its way back, the breaking ice sounds like gunshots in a still forest. The river that carried people's footsteps now carries blocks of ice, slowly changing their shape as they float down the stream. 

Richard Mosse: Not Boring or Trite

I never liked Richard Mosse's infrared pictures of Congo. I always felt the pictures never quite matched up to the statement, that it didn't quite do what it said on the tin.

At the same time, it was one of those projects that everyone loved (reactionary opinions including my own opinion don't count in this paragraph). So much so that it was almost sacrilege not to like it. In film terms, it would be like saying you think Distances Voices, Still Lives is boring and trite, or that Apocalypse Now is the biggest load of guff going or that Stalker is, oh dear, what, let's use boring and trite again.

But Mosse's infrared film, The Enclave, looks amazing from this clip of the installation that will be shown at the Venice Biennale. I especially like the posturing of the rebel soldiers. Posturing and soldiers go together so well  and it is refreshing to see war broken down to its basics infantilism - a huge change from the rhetoric of heroism, bravery and sacrifice that we are so often presented with both verbally and visually. 

Congo - Editors are "as guilty as the warlords"

Tying in with the Chanarin/Broomberg essay and returning to the theme of gorillas, in The Independent Media section, Claire Soares writes about the 'scandal' of an animal's death getting more coverage than the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Congo.

"Kill a mountain gorilla in Congo and it gets much more coverage than five million dead... It irks me every time," says Anneke van woudenberg, the Congo specialist for HRW.

"Death and destruction in Congo is not something people want to think about over Sunday breakfast. The bean counters at media outlets know this," sighs Marcus Bleasdale... "But as journalists, we have a responsibility to let the world know what is going on, whether or not it sells newspapers or magazines."

As with animals, the death of children makes for good copy, as do bizarre stories of stole penises and of course celebrity - "Yet if I were to tell them (editors) that Ben Affleck is going there next week then suddenly I'd have eight pages," says Bleasdale. "What the hell does Ben Affleck, who's probably only going to spend 24 hours there, have to do with the story?"

Soares writes about the reinforcement of the Heart of Darkness myth through lazy reporting, while Richard Dowden of the Royal African Society says that there are few people to contextualise events. "What strikes the visitor may be important or unimportant to people who live thee - or have a completely different meaning. And it so very difficult to find Congolese who can explain Congo to outsiders."

The UN has tried to brand disasters to overcome this problem with one being "the most forgotten", another "the worst in the world". But still it is under-reported. "If journalists aren't writing about it or editors won't run the stories," says Bleasdale, "then they are just as guilty as the warlords."