Charlie Surfs on Lotus Flowers: There's too much to choose

I've got a vested interest in this book because Simone Sapienza used to be my lovely student and b) he was one of the three people who started Gazebook Sicily. Gazebook Sicily was a photobook festival by the sea in Sicily. For three straight years, that's how I began every september.

It was free and, if you're looking for a model on how to organise a photobook festival with food, drink, music and free access to talks and portfolio reviews and all the rest, well Gazebook might be the one. So because of that I kind of love Simone. That and quite a lot more including the fact that he's a brilliant photographer and human being.

Charlie Surfs on Lotus Flowers is a book Simone published last year. It's avisual stream of consciousness through Ho Chi Minh City, through Vietnamese capitalism and all its contradictions. It's a mix of still-lifes, portraits made in a pop-up studio. backdrop heavy street images, and disjointed fragments of the alienation of everyday life. How do you manage to live in a country with such a history, and such a present and so many contradictions, Simone is asking. How do you make sense of it all.

You can read a really good review of the book here.

And here is my short video review of the book.

I got the book just after reading The Refugees by Viet Thanh Nguyen. The Refugees is a collection of short stories about the lives of Vietnamese refugees living in the United States, about people who left Vietnam after the end of the war there or in the late 1970s.

It's a book about people who are living between two worlds; one is the violence, dysfunction and tradition of Vietnam during the war years, it's a world where people are at ease with themselves and their families, where they own the dysfunction around them, where religion, family, food, community and the contradictions and psychosis that accompany those things are internal to their lives.

And then they get to America and everything changes. A simulacrum of family, community is built into their new lives but it's built on quicksand, it doesn't quite take; the dysfunction is not familiar.. Attempts are made to recreate the old life through political organisations but without the unifying sense of place of Vietnam, these are just deluded and corrupt.

In one story, the main character#s mother  has a shop selling groceries to Vietnamese migrants. She faces the challenges of making money from customers who question every price, who wonder why it's more expenensive than back 'home', who are in denial about the deaths of their missing family members, and who threaten to blackball the mother's shop if she doesn't pay money to fight the Communists back home. The mother knows what will happen if she doesn't pay. She resists, but can't resist enough. In the end, she pays money that she knows is at best a waste, for a futile cause.

And as she pays, she realises that the old life, the life in pre-Communist Vietnam, is over, that she lives in America now. And with that, she gives her son, for the first time ever, a $5 bill to spend as he likes. He goes to the local shop, a shop run by Sikhs, and he looks in wonder at the comics, at the sweets, at the chocolate. 'While the clerks chatted in a language I did not understand,' the final line reads, 'I hesitated, yearning to take everything home but unable to choose.'

And that is what Charlie Surfs on Lotus Flowers is about! It's a wonderful book.

Buy the book here.

End This Horror!

One picture that keeps on coming up in discussions connected to the Aylan Kurdi pictures is Nick Ut's 1972 picture of Kim Phuc screaming in pain after being burnt by napalm.

You read it again and again; how the Nick Ut picture helped end the Vietnam War, or contributed to the mood that ended the Vietnam War (and you can read that in the Sun front page from 1972). But perhaps we exaggerate the power of the media, and of photography.

Flicking through my History of Vietnam book, I see that in 1972 (when the picture was taken) the US only had 6,000 combat troops in the country, and that Richard Nixon was getting 60% approval ratings and that later in the year, the US mounted heavy bombing raids on North Vietnam. How does the effect of the image weigh up against that, or against the ending of the draft, or the Watergate trials or the 1974 cease fire?

I keep on looking for things that tell me of the effect that pictures have on policy but I can't find anything. I also wonder if  the TV footage which appeared on news programmes around the world (the Vietnam War was the 'Living Room War' after all) more influential than Ut's photograph in some ways? The picture has become iconic and is a great picture but was Ut's photograph  a kind of index to the newsreel.

This happens quite a lot. We remember old television through photographs and then a new memory overtakes us and the photograph takes on a life of its own and serves different narratives ( of reconciliation and forgivness in the case of Kim Phuc, and the upholding of the American conscience).

I wonder if that isn't what is happening with Aylan, but rather than being an index to the newsreel, he's the index to the social media storm. The pictures of Aylan were published at the end of a week in which a contemporary Trail of Tears from Turkey up to Germany became very visible on our TV screens. And Aylan became the symbol of this trail. A terribly sad symbol, one of childhood and innocence, that we can all sympathise with. It's not really an accident that a child became a symbol. His death is truly tragic, but so are the deaths of all those who have died and drowned, and been beaten, raped and tortured on their pathways from Syria, Eritrea, Afghanistan, Somalia and beyond.


The outpourings of emotions and statements of intent are really welcome and will result in some change or crystallise some form of policy, but we'll see. People can say thing and, full in the knowledge that we are a fickle public with short attention spans, do another.

For the past 5 years, in Britain at least, we have had cuts to education, welfare, health, and housing for asylum-seekers and refugees. People who have already reached these shores have been forcibly repatriated to face torture and abuse. All the major political parties have engaged in anti-immigrant and refugee rhetoric.

So perhaps a first step in having change in the UK is to restore those things that have been cut. But I don't think that's going to happen. I don't think that the sudden pro-refugee sentiments will last either. New pictures will come along, new stories, new outrages, the racist undercurrents will return and the Daily Mail and all the rest will click back to default mode. Aylan will become just another flicker on the social media landscape, the Kony 2012 or #bringbackourgirls for 2015.

I hope it doesn't end up that way but let's wait and see how things stand in two weeks', two months', two years' time. Time. Yes.

End This Horror!


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How not to Photograph: Make Like a Native and Weave

picture: Colin Pantall - Lijiang: Death by Tourism


There's one photographic tendency to portray other people as victims already noted in the Do Mind That post. The general idea is that these other people live in faraway lands of which we know little. The little that we do know about them tells us that these people are primitive people living lives that, in true Hobbesian form, are nasty, brutish and short. We know this because we have seen the pictures of skeletal men and screaming babies. They are helpless infants leading terrible lives only we, the people of the developed and civilized world, can provide a solution to. If only they would do as we said, then everything would be alright.

The flip side of this version of events is the Noble Savage, the Never Mind That version of events. One of the most memorable things I ever overheard whilst travelling was in Sapa, Vietnam. An Australian tourist educated to postgraduate level bemoaned the fact that the young Hmong girls would go to school and learn to read and write, thus taking away the oral tradition inherent in learning to weave, dye and embroider the Hmong clothes. The clothes are great and there are many thing wrong with Vietnamese education, especially with regard to minorities but that took the biscuit/cake; a classic example of Noble Savage relativism.

The Noble Savage is uncorrupted by civilisation, consumption and materialism. He is naturally happy and lives his life in the forests and jungles and mountains of faraway lands of which we also know little.

The Noble Savage wears colourful clothes and fancy hats. He uses feathers for decoration, plays ancient atonal music of the forests/woods/mountains. He has a good sense of rhythm and can run through the jungle like a deer or climb a mountain like a billy goat.

If he lives in the jungle, he doesn't wear many clothes at all, but if he lives in the mountains, his womenfolk weave and embroider colourful clothes that they wear on market days.

Because the Noble Savage lives outside the world of consumption, he has a simple and happy life and knows little of the evil worlds of which we are part until the loggers, miners and tourists come to visit, destroy and corrupt.

The Noble Savage looks great in a photograph and often takes part in the Vacation Slide Show. That's why it is important to photograph him, because then natural nobility shines through and it raises awareness of the threat that consumption, materialism and deforestation, mining and cheap T-shirts pose to their world.

And then they can carry on with their weaving and their foraging and water-hauling because there is nothing they like doing better. Except for posing for our pictures. They love that.

And so on...

In the 19th century people used to photographic "natives" in this manner, enthusing about their unspoilt childlike manner, so making it easier to rationalise away the abuse, enslavement and humiliation of colonialism. But that was over 100 years; people are more than the sum of their cultural token parts just as people are more than the sufferings they are forced to endure. That the truth is more complex than either both the Hobbesian and the Noble Savage ends of the spectrum portray.There are few newspaper, magazine or TV editors who are happy to show this complexity so for the time being it seems we're stuck with being shown a simplistic state of affairs in the world.

But there are lots of photographers who have cottoned on to the fact that the world is not such a simple place and try to portray a different front to the world. Perhaps the rest of us should follow suit, wherever we are, whoever we are and whatever we do. And then the world would be a better place. Perhaps.

Agent Orange: Philip Jones Griffiths

Once upon a time, I used to freelance for the Far Eastern Economic Review. This was my favourite news magazine of all time. It reported on Asia in a manner unlike any other magazine, and had charming and delightful editors like Brian Keeley, Jane Camens and Miranda Lam - they always made things better. Sadly, Feer got taken over by Dow Jones, had the wrong kind of makeover and was put to sleep suddenly.

A few years back, I wrote a piece for Feer on Agent Orange - based on Philip Jones Griffiths RIP book of the same name. Interviewing scientists working in the field was a revelation to me. The completeness bitchiness and cat-calling, accusation and counteraccusation of the scientific community (though not by any of the people mentioned in the article of course!) was a revelation - this person was "a purveyor of factoids", that person's results were determined by the funding body (the chemical industry) and so on. And the worst thing was it was all true. As for Griffiths book - everyone agreed that it was a "coffee table book".

An exhibition of Griffiths' Agent Orange is on display at the Brighton Photo Biennale. Also on show are Paul Seawright, Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, Frank Hurley, Simon Norfolk, Geert van Kesteren, Larry Burrows, Susan Meiselas, Harriet Logan, Ghaith Abdul-Ahad and many, many more. Quite a line-up in other words and Brighton is always such a lovely place to be..

Here is the text from the Feer review piece.

Agent Provocateur (From the Far Eastern Economic Review: 2004, Vol 167(5))

Welsh photographer Philip Jones Griffiths first heard about the dangers of Agent Orange (the highly toxic herbicide used as a defoliant during the Vietnam War) in Saigon in 1967. "During the war there were these rumours that babies were being born without eyes and it became a quest to find them," says Griffiths. "I visited as many catholic orphanages as I could, but I was barred entry from most of them and I became convinced that the Americans had put the word out - don't let any press in."

Continue reading here.

Photography and the Buddha

I was thinking of photography and Buddhism, how we need to humble ourselves and empty ourselves of avarice and desire in our image making (you'll get seen by....) when Sonja Engdahl sent me a link with exactly that subject. It's called Shoot the Buddha and it ties Buddhism into the working practice and much more besides.

image: Colin Pantall

Griffiths and Burrows

Philip Jones Griffiths was one of two photographers who shot the destruction of Cholon/Saigon in 1969. The other photographer was the late, great Larry Burrows. The top image is by Griffiths (and converted from colour for Vietnam Inc.), the bottom one by Burrows - that's Griffiths lens you can see in the corner.

Burrows was a true great. His images didn't shy from the suffering on all sides, including US troops - this image is one of his best known (the soldier with the bandage on his head attended the book launch of Larry Burrows Vietnam a few years ago).











Burrows (like Nick Broomfield in his documentary, Battle for Haditha) also captured the psychological damage of war on the ordinary soldier, and no better than in his story "One ride with Yankee Papa 13", a story which showed as directly as possible the effect witnessing his comrades getting killed had on a young soldier.

As Stan at Reciprocity Failure pointed out, images of US and Iraqi casualties of war are heavily censored (both in the US and the UK, though not in other countries) - Stan recommends people google "Iraqi war casualties - photos". The first place that takes you is here .

Not subtle, but so it goes - we are allowed to see the kind of images Griffiths and Burrows made. A short video of Larry Burrows can be found on the Digital Journalist here.

Philip Jones Griffiths

"The world that I grew up in will be, from today, a poorer place. It is with great sadness I have to write that Philip - a monumental, irrepressible force in photography and in life - and a courageous fighter against the cancer that finally defeated him - passed away early this morning... " Continue reading here.


Griffiths' Vietnam Inc. remains to my mind the great book of war photography - a sarcastic ransacking of the hypocrisy and lies that accompanied the Vietnam War, and one which can still serve as a guide to the rationalisations and deceit that forms the foundation for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I interviewed Griffiths about his follow up to Vietnam Inc., Agent Orange, a few years back - the text follows below.

Agent Orange

Welsh photographer Philip Jones Griffiths first heard about the dangers of Agent Orange (the highly toxic herbicide used as a defoliant during the Vietnam War) in Saigon in 1967. "During the war there were these rumours that babies were being born without eyes and it became a quest to find them," says Griffiths. "I visited as many catholic orphanages as I could, but I was barred entry from most of them and I became convinced that the Americans had put the word out - don't let any press in."

Continue reading here.