the house of the seven women by Tito Mouraz

 all pictures copyright Tito Mouraz

The House of the Seven Women by Tito Mouraz is a lovely book. It's a visual story of the region around Mouraz's place of birth in Portugal told through The House of the Seven Women; seven unmarried sisters with strange mystical powers.

'On full moon nights, the women would fly in their white garments from balcony to the leafy branches of the chestnut tree across the street. From there they would seduce men who would pass by.'

The story starts with a wood shown in the daytime. It's a tranquil wood, with pine trees rising above a fern-covered floor.

Then we see a house; ramshackle, windowless, deserted. A picture of a tree comes next; isolated, sinuous and bare. There's grass; dessicated, flattened and white. We already have a picture of the world the seven women live in, the world they have created.

Interspersed throughout the book are portraits of locals, especially men. The region has been left behind, deserted both by the population and by time. There is a feeling these portraits are showing lost souls; to the seven women of the house, seven women who find a parallel in the savage economics of a rapacious world.

Destruction comes in the form of fire and from the fire comes smoke. This world is burning, there is destruction in the air. Then the nightime comes. There are ladders that reach into the sky, trees that take the form of rearing goats and stone circled firepits that speak of worlds beyond our ken.

This is an empty land with burnt out cars and unpicked fruit. The fertility that exists shrivels on the vine, the life that there is struggles to survive because there is simply nowhere else to go. It struggles and then it dies.

You can fight against the never-ending maelstrom of this 'progress'; a badly stuffed dog on a pedestal in front of your house might ward off the malevolence for a while, but in actuality only death awaits and your house will end up as empty as the rest, and the land left only for those beautiful but fleeting spirits of the night.

So there you have it, it's the House of the Seven Women, but really the seduction comes from the cheapness with which we value the world, the land, the lifestyle that came before. We don't and so it dies quite easily.

The House of the Seven Women reminds me of another favourite, The Spook Light Chronicles (which I wrote about here and here). But while The Spook Light Chronicles tells its story through the people of the Ozarks, Mouraz (through his editing) tells his story in more stark economic terms, creating a very strong and transparent narrative through evocative images.


Buy The House of the Seven Women here. 

We Always Lie to Strangers

from Antone Dolezal and Lara Shipley's Spook Light Chronicles Vol 3 ( We Always Lie to Strangers)

Petapixel posted more detailed complaints on the World Press Photo Winning series on Charleroi yesterday. In the Petapixel account, the series is accused of manipulating the audience through rather imaginative captioning and indeed editing. The complaints centre on the role of Big Phil - he's presented by Troilo  as a man hiding in a doorway in his home in an area ridden with crime. But then the mayor says he lives in a nice house and is the life and soul of the party. Well, he would say that wouldn't he. Who know's, maybe both accounts are 'true'.

So as well as technical manipulation in WPP - which I think is really quite clear and simple as far as it goes - there is now the question of false representation and truth.

Take me out and throw me in the River Tiber in a sack with a mad dog and a lobster now (When in Rome and all that). Whenever philosophical mumblings about truth in photography come up, you know you are in for a rough ride of circular arguments, contradictions and a special photographic perspective.

I manage to get by in the rest of my life without worrying too much about truth. This morning, I look out of the window and see the sun shining on Solsbury Hill and somehow don't worry that the weather will change and it will be pissing down with rain later. It doesn't stop the direct joyfulness of the experience from being direct and real. When I have my dinner tonight, I enjoy it and don't worry too much about whether it is really a fish - or even why I am eating a meal that has been done before. I still enjoy it. Truth doesn't come into it. It could if I was of a certain bent. But it doesn't.

And actually truth doesn't come into photography either. It's the wrong word to use. Maybe misrepresentation, bias, propaganda,  dishonesty, venality, corruption, denial would be better? Or maybe not? Who knows? Not me.

One of the things I've written this week is a book review of the final volume of Dolezal and Shipley's Spook Light Chronicles for Photo Eye (read a review of the first volume here). This is a fictional narrative that uses text, pictures and the archive to examine the phenomenon of the Spook Light in this Missouri/Kansas/Oklahoma corner of the Ozarks.

I really, really like the series. More than that, I enjoy the series and the way each volume builds on the previous one to create a whole. The first volume looks at the phenomenon of the spook light, the second volume looks at the industry built around it, and the final volume goes beyond the actuality of the spook light to look at what it is like to live in the Ozarks.

Nothing is ever pinned down. Things are left open and unexplained and we are never quite sure where we stand. Stories are told and loosely attached to images that have different levels of the theatrical about them. But we are left with a feeling of what it might be to live in the Ozarks and the way of thinking that exists in a place where history, myth, religion and the land merge into one. It's a documentary in other words - one that hits all of Bill Nichols documentary (film) modes mixing happily together but in a manner that does not have the 'this is true?' question at its heart.

The other writing I've done is a feature on Lina Hashim (who is my other favourite of the month and beyond) for the BJP. Her work (see this post on Unlawful Meetings here) examines her identity and how it is affected through the rules that are imposed on her through community interpretations of Islam, She fuses photography, religion and the way in which photography is made, disseminated and read within that same community.

Some of the time she is a Sophie Calle, sometimes she's a Kohei Yoshiyuki, sometimes she's a Wendy Ewald. She flits here and she flits there between the mixed up messages and the confusion of ideas that are part of her everyday life. And she wants to know where these ideas (why wear hijab, why can't you photograph a face, why is unmarried sex forbidden when so many young muslims do it, why do people pretend it doesn't exist, how can a suicide bomber be a martyr, why is there a market for their photographs, where does all this stuff come from!) originate. It's independent thinking that questions why so many people don't have an independent thought process (or pretend they don't).

The methods push the boundaries and involve a large amount of subterfuge, but that is central to the work and the way it examines where images and ideas come from, and why they are so readily accepted. At the same time, Hashim is quite brutal in her quest for what is not 'true' and it probably doesn't make comfortable reading for lots of people - the stupid, the cruel, the apologetic and the racist for example. But that doesn't stop her. Again, at the heart of her projects there is a huge sense of documentary. Not a documentary of 'truth', but a documentary of belief and where it comes from. And embedded in that work are the beliefs of those who believe. Which makes for a really nice symmetry.

Both  Dolezal and Shipley's work, nor that of Hashim is 'true', but it does represent in the most considered and honest of ways the worlds of which they are part. And they help me to understand those worlds and know, in a small way, what it is like to be in those worlds.

The Spook Light. It's Spooky but is it Real?

I love the idea of the Spook Light. It's a great name for a light that mysteriously appears '...on a remote road deep in the Ozark Hills."

Spook Light Chronicles vol. 1 - the road and the light is an artist's book by Antone Dolezal and Lara Shipley that examines the strange phenomenon of the Spook Light. 

The book is a mix of found, appropriated and real-life-we-photographed-this pictures. These are mixed with text that takes us somewhere into the hearts and minds of Spook Light Country. Here's the place. They have an old map and that makes it Real! And because it's real, it's even scarier.

And Spook Light Country is a scary place; it's '...an insular community living in the heart of the Bible Belt where the struggle between heaven and hell factors into everyday conversation.'

They factor into the book, because for Dolezal and Shipley "...the Spook Light has come to represent for the people we meet a desire for redemption and the fear of slipping into darkness." The  Spook Light "...provides a reprieve from ordinary life."

So Dolezal and Shipley are cranking it up, and with a name like The Spook Light, what's not to crank. The first question on my lips is "Is it real?" I really want to know this and like to believe that it is real. And Dolezal and Shipley pointing me in that direction with pictures like the one below. That has to be real.

One picture titled the boys that scared me, shows a young man standing bare-chested in the roadway.He has got two star tatoos on his chest and his hands are bunched into fists. He has a kind of smile on his face, but it's not a very nice smile and the man in the background has a near empty bottle of Jack Daniels in his hand. There is tension in the air.

The caption reads:

I was kind of thinking what if the spook light were to come right here and collide with me and take my soul with it. And you guys would just have to leave me here, because I'd be a soulless man, just wandering down the road. 

There are more references to lost souls, the afterlife and it adds to the threat. The Spook Light is not benign. This is a book for suggestible people by, I'm hoping, suggestible artists. I know that if I was on the Devil's Promenade, more than a little bit of me would believe. No, let's be honest. All of me would believe. I'd be petrified with all that spookiness going on.

The found photographs build on this suggestibility and really make me believe. If it's old it must be true. The contemporary pictures of flashes of light add to this sense of threat while the lit landscapes add an alien element to the mental picture.

There are two more volumes to come in the series (the first is sold out). Hopefully by the end, I'll have the answer to my question. Is it Real?