Deleted Scene: An Ethnic Landscape?

It's Sound, Word and Landscape at the Southbank Centre in Bristol this Saturday, an event that is about how we think about, make and show pictures, about how you can use word, sound, music, biography and geology to deepen the viewer's connection to the world around us.

You can buy tickets here.

So, in that vein, there's a series of reviews of books dealing with the landscape on the blog this week. Next up is Yury Toroptsov's Deleted Scene, a book where biography, ethnic background and how we live either on the land or with the land all play a role.

Yury will be doing book signings at Paris Photo next week on Friday 13th at 4pm.


Yury Toroptsov wasn't even 2 years old when his father died. 'I have no personal memories of him,' he says in his new book, Deleted Scene.

'He was almost forgotten. No one spoke of him. His grave was abandoned. The extent of my knowledge about my father was gleaned from a couple of stories that folks who once knew him told me.'

One of these stories involved the family (father, mother and Yury) coming across the Japanese director Akira Kurosawa shooting his film Dersu Uzala 'in the vicinity of our village (in Eastern Siberia) in 1974. Those were among the last remembered moments when we were still a happy family.'

So there's autobiography of a recreated type; half-formed memories that have been adapted over time to form a new narrative, one that is adjusted again as Toroptsov juggles the elements of this family legend; there's the memory of Dersu Uzala (who was a nomadic 'Goldi' native who lived and worked in the forests of Siberia), there is Kurosawa and the 'meeting' with Toroptsov family, and there are local archive pictures of Kurosawa making the movie - including scenes which his family witnessed being shot.




And then there's present day Siberia. One where the urban, the ideological and the natural merge together. We see the town where Toroptsov spent his early years, the tracks into the forest, and the spaces in between.

Flat vistas and stretching roads give the scale of the place, and the ramshackle wooden houses provide the familiar feeling of isolation, that you are far from at least one centre of things.

But there is always more than one centre. So there are little curiosities - the painted posts on smallholdings that hint at another world. These have an aboriginal feel to them, a lightness almost, that is connected to the land in a more spiritual way.

The goalposts made of tree trunks that still have bark on have a similar effect, as does the picture of an offering by a blue painted fence. This is a landscape that has multiple meanings and resonances that go beyond surface history.

The archive pictures show Kurosawa filming, and we see the real Dersu Uzala, resplendent in his furs, a man whose relationship to the land was very different to that of non-native Siberians. And that you feel is at the heart of this book. There are pictures of Toroptsov's father in there, and his features are East Asian (Korean) rather than Russian, so there is a personal element to the book that comes across far more strongly than the relatively eliptical statements would have us believe.

More hints of a different ideology come across in pictures of a local monument, featuring curlesque carvings of elk and big-eyed faces that are more Inuit in nature. There's a tension between two ideas of the land or the territory. And we see it right at the end. There's a tiger (this is another connection to Dersu Uzala - I have to see the film now), followed by a woman whose chest is bared, a massive scar down the front where something seems to have been ripped out. The book ends with a picture of the forest followed by one of an old Communist Party building, and then a statue (of Dersu Uzala himself).

It's a book with a strong political statement. Political landscape. Or an ethnic landscape because how we live the land is so much connected with who we are. We can live with it or we can live against it. In Deleted Scene, Yoroptsov is quietly making that choice. Let's go with that. Why not?

Buy Deleted Scenes here

This Saturday 7th November: Come and See - Sound, Word and Landscape

This is the schedule for Sound, Word and Landscape (my prejudice keeps on changing it to Word, Sound and Landscape) taking place in Bristol this Saturday November 7th. 

It's landscape but there's sound, music, word, biography, walking, geology, meditation, maps and bombs thrown in - so it's more about how you think about, make and show work. Landscape is not just landscape in other words.

Beth and Thom Atkinson will be second-launching their fabulous book, Missing Buildings, and Paul Gaffney will be launching his new book Stray. You'll be able to see, feel and smell a copy - and you'll be able to order one too. They're handmade so there's only 50 of them and they will go very fast. 

Tickets are £25 full price, £18 for students. You get a free £5 book voucher for spending at the bookshop on the day. And there is a fabulous buffet dinner (and it is fabulous) for £10 at the end of the talks (you need to book before for this). 

If you're in the area, or even if you're not, don't miss it. 

Sound, Word and Landscape Schedule

 12:00 – Doors Open

12:20 Introduction by Jesse Alexander

12:30 – 1:15 Angus Carlyle 

1:15 – 2:00 Beth and Thom Atkinson 

2:00 – 2:40 Max Houghton 

3:20 – 4:05 Jem Southam 

4:05 – 4:50 Paul Gaffney 

5:20  - 6:05 Ester Vonplon 

6:05 – 6:50 Susan Derges 

6:50 – 7:20 Panel Q and A: Jesse and  Max Chair:  Susan, Angus, Jem, Paul, Ester, Beth and Thom

8:00 Dinner

Stacy Kranitz In Conversation in Bristol

I'm in conversation with Stacy Kranitz next Monday, 2nd November. It's at IC Visual Labs in Bristol. Entry is £2.

Stacy Kranitz is the real deal in photography, somebody who puts her heart and soul into her photography.

I think we'll be talking about family, photography, education, skating, Appalachia, Leni Riefenstahl, various Bruces with various spellings, putting yourself into the picture, and much, much more. Actually, I'm kind of hoping Stacy will be talking about that stuff.

Here's a taster for you.

From an interview with Stacy Kranitz, 2013.

 “I’d get hit on a lot and people would ask me what is your heritage and then I’d say I’m Jewish, then they’d look at me and have a drink then have a think and conclude that “you’re still a woman” even if you are Jewish and still hit on me. Hatred fluctuates, it ebbs and flows and sometimes one thing will outweigh another. I was pushed up against walls and yelled at and called an Israeli spy, but I liked the fact that it was difficult and I had to gain people’s trust.”

........

“I grew up in a really violent house. There was a lot domestic violence from my father and later on my brother too because it’s all very much a learned behaviour.”

“I loved my father because he was trying to be a good father but he couldn’t control his anger. I grew up in an upper middle class house in an upper-middle class neighbourhood  so you wouldn’t expect it. The cops would come to our house every week, and it was very confusing and very insular. It became this dark thing we couldn’t get out of.”

“So I’m looking for these different levels of families where people create their own value system and sense of right and wrong and Skatopia is such a wonderful place for that. It is a very open place which is very accepting of people with cameras. I first went with a friend but later I had a boyfriend there for 3 years (every project I do I get a new boyfriend. I have a lot of projects on the go at the moment so I have a lot of boyfriends) and it infiltrated my life to the point where the personal and professional merged.”

.....

“People dismiss anthropology for its dark history but I think they are doing the best job examining their own past to forge new ways of engaging with how to represent culture. Photojournalism is shamefully behind, there is so little self-reflexivity.”

Kranitz references Katherine Stewart as an influence on her work (which is also part of an MFA she is studying for). Stewart believes that over-intellectualising things gets in the way of understanding the incoherent and inexplicable elements in a society. “I see myself, like Stewart, making work that I hope destabilizes the very claim of knowing the meaning of things at all because culture isn’t something that can be gotten right,’ says Kranitz.

Paul Gaffney's new book, Stray Launching in Belfast and Bristol

Paul Gaffney will be talking at  Sound, Word and Landscape: Beyond the Visual at the SouthBank Club, Bristol

November 7th: 12:00 - 19:00 

Buy Tickets here


If you're wondering what the book is that Paul Gaffney has made as a follow-up to We Make the Path by Walking, you can see this coming Thursday in Belfast.

The book is called Stray and it looks amazing. There's 50 of them, it's handmade, an artist's book, every copy is a special edition, and you will be able to see it in Belfast first. Hopefully, pricing and order details will follow later in the week.

But if you're in Northern Ireland this week, go see Paul Gaffney talk about Stray at Belfast Exposed and see how he is showing it; the darkened room, the eight carousels, the leaves, the sounds, the grass, the pillars, the torches, the injuries....

It's on Thursday 15 October, 6pm

Closing event:  Book Launch of Stray

And you will be able to see and order Stray (it's handmade, so it's made to order) at its launch ( a book can have two launches, for sure, why not) in Bristol on November 7th  where Paul will also talk about the Path, making this work, sensory experience in its vieweing and the importance of music, sound and mind in photography.



Paul Gaffney will be talking at  Sound, Word and Landscape: Beyond the Visual at the SouthBank Club, Bristol

November 7th: 12:00 - 19:00 

Buy Tickets here

Paul Gaffney: One Day, Three Shoots, One Book

Paul Gaffney will be talking at  Sound, Word and Landscape: Beyond the Visual at the SouthBank Club, Bristol

November 7th: 12:00 - 19:00 

Buy Tickets here





A year ago, Paul Gaffney went to Belgium for Three Days in Tharoul, an event where editor, photographer and publisher Fabrice Wagner invites a photographer, a writer, a bookmaker, a printer, to make a book in the house of Philippe Malcorps, deep in the Belgian countryside.

Last year the photographer was the photographer was Paul Gaffney, the bookmaker was Pierre Liebaert, and I was the writer. 

It was a magical event filled with fine wine, fine beer and fine music. Very special people in a very special setting. A one off, I've never experienced anything quite like it. 

They call it Three Days in Tharoul, but for Paul Gaffney, to photograph, it was more like one day; 24 hours, 3 shoots, And then the editing, and then the printing, and then the making of one book, a unique object that stays in the house. 

It was very precious, but in a good way. I followed Paul around as he photographed, delving into the forest, following the trails where the wild boar roamed, tracing their paths, searching for their dens in the rain and the mist. He'd find a smeuse  and he'd follow it, leaving me behind. And then he'd come back with his images; the first edit - not too sure, the second edit - taking shape, the final edit - shifted and sequenced, back and forth, feeling his way into the story, into the forest, into the boar's den, an example of Arnold's Berleant's...

'... participatory approach to landscape in which the artist, environment and viewer are considered to be in continuous dialogue with each other...'

It was quite something, a way of working where nothing is certain, where the unconscious, the lizard brain comes alive through walking, through photography, through a particular mental state. 

And that's a way of working that he has in his new work, Stray. The book is out soon. Will it be ready in time for Sound, Word and Landscape? I hope so.



Paul Gaffney will be talking at  Sound, Word and Landscape: Beyond the Visual at the SouthBank Club, Bristol

November 7th: 12:00 - 19:00 

Buy Tickets here

Jem Southam: Making the World Richer, Grander, and Better

Jem Southam

Jem Southam will be speaking at Beyond  Beyond the Visual: Music, Word and Landscape at the SouthBank Club, Bristol

November 7th: 12:00 - 19:00 

Buy Tickets here

History is embedded deep within all of Jem Southam's photography, but one of the pictures  that most resonated most with me is the one above, of a dew pond. Indeed, the very idea of what a dew pond is struck me as something rather beautiful.

These are man-made ponds in the middles of fields that fill with water (not the dew that gathers on the grass in the morning, but rainwater) for cows to drink.

Some of them are very old (Oxenmere  in Wiltshire dates back to Saxon times) so there is a sense of something ancient about them. They look old and they feel old.

That's why they featured as the wormhole through which Catweazle travelled from the 12th to the 20th century in the, er, phenomenally popular 1970s TV series of the same name.



Seeing Southam's pictures of dew ponds was for me like hearing a new word. It gave me a realisation of how the banal curves and contours of the land contain a profound history. And because of that suddenly I started becoming a bit more observant, and began looking for those curves and contours and what lies beneath them in the world around me.

And once I started looking for them, the signs of the past became more apparent. The obvious ones are easy to see, but then new ones start creeping in and the land becomes a far less benevolent or pretty place. It seethes with venality and menace.

In his work, Southam focusses on rockfalls, rivers, and ponds, places where the signs of geological, seasonal, and waterborne change are apparent. But this doesn't stand in isolation from human change and as you look at his pictures, this change starts to creep in too. The land begins to live and we become part of it.

It changes the way you see things too. John Davies does the same thing with his more urban pictures. I always love seeing this picture of Mersey Square in Stockport. It always touched me because the warehouse with the chimney coming out behind it used to house a skateboard park. It wasn't a very good one, but it brings back fond memories for me.

I showed this picture to a class one day and instantly one of the students dated it - 1986. He didn't get that from the captions, but from the number plates of the cars going up the A4.  That's how he sees this urban environment, through the cars that drive through it.

And then if I show it my dad, he sees a hat museum. Because Stockport has a long hat-making history and he was involved in that.




Now I live on the edge of Bath, with the Avon Valley stretching before me to the south, Solsbury Hill to the east and Bath to the west.

It's not the most dynamic of places but if I stand outside my house and look out, I can see a landscape that includes the following sites and histories.

Stone Age Settlements
Roman remains
The foundations of medieval farming terraces
The valley Jane Austen used to walk down
Georgian stone mines
Brunel's rubbish heap
The grave of the man who founded New South Wales
The grave of Jack the Ripper, depending on who you believe
An underground train and tunnel network
A second world war explosive dump
a Genesis song
A past road protest site
A murder site
The Australian Rugby Team
The world's second oldest bat
A future road protest site

The simple pastoral landscapes of the Avon Valley are anything but simply pastoral. They live and breathe human intervention, they are man-made, messed with by man, they contain corruption and violence, conquest and spite. These landscapes don't have the  isolation which we sometimes assume to be the case with pastoral landscape photography. They are connected to the past, the future, to faraway lands that we pillaged and conquered, to murder, romanticism, and short-sighted stupidity and greed,

But the problem is how to photograph this history. You don't embed that history into a landscape just by snapping a picture or two. It is more difficult than that. What Jem Southam does looks incredibly easy, but there is something in the process that adds depth and ties the image to the lay of the land, that puts you in the place in a manner where the folds of the land, the geology, the history, the sensation comes through.

I don't know how he does it. I believe Jem Southam's work is beyond something formal, and that there is a sense of mystery in there, that it is to do with his process of walking and being in and part of a place and the way in which that inhabits you in a non-photographic way. I like the idea that his photographic practice somehow mirrors the sensation of being in a place and of a place and connected to a place. And by being connected you connect others and you make the world grander and richer than it otherwise might be.

And that is why Jem Southam's work is important and why he's talking at Beyond the Visual: Music, Word, and Landscape.

Exactly what he'll be talking about is still a mystery however because Southam's talks are always different and always made in response to the when and the where of the occasion which makes things even more exciting. So there's another draw for you .

Susan Derges will be speaking at Beyond  Beyond the Visual: Music, Word and Landscape at the SouthBank Club, Bristol

November 7th: 12:00 - 19:00 

Buy Tickets here

Susan Derges: Water, Life and Photography

 
 all images by Susan Derges

About a year ago I spoke to Susan Derges for an article for the RPS journal. It was fascinating to hear about experience, opportunity, chance and a singular appetite for experimentation led to a career path in which each project follows on from the other with common themes that are both personal and universal in nature, where water is a driving force both in Derges' life-history and the prints that she makes in very physical ways.


Susan Derges will be speaking at Beyond  Beyond the Visual: Music, Word and Landscape at the SouthBank Club, Bristol

November 7th: 12:00 - 19:00 

Buy Tickets here

This is what she said.

Susan Derges is best-known for her large scale photograms that combine simplicity with a reverence for the element in which they are made. An almost personal involvement with water has been a hallmark of her work, and the lush but minimal way in which she examines its actions on the world around us can be traced back both to her schooldays in rural Hampshire and the time she spent working in Japan in the early 1980s.

“I grew up in Fleet by the Basingstoke Canal and was very interested in what was going on in the waterway in all seasons,” she says. “It was a regular place of reference and it started in early childhood. I was mesmerised by it. You’d get barges go by and you’d get these wave patterns with interference or a duck would land and the droplets would ripple across each other. And in the seasons everything would change; shiny and still in summer, frozen in winter and moody and dripping in Autumn.”

The fascination with water was filtered through an organic minimalism that emerged from Derges’ experience of living in Japan in the early 1980s. “I  went to live in Japan for a period of five years,” she says. “And Japan reflected that fascination as well because water is venerated there; in the temples, in the gardens, even in modern office buildings you’ll go in and there will be a quiet place with a small pond of water where you can sit and contemplate. Japan is completely watery,” says Derges with a laugh.

After returning from Japan, Derges continued researching new ways to portray the physical world. “I was reading a lot about physics and the observer and the observed and was really interested in finding ways to visually articulate that. I was exploring the invisible world and appropriating things from early science.”

This curiosity with how to make the sensory and emotional visible has been a hallmark of her career. She has experimented with process, symbolism and the environment to create one of the most distinctive bodies of work in photography today. It’s a curiosity that has continued to this day. From environmentally based photograms to digitally produced constructed environments, Susan Derges’ work bridges the past and the present.

1. Observer and Observed no 6.

“I had a marvellous book from the 1950s called Soap Bubbles and the Forces that Mould them. It was a beautiful gem of a book and it had an experiment called musical fountains. You charged the fountains with a tuning fork and then lit it with a strobe light so it seemed as though the water wasn’t moving. I set this experiment up in my darkroom with a transducer, a jet of water and a frequency generator for the sound and it was amazing. You had these water droplets hanging in space and they looked so still, as though you could reach out and touch them, but of course if you did that your hand got wet because they weren’t still at all.”

Derges says she “…took lots of boring Harold Egerton like images…” and then her camera jammed. She went in front of the lens to unjam it, the film apparently ruined. “When I developed the film I was about to throw it away, but then I looked more closely and I thought, ah, there’s something going on here. Then I saw the information in the water droplets. They were like little fish eye lenses reflecting multiple images of me. So there was that Man Ray teardrop element and it started having connections with surrealism. It was a fortuitous accident but one that I was looking for.”

2. Full Circle

“When I was making the previous work I was in a flat in Notting Hill Gate using the flat as a studio and doing very science based work. But I moved to Devon in 1991 and suddenly found the landscape of Devon enormously rich. I saw this pond on Dartmoor and the sun was hitting this frogspawn and the shadow from the sun looked just like a photogram. I thought I can do that in the studio. So I did.”

3. River Bovey

“After that I got more interested in what I was looking at rather than how to represent it. I got interested in life cycles, the cycles of frogs and bees, and the processes of what was going on in the landscape.”

“I thought I could go outside at night with big sheets of paper and go into the place and be led by the place and the situation. That was what I experienced with the River Taw and Bovey. I wanted to get as close as possible to a process that is also our process. Our bodies, our mental processes work in a way that is very similar to what happens in a river. There are streams and flows and blockages, so I was dabbling in reading complexity and chaos and considering myself a participant rather than an author.”

4. Shorelines

“I was processing my own prints by the time I made Shoreline. These prints were made on the South Devon Coast around Sidmouth and Dawlish. I’d go there and wait for high tide and then let the waters flow over them. They were 3 ½  feet x 8 feet long and I got quite adept at reading the patterns of the water and the moon and the effect it would have on the paper.”

“There was such an investment in taking these big prints and you could lose so many prints in one night and end up with nothing if the waves went the wrong way. But I started to get headaches and eye strain from spending hours and hours in the dark room . It was physically taxing.”

5. Full Moon

“I had got very tired of being dictated to by a process but I got really interested in the moons, the clouds and the star fields so I started to do a lot of night photography of moons and star fields. Then I used an enlarger head on a rail to make a tracking device and put in the transparency of the moon or stars and projected that onto the Cibachrome in the tank with the leaves and branches laid on top of it.”

6. Canal Bridge

“That’s made with constructed silhouettes. It’s a reference back to growing up. It’s an imaginary place with the branches brought in. It’s a digital print made with a digital camera.”

“In a way it’s about death. There’s this symbol of crossing the river and there’s the symbol of the fading moon but I wasn’t thinking about these things when I made it. I made it just after my mother’s death and I had a strong sense of the transience of life. It refers back to my childhood and the canal I used to play at, but I’ll probably never go to that place again because the person associated with it is gone.”

Susan Derges will be speaking at Beyond  Beyond the Visual: Music, Word and Landscape 

at the SouthBank Club, Bristol

November 7th: 12:00 - 19:00 

Buy Tickets here

Glaciers, Shipping Forecasts and Songs

Music, Word and Landscape: Limits of the Visual at the SouthBank Club, Bristol

November 7th: 12:00 - 19:30 

Buy Tickets here

Back in June I posted on the work of Esther Vonplon's  Gletscherfahrt work. It's a project about the meliting glaciers in Switzerland, and the sheets that are used to cover them, to slow the melting. It's a project for our times. 

I saw the work on her laptop at Vienna Photobook Festival and was touched to the core by the mix of images where soot and ash and carbon fallout mixed with snow, ice and sheets that, by the end of the melting, looked like something from Tracey Emin's bed. 

It didn't look like a glacier, it didn't look like Switzerland. So the pictures were great, something I hadn't seen before, but then came the soundtrack; the sound of cracking ice, of drips turning to dribbles and flows, all mixed in with a quite beautiful score. And that ripped right through me. I don't know how or why the images, the music and the ambient sounds resonated so much, so I asked Esther if she could come to Bristol in November, and she said yes. 

Later in the summer, I was listening to the radio and heard a programme on the Shipping Forecast. The Shipping Forecast is the weather forecast for the shipping zones around Britain and Ireland. You hear it on the radio, telling the ships about the gale force winds and rain in places with magical sounding names like Bailey, German Bight, South Utsire; places I've never been to but which are instantly recognisable to me, with a mystery provided merely by their name. 

Knapp also sang a song, the lyrics of which are basically the names of the shipping areas with a bit of weather thrown in, but she gives them a landborn magic which is added to in the documentary which looks at the Shipping Forecast '...from the perspective of artists, poets, musicians and all the rest of us who aren't sailors but love it nonetheless.'



So I was thinking about Knapp and the Shipping Forecast and of course Mark Power and his great book, The Shipping Forecast came to mind.

For this project, Power went and photographed in each of the shipping areas. He made a book (which sold in the tens of thousands) and then he made an audio-visual, mixing the pictures with the forecast itself. So this is yesterday's forecast for Forth, and this is what is read out on the radio (almost verbatim), in the most lyrical of voices.

Wind -- Cyclonic 4 or 5, becoming northwesterly 5 to 7.

Sea state -- Slight, becoming moderate, occasionally rough later.

Weather -- Rain.

Visibility -- Moderate or poor, occasionally very poor.

It's different to Knapp's, slower and sadder in some ways. At the start, there's more of the sense of being at sea, but keep going and it becomes a homage to the radio and hearing this strange forecast in the comfort of one's own home. The perspective shifts as you listen. I'm not quite sure what the difference is between Knapp's and Power's Shipping Forecast, but there is a huge one. And it got me wondering what Power and Knapp would look like together, how they would sound together, how the pictures would change if accompanied by Knapp's beautiful, haunting voice.

Then a week ago, I saw him speak at the Gazebook Festival in Sicily. He talked about the work and showed the slideshow against a wall, under a lighthouse in the town of Punta Secca. It was quite magnificent and added another element to how person, place, image and sound can come together so perfectly, how easily one glides into the other and takes us in all kinds of unexpected directions.

At the end of his talk, Power showed his Berlin work (now published in book form as Die Mauer ist Weg - er, sold out). Which was great. He said it wasn't important work, or ground-breaking work, but I don't know. I think it is, especially when he showed the audio-visual, the pictures accompanied by the Lambada - and a more perfect fit I don't really know.

So sound, picture, person, place. How does it all tie together? I haven't got a clue, but in November, I'm hoping to find out a little when Ester Vonplon talks about her Gleischfahrt and other work!

Get your tickets here (this will be a bit of a theme in coming weeks).

Thank you for Reading. Come to the Bristol Landscape Day in November

That's it for me for the blogging year. Thank you for reading.

I'll be back in September or October sometime. If you're in Sicily in September come to Gazebook Sicily. There's a beach and everything!

And if you're in the UK in November, don't forget to get your tickets for:

Beyond the Visual Landscape at the SouthBank Club, Bristol

November 7th: 12:00 - 19:30 tbc

Buy Tickets here

It's a  day of talks and screenings looking at how landscape, words, music and sound connect us to ourselves and the places we photograph. The rough outlines below give an idea of what people will talk about and speakers include Beth and Thom Atkinson, Angus Carlyle, Susan Derges, Paul Gaffney, Max Houghton, Jem Southam, and Ester Vonplon.

Beth and Thom Atkinson will be talking about the secret history of London as made apparent in their Missing Buildings project, an enigma where the visible is made Visible and layers of the past are suddenly revealed.

Angus Carlyle will talk about sound and landscape, and how the one affects our experience of the other, how sound cuts through time, how sound creates pressure, how sound ties to emotion, memory and landscape. The screenshot below is from a project on a wartime hiding place/cave in Okinawa.

From The Cave Mouth and The Giant Voice by Rupert Cox and Angus Carlyle

Susan Derges has a practice that has evolved with herself. She makes amazing photograms that connect water, personal history and landscape, but for this weekend she will talk about her newest work - all will be revealed on the day.

Shoreline by Susan Derges

Paul Gaffney will look at the evolution of his psycho-geographical, intuition based landscapes. He will also be showing new work from his latest book which continues the intuition-based tradition of We Make the Path by Walking but is also very different..

Max Houghton will talk about language, literature and landscape, and how our knowledge of language shapes our experience of the world around us.

Carpet-Mounds by Colin Pantall

Jem Southam's practice connects to the landscape through the very personal act of walking. He uses time to capture the shifts of nature at the most basic level. He will talk about his latest work and returning to a photographic practice based firmly around the fields, rivers, ponds and coastlines of the Southwest of England.

The Exe River by Jem southam

Ester Vonplon photographs a Switzerland denuded of its familiar lyricism. She will talk about her Gletscherfahrt project and the commissioned sound/music blend that makes it such a emotionally powerful piece.

From Gletscherfahrt by Ester Vonplon


Save the place (Bristol), the date (November 7th) and

Buy your tickets here.

Ester Vonplon:Ice Will Tear Us Apart

One of the most exciting things about photography is the different ways of telling stories that are emerging, the way that different ideas, emotions and senses are overlapping. And it's this overlap of images, ideas and senses that form the heart of a series of talks and screenings taking place in Bristol on November 7th (organised by Max Houghton of London College of Communication and myself).

Ester Vonplon will be there presenting and talking about her Glacier work. Susan Derges will talk about her water-based photograms, Jem Southam and Paul Gaffney will be looking at mind, landscape and walking, Angus Carlyle will talk about sound and landscape and how the one changes the other, and Max Houghton will talk about language and landscape, and how that affects our vision, experience and senses. There may be an addition here or there as well.

It's in Bristol, Saturday November 7th

Tickets are available here.

One of the people on the list who, in the UK at least, is less well-known, is Ester Vonplon. She's a Swiss photographer who made a book about the melting glaciers of Switzerland.

One of the interesting things about photobooks is when you get books that are great, but also go beyond the book form. Olivia Arthur's Stranger does that in a cinematic way, Ivars Gravlejs' Early Works does it by tying in to universal ideas of school and education, and Hidden Islam does it because it has such massive  political relevance.

With all these books, you get the feeling that there is more to the work than just the book. The book is not an end in itself, but is a key to something else that is bigger than the book.

That's also the feeling I get with Ester Vonplon's Gletscherfahrt. Ester Vonplon is a photographer who shows a deromanticised vision of Switzerland and Gletscherfahrt is a project where romance is tossed out of the window. It's an elegy of a book where the textures and touch of the landscape comes across in pictures that have a gut-churning poignancy.

The book shows Vonplon's pictures of glaciers in Switzerland. These are retreating glaciers, melting glaciers. To protect them from further shrinkage, they have been wrapped in giant white reflective sheets. That's what Vonplon photographs. But she photographs them dirty. This is snow that is filled with sediment, grit, particulates and ash. Everything is a bit smoke-stained and grubby. There is no purely driven snow here. And it's all shrouded in these godforsaken bits of cloth that start of pristine but gradually rip and decay grey into the melting ice of the glacier. It's disease and decay and mortality. The ice has torn them apart.

And that's just the pictures. The book comes with a record and the record plays a score that was specially composed for the work. You can play the record and look at the pictures and you instantly get the idea of what has been made and why it has been made.

But there is also a slideshow (and if there isn't yet. I'm guessing be some kind of installation). And that's where the music-picture overlap really strikes you in the belly. It's a composition filled with ripping, dripping, flowing sounds of mortality, a composition that combines the music of Stephan Eicher with the location recordings of Vonplon. She records the sound of melting glacier water (Gletschermilch or 'glacier milk' is the touching German word for it).

It is something so beautiful and yet so sad. It's chilling. But Vonplon has captured that in pictures and sound in a way that really needs no explanation. It's there in the pictures and the music and it's heartbreaking.

That combination of pictures and sound is just one way of extending the photograph beyond the purely visual. It works beautifully. But with landscape there are people working with landscape, with psychology, with meditation, with film and sound in ways that go beyond the visual to provide insights into what it really feels like to be in a place and of a place.

And that's what the November event will look at, how we can beneath the surface of the landscape, how sound and words and music and self connect into the places where we walk, where we live, where we breathe... and last, and most definitely least, where we photograph.


If you're lucky enough to be in Arles, See the slideshow at the Night of the Year.

See more of Ester Vonplon's work here. 

Buy the book here.

Slow Photography: Beyond the Visual Landscape

from Angus Carlyle: The Cave Mouth and the Giant Voice

So we've had slow TV, how about slow photography? Most photography is pretty slow, some of it by accident, and some of it quite intentionally.

    picture by Susan Derges

This November, together with Max Houghton and Jesse Alexander, I'm organising a day of events titled Beyond the Visual Landscape. It's a day of sound and word and image and how they all tie together, a day where we go beyond photography to understand what it is that makes a place look, sound and feel the way it does, and how we can use these ideas to represent the landscape and the way we walk, sense and remember it. It's a day of intentionally slow work taking place in a slow venue filled with slow loveliness.



picture by Paul Gaffney

The line-up is:

Angus Carlyle
Susan Derges
Paul Gaffney
Jem Southam 

Which is a great line-up (and we have additions to make) of thought provoking artists who put the psychological, emotional, biographical and physical at the heart of their work. So put the date in your diary. It's taking place at the Southbank Centre (the spiritual home of Photobook Bristol) on Saturday November 7th. Tickets will be available in July/August.



picture by Jem Southam

'Landscape is Boring!'

     The Engendered Landscape: Jane Austen's Walk  #1, Charlcombe Valley

'Landscape is an exhausted medium, no longer viable as a mode of artistic expression. Like life, landscape is boring; we must not say so.'

That is a 'thesis' from the introduction to W.J.T. Mitchell's Landscape and Power. On Thursday, I'm at IC Visual Labs in Bristol for the launch of another book on landscape, Jesse Alexanders Perspectives on Place and a discussion on landscape and I'm sure that quote will come up.

Perspectives on Place takes that inflammatory Mitchell thesis as its point of reference in some ways. It looks at the different strategies that have been used to drive our understanding of the landscape forward. It's a Users Guide to Landscape.

So there are sections on the sublime, the exploratory, the synthetic and the contested landscape. What's great is that you can think of any landscape work and the how and the why of its making will be covered in some way.

So Marc Wilson's Last Stand comes under Landmarks or Contested Territories, Paul Gaffney's We Make the Path by Walking is Wilderness/Exploration, and Nicolo Degiorgis's Hidden Islam would be in transient Spaces and you can go on and on with virtually any landscape-based projective. Perspectives on Place is a really clear way of reading landscape photography and putting it in a historical and contemporary perspective. It's a way of stopping it being boring.


I don't normally put up blog posts on people I work with, but I'll make an exception for Jesse for lots of reasons, and because I can advertise his book and an IC Visual Labs event at the same time and it's a bit of a Bristol promotion week on the blog this week. So there you have it.

Come to IC Visual Labs in Bristol on Thursday 19th February, 7pm, for the book launch of Perspectives on Place and Panel Discussion with me, Jesse Alexander, Celia Jackson and Gawain Barnard. 


Buy Perspectives on Place Here

Saudi Arabia, Somalia and a Bristol Schoolgirl

The most important and very simple thing about Wadjda and Single Saudi Women  is the visibility it presents of a world that most people never see.

I have seen news on the TV about Saudi Arabia. But those stories have always been about men, and most of the time they are obsessive or neurotic men. So it's a not a positive picture.

I have read books about Saudi, but again, they are man books about man things like oil, religion and war. So  it's a man picture again -  and it's not a positive one.

I have come across Saudi influence all over the place. I have visited mosques built with Saudi money and met men who work or worship in those mosques. I don't need to tell you what kind of a picture it is. Money changes everything!

I used to live in a house which had been a kind of holding station for people on their way to Saudi. And I've met and spoken to lots of people who have worked in Saudi. No matter what their religion, gender or nationality, I have felt only hostility bordering on hatred. Never love.

So Wadjda presents a completely different perspective to Saudi Arabia, a woman's perspective , a perspective that changes everything and brings it into 3 dimensions that go beyond oil, religion and war. There are women there and they have feelings. Who'd have guessed.

And as soon as you get that happening, then outlandish things like this story on women only being allowed to visit hospitals with a male guardian present become much more real. The outrage comes to the surface, the voice and the visibility become three dimensional rather than an amorphous shape shrouded in a black abaya.

This creates a model to act against a conformity that is not just in men's way of thinking, but also in women too. Women will also maintain the status quo by saying that this kind of dress is necessary, that the man is always right, that she needs to be protected against the immorality of her male world by her male guardian. It's a denial of freedom in which the woman gains status through conforming to a patriarchal power structure that belittles women.

And that's not just in Saudi. That's everywhere. Here in the UK, women collude in a patriarchal disgust of the female body (it's evident on the magazine racks of every supermarket), in the belittling of physicality, sexuality, desire and individuality. It's a denial of freedom where the woman gains status through conforming to a patriarchal power structure. The body isn't dirty or disgusting!

But of course it's not just individual or communal. It's also institutional. And in the UK, institutions play a part in this denial of freedom. Educational institutions are a fine example. I used to work in a college in Bristol which had a huge number of students from Somali, Afghan, Iraqi and Pakistani backgrounds . Female Genital Mutilation, Forced Marriage and Domestic Violence were concrete realities for many of our students.

Yet there was no coherent policy or training on how to deal with these issues when they arose. And because of that, the problems rarely arose - because if you a student, what's the point of putting your head above the parapet when you are going to be met with ineffectual hand-wringing at best.

But you always had girls (and boys) who spoke up against the status quo and they always had an influence on the way others thought, dressed, spoke and behaved. So it was heartening to see girls and boys flourishing and opening up to the possibilities beyond the constraints that some had imposed upon them.

It was a similar case in Bristol schools. Lip service was paid to addressing the needs of students from the communities mentioned above but the schools simply didn't have the energy or resources necessary. If you put a thirteen-year-old boy or girl who has not had a primary education into a secondary school and expect them to flourish, it's not going to happen.

Inclusion doesn't happen overnight because you will it to happen. And it especially doesn't happen if your funding is being cut, if voluntary sector services for parents are being cut, if outreach programmes are being cut, if everything that is designed to enculturate and allow people to grow in a new society has been cut.

That's why it was so heartening to read about Fahma Mohammed and her petition to tell schools to teach the risks of genital mutilation before the summer. She is:

A Bristol teenager has been chosen to lead a national campaign against female genital mutilation (FGM).

Fahma Mohamed, 17, is one of nine daughters in a Muslim Somali family who came to Britain when she was seven.

She has seen at firsthand among her friends and family the devastation that FGM can cause and, along with her classmates, has been campaigning for her school in Bristol to do more.

Along with Fahma, a broad coalition of charities and campaigners have joined the Guardian newspaper to ask the Education Secretary Michael Gove to write to head teachers of all primary and secondary schools, urging them to flag up the dangers of FGM before the summer holidays, when girls are at the greatest risk.

I
As with Wadjda, Fahma Mohammed is making herself visible, she is being a named and public precedent, she's somebody saying that no, this isn't some cultural nicety that can be swept under the carpet because of cultural sensitivities - sensitivities that are used as an excuse by men and women of all ethnicities, an excuse that often masks laziness, neglect or violence. This is abuse and has to be recognised as such.

The poet, Warsan Shire is also part of this visibility, and is involved in the  campaign to get FGM recognized in schools. This is something so fundamental that it is hard to believe it doesn't exist already.

"I write poems on FGM because I have been raised and loved by a community where many people I know have undergone this procedure. To work towards the eradication of this practice, their voices need to be heard."

One of her earlier poems, The Things We Lost in the Summer was inspired by the experiences of people she knew who were to be cut when they were on the cusp of puberty.

And how is all this connected to photography. Because by being three dimensional, by providing a voice that has dynamism and passion and life, we can make things visible. That's what Haifaa al Mansour did with Wadjda, that's what Wasma Mansour did with Saudi Interiors and that is what Fahma Mohammed and Warshan Shire are doing with their FGM campaign. 

Sign the Petition here.