If you're wondering how to make your pictures come alive, then look to Olivia Arthur and her new book Stranger.
It looks like a normal book with a normal cover. It's a what-if story - what if a man had survived a shipwreck off the coast of Dubai that happened 50 years ago and returned to the place 50 years later. How would they feel, how would they see, what would they do? Especially if they were a poor man, an Indian man, a man without status.
You open up Stranger and everything goes a little bit dreamy. It's hard to show on a screen because it is such a tactile book, a book printed on tracing paper in which one image melts into the one below till you become immersed in something that isn't so much a book as a kind of tracing paper shadow-play or lantern show. It's a dreamboat of a book, something that gets a life beyond the page. And if you're the kind of person who goes 'fiddlesticks to that, it's the pictures that matters, you just take a piece of white card (it even comes with the book. I didn't know what to do with it until I was told) and then you see the picture in its full glory.
You can't see the effect on the screen and you don't see it in the opened object. But once you get a short flow going it is like a film as you uncover one page after another and look for the story, and you feel the place flood into you.
The text is simple and direct. It builds the sense of Dubai as a city of the imagination. So there is a huge sense of place in there; to the extent that there is a large landscape element to it. There is also that combination of documentary and fiction (and a nod to Cristina de Middel at the start of the book) that is taking photography into new and exciting places. The tracing people lift and reveal has been used before, but I don't know if anybody has done it so beautifully. It extends the story-telling form and is something that feels lovely to the touch and the emotion created by the paper completely fits the circular narrative of the book. It's fantastic.
Right, let's get the gimmick over with first because it's a top gimmick. In fact if there were a Photobook Prize for Gimmick of the Year, this book would win it (jointly with Melinda Gibson's Smell-O-Rama Fire Experience).
The book is everything will be ok by Alberto Lizaralde (co-edited by Cristina de Middel ) and the gimmick is a thermodynamic cover that changes colour when you touch it. Press your hot little fingers on the matt black cover and it bruises, it is marked. The black turns to white. It's like charcoal turning to ash, death in its physical form fading into something ethereal and immaterial.
That fits the idea of the book which is called everything is ok. It is a fact/fiction book that is crystallised through a little end quote: 'I made these pictures between 2009 - 2013. Jorge died in 2010.'
That gets you thinking and so do the pictures of tears that run throughout the book. They are real tears, real grief, and they make the book. A theme of absence, loss and acute violence runs throughout the book. Abstract images of holes in the ground, gaping fish mouths and concrete blocks in the sea are familiar but still provide a feeling of disorientation, but it is the grief that tells you that something is wrong; the exhausted face of a woman spent through waping, the reddened face of the (same?) woman stuck in the depths of grief. Who was Jorge and how did he die? And who is this woman that grieves for him so? Or is she not grieving for him?
The book ends on a high note with fireworks, waves and celebration; the material becomes immaterial, loss loses its immediacy and the sky is bright with freed spirits. Which is the cover again though on the cover the loss of pain is only temporary granted by human touch, warmth and emotion. And perhaps that's the same real grief. It only goes away when you touch it.
'In life we all go through good times and bad times over and over, tirelessly. I went through one of these cycles and transformed it into this book. It was my story but very well could it be yours. "everything will be ok" is the chronicle of a magical journey that starts with the emotional collapse that comes after falling into the hole and ends, through a long healing walk, with the assumption that after all, and whatever happens, life is always worth the struggle and it can actually be pretty funny. Through photographs taken over five years, the book is set up to form as a classical narrative structure in three acts that continuously crosses the line between documentary and imaginary together with the line between the personal and the unfamiliar. The ink in the book cover, reacts to temperature so it changes color whenever it is touched, leaving the fingerprints of the reader visible for some time. It is, in a way, a living book that mutates and adapts according to the viewer whose warmth and contact heals the darkness.
My favourite part is when he snaps back at photographers with a conceptual bent; Broomberg and Chanarin, Cristina de Middel and Mishka Henner are named in the question.
These conceptual photographers are trying to kill the traditions, but they’ve been informed by them; the institutions they’re criticising aren’t going away. It’s good that they push its limits, but documentary photography is always going to exist. Even if it can sometimes be clichéd, there’s always a core of it that is going to be great. I have a certain sympathy with that idea of conceptual photography riding on the back of documentary - mainly because it does (and I'm not sure anyone says that it doesn't). I also have a sympathy for his bite back - in fact I think it's a good thing. It adds to the debate and is perhaps a response to the repeated announcements of the death of this or that kind of photography. (And in fact, immediately after the article appeared van Atgmael tweeted Not sure why I said that. I like a lot of conceptual photography. I think I was just grumpy that Chris Killip didn't win the deutsche borse prize as I cherish his work. It was a dumb thing to say. David Campbell alerted me to this after I knocked this post out, but hey, this paragraph aside, we'll let it all stand because it's relevant. ) And there's lots to debate, most of it very reasonable. This is what Mishka Henner said in an interview he did with me a few years back
“I found that I could discover something new by pointing a camera, but the more proficient I became with the language of photography, the more frustrated I was with it. I wanted to find new ways of communicating but the Photography World with a capital P can be quite conservative. I needed to go beyond it, I needed to get my work seen by people outside photography. One of the things that frustrates me is how photography is often taught according to a set agenda of what is good; and looking at photography in this way can be restrained and narrow. We’re surrounded by cameras and from a basic point of view that changes the way we function. We don’t need to carry a camera around with us all the time anymore because everything is being photographed in any case.” ...... It’s a manifesto opposed to the idea of the purity of photography, opposed to the idea that there is any one right way of doing things. “An example of this,” explains Henner, “is a student who came in and told me she hadn’t taken any pictures all week and had nothing to show me. I asked her if she had uploaded anything to Facebook and she said yes, of course, loads of pictures. But she couldn’t see that the Facebook pictures were just as valid and maybe even more interesting than what she saw as the ‘Proper Photographs’.”
Which is all very reasonable and I agree with it all. It's about opening up photography to new ideas and new ways of working.
And this is what Broomberg and Chanarin say about it in this post, Unconcerned but not Indifferent. This is about judging the World Press Photo, the surfeit of images and they reliance that war photography has on war.
Do we even need to be producing these images any more? Do we need to be looking at them? We have enough of an image archive within our heads to be able to conjure up a representation of any manner of pleasure or horror. Does the photographic image even have a role to play any more? Video footage, downloaded from the internet, conveys the sounds and textures of war like photographs never could. High Definition video cameras create high-resolution images twenty-four photographs a second, eliminating the need to click the shutter. But since we do still demand illustrations to our news then there is a chance to make images that challenge our preconceptions, rather than regurgitate old cliche? Again, I agree with all that. But I agree with the response that Tim Hetherington (who never identified himself as a war photographer and was open to all forms of visual representation - "I wish people would stop wittering on about photography" was his view) gave in his essay By Any Means Necessary (thanks Lucas Pernin for the link). "Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin begin their critique of contemporary photojournalism by referring to a quote by Bertolt Brecht in which he claims, without providing any basis, that photojournalism contributes almost nothing to our understanding of the world. In fact, he goes further, claiming that photographs are actually a 'weapon against truth'. Let us ignore, for a moment, the fact that photographs have been used as evidence in every war crimes trial since Nuremberg. Let us ignore the fact that photography has infiltrated almost every aspect of popular culture and private life – what Brecht dismisses as the 'bourgouisie'. If photographs do not reflect something of an objective truth, then nothing does, and we are left with an endlessly subjective, nihilistic understanding of the world." ......
"I’m not interested in playing the ‘concerned’ moral crusader by ramming violent images in people’s faces," he concludes, "but that doesn’t mean the world shouldn’t have access to them. Images don’t need ‘intelligent’ aesthetics to convey their message - again, think of the Falling Man – but they can benefit from them. Like advertising, visual journalism employs many strategies to communicate. In Yemen, I recently saw fly-posters of what appear to be dead Palestinian children. It’s the sort of thing that would be distasteful on streets of the UK and yet they are manifestly accepted in Yemen. These images highlight the plight of Palestine and inculcate anti-western sentiments. Similarly, images of starving Ethiopians were instrumental in focusing world attention, gathering funds and mobilising the international relief effort there in the 1980s. The fact is, images of pain and suffering make people uncomfortable and sometimes inspire them to action. We try to ignore them and we fail. And then we secretly look at them on the internet." I sometimes get the feeling that there's this strange opposition between two imaginary sides that secretly agree with each other. I sometimes feel it is about how things are said, about taking an artificial stand for or against something, about being a gobshite for the sake of it. It's like the Life of Brian where the anti-Roman factions hate each other more than the supposed target of their hatred. That kind of factionalism gives things a label (conceptual, documentary, fashion, conceptual documentary etc etc...) but on the balance is probably a bad thing. But at the same time, the idea that something '...is always going to exist' does strike me as a tad of complacent. I bet the dinosaurs thought they were always going to exist and look what happened to them. It exists until it dies and if it doesn't get new ideas and new blood, it will die. The days of misery-mongering photo-essays that just repeat the stereotypes of war, poverty and injustice (and rely on it - there's always that strange symbiosis going on there) are numbered.
That's something van Atgmael recognises. It's also something that people like Jim Goldberg recognises. I like his response to all the Google Street View work made of people from a distance - something Goldberg has responded to very directlyon occasions by sitting on top of the Magnum RV taking pictures and engaging directly with the subjects on occasions. It's a kind of fuck-you both to Google and GSV projects. Not that Postcards from America doesn't have all kinds of ethical whatnots you could get into if you are that way inclined.
So round and round we go. Conceptual is informed by documentary and documentary is informed by conceptual. Throw in some politics, some art, some film, some justice, some science.... the more photography reaches outside itself the better. If it stays locked in some little ghetto it becomes impoverished and, no matter what the tradition, it will die. And that's being recognised by photographers. So we'll end the week by saying congratulations to both Max Pinckers for winning the Photographic Museum of Humanity Grant 2014 for Will they Sing Like Raindrops or Leave Me Thirsty and to Lorenzo Vitturi for winning the Hyeres Photography Award 2014 for his Dalston Anatomy. Both of these recognise and are part of a documentary tradition and deal with very serious documentary subjects, but deal with them in new and unexpected ways. And thank God for that.
I used to love Horrible Histories ( a series of books and BBC programme that is for children, but is also a kind of People's History of the UK). The writer, Terry Deary, said that he wrote it to make history interesting and relevant to all people, with a focus on the social and cultural history of the underdog. Fabulous.
In my mind, Deary 's reputation has taken a nosedive, and by extension, so has Horrible Histories. It's a bit fickle and rather unfair, but that is the kind of knee-jerk reaction that I work with. I'm trying to compensate for my fickleness and like Horrible Histories again, but it still comes with a bitter taste, the idea that such a great programme should be made by such a big fool! How can that be!
By the same token, the same thing happens in reverse. So Julia Donaldson, who I always loved anyway, lifts my spirits with this article, and goes up a notch in my estimation. She says, "I think it's brilliant that libraries are free. Not only do library
users also buy books, but if some users genuinely are too poor to buy
books, then it's great that we've got libraries for those people … [And]
If libraries have any bearing on bookshops, it's the other way –
libraries are creating readers," said Donaldson, who has "never met" a
bookseller who believes libraries are putting them out of business.
We make allowances and over-compensate for those that we like. I do it all the time, and being aware of it doesn't really make it any better. It happens all the time with photography. Somebody's pleasant and kind and we like their work better. Someone's an asshole it goes the other way.
I wonder if that isn't what happened with Cristina de Middel's Afronauts. She is such an engaging speaker and livewire of a personality that we believe what we want to believe in her work because she's worth it. I think it's a great fun project, and an exercise in making things happen and improvising, but I don't think it has a depth to it. It's part of a long, long line of science fiction projects that connect to space and Africa
and it is entertaining for all that - that has value in itself. Political, a commentary on African development or our perceptions of the continent - not really. It's more of a depoliticisation than anything..
Not everyone agrees: this is what the inestimable John Edwin Mason said about the Afronauts.
Cristina said that she was signifying? Well, not precisely. But darned close. She told Pete that
The Afronauts, in other words, is about us -- we
non-Africans -- and the stereotypes and prejudices about Africa that we
carry around in our heads. It's about challenging those stereotypes and
beliefs, on the sly, with humor, and with a sleight of hand.
''''''''''''''''''''''' It seems to me that this is Cristina's strategy as well. She takes what
seems to be a playful look at the silly idea that Africans can build
rockets and lures her readers into wondering why the idea seems so
absurd.
I don't know but I think the whole premise of the Zambian Space Programme was absurd (and it was always the brainchild of an individual rather than a national programme). An article in the . the Lusaka Times reproduces this article from Discovery, which details how the Programme chief, Edward Nkoloso, unilaterally declared his eccentric ideas to the press.
In a newspaper editorial,
Nkoloso claimed to have studied Mars for some time from telescopes at
his “secret headquarters” outside Lusaka, and announced that the planet
was populated by primitive natives. (He graciously added that his
missionaries would not force the native Martians to convert to
Christianity.) In fact, he said, he could have achieved the conquest of
Mars a mere few days after Zambia’s independence had UNESCO come through
with the funding. Oh, he also called for the detention of Russian and
American spies trying to steal his “space secrets” — and his cats.
It’s hard not to like Nkoloso, based on what little we know of
him today. Here’s a grade school science teacher setting up his own
national space program with a small group of trainees who had to roll
downhill in a 44-gallon oil drum as part of Nkoloso’s plan to simulate
the sensation of rushing through space. Zero gravity? He simulated that
by having them swing from the end of a long rope, cutting the rope when
they reached the highest point so they went into freefall. He also
taught them how to walk on their hands, “the only way humans could walk
on the moon.”
Naive? Ignorant? Sure. Especially in light of his less than
dedicated volunteers: “They won’t concentrate on space flight; there’s
too much love-making when they should be studying the moon,” he complained. Indeed, the much-touted girl astronaut, Matha, became pregnant and her parents brought her back to their village.
You can read more of Nkoloso's proposal in the article. Is it absurd? Well, yes it is, clearly and obviously, to everybody involved in the case. We don't just have absurd people in Europe and America, there are absurd people in Africa as well and Nkoloso, as all Africans of sane mind would and do recognise, was top-grade absurd, as nutty as a fruitcake, as fruity as a nutcake.
