Stranger: A Dreamboat of a Book

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.

Buy the book here. 

Danny Carter and Dying Bees

Danny Carter, also graduating from the documentary course at Newport, looks at collapsing bee colonies in the XYZ of bee culture. He made the pictures on good old 35mm slides and will be showing this work on a large light box, replicating the intimacy of looking into a bee hive and giving the project an archival feel.

This is what he says about his project.

'The mysterious disappearance and collapse of bee colonies across the world is one of the most significant environmental issues of the 21st century.  They pollinate more than a third of all we eat and a lot of what we wear is entirely dependent on their hard work.  The endless list of foods and produce they are responsible for is mind-blowing.  Not only is honey used for consumption, but beauty products, preservation and medicinally.  Its antiviral and antibiotic capabilities make it the number one ingredient in traditional Chinese medicine. 
Hand pollination of crops is already necessary in Sichuan, China, and this painstaking task is estimated to cost around £1.8 billion a year in the UK alone.  Scientists are even trying to build tiny robots to emulate the work of bees but nature is still thousands of years ahead.
Without bees our food system would collapse and our landscapes would become flowerless.  Although the exact cause of colony collapse disorder (CCD) is still in discussion, one thing is certain, it has been caused by man.  Pesticides, monocultures and intensive farming are taking their toll on the natural world.  Like the canary in the mine, the death of the bee is an indicator of an unsafe environment. 
This project acts as a bee retrospective, using the visual language of the archive and specimen collections, I wanted the viewer to imagine/ believe that this vital species is already extinct.'

We are alike you and I: Don McCullin and Lorenzo Vitturi

Don McCullin has spoken about how few people are photographing conflict and destruction overseas and missing out on the ongoing conflict social destruction and in Britain.

It made me think of a few things that I have mentioned before on this blo, especially regarding Jim Mortram. Firstly, that there are people documenting the social changes happening in Britain, but most of the time those social changes are so wrapped up in the generic formulas of art/documentary photography that the message gets lost and the photographs only become for those au fait and fully converted to the machinations of photographic representation. And complex as these machinations can be, most of the time they are as generic as a family album.

Sometimes it's the directness that matters. McCullin is direct in his photography (see the above image by McCullin), so perhaps that's where he's coming from. And perhaps Old School might be better than New School in this respect, taking Old School in the broadest story-telling sense.

And if you take it that way, then perhaps Old School isn't really that Old School after all. My favourite book of the moment is  Lorenzo Vitturi's Dalston Anatomy, a book that seems fresh and vivid and new. But embedded within it are elements that reflect on the ethnic and economic cleansing of one particular area of London. It might be eliptical and lack the directness I mentioned above, but it's there, just a fingernail scratch beneath the bright colours and powdered paint.

I'm probably way off on this and I've got a feeling I doubled back on myself somewhere along the line there, but a post that connects Don McCullin, Jim Mortram and Lorenzo Vitturi?; it has to be!

I now Know how they felt when I killed them... Er, no, not really...

picture by Andy Fuller

I watched the Act of Killing again today, so I'll post on it again - why not. It's a film that is ostensibly about the slaughter of communists in Indonesia in 1965. But at the same time it's the story of a man called Anwar Congo. He's one of the killers - it's about his discovery of self through the making of the film by director Joshua Oppenheimer. Or his performance of the above through the making of the film by director Joshua Oppenheimer. 

But the very subject of the film is tremendously sensitive - the official line is that the communists were cruel and evil and so had to be killed, when really it was the government and military that were cruel and evil. To circumvent this problem, Oppenheimer tells Congo and his fellow gangsters ( in the government-sanctioned Pemuda Pancasila organisation) that he is making a film about them. 

So within the overall film there are multiple narratives - there is the official Indonesian government narrative of what happened in 1965, there is the gangster, narrative, there is a hidden official narrative (this is the one that permitted Oppenheimer to make his film), there is the victim's narrative, there is a narrative of truth, a narrative of realpolitik and a concealed emotional narrative that is gradually pealed back as we witness the transformation of Congo's mindset as he re-enacts his brutality. 

But this final narrative is disguised and distorted by other narratives - the gangsters know that people are looking at them, and perhaps they act according to that look - but then their vanity gets the better of them and the narrative of the film they think they are making overtakes them. 

Throughout the film, there are other layers - the fear that is acted out by the people performing in the film within the film is not always acted - it's sometimes real. The gangsterism and extortion we witness in the film is part of a wider commentary on how authority and power create it's own moral narrative. The victims here are purportedly communists, but this could be any victim of power anywhere in the world. Though peculiarly Indonesian, the themes of the film are defiantly universal. 

But the thing is - it all comes through this character, Anwar Congo - he's the front of the film, he's the one in whom the contradictions are played out. So although there are economic, political, religious, ethical and psychological layers to the film they are secondary. That's why the film works. Because we feel we know who the players are, even though we don't actually know who the players - perhaps because we don't know who the players are. 

The film's too long, it's not edited that well. it's patchy. But it's amazing and it's laugh-out-loud funny in the absurd venality and self-delusion of the film's main players. It's  a film where new layers emerge with each viewing. 

The man who oversaw the massacres was General Suharto. He became president till he was nudged out in 1998. But his memory is being resurrected - as you can see in this story here. 

Mods UK: Double Well Good

 

Following on from Mike Brodie, here are more cool pictures, this time of UK Mods, from a story called Mods UK by Owen Harvey, a final year Documentary Photography student at the University of Wales, Newport (which is where I teach ). But it's nice to see Owen mixing up the genres with music and fashion thrown into the mix.

I can't say I ever found Mod-ism attractive in terms of dress, people or values, and I can't say I do now (the music is another thing altogether). But the pictures are the thing and these are great, a picture of a different England, with people that look different to the usual English. Well good I say! No double well good!

random conversations #2: Why don't people like Salgado?

J:  So why isn't Salgado considered a documentary photographer when somebody like Jim Goldberg is?

Me: Well I like him.

J: But why don't other people like him?

Me: I think it's because his pictures were always regarded as too beautiful and people could write against him. He became a photographic superstar who was too considerate of light and shade and brought quasi-religious imagery into his work. And he's not a "proper" documentary photographer because of that. On top of that,he was too big and too successful. People envied him. Maybe. To be honest I don't know. I know you can read all about him and people say he denied his subjects agency - first by fitting into a photojournalistic/concerned genre and second by shooting in black and white. Or there's no context for his work and it stands in aesthetic isolation, but I always thought the his pictures, especially his Brazil ones, were contextualised by Salgado's economic and political groundings.

J: But lots of people do that and they are still considered serious photographers. Why is Jim Goldberg so often referred to, as just one example, but not Salgado. Why isn't Jim Goldberg exploitative or out-of-context?

Me: Because he uses the subjects own words and his pictures are, much as I love them, a bit ugly?

J: Is that all though?

Me: A different discourse attaches itself to Goldberg

J: What kind of discourse?

Me: A discourse of sobriety - it's a film thing. If you talk about documentary, people use a discourse of sobriety. If you talk about musicals, they use a discourse of entertainment. You get generic discourses too - India movies have a discourse of love, German films a discourse of guilt, Korean films a discourse of revenge, American films a discourse of violence and English films the class discourse. But in photography, documentary has a discourse of sobriety; so when you talk about it you have to be sober and serious. I think Salgado might have be too beautiful for that discourse. His pictures don't fit the discourse of the genre, the discourse won't change - therefore Salgado doesn't fit the genre.

J: So where does he belong - in art? What's the discourse of art photography?

Me: The discourse of art photography is a discourse of pretension and deceit on the whole, which is wholely counter to the discourse of creativity - creativity doesn't have a discourse. Salgado doesn't belong in the discourse of sobriety. He belongs in documentary. But it's not Salgado who's wrong, it's the discourse.

J: So why don't you change the discourse?

The Documentary Maker's Daughter

 

Doug Block filmed his daughter growing up. The result was the documentary, The Kids Grow Up. Below are some extracts from a Guardian article on the film, with some pertinent and close-to-home questions raised for anybody who films or photographs their family.

  

^'Just think," says Doug Block's wife, Marjorie, while he trains his camera on her, "when she works all this through in therapy she can take the footage with her. Her therapist won't have to imagine what you were like." 

Block, a documentary-maker, filmed their daughter Lucy's final year at high school – interspersed with footage of her over the years. His film, The Kids Grow Up, is ostensibly about how a father copes with the prospect of his cherished only child leaving home to go to college. But there is lots more here. It is about his own childhood – "I was a lousy parent in the main," admits Block's elderly, ailing father – and about what it means to be a modern dad (friend or father?). It is about the passage of time,and Block's inability to let go of the past and grow up, as his wife – ever the voice of reason – puts it during one of their filmed interviews. 

There are plenty of other moments that make Block look terrible: when he is filming Lucy – aged about 13 – at a basketball game and she doesn't realise until she catches sight of him, and then, her face furious, she shouts across the court: "Stop it, stop it, stop it!" When he looks like a creep for filming his daughter's boyfriend, unaware, through the kitchen window. When his distressed daughter, soon to leave for college, says through her tears as he attempts yet another interview with her: "I'm really pissed off that you're doing this at all. I hate it." "I'm sorry," says Block, in a weedy voice, but he still doesn't take his camera off her. "That was really hard because the whole time I'm thinking, do I turn it off?" says Block. "But Lucy hadn't said to turn it off. She knows I'm rolling because there's a red light on the camera. All I wanted to do was put it down and wrap my arms around her." Why didn't he? "Because your instincts as a documentarian take over and you go: OK, she hasn't told me to turn it off and this is an important discussion. I can always decide later not to include it if it's going over the line. "I know it makes me look really bad, but if you are making personal films, you can't worry about looking good. 

Later, when I speak to Lucy, who is at college in California, she says she was never excited about the prospect of being the subject of a documentary. "It shows a much more personal side of my life than I share with most people," she says. "I thought it would be weird and it was. At the beginning I said I didn't want him to film me in public. He asked to come by when I was with my friends and I was totally opposed to that. I probably asked him to stop filming about 50% of the time. Maybe I would let him film for a little while and then I would tell him to stop, usually because I would be doing something, he would start filming and I wouldn't be able to do it any more because I felt like I was acting." 

How did Marjorie feel about the filming in general – wasn't it an intrusion into their family life? "No," Block says. "These are two really strong women who say what they think and if they didn't want me doing it, they would have told me. They didn't necessarily want it done, and in the moments when Marjorie didn't want to be filmed she would say not now. But she generally likes to do interviews – she feels that, over the years, we've had some of our best conversations on camera because she says I never listen to her as closely as when I'm interviewing her." It wasn't always like that for Lucy. During her last month at home, she felt increasingly unhappy about being filmed and ultimately broke down on camera. "If I had known at the beginning that the filming would have had a negative impact, I wouldn't have made it," says Block. He also says he would never have released it had Lucy been unhappy with the footage. "She was always going to be the first to see it. During her first break home over Christmas, I showed it to her, very roughly put together, and I gave her the opportunity to opt out. I was prepared to shelve it, and she said no, that she thought it would be a good film." But hadn't he put his daughter in an impossible position? This was his career – she could hardly ask him to stop a project he had been working on all year. He says it occurred to him. And Lucy admits: "There were times when I didn't want him to make it but there was no way I could have brought myself to tell him that. "The hardest part has been for my dad and me to separate our relationship from the movie. I told him recently that I had a hard time distinguishing what his real feelings were from the things he said in the film [for the sake of the story]. I don't know if he realised that before. I feel good about the film now but it has enveloped our family life too much for the past three years and I'm very much ready to move on from it." 

Read the whole article here.

Collapsing Art Market Down the Toilet

picture: Colin Pantall (with thanks to Saniplus Macerators)



Over at the Magnum Blog, Alec Soth quotes Richard Lacayo and Jerry Saltz musing on what the
current economic crisis means for the art market and photography.

"Many younger artists who made a killing will be forgotten quickly," says Salts. "Others will be seen mainly as relics of a time when marketability equaled likability." Like Lacayo, he sees an upside. "The good news is that, since almost no one will be selling art, artists -- especially emerging ones -- won't have to think about turning out a consistent style or creating a brand."

Soth continues with his own take on affairs.

"A few years ago a major collector pulled me aside to offer some advice. "If you want success in the art world," he told me, "the key is to find your thing and never change." His advice almost had me vomiting on his Hirst, but he was probably right. The commerce of art isn't much different than the commerce of handbags. It is all about showing off the brand.



One wonders how the collapsing markets might affect the larger universe (or is it a ghetto?) of the photography world. Will gimmickry and branding become less prominent? Will documentation take precedence over decoration? Will people start caring less about the bag than the stuff it is carrying?"

Hopefully gimmickry will fail, new creativity will emerge and an opening up of photography beyond both the branding of the market and documentary will become apparent - and the move away from documentary in its current form can only be a good thing. Photography is incredibly constrained by academic, media and market perspectives. It is lost in its own rhetoric - the sooner it opens up the better. Perhaps we should all stop caring about what everyone else thinks and just show it how we think it is - then perhaps everything wouldn't quite look all the same.

Isn't that what Obama would do.