The Floods: the kind of floods you could have a cup of tea with

You get some incredibly nice surprises sometimes. That was the case with Joe Wright's  book, The Floods. It's a book made between 2012 and 2014, when there was heavy flooding in the UK, when rivers swelled their banks, meadows were indundated and life for people living by rivers came to a standstill.

I remember those years well. On a very trivial level we were affected. We couldn't get to the pub we visited after our walks over Solsbury Hill because the River Avon was flooded. The scenic route we took into Bath became unpassable because of a raging torrent of clay brown water was blocking our way. The river had burst its banks and invaded the pathways, the woodlands, and the brambles that had once stood so peaceful and benign..

Everything became wilder and more primaeval during those floods. I remember looking at the water flooding across rocks and tree roots, how swamplike the marginal lands that we usually passed by without a glance had suddenly become. It was never pastoral this land, it was disused and a bit wasted, but suddenly it had a wild side. It became swamplike and murky, a damp mud-soaked expanse that hinted at parallel universe of an unpeopled land.


The floods created a world that was quite exciting in its way, but it also had a resolute Englishness to it; these were still downtrodden, low-key floods. It was a flood, but it was an English flood on English land with English vegetation, the kind of flood that (if you weren't flooded out of your house and you didn't have the anxiety of living by a river) you could have a cup of tea with.

And that's what Joe Wright's book The Floods looks like exactly. It's a book of beautiful, beautiful pictures of these flooded margins, pictures that fit in that difficult space between the pastoral, the primaeval and the sublime (and you can read more about that in Rob Hudson's thoughtful review here).

A lot of the books featured here on this blog have some kind of ideas going on that take the photography up a level, that makes images work in book form rather than as images in themselves. But in the Floods there is both great photography and an idea that revolves around the representation of landscape, Englishness and the margins that we take for granted. There might be a bit much of this at times - I don't think you need the word Edgelands in the title for example (it takes away from the globally relevant environmental nature of the work - and there is an environmental side to it) - but at the same time, the use of text from Robbie Cowen's Common Ground is smart and gives the work a biographical tinge.

The Floods is a book that resonates at the highest level. It's a bit odd having something like this come out of nowhere; it leaves you second guessing yourself (and Rob Hudson had the same reaction), but in terms of intelligent landscape work, this feels very special.

It's a hand made book and unfortunately the first 50 books has sold out, so you can only get the special edition (Wright is a book-binder as well as a photographer so the special edition is beautifully made). It's very good.


Buy the Floods here.

Oh God. Not Another Book of Non-Spaces!

Edgelands, the liminal, in-between-anything, these are words that should fill everybody with horror. It is quite bewildering why so many people think it's worthwhile to focus all their energies on non-spaces and their bastard brethren when you know that what's going to come out is an exercise in boredom with an even more pointless statement to crank the tedium onto catatonic levels; "I am interested in exploring the non-spaces that emergezzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz..."

Curse the Edgelands, the liminal and the whole clan of emptiness. Fling it onto a funeral pyre together with any project that hits the photo-poet full-house of sea, sky, cloud and cave in its epistemiological statement on our own and this world's mortality.



Every year I make a kind of resolution that I won't look at any more. But the problem is that although these kinds of projects never really hit the zingy high-energy mad-bastard levels I like in a project, there are so many that, when done really well, are thoughtful and really good. There have been a few this year (Ama Lur in particular) that do the sea, sky, cloud and cave thing really well.

And that's where Martin Cregg's Midlands fits in. It's a book of all those in-between spaces that just does it really, really well through intelligent use of the whole book form.

Well, not the whole book form. There's an essay at the back, which is a perfectly fine essay. But I do have this lingering feeling that Heidegger and photography should be kept separate. There should be a tidy little picket fence marking off the patch of grass where Heidegger can step from the patch of grass where photography can step.




But the basic idea of the book is it's showing the construction and collapse of Ireland's housing market using the 'National Spatial Strategy' housing/development/repopulation plan as a kind of metaphor for the disaster that is the Irish housing market. It goes from the boom years through to the comprehensive economic collapse of 2007 and beyond, through the newly-build housing estates of the Midlands area of Ireland. It's a boom and bust scenario in other words, and Cregg is photographing how that affects the landscape.

It's beautifully presented. The book comes in a manila envelope with a string tie. The book is covered in manila card with a map like design on it.

The images start with rough pictures of dug-up earthworks; construction. Then we see the houses, with little fold out booklets camouflage-folded into the middle of the book. These show additional images or extra information (one problem with the Midlands National Spatial Strategy was nobody could agree on where the Midlands were).

There's grass, there are fences, there are various tones of grey, concrete and brick - places that fit that idea of the liminal or the non-place. But here they kind of go beyond that. They fit a political and metaphorical picture of housing speculation gone wrong, of construction and destruction, of dead ends and estates haunted by the spectre of housing speculation gone bad.

Midlands is ultimately rather sad. It's a colour chart of soul-less construction (that's where the Heidegger kicks in I know) where banking profit and speculation creates a colour chart of how colour and vitality can be removed so fully from a place. It's a book about housing bubble voodoo economics where the content fits the design and the surface subject matter (space, non-space etc) actually has a political and economic point to it. It's really very good.

Buy Midlands here. 

Dark, Claustrophobic and Grey!

Gerry Badger is the man who writes the words for the Photobook Histories. But he's also a photographer and It was a Grey Day (Photographs of Berlin) is his first photobook. And it's a really good one, a depiction of unpeopled greyness that captures a city on the brink of a change. It's the kind of change that will transform Badger's studies in grey into pictures of nostalgia that people will look back on with affection and wonder. It was a Grey Day is a study in the marginalia of a city, and it does a fantastic job.

Badger's a writer and a photographer. But he's also an architect and in the book he brings his architect's eye to a city where he is drawn to the spaces between buildings, to the gaps and the temporary structures that inhabit the city, that in Badger's eye almost define the city. Because of this, there's a formality to the pictures but at the same time they are not cold. They speak of spaces that are deserted but have life all around them.

This is Berlin's Terrain Vague, although it's not always of a large enough scale to be called that. It's more of an opportunistic seizing of space and repurposing of it through graffiti, sculpture, and a placing of rubbish and junk that is almost installation-like in its purposefulness. Are these spaces beautiful or ugly, Badger asks? And why is he so drawn to them? Badger concludes that it's not ruin or splendour he's photographing, but change, layer upon layer of change.

The book starts with a picture of a small supermarket. Above the window a line of graffiti reads, 'This is not America (Here is not Everywhere).' Just in case you didn't know, there's a manifesto for you.

The book continues into a grey claustrophobia. It's more than overcast (there's a corner of sky in almost every picture) and the concrete of the city is complete leaden. There are fences, there are trees and there is a sense of history that adds a certain gravity to the book.

There are repeated references to Atget's Terrain Vague pictures and there are nods to John Gossage's Berlin In the Time of the Wall, there are pictures of the Wall, but ultimately this is Badger's book and it settles into a pattern of images of different forms of dereliction and untidiness mixed with urban escapism; impromptu corners where Berliners escape the concrete and sit outside in these little pockets of human comfort. There's a checked sofa with a barbecue in front, benches of varying degrees of decrepitude and a courtyard with a sign saying 'Refugees Welcome, Tourists Piss Off!'

So it's not that comfortable, but it's not uncomfortable either. It's just messy and weighty, with link chains and fences creating a hierarchy of marginal landscapes. And that's what the book is, a kind of hierarchy of non-empty empty spaces; a book where you can unpick the subtle differences between Third Landscapes, Edgelands and Terrain Vague with concrete parking places, pathways, steel doors, stairways to nowhere and communal courtyards thrown into the mix. There's destruction mixed with collapse and decay and a sense that construction (and another kind of destruction) are not too far away. These are urban spaces that are up-for-grabs but aren't being grabbed because that is not the nature of the place. 'Smash Capitalism!' proclaims one sign, and in a sense that is what is being shown here because there's nothing here to be smashed.

In the afterword Badger writes 'In the normal course of events I spend my time writing about photographs - the photographs of others. Now, faced with a a group of my own photographs, I feel stuck for words.... I feel disembodied by them... they baffle me. I find them obtuse and quite mysterious.'

He writes about how he sees his pictures of Berlin and wonders at how downbeat they appear. On the surface this is a very dismal Berlin. But at the same time it's not. It's a Berlin that is of itself and by itself. For now. The dismal Berlin will come later, when the hand sculpture (which is already gone) and the gentrification of the city 'continues apace'.

Buy the book here.

Michele Cera's Dust

Dust by Michele Cera is a series of landscape photographs, almost all of which feature a human somewhere in the scene and quite a lot of dust. The pictures are from Albania (where Cera's grandfather was stationed during the Second World War) and are a recreation of an Italy that Cera imagines existed after the war (an Italy that Cera saw in Italian cinema from that time).

It's not an idealised Italy that Cera imagines. It's an Italy in torpor, an Italy emptied of people. And the same goes for the Albania he photographs; it's a precarious Albania where people wait by dusty roadsides and stand by half-finshed construction sites - all the locations are in between and the things that people do are in between as well. People talk on phones, or hang around billiard halls, we pass from the empty cities to the empty countryside, and all the time there is a sense lethargy about the place, that whatever is happening is happening somewhere else.

Which perhaps sums up the dissatisfaction of the human condition, that we must always be restless and look elsewhere for our livelihood or our fun, that happiness can never be truly attained except somewhere else, that there is always more to be consumed, experienced, seen or photographed. Ah, that's the photographic condition isn't it, the all-consuming all-seeing nature of photography that we imagine exists but doesn't really exist. So perhaps I could take Dust as an antidote to that kind of photographic desire; as a call to sit back and enjoy life while the sun shines - and the sun shines a lot in Albania! I don't think that's what it's about at all, but it seems to fit

The Garden: Photography that doesn't put you in a corner

 

In Blue Mud Swamp, the colour blue sets the tone. Another book where colour dominates and defines the story is Alessandro Imbriaco's The Garden - but this time the colours are murky greens, browns and greys, dusk colours that rise like a miasma from the Roman swamp where Imbriaco made the pictures.

The Garden is the story of a swamp, a wild tangle of brambles, weeds and trees on the edge of a Roman highway. And in the middle of the swamp live Piero, Angela a - a homeless couple who have made their home in this Garden - and Lupa, their daughter who was born and is being raised there, the trees and streams and underpasses her playground.

The Garden is an Edenic reference but I think it's all a bit more pagan than that - more of a Pan's Labyrinth than Eden, a place where life is more nuanced than the monotheistic ideas that Eden represents. Little Lupa is no Eve. She has knowledge of the world around her and it is a good thing. No sin attaches to her because of what she is.

Despite, or perhaps because of  this pagan quality, there is a real earthiness to the book that is not at all romantic. It also feels real, but not in the gritty kind of way that puts you in a corner and doesn't give you a choice. There always seems to be a choice in The Garden - of how you read the characters, the landscape, the environment, and that seems to be something that is quite rare. It's not a spectacle and it's not a prescription. You are free to see what you want to see and think what you want to think.

I'm not sure why that should seem so special but it does. There is so much photography, especially of a 'serious' nature, that ties you up in knots, that seeks to put you into a particular place  in the way that you see and understand it. It's a kind of photographic correctness, where even though you may agree wholeheartedly with what is being said or shown, the resentment at being forced to agree with the sentiments of the work, the inability of the work to offer even a second dimension or alternative perspective makes one want to disagree with it just for the sake of it. It's Stupid Photography that doesn't enlighten or engage, but just shuts things up and makes one long for something that is open and free. Photography isn't always open or free. The Garden is.

Read my interview with Alessandro Imbriaco in the BJP here.

 

Blue Mud Swamp

Filipe Casaca sent me a copy of his latest book,Blue Mud Swamp, a move on in book terms from his previous relationship study, the rather lovely my home is where you are.

Blue Mud Swamp is a colour coded look at the frayed edges of urban China. It's tattered and torn, worn-out with a chemical taint. It's a short term project but it says more to me than the smog-laden cityscapes that have dominated Western landscapes of China over the last 10 years. This is what Casaca told me about his work.

This series developed in Dalian, China. Recently, this city was classified as "one of the best cities to live in China" and an example of the modern patterns of China’s development.

In Dalian, I was attracted to the strong presence of the sea and coastal area – which has some of the few useable beaches in China - where I could find a prominence of youngsters/couples and a variety of leisure infrastructures.Due to its importance and main influence on the city’s characteristics, I decided that the sea would be a guideline in this work.

I observed that existed an excess of entertainment facilities – some in use, while other completely neglected with clear signs of degradation.  Abundance, in a broad sense, is one of the visible faces of Dalian.

The city is filled with multiple stimuli and a big magnet for young couples looking for fun. Nevertheless, their way of being led me to feel that they were “dominated” by a certain absence.

In some leisure facilities such as theme parks, zoo and gardens, I found a recurring presence of animals that have an important symbolism in Chinese culture: the Tiger, symbol progress and protection; Horse, representing movement and power, and Turtle that not only symbolizes wisdom and longevity as the Universe itself in the Far East.

It was difficult for me to recognize "the best city to live in China”, the much-publicized “perfect universe” built by man. Instead, I found worlds artificially created and I came across fantastic scenarios created to sublimate Man, which paradoxically led me to a sensation of emptiness.

Atget and Terrain Vague

I was looking at pictures by Mohamed Bourouissa  and was wondering about the Parisian banlieues in which they were set. What is the story there because that kind of beyond the Pale environment is something that we don't have in the same way in the  UK. Not quite and not yet - with the current economic cleansing of London, we will start having something along these lines in the next few years.

So I was wondering about this and then I got a copy of City Gorged with Dreams. It's by Ian Walker and  interweaves Paris, surrealism, documentary photography. And it directly connects tot he work of Bourousisa as well as the idea of Terrain Vague, that ending of one landscape and beginning of another. He explains the idea Terrain Vague is connected to the area outside the  fortifications of Paris. Walker quotes a passage from Victor Hugo's Les Miserables.

To wander in a kind of reverie, to take a stroll as they call it, is a good way for a philosopher to spend his time; particularly in that kind of bastard countryside, somewhat ugly but bizarre, made up of two different natures, whih surrounds certain great cities, notably Paris. To observe the banlieue is to observe an amphibian. End of trees, beginning of roofs, end of grass, beginning of paving stones, end of ploughed fields, beginning of shops, the end of the beaten track, the beginning of the passions, the end of the murmur of all things divine, the beginning of the noise of humankind - all of this holds an extraordinary interest. And thus, in these unattractive places, forever marked by the passer-by with the epithet sad, the promenades, apparently aimless, of the dreamer.

Walker notes the fascination of the surrealists with this terrain vague. "The most extensive of these derelict spaces lay between the Parisian fortifications and the banlieue;  the Zone. This was a strip of land about 250 metres wide immediately in front of the fortifications where builiding had been forbidden for defensive purposes. But the Zone outlived such practicalities and by the late nineteenth century it was inhabited by gypsies, ragpickers, , itinerants - known collectively as zoniers - whose presence had become integral to the myth of the city itself."

Eugene Atget photographed the Zoniers, so did Man Ray - who bought seven of Atget's chaos ridden prints.of the Zone. The Zone came to an end in 1973 when the boulevard periperique was completed, making for a new and very different Terrain Vague.

Which puts Bourouissa's work into a much wider historical and photographic context, replete with ides of ethnic, social, economic and planning histories.

There is so much photography based on different kinds of Edgelands and terrains vagues, where walls, borders and boundaries of some kind or other create a buffer zone and different environments, architectures or cultures can mingle and mix. I'm not sure how much of a shelf life some of this work has, but where the histories are clearly delineated to make apparent the specific differences, and where the social histories are brought out, it can be absolutely fascinating. The problem here of course is that the picture on its own don't always tell the story on their own; instead social and cultural backdrops form the narrative drive with which the images build and intertwine. Sometimes, the pictures on their own just aren't enough.. There is a symbiotic relationship between text and supporting material - the one without the other is really of no use whatsoever.


Gallery of Eugene Atget Zone pictures


Tim Atherton On Atget with links to other articles.

Brown's Folly and Bicycle Mountains: Altered Landscapes

I don't think these places around Bath are quite Edgelands but they do resonate with a historicity that connects to Bath, the West Country and Georgian and Victorian history. The top picture is an informal BMX track (that nobody has used for a couple of years due to England's appalling summers). It sits between the River Avon and the Bath-London Railway. In the background is Grosvenor Place, a terrace of late regency houses which were to form one side of a huge pleasure garden that would form the entrance to Bath from the east. The land on which the jumps track was worked by engineers building Brunel's Great Western Railway in the 19th Century. Walk along the river a bit and you come to a row of terraces where the workers who did the digging used to live. Now, on the banks of the river, a little town of benders has cropped up.

The other pictures are from Brown's Folly, former Bath stone quarry and home to Boris, the world's second oldest bat. There is a network of caves under Brown's Folly. In the fifties the Ministry of Defence used the caves and mines to store explosives. In the nineties (I think) they pulled them out and burned the cordite, then collapsed the biggest of the caves - you can see the entrance in the bottom picture. The empty explosive casings used to fill the valley in the bottom picture. Now they have mostly rotted away, but new ones always come to the surface - old explosives in one of my very favourite landscapes.

An interview with Rob Ball

all pictures copyright Rob Ball

 Different countries have different responses to inbetween suburban/semi-suburban landscapes - but it's something that figures large in contemporary photography. In North America, apparent expanses of space, urban sprawl and box architecture have a different set of planning laws and preconceptions of space than those in Germany or the Netherlands - the result is different photographic responses, strategies and histories - something we should pay more attention to.


Steve Bisson tells me the Italians call this kind inbetween landscape the Third Landscape. It used to be referred to more broadly in the UK as liminal space (inbetween space), but now the idea of Edgelands has become dominant - in the UK at least..

Marion Shoard writes about Edgelands here - she defines it as an "...unplanned, certainly uncelebrated and largely incomprehensible territory where town and country meet..."

There is also the book published last year Edgelands, by Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts., which celebrates Edgelands as urban wasteland - in quite a romantic way.

Perhaps the prime writer on Edgelands-type environments is Iain Sinclair. His London Orbital is about walking the M25 - I can't read it but lots of people can. More accessible is this article on the development of the site for the London Olympics. And if you're looking for the photographic equivalent of Iain Sinclair is Stephen Gill and his earlier Hackney Wick work.

Marion Shoard teaches at the University of Canterbury which is also where Rob Ball teaches on the photography course. Rob works a lot with the idea of Edgelands so I fired off some questions to him which he very kindly answered.

What are Edgelands?

For a while Edgelands were my home. I guess, most commonly, they would be described as being a space in between – neither urban nor rural.  Farley and Symmonds describe Edgelands as a place ‘looked at but not into’.   The Edgelands I am photographing are everyday places to many people, but to me they resonate strongly with my past – that’s why I’m working in them.

Why are so many photographers interested in photographing them?

Photographers are always looking for new stories to tell and this is a rich time for photographs of England. There is a renewed interest in our own landscape, whether that be urban, rural or somewhere in between. I became interested in the green areas where I used to play when our government attempted to sell them.

How successful are photographers in photographing Edgelands environments? What is the difference between insight and non-insight?  

I spent some time in the US a couple of years ago and understand the excitement of everything feeling new and alien – at these times its hard not to take pictures.

Working in my personal Edgelands is the opposite – I have to continually self-edit – how do I tell the story in the most succinct way? How do I make my (unremarkable) story, the Essex/London border, interesting and relevant to someone in the US for example?

The question of insight is echoed throughout photography. What do I bring by having this relationship with the environment? This project to me is more like writing a biography – but I think my story applies to others too.

I am interested in how someone like George Shaw works – we have to be bold - Tile Hill, my local park, or Yosemite – I’d like to offer them all equal importance. I’d like to see more photographers from different cultures working in our Edgelands – the idea that non-insight can be just as interesting.

For reference there is an interesting show coming up at the Hotshoe Gallery that addresses question of ‘I’ and ‘Other’ - http://www.hotshoegallery.com/upcomingexhibitions/other-i-alec-soth-wassinklundgren-viviane-sassen/

What do Edgelands say about us?

It’s a paradox: shocking town planning verses wonderful examples of the human spirit; dens, desire paths, and a willingness to interact with the landscape in such an interesting way.

How do Edgelands differ in countries? What is the UK v the US for example?

I guess the American equivalent would be the Urban Sprawl. Some wonderful work has been made over the years – often in the 70s. More recently I love the work of Jeff Brouws. Most things in America exist on a grander scale – the sense of space is epic in comparison. In my Edgelands you can see Canary Wharf in the distance – a reminder that we are never cut adrift. In a way though, there is something incredibly British about Edgelands. There’s nothing grand going on, mostly it’s home made and understated. That’s the attraction for me.

Why do you photograph Edgelands?

I think there’s a richness there, I can also record these places with some honesty, integrity and a real sense of history. These landscapes are mine and have been for 30 years. Upon revisiting them (I no longer live close by) I feel it all coming back; building dens, sitting under the bridge smoking, scouring the landscape for porno mags and most of all, hanging around because there’s nothing to do here. The park was our haven – the only place where we would be left alone.

Who are the artists doing interesting things with that kind of inbetween/Edgeland space?

There are many and I think we’re about to see more. Joni Sternbach, Beierle & Keijser, George Shaw, Farley & Symmonds, Mark Power.

Edgelands is a very landscape-oriented term with a sense of inbetweenness - do you think there are equivalents in other areas of photography - in portrait photography, or documentary photography for example?

I think the liminal space is really interesting in photography. I occasionally work with Wet Plate Collodion creating exposures over a period of 30 seconds, the images are intense and the camera seems to record something in-between.  I love the work or Richard Learoyd who does something similar with cibachrome paper.