Who's going to deal with the problem of sexual harassment?

So then. Aritry Das has named Manik Katyal, editor of Emaho Magazine as a harasser and sexual predator on Facebook. And following her outing, many other photographers described their experiences on the blog below.

I don't know if having a blog focussed only on Katyal is a good thing - but I can understand the frustration, resentment and rage (that in India has been going on for years and years) that must be felt at seeing Katyal gladhanding it at places like Paris Photo, Fabrica, Kassel, ISSP, New York, Tokyo after being a serial harasser in India for so many years. He's not loved by many in India, and there is a sense of gobsmacked disbelief that he was so successful in other parts of the world. How come the Europeans are so dumb! Let's put it that way.

Katyal has been communicating with women in a similar way in Europe and other parts of Asia for many years. You're a woman, you're on Facebook. The proposition is likely to come. Very few people in Europe are at present willing to put their names forward publically, though many, many do so privately or in public gatherings.

The problem is while Katyal was known by many to be a sleazebag of the first order, in Europe, people (writers, editors, curators, festival directors etc) were promoting him and saying he was a great guy - including me. I apologise for that. Which only increased the reluctance of people in India, or South Korea, or Japan to come forward.

We're all connected in other words. We have a responsibility to who we like on Facebook, who we Share and all the rest of it. The problem is social media and photography culture is based on being positive. When things go bad, there's no easy way to take it back. And even if there is, if you have said this person's great and then it turns out they are not, the easy thing to do is pretend you didn't say it. The easiest thing is to ignore the problem.

This is not a problem that should be ignored. But at the moment, apart from a few organisations, this is something random individuals are trying to tackle on an isolated international basis.

But surely this is something the big photographic organisations and festivals should be dealing with. And this would help in people feeling the need to have social media witch-hunts - these are not good.

Photographic organisations need to take some responsibility for their actions and their influence (which they are always happy to proclaim in good times). They need to put policies in place that have some kind of strategy that can make it unacceptable for people to use portfolio reviews, workshops or lectures as opportunities to hit on the female (or male) participants.

And there should be an organisation that oversees this, something that has the ability to deal, on an globally institutional level, with the kind of opportunistic harassment and exploitation that the above case exemplifies.

At the weekend there was a really successful conference in London called Women in Photography. This wasn't about the issues mentioned above, it was about representation of women in photography and it sounds like it was brilliant. But there should be an organisation that does deal with and advocate on the issues mentioned above. It shouldn't be down to random individuals or random blogs. It needs something more.

So I'll throw this out there. Who's going to deal with this? I'm not. Who is?

Or, maybe it's not really a problem. And we can just ignore it.

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!

Dalstony Anatomy takes the Banana, the Cassava and the Yam!

Here's a review of the wonderful Dalston Anatomy I did for Manik Katyal over at Emaho Magazine. It looks much nicer there. 

Every now and then, a photography book comes along that looks completely different. Dalston Anatomy by Lorenzo Vitturi is one of those books; a sculptural, colour-soaked dance through the community of Dalston’s Ridley Road Market.

The photographic music starts with the cover, which is decorated with an African-themed fabric sourced in the market. Open the pages and the colour gets straight into its rhythm. A statue of pig trotters against a red background segue into a portrait of a local resident wearing a Hello Kitty Hat with that red background picking up the beat. The white goes to green and then we see a collage consisting of a 2-dimensional portrait of a woman, her hair wrapped in white fabric, with another piece of cloth nailed over the portrait.

Right from the start, Vitturi’s organic colour-based approach jumps off the page. This is a book with a rhythm and a sophistication that goes beyond the simple two-dimensional image. Instead pictures and objects are modified to create what Vitturi sees as an anatomical dissection of the market, products and people of Ridley Road.

Vitturi’s role as a photographer is to reimagining these elements into a sequence that revealed the deeper layers of the market; Vitturi sees himself as a photographic surgeon, using the scalpel of his lens to uncover the anatomy of Dalston’s Market.

Strangest of all in this mix are the sculptures that Vitturi made and photographed in his studio. These are precarious affairs, short-lived concoctions that call to mind the primitive art that can be found in Sigmund’s Freud’s house, non-mechanical combines that are half-Danny Treacy and half Robert Rauschenberg.

One sculpture is of half a cassava sitting on a fish head, with acid-coloured hair breads reaching out. At the base of the sculpture there is a scattering of a pink powder. The Freudian reference invites us to analyse the contents of the sculpture, and lead us into the cosmopolitan community that forms the clientele for the market.

Another sculpture shows unknown tubers piled on top of a cracked open coconut. At its base is a sprinkle of yellow powder. Across the page the yellow powder appears again, scattered over the face of a woman dressed in red. She’s wearing beads in the colours of Ghana, part of an continuous reference to the diversity of the people who work, shop and live in Ridley Road.

The ethnic make-up of the market is further explored the text that runs through the middle of the book; pawpaw or papaya, Jesus Saves, Dominican Mangoes, Yiddish women in wigs and people come and gone are all referenced. African, Asian, Hindu, Muslim and Jew rub together. There are Pakistanis and Turks and old-style cockneys from an area of London that has been first port of call for newly arrived migrants to the city for hundreds of years. Where once it was Jews and Jamaicans fleeing pogroms or seeking work, now Turks and Poles who are coming into the area; and using its market as a recognisable place of refuge in a city that is less welcoming to the outsiders than it once was.

Dalston Anatomy is a celebration of a London that once was, a memory of a city that is changing into a place for the rich and nobody else. There are vans going round London telling illegal immigrants to go back home, there is a social cleansing where the poor of London are being shipped out of over-priced housing to cheaper boroughs in the midlands and beyond. Once affordable properties  in once affordable boroughs are being redeveloped into gentrified properties for  a middle class that is being squeezed out of inner suburbs that have become the homes for the international super-rich. As the city gets richer, and the poor get poorer and so do the middle classes. As a result, great swathes of London are now barely affordable for anybody but the abominably wealthy.

And with that wealth comes conformity and a brutal blandness. Dalston Anatomy is the antithesis of bland. It is a book that celebrates the diversity of life; food, of dress, of being who you are. In terms of structure, it is supremely made, with colour, texture and shape feeding into a nuanced view of how the people, places and goods of  Ridley Road Market interact. More importantly than that, however, it is a book that has a heart, a rhythm and a soul. And that is what makes it so very special.