Only the Sky Remains Untouched

 all pictures copyright Claire Felicie


It was a real pleasure to revisit Carolyn Drake's Wild Pigeon last week. It's such a beautiful book with such a powerful message. The images are fantastic and the way they were made (they were collaged by the people who feature in the book) adds to the whole package. I've had a fair few people tell me the photobook is over and it is. The generic photobook that is, the boring photobook, the bad photobook. But the brilliant photobook isn't. It's alive and kicking. There just aren't that many of them.

Wild Pigeon is designed by Syben Kuiper and, he shows that great design does make a difference, I can think of a few badly designed books that would have been turned into something quite different with a bit of intelligent design. But there you go. He costs money. And not all of us have it.


On Friday I also wrote about the students I used to teach in my old job 16-19 kids learning English for Speakers of Other Languages. About half of the kids came from difficult backgrounds, or had had/were having difficult experiences, horrific experiences even.

There used to be some support for them, not much but more than there is now. For those who were refugees or asylum seekers it was pitifully little. Even when you saw organisations saying they support people with psychological, housing, financial, gender-based problems it didn't mean that they did. And if they did, then the funding they had was insufficient and barely scratched the surface.

One of the biggest problems some of our students had was PTSD. They didn't know they had it, but they did. I remember conversations with students who would talk about their experiences back in the country they had come from. Sometimes it was a weird form of nostalgia which marked an ending of sorts. I remember kids talking about watching the firefights in their hometown, and the excitement when the rockets started going off, or describing the strange rush of being on a bus running along a canyonside roadway with bandits shooting at them. Another student had an RPG explode in the room where he was sitting. It killed his brother. And yet another, who spoke with bitterness, described being deserted by relatives and left to take his four brothers and sisters across a border to a refugee camp. It took him four days and he has never forgiven those who left him in this situation.

We had kids who'd been kept in containers, or locked in back-rooms, or witnessed mass killings, who had woken up in mass graves, or woken up next to bodies on a lorry going overland. That's just the stuff they'd talk about. There were other things they didn't talk about, or would only hint at.

They had nightmares about it. They had anxiety. They got depressed. They got terrified. They woke up in the middle of the night with the night terrors. They had Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. And they were kids. And there was no help for them. There was said to be help for them, but there wasn't. Indeed, the problem was barely recognised.

It's a little more recognised for adults, especially those with a military background. But still there's precious little help even for them. Even in a wealthy country such as the Netherlands where the number of traumatised soldiers is relatively low.

But they do exist and they are the subject of Claire Felicie's Only the Sky Remains Untouched, a book designed by Syben Kuiper that arrived in the post on Friday. Normally it would sit on a pile for a month, but this blog is organic and impestuous and its content is determined by circumstance and it is a quite beautiful book.

First of all, it's a tall book. It's a black and white book with the title embossed on the front page, To read it against the black and white picture of a brick wall is near impossible. You have to turn the page and read the mirror image.

Open the book and there are full-bleed edgelandy landscapes of ditches, of forests, of a dilapidated factory. It's very dark. We go inside and see the verso torso of a man in combat fatigues, the head divided and coming up on the recto side at the back of the book.

Flick the page and the same thing happens, except now on the left there's a scrawled, scarred wall and on the right the torso of a man. The man is a former soldier and he's got a name, Marnix. From the back of the book we learn he was in Afghanistan in 2009, a place where he witnessed a rocket going off in front of him with devastating consequence. He's had PTSD ever since.

There's Oscar who was recruited by Mossad but left when he refused to shoot a prisoner with a sack over his head, there's Dominique who lived off Pringles for three weeks and lost 40 pounds when  he got trapped in his radio post in Afghanistan, and there's Armand who was one of the first on the scene after a land mine had blown the occupants of an army truck to smithereens.

There are more portraits made in astonishingly trusting circumstances and the walls get more scarred and battle-worn as well they might. All the pictures in the book were shot in a former 'military terrain and weapons factory' in the Netherlands, a fitting place for the portraits to be made. The weapons factory sits in the 'military terrain' of a 'shock forest', a place were explosives were once tested. So the symbolism in the split images is matched by the historicity of the place.

Only the Sky Remains Untouched is a moving book made for moving reasons. Cecilie describes how people with PTSD 'are emotionally wounded and carry those wounds with them for the rest of their lives. Not only the people portrayed in this book suffer from the consequences of PTSD, which includes reliving the horrors of war, nightmares, sudden outbursts of anger and intense shock reactions. Their failies and everyone around them suffer too.

Felicie made it 'with the aim of breaking the taboo that surrounds PTSD.' Here she focuses on PTSD for veterans. There's a huge taboo. PTSD is not a clean flesh wound. It's messy and dirty and talks about the atrocities of war. But I think the idea of there being a taboo applies even more to civilians. Because to recognise the mental wounds of war is to recognise the horrific experiences people have gone through, It's to recognise the depth of the problem, and the need for those wounds to be healed. That is a huge job and it is one that needs to be addressed. And of course it's not.

Buy Only the Sky Remains Untouched here. 

Hijab, Headscarves and Freedom of Choice

pictures from Amak Mahmoodian's Shenasnameh

I used to teach ESOL to 16-19 year olds in Bristol; it was a mixture of migrants, refugees and asylum seekers with the full spectrum of difficulties you can imagine. It was the most difficult job I've done, working in institutional, organisational circumstances that were far from ideal. But they were also the nicest, most lively people and it was often a joy to teach them and the people I worked with directly were all committed, hard-working and transparent.

We had people who were literally just off the boat, and we had people who had been in the country for years, but various things (like the education system as it stands) hadn't worked out for them. Identity politics was live and real at the college, but wasn't quite like you read about in books. It was confused, mixed up and had a hundred social, cultural, religious, political, national and regional reference points.

Dress was always a key thing, especially among the girls, many of whom were of muslim background. I remember one girl in particular, who had spent five years at Cary Grant's old school, Fairfield High. She told me of how she used to wear 'Western' dress to school - and how she got harassed by both her Somali friends and other students. She'd be getting told what to wear by everyone.

In the end she went to school in hijab because that made life easier for her; she was who she was expected to be and she could sit at the back of the class and be ignored by every side, including those people who would tell her that wearing hijab was a foreign thing and those who would tell her that wearing a skirt was a foreign thing.

It was fascinating to see the politics of dress and how girls would influence each other. There would be those who would gradually loosen their headscarf or take it off altogether when they did sports- and if one took it off, then the others would follow. But then in other years you'd get the ones who would toe the party line and berate anyone not doing likewise- and then even getting girls to do sport was an effort in itself. There was always an unofficial power struggle going on with some people trying to impose views that had come from outside; from siblings or parents or the mosque.

Reina Lewis writes about this in her essay Hijab Stories: Choice, Politics, Fashion (in Fashion Cultures Revisited) Lewis talks about the complexity interweaving of identification connected with wearing the hijab, in both the positive and negative sense. It identifies it as both a positive choice and a generational choice, and talks about how hijab-wearing can be generationally 'upward' as well as 'downward.'

Lewis also touches on the idea of the idea of a non-consensual wearing of the hijab which is hugely relevant in countries where there is a compulsion for women to wear a particular type of dress, where it is enshrined into law and punishable by sanction.



(picture above from a demonstration against forced wearing of Hijab in Iran, 1979, I think)




Picture above from National Hijab Day in Pakistan. Er, yes. Read about it here. 

One of these countries where Hijab is compulsory is Iran, which is where Amak Mahmoodian comes from originally. Now she lives in Bristol (it's Bristol week on the blog) and has used different strategies to record how Iranian women preserve and express their identities beneath the head scarf, how control is enforced and resisted. Shenasnameh (see above) looks at collected passport pictures (and these are really impressive as a collection - his project is still developing) and how identity is presented on a photographic, individual and state level. The project below is called Gereh and looks at the tying of head scarves and what is expressed through that.  .. and the one below.

I also asked Amak a few questions about her projectsThis is what she said.

Photography is the most pertinent medium for me, because of its relationship to reality, its indexicality and its traditional links to documentary.

The photographic and the video content of my project explore the cultural and the social life of   Iran, with an emphasis on religion, gender and identity.  Using a structure that evokes the classic Middle Eastern collection of oriental stories, my project explores the subtleties of everyday life in contemporary Iran and specific codes of conduct that influence a person's behaviour, relationship and sense of self.

I am trying to examine the modification that had taken place in Iran since the revolution in 1975, the condition of women, social censorship and diversity. My main theme is the visual representation of feminine identity, and in particular the notion of double identity as evidenced by the strong contrast between the presentation of the feminine in public and private spaces.

Therefore I show a woman's photo to you, you see her, the same woman that I am seeing. Her secret is at least penetrable by someone, for me and for her. You can also get to know this woman through the photographs.

This woman could be my mother, my teacher, my friend or even me, myself. In fact my subjects are the ones with whom I have been living for years and this project is the narration of my life too.

The woman who I represent in different projects ;  False face, seal, Determinate, knot and videos,  she is not voiceless, she talks without using a word,with her scarf's knot, her fingerprint, her necklace and her silence. A small part of her being can show how different  she is from the others.