Chronicle: No Progress, No Photography, Old Country, New Country

In 2014, Sergiy Lebedynskyy and Vladyslav Krasnoshchok self-published Euromaidan. It was a modest perfect-bound book consisting of images of the demonstrations in Kiev that winter. The book was handmade and when I got my badly folded copy I felt a strange resonance. It was my kind of book, inasmuch as I'm terrible at packing things and I can’t fold paper or do creases very well either.

The pictures inside were great though. It was a classic protest book in the Japanese sense, filled with  images of sturm und drang. It was are-bure-bokeh Kiev and it caused a stir in photobook land that went beyond its modest means.

Now Lebedynskyy and Krasnoshchok have published a new book with Die Nacht. It’s called Chronicle and it sums up their photographic activities as part of the Shilo Group. And this time it’s not a modest affair. It’s stitched at the side (that’s called open thread stitching) as are so many books these days, and the cover is made of simple brown card. But there at the top is the title, laser cut out of its brown surroundings, circled with what looks like brown smoke marks.

Open the pages and there’s a brief introduction by Lebedynskyy that begins. ‘We were taught in school that we were born in the best country and that we were sure to get the victory over everybody else. In a little while the country seized (sic) to exist. It is believed that the 90s were a time of changes and cataclysms, but for us it has all started just now.’



 So it’s a book that is about the birth of a country (Ukraine) against a backdrop of the death of a country (the Soviet Union). The pictures were shot over five years between 2010 and 2015 and are divided into 3 chapters, printed on 3 separate paper stocks.

The first chapter looks at pre-Maidan Ukraine, through images from Kharkiv (best known in photography for being Boris Mikhailov’s hometown – the place where he shot Case History). The second looks at the demonstrations in Maidan, Kiev. And the final section looks at the ongoing conflict taking place in Donetsk and Lugansk.




Depending on how world affairs progress in the next few years,  as well as being a book about the birth of one nation (Ukraine) and the death of another (the Soviet Union), it is also about the possible death of one country (Ukraine) and the possible rebirth of another (the Soviet Union). Which makes things very complicated.

The Kharkiv section is from 2010-2013. It shows black and white pictures of brutalist architecture, farmyards and snow-covered streets. There are stray dogs and telephone wires so the Japanese influence is apparent.



But through all the grain and the mist, there are bare-legged women standing on street corners, weather worn faces, tattoos and chimney stacks. The blacks are not quite black, they’re more grey, the pictures are falling apart and the sad nostalgia (in the picture of the man reading a paper on a subway train for example) is calculated and serves a purpose. Mikhailov is alive in these pages.
The Maidan section shows the events in Kiev from 20th January to 10th February 2014. Here the pictures are printed proper Moriyama style, in full-bleed with deep blacks and grainy whites. So we get the piles of tires, the flames, the smoke and the barricades. It’s a blurry mass of chaos that seems quite familiar.

It might be that it seems too familiar. There is so much blurry graininess around that it has become somewhat trite; the angst-filled equivalent of an Ansel Adams inspired landscape or an Edward Weston copied nude. In Chronicle however, the black and white mannerisms serve a purpose and are also built into the process of making the pictures look so old, and so grimly nostalgic.


The pictures in Chronicle were made on old film bought on ebay, and printed on a Soviet paper called Bromopress - it was discontinued in 1991. The rationale for this process is, says Lebedynsky, that , ‘It is cheap, the process of print development goes on it's own, always unpredictable, with bad "quality". In my opinion this aesthetic just fits perfectly for the place where no progress is made, also where photography is not treated as art, you can not even study it.’

This artlessness is most marked in the final section where the pictures were made in the Donetsk and Lubansk regions from December 2014 – April 2015. Here the paper is grey, the pictures greyer. Here, we’re in wartime and, as with Lens Liebchen’s Stereotypes of War, the Shilo Group are playing to that. Armed soldiers, burned-out buildings and shattered bridges testify to that fact.

This looks like an old war in an old country. And it is supposed to because it is an old war in an old country, one that keeps repeating itself wherever in the world you choose to go. All made in a style that, says Lebedynskyy, ‘…Just fits perfectly for the place where no progress is made, also where photography is not treated as art, you can not even study it.’

It looks great and it's smart, both on the surface and beneath the surface. I get the feeling that, despite all the looking like war, there's a lot going on that I don't have the background to detect, either photographically or politically. It's a fast burner and a slow burner at the same time.

Buy Chronicle here. 

Kazuma Obara's Silent Histories

The shortlist for the Aperture First Photobook Prize is up and there are so many really good books in there (including old favourites like  Hidden Islam, Father Figure, War Porn and Euromaidan as well as great books like Epilogue, Red String and Andrea Botto's Number Book!). It's strange how the First Photobook Prize seems so much more interesting than the other Aperture book awards. It's also strange how small some of the editions are. And how concerned they are.

For example, Silent Histories came in a really small edition of 45. And it was expensive. But it sold out very quickly because it is an meticulously made photobook that combines contemporary, historical and archive photography with first hand accounts of what it's like to grow up with a war-inflicted disability in post-war Japan. It helps redefine events that happened a long time ago and it's a campaigning photobook. And it deals with a difficult subject; Japan and the Second World War. A that, despite all the fetishisation of the Japanese photobook, isn't talked about too much. I'm not sure why. 

So I wrote about Silent Histories for Emaho Magazine. This is what I said. 

Grave of the Fireflies is an anime film about the Second World War in Japan.  The main characters are a young boy and his younger sister. Their house is bombed, their mother is killed, they are shunned by their family and they go to live beyond the town in a life where the food runs out. It goes beyond miserable. I won’t give away the ending but it is one of the most tragic films I have ever seen, a film where the people who neglect and mistreat these children are almost as bad as the people who bombed them out of their house and home.

Silent Histories, a handmade book made in a sold-out edition of 45 by Kazuma Obara  shares many characteristics with Grave of the Fireflies. It’s a book that details the suffering endured by civilians who were injured in the American bombing of Japan. And it’s fantastic.

As an object it is beautiful. It comes bound in ox-blood and brown tweed, with a family portrait from 1930s Japan on the cover. But in the middle of the picture the face of the youngest family member is whited out. She’s missing. She’s hiding herself. This is a book about people who were destroyed by the war, who hide themselves away.

Open the book and the adventure begins. There are inserts; one class picture, four certificates and three replicas of a Japanese propaganda magazine dedicated to showing civilians how to defend themselves against aerial bombing.

The introduction to the book details the destruction to life and property endured: ‘The indiscriminate bombing by US forces during the Second World War massacred 330,000 and left 430,000 Japanese civilians injured.’

It highlights the resultant suffering of survivors who, ‘…have lived in the shadows, trying to hide their scars and avoid causing someone trouble by being visible, trying hard to cover their pain.’ And that is what the book is about, the Japanese people who have suffered because of the war.

The first subject is Teruko Anno. We see childhood snaps of her, class photos and the background she came from. But we also see waves of American bombers in the sky, their bombs dropping and a destroyed city. The message is clear. America did this. America is to blame.

We also see Teruko at the doctors, her suffering and pain still ongoing, and we hear her story, of how she was bombed in 1945, how she lost her leg, of the malnutrition that took her brother’s life and of the ‘…discrimination and prejudice against the wounds of war.’

Eiko Kobayashi tells her story through an illustrated insert. Her house was firebombed, she ran and was hit by shrapnel, she ended up in a hospital where she stayed for four days until her parents finally found her. It’s a story filled with the wanton violence of war, and what it does to the people who live under it. Kobayashi also suffered prejudice after the war ended. She was blamed for a defective product at the company she worked for; ‘”It’s because you employ people like her with bad legs.”’ And so she resigned, but from then on simply agreed with people who expressed their prejudice. ‘First and foremost, I had to prioritize making a living.’

The tales of suffering and prejudice continue. Mariko Fujiwara’s left leg was injured by a bomb two hours after she was born. She tells us how she went to a public washhouse when she was a child. In the evening to avoid other people. But one day a boy and a girl saw her injured leg. ‘”Mom, look, what a strange leg!” Their mother said, “If you do bad things, your legs become like that too!” When I heard that, I felt so sad.

There is a long list of classic Japanese photobooks that deal with how awful the Americans were in the Second World War, that examine the horrors of the blanket bombing of cities and the cruel devastation Hiroshima and Nagasaki. What’s worrisome is, in a country that has never been able to take responsibility for the crimes it committed during the Second World War, the lack of photobooks or photography that recognise the horrors Japan inflicted on the populations of other Asian countries.  There are Dutch books, Korean books and Chinese books, but Japanese? Japanese textbooks still skim over what Japan did in the Second World War. It would be nice if there photobooks that did otherwise.

But in a strange and very quiet way, Silent Histories is a step in the right direction. Though it addresses the indiscriminate cruelty of the American bombing campaign, it also addresses the failings of the Japanese government to adequately compensate the victims of the bombing. In a postscript, the photographer Obara writes how he went to attend a ‘…signature-collecting campaign for legislation supporting victims of the air attacks.’ But  the legislation hasn’t come, there is no support from a government which still provides compensation for ‘former military personnel, civilian employees and surviving relatives’.  The case is coming up to the Supreme Court and the next step is for the victims of the bombings to show the scars they have kept hidden for almost 70 years.

So ultimately the book is about making visible the scars and pain of war, of recognising the suffering that civilians go through everywhere, and ending all wars. It’s a dream, but it’s a good one, delivered in outstanding powerful fashion.

Don't Believe the Hype. It's not really Hype

picture by Eamonn Doyle

The Amazon Turns Everything to Shit post got a lot of attention and a few misunderstandings. Some people thought I meant that photobook-making should be some hairshirt cut-and-paste budget operation. And it can be. Café Royal Books make really cheap saddle-stitched (stapled) photobooks on a budget. And they look great. Head over here and buy some.

And some people thought I meant that you should only make really expensive books, bound in  unicorn hide and presented in a box carved out of a single piece of the inner-most rings of the tree of life. And  that’s fine (except for the tree of life and unicorn parts - find something less destructive for your books please. Don't be destructive and vulgar) if you have the cash. Amc have the cash and they make beautiful books.

But that’s projection I think, and most of the piece was on the business of photobooks and the hype of it all and the central idea that the hype is really hyped. The photobook world  is not that big, most of the numbers and prices and deal-making that you see does not really exist – it’s all smoke and mirrors.

So with that in mind, I thought it would be good to present a couple of hyped books (that will probably sell out in the next couple of months and be listed for a few hundred pounds on ebay).

The first is Eamonn Doyle’s i. I heard about this book from a student (thank you Paul Fox) who saw it on the Hardcore Street Photography flickr page where Martin Parr, in a post titled, 'The best new street photo book I have seen in a decade', said: 

Hello hard core street people!
Take a look at this book, very small edition ( 750) self published by an
Irish photographer, beautiful printing, and great images.
I am sure it will sell out pretty quickly.
On top of this the simplicity and directness of the images is brilliant.
You heard about it here first.
Martin Parr

I don't know if  it is the the best new street photo book, but it is a lovely book with a very simple design that highlights Doyle's main subjects; old people on the streets of Dublin. There's a focus on backs, on coats, on the weight of the world on their shoulders, and he hits the street photo sweet spot of getting both a sense of the democratic into the book and doing something that is really simple; because most of the time, Doyle photographs pictures of backs. 

Maybe that's one of the reasons it's such a powerful book. We have all photographed pictures of backs, we've all thought about them, but Doyle is the person who has got in there first-ish and invested the time and the money in making it something that looks fantastic. 

And he spent money on it; on the design, the paper, the binding, the whole process. He's gone down the route of putting in £20,000 give or take five grand into publishing his own book. And he's sent them out to people like Parr and got a big bite. He's lucky in that respect but a lot of background hard work has also gone into the book. 

Parr's comment instantly rippled the book out to other people (and he recommended it as a book of the week for Photo Eye, and I have reviewed it for them) and that is helping very much in selling the book. So it's a hyped book and it will almost sell itself. That, very simply, is how hype, in photobook terms, works. I don't really see it as hype though, or as a bad thing. If that's what hype amounts to, it's pretty lame. Get over being affected by it. And if you can't get over it, tThe only way to prevent it is to stop people giving opinions about books. But opinions about books and the expression of those opinions are what makes it all so interesting.

Eamonn Doyle's i is a book where the photographer had money to spend. Another book that is getting a lot of attention (and I saw it on Josef Chladek's excellent photobook showcase) is Euromaidan by Vladislav Krasnoshek and Sergiy Lebedynskyy.

This is a book that memorialises the protests in Kiev. But it's a book that is made on a limited budget - it's handmade with a sewing-machine binding on 21cm x 15cm paper - which I'm guessing was printed off digitally somehow. 

It's a protest book then, which brings Japanese aesthetics to a 21st century conflict - which is also kind of obvious but Krasnoshek and Lebedynskyy got in there and made it happen. I guess their book will sell out too and, like Eammon Doyle's book, be listed for outlandish prices on ebay. 

But that's not happening yet. They're worth the £30 that you pay for them now. They're worth that now and even in the future, in monetary terms that's still what they're worth as far as I'm concerned. Because when you buy a photobook, the value is in the feel, in the touch, in the feel of the paper upon your naked flesh.... no that's nonsense! I'm going to get 10 of each. 2 x 10 x £200 = £4,000. Whoo - I'm in the money! Over £3,000 profit, etcetera, etcetera... continued in Delusional Hut, Daydream Beach, Fantasy Island, Parallel Universe in a galaxy far, far, four hundred volts please-------------------------------------------------------

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Buy Eamonn Doyle's i here. 

Buy Euromaidan here.

See more work on the Ukraine on Friday 2nd May at the Third Floor Gallery.

And read Oliver Burkeman on why  blame relatively harmless people much more than completely evil bastards for there misdeeds.