Random Conversations #7 - Exotic England

K: Sure I like it, but I want to know why you like it.

Me: Because the pictures don't look like other people's pictures of England. They don't even look like other pictures from the early eighties which was when they were taken. They don't really look like poor people pictures either. They look different.

K: Is looking different enough though?

Me: No, not really. It's more than that. The backstory of how Killip came to do the project is brilliant for a start - a kind of case study in documentary photography chickens coming home to roost in a good way. He went down to the beach where all these people were collecting coal from the sea - hence the title of the book, Seacoal - and and was just blown away by how medieval it all was. But when the coal collectors saw him, they told him to fuck off. They thought he was from the DHSS and was spying on them. So he fucked off and thought I'm not going there again.

Then a couple of years later he thought, what the heck, let's give it another go. And they told him to fuck off again - and charged him with the horse and carts they used to carry the coal. So he decided to go to where they drank and ask them again. So he went to the pub where they drank, walked through the door and the pub fell silent. Everyone stared at him. Then he told them what he wanted to do. Then they told him to fuck off. so he was just about to fuck off again, when a man walked in and said, hold on, do you remember me. Killip didn't remember him but the man, who was called Brian, remembered Killip taking his picture at a horse fair a few years before. And that's how the Seacoal pictures started. Killip stayed in a caravan on the beach for 14 months on and off and made his Seacoal photographs. .

K: Great back story but what about the pictures.

Me: They just look so bleak and raw, bleak in a way that no other pictures look bleak. And nobody is even noticing Killip half the time so everything is quiet and natural but with this harsh edge. Even when people are noticing him and posing, there is something very human about the faces. Not downtrodden even though the life looks tough. And not noble either. And the faces are kind of hard and soft at the same time, but always, always set against this beach where the pebbles are coal and you can almost see the wind and the cold, you can almost smell the salt blowing in from the east.

K: Sounds kind of exotic to me.

Me: No it's not.


K: But it doesn't exist anymore, this landscape and this community.

Me: No. Perhaps that's part of what makes it so good.

K: That it's rare, that it can't be photographed again.

Me: Yes. It's more than that but that's a part of it.

K: Sounds exotic to me.

Me: Well it's not.

K: But it's rare.

Me: Yes.

K: Does something have to be rare to be good?

Me: Uh?

K: I mean in photography, if something common and anybody can photograph it, then it can't really be anything special, can it? It becomes generic then.

Me: The way you're putting it, yes..

K: So something good has to have a rarity value. Like those giant pinhole pictures or the ones made with the massive camera.

Me: Up to a point yes,

K: Or Chris Killip's Seacoal because nobody else photographed it and it doesn't exist anymore?

Me: Maybe?

K: Which is rare. And so exotic.

Me: No, I don't think so. They're different.

K: Alright then. I suppose everybody loves Killip, don't they.

Me: Pretty much, yes.

K: You sure it's not a case of you liking him because everybody likes him.

Me: Absolutely not. He's properly good. And Seacoal is properly good.

K: I'll believe you. Let's watch some telly. What's on?

Me: Ooh, second part of the new Adam Curtis thing is on at 9. Excellent!

Osama Esid and Orientalism

Osama Esid is a Syrian-born, Minneapolis based artist who works with ideas of Orientalism - specifically how Western constructs of the exotic are also part of the 'Oriental' (Arab in this case) identity and world-view.

He cranks this up in his beautiful hand-tinted large format pictures that wind a mythologized past into an idealized present. We all like to mythologize the places we live/don't live - people do it in England, idealizing the simple life of Devon and Dorset and Cornwall, fantasizing about downsizing from London and moving to Bristol (aka Clifton) or Bath. In Indonesia, people living in Jakarta idealize Bali (just as we do), or talk about their dreams of living the simple peasant life in the kampung - with a golf course not too far away if possible but they don't mention that. Migrants do the same on their hell-trips across Asia, Africa and Europe, dreaming of a safe and prosperous England to get them through their journey, and millions more around the world hope to live out their very own American Dream - so as well as your down the line Edward Said style Orientalism there are countless variations on the theme and opposing, but really very similar, forms of Occidentalism.

So, although Esid deals quite specifically with Orientalist perspectives, he also deals with the universal virtue/vice of idealisation, something you could extend to far wider areas of representation - including my own current interest, that of childhood.

So it's good to see such universal themes dealt with so directly in his beautiful pictures. There is a sense of he's having his cake and eating it, but so what. Lots of people tint their pictures, lots of people pose workers with their tools in studios and hope something profound or beautiful will emerge - and most times nothing does and you get a cringeworthy mess. Esid's pictures aren't cringeworthy - they are lovely. And he gets to eat his cake.

His website is here, but I couldn't get past the beautiful music. The words below are from the gallery statement, and represent a middle way that could apply to almost anywhere in the world that is idealized or represented as some kind of exotic/paradise/Shangri-La. So not "grandiloquent hokum" (I think that matters, but I'm not entirely sure).

For Esid that image of Orient constructed by the West also penetrated the East, “the oriental fantasy exists on both sides”. Furthermore and here is where Esid’s motivation and inspiration lies, one can inquire into a stereotype to create new interpretations using its own language and mechanisms and feeding on those same inner contradictions, without needing to pigeonhole a culture.

Thus in the “Orientalism and Nostalgia” series, Esid reconstructs a theatrical period scenario but displaces it in full XXI century in one of the most important capitals of the region, Cairo. The aim of each piece is to acquire the atmosphere of those old vintage pictorialist photos, where beauty becomes the main protagonist. He highlights the more sensual side of Orientalism, referring to those essentially feminine spaces which also remind us of French XIX century painting. He retrieves the sensuality and eroticism in the gaze and enticing pose, although endowing his women with a defiant intensity, no longer passive and complacent, but on the contrary women who are in control of their bodies and their destinies.

By acknowledging beauty in this context, Osama Esid brings forth another representative twist, which is to try to modify the current widespread vision of his region, one characterised by images of war, terrorism and fundamentalism.

On the other hand, the “Workers of Cairo” series presents a direct contemporary account of the most common professions and jobs of this immense metropolis. Once again, however Esid portrays it as if it belonged to another time, endowing his models with a timeless quality. The strength of this series, which is so reminiscent of the work of August Sander, lies in forcing both the Western and Eastern audience to observe those armies of average men who create our day to day lives, the mundane heroes, who we refuse to acknowledge and would prefer to ignore.