Home is not a Place

Always the Guest by Wendy Marijnessen is a delightful but curious book. It's a mix of text, archival images, and photographs from Pakistan, with some from the particular the Koohi Goth Women's Hospital, a place Marjinessen advocates and fund raises for (5 euros from each book sold goes to the hospital).

The text kickstarts the story, bridging from one kind of domestic to another, mixing the personal image with the photojournalistic, mixing genre and voice as she goes. Marijnissen tells the story of her childhood, of her mother's struggle with cancer, her death, and that of her father some years later. It's a hammer blow to her heart, one that leaves her lost and reeling.

Where, she wonders, is home.

Faded snapshots of a distant life punctuate these thoughts, a dreamlike reverie of what once was - though even here the cracks appear, her mother and father standing together, united in life as they became in death, as a child (even Wendy or her younger sister) stand back to the camera to one side.

Confusion reigns in her life until she crosses the border from India into Pakistan and makes her way to the Women's Hospital. There she witnesses birth, she experiences death at close-quarters, in the vacuum of cultural expectations she finds herself again. The flow of life in Karachi, the food, the smells, the easy familiarity create a space for her. Even the crows become symbols of life.

And amidst that explosion of life, she finds a little corner of herself.

It's a story of rebirth, of finding a place in a country where she has no place, which is a vacuum to her, but where life, with all its celebrations, its sufferings, its failings, is all around.

It could go wrong in all kinds of ways here but it doesn't, there is a genuine sense of Marijnissen grappling to express her loss, her self, her idea of being through the images she makes, the images that have been bequeathed to her, the way and the roles those images play in the defining of who you are. That's a very unusual thing to do.

The family photos are mixed with what look like polaroids from Pakistan, parallel images that make the case for this new life morphing into the old, so that genre is serving a purpose and is part of the narrative in itself - not explicitly, but embedded into the story telling.. Also mixed in are larger black and white images, the realities, both harsh and pleasurable, of life folded in the visual flow.

I don't know if it's always successful (what book is?) in the telling of the story, but who cares? It's tells a personal story and it doesn't  follow all the conventions that you get in the telling of those stories. It's a bit odd in other words.

And that fits the theme of the story, an idea of never finding home that is common to so many yet never really expressed. For Marijnissen, the question of whether it's in Karachi or in Antwerp is never quite answered. In Always a Guest, Home is an emotional state where emotion happens, where human contact happens, where you are a person.

Or perhaps, as James Baldwin states at the beginning of the book, it's not a place at all, it's an irrevocable condition.

Buy the Book here.

Anne de Gelas and the Recovery of Self

So there are people who aren't written about and one of the pleasures of this site is I can write about them and hopefully more people get to see their work.

One of the least-written about artists is Anne de Gelas. I wrote about her beautiful but tragic L'Amoureuse five years ago. This told the story of Anne's search for herself following the death of her husband on a day out at the beach.


T., my lover and father of my son, died on April 5, 2010 of a brain stroke. He fell beside us on a beach at the North Sea. The violence of his death put me in front of a big void…a silence that echoed in my head only equal to the brightness of the blue sky which no planes crossed because of the ashes of a volcano in anger, my anger.

So the book's about the search for herself - which comes after the loss of self, the loss of multiple selves in fact, and the strategies employed to reconnect, to disconnect, or simply to evade the question.

It really is a most beautiful book and (even though it is in French) I find it hard to fathom that nobody else has written about it in the English language. Perhaps it's time for an English language edition.




Now de Gelas has a new book out. It's called Mère Et Fils (Mother and Son) and it's about how de Gelas's relationship with her son has changed, how her son has changed, the intensity that has become upon him since he became a teenager, since the death of his father. 

It's also about de Gelas herself, and the return to femininity and a desire that disappeared with the death of her partner. 

So it's a collaborative project, one of shifting identities, one that deals with the most difficult challenges that life can throw at us in a thoughtful and very moving way. Again, it helps if you speak French, but the depth of the work comes through no matter what the language. This is work that confronts life. 

See more images here. 

See the limited edition artist's book here

Maus: "Having a writer in the family is to have a traitor in it"

Continuing on the cartoon and animation theme are these images from the manga, Doubt. It is wonderful the way that visual tropes get poached and translated from one place to another. In yesterday's post, I looked at the use of still photographs in Black Lagoon ( an anime which was heavily influenced by the films of Quention Tarantino, a film maker who was heavily influenced by anime - as well as everything else )  and here you can see a little bit of Guantanamo creeping into the manga action.

The central symbol of Doubt is hanging rabbits. And as soon as you see hanging rabbits, you are absolutely into Art Spiegelman and Maus; the link is inescapable It's how you get from Japanese teen fiction to the Holocaust in one easy step. Such is the magic of the visual world.

Maus is the phenomenal story of Art Spiegelmann's father and the holocaust. But it's also a story about family, relationships and the destruction the Holocaust wrought after the fact. It's a story in which Jews are depicted as mice, Germans as cats, Poles as pigs, Americans as dogs and French as frogs. That notwithstanding, it's a story that Spiegelmann insisted should be filed in the non-fiction section of bookshops. And quite right he was too.

But in Maus, amidst the mice, and the cats and pigs, there are photographs. There are cartoons of photographs and then there are 'real' photographs; three of them. One of Spiegelmann's brother Richelieu (who died before he was born), one of his father, and one of Spiegelmann with his mother.

In Family Frames, Marianne Hirsch writes about how these images ask how 'different media - comics, photographs, narrative, testimony' create multiple voices that may 'definitively eradicate any clear-cut distinction between documentary and aesthetic.'

Maybe, and maybe for Spiegelmann including these images reconstitutes a nuclear family that once was and now is reimagined in a haze of Spiegelmann's  'postmemory' ( that's a memory where the personal and historical overlap).

The top image is of Richeu, the brother Spiegelmann never met. He was poisoned before deportation so 'he wouldn't suffer in the death camps.' The picture is a longing, a memory that isn't, of a being together that never happened. The picture introduces a chapter, it's outside the narrative. It's a stamp of personal sorrow and regret.

The picture of his mother is one of a meeting of histories; Spiegelmann's personal history, that of his family and that of the Holocaust, with the history of his mother smothered; she killed herself in 1968 when Spiegelmann was just out of 3 months in a mental hospital. In the chapter that follows, the mice and cats and pigs of the rest of Maus are replaced by human figures and it's Spiegelmann who is now wearing the camp uniform. He's been transported into the hell that his parents lived through but now it's one of family anguish and guilt with an overlay of the Holocaust to make things even worse.

The picture of his father is a 'souvenir photo'. It shows him after liberation in a borrowed camp uniform provided by the studio where the picture was taken. It's the picture he sent his wife, Anja, to show he survived. He didn't send a picture of himself in civilian clothes, but in camp stripes. But they're souvenir stripes, ironed and clean, and Vladek is full-cheeked and bright eyed. He's showing 'their common past, their survival, perhaps their hope for a future,' says Hirsch. Spiegelman didn't sentimentalise his father in Maus, he portrayed him with all his flaws and in the book stated that he could barely stand to be in the same room as him, so there might be a bit of that coming up in the photograph as well.

"Having a writer in the family is to have a traitor in it," says Spiegelman and the treachery here is the refusal to conform to the idealised view of what a father, a family, a survivor should look like. And it might be that Spiegelman's brutal familial view is slipping into how his father portrait is used in the book. It's another kind of alchemy at play here, one that works at a subconscious level.

The photographs then are fragments, part of the 'testimonial chain' that make us identify with the survivor. And the whole of Maus is made up of framed fragments in 'an aesthetic that is indistinguishable from the documentary.'

But at the same time the photographs jump out of this past/present chain as something that is instantly recognisable as a photograph but at the same time an unfamiliar part of a history 'we cannot assimilate', 'a past that will neither fade away nor be integrated into the present.'


The picture of Spiegelmann's father is also a kind of trophy picture. Vladek is reclaiming himself and is wearing the clean, lice-free skin of the thing that tried to kill him. He's making himself a human again and he's giving the finger to the dehumanisation of those millions that were killed in Auschwitz and in the other campls.

Cake, Cake and More Cake

In the UK we have a TV programme called The Great British Bake Off. It's presented by Mary Berry (imagine Margaret Thatcher crossed with The Terminator but nice) and Paul Hollywood (housewives favourite, if you're the kind of housewife who likes them not so nice). There are two comedians who run around to no good effect.

And then there are the people who do the baking. They're lovely. And the stuff they make is, on the whole lovely. Last night they did extreme dough; so they made doughnuts and fruit breads. The basic upshot is that you come out of it desperate to bake cakes (or bread or doughnuts). It makes you hungry. And even when the cakes don't turn out right, then you can play one-upmanship and say well I could do better than that. Last night they made a Croatian version of potica, which is something my wife makes for Christmas every year. But hers is far better and truer and all the rest of it than any of the chocolate infested dreck they had on last night.

So you win both ways.



Which brings me to my last family themed book of the week, Lots of Cake by Laura Curran. This is a modest book which looks at her mother and the way she celebrates every festival possible. I like that idea.

So we see snippets from birthdays, Christmases, Halloweens and various fancy dress parties. The pictures are rough, but it has a touch of the KayLynn Deveney's about it with its emphasis on the small details and the contrast of warm interiors with the dreich exteriors.

There are arts and crafts, the painting of banners and the hanging up of bunting. There's dressing up; for Halloween and for other events. There's one where Curran's mother (I think) and two guests stand in leopard skin blouses and shirts. I've always wanted a leopard skin jacket (a gold lame jacket too) so that gave me a twinge of envy.




We see the baking, the recipes and we see the cakes. My favourite is definitely the one with RIP printed on it - is this a Wake Cake (does such a thing exist) or a Halloween Cake. It's a quiet book so though you see the cakes they are part of a broader household celebration, the events that are created by Curran's mother, the events that add so much to the lives of everybody around her.

Buy the Book Here

Other Pictures: Metaphorical Photography

I had the rare pleasure last month of talking to Miles Aldridge about his book of family pictures, called Other Pictures. This was for a family book feature in the April edition of BJP.

Other Lives is a book with two halves, one of the life before children, where Aldridge hangs out with his girlfriend/wife Kristen McMenamy (a supermodel), travelling from shoot to fashion show and living in hotel rooms along the way. It's looks exhausting.

And that is where Other Lives begins, in the fashion world, with a sheet taken from the notebooks Aldridge kept for ideas, timetables and sketches. On the sheet, there’s a handwritten work schedule that goes from New York to London to Paris to Milan. There’s a checklist of fashion houses he’s shooting for, sketches of Kristen and some canoodling doves and then an insight into the toll his schedule is taking on him. “I am travelling very fast between New York and Paris on campaigns and editorials,” it reads. “I remember my life before. The one where I would spend the whole day at the Everyman Cinema watching old movies. The days seemed to drag on in a gentel comforting with the promise of a beer at the Hollybush after. Now I scramble from bed to airport to studio to lab to meeting barely having time to do up my shoe-laces. It may destroy me. Part of me doesn’t care if it does. Is this because I feel that so much of what I do is meaningless or because I have already done quite a lot. I don’t know. My first child is due in two months maybe she will give my life more focus.”

The life with McMenamy is in black and white, the second half ( the life after children ) is in colour. The second half is dreamy, the first half is concrete and is a kind of discourse on the modelling, body and the way that it changes. Frustratingly, I can't really show those - they are not available for certain areas of the public arena, something that is interesting in itself. But the book is wonderfully put together, with the first half really setting the scene.

Happy New Year

Happy New Year to you all.

The picture is especially for all those on the annual wagon again. My English grandmother is second from the left, it's from Chorley in 1913, and it's a Methodist temperance march.

I think.