Stranger: A Dreamboat of a Book

If you're wondering how to make your pictures come alive, then look to Olivia Arthur and her new book Stranger.

It looks like a normal book with a normal cover. It's a what-if story - what if a man had survived a shipwreck off the coast of Dubai that happened 50 years ago and returned to the place 50 years later. How would they feel, how would they see, what would they do? Especially if they were a poor man, an Indian man, a man without status.

You open up Stranger and everything goes a little bit dreamy. It's hard to show on a screen because it is such a tactile book, a book printed on tracing paper in which one image melts into the one below till you become immersed in something that isn't so much a book as a kind of tracing paper shadow-play or lantern show. It's a dreamboat of a book, something that gets a life beyond the page. And if you're the kind of person who goes 'fiddlesticks to that, it's the pictures that matters, you just take a piece of white card (it even comes with the book. I didn't know what to do with it until I was told) and then you see the picture in its full glory.

You can't see the effect on the screen and you don't see it in the opened object. But once you get a short flow going it is like a film as you uncover one page after another and look for the story, and you feel the place flood into you.

The text is simple and direct. It builds the sense of Dubai as a city of the imagination. So there is a huge sense of place in there; to the extent that there is a large landscape element to it. There is also that combination of documentary and fiction (and a nod to Cristina de Middel at the start of the book) that is taking photography into new and exciting places. The tracing people lift and reveal has been used before, but I don't know if anybody has done it so beautifully. It extends the story-telling form and is something that feels lovely to the touch and the emotion created by the paper completely fits the circular narrative of the book. It's fantastic.

Buy the book here. 

The Spook Light. It's Spooky but is it Real?

I love the idea of the Spook Light. It's a great name for a light that mysteriously appears '...on a remote road deep in the Ozark Hills."

Spook Light Chronicles vol. 1 - the road and the light is an artist's book by Antone Dolezal and Lara Shipley that examines the strange phenomenon of the Spook Light. 

The book is a mix of found, appropriated and real-life-we-photographed-this pictures. These are mixed with text that takes us somewhere into the hearts and minds of Spook Light Country. Here's the place. They have an old map and that makes it Real! And because it's real, it's even scarier.

And Spook Light Country is a scary place; it's '...an insular community living in the heart of the Bible Belt where the struggle between heaven and hell factors into everyday conversation.'

They factor into the book, because for Dolezal and Shipley "...the Spook Light has come to represent for the people we meet a desire for redemption and the fear of slipping into darkness." The  Spook Light "...provides a reprieve from ordinary life."

So Dolezal and Shipley are cranking it up, and with a name like The Spook Light, what's not to crank. The first question on my lips is "Is it real?" I really want to know this and like to believe that it is real. And Dolezal and Shipley pointing me in that direction with pictures like the one below. That has to be real.

One picture titled the boys that scared me, shows a young man standing bare-chested in the roadway.He has got two star tatoos on his chest and his hands are bunched into fists. He has a kind of smile on his face, but it's not a very nice smile and the man in the background has a near empty bottle of Jack Daniels in his hand. There is tension in the air.

The caption reads:

I was kind of thinking what if the spook light were to come right here and collide with me and take my soul with it. And you guys would just have to leave me here, because I'd be a soulless man, just wandering down the road. 

There are more references to lost souls, the afterlife and it adds to the threat. The Spook Light is not benign. This is a book for suggestible people by, I'm hoping, suggestible artists. I know that if I was on the Devil's Promenade, more than a little bit of me would believe. No, let's be honest. All of me would believe. I'd be petrified with all that spookiness going on.

The found photographs build on this suggestibility and really make me believe. If it's old it must be true. The contemporary pictures of flashes of light add to this sense of threat while the lit landscapes add an alien element to the mental picture.

There are two more volumes to come in the series (the first is sold out). Hopefully by the end, I'll have the answer to my question. Is it Real?

I now Know how they felt when I killed them... Er, no, not really...

picture by Andy Fuller

I watched the Act of Killing again today, so I'll post on it again - why not. It's a film that is ostensibly about the slaughter of communists in Indonesia in 1965. But at the same time it's the story of a man called Anwar Congo. He's one of the killers - it's about his discovery of self through the making of the film by director Joshua Oppenheimer. Or his performance of the above through the making of the film by director Joshua Oppenheimer. 

But the very subject of the film is tremendously sensitive - the official line is that the communists were cruel and evil and so had to be killed, when really it was the government and military that were cruel and evil. To circumvent this problem, Oppenheimer tells Congo and his fellow gangsters ( in the government-sanctioned Pemuda Pancasila organisation) that he is making a film about them. 

So within the overall film there are multiple narratives - there is the official Indonesian government narrative of what happened in 1965, there is the gangster, narrative, there is a hidden official narrative (this is the one that permitted Oppenheimer to make his film), there is the victim's narrative, there is a narrative of truth, a narrative of realpolitik and a concealed emotional narrative that is gradually pealed back as we witness the transformation of Congo's mindset as he re-enacts his brutality. 

But this final narrative is disguised and distorted by other narratives - the gangsters know that people are looking at them, and perhaps they act according to that look - but then their vanity gets the better of them and the narrative of the film they think they are making overtakes them. 

Throughout the film, there are other layers - the fear that is acted out by the people performing in the film within the film is not always acted - it's sometimes real. The gangsterism and extortion we witness in the film is part of a wider commentary on how authority and power create it's own moral narrative. The victims here are purportedly communists, but this could be any victim of power anywhere in the world. Though peculiarly Indonesian, the themes of the film are defiantly universal. 

But the thing is - it all comes through this character, Anwar Congo - he's the front of the film, he's the one in whom the contradictions are played out. So although there are economic, political, religious, ethical and psychological layers to the film they are secondary. That's why the film works. Because we feel we know who the players are, even though we don't actually know who the players - perhaps because we don't know who the players are. 

The film's too long, it's not edited that well. it's patchy. But it's amazing and it's laugh-out-loud funny in the absurd venality and self-delusion of the film's main players. It's  a film where new layers emerge with each viewing. 

The man who oversaw the massacres was General Suharto. He became president till he was nudged out in 1998. But his memory is being resurrected - as you can see in this story here.