My Eyes Are Bleeding!

Oh dear, I've got a headache coming on from looking at the darned computer screen for too long. Let's rest my eyes a little by letting them scan across the pages of a nice and soothing photobook.

How about this one? A Plastic Tool by Maya Rochat. This should do the trick.

Just open the pages and arrgghh,,,, my eyes! my eyes! They're bleeding!



OK, I exaggerate but not too much. A Plastic Tool is not a book of quiet photographs. If you want to be sure of buying a book that isn't quiet, this is the one. It's a Spinal Tap of a book where all the visual levels go up to 11, with pictures that makes the pictures in Bye Bye Photography or A Language to Come seem positively pastoral in comparison.

A Plastic Tool is something of an experiment in printing, so there's a reason for all the noise.  The basic idea is that Rochat is taking '...us into her own universe, a world mainly concerned with her immediate surroundings, tinged with mystery and blurring the boundaries between fiction and reality. Working with different media and materials, her work forms a vast web of intertwined images whose energy disturbs our habitual codes of interpretation and perception.'

No kidding. I have no idea what is happening in this beyond a general uneasiness to do with body mud, strange collages and gloomy interiors made merry with the full Rochat treatment. Other things disturbing our habitual codes of interpretations and perceptions are the range of print technologies on offer -  offset, stencil print and silkscreen all figure so there's a 'unique materiality'. It's tactile in other words, there's a three dimensional element to it.

It's abstract expressionist, riso-coloured, oil-textured, mud-splattered and much, much more. I don't know quite what to make of it. I haven't got a clue what's going on.

One thing's for sure though. Rochat is playing it safe with this one. She's giving it a go. And as always, that's probably a good thing. I think.

Buy the Book Here


A Plastic Tool, Maya Rochat

£65.00

Don't ask for the meaning, ask for the use!

EVA-04 by Sabine Schründer is a book about identity and how it is constructed. It's quite conceptual in some ways because it's based on a series of polarities (individual and the social, location and studio), but it has a heart and it tells a story that is both sometimes puzzling but also visually engaging. The clues click together, which is part of the point of the book and the way it has been sequenced..

There's a  Wittgenstein quote at the back of Sabine Schrunder's book, EVA 04. 'The meaning of a word is its use in the language'. That sums up what the book is about; how people function in (Japanese) society, how they are suited and booted by the world around them, by the social constraints, the architecture, the planning, the way of thinking, everything. That's the book explained in verbal form.

The book starts on a grey sand beach with a woman in jeans sticking pieces of straw into the grey sand of the beach, sand that she is patting down with her right hand. She's not looking a happy camper, but does have a slightly wistful air as seen from the back. It seems like she's dreaming of another life, that there's a conflict between what she is and what she is supposed to be. That's the book explained in visual form.

A grey framed window appears next and then we're back on the beach with schoolgirls whose grey socks match the grey sand. Their shoes are brown and they stand pigeon-toed on this rather joyless looking beach.


By the next picture, the schoolgirls are gone and we have two attendants of sorts. Maybe they work in a car park, maybe they work in a hotel. We don't know but what we do know is their shoes are black and they are not pigeon toed. And we can see one of the attendant's face. She's got ill-fitting gloves to go with her ill-fitting jacket but the skirt has stayed the same. And it's grey. The world doesn't fit and the world is dull!


A child watches his mother blowing bubbles. She's wearing a grey skirt too. She's standing under a roof and behind her is a grid of panels. Never mind the bubbles, the child's world is being shaped already to fit into her socially-moulded template.



We see that world taking shape in a rooftop panorama of a city's rooftops. There are squares, there are grids, there are lines that are straight and everything is in grey order.  It's a kit world, one that you put together with steel and screws and concrete.

To emphasise that point there are pictures of a plastic robot kit (the kind that Airfix or Revell make), though these might be pressing the point. The architecture and the grids get the point across. Mixed in with these are black and white studio portraits, Japanese men and women pose deadpan for the camera, but now you can see their faces and (even when there are lines) the lines that society seeks to impose are broken through a particular vulnerability. The organised chaos of uncombed but not unkempt hair, the intimacy (or intrusion) of a hand holding a forearm, and a subtle sense of the androgynous (the skirts have disappeared by the end ) add to the disruption.





By the end of the book we're back where we started, with the sticks in the sand on the grey beach. Only now there's no hand to pat the sand down and without that nod towards scale, the sticks look like driftwood cast onto a wild landscape because that, ultimately, is what we are.


Buy the Book here.

What is Our Propaganda?

My aunt, grandmother, mother, uncle and grandfather sifting through family photos in 1936 Germany

I saw the film, Lore, at the weekend. The film looks at a German family at the end of the Second World War. The mother is a Nazi who idolises Hitler, their father an SS officer who served in Belarus. They are destined for denazification and a war crimes trial respectively and the children are left alone to march across Germany  to reach the sanctuary of their grandmother's peaceful home.

As the children struggle through a devastated countryside with a devastated population, Lore (the name of the eldest child) begins to realise that her entire world has been based on a lie, that Hitler, Germany and her father have all participated in the most horrific of crimes, that the American propaganda is true.

As the film progresses, the layers of deceit become more complex. Hidden pasts mix with disguised presents and delusional futures Photographs play a large part in this. There are the lies of identity photographs and a very direct example of how a symbol ( a yellow Star of David) can overwhelm photographic evidence. There are photographs used as evidence of atrocity and the reactions of the German population to them; denial, anger and realisation. And there is the deceit of a family album with pages photos torn from its middle, the Nazi past obliterated from the heart of the happy family as its meaning becomes apparent.

That erasure of the Nazi elements of the German family album is the idea at the heart of Philip Ebeling's Land Without Past, a project where he combines elements from 1930s German family albums with rephotography from the present.

But not all German family albums did have the Nazi elements removed. My German Family Album is one of those where the Nazi elements still remain, and I think that is interesting, especially in the way that the Nazi elements affect how we see the more benign pictures in the album. Everything becomes threatening and sinister when there's a Swastika or a raised arm around the corner.

And that also connects back to Lore. One of the central ideas (and one that Paolo Marchetti touches on in his work on contemporary European fascists) is that you can't just bury an ideology. Its traces will still remain even if its outer skin is removed. You don't have to be a fascist to be a fascist in other words. You don't have to be a Nazi to be a Nazi.

Roger Ebert did a good review of Lore here in which he questions whether we are so distant from horrors perpetrated by the Nazis and others in the Second World War.

Wherever “Lore” is apt to screen, most audience members are likely to be citizens of the 27 NATO countries that signed onto America's War on Terror. How many of these folks are as loyal and unquestioning of the war's aims and practices as Lore is of her Fuhrer early on? How many Americans among them believe in extrajudicial killing of fellow citizens “suspected” of ties to terrorism -- and in assassination-by-robot-plane of individuals thought to be linked to Al Qaeda? How many Westerners subscribe to the “better there than here” philosophy that has kept thousands of foreign civilian deaths out of our sight? (An international treasure, thenausea.com, was censored off the web a few years ago, due to its raw images and videos of war atrocities that shame governments on every continent.)

I'm referring to a specific contemporary situation, but “Lore” offers up its lessons for all time. Citizens everywhere are often lost in the fog of their nation's propaganda, until reality comes crashing in. Lore's mental breakdown begins at an exhibit of fresh holocaust photos. The Americans taunt her and her neighbors with stark black & white images of concentration camp bodies piled high. Denial and acceptance push her to the verge of suicide. This can't be real. I don't live in a country that could do this to innocent people.