Dark, Claustrophobic and Grey!

Gerry Badger is the man who writes the words for the Photobook Histories. But he's also a photographer and It was a Grey Day (Photographs of Berlin) is his first photobook. And it's a really good one, a depiction of unpeopled greyness that captures a city on the brink of a change. It's the kind of change that will transform Badger's studies in grey into pictures of nostalgia that people will look back on with affection and wonder. It was a Grey Day is a study in the marginalia of a city, and it does a fantastic job.

Badger's a writer and a photographer. But he's also an architect and in the book he brings his architect's eye to a city where he is drawn to the spaces between buildings, to the gaps and the temporary structures that inhabit the city, that in Badger's eye almost define the city. Because of this, there's a formality to the pictures but at the same time they are not cold. They speak of spaces that are deserted but have life all around them.

This is Berlin's Terrain Vague, although it's not always of a large enough scale to be called that. It's more of an opportunistic seizing of space and repurposing of it through graffiti, sculpture, and a placing of rubbish and junk that is almost installation-like in its purposefulness. Are these spaces beautiful or ugly, Badger asks? And why is he so drawn to them? Badger concludes that it's not ruin or splendour he's photographing, but change, layer upon layer of change.

The book starts with a picture of a small supermarket. Above the window a line of graffiti reads, 'This is not America (Here is not Everywhere).' Just in case you didn't know, there's a manifesto for you.

The book continues into a grey claustrophobia. It's more than overcast (there's a corner of sky in almost every picture) and the concrete of the city is complete leaden. There are fences, there are trees and there is a sense of history that adds a certain gravity to the book.

There are repeated references to Atget's Terrain Vague pictures and there are nods to John Gossage's Berlin In the Time of the Wall, there are pictures of the Wall, but ultimately this is Badger's book and it settles into a pattern of images of different forms of dereliction and untidiness mixed with urban escapism; impromptu corners where Berliners escape the concrete and sit outside in these little pockets of human comfort. There's a checked sofa with a barbecue in front, benches of varying degrees of decrepitude and a courtyard with a sign saying 'Refugees Welcome, Tourists Piss Off!'

So it's not that comfortable, but it's not uncomfortable either. It's just messy and weighty, with link chains and fences creating a hierarchy of marginal landscapes. And that's what the book is, a kind of hierarchy of non-empty empty spaces; a book where you can unpick the subtle differences between Third Landscapes, Edgelands and Terrain Vague with concrete parking places, pathways, steel doors, stairways to nowhere and communal courtyards thrown into the mix. There's destruction mixed with collapse and decay and a sense that construction (and another kind of destruction) are not too far away. These are urban spaces that are up-for-grabs but aren't being grabbed because that is not the nature of the place. 'Smash Capitalism!' proclaims one sign, and in a sense that is what is being shown here because there's nothing here to be smashed.

In the afterword Badger writes 'In the normal course of events I spend my time writing about photographs - the photographs of others. Now, faced with a a group of my own photographs, I feel stuck for words.... I feel disembodied by them... they baffle me. I find them obtuse and quite mysterious.'

He writes about how he sees his pictures of Berlin and wonders at how downbeat they appear. On the surface this is a very dismal Berlin. But at the same time it's not. It's a Berlin that is of itself and by itself. For now. The dismal Berlin will come later, when the hand sculpture (which is already gone) and the gentrification of the city 'continues apace'.

Buy the book here.

The Photobook Review

More good things came to me from Helka Aleksdóttir who so very kindly sent me a copy of  the Aperture Photobook Review.

It's a great magazine that looks at Photobooks, especially those from smaller publishers. Many things caught my eye. However, Gerry Badger's comments on Reading a Photobook and what makes a good photobook really struck me. 

He says that reading a photobook is a mix of watching a film and reading a book, that it combines appreciation of individual pictures with "following the story that is being told, negotiating not only a trail of facts, but also a labyrinth of signs and symbols."

Badger also quotes Gossage's perspective on the photobook; "First, it should contain great work. Secondly it should make that work function as a concise world within the book itself. Thirdly, it should have a design that complements what is being dealt with. And finally, it should deal with content that sustains an ongoing interest."

 Badger also mentions Gossage's view that a photobook should be "a world of its own", an imaginary work, a fiction. Mmm, well we all know that all photography is propaganda and unreliable, lacking inauthenticity and truthfulness.

So having the photobook inhabit this self-contained world seems fair enough. But viewing everything as fiction, as propaganda is something of a leap of faith, more of a leap of faith than the converse. It is a leap of faith that cons us into thinking that our trickery and deception is so clever that the viewer is unable to see it - and not just for now, but for ever more as well.

But we can see it, we do see it. When we think about it we see it all the time, every day in the newspapers, on advertising hoardings, on labels, in magazines. We don't see everything, but we see alot. When we don't think about it, as we don't most of the time, it catches us unaware and we fall for it - unawares. 

But just because something is propaganda doesn't mean it's not true. The propaganda, the lie, the deceit is right at the heart of what we see. It's built in, part of the world, a solid, almost tangible aspect of a way of thinking and seeing and being. We know this when we choose to know it but sadly most of the time we're like mug punters betting on the wrong horse; we know it's going to lose but still we back it. 

Perhaps it would be better to flick things round and see the truth evident in photography, not the fiction - and lies might be part of that truth. In our everyday life, that is how we see the world, deceit and all. It seems to take a somewhat mystical view of the world and its photographic representations not to see photography and photobooks for what they are - no matter what design, sequencing and textual trickery they might employ - as solid representations of fairly straightforward routine series of photographic conventions.

Making the photobook not a thing-in-itself, but an object of the world that attaches to the world will help widen the audience for photography. And while photography as a whole has a huge audience, photography of the kind this blog, or the Photobook Review, talks about has a very limited audience. 

That limited audience is apparent in the countless lists of best photobooks of 2011 (here's a great summary of those lists from Marc Feustel ), some of which have editions of 50 or even less and are for an audience that is very limited in number by definition of their form. But for all the great design, layout and tricks with paper, the trickery, investigations and subterfuge cannot disguise that almost all the books mentioned have an outrageously strong connection to the non-fictional world. 

So there is an attempt to fictionalise the world, mainly by using fictional rhetoric (of the novel, the film, the archive, visual semantics, the endlessly self-referential), but that fictionalisation never achieves full realisation. 

 It will be nice to see people crystallising this attempted fictionalisation and escaping the closed circle of the photobook world and actually making photobooks that have a real fictional edge - Jackie Magazine in the 1970s kind of thing will do, Love on the Left Bank would be perfect.

So, in conclusion, it's great to see the Photobook Review. It's marvellous and right on the money. At the same time, it will be interesting to see how it develops and how it will escape the closed photobook circle and find an audience beyond the converted. Because that's what it needs.

A final note on photobooks. Blake Andrews has a wonderful end-of-year best of list here. What is most shocking for me is how long it took me to realise that this is part of Blake's very own special collection and everything is sold out. I was so looking forward  to buying Eping by the Missis, Harvey Kenmore's square format crop of Alec Soth's classic Sleeping by the Mississipp. Old ou!