My Best Photo-Text Award: On Abortion

I have been enjoying writing, reviewing and interviewing so much this summer. It is wonderful when the pleasure of writing comes from the ideas and energies of what you are writing about. Part of that pleasure has come from Laia Abril's On Abortion, which I reviewed here. It'sa chapter in a five chapter series on misogyny and it's my book of the year by a distance.

It's a timely book (books on misogyny have been timely for ooh, the last how many thousand years. But they're especially timely now) where text and image are fused, where the text is designed to be communicative, accessible, and (in a surprisingly low-key way) persuasive. It's backed up by in-depth research which is selectively presented - so it's interesting, informative and ties in to emotional narratives. It's of  quite a different level and the accessibility is a key element of that. We talk a lot about communicating effectively, of extending audiences, of making things accessible, but very often what we say goes hand in hand with doing quite the opposite. We obfuscate, we make things inaccessible, we limite the audience - but can't see it because all our immediate peers are working in the same realm of self-indulgent obfuscation.

On Abortion is absolutely not an example of that. It didn't win the Arles Photo-text book award last week, but then it didn't need to (even though lots of people are unhappy with the awarding of the book to Broomberg and Chanarin's War Primer, for a multitude of reasons - click on the link below).





The thing is that awards get awarded to surprising books sometimes. Or films, or books, or people.. So it goes. And so it goes.

And so it goes with On Abortion (published in an edition of 4,000 incidentally).  On Abortion gets my imaginary Photo-Text Book Award for 2018. And that aside, time will be the reward as I think it's one of the most vital books for a long, long time, an example of a new kind of independent, self-commissioning slow photojournalism that is emerging out of the ashes of the old.

And as for Akina books. I'll award them my imaginary prize for just taking chances, making quality books, not compromising and going their own way. There is a barrier there in other words.

Read the review here.

Congratulations to Laia Abril and Luke Willis Thompson

The move towards directness in photography, and long term self-initiated visual research projects continued with Laia Abril's winning the Tim Hetherington Trust Visionary Award for her ongoing project, On Misogyny. It's a long project, she could spend all her life doing it, and her brilliant book On Abortion is simply the first chapter.

This award will help her fund her next chapter on Rape Culture. So winning does matter as it allows her to spend less time writing grant proposals and more time working.

On the same day (and rather overshadowing the Tim Hetherington award) the award for the Deutsche Borse Prize was announced. The most direct of the Deutsche Borse finalists was Mathieu Asselin who presented a new fifth chapter in his exhibition at the Photographer's Gallery. It is a work that involves deep research. In some ways it's not photographic with its emphasis on images that link to captions that suck you into the wider body of the work, and with a link to how the book and the images in the book have been recontextualised throughout the course of the post-project.

It was superbly curated, packed a punch and showed the human costs of Monsanto's activities and their links to the markets, monopolising, suppression of freedom of trade and beyond.

It also linked Monsanto to Deutsche Borse, the sponsors - and I did see somebody on their phone at the awards ceremony checking some kind of commodity prices saying, "this is going up, you want to buy this, this is going down, this declares its figures next week, they're going to be good, this is having a merger..." which was beyond irony.

But the winner was Luke Willis Thompson for his beautiful piece autoportrait. This is his response to the video that Diamond Reynolds shared on social media in the immediate aftermath of the police murder of her partener, Philando Castile. That video was filled with violence and mayhem. It's video as evidence.

This is film as evidence, but in contrast to the social media video, this is a quiet, contemplative piece. Curiously, it's the most photographic of all the pieces on show even though it's moving image. It's film, you can see the celluloid move through the sprockets. It has surface. it's black and white, it references classic studio portraiture through lighting and angles chose by Diamond herself. It's so photographic. the only thing that isn't photographic is that it's moving - a bit.

There is no sound, it's still, it's beautiful it exists solely as a installation piece, so it's not been uploaded by Thompson on social media as a moving image. Ironically, as a still image of the installation it's the hands-down winner of the best-looking image from all the four contenders, and probably the most shared. That matters. It shouldn't but it does.

Thompson is a Fijian New Zealander, so has very direct experience of racial oppression both now and going back into the past, and his earlier work reference this directly and very powerfully. Very powerfully.

There is some resistance to his victory and it seems a lot of it stems from the title and the lack of clarity in the statement. Claims are made for the collaborative nature of the piece and the title is autoportrait - which comes with very strong ideas of the author as subject.

This is  Diane Smyth reporting on the award for the BJP.

“...the panel decided to award the 2018 prize to Luke. His singular and uncompromising portrait, made in collaboration with its subject, Diamond Reynolds, was conceived as a way to return agency to the protagonist.

“As a contender for a prize focused on photography, the jury felt autoportrait imbued the moving image format with the singular and almost obsessional quality of a still photograph, drawing attention to its materiality, and challenging viewers to consider the personal stakes of representation in an environment at once intimate and collective.

“Ultimately though, the project was felt to invite a timely and prescient conversation around the nature of image control, authorship and distribution in a way that expands rather than shuts down the debate.”

Statements matter and titles matter and if you have autoportrait as your title and are claiming it to be a very collaborative piece - and it is a collaborative piece - you do have to front load that. There does need to be some sharing of authorship in the naming. So it needs to be Diamond Reynolds and Luke Willis Thompson named as the creators of the work. And then that means the prize is shared and it can be autoportrait, because it is an autoportrait.

If you have only Luke Willis Thompson as the author, then any autoportrait is an autoportrait of him. I. I was with somebody reading the caption for whom this really matters and she was going through apoplexies at this. It's a simple indexical thing and people notice that. The title and the idea of the piece simply do not connect. Share the authorship and they do. Or change the title. It's very simple.

Anyway, titles matter, statements matter, but ultimately they don't. It's a great work, and you get the feeling all the elements that are mentioned above are in there somewhere, and obviously there are other things happening that  but are not quite expressed as well as they could be.

Directness is good.

I can't help but feel like I'm missing something.

 It's a great piece, never mind the semiotics. And that is the end of that.

San Sebastian and the Brilliant Photobook Phenomenon

The Photobook Phenomenon exhibition at the San Telmo Museum in San Sebastian (executively curated by Moritz Neumüller)   is a wonderful exhibition on the photobook - and more importantly on the photobook and its function in society. It takes place in a museum that blends a contemporary facade with a cloister off which runs a chapel decorated with the paintings of Sert. It's an amazing building for a start.

Step into the exhibition and you see one space that is dominated by part of the collection of Gabriela Cendoya-Bergareche. Gabriela has been a huge supporter of photobooks over the years and donated her collection to the museum - a donation which provided the impetus for this exhibition.

In the exhibition itself, you see her books both on the shelf and also on a table surrounded by bean bags, there for you to view at your pleasure. They are also housed in the museum library, so providing an amazing resource for anybody visiting the town. This collection has a contemporary feel so if you want to see anything significant that has been produced in the last 20 years, this is the place to go with both regular and special editions from Akina books, Reminders Photography Stronghold, Beijing Silvermine and beyond giving it a really international feel that combines with the idea of the book as an object. This is a place where paper, bindings, and touch come close.

Move beyond this and there for you to open and leaf through at your leisure, are some of Martin Parr's best 57 books.

On the walls there are presentations of works by August Sander. Henri Cartier Bresson's ideal library of 90 books is shown with his portraits of writers and artists on the walls above, and there is a feature on William Klein's New York work.

All well and good. I thought that was going to be it, but then you slip into the next room. Here you get a collection of photobook histories that you can look through and cross reference with the books featured earlier; global histories, Dutch histories, Chinese histories, Latin American histories, Spanish histories, you get the idea. You can spend hours on this table alone.

But if it was only about books it would be a bit limited. The Photobook Phenomenon is about how photobooks act as a focal point and sounding board for wider political trends. You see that as you head into the protest and propaganda section. Giant vinyls featuring images from fascist Portugal, from Nazi Germany, from protest books that run from Laura El-Tantawy's Shadow of the Pyramids or Veronica Fieiras's The Disappeared back to screen based presentations on Chinese propaganda and original copies of Willem van der Bol's Nazi Hel.

At the end of the room there is the centrepiece, a wall of covers from Der Führer magazine. It's a wall full of Hitlers. And there to one side is a veritable snowstorm of the 1945 publication KZ. KZ (as in Konzentration) consisted of  pictures of atrocity from newly liberated concentration camps. It was a blunt and direct message to the Geman people of the regime they had supported, and the snowstorm represents the airborne means of delivery of the magazine to German cities.

The final room has another change of mood. Here things are more contemplative. There's a presentation of the post-911 Democracy of Photographs, and then we're into the contemporary photobooks with interviews, slideshows and books to handle from around the world. It's global, it's diverse.

I was hugely impressed by the whole exhibition (as were other people who believe this sets a new level for the presentation of photobooks ). There is a danger with books to over-rely on the books and the interest of the audience in photobooks. You can have too many books, as anyone who's ever been to a book fair will know.

Here the giant vinyls, the prints, the videos, and the text all lead into a fantastic presentation with a balance between the book as object, the book as information, the book as entertainment, and the ways in which it is a reflection and a creation of news.

It wasn't preaching to the converted, or even attempting to convert, but highlighting, through the visual, the lingual, and the tactile, the relevance of the photobook. You could see how this could be developed further and the avenues that were being explored, because this was an opening of photobooks, an engagement of the book form with how we understand the world.

Because books do reflect the world around us, and are a product of the world around us. In the evening I was part of a panel of speakers on the relevance of the photobook. I gave a talk on All Quiet on the Home Front - which is all about how my relationship with my daughter developed through the landscape.

    picture by Gabriela Cendoya-Bergareche

Laia Abril gave a talk on her brilliant new book On Abortion (one of my books of the year so far together with Carmen Winant's My Birth) and the process of making visual information engaging and accessible. On Abortion is a reflection of the world, a response to the misrepresentation and hijacking of women's control of their own bodies by the religious right and other reactionary forces.

A few weeks ago I asked some photographers, editors, and publishers about the future of photojournalism. One version of the responses was photojournalism is dead. That's it! Forget it, you're not going to be the next James Nachtwey, never mind that Time ran a whole issue of his pictures. It's dead. Photojournalism. Move along please.

But the other side of that is that photojournalism is in the process of redefining itself. It's become about working in different ways, representing events in different ways, and developing a new visual language. It's about enlarging the world and representing it in all its diversity and complexity, something that has been lacking in the past (and the present). That's something that is now being recognised. That's a start.

It's also about emphasising the personal, and ultimately creating your own content. Because why surrender your work to a publication owned by some reactionary conglomerate that is guaranteed to misrepresent that work - and in another section, undermine it completely thanks to the publication's editorial position (photography has always been the shadow of a liberal conscience in otherwise reactionary newspapers. It's the beard!).

In the mythical old days, the rationale was that you got paid for doing this and a photographer could get a good spread and the image was king. Once that's gone, well what's left.  Not much.

I see Laia's work as being part of that new way of working. It's a long-term project that goes beneath the surface but also uses design, video, and persuasion as tools that connect culturally and politically to external events that have roots that go way back to broader historical currents. It's the new photojournalism if you like, a photojournalism which is actually incredibly more sophisticated and demanding than what came before.

That's one way of looking at it. If you want to be a bit anal with genres and labels, you can say it's not photojournalism - and in many, many ways, it's not. And then you're left with the idea that photojournalism is dead. But I prefer the other model.

Next up was Julian Baron who talked about his practice, and the ways in which the book can be made accessible and moved from the private to the public sphere. Being in Julian's company is like being in the presence of this amazing energy, an energy you always end up learning something from, an energy that is firing on all cylinders in all directions, all at the same time - in a lovely and very open and welcoming way. You also end up questioning what a book is, and opening up the idea of what a book is or can be, something that is challenging to one's complacency and so ultimately invigorating.

In the group discussion led by Jon Uriarte that followed, in which he talked about how books and their design provide an avenue into a different way of considering ideas, understanding images, and disrupting images. His latest book (which you can download here) is a case in point. It's a book that was taken to the street in Peru but is also  a downloadable book that is free. But if you want to have it as an object you can buy the screenprinted cover, copy off your download, and bind it yourself. This was one of those rare occasions when the talks ended too soon. But that's a good thing too sometimes. Short and sweet can be good.

Brilliant is also how I would describe Julian's book-jockeying skills. I took part in a book-jockey duet with him. Brilliant is not how I'd describe my book-jockeying skills. My attempt was a bit like  John Malkovich's first puppeteering performance in Being John Malkovich.

But the location was amazing, in the San Telmo chapel with giant paintings by Sert decorating the chapel walls. It doesn't get any better than this. This was as good as it gets. I take this opportunity to announce my retirement from book-jockeying at this dizzy peak. You've been fabulous. I couldn't have done this without you. I love you all.

Book Jockeying in San Sebastian!

Life is a continual learning experience and I'm looking forward to learning all about being a book jockey, with the master of book-jockeying, Julien Baron (shown below installing ICVL's brilliant Cage installation in Bristol earlier this year).

Ok, book-jockeying, what is it? It's this! Editing from multiple books to music! I will the learner and Julian Baron the master I think.

And I'll be talking about All Quiet on the Home Front as well, in San Sebastian this saturday as well as participating in a discussion with the great Laia Abril and Julian Baron and Jon Uriarte, so come along and say hello if you're in the area.

75 Psychics and they're all Wrong!

Out of the Blue by Virginie Rebetez is the latest book that focusses on a crime scene (the massively influential Red Headed Peckerwood, Watabe Yutichi's visually brilliant A Criminal Investigation and Jack Latham's excellent Sugar Paper Theories are three more. There are some really bad ones as well).

The book tells the story of Suzanne Lyall, who disappeared (Out of the Blue) in New York in 1998. It consists of a series of images from police and personal archives, mixed in with contemporary portraits of the area. There are personal recollections, psychic reports and police sketches to add to the mix (and you can read an interview from the artist's perspective here).

Out of the Blue opens with helicopter surveillance images of the highway where the initial police search began. It sets the scene of a narrative that never quites settles, in keeping perhaps with the lack of ease which we feel with the still-disappeared nature of Suzanne Lyall.

That lack of ease is compounded by the writing we see on the back of a photograph of Suzanne. 'Well, this is me! What do you think ugly or what?' it begins. We don't get to see the front of the photograph. We never get to see the front of the photograph, or any other image of Suzanne, not in full. She is partial, she's been partial ever since she went missing on March 2nd 1998.

The present kicks in after that through pictures of Upstate New York and then snippets from the Lyall family album. Here we see the empty frames of a set of passport pictures, the face of Suzanne snipped out, we see a page from a family album, the face of what we think to be Suzanne half covered by a scrap of paper (provided by the photographer I'm sure. So it's an interventionist obscuring).

There's her bedroom, her belongings (shrink-wrapped), a corsage made for her sister's Sandy's wedding (post-missing I am guessing) and more images where Suzanne appears, not quite fully there in some way.

A photocopy of her hand adds to the spectral half-presence, which is really a full presence but one reflected through the hard anchorage of the present day portraits of her mother, her house, the handmade t-shirts that have been framed in a memory that is as much in the present as it is in the past.

There's a clue about one of the hearts of the story, the psychic element as a fragment of a report in full capitalled Courier tells of an elderly female's dream about the 'missing'.

More landscapes appear, more sketches of psychic dreaming, more pictures of Suzanne's parents, Mary and Doug. But now the landscapes are less benign. The waters have a malign potential behind them, the pick up trucks and the diners exude a certain menace. And all the while there's a tension between these pieces of the past and the calm exteriors of Mary and Doug and their attempts to preserve their daughter's life through the collected ephemera of what was her everyday life.

And then we're into the 'Correspondence, since 1998' section. This consists of

'Reprints from the Lyall's family archive. Over the years the family was contacted by over 75 psychics. The 48 pink pages are a selection of documents from the correspondence between psychics, the Lyall family and Police investigators. These documents include fax, letters, emails, maps, drawings and reports.'


It's heartbreaking to read these psychic, spiritual and astrological meditations on Suzanne's fate, the brutal descriptiveness of them adding the idea that they are rooted in a very physical reality, a reality that involves violence, rape, strangling, murder. They read like they are real, they are written in such a way as to be believed. And yet they are all completely and utterly fabricated. It's a cruel trick to play on parents clinging to hope - a cruel trick that was played by over 75 people, all of whom (if they gave their report) had completely different endings. And each of those endings would have been played and replayed in the minds of Mary and Doug Lyall, with every variation

That might not be what was intended I don't know. But that's what happens with the reader far above and beyond the mysteries of siting and place and abstract ideas of multiple narratives. The reality of reading the book is the grounding of those multiple realities in the fate of Suzanne and her family.

There's a poster of  a retouched photograph of Suzanne enclosed in the book so we get to see who she is, sort of (it's one of 3 images that Rebetez commissioned a forensic artist to make that shows how old Suzanne would look at different ages). Everything is sort of. The whole tone of the book is wrapped in this miasma of a half-person who is neither here nor there, neither dead nor alive, who is kept alive through her parents' anguish and the slim chance that she is alive (which would probably lead to even more anguish), all topped off with this parasitic community of cruel psychics who feed off people's grief. And they are cruel.

The mix of materials, the partial picture, the unresolved grief, the parental view are all reminiscent of Laia Abril's brilliant The Epilogue. And like The Epilogue, Out of the Blue is not the easiest book to get into. Its text heavy, the images are fragmented, the story is not clean and simple, and in some ways the design reflects that. At the same time, it is entirely accessible and the fragmentation serves a purpose; it's not clinical, it's not cold. It's moving, a truly sad book that lays its tragedy down on the page, there for the reader to pick up. It's a really good book I think. Really good.

Buy Out of the Blue here. 

Jessica Hardy: 'These are all fictions of me'

Next up from the Documentary Photography course at the University of South Wales is Jessica Hardy with her project, The Running of the Tap. 

This project is very much in progress. It was partly inspired by the work of Laia Abril, with references to Rosy Martin and Jo Spence (who Jess wrote in her final paper - the link between research and practice coming good ), but most of it is coming from Jess's own experience with bulimia. 

It's an intensely personal project, with words from diaries, from school year books, reflections on former relationships and friendships, both uplifting and toxic all coming into play. 

Those elements and those words are still waiting to be resolved (which is difficult because they are quite brutal words), but the images relive key chapters from Jess's life, chapters that connect to the development of her bulimia and her ability to confront it through its causes. 

This is Jess's Statement:

‘Through the medium of visual reframing we can begin to understand that images we hold of ourselves are often the embodiment of particular traumas, fears, losses, hopes and desires’ (Spence, J, 1988) 

Recreation of memories allow one to reach a deeper understanding of themselves by exploring their thoughts and feelings attached to each moment. I now presently have Bulimia, an eating disorder that involves purging after eating. I believe that this could be linked to my past experiences, so through using the technique of recreating memories within photography I learned to help myself understand and accept what has happened to me to move on from it. After constructing my past selves I then worked with creating my present selves to understand where I am now in my life and again try to gain an understanding and acceptance of who I am.

‘These are all ‘fictions’ of me – as are all photographs. Each shows different ways of ‘seeing’ myself.’ (Spence, J, 1988)

Rosy Martin writes: ‘By acknowledging aspects of myself and my past, which I might otherwise hide, or see as my ‘shadow’ side, I have freed myself from internalized restrictions and oppressions, and have come to accept myself as I am.’ (Spence, J, 1988)

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That's a Real Damaged Life in There! And a Photo Book. And...

Lisa, the night I met her through law enforcement. I followed up with her about a month later, beginning a journalistic relationship that continues today.

A few weeks back, The Eichmann Show aired in the UK. It was a drama about the filming of the Eichmann Trial in 1961, and was the first globally screened documentary.

During the drama there was a great line in there which encapsulates whether serious drama, documentary or anything should have an entertainment element in it. It's the part where a witness collapses during the trial and the producer Milton asks the director if he got the shot.

Milton: Did you get it?

Leo: We got almost everything but I think we missed the collapse.

Milton: Missed the collapse. Jesus, Leo.

Leo: We got a couple of seconds of it, but it's impossible to anticipate something like that. 

Milton: That was a stand-out moment, Leo, like someone crying out in the auditorium. Talking points. Human drama.

Leo: That's a real damaged life in there, not a fucking TV show. 

Milton: And a fucking TV show. AND. AND.

It's a refutation in some ways of the old Adorno idea that it was barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz, that anything that reeked of the culture (be it high, be it low, but especially be it popular) from which the Holocaust arose was to blame for that holocaust. And if you like, it's a position in which there is a coldness, a calculation, and  a displaced sense of one's own self-delusion that is even more in common with the foundations upon which the holocaust ( or other horrors of war) was built.

Keep on with the poetry, the drama, the entertainment and the TV shows in other words. I'll take them over Adorno any day of the week (and please, if you are really into Adorno or the rest of the Frankfurt school and I've made fundamental errors in this post, please fuck off and weave yourself a hair shirt!) 

Lots of people like that photograph-and-feel-the-pain stance. There's a Stafford Cripps kind of mentality prevalent in photography that you should suffer for your work and so should the people who look at it. And it'll do you good. And you'll like it. Same way you like wheat grass juice or quinoa or salad without dressing (my wife calls it English Salad) or thrashing yourself across the back with stripped birch.

I wondered about this week as I read through Laia Abril's brilliant Epilogue. The Epilogue is a book that deals with a really difficult subject through the heartache of a family, through missed opportunity and an ever present sense of regret. It's a difficult thing to do, to make a book like that. You have to be brutal. You have to tell the story and you have to make people want to read the story. You're designing pages around real people's lives, you are literally laying out their emotions on the page. The temptations to ease your foot off the gas a little must come up again and again. That's what makes it difficult. there is real anguish and pain that is still present in the lives of the people who surrounded Cammy and must be made apparent in the pages of the book. 

That's a real damaged life in there. And a photo book. And...

There's also an obsessiveness in there to follow the story to its dark heart. And that same obsessiveness is apparent in Tim Matsui's much shared article on winning a World Press Multimedia Prize for his work on sex trafficking. 

The title of the story is I Just Won a World Press Photo Award and a POYi, But I’m Not Celebrating . Again, there are real damaged lives in there, but there is also a story to tell and Matsui tells that story beautifully in the post (which I've read) and I'm sure he does in the film as well (which I haven't seen - but here's the trailer).

It's heartbreaking just to read and see the pictures and it's done with a purpose in mind, to use documentary storytelling to engage and more importantly to change attitudes towards sex trafficking - to make it visible and to understand what lies on the surface and beneath the surface and how we collude in it much more than we realise. There's also a huge journalistic interest in how sex trafficking is represented and managed at a police, community and legal level. It's ridiculously complex and Matsui isn't holding back in the scale of his ambition. 

It's a bit terrifying to be honest, and it demonstrates a level of commitment that really answers the question of why Matsui writes, films and photographs. He doesn't do it for photography's sake but for a wider purpose. He's committed to his belief in a way that few of us are and that is so very admirable. It's also a bit of a lesson for those of us who would like to think photography can change things, because he might be an example of somebody who is making that absurd proposition a little bit real. If you want to change things through photography, look at Matsui - this is one example of what you need to do. It's not just taking pictures anymore. It never was.

I don't know if the post was entertaining, but it was certainly engaging and was written to draw the reader into what Matsui is doing. He ended the post with some general thoughts on photography which are worth repeating. And not just for people who are making this kind of committed work. But for anybody making any kind of work. You can't sit back and be lazy. You have to be doing things, constantly. Non-stop. Never-ending. It's exhausting just thinking about it. But it's easier than ever if you have a mind for it. And remember that it's a story that you're telling. 

For now, let’s just say, we’re in a new era. If you want to make stories, you have to think about publishing and distribution by yourself. These things requires nimbleness, ingenuity, and willingness to go where the audience is. You can get to those places more easily then an entire publication can!

Photographers looking for validation through awards and publishing limit us to the traditional model. Think bigger. If you say you want to make a difference, then be proactive. Don’t rely on traditional distribution models.

Engagement is not necessarily a photographer’s core competency, but engagement is essential. That’s what partners are for. Find them and build something custom. If it is reflexive and good and novel, the traditional distributors will take notice. Change in the industry can occur.

Finally, we’re not just content providers, we’re journalists turning a critical eye on the world and giving voice to the voiceless.


Always remember that.