Best Book that's an Exhibition that's a book that's an exhibition....

Next up in the best book, pre-list categories is the best book that's an exhibition, or is it a book.

The first one is Eamonn Doyle's mad book, End. It's the last in his trilogy of Dublin street books and it's a kind of sketchbook for the show that wowed Arles this year and was made in collaboration with graphic designer Niall Sweeney and composer/sound artist David Donohoe.

It's something else, and like all of his work (except the backs - I love the backs) I can't decide how much substance it really has, but it's certainly an eye-catcher with it's mass of pull-outs, use of different materials and integration of graphics and cellophane into the mix.

But at Arles, Doyle went beyond eye-catching and proved he knows how to show the work, he knows how to use sound and music and walls and scale to bring the work up to a different level, how to affect people with his mixing of sound and space and image. And by doing that he gives it a whole bunch of substance. And because END was made in conjunction with the show, indeed was a kind of sketchbook of the show, that adds substance to the book. The one feeds forward and the other feedback and you're in a kind of feedback loop. Which is exactly what happens at the show (not that I was there mind).

A lot of Doyle's creativity comes directly from his career in music, a world where Doyle used to organise club nights where creative mixing were "what you do on a club night so we thought we'd give it a go in Arles" (I'm quoting from memory there). So in a very direct way, the show that made such an impression on Arles came from an intermingling of the bodily fluids of the worlds of music and photography. Above all else, it showed what a great curator Eamonn Doyle is.I'd love to see what he'd do with Robert Frank or Gary Winogrand - or both actually. So long may that intermingling continue, and long may there be more such interminglings. It makes us all culturally richer and stronger!

KL Troopers: Dickheads

The Clash playing at a Rock Against Racism gig in 1978. Image by Val Welmer.



Don Letts' Skinheads was a really enjoyable overview of the five or six lives of Skinhead-ism, and the contradictions between the disparate parts of the subculture.

There was one clip of the man who set up the Skinheads against Racism in Music talking about global manifestations of racist skinheads: 'There's this gang of fucking dickheads called KL Troopers and they're Malay Nazis... and they want all the Chinese and Indians to fuck off...'

Malaysia for the Malays only. That would be as good as England for the English  or India for the Hindus, or France for the French, or Nigeria for the Nigerians; you'd be left with a nation of inbred simpletons sewing on their silly patches and drooling into their 100% native nasi lemak/fish and chips/whatever...

So there you have it, KL troopers. You're now known internationally as dickheads. Well done.

Watch Skinheads here if you're in the UK or you can get around it.

And buy Skinheads the book here, for only £8.99 (that's probably about 5 of your euros if you're reading this in 2018). This is Nick Knight's first book, made in his second year at college the bastard before he became a fashion superstar.

The book was made in 1982 and is symptomatic of the huge link between music, subcultures, publishing, fashion and photography in Britain at the time. There's such a direct connection between the ethos of music, the rise of colour in British photography, the development of fashion magazines in the early 1980s, the rise of British fashion photography and the ethos of punk and protest and how that affected photography, and design - to the present day.

Ah yes, design. In parts of the UK, design does gets a little fetishised, especially in places like Manchester, where the emphasis is understandably on the high-end manifestations and you can get all Factoried out by the design. Here's a more typical example below of Manchester design (from this classic source of ephemera from Manchester's musical past).

You can read about music and anti-racism in this review of Walls Come Tumbling Down.

And here's Syd Shelton talking about his photograph at a Rock Against Racism/Ruts gig in 1979.

Jem Southam: Making the World Richer, Grander, and Better

Jem Southam

Jem Southam will be speaking at Beyond  Beyond the Visual: Music, Word and Landscape at the SouthBank Club, Bristol

November 7th: 12:00 - 19:00 

Buy Tickets here

History is embedded deep within all of Jem Southam's photography, but one of the pictures  that most resonated most with me is the one above, of a dew pond. Indeed, the very idea of what a dew pond is struck me as something rather beautiful.

These are man-made ponds in the middles of fields that fill with water (not the dew that gathers on the grass in the morning, but rainwater) for cows to drink.

Some of them are very old (Oxenmere  in Wiltshire dates back to Saxon times) so there is a sense of something ancient about them. They look old and they feel old.

That's why they featured as the wormhole through which Catweazle travelled from the 12th to the 20th century in the, er, phenomenally popular 1970s TV series of the same name.



Seeing Southam's pictures of dew ponds was for me like hearing a new word. It gave me a realisation of how the banal curves and contours of the land contain a profound history. And because of that suddenly I started becoming a bit more observant, and began looking for those curves and contours and what lies beneath them in the world around me.

And once I started looking for them, the signs of the past became more apparent. The obvious ones are easy to see, but then new ones start creeping in and the land becomes a far less benevolent or pretty place. It seethes with venality and menace.

In his work, Southam focusses on rockfalls, rivers, and ponds, places where the signs of geological, seasonal, and waterborne change are apparent. But this doesn't stand in isolation from human change and as you look at his pictures, this change starts to creep in too. The land begins to live and we become part of it.

It changes the way you see things too. John Davies does the same thing with his more urban pictures. I always love seeing this picture of Mersey Square in Stockport. It always touched me because the warehouse with the chimney coming out behind it used to house a skateboard park. It wasn't a very good one, but it brings back fond memories for me.

I showed this picture to a class one day and instantly one of the students dated it - 1986. He didn't get that from the captions, but from the number plates of the cars going up the A4.  That's how he sees this urban environment, through the cars that drive through it.

And then if I show it my dad, he sees a hat museum. Because Stockport has a long hat-making history and he was involved in that.




Now I live on the edge of Bath, with the Avon Valley stretching before me to the south, Solsbury Hill to the east and Bath to the west.

It's not the most dynamic of places but if I stand outside my house and look out, I can see a landscape that includes the following sites and histories.

Stone Age Settlements
Roman remains
The foundations of medieval farming terraces
The valley Jane Austen used to walk down
Georgian stone mines
Brunel's rubbish heap
The grave of the man who founded New South Wales
The grave of Jack the Ripper, depending on who you believe
An underground train and tunnel network
A second world war explosive dump
a Genesis song
A past road protest site
A murder site
The Australian Rugby Team
The world's second oldest bat
A future road protest site

The simple pastoral landscapes of the Avon Valley are anything but simply pastoral. They live and breathe human intervention, they are man-made, messed with by man, they contain corruption and violence, conquest and spite. These landscapes don't have the  isolation which we sometimes assume to be the case with pastoral landscape photography. They are connected to the past, the future, to faraway lands that we pillaged and conquered, to murder, romanticism, and short-sighted stupidity and greed,

But the problem is how to photograph this history. You don't embed that history into a landscape just by snapping a picture or two. It is more difficult than that. What Jem Southam does looks incredibly easy, but there is something in the process that adds depth and ties the image to the lay of the land, that puts you in the place in a manner where the folds of the land, the geology, the history, the sensation comes through.

I don't know how he does it. I believe Jem Southam's work is beyond something formal, and that there is a sense of mystery in there, that it is to do with his process of walking and being in and part of a place and the way in which that inhabits you in a non-photographic way. I like the idea that his photographic practice somehow mirrors the sensation of being in a place and of a place and connected to a place. And by being connected you connect others and you make the world grander and richer than it otherwise might be.

And that is why Jem Southam's work is important and why he's talking at Beyond the Visual: Music, Word, and Landscape.

Exactly what he'll be talking about is still a mystery however because Southam's talks are always different and always made in response to the when and the where of the occasion which makes things even more exciting. So there's another draw for you .

Susan Derges will be speaking at Beyond  Beyond the Visual: Music, Word and Landscape at the SouthBank Club, Bristol

November 7th: 12:00 - 19:00 

Buy Tickets here

Susan Derges: Water, Life and Photography

 
 all images by Susan Derges

About a year ago I spoke to Susan Derges for an article for the RPS journal. It was fascinating to hear about experience, opportunity, chance and a singular appetite for experimentation led to a career path in which each project follows on from the other with common themes that are both personal and universal in nature, where water is a driving force both in Derges' life-history and the prints that she makes in very physical ways.


Susan Derges will be speaking at Beyond  Beyond the Visual: Music, Word and Landscape at the SouthBank Club, Bristol

November 7th: 12:00 - 19:00 

Buy Tickets here

This is what she said.

Susan Derges is best-known for her large scale photograms that combine simplicity with a reverence for the element in which they are made. An almost personal involvement with water has been a hallmark of her work, and the lush but minimal way in which she examines its actions on the world around us can be traced back both to her schooldays in rural Hampshire and the time she spent working in Japan in the early 1980s.

“I grew up in Fleet by the Basingstoke Canal and was very interested in what was going on in the waterway in all seasons,” she says. “It was a regular place of reference and it started in early childhood. I was mesmerised by it. You’d get barges go by and you’d get these wave patterns with interference or a duck would land and the droplets would ripple across each other. And in the seasons everything would change; shiny and still in summer, frozen in winter and moody and dripping in Autumn.”

The fascination with water was filtered through an organic minimalism that emerged from Derges’ experience of living in Japan in the early 1980s. “I  went to live in Japan for a period of five years,” she says. “And Japan reflected that fascination as well because water is venerated there; in the temples, in the gardens, even in modern office buildings you’ll go in and there will be a quiet place with a small pond of water where you can sit and contemplate. Japan is completely watery,” says Derges with a laugh.

After returning from Japan, Derges continued researching new ways to portray the physical world. “I was reading a lot about physics and the observer and the observed and was really interested in finding ways to visually articulate that. I was exploring the invisible world and appropriating things from early science.”

This curiosity with how to make the sensory and emotional visible has been a hallmark of her career. She has experimented with process, symbolism and the environment to create one of the most distinctive bodies of work in photography today. It’s a curiosity that has continued to this day. From environmentally based photograms to digitally produced constructed environments, Susan Derges’ work bridges the past and the present.

1. Observer and Observed no 6.

“I had a marvellous book from the 1950s called Soap Bubbles and the Forces that Mould them. It was a beautiful gem of a book and it had an experiment called musical fountains. You charged the fountains with a tuning fork and then lit it with a strobe light so it seemed as though the water wasn’t moving. I set this experiment up in my darkroom with a transducer, a jet of water and a frequency generator for the sound and it was amazing. You had these water droplets hanging in space and they looked so still, as though you could reach out and touch them, but of course if you did that your hand got wet because they weren’t still at all.”

Derges says she “…took lots of boring Harold Egerton like images…” and then her camera jammed. She went in front of the lens to unjam it, the film apparently ruined. “When I developed the film I was about to throw it away, but then I looked more closely and I thought, ah, there’s something going on here. Then I saw the information in the water droplets. They were like little fish eye lenses reflecting multiple images of me. So there was that Man Ray teardrop element and it started having connections with surrealism. It was a fortuitous accident but one that I was looking for.”

2. Full Circle

“When I was making the previous work I was in a flat in Notting Hill Gate using the flat as a studio and doing very science based work. But I moved to Devon in 1991 and suddenly found the landscape of Devon enormously rich. I saw this pond on Dartmoor and the sun was hitting this frogspawn and the shadow from the sun looked just like a photogram. I thought I can do that in the studio. So I did.”

3. River Bovey

“After that I got more interested in what I was looking at rather than how to represent it. I got interested in life cycles, the cycles of frogs and bees, and the processes of what was going on in the landscape.”

“I thought I could go outside at night with big sheets of paper and go into the place and be led by the place and the situation. That was what I experienced with the River Taw and Bovey. I wanted to get as close as possible to a process that is also our process. Our bodies, our mental processes work in a way that is very similar to what happens in a river. There are streams and flows and blockages, so I was dabbling in reading complexity and chaos and considering myself a participant rather than an author.”

4. Shorelines

“I was processing my own prints by the time I made Shoreline. These prints were made on the South Devon Coast around Sidmouth and Dawlish. I’d go there and wait for high tide and then let the waters flow over them. They were 3 ½  feet x 8 feet long and I got quite adept at reading the patterns of the water and the moon and the effect it would have on the paper.”

“There was such an investment in taking these big prints and you could lose so many prints in one night and end up with nothing if the waves went the wrong way. But I started to get headaches and eye strain from spending hours and hours in the dark room . It was physically taxing.”

5. Full Moon

“I had got very tired of being dictated to by a process but I got really interested in the moons, the clouds and the star fields so I started to do a lot of night photography of moons and star fields. Then I used an enlarger head on a rail to make a tracking device and put in the transparency of the moon or stars and projected that onto the Cibachrome in the tank with the leaves and branches laid on top of it.”

6. Canal Bridge

“That’s made with constructed silhouettes. It’s a reference back to growing up. It’s an imaginary place with the branches brought in. It’s a digital print made with a digital camera.”

“In a way it’s about death. There’s this symbol of crossing the river and there’s the symbol of the fading moon but I wasn’t thinking about these things when I made it. I made it just after my mother’s death and I had a strong sense of the transience of life. It refers back to my childhood and the canal I used to play at, but I’ll probably never go to that place again because the person associated with it is gone.”

Susan Derges will be speaking at Beyond  Beyond the Visual: Music, Word and Landscape 

at the SouthBank Club, Bristol

November 7th: 12:00 - 19:00 

Buy Tickets here

Composition for Isabel with Camellia

Composer Huw Belling created a piece entitled Blumenduft (Floral Scent) to accompany my Isabel with Camellia picture at the National Portrait Gallery. Performed by oboeist Helen Fraser, the piece premiered at The National Portrait Gallery last week.

You can listen to the piece at Huw's website. I love it of course and am honoured to have a piece written for the work.

As the programme notes says,

Blumenduft translates from German as ‘floral scent’. As the piece unfolds, the emphatic repetition of phrases in slightly different iterations permeates the consciousness like a sweetly wafting scent. But the piece is not all innocence. There is a subcutaneous strain of uncertainty; broken phrases betray a certain doubt; a distrust of the senses.