Or are you a stranger without even a name: Postcards from Donetsk

( I wrote this post about Anastasia Taylor-Lind's Postcards from Donetsk last week, but then, as we began promoting Music, Word, and Landscape on November 7th, I realised that actually, very obviously, this is all about landscape, about the pastoral, about war, about where we live and how we want people to see it. It's about our expectations and how we use photography to fulfil those expectations through generic representations of place, both in postcards and beyond.

It's also about music and song, which is what yesterday's post was about.

And that of course is the subject of the Word, Music, Landscape: Beyond the Visual. For which, you can, as always, Buy Your Tickets Here )

In July, Anastasia Taylor-Lind put a call out on Facebook asking if anybody a postcard from Donetsk. I, along with 921 others, said yes.

A few weeks later, the card arrived. It was a simple postcard of a rose-filled Donetsk (it's the City of Roses) at dusk. On the back there's some writing; Mikhail Meshkov was killed in Debaltsevo on Saturday 31st of January 2015.

Very simple. Very sad. Instantly the question came up. Who was this man, where did he die, how did he die? What was his story? I googled it. Debaltsevo was the site of a major battle/siege and Meshkov was possibly a separatist or possibly not, One search led me to a Meshkov who had insulted Putin on the internet, another one led m to a Meshkov with SPQR and a separatist flag on his Instagram feed.

That was kind of striking and I wondered if that was not the way the project was supposed to work. But then at the same time, it is exactly the way the project is supposed to work.

It struck me how simple and effective Postcards from Donetsk was, so I decided to have a short chat with her about it. This is part of what she said.

"I got the idea from a song called No Man's Land by June Tabor. I heard it on the radio as part of a programme to commemorate the music from the first world war. In the song, June Tabor describes coming across a gravestone for a soldier called Willie McBride. She imagines what his life was like and if he left behind people who loved him. Or if he didn't. Was he remembered or was he forgotten?

I bought the album and played it over and over, until I knew all the words.

(This is one of the verses.)


And did you leave a wife or a sweetheart behind
In some faithful heart is your memory enshrined
Although you died back there in nineteen-sixteen
In that faithful heart are you ever nineteen
Or are you a stranger without even a name
Enclosed and forgotten behind the glass frame
In a old photograph, torn and battered and stained
And faded to yellow in a brown leather frame.

It's a song about war, about loss, but also about photography and naming people. This song named Willie McBride. And I thought that was important.

When I went to Ukraine I thought naming people was important. Photojournalism doesn't often do that, especially in a personal manner.

Instead there's a cast of characters in most photojournalistic depictions of war; the refugee, the grieving mother, the wounded soldier, those fleeing, those left behind in the ruins.

War happens to people who live in a war zone. It happens in places where war happens. It doesn't happen in Boston where I'm living or Bath where you live. We don't believe it's possible.

But it is possible. It can happen. And the greatest story you can tell is one where at the end, people say, 'that could happen to me.'

Before this I was making pictures of war as I knew how to make them. I photographed bombed-out apartment buildings and wounded soldiers. I was making pictures that looked like war pictures.

But then I saw these postcards of Donetsk which was in the middle of a war zone and I thought this could be where I'm from in Devon in England. If it could happen in Donetsk, it could happen anywhere.

Wherever I go my mum follows the news. She's concerned and needs to know what's happening where I am. With these cards, I wanted to make sure that people would care as much about the news from Ukraine as my mum did. I wanted to make it personal.

So I put a picture of the card up on Instagram, then I year later went back and got more cards.  But the question was who to send them to.

 I put a call out on Facebook and social media asking if people wanted a card. I didn't know if it would be a complete failure or what would happen. But in the end I got 900 names to send cards to.

I spent 10 days with my assistant researching people who had died in the war and writing the postcards to people. I wrote the names of those who had died and the place and date they had died and that's all. It was about giving a name. I still didn't know what would happen when people got the cards.

This was where social media kicked in. I have 70,000 followers on Instagram, but I had  never realised the power of social media. This was the first time I saw how it can be used to reach outside the photographic community. That's so important to me about the project.

So after I sent the cards out, people started posting pictures on Instagram, they started sending me stories of what they did when they got the cards; they lit candles, they prayed, they gave toasts, they made shrines around the card, they went to the top of hills and remembered the name on the card, and commemorated the anniversary of their death. There were people telling the story of the card to friends, to family, to their children over dinner. People were googling the names and researching the places named on the cards.

It was quite incredible. In all my years of photojournalism, nobody has ever written to me saying they had prayed for the person in the picture. Yet here it was happening repeatedly. Something different was happening.

I thought the story-telling would be when I wrote the card to the person I was sending it to. But it wasn't. The story telling happens when the person who receives the card starts telling the story to others; to their family, to their friends, the people they meet.

I don't know how this is going to end. I funded the first part with loans from 3 other photographers but now I'm going to continue. Robin Hammond has got me 2,000 more cards from Donetsk and I'm going to go back in January and send out another thousand. It seems wrong to stop it now when almost 7,000 people have died in the war. Though in reality, the total is probably much higher. There's no official list and because it's an artillery war, lots of people are missing in action; they don't have dog tags or ID, or their remains are never found.

For me it's a new way of working but it's one I'm very excited about. The difference between this and photojournalism is that if I'd photographed death for 10 days, I'd have felt fear, anxiety and terror. I'd feel the emotions of a war zone. With Postcards from Donetsk, after 10 days of writing the effect was one of sadness. I felt very sad. It's a big difference.

To receive a postcard, email your address to: anastasiataylorlind@gmail.com

To contribute to the campaign, donate here

To see more pictures, go here

Country Fictions/Country Hell

I like Country Fictions by Juan Aballe. It's published by Fuego Books, a Spanish publishing house based in Madrid, and it's an elegant green cloth-backed volume, one picture pasted on the cover. This pastoral cover image looks like a painting, it's all mountains, hills and fields with an idyllic-looking farmhouses in the foreground.

So there's the Country and there are the Fictions. We're straight into what we, as city dwellers, project onto country living, that pastoral idyll.

There are sheep on hills and smoky hilltops, a caravan where a woman who has just washed her hair sits drawing on a smoke; she's found the patch of sun and dappled light streams in through the vines growing above.

There are more caravans and lean-tos and teepees, mattresses spread out on floors where escapees from the city (or not from the city) flake out and rest their tired limbs. and at the end of the book a white haired woman looks out over a wooded valley, white shawl and felt shoes hinting at the nip in the air.



And then comes the poem. It begins like this:

We search for years, 
we imagine our future in better places
where we could start all over.

Maybe there was once a countryside, 
a village with green and fertile meadows,
Now we return to find only
the remains of a disused scenery.

We search for beauty in a landscape
where we do not belong,
where time seems to have stopped still.

We live our own transition,
our fragile utopia,
trying to understand,
what we are doing here,
and who we are.

So there's the scene set and we can project that onto the people - but that is all we can do. Looking at the pictures (which are really good. It's a nice edit) I can try to understand what these people are doing there - which ones are damaged or disturbed or lonely or shy. Who has found a refuge, who has escaped, who has left behind. We can make our guesses, but guesses are only guesses.

Maybe that's half the fun?

Buy Country Fictions here. 

Seeing 3,000 Pictures and Remembering One

In light of the other week's post on photographic muzak, I asked a couple of people (er, my wife and daughter) who had walked through Bath city centre in the morning what pictures they remembered. They came up with two - one was a Red Cross advert on a bus, the other was an advert on a pub (not in Bath City Centre) showing a happy couple asking if people would be interested in running the pub. The happiness of the picture was at odds with the words and the backdrop. That's why it got remembered. That's all they came up with. One picture each.

On their walk through Bath, they probably passed around 3,000 photographs. They remembered one of them! One out of 3,000. Of course, some of the pictures they passed are not designed to be remembered, they work on more cumulative, subliminal levels, some of them are not shown well, and most of them are illustrative (they definitely would have walked past around 500 photographs in estate agent's windows) and designed to be looked at rather than seen.

But still, the photographs were all there and even if they weren't consciously remembered, some of them went in by other means, and some of them are even designed to go in through other means. They will have been noticed on some level.

Then yesterday I found myself looking at the Pastoral work of Alexander Gronsky. It was online and click, click, click I went, skimming over the surface of the pictures, spending a few seconds at most on each.

It was another example of pictures not getting noticed. Here they are fine landscape/documentary images of the highest order (look at Norilsk. Amazing). They have a visual heritage that ties right into Atget and they are fantastic, but the problem is the same. They are appearing on a platform that begs you not to stop, to consider or to think. You dismiss them.

I write a lot about photobooks on this blog. Gronsky made a book of this work and he did it for a reason. The purpose of photobooks (if they are any good at all) is to make the viewer take some time over an image, to consider where it's come from, where it's going, to revel in its aesthetic glory, to touch on the world outside, to make links and connections between art, history and ideas.

That's the point of half the writing on photography as well; it examines and tries to link photography to art, to process, to psychology, to ethics, to add a dimension to a two-dimensional bit of paper or a no-dimension scrunch of bytes.

Making people stop and consider an image is not something limited to any medium then. It's central to all photography, it's central to all art, it's central to writing. How do you get people to stop.

And that's what this piece by Francis Hodgson is about. It's about the marks we make on paper, how we make an image stick in a tactile sense almost. Does photography work like art? Artist, Ian Mckeever, thinks not.

“A photograph”, said Ian McKeever that day, “is at its maximum position at the very moment it is made. [Afterwards] it can only ever be less than that…so a photographer is left with a dilemma: how to extend the language. The painter has a year or two in which to inflect meaning into what he’s doing. The question becomes how does the photographer bring that to the photograph?” And McKeever’s answer, clearly felt, although never in fact stated outright, was that he can’t.

Hodgson disagrees and argues that the fine print is something designed to hold the viewer.

I’ve argued that the whole Pictorialist tendency contained at root a kind of campaign for viewers to be held longer on the surface of photographs than has been the norm in news, or advertising or topography or any of the one of the dominant zones of photography. Maybe it was not always mark making, but certainly mark-imitating. Interesting surfaces will do, if you can’t have marks upon them or seemingly upon them. Anything which counters the tendency in viewers to see a photograph as a single rectangular frameful of information can help to slow the viewer’s mind within a photograph. 

He goes on to talk about how dimension, eye movement, attention grabbing and composition attract attention. Hodgson has a background in and a specific interest in the photographic print, but the key idea is, if a photograph is something that we want people to invest time and energy in (and we don't always), how do we get them to do that, especially when we view them on the computer.

Sooner or later photographs will become rare as physical objects. On screens, photographs never have those marks: unless … somebody has put them there on purpose. And that’s where we began. It’s not really about mark-making as such. It’s just making marks or finding ways to imitate them is one of the very best ways to keep the eye of the viewer where you want it. And once you’ve done that, you can begin to say whatever it is you have to say. But you’ve got to find a way to keep the viewer from sliding off your photograph.

 Read the whole piece here.