Three Books on Planes, Trees and Suicide

Here are three nice books from the Eriskay Connection. Enjoy the English while it lasts because next year the reviews go through the filter of a foreign language. The impetus for this was a couple of years ago I was at Paris Photo with a bunch of people who were from France, Italy, Spain, Germany and then there was me. Everybody else had the workings of at least two languages (English and their own) and more often than not, three or four or five. But not me. Which is often the way with English speakers. It was a bit shameful. It will be even more shameful when I start writing five-line reviews in mangled German, Spanish, French, Italian, Indonesian. But maybe I'll learn something even if nobody else will. Anyway here goes...

Aeronautics in the Backyard by Xiaoxiao Lu is a straightforward documentary of people in China who make model planes. And what planes they are; they are real flying planes, helicopters,auto-gyro hopping, propellered contraptions that fly, crash and fail to take off in various combinations.

The book comes complete with illustrations (very Da Vinci illustrations) of plans, footage from film of the flights - and the crashes, and details of the cost, height reached, and years spent making the planes.

There are pictures from back in the day when Mao caps and blue jackets were the order of dress, reaching forward to designers who have turned their hobby into a corporate kit-making reality. It's a really nice project and a different look into the resilience and energy of the Chinese aeronautical obsessive.

Nonni's Paradiso by Martina Marangoni tells the story of the farm where Nonni (  moved in 1950. To Nonni, it was paradise and she lived there the rest of her life. She photographed the farm on an old Rollei and it these yellowed images that are mixed with Marangoni's pictures of the fields, the trees, the undergrowth and the very earth on which the olive trees grow.

The book tells the story of the olive trees, of the farm on which he was born (in 1950, as part of a family of 'nine sharecroppers who worked from dawn to dusk to grow just about everything they need feed themselves and their animals'), of the struggle for life in a place that was both harsh and beautiful.

But it also tells the story of how the land has changed, what it has become. In that sense it's reminescent of Andy Sewell's Something Like a Nest; this was a book that looked at the reality of the British farming landscape that lies beneath the pastoral chocolate box image. In the same way, Marangoni looks at what the Tuscan landscape has become, what his family's farm, and the way of thinking and living that underpinned it, has become; a world-weary, shabby and neglected landscape with not thought for the environment, history or wellness of being.

(un)expected by Peter Dekens. Dekens made Touch a few years ago. This was a really well-thought out accordion book that showed a partially sighted man navigating his way around his house. It was sequence by space, by colour, by touch and was quite something.

(un)expected is a story of suicide. It consists of black and white pictures fromt the streets of Western Flanders, a Belgian province with an exceptionally high suicide rate. Mixed in with these landscapes are small booklets that tell the story of people who have had a loved one who has committed suicide. So we hear of Ime and Hanna. Ime hung himself from a tree in 2013. Ime was left behind and it is her we see in Dekens' photographs, struggling to come to terms with her loss and the nature of it. We see her in the woods, by trees. For several months after Ime's suicide, she would visit the tree where he hung himself. The reason; to feel close to him.

Then there's mother and father, Dekens' mother and father. His mother killed herself in 2008, after his father told her he was going to commit suicide. She believed him and, unable to face a future without him, she 'hanged herself at home.'

The story tells of how his father coped with this; badly at first but soon he fell in love again 'on a bus trip to Paris.'

There's Jose and Steven, her adopted son. Steven had psychotic episodes and was struggling when he threw himself under a train. Grief followed for Jose, but only after initial relief at Steven's death and the release from the pain he was experiencing.

For Kris, the grief is overwhelming. Her child, Ward, killed himself with pills after experiencing a gender-identity crisis that led to his suicide. She's 'desperate and depressed', she's spent time in a psychiatric hospital and she feels as though part of her, the mother part, has been 'amputated'.

The final subject is Anna, the mother of a family who struggle on, and try to talk about her in a 'sensitive, supportive way.' And that is what the whole book is about, about looking at suicide and showing how it affects those who are left behind, how they live in the spaces that were once filled with a loved one's presence but have been emptied of it through the most tragic of circumstances. It's about quiet rooms, quiet moments, about silence that is usually unwelcome and intrusive in its lack.

Buy Aeronautics in the Backyard here

Buy Nonni's Paradiso here

Buy (un)expected here

Remembering What you See: Rein Jelle Terpstra

pictures by Rein Jelle Terpstra

A break from dos and don'ts now.

So what would you want to remember seeing if you were going blind, if you were never going to see again?







‘Blindness is like a giant vacuum cleaner that takes over your life and sucks up almost everything. Your memories, your interests, your idea of time and how you would like to spend it, the places themselves, even the world; everything is hoovered away. Your consciousness is being emptied.’

John Hull in Touching the Rock (1990), the book in which he describes how all images gradually disappeared from his head after he went blind. Within just a couple of years, Hull had forgotten what his family or his house looked like .

That text (and the initial question) comes from Rein Jelle Terpstra's project and book on blindness, Retracing. It's a complex project about seeing, remembering, forgetting and losing one's sight (and with it one's visual memory) - and then relating this in book and exhibition form.

It's a thought-provoking and really engaging project which is collaborative in much that way that Anouk Kruithof's Happy Birthday was.

This is how Terpstra describes the project on his website.

InRetracing I am working with people who are about to lose their eyesight. I have asked them about images that are valuable to them. How would they like to remember these images and how can they do this? In a sense, I am looking over their shoulders to photograph the things they point out: the things they see, but also the things they still think they see or would like to see.

These images include the sea, someone's handwriting, the reflection in a mirror of a young woman applying make-up to her eyes, the view from the window, the studio of decorative painter, and much more.

All the images were shot on Kodachrome slides in 2010. Besides having special colours and sharpness, Kodachrome is known to last long. These images of light outlast human memory, which after all lasts only one lifetime.

I was able to have the films developed just in time in America, at the only place that still provided the service. They stopped developing this famous stock for good on 31 December 2010.

I will present this – analogue – series as a slideshow installation with multiple projectors.

For the people I work with in this project this is an urgent theme. For them, perception is no longer a given and has become a precious thing. Photography’s role of preserving images here becomes an ambivalent one.

Two human motives for photography – the wish the document certain moments and show the results to others – now have a different effect. For that reason I want to follow up this project and document it.

I keep in touch with these people. I give them prints of the slides and in a couple of years I will tell them about these prints. I will describe the photographs carefully in words, in an iconographic way, so that the images can be invoked in their heads through language.

So when you open the book you know you are seeing pictures of things that people want to remember. On the whole, the people featured in the book ordinary things that  have a tactile quality to them; a view from a window, a shiny length of piping, a paint splatted floor, an hand rubbing on eyeshadow, a trail of animal prints in the snow. Part of the reason for this is the gradual realisation on the part of the subjects that though they won't have a visual sense of the things that Terpstra is photographing, they will have other sensory experiences of those objects - the visual is being remembered through the auditory, the tactile, the olfactory senses.

Half of the book is filled with these pictures of ordinary things, with Terpstra photographing them in the service of his subjects.

The other half of the book is filled with pictures of the slide show in which the images were exhibited, with each one fading in and out rather like the blindness that will come to the people who chose those images. These are printed on a different paper stock and the background is black. Terpstra is running with a theme here, elevating the everyday into something that is to be savoured. The pictures are banal - they're not 'good' pictures, but the ideas around them elevate them into something altogether different,  something that is part of another person's experience, something that is about to be lost, something that extends beyond the picture on the page.

Terpstra says that he takes "...pictures of what they see, or think they see, and what they don't want to forget. The project is about farewell and loss, about almost anything that runs through your fingers... These people know exactly what images they will lose. One of the participants wanted me to record the insignificant, everyday images. "Those are the ones you will forget about first," she said."


Buy the book here.