Yann Gross and African Skateboarders

 

I do like Yann Gross' pictures of skateboarders in Kampala.

Some of them remind me of both Paul Close and Pieter Hugo.

His website is here. 

"I love exploring the way people come together," says the award-winning Swiss photographer Yann Gross, 29. "Two years ago, I visited my girlfriend who was working in Uganda, and she took me to this skate park she'd found in Kitintale, a working-class suburb of Kampala. It's the first east African skate park, and as a skateboarder I was fascinated by the community that had built up around it. It was constructed entirely by local kids. I ended up staying there for two months; I became friends with them first, and only then I started to take pictures.

"Here, you can see some goats milling around. It's a poor neighbourhood; there's no big shops, just small huts made of bricks and mud. The park is a little island in the middle, where the children can live their dream."

I'll have to do a repeat posting. This is Binyavanga Wainana (from Granta 92) writing about how to write about Africa.

How to Write about Africa

Always use the word 'Africa' or 'Darkness' or 'Safari' in your title. Subtitles may include the words 'Zanzibar', 'Masai', 'Zulu', 'Zambezi', 'Congo', 'Nile', 'Big', 'Sky', 'Shadow', 'Drum', 'Sun' or 'Bygone'. Also useful are words such as 'Guerrillas', 'Timeless', 'Primordial' and 'Tribal'. Note that 'People' means Africans who are not black, while 'The People' means black Africans.

Never have a picture of a well-adjusted African on the cover of your book, or in it, unless that African has won the Nobel Prize. An AK-47, prominent ribs, naked breasts: use these. If you must include an African, make sure you get one in Masai or Zulu or Dogon dress.

In your text, treat Africa as if it were one country. It is hot and dusty with rolling grasslands and huge herds of animals and tall, thin people who are starving. Or it is hot and steamy with very short people who eat primates. Don't get bogged down with precise descriptions. Africa is big: fifty-four countries, 900 million people who are too busy starving and dying and warring and emigrating to read your book. The continent is full of deserts, jungles, highlands, savannahs and many other things, but your reader doesn't care about all that, so keep your descriptions romantic and evocative and unparticular.

Make sure you show how Africans have music and rhythm deep in their souls, and eat things no other humans eat. Do not mention rice and beef and wheat; monkey-brain is an African's cuisine of choice, along with goat, snake, worms and grubs and all manner of game meat. Make sure you show that you are able to eat such food without flinching, and describe how you learn to enjoy it—because you care.

Taboo subjects: ordinary domestic scenes, love between Africans (unless a death is involved), references to African writers or intellectuals, mention of school-going children who are not suffering from yaws or Ebola fever or female genital mutilation.

Throughout the book, adopt a sotto voice, in conspiracy with the reader, and a sad I-expected-so-much tone. Establish early on that your liberalism is impeccable, and mention near the beginning how much you love Africa, how you fell in love with the place and can't live without her. Africa is the only continent you can love—take advantage of this. If you are a man, thrust yourself into her warm virgin forests. If you are a woman, treat Africa as a man who wears a bush jacket and disappears off into the sunset. Africa is to be pitied, worshipped or dominated. Whichever angle you take, be sure to leave the strong impression that without your intervention and your important book, Africa is doomed.

Your African characters may include naked warriors, loyal servants, diviners and seers, ancient wise men living in hermitic splendour. Or corrupt politicians, inept polygamous travel-guides, and prostitutes you have slept with. The Loyal Servant always behaves like a seven-year-old and needs a firm hand; he is scared of snakes, good with children, and always involving you in his complex domestic dramas. The Ancient Wise Man always comes from a noble tribe (not the money-grubbing tribes like the Gikuyu, the Igbo or the Shona). He has rheumy eyes and is close to the Earth. The Modern African is a fat man who steals and works in the visa office, refusing to give work permits to qualified Westerners who really care about Africa. He is an enemy of development, always using his government job to make it difficult for pragmatic and good-hearted expats to set up NGOs or Legal Conservation Areas. Or he is an Oxford-educated intellectual turned serial-killing politician in a Savile Row suit. He is a cannibal who likes Cristal champagne, and his mother is a rich witch-doctor who really runs the country.

Among your characters you must always include The Starving African, who wanders the refugee camp nearly naked, and waits for the benevolence of the West. Her children have flies on their eyelids and pot bellies, and her breasts are flat and empty. She must look utterly helpless. She can have no past, no history; such diversions ruin the dramatic moment. Moans are good. She must never say anything about herself in the dialogue except to speak of her (unspeakable) suffering. Also be sure to include a warm and motherly woman who has a rolling laugh and who is concerned for your well-being. Just call her Mama. Her children are all delinquent. These characters should buzz around your main hero, making him look good. Your hero can teach them, bathe them, feed them; he carries lots of babies and has seen Death. Your hero is you (if reportage), or a beautiful, tragic international celebrity/aristocrat who now cares for animals (if fiction).

Bad Western characters may include children of Tory cabinet ministers, Afrikaners, employees of the World Bank. When talking about exploitation by foreigners mention the Chinese and Indian traders. Blame the West for Africa's situation. But do not be too specific.

Broad brushstrokes throughout are good. Avoid having the African characters laugh, or struggle to educate their kids, or just make do in mundane circumstances. Have them illuminate something about Europe or America in Africa. African characters should be colourful, exotic, larger than life—but empty inside, with no dialogue, no conflicts or resolutions in their stories, no depth or quirks to confuse the cause.

Describe, in detail, naked breasts (young, old, conservative, recently raped, big, small) or mutilated genitals, or enhanced genitals. Or any kind of genitals. And dead bodies. Or, better, naked dead bodies. And especially rotting naked dead bodies. Remember, any work you submit in which people look filthy and miserable will be referred to as the 'real Africa', and you want that on your dust jacket. Do not feel queasy about this: you are trying to help them to get aid from the West. The biggest taboo in writing about Africa is to describe or show dead or suffering white people.

Animals, on the other hand, must be treated as well rounded, complex characters. They speak (or grunt while tossing their manes proudly) and have names, ambitions and desires. They also have family values: see how lions teach their children? Elephants are caring, and are good feminists or dignified patriarchs. So are gorillas. Never, ever say anything negative about an elephant or a gorilla. Elephants may attack people's property, destroy their crops, and even kill them. Always take the side of the elephant. Big cats have public-school accents. Hyenas are fair game and have vaguely Middle Eastern accents. Any short Africans who live in the jungle or desert may be portrayed with good humour (unless they are in conflict with an elephant or chimpanzee or gorilla, in which case they are pure evil).

After celebrity activists and aid workers, conservationists are Africa's most important people. Do not offend them. You need them to invite you to their 30,000-acre game ranch or 'conservation area', and this is the only way you will get to interview the celebrity activist. Often a book cover with a heroic-looking conservationist on it works magic for sales. Anybody white, tanned and wearing khaki who once had a pet antelope or a farm is a conservationist, one who is preserving Africa's rich heritage. When interviewing him or her, do not ask how much funding they have; do not ask how much money they make off their game. Never ask how much they pay their employees.

Readers will be put off if you don't mention the light in Africa. And sunsets, the African sunset is a must. It is always big and red. There is always a big sky. Wide empty spaces and game are critical—Africa is the Land of Wide Empty Spaces. When writing about the plight of flora and fauna, make sure you mention that Africa is overpopulated. When your main character is in a desert or jungle living with indigenous peoples (anybody short) it is okay to mention that Africa has been severely depopulated by Aids and War (use caps).

You'll also need a nightclub called Tropicana, where mercenaries, evil nouveau riche Africans and prostitutes and guerrillas and expats hang out.

Always end your book with Nelson Mandela saying something about rainbows or renaissances. Because you care.

End

I love Pieter Hugo's work - it's fantastic. It's also multi-layered, it reeks of urbanisation, industrialisation, fake machismo, the film industry (they have a film industry!) and the animals that do feature are mangy, mistreated objects of somebody else's (not our) curiosity. Not a safari or a sotto voce David Attenborough in sight.

How Not to Photograph: The Freak Show

picture: Colin Pantall - Only a Two on the Ballen Scale of Freakiness

Diametrically opposed to the Man of Average Height is the Freak Show. Diane Arbus was the mistress of this, showing both her regular freaks as well as flipping things round and imbuing the ordinary with a freakishness that belied their apparent conventionality.

In other words, you can photograph freaks as freaks and ordinary people as ordinary people, or you can photograph freaks as ordinary people and ordinary people as freaks. It's like a circle of life that swings from the ordinary to freaks and back again.

We are all freaks in the end, just as we are all ordinary. The only question is where you end up placing your photography on that circle of freakiness/normality. One thing that isn't any good is photographing ordinary people as ordinary people because then you just end up with a load of pictures of men of average height as mentioned in the previous post.

Photographing freaks as freaks is one of the great cliches of photography. Photographing the oddities of human nature as oddities is as insulting as calling them oddities (or freaks) in the first place. There is nothing intrinsically interesting about giants or little people or transvestites beyond the simple act of staring. Freak show photography is a trivialisation of the human condition.

It is a trivialisation that has many forms. The worst kind of photojournalism or NGO reportage, where the starving and the suffering stare big-eyed and helpless at the camera is a kind of freak show. We see people in their passive state, afflicted by conditions beyond their control, conditions that they have no power over or ability to change (only we have that power, by pledging only £5 a month, we can save...). They have no power over their starvation and disease because it is shown as intrinsically part of them. They are different to us. And because they are different to us, their afflictions are not quite the same as ours. It doesn't really matter what happens to them. They are different to us and we can stare. So we stare. But at the same time, if photography is not about staring what is it about?

The best kind of freak show is that where the freak is shown as ordinary and human. The most successful example of this from recent years are Pieter Hugo's pictures from Nigeria. He blasts his hyena men at us in full freakovision, but then undermines the effect with his muted colours and fifth-flyover landscapes. Throw in the fact that the hyena action is taking place in Africa, where you're not supposed to show that kind of thing, add the bloodshot, musclebound power of the hyena guys and you end up with a sensation of flipping between the ordinary, the exotic and the outlandish, ending up in a space where you are neither here or there. Somehow, between all these gaps other aspects of African life seem to shine through. Or am I thinking about it too much and is it just a darned good freak show?

That is Pieter Hugo (and more recently, there are photographers who do a similar, but lower-key thing admirably as well). However, most of us who attempt to do this aren't so successful. We try to show something freakish as beautiful/ordinary but this is only because we have chosen beautiful subjects in the first place, subjects with a symmetry of figure and face that belies their condition. We are choosing our freaks for their beauty in the first place and ignoring the ones who are, in conventional terms, too ugly, too scarred, too defeated, too unsymmetrical - the ones who are too freakish for our good taste. Which kind of defeats the purpose of the exercise and reveals it for what it is - an exercise in having your cake and eating it. But then what is the point of having a cake if you don't eat it.

There is also the danger of the freak becoming the slightly-odd-looking-person which also defeats the purpose of the exercise. However, many of us live in such a conformist world with such an overflow of images of distorted beauty and normality that this becomes something visionary and almost empowering - almost but not quite.

Some photographers are not remotely interested in the slightly-0dd-looking person, and his name is Roger Ballen. His cast of characters look anything but normal and the viewer can project his own genetic, physical and mental illnesses onto Ballen's subjects and the puppies, wire and scratched world that make up their photographic universe. I don't know if these imagined conditions and syndromes are any kind of reflection of reality. Perhaps Ballen's subjects all have Phd's in Rocket Science, nibble on Heston Blumenthal cuisine and dress in Prada when Ballen's not photographing them. Perhaps, but I suspect there's a bit of a South African country thing going on. That and the fact that Ballen's Hasselblad has a special Freak setting (that goes all the way to 11 and gave the name to the scale by which freakiness in photography is measured, The Ballen Scale). We don't have that kind of Hasselblad - just one reason why we shouldn't try to copy.

What can we learn from these pictures?

pcture: Larry Sultan


A few months ago, somebody said to me "What can we learn from these pictures?"

It's a bewildering question that presupposes so much, in particular that the purpose of photography is education learning.

But it's not. Photography doesn't teach us anything. It can show us things, it can make us revel in the beauty and the horror of it all, it can create emotional links between what we see and the lives we lead, the world around us, but why should we
expect it to teach us something. Even photography that comes in a book, with words, like Larry Sultan's Pictures From Home, doesn't teach us anything. But it does make us feel, it ties in ideas of land and home and family and creates a historical backdrop against which we can conjure up our own version of the truth.

Martin Parr once said that "All photography is propaganda" and he's absolutely right once you flip that round so that it becomes "All photography is true". But it's a truth that is visceral, emotional, non-rational and connects to a socialised visual reading, the same kind of reading that made Pieter Hugo say that "If you really want to know about anything - a war, a place, a person - you go read a book, right? You don't look at a photograph."

So if you want to learn the nitty-gritty of post-war migration to California, the who, where, when and why, go search the history section of your local library or do the simple thing and google it.

But that won't tell you about the cultural history of the migration, about the home, work and family and the disappointments of success or even what success really is. Larry Sultan's book won't tell you about that either, but it will lead you into places where you can feel the history in a way that words and statistics never can.

And it will do that because a photograph or a painting can touch us in places words can never reach. Pieter Hugo's hyena pictures, for example, don't teach me anything apart from a little footnote that guys in Nigeria make money with hyenas - I didn't know that before he came along. But the images have a level of uncertainty, a power and an elemental sense of rawness that combines with the post-apocalyptic nature of developing urban environments that carries them way beyond the bare socio-economic bones of how these people lead their lives.

And that is the way with all photography. It doesn't teach us anything, most of the time what it shows is blindingly obvious - teenage girls worry about their bodies, industrial structures are both ugly and beautiful, alcoholic parents create domestic mayhem and so on.

The work doesn't teach us anything, but why should it. It takes us to places we might normally not go and interweaves unconscious elements in ways that are far richer than any linear written narrative can do.