Life Advice from Sam Harris: It's Raining! It's Cold! It's London! Let's Go to India!

The Middle of Somewhere is a lovely book about growing up, about being a child, about experiencing the world, about being part of nature.

The world of the Middle of Somewhere is ostensibly India and Australia, but really in an ideal world it could be anywhere where there are open spaces, clear skies and a family where freedom, adventure and discovery are the norm. And the children are Uma and Yali, daughters of  Sam Harris. He photographed their lives, their joys, their tears and their traumas as they grew up in the most idyllic surroundings. But again, in an ideal world, it could be any child.

It's a joyful book then, one that starts with a picture of a line of green clad girls, their feet pushing through the grass of a forest clearing, their arms pushing against the barriers of our imagination. Flick forward a page and we see  Uma (I think) lying in a meadow, her eyes closed as she falls into the ground upon which she lies.

There's a pagan element to the book, a sense that we are, or should be, one with nature, and that is emphasised through repeated pictures of birds, animals, flowers and fruit. A double-page spread shows a dead red-beaked finch held in the palm of a hand that is adorned with bangles and bead, together with Yali (I think) holding a mashed up bunch of blackberries, her lips stained red, her eyes gazing directly into the camera from hair that is reminiscent of the well-dwelling Sadako of The Ring.

So we have coming of age and we have mortality and there is half a nod to Sanguinetti's Sixth Day and the lyricism of the Immediate Family landscape, but the symbolism is never heavy handed and the book can be read as a straightforward journal, especially because it is made like a journal.

The journal inserts help in this. We hear from Yael, Harris's partner, as she sits with a young Uma in a one-bedroom flat in London. It's raining and she needs a change, they all need a change. The next entry comes from Goa. The change has come and life becomes a romantic tale of travelling in India, on the road in places where hungry cows, blue seas and freak storms create memories that have a value beyond value. Then Yael is suddenly pregnant, one month from term and ready to give birth, 'just like millions of other women..' in an Indian village.

And on life goes.



There's a great picture of gleaming eucalypti (I think?) shot from the inside of a car. It's a familiar shot with the dashboard in the foreground but is evocative all the same, a sign of the move to Australia, and the beginning of a new kind of life.

Here, the open spaces and the big skies open up before Harris and Yael. We see them standing beneath the stars, looking at a gleaming mood, a moment of peace as a quiet domesticity (toys, make-up, washing, chickens - the quieter pictures that punctuate the stronger double page spreads) makes a home in the smallholding that the family now calls home.



Amidst all this there are tears and conflict. Uma and Yali fight, then make up. We see this in little kiss-and-make-up notes stuck into the pages of the book.

The girls grow and so does the family's Australian home. Uma and Yael reach up with brooms to dislodge water trapped in an awning. But now Uma is almost Yael's height, more nimble and stronger. The generational 'surpasso' beckons.



And that is almost how the book ends. It's a gorgeous book with a gorgeous cover that is a pointillist rendition of the bush surrounding the Australian home. It's romantic, populist and beautifully produced; as well as the post-it notes and journal inserts, it comes with rounded corners to edge off that travelogue feel.

Buy the book here. 

How to Stop your Pictures Being Boring

Francis Hodgson gave a talk at Newport (the University of South Wales) last week in which he outlined his views on how to elevate the photograph from the digital soup into which it is in danger of being immersed.

(Read Francis Hodgson in conversation with Joerg Colberg here)

I like the idea of digital soup - it corresponds to Erik Kessels piles of photographs - a squillion photographs uploaded to flickr in one day (although is it really a squillion, and were a squillion really printed out?)- and raises the same questions. How do we differentiate our images from this amorphous mass of visual detritus?

Francis suggested 3 major ways of doing this (and noted that there are a whole bunch more).


Process
Series
Allusion

Work with processes and you may escape the surface problem of photography - that it only has surface. You also touch on craft and connect your work to historical uses of photography.

Work in series and what is banal in the individual image is ampliflied so that similarity and difference are accentuated, so a narrative is formed.

Work with allusion and you connect your work with a broader world, one where the art-historical, the psychological, the political, the market - take your pick - is referenced. It makes people take your work seriously.

Trouble is when it doesn't work, allusion becomes collusion, delusion or illusion. And there's a lot of that kind of work around.

When it does work? A couple of examples of people who to my mind hit the three Hodgson sweet spots (process, series and allusion) every time: Sally Mann and Abelardo Morell (see  below)

Leo Maguire's Dogging Tales

Leo Maguire's ( ex-Newport student, made the fabulous Gypsy Blood - see an interview here) latest film, 
Dogging Tales, showed on Channel 4 in the UK last week.

For those of you unfamiliar with what dogging is, it is basically having sex (or watching people have sex ) in the woods at night.

I was expecting something really sensationalist and lurid, but that's not what Maguire showed. Instead we saw a series of vaguely unattractive men saying how dogging was like real-life porn, and a series of women with confidence issues and a variety of histories saying how dogging has improved their confidence.

So there was a degree of subtlety to it, and the animal masks that were used to disguise people's identities were funny/strange and connected to the nightime wildlife footage that was liberally banded through the documentary - I did get the feeling at times that Maguire might not have got all the footage he wanted, but hey, it was the most tweeted Channel 4 programme of the year and got all the old dogging jokes flowing - who are the dogger neighbours, the dogger colleagues, the dogger photographers? But most of all, you got the feeling that dogging is something you really don't want to do unless you are the woman who liked getting fucked by as many men as quickly as possible. But I guess there aren't too many of those around. This was apparent from the attempts of 'Dogging Terry' (pictured above) and his girlfriend, Sarah's attempt to get into dogging. it was all fine until the reality of Terry watching somebody else touching Sarah got too much and he said "I'm really not comfortable with this" and ended the affair.The bathos of both the dogging footgage and  the people interviewed was overwhelming.

Maguire's film got me thinking of a couple of photography dogger projects. The first one is The Park by Kohei Yoshiyuki, which is a series of dogging pictures. But because it is in Japan, it comes with a whole different series of connotations and we somehow take it more seriously than dogging (which has a Carry On/Donald McGill seaside postcard association). The more exotic, the more we believe in our fictions.

That taking something seriously due to cultural presumptions reminds me of an overnight train trip I once took in India from Varanasi to Chennai. There was a Japanese woman on the train singing songs all the way down (to keep her mind off the freezing cold I think) and we were wondering at the high, spiritual nature of them - and then she started on Give me a Home Where the Buffalo Roam... and the illusion was blown. It's kind of the same with Kohei Yoshiyuki - the scales have fallen off my eyes. He's a dogger with a camera. You Dirty Old Man!






The other projects it reminds me of are Scott Sothern's Lowlife and Nocturnal Submissions, the latter a series of anecdotes about Scott visiting low-rent prostitutes in the 80s. It's fascinating but, like the dogging, leaves one more than a little bit grubby with a very organic description of the sexual process that has a little bit of exploitation thrown in for good measure. The representation of women's bodies is also interesting, in that they are not titillating or idealised. Everything is as it is, so to speak.

That reminds me of a piece on Rachel Whiteread in the weekend's paper in which she describes how her mother "...was involved in a famous feminist exhibition at the ICA called Women's Images of Men."

And that got me to thinking about what women photographers represent men. And I came up with Sally Mann's amazing pictures of her husband. And that was about it. So who else?

Frieke Janssens Child Smokers

Child smokers by Frieke Janssens are certainly striking, the bastard child of Loretta Lux and Mark E.Smith.

The first thing I felt when I saw it was a sense of nostalgia for those days in the 70s when you'd have scrawny, ferret-like 11-year-old kids lighting up and gobbing all over the place behind the bike sheds at school.

There was a complex range of ways kids held and smoked their fags, and a complex range of different ways of gobbing. But I don't really think that Hanssens addresses the appeal smoking had for British kids - as something hard as well as cool (see Lewis Hine below) - but rather projects an adult idea of smoking onto the children. But then it's commercial photography which is kind of like smoking in that it's the first hit that counts and not the long-term view.

So I thought of other pictures of children smoking and came up with a few that really nail it for me.

Mary Ellen Mark

Sally Mann

Lewis Hine

Hayashi Tadahiko

 and Joseph Szabo whose teenagers are nearly always smoking.

Mmm, that's a bit American-heavy but so it goes. I keep on thinking there should be loads of hollow-cheeked northern English kids smoking but I can't seem to find them...

Anyway, here's the Making of Child Smokers and the smoking Indonesia kid that inspired the project.

 

The Brave New World of Photography: Day 2 - Lauren Simonutti

 

I remember reading Rob Hornstra’s ( who should be in this review of new work for his funding of the Sochi project) thoughts on newspapers and how limited they were. He was publishing a newspaper

and wanted to loosen things up. The problem is, he was confusing newspaper design with newspaper use.

“That's the problem we're facing, people are still thinking about the idea of it being an actual newspaper. You shouldn't. You should think about it as being a series of pages with which you can do whatever you want. Most of the newspapers I've seen are still fairly conservative.”

 So the idea with Hornstra’s newspaper was that you could open it up and sequence it, pin it on the wall and do what you like with it. So you could that with Rob’s newspaper, but not with your regular run-of-the-mill non-Sochi newspaper. 

I understand exactly with what Rob is saying, but these comments (which are a little out of context here)  gave me the feeling that Rob isn’t much of a newspaper man. I am a newspaper man. I buy a newspaper every day except Sunday. And when I buy a regular newspaper, I do a lot of things with it.

I sometimes buy photography newspapers – Aperture Photo Review, the Prison Photography catalogue are a couple of fine examples I have got this year. But I don’t do much with them. I read them, then carefully fold them up and keep them safe. 

The regular newspaper, with its normal conservative design  I do all sorts with. Most days I start at the back, then move to the front. I do the puzzles and write on them. My daughter gets them and blacks in the eyes of Cameron and Clegg, Obama and Kate. I share my paper, I pull it apart so others can read it (try that with an ipad) I cut things out (try that with an ipad), I put them on the fridge and the wall. I save articles and read them again. I copy them, I paste them in books. I’ve wiped my arse with a newspaper (and I know we’ve all tried that with an ipad), I’ve ripped them up to make confetti, torn them into strips for papier mache, lined cupboards and floors with them, used them to protect furniture from paint, wrapped food in them, made paper planes and hats and kites with them, oh the list is endless to the things I’ve done with a newspaper.

So when I think of a radically designed newspaper, I’m not that impressed because I know that the use is not going to match the design of a regular newspaper. 

So for radical design, I’m not going to look at newspapers, but at a maker of handmade photobooks. The Dutch are pretty much recognised as the masters of photobook design and this runs through to small print editions and the handmade object. So I'm not going to choose a Dutch bookmaker - I'll leave that to others.

Lauren Simonutti made handmade books that were filled with self-portraits. The portraits are a record to her mental illness, made around the house with clocks and cakes and staircases as props. Simonutti lived in Baltimore, the birthplace of Edgar Allan Poe, so its fitting that there’s something darkly gothic about them. They are about being locked in, about a way of being that cannot be escaped, about being trapped with sounds and voices that can’t be escaped. But at the same time, there’s a life and a humour about them, there’s both a response and a kind of acceptance in the pictures – not enough of an acceptance though. Lauren Simonutti killed herself earlier this year. So for her handmade books, for having bells and feathers attached, but also for unblinking self-portraiture, I nominate Lauren Simonutti for both doing something new and doing something brave. I also get the feeling that Simonutti didn’t quite talk about her work in the way that you are supposed to if you are an artist, and she didn’t quite make it as you’re supposed to.

An interview I did with Lauren Simonutti is here.

But this is the best of week, so while I’m running on a theme, I think I’ll add a couple of people. I just got Elina Brotherus’s  new book, Artist and her Model. One of her most recent series is called Annunciation. These pictures, as Susan Bright writes in her introduction, show "...a woman all too versed in being able to communicate and articulate herself but still having battles with sex, the pain of love and waiting for her life to shift... The photographs deftly illustrate how enervating the process of trying to conceive can be."

They are incredibly sad. Many, many people have made photographs of people crying, but very few of them move me, very few hint at any kind of interior life. Brotherus doesn’t cry, but the sorrow ( if it is sorrow) seems to reach out of the picture and clutch at one’s heart.

The picture below is one of Brotherus' earlier works, titled I hate sex.

 

Oh, and another one. Alright. Sally Mann, both for leaving the children behind and, over the period of a decade, making flesh live on the photographic page and making a visual representation of muscular dystrophy, the disease that struck her husband, Larry Mann. Marvellous and moving.

 

Proud Flesh and Adult Muscular Dystrophy

So here are some images from Proud Flesh,  Sally Mann's pictures of her husband Larry (thanks for the suggestion, Suzanne Revy). They are notable because they are taken of a man by a woman, but also because they go against the norm of the male nude - they're not heroic, muscular or virile.

The pictures focus on Larry's adult muscular dystrophy, on the failure of his body, on its fall into physical darkness. These are photographs of human frailty, where the fragility of the medium mirrors the bodily decay.

I'm not sure if these pictures reflect badly on Larry Mann, if, as Sally says, they "come at the expense of the sitter".But they do reveal his weakness and his impotence; he has no response to what has struck him down. If they didn't do that, if they showed some phoney nobility of spirit, some humanity in the face of illness, they wouldn't be nearly so strong.

This is what John B.Ravenal has to say about the pictures in The Flesh and the Spirit.

"The long, sometimes awkward poses endured in the underheated barn that serves as Mann's studio, with minimal props and Spartan surroundings, have produced a sustained reflection on aging and mortality forged in a collaboration based on trust and mutual respect.The works reveal a subject willing to make himself vulnerable and to be measured against the idealized images thatstill pervade our conception of masculinity, and taken by a photographer aware of the unusual opportunity presented to her. Reflecting on the situation, Mann stated,  "Larry and I both understand how ethically complex and potent the act of making photographs is , how freighted with issues of honesty, responsibility, power and complicity, and how so many good images come at the expense of the sitter, in one way or another. These new images, we both knew, would come at his."

Death and Deceit

 

   

I enjoyed reading Joerg Colberg's musings on the defiance of death. It fits right in with internet discourse which is so different and less formal to that of other media, but at the same time, if you are selective and discerning to some extent, richer, more informative, thought-provoking and fun. And it can be lots of bad things too, but then so can everything.

Back to death and a link in to the previous post. From the top, we have Alexander Gardner, W.Willoughby Hooper's famine pictures from Madras, Memento Mori pictures, death by dismemberment from 1890 in China, an Indiana lynching from 1930, World War II deaths including Dimitri Baltermants Ukrainian mothers, Lee Miller's river corpse and the Nuremburg executions, the body of Che Guevara, Eddie Adams' Vietcong suspect getting shot, Jeffrey Silverthorne's morgue lady, the body of Mao, Joel Peter Witkin's kiss, an Andres Serrano morgue picture, Paul Watson's Mogadishu picture, a Sally Mann, Walter Schels' Nochmalleben, Saddam Hussein and Colonel Gaddafi. And just to bring things round full circle, I could have added some contemporary memento mori from Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep.

It's death all the way in other words but over a range of uses, formats and connotations, with readings that shift and shimmer and remain unfixed. Death is used to inform, to sensationalise, to memorialise,  sentimentalise, to portray as primitive, to villify, to justify and to glorify. It's a sign of community, a symbol of shame, of power corrupted and a chance to gloat. Death is used to warn, to remember, to spiritualise and  to signify and end to the old and the beginning of something new. It's used persuasively as evidence, unwittingly as a witness, a sign of our essential mortality and our attempt to defy that, to defy and deify. For Witkin, death is Grand Guignol, for Serrano  it's money. Death in Mogadishu comes packed with different meanings, collapse and chaos, hatred, humiliation as well as an embedded one of vengeance. Sally Mann reminds us of  the fluidity of life, of our organic core, how we  melt back into the ground. Saddam is a picture of chickens coming home to roost, of the thing that goes around has come around, and will go around and come around again. Gaddafi is vengeance, humiliation and hypocrisy.

At the heart of all death is some form of deceit, a grey area where the uncertainty of what lies beyond meets with our own attempts to change our fate, to shift the goalposts, to defy the end that awaits us all. Most obviously, we can see this with the Victorian memento mori, where corpses are propped up and eyes painted into to a facsimile of a family snapshot, only with one member as dead and stiff as a board. In the near dead famine pictures of Willoughby, the deceit isone of general humanity, of how, after taking the photos, he would send the famine victims on his way without giving them treatment, food or help.

The embalming of Mao, or Lenin, or Ho, was an attempt to sanctify and deify, to prevent death even as incompetent embalming collapses in on itself. Sally Mann's pictures of death do the opposite, allowing the flesh to melt back into the ground from which it once grew, as if it had never existed, as if it had never been part of a living body and soul, with a mind and a heart, part of a memory, a consciousness that still lingers somehow, somewhere in someone's heart

And Paul Watson's pictures of David Cleveland are inundated with deceit. For Somalis, the lie is that this was any kind of victory, that anything but bad came of it, and for the US - well it's not too far different really but with more contemporary resonances.

And what of Saddam and Gaddafi. These are desecrations, a humiliation of a figure and a regime, but desecrations that in their cruelty and inhumanity, bring back to life the very figures they seek to destroy. These pictures don't signify endings, only a return to the same beginning. That's their deceit.

But in real life, outside the photograph, isn't that what we do with death - we fear it, we cheat it, we glorify it and deny it. We do all those things because what do we really know in the end. And so in that respect, aren't these pictures as truthful as you can get, reflections of the human condition in all its ignorance uncertainty. It's not propaganda. It's just the way we are.

And that, dear readers, is the discourse of the internet. Notebook style. .