Only the Sky Remains Untouched

 all pictures copyright Claire Felicie


It was a real pleasure to revisit Carolyn Drake's Wild Pigeon last week. It's such a beautiful book with such a powerful message. The images are fantastic and the way they were made (they were collaged by the people who feature in the book) adds to the whole package. I've had a fair few people tell me the photobook is over and it is. The generic photobook that is, the boring photobook, the bad photobook. But the brilliant photobook isn't. It's alive and kicking. There just aren't that many of them.

Wild Pigeon is designed by Syben Kuiper and, he shows that great design does make a difference, I can think of a few badly designed books that would have been turned into something quite different with a bit of intelligent design. But there you go. He costs money. And not all of us have it.


On Friday I also wrote about the students I used to teach in my old job 16-19 kids learning English for Speakers of Other Languages. About half of the kids came from difficult backgrounds, or had had/were having difficult experiences, horrific experiences even.

There used to be some support for them, not much but more than there is now. For those who were refugees or asylum seekers it was pitifully little. Even when you saw organisations saying they support people with psychological, housing, financial, gender-based problems it didn't mean that they did. And if they did, then the funding they had was insufficient and barely scratched the surface.

One of the biggest problems some of our students had was PTSD. They didn't know they had it, but they did. I remember conversations with students who would talk about their experiences back in the country they had come from. Sometimes it was a weird form of nostalgia which marked an ending of sorts. I remember kids talking about watching the firefights in their hometown, and the excitement when the rockets started going off, or describing the strange rush of being on a bus running along a canyonside roadway with bandits shooting at them. Another student had an RPG explode in the room where he was sitting. It killed his brother. And yet another, who spoke with bitterness, described being deserted by relatives and left to take his four brothers and sisters across a border to a refugee camp. It took him four days and he has never forgiven those who left him in this situation.

We had kids who'd been kept in containers, or locked in back-rooms, or witnessed mass killings, who had woken up in mass graves, or woken up next to bodies on a lorry going overland. That's just the stuff they'd talk about. There were other things they didn't talk about, or would only hint at.

They had nightmares about it. They had anxiety. They got depressed. They got terrified. They woke up in the middle of the night with the night terrors. They had Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. And they were kids. And there was no help for them. There was said to be help for them, but there wasn't. Indeed, the problem was barely recognised.

It's a little more recognised for adults, especially those with a military background. But still there's precious little help even for them. Even in a wealthy country such as the Netherlands where the number of traumatised soldiers is relatively low.

But they do exist and they are the subject of Claire Felicie's Only the Sky Remains Untouched, a book designed by Syben Kuiper that arrived in the post on Friday. Normally it would sit on a pile for a month, but this blog is organic and impestuous and its content is determined by circumstance and it is a quite beautiful book.

First of all, it's a tall book. It's a black and white book with the title embossed on the front page, To read it against the black and white picture of a brick wall is near impossible. You have to turn the page and read the mirror image.

Open the book and there are full-bleed edgelandy landscapes of ditches, of forests, of a dilapidated factory. It's very dark. We go inside and see the verso torso of a man in combat fatigues, the head divided and coming up on the recto side at the back of the book.

Flick the page and the same thing happens, except now on the left there's a scrawled, scarred wall and on the right the torso of a man. The man is a former soldier and he's got a name, Marnix. From the back of the book we learn he was in Afghanistan in 2009, a place where he witnessed a rocket going off in front of him with devastating consequence. He's had PTSD ever since.

There's Oscar who was recruited by Mossad but left when he refused to shoot a prisoner with a sack over his head, there's Dominique who lived off Pringles for three weeks and lost 40 pounds when  he got trapped in his radio post in Afghanistan, and there's Armand who was one of the first on the scene after a land mine had blown the occupants of an army truck to smithereens.

There are more portraits made in astonishingly trusting circumstances and the walls get more scarred and battle-worn as well they might. All the pictures in the book were shot in a former 'military terrain and weapons factory' in the Netherlands, a fitting place for the portraits to be made. The weapons factory sits in the 'military terrain' of a 'shock forest', a place were explosives were once tested. So the symbolism in the split images is matched by the historicity of the place.

Only the Sky Remains Untouched is a moving book made for moving reasons. Cecilie describes how people with PTSD 'are emotionally wounded and carry those wounds with them for the rest of their lives. Not only the people portrayed in this book suffer from the consequences of PTSD, which includes reliving the horrors of war, nightmares, sudden outbursts of anger and intense shock reactions. Their failies and everyone around them suffer too.

Felicie made it 'with the aim of breaking the taboo that surrounds PTSD.' Here she focuses on PTSD for veterans. There's a huge taboo. PTSD is not a clean flesh wound. It's messy and dirty and talks about the atrocities of war. But I think the idea of there being a taboo applies even more to civilians. Because to recognise the mental wounds of war is to recognise the horrific experiences people have gone through, It's to recognise the depth of the problem, and the need for those wounds to be healed. That is a huge job and it is one that needs to be addressed. And of course it's not.

Buy Only the Sky Remains Untouched here. 

The People: A Day of Chaos, Bloodshed and Death

In the Shadow of the Pyramids by Laura El-Tantawy was a quick sell. The 500 copies went in about a month and if you missed it, well you missed it. It sold well because it was a superb combination of a personal story (El Tantawy's return to Egypt and discovery of herself and her country) mixed with the story of the protests of Tahrir Square. This is from the review I wrote for Photo Eye.

“There are 90 million people in this country. Ninety million stories to be told. This is the beginning of only one.”

The country is Egypt, the year is 2011 and the Arab Spring is in full flight. Cairo’s Tahrir Square is packed with protestors against the president’s rule and El-Tantawy is in their midst. “In the square of Liberation I found dreamers. Just like in the films. Thousands of them. In Tahrir Square I found myself again.”


It's a great book and there's the idea that she could have sold 2,000 copies so why didn't she print 2,000 copies. Why was she so selfish as to make such a small edition when she KNEW they would sell out.

Except she didn't know. The idea here is being wise after the event. I'm sure El Tantawy was confident in her heart that her book would do well, but I also know there was a lack of confidence there, an uncertainty that the book might not sell.

We know now that In the Shadow of the Pyramids sold well but how can we be wise before the event. There are many people who think their book will do brilliantly and sell in the thousands and they don't. What happens when you print too many books? You end up with a massive stock pile of books which you can't store. You've cut down half a rainforest for something that is ultimately going to be pulped. And you end up looking a bit of complacent for doing so. And there's nothing quite so annoying as complacency (either in myself or in others).

I don't mind small editions, big editions, cheap books, expensive books, books that sell out, stupid ebay prices, book-fetishisation, whatever. It's all good to me. There are lots of books out there, so if you can't buy one, then buy another. And if you really love something, get it whilst you can. Or pay a bit more for it if it's sold out and you want it so bad. Save up if you're skint.

And if you still can't afford it, look at it online somewhere, or  watch the movie. It's not ideal but so it goes. It's nice that people are doing this (and they're doing it for love not money) and hopefully one day soon, somebody will create a digital library of photobooks.

So perhaps that's why El Tantawy didn't print 2,000 copies. It's the sign of a smart photographer not being complacent. Because complacency really is the enemy of everything.

What El-Tantawy did print 1,500 copies of is a newspaper called The People. This was meant to be distributed free to the people of Cairo - but that proved difficult so it went on sale in a variety of currencies. £25, $25, Euros 25, 25 Egyptian pounds and so on. The more expensive versions subsidised the cheaper version.

The People is not the same as In the Shadow of the Pyramids. It doesn't have that sense of personal discovery, it is more focussed on the chaos of the events in Tahrir Square and beyond. Changing that story was a challenge for Sybren Kuiper the designer.

'It was really interesting to design that story in a totally different way. but when Laura asked me to do a newspaper edition it posed a few challenges.

 A real newspaper has more text to combine with the photos and it has bigger pages so you can't work with one image a spread if you want to use a significant amount of the pictures from the book. Still you want to get the growing chaos across to the readers. So you end up with a totally different graphic design. I applaud here for her courage to do so. Most people would have wanted an In the Shadow of the Pyramids 2.'

So the People is about the chaos of events. It's a newspaper where one picture folds into another. But it's not really a newspaper because there's a sense of the image breaking up into each other - the photographs are destroyed to form part of a greater whole.

The People shows the escalation of the demonstrations, the violence inflicted on the people, the bloodshed, the death and the aftermath of the clampdown. It's beautifully designed with  a bell-jar sequence (quiet-loud-quiet) that is laid out over a dawn-dusk-dawn framework and it works splendidly. There are colour inserts that focus on the grieving, the missing, the dead, and there is a text in Arabic that gives it a specific context (as does the Arabic reverse-flow of the pages).

And even though it's not an In the Shadow of the Pyramids 2, at the same time it is. It's the same but different, and if you missed out on the out-of-print book edition, the newspaper version is not a disappointment. And if you have the book, the newspaper creates a different perspective on how both the book and the events of Tahrir Square unfolded.


See more spreads on Josef Chladek's Virtual Bookshelf.

Buy the People here.