Dark, Claustrophobic and Grey!

Gerry Badger is the man who writes the words for the Photobook Histories. But he's also a photographer and It was a Grey Day (Photographs of Berlin) is his first photobook. And it's a really good one, a depiction of unpeopled greyness that captures a city on the brink of a change. It's the kind of change that will transform Badger's studies in grey into pictures of nostalgia that people will look back on with affection and wonder. It was a Grey Day is a study in the marginalia of a city, and it does a fantastic job.

Badger's a writer and a photographer. But he's also an architect and in the book he brings his architect's eye to a city where he is drawn to the spaces between buildings, to the gaps and the temporary structures that inhabit the city, that in Badger's eye almost define the city. Because of this, there's a formality to the pictures but at the same time they are not cold. They speak of spaces that are deserted but have life all around them.

This is Berlin's Terrain Vague, although it's not always of a large enough scale to be called that. It's more of an opportunistic seizing of space and repurposing of it through graffiti, sculpture, and a placing of rubbish and junk that is almost installation-like in its purposefulness. Are these spaces beautiful or ugly, Badger asks? And why is he so drawn to them? Badger concludes that it's not ruin or splendour he's photographing, but change, layer upon layer of change.

The book starts with a picture of a small supermarket. Above the window a line of graffiti reads, 'This is not America (Here is not Everywhere).' Just in case you didn't know, there's a manifesto for you.

The book continues into a grey claustrophobia. It's more than overcast (there's a corner of sky in almost every picture) and the concrete of the city is complete leaden. There are fences, there are trees and there is a sense of history that adds a certain gravity to the book.

There are repeated references to Atget's Terrain Vague pictures and there are nods to John Gossage's Berlin In the Time of the Wall, there are pictures of the Wall, but ultimately this is Badger's book and it settles into a pattern of images of different forms of dereliction and untidiness mixed with urban escapism; impromptu corners where Berliners escape the concrete and sit outside in these little pockets of human comfort. There's a checked sofa with a barbecue in front, benches of varying degrees of decrepitude and a courtyard with a sign saying 'Refugees Welcome, Tourists Piss Off!'

So it's not that comfortable, but it's not uncomfortable either. It's just messy and weighty, with link chains and fences creating a hierarchy of marginal landscapes. And that's what the book is, a kind of hierarchy of non-empty empty spaces; a book where you can unpick the subtle differences between Third Landscapes, Edgelands and Terrain Vague with concrete parking places, pathways, steel doors, stairways to nowhere and communal courtyards thrown into the mix. There's destruction mixed with collapse and decay and a sense that construction (and another kind of destruction) are not too far away. These are urban spaces that are up-for-grabs but aren't being grabbed because that is not the nature of the place. 'Smash Capitalism!' proclaims one sign, and in a sense that is what is being shown here because there's nothing here to be smashed.

In the afterword Badger writes 'In the normal course of events I spend my time writing about photographs - the photographs of others. Now, faced with a a group of my own photographs, I feel stuck for words.... I feel disembodied by them... they baffle me. I find them obtuse and quite mysterious.'

He writes about how he sees his pictures of Berlin and wonders at how downbeat they appear. On the surface this is a very dismal Berlin. But at the same time it's not. It's a Berlin that is of itself and by itself. For now. The dismal Berlin will come later, when the hand sculpture (which is already gone) and the gentrification of the city 'continues apace'.

Buy the book here.

Apocalypse Portuguese Style

Costa by José Pedro Cortes is a book of bleak costal landscapes based around Costa da Caparica, a town south of Lisbon. It's a book of such barren sand, worn interiors and low grade vegetation, that it makes a day trip Weston-Super-Mare in February in the rain look like a right, rare old treat.

There are so many different kinds of Scrub, Edgelands, Terrain Vague and Third Landscapes that exist that I'm not quite sure where Costa fits into all this. Perhaps it goes into an apocalyptic sub-category where all life (except for that of a snake and some dusty palm trees) has been eliminated.

That's probably the case because Costa looks like something from The Road - there are footprints in lunar-like sand, but in terms of human inhabitation that's about it. The people have left town and are notable by their hurried absence. And if there are any people around then, as in the Road, you would probably want to avoid them. Everything that could be inhabited is falling apart, it's run ragged by the sea and the sand and the wind. Awnings are frayed, beach huts stripped of paint and everything is covered in a thick patina of dust.

Even the rocks look worn out. Defeated by the climate and the heat, they are mere shadows of rocks, rocks without solidity or soul. How did all this happen? Why the long face? Well that's the puzzle and that's the book.

Buy it here at  Pierre von Kleist Editions

Atget and Terrain Vague

I was looking at pictures by Mohamed Bourouissa  and was wondering about the Parisian banlieues in which they were set. What is the story there because that kind of beyond the Pale environment is something that we don't have in the same way in the  UK. Not quite and not yet - with the current economic cleansing of London, we will start having something along these lines in the next few years.

So I was wondering about this and then I got a copy of City Gorged with Dreams. It's by Ian Walker and  interweaves Paris, surrealism, documentary photography. And it directly connects tot he work of Bourousisa as well as the idea of Terrain Vague, that ending of one landscape and beginning of another. He explains the idea Terrain Vague is connected to the area outside the  fortifications of Paris. Walker quotes a passage from Victor Hugo's Les Miserables.

To wander in a kind of reverie, to take a stroll as they call it, is a good way for a philosopher to spend his time; particularly in that kind of bastard countryside, somewhat ugly but bizarre, made up of two different natures, whih surrounds certain great cities, notably Paris. To observe the banlieue is to observe an amphibian. End of trees, beginning of roofs, end of grass, beginning of paving stones, end of ploughed fields, beginning of shops, the end of the beaten track, the beginning of the passions, the end of the murmur of all things divine, the beginning of the noise of humankind - all of this holds an extraordinary interest. And thus, in these unattractive places, forever marked by the passer-by with the epithet sad, the promenades, apparently aimless, of the dreamer.

Walker notes the fascination of the surrealists with this terrain vague. "The most extensive of these derelict spaces lay between the Parisian fortifications and the banlieue;  the Zone. This was a strip of land about 250 metres wide immediately in front of the fortifications where builiding had been forbidden for defensive purposes. But the Zone outlived such practicalities and by the late nineteenth century it was inhabited by gypsies, ragpickers, , itinerants - known collectively as zoniers - whose presence had become integral to the myth of the city itself."

Eugene Atget photographed the Zoniers, so did Man Ray - who bought seven of Atget's chaos ridden prints.of the Zone. The Zone came to an end in 1973 when the boulevard periperique was completed, making for a new and very different Terrain Vague.

Which puts Bourouissa's work into a much wider historical and photographic context, replete with ides of ethnic, social, economic and planning histories.

There is so much photography based on different kinds of Edgelands and terrains vagues, where walls, borders and boundaries of some kind or other create a buffer zone and different environments, architectures or cultures can mingle and mix. I'm not sure how much of a shelf life some of this work has, but where the histories are clearly delineated to make apparent the specific differences, and where the social histories are brought out, it can be absolutely fascinating. The problem here of course is that the picture on its own don't always tell the story on their own; instead social and cultural backdrops form the narrative drive with which the images build and intertwine. Sometimes, the pictures on their own just aren't enough.. There is a symbiotic relationship between text and supporting material - the one without the other is really of no use whatsoever.


Gallery of Eugene Atget Zone pictures


Tim Atherton On Atget with links to other articles.