Zona: You have to make the effort!

Nuno Moreira is a Portuguese photographer and Zona is his book of meditations on 'the realms of the psyche.'

In the blur, we see that the narrative of the book 'follows a live performance and is somewhat similar to a dream experience,' an experience that comes complete with 'mystery and ambiguity.'

The book comes with words by José Luís Peixoto that help us navigate through the story Moreira tells through his pictues. It's very much a joint effort.

It's a gentle story, but not the most transparent of stories, it's not a come-and-sit-by-the-fire-and-I'll-tell-you-a-story story, or a bedtime story, or a page turner, spine-tingler or tear-jerker of a story. Instead it's a story that you take on the photographer's terms. You have to adjust to his way of seeing, their way of thinking to understand what is happening, and this takes time and effort.

If you make the effort, the book is well worthwhile. It is a lovely paperback size with a hardback charcoal cover, and papers that make an Everton-Mint pattern.



The first picture is of a pair of hands rather awkwardly holding a key. Open the door, and we're in!



Toes are followed by feet are followed by a hand over a shoulder, then two hands of a woman on her own back, then fists steeped in a pan of milk.

It's all quite esoteric, but then the first text comes; a meditation on the need for a secret place, a place free of words, a place of silence because 'If you knew my eyes, you would know that everything I could not silence hurt me time and again.'

But this silence is not enough, life consists of more than just silence. Soon there is a clamour for somebody else, hands reaching against a wall, panics when the narration momentarily thinks they are alone, that the spirit and texture of whoever it is they love has left them. And they have left too, seeking solace in that silence.

And that is the final part, dead flowers on the table, the acceptance that one doesn't own life, or the spaces we inhabit, and nor are those spaces personal and owned individually. Rather they are communal spaces that we all inhabit, that we must co-exist in, and we must reach out of our individual silences to flourish.

So it's a lovely book if you make the effort. The pictures are black and white, high contrast images of what looks like modern dance. They are fine and but it's the words that give these pictures structure and meaning. And though it's a lovely meaning, I do wish it actually attached to some real love, that the metaphysical somehow became concrete and there was a tearjerker that I could emote to. But that's just me being simple and not making an effort. You do have to make an effort!


Buy the Book here


Read Christer Ek's review. 

"Slavs Never Lived Good" - Kate Nolan's Neither

"Maybe life here isn't that good as in Western Europe but honestly, Slavs never lived good."

That cuts to the chase of Kate Nolan's Neither, a book about the women of Kalingrad - a Russian exclave stuck between Poland and Lithuania. It's an isolated place with borders that were closed at the fall of communism, a place neither part of Europe nor part of the Greater Russia it belongs to. It's a place, like most places, where it's difficult to be a woman and that is what the book is about; the expectations of being the woman you're supposed to be at the expense of the woman who you are.

Kalingrad wasn't always Russian. When it was German territory it was called  Königsberg, but following the Second World War, the Germans were forcibly removed and Russian transmigrants were put into their place.




It wasn't an easy move to make. Nolan sources archival interviews with some of the women who moved into the ruins of  Königsberg in 1945, the first steps into a hostile and desolate city that was still in a state of upheaval. And we hear from the present inhabitants, women who are on de-facto Russian land but not completely part of Russia, who are in a massive state of in-betweeness, neither East nor West, but somehow chugging along with live in one of the weirder geographical accidents of history.



The no-man's land nature of Kalingrad comes across in the pictures. Brutalist architecture and Soviet interiors are visible, as are Communist era cars and women who are living fully up to the 'Slavs-not-living-good' line. Old pillboxs, men in uniform and rows of new apartment blocks come and we end with a woman in a leather jacket and black skirt looking out of the decaying window of a tenement stairwell.

Neither is a really smart book that is beautifully produced and thought out (though the strip of pages at the bottom feels fiddly and redundant). It's another example of a book re-examining the aftermath of the Second World War, this time from the perspective of the Russian women who moved into the city in 1945 and the women who live there now. And it is these perspectives that appear in the cracks of the image, mirroring the texts past and present.


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