75 Psychics and they're all Wrong!

Out of the Blue by Virginie Rebetez is the latest book that focusses on a crime scene (the massively influential Red Headed Peckerwood, Watabe Yutichi's visually brilliant A Criminal Investigation and Jack Latham's excellent Sugar Paper Theories are three more. There are some really bad ones as well).

The book tells the story of Suzanne Lyall, who disappeared (Out of the Blue) in New York in 1998. It consists of a series of images from police and personal archives, mixed in with contemporary portraits of the area. There are personal recollections, psychic reports and police sketches to add to the mix (and you can read an interview from the artist's perspective here).

Out of the Blue opens with helicopter surveillance images of the highway where the initial police search began. It sets the scene of a narrative that never quites settles, in keeping perhaps with the lack of ease which we feel with the still-disappeared nature of Suzanne Lyall.

That lack of ease is compounded by the writing we see on the back of a photograph of Suzanne. 'Well, this is me! What do you think ugly or what?' it begins. We don't get to see the front of the photograph. We never get to see the front of the photograph, or any other image of Suzanne, not in full. She is partial, she's been partial ever since she went missing on March 2nd 1998.

The present kicks in after that through pictures of Upstate New York and then snippets from the Lyall family album. Here we see the empty frames of a set of passport pictures, the face of Suzanne snipped out, we see a page from a family album, the face of what we think to be Suzanne half covered by a scrap of paper (provided by the photographer I'm sure. So it's an interventionist obscuring).

There's her bedroom, her belongings (shrink-wrapped), a corsage made for her sister's Sandy's wedding (post-missing I am guessing) and more images where Suzanne appears, not quite fully there in some way.

A photocopy of her hand adds to the spectral half-presence, which is really a full presence but one reflected through the hard anchorage of the present day portraits of her mother, her house, the handmade t-shirts that have been framed in a memory that is as much in the present as it is in the past.

There's a clue about one of the hearts of the story, the psychic element as a fragment of a report in full capitalled Courier tells of an elderly female's dream about the 'missing'.

More landscapes appear, more sketches of psychic dreaming, more pictures of Suzanne's parents, Mary and Doug. But now the landscapes are less benign. The waters have a malign potential behind them, the pick up trucks and the diners exude a certain menace. And all the while there's a tension between these pieces of the past and the calm exteriors of Mary and Doug and their attempts to preserve their daughter's life through the collected ephemera of what was her everyday life.

And then we're into the 'Correspondence, since 1998' section. This consists of

'Reprints from the Lyall's family archive. Over the years the family was contacted by over 75 psychics. The 48 pink pages are a selection of documents from the correspondence between psychics, the Lyall family and Police investigators. These documents include fax, letters, emails, maps, drawings and reports.'


It's heartbreaking to read these psychic, spiritual and astrological meditations on Suzanne's fate, the brutal descriptiveness of them adding the idea that they are rooted in a very physical reality, a reality that involves violence, rape, strangling, murder. They read like they are real, they are written in such a way as to be believed. And yet they are all completely and utterly fabricated. It's a cruel trick to play on parents clinging to hope - a cruel trick that was played by over 75 people, all of whom (if they gave their report) had completely different endings. And each of those endings would have been played and replayed in the minds of Mary and Doug Lyall, with every variation

That might not be what was intended I don't know. But that's what happens with the reader far above and beyond the mysteries of siting and place and abstract ideas of multiple narratives. The reality of reading the book is the grounding of those multiple realities in the fate of Suzanne and her family.

There's a poster of  a retouched photograph of Suzanne enclosed in the book so we get to see who she is, sort of (it's one of 3 images that Rebetez commissioned a forensic artist to make that shows how old Suzanne would look at different ages). Everything is sort of. The whole tone of the book is wrapped in this miasma of a half-person who is neither here nor there, neither dead nor alive, who is kept alive through her parents' anguish and the slim chance that she is alive (which would probably lead to even more anguish), all topped off with this parasitic community of cruel psychics who feed off people's grief. And they are cruel.

The mix of materials, the partial picture, the unresolved grief, the parental view are all reminiscent of Laia Abril's brilliant The Epilogue. And like The Epilogue, Out of the Blue is not the easiest book to get into. Its text heavy, the images are fragmented, the story is not clean and simple, and in some ways the design reflects that. At the same time, it is entirely accessible and the fragmentation serves a purpose; it's not clinical, it's not cold. It's moving, a truly sad book that lays its tragedy down on the page, there for the reader to pick up. It's a really good book I think. Really good.

Buy Out of the Blue here. 

Jessica Hardy: 'These are all fictions of me'

Next up from the Documentary Photography course at the University of South Wales is Jessica Hardy with her project, The Running of the Tap. 

This project is very much in progress. It was partly inspired by the work of Laia Abril, with references to Rosy Martin and Jo Spence (who Jess wrote in her final paper - the link between research and practice coming good ), but most of it is coming from Jess's own experience with bulimia. 

It's an intensely personal project, with words from diaries, from school year books, reflections on former relationships and friendships, both uplifting and toxic all coming into play. 

Those elements and those words are still waiting to be resolved (which is difficult because they are quite brutal words), but the images relive key chapters from Jess's life, chapters that connect to the development of her bulimia and her ability to confront it through its causes. 

This is Jess's Statement:

‘Through the medium of visual reframing we can begin to understand that images we hold of ourselves are often the embodiment of particular traumas, fears, losses, hopes and desires’ (Spence, J, 1988) 

Recreation of memories allow one to reach a deeper understanding of themselves by exploring their thoughts and feelings attached to each moment. I now presently have Bulimia, an eating disorder that involves purging after eating. I believe that this could be linked to my past experiences, so through using the technique of recreating memories within photography I learned to help myself understand and accept what has happened to me to move on from it. After constructing my past selves I then worked with creating my present selves to understand where I am now in my life and again try to gain an understanding and acceptance of who I am.

‘These are all ‘fictions’ of me – as are all photographs. Each shows different ways of ‘seeing’ myself.’ (Spence, J, 1988)

Rosy Martin writes: ‘By acknowledging aspects of myself and my past, which I might otherwise hide, or see as my ‘shadow’ side, I have freed myself from internalized restrictions and oppressions, and have come to accept myself as I am.’ (Spence, J, 1988)

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That's a Real Damaged Life in There! And a Photo Book. And...

Lisa, the night I met her through law enforcement. I followed up with her about a month later, beginning a journalistic relationship that continues today.

A few weeks back, The Eichmann Show aired in the UK. It was a drama about the filming of the Eichmann Trial in 1961, and was the first globally screened documentary.

During the drama there was a great line in there which encapsulates whether serious drama, documentary or anything should have an entertainment element in it. It's the part where a witness collapses during the trial and the producer Milton asks the director if he got the shot.

Milton: Did you get it?

Leo: We got almost everything but I think we missed the collapse.

Milton: Missed the collapse. Jesus, Leo.

Leo: We got a couple of seconds of it, but it's impossible to anticipate something like that. 

Milton: That was a stand-out moment, Leo, like someone crying out in the auditorium. Talking points. Human drama.

Leo: That's a real damaged life in there, not a fucking TV show. 

Milton: And a fucking TV show. AND. AND.

It's a refutation in some ways of the old Adorno idea that it was barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz, that anything that reeked of the culture (be it high, be it low, but especially be it popular) from which the Holocaust arose was to blame for that holocaust. And if you like, it's a position in which there is a coldness, a calculation, and  a displaced sense of one's own self-delusion that is even more in common with the foundations upon which the holocaust ( or other horrors of war) was built.

Keep on with the poetry, the drama, the entertainment and the TV shows in other words. I'll take them over Adorno any day of the week (and please, if you are really into Adorno or the rest of the Frankfurt school and I've made fundamental errors in this post, please fuck off and weave yourself a hair shirt!) 

Lots of people like that photograph-and-feel-the-pain stance. There's a Stafford Cripps kind of mentality prevalent in photography that you should suffer for your work and so should the people who look at it. And it'll do you good. And you'll like it. Same way you like wheat grass juice or quinoa or salad without dressing (my wife calls it English Salad) or thrashing yourself across the back with stripped birch.

I wondered about this week as I read through Laia Abril's brilliant Epilogue. The Epilogue is a book that deals with a really difficult subject through the heartache of a family, through missed opportunity and an ever present sense of regret. It's a difficult thing to do, to make a book like that. You have to be brutal. You have to tell the story and you have to make people want to read the story. You're designing pages around real people's lives, you are literally laying out their emotions on the page. The temptations to ease your foot off the gas a little must come up again and again. That's what makes it difficult. there is real anguish and pain that is still present in the lives of the people who surrounded Cammy and must be made apparent in the pages of the book. 

That's a real damaged life in there. And a photo book. And...

There's also an obsessiveness in there to follow the story to its dark heart. And that same obsessiveness is apparent in Tim Matsui's much shared article on winning a World Press Multimedia Prize for his work on sex trafficking. 

The title of the story is I Just Won a World Press Photo Award and a POYi, But I’m Not Celebrating . Again, there are real damaged lives in there, but there is also a story to tell and Matsui tells that story beautifully in the post (which I've read) and I'm sure he does in the film as well (which I haven't seen - but here's the trailer).

It's heartbreaking just to read and see the pictures and it's done with a purpose in mind, to use documentary storytelling to engage and more importantly to change attitudes towards sex trafficking - to make it visible and to understand what lies on the surface and beneath the surface and how we collude in it much more than we realise. There's also a huge journalistic interest in how sex trafficking is represented and managed at a police, community and legal level. It's ridiculously complex and Matsui isn't holding back in the scale of his ambition. 

It's a bit terrifying to be honest, and it demonstrates a level of commitment that really answers the question of why Matsui writes, films and photographs. He doesn't do it for photography's sake but for a wider purpose. He's committed to his belief in a way that few of us are and that is so very admirable. It's also a bit of a lesson for those of us who would like to think photography can change things, because he might be an example of somebody who is making that absurd proposition a little bit real. If you want to change things through photography, look at Matsui - this is one example of what you need to do. It's not just taking pictures anymore. It never was.

I don't know if the post was entertaining, but it was certainly engaging and was written to draw the reader into what Matsui is doing. He ended the post with some general thoughts on photography which are worth repeating. And not just for people who are making this kind of committed work. But for anybody making any kind of work. You can't sit back and be lazy. You have to be doing things, constantly. Non-stop. Never-ending. It's exhausting just thinking about it. But it's easier than ever if you have a mind for it. And remember that it's a story that you're telling. 

For now, let’s just say, we’re in a new era. If you want to make stories, you have to think about publishing and distribution by yourself. These things requires nimbleness, ingenuity, and willingness to go where the audience is. You can get to those places more easily then an entire publication can!

Photographers looking for validation through awards and publishing limit us to the traditional model. Think bigger. If you say you want to make a difference, then be proactive. Don’t rely on traditional distribution models.

Engagement is not necessarily a photographer’s core competency, but engagement is essential. That’s what partners are for. Find them and build something custom. If it is reflexive and good and novel, the traditional distributors will take notice. Change in the industry can occur.

Finally, we’re not just content providers, we’re journalists turning a critical eye on the world and giving voice to the voiceless.


Always remember that.