The History of British Violence

The Last Stand of the 44th at Gundamuck, by William Barnes Wollen (1842)

When my daughter was little I used to get up early with her every other morning to 'play'. The playing often revolved around the Playmobile people she had. She had millions of them and they all had names, so we'd invent these elaborate stories and play them out as the sun rose in the back window over the scenic Avon Valley Countryside. 

But it was early, so sometimes I'd lose track of the stories, and then I'd get asked to repeat old stories which would melt my brain and leave me in a state of existential crisis. So instead I started playing out the plots of films (Dracula, Frankenstein, the Invisible Man, the Shining and the like). The best one to play out was the Exorcist because Playmobil People's heads really do go round. 

The other thing I did was play out scenes from history - the rise of Hitler, the rise of Mao, Soviet history, slightly biased British history and so on. It got to be quite global in its scope. 

So she loved history from an early age and then she went to school. And it kind of got stuck on the first and second world wars with a bit of Egypt, Romans and Henry VIII thrown in. It was rubbish. There is nothing like a bad history teacher for taking the interest out of a subject that is manifestly fascinating. 

And that is what struck me first in this article by William Dalrymple from September. He talks about the censoring of British history (and censorship makes everything uninteresting) and the reason why we don't understand our own history. And the importance of understanding the dark side of what we did and what we do and who we support and where we support them. 

'Yet much of the story of the empire is still absent from our history curriculum. My children learned the Tudors and the Nazis over and over again in history class but never came across a whiff of Indian or Caribbean history. This means that they, like most people who go through the British education system, are wholly ill equipped to judge either the good or the bad in what we did to the rest of the world.

...

Yet if the British remain largely ignorant of the blackest side of the imperial experience, and are still taught in their schools that it was only our German enemies who turned racism into an ideology that sought to justify mass murder, then we also remain largely unaware of some of the more positive, and perhaps surprising, moments of our imperial experience.'

And then In this article from the weekend, Dalrymple talks about the artistic legacy of the empire, in particular that which connects to the brutalities of British rule.

'Paul Gilroy rightly puts it in the excellent accompanying catalogue, Britain’s “inability to come to terms with the disputed legacies of empire has been corrosive. Locally, it has contributed to a deep and abiding ignorance. Knowledge of the empire’s actual history is unevenly distributed across the globe. Descendants of the victims of past injustice are often more familiar with the bloody annals of colonial government than British subjects, safely insulated at home from any exposure to the violent details of conquest and expropriation.” That was certainly the case with The Last Stand of the 44th: in 2000, soldiers of the Royal Anglian Regiment – the lineal successors of the 44th – reported that coloured postcards of the image were selling well in Afghan markets, as if in celebration of a recent rather than a distant British defeat.

When I was researching my book on the 1857 Great Uprising – still anachronistically known in the UK as “the Indian Mutiny” – I was horrified to discover the scale of the war crimes our ancestors committed while supressing the rebellion: tens if not hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians were slaughtered in British reprisals; in one mohalla (neighbourhood) of Delhi alone, Kucha Chelan, some 1,400 unarmed citizens were cut down. “The orders went out to shoot every soul,” recorded a young officer, Edward Vibart.

It was literally murder … I have seen many bloody and awful sights lately but such as I witnessed yesterday I pray I never see again. The women were all spared but their screams, on seeing their husbands and sons butchered, were most painful … Heaven knows I feel no pity, but when some old grey bearded man is brought and shot before your very eyes, hard must be that heart that can look on with indifference.

By 1858, Delhi, a sophisticated city of half a million people, was left an empty ruin, as were Kanpur (“Cawnpore”) and Lucknow. Similar excesses were inflicted on many other cities from Kandahar and Kabul –both laid waste by the British “Army of Retribution” in 1842 – to Mandalay and Rangoon, burned down a few years later. Yet most people in the UK remain completely unaware of these aspects of their imperial history, and many leave school without touching upon it at any point in their formal education. In our school textbooks, it is only the Germans who imagine racial hierarchies and commit racially inspired genocides.'

Dalrymple's talking about British history because it is something which is rarely addressed. But the same applies to any nation which wields or has wielded political, economic, ideological or religious power over others. 

Which means just about everybody. Rather than always pointing the fingers at others and wallowing in blame and victimhood, we should all look at the cruel side of our history, our ideologies and the consequencs of our actions. And if we think our country doesn't have a cruel side, then we should think again.

It's your fault you don't get it!

picture: Colin Pantall

I posted on the eyegazing research that was used to determine what held people's attention when viewing a photograph. The research was commissioned by an organisation of professional photographers and used 58 subjects attending university. So in some respects it's not a really representative sample, but then again it's representative enough if you want to say that a certain demographic are more likely to look at professional pictures than amateur pictures.

Ultimately though it's a nice little yarn that gets picked up by petapixel and can get us mumbling into our cornflakes for half a day.

A fair few people did question the findings though. And with good reason because the methodology may very well be questionable.

But what of the methodology of anything that is connected to photography. Some of the time, I teach history, research and theory of photography across a number of programmes and most of the time, I'm pointing my students in the direction of  Linfield, Sontag, Barthes, Baudrillard, Clarke, Craik, Cotton, Linkman, Mulvey, Struk, Stallabrass, Fontcuberta as well as a bunch of other subjects depending on what studetns are interested writing about.

But I'm not sure if any of these have a particular methodology in mind when they write their work. Writers such as Linkman, Batchen and Struk base their work on particular archives ( Linkman includes references to Mass Observation) and refer to social history so that's different, but the majority? Don't tell me they just chimp their ideas out and it might just all be made-up - in the nicest possible way! Don't tell me that some of the rather sweeping claims aren't backed up with some kind of scientific, methodological rigour.

But even if it is (and it is), does it really matter? We live in a world ruled by mass psychosis so what harm does it do? We mostly read these these writers because they have a particular agenda and they wrap their particular yarn around that agenda so it fits. And they do it in quite an entertaining and tidy manner. The ideas are neat. It's nonsense but it's neat nonsense. That's important.

Sample sizes and demographic don't come into it. You might as well talk about the sample size used to determine the efficacy of reading chicken entrails or the science of alchemy. It doesn't apply. These thoughts are plucked from the ether and made to fit, no matter what. It's all part of the fun.

Tell me, when we (you, me, anyone) yabber on about exploitation, collaboration, the body or the power of the gaze, does it connect to any field research? I'm sure there is research out there somewhere (and especially with regards to surveillance, weapons and algorithms) but in the theoretical field?

Nearly all the time I am guessing the answer is no. People are just pissing their ideas into the wind. Some do it in a dynamic, engaging manner. Some obfuscate and couch their thoughts in the densest of possible prose. They are literally unreadable.

On Monday I posted on Marc Wilson's beautiful pictures of Second World War defences, The Last Stand, Perhaps the best-known of sea defence work is Paul Virilio's Bunker Archaeology. It's a great book too but with a brutal photography which suits the subject. And the text is rather brutal too. Virilio was one of the author's cited by Sokal and Bricmont in Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science.

This is a book (I haven't read it yet) where the authors debunk the pretensions of well-known theorists (Lacan, Baudrillard, Deleuze, Kristeva) and the manner in which they conflate theory and dubious readings of science.

I don't know. It's science heavy and has an anti-intellectural undercurrent to it -  I kind of like the flaky made-up language some of the time (simulacra is practically my favourite word. I have it on the cornflakes I mumble into in the morning. It sets the day up nicely) - but at the same time, if you have ever had anybody fire off a few key buzzwords at you in the hope of intimidating you, then the debunking is kind of welcome and necessary. Anything that makes language less ugly and laden with incestuous powermongering should be welcomed.

There was a feature in the Guardian today celebrating the 10-year anniversary of Nathan Barley. This is a programme which satirises the idiocy of start-up culture and mass-audience internet content. It's about the Idiots of the Internet in other words. And the Idiots are winning.

But it had a little line in it... "the massive self-regard, the daft fashion statements and the low-level passive-aggressive insinuation that if you don’t get what they’re doing then somehow it’s your fault … these are the hallmarks of the modern creative layabout from Dalston to Williamsburg to Kreuzberg to Nørrebro."

 I wonder if that line isn't something that applies to all our worlds, including the photography world, the photobook world and the academic worlds, if sometimes we feel guilty if we don't embrace the ugly ideas, the ugly language and the ugly pictures and design in all its glory.

So anything that can make photography less ugly (in a metaphorical sense) should be welcomed. There is a parallel in photography (at least our little niche that we deal with here) with Sokal and Bricmont. There is so much bad and ugly photography out there that has lame statement justifications, that ultimately is fraudulent and empty. But we still fall for it, because that is the nature of things. If we don't get it, it's our fault! And it is - sometimes.

Landscape is Not Dead: The Last Stand

all pictures by Marc Wilson

There is something quite compelling about finding old war defences on the British coastline. Without even looking for them, you stumble on bunkers, radar stations and old radio bases, curious constructions that were never quite put to their fullest possible use and have been left to decay in the face of the sea and the salt and the wind.

These sea defences are the subject of Marc Wilson's book, The Last Stand: Northern Europe, in which he travels around Europe photographing the sea defences of Britain, Belgium, Denmark, Norway and France.

It's large format work and it's quite beautiful (Paul Virilio's Bunker Archaeology may be the most recognised photography of sea defences but that's a different kind of book) . Everything is shot in subdued diffused light, the pre-dawn it looks like much of the time, and the way in which the different defences merge and crumble into the landscape of which they are now part.



At Sainte-Margtuerite-sur-Mer in Normandy, the grey brutalism of bunkers meets with the brutalism of crumbling cliffs, the plates of concrete mirroriing the tectonic plates of a shifting earth. On the pebble beaches, the shards of blackened concrete look like the remains of ancient megaliths, while on the grey sand stretches the slabs look almost soft and malleable.



The Scandanavian defences take on a pagan look. At Vorupor in Denmark, a radar receiver is buried into what looks like peat bog, while on the beach the batteries (which could fire 495 kilogramme projectiles) look like the remains of particularly malevolent beetles.

At Haugesund in Norway, the batteries are folded into the basalt rock formations. The top of one bunker peeks out from a pile of shattered rock like the top of some strange helmet, the opening a visor from which some mysterious being looks out upon the world.




The most attractive patterns are made by tank walls, the one-kilometre wall at Newburgh, Scotland being a particularly fine example, while the anti-submarine barrier in the Firth of Forth is known as 'the dragons' teeth' for good reason.

The English sea defences are curious and range from old gun placements on the white cliffs between Dover and Folkestone and the defences at Studland Bay in Dorset, the bay where the full-scale rehearsal for D-Day took place.

The Last Stand is as multi-layered as the landscapes which it features; there's historical detail wrapped folded over into a chronotopia of functional brutalism, mixed with local touches that feeds into the geological, panoramic and tactical.

All the boxes are ticked in Robert Adams traditional landscape list: there's geography, autobiography,  and metaphor. But on top of that, Wilson gives us a politicised view of landscape and power that ties back to survey photography of Timothy O'Sullivan and the work of Mitch Epstein.

Layered into that is an Arcadian vision. With its focus on Northern Europe it's a dystopian Arcadia; there is a pagan feel to Wilson's pictures, a syncretic vision where geology, flora, climate and war find a single expression. And it's beautiful. .

Buy the book here