Love Makes Everything Bleak!

There's always something sad about photographic love stories. They are stories that have ended so that makes them sad to begin with; the love arc peaks, declines and then we are left with a conclusion that is either tragic or bathetic.

Throw photography into the mix and the sadness intensifies. The essential nostalgia of photography fixes the past in concrete form. It's what has-been and will never be again, it's a marker of the height of our emotions, a paean to our youth. Photography of the past (which is all photography - duh!) looks times when we were younger, stronger, smarter, sexier. And there it is fixed for all time, a laughing contrast to our present, decrepit, boring, faded selves. The real me is filled with uncertainty, the photographic me is clearly defined in every possible way (as long as it is a 'good' photograph - because that's what 'good' photographs do).

There's that sadness in just about every photographic story going; think Solitude of Ravens, Sentimental Journey, Love on the Left Bank, or, more recently, Yolanda. There is death involved in three of those, so that helps, but you get the idea.

The same sadness infests Alex and Me by James Pfaff. This is a cinematic love story, a road trip love story that goes from Florida through to Ontario and features Pfaff and his lover, Alex. It's shot in the past, so it is of a time, and it's kind of rough around the edges in a nineties kind of way. Which adds to the melancholic air of the piece.

The book has a notebook type cover (Pfaff works a lot with notebooks and diaries). It's covered in notes and is painted over, so there's a nice start to the book, a reason to get you into it. Open it up and there's an envelope with a postcard and a typed summary of the relationship.

It's the summer of '98, there's asphalt, coffee and cigarettes. And Alex:

I'd only been together with Alex for a few short weeks, but I knew she was a special woman. 

Alive and real. 

Carefree, intoxicating.

In full blood, sensual...

Well, it was a beautiful journey.

We burned bright and faded. 

Later, in a gentle moment, I noticed it was autumn.

So you know there's going to be some poetry in there, with the melancholy cranked up (as it should be). The pictures begin with pictures of the road at night; a sign on the highway pointing to Baton Rouge, a coffee, a juke box, a waffle house. There's a nod to Robert Frank, Stephen Shore, Walker Evans and road photography as a whole, but with more road, more darkness, and more paint (some of the images are painted over! I'm still thinking about that).

We see Alex on the bed, followed by a picture from a soft-porn magazine. More road pictures follow, an American flag, gas stations and the detritus of the road. It's a quite barren environment for this love affair to play out against. The barrenness is compounded by how the pictures are laid out on the page, set on what looks like a painted wall, the brush strokes letting the pink of the plaster show, bare bones, bare flesh only partially hidden. That textured feel is echoed by the cover, which is in notebook mode (but a bit too smooth to the touch).

There are nods to the times; a Daily News cover featuring Bill Clinton, phone booths covered in graffiti, and repeated Go-Go bars. Finally, the couple end their trip in Canada - we see a map that tells us this is the end, and we see them crossing the border at Niagara Falls. The book ends with portraits of 'Me' and 'Alex'. Me is shot through the rear view mirror of the car, Alex is shot with her hand across her face. We never really know who they are in other words.

Edited by Francesca Seravalle, Alex and Me is a moody, road-trip of an affair that is tinged with an inevitable sadness. Canada marks the end of the affair, the end of the passion and the burning bright, the return to a more faded life. And such is the fate of photographic love stories, they have a love that is lived in sadness, a serotonin antidote to the bleakness of the backdrop they are played out against, and then they end - and the consolation of passion is gone. All that is left is the bleakness.

Buy Alex and Me here

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Buy Alex and Me here

Photobooks: "These don't sell." Graphic Novels: "These do."

Yesterday's post looked at the Golden Age of Photobooks; the conclusion from this blog is that there is a huge amount of energy, creativity and communication going on. If there is a Golden Age, it's a Golden Age of energy.

It's also a Golden Age of experimentation; with layout, paper, design and ideas. That doesn't mean there is a flood of outrageously fantastic books. There isn't. There are lots of flawed books. But just because these books don't hit all the high notes, the sense of adventure, obsession, anger, passion or just plain oddness makes these books of interest. These are the books I feature on my blog, books where photographers are trying to do something different, where hard work, originality, wit or intelligence are being used.

There are also those books where people are making books because that's what you do, where there is no originality, where there is a grant that needs to be spent, research that needs to be ticked off or a stagnation of thought. They're a waste of time. These are boring, stupid, lazy books. Or just pointless. There are lots of those.

The Time article caused lots of debate in the small world of Photobook-Online Land. One question raised by a few people was should the audience be made bigger? Does it need to be made bigger? Or can it just continue on its merry way? And if it does need to be made bigger, is the current photobook world actually capable of appealing to a wider audience?

It's worth thinking of what appeals to a wider audience. So here is a list that I carefully thought out in the last five minutes. This is what a blog is for by the way. It is not a carefully edited thing. It is a piece of chaos. That's why it's enjoyable and so often madly wrong.

Engagement with (and Knowledge of) what's happening in the world
Engagement with (and knowledge of) different forms of narrative
Use of Social Media
Striking Pictures
The Ability to Tell a Story
The Ability to Be Direct
Understanding who you want your audience to be
Understanding Pricing/Design/Marketing
Self-awareness (of yourself and the limitations of photobook land) and the ability not to take yourself too seriously
Being Interesting
Not being boring


So I can flash back over the years and think of books and projects that hit those spots and get out to a wider audience. Laura El-Tantawy, Timothy Archibald, Lina Hashim are just a few people who really hit some of those spots hard over the years in different ways.

But sometimes you get too much indirectness, where the story isn't told, but rather we rejig photography's fascination with telling how the story is told. That can be done really well. Anouk Kruithof has done it fantastically well and in a way that's fun. That's her thing and she makes great books out of it.

But sometimes I wonder if we don't take ourselves too seriously. I think of Broomberg and Chanarin's People in Trouble Laughing and Falling to the Ground. It's the project where they went to the archive in Belfast, took a bunch of pictures out and then photographed the spaces below stickers that were used to show the pictures had been used. So instead of being a project about Belfast it's a project about the photography of Belfast.

I like the pictures. They are fun. They are funny. But they are not really framed that way and you wonder how it is that the best known photographic representation of an archive that covers the last 30 years of life in Northern Ireland is a piece about stickers on pictures;  the conflict of the time, the surface politics and the low-level domestic stress and anguish are by-the-by.

Maybe the archive is not very good. I don't know. I haven't seen it. But it does not seem quite right somehow. It's not as though all these stories of the tail end of the Troubles have been told. And if they have been told, they can be told again, in a different way. In a better way. In a more interesting way.

But the dilemma is it's still a great project and photographers take it as their inspiration. So  then you get all these younger people flitting around a subject saying things like it's all been photographed, it's all been done, this is about the production, the act of looking, the archive, the control.

The same thing happens with Paul Graham, whose work I love. But God help us when people start trying to make work in the shape of a Shimmer of Possibility. You end up with awful sequences of non-pictures and people mumbling about montage.

It's like an endless circling around a story, a failure to look at something that is really interesting in favour of something that is, most of the time, not nearly so interesting.

If serious photography and photobooks want to punch at the weight we think they are entitled to we need to address that. We also have to think of the language that we use and who we are talking to. There is a sobriety in photography that can be stomach-churningly dull.

Sometimes looking at a photobook, or more commonly an exhibition (so lets go there), is just so depressing it makes your heart sink. How often have you been to shows where you wander around intently trying to get something out of it. And when you look around, you see other people walking around the sparsely decorated concrete space looking deeply into pictures, reading captions, and trying to fathom some kind of meaning out of something that has taken huge effort and cost to make, fabricate and show. But the work that is required to understand it for so little reward is immense. It really is a pointless exercise because essentially the work is a failure, the words are a failure, the idea is a failure. On the outside you try to put an intelligent face on, but on the inside you feel like one of the people in the picture up top.And so you leave feeling empty and something of a failure for not being smart enough to get it.  But really it might be that there is nothing to get.

I've seen this happen and people excuse it and say, 'well it's not a very interesting subject'. But I disagree; everything can be made interesting if you work at it. Something like Yann Mingard's Deposit (or A Shimmer of Possibility) can be long and complex and intelligent and take some effort, but still not be boring. So it's not the length or the subject, it's the approach, an approach where tedium is embedded in the heart of the project. So if  a project or a book can't be made interesting using pictures, why not just write a paper on it and forget about the camera. Surely then we will only be bored one way, rather than being both visually and verbally bored to exhaustion.

A few months back I was in Bath's best bookshop, Mr B's Emporium of Reading Delights. Ed, who stocks the visual arts shelves, pointed at the Photobooks and said "Those don't sell." And then he pointed at the graphic novel section and said "But these do."

One reason the photobooks don't sell is because most of the books on offer at Mr B's are trade books, books put out by big publishers. But now the market has shifted to more bijou small-published and self-published books and that's where the money is going. The idea here is that the market hasn't grown, it has just changed.

But even the small and self-published books don't sell. Compare their sales to the mass audience and mass global appeal of graphic novels and manga. There is no comparison.

I don't know if this matters. The photobook world is a niche and let it be so. A great book can sell a few hundred copies and still be a great book. So what. Who cares.

But at the same time, because there are so many photobooks around and people are looking at them in different ways, there is an increased sophistication in how we read images, how we tie them together, how we tell stories.

I think of relatively modest books like The Spook Light Chronicles, Yolanda or Will they Sing Like Raindrops or Leave Me Thirsty and I see people really trying to engage with their audience in visually and verbally engaging manners. It's probably nothing new but it's something that connects to the idea of how we communicate pictures to an audience in a way that is interesting, that is outward-looking and mindful of the audience rather than inward-looking and lacking in self-awareness.

Whether that will ever translate to a mass audience I don't know. Because the really big problem with photobooks is price. As I mentioned in this post, we had an artist's book fair in Bristol a few weeks back and with ten pounds my daughter came out with loads of stuff, some free, some paid for. It had an appeal. If she went to Offprint or the stands at one of the upcoming photobook festivals, she'd come away with nothing - almost everything would be beyond her price range or she wouldn't be interested. So if people are talking about a bigger audience, you have to make it happen. And pricing is part of that.



By sheer coincidence, the subject of photobook narratives is one of the topics of a talk I'll be giving at Photobook Vienna in two weeks time. The other topic that I'll be connecting that to is my German Family Album and the question of how I can make that interesting! Because the last thing any of us need in our lives is more boredom.

Read the full programme here. I get a great tagline and William Klein is the undoubted headline of many great speakers. Ahhh, Vienna....

This week's claim to fame: I saw Midge Ure in Tony's, my local greengrocer once.

Snapshot Words to go with Snapshot Pictures

Yolanda by Ignacio Navas is a modest book (Navas calls it a fanzine). It's about a woman called Yolanda, and it tells her story and that of her boyfriend, Gabriel. This is how the story ends:

She died December 6th, 1995. 

I already didn't like Christmas much, so from that year on, I haven't been able to stand it. 

It was hard, very hard. I was 25, very young. It was a mess.

- MY UNCLE GABRIEL




The book is small and handy, A5 size. It has a soft cover that looks like the kind of branded wrapping paper you get on a box of chocolates. But instead of Leonidas or Galler (and thank you Philippe, they were fabulous!) you have the name Yolanda on the paper. It's not the best cover.

(and thanks to Nico Baumgarten for pointing out it's like the writing on the back of old snapshots - and nothing to do with chocolate! That's my belly talking.)

Get inside though and you have a series of pictures from Uncle Gabriel's album mixed in with a very spare use of Navas's own location shots (read more about the background here).

All the way through, there's a snapshot feel and it looks like the 1980s however. This is not a slice and dice, mix and match throw a few old pictures in project. The snapshots are the soul of the book and they fit perfectly with the commentary of Gabriel that is slotted between the pages in half-page ten-line snippets that are about Gabriel and his friends and his dead-end life.

We all met up after work, 5 or 6 cars, and in each car 4 or 5 guys, all the gang was there. 

It wasn't just taking drugs and laying around. I went to work high when I had 20-hour shifts. 

Spent the whole day gong up and down in the van or else no fucking one could have stood it. All year long for two coins, no nothing... God.

And so life goes on; doing shitty jobs and scheming and stealing and dealing and doing drugs between times. And getting hooked on heroin  because, '...it was nice, look how stoned we are, how chill we are. And then everything becomes shitty. You eat up your family, you eat up everything.'

Gabriel meets Yolanda, they become a couple, she becomes dependent on him and life goes on. He joins the military, he flees the military (because if you're good it makes you bad, and if you're bad it makes you worse).

He buys a car, he hits 'a grandfather'. From the state of the car he kills the 'grandfather.' But life goes on and things get happy. Yolanda gets a dog and she loves her dog



.



She kicks drugs, she gets back on drugs because she's too much too young and life without drugs is a life less lived.

And then she is diagnosed with AIDS and it's the end.

So that's the story told through words and all the way through there are these snapshots that are just that; snapshots of Yolanda and Gabriel and their lacklustre holidays and their smashed-up car. It's abook about what lies beneath the surfaces of these pictures that we take, these casual throwaway scenarios that have a backstory that is always there no matter how much we pretend that it itsn't. The words are sparse and clean and matter of fact. They're snapshot words to go with snapshot pictures, and they are full of the heartbreak and sorrow that are still part of Gabriel's life.

It's a great book.

Buy Yolanda here