Switzerland, Curious George and Slow-on-the-Uptake

Lewis Hamilton won the Monaco Grand Prix today and now makes his home in Switzerland - which he doesn't like because it's boring. Bears - woods. Pope - Catholic. Switzerland...

Which leads us to the ad at the top, which is from the Swiss People's Party campaign of 2007, and could be indicative of a few other reasons not to be mad keen on living in Switzerland.

The Curious George/Obama in 08 T-shirt is a more localized American example of a similar thing (and one reason this isn't the same as showing George Bush as a monkey, is because Obama isn't).

The sign in the window is a pre-race-relations act bed and breakfast ad from England. And, last of all, courtesy of Simon Roberts come these contemporary versions from the Little England town of Stow-on-the-Wold - which, Simon Says, mysteriously shut down for a few days during the recent Stow Gypsy Horse Fair.

Larvotto Beach

picture: Colin Pantall

A place that ties in mutilated landscapes and no ethics is Monaco. This is Larvotto Beach, which is lovely with lots of fish in the sea!

Bruce Gilden on Ethics

Bruce Gilden's view on ethics in street photography.

"I have no ethics. ...ethics - come on, give me a break."


But what about manners or dress sense (he's a cheeky, scruffy chappie)? From a video interview with the fabulous Bruce Gilden (via 2point8) - essential viewing here.

Salgado and Afghanistan

picture - Sebastiao Salgado

From mines in Kentucky, to mines in Brazil and this image from Salgado's Sierra Pelada series. I love this image for its complexity - it combines economic, racial, social and environmental elements in a manner that also resonates with symbolism from the religious and art historical.

Salgado has been criticised for the sentimentality of his work and the inherent exploitation of its subject - Victim photography with a capital V. Alfredo Jaar was one critic - he made his own pictures of Sierra Pelada miners and showed them in a massive print in a gallery setting as a counterpoint to Salgado's exploitative images.

Not sure quite what the thinking was behind Jaar's rhetoric and how the agency or empowerment of the miners quite worked out in the scheme of things. I'm not even sure if ethics and exploitation are even terms that should apply for photographers working in this situation. It is a little self-centred to measure a humble snapper's (and great as he is, Salgado is just a humble snapper - as is Dijkstra, Mann, Lux, Crewdson, Sherman or whoever) efforts on the same level as the economic wheels that destroy an environment and the people that live in it.

Anyways, the great thing about old school photographers like Salgado is they do get straight to the point and show the peopled environment - he shows the environment people live in, their effect on it and the effect economic forces have on how they live in it.

I find this much more appealing than abstracted representations of environmental disaster, famine or war - representations that remove the people from the equation and show aftermaths of events denuded of human habitation. Jacques Ellul’s suggested propaganda was "an enterprise for perverting the significance of events."
Sure, Salgado might have once had a sentimental optimism (and why not?), but he also addressed the issue head on - he didn't pervert the significance of events.

By contrast, photographers who denude a landscape or nation of its people do, perhaps not in isolation, but certainly in combination with the work of others and also by circumstance do. Two of the main British representations of Afghanistan in recent years are Simon Norfolk's Afghanistan and Paul Seawright's Hidden. Hidden is a sophisticated work (by far my favourite of Seawright's work) but it doesnt' stand in isolation. Throw Norfolk's work in, add the odd Sunday Times photo-essay of marines camping out in the desert, follow up with a bit of Royal PR on behalf of Prince Harry, watch BBC Television's broadcasts on the Eurasian campaign and a common theme emerges - nobody lives in Afghanistan, there are no people there ( bar the odd balloon seller) the place is empty, the enemy is invisible and it's just a dried up old desert. That's what we are repeatedly shown and that is what we see - a perception that does "pervert the significance of events".

Except it's not a dried up desert of course. So, given the option between picturesque images of pockmarked palaces and orphans and war dead, I'll take the latter anyday, even Luc Delahaye.

picture - Shelby Lee Adams

This story from yesterday's Independent about coal-mining in Kentucky reminded me of lots of things. It reminded me of Indonesia, where the Mormon Mining Company of West Papua (aka Freeport McMoran) removes mountain tops, poisons water and displaces and dispatches the local people - almost the same as happens in Kentucky.

It reminded me of Daniel Shea's recent work, and the older Appalachian work of Wendy Ewald, Shelby-Lee Adams and Susan Lipper. And it reminded me of great mining photograpy, especially that of Marcus Bleasdale and Sebastiao Salgado.

And most of all, when the article mentioned the failure of Obama or Clinton to take on the American mining lobby or defend the environment, it reminded me not to expect too much of whoever becomes the next US president.

The mountain that lost its top

from The Independent

The act of destroying a million-year-old mountain has several distinct stages. First it is earmarked for removal and the hardwood forest cover, containing over 500 species of tree per acre in this region, is bulldozed away. The trees are typically burnt rather than logged, because mining companies are not in the lumber business. Then topsoil is scraped away and high explosives laid in the sandstone. Thousands of blasts go off across the region every day, blowing up what the mining industry calls "overburden".

The rubble is then tipped into the valleys – more than 7,000 have already been filled – and more than 700 miles of rivers and streams have disappeared under rubble and thousands more soiled with toxic waste.

read full article here

End Mountaintop Removal

Kentuckians for the Commonwealth

Earthquake sympathies

Following on from the Fragments post, the blog joins China in its 3 minute silence for the Sichuan earthquake victims.

20 Fragments of a Ravenous Youth - Xiaolu Guo

Mr Third-Rate Photographer here (at least that's what it says on my business card) with some extracts from Xiaolu Guo's excellent( first novel )20 Fragments of a Ravenous Youth.

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You can check any Chinese dictionary, there's no word for romance. We say 'Lo Man', copying the English pronunciation. What the fuck use was a word like romance to me anyway? There wasn't much of it about in China, and Beijing was the least romantic place in the whole universe.


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'Fenfang, how are you? this is Old Third-Rate Director, but you can just call me Old Third.'

'Ah, hello, Old Third.'

The Chinese Film and Television Bureau has a rigid four-tier classification system for Directors: first-rate, second-rate, third-rate and fourth-rate. But the loss of face that would have to be endured by someone with Fourth-Rate Director printed on their business card meant that I had yet to meet one.'

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The routine of a small, desolate village can rule its inhabitants' lives more effectively than an imperial dynasty. Fo thousands of years, people have done the same thing. In our village, it went like this: if, around, four in the morning, you heard a rooster in the yard singing five notes, then you knew with absolute certainty that you would hear the same rooster at the same time the next morning, singing at exactly the same pitch and frequency, just as roosters have done since the beginning of time, and would do for ever more.

Or one afternoon, as the sun fell into the valley, ou might see an old man carrying an old axe and walking along the fields.He might cough twice and spit once.And then, just wait, because the next afternoon, when the sun started to fall into the damn valley, you would see that same old man carrying the same old damn axe slowly walking along the fields. Again, he would cough exactly twice and spit exactly once. Whenever I heard this cough, I wanted to kill myself. You see, my ancestors ploughed those fields every day. And then they chose a day to die. On that day, they would tell themselves: today I will die. And they died as if they had never lived. They died like an ant dies. Who gives a damn when an ant dies.


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I spent the next two days crawling over my carpet, shaking out my duvet and wiping the surfaces of my shabby furniture as I cleaned up leftovers from the magnificent glass party. I kept finding blood on the bottoms of my feet. For every shard of glass I pulled from my skin, another would find its way in.

It was on one of these days, as I was extracting a piece of glass from the arch of my foot, that Ben called.

'Hey, Fenfang, how are you doing? It's eleven o'clock her in Boston. I'm getting ready for bed. What are you up to?'

I was holding the phone and staring at the piece of glass that I'd just removed rom my foot. It glowed in the light from my mobile. 'Ben,' I said, 'I've just been tidying my apartment. I was just cleaning the carpet when you called.'

His voice came back. 'Fenfang. I miss you.'

I turned off the phone, and sat still and quiet in my room, my feet resting on glass splinters stuck in the carpet. I had this great urge to cry, but I didn't want to cry alone. For a really good cry, I needed a man's shoulder.