Is it December yet

Is it December yet?

Roundhill - pictures by Colin Pantall

In the Dentist's Chair

I need some distraction so...

I like the way that  Muriel Hasbun ties in the archival x-rays of her dentist father into a wider cultural debate. They latch onto the idea of trauma, identification and evidence and are part of a larger history of how photography (including x-ray photography) connects to a social and medical history beyond simple photography per se.

It also ties into the idea that photography is not a simple subject. It's too big for that. Most discussions of photography touch on a tiny area of photography -  you can read Marvin Heifermann's questions on this here - so it's good to see the dental x-rays being put forward.

I saw Muriel's pictures a week before I had the joy of joys of going to the Eastman Dental Hospital in London - four hours of sitting in a chair while I was exhaustively cut and slit and drilled and chipped and poked with scalpels, needles, chisels and drills in a combination of bone grafting, cutting and implanting.

For Scott, my fantastic, meticulous painless dentist, I am also the subject of a dissertation which has a large visual element in it - including film and photography. And as I continue my fortnightly visits to the dentist's chair, I continue to be filmed. For me it's a good thing, it's evidential and I know that Scott wants to get the highest possible grades. And he will. The photography proves that.

But at the same time, it is also curious that here I am, somebody interested in photography, being photographed in a way that is not really considered photography. But it is.

I'm sure there must be many books on dentistry within the medical field but how about one's that go beyond medical, one's that enter photographic culture that we know and love. Broomberg and Chanarin did something on dentist chairs and more there's the British Book of Smiles from the Simpsons (it gets shown to Ralph to show him what happens if...)

But apart from that, there's not much. And there should be, because teeth are such an integral part of our lives.

More integral than a selfie is. Here's a selfie of me in the dentist's chair.

And here's another... No, one's too many already. And now I have to get back to whatever it was that I was doing. Wasn't easy, I know that. And it wasn't fun, I know that.

I am a Disco Dancer! Yeah

From the sublime to 'Disco Dancer', a film that I saw last week. I am a Disco Dancer - that's the feature song of the movie, and the one that is rattling around my brain for half of my waking hours (the good half. The bad half there's another song rattling round in there).

Sometimes there  is a right time for a film (or a book or a photograph or whatever). Last Friday was the right time for Disco Dancer, possibly the only time in my life that I would have been willing to sit through 2 and a half hours of Hindi Cinema Disco dancing.

In this post, I mentioned a talk Francis Hodgson gave at which he emphasised the importance of allusion in work. 

Well, there's allusion and there's allusion, Hindi film style. Disco Dancer has none of the former but loads of the latter. In the soundtrack alone, I caught fleeting glimpses of songs such as Video Killed the Radio Star, You're the one that I want and One for you, One for me, the latter a song that I felt I had truly put behind me and would never hear again. Yet there it is in Disco Dancer filling my head with a song that sits like a hyperactive limb twitching child at the very forefront of my mind. How do I get rid of it.

The interesting thing about Disco Dancer is it was a huge hit in the Soviet Union, where Indian cinema was incredibly popular (Awara was possibly the most popular film released there). After its release in 1986, there was a huge debate about whether these 'popular' films were worthy of viewing, with a even bigger counter debate telling critics that '...Indian films taught one to love 'without an eye to personal gain' They suggested that those who were hostile to these films 'had perhaps never loved like that'.'

Soviet viewers also like the 'real men' in Hindi cinema, it was 'vivid' and 'bright' and packed the cinemas every time - one Hindi film fan noted that in contrast at a screening of a critically acclaimed Soviet film that was shown at the same time only one of the original 15 members of the audience stayed after the first 20 minutes.

But enough of this - buy Indian films in Soviet Cinemas: The Culture of Movie-Going After Stalin by Sudha Rajagopalan if you are interested.

In the meantime, here are a couple of Soviet animations - good old American Imperialist Mr Twister, you have to love his big fat racist ass, and what happened to poor old Vinni Puuh - he turned into the inspiration for South Park.

What is really good: The Passion of Joan of Arc

Last night I saw the Passion of Joan of Arc at Bath Abbey as part of the Bath Film Festival. The film was accompanied by a live score by Will Gregory and Adrian Utley performed by six guitarists, a vocal section, harps,  woodwind and brass and conducted by Charles Hazlewood.

With the live score, this was a heart stopping event that moved me in a way that cinema had never moved me before. I sat there watching Joan go through the tribulations of her trial, threat of torture and her ultimate burning at the stake.

The music accompanying the film amplified the venality, the fervour, the cruelty, the dignity and the tenderness of the characters - the pious Joan in her man's clothing, the priests, the peasants, the judges.

It's the Passion of Joan of Arc so faces dominated the screen; they were brought even further to life by guitars, harps and trumpets that echoed the anxiety, the madness and the injustice happening on screen.

The Joan of Arc narrative is driven through a study of faces that is at a revolutionary mix of expressionism and off-kilter editing. So it's a conceptual film as well, made up of close-ups that reveal the inner workings of a tortured soul.

So the cinematography, the staging, the editing is all ground-breaking. It's incredible. But at the same time it's only a secondary layer. The story comes first and that is what gives the Passion of Joan of Arc its heart and soul, its power to move. And that is what the score addressed so beautifully. I spent the film with my head upturned watching the amazing face of Maria Falconetti slide into the ultimate depths of despair. By the end of the film, in a very small way, I had become her - head tilted, lips parted and teary eyed.

I arrived home yesterday despondent and world-weary. In photography, I see a great deal of wonderful work that has spirit and heart and pierces me to the core. But on the flip side I hear so much about amazing work that issinsightful and inspirational - work that is supposed to be amazing but simply isn't; the kind of work that is conceptual and looks at the inner workings of photography, that strips it to its means of representation and its mode of distribution, that uses dense texts to convey its power, texts of theory that alienate and intimidate, that become of a self-justifying world where the statement rules and intellectual jiggery-pokery is a major part of the game. But sometimes I feel I should like it, that I should be part of that club. But I am not very good at clubs and in any case it's not any good. Or is it?

The Passion of Joan of Arc killed that despondency. It showed me in the most direct way possible what amazing work is, that it does not strip away the emotional power of a story, but has it at its heart. Things can be minimal and laid bare, but when all that is left is the act of stripping, then what exactly is the point; we are left with a barren, presbyterian world view of art, where what tastes harsh and bitter in our mouths is what is good for us, where the obscurantist becomes an end in itself.

For me, The Passion of Joan of Arc calls bullshit on that. It lifted my despondency at the world of branding, pretension and hype and stopped me (for a while at least) from second-guessing my instincts. Somthing brilliant had touched me and made me remembered what really matters in film, in photography, in life. And conversely, what really doesn't matter, what is just so much empty vanity and branding and hot air.

I live in Bath which is a beautiful place. Every morning I walk out of my door and see Solsbury Hill, Brown's Folly and Claverton Down. Without exception I count my blessings and wonder at the beauty of this world.

This morning I did exactly the same, but with a little something added. Thank you Joan of Arc.

How to Stop your Pictures Being Boring

Francis Hodgson gave a talk at Newport (the University of South Wales) last week in which he outlined his views on how to elevate the photograph from the digital soup into which it is in danger of being immersed.

(Read Francis Hodgson in conversation with Joerg Colberg here)

I like the idea of digital soup - it corresponds to Erik Kessels piles of photographs - a squillion photographs uploaded to flickr in one day (although is it really a squillion, and were a squillion really printed out?)- and raises the same questions. How do we differentiate our images from this amorphous mass of visual detritus?

Francis suggested 3 major ways of doing this (and noted that there are a whole bunch more).


Process
Series
Allusion

Work with processes and you may escape the surface problem of photography - that it only has surface. You also touch on craft and connect your work to historical uses of photography.

Work in series and what is banal in the individual image is ampliflied so that similarity and difference are accentuated, so a narrative is formed.

Work with allusion and you connect your work with a broader world, one where the art-historical, the psychological, the political, the market - take your pick - is referenced. It makes people take your work seriously.

Trouble is when it doesn't work, allusion becomes collusion, delusion or illusion. And there's a lot of that kind of work around.

When it does work? A couple of examples of people who to my mind hit the three Hodgson sweet spots (process, series and allusion) every time: Sally Mann and Abelardo Morell (see  below)

Transgender Day of Remembrance - A day late

This is a day late, but better late than never. This is a post on the photography of  Nazik Armenakian but is also about visibility and silence by Aenne Pallasc. Read it in full here.


Today is the Transgender Day of Remembrance. This year, at least 238 trans people have been murdered - and this count does not include the numerous cases of suicide after transphobic violence. We need to remember them - "We can't bring back the trans people that have lost their lives but we can stop the body count increasing." (Ava Vidal)


And, Pallasca continues, conflating visibility with acceptance and inivisibility, in particular a deliberate invisibility with complicity.

It is an innocent, curious approach that Armenakian takes there - the equation of visibility with establishment. It is only fair when you read her describing her confusion when she first met these sex workers, and found her notions of 'male' and 'female' were seriously challenged. She overcame her first shock, began talking to the women, learned their stories, shared their stories. It's a beginning, and sets a good example not only for her Armenian compatriots, but to everyone. To end with Ava Vidal: "You don't have to be personally responsible for anyone's death, being complicit by remaining silent is bad enough. Be better. Do better.

Asim Rafiqi and Koudelka's Holy Landscapes

above image from the Visualizing Palestine Project

So I go into one of those twitterific discussions about this post from Josef Koudelka's new work on the Wall in Palestine and this response from Asim Rafiqi.

The title is The Moral And Intellectual Cowardice Of Josef Koudelka, which seems a bit harsh. 

I'm not sure that I'm that brave that I would call either Koudelka or Rafiqi a coward. 

Rafiqi starts by pulling apart Koudelka's opening gambit of 

…I don’t want to get mixed up with Israel because it’s very, very complicated…

On his blog, Rafiqi says about his projects"It is difficult for me to talk in public about my personal projects." He works in Pakistan, and from the very strong work that he is showing, one can imagine why his other projects might be difficult to talk about.

But things are difficult to talk about, and not just because they of the complexities of the politics or religion of a place, but because talking about them can open a whole can of worms. Talking about Israel in a particular way in some places can threaten one's funding, one's livelihood and make one the target of a whole bunch of religious and ideoligical extremists and opportunists. It can lead to an endless trail of tiresome arguments by people who know their UN resolutions inside out and have a counter attack consisting of low level psychological warfare with high end bullying and brainwashing - with a toxic dose of denial thrown in with the full gamut of defence mechanisms that will leave you feeling bruised and dirty. 

You don't want to go there. Not if you're a coward like me anyways. 

A similar thing applies in other areas, including Pakistan or the UK. This might be something major or something quite everyday. There are things that have become accepted taboos - not wearing a poppy in the UK for example, out of the collective militarisation and conformism that has happened in the UK over the last 30 years. Newsreader Charlene White is an example of what happens when you stand out. 

Anyway, this is what Rafiqi wrote about Koudelka.



I wanted to give this post a gentler title. I wanted to do that because I have been an admirer of Koudelka’s work for years, considering his book Gypsies to be one of the most important influences in pushing me to become a photographer. For me he has always been the photographer famous for his independence of thought, his personal moral and political integrity and his public reputation as a man whose works embody a moral and social conscience. So it was shocking to read his recent interview in the New York Times Lens blog about his work on the Israeli wall that scars the Palestinian West Bank and Gaza (Koudelka only documented as far as I know the wall as it exists in the West Bank). To find that this otherwise intelligent individual, with enough intellectual and emotional independence to come to an honest conclusion about what is taking place in the West Bank, choses to hide behind an apolitical and frankly cowardly language of ‘environment’ and ‘its too complex’ was staggering to confront. It was down right shameful to read.

Rafiqi continues to pick out pieces of the interview where Koudelka focusses on the landscape (and by extension the Israeli Wall) as the victim of both sides of the conflict. He accuses Koudelka of a lack of empathy with the people. This is what Koudelka says, 

We have a divided country and each of two groups of people tries to defend themselves. The one that can’t defend itself is the landscape. I call what is going on in this most holy landscape, which is most holy for a big part of humanity, is the crime against the landscape. As there exists crimes against humanity there should exist the crime against the landscape.

I am principally against destruction — and what’s going on is a crime against the landscape that is enormous in one of the most important landscapes in the world.

And this is Rafiqi's response to another Koudelka quote. 

What is interesting for me is that I showed these books in Israel and everyone told me this book is not a political book — that this is about man and the place. This book is not about conflict — of course you can take it as you want.

I wonder if Mr. Koudelka thought about showing this book in Palestine and to Palestinians? I suspect not because there he would have had to deal with the inconvenient truth about the real meaning of the wall. And thatit is in fact very much about a conflict! But no matter how much Koudeka tries to dodge the meaning and brutal realities he refuses to speak about in the interview, or in the book (the book lacks text – see my post Offering Silence To The Oppressed Or How Photography Can Become A Weapon Of Repression on this issue!), he can’t help but reveal something tremendously insidious

So something is going on, but it seems to be a partisanship (the holy landscape? Really.). But is this lack of empathy really cowardice. I don't know. The interview is quite striking in its lack of real engagement with what I imagine to be the realities of the place. Perhaps it is just lack of empathy or lack of identification or lack of... insight maybe. 

So perhaps it should be Ignorance in the title rather than Cowardice. Or maybe not. Who knows, but the interview doesn't sit pretty. Pictures are great though but only if they are political. If they are not political, it makes them part of a tumblr stream that ends up on an Erik Kessels Installation. And that's where nobody wants to be.