Silence is the Ultimate Weapon of Power

Indeed. I love it. These are by Angus Carlyle who works with image and sound - and how the one changes the other. And how silence operates, both within the image and without!

Angus is talking tomorrow at Sound, Word and Landscape in Bristol. If you're interested in how to communicate with images to bring in word, sound, music and more, come to this. It will be brilliant.

The full schedule and other information is below.

Buy Tickets here

RUNNING ORDER
Doors open 12pm for 12.30 start

1st session

Introduction by Jesse Alexander
12:30 – 1:15 Angus Carlyle
1:15 – 2:00 Beth and Thom
2:00 – 2:40 Max Houghton

2:40 – 3:20 Break – and signings

2nd Session
3:20 – 4:05 Jem Southam
4:05 – 4:50 Paul Gaffney – followed by Stray: book launch and order taking

4:50 – 5:20 Break

3rd Session

5:20 - 6:05 Ester Vonplon
6:05 – 6:50 Susan Derges
6:50 – 7:20 Panel Discussion/Q and A: Jesse and Max Chair: Susan, Angus, Jem, Paul, Ester, Beth and Thom

8:00 Dinner

BUFFET DINNER
Dinner after the event is at 8pm and will be a buffet prepared by Chandos Deli (If you’ve been to a Photobook Bristol event before, you might know how great this food is). This costs £10 and you can pay on the day in cash, but we need to know numbers in advance, so please email us back ASAP and let us know if you would like to be fed. Thanks.

GETTING THERE
The SouthBank Club is on Dean Lane, Bedminster, Bristol BS3 1DB - From the centre take the second left off Coronation Rd., running along the south side of the river. The venue is down the hill on the bend. There is no off road parking at the venue.

On foot

The Southbank is 15 minute walk from Bristol Temple Meads Train Station.

Take the swing bridge by the Arnolfini and the pedestrian footbridge over the river. Straight across is Dean Lane. Its 10 mins walk from the Arnolfini & 5 mins walk from Asda car park.

TICKETS
All your names are on the door. No physical tickets needed.

FREEBIES
All advance ticket holders get the choice between a £5 voucher to spend on the day at the RRB stall, or a free copy of Fulton’s Walking Artist. Claim your preferred option when you arrive.

BOOKSHOP
Will be open all day with a large selection of photobooks on offer.

SNACKS
Will be available to buy from the venue throughout the day.

See you there on Saturday.

Deleted Scene: An Ethnic Landscape?

It's Sound, Word and Landscape at the Southbank Centre in Bristol this Saturday, an event that is about how we think about, make and show pictures, about how you can use word, sound, music, biography and geology to deepen the viewer's connection to the world around us.

You can buy tickets here.

So, in that vein, there's a series of reviews of books dealing with the landscape on the blog this week. Next up is Yury Toroptsov's Deleted Scene, a book where biography, ethnic background and how we live either on the land or with the land all play a role.

Yury will be doing book signings at Paris Photo next week on Friday 13th at 4pm.


Yury Toroptsov wasn't even 2 years old when his father died. 'I have no personal memories of him,' he says in his new book, Deleted Scene.

'He was almost forgotten. No one spoke of him. His grave was abandoned. The extent of my knowledge about my father was gleaned from a couple of stories that folks who once knew him told me.'

One of these stories involved the family (father, mother and Yury) coming across the Japanese director Akira Kurosawa shooting his film Dersu Uzala 'in the vicinity of our village (in Eastern Siberia) in 1974. Those were among the last remembered moments when we were still a happy family.'

So there's autobiography of a recreated type; half-formed memories that have been adapted over time to form a new narrative, one that is adjusted again as Toroptsov juggles the elements of this family legend; there's the memory of Dersu Uzala (who was a nomadic 'Goldi' native who lived and worked in the forests of Siberia), there is Kurosawa and the 'meeting' with Toroptsov family, and there are local archive pictures of Kurosawa making the movie - including scenes which his family witnessed being shot.




And then there's present day Siberia. One where the urban, the ideological and the natural merge together. We see the town where Toroptsov spent his early years, the tracks into the forest, and the spaces in between.

Flat vistas and stretching roads give the scale of the place, and the ramshackle wooden houses provide the familiar feeling of isolation, that you are far from at least one centre of things.

But there is always more than one centre. So there are little curiosities - the painted posts on smallholdings that hint at another world. These have an aboriginal feel to them, a lightness almost, that is connected to the land in a more spiritual way.

The goalposts made of tree trunks that still have bark on have a similar effect, as does the picture of an offering by a blue painted fence. This is a landscape that has multiple meanings and resonances that go beyond surface history.

The archive pictures show Kurosawa filming, and we see the real Dersu Uzala, resplendent in his furs, a man whose relationship to the land was very different to that of non-native Siberians. And that you feel is at the heart of this book. There are pictures of Toroptsov's father in there, and his features are East Asian (Korean) rather than Russian, so there is a personal element to the book that comes across far more strongly than the relatively eliptical statements would have us believe.

More hints of a different ideology come across in pictures of a local monument, featuring curlesque carvings of elk and big-eyed faces that are more Inuit in nature. There's a tension between two ideas of the land or the territory. And we see it right at the end. There's a tiger (this is another connection to Dersu Uzala - I have to see the film now), followed by a woman whose chest is bared, a massive scar down the front where something seems to have been ripped out. The book ends with a picture of the forest followed by one of an old Communist Party building, and then a statue (of Dersu Uzala himself).

It's a book with a strong political statement. Political landscape. Or an ethnic landscape because how we live the land is so much connected with who we are. We can live with it or we can live against it. In Deleted Scene, Yoroptsov is quietly making that choice. Let's go with that. Why not?

Buy Deleted Scenes here

New Black Landscapes, New Spanish Landscapes, All Brazilian Landscapes

It's Sound, Word and Landscape at the Southbank Centre this Saturday. You can buy tickets here for an event that is about how we think about, make and show pictures, about how you can use word, sound, music, biography and geology to deepen the viewer's connection to the world around us.

You can buy tickets here.

And because of that, there are a few landscape related book reviews on the blog this last week. First up was Martin Cregg's Midlands, next was Salvi Danes and today we have Laura del Rey's Hart.

This is a book made in collaboration with cinematographer Alizo Barboza, following a workshop at Blank Paper Escuela in Madrid. The Spanish connection is evident in a book which looks at the earth as a birthplace for humanity. That idea comes across in the cover which features a striking embossed crack running across it.




Open the pages and you're into the landscapes. They are misty, unclear pictures of the sea, of clouds, of sand and mud. It's a textured world in keeping with what we might as well call New Spanish Landscape . This is a primal landscape that uses basic elemental images to take us back (or more likely forward) to another place, another time. It's both apocalyptic, escapist, but also somehow connected to the very obvious economic disasters that have befallen the country - while also not being connected to them.



Del Rey and Barboza are Brazilian but never mind, the work was inspired in Spain, right down to the over-poetic statement. It wasn't made in Spain though, but in a way it doesn't matter where it was made, because where it differs from, er, New Spanish Landscape, is in not having that definitive sense of place. Instead, there's  a strong cinematic element that comes across in Hart. Most of the pictures are panoramic, very panoramic. It works really well, because the mistiness and murkiness gives an elevated quality to the pictures. It looks like it's shot from the heavens in other words, even though it quite obviously is not.

There's a distance to it,  it's looking down on the world, it's A Matter of Life and Death in black and white, with the almost whites rubbing up against deep charcoals. It's New Black Landscapes meets New Spanish Landscapes in Brazilian form. The only picture which has a tangible earthly feel is the last one - this is the rebirth image I guess, the sea-land link emerging from the mud. I think it would be better without but ultimately it doesn't really matter. Because Hart is a well-thought out and beautiful book that looks much better in real life than it does on the screen..

Buy Hart here.

This Saturday 7th November: Come and See - Sound, Word and Landscape

This is the schedule for Sound, Word and Landscape (my prejudice keeps on changing it to Word, Sound and Landscape) taking place in Bristol this Saturday November 7th. 

It's landscape but there's sound, music, word, biography, walking, geology, meditation, maps and bombs thrown in - so it's more about how you think about, make and show work. Landscape is not just landscape in other words.

Beth and Thom Atkinson will be second-launching their fabulous book, Missing Buildings, and Paul Gaffney will be launching his new book Stray. You'll be able to see, feel and smell a copy - and you'll be able to order one too. They're handmade so there's only 50 of them and they will go very fast. 

Tickets are £25 full price, £18 for students. You get a free £5 book voucher for spending at the bookshop on the day. And there is a fabulous buffet dinner (and it is fabulous) for £10 at the end of the talks (you need to book before for this). 

If you're in the area, or even if you're not, don't miss it. 

Sound, Word and Landscape Schedule

 12:00 – Doors Open

12:20 Introduction by Jesse Alexander

12:30 – 1:15 Angus Carlyle 

1:15 – 2:00 Beth and Thom Atkinson 

2:00 – 2:40 Max Houghton 

3:20 – 4:05 Jem Southam 

4:05 – 4:50 Paul Gaffney 

5:20  - 6:05 Ester Vonplon 

6:05 – 6:50 Susan Derges 

6:50 – 7:20 Panel Q and A: Jesse and  Max Chair:  Susan, Angus, Jem, Paul, Ester, Beth and Thom

8:00 Dinner

Blackcelona: Not so much noir as charcoal

Blackcelona is a book of photographs of Barcelona by Salvi Danes. It's got a black cover and the pictures are kind of dark, mostly in black and white, with a slightly underexposed edge to them. It's dark. Hence Blackcelona.

There are portraits,  archive pictures,  interiors, and night time pictures all adding up to a feeling of a city that is slightly out of time.




It's not so much noir as charcoal, but despite this there is some colour in the portraits and odd pictures that don't fit - the innards of a beast that look like an offcut from the cover of Grand Circle Diego.




Hairdos, watches and cinema seats all put in an appearance, the cinema seats hinting at some pornographic underworld from a distant past lying somewhere beneath the surface. A bit of bondage adds to the sense of sexual mystery.



Roundabouts, bird wings and a sense of some deep Catalan past click in. I'm not sure what it all means, or even if it means anything, but again, it's a book that is not trying to be obvious. You have to read the pictures and work it out for yourself.

And that's always a rewarding process.

Buy the book here. 

Oh God. Not Another Book of Non-Spaces!

Edgelands, the liminal, in-between-anything, these are words that should fill everybody with horror. It is quite bewildering why so many people think it's worthwhile to focus all their energies on non-spaces and their bastard brethren when you know that what's going to come out is an exercise in boredom with an even more pointless statement to crank the tedium onto catatonic levels; "I am interested in exploring the non-spaces that emergezzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz..."

Curse the Edgelands, the liminal and the whole clan of emptiness. Fling it onto a funeral pyre together with any project that hits the photo-poet full-house of sea, sky, cloud and cave in its epistemiological statement on our own and this world's mortality.



Every year I make a kind of resolution that I won't look at any more. But the problem is that although these kinds of projects never really hit the zingy high-energy mad-bastard levels I like in a project, there are so many that, when done really well, are thoughtful and really good. There have been a few this year (Ama Lur in particular) that do the sea, sky, cloud and cave thing really well.

And that's where Martin Cregg's Midlands fits in. It's a book of all those in-between spaces that just does it really, really well through intelligent use of the whole book form.

Well, not the whole book form. There's an essay at the back, which is a perfectly fine essay. But I do have this lingering feeling that Heidegger and photography should be kept separate. There should be a tidy little picket fence marking off the patch of grass where Heidegger can step from the patch of grass where photography can step.




But the basic idea of the book is it's showing the construction and collapse of Ireland's housing market using the 'National Spatial Strategy' housing/development/repopulation plan as a kind of metaphor for the disaster that is the Irish housing market. It goes from the boom years through to the comprehensive economic collapse of 2007 and beyond, through the newly-build housing estates of the Midlands area of Ireland. It's a boom and bust scenario in other words, and Cregg is photographing how that affects the landscape.

It's beautifully presented. The book comes in a manila envelope with a string tie. The book is covered in manila card with a map like design on it.

The images start with rough pictures of dug-up earthworks; construction. Then we see the houses, with little fold out booklets camouflage-folded into the middle of the book. These show additional images or extra information (one problem with the Midlands National Spatial Strategy was nobody could agree on where the Midlands were).

There's grass, there are fences, there are various tones of grey, concrete and brick - places that fit that idea of the liminal or the non-place. But here they kind of go beyond that. They fit a political and metaphorical picture of housing speculation gone wrong, of construction and destruction, of dead ends and estates haunted by the spectre of housing speculation gone bad.

Midlands is ultimately rather sad. It's a colour chart of soul-less construction (that's where the Heidegger kicks in I know) where banking profit and speculation creates a colour chart of how colour and vitality can be removed so fully from a place. It's a book about housing bubble voodoo economics where the content fits the design and the surface subject matter (space, non-space etc) actually has a political and economic point to it. It's really very good.

Buy Midlands here. 

Delhi Photography Festival: A Statement

It's good to see that Delhi Photography Festival  ( which is currently underway )has put this statement up regarding harassment, so providing a postive response to numerous complaints and providing a possible course of action against predatory sleazebags.

Hopefully others will do the same. The alternative is apparent in the scene from Chak de India (surely the greatest hockey scene ever made). It's quite a tempting alternative, but you know, non-violence is always better.




Delhi PhotographyFestival

DPF is committed to maintaining a positive, safe and productive working environment for all during the course of its daily work, lectures, workshops, meetings, festivals and other events. The organization does not tolerate verbal or physical conduct of a sexual nature by anyone that harasses, disrupts or interferes with another's  work  or that creates an intimidating, offensive, or hostile environment; irrespective of where such harassment is alleged to have taken place, so long as it pertains to a DPF activity. Sexually harassing or offensive conduct in our workplace, whether committed by members or DPF or visiting nonmembers is explicitly prohibited.

“Sexual harassment” includes any one or more of the following unwelcome acts or behaviour (whether directly or by implication) namely; physical contact and advances; or a demand or request for sexual favours; or making sexually coloured remarks' or any other unwelcome physical, verbal or non verbal conduct of sexual nature.

In the event of an unfortunate incident of the above nature, we commit to provide an immediate access to grievance addressal. The DPF secretariat has a designated anti harassment committee comprising of two females and one male member who can be reached at delhiphotofestival@nazarfoundation.com