Photography Always Shows What We Already Think We Know

‘photography always shows what we already think we know.’

That’s from Kodachrome, an essay from Luigi Ghirri’s new book of essays. Published by Mack, this is a book where Ghirri examines how we make see and experience photographs. And how these images form a larger whole which feeds back onto that making, seeing and feeling.

In f/11, 1/125, natural light, Ghirri writes about the photographer being part of the flow of things, rejecting the idea of the photographer as outsider. Within that flow there are infinite decisive moments; the realisation of that infinity of decisive moments really defeats the decisive moment and is, for Ghirri, liberating.

So it’s a liberating book. It’s one where the possibilities of photography are endless, except that they are not. For Ghirri there is a kind of world of photographic possibilities and it is these that limit us as they create a visual map we are constrained by.

To open the doors of perception we need to go beyond this world. Which is not easy because it is familiar to us and provides a foundation for us. But if you really want to step beyond this world, all you have to do is step – and you are out.

The book, which is called The Complete Essays 1973-1991, is a journey through photography then, one where writing, photography, art and architecture all overlap. It's a journey in itself where photography and ideas are linked in a world that floats mist-like all around us, a mist which settles at key points where the ideas, Ghirri's photography and the world around us all come together..

Mack also published the excellent Pandora’s Camera by Joan Fontcuberta. This is a book where the meaning of  photography is found in wider personal, social and institutional structures. It works in a informational power-based space.

Luigi Ghirri’s book in contrast places photography in a psychological visual space, a noumenal world of the photographic which comes complete with ideas of sense and reference, truth and reality, sign and signifier – but which we (as Ghirri points out) somehow see as fixed. But this world has boundaries that are made by the limitations of our own imaginations. If we want to make something new, we open our imaginations and we can make new worlds. That is the point of the book, I feel, to open us up to more rigourous ways of being, which will lead us to new ways of seeing

This is what Ghirri says in his final essay, A Light on the Wall:

‘…in the face of the exploding, boundless world, we need to find a new common language, and to be aware that every word, sound, figure, frame, image, photograph and painting are becoming entire constellations of meaning and reference, as the echoes and assemblages of different forms and ethnicities. 

I believe, in this manner, a sort of Esperanto has been created, a language not made up of individual words, but of small constellations, which include sounds, images, words, perceptions. A language which may only be sensed, never spoken or explained – a new, mysterious silence which binds us together, and which we share.’

Curation is a Matter of Life and Death

The thing that was most obscene about the Hillsborough Disaster wasn't the photograph of people dying on the terraces, it was the Sun headline based on series of lies.

And it was the words that led to that headline that created an injustice that lasted it 27 years and is still ongoing.

Words held more substance than photography. Journalism ruled over photojournalism even though the words were lies and the pictures were truths.

And from the documentary Hillsborough (which aired on BBC last night), the pictures that caused most offence weren't photojournalistic pictures. They were polaroid pictures of the dead. Printed small, with bad lighting, they were tacked up on the wall of a gymnasium for grieving relatives to scan through and identify their loved ones by. There was no filtering, no ordering by age, gender, or race. To identify your loved one, you had to look into the faces of tens of other loved ones - at faces bruised and battered and crushed to the point of death.

These were identity pictures, but they show how much photography matters. And  it's not just what those photographs show; it's how they show it. The lighting, the size, the hanging, the ability to discriminate between images all matter.

Curation matters, even in matters of life and death. Especially in matters of life and death. And with Hillsborough, the place where that curation mattered wasn't a White Cube Gallery, it was a gymnasium packed with the bodies of the dead.

The Hillsborough Disaster: Pictures of People Dying

I found the reporting on the Hillsborough Disaster verdict of Unlawful Killing  quite upsetting.

If you're not familiar with the Hillsborough disaster, watch this, or here's a brief summary; in 1989, 96 people died at Hillsborough Stadium in Sheffield while attending a football match.

They were crushed to death when the police opened gates to let in fans who had not gained entry when the game had started.

As people were being crushed to death before the eyes of the stewards, reporters, players and the police, the police beat back fans who were trying to climb the fences against which they were being crushed. Police milled about aimlessly or formed a pointless cordon on the halfway line.

Nobody opened the gates to the fences to relieve the pressure. Nobody knew where the keys were. For thirty minutes or so, people continued to die. No leadership was taken by anyone in the stadium.

As injured fans lay on the pitch, there was no oxygen or other basic resuscitatory equipment in the stadium whatsoever and ambulances and medical staff were mismanaged at the cost of lives.

96 people died. They were Liverpool fans. That matters.

The police took no responsibility for this. They blamed drunken fans. The Sun Newspaper printed lies saying that Liverpool fans stole from and urinated on the bodies of the dead. This was a lie.




The families of the dead only got recognition that the incompetence of the South Yorkshire Police and the officer in charge of the policing of the game for the day, David Duckinfield, were to blame for the disaster.

They were also to blame for the lies, deceit and heartlessness that followed. This was recognised 27 years after the event.

What I found especially shocking was to hear the reports from the day again, reports where the football commentary of Peter Jones came laced with a subtext that this was 'trouble' - with all its connotations of football violence - when this was obviously  not football violence. There was nothing about the movement, the faces, the noise, the atmosphere that suggested it was football violence. It was something quite different.

Another disturbing thing was to hear a doctor express his outrage at the lack of medical supplies, of coordination, and at the fact that people were dying because of neglect and incompetence. And he wasn't doing it 27 years after the event. He was doing it an hour after the event. It was that obvious!

What condemns David Duckinfield and the South Yorkshire Police most are the images of those who died. The picture above shows the faces of Liverpool fans crushed up against the fence. You don't see this when they report the news now. Probably for good reason. But at the same time, I can't help but feel it cuts through all the lies of the police, the lies of the Sun, the lies that it took 27 years for the courts to recognise as Unlawful Killing. And it's not yet a full recognition.

It shows people, including children, dying. It's an awful picture and the people in them have names. I don't know who they are or what happened to them and I feel bad for that. But I think the picture is important because it shows what the players saw, what the stewards saw, and what the police saw. It shows what happened, and it shows people who suffered and died. They aren't others and the picture reclaims them from being others. And they stood by, under the command of David Dukinfield and let those people die. Which amounts to nothing less than murder.

Hillsborough was about reducing people to become something less than people. There was a whole structure of government, of police, of press, of the legal establishment in place to do this. Photography didn't do this. For me, if anything, the picture above doesn't help recover those lost lives, but it does reclaim them from being some kind of alien others, and it does make the responsibility of those in power even more apparent.

Hillsborough was a unique event, with unique lives lost. But the cover-up, and the way in which power conceals its inadequacies and blames the less wealthy and less powerful for disaster, poverty and death is not unique as Ian Jack points out here. So the question remains, if Hillsborough exemplifies the cover-ups, and  the lives that didn't count in 1980s Britain, what are the cover-ups, the deceits and the lives that don't matter of today?

Home Instruction Manual: A Manifesto for the Messy

Home Instruction Manual by Jan McCullough is a book for all of us who are not anally-fixated, minimalist tidy-nuts, who don't have a home that looks like it came out of the World of Interiors, for whom interior design means how you line up your knickers on the radiator, how you cover up those drill holes in the plasterboard wall that didn't quite fix properly, or what to do with the cat that likes sleeping 'asshole down' on your 'face pillows'.

 

The answer to that is you stick him on the 'GUEST bed' because 'He can do what he likes in that room.'

Actually, face pillows is pushing the boundaries of my interior design, but I'm guessing that McCullough is a bit more sophisticated than me, and a bit more tidy.

The book is a mix of pictures of McCullough's home, a home she decorated in keeping with comments she found on a 'chat forum in which self-described experts were exchanging detailed instructions'.

So McCullough designed her house according to these instructions and the book is the result; a mix of the pictures and the text.

It's kind of anti-design, full of people who stick plants in corners because there's nowhere else to put it, or have rooms that you can't open the door to because it's too full of stuff. There are stains and smells and cats arses.

The pictures go with that flow; they are anti-pictures that match the descriptions. So the picture of the 'hideous 90's bin with tesco bag bin liner' matches that evocative description; it's matter of fact not-very-attractive.

And it works. There's a plastic band and a map of the house attached and altogether it's very entertaining. I don't think it is a manifesto to all us messy souls who secretly have the living room layouts in IKEA box-stores as the pinnacle of domestic order, it's a bit too Dutch for that - and surely there must be a whole bunch of untidy Dutch people with couldn't design a paper bag. I hope so. It'd be worrying if there weren't.

But I can think of it as a manifesto. I like to think of it that way. Yes, why not! Home Instruction Manual: It's a Manifesto for the Messy!

Buy Home Instruction Manual Here. 

Last Post from Documentary Photography: Lua Riberia's Noises in the Blood

Last up from the Documentary Photography Course at the University of South Wales (formerly known as Newport) is Lua Ribeira's Noises in the Blood. 

This is a look at Dancehall Culture from a perspective that preserves the ritual, the mythical, and the sexual in a very direct manner. 

Last year, Lua won the Firecracker Photographic Grant (which is open to entries now) for an earlier incarnation of Noises in the Blood, a project which has significantly got a thumbs up from Professor Carolyn Cooper who wrote the book from which Lua found her title - and you can see Professor Carolyn Cooper's Noises in the Blood here.  

'Noises in the Blood, is an interpretation of the Jamaican Dancehall ritual. The work reflects on the richness of this Afro Caribbean form of folklore, currently developing in the United Kingdom. My intention is to explore the complexity and importance of this cultural expression in relation to a Western perspective, embracing the impossibility of fully understanding it, as starting point of a greater dialogue.'

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Jonathan Fisher's Sculptural Landscapes

Jonathan Fisher Next ( graduating this year from the Documentary Photography Course at the University of South Wales (formerly known as Newport) ) works with landscape, data and his self. His work is a struggle to connect the physical, the environmental and the psychological. It involves data (so you can see Lidar representations, you can see Orthogenesis-type 3-D manifestations of Jonathan's heartbeat, and you can see line mappings of the walks he has undertaken along with fairly straightforward (and very beautiful landscapes).

So it's about walking? Well, walking's involved but I get the feeling that's not the journey that's being depicted here. The photographic representation is the journey - the way in which earth, body and mind are connected - and the difficulties in doing this are at the heart of Jonathan's practice. It's like a photographic sculpture, a work in progress that is intended to get the totality of how we experience the landscapes. I expect words, music and sound to be incorporated eventually. It will never be complete.

There are no simple answers in other words. The beat of the heart, the tread of the boot, the flake of snow burning on the cheek of a face are all part of the conundrum of physical representation that Jonathan is trying to resolve. There is cold hard data, there are words, pain, fears and uncertainties - all are part of a package.

The journey, the visual journey, the psychological journey is depicted here. Nothing is certain, and nothing is clear - because nothing ever is.

For Jonathan's thoughts on his process, read below.

My Practice

The Landscape

At the heart of my work is the constant struggle to find new ways to visualise and the present the landscape.  I have explored new technologies throughout my exploration of the landscape and through this thinking my motivations have developed and evolved.

The earliest work I created on this path could be seen as the genesis object for my whole practice, the 3D model of a footprint, created from a series of photographs that I took when out exploring the landscape.  The model represents a shift in my thinking about photography and photography in the landscape.  I wanted to question how the landscape was viewed in contemporary society, viewed in the personal sense but also how it is continually surveyed, mapped and recorded through new technologies.  The aesthetic of the work is very important when compared against the rest of my body of work.  I have favoured this rather detached, technical aesthetic throughout the whole project and I am only now beginning to realise it has come to represent the conflict between the personal and the technological viewpoint of the landscape.

At this point I feel as though I was still trying to work against photography in my practice, purposefully trying to avoid any photographic representations of the landscape.  In hindsight the work could be seen as quite critical of the mass consumption of imagery, the constant uploading of the same tourist snapshots that we take.  The work of Penelope Umbrico was a massive inspiration but I believe the work was more focused on the idea of the survey. 

 Through sites like Flickr and Instagram, we are constantly surveying the landscape, consciously or not.  We are creating a record of the landscape in much the same way that the early King Survey photographers like Timothy O’Sullivan did.  It felt natural then to choose Yosemite as my subject, the model above is Half Dome, a mountain in Yosemite that is one of the most recognisable landmarks of the American landscape.  The mountain has been immortalised by photographers such as Ansel Adams and Carleton Watkins and by scores of people each day who photograph it. 

The model above was created using the same software that I used to create my footprint, but by inputting images downloaded from Flickr, and the famous Ansel Adams photograph.  The distance between myself and Yosemite played an important as I sought to question the way the world is mapped and recorded from afar.  The second part of this project consisted of me appropriating imagery and data from various sources such as the US Geological Survey and trying to place them into an art context. 

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For me, the work has come to represent me questioning my own personal relationship with both photography and the landscape.  The next piece of work I created could be seen as a departure from this area but they are very connected.

I began to focus on the experience of being in the landscape itself but I was still searching for a way to quantify this.  In a way I was still working against using photography itself, but I began to use the walk to explore how we use the camera as a recording device in the land. 

The work consisted of a series of walks over an unnamed mountain in Wales, I recorded these walks using a GPS watch and heart rate monitor.  The GPS data harks back to the idea of the survey and the map, by carrying out a series of walks I was able to create a view of the mountain purely from where I walked. 

 

The data was then compared against my heart rate data that was recorded on the walk.  The data from my heart was used to create a map, a map that is both personal and universal.  If I was to walk up the mountain, my heart rate would increase, creating an actual map of the land similar to the GPS tracks, however if I stopped half way up the mountain my heart rate would decrease.  This cycle of walking and pausing created new landscapes in the data.  If I paused to take in the view, or breathe a new hill would be created in the data.

By using my body as the recording device I became the surveyor of the landscape, a personal landscape and the actual landscape.  At this point I began to embrace this idea of the subjective landscape and the landscape as an experience. 

“We invent or create the world as we look at it, it has no being beyond our own awareness of it”

It seemed natural to me when thinking about the landscape as experience to explore ideas surrounding the Sublime.  The effect of the Sublime on my body would be both physical and psychological.  I planned to carry out a series of walks to find what triggers this sense of the sublime in myself, and combine photographs taken of this moment with the heart rate data that I was also collecting. 

Since the British Romantics in the 19^th Century, the landscape of Scotland has long been associated with the theory of the Sublime.  By walking I was able to confront these personal ideas, using the camera not as a means to record the landscape, but as a way to express an emotion. 

The photographs that I created along these walks have a symbiotic relationship with the landscape and its effect upon me.  The photographs I took are my view of the landscape but there is a symbiotic relationship between the effect of the landscape on me and the way I force my feelings upon the photograph.

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Daragh Soden's Young Dubliners

 Next up from the Documentary Photography Course at the University of South Wales (formerly known as Newport) is work by Daragh Soden. Daragh is a multi-talented photographer from Dublin. These images are from his series, Young Dubliners, but he also makes more conceptual work that questions the role of the photographer and the assumptions of documentary.

Young Dubliners already has a life of its own; it will be shown in Dublin later in the year as part of a wider project on Irish youth, and Daragh is working on how to integrate text and image through pieces of his fictional writing based on his own experiences growing up in the city.

This is what he says about the work.

"Young Dubliners is a celebration of the unique character of Dublin's youth, the place where I grew up. During a time of time austerity, the young people who would inherit the consequences of actions taken by the powers that be are championed in empowering portraits."

"It's one of the things about adolescence, everyone goes through it. Yet, it's different for everyone. Everyone is dealt a unique set of problems and challenges, some much more so than others."

"The young Dubliners in the pictures are all united in their youth, but are divided in Dublin. Around the figure in the foreground, the extent of social division in Dublin is apparent."

 A man was cutting the grass when we ran down the big hill to the chipper at lunch time. When we got to the road the sweet smell of the grass changed to tarmac. Dylan’s da was there, raking the hot black stuff.

-Is that your da Dylan?

-Yeah, he said looking down at the ground.

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