Saint Sebastian was Beaten to Death You Know!

Earlier this month, I finished writing a piece for the BJP on workshops and alternatives in photographic education; from the intense 3-day kind to the longer one year school.

It was a most enjoyable experience that ended up being almost like a workshop in itself for my own work; when you are talking with JH Engstrom, Margot Wallard, Michael Grieve, Yumi Goto, Kazuma Obara, Rafal Milach, Lua Ribeira and Juliya Berkovica, there is a lot of energy, intelligence and inspiration in the air. And I think some of it rubbed off.

One thing that is notable is how the speakers differentiated between the shorter, more intense workshop where teachers  like the people mentioned above (or Anders Petersen, Michael Ackermann, and Antoine D'Agata - who is altogether a creature on another level) really challenge you to look deep into yourself and to challenge your complacency.



Carl Fischer for Esquire Magazine (George Lois art-directed|)

The other notable thing was how socially based the longer courses (such as Engstrom and Wallard's year long Paris school) and how much they are based on a less hierarchical form of teaching than might be expected.

And the final notable thing is the hostility many people have to the academic model and in particular to the theoretical side of the academic model. I can understand the misgivings people have about this side of teaching. I can more than understand it, I share it in some ways. It is common for people repeatedly attempt to bully and mystify their peers and their students into feelings of inferiority. It is common for personal differences to be displaced into academic arguments. It is common for people to resist operating outside their comfort zones. And so they belittle what lies outside their comfort zone to preserve their little universe.

People should be hostile to teaching that is formulaic, dry, not suited to student needs, being taught by people who might know alot about a particular subject, but who know nothing about teaching - especially to visually minded students who very often have had negative learning experiences in secondary school.



Yukio Mishima as Saint Sebastian - photographed by Kishin Shinoyama

Very often, the teaching of theory is hierarchical, with a top-down spoonfeeding of obligatory texts to students who don't have the background knowledge to understand what they are reading or studying - and why they are studying it. Foucault, for example, is great for some students and some work, but he's suited to everybody.

Names will be ticked off the theory list as some kind of imagined mapping of progress without consideration of prior knowledge. And very often the teaching does not take into account all those negative educational experiences, the reading and writing difficulties and the general aversion to written research that is typical of so many learners with high visual intelligence.



Saint Sebastian by Guido Reni

At its best, the teaching of photography theory goes way beyond the horrible Theory word. Sure you tick off the Sontag and Rosler and Ritchin because they are accessible and direct and entertaining, but at the same time they are by far the most humdrum element of a research-based module and deal more with the distribution of photography rather than its content.

At its best, research is being led by students and they are going into the arts, history, politics, economics, science, for their ideas. The Sontag, Rosler and Ritchin are just the starting points. Then the learning is not top-down, it is a two-way process and really the teacher is creating a learning community with independent thinking top of the list.



Saint Sebastian by Lucas Tytgadt

Todd Papageorge famously said "If your pictures aren't good enough, you're not reading enough" which is pretty nice. I'd add a little caveat that if you're pictures aren't good enough, you're not reading the right books'.

The trouble is what are the right books? It depends on the person. But basically, I believe that the most important part of photographic education is the research element - not in the formal sense, but in the sense of what is the photographer's global knowledge, their world view. During the interviews, Yumi Goto said what's the point of teaching somebody to take a great picture when everybody can take a great picture. It's not about the great pictures anymore. It's about making the pictures tell a story.

And I'd also add something Michael Grieve, who both teaches on workshops and in an academic setting, said. He described the generosity you can experience when teaching, a generosity that is at odds with the often isolating nature of photography.

"Seeing people developing their work, embracing their failures and learning from their failures, and then see the results is an extraordinary thing. It’s a creative thing and for me, it has really saved me as a person. To give is a real strength I think.”

And when you teach research well, that is what you are doing.

You can read the full article in the July issue of the BJP.

All images come via one my favourite essays of the year -  on Saint Sebastian, Martyrdom, Yukio Mishima and Homo-eroticism. Thank you James!

Saint Sebastian was beaten to death you know!

Why, Oh Why is Nothing Simple Anymore?

A short story by Thomas Boivin from Tipi Bookshop on Vimeo.


A Short Story by Thomas Boivin is a lovely book. It's a poetic affair, that tells the story of a relationship - from meeting across a table, to the beginning of passion, the apex, the highs and lows of a long distance relationship, final petering out into asymetrical falling out of love, separation, heartbreak and desolation.

It's a universal story, and the words are universal in a way. They are not pinned down in some ways, and they are certainly not pinned to the pictures which have a floaty, nebulous feel to them. So it's dreamlike. Sadly it's one of those books that is printed in a tiny edition (100) when it could sell more. How many more is the question, but I hope he prints a second edition (of more than 100).

A Short Story is a really strong example of text and image working together and it's probably (along with Yolanda by Ignacio Navas, The Spook Light Chronicles by Antone Dolezal and Lara Shipley, Yu by Dragana Jurisic, Early Works by Ivars Gravlejs, Love on the Left Bank by Ed Van der Elsken, etc etc) one of my favourites.

But so many people are using supplementary elements to tell the story. At Photobook Bristol, Mark Power launched Destroying the Laboratory for the Sake of the Experiment ( a collaboration with poet Dan Cockrill and designer Dominic Brookman). This is an exploration of England which comes complete with poetry written by Cockrill, and delivered by Cockrill in Power's presentation, to accompany Mark's bang-on images of our soiled and faded nation.



More conventional forms of writing came courtesy of Murray Ballard's The Prospect of Immortality. This, together with Matthieu Asselin's Monsanto (winner of the Kassel Dummy Award), is one of the outstanding examples of a long-term documentary project finding its full expression in book form. In his book, Ballard looks at Cryonics and 'the quest to overcome the ‘problem of death’. Ballard is working with the text in a more considered and reduced form than is often the case in such a documentary subject, so making the story pack a punch and serves the images, rather than simply fills space.

On the Tipi table (which is a sight to behold), Andrea Copetti was showing Anne de Gelas' quite brilliant Mere et Fils and L'Amoureuse projects - both of which used extremely personal diaristic entries combined with sketches of heartbreak, loss and rediscovered passion. It really is quite beautiful.



Other books on the Tipi table showed the book form developing as object. Antonio Jiminez's Elite Controllers being one example of this.This is also an example of the merging of bookseller, publisher, gallerist and curator, a role that Martin Amis of Photobookstore has also taken on.



That is pretty much what Yumi Goto is as well. She talked about and then showed examples of work made through her Reminders Project Stronghold workshops. Again, text figured large in punching through extremely personal stories, but so did extremely intricate and beautiful design. Both Hajime Kimura (who brought his beautiful Snowflakes, Dog, Man book) and Hiroshi Okamoto (who brought his intricate and tragic Recruit book - runner up in the Kassel Dummy Awards) are examples of this.




The Reminders books are done brilliantly because ultimately there is Yumi Goto lurking in the background making sure that, design details notwithstanding, it's the story that matters. There's clarity there in other words,

But something can be good without that clarity. A case in point is the puzzle that is Eamonn Doyle's new book, End.. This comes with music, thirteen inserts, a glassine poster, a yellow cellophane wrapping that over-intrigued me (you can read all about it my review on Photo Eye next week)... Actually even reading the contents confuses me and gives me a headache. But I like it and it works and it's coming from a very different direction from just about everything.

End. is a set of 13 sections all brought together in a white leatherette slipcase, with black-embossed drawings and tip-in title sheet, wrapped in yellow cellophane.

Each section is folded to 200 x 280 mm, portrait.

Featuring 273 photographs, 20 ink drawings and a 7” vinyl sound work, these 13 Dublin “moments” comprise:

One yellow book, thread sewn, printed in black duotone with screen-printed drawings.

Two black books, thread sewn, printed with silver inks.

Three full-colour books, thread sewn, with screen-printed drawings.

Four concertina-folded double-sided diptychs in full-colour with screen-printed drawings.

One large full-colour double-sided folded map.

One 7” vinyl record tucked inside a printed and folded glassine poster.

At the centre of the work is a concertina-folded double-sided full-colour triptych.

So everything is getting more involved, personal and generally difficult. Which is a good thing. But you can have too much of a good thing because when it's done badly, the design becomes redundant and all you are left with is a mulch of inserts, pull-outs and shabby stitching that can't disguise the crapness of the content.




So it was refreshing to see Hoxton Mini Press's books. These are beautifully made and presented books that are a kind of an upscale variation on the Cafe Royal Model with a nod towards the Useful Photography brand of content. The books cost £12 and the special editions (which look fantastic) cost £40. So there's accessibility in pricing. And the content is great. My favourite was Ronni Campana's Badly Repaired Cars.

It's simple but it's pushing the book form in a different way. Photographers, designers, publishers, booksellers, everybody's pushing the book form in a different way, and those ways are not always in the same direction. There's a lot going on. What it all means is, as always, another question that neither I nor anybody else seems to have an answer to.

A Non-Critical Review of Lookbook!

Lookbook by Anastasia Bogomolova is a fun publication! It's a book of fashion pictures. It shows Bogomolova wearing the clothes her mother and sister used to wear in the 1980s and 1990s, in the days when shopping was done at Soviet department stores or through patterns found in fashion magazines, in the days before the world was taken over by the high-end/low-end shopping polarities of Armani and H&M.

When she was a child, Bogmolova used to dress up in these clothes, and now she does so again for the purpose of the book. For each outfit she poses against a florally papered wall and goes through the gamut of the catalogue emotions. There are slightly opened lips to go with the 'tender green silk' holiday dress, hands on hips for the 'youth dress from silk with a black and white print', and the badass eyes over shoulder for the 'jacket from synthetic knitted cloth made in Japan,'




There are inserts (the book is designed by Julia Borissova) from old fashion catalogues, and they are the inspiration for the  glorious cheesiness that combines with a certain nostalgia for the childhood of which these clothes form a part.

It's a fun book then, with biography mixing with some social and fashion history. It's softcover, bound with staples, and the inside cover is a replica from an old pattern book, and you get a free poster that you can stick on the wall. I like posters.  The pictures themselves are as artlessly shot as they are posed, but I guess that's part of the fun of the experiment. It's not entirely consistent in some ways, the wallpaper works but is a slightly overdone motif, and the message and the chronology are elements that you could pick at. But that's not the point of the book, or this blog. It's not operating in that critical world. Not much photography does.

Lookbook is operating in a world where dry humour is the modus operandi. And that's a good thing. There's seriousness in her intent, and the tactile qualities of the book take us onto a sensory plane. All the time there is a little glint in Bogomolova's eye, part of the return to her childhood that this book has taken her to, and also perhaps part of her understanding of what it was like for her mother and her sister to be women back in the day. The nostalgia is personal rather than political and is linked to her experience of being a woman in contemporary Russia. What remains the same and what has changed? Not much perhaps.

So all in all, it's a lovely book.

Buy Lookbook here.

An Interview with Amak Mahmoodian

I've just finished posting on the Photobook Bristol Blog. Here here are some of the best posts from the blog.

The first is an interview with Amak Mahmoodian who talked at the festival and launched her beautiful, beautiful book Shenasnameh there over the weekend (and it's the first publication of Alejandro Acin and his IC Visual Labs).

I'm biased because I was involved in its making, but when Yumi Goto, Susan Meiselas and Andrea Copetti are buying your book, you know you're making something special, something that is personal, political and ultimately loving. And it works perfectly as a book.

An Interview with Amak Mahmoodian

I didn’t know it could be a book at first. I believe all good books start with some personal stories. It doesn’t matter if they are going to be successful or not, but each person must have a personal reason to create a book.

I started to collect the pictures with my friends and family and then friends of friends, in Tehran and then in other cities. At first I didn’t ask other women because I didn’t know if I had the right to ask other women.

As I collected them, I started to notice how different they were, especially in their look. It was really emotional for me, because in many cases I had their photograph but I had never met the woman. I would imagine her voice and her smile, her eyes, her life.  And then I would go and meet the woman and when I knocked at the door, it was like I was going to meet a photograph.

Sometimes I was really shocked because the woman was so different from the portrait I had imagined from the photograph. So each woman was different from another and then each woman was different from her photograph.

Read  the whole interview with Amak Mahmoodian here.

Buy Shenasnameh here.

Rudi Says This, Rudi Says That, Rudi Says the Other...

Rudi Thoemmes of Photobook Bristol with Ivars Gravlejs

This is fun! Richard West of Source Magazine interviews Rudi Thoemmes of Photobook Bristol about books, funding and believing in the hype.

Here's the key quote:

"As soon as a book is subsidised by the photographer, it means the publisher doesn't have to sell it."

He also talks about:

On starting a Photobook Festival by accident.

On why you don't want a festival in a gallery.

On taking the hype out of the photobook world.

On what has gone wrong in the photobook world.

On design taking over from content.


If you think you'll make money from photobooks, Rudi says you won't.

If you think photobooks are a big thing, Rudi says you're mistaken.

If you think the Arnolfini Museum in Bristol is really a contender for British Museum of the Year, Rudi says it's not.

If you're thinking of paying somebody £15,000 to publish your photobook, Rudi says think again. 

If you think paying money to publish your book is a contribution, Rudi says it's not.

If you do do the above and think somebody will take your £15,000 and stick your book through InDesign Template Number 4 and send it to his mates for printing and jobs done, Rudi says you're right. 



Aside from that, He's holding back a bit I think. He likes Multistory though.

Watch the full interview here.

Farewell Photobook Bristol 2016.

As Creative Director (together with Alejandro Acin) of Photobook Bristol  I've been a little absent from this blog for the last few months taking care of Photobook Bristol Business, including running content on the PBB blog (some of which I'll highlight on this blog as a way of slowly getting it in gear before shutting it down for the summer).

The final post on the the Photobook Bristol gave a twitterfied overview of the festival, but maybe didn't quite capture the spirit of the event possibly because it was virtually unreadable due to all the typos.

And it was the spirit of the event that made it so special. Because it was special. That's what I felt, and that's what even the most cynical, bitter, and hardened photobook festival attendees in the audience felt. Photobook Bristol is very much based in the community; the volunteers, the people who host the speakers, the venue, the food, are all Bristol based. That makes a difference.

Tied in with that sense of localness is an outward looking philosophy. So there were speakers from five continents; in addition to the European speakers, there was Mariela Sancari from Central America, David Solo and Susan Meiselas from North America, James Barnor and Laura El-Tantawy from Africa, and Amak Mahmoodian and Yumi Goto from Asia. Photobook Bristol may be local but it's not parochial.

It's also a festival, not a conference or a symposium. So it's a bit of a pow-wow of photography and photobook types. At the same, it ultimately strips down to a bunch of people involved in photobooks, art, publishing or photography listening to a bunch of other people involved in photobooks, publishing or photography talking. For three days straight.

If this were a conference, this might be a painful thing involving lots of attempts to stop the eyelids from drooping, but what became increasingly apparent this year was that nearly all those speakers involved in photobooks, publishing or photography didn't actually talk that much about photobooks, publishing or photography - mainly because it's not that interesting beyond a certain threshold.

Instead they talked about other things that were much more interesting; like what it is to suddenly find yourself without a home, or the hatred needed to scratch penmarks across the face and eyes of a passport photograph, or the reactions you get when you show art lovers pornography at a gallery opening.

It was entertaining and the talks came with music, with singing, with poetry, with literature, with film. The main intent was to be interesting, to be entertaining even! Deeply serious content was in there as well - but it was secondary to the story. The story exemplified the content and so made it accessible, and not dry.

That indicates an increasing openness of thinking, of a fluidity of ideas and how you can combine images with text, with music, with sound, with sculpture to tell a story, to nail an idea. So it's photobooks going beyond the printed page.

I don't really give a monkeys about discussions on how the photobook will take over, or how to grow the market, or edition sizes, or whether it's a vanity object or not (and there are a bunch of articles on this blog that talk about this). To me it's a niche market of enthusiasts who have passion for what they do, what they make and who they communicate with, and are seeking new ways to do all of these things.

I don't think the photobook market will grow or go mainstream. But I think a lot of the ideas being developed from photobooks will develop and be used in different forms. That's where it will have weight.

Tied in with that openness in the way of working, there is a large shift in the way of talking about work. There is a willingness to experiment and try new things, and in accompaniment with that there is a recognition that not everything always works, that people don't necessarily know how things work. There is a kind of confidence in this lack of knowledge; a confidence in having a lack of confidence. And that was recognised by the audience, and respected and appreciated, So there is a kindness and a generosity in there on the part of the audience. That's very important.

There is also an understanding that an unneccessary opacity and the tendency to linger on points that exaggerrate the importance and voice of the photographer and her/his influence in the world - are arrogant, pointless and ultimately tedious.

You need to be interesting in other words. You need to tell a story. The loosening up of documentary practice has led to a loosening up of the way people make work - and talk about work. It has led to a greater degree of uncertainty in their work, and people seem to recognise this quite readily. And this has led to a loosening up of the way people listen about work.

So instead of an endless stream of questions on the ethics of this or that, or the politics of representation, the questions asked by the audience came more from an equal footing, an attempt to try to understand the how and why of the work. Embedded in these attempts were all the usual questions on ethics and politics. But these things weren't front loaded and so the effect was more of a search for answers rather than an attack dog mentality.

It seems that everybody is trying to understand how images work - on their own, in books, in installations, with music, with text - and there's a recognition that nobody is quite certain. That makes for a discussion and atmosphere that is both invigorating, democratic and, ultimately, interesting.

And I think that is part of what made this year such a success.

In any case, here are a few prize nuggets from the weekend, along with some images.

Dragana Jurisic: "Nationalism is for stupid people”

Sonia Berger of @dalpinebooks . It’s better to have an excess of books than too few books

Ivars Gravlejs: Being a photographer at a newspaper is “like a taxi driver profession.”

Ken Grant: “My dad never told me I could get arrested for driving the transit van to the timber yard when I was 12.”

James Barnor: “When you take pictures of babies you have to be patient and you have to be alert”

Martin Parr: “If you ask most curators, they don’t know who Krass Clement is.”

Krass Clement: “I love the modern world but I can’t support it.”

Krass Clement: “You can’t live without humour and at the end of your life you die. That’s what you’re sure of in life.”

Ania Nalecka on photobook design: “The first rule of design. There are no rules, there are only consequences.”

Ania Nalecka: “A Photobook gives you dots to connect, not drawing the lines. The question is how far you put the dots apart.”

Mariela Sancari: “It might sound corny but I do believe in the healing power of art, both for the artist and the viewer.”

Laura El-Tantawy: “After photographing one, two, three protests, you’re basically done.” 

Laura El-Tantawy: “The narrative around the Revolution has been fragmented, and manipulated in every way.”

Mark Power: "What can a foreigner bring, or see in another country that people in that country can’t see."
Dan Cockrill: “Let me shit upon Avon and piss on Shakespeare’s grave.”

And the stand out? There were many stand outs, but Martin Parr in conversation with Krass Clement was something I will never forget.

How to be a Real Artist

A few years back I met a guy who told me that he even though he didn't look like an artist, he was an artist.

Trouble was the guy had statement glasses, a black polo neck, and a designer chin. He didn't look like an artist in the same way that Danny Kaye doesn't look like a choreographer when he's doing the Choreography number in White Christmas.

Kaye (who was a choreographer in real life) looked like somebody pretending to be a choreographer, in the same way my guy looked like somebody pretending to be an artist.



Because really, what does an artist look like?

Does the British photographer Peter Mitchell look like an artist? He doesn't wear statement glasses or have an 'artist's' haircut, so maybe not (though he does wear DMs). What I do know is that he is one; through his work, through his life, through his persona. he's the living embodiment of an artist.

Last year his Scarecrow-centred biographical book, Some Thing Means Everything to Somebody came out. I was told he was on death's door, that he wasn't going to make it through the week, that this would be the only review that he would see of the book. So I wrote a very nice one. And it did the job. He's alive and kicking now, And he is very suddenly being recognised as an artist in his own right.  And I guess it's all down to me for keeping him going with that review.

That notwithstanding, I would have written a very nice review even if he hadn't been at death's door. It's a great book. As is Strangely Familiar (and here's a review of that one). As is Memento Mori.

More than that, though, is the influence Peter has had on a generation of UK photographers. I wrote a chapter on British photography from 1970-2000 for the History of European Photography series recently.

It was really difficult to do. I had to narrow it down to about 25 photographers across all genres, and so as a result loads of great photographers and artists were missed out. No David Hockney for example! How can that be so?

There are so many great photographers from the 1970s in particular who I just couldn't include and it was a real shame. It made me sad.

What was interesting was that some key people who were working back in the day helped in my choice making. And there was one name that kept on coming up. And it was Peter Mitchell.

'Oh yes, you have to have Peter Mitchell.' He wasn't a big name, but in the small world of British photography he was huge.

The quality, the colour, the originality of his work are why he is so highly thought of. But there is also the thoroughness and the work ethic. The Scarecrow book highlights his individuality and unique way of thinking, but look at Memento Mori and you end up with quite a different persona.


This is a complete book, a beautifully researched book that ties in architecture, social history with
news reports, planning documents and archive pictures of all time.

The subject of the book are the Quarry Hill Flats, flats which, according to a newspaper report from 1939t were felt to have 'something immoral and disreputable' about them and 'were thought to be largely inhabited by actresses, Lords and foreigners.'

Memento Mori a reprint of the original 1990 version and is published by RRB which is run by Rudi Thoemmes, Peter Mitchell's biggest fan and the brains behind Photobook Bristol. The book is laid out in chronological form, starting with reports on the design and construction of the flats, the inspiration in the Karl Marx-Hof in Vienna, all the way through to their destruction and beyond.

Interspersed with the documents are Mitchell's own thoughts, tied in to the political events of the time (the three-day week of the 1970s makes everything seem like wartime). There are notes on the structural failings of the flats and vandalism in the area (one couple from Northern Ireland talk about wanting to move back to Belfast for a bit of peace and quiet).

So it's a superb book, a book that was originally published in 1990 but feels very contemporary with its use of multiple voices, a range of visual sources (including a range of archive and vernacular images) and a layered narrative that combines with Mitchell's personal vision.

Does it make him an artist? In terms of the quality of work, it does, in terms of the attention he has received for the book, I'm not so sure. Memento Mori was recognised by many as one of the great documentations of social housing, and it struck a chord in Leeds where it went way beyond the 1990 photobook ghetto. But in the wider world? I'm not sure.

As I mentioned earlier, Peter Mitchell has very suddenly got the attention of people in the UK, Europe and beyond in a way that he didn't have a couple of months ago let alone a couple of years ago.

But it's not because of any of the work that he has done, and not really directly due to the books that have been made.

What makes the difference? A show at Arles helps.

And an article on his scarecrows by Geoff Dyer in the New York Times. That really does the job.

So if you want to look, feel, and sound like an artist, forget the glasses and the polo neck and the mid-life crisis leather jacket and the Danny Kaye beret. Get an interview by Geoff Dyer for the New York Times. Then everyone will come running and you will be a real artist.

Read Geoff Dyer on Peter Mitchell here.

Buy Memento Mori here.