Skin Darkening and Big Coats!

Wow. It's a special day for racially-tinged propaganda in our newspapers. First there was the Sun's OJ-esque skin darkening of Gina Miller.

And now there's this poster warning against people in 'big coats'.

Beyond the anti-semitic heritage of this image, there's a bigger question. Who should the real target be? Who should really be under suspicion for undermining British Values and the myth of our tolerance and open-mindedness. How about the morons who came up with this ad.

So never mind the guy in the 'big coat', look at the tall fucker in the shades in the background.

He's probably the Sun's Retouching Consultant. What are you thinking?

And the guy laughing! What's he laughing at?

He's probably the talentless prick who drew this poster. Takes other people's ideas and makes them even worse. You useless bellend! Who gave him a job?

And a clue for the morons who come up with this crap. If you really want to go after people in big coats, then go to the source; Ian McCulloch. That's him in the middle there leaning by the tree.

What's he got under his big coat, I wonder.

Where Documentary Fails: Prematurely Aged Asylum Seekers and Grooming

Three men who were part of an inner city sex ring involving the abuse, rape and trafficking of young girls have been jailed


It was terrible when the Jungle was taken down and the UK and France prevaricated and played politics over the kids who were there.

One of the worst things was the questioning of the ages of the young people in the camp due to the fact that some of them looked much older than their stated years. I believe a poster was even found in the House of Commons showing the asylum seekers as pensioners.

I remember when I taught ESOL to 16-19 year olds, we'd do the same thing. It was a standard joke. It kind of had to be. When you have a 17-year-old who is taller than me (I'm tall) asking if you want anybody beaten up because that's what he used to do back home for the 5 years before he left, it does make you wonder about whether this man is really 17-years-old.

He was a horrible man in some ways. But then he had never had an education, he was brought up in a dysfunctional, mysogynistic country, in a family where power comes through force, and he was intricately connected to that. So in some ways, due to his lack of schooling and maybe even love, he was about on the level of an 8-year-old, in a good way, and it was sad to see where his life had gone.

He'd got to the UK the hard way, overland with the Jungle as a holding camp. He would have known the laws on ages in the UK and what is a 'good' age. Supposing you crossed half of Asia in the back of trucks without a passport, at the hands of traffickers, what would you do? I've lied about my age in the past to get into clubs, to get a drink. Damn right, I'd lie about my age to get a life.

The reason he was pretending to be 17 was because then he couldn't be deported, then he could get something of an education, then and maybe, just maybe move away from his history of violence. Or maybe he'd bring his violence with him. Or a bit of both. Perhaps the purpose of the education, of civil society, of a functioning liberal-minded nation is to remove at least some of the violence and the misogyny that is required from most people for a society to function adequately.

It doesn't come cheap of course, and if you provide counselling and education and a lot more, you're creating a massive problem. You're embedding that violence into the community of which it becomes part.

That violence (not just of deed, but of word and of thought) needs to be counteracted through education, through advice, through accomodation and health care, through compassion.

So we had many prematurely aged children (and travelling across Asia or Africa without papers does age you). But some of them were beyond old, they were Yoda-Old. Our favourite and most troubled old child was a case in point. He was absolutely lovely and had been through a terrible time. His parents had been murdered along with half of his village, he'd woken up covered in bugs in a mass grave, his family next to him, and he'd walked out of his country and managed to get to the UK. He was probably about 25 but he looked about 45. Nobody cared.

His mental state was awful. He was near psychotic, he self-harmed to make sure he was still alive and was not in hell, attempted suicide on regular occasions, never slept and lived in constant fear of being deported when he was 19 and going back to face what he thought was certain death.

Every year, when he was about to turn 19, he'd go to see a home office doctor to get his age checked. And every year, until he got refugee status and leave to remain, his age would go down a year. He was like a real-life Groundhog Day, a man who was stuck on his 18th birthday.

And every time his year of birth changed, a cheer would go up all round the building, in the staff room, in the class room, from his friends. We didn't care how old he was, we knew he was somebody who deserved to be in this country, who deserved every bit of help he could get. And believe me, it wasn't much, it wasn't what he deserved.

And of course, once he did get his indefinite leave, the psychosis (which wasn't psychosis - it was justified fear), disappeared and he ended up in college, a poster boy for what a country can do for a refugee, for what a little bit of compassion from a faceless doctor at the Home Office can do.

The other thing we used to wonder about was who was grooming, who was a predatory piece of shit. Gender-based violence was very real and ever present in our classrooms and in the homes our students came from.  It turned out to be one of the men in this dreadful story had been in my class. It was no surprise, it was just terribly sad.    But the abuse and the rape didn't come out of nowhere. It came out of a devaluing of a girl's life. It came out of a culture and misogyny that was never fully challenged by any number of parties. (He wasn't an asylum seeker or refugee by the way. Not that it makes any difference).

David Goldblatt once said (and I can't remember where so I'm paraphrasing wildly here) something about documentary not being about good or bad stories, it's about the whole story, and the approach you take to it, especially when it is an empathetic approach, should encompass all of that story.

I wonder if documentary photography does that on all occassions. In all the photography I've seen on migration, I've never seen questions such as faked ages, sexual violence, grooming, or the need for counselling and education addressed. Perhaps I've missed it.

It's as if it's a taboo  to say anything remotely negative about people who are undertaking these epic, tragic migrations, as though all of them are saints. It's demeaning as it reduces them to absurdly romantic stereotypes. It's damaging as it doesn't recognise the need for meaningful support - which costs money, which used to be provided up to a point, but was massively cut in the name of austerity by our current robber-baron government. And it leaves those negative elements as propagandist weapons for the cruel and greedy to use. And it's deceitful and stupid. And it misses out all the parts that make a story interesting, emotional and life-affirming. Because not everybody is Mohammed Dahir. And despite everything, teaching these kids was my favourite job of all time, and the kids were the greatest and most human people I've ever met. But it could be upsetting. And it still is.

So there... Time to get on with something else now. .

 For more on refugees and asylum seekers, go here. 

Partisan versus Balanced Honest versus Wilfully Ignorant

Raised by Wolves from Jim Goldberg on Vimeo.


I got quite excited over the weekend over an article (that I didn't read in full - ah, no, I have now) about a film that I haven't seen. You can read a critique of the article here.

The article was by Camilla Long (she's the journalist who opened an interview with Michael Fassbender with the line, "So what's it like to have a big cock" and ended it with saying he flirted with her). The article I'm talking about was about I, Daniel by Ken Loach.

I like the idea of Ken Loach, a socially committed film-maker who deals with really important issues. I, Daniel is a film that details the effect of this government's benefits change and the very real violence they are inflicting on the poor of the UK.

Camilla Long objected to details in the film  not ringing true. That is embedded into other criticisms of the film which may be fair enough. But the language of the criticism of the truth of elements in the plot is what sticks and reveals either her own privileged ignorance at work or a politically nuanced editorial line at work.

From what I've heard, everything in the film rings very true. The characters might be two-dimensional (I don't know), but what happens to them is something very real. One of the reasons I won't be going to see the film is because my wife won't come with me because basically this is her job. She works in a world where people are under threat of benefit cuts, eviction, deportation, bankruptcy every day. There are lots of Daniel Blakes in her life already.

If you are in the UK and you're not wearing blinkers-of-privilege, you know the kind of thing. It's like the Monty Python sketch where the knight has no arms or legs but he still wants to fight. But here, it's a man with no arms or legs who's being told that he can still work - "You've got a tongue haven't you. You can be a stamp-licker." And if you don't do the job, then you lose the benefits, your home, everything.

Another potential objection to the film is it's not balanced. I'm not sure it needs to be balanced. It's telling a story about what happened to one man. The only crime is that it is about a poor man, a disabled man, a man who is not at the top of the economic order. Where does the balance need to be?

Or perhaps the film is partisan? I would bloody well hope so. In a world where television, newspapers, publishing, the government, every political party marginalises and dismisses the poor, the unfortunate, 'the crippled and lame' (Luke 14:13 - yes, time for some Bible today. It's good for atheists too) without a thought for bipartisanship or equity of voice, of course he should be partisan. If anything, he's not partisan enough. He should be screaming from the rooftops, shouting abuse and throwing things. He's far too nice for that. That's because he lives in Bath. I live in Bath. It's lovely. We don't shout abuse and throw things. Not most of the time anyway.

More people should be partisan. More photographers should be partisan. Should call people bastards and point the finger. I wonder (every year pretty much on this blog) why they aren't. So many photographers profess to be progressive and get outraged about exploitation in photography and the like, yet fail to reflect that in the overwhelmingly dull work that often passes for photojournalism or documentary.

I'm not sure why that is. I guess it's because there's still the myth of the objective truth-telling photographer and there is the dominating voice of documentary - which is one of sobriety. But really! The sober voice is a boring voice. You should be shouting abuse and throwing things.

The other reason is photographers are scared of offending those who might potentially give them custom and help them make a living. You don't want to offend the wealthy and powerful; they own the magazines, the companies, the galleries, the universities, the foundations, they publish your work, they buy your work, they commission your work, they show your work.

Essentially we should be fucking the rich with photography, not literally, but metaphorically. Instead, photography is, as always, serving the rich, it is giving it a right royal tongue-up-the-arse servicing. How did that happen? How does it continue to happen? Or am I missing something?

Anyway, as an antidote to all that, Jim Goldberg has a so-called bootleg edition of Raised by Wolves available. I don't think too many school libraries will be buying it (you'll have to give it away, Jim - there's an idea) because it a bit pricey. But it looks worth it.

Buy Raised by Wolves here

Colin Simpson: The Real Author of the Bricks (Equivalent VIII)

The BBC documentary on Carl Andre and his bricks was fantastic, a real eye opener into how a critical newspaper article can make a work of art become part of the public consciousness, make a work of art become something that captures the imagination to the extent that it becomes part of popular culture, advertising culture, art culture.

A few years ago, there was a TV series called The Rock and Roll Years. This showed the news events of the year cut with a soundtrack of the music highlights of the year. It was brilliant. Bricks used the same idea, but folded in some conceptual art, the popular press view of the bricks all with a cast list of the Tate back in 1976.

I love the fact that Andre's bricks were part of a larger body of work (Equivalents - the Tate Bricks are Equivalent V111 ) which was never shown, and the fact that when the Tate tried to buy the work, Andre had already returned the bricks to the brick-shop where he bought them to get a refund because he was so skint. And because the brickworks had closed already, he had to buy some slightly different bricks which he then sold to the Tate.

So it's about questions of what makes an artwork, it's about what the work is made of, it's about how it strips down and connects to the world, the land, to Andre himself, it's about how people look at a work, and what they look at. And why do they look when they profess that is all a load of old nonsense? There's lots of nonsense in the world but we don't look at it in too much detail. So why these Bricks.

I was slightly shocked at how the bricks were stacked together, not quite perfectly, with some gaps and unevenness in their stacking. And it was really interesting to see present day gallery goers bending down and looking at it in the same kind of way.

There wasn't really any one answer to what it all means, and that's the point of it all (see also Who's Afraid of Conceptual Art). And the media storm that surrounded the work has become part of it. The work had never been exhibited at the Tate until a newspaper article attacking it was published. As soon as that came out, then the Tate put it on display. And they put it on display while there was a massive exhibition of Constable in another part of the gallery - so you had huge very traditional audiences stopping by to look at something very contemporary. They were an audience ready to be outraged.

And that is what made the Bricks so very well known. Without that coming together of circumstances, they would have remained anonymous. So essentially the artist of the work as we know it today is not Carl Andre, but Colin Simpson, the Sunday Times journalist who started the shit storm (he's the guy with the glasses holding the paper.

The chef is the man who vandalised the work with blue paint. He got a round of applause when he did it and the security guards asked him if he was the artist. Central artistic considerations like the fact that the Bricks are part of a larger body of work are by the by compared to  Heineken making the bricks part of their advertising campaign, to every brickie in the land saying they could do better, and the mass of random junk that got sent to the Tate asking if they'd buy it. Sandy Nairne (former director of the National Portrait Gallery) wrote the letters saying 'but sadly on this occasion we have to pass up your kind offer'.

The programme mentioned Ana Mendieta, Andre's wife, but only in passing. Andre was acquitted of her murder. Click on the link for more of the story.

In the early hours of 8 September 1985, Mendieta had – to borrow the words Andre had used when he called the emergency services – "somehow gone out the window" of their 34th floor apartment on Manhattan's Mercer Street.

Both had been drinking heavily. Andre later claimed to remember nothing of the events leading up to her death and that she may even have committed suicide, but those that knew her well – and knew of her acute fear of heights – thought this unlikely. Many of them believed he had pushed or even thrown her out of the window during a drunken argument.

"What happened that night, no one will ever know," says the artist Ted Victoria, a close friend of Mendieta who still lives and works in a studio in SoHo close to where she first lived after arriving in New York. "But the notion that she would jump out the window in her underwear – no. She had too much going for her at the time, more so than him. Her work was being noticed. And she wasn't depressed.

"I know because I saw her a few nights before her death. She was up and happy. She hated heights, so she would not have climbed up on the window, which was close to, and just above, the bed in their apartment. My guess is they were fighting and it just happened, this terrible thing."

The Xerox Edition of Raised by Wolves

Raised by Wolves Bootleg Edition. It's a bit pricey but damn!


Buy the book here 



Via Harvey Benge.

"You are lucky... you can never meet my mother, my father, our neighbour"

You Could Even Die For Not Being a Real Couple by Laura Lafon (available here)  is a love story of sorts, an unhappy love story, where love, friendship and simply being are restricted through psychological, social and physical means. It’s about the culture of violence and control that is imposed on those who seek a life outside the very limited prescriptions of distorted famial, religious and cultural norms.

It’s a book about misogyny. And then some.

And it takes place in eastern Turkey, among the people where Lafon has gone to visit with her boyfriend Martin Gallone. They visit, they talk to locals, they photograph and they fall in love. Against a backdrop of young local people who don’t quite have that freedom.

The book starts with its cover, red velveteen with a gold carpet-like design on it. It is very nice to touch. Then you open the book and there’s a car, then a  couple by the car. Shot at night, the car parked on a dusty layby, there’s an anxiety to the couple, as though their love is forbidden, their meeting secret in some way.

The next pictures shows Lafon and Gallone lying naked by some strange grotto in the darkness of the night, the idea of why they are lying there indicated by the texts that are interspersed with the images.

“We can’t think like European people…. If my girlfriend cheats me, if she is my wife, I have to kill her, according to our traditions. I can force her family to kill her. If my sister comes home as pregnant or raped, I am sure my father wants to kill her because she dishonoured our family. It’s her fault, it’s her choice, it’s stupid to get pregnant buy I wold do my best to stop him to kill her. In his opinion I am stupid, but who is that people placing woman so important that they deserve to die if she is raped?”

Unpick that if you will. There is the idea (expressed by misogynists, brutalists and people who take money from questionable sources on both the left and right) that questioning violence and murder against women, against homosexuals, against minorities, is an example of cultural imperialism and part of the othering of the non-western world. I would beg to differ. I've yet to meet anybody from non-western countries who have encountered violence or limitations to freedom that is sanctioned by religion, by family, by cultural norms, by the state - to have that view. And the idea that a respect for human rights is something limited to western countries is both absurd and reveals a profound ignorance and venality.

Anyway, back to Lafon. More pictures show the landscapes, the generations, the city. We see a café at night, patronised only by men. We see men standing, posing, looking, wanting. We see young women doing the same, but more vulnerable, with the air of violence above and behind them. Boys are boys, and girls are girls and only the pictures of darkened gardens and shadowy streets show where they might meet. In the meantime, Gallone goes down on Lafon, and we see them both posing naked in a hotel room.

Marriage, religion and guns appear and there is a general air of male-dominated stupidity in the air. It’s not one thing, it’s the totality of it all, a totality that justifies oppression (including killing) in the name of tradition - and if you ever want to know what’s wrong with tradition then this song from Fiddler on the Roof  gives you a pretty good answer.

The book is about something that really matters. In places it is not as clear as it could be. You have to know the story before you begin (it has the sentences that explains it at the back), but at the same time it is about a subject that is concrete and really matters, both over there and over here.

Of course, it’s coming from a privileged place, but Lafon recognises this. One of the quotes she includes reads:

“Life is really cheap. You are lucky because you can only meet educated people, open minded who speak English, but you can never meet my mother, my father, our neighbour. This can mislead you.”

At its heart though, it’s a book about fundamental human rights; the right to free association, the right to love who you want, the right not to be killed for falling in love, the right not to have labels of honour and dishonour used to justify torture, killing and forced marriage.

And that’s a really good thing. The United Nations was founded 71 years ago to this day to fight for those principles.. The Declaration of Universal Human Rights followed three years later. You can see them here. See them and tick off the ones that the country you live in violates. I live in the UK. We violate plenty both domestically and overseas. The Declaration is for us as well. 

Lafon, in her small photobook way, is doing the same thing. And that is to be praised and admired. Photography, along with many other things, can still make a difference. And if it doesn't make a difference, it can at least have a voice. About something that really matters.

Buy the book here.

Hypernoramlisation, no Hypernomralisation, no Hypernormalisation: When you end up believing Adam Curtis films.

I feel a bit bad hating on Adam Curtis because I really liked Century of the Self and the one on Afghanistan.


But Hypernormalisation feels like a rehash, it feels like he's going through the motions, it feels a bit too dicey and speculative and made up. It feel like what it is critiquing (which is the Spectacle basically).

Part of the problem is Curtis' voice. He's not God, so why's he using his voice.

The other problem is the stream of snippets of  stuff that is thrown at us. We're living in the age of snippets of stuff and it is really quite exhausting. Especially when the snippets are selective in the extreme and have a time limitation. Nothing is older than the age of the archives he is picking from, too much is left unsaid, and the examples he chooses are often two-dimensional.

In Hypernormalisation, there's a snippet of Patti Smith being vague and apolitical  and uncommitted and harking on about some irrelevance in a two-dimensional sort of way - but you get the feeling that is what Curtis is doing with this film,

You also get the feeling that he could just as well do exactly the same programme but put a rightist spin on it and it wouldn't be too different.

The real problem is there are parts of it that are absolutely fascinating but that the voice Curtis has made his own is really a barrier to our understanding. There are three hours of headache-inducing footage with too much noise, incoherence and questionable material that lacks a certain substance and depth. He's been trapped by his own branding it seems, which is a shame because there's probably about 5 or six top-notch documentaries in there.

 Play Adam Curtis Bingo here (it should have "But then..." in as well) and there's a South Park parody I'm told (thanks Alex and Mark) but I've never seen it and don't know where.