Remembering the Dead on Armistice Day

The only consolation of this week was going to a school open evening and seeing all the history/politics teachers wearing white poppies. This is from the Peace Union website.


'Remember all the victims of war

White Poppies recall all victims of all wars, including victims of wars that are still being fought. This includes people of all nationalities. It includes both civilians and members of armed forces. Today, over 90% of people killed in warfare are civilians.

In wearing White Poppies, we remember all those killed in war, all those wounded in body or mind, the millions who have been made sick or homeless by war and the families and communities torn apart. We also remember those killed or imprisoned for refusing to fight and for resisting war.'

 -

You can buy white poppies here

Three Books on Planes, Trees and Suicide

Here are three nice books from the Eriskay Connection. Enjoy the English while it lasts because next year the reviews go through the filter of a foreign language. The impetus for this was a couple of years ago I was at Paris Photo with a bunch of people who were from France, Italy, Spain, Germany and then there was me. Everybody else had the workings of at least two languages (English and their own) and more often than not, three or four or five. But not me. Which is often the way with English speakers. It was a bit shameful. It will be even more shameful when I start writing five-line reviews in mangled German, Spanish, French, Italian, Indonesian. But maybe I'll learn something even if nobody else will. Anyway here goes...

Aeronautics in the Backyard by Xiaoxiao Lu is a straightforward documentary of people in China who make model planes. And what planes they are; they are real flying planes, helicopters,auto-gyro hopping, propellered contraptions that fly, crash and fail to take off in various combinations.

The book comes complete with illustrations (very Da Vinci illustrations) of plans, footage from film of the flights - and the crashes, and details of the cost, height reached, and years spent making the planes.

There are pictures from back in the day when Mao caps and blue jackets were the order of dress, reaching forward to designers who have turned their hobby into a corporate kit-making reality. It's a really nice project and a different look into the resilience and energy of the Chinese aeronautical obsessive.

Nonni's Paradiso by Martina Marangoni tells the story of the farm where Nonni (  moved in 1950. To Nonni, it was paradise and she lived there the rest of her life. She photographed the farm on an old Rollei and it these yellowed images that are mixed with Marangoni's pictures of the fields, the trees, the undergrowth and the very earth on which the olive trees grow.

The book tells the story of the olive trees, of the farm on which he was born (in 1950, as part of a family of 'nine sharecroppers who worked from dawn to dusk to grow just about everything they need feed themselves and their animals'), of the struggle for life in a place that was both harsh and beautiful.

But it also tells the story of how the land has changed, what it has become. In that sense it's reminescent of Andy Sewell's Something Like a Nest; this was a book that looked at the reality of the British farming landscape that lies beneath the pastoral chocolate box image. In the same way, Marangoni looks at what the Tuscan landscape has become, what his family's farm, and the way of thinking and living that underpinned it, has become; a world-weary, shabby and neglected landscape with not thought for the environment, history or wellness of being.

(un)expected by Peter Dekens. Dekens made Touch a few years ago. This was a really well-thought out accordion book that showed a partially sighted man navigating his way around his house. It was sequence by space, by colour, by touch and was quite something.

(un)expected is a story of suicide. It consists of black and white pictures fromt the streets of Western Flanders, a Belgian province with an exceptionally high suicide rate. Mixed in with these landscapes are small booklets that tell the story of people who have had a loved one who has committed suicide. So we hear of Ime and Hanna. Ime hung himself from a tree in 2013. Ime was left behind and it is her we see in Dekens' photographs, struggling to come to terms with her loss and the nature of it. We see her in the woods, by trees. For several months after Ime's suicide, she would visit the tree where he hung himself. The reason; to feel close to him.

Then there's mother and father, Dekens' mother and father. His mother killed herself in 2008, after his father told her he was going to commit suicide. She believed him and, unable to face a future without him, she 'hanged herself at home.'

The story tells of how his father coped with this; badly at first but soon he fell in love again 'on a bus trip to Paris.'

There's Jose and Steven, her adopted son. Steven had psychotic episodes and was struggling when he threw himself under a train. Grief followed for Jose, but only after initial relief at Steven's death and the release from the pain he was experiencing.

For Kris, the grief is overwhelming. Her child, Ward, killed himself with pills after experiencing a gender-identity crisis that led to his suicide. She's 'desperate and depressed', she's spent time in a psychiatric hospital and she feels as though part of her, the mother part, has been 'amputated'.

The final subject is Anna, the mother of a family who struggle on, and try to talk about her in a 'sensitive, supportive way.' And that is what the whole book is about, about looking at suicide and showing how it affects those who are left behind, how they live in the spaces that were once filled with a loved one's presence but have been emptied of it through the most tragic of circumstances. It's about quiet rooms, quiet moments, about silence that is usually unwelcome and intrusive in its lack.

Buy Aeronautics in the Backyard here

Buy Nonni's Paradiso here

Buy (un)expected here

Che Schifo! Il Porco Donald Trump è presidente!

Dio Mio! Che è successo? Gli americani a votano per il porco Donald Trump come il presidente. Che Schifo. 

Prima gli inglese a votano per il Brexit. Che stupido,

Primo quest'anno, inglese è la lingua di Shakespeare, di Laura Ingalls Wilder, di Chaucer, di Andy Stanton, di Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, di John Cheever, di Lennon-McCartney, di molti uomi e donni intelligente e bravi. 

Adesso, inglese e la lingua di personi stupidi.

Allora, l'anno prossimo, sul questo blogo, scrivo i posti in lingua strano per il mio; italiano, francese, spagnolo, tedesco e indonesiano. E inglese quante volta. 

C'è una problema. Io non posso parlare o scrivare le lingue. Ma, io posso imparare. 

Si. Prendo due piccioni con una fava.

E per le persone chi non legge le lingue strane, c'è Google Translate. Io faccio per voi per che capisco il miei lettori sono qualche volte pigri.

My God! What happened? Americans to vote for the pig Donald Trump as president. .


Before the English to vote for the Brexit. What a stupid,

First year, English is the language of Shakespeare, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Chaucer, Andy Stanton, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, John Cheever, Lennon-McCartney, of many men and donni intelligent and talented.

Now, English and the language of pax stupid.

Then, next year, on this blogo, I write the places for my strange language; Italian, French, Spanish, German and Indonesian. And how many English time.

There is a problem. I can not speak or scrivare languages. But, I can learn.

Yes. I take two birds with one stone.

And for people who do not read the strange languages, there is Google Translate. I do for you to understand that my readers are some lazy sometimes.

Only the Sky Remains Untouched

 all pictures copyright Claire Felicie


It was a real pleasure to revisit Carolyn Drake's Wild Pigeon last week. It's such a beautiful book with such a powerful message. The images are fantastic and the way they were made (they were collaged by the people who feature in the book) adds to the whole package. I've had a fair few people tell me the photobook is over and it is. The generic photobook that is, the boring photobook, the bad photobook. But the brilliant photobook isn't. It's alive and kicking. There just aren't that many of them.

Wild Pigeon is designed by Syben Kuiper and, he shows that great design does make a difference, I can think of a few badly designed books that would have been turned into something quite different with a bit of intelligent design. But there you go. He costs money. And not all of us have it.


On Friday I also wrote about the students I used to teach in my old job 16-19 kids learning English for Speakers of Other Languages. About half of the kids came from difficult backgrounds, or had had/were having difficult experiences, horrific experiences even.

There used to be some support for them, not much but more than there is now. For those who were refugees or asylum seekers it was pitifully little. Even when you saw organisations saying they support people with psychological, housing, financial, gender-based problems it didn't mean that they did. And if they did, then the funding they had was insufficient and barely scratched the surface.

One of the biggest problems some of our students had was PTSD. They didn't know they had it, but they did. I remember conversations with students who would talk about their experiences back in the country they had come from. Sometimes it was a weird form of nostalgia which marked an ending of sorts. I remember kids talking about watching the firefights in their hometown, and the excitement when the rockets started going off, or describing the strange rush of being on a bus running along a canyonside roadway with bandits shooting at them. Another student had an RPG explode in the room where he was sitting. It killed his brother. And yet another, who spoke with bitterness, described being deserted by relatives and left to take his four brothers and sisters across a border to a refugee camp. It took him four days and he has never forgiven those who left him in this situation.

We had kids who'd been kept in containers, or locked in back-rooms, or witnessed mass killings, who had woken up in mass graves, or woken up next to bodies on a lorry going overland. That's just the stuff they'd talk about. There were other things they didn't talk about, or would only hint at.

They had nightmares about it. They had anxiety. They got depressed. They got terrified. They woke up in the middle of the night with the night terrors. They had Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. And they were kids. And there was no help for them. There was said to be help for them, but there wasn't. Indeed, the problem was barely recognised.

It's a little more recognised for adults, especially those with a military background. But still there's precious little help even for them. Even in a wealthy country such as the Netherlands where the number of traumatised soldiers is relatively low.

But they do exist and they are the subject of Claire Felicie's Only the Sky Remains Untouched, a book designed by Syben Kuiper that arrived in the post on Friday. Normally it would sit on a pile for a month, but this blog is organic and impestuous and its content is determined by circumstance and it is a quite beautiful book.

First of all, it's a tall book. It's a black and white book with the title embossed on the front page, To read it against the black and white picture of a brick wall is near impossible. You have to turn the page and read the mirror image.

Open the book and there are full-bleed edgelandy landscapes of ditches, of forests, of a dilapidated factory. It's very dark. We go inside and see the verso torso of a man in combat fatigues, the head divided and coming up on the recto side at the back of the book.

Flick the page and the same thing happens, except now on the left there's a scrawled, scarred wall and on the right the torso of a man. The man is a former soldier and he's got a name, Marnix. From the back of the book we learn he was in Afghanistan in 2009, a place where he witnessed a rocket going off in front of him with devastating consequence. He's had PTSD ever since.

There's Oscar who was recruited by Mossad but left when he refused to shoot a prisoner with a sack over his head, there's Dominique who lived off Pringles for three weeks and lost 40 pounds when  he got trapped in his radio post in Afghanistan, and there's Armand who was one of the first on the scene after a land mine had blown the occupants of an army truck to smithereens.

There are more portraits made in astonishingly trusting circumstances and the walls get more scarred and battle-worn as well they might. All the pictures in the book were shot in a former 'military terrain and weapons factory' in the Netherlands, a fitting place for the portraits to be made. The weapons factory sits in the 'military terrain' of a 'shock forest', a place were explosives were once tested. So the symbolism in the split images is matched by the historicity of the place.

Only the Sky Remains Untouched is a moving book made for moving reasons. Cecilie describes how people with PTSD 'are emotionally wounded and carry those wounds with them for the rest of their lives. Not only the people portrayed in this book suffer from the consequences of PTSD, which includes reliving the horrors of war, nightmares, sudden outbursts of anger and intense shock reactions. Their failies and everyone around them suffer too.

Felicie made it 'with the aim of breaking the taboo that surrounds PTSD.' Here she focuses on PTSD for veterans. There's a huge taboo. PTSD is not a clean flesh wound. It's messy and dirty and talks about the atrocities of war. But I think the idea of there being a taboo applies even more to civilians. Because to recognise the mental wounds of war is to recognise the horrific experiences people have gone through, It's to recognise the depth of the problem, and the need for those wounds to be healed. That is a huge job and it is one that needs to be addressed. And of course it's not.

Buy Only the Sky Remains Untouched here. 

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