Issue 24 by Foto8

I S S UE 2 4 - AU T U M N 2 0 0 8

The Photography Biannual

T Th he e P Ph ho ot to og gr ra ap ph hy y B Bi ai an n nu ua al l I I S S SUEUE 2 24 3 - - a SU PT RING U M N 22 00 00 88

Forthcoming Exhibitions 2 October – 15 November My America Christopher Morris 25 November – 10 January The Collection Maurice Broomfield 2 Febuary – 6 March Sweet Nothings Vanessa Winship

Test Spraying Thermal Insulation, Shell International,1963, Maurice Broomfield

ISSUE 24 RESISTANCE Photographer: Simon Norfolk

Welcome to the second biannual edition of 8. We have taken Resistance as our theme, not least because we’ve been wondering if it’s still possible, or whether it has become a redundant, even futile, concept. For the FARC, of course, in Colombia, resistance is a way of life, and has been so for over 40 years. Spanish photographer Alvaro Ybarra Zavala has been on patrol with them, attesting to the casualties – on all sides – and the cocaine manufacture that characterise their pursuit of a communist state. A few residents in the small village of Peacehaven on Britain’s south coast, meanwhile, are engaged in the ultimate act of resistance: against mortality itself. They have put their faith – and money – into the ﬂedgling science of cryonics, in which devotees have their bodies frozen after death with the intention of reanimation, as Murray Ballard discovered. In the US, Seba Kurtis has been using his camera as resistance, celebrating the chaotic exuberance of “illegal” Hispanic residents in the land of the free by purposefully double-exposing his film, and letting light fall onto his negatives. One route to resistance is through knowledge, and this is the path taken by Simon Norfolk, with his latest project Full Spectrum Dominance. While most of us may never be in a position to challenge US military might, and its aim to utilise space in the battle to win the information war, at least through engagement with Norfolk’s graceful photographs and stark, densely-researched captions, we can better understand the reach of its power. We could even start a collective act of resistance by displaying the free Full Spectrum Dominance poster in our windows... Elsewhere in the magazine, sports writer Paul Hayward reﬂects on the hypnotic spectacle that was the Beijing Olympics and academic and journalist Susan Greenberg enters unchartered territory, writing about personal experience for the first time, as she tries to resist breast cancer through chemotherapy. Thanks for reading and keep in touch through the website until our next edition in Spring 2009. The Editors

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Art Direction & Design

Daniel Baer Editorial Board

Jassim Ahmad David Brittain Shannon Ghannam Ken Grant Colin Jacobson Guy Lane Paul Lowe Steve Macleod Tim Minogue Editors’ Assistant

Rosie French

Lally Pearson

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contents 11 M OMENTS

The Foto8 Summer Show & Award

18 S POTLIGHT Brighton Photo Biennial Lurdes Basoli Carolyn Drake

24 O FF THE PAGE Michael David Murphy

26 I NTERVIEW Jack Schofield

32 W ORK IN PROGRESS Simon Norfolk

82 N OTHING BUT BLUE SKIES Paul Hayward

102 D ON’T LET THE BASTARDS John O’Farrell

133 MEDIA COLUMN Chris Steele-Perkins Susan Greenberg

138 A RTS COLUMN David Matthews

140 F ICTION Vanessa Gebbie

Reviews

42 R ESISTING CAPTURE

142 B OOK SPOTLIGHT

60 T HIS DARK HISTORY Kathryn Cook

72 M INUS 197°C Murray Ballard

84 H ALF WAY HOUSE Ilan Godfrey

94 L AND OF THE FREE Seba Kurtis

104 FALL AND RISE Michael Donald

110 P OINT BLANK Andrea Diefenbach

123 H OST PORTFOLIO Ewen Spencer

COLUMNS 58 A FTER TORTURE

136 B ODY IMAGE COLUMN

FEATURES Alvaro Ybarra Zalava

Nicaragua

150 B OOK REVIEWS The Roma Journeys The Somnambulists Ten Series/106 Photographs French Kiss Paris, Peru The World From my Front Porch Curse of the Black Gold Trinity No Such Thing As Society Sri Lanka Ming Jue Like a Thief’s Dream

162 E XHIBITION REVIEWS

The Day Nobody Died Street & Studio Afghanistan The Last Things

110

166 M AGAZINE REPORT 178 O N MY SHELF Zelda Cheatle

Tim Minogue

Magazine Contributors

Murray Ballard Ballard graduated from the University of Brighton in 2007 with a degree in Editorial Photography. His work has been exhibited in The Photographers’ Gallery and HOST gallery and is featured this October as part of the Brighton Photo Fringe. He is currently working as an assistant to Magnum photographer Mark Power. Kathryn Cook Cook started her career working for AP in Panama in 2003, and then covered the presidential elections in Bolivia in 2005. She moved to Turkey two years in 2006, and became interested in the frequent references to Article 301 of the Turkish penal code in the press, which makes it illegal to “insult Turkishness”. As a result, Cook decided to try to make a commemorative photographic work of the one million victims of the Armenian genocide of 1915. She is a recipient of the 2008 Aftermath Project grant and is represented by Agence VU. Andrea Diefenbach Diefenbach studied photography at the University of Applied Science in Bielefeld, Germany. In 2006 she graduated with her final project on Aids in Odessa, which was published as a book by Hatje Cantz in June 2008. Most of Diefenbach’s work centres on social issues in Germany or Eastern Europe. Currently working as a freelance photographer in Germany, her work has been published in several European magazines. Ilan Godfrey Godfrey graduated from University of Westminster with a masters degree in photojournalism in 2007. Since then, he has exhibited at the Hereford Photo Festival and has had his work published in the Sunday Times. He is based in London, making frequent trips to his native South Africa to work on new projects.

FOTO8.COM Passing Place | Jose Navarro

Les Rencontres Arles | George Georgiou

Two Dogs and a Limousine | Luca Tronci

The new foto8.com has become a hub of information and interactivity – an essential stop over for anyone with an interest in photography and world events. On foto8.com photo stories, selected and produced by 8’s editors, are uploaded weekly and reports, blogs and photos from photography festivals around the globe are sent in from our correspondents, as we rate other peoples’ take on photography. Members to the site can comment on items, have their own individual space to promote their work and become part of the foto8 community. Here are some of the most recent additions.

PHOTO STORIES

FESTIVAL REPORTS

TWO DOGS AND A LIMOUSINE

Reportage festival

Luca Tronci

Sydney, Australia

BETWEEN THEN AND NOW

VISA POUR L’IMAGE

Evi Lemberger

Perpignan, France

PROVINCIAL JAPAN

FOTOPUB

Guido Castagnoli

Novo Mesto, Slovenia

CHILD BIRTH IN SIERRA LEONE Susan Schulman

Les RENCONTRES ARLES Arles, France

CROSSING THE LIMPOPO

PHOTO ESPAÑA

Shervorn Monaghan

Madrid, Spain

Passing Place

NYPH 08

Jose Navarro

New York, USA

BROADCASTS

IN CONVERSATION

FRONTLINE LIVE

MARTIN PARR & ERIK KESSELS

Broadcast from the Frontline Club in London. Photographer talks and slideshows by Jehad Nga and Liu Heung Shing.

The double-act that’s touring the festival circuit from NY Photo to Fotodok, Holland. Where can you catch it? Foto8 of course.

Where can you find some of the worlds best fine art and commercial photographerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s stock imagery?

Unit 3E1 Zetland House 5-25 Scrutton Street London, EC2A 4HJ t: + 44 207 729 9467 f: + 44 207 033 9285 e: london@gallerystock.com

www.gallerystock.com/london

13-16 NOV. 08

CARROUSEL DU LOUVRE

JAPAN, GUEST OF HONOUR

WWW.PARISPHOTO.FR

Rosie French

MOMENTS The Foto8 Award & summer show

The inaugural Foto8 Award & Summer Show took place at HOST gallery in the summer of 2008. Over 1,800 individual images were submitted and 170 chosen to be exhibited, with one image winning the coveted Best in Show accolade. As all styles and genres were included in the show, choosing 170 images, let alone one image as the “best”, was going to be a serious challenge. The selection process began one evening in the office, with a group of us looking through all 1,800 images – with neither captions nor photographers’ names – to select 150 each. The most popular were then put up on the walls, crammed in from ceiling to floor, spilling out onto the staircase. Once the show was up, our panel of judges – publisher Chris Boot, photography fund manager Zelda Cheatle, gallerists Steve MacLeod and Di Poole and academic Ken Grant – set out

to select one image and finally settled on the winner: Provincial Japan by Guido Castagnoli. “It’s difficult to identify where this image is. It has a mysterious, 1950s bleach down effect, and has a very odd feeling to it. You could have it on your wall and continue to be intrigued,” said Zelda Cheatle. That photograph is featured on these pages, along with some of our other favourites. Visitors to the gallery were able to challenge the judges’ decision by voting for the “people's choice”. Swimmers, a vibrant image of boys jumping into the surf in India, won Dougie Wallace the award, and a digital camera system kindly donated by Olympus. It has also been interesting to observe which pictures sold. The photos we want to live with, it transpires, are often different from the ones that we admire. See the full catalogue – www.foto8.com 11

Moments

Street to the Main Station, Shimada, from the series Provencial Japan by Guido Castagnoli

MOMENTS

Assenois. Deer hunters gather in the Beligian forest, by Sofie Knijff

MOMENTS

People’s Park, China by Kurt Tong

Spotlight BRIGHTON PHOTO BIENNIAL 2008 While it’s the south coast city that gives its name to the 3rd Brighton Photo Biennial, this year’s series of exhibitions spreads out crab-like along the coast, from Bexhill in the east to Portsmouth in the west. Under the umbrella title, Memory of Fire: The War of Images and Images of War, the host city is exhibiting just three major shows. At a recent talk in Brighton, critic Miranda Sawyer mentioned en passant that she didn’t vote for Brighton to win City of Culture status (it lost out to Liverpool) because of its lack of provision for visual arts. It is regrettable that neither of the two Brighton and Hove museums are hosting a photographic exhibition during this potentially very exciting festival. While several of the new venues are showstoppingly good-looking – Bexhill’s De La Warr Pavilion is a palace of light – it will be a tall order to maintain a sense of cohesion across half a dozen towns. This year’s curator, Julian Stallabrass, a reader at the Courtauld Institute, developed the conflict-related theme from a paper he gave at the 2006 Biennial conference on the legacy of the Vietnam War in terms of both photography and military strategy on the present war in Iraq. Two shows in particular are directly related to that theme, Iraq through the Lens of Vietnam – a group show at Brighton University Gallery featuring the work of Tim Page, Larry Burrows and Sean Smith, among others – and Agent Orange – a harrowing body of work by the recently deceased Philip Jones Griffiths, showing at Pallant House Gallery in Chichester. “I wanted to examine the contrast 18

between Iraq and Vietnam, thinking about the way in which the character of images of war had changed in that intervening time, but also the way in which to an extent the US military and the US government as an image-making machine – one which makes images itself, but also encourages others to make images of its activities – changed profoundly as a result of the Vietnam experience,” says Stallabrass. As the biennial’s subtitle makes clear, Stallabrass is as interested in the dissemination of images as the images themselves. To this end, Geert Van Kesteren’s Baghdad Calling, exhibited at Lighthouse in Brighton, offers an examination of images exchanged via mobile phone between Iraqi refugees and

A muslim family celebrates Christmas at home. Geert van Kesteren/Collection Baghdad Calling Nixon tearing heart out of Indochina, 1971. René Mederos, OSPAAAL/University of Brighton Design Archives

Spotlight

those who remained in the country. The increasing acceptance of the photograph into the institution of the museum – and how this newfound status affects photographs – is another debate that subtly underpins Stallabrass’s curation: “I think photography in certain ways is being transformed by the museum … and one can ask critical questions about that. It’s obviously great for people who are interested in photography that it is being finally and fully embraced by the museum, but the terms on which that has happened are open for examination,” he says. “There’s a number of clichés around the making of museum photography; so many of these photographers work with large cameras, and in very strict post-conceptual series

and there’s a certain kind of detachment or deportment that comes with that. Perhaps this debate will be cracked open by The Sublime Image of Destruction – work by Broomberg and Chanarin, Simon Norfolk and Paul Seawright – at the De La Warr Pavilion or by The Incommensurable Banner by Thomas Hirschhorn at Fabrica, a former Brighton church. An interesting inclusion out at the old Bloomsbury haunt of Charleston carries a prosaic title, Photographing the First World War, which belies a fascinating exhibition by Frank Hurley, who, frustrated that he couldn’t capture what he saw to be the complexity of the battlefield on film, developed a very sophisticated use of montage to present

a more accurate representation. The inclusion of this modest show, hung in a small backroom, speaks of intelligent curation. When questions are raised in relation to the truth-telling capacity of photography, and whether it is ever acceptable to manipulate images digitally, Hurley will be an interesting precursor to this very contemporary debate. What will make for a successful biennial? For its curator: “I’ll be happy if it allows people to have the material to think about the new kind of media space in which we live, and to have a more critical attitude.” Max Houghton The Brighton Photo Biennial is on until 16 November 2008. www.bpb.org.uk 19

Spotlight Lurdes Basoli

When Spanish photographer Lurdes Basoli travelled to Venezuela to cover the “Chavez phenomenon” and the 2006 elections, she discovered another compelling story: the urban violence that has become a part of everyday life in Caracas. Official figures report more than 13,000 murders throughout the country last year. Actual numbers are widely thought to be much higher, and rising. Basoli embarked on a project to document this violence and its effects. These photographs were made over five weeks and two visits to the city; a combination of research, contacts, and time on the street provided Basoli access to victims and crime scenes. Her work has received increasing attention, earning her an inclusion in the discoveries selection, Descubrimientos, at PhotoEspaña this year as well as a grant from FotoPres that will allow her to continue work on the project. Her Photographs are bleak and describe victims – not only the dead and the survivors of the dead, but the city itself, bleeding out. Basoli calls this project “Des(Hampa)rada”, a play on the

words desamparada, or abandoned, and hampa, the criminal underworld and the violence surrounding it. Drawn to the project by indignation over the violence, and media coverage that sidelined it to focus on Chavez and his revolution, Basoli sought to bear witness to this undeclared war. Her own understanding of the violence developed with her explorations: “I don’t know if I will ever understand violence in any sense. But I am convinced now that it is not a matter of good or bad people. It is a matter of opportunities, inequality, politics (yes, politics), drugs, place of birth, family, education, power, history… and the mixture of a part or all of it,” she says. Fear proved an obstacle – others were afraid to take Basoli to certain areas and she sometimes feared for her own safety. With her light skin and blonde hair, locals often perceived her as a rich Venezuelan girl, a sifrina, “or what is worse, a foreigner” – an outsider and possibly a target. (Being Spanish, however, may have afforded her access to victims who did not want to be shown in Venezuelan newspapers.) Visiting

Spotlight

favelas in the company of residents and journalists in the day, and with police at night, Basoli negotiated the feelings of being at risk. She notes that acknowledging risks can create a false sense of security where, in reality, there is little or no control at all. On occasion she recognised only later how dangerous some situations had been. But being in these areas provided the access she needed to be close to the violence – she was once only 50 meters from a shooting – and to see its aftermath. This body of work has yet to be published in Venezuela although one image was used by the Caracas daily, El Universal: “I found this woman who lost three kids, killed in separate situations in her neighbourhood. I interviewed her in a secure area of Caracas but then I wanted to take a picture of her in her home. I tried every taxi in Caracas and no one wanted to take me to Barrio Unión, where she lives. I knew it was dangerous, but later on I realised it was one of the three most ‘red’ areas in Caracas. As none of the taxis wanted to take me there, I called my friend who

The father of this girl (left) was killed by a single shot as he was robbed. San Martín, Caracas Friends and family of the deceased (above) carry the coffin from his house to the cemetery. The wake took place in his bedroom. Cota 905, Caracas

is a journalist at El Universal. We never imagined it would be the front page!” Her story had led to another story: “Once we arrived we were surrounded by a gang and we got into this woman’s house and called the police. When the police came they arrested many of them. Next day the papers said ‘A dangerous band dismantled in El Petare’.” Basoli plans to work on other projects related to violence in the future, in the United States and perhaps in Spain, though for now she continues to focus on Caracas. Would she ever choose to work in a militarised war zone such as Iraq? “Definitely not… Few photographers know how to document wars. It is extremely difficult to do a good job in a war like Iraq.” (“And I’m only 26,” she adds. “My parents don’t deserve it!”) Arguably, few photographers know how to photograph urban violence either, to convey both its horror and its precise human detail. Leo Hsu Lurdes Basoli – www.lurdesbasoli.com 21

Spotlight CAROLYN DRAKE

While all the talk was of Tibet, the eve of the Beijing Olympics saw a bloody, headline-grabbing clash between militant Uighurs and Chinese police. Shoot-outs aside – and they have been stepping up in number – such attention is rare and, as photographer Carolyn Drake says, the region of Xinjiang and its dominant minority, the Uighurs, remain largely unknown to the world outside. Uighurs make up nearly half of the 20 million inhabitants of Xinjiang. The vast region in China’s far west accounts for about a sixth of its area. It is largely desert, cut across by mountain ranges and ancient trade routes connecting China with Central Asia and Europe beyond. Of all the cities of the world, Xinjiang’s capital Urumqi is farthest from any ocean or sea. Drake and writer Ilan Greenberg are the 2008 recipients of the Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor Prize for their proposal to produce a “Uighur cultural topography of the moment”. “Becoming Chinese: Uighurs in Cultural Transition”, asks how ordinary Uighurs respond to the cultural and political pressures of

central government to assimilate them into mainstream Han Chinese society. Greenberg says such coverage is too often “compressed into a six-inch story about terrorism and leaves out the experience of a people and what they’re going through now.” Their intention, rather, is to document everyday life, “the nodes of the Uighur network: the truck stops, livestock markets, secondary schools and county offices where Uighurs connect with each other.” The Lange-Taylor Prize supports collaborations between a writer and a photographer, and is offered by the Centre for Documentary Studies at Duke University. It honours the working partnership of FSA photographer Lange and economist Taylor, who together produced seminal documentary projects on the dustbowl migration in the US and the internment of Japanese-Americans during the Second World War. CDS awards director Alexa Dilworth notes that Drake’s imaginative photography combines with Greenberg’s lyrical writing to produce something “that either medium could not accomplish alone.”

Spotlight

Workers string electric lines across Taklamakan Desert, part of the Chinese government’s effort to develop the West An infant sleeps under a veil in a quiet section of a Uighur market on the road between Yarkand and Hota

Drake and Greenberg’s project is significant not only because it draws attention to an area and people that are under-represented in the Western media, but also because their work presents a counter-narrative to the story being told by the “war on terror”. The Uighurs are traditionally Muslim but Drake notes that “we [in the West] don’t like to think of Muslims as victims, so it’s a complicated story with which the Western press sometimes has a difficult time.” Drake’s attention to the mediascape, and desire to carve out her own stories, follow from her undergraduate studies in Media Culture at Brown University. “I’m interested in thinking about why certain areas of the world are overlooked and why others draw what seems like an

excessive amount of attention from the Western press,” says Drake. This impulse follows from an even more basic drive to go out and learn about the world through personal experience. Drake left a job in Manhattan’s Silicon Alley to take up photography, training at the International Center of Photography and Ohio University and then interning at National Geographic, where she produced her acclaimed essay on the Lubavitchers. She worked at the Palm Beach Post and then spent a year in Ukraine. She now lives in Istanbul. While the Lubavitcher project was shot with National Geographic in mind, her time in Ukraine, free of editorial demands, allowed her to explore her own voice as a photographer. “Not working for anyone else was a really great thing even though I kept trying to get an assignment and couldn’t. In retrospect that may have been a good thing.” Drake’s pictures demonstrate a commitment to the subject. Greenberg praises her for the time she invests when approaching a community: “Carolyn’s

patience with villages in Central Asia is endless. She’s the opposite of the photographer who parachutes in. She invests an enormous amount of time trying to understand the image she’s trying to capture.” But her desire to get close is accompanied by a desire to make pictures that are a bit ambiguous. She exploits the aberrations of camera technology, using lens flare and colour temperature to effect; her compositions are often slightly skewed off the horizontal. There are many compositions with two figures in which one will engage with the camera, creating a slightly uncomfortable relationship between the viewer and the other subject. Drake is drawn to “mysterious” pictures, and edits for them, embracing the contradiction of documentary photography that it is about the author as much as the world. This position, which inscribes a relationship between photographer, viewer and subjects, will ensure the work’s enduring validity. Leo Hsu Carolyn Drake is represented by Panos 23

Off the page MIchael DAvid Murphy 24

Tod Papageorge, literate dean of American photography who directs the graduate programme in photography at Yale University, has published two of the most dramatic photobooks in the past two years, America Sports, 1970, or, How We Spent the War in Vietnam and Passing Through Eden, Photographs of Central Park. The books are dramatic in a theatrical sense; themes are introduced, curtains are raised, tensions build and subside. In each, you feel a final act rising as the pages in your right thumb thin to meet the book’s end-flap.

As rock solid, book-length projects, there are single frames within each book that get lost to the slow, stately roll of Papageorge’s drama. This dilemma is a photographer’s dream, really. Papageorge’s photographs are marching so cleanly toward achieving their grand, book-length expression that it’s easy to lose track of the pictures for what they are by themselves, unadorned. It’s the details that are so beguiling. There’s so much information in Papageorge’s frames, they quench the thirst to know what’s beyond. It’s a

Off the page

photographic sleight of hand; the reveal is that there is no visible world outside of Papageorge’s photographs. Try a closer look at American Sports, 1970: take page 17, Indianapolis Motor Speedway on 30 May. It’s a familiar cacophony on the infield at Indy. The scene’s stacked with people who lend their limbs to a composition that’s coming apart just as it’s coming together. At the centre of the spin is an officer of the law, reprimanding a youth for an unknown grievance. Leaning in, we’re at an entrance of

a kind of wooden structure, perhaps makeshift restrooms. It’s a structure that’s higher than the rest of its surroundings, so people have climbed on top to get a better view of the race. The confrontation at the centre of the picture is the upraised arm of the law, complete with nightstick raised high, against youth’s insouciance. Here’s what amazes: • The kid who’s getting dressed down can’t look the cop in the face, but he’s firm in his stance. He’s protecting himself a bit (who wouldn’t with that raised nightstick) but his face shows a sharp brow, a fierceness that won’t yield. The killings of anti-war protesters by the National Guard at Kent State University happened four weeks before, just a state away in Ohio. The fierceness in the kid’s face is the face of someone who knows Kent State, and is willing to take his own stand against Johnny Law, right there in his short shorts. • The wooden structure is Papageorge’s public studio. It’s both backdrop and frame. A sculptural element, it accentuates the disembodied feet, legs, hands and lips edging in from all sides, which lend support all the way back to the centre of the aggrieved kid’s forehead. • Hippies were far out because they knew how to get there, and weren’t afraid of the journey. I think of the guy with the headband and long hair on the left edge of the frame as a hippie, and admire how he’s heading somewhere else, with purpose, away from the law, away from confrontation, away from the stands and the spotlight, to some kind of pasture of peace. Run hippie, run! • I can’t ever recall seeing a pair of lips at the lower left corner of any picture, much less lips that declare themselves so, puckered as they are, the lips of a kid making smoochy noises, teasing someone up above (while a kid’s about to get cracked, front and centre). If these lips could swing, they’d have a great backhand. They swat all errant action back into the centre, over the cop net, and end up in loafer land. • When I look into this picture, I look for my uncle who was a conscientious objector and refused to go to Vietnam. I look for my other uncle who was too young to be drafted, and took his own path through youthful objection. I’m looking for my father, who was born in Indianapolis, but he was halfway around

the world that May, on a ship in the middle of the South China Sea. • Papageorge may be a professor, but I’d hate to see this kind of photography taught. If you want to learn how to take pictures like these, buy two copies of the book. Rip out every page and put each picture on your walls at home at eye level. Lock yourself in your house for a month. Then pick up your camera and go outside and see what’s changed. • The other day I told a friend that I’d been photographing the presidential campaign atraditionally, that I wasn’t making typical press/photojourno pictures. He said, “Oh, so lots of hands and elbows?” and I said, yeah, hands and elbows. Papageorge doesn’t just photograph hands and elbows, he makes them work to his advantage, revealing a truth that body parts in celebration are the same as body parts in war. • The left-side look of the sold-out stands. How at f11, you can see so far away so cleanly that you might end up in another story altogether, the story of today beyond the infield kerfuffle, where people froth and cheer and get crazy over the smell of tires, speed, and fuel. • Sitting on a plane now, the Papageorge picture cemented in my cortex, 30,000 feet high. I can see the cop’s hip, the strength of his holster, the gun’s threatening promise. I see the muscles in the cop’s arm, and the tightness of his uniform, not unlike the cop costumes in The Castro in San Francisco on Hallowe’en. Perfectly masculine for the time, but now, a bit fey. Like a cop’s bushy moustache. • If Martians arrived and wanted to know how Americans come together and express themselves as one, and you handed them this photograph, they’d probably turn right around and go back where they came from. The core of this picture is a kind of napalm, hot and repellent, inescapably deadly, undeniably American. What amazes me isn’t that Tod Papageorge was there, and ready, and brought this photograph back to show us, but that this point of view existed in the first place. What a world we live in where life was once like this, so perfectly shaggy and focused, contradictory and clear. Michael David Murphy is a photographer and writer in Atlanta, Georgia 25

Interview David Brittain in Conversation with Editor Jack schofield Jack Schofield is now best known as the Guardian’s IT Mr Fix-it, but in the 1980s he was one of the most prolific editors working in photography. In 1978 he became editor of English Zoom where he stayed for 10 issues. Zoom was unrivalled among photographic magazines. This glossy title, known for its dramatic use of colour, showcased the most sensational commercial photography from around the world and delighted in becoming more controversial with each new edition. David Brittain, former editor of Creative Camera, has compiled a series of interviews with key editors from the past four decades 26

David Brittain: How did you get involved with Zoom? Jack Schofield: I met Joel Laroche, who was the guy who ran it, in France. I guess he found me because I was editing camera magazines in the UK – Photo Technique, at the time. We got on very well and I started doing work for Zoom. I had to fly to Paris – sometimes two or three times a week. As a magazine publisher, Joel was very opportunistic. I suppose there was a UK equivalent… maybe Felix Dennis might be close. Joel used to do cartoon magazines, poster magazines. He started a skateboard magazine when skateboards were fashionable,

and I did some work for that. We both got involved in computing around the same time. He wanted to use computers for illustration. He started a computer graphics magazine that turned out to be very successful, I think. Zoom was clearly the most important thing he did, but he was willing to do anything to turn an honest penny. Originally it was Paris-based, but Joel had the idea of expanding it globally. The thing about Zoom was the colour – at the time, practically everything was in black and white. Colour was very expensive. We had a very good deal on colour printing from a company called Istra in Strasbourg, who were mainly

Interview

So it was a small publisher that concentrated on photographic magazines. The French Zoom was very successful and Joel believed that it could be very successful in other places. To his enormous credit, Penblade’s publisher, Terry Griffiths, backed that idea and launched it in the UK. We had a do at Langan’s Brasserie, and Adrian Flowers made a nice little speech.

known for printing knitting patterns. To them, Zoom was a kind of flagship “look what we can do” kind of product. They were wonderful. I used to go to Istra to see Zoom off the press, and I had huge admiration for the guys there. They would always go the extra mile, and they would always want to do it better than you did. The basic idea was that Zoom had limited circulation in France and limited potential elsewhere, but you could do five-colour printing – you could do four colours and black. So, basically Joel went around Europe and invited other publishers to launch editions of Zoom using the same colour plates, because that would make it affordable. So we would print up to five languages in two days. All the colour was done the same, and you just changed the black plate. So you’d have a French run with French black (text plate), then you’d take the French black off and you’d put the English black on, to get a longer run. DB: The same pictures for everyone? JS: It was the same pictures everywhere, but they weren’t always in the same order. We used to work in sections of 16 or 32 pages, so you could drop a section. Typically, I would say: I will take that French section and that French section, but in between I’m going to have an English section. Or, I could do a section that the French would take. So, for instance, I did a feature on Hipgnosis [the company that designed the classic Pink Floyd album covers among others] and the French did their translation of it. The idea was that everybody would be able to contribute if they had good stuff. The opening section with the contents and gallery listings would be all in English because this would never be in any other edition. DB: How could the French sustain Zoom as a monthly? JS: It was very, very popular. The French had more taste. DB: You worked for a London-based publisher? JS: Yes. I worked for Penblade Publishers, where at various times I edited Photo Technique, Film Making and the Royal Photographic Society’s Journal, and we did a magazine for the British Institute of Professional Photographers.

DB: So how did it sell in the UK? JS: It turned out the UK market was not worth it! But for Joel, a big reason for doing the UK edition was to create English language content that could be repackaged for the American edition. I am not privy to the figures on that. But the UK print run started out at 15,000 and if we sold 10 we were pretty lucky. We had about two-and-a-half-thousand subscriptions. Zoom was £2.50, which was a lot of money then – four times the cost of an average magazine. It was hard to compete. One of the bookstores at Heathrow took us off the shelves – it was one of our biggest outlets, selling a couple of hundred a month. They said, “Well, it’s revenue per foot. If we put Cosmopolitan there we’d sell thousands.” DB: Who was your reader? JS: My target reader was professional photographers, advertising agencies, media buyers – the business, students, sophisticated amateurs. People interested in images – because you couldn’t compete with AP [Amateur Photographer]. The volume of Zoom, the separations, the costs of printing: you would need a lot of advertising to support 100,000 copies. It wasn’t there. The first three covers of the English edition of Zoom, edited by Jack Schofield

DB: What was the Zoom idea of a “good picture”? JS: There wasn’t an idea of a good picture – that was what made Zoom great! We used to have these arguments about whether something was good or not – but actually we didn’t really care. We appreciated craft: there was something that came with being really, really well crafted, so that was a good reason for publishing something. Then there was famous photography and portfolios you got from new books. Then there was stuff that was, well, had anyone seen it before? The great thing about Zoom was the willingness to publish things – even if we were a bit 27

Interview

I didn’t go for the reportage: I always wanted things in which the image sort of transcended the reportorial aspect doubtful about them – on the grounds that this guy had something to say and he really wanted to say it. There was a sense in which Zoom provided raw material and ideas for art directors and other photographers. There was never any sense that you were trying to find the 50 greatest black and white pictures of all time, that this was immortal. You were trying to say: “Who’s doing what now, and why are they doing it? What’s interesting?” Joel was always looking for things that were “very fun”.

It reflected what was going on. If you did a “Zoom goes to California” issue – if it was happening in California, it could go in. It didn’t have to meet any golden rules. It had to be at least interesting for the 15 minutes that you might see it.

DB: The Creative Camera editors felt that they knew the best work – but unlike you they felt they were on a mission. JS: We didn’t know what the best work was. We had the this-is-going-to-bewonderful-for-15-minutes attitude! We wanted to have an impact and knock your eyes out, but if you go back a year later, as I have done, maybe you see whether you were right to run something, with hindsight. There was no attempt to canonise things. It was a “pick and mix” kind of operation. We didn’t see Creative Camera as being commercial, while a lot of our stuff was commercial. Our contributors were mostly professional photographers, so they were doing it for money. Christian Vogt, for example, you might say he is a commercial art photographer. Sometimes they were commercial photographers who were doing something interesting on the side.

DB: What, no discussion about the impact of glamour on sales? JS: No. We were more or less impervious to it. Obviously, we had some of it because a lot of the interesting stuff that was happening was happening in that world. I don’t honestly think you can say Christian Vogt is sub-porn. I would say that if we’d thought it was porn we wouldn’t have published it – unless it was, say, historical porn or whatever. We might well do something that was erotic, but we didn’t go out looking for erotic pictures. We’d go out looking for things that were different. If they happened to be erotic then that might be a nice bonus – we were never against eroticism!

DB: The contents are a tremendous clash of advertising, reportage, historical art photography. I suppose it was meant to be an index of what was out there then. JS: Yes, there wasn’t any set plan. We did literally drive round California knocking on doors of people we’d never heard of before and asking them: “Would you like to be in Zoom? – you’ve never heard of us, but this is the magazine we do.” Some of it was great photography and some of it was crap, but it didn’t matter. 28

DB: Zoom was famous for – well, its sub-porn. Was there a policy there? At Amateur Photographer there was a golden rule about putting what was called “glamour” on every cover. JS: No, we didn’t.

DB: How did the illustration fit in? JS: Zoom was an image magazine, not a photography magazine – it says on the front: “the image magazine”. So we had discussions where we might have said, “What illustration can we get?” because, clearly there was a danger of photography over-running the whole thing. Which you didn’t want. You wanted to have record covers and adverts and stuff that was designed. It was an essential part of the agenda: not to be a camera magazine. We were trying to benefit from the photo magazine market and sell to it without that being a limitation. We wanted to be on trendy people’s coffee tables.

DB: You could always open Zoom and find something really interesting – even if most of it didn’t appeal. JS: Yes! That was success. If you were on an art director’s budget then you were probably buying it on expenses, and you’d pay two quid for one picture. And cheap at the price. DB: Would you say Zoom was in the business of supporting photography? JS: Yes. Promoting photography, promoting originality and art… If you forget that a picture started as a doublepage ad selling cornflakes or whatever – if you take it out of that context and you reproduce it really beautifully and give it (say it’s by Marty Evans) the kind of respect that you would give an art photograph, or a photograph by CartierBresson, you can look at it purely as an image. If it’s done really well, it’s worthy of respect. It may give you an idea. If you have done – as I have – successful [regular] magazines then you know how this kind of thing works. You have the letters pages, the news page, the book reviews, the columns, the departments and all that, so in an average magazine you could have 40 pages of routine stuff and only six or eight pages of stuff that was new and exciting, like portfolios. Zoom was the reverse. We would have 100 pages of portfolios and five or six pages of this other stuff. I liked Andy Warhol’s Interview. I liked the generosity of it. The trouble with most commercial magazines is – increasingly – if you want someone to read something, you put 50 words in a box, and there are hundreds of things happening on the page. The great thing about Zoom, Rolling Stone and a few others was the sense of “Let’s make it big.” Nova, of course, was another one. It had the idea that if you picked it up it wouldn’t necessarily be predictable. A lot of readers want their publication to slide on like a warm sock – you always

Dryden Goodwin Cast

26 September – 16 November 08

Also showing

Soho Archives 1950s & 1960s

Open Daily Admission Free

5 & 8 Great Newport St. London WC2H 7HY Leicester Square www.photonet.org.uk Caul 3 (detail), 2008 © Dryden Goodwin. Courtesy of the artist and Stephen Friedman Gallery (London)

Interview

know where the crossword is and where the editorial is, so there’s a lot of habit forming, reassurance and satisfaction. It works. If you want to do a successful magazine, that’s what you do. Never move stuff around. You give the reader a home from home that’s comfortable, where they know where things are, and the things that are there are satisfying. But there’s a reaction against that that says: “By the way, we’ve done you an entire wall poster, so you’ll have to take the magazine apart and stick the bits together, then put it on your wall.” Well, fantastic! People remember that. Nova at its best had the ability to throw away the flight plan and do X, Y or Z. You have to be really committed to do things like that. When you’re running a magazine, you hire a guy to write a column, and it falls in the door and you don’t have to think about it. So a large proportion of a magazine just runs itself. You can go away for two weeks, have a holiday, and when you come back, you know, the machinery works. That’s quite different from deciding to do a whole issue about Polaroid, or California, or 30

Japan, because then you have to start from scratch. There’s obviously much more work involved. DB: So Zoom promoted photography, yet wasn’t a photography magazine. Was there anything else like it? JS: There was The Image magazine, produced by David Bailey and David Litchfield. That was the thing I saw in the UK that was a kind of wake-up call. DB: Did the word image then mean what it does now; you know both an image and your image? JS: Yes. Absolutely. There was a lot of exasperation that Zoom was elitist. But it was elitism in a democratic way – because you could join the elite just by buying the magazine. My sense was that if you were a buyer you might like a third of it. The thing was, somebody else might like a different third and somebody else a different third. It seems to me that if you gave them one or two portfolios that they really loved then you could satisfy that reader, even if they didn’t

like the rest. What I didn’t want was a magazine with a 100 per cent that would satisfy him, because if you did that, you would have something that was very narrow. Of course, if you’re after the art director market, they’re butterflies. It’s a fashion business. In a sense, Zoom was a fashion magazine for people in advertising and design. You’re trying to pick up what’s new, like a jackdaw. You have a number of feeders. The Photographers’ Gallery was clearly one. And books. You might be able to get 16 pages from a book, and you might even get the colour separations, which were very expensive at the time. Degree shows – there was some good stuff from degree shows. You plundered other magazines – Avenue from Holland, Vogue, anything from Japan – these were the places you would look for stuff. If you go for people who are masters of their craft, you can usually leave the art bit up to them. One thing I tried not to have too much of was what you might call realistic photography. I didn’t go for the reportage: I always wanted things that didn’t look like real life. I always

Interview

wanted things in which the image sort of transcended the reportorial aspect. DB: You must have been pulling out a lot of black and white documentary stuff – that was the heyday of it. JS: Yes. That wasn’t our bag. We did some UK-based people, such as Adrian Berry, but the French did much more reportage. The German version of Zoom was really very sexy. It had a lot of high quality… not quite porn… they spent much more money than we did. What went for Zoom in the UK and the US didn’t necessarily go for the Germans, or vice versa. DB: There was a kind of permanence about Zoom, wasn’t there? You could pin up the pictures from it. I bet they never had an art magazine that allowed people to do that. Have you ever thought what the relationship is between the reproduction and the photograph? JS: The thing about a photograph on a page is that it can be almost as good as or maybe better than a print, partly through context and partly through the

quality of the reproduction. You can actually have something that is really close to the real thing. If you ever go to an exhibition of an artist such as [Georges] Rouault, who puts paint on an inch thick, you can’t possibly reproduce that. You lose almost everything. DB: Was Zoom interested in art? JS: We weren’t an art magazine: we much preferred commercial artists. So you might take commercial illustration and look at it as if it was art. Stuff that was art to begin with was less interesting, because you already knew how to look at it... We were very closely aligned with the commercial publishing industry. We loved art directors, we loved photographers, we loved galleries, we loved book publishers. At the same time we were looking for things that you couldn’t show anywhere else. We never felt we were anti-commercial or non-commercial. We wanted to sell magazines; we never wanted to change the world in any real sense. We wanted to make it prettier – more interesting,

really. Why have really boring ads when you can have nice ads? What was interesting was that it was really very hard to decide what was very good. Even from your own point of view as a consumer of what you’re producing, it wasn’t always clear what was good and what was bad. DB: What was the photographers’ sense of the context of Zoom? JS: I think they felt recognised. We never tried to set a standard or to say, this is good enough and this isn’t good enough. We took the line: is it different? Is it interesting? If it was transitory, it didn’t matter. Is it transitory? Great! There was a sense of amusement about it. You would never try to be worthy. Further interviews by David Brittain with influential magazine editors continue online at www.foto8.com/8xtra

The Rocket Park at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico

work in progress Simon Norfolk Full spectrum dominance

What will Simon Norfolk do next? Since his last solo exhibition, Supercomputers, in 2006, Norfolk has been slightly less high-profile than usual, not least because he spent much of 2007 on assignment for National Geographic in Mexico. While any photographer would consider such an assignment prestigious, the time-consuming work photographing ancient Mayan temples did not offer sufficient challenge to a self-motivated individual like Norfolk, whose passion for photography increasingly lies in the medium’s capacity to make visible that which is invisible. He added a quietly powerful series on submarine warfare, which appeared in Granta, to what might be termed his “lifework”: Et in Arcadia Ego, an ongoing project that seeks to understand how war and the need to fight shapes our world. Then, at the start of 2008, Norfolk was taken on by a new gallery, Michael Hoppen Contemporary. He must be up to something big… Full Spectrum Dominance is the title of Norfolk’s latest project, which takes the politics of space as its subject. Full spectrum dominance is the rhetoric employed by the US government in relation to its future warfare strategy, a matter on which Norfolk is extremely well-versed. His vocabulary is peppered with phrases like “payloads”, “force multipliers”, “exoatmospheric kill vehicles” and “glory trips” – which he picks up from detailed readings of doctrinal documents written by the US military, which are – he is quick to point out – freely accessible online. The reasoning behind his focus on US military strategy (as opposed to UK, which he considers “a bit crap, we just piggyback off the Americans”) is simple: vast amounts of money that are being used to effectively weaponise space. “The American military has a so-called black budget of $32 billion – they don’t even have to say where they’re spending it,” says Norfolk. “This idea about accountability is really crucial. Look at British military deaths in Afghanistan – 108, are we up to? Every time I hear about this I think – what have you died for? For the Queen? For England? For George Bush’s foreign policy? There are 8,000 soldiers out there and we haven’t a clue what they’re doing.” Norfolk pins this problem of accountability onto a lack of visibility; if we don’t know what the military is up to,

we can’t express an opinion about it. It is for this very reason that he castigates contemporary war photography: “The problem with photojournalism is that it is hooked on the visible. When these photographers are invited along on a little jolly ride to be embedded with the troops, the military know where the real war is taking place. So the reason they allow people to tag along is because they know that what they will be allowed to see is unimportant. Hegel says the Owl of Minerva spreads its wings at dusk. When the thing is over, that’s when you get access to it. It’s because it’s irrelevant that they allow you to embed and watch them fire some guns through a slit.” “Once the war has moved into this other realm, it’s completely unstoppable because no one is talking about it. That’s the powerlessness of photojournalism; it’s intellectually bankrupt, locked in a mode of operating that came to an end in the ’50s, its heyday. Like an old bloke who still listens to the records he got into when he was 18, photojournalism is unable to unhinge itself from the modes it learnt in its puberty.” Research has always been Norfolk’s own precision tool; the quality of his photographic output is a direct result of a desire to understand his subject combined with his own particular aesthetic sensibility. He admits to spending as much time writing these days as he does photographing, decrying those who feel the caption is some kind of poor relative. The knowledge gleaned from his assiduous research is the hard-pedalling engine that powers the swan-like grace of his photographs. “What interests me is how I photograph a predator drone flying over Yemen, that picks up a mobile phone signal through satellite systems, picks up a voice recognition of a certain person who’s on the phone and then using a radiation-seeking missile just homes in on that missile and kills that person. What is the photograph of that? It’s absolutely unphotographable. And yet it’s happening all the time.” Securing permissions by writing “a really lovely email” where he namedrops his longterm media patrons, such as the New York Times, the Guardian or Italian magazine Gio, he truthfully describes his fascination with the sublime beauty of light and succeeds in catching the PR wings of the US military on the horns of 33

Work in progress

a dilemma: their desire for total secrecy and their desire to attract more money from the government. Money often wins. In his mission to photograph the unphotographable, Norfolk has travelled to and from scheduled satellite launches in the US, in what has been a “horribly expensive” venture, the more so when a launch is cancelled at the last minute. From about three miles away from the site, he is close enough to experience the physical effects of a rocket launch, or glory trip, as they are affectionately termed: “For five or six seconds the floor rumbles, your body shakes, your chest thumps. It’s this amazing exuberance and then it disappears.” To ensure capture, Norfolk lines up three or four of the huge wooden 5x4 cameras that are his stock-in-trade, to capture a single ray of light that illuminates the sky like a second sunrise. 34

He is using the camera to peer into things that the human eye cannot see. “It’s all part of the metaphor of looking into this world of secrets. I wasn’t really sure how to go about photographing any of this. They spend 15 years constructing these ideas inside skunk works, then the satellites are launched 1,000 miles out into space... What they do in this silent void of limitless emptiness is unknown. Who would have thought somewhere so empty would make such a great place to hide things: the amazing paradox of space. There are these two worlds, but between them is this moment when it’s very noisy, very bright, very present; jubilant and juvenile. Then the satellites are lofted up into space and that’s it – they’re gone. I photograph the chinks in the armour where you can just see through to these worlds.”

Norfolk found direction from the work of amateur photographers who live near the launch sites, and was particularly captivated by the long exposures that created a field of colour, redolent of abstract expressionism, and practitioners like Barnett Newman and Rothko. “Behind the missile was a field of colour of these dawn skies, with beautiful gradations from blue to black. I thought if you kept the shutter open long enough you’d get a second field which would be the rotation of the stars in the sky. The two fields in which the launch takes place are created by god or nature and are absolutely perfect and then across them you have this kind of scratch – the launch – like a scar across the face of the deep. The scratch of the launch is perfect in its own way because it forms this lovely geometric arch but at the same time it has this brutality to it

because you know the arch was made by a nuclear missile being tested.” Part of this new series was exhibited in an unusual way at this year’s New York Photo Festival. The pictures of the rocket launches were split in two and then offset slightly so the line remained intact. Norfolk wanted people to stand in front of the picture and for their heads to rotate, to tilt back, like his did as he watched the actual launch. “The line of light lifts you across the two worlds. It shows this earthly world of industrialisation and big metal cans full of explosives where the missiles live and how they are then lifted up into this world of weightlessness, soundlessness, emptiness, observationlessness, invisibility, the world of omniscience. It’s a kind of dialectic and everything I do that’s interesting is about those parallel worlds of beauty and horror that are

Scenic Overlook (left), White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico A preserved Titan 2 nuclear missile launch complex (above), which was in use until 1980. The red box, with dual key access, contained the launch codes. Vandenberg Air Force Base, California

joined for a moment by the photograph.” Where many photographers use visibility as a route to information as opposed to knowledge, it is in his pursuit of the latter that Norfolk’s latest work can be justifiably termed exceptional, though his own rhetoric is likely to divide audiences. Aesthetically the new work combines the clinical precision of Supercomputers with the sublime beauty of Chronotopia – which could please many or few. With work in the Brighton Biennial, a major landscape show at the Museum of Contemporary Art in La Coruña this autumn as well as the Hoppen show, perhaps Norfolk, after a quieter couple of years, is now aiming for full spectrum dominance. Max Houghton Full Spectrum Dominance is at Michael Hoppen until 17 November 2008 35

Work in Progress

The controlled destruction (previous pages, left), 27 seconds from launch, of an ALV-X1 rocket carying NASA experiments and classified US Navy satellites. Wallops Island Flight Facility, Virginia Launch of a Delta II rocket (previous pages, right) from Cape Canaveral carrying a USAF GPS II satellite. Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida

The rusting remains of Launch Complex 19, a National Historical Monument (above) where all the manned Gemini launches were made up until 1966. The tower is lying on its back but would originally have stood up-right and supported the rocket on the pad and its umbilicals. Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida

Interior of a preserved Titan II nuclear missile launch complex at Vandenberg Air Force Base, California (above). The 160-feetdeep silo, which would have contained a â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;ready to launchâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; missile, was decommissioned in 1987.

Glory Trip 196 (next page) and Glory Trip 195 (page 41). Unarmed Minuteman III nuclear missile testing with improved warhead design, launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base

Work in Progress

RESISTING CAPTURE PHOTOGRAphER alvaro ybarra zavala TExt Guy lane

The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, FARC, has fought a bloody war with the country’s government for more than 40 years. The movement is regarded by some as one of the world’s most lethal Marxist guerrilla organisations committed to the implementation of a Communist society. Others propose that its record of kidnappings, car bombings, assassinations and extortion is more directly related to control of a multimillion dollar narcotics trade. Spanish photographer Alvaro Ybarra Zavala spent six months with the insurgents in FARC-held country – accompanying them on patrols, in camps and off duty. “I was interested in trying to photograph who is behind each of those uniforms. Most of the people from the FARC are from the countryside and small villages. Many of them became 42

fighters when they were still young, they were child soldiers. Their life stories are complex: imagine you are the ninth son, or the ninth daughter, from a family where your father doesn’t give a shit about you, and you live in the middle of nowhere. You see an armed group one day – and they are the real kings of the area. So at least you have a chance to be someone, and you are able to have an opportunity in your life. I was interested in trying to find out about people like this – their background, their history, their daily life.” Though the FARC soldiers accepted Zavala’s presence, they remained keenly aware of his purpose. “One moment they would be used to me, a photographer, but they never got used to the camera. They were very, very protective of their own image; and every time they saw that I was working with the camera, they

just changed. As a photographer you see it – you see that they are not as relaxed.” Zavala’s interest in the quiet habits and routines of everyday FARC life did not necessarily fit with the image the army considered appropriate. “One of the photographs that was very hard to get was a picture of a lady doing her make-up. That’s the kind of photograph that I was interested in getting – one which makes you think ‘that could be me’ or ‘it could be my girlfriend’.” “But they couldn’t understand why I was interested in that; so every time I was trying to photograph them when they were normal, it became very hard. They were more relaxed when I was photographing how they were producing cocaine! In the end I got it, but not as much as I would like to. Maybe – to get what I was trying to get – in the end I would have to have been one of them.”

Out on patrol, a member of the Arturo Ruiz Mobile Unit (previous page), a special unit of FARC that fights in many different regions of Colombia. It is a quick reaction force that helps other FARC groups. It has been accused of being responsible for the taking of hostages Judith and Isa (this page), fighters with the Arturo Ruiz Mobile Unit

Members of the Arturo Ruiz Mobile Unit during combat against the paramilitary group Los Rastrojos near the community of Ca単aberal on the river Sipi. And back at camp, a guerrilla plays with a puppy

The river San Juan is one of the most important FARC strongholds on the Pacific coast of Colombia â&#x20AC;&#x201C; an important strategic place for military operations and also for the control of narcotrafficking

Workers inside a clandestine coca lab controlled by FARC in the jungle. A local narcotraficante (bottom right) shows pure cocaine. Different armed groups that take part in the conflict all benefit from the market

An internally displaced person from the Tangui community in an improvised camp. Fighting between the various rebel groups forces people from their land

Hunger is rampant in the river communities. The situation in the mid-Atrato region is critical as people have to travel many days through rebel fighting to reach hospitals. In the public hospital of San Javier, many people arrive only to die

Patricia and Esteban, FARC guerrillas from the Arturo Ruiz Mobile Unit

circling the region for generations, appearing at different moments in time to capture a glimpse of the eternal, to grasp a memory and hold on to it. Like the Black Sea itself, the sea of paradoxes, Winship’s work operates on two levels: one of fiction where the tides of truth and change flow freely and one of “reality”, of war, where one man’s truth is another man’s heresy. Winship’s breadth of vision can encompass a time before politics, when only the sea would have constituted a border between lands. It can equally incorporate the idea of a state – Sochi – displaying the skittishness of a terrorist or a search for an Albanian epic poem that only exists in oral form. And all the while, the scent of

After Torture Tim Minogue

Ahmed X isn’t exactly sure how he survived five years of beatings and torture in Evin prison, Tehran. Luck played a part. Taking the moral but dangerous decision to lie and lie to his interrogators in order to save the lives of others certainly helped. I met Ahmed in the 1990s, at the offices of the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture in North London, where he was undergoing psychotherapy to help him try to handle acute feelings of guilt and sorrow. He had won political asylum in Britain, most of his family had survived and joined him, he had recently married and was about to resume university studies for an engineering degree. His broken feet had been repaired as had the internal abdominal injuries caused by years of beatings. But the nightmares, the flashbacks and the depression were harder to handle. Ahmed’s ordeal began as he walked down the street on a spring day in Tehran. A car drew up beside him. Two men dragged him inside and took him to a police station. He was accused of belonging to the Marxist Fedayeen group, at a time when the infant Islamist regime was ruthlessly suppressing all dissent. “They said I was a political organiser for the Fedayeen. They blindfolded me and gave me a severe beating. This was within an hour of my arrest. Then I was taken straight to 58

prison.” He was 19. It was the start of a 10-year ordeal which only came to an end when he was granted political asylum in the UK. Ahmed’s interrogators wanted to know who the members of his group were, how many people he was in charge of and what they discussed at their meetings. He knew the answers, because he was indeed a Fedayeen organiser. But he admitted only to being a passive sympathiser, his involvement limited to reading newspapers. For nearly five years Ahmed stuck to his story. He believes this saved his life: “If I had answered their questions truthfully, I would have had to betray dozens of people. And there was still no guarantee I wouldn’t be killed. It wasn’t a question of political belief, but a moral decision. When I saw what was going on in the prison, I knew I could not live with myself if I let other people be dragged into the evil.” “The evil”, for Ahmed and the 50 or 60 other political prisoners crammed in the 7 metre square cell, consisted of regular beatings, usually on the soles of the feet or stomach, with a length of metal cable. Loudspeakers blared readings from the Koran from 7am until 10pm. Inmates were only allowed out for half-an-hour every morning and evening to wash, go to the lavatory, do their laundry and exercise. The prisoners slept on the floor “as close as books on a shelf”. When there was a mass arrest

another 40 or 50 would be crammed in and everyone had to sleep standing up, shoulder to shoulder, for there was no room to lie down. Imprisonment in the overcrowded “big” cell alternated with periods of solitary confinement of up to six months, during which he was blindfolded and constantly handcuffed. Most terrifying of all were the mock executions, which Ahmed suffered five or six times. “They would tell you to pack all your things – the usual indication that execution was imminent. They would take six or seven of us outside and make us dig graves. A firing squad would come and shoot five or six of the group. You would think it was your turn to die. But one or two would be spared and returned to the cell.” Ahmed could not explain why he was always one of the “lucky” ones. He thought it was because his interrogators, who believed in absolute right and wrong, could not be 100 per cent sure of his “guilt” because he always stuck to his story. “One day the guards murdered my friend by setting fire to him in his cell. They poured petrol over him and lit a match. That made me only more inclined to resist. No way could I tell them things that would drag more people in.” Ahmed’s ordeal ended after he was sent, unguarded, to hospital for treatment to repair internal injuries caused by the years of beatings. His parents handed over the deeds of their

When I saw what was going on in the prison, I knew I could not live with myself if I let other people be dragged into the evil house to the government as security for his return to jail. Instead the whole family went into hiding for three years, thereby losing their home. They handed over their life savings to a smuggler who disappeared with the money. They crossed the border into Turkey, where they had to bribe police to let them stay, for the Iranians were paying a bounty of £300 for every refugee sent home, and eventually, two years later, made their way to Britain, where Ahmed was put in touch with the Medical Foundation. After a detailed medical examination they prepared a report which backed up his story. The injuries to his feet and stomach were consistent with the beatings he had described. The Foundation’s report was vital to the success of Ahmed’s application to stay in the UK. “When I arrived in Britain I had difficulty walking, because of the damage to my feet and legs and because I was generally weak. The Foundation’s doctors helped me with those problems. And the Foundation gave me a lot of practical advice. I was very troubled by my memories, especially by nightmares in which my dead friends came back. I found it very hard to talk to people who did not understand what had happened to me.” Regular sessions with a personal counsellor, where he was able to talk safely and express his grief were a great help. “I didn’t believe anyone could

understand me or help me. It was wonderful to discover that there were people who could.” With the help of the Medical Foundation Ahmed became well enough to resume his long-interrupted university studies. Today he works as an engineer, has married a fellow Iranian exile and started a family. The Foundation was established in 1985, when doctors working for the Medical Group of Amnesty International realised they could no longer cope with the numbers of tortured refugees from oppressive regimes who were arriving in Britain. In the first year the Foundation’s doctors, physiotherapists, psychiatrists and other specialists saw 79 “clients”. It now sees some 2,000 people from all over the world every year. Last year 233 clients came from Iran, 181 from the democratic Republic of Congo, 137 from Sri Lanka and 102 from Iraq; the rest being from nearly 100 different countries. “Torture is a way of getting at a person’s mind through their body,” the Foundation’s founding director Helen Bamber, now retired, told me. “Through the deliberate infliction of pain, sometimes in a very sophisticated way, the torturers hope to crush the beliefs or the identity of an individual and terrorise the other members of their community, whether religious, political or ethnic.” Despite hearing the most

terrible stories of human cruelty every day, none of the Foundation’s dozens of mostly volunteer medical specialists have ever left because they could not cope. “I think it is because, although the torturers are trying to use the body to get at a person’s soul, they very often fail. I am not religious, but in case after case here we sense something at the very core of a person that resists the evil, that cannot be touched. And then we can start to rebuild around that core. We go on because it is easier to be engaged in this struggle against torture than it is to be a bystander.” Tim Minogue writes for Private Eye. For more information on the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture see www.torturecare.org.uk

THIS DARK HISTORY PHOTOGRAphy Kathryn Cook TExt Max Houghton

Mist rises from a field outside of Erzerum, Turkey (previous pages). This region of eastern Turkey is where the largest population of Turkey’s Armenians had been living for centuries and was particularly hard hit by violence and massacre during the Armenian genocide

There are few outward signs that the massacre of over one million Armenians took place on this soil. The genocide has never been acknowledged by its perpetrators, the “Young Turk” government of Ottoman Empire Turkey; it is feared that an admission would necessitate a rewriting of history and a potential collapse of the present Turkish nation. Though a monument now exists in Yerevan to which those who want to remember – and those who cannot forget – walk through the dark in pilgrimage on the nightof 24 April each year (the Genocide Memorial Day, after hundreds of Armenian leaders were murdered in Istanbul on that date in 1915) evidence of the slaughter is buried deep in the earth. To those who are actively seeking traces of the mass murders and the 62

vacuum left by their disappearance, like photographer Kathryn Cook, who has been based in the region since 2006, the landscape quietly reveals its secrets from time to time. A solitary child hovers on the steps of a former orphanage for Armenian children whose parents had been deported. In the village of Vakif Köy, a cluster of empty chairs awaits participants in the Armenian Blessing Day, The Blessing of the Grapes. From a telegraph pole, two loose wires dangle heavily like nooses, as though threatening to disrupt the snow’s white perfection with a sudden slash of red. Such whispers from the past can make unexpected incursions into the present: when a train journey across the backbone of Anatolia tracks former deportation routes; when a prominent

Turkish-Armenian journalist is murdered in broad daylight; or each time Article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code is invoked, reminding citizens that to insult Turkishness (and thus to mention the unacknowledged genocide) is illegal. The legacy of the Armenian genocide lives on, but, as one survivor expressed it: what is the legacy of silence? Kathryn Cook is the recipient of the Aftermath Project Grant 2008.

A photograph of slain TurkishArmenian journalist Hrant Dink (left) is seen in the reflection of the hearse carrying his flower-covered coffin during the funeral procession in Istanbul, on 23 January 2007. Dink was shot in broad daylight outside his newspaperâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s office The shadow of a train that runs from Adana to Istanbul (top) A photograph made during the Armenian deportations from Turkey (right) shows a trail of people on their way through the desert heading to Aleppo, Syria

Young Armenian boys (above) run through the grounds of an abandoned seminary in the Armenian quarter of the Old City in Jerusalem A young Christian pilgrim ( top right) in the Christian quarter of the Old City, is covered with a traditional veil at the entrance to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre on Good Friday, 2008 A visitor to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre (right) runs his hand over crosses that pilgrims have engraved on a wall in the Armenian section

People walk towards the entrance of the Armenian genocide monument to pay their respects during a procession on the eve of the April 24th anniversary in Yerevan, Armenia

Pigeons roost in the ruin of a building (top left) that was formerly an Armenian orphanage in Aleppo. Half of the building is used as a house and in the other half the owner keeps his pigeons Tables and chairs (left) are set up before the start of an Armenian celebration in Vakifli, Turkey Children play in the courtyard of an old religious school (above) in Bitlis, Turkey The ruins of an Armenian house (right) in a former Armenian quarter in Gaziantep, Turkey

Snow blankets the countryside along a road between Van and Dogubayazit inTurkey, close to the border with present-day Armenia

Minus 197째C PHOTOGRAphy murray ballard TExt Lauren Heinz

Alan and his wife Silvia, OF Peacehaven, East Sussex, have held monthly meetings in their home for over three years now. The group of around 10 people – sometimes less, sometimes more – gather together to discuss the latest news in cardiopulmonary support, or CPS, and practice and train themselves in surface cooling and blood washout and perfusion. They are preparing painstakingly for the event that one of them should suddenly die, in which case they would have to act quickly to preserve their loved one’s body with a sort of human anti-freeze, also referred to as a cryoprotectant. Alan and Silvia are members of a small group, numbering just 15 in the UK, who have signed up to the science of cryonics. 74

LN2 vapour extractor and thermocoupling device for neuro-patients (previous page), Phoenix, Arizona. This device is used in the last stages of a cryo-preservation, to control and monitor temperatures during the final cool down to minus 197°C Operating room in the Phoenix facility (above). Cryonics patients are brought here once they have died to undergo vitrification and perfusion. At this stage the body is cooled, using liquid nitrogen, to prevent deterioration Prospective patients train for the early stages of a cryo-suspension, Phoenix, Arizona (right)

Cryonics is the practice of preserving a dead body by freezing at extremely low temperatures in the hope that relevant technology will be developed to bring the person or animal back to life (not to be confused with cryogenics, which is concerned with preservation, not reanimation). Apart from the Peacehaven group in the UK, there are more than 1,000 other people in the world signed up to the promise of cryonics. Two main storage facilities, located in Phoenix and Detroit in the US, each hold around 75 bodies. At present, there are no cryonics facilities in the UK, so it is imperative that people are correctly preserved before being flown across the Atlantic. Robert CW Ettinger, dubbed the grandfather of cryonics, first published

his science-fiction ideas as non-fiction in The Prospect of Immortality in 1964. The title was reprinted in 2005. “If civilisation endures, if the Golden Age materialises,” he writes, “the future will reveal a wonderful world indeed, a vista to excite the mind and thrill the heart. It will be bigger and better than the present – but not only that… it will be different… You and I, the frozen, the resuscitees, will be not merely revived and cured, but enlarged and improved, made fit to work, play, and perhaps fight, on a grand scale and in a grand style.” Tempted by such lofty visions of the future, devotees struggle to afford price tags of $75,000, for just a head, or $150,000 for the preservation of an entire body. The facility in Phoenix mainly houses frozen heads, referred to

as neuro-patients, in the belief that if the technology is advanced enough to bring someone back to life then scientists will be able to grow a new body with ease. Yet, it’s all too apparent that this industry doesn’t have the money it needs to be able to store bodies for an indefinite amount of time. Liquid nitrogen doesn’t come cheap and the facilities require weekly deliveries. In the past, the practice has attracted more negative publicity than fans, so photographer Murray Ballard had to overcome his subjects’ reticence – as well as paranoia – in his pursuit to document the cryonics believers. As he photographed, he couldn’t help noticing that some of the equipment looked less than state-of-the-art: “On my first visit I was quite taken aback by the primitive

nature of some of the equipment... having expected such ground breaking science to be carried out by cutting-edge technology.” Yet card-carrying, staff members, such as Dr Mike Perry, caretaker and prospective cryonics patient since 1984, appear unconditionally optimistic about the cause: “All my life I have been interested in some way of getting around the problem of death. At first I was taught about supernatural powers which were able to resurrect the dead, a feat no human science supposedly would ever accomplish or explain. But my belief in the supernatural faded out when I was a teenager so I became interested in alternatives. Cryonics is the best I have found so far.” 75

A large stainless steel dewar being filled with liquid nitrogen in the Phoenix facility. Dewars are low temperature storage containers used to permanently store cryonics patients. The dewar is being filled so that in the event of an unexpected cryopreservation it is ready for use

LN2 vapour extractor and thermo-coupling device (left) Cryo-suspension in progress, Phoenix, Arizona (above). Ballard witnessed the first preservation in two years at the facility Silvia (facing page, top left) prospective patient, Peacehaven, East Sussex, UK Dr. Mike Perry (top right) in Phoenix, Arizona, monitors patients in storage, provides surveillance during out of work hours and maintains log books

Frank, prospective patient and standby team member, Peacehaven (bottom right). A software engineer from Cambridge, Frank attends Alan and Silvia’s training weekends. He signed up as a prospective patient in 2005 Hugh, facilities engineer, Phoenix (bottom left). Hugh has been working at the cryonics facility since 1982 as an engineer. He is in charge of technology application and development. Hugh has designed and constructed the majority of devices and equipment used at the facility including, the ‘Patient Care Bulk Fill System’ and the ‘LN2 Vapor Cloud Extractor Thermo Coupling Device’

Cryo-stats, Cryonics Institute, Detroit, Michigan. Six patients are stored in each cryo-stat, placed inside a sleeve â&#x20AC;&#x201C; rather like a sleeping bag â&#x20AC;&#x201C; before being permanently suspended upside down in a pool of liquid nitrogen. Their heads are stored at the bottom as, should disaster occur, the feet would be the first to suffer exposure and the head last

Flower box, Detroit facility. Family members leave flowers in the numbered slots, corresponding with where their loved ones are held

Nothing but Blue skies Paul Hayward

After the Olympics, older Beijingers will recall with wonder the moment Deng Xiaoping decreed that “China should hide its dazzling light”. The “Walled World” of Maoist isolation mutated into the giant bubble of the 29th Olympiad, in which we witnessed an almost tangible shift in energy, in cultural power. Portentous newspaper columns on the symbolic dawning of the “Chinese century” flew off the default keys of commentators eager to read geopolitical significance into the javelin, the GraecoRoman wrestling and the Yngling, out on a sailing course miraculously cleared of hull-clinging algae. But for once the grand sweep of historical over-statement was easy to surrender to, because none of us who were in Beijing for those three weeks could doubt the scale of Chinese ambition. The Times in London said it best in an editorial. The three great new power blocks refuse to conform to western notions of “democracy” and “liberty” but are thundering on regardless with systems Marx or Mao would have laughed off as impossible. Russia, China and the Gulf States are free-market authoritarian societies. They blend rampant consumerism with repression. Between May and August, I spent significant time in both Moscow and Beijing and was struck by one important difference. Muscovites, on average, were 82

hostile, resentful, worn down, perhaps by a sense that an onerous national story had merely taken on another oppressive form. If they looked up, they saw a reformed KGB in government and a class of robber-oligarchs whose appropriation of old Soviet state assets had only been partly rectified by Vladimir Putin. Beijing was another universe. The pact between the people of this dramatically expanding city and its Politburo was that prosperity would trickle down through every borough so long as the people left the boat unrocked. This involved many charades and much Orwellian language-twisting. The Beijing authorities set up official protest parks for the Games but then announced that almost every dispute had been resolved by mediation, which no one witnessed. Two frail women in their 70s were sentenced to a year’s “reeducation through labour” for daring to apply to stage a legal protest at what they considered to be inadequate government compensation for the loss of their homes. When the “One World, One Dream” Olympic rhetoric threatened to scramble our senses, there were ample reminders that 10 per cent-plus growth, the beauty of the Bird’s Nest and Water Cube venues and the warmth and cheeriness of Olympic volunteers told only part of the story: the one China wanted us to see and report.

The local China Daily hyperventilated impressively for 17 days. Its opinion formers wondered: “Is the Chinese Dream the new American Dream?” And its news pages kept up a barrage of feelgood stories that might be summarised as: “Pollution down, happiness up!” If China is poisoning itself through madcap industrialisation, the Beijing organisers went to war with the climate to persuade 10,000 athletes and 20,000 media scufflers that an economic miracle can be achieved without turning the air into leek and potato soup. They fired cloud-dispersal rockets at the skies above the opening and closing ceremonies to avert the PR disaster of rain, forced cars off the roads and closed factories to combat smog. Under the headline: “Nothing but blue skies from now on”, the China Daily announced: “Beijing is enjoying its cleanest air for 10 years.” For now, a majority of Chinese still live in the countryside, but in 20 years 60 per cent of the population will reside in cities, and we wait to see whether the environmental lessons have truly been absorbed. As Mark Leonard writes in his book What Does China Think?, “For the first time since the end of the Cold War, Europe and America face a formidable alternative: the Chinese model.” Few experts expect America’s standing as the world’s biggest economy to last beyond 2050. Already the US have lost their

The IOC still think they were doing missionary work in Beijing. It was the other way around. China was the proselytiser hallowed status as No 1 Olympic power. China’s 51 gold medals raised them to the head of the table for the first time – 15 clear of America – and re-stated the message of the lavish opening ceremony, which was that no feat of social or cultural engineering is beyond the world’s most populous nation. The audacity of the capitalistcommunist merger is breathtaking. Inside the Forbidden City, Beijing’s favourite tourist attraction, which spreads north from Tiananmen Square, you amble through the Hall of Supreme Harmony and the Hall of Heavenly Purity believing yourself to be in a perfect museum of ancient dynastic splendour, only to come across a plaque that announces: “The preservation of this hall was made possible by American Express.” So much for “Last Emperor” daydreams. On the journey back north to the vast Olympic compound, a taxi would take you past a Floridian gated community (the “Laguna Resort”), guarded by the untwitching sentries who are everywhere in Beijing, and who prompted visitors from 204 countries to marvel at the Chinese talent for standing motionless, with hands glued to sides. Young Beijing smiled and practised its English. It spoke softly and gazed outwards. Older Beijing was largely mystified by the spaceship landing on its homeland. The oldest Beijing busied

itself as usual in the rapidly disappearing hutongs: the low-rise warrens of walls and alleys that have mostly been swept away by plazas, skyscrapers and hotels, where the western concept of instant service has yet to take root. Triumphalist, as ever, the International Olympic Committee president Jacques Rogge claimed: “One-fifth of the world’s population was exposed to Olympic values in a way they had never experienced before. Placing sport at the service of mankind and leveraging Olympic values to promote better understanding between people, nations and religions stands at the core of our mission.” Spot the conceit. The IOC still think they were doing missionary work in Beijing. It was the other way around. China was the proselytiser. It took the giant screen of Olympic triviality and projected on to it a distinctly Chinese vision of how the world will look once Western didacticism has run its course. As Leonard wrote, before the Games: “Since the time when British missionaries first travelled to the East, the West has focused on what it wanted from China – and how to convert the Chinese to a Western way of life. People wrongly assumed that as China grew richer, it would also become more like us.” The IOC’s Trojan Horse theory looked especially ragged as the Mayor of

London, Boris Johnson, mistook a closing ceremony for a Sandhurst parade and saluted Britain’s victorious athletes during the handover of the flag for 2012. The missing ingredient, which London will surely supply, was the absence of real human engagement; the gnawing suspicion that the regime could not trust its own citizens with tickets, with spontaneity, with imaginative freedom; and so the people who should derive most from the Games (and sacrificed most to make them happen) were often like ghosts at the fiesta. Now, though, a declaration. This was the most illuminating, preconceptionsmashing assignment of my professional life. A country is not only its political system. China is not solely the bleak memory of Tiananmen Square, nor the megalomania of its leaders. It’s also the light in its people’s eyes: hypnotic and eternal. Paul Hayward is a sports writer for the UK press

Half Way HOUSE PHOTOGRAphy ILAN GODFREY TExt GUY LANE

Since Johannesburg’s Central Methodist Church first opened its doors to refugees over four years ago, an estimated 5,000 have sought a form of sanctuary there – some for a couple of nights, others for years. Support for its outspoken bishop, Paul Verryn, is far from unanimous: local newspapers have decried the supposed transformation of a “place of worship” into a “den of iniquity”. Ilan Godfrey’s photographs of the privations endured inside the church date from March 2008 when the building served as a shelter for growing numbers of Zimbabweans fleeing escalating election violence in their country. They show cramped rooms of undoubted, den-like squalor: scenes not of iniquity, 86

but of hardship and making-do. “You’ve got to remember this is a church – it’s not built to provide a home for thousands of people. The facilities were shocking, disturbing in many ways,” says Godfrey. Yet he found that, despite the deplorable conditions, some semblance of order prevailed among the occupants: “Each person found a spot and they all seemed to respect their spaces. The people who were there permanently, and a lot of the women, were able to stay in the same place night after night. Certain areas were sectioned off for women and children; there was a family room; and the men would stay mostly in the passages and staircases.” Grim though the conditions were, in retrospect, Godfrey’s photographs were

A group of Zimbabweans living in cramped conditions (previous spread) in a section of the church called ‘The Boiler Room’. Up to 10 people stay here at any one time The entrance to the Central Methodist Church on Pritchard Street (above left). By late afternoon queues begin to form with people hoping to find shelter for the night A man sits alone in the west wing of the church (above). Many come here to pray and gather their thoughts

taken during some weeks of comparative stability and promise. “Everyone had high hopes for Morgan Tsvangirai, leader of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change, to win. There were a lot of people who were actually packing their bags and planning to go back to Zimbabwe to vote. Many people in the church had these ‘Vote MDC’ stickers and they were really enthusiastic about the whole idea of a new Zimbabwe and a positive future.” As events unfolded it was to become clear that their vision of progress in Zimbabwe was overly optimistic; just as their trust in the democratic credentials of Robert Mugabe was misplaced. More immediate concerns were to take precedence when an astonishing

wave of anti-immigrant violence left 62 dead across South Africa. The 2,000 Zimbabweans taking refuge in the Church would be forced to arm themselves as best they could while mobs besieged the building. As of late summer, the post-election surge in refugees entering South Africa has abated; a calm has returned to Johannesburg. Some of the homeless are even daring to take the trip back north, back across the Limpopo, and back to a future in Zimbabwe.

The rear end of the church building (left) has been transformed into makeshift laundry facilities. Here, piping and entangled washing lines act as drying space for clothing, linen and towels The roof of the church (below) is one of the few areas that get any sun, so residentsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; clothes are laid out here to dry Two men rest (bottom) after a long day in search of work. Employment in South Africa for foreigners, as for citizens, is limited

A resident attempts to clean the overcrowded room (top) where only women and children are allowed to stay. Belongings are used to separate one personâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s living space from the other; privacy is not an option Children pass their time (above) in the confined spaces of the church with little to occupy them It is not clear how many people reside in this room at any given time (right). On the day this photograph was taken it seems numerous women and children were utilising this small, cluttered and poorly lit space

Colin Masina has been staying at the church with his mother for the past three months. All he longs for is to return home to go back to school

John and Ingrid gather to talk in a dark passage of the church. Ingrid has been at the church for the past five months. ‘It is very difficult to find work,’ she says, ‘and if you do, the employers pay you unfair wages as they know you are a Zimbabwean’

LAND OF THE FREE PHOTOGRAPHY SEBA KURTIS TEXT MAX HOUGHTON

As a former illegal immigrant himself â&#x20AC;&#x201C; an Argentinian living in Europe â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Seba Kurtis turned his sensitised eye to Americaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s rapidly expanding Hispanic population, celebrating the way in which it brings an exuberant chaos to a sometimes sterile US panorama. He dramatises this disorderly aesthetic by letting light fall onto his negatives or by double exposing, resulting in pockets of brilliant brightness, or the surprise inclusion of

a blue plastic chair, beloved of Mexicans for front porchcontemplation, in the middle of the dull Douglas, Arizona landscape. As he observed the lives of second class citizens in the Land of the Free, Kurtis payed particular attention to the vast $2.2 billion keep-the Mexicansout-fence that is still being constructed through Arizona, Texas and California, as well to a tiny camera in a Hispanic bar in Luciana that observes bathroom activity.

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Don’t let The Bastards John O’Farrell

The middle eight of the Clash’s “Working for the Clampdown” ends with this stirring appeal: The men at the factory are old and cunning You don’t owe nothing, so boy get running It’s the best years of your life they want to steal... Since the first clank of industrialisation, there has existed a tattered thread of resistance to the hum of machinery and the regulating tick of the boss’s clock. The Luddites were legendary victims of history, as are today’s denizens of the free enterprise zones from Vietnam to Mexico and a hundred other shining lights of corporate globalisation. Here and there, improvements are made to the daily grind, but when faced with the seeming permanence of a regular job over the alternatives, the grind wins out. This is simply because the alternative for peasants stuffed into the dark satanic mills was as bleak as the alternative is for Latino peasants today. The feudalism, the superstition, the “traditions” that regulate thought and ensure male domination and the chaos of nature make a small income from a sweatshop seem like a ticket to freedom. The factory timetable may seem soulcrushing to educated moderns in the rich west, but its very predictability 102

offers stability to this new proletariat, especially for women workers. So much for the hundreds of millions who make the fabric of our consumer lives. Citizens of OECD states do have the luxury of reflection, and occasionally the most advanced economies have lessons for those still in the process of development. Take the debate that occurred in the decade or so as the post-war consensus collapsed in the UK and the spirit of revolt cloaked the mindsets of radicals from Berkeley to Berlin. The script that trickled down to the lyrics of the Clash began in the aftermath of 1956, when Khrushchev denounced Stalin at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, a speech whose force and content caused delegates to literally faint in the aisles. This crisis split the global left into smithereens, and one sliver went in a completely novel direction. They would become known as the Situationists, and the core of their message was summed up as “The critique of everyday life”. Their ideas were a hotchpotch of revulsion at the emergence of a US-led consumer culture, the political dirge of French politics, the violence of the Algerian war and their inspirations were half-read bits of Freud, Durkheim, the Dadaists, the Marquis de Sade and selected chunks of Marx. Their single word summary was the spectacle:

“The show is established once merchandise comes to occupy the whole of social life. Thus in a merchantshowman economy, alienated production is supplemented by alienated consumption. The modern pariah, Marx’s proletarian, is no longer so much the producer separated from his product as a consumer. The exchange value of goods has finally ended up by dictating their use. The consumer has become the consumer of dreams.” Richard Gombin’s succinct summary was truncated further by the Berkeley Free Speech Movement who, in 1964, produced parodies of the cards used by IBM on their early computers; “I am a human being. Do not punch, fold or bend.” The decade that saw the hippies become yippies ended with the democratisation of a thousand pleasures that had been the province of the avant garde. Music and art became means of self-expression for the most untalented, and the shallow and self-absorbed became wordsmiths in psychobabble. Communes became compounds. The Human Potential Movement sought to eliminate the cop in our minds but ended up freeing the ids and superegos that clustered around charlatans like Ronnie Laing and Werner Erhardt. And to be completely vulgar-Marxist about it, money had most to do with it. The shift in thought began in an era of unprecedented prosperity. By the mid-

Resistance is not futile, but it is tough, it requires hard thinking and reading more than the blogs of two or three friends ’70s, the oil crisis and the crumbling of the public institutions lovingly crafted by the post-war elites had created a nastier scenario. Howard Kirk, the hero of Malcolm Bradbury’s The History Man (1975) personified this beautifully, showing his radical chic rhetoric and his radical chicanery lifestyle. The coda on the 1980 TV version adds that Howard voted Tory in 1979, the same year as the Clash wrote “Clampdown”. Long before history “ended” in 1989, the anarchism of the communes had become the individualism of the suburbs, and the motto adapted from the original American revolutionaries, “Live Free or Die”, had become “Give Me Convenience or Give Me Death”, as sourly noted by Jello Biafra. As with each step of technological progress, we have a choice, a lifestyle choice, to use it to improve our selves or our environment. For every brave campaigning web operator highlighting oppression in his own sordid backwater at huge personal risk, there are a thousand blogs giving an outlet to the class of cranks who used to write letters to the papers in green ink. Technology, cheap travel, the demise of national sovereignty and the transient prosperity of the credit boom are circumstances that could have seen a flowering of a new and radical internationalism, and this has happened to a significant, yet small, degree. It has

mostly let a thousand flowers bloom that would be better left to the weeds. Resistance is not futile, but it is tough, it requires hard thinking and reading more than the blogs of two or three friends. That is difficult to do because we don’t have much time to our selves and our thoughts, and we don’t have the time to seek out allies and prospective comrades who can organise change. Which brings us back to the Situationists and their “critique of the real by the possible”. That much, they learnt from Marx, who toiled away in the British Library, as Chomsky noted, rather than burning it down. Resistance to Everyday Life has become a consumer option. Bookburning is one, be it The Satanic Verses or Danish cartoons for those whose resistance to Modernity means a retreat into religious fundamentalism. Cranks who deny global warming or the persistence of inequalities delude themselves that they are combating political correctness. Liberals whose commitment to diversity blinds them to the prison of “traditional” communalism are as deluded as the above. At least religious fundamentalists have a programme, which is more than can be said for the coalitions of the willful opposed to (say) the EU, the WTO or the War on Terror. The absence of a big picture alternative leads one to conclude that resistance is best fought

when a visible and achievable outcome is possible, be it a single local issue or a gripe in one’s workplace. If another Everyday Life is possible, and perhaps that of one’s neighbours and friends, then that step is surely worth taking. If changing one’s own life for one’s own sake is the theory and the practice however, that is not resistance but therapy – “socialism in one person”, as was ruefully observed about Jerry Rubin by one of his ex-Yippie buddies. If one’s road to resistance is a solo journey, then the first step is not worth taking. Resistance is too much fun not to be shared. John O’Farrell is Communications Officer with the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, based in Belfast

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FALL AND RISE

PHOTOGRApher michael donald interview guy lane 104

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I used to regularly pass a half-demolished building with a chair on the first floor it seemed that someone had just got up and left it, that it was frozen in time. A lot of pictures of derelict buildings can look really lovely, but they only tell half the story. I wanted to find a building that was going to be demolished so I could take photographs beforehand.

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The first option of a building that came up was Longbow House in Hoxton. I’d just go there and hang around. The residents were ambivalent about what I was doing. They thought, ‘He’s harmless, we’ll just let him get on with it,’ as opposed to really engaging with the project, which was fine by me. I didn’t think – and still don’t think – that anything I did was particularly lofty, or making any kind of social statement.

A national newspaper wrote a piece saying these people were having their community destroyed. That was absolutely not the case; the people that lived there got good deals and they were all quite happy with the situation. When they were re-housed they were able to choose their neighbours â&#x20AC;&#x201C; they werenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t bullied at all.

For a period of about three weeks everybody had gone, and nothing was happening. The place was empty and the demolition company had given me the key codes to get into every flat and just wander about. It was quite surreal. That was the weirdest bit and it made the biggest impression on me because there were tiny traces of life left around â&#x20AC;&#x201C; but no demolition people and no builders. The whole place was completely empty.

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“There was an exhibition of the pictures on the estate soon after it was knocked down. People didn’t necessarily come to see the photographs; they came to see into other people’s flats. There were little communities within the blocks: Greek-Cypriot, Irish, hardcore fly-the-flag English. And within their communities they were in and out of each other’s flats all the time but they never really mixed so they were very interested in seeing everybody else’s flats.”

“For me there had to be a sense of loss at the end. I suppose that is sentimental; by that I mean remembering things emotionally. And the people that lived there are much more attached to the pictures now than they were at the time. They really love the work now – it means more to them as time goes on.”

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POINT BLANK PHOTOGRAphy andrea diefenbach TExt GUY LANE

The HIV virus is believed to have entered the countries of the former Soviet Union through the city port of Odessa, “Pearl of the Black Sea”. The first case of infection was reported in 1987, and since then the numbers – and fatalities – have soared. Andrea Diefenbach’s Aids in Odessa project is an unflinching study of the lives of individual Ukrainians who are, or were, HIV-positive or suffering from fully developed Aids. Intravenous drug use is a recurrent theme, it is a causal factor in about 70 per cent of registered HIV cases in the Ukraine. Sergej, 40, (pictured right) began injecting drugs in 1981. When he reached the stage where his ruined veins could accommodate no more needles he turned instead to codeine-laced fever tablets. He suffered from spinal injuries and bone tuberculosis, but dosed-up and numbed he could wander the city free from pain. He was registered HIVpositive in 1999 but not informed of the fact until a prison test in 2003. As might be expected of any work that seeks to squarely confront addiction, many of Diefenbach’s photographs are studies in human bankruptcy, futile repetition and senseless waste. Those with a predilection for positive role models and a preference for victims to wear brave faces would do well to look away. Diefenbach’s 15 case studies were photographed in 2006; at least six are now dead. Sergej died in August 2007. 110

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NATASCHA, AGE 23 Before Natascha (seated right) lost the use of her legs she funded her habit by prostitution. Clients dislike tell-tale track marks on the arm, so her doses of baltushka, a cheap ephedrine-based mixture, were administered to her neck by a companion. She thinks it was a combination of drug abuse and syphilis that resulted in a partial paralysis which has left her unable to walk. She tested HIV-positive in 2005

‘My husband-to-be sold me for $2200. The pimp tried to induce an abortion by administering pills, but it did not work. So I was carrying a dead foetus in my womb for two months. I was still forced to do three, four clients a day. Only the thought of my baby daughter back home stopped me from taking my life’ – Dalia, 20

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AIDS MEMORIAL DAY, 2006 Balloons are released in commemoration of those who are dying of Aids in Odessa

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SERGEJ, AGE 36 By his own account Sergej’s life began to fall apart once he started taking drugs: he lost his wife (also an addict), two sons, his home, his freedom, and of course his health. The death of his wife spurred an attempt to get clean and stay out of prison, but… Doctors at the Aids clinic said there was no hope for patients with his illness. Still Sergej believed that – if the fluid could be drained from his lungs, and if he could finish the medication – he might one day return home. Sergej died in June 2006

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MASHA, AGE 26 Soon after she first injected drugs at 17, Masha became dependent, needing increasingly large daily doses of opium and heroin. Despite the severity of her addiction she maintained a veneer of normality that prevented even her brother learning of her illness. Only the death of a close friend from an overdose alerted Mashaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s family to her condition. She tested positive for HIV in 2004. She died in September 2007

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SERGEJ, AGE 35 Sergej and his girlfriend Jula were trapped in a life of petty crime and addiction. The couple were persuaded by Aids workers to undertake tests: both were positive. Sergej believes himself the father of Jula’s daughter – conceived, he claims, during prison visits while he was incarcerated for drug offences. Time served, Sergej was kicked out of the clinic where he sought treatment for tuberculosis. Since then, he has failed to organise the paperwork necessary for further treatment

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Portfolio Ewen Spencer

Ewen Spencer graduated from Brighton School of Art and Design in 1997. His degree show project on the UK’s Northern Soul scene introduced him as a perceptive photographer of British sub-cultures. Tipped by Martin Parr as the most promising newcomer in 2002, Spencer also gained a reputation for his work with bands such as The Streets, The White Stripes and New Order, creating some of the most inspired album covers over the past decade. Images from Spencer’s project on British teenagers have been exhibited around the world and have found their way into many public and personal collections. In 2005, Spencer developed his interest in youth sub-cultures, completing a project on London’s Grime music scene, which was published in 8 magazine in 2006. Ewen Spencer is represented by HOST Gallery in London and his signed, edition prints are available for purchase. hostgallery.co.uk

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Hannah Murray, Skins, commissioned by Channel 4, 2007

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From the series on teenagers, 2001

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From the series on teenagers, Rossendale, 2001

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From the series on teenagers, Rossendale, 2001

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From the series on teenagers, Rock, Cornwall, 2001

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The Streets, Original Pirate Material, Universal Music, 2002

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Limehouse, Open Mic, 2005

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Columns 133 FICTION 140 BOOK SPOTLIGHT 142 Book Reviews 150 Exhibtion Reviews 162 Magazine Report 166 Listings 168 On my shelf 178

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The press Photographer Chris Steele-Perkins There is an idea floating about among critics and curators within British photography and beyond, that working photographers are not to be taken seriously. They are employed and subject to their masters, unlike an elite group of Independent Photographers whose work is more honest, pure, artistic – better. Sometimes it is, often it is not, and the cloak of IP often masks the sterner reality that they are not good enough to find employment and supplement their income from grants and teaching while producing a thin gruel of material floundering on a low work ethic and limited ability. The butt of the IP scorn is the newspaper photographer, the Smudgers who graft away, in their simple way, day on day, year on year, photographing chores they are told to do and having their work chosen and cropped by picture editors and designers, without a voice of their own. Like most clichés this view of the press photographer is actually true in part, and in large part very much false. I was forcefully reminded of this divide in photography when I visited the exhibition of the late Don McPhee at the Guardian Newsroom in London and was reminded of what I always knew, that he was a fine photographer with a distinctive voice. I was reminded of how valuable the work is as a social history of Britain – both on the larger political stage of major events and in the smaller, but no less valuable, observations on life as lived by ordinary people. The output of the press photographers offers an extraordinary treasure chest.

Don McPhee was one of the most able and the Guardian and Observer newspapers have generally maintained photography of consistently high quality. Since this was triggered by Don’s work I focus on him, and broaden it out to include two of his colleagues Denis Thorpe and Neil Libbert whose work I remember noting when I was starting to make my way as a photographer. They turned their hand to everything – hard news, sport, portraits, features, and again and again I would spend time with their pictures. They made me pay attention. It is the abiding importance of the best work of the press photographers that I make a case for. Documentary photography straddles art, history, sociology, memory, politics, culture, serendipity and beauty in a complex and intricate way. First it is a record of something – an event, a place, a person. That record is executed with differing degrees of success by the photographer and their skills may not be just “photographic”, of a subtle eye, but the ability to blend in, disappear, or the opposite, to make oneself sufficiently unforgettable and persuasive to achieve results others could not: to get the picture. One of the wonders of photography is that the most pedestrian of photographers, so long as they keep grafting away, will sometimes come up with some treasures – a gift of chance, doggedness and the camera. The more often you are out there photographing the greater the likelihood of you coming up with something worthwhile. This

Media Column

necessity, of getting out there and interacting with the world and its vicissitudes, is at the core of all documentary photography. Press photography should not be cordoned off as the poor cousin of documentary photography, for it is at the pulsing heart of it. Moreover, many of the newspaper photographers are deeply committed to photography and practise it outside of their daily newspaper work, following projects of their own and keeping a knowledgeable eye on other developments in photography. Denis Thorpe says that the Robert Frank’s photographs of Wales published in US Camera in 1955 and Eugene Smith’s Pittsburgh images, published in Popular Photography in 1959, which he saw at the time of publication, were hugely influential on him. The great American curator and critic John Szarkowsky was one of the few in positions of power in the art world to celebrate this cornucopia of imagery made by the press in the exhibition and book From the Picture Press in 1973. Yet overall, the contribution of the newspaper photographers has been little explored in relation to the history of documentary photography, other than in the self-referential manner of comparing like to like, asking only the question: what is the best press photograph, rather than what is its place in the photographic canon? Peter Hamilton, in his introduction to Denis’ book On Home Ground, identifies him as a “humanist/ pictorialist, crafting a body of work 133

Media Column

This necessity, of getting out there and interacting with the world and its vicissitudes, is at the core of all documentary photography

from the daily tasks of reportage”. I would say this description is true of all three of these photographers, and in these current times, humanist/pictorialist is not a good thing to be according to the critical tendency. Cynical, repetitive, bland, staged perhaps, but, engaged with a touch of lyrical romanticism, ah! the kiss of critical death. Don McPhee, who died in 2007, was a staff photographer for the Guardian all his working life. He had a wry humour – something shared by them all, but more to the fore in Don’s work. You can feel the same sensibility at work in the nonchalant absurdity of the juxtaposition in Miners’ Strike, Orgreave Coking Plant, 1984, and the belly laugh contained in Anglican Whitsuntide Walk, Manchester, 1980, as the man of God inflicts his private pleasure on one of his flock. Both photographs surpass the level of a slick joke for they are precisely made images that do not exhaust themselves on repeated viewing. On the other hand, in pictures like Disused Pit Stack, South Elmsall, 1984, he also displays a complex compositional mastery allied to descriptive purpose that many more selfregarding photographers are unable to achieve. Of the three photographers shown here, Denis has the more graphic leaning as he enjoys exploring the cut-out qualities of the silhouette and the linear graphics of the urban and rural landscape, while another aspect of his work offers raw, simple and unfakeable warmth. These are marvelously blended in Arbor Low Prehistoric Stone Circle, Derbyshire, 1975 and A Miner’s Child at 134

Media Column Clockwise from top right: A Miner’s Child at the Welfare Hall, Askern, South Yorkshire, Denis Thorpe; The DHSS Office, 1986, Neil Libbert; Heben Bridge, Yorkshire, 1978, Denis Thorpe; Miners’ Strike, Orgreave Coking Plant, 1984, Don McPhee; Anglican Whitsuntide Walk, Manchester 1980, Don McPhee

the Welfare Hall, Askern, South Yorkshire. Sentimentality is avoided by the shade of melancholy. Hebden Bridge, Yorkshire, 1978 is at first glance a simple landscape yet somehow charged with echoes of Pieter Brueghel the Elder, LS Lowry and even MC Escher. Neil Libbert did work as a staff photographer for some years from 1960 for the Guardian and then spent a period working with the Sunday Times before moving to the Observer. Neil has also had periods of working freelance. In the late 1980s he spent over a year photographing unemployment and homelessness, particularly concentrating on DHSS offices. It is interesting to note how Paul Graham made his reputation with a series of cool, detached colour photographs taken inside DHSS offices – work that has been shown in Tate Modern – and Neil Libbert’s intense, desperate images of the same period are unknown. The great collections of photography, or those that aspire to be great collections, need to reflect the best work across the spectrum of the media. Press photography, across the board, has rarely been championed. And yet it is the photograph of everyday life as it is lived, it is photography at the core of social documentary practice, and we should show a bit more respect to some of its finest practitioners. Chris Steele-Perkins has been a Magnum photographer for 25 years. A Long Exposure: 100 Years of Guardian Photography is on at the Lowry in Salford until 1 March 2009 135

Body image column

Baring All Susan Greenberg I am told that my bald head is very pretty. It is smooth and sculpted, the basic oval shape planed at interesting angles on both sides of the front dome. I know this, along with a bunch of other odd facts, because six months of chemotherapy for breast cancer removed every strand of hair from my body. The head hair went first, in great clumps, a few weeks after my first dose in December 2007. I told a friend, “It’s bloody cold up there!” He laughed, and pointed to his own bald head: “Now you know what we have to put up with.” Covering up is fiddly. Wigs itch like crazy, and go askew, and the hair can look too obedient. I catch glimpses of this in shop windows. What passed as normal and nice in front of the hallway mirror suddenly looks “wiggy”. With a headscarf, it is hard to maintain temperature control: a covering comfortable for indoors is not warm enough for the winter air. In the summer, if you expose your scalp to the sun, you are risking a new form of cancer and if you cover up, you risk boiling your brains. Sometimes I stayed at home, just to avoid the effort of presenting my head to the world. The eyebrows and eyelashes were gone by Easter. Forewarned, I went to Selfridges cosmetics hall to buy an eyebrow pencil, but this turned out to be difficult. I learned that eyebrows are now very “big” in make-up fashion, and the pencil has been eclipsed by waxes, powders and washes, brushed over the existing hair for dramatic effect. I tried to indicate my problem to a young sales assistant but her self-absorbed eye didn’t 136

take in my scarf and bare temples. So I spelled it out: “The thing is, I need something to use instead of eyebrows, not on top of them.” “Instead?” Her face was a grimace of incomprehension. I felt ridiculously upset, and ran to the ladies to wash my red eyes. I learned some people deliberately remove their eyebrow hair, favouring art over nature. A visitor from the US brought me a pack of “Perfection Stencils” – they came in four styles: Delicate, Elegant, Glamorous and Classic – and a matching compact of wax and eyebrow powder. I preferred to go freehand with a pencil, sourced at last. The absence of eyelashes was a much bigger shock. I felt very exposed to the world, and the world exposed to me. When I cried, my tears splattered and leaked in all directions. The last chemo dose came at the end of May. Two months later, my head was covered in short fuzz and the eyebrows showed a 5 o’clock shadow. In the heat, through sheer physical desperation, I went around a museum exhibition completely wigless and hatless for the first time. People were terribly polite: no one stared or pointed. Confidence boosted, I started to bare my head in more of London’s public places, and met the same polite indifference. During chemo I became very selfconscious about my right hand, which was permanently bruised. Every three weeks, nurses took a blood sample to check the cell count, and then the next day, inserted a cannula to deliver the drugs. Sometimes the first try didn’t succeed, so there were three or four

attempts, each one leaving a sore, purple mark. The cannula is a piece of plastic plumbing, sitting on top of a hollow surgical needle. This is inserted into the vein, to allow doctors and nurses to attach and detach drips at will. Sometimes, I was expected to wear one for long periods – for example, when there was a long delay while the chemo mix was prepared, or during any hospitalisation. For me it had its own special horror, beyond the pain of insertion. There is something about wandering around with a port into your body’s interior that makes you feel harpooned, pinned down and marked with a capital P for Patient. Conversely, this instant access seems to make medical people very happy; it takes very little excuse for a cannula to be prescribed. One of the chemo drugs, Taxotere, made my fingers and toes numb and the nails discoloured. “Oh yes, you might lose a few fingernails,” the oncologist observed. Each nail now has at the top an area of white, where the nail is pulling free of the skin, a band of mottled brown, a band of normal pink skin and a wide pale stripe across the bottom. The whole surface is stippled and crooked. Two months from the last dose, it is still hard to use my fingers. They feel unreliable, as if I am being erased from the tips upwards. It bothers me out of all proportion to the relative seriousness of this problem, compared to my general predicament. Like anyone with a serious illness, I must manage other people’s anxieties as well as my own. Chemotherapy is odd in that you actually get worse every day,

Body image column

There is something about wandering around with a port into your body’s interior that makes you feel harpooned, pinned down and marked with a capital P for Patient

not better. For breast cancer it also often takes place before surgery, not afterwards, so the tumour remains in place during the long wait. This always surprises people, and upsets their strong need to see the afflicted friend or colleague as someone who, having been given a diagnosis and treatment, is therefore getting better. They wish a swift recovery, but there is no recovery going on. This must wait not only for the end of chemo, but also the surgery and, often, radiotherapy. If all goes well, treatment takes 10 months. If it doesn’t – for example, if chemo is delayed by adverse reactions, or if the first surgical operation is unsuccessful in removing all diseased tissue – it can drag on for considerably longer. Even when the trajectory of treatment is completed, recovery is, properly speaking, a recovery from the treatment alone, rather than the main illness. Chemo makes the hair fall out, and then the hair grows back again: this is good for morale, but it says nothing about the progress of the cancer itself. One must wait two or more years to know if all traces of the disease have been eradicated. And even then, there is no certainty. Once one has had cancer, one is never entirely free from risk of a recurrence. The doctors talk only in terms of minimising the risk. When surgery finally comes, it is a relief. But none of the options is exactly nice. Reconstruction options following mastectomy include the L-flap, which moves back muscle around to the front, and the rectus free flap, which uses tissue from the abdomen. If the tumour

is small enough, and in the right place, one is offered what is elegantly called “breast conservation”. This ranges from a small incision directly into the affected area to the much more ambitious “central block technique”. In this operation, the original breast tissue, skin and nipple are retained, but underneath the surface it goes through a major trauma of reorganisation. The afternoon before surgery, the invisible is briefly made visible when surgeons visit women in the ward and mark them up with black felt tips pens. Dotted lines for the surgeon’s knife, and X marks the tumour spot; a helpful “L” or “R” (for left or right), to make sure they don’t take the wrong one. Throughout the months of treatment, people habitually say that I look very well. It is hard to know if this is true in an absolute sense or only by comparison with their expectations: cancer and chemo are dread words that evoke dread images. For the patient, however, one’s notion of “dread” and “good” changes radically. Now, “good news” consists of learning that the tumour tested strongly for hormone receptors, because that means the doctors can throw in an extra treatment. On diagnosis, a year earlier, the response was: “Tumour? I have a freaking tumour?!” Susan Greenberg is a senior lecturer in creative writing at Roehampton University. She is a founding member of the International Association for Literary Journalism Studies (www.ialjs.org) and a contributor to Prospect 137

Arts Column

The price of Stillness David Matthews In March 1991, a group of insurgents invaded the tiny west African state of Sierra Leone from neighbouring Liberia. Led by ex-Sierra Leonean army photographer, Foday Sankoh, this ragtag of fellow countrymen and National Patriotic Front of Liberia troops called themselves the Revolutionary United Front. They had an axe to grind against a corrupt and dictatorial regime and came in the name of “the people”. But in the ensuing conflict that lasted more than 10 years, tens of thousands of men, women and children were maimed, tortured and killed. Though hostilities ended in 2002, thousands of the country’s six million people are still displaced or suffering the aftershock of war. The capital, Freetown, like many parts of the country, has no 24-hour electricity supply, little running water, and poorly paved roads. According to the UN Development Programme, Sierra Leone is the poorest country in the world. Life expectancy is 41 years and infant mortality is the worst on earth. Yet life goes on. Sierra Leoneans have an unquenchable spirit, a spirit that is seen day in day out on the anarchic, frenetic city streets of Freetown, streets where over a million people battle, jostle and banter their way to survive. It was this spirit that I tried to capture in “Rush Hour”, a video triptych I cocreated with visual artist Paul Howard between 2006 and 2007. “Rush Hour” was an ambitious collaboration that drew on the people of Freetown as a way to graphically illustrate working life on the streets of a modern African city. How? By co-opting 138

some 200 people into being “actors” in a motionless piece of street theatre, an installation, that effectively shut down the centre of the world’s poorest city as an act of aesthetic defiance. After several months of planning, cutting through reams of red tape and cajoling, bullying and “charming” assorted government officials, at 6am on Friday 6 December, 2006, still under the cover of darkness, with the support of a local theatre company, the Freetong Players, and half a dozen or so somewhat disengaged cops, we closed down Freetown’s busiest thoroughfare, Siaka Stevens Street. An entire block was “dressed” with more than 200 extras and actors, literally posing as everyday characters: newspaper vendors, shopkeepers, street sweepers, schoolchildren, grocers, businessmen on their way to the office. They were filmed in situ, all motionless, except for their slight movements: blinking, breathing, swallowing and muscle twitching. Into this space we also brought static objects such as a taxi, a minibus, a handcart and assorted goods. This “real time”, high-definition video material was later edited and mixed with still photographic images, which in turn were computer-animated. The resulting 22-minute piece, once projected onto three massive screens, concealed the surface speed and velocity of street life in Freetown while revealing the subjectivity of the event on the individuals involved. The visual imagery was accompanied by a “mockumentary” soundtrack, which imitated a trawl through Sierra Leone’s

airwaves (complete with music, jingles and commercials) and focused on a scripted but “as live” radio phone-in show that added cultural and historical detail to the work and thus enhanced its sense of time, place and mood. As Sierra Leone was founded in 1787 as a safe haven for liberated slaves, the soundtrack gave us an opportunity to link the work to last year’s bicentenary of the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act of 1807 and thus weave a timely political thread into our more abstract imagery. “Rush Hour” set out to challenge its subjects (as well as its audience) to confront notions of contemporary poverty, industry, patience, liberty “African-ness” and how Africans and Westerners interact with one another via the camera. So much of what the West sees of Africa in film or photography is stereotypical, predictable, a homogenous whole, or even, “hole” – a bottomless pit into which Westerners gawp at the tragic “heart of darkness” of Africa. Africans thus become “othered” – turned into shapeless, faceless armies of victims, denied individuality or personalities or cultural nuance. Paul and I wanted to play on such notions, by manipulating our 200-odd actors into an illusionary “cast of thousands”, initially as a deliberately clichéd view of everyday Africa. Our subjects (or is it “objects”?) were amorphous, seemingly frozen in time, and appeared in the opening sequence of the film as just another crowd scene on a TV screen or in a guidebook. But slowly, as the camera angle changes, the viewer is given the sensation of moving into and

Arts Column

The moment they became aware of what they were doing a ripple of laughter would spread through the crowd and we’d have to start the sequence again

around the crowd. Individual faces and features become apparent; the crowd is not as “frozen” as first thought. The subjects were in fact struggling to stay still. They twitched and fidgeted and did their best to resist the urge to move. As we could only shut down Siaka Stevens Street for four hours, many of our scenes were shot in just one take. Any form of movement was therefore a problem. There were moments in filming when an actor would find him or herself caught in a moment of self-conscious recognition: I could see from their expressions how absurd, how Western, how pretentious such moments were for them. The moment they became aware of what they were doing, they’d burst out laughing, causing a ripple effect throughout the crowd, and we’d have to start the sequence all over again. All the while the subjects had to stay still, not only to satisfy us, the artists, but themselves. After all, the work wasn’t called “Rush Hour” for nothing; the primary feature of rush hour anywhere in the world is to get to and from work and thus make money. And so, the subjects of this work were not standing on a humid street in Africa for the love of art. They were standing still because they had been paid to do so. Given that the average Freetown inhabitant spends much of their waking hours trying to hustle enough food to eat, making a street full of city-dwellers stand still for the equivalent of a month’s pay may seem like a piece of cake, to a European. But Sierra Leoneans are not Europeans. To them survival is about movement.

“Rush Hour” thus posed the questions: How much does it take to make someone stand still in a place as chaotic as Freetown? What is the value of stillness, of silence, of peace – notions that Westerners take for granted, yet have commodified through mini-breaks, yoga, holidays, flotation tanks and, of course, art? I’d like to think that by being explicit about the nature of my relationship with the subjects in “Rush Hour” I have resisted the temptation to romanticise my role, or theirs, or the fantasy that there has ever been any fair exchange between the West and Africa. Certainly, the subjects of the film knew what they were getting into when I briefed them beforehand. And all 200 were reminded again when they received the

equivalent of £4 for four hours work. People are dirt poor in Sierra Leone. Therefore the monetary exchange between Paul and me as artistic “paymasters” and that of the actors as “labour” is part of the extended politics of the piece. We actively court controversy by exposing the obvious answer to “how we got them to stand still”. This may sound like chequebook guerrilla art, at its most mercenary. But is that any worse than driving down an African city street in a 4x4 taking photos of “the other” without their permission, let alone any payment? I don’t think so. David Matthews writes for the Observer, the Sunday Telegraph and other UK press. His latest book, True Blue, will be published in March 2009 (Fourth Estate) 139

Fiction

Echoes, Elephants Vanessa Gebbie Exorcise it, they said. So Tom writes with photos as prompts, picked at random from a glossy compilation of news shots. Therapy, this is. Like someone will take his words, read them, use them as medicine. But here, at home now after months, years, there is no one to read, no one to even file the words away like they don’t say anything – ever. But this is what he does. Today the photo is of a car crash. A pale blue car concertinaed between lorry and brick wall. It’s dark, raining. The tarmac glows. There’s a single streetlamp, orange light fizzing like a kid’s spilt drink. Tom would usually note that down, but this time, he doesn’t. Not that his kids are of an age to spill drinks, but the mix of kids’ drinks and the broken body of the car echoes. Echoes. The door of the driver’s cab hangs open. On the door the letter G just visible in yellow on dark green. A sheaf of papers on the floor. Hanging from the rear view mirror is something on a chain. Tom pushes his glasses back up his nose, peers at the photo. It’s a crucifix. A rosary. It’s almost moving, swinging. The pendulum of a clock. A censer. Tom smells incense, feels starched cotton over bare knees, smells mothballs. The hairs on the back of his neck prickle. Has he remembered to polish his shoes? Will his father see dirty shoes beneath the robes, get the stick out? Will his mother 140

pull his father by the sleeve, try to stroke the leather patch, will his father push her away, tell her to get the food on the table only this lad’ll have to eat his standing up because his arse will be raw? In the photo, the wall is painted brick. Cream, peeling. There are flakes of paint on the wet tarmac, a few on the bonnet of the car. The bonnet steams. Like the car’s soul is escaping. Tom’s hands are cracked. The skin down the sides of his nails is cracked and sore, like a miner’s. On the mantelpiece in his front room is a miner’s lamp. It’s dented, like the car bonnet… … the room is filled with dark dust, he can’t breathe, he hears horses whinnying, the screech of metal-rimmed wheels careening off metal rails, a tumbling of rocks into water, the creak of timber, the fall of stone… a man standing at a door holding a hat, blocking the sun, handing Tom’s father – who is young and will never be happy again – his own father’s lamp, and he’s saying something, keeping his eyes lowered. There’s glass on the tarmac. Burst out of its frame like a live thing and heaped itself all about in fairy cubes. He thinks, stupidly, of confetti, and cries. Thinks of a wedding night. … and oyster satin on the floor, and sweat, and first times, and confetti in her hair, dark on the pillow, and her, Maggie, his wife, Maggie his wife! Clutching the sheet to her breasts, the nipples red, red. And asking if you can fall first time? And a tiny, tiny fleck on the sheet, but red,

red... He makes a note about multicoloured confetti and blood… … and much, much later, saving up for a trip to a place in London with the wife and kids to see sculptures made from cars. An elephant’s head made from ribbons of car-door steel, the frame a skeleton, the elephant looming up and out, ears flapping, the distant sound of trumpeting from a loudspeaker while people pushed and touched and the sign said “Please don’t touch.” And her, Liddy, hair dark as her mother’s, stuffed her fingers in her mouth to stop the laughter echoing on the white walls… echoing… The car door here, this car door, is buckled but still latched. The window’s burst, the door almost folded in two, but it’s still latched. His voice saying, “Always lock the car when you’re driving at night, love.” Tom doesn’t want to see into the car. Behind it is a breakdown truck. Door open. A bloke in uniform sitting on the tarmac in the glass and the damp, leaning against the broken car, one arm over his eyes. He’s resting his head on his knee, and Tom can see his hair is thinning. That pulls. He maybe tried to do something. Maybe he got a callout, There’s a car broken down, Victoria Street, near the old cinema. Maybe the message said, it’s a girl driving, a dark-haired girl with shoulder-

Gordon Miller

Fiction

length hair and earrings in the shape of sailing ships. On her own, a bit scared of the dark. And someone said, someone at the office who took her message from the mobile, No problem darling, stay in the car. That’s the best. We’re on our way. And Tom wonders if she put the radio on, or whether she got out her handbag and did something with lip gloss, or whether she called home. He doesn’t think so. But resting on the wheel – he can see it now, he can look – there’s a hand holding a mobile. A white mobile with a pink ribbon for a strap. … a pink ribbon pinned on a nurse’s uniform. He got confused, said it was in the wrong place, went to get it because it belonged on a mobile, Liddy’s mobile, not twisted into a loop on a nurse, and they pulled his hand away. Then someone

was shouting. It sounded a bit like his father and Tom flinched, waited for the stick, then slid down the wall and put his forehead on his knees because suddenly, his head was so, so heavy. Tom puts down his pen and looks at the photo. The Press gets everywhere. The bloke, called Tom, with his head on his arm, didn’t see the flash. He looks at the girl’s dark head resting gently on the wheel like she’s asleep, he can see an earring in the shape of a sailing ship and he’s at a Twenty-First… … and Liddy’s smiling up at him, “Oh Dad, you shouldn’t have,” and he’s kissing her and saying “I know… I’ll take them back…” pulling the little box away and she’s laughing and hugging and her hair is dark over his face.

mental illnesses, or wives who have left, or sons who moved away, or Tom, him, himself, THIS Tom… the breakdown man… … being too slow to stop a lorry skidding down Victoria Road and into the wall of the old cinema, or a lorry driver who probably never noticed the little blue car stopped, or a dark-haired girl on a mobile phone who once saw an elephant’s head made out of a car door and laughed… Vanessa Gebbie’s collection of stories Words From a Glass Bubble is published by Salt Publishing, 2008 www.vanessagebbie.com

He hurts. He can’t write about love, or 141

BOOK Spotlight

Nicaragua Susan Meiselas A single book by Susan Meiselas is never enough. Her arresting images have always been underpinned by a fierce concern about their subsequent reception and dissemination. In this way, her book publishing has always been one event among many, each designed to address and disturb a stable framework of meaning that might attach to the complex situation or group of people she had been photographing. Fittingly, the republication of her seminal work Nicaragua from 1978-9 coincides with a season-long exhibition at the ICP in New York, where her 1982 show Meditations will be reprised – her tearsheets, magazine articles and prints sold to collectors all displayed – thus providing the necessary contextual information without which Meiselas’ work – any photographer’s work – would be removed from history. Nicaragua was an extraordinary undertaking for a young woman, fresh out of graduate school. In uncommonly vivid colour, Meiselas documented the death throes of the Somoza regime and the subsequent Sandinista insurrection, tracing the tumultuous evolution of the popular resistance movement to its triumphant victory. The 2008 edition contains a film showing Meiselas’ return to the scenes she photographed 30 years ago, tracking down some of her original subjects to listen to their stories of life in post-revolution Nicaragua. Nicaragua is published by Aperture (www.aperture.org). An exhibition of this work is on at the International Centre of Photography until 4 January, 2009 142

Youths practice throwing contact bombs (right) in forest surrounding Monimbo, Nicaragua, 1978

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Street fighter, Managua, Nicaragua, 1979

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Body being burned by the Red Cross to prevent the spread of disease, Masaya, Nicaragua

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Muchachos (young rebels) holding barricade, Matagalpa, Nicaragua

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Book Review

The ROMA JOURNEYS Joakim Eskildsen Published by Steidl www.steidlville.com £40 (416pp Hardback)

Charlotta’s sleeping infant is held in a patterned knotted hammock. Next to a railside escarpment, between trees that root themselves deeply in the earth of an adopted country, this young unblemished life will grow. Close to a mother who will shield her from the extremes of a St Petersburg winter, and a father who will exchange scrap from the land for nourishment, the family will mature among a people that, in a watchful and nervous age, remain at the edge of a more cared-for world. Joakim Eskildsen’s substantial new book opens with this tender and poignant observation. Perhaps signalling an ambition to work with a greater warmth and intimacy among a stigmatised, widely spread community, Eskildsen’s collaboration with his partner, the writer and poet Cia Rinne, is a move beyond the cursory, opportunist representations that photographers, for whom the Roma people have long held a fascination, have so often settled for. The book, at over 400 pages, is indeed a committed and ambitious statement 150

by both publisher and contributors. Its distinctive shape and carefully chosen materials successfully negotiate the extravagant freedoms that have been deployed in Finnish photo-book design over the past 25 years and, as such, it is a deep, sprawling and engaging work. In considering the Roma, the book touches upon approaches that Eskildsen has previously used in an earlier work, iChickenMoon. Again, it is a collaborative work, layering the photographs with essays and field recordings of music and the incidental activities of Roma life. Eskildsen and Rinne initially undertook the project in 2000, and until 2006 they moved through Roma communities in seven countries – working over extended periods to articulate a response to a people who, to use a phrase from Gunter Grass’ eloquent and emotive introduction, live “somewhere beyond all provident care”. Each chapter shares a structure that moves from panoramic monochrome to the earthen and saturated colour of medium format. While the wide scenes evoke a sense of interaction and activity, it’s the application of colour itself that distinguishes Eskildsen’s work. Rich, ink-laden and dark – the photographs are often made at dusk or in shallow light, allowing a vivid sense of territory and the adornment of body and interior to dominate. The colour seems to shift as the photographer travels. It becomes particular to each region, emphasising characteristics, like the blue-greys of Finland, or the ochre sands and pink twilight of Rajasthan, to significant effect. The photographs extend into

large, generously edited series, often with the sense of family dynamics and architecture foregrounded through repetition – rather than perhaps the iconic stoicism we have enjoyed in Koudelka’s early work. Eskildsen has found a voice that manages to merge the formal portrayal of washing scenes in Rajasthan – as still and laden in purpose as a 19th century Felice Beato plate – with the most contemporary sense of a frayed, unsettled landscape. Furthermore, the portrayal of order, warmth and progress within the family successfully extends the thoughtful journalism of Isabel Fonseca, whose earlier essays (previously published as Bury Me Standing), seemed preoccupied with the anxiety, social mistreatment and inequality of Roma communities in a manner that Eskildsen, though conscious of, is purposefully free from any obligation to labour. Beyond the copious portraiture that dominates this work, it’s perhaps the photographs of the land that add so much. Eskildsen’s colour photographs of the villages and wider landscapes are exquisite and singular, taking him – and us – somewhere fresh and significant in photography. They show how a community functions, how it manages itself, how its people work, survive and even how night falls upon it… It’s here, with attempts to suggest something of the structure and roots of the Roma communities, that the work becomes such strong, evocative and exciting territory in itself, and a book of no small achievement. Ken Grant

Book Review

The Somnambulists Joanna Kane Published by Dewi Lewis www.dewilewispublishing.com £19.99 (112pp Softback)

Statesman, poet, criminal, slave – could you tell who was who and which was which if you were simply presented with photographs of four different people? You would have a guess, trying to discern tell-tale traces which might reveal clues as to personality traits and lives lived. Of course, you’d actually hope to get it wrong – for it’s as much a truth that “thus is his cheek the map of days outworn”, in Shakespeare’s words, as it is that we’re all comfortable wearing our faces as masks to conceal our inner workings. The face may betray our age, health and general weathering, but it never reveals the whole picture. This has always intrigued scientists, as has the desire to read the external features as a peculiar barometer of human intellect, will and emotion. Phrenology, the late 18th century study partner of Physiognomy, sought to

demonstrate this supposed “connection between the faculties of the mind and organs in the brain”. This science of lumps and bumps was defined in Webster’s Dictionary c 1900 as “the physiological hypothesis that mental faculties, and traits of character, are shown on the surface of the head or skull”. You’ve probably encountered a phrenology bust or skull, with its carefully delineated areas deemed to correspond to emotional faculties such as “secretiveness”, “amativeness”, “combativeness” and “alimentiveness”. It would be disingenuous to deny that Phrenology as a discipline itself was not two-faced, and Joanna Kane’s study of phrenologists’ life and death masks does not shy from holding up the mirror. The phrenological mask was one of a range of emergent technologies in the early 19th century concerned with the understanding of and documentation of “social types”. The social distinction of Kane’s “sitters” is however, concealed by these photographs, their “faces” made to look essentially similar – poised, elegant, in deep repose, eyes and mouths closed. In this way, Kane’s apparently innocent, exquisite images would seem to reflect subtly and intelligently upon the double-edged history from which they arose: Phrenology’s efforts towards creating a democratisation of knowledge engendered a psychological reductionism which later led to it being deployed to justify racism and social engineering. A terrible example of this occurred in the 1930s, when colonial authorities in Rwanda used Phrenology to justify the alleged superiority of the Tutsis over

the Hutus, thus reportedly laying the groundwork for the genocide of 1994. Phrenology cannot cast off this awful legacy, yet the objects and ephemera of this disabused science remain like archaeological relics awaiting their own pardon and laying to rest. Kane’s photographs of a number of phrenological masks from the 300 or so remaining from an extensive collection (of over 2,500) from the Edinburgh Phrenological Society sought to create lifelike images through which we might – almost tangibly – explore the faces she focuses on here. Some are famous, some not: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake and Keats, the philosopher Jeremy Bentham and painters David Wilkie and Jacques-Louis David hover almost transcendentally alongside the unnamed, untitled and the criminal – oh, and there’s a Russian princess, too. Yet, Kane’s subjects become somehow one and the same, all reduced to beauty, their triumphs, talents, wealth or wrongdoing levelled to an ethereal, almost holographic, presence. Highly stylised, the lighting is staged to conceal the distinguishing features of the sitters and whitewash away any differences we might be keen to perceive; to force us to play exactly that guessing game of who’s who, or rather, who did what to whom. A compendium of thumbnails in the back details each mask and its wearer. So you do finally find out who was the slave, who the phrenologist, who the metaphysical poet and who the 14-yearold boy who killed a fellow 13-year-old for the sum of nine shillings. Colette Meacher 151

Book Review

ten series/ 106 photographs Matthew Sleeth Published by Aperture www.aperture.org £19.95 (208pp Hardback)

A photographer’s private thoughts and motivations are often found scrawled on the back of napkins, posted to the occasional blog, or tattooed to the underside of an insomniac’s eyelids. If you happen to be Matthew Sweet, whose book Ten Series/106 Photographs is now available from Aperture, your work offers a unique glimpse into that internal conversation. Photographers like Sleeth, drawn to the constraints of typologies, reveal their process for what it is: mad pursuit and obsession, as much a myopic exclusion of the rest of the world, as it is a selection of what’s facing them. Any record collector, librarian, or archivist shows the same predisposition: what you collect, collate, or file away says as much about you as your subject. While the typological instinct 152

is encrypted deep inside the core of the photography’s dusty mainframe, its modern adherents deliver the data of their discoveries as if uploading beautifully composed, well-lit, contemporary offerings to the Goddess of Typology. Sleeth’s photographs act as a kind of Human Highlight Film. It’s like watching a basketball game that’s been sped-up and compressed into only those moments when the ball goes through the hoop. Sleeth scores these 106 points with his fleet feet. Proving he can shoot anything, anywhere – from quiet portraits of women in uniform, to perfectly composed landscapes of Mt Fuji, his technical talent for capturing what he needs to capture, regardless of the setting, is obvious. Sleeth may not be Indiana Jones, but that photographic impulse to go out, find the thing, and drag it back, shows him to be more hunter than gatherer, more Sander than Soth. Yet, often in direct relation to the strength with which it succeeds, the typological instinct has a weakness at its core, as if its blood were bad, and no amount of treasure from an unknown land can soothe its soul. It’s not that building a book of typologies is a bad thing: it’s a form, like any other, a way of presenting information. If I’ve one misgiving about Sleeth’s work, it’s that his typologies seem too planned, too precious. Their message often edges into the great failure of street photography – the easy joke, the telegraphed laugh. The gist: I want you to see the remarkable things I’ve found, and I hope you’ll find them remarkable, too. Isn’t that the

wish of any photographer? However, in the typological tradition (as in most contemporary street photography) the wish feels electrified, brighter and glitzier than the photographs themselves. The photographer’s hand, and its need to show us one thing and one thing only, has a heaviness that prevents any kind of deep, interpretive reading. Ten Series/106 Photographs is not the kind of book you revisit for a multiplicity of meaning. And then... near the end of the book Sleeth reveals a series, “Kawaii Baby”, that stands heads and shoulders (literally) above the rest of the book. It’s a series in which Sleeth’s blonde toddler is shown being admired by Japanese women and girls. On the street, in restaurants, in the park, and always seen from behind (to capture the reaction of her admirers) Sleeth’s daughter acts as a kind of conceptual foil that opens up questions of ethnicity, community, and what it means to record the reactions people have when they’re looking at a pure expression of youth. “Kawaii Baby” makes-up a tenth of Ten Series/106 Photographs but it portends a talent who makes fine photographs 90 per cent of the time, but for that last 10 per cent, gets it very, very right. “Kawaii Baby” may be a type of picture itself, found within a larger collection of types, but the pictures aren’t drained or constrained by the form. Like the small blonde head in their foreground, they give Sleeth’s work a new, youthful light, while singlehandedly validating the drive of his particularly contemporary vision. Michael David Murphy

Book Review

french kiss Anders Petersen Published by Dewi Lewis www.dewilewispublishing.com £19.99 (120pp Hardback)

Discreetly located in a simple rectangular recess, at the heart of the Barbican’s 2006 survey of European Photography, a series of Anders Petersen’s Café Lehmitz photographs came close to resembling genuine photographic treasure. Made over three years in the late 1960s, the photographs effortlessly affirmed their place in a somewhat contentious show of subjective documentary work. More usefully, perhaps, they provided a key into a lineage of self-reflective practice that would follow, both in Europe and America. Graham Smith’s all too rarely seen South Bank photographs, for example, would later echo the sense

of veracity and participation found in Petersen’s work – and it’s impossible to think of these pictures without noting that those who populate Nan Goldin’s sprawling and formative early colour work convey similar intimacies. The expansive Ballad of Sexual Dependency would begin to gather momentum as Petersen’s influential Café Lehmitz was finally published in Europe in 1978. Petersen’s most recent work, French Kiss, gathers photographs made on extended recent trips to the SaintEtienne and Gap regions of south-eastern France, and once again confirms his thought that throughout his work he has been making, and trying to re-make, the same photograph. But where once the Café Lehmitz became a surrogate world, cushioning and constraining its dwellers, French Kiss exposes a wider, more harshly lit space, without the benefit of such tobacco-stained boundaries. It’s a book where Mediterranean skies are burnt to black, to meet dark interiors, and where incidental couplings seem to fan the final embers of some dwindling, lurid carnival. French Kiss joins a very different and experimental world from that which he first embraced in Café Lehmitz. It is a world after The Banquet by Araki, in which photographs of food were gathered in memory of his wife, as a brave and ambitious dedication. In the Petersen book, a plate of glistening oysters becomes an abrupt and luscious punctuation, generating notions of procreation and sustenance, particularly when placed between a close embrace and a solemn, unclothed portrait.

As Christian Caujolle notes in the book’s only extended text, there is a sense of skin upon skin, of lives in shadow, shaded from an austere and grain-blistered landscape. This shade finds partners at rest, sleeping like evacuees exhausted from the strain of an emotional war. Elsewhere, sitters present themselves to us, in alert and knowing moments that emerge from dull rooms as partially clothed moments of sanctuary, sexuality and forthright selfproclamation. Petersen’s work has often been underwritten as melancholy. It is, we hear, the work of a poet who draws upon a universal sadness in our name. Perhaps this is something felt by those outside the pictures, by those (as John Berger once usefully said) afforded “a compassionate leave” from what they witness. Instead, French Kiss perhaps draws us closer to Petersen himself, who has refined a working process over a course of more than 20 previous books. When Petersen’s work succeeds, it does so because the knowing skills of photography become secondary and effortless, leaving only intimacies, revelations and possibilities. The formal tactics that dominate French Kiss have been long refined. Yet, perhaps for that very reason the book rarely feels as untethered as the Lehmitz work still feels when happened upon, a substantial series defined, not by the photographer, but by risk, openness and the energy of his subjects, by the depth and relationships, and by the uncertain prospect of reaching a steady tomorrow. Ken Grant 153

Book Review

paris peru Robert Frank Published by Steidl www.steidlville.com £25; £17.50 (108pp Hardback); (48pp Hardback)

“I went to Peru to satisfy my own nature, to be free to work for myself,” Robert Frank would later say. “I didn’t think of what would be the correct thing to do, I did what I felt good doing.” In 1948, after moving to New York where he found work as a commercial photographer at Harper’s Bazaar, for star art director Alexey Brodovitch, and before the prolific decade in which he 154

photographed throughout Europe and America and produced The Americans, Frank, then 23, spent six months travelling through South America. On his return, he edited his images from Peru into a maquette. He gave one copy to Brodovitch and another to his mother as a birthday present. Steidl recently released this maquette as a clothbound book, along with Paris, a collection of Frank’s photographs of that city made in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Both books are strong and are published as part of Steidl’s “Robert Frank Project” which seeks to present a definitive collection of his work to date, including work that has not been seen before. Peru consists of 18 pairings of images plus a closer, and the dust jacket images reprinted inside. The paired images speak to one another compositionally, thematically, and figuratively; as a group, the pictures impart a feeling of peaceful calm and describe a bright, ordered society in harmony with both natural and constructed landscapes. Apart from the title and publishing data, there are no words in Peru at all. Where Peru is a presentation of the book that Frank assembled 60 years ago, Paris is a new edit of old photographs, pictures made in Paris after Frank had lived in New York. Where Peru is a focused portrait of light and silence (and where The Americans is a jangling portrait of the diverse contradictions of American culture), Paris is an ode to the contradictions of cities that make urban life vital. Although the pictures in this book span seasons and move between day and night, and suburbs and city, the

overall rhythm of the book is fluid. The sequencing of the 80 images in Paris is credited to both Frank and Ute Eskildsen, Steidl’s adviser on the Frank Project. A transcript of a conversation between the two indicates that these images show Frank’s response to the “Old World” after having been in the “New World”, and that looking at pictures of Paris at a distance of 60 years imbues them with a “sentimental quality”. The editing is accordingly gentle and sometimes playful, and both edit and pictures have a soft, dreamlike quality. Peru and Paris both contribute to a better understanding of Frank’s photography leading up to The Americans. We see the way he works motifs throughout an essay: hats are a strong visual motif throughout Peru, as chairs would be in Paris, and cars in The Americans. In Peru we see the use of the landscape as metaphor, including roads and railways stretching away into the distance. Most importantly, we see how his feelings about a place inform the ways that he studies that place. But these two books also deserve attention as part of the ongoing conversation that Frank has had with his own work and his life for more than 30 years. Since the 1970s, Frank has created a great deal of intensely personal mixed media work that incorporates his earlier prints. If Peru is a time capsule unearthed, Paris is a story told in the present about the past. It is a new intervention by an artist whose work has often had a complicated relationship with his own past and experiences. Leo Hsu

Book Review

The World from my front porch Larry Towell Published by Chris Boot www.chrisboot.com £40 (224pp Hardback)

In 1930, Andre Kertesz looked out on Carrefour Blois and playfully photographed the street below. Drawing together the geometry, labour and shadows of an inconsequential corner, it remains impossible to dismiss. Such curiosity comes to mind as I work through a new collection that weaves Larry Towell’s long-term book and magazine projects around archival documents, objects and the ongoing family pictures that he has consistently made around the farm his family sharecrop in Ontario. Through a format that wraps substantial documentary series around the nourishment and loose-ended progression of home life, the photographer generates a body of work ambitious enough to approach deeper narratives that touch on

territory, stability and the importance of belonging. Towell’s porch becomes a busy turnpike, occupied by children, animals and the discarded tools of summer. His wife, Ann, nurtures and cradles at the heart of the home; children swim, swing and carry each other, growing in a clement world of cattle, dogs and flowered meadows. Beyond the porch, there is discovery, tenderness, fruition, and the endless animation of childhood. It’s little wonder that Larry Towell talks of needing home, a respite from the difficult territories he visits, a place that affirms all that is secure and logical. Yet before such pages of domestic intimacy centre the book, a sense of the troubled provenance of this landscape grows. The foundations of the Towell home have been shaped by the efforts of difficult lives; by transient labourers whose lives are short; by those who challenge the borders of the land, ripping away fences and plundering in tense times… These urgencies are made known by means of a layered and carefully gathered archive of texts, pictures and ledgers. The relationship between photography and additional, diverse inclusions has sometimes offered a more vernacular, rooted and useful contextualisation, embellishing and propelling the photographs at the heart of a project by their adjacency to a rich and tactile lineage. Here, the strategy is employed to sensitively render objects on paper: notebook pages provide distinct voices; flowing hand-written letters betray the anxieties of working days; the apparatus of early surveyors mark attempts at

some sober scrutiny. These accounts are grounding, suggesting how residents have been shaped and propelled by the land itself. Through archival Towell family photographs, lives come of age against the landscape: the kinships and close relationships of middle-age, the awkward young musicians trusted to carry a tune, the hunters commemorating their catch… and the fathers, who always know the best places to fish. These pictures are affecting, a pleasure to sit with and unpack across the double pages of this collection. A number of significant projects are included: Towell’s excellent Mennonites series is reproduced, its inclusion educational, faithful and haunting – not least because it sits between essays made in troubled South American communities, sun-blued martyr posters from Jenin and the collected fragments of Israeli rockets and home-made explosives. Each additional series in the book relates the uncertainties of relationships and security in a world way beyond Towell’s Ontario farm. By noting the modest progress of his own heritage, Towell seems aware of what should be cherished – of lives that, no matter how quiet, matter. In a collection of work so dextrous, refined and involving, a Hank Williams song of heartache sits in company with tear gas grenades, collected in the West Bank in 2004. This is a book of bold and emotional juxtaposition, and a fitting inventory of the values of a gifted photographer. Ken Grant 155

Book Review

curse of the black gold Ed Kashi Published by PowerHouse www.powerhousebooks.com $45 (220pp Hardback)

“It’s as though the presence of oil makes everyone behave at their worst,” said Ed Kashi about his new book, Curse of the Black Gold: 50 Years of Oil in the Niger Delta. Nigeria is the world’s sixth largest oil producer and the book investigates the environmental and social damage that this hugely valuable resource has inflicted upon the region. It was not an easy ride; Kashi was detained for six days by the Nigerian authorities, at one point fearing for his life. He also gained risky access to the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta, militant rebels who use violence to try to bring about change. In a recent interview in PDN, Martin Parr, a man who enjoys having a go at his traditionalist Magnum colleagues, put the boot into the “humanist” approach to photojournalism: “There 156

is the old approach, whereby you try to change the world. Nobody is going to obliterate war, famine, Aids, and all the other things that are the usual subject matter that more campaigning photojournalists would be attracted to.” Parr claims to subvert the magazine agenda: “I shoot interesting subject matter but disguise it as entertainment. That’s what people want in magazines.” Curse of the Black Gold is unlikely to appeal to the luvvie factor of smart magazines; it is neither coolly ironic nor cleverly self-mocking. Kashi probably does not see himself as an entertainer and might be happy to align himself with those marginalised Magnum oldies though I doubt whether he ever felt able to “change the world”. He may, perhaps, have hoped to touch our consciousness and make us more aware of the global connection between the resources we consume and the human costs involved. This carefully conceived and designed exposition of what oil can do to those who live and work within its viscous shadow is a riveting, fresh and revealing body of documentary work. Its complexity lies in the way that it relates back the Delta’s anarchy, poverty, corruption, lack of education and healthcare, atrocious housing and angry hopelessness to the core situation in which those who live in this oil-rich land receive virtually none of the benefits. The book’s powerful photo essays are interspersed with diverse writings by leading Nigerian journalists and human rights activists and an authoritative background article by the book’s editor, Michael Watts, director of African studies

at the University of California, Berkeley. The visual journalism interconnects and overlaps, permeated by a strong consistency of vision. It’s the oil, of course, that binds it all together and Kashi’s apocalyptic tone shakes one to the roots. The looming physical presence of oil and gas infrastructure and detritus is everywhere. Two extraordinary images convey the environmental degradation that so upsets Kashi; in one, a group of women bake tapioca using the heat of a gas flare from a pipeline; in another, in the largest abattoir in the region, carcasses of freshly killed animals are roasted by the flames of burning tyres, causing acrid, black smoke to pollute the neighbourhood (and no doubt the lungs of the workers too). In the absence of a strong and consistent documentary presence in magazines, what should we expect from a book such as this? Over and above a high level of photography, we should want to feel that the photographer has earned the right to demand our attention, that he knows his subject, has done his research and has put in the time. We may secretly hope that the publication will work a bit of magic on us, persuading us to think a little more about the subject than we did before. Above all, we should be motivated to return to the book often and look at the images many times over. Unlike so many contemporary photographic books that eschew narrative and disdain explicit communication, Curse of the Black Gold fulfils these expectations, chipping away at the edge of our indifference. Colin Jacobson

Book Review

Trinity Carl De Keyser Published by Mets & Schilt www.metsenschilt.com Eur49.40 (176pp Hardback)

Carl De Keyser’s new book Trinity, with its allusions to religion, art and the atomic bomb, brings together many of the themes and concerns of his whole career. While not a straightforward retrospective, it can be seen as a kind of culmination of his output to date, as it brings together much of the territory of his earlier books – religion, conflict, power, spectacle, differing political cultures – within a formal strategy he has developed over a long time: medium format with flash, and the panoramic format, all in colour in this case. Indeed, one of the key images, and De Keyser’s self-confessed catalyst for the book, dates from 1991. A tremendous picture, of fake Roman legionaries parading in Texas on a float sponsored by Coca-Cola, it displays all the pomp and circumstance of Ancient Rome, undercut by the iconography of modern consumerism. The claims of this image underpin that of the whole book, that it is a critique of the forces that shape our world, and have done so since time immemorial, the shadowy nexus of power – politics, big business, imperialism, religion and the ways in

which they have exploited and devoured the weak and the poor, the populace. While such a grand ambition is to be admired, the question is whether or not Trinity is successful in this – is its message clear enough or argued convincingly enough? And this is where, for me, the project fails. Undoubtedly there are many fine images in the book, which individually work extremely well as part of the argument. And each individual section has something interesting to say about a part of global politics. But collectively, the three sections of the book don’t really cohere. The first chapter, Tableaux d’histoire, deals with the society of spectacle, a world of surfaces and illusions, where fakery and performance are preferred over substance and truth. The references to the history paintings of the 18th and 19th century are effective, by turning his back on the main event and focusing on the polis that both enacts and attends the spectacle, yet affording them the scale and formal respect of the larger format camera, with is extraordinary detail and depth to the image. This section mixes party politics with religion, the showmanship of military recruiting with the excesses of consumerism. Again, although there are many memorable photographs, on closer inspection there are many memorable omissions as well, and the fact that there are series of images from the same events – several from the Clinton inauguration, several from the Yeltsin elections, several from the 30th anniversary of the UN – undermines the claims that these are universal themes, the ground De Keyser

covers is just too limited to make the scale of claims he is intending. This becomes the problem with the second part of the book, which deals with Tableaux de guerre. When you position something as a critique of the state of the world no less, the inclusion of one example and the omission of another become extremely significant. So the viewer asks, why Indonesia and why not Darfur, why Kashmir and not Iraq? And the inhabitants of the panoramas seem detached and powerless to affect their environments, able only to walk past the facades of destruction like passers-by to a narrative that they cannot control. For me the final chapter, Tableaux de politiques, is perhaps the most successful, offering an intimate viewpoint onto the internal machinations of contemporary politics in three competing cultures, the US of pork barrel politics, the EU of wrangling bureaucracy and the China of one party rule. There are many wonderfully insightful and witty images in this section. The most recent images in the book, they mark something of a departure for De Keyser: shot on digital with no flash they are subtler and more gentle than the earlier super-saturated work, and are a more sophisticated and nuanced investigation of the scene. Overall then, Trinity has much to commend it in the way that individual images from De Keysers’ sharp satirical eye drive forward his critique, but the sum of the collective parts is sadly less than its constituents. Perhaps a trilogy of three separate smaller books would have been better than the Trinity of one. Paul Lowe 157

Book Review

No Such Thing as Society: Photography in Britain 1967-1987 David Alan Mellor Published by Hayward Publishing www.southbankcentre.co.uk £17.99 (168pp Softback)

No Such Thing as Society is a look at some of the photography in the collection of the Arts Council and the British Council. Unfortunately it subtitles itself as Photography in Britain 1967-87, and that it most surely is not. In Caroline Douglas’ preface we are informed that it actually “takes a particular point of view then and does not aim to be entirely inclusive… concentrates on naturalistic, documentary and Realist traditions of portraiture and wider social activity. It does not attempt to treat the important contributions to romantic landscape photography… nor the lyrical work of David Hurn...” Eh? David Hurn is a first rate documentary photographer in the Realist tradition. What confusion is evident here? But let’s see what the editor, David Mellor, has to say. “NSTAS looks at developments in British photography through the efforts of some of its leading figures and its social context. It focuses 158

upon strands of Realism in photography as represented in these two collections during this time.” Fine. The problem arises because the two collections, while interesting, massively fail to represent what was actually going on at the time. Even if we stick with the work that followed “naturalistic, documentary and Realist traditions,” so much is ignored or missed by this book as to be embarrassing. Whom did he speak to for this groundbreaking research? Not David Hurn, although he is acknowledged by Douglas because he “did so much to help establish the Arts Council’s photography initiatives in the 1970s.” Not me, and I, along with Hurn, was on the Arts Council’s photography committee in the ’70s and purchased a number of photographs featured in the book. Mellor deals with newspaper supplements in his introduction thus: “By the late 1950s such magazines [The Weekly Illustrated and Picture Post] were in terminal decline and were only partially replaced by the colour supplements of the early and mid1960s.” That’s it. But during that time the big foreign picture magazines, Stern, Paris Match and Life, along with the newspaper colour supplements and other British magazines such as Town, were enormously influential both in commissioning and in presenting new work. Mellor does mention Don McCullin who worked for the Sunday Times, but there was an explosion of work. The Sunday Times magazine under Michael Rand’s art directorship would do 14-page spreads and worked with foreign photographers like Leonard

Freed and Diane Arbus as well as British photographers like John Bulmer, Terence Donovan, Philip Jones Griffith, Tony Armstrong-Jones, Hurn and so many more were working for these magazines. There was also a groundswell of photographers who never received or sought Arts Council grants but focused on social issues or aspects of contemporary life that intrigued them, producing important and powerful documents. Nick Hedges was supported by Shelter to document poverty in Britain, while James Ravillious continued to document his own rural community in Devon. Independent photographic agencies were formed by committed photographers, like Network Photographers, to attract funding and disseminate work. A wave of British photographers, Magnum and Life photographers travelled Britain and the world producing an unprecedented mountain of new documentary work. It is against this creative explosion by a vast array of photographers with widely differing agendas that the work in NSTAS needs to be reflected. But isn’t. There is some interesting and important work here. And it is difficult for the Arts Council to publish a book and declare that they have a deeply under-representative collection of photography from this period of time. But that is a fact – and perhaps these shortcomings should be recognised rather than attempting to write a history that implies this collection was the pulsing heart of British photography. Chris Steele-Perkins

Book Review

Sri Lanka Stephen Champion Published by Hotshoe Books www.hotshoeinternational.com £30 (160pp Hardback)

A beautiful young boy lies stretched out on a shiny white painted bench, wrapped in a neatly tucked-in white sheet and with his hands folded prettily under his chin. The silvery blue light is at once both kind and oddly ethereal, softening the picture’s secret. Drawn in to look closer, you casually nose at the neatlycut square label tied to the boy’s wrist. Reading what’s scribbled on it, you pull back sharply. “Wound calamity”, it reads, and with a mercurial flash you realise simply, the boy is dead. Turning the subsequent pages, the sense of initial shock is quickly supplanted by images that tell a grander story, indicate an ancient landscape of peace, immensity and a distinct spiritual tranquillity. The vast Horton Plains effuse a tropical haze through

a muted palette evocative of a balmy nightfall. Sigiriya, or Lion’s Rock, an imposing edifice which formerly housed both monasteries and a palace and still harbours frescoes on its walls, bespeaks heritage and national treasure. Alongside a waterfall, a woman bears water in silver urns atop her crown. A Buddhist monk gazes into his reflection in a sequestered pool and a group of women harvest paddy against a backdrop of tropical birds and palm trees. Everything appears to be as it has always been, for unknown millennia, in a land celebrated for its rich culture and abundant forests, its mixed heritage and multi-faiths. Yet, the picture of a perfect life lived simply suddenly dissolves and a photograph of the United Nations’ headquarters is instead thrust before you. Forget the brief glimpse of a paradisiacal island promising meditation, temples and monasteries. As you pass through the UN gates, what you face is a visual catalogue of human tragedy – of massacres, drive-by shootings, refugee camps, child labour, masked soldiers, open mines, mass graves. Much is made of the name Sri Lanka, its Sanskrit transliteration denoting “veneration” (Sri) and “resplendent land” (Lanka). Yet the island-nation today is neither venerated nor resplendent. It is war-torn, ravaged and brutally split between the Tamils and the Sinhalese who largely inhabit it and dominated by a savage civil war that has raged for the past 60 years. The “wounded calamities” in Sri Lanka up to 2002 may number as many as 338,000. Post 9/11, a temporary

ceasefire was established, though talks broke down a year later. Following serious and repeated infractions of the agreement, conflict resumed at the end of 2005, though the government held on to the possibility of peace against the odds, only finally withdrawing from the pact in January 2008. The tit-for-tat violence and catalogue of daily brutality today shows no sign of abating.What does it take for a nation to pull together and decide to cherish the land and culture it shares rather than blast holes through it? Charred bodies by the side of the road still slowly burning or Buddhist monks sitting in peace, contemplating the exquisite charms of their land – which picture ought to represent a nation and be held up to the world? It seems a simple choice, which Stephen Champion, who has spent 30 years photographing Sri Lanka, presents quite ingeniously. His picture-editing dramatises an all too familiar tragedy, the gory glory of the troubled isle held up in his careful juxtapositions of beauty and tragedy, cause and effect with images laid side by side to devastating effect. Exposing so much more than a written document detailing the struggles of a nation to deal with so much bloodshed and grief could do, Champion too suggests that a simplicity of vision is needed, rather than an examination of the intricacies of the dispute. Champion’s homage to Sri Lanka underlines a basic truth that “all must come into the mix, in order that we might co-exist in our tiny little world... in all our forms and tribes”. Colette Meacher 159

Book Review

Ming Jue Stuart Whipps Published by Art Gallery Walsall www.artatwalsall.org.uk £20 (84pp Hardback)

“Ming Jue” is Chinese for “Modern Gentleman” – the clue’s in the name. When MG Rover collapsed in 2005 with debts of £1.4 billion and the loss of 6,500 jobs, Nanjing Auto (China’s oldest carmaker) bought the MG brand and set about transferring the main production lines from Longbridge to a new home 6,000 miles away to the east. MG originally stood for “Morris Garages”… but no longer. Re-branded, it now stands for the – oddly anachronistic – Modern Gentleman. Before the meltdown, Stuart Whipps had begun photographing at Longbridge as part of a project exploring the relationship between the workers, the historic plant and the neighbouring town. Given subsequent developments, it is no surprise that he finished with something very different: a set of pictures documenting both the deserted West Midlands factory, and its successor in the Pukou district of Nanjing. In a sense, the focus of his work became the 160

hiatus in production between the demise of one plant and the establishment of its replacement. There are very few cars to be seen. In fact – this is China, remember – they are outnumbered by bicycles. Many of the UK pictures have an eerie, interrupted feel. Longbridge’s closure was initially described as a temporary disruption – the suggestion being that work might resume within the week. So there is a Coke bottle still standing on a canteen table; a fading snapshot still stuck to a laboratory fridge; even a jacket, tie and pressed trousers left hanging, like the plant, in limbo. The shells of three vehicles on one of the arrested assembly lines appear stalled rather than abandoned. On top of a filing cabinet someone has left a trophy behind. Elsewhere, in compositions of austere symmetry, the sense of finality is more palpable: cables hang from ripped ceiling tiles; leaves and newspapers litter a floor; pipes run nowhere; rust and flaking paint make their progress. However, the book is more than a study in the picturesque opportunities offered by the processes of industrial decay. In Nanjing the pictures are of brightly lit, pristine assembly lines and Chinese workers in new MG uniforms. But still no cars. Judging by several of Whipps’ images, it would appear that the most industrious of the new owner’s staff are employed in the Advertising & Marketing department. Indeed, when a new MG does make an appearance it plays second fiddle in the photograph to a cameraman standing amid the falling confetti and streamers of a heavily

trailed launch ceremony photocall. The media re-branding of the car also dominates a view of the Nanjing factory exterior. A huge billboard – topping the plant’s main building – shows an MG speeding along an empty road as the sun sets over an open landscape. On closer inspection the image, and its promise of freedom and leisure, dominates not only the workplace but also the pedestrians – rendered minuscule and barely visible – that pass by the plant. Well, it’s an ill wind… Whipps missed the chance to complete a local project on Longbridge, its environs and workers. But he gained the opportunity to produce something certainly more ambitious, perhaps more vivid: a body of work that has some purchase on the movements of capital, labour and commodities in the 21st century. Guy Lane

Book Review

like a thief’s dream Danny Lyon Published by PowerHouse www.powerhousebooks.com $29.95 (200pp Hardback)

“Multi-layered” is how to describe this offering from prolific writer, filmmaker and photographer, Danny Lyon, in his first full-length, non-fiction book Like A Thief ’s Dream. The story takes place over a 30-year period and to best appreciate the work it is helpful to consider a couple of key figures from US history. In 1970, Yippie radical Jerry Rubin published DO IT! Scenarios of the Revolution, with an introduction written in exile by then Black Panther leader and ex-prisoner Eldridge Cleaver. On the inner sleeve of DO IT! is a Norman Mailer quote from his 1969 book Armies of the Night. Lyon sets the tone by describing the American public’s ignorance of their prison system throughout the ’60s, until,

in 1971 –after the publication of Soul on Ice by Eldridge Cleaver – the New York State maximum security unit Attica exploded in a dramatic uprising. The prisoners demanded and received live television time. Lyon was arrested with Mailer in 1967 during a demonstration at the Pentagon: Armies of the Night was Mailer’s account of this protest, winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1969. For photojournalists and fans of Lyon’s photography, it is intriguing to read how he was introduced to the Texas prison system by a clown at a prison rodeo and given unprecedented access to “the Walls” prison in Houston. It is at the Walls that Lyon’s landmark book on prison life, Conversations with the Dead, is set. The focus of Thief ’s Dream is the extraordinary friendship he had with a prisoner at the Walls, James Renton. The two had plenty to draw them together: both in their 20s, both “potheads” with a shared love of photography. In fact, Renton photographed and made lithograph plates for Lyon’s portfolio, Born to Lose. Don’t buy this book for Lyon’s photography. Lyon himself admits, “Throughout my time inside the Walls I was never able to make a particularly good picture of Jimmy Renton.” We are, however, treated to Lyon’s picture of the filmmaker Robert Frank in a cell at the Walls with Renton and another prisoner, Aaron Everet Jones, when Lyon invited Frank to do some filming there. And, perhaps even better, a shot by Robert Frank of Lyon with his inmate mates. Renton was half way through an 11-year sentence for burglary. The two

met once in the free world but things suddenly got heavier when Renton, along with three others, was involved in the murder of a 22-year-old Arkansas policeman after the burglary of a department store. Renton was one of America’s 10 Most Wanted Men. In the courtroom on trial for his life, it was established that, by prison standards, Renton was an intelligent individual, possessing a code of ethics, charm and wit. The strength of this book is Renton’s character unveiled in his letters to Lyon, his confidant. When speaking about the former inmate Everet, who Lyon kept in touch with, Renton said, “Everet’s a wonderful person. The only thing wrong with him is his brain would fit inside a walnut shell.” And when Renton received photos from Lyon of his home and family, he replied, “Your two are leading an ideal life – like a thief’s dream.” Renton escaped from prison and was on the road for two adventurous months. In epistolary form he recounted the events for Lyon. With Renton’s death in prison from hepatitis C, the epilogue to Lyon’s 30 years of probing and persevering unearthed details of what actually happened the night of the policeman’s death. The likelihood is that one of the four members found guilty of the crime was not at the scene and yet was serving a life sentence. In the 1960s Lyon spoke softly and carried a camera; now he might consider himself a classic documentarian. In his quest for truth he seems to have left no stone unturned. Lou Siroy 161

Exhibition Review

The day nobody died

Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin Paradise Row 12 September – 26 October 2008 www.paradiserow.com

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The photographic duo Broomberg and Chanarin has become photography’s version of a household name, after courting much controversy with their uniquely non-traditional approach to documentary photography. Adam and Oli, as they are also known, have been working as a team for over a decade and are bait for self-styled war photographers. Their outspoken comments* in the light of last year’s World Press Photo awards – for which they were judges – caused ripples among the photojournalism community, which they criticised for outdated and uninspiring modes of representation. Broomberg and Chanarin’s exhibition at Paradise Row in east London, The Day Nobody Died, will no doubt raise a sneer from the desert-scarf fraternity. While the pair ticked all the boxes by being “where it’s at” – the frontline of the conflict in Afghanistan, indeed during the deadliest month since fighting began – the similarity between their work and that of other embeds ends there. The first departure from the traditional approach was evident in their decision to not take a camera. Instead, they hoiked around a 50 metre long, 72.6 cm wide roll of photographic paper, protected in a lightproof cardboard box. A seven metre section of the photo paper was unrolled and exposed to the sun for 20 seconds as specific events were taking place – a press conference, the day one hundred people were killed, the execution of a fixer and The Day Nobody Died. The documentary aspect of the work is not about what “happened” at these events but about another way of being able

to document lived reality, producing artifacts that serve as a kind of evidence to certain events. Just being there is not enough. The six, 600 cm long panoramic, framed works adorn the walls of the gallery, which are arranged parallel to each other. Walking inbetween the parallel walls becomes an experience of trying to discern similarities and inconsistencies in the subtle colourings and gashes of light invading the frame. And, unlike with photographic prints, looking at the work involves a conscious acknowledgment that these objects were present in the time that they want to communicate. In addition to the panoramas, Broomberg and Chanarin also produced a short video, made up of stills, of the roll of paper being transported by the British military from London to Helmand, the box itself being part of the performance of war. The exhibition also includes a separate room displaying random snippets from their career together, which despite looking like an afterthought, provides a solid context to the Broomberg and Chanarin thought process and way of working. The work in The Day Nobody Died may not be visually informative or even arresting but the stimulating aspect is the process and the debate it will engender about photographic representation; even the future of documentary photography. Lauren Heinz * read this at www.foto8.com

Exhibition Review

Street & Studio

Tate Modern 22 May – 31 August 2008 www.tate.org.uk

Imagine trying to provide a convincing rationale – or even a title – for an exhibition so wide-ranging it included work by Daido Moriyama and Cecil Beaton, Rineke Dijksta and Weegee, Lartigue and Richard Prince. Imagine too that anonymous photo booth pictures, fashion shoots, police mugshots and paparazzi snaps were to accompany the varieties of documentary and art photography on display. Nor would the exhibition confine itself to photographic prints: books and dummies for books would be on show, as would twin-screen video projections and digital slide shows. Under the circumstances a theme as nebulous and as open-ended as “street and studio” might begin to appeal. Tate Modern’s exhibition of the same name amassed over 400 works by more than 100 photographers from Europe, the United States, Africa, Asia and, for good measure, South America. The period covered – from 1852 to 2007 – was equally immodest, sparking fears that Bankside was gripped by an unchecked outbreak of curatorial megalomania. The question remains whether the show testified more eloquently to the host’s institutional clout, and an exhausting Now That’s What I Call Photography! inclusiveness, than it did to the conceptual coherence of the project. Street and Studio plotted the emergence of street photography, here conflated with forms of urban portraiture, from origins in 19th century France (represented by works by Charles Nègre, Henri Rivière and Louis Vert). By the turn of the century, technological developments – including the use of fast

gelatin silver prints and the introduction of smaller cameras – enabled the photography of moving subjects. The representation of transitory and fugitive moments came to be recognised as an especially modern response to new areas of urban experience. Passers-by, pedestrians and passengers became one of street photography’s most fertile subject areas. Street and Studio offered an exemplary overview of such work, and included pictures by Paul Strand, Cartier-Bresson, Brassaï, Helen Levitt, William Klein, Diane Arbus, Philip-Lorca DiCorcia, Beat Streuli and Pieter Hugo. In apparent contrast to the supposed spontaneity and authenticity of street work, studio photography offered a controlled environment in which sitters and portraitists could collaborate on presenting a posed and composed image. Its versatility guaranteed a multiplicity of functions: the show included advertising and editorial commissions, society portraits, publicity shots, and artworks exploring identity and representation. Given the vast scope of the exhibition it is not surprising that it should raise far more questions than it could ever hope to answer. Maybe the only secure generalisation to be made is to observe how often the histories of studio and street photography have intersected. The earliest street pictures in the show, by Charles Nègre, were as elaborately staged as any studio portrait – in the same way that much of the most engaging and innovative studio work has depended for its vitality on references to the street beyond its confines. Guy Lane 163

Exhibition Review

afghanistan

Seamus Murphy Asia House 1 July – 13 September 2008 www.asiahouse.org

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Charikar, Parwan Province, Afghanistan, November 2001. A man stretches out his hand to release a pigeon, the light catching his profile as the pigeon leaps with open wings into the misty sky, silhouetted in the low morning light. Further in the distance, a flock race above the mountains and rooftops beyond. It is an image by Seamus Murphy of freedom and peace, from this remarkable set of black and white photographs of the country spanning 1994–2007. Murphy’s long-standing connection with Afghanistan is borne out in the close and trusting proximity with which he is granted access to capture intimate scenes of village life, and the spirit of a country which is often more crudely depicted as a mess of poverty and war. Humanity, against the backdrop of Afghanistan’s awesome landscapes, is always at the fore in Murphy’s photographs. The barren beauty emphasises the physicality of Afghani life; the inescapable elements foster a raw vitality in the faces we see. In Gulbahar, Kaspia Province, November 2001, a crowd of men stand on a half-demolished house. A young boy on a horse stands patiently, and everyone is craning to look at the traditional sport of buzkashi, where men fight on horseback to claim a headless goat. Elsewhere, in Ishkashem, Badakhshan Province, November 2004, a father and son load a donkey with barley – its tiny rear end fanned out with bushels to at least four times its size. In the same area, a mother and daughter return home from work in the fields. The mesh of

the mother’s burkha comes directly into the lens, and the daughter at the centre of the image, strains under the weight of a sheep wrapped over her shoulders and neck. They are all staring into the camera in what is a sharp confrontation with the extremes of physical labour. In the heat and dust, relief can sometimes be found, and when it is, is met with joy. A picture from the bathhouse in the Jadai Masegara Massoudi Hamam shows water and light streaming down over closed eyes, dripping from the nose, and a man smiling in pleasure, as the liquid cleanses and washes away dirt and sweat. These are scenes that we do not normally see. But Murphy’s pictures of war and killing also offer fresh perspectives. In one image from 2000, we are in the back of a car with Ahmad Shah Massoud, Afghanistan’s resistance hero, heading to the frontlines. Shah Massoud fought nine Soviet offences and was then driven from Kabul by the Taliban in 1996. Just one year after the picture was taken, we are told, he was killed by suicide bombers. A timeline in the exhibition makes a useful guide to the dates of control wrangled in this land, which over the last 100 years has been the pawn of ideological ambition. Seamus Murphy’s images pay homage to a country whose identity struggles to survive in the face of fear, bombardment and conflict. His love and fascination with Afghanistan carries us deeper into its heart; to the people, its spirit and the land. This is a significant and humbling contribution to our understanding. Ruth Hedges

Exhibition Review

the last things David Moore Belfast Exposed Gallery 22 August – 3 October 2008 www.belfastexposed.org

There is a story about Fritz Lang, that when the German film director first saw the towers of New York, he turned to his companion and exclaimed: “Look! What magnificent ruins they will make!” This exhibition of coolly dispassionate photographs portrays an un-ruin. The Last Things is fascinating for the access granted to the photographer David Moore as much as the pictures themselves. They show to the world a place very few were intended to ever see; and those who did see it, if things had gone to plan, would see no other place for the rest of their lives. It looks like a maximum security prison. It has the steel doors and the metallic functionality of, say, the HBlocks, but without the sweat and grime of, say, Abu Ghraib. It is directly below the streets of central London. Those trapped in this place may well have asked the dozens of questions that make up Chris Petit’s brilliant introduction to the book of the show. “Will people miss what has been lost? What accommodation is made for nearest and dearest, lovers and children, or is the selection process ruthless? Has Peter Mandelson wangled his way down here somehow?” What is portrayed in this exhibition is the Ministry of Defence’s Crisis Management facility, to be occupied when the apocalypse unleashes across the rooftops of London and the rest of the Kingdom. This is where the end will be regulated. There are no people in these snaps, and very little to occupy the corneas. The bare necessities are just enough.

A barren TV studio to send messages to the citizenry, or simply to ask, “Is there anybody out there?” The cheap Constablesque landscape print in The Principal Office, the last home for the last Prime Minister. The metal cupboard in the Site Manager’s stores, with dozens of packets of Tesco’s cheapest toothpaste and toothbrushes, and three cartons of Kiwi black shoe polish. It is all rather poignant and, this side of the Cold War, slightly comic. This is why it is an un-ruin. It is pristine and perfectly usable, but it is a relic from the time when a paranoid gerontocracy in the Kremlin were petrified of a senile oaf called Ronald Reagan who used to make jokes about winning “limited” nuclear wars in Europe. These bunkers were designed to remain when the earth above became a radioactive ruin. And then, in the space of time that it took this exhibition to open in the Belfast Exposed Gallery, the old fissure opened across the continent and Russia seemed more than the failed empire it had been for two decades. The cool and detached spirit of these photos has been interrupted by a darker context. Telephones, CCTV cameras, breathing apparatus kits, radiation showers, document shredders, decontamination suites, Len Deighton’s Ipcress File, maps, identity cards, a medical bay triage, the Daily Occurrence Book, mouthwash... That is the way the world ends, not with a whimper, but a gargle. Or as Petit’s essay concludes: “And will there be a moment when everyone looks at each other and realises: this is it.” John O’Farrell 165

Magazine Report

the magazine report

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I’ve written here before about the two-way relationship between printed magazines and the internet, a relationship that has at last moved on from outright hostility to become a discussion about the appropriate balance between the respective media. Consider the debate this October, co-organised by publishing industry organisations BSME and EDO. The motion was that “The web needs magazines more than magazines need the web” and was debated by a number of industry luminaries, few of whom, whether for or against, would argue the internet is irrelevant to their publications. If such debates highlights the high level of interest in the internet, they also to bring to the fore some of the problems inherent in grappling with the new technology. Like all major changes in focus, the internet brings with it a whole compendium of jargon. The talk is of repurposing content, brand migration and multi-channel communication. Like all jargon, these phrases are spoken with meaning yet can be interpreted in drastically different ways. But behind the jargon are some sound concepts that are far less complex than many experts might pretend. The link between the community of readers and an online community is actually simpler to bridge than some would have you believe. Like so many brand-orientated projects, it needs a strong sense of what your publication stands for and an understanding of the context within which it fits. This is how the Guardian, at one extreme, and 8, at the other, have succeeded in combining

print and online presences. They both have strong identities with clear tones of voice. Yet many publishers fiddle with the ubiquitous PDF page-turner, the equivalent of printing out a series of web pages and telling the reader that’s a magazine. While publishers attempt to come to terms with the new media, what are they to do with the old medium of print? One interactive evangelist I talked to recently was adamant that the rise of the internet, combined with the current credit crunch, would leave most newspapers and many magazines extinct within two years. This may be an extreme view, but certainly represents the direction we are travelling. Yet everything we know, enjoy and love about publications is tied to their physicality, and both the Guardian and 8 rely on a print edition to lend weight to their online presence. The simple answer is to take maximum advantage of what is unique about the print medium. Make your magazine as magazine-y as possible. Independent magazines have always taken advantage of their relatively small print runs to use otherwise uneconomic papers and effects. Swiss title SoDa regularly combines different papers and rare binding effects; Amelia’s Magazine has made clever use of fur-effect paper and complicated laser cutting to create cover finishes that provide uniquely tactile experiences; titles like 032c and Fantastic Man, both featured in this column before for other reasons, add extra magazine-y-ness through a special binding technique and use of a special

Magazine Report

matt paper stock respectively. Those titles, while experimental, still rely on traditional page size formats, but others also play with that basic element. Middle Eastern arts magazine Bidoun recently produced an issue consisting of fold-out posters, while Cream, from Hong Kong, changes size and shape every issue – one time it’s a book format, next it’s a folder of torn imagery. Against a context of reductionism in newspaper publishing, British quarterly The Drawbridge deliberately launched at full broadsheet size. In the US, where small publishers can take advantage of tax breaks to fund their projects, McSweeney’s and Esopus have taken creativity to another level. Literary title McSweeney’s has published in beautifully finished hardback book form for an issue, while another time appearing as a pile of direct-mail style flyers bound by rubber band. Art magazine Esopus isn’t just about art, much of each issue actually is art. The magazine regularly includes art prints and crafted origami foldouts tipped into its pages – one-off pieces specially created by contributors. These magazines let their editors and designers experiment and play with the idea of what a magazine can be, pushing the boundaries in ways unthinkable to the average Grazia reader, say. Yet the success of that magazine – one of the UK’s most successful mainstream launches of recent times – is partly due to the choice of paper and printing technique. It uses a matt paper stock that takes great advantage of the way gravure printing deals with flat areas of

heavy black ink. As a result, Grazia has a special tactile feel, something unlike any of its competitors had at the time of its launch. This quality is a part of its success, whether or not its readers are conscious of it. Grazia is not the only magazine from a major publisher to seek to take advantage of the tactile nature of print in this way. Technology title Wired has long sought to bridge the gap between printed and online presentation by using multiple fluorescent and metallic inks across every page. Other titles produce special one-off “event” effects, such as Harper’s Bazaar’s re-launch as Bazaar featuring a logo covered in real Swarovski crystals. Less ostentatious are the increasing numbers of foil-blocked logos – see the Economist’s Intelligent Life quarterly lifestyle spin-off. Intelligent Life is one of a spate of launches in the UK aiming at a high-end affluent reader that have sought to be as magazine-y as possible. The prime example is Monocle, which uses mixed paper stocks to great effect, and also includes a bound-in Manga comic each issue that helps position the title apart from the crowd. When it adds special supplements, Monocle eschews the usual glue or belly-band to contain them in favour of combining magazine and supplement by rubber band. Wallpaper* also deserves a mention here for its use of gatefold pull-outs, special inks and special subscription editions that appear without cover lines. Earlier generations of magazines regularly used many of these techniques, and if the development of

web publishing channels allows more magazines to take advantage of these same techniques, who can complain? In their desire to make the most of their physical attributes these titles demonstrate a shared love of the magazine form which harks back to a time when magazines were produced on a less industrial scale that encouraged experimentation. They are making themselves more magazine-y. Jeremy Leslie Jeremy Leslie is group creative director of John Brown Publishing and writes a blog on magazines. www.magculture.com

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An-My Lê, Offload, LCACs and Tank, California, 2006. Courtesy Murray Guy, New York

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On my Shelf

On My Shelf Sources of INspiration Zelda Cheatle If I can be slightly unorthodox, I'd like to top and tail my choices with a mention of two texts that have shaped my relationship with the world and with art. So I must be begin with the James Agee text from Let Us Now Praise Famous Men – it expresses a very beautiful way of opening your eyes, a way of looking. Everything you need to know about how writing and photographs work together is in this book. My first inspiration is The Unretouched Woman by Eve Arnold. Eve gave me this book and wrote a dedication inside: “With great appreciation, regard and of course affection” – which is very nice. Eve’s picture of the very, very old Chinese lady is one of the first photographs I ever put up on my wall. She is a fantastic woman and a very good friend. In this book is a picture of a beautiful black girl called Fabulous, which is one of her very first pictures. Alexey Brodovitch, the great art director at Harper's Bazaar for nearly 25 years, had sent her out to take some pictures and she went to Harlem and

photographed Fabulous doing a fashion show. When she took them back to Brodovitch, he said “I don’t think I have anything to teach you, Eve.” Eve is now 96 and she’s still going strong. And I just think for women out there, she’s a great example of someone who has remained graceful and dignified throughout her life, and has taken important pictures. The next person who opened my eyes was Manuel Alvarez Bravo – and Manuel Alvarez Bravo was the first book he ever gave me. He’s Mexican; his work is very philosophical and very beautiful in the way that it celebrates Mexico but also celebrates a whole way of thinking and looking and seeing. He was given his first camera by Tina Modotti in 1929, who was another absolutely extraordinary woman in photography and so really, I’d like to suggest a double whammy: Bravo and Modotti should be put together as being seminal in the way that the medium of photography has had this global power. They’re inseparable in a way. Modotti was thrown out of Mexico for being a dissident and a revolutionary and he had to take over her job and her camera and start life. Alvarez Bravo's images are timeless, they require contemplative viewing as opposed to instantaneous gratification. He was friends with Diego Rivera, Pablo Neruda, all of those people. The picture that haunts me from this collection is of a stump of a tree that the peasants chip away at for firewood: And By Night It Moans. What I really love in Modotti’s work is her portraits. If I had to recommend one book, it would be the one with [Edward] Weston – The Mexico Years – because it’s about really being in love and being politically passionate and passionate about each other and about Mexico. When you look at their work, when you read some of their letters, you just feel “phwooar!” It’s great! This leads me to any Robert Frank book. The first one I had was The Lines on my Hand. I don’t think I have ever been so moved as by the exhibition of his that Anne Tucker did at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. You began to sob with the pain and the torture that it showed. It’s so very beautiful. Robert Frank is almost incapable of taking a picture that is not poignant and loaded. Anyone that works in photography should see that he begins documentary photography with an outsider’s eye.

He ends up making something more conceptual with the way that he is looking and in many ways he is a precursor of what is happening now. The way that he has used Polaroid, the way he used film, the way he even used words, I don’t think that even very sophisticated people like Mitra Tabrizian or the people who use image-text surpass him: he’s done it all, he is the great guy. From Robert Frank to The Street Photographs of Roger Mayne. This was a V&A publication that we republished. I admire Helen Levitt too but Mayne is so absolutely London. Mayne’s work was of Notting Hill Gate before the Westway was built, which he captured so incredibly – some of his pictures of little girls and naughty boys I just adore. Another major influence in my life is Soviet photographs. In the collection I have now made for The Photography Fund, I have 2,000 pictures that document Russia in the 20th century. There’s a particular picture in The Russian Century (text by Brian Moynahan) that has haunted me ever since I saw it. It was taken during the terrible, terrible famine – of cannibals selling human body parts. I’ve lived with it and it’s in my brain a lot of the time. I think a lot of people who live in Russia who are my age and older have never seen a lot of this stuff. I hope a lot of the pictures that I have gathered together of Russia end up going back to Russia. Finally, I’d like to group together three bodies of contemporary photographic work – Joy Gregory, Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin and Mari Mahr. I want to do this not because they are similar but because they each bring to the fore lots of issues – from the war to gender to race – and create something more powerful and beautiful than saying “I think this”. They are all cerebral, and I think this is the future of photography. My endpiece that I want everyone to read is Art, Truth & Politics by Harold Pinter. We need political awareness, to think about where we are and what we are doing and how we see and how we are reading images to inform the whole beauty of collecting amazing photography. It’s a responsibility; so the better informed you are, the better it is. Zelda Cheatle manages The Photography Fund. She was talking to Max Houghton. See more at www.foto8.com

Forthcoming Exhibitions 2 October – 15 November My America Christopher Morris 25 November – 10 January The Collection Maurice Broomfield 2 Febuary – 6 March Sweet Nothings Vanessa Winship

Test Spraying Thermal Insulation, Shell International,1963, Maurice Broomfield

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The Photography Biannual

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