Volume 3 Number 1

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photojournalism

WOMEN TRAFFICKING AND THE POWER OF JU-JU IN DEEP WITH PERU’S ECCENTRIC DIVERS THE MISSION: MADAGASCAR’S AWAKENING PUBLIC BATHS AND PRIVATE MOMENTS A BRIDGE FROM IRAQ VOL.3 NO.1

CONTENTS: VOL3 NO.1 JUNE 2004

COVER: © Karim Ben Khelifa, festival of Ashura, Iraq 2004

MOMENTS 6 GOLDEN HORSE Novice monks spread their message of peace, by Jack Picone

16 AROUND AND AROUND Roundabouts, by Andreas Züst

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46 MOON BLOOM Flowers illuminated in the night, by K T Auleta

FEATURES 8 BELIEF IS MY BOND Lorena Ros investigates the ritualisation of slavery in Nigeria where women commit their souls to ju-ju

18 THE AWAKENING Salah Benacer discovers a refuge for the insane amidst the blinding light and searing heat of Madagascar

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Reporting from Iraq, Karim Ben Khelifa reveals how faith and hope are held hostage to untamed chaos

36 PUBLIC BATHS Julia Baier rediscovers the memories of her childhood and celebrates swimming

42 COMING UP FOR AIR John Alflatt carries his equipment across the desert plains to meet the divers of Peru

48 TUVA Yann Mingard discovers the fusing of spirits and nature in the expanse of this remote Russian republic

DEBATE 32 THREE THINGS ON TEACHING AND THE TAUGHT Witold Krassowski present his provocative views on how photography is taught

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Gary Knight responds

REVIEWS 54 Rethink 57 They Did Nothing, 1001 Nights, 58 Pictures From Here, Postcards Home 60 René Burri Photographs FOCUS 62 Tobias Zielony’s Shrinking Cities DIARY 64 Exhibitions worldwide, 67 UK College Degree Shows RESOURCES 68 Picture Agencies & Libraries, Pro Services SCENE 74 Liz Johnson-Artur celebrates the Notting Hill Carnival ei8ht

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EDITORIAL

INDEX

LEAVE YOUR COMFORT ZONE BEHIND! This is my declaration and my call to you to sign up to ei8ht and support the publishing of compelling, independent photojournalism.

I cannot guarantee the stories in this issue will be “comfortable”: witness the fear on the faces of young women as they are enslaved by the power of ju-ju in Lorena Ros’ images, and feel the intensity amidst the insanity in a remote catholic mission in Salah Benacer’s story. Nor can I promise that you will find solutions to deadly conflicts. As Karim Ben Khelifa’s photographs attest there can be no words to faithfully describe the despair that is evident in Iraq today as it undergoes violent transformation.

The point of ei8ht is to be an instrument for readers, to assist them to navigate these stories and gain an understanding of issues through photography. ei8ht, itself, leaves its comfort zone behind by engaging with and supporting authors to provide them with the forum for free photographic expression. In previous issues I have reinforced my dedication to this mission and by publishing this issue, the start of a new volume in our third year, I provide the evidence of my continued belief in the magazine’s purpose.

As the magazine grows and the motivation to publish worthwhile stories compels it to expand in size, it is crucial for ei8ht to create ways of funding for the future. In this sense the above “call to arms” can also be heard as a call to you, the individual, to make a difference by helping to underwrite the costs associated with the production of a quarterly publication.

The comforts and distractions we have in our lives are best left behind, if only momentarily, as you look over the photographs.

Don’t just read…inhale. Share with Julia Baier her memories of swimming, enjoy the good times John Alflatt had with the divers of Peru and find tranquility and peace in the Tuva that Yann Mingard discovered. Then, maybe, you will see the sword on our cover for what it is – an implement that symbolizes passionate belief and not violent menace as it may at first glance appear. I hope, then, that you will agree with me: if the pen is mightier than the sword, in our day and age, the camera is more powerful than both of them.

Jon

GOLDEN HORSE Jack Picone is based in Chiang Mai, Thailand. This story is part of a larger body of work on Burmese and ethnic minorities who live along the Thai/Burma border. www.jackpicone.com and www.networkphotographers.com +44 20 7739 9000 contact Samantha Thomas

PS: Those wishing to become supporters of ei8ht can learn more about our work and give securely online at: www.foto8.com/supporter/

BELIEF IS MY BOND Lorena Ros continues to document the trafficking of women from Benin City, Nigeria, to major European cities. She is based in Barcelona and London. www.lorenaros.com and www.panos.co.uk +44 20 7234 0010 contact Michael Regnier AROUND AND AROUND Rondabouts by Andreas ZÜRST is published by Edition Patrick Frey, Switzerland www.editionpatrickfrey.ch THE AWAKENING Salah Benacer visited Madagascar in 2003 to photograph patients at the Awakening Centre for the mentally ill in Antoby. Cathy Stresing and Fiona Dutoit translated his words into English. He is based in Paris. www.400asa.net see also www.revue.com ONE WAY BABYLON Karim Ben Khelifa is an independent photographer based in Paris. Since September 11 he has often focused on Arab affairs, his dual Belgian-Tunisian nationality offering an alternative view for the Western press. www.karimbenkhelifa.com PUBLIC BATHS Julia Baier is a member of Kooperative F R Fotografie. She has exhibited in Istanbul and Paris, as well as her native Germany. www.juliabaier.de COMING UP FOR AIR John Alflatt is an advertising photographer based in London who pursues two or three personal projects a year, such as this trip to Peru to photograph the deep sea divers. www.johnalflatt.com and www.gsabroad.com MOON BLOOM K T Auleta is a New York-based fashion and portraiture photographer. www.ktauleta.com TUVA Yann Mingard from Switzerland collaborated with journalist Claire Bigg, who is based in St Petersburg, to document the spirit of the tiny Soviet republic, Tuva.

Mingard is a member of Strates Photographies. www.strates.ch +41 21 683 0859 contact Susan Manuel CARNIVAL Liz Johnson-Artur is a London-based photographer. Her work can be found at: www.pymca.com +44 20 7613 3725 contact Jake PARTNER WEBSITES documentography.org/, photodocument.pl/, photographer.ru/ red-top.com/, reportage.org/, revue.com/, tangophoto.ch/ ERRATUM In Vol.2 No.4’s review of Susan Meiselas’ book, Encounters with the Dani, the tribe she documented live in West Papua, not Papua New Guinea as stated.

EIGHT ONLINE – Subscriptions, Previews and Media Information. Visit: www.foto8.com EDITOR-IN-CHIEF: Jon Levy FEATURES EDITOR: Max Houghton EDITORIAL ASSISTANT/INTERN: Lauren Heinz CONTRIBUTING EDITOR Colin Jacobson CONTRIBUTING PHOTO EDITORS: Sophie Batterbury, Flora Bathurst, Chloe Howley, Ludivine Morel DESIGN: David Jackson REVIEWERS: Sophie Wright, Phil Lee SPECIAL THANKS: Maurice Geller, Andrew Ferguson, Alex de Cadenet PUBLISHER: Gordon Miller EUROPEAN ASSOCIATE: Arnaud Blanchard REPROGRAPHICS: John Doran at Wyndham Graphics PRINTER: Pensord Press DISTRIBUTION: Specialist Bookshps & Galleries – Central Books 020 8986 4854, Newstrade – Comag Specialist 01895 433800 ISSN: 1476-6817. ei8ht is published by foto8 ltd, 18 great portland street, london w1w 8qp. t: +44 (0)20 7636 0399 f: +44 (0)20 7636 8888 e: info@foto8.com The views expressed in this magazine are not necessarily the views of ei8ht or foto8 ltd. Copyright © 2004 foto8 ltd. All rights reserved.

No part of this magazine may be copied or reproduced without the prior written consent of the publisher.

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MOMENTS

HIGH IN THE MOUNTAINOUS border country between Thailand and Burma, under the heart-shaped leaves of the Holy Boddhi tree, shaven-headed novice monks sit in the lotus position, chanting.

Their ascetic life of prayer and meditation is part of an unbroken tradition of Buddhist belief in the region. Muay kick-boxing and riding bareback on wild horses also feature prominently in their gruelling schedules.

The tranquil Golden Horse monastery is not the usual spiritual refuge from earthly concerns, and its abbott no ordinary monk.

Elaborately tattooed Khru Ba is a warrior as well as a holy man; his mission to rid the notorious Golden Triangle of the vast quantities of drugs that pass through the area. The prime traffickers are members of the ethnic Burmese Wa tribe, who belong to the former rebel group the United Wa State Army (UWSA). Heavily armed UWSA caravans laden with heroin and methamphetamine cross the jungle frontier in one of the largest drug-producing organisations on the planet.

The young monks are mostly orphans, some abandoned by opium-addicted parents, or by families whose land was seized by the Wa Army to grow narcotics. Regularly they mount their wild horses and gallop into the heart of UWSA country. Their aim is not to fight, but to persuade the tribesmen to cease their activities through the power of faith â?˝

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GOLDEN HORSE

By Jack Picone

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BELIEF IS MY BOND

IN BENIN, A GIRL DREAMS OF LIFE IN EUROPE, OF COMFORT AND RICHES. THE REALITY, AT THE END OF A LONG AND HARROWING JOURNEY, IS PROSTITUTION ON THE STREETS OF SPAIN AND FRANCE – BOUND IN SERVICE

BY THE POWER OF JU-JU

By Lorena Ros

FOR A YOUNG NIGERIAN WOMAN, illegally trafficked into Europe, the power of ju-ju is absolute. Before her dream of living in the UK – a mythical place of fun and riches – can be realised, she must take part in a traditional ju-ju ceremony, which will rob her of her spirit, and bind her inexorably to her trafficker, or madam as she is known.

“Ju-ju is often used for trafficking purposes,” explains photojournalist Lorena Ros, who met the women pictured here on the streets of Barcelona, Madrid and Paris, before travelling to Benin City, in the south of Nigeria, to find the heart of the story. “When the girl faints, her spirit, her soul is taken away, and it is understood that it will not return until she accomplishes her mission in Europe.”

Such is the power of ju-ju the young women are absolutely terrified

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at the thought of failing their “mission”, which first and foremost is to repay the $50,000 debt owed to the madam for facilitating the eight-month journey, often on foot, through the desert from Nigeria to Morocco, from where they will finally take a boat to Spain.

Before the girls leave, the madam informs them that they may have to “go with some men” for a few months, and she gives them a few rules on how to treat their clients. None of the girls has ever worked as a prostitute in Nigeria.

“Of course they cannot work legally as they have no papers,” says Ros. “Men can work in construction, but the women have to go into prostitution. What else is there but to sell themselves? The madams tell them their debt will be paid in a couple of months. The reality is that they’re still paying four years later.”

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The women’s religious and cultural heritage makes it very hard for them to break their ties with the madams. “On the one hand, they are fanatically Christian, evangelical,” says Ros. “They are proud to be Nigerian and believe themselves to be very faithful when they make a promise. And then there’s the ju-ju, which enforces the pressure they’re under to pay the debt.

“They all say ‘I don’t believe in that shit!’ but they’re all very, very frightened by it. In the next breath, they will say ‘The power of the ju-ju will kill me if I don’t pay.’”

It is this contradiction that the madams have successfully exploited.

Not that the girls see it that way: “They never, ever, talk badly of their madam. They don’t fight her. She is their only point of contact. They are very isolated once they are in Europe, and they have nothing else to

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hold onto except the madam and each other. When they arrive and the reality of their situation hits home, they blame the white man for the lack of jobs. They blame the government for not giving them papers.�

Few make it as far as the UK. Some become pregnant en route, either as a result of rape, or because they ran out of money during the long journey and turned to prostitution. These women will have to cross the Straits of Gibraltar holding a newborn baby, born in Morocco, yet with no official nationality. Once resident in the busy European cities, the girls take it in turns to work, sleep and look after their babies.

It seems impossible that any of the devout and hopeful young women could ever really repay the $50,000 debt that gave them access to their much desired new life. But one thing is certain: the invisible shackles of ju-ju will ensure they keep on trying in the hope of recovering their soul â?˝ Max Houghton

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MOMENTS

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AROUND AND AROUND

by Andreas Züst ANDREAS ZÜST SET OUT with Ize Hollinger, a taxi driver, to comprehensively record Switzerland’s roundabouts. After a year he expanded his field of research into other countries. The Kreiselfindteam – “roundabout finding team” – as Hollinger called it undertook some exploratory excursions: from Orange on France’s Cote d’Azur, down to Marseilles and back via Clermont-Ferrand; another trip saw the pair cutting through the centre of France up to Normandy and back via Belgium and Luxembourg. The team went on to explore Brittany, the Channel island of Guernsey and finally embarked upon the shores of England.

Züst pursued his passion in Spain with Caroline Kesser and in India with Heinz Keller. A few days before he died in 2000, he commissioned the last step in his documentation. His daughter was on holiday with her family and she was instructed to take a picture of the Rond-point de l’Etoile at the Arc de Triomphe, Paris, the site of the first ever roundabout some 100 years earlier. And so the story came full circle ❽

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THE AWAKENING 18

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The Awakening Centre, Antoby, Madagascar.

IT WAS NOON WHEN I ARRIVED AT THE AWAKENING CENTRE IN ANTOBY. THE HEAT WAS OVERWHELMING, THE WHITE GROUND VIOLENTLY REFLECTING THE LIGHT.

by Salah Benacer

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I WENT THROUGH the door and found myself in a large room where a great silence prevailed. On the floor lay patients with their feet chained, empty-eyed. One woman was wrapped in a blanket, seemingly oblivious to the heat. A man played with a soccer ball made with the shreds of his sheet.

Some looked at me, disconcerted; others ignored me.

I applied myself to taking very close-up pictures; I got as close as possible, making as little noise as I could as if the silence were synonymous with meditation. I hoped for a reaction. Nothing happened. Just the heat, the

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silence, the madness. Over time, we exchanged a little: a handshake, a smile, a photograph, before the eyes became empty once more; before silence took back its place.

The Awakening Centre is run by the Lutheran Church of Madagascar. It was founded by Maman Jeanne in 1963 on a calling from God. The Pasteur and the piandre – as the staff are known: piandre is Malagache for “angel” – believe the devil is at the root of the madness and responsible for the addictions of the patients.

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The Awakening Centre holds weekly exorcisms on Sundays and Monday afternoons: “In the name of Jesus of Nazareth, go away demon!”

The centre is run on a budget of just 150 euros a month to care for 198 patients, the sick, the mentally or physically handicapped, those addicted to drugs. Some come from distant villages and have been there for years. Some come with a relative who takes care of them while the treatment lasts. Others have been abandoned at the entrance to the village.

If a healing is declared by the village council, and approved by an “angel”, the patient may benefit from a plot of land within the village where he is free ei8ht

to build a hut. He will also join the benevolent staff of the centre. But I feared for the dignity and future of the more seriously ill patients, who are without access to modern diagnosis or treatment.

It was during the Thursday morning bath sessions that I saw patients experiencing real enjoyment. As the water flowed over them, it was as if neither time, nor loneliness nor madness was a hindrance to them. Taking pictures had become meaningless. I was trying to find out what it is that one calls madness. Is it those looks, those voids, those silences, that despair?

I still don’t know ❽ 23

ONE WAY BABYLON

by Karim Ben Khelifa

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I AM VERY SHOCKED about the way things are unfolding in Iraq now. Nobody expected this. Iraqis had such high expectations for what the coalition forces would achieve. They were so excited and happy; they thought Baghdad would be like New York,” says Tunisian-Belgian photographer Karim Ben Khelifa.

Encapsulated in that sentiment was a dream of freedom and prosperity for the Iraqi people. Freedom from a tyrannical and murderous leader has been achieved, but freedom from fear still seems a distant prospect.

“I was in Iraq for Ramadan,” says Khelifa. “I saw how the Iraqi people had become absolutely paranoid about security. Although Ramadan is about forgiveness, it is also a celebration. At night, the streets are usually full of people going out together for ice cream, to

‘We can gain an unusual insight into daily life, its joy, its chaos and its dangers, since the fall of Saddam.’

‘We can gain an unusual insight into daily life – its joy, its chaos and its dangers – since the fall of Saddam.’ Previous page: Iraqi resistance fighter against the US-led coalition forces, hides out in a secret location in Baghdad, November 2003. Top left: Students gather between classes in Baghdad University’s car park, January 2004 Top right: Saddam Hussein depicted in a painting by Iraqi artist Wissam Rady, February 2004. Left: Shia wedding in the Sadr City district of the Iraqi capital, February 2004

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meet, to talk, to celebrate. This year the streets were completely empty.” Khelifa was also witness to the bomb attack during the festival of Ashura in Karbala that killed more than 220 people.

It was the first time in 30 years the Shia community had been able to celebrate freely at the shrine of Imam Hussein, and two million pilgrims had come to the town to worship. “It was amazing to witness what the Shia community are ready to prove for God. Then the bombs went off right in the middle of it. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing: blood, legs, people screaming. It was just hell.

“Emotionally, it was really, really hard. But I am going back to Iraq.”

Although Khelifa publishes his work in a variety of European and American publications he works independently and is comfortable with his role as an “outsider”.

“A lot of new photographers ask me if I’m Iraqi. They’re intrigued because I’m out there on my own with this old Nikon. They were

‘I couldn’t believe what I was seeing: blood, legs, people screaming, it was just hell.’

Top: On the highest point of the Shia holiday of Ashura, six bombs explode in different parts of the holy city of Karbala killing more than 200 people, February 2004. Below left Shia celebrate the last day of Ashura, March, 2004. An estimated two million pilgrims from Iraq, Iran, Pakistan and as far away as Canada made their way Karbala to mark Ashura, which commemorates the martyrdom of Imam Hussein, grandson of the Prophet Mohammed, killed in battle more than 1,300 years ago. Right: Specialist First Class Brown, 26, from Bravo Company, waits in the street for a seat to become available at The Lancers Internet Cafe, Beji, November 2003

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calling me ‘the last dinosaur’ because I use film. Everyone is shooting digitally out there, but for me it doesn’t match what I want to achieve – the grain, the feeling, the intensity.”

In the run-up to the planned handover of sovereignty on 30 June, tensions are running desperately high in Iraq, but Khelifa is heading out there again as soon as he feels the moment is right.

“Because of my background, I understand the Arab way of thinking – although not completely. I can translate the Arab world for the western media, but even if I was working in the western world, the Arab press wouldn’t take my pictures.

“I feel I am in between two worlds, a bridge between them since ‘9/11’, but the bridge only goes one way” ❽ Max Houghton

Top left: Saddoun street in central Baghdad, February 2004 Top right: Sergeant Bates, 27, of the HH3-66 Batallion, calls relatives back home in Memphis, Tennessee, Beji, November 2003. Main: Posters and cards depicting well known Shia Imams are sold on the streets of Baghdad after decades of being banned by Saddam’s regime. Including: Imam Al-Hussein, Imam Ali the Lion, Imam Al-Rida, Shia leader Moktada Al-Sader and his father Ayattolah Mohamed Al-Sader, Shia leader Abdul Aziz Al-Hakim, Ayatollah Al-Sistani, Ayatollah Mohamed Baker Al-Hakim. Above: Kerrada street in Baghdad where fridges, TV sets, mobile phones and all hi-tech goods either banned or too expensive during Saddam’s rule now sell freely, February 2004

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ESSAY

THREE THINGS ON TEACHING AND THE TAUGHT IN A POSTMODERN AGE, CAN REPORTAGE PHOTOGRAPHY EVER BE ANYTHING MORE THAN A SET OF SUBJECTIVE IMPRESSIONS?

Colin Jacobson introduces a provocative contribution from Witold Krassowski to the ongoing ei8ht debate THE COMPLEX DEBATE about the nature of contemporary photography goes round and round. Is photography an art, or do artists use photography? In a postmodern age, can reportage photography ever be anything more than a messy set of subjective impressions? When television can bring us live coverage of momentous events in our sitting rooms, is there any genuine role left for photojournalism? So it grinds on, but one thing is indisputable: more and more young people globally want to study photography.

The world is awash with emerging photographers, all seeking to make a contribution to the future of the medium.

Since the 1970s, academics and philosophers have been warning us that photography is an endlessly misleading form of representation. We should not believe everything we see in a photograph and must rid ourselves of the notion that such a seductive form of expression could have any relationship to the “truth”. Surprisingly, it was an artist, Craigie Horsfield, writing in Creative Review in 1993, who provided a sensible perspective on a tiresome discussion: “The fact is that we do invest form with meaning; you do as you read this and I do as I write. We do believe in 32

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some things and not in others and, while words may allow us all kinds of untruths, we would not survive if we were not able to communicate, to some degree, a shared perception of the world… Without falling back on assumptions of an absolute truth to which the camera gives us access, the responsibility is thrown onto the maker and the audience to shape between them the nature and limits of that pact.”

Was it not always like this, that we negotiate our way through life trusting in some people’s viewpoint and not others?

Illuminating therefore to read in the recent Phaidon book, Art & Photography, a quote from the academic, Victor Burgin, whose writing pushed a generation away from reporting the world into deeply personal agendas: “I’d have students come into my office and they’d say, ‘Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I don’t like the theory classes. I find them really interesting but I can’t take a picture any more…’ The advice I always gave them was: Shoot first, ask questions later.”

Which brings us to Witold Krassowski’s important polemic on the dangers of too much thinking and not enough looking.

Krassowski is an experienced photojournalist based in Warsaw but who works with Network Photographers in the UK. Recently, he was invited to talk at one of England’s leading centres of photographic education.

His experience there prompted him into some hard thinking about the effects of teaching on the future of photojournalism.

CJ

THE PERSPECTIVE THING Is photography a medium? Or rather is it still a medium? If it is, it must possess its own means of expression and what is produced cannot be translated into any other medium without incurring a loss of meaning. The photographic image has many weaknesses. It is hopeless when you need to present a logical relationship between elements, such as cause and effect, especially if they are separated in time (juxtaposition doesn’t seem a sophisticated enough way to convey complex logical relationships). It is no good at documenting a process, it cannot explain, analyse nor make a prognosis. In fact it is very limited. But one action it can perform brilliantly: it can influence human emotions. The mechanism is based both on recognition and the ability to disturb.

While looking at a photograph a viewer recognises aspects in common with the situation in the picture, be it the landscape, the situation or the emotions of the people photographed. They are recognised and accepted as true because it is a photograph. But the viewer’s sense of well-being can be destroyed if something is seen contrary to their experience of life, something opposed to a wellestablished idea of reality. Such an image will be disturbing and force the viewer to rethink their understanding of reality, again because it ei8ht

is a photograph. This achievement belongs to photography.

It also has consequences for the way photographs are made. Everyone creates an image of reality in their mind and tries to protect this image. To bypass all the barriers that human beings put up to protect their concept of reality, the photographer cannot start with conceptions of his own. The photographer must focus attention externally, ready to react instinctively and register the developing situation – without stopping to

pushing the slippers underneath it were all elements of this dramatic struggle. The problem was I failed to spot this brilliant theory expressed in pictures that were boring.

The initial idea, even if true, was an example of something that photography is poorly equipped to do. A thesis in psychology, sociology or anthropology would be more appropriate (Hiding Traces: the Shame of Living in the British Isles at the Turn of the XXI Century, Acme University Press, 2008). The pictures were not the product of an autonomous

THE BASIC DILEMMA OF PHOTOGRAPHERS REMAINS LARGELY UNANSWERED: HOW DO THEY REMAIN HONEST WITH THEMSELVES AND HONEST WITH THEIR PUBLIC? think about its meaning and so produce an image. The resulting image will be based largely on subliminal reactions. In actual fact, the photographer reacts to an element of reality that is disturbing.

The traditionally accepted perspective of photography would then advocate the following: start with a given reality, approached through an instinctual and semi-conscious response, and end up with the conscious production of an image. In other words, the process goes from reality through instinct to image.

The interesting thing is that the modus operandi of photographic schools seems to reverse this approach. Students are expected to torture their brains to come up with a “concept” for a project, then to torture themselves a bit more to find a way of “visualising” their discoveries and only at the end to do the hard photographic work. So the process goes from brain through brain to image. They are taught to observe the workings of their own minds and mistake them for the representation of reality at large. Instinct is dead, curiosity is gone. The end products are predictably uninteresting.

I was shown a photography project by a third year student. Pairs of pictures, one showing a bedroom – bed, small table, lamp, occasional painting, heater and wall; the second – just a close-up of wallpaper. I learned then that the project was about people trying to hide traces of their life, but not succeeding. Tidying the room, covering the bed, ei8ht

medium, they were a pretext for somebody’s cogitations that belonged to a completely different field. Photography was used as a tool to obtain an image, not as a way of saying something in its own right, even though the author pretended the opposite.

I would suggest a possible reason for this: photography schools are in the business of organising a teaching process, and teaching is much easier to do from this perspective. It can take three years, using few teachers for many pupils and a mark can be given at the end. Teaching what I call the accepted perspective would require a one to one relationship, which would take much longer and would not be economically viable.

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Being honest with oneself means sending out a message in the public domain that one believes in and stands by. But what if it’s something unpopular? And what if an idea for a smart career move is contrary to one’s beliefs? Should the career go out the window? And what about the most common situation – it seems – what if the photographer actually has nothing to say but longs for public recognition?

Students seem to aim at establishing social status first and only later look at whether they can produce anything of quality. They use the media and self-promotion whenever possible. As a result, the public area is flooded with mediocre photographs, making 33

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social communication in this field even more difficult (I am talking only about pictures that pretend to have a legitimate message of their own). The authors show a lack of patience and a lack of critical judgment: I have done it, therefore it must be displayed.

Due consideration is rarely given to 150 years of photographic history, with old ideas presented as personal achievement.

It is the general public that has to suffer the consequences; there is a complete lack of respect for the people that come to look at the pictures. The authors seem to believe that the public is as ignorant about photography as they are. Exhibitions are considered mere tools for a personal career.

Yet again the underlying reason for this behaviour is lack of time. The success is real only if it comes fast, because it will last for but a split second anyway. Tomorrow somebody else, another “artist”, will present their achievement. The idea that photography, or at least saying something with it, is what TH Eriksen calls a “linear and cumulative process” doesn’t suit the artists or the publishers. It would mean that long periods of time are needed to send a coherent message into the public domain – a very costly process. The young photographers who fight for quick recognition are not prepared to wait, the publishers are not ready to cover the costs. The public can walk out and the media will still call it a success.

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THE EMPATHY THING Some photographers choose to photograph other people in very difficult moments of their lives. They are facing another dilemma – the use of someone’s image and life for photographic purposes.

This dilemma seems to present itself at different levels, from banal representation of someone in a depersonalised way to the use of human disasters to promote a photographer’s career. There is no denying that every photographer’s activity can be described as cultivating the ego, so it is a question of balance.

Does it serve anything other than a personal purpose to present people’s suffering? If so, what is this purpose? On a daily basis we see humans being used as graphic signs – shapes and forms that give organisation to an image or improve its composition without adding anything to the meaning. It seems both fair and logical to me that if someone decides to photograph people, the resulting pictures should try to say something about the people, not just about the photographer. Apart from anything it’s likely to be much more interesting.

The worst case scenario is when photographers use other people’s distress to send the message: look – I am an artist. The most blatant example of this approach for me is the book by Gilles Peress about the

massacres of Hutus and Tutsis, The Silence – Rwanda. Photographed both inside Rwanda and in refugee camps, it shows very little of the people that are supposedly its topic.

They are just a pretext for the photographer to experiment with the photographic means of expression, with the result that the formal aspect of the images is stronger that the actual information about the people, their feelings and problems. There is no human contact. The message sings out from every page: look how skilful I am – truly I am an artist. Interestingly this kind of abuse doesn’t seem to happen in news photography with the many hard-working photographers who feed the news agencies. Maybe they have a far better understanding of such difficult situations and more respect for the world around them. Or are they happy with the modest status they have attained?

These aspects of contemporary photography are a result of growing changes in our societies. I don’t think they can be reversed.

But this path to future happiness will bring alterations in photographic criteria. We may no longer expect a photograph to have content or meaning. By focusing attention not on the outside world but on the photographer’s ever-growing ego, photography may also lose this unique feeling of human presence and its ability to inform us that we are all the same. In a world saturated with images we will suffer further alienation. We will be surprised by others’ “incomprehensible” behaviour. Photographers will survive but a certain WK social sensitivity will be lost.

Gilles Peress was asked for his response to this article.

He wishes to contribute a feature that will be published in a future issue.

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& DEAR JON I have read many debates over the last few years about photography in the journalism and documentary genre.

They have ranged from predictions that photojournalism is dead to debates on the merits of one aesthetic value over another. I don’t remember any that did not seek to reinforce prejudice and consolidate division, and I have difficulty remembering any that contributed to a constructive dialogue. Despite the acres of typeface, I feel the issues that should concern photographers the most are not being addressed.

Debates over the merits of black and white over colour or one aesthetic over another do not take us anywhere interesting. The endless angst over the state of the print media and comparisons with the situation four decades ago are simplistic and pointless. The observation that it is hard for photojournalists or documentary photographers to make a living these days because they don’t have the financial or philosophical support of the media is not entirely correct and even if it were it is not important. It is what it is. The archives of agencies ranging from Getty and Corbis to Magnum and VII are swollen with images taken in the last few

years with the support of these magazines and newspapers. (The situation varies from one country to another of course but we are living in a time where we have an unprecedented ability to reach a global audience so we should no longer be thinking in terms of nations or regions when we consider our reach.)

The problems that are more pressing and for which we alone are responsible are questions of integrity, inarticulacy, and self-obsession combined with an inability to develop the means to sustain independent authorship ourselves.

Although the traditional print media is an important collaborator in our production it should not be considered as anything more than a small part of our dialogue with the public and the political decision-makers and a fragment of our commercial activity. The total abrogation of economic responsibility by many photographers to agents and other representatives has resulted in a commercial myopia by photographers generally, particularly when it comes to seeking a broad-based support structure to publish or exhibit work. Ipso facto there exists a complete disregard by us for the real value of that work either as a communication tool or as a commodity and it is this disregard that has enabled avaricious corporate entities to exploit and profit from our weakness.

Authors in all genres have collaborated with philanthropists, with commerce and with governmental and nongovernmental organisations to enable production since story telling began. In terms of photography two of the most successful collaborations I recall have been between Walker Evans, James Agee and the US Farm Administration and Gilles Peress and La Fondation de France.

Photographers today are more able (ie, have greater resources available) to seek out collaboration with partners who may have interests that segue with their own and who have the means to enable production whether they be local, national, regional or international.

Diversifying our funding will increase our ability to create independently of imposed editorial views and the financial

constraints of any one single market.

The oft-voiced complaint that our work is not used well – or that the media has a different agenda – is in part due to our self-disenfranchisement; we should ask some serious questions of ourselves. I am constantly surprised and saddened that so many of us have no relationship with the senior editors of newspapers and magazines, curators of galleries or book publishers. If we hide behind agents how then can we expect to have an interesting intellectual collaboration with any partner who publishes our work? How can we possibly expect them to consider us as equal partners if we are too timid, too arrogant or simply too disinterested to engage in serious dialogue with them?

I believe the issues that should concern photographers the most are ones of integrity, substance and direct dialogue with the public, not style and aesthetic.

The aggressive, competitive and vainglorious search for a style and the rigid application of it when found often leads to formulaic and constrained illustration that obstructs any point of view and subverts the issues the photographer is attempting to address.

This self-obsession has led an uncom fortably large number among us to stagemanage and fabricate reality and dress it as actuality. Whether through Adobe Photoshop or the more traditional form of fabrication it all has the same result: it undermines the integrity of every single one of us. Much of the photography on view is nothing more than a cry for attention. It is banal, self-obsessed and has no point of view.

I offer that it is time for a little selfcriticism and to begin looking forwards rather than backwards. A good place to start would be paying more attention to the issues and less to our stature, worrying less about things we can’t control, and focusing more on seeking out new places to publish and exhibit to serve our work as independent authors.

Yours, Gary Gary Knight, Photographer Gary Knight is a founding member of VII

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Athlete’s foot Unflattering swimsuits Foggy goggles Bloodshot eyes Wandering eyes Chlorine stench

Beautiful bodies Weightlessness Bubble massage Gleaming surface Diving in Youth and age

PUBLIC BATHS

By Julia Baier

SWIMMERS

By Julia Baier

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I spent my childhood summers often swimming in one of the three rivers that surround my home town, Passau in Bavaria. The perennial winter experience of the public baths became a source of continuing fascination for me. People sharing the space, the water, displaying their bodies, yet somehow maintaining privacy in a quintessentially public place â?˝ 38

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COMING UP FOR AIR KOKI AND HIS COMPANIONS DRIVE FOR HALF A DAY ACROSS THE PERUVIAN DESERT TO BRAVE ICY WATERS, SHARKS AND THE ‘BENDS’ IN SEARCH OF ‘CONCHA DE ABANICO’. ONE DAY, AN ENGLISHMAN WENT WITH THEM

By John Alflatt

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THE DRIVER OF THE CORONET is Jorge Taypi, known to his friends as Koki. They are following the familiar route from their hometown of Pisco through the desert to Laguna Grande in the Peruvian basin, where Koki’s boat awaits the crew.

When they arrive, at daybreak, the men will don home-made diving suits, fashioned entirely from car-tyre inner tubes, and dive off the small wooden fishing boat into the deep, fertile waters of the South Pacific in search of concha de abanico. The internationally prized fan mussels cluster close to the Peruvian shoreline in the wake of El Niño. Although capable of causing devastation on land, the extreme weather condition – which was first detected by Peruvian fishermen in the late 1880s – brings warmer waters in its path which favours the shellfish.

Fishermen, like Koki’s friends Carlos and Cesar, rely on the sporadic influx of the scallop-like fan mussels to boost their subsistence level income. The alternative is to work in one of the vast, impersonal fish factories in Pisco, grafting long hours for scant reward. At sea, their time is their own. Sometimes they spend a couple of days out on open-topped boats, cooking freshly caught fish on a small stove, taking it in turns to dive and sleep.

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Lacking any modern scuba-diving equipment, the men attach themselves to an ordinary industrial compressor, using a hosepipe clipped to their lead belt for an airline. They regulate the airflow with their teeth. Such enterprising tactics mean the men can dive 15 metres, for up to five hours at a time. The divers enlist the services of a young boy whose job it is not only to help shoehorn the men into their bulky drysuits, but also to monitor their air bubbles rising up from the deep.

Despite the makeshift kit and serious hazards – sharks, freezing waters, the fact that the nearest recompression chamber is in a hospital in Lima, over half a day’s drive away – the men do not swap horror stories over their evening meal. Rather, they choose to share a laugh and a drink with the Englishman. More accustomed to shooting a new campaign for Mercedes in a London studio than haring through the Peruvian desert in the back of a 1972 Dodge Coronet, he has travelled thousands of miles to photograph their pursuits.

Their drink of choice is warm beer – but this is not an attempt to share a peculiarly English cultural heritage. Warm beer has less gas – the doughty divers are therefore less likely to suffer decompression sickness – the dreaded “bends” – the next day ❽

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MOMENTS

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MOON BLOOM

By K T Auleta

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FLOWERS AT NIGHT began with a snapshot of a weed taken on the way home one night in New York, it turned into an project, exploring flowers in their natural settings (public parks, roadsides, and private gardens in London and New York).

The urban night is not a wise place to stop to notice the beauty of flowers. In London’s East End, I took the time to savour a lilac tree, and was mugged of my camera and all my belongings. The images give the flowers an eery, isolated quality – the opposite of their “purpose” – to beautify our daytime urban landscape ❽

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INGUI KHE HOLDS up a flower, turning it between her calloused fingers. Her cracked voice breaks the silence in the hut as she explains how this flower cures many diseases when drunk as an infusion. From a canvas bag she delicately pulls out many treasures – a dried root, a handful of tiny polished pebbles, a scented juniper twig – gathered from the remote forests.

At 70, Ingui Khe is one of the oldest shamans in Tuva, a small Russian republic caught between the vast Siberian expanses in the north and Mongolia in the south. In a region where life expectancy barely reaches 55 years, Ingui Khe is a respected elder and has

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TUVA

by Yann Mingard

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witnessed many changes in her country’s turbulent history from the wild steppe which has always been her home.

She recalls how men in uniform came to her family’s yurt some years after Tuva’s entry into the Soviet Union and burned her mother’s shamanic robes and drum. But the shaman’s secrets were safe, already passed from mother to daughter. Now, after almost half a century of violent repression under Soviet rule, when shamans were killed, sent to gulags or driven underground, shamanism is experiencing a revival.

The shamanic worldview is still deeply ingrained in the mindset of all Tuvans; it never really went away. According to shamanic lore, this world is divided into two worlds: the real world and the invisible world. The latter is a projection of the real world but is inhabited by spirits whose actions influence the lives of people in the real world.

Shamans are believed to have the power to see the invisible world and communicate with the spirits. Increasingly, it is not just ordinary Tuvans who visit shamans like Ingui Khe, to ask her to cure an illness, predict their future or solve a family problem in exchange for a few hundred roubles or maybe a bag of provisions. Local politicians seek advice, and the police regularly request help in finding missing people.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, many

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Tuvans have returned to a semi-nomadic lifestyle, moving their yurts every season, making a living raising sheep, horses, even camels in the south, or reindeer in the high mountains that border the west of the republic.

Inside the yurt, it is as though time is suspended. At nightfall, while men are out on horseback rounding up cattle, women grill mutton over the stove and prepare araka, a trad-itional alcoholic drink made with fermented milk. Each family member has an assigned place and status within the yurt.

Although many ancient rites have disappeared over the 50 years of Soviet rule, Tuva’s geographical isolation has ensured many traditions have survived. Ringed by high mountains, framed by the Altai plateau to the west and the Sayan mountains in the east, Tuva is not accessible by train.

Most Tuvans are keen to maintain this isolation and are slow to embrace the tide of consumerism still sweeping Russia. Their extraordinarily deep attachment to nature brings with it a strong ecological consciousness, a key feature of shamanist societies.

Orlan is a young shaman living in a village near the Mongolian border. He is aware of the pull of a comfortable apartment in the city, but says that such desires disappear when he is in nature.

“The forests, the mountains, the water, the earth, they are the ones we have to Claire Bigg listen to.” ❽

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REVIEWS

REVIEWS

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FOCUS, DIARY, AGENCIES, PRO SERVICES, SCENE

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title: Rethink: Cause and consequences of September 11 editor: Giorgio Baravalle publisher: de.MO www.demo.org cost: £53.00 (582pp hardback)

n Peshawar, Pakistan, 9 October 2001, a fireball engulfs an effigy of George Bush, during anti-US demonstrations. In this, the first striking image from Rethink, you can almost feel the heat of the scorching, bright orange flames flaring out at the surrounding crowd. Taken from John Stanmeyer’s essay “Moving through the wrinkles of God’s hand – Pakistan and Afghanistan 2001-2002” this photograph makes an effective metaphor for the intense animosity towards US foreign policy currently raging out of control across the Middle East. Rethink, a doorstep of a book, proposes various explanations for, and records of, related events in global politics through a combination of photographic essays and texts by political and cultural commentators.

We begin with Antonin Kratochvil’s black and white essay on the impact of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan: “The bear that overstayed: 1978-1988”. These grainy black and white shots, taken up to a quarter of century ago, introduce us to this dustcovered country and its tough war-weary inhabitants during their battles against the Soviets. John Stanmeyer’s story which follows produces some of the book’s most visually striking images. Children’s graffiti

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on a wall in Kabul creates a Cy Twombly canvas depicting the tanks and bombs. Its scribbles and energy convey the frenzy of combat and remind us of the tragedy of a childhood overshadowed by war. In another image the jet trails of a circling US fighter plane create a halo around the turbanned head of a Northern Alliance man as he sits against a softly glowing evening sky. In Alexandra Boulat’s “Terror against terror”, we move to Palestine in April 2002.

Boulat’s photographs depict the clashes and incursions in Jenin and Ramallah that were part of Ariel Sharon’s operation Wall of Protection in the Palestinian territories.

Palestinian detainees walk back into Ramallah, the ground beneath them crisscrossed with tank tracks, their hands and

Anderson’s depiction of the desperate world of the stone throwers in Gaza, children fighting hi-tech weaponry with rocks – a horribly ineffective contemporary twist on David versus Goliath.

Gary Knight photographs Kashmir’s ongoing conflict in 2002. His images depict the ethereal beauty of this troubled region, the various forces at war within it and the effect of the fighting on a society trying to maintain its traditional way of life.

Christopher Morris’s “Counter terrorism and the war on Iraq” mixes formal black and white photographs of meetings in the Oval Office with colour images of the messy reality of the US troops’ drive toward Baghdad.

James Nachtwey’s stark black and whites stand out both for their unflinching gaze and

PHOTOGRAPHY IS ‘AN ESSENTIAL METHOD FOR POLITICAL DELIBERATION’ shirts held up past the unseen gun sights of the Israeli army. A crowd gathers in the rubble that once was the Jenin refugee camp.

These are plain-speaking pictures of people weeping, body bags, rubble and blood.

Ron Haviv’s “Black and white – an uncertain journey with the US military” depicts the blurring of simplistic notions of good versus evil in the Iraqi and Bosnian wars. His colour photography includes clever compositions of soldiers silhouetted against a burning sunset while in training at Fort Worth, praying in the long grass, with a camouflage-clad priest, among the almost biblical landscape of Kurdistan. Other photographs are memorable for more shocking reasons. Haviv captures one of Arkan’s Tigers casually kicking his victim in the first battle for Bosnia. We return again to the Israeli conflict, in Christopher 56

their scope. “The Passion of Allah” tells stories from Pakistan 2001, Kosovo 1999, Kashmir 1999, Somalia 1992, Indonesia 1998-2000, West Bank 2000, Chechnya 1995-96, Bosnia 1993-94, Afghanistan 1996-2001 – the list itself speaks volumes.

All pack an emotional punch, with images at times difficult to stomach, but he also has a fantastic eye – one can’t escape the menace and metaphor in the image from Kosovo of a clutch of scythes carried by a farmer walking past the ruin of a bombed-out building.

The motivation behind Rethink is best summed up in an article by Robert Dannin, found halfway through the book as an introduction to the work of James Nachtwey.

In it Dannin argues the importance of photographs as “an essential method for political deliberation”. Rethink supports these noble intentions: to promote debate

and understanding of current affairs in the context of “9/11”, the shattering attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon of 11 September 2001 and their aftermath. But the very size and scope of this ambitious publication brings problems of its own.

The content is let down by the structure and presentation. It certainly makes for a cumbersome read. The book is about two thirds text, reproduced without images, in blocks interspersed with photographic essays. In a publication of this size, with its large square format, this creates intimidating expanses of writing in a small font that is not particularly inviting to the reader. Another problem is the captioning system – it is not helpful to have to keep flicking backwards and forwards to find the information relating to an image.

The articles do not appear to be arranged in a coherent order and there is minimal background information provided on the authors. Some of the names – and their provenance – are well known: Kofi Annan and John Berger, Robert Fisk and Noam Chomsky, Günther Grass and Edward Said, Susan Sontag and the Dalai Lama to list a few… But not all the contributors are so easily recognisable. Among the multitude of voices are many articulate and interesting inclusions – an exchange of letters between Japanese author Kenzaburo Oe and American Jonathan Schell on Asian power politics and Robert Dannin’s passionate argument for war photography stand out.

But any understanding to be gained from such a publication would only be enhanced by placing these words in a more defined personal and historical context.

This omission of background information also applies to the photographers. I find it very odd that nowhere do the editors explain that all of Rethink’s photographic work is by ei8ht

members of the VII reportage agency. That this is in fact the case can only contradict the all-encompassing approach promoted by the title. Indeed, when separated from the text, the scope of the photography is not so broad-reaching. Was the addition of the articles an attempt to give it a more rounded and global emphasis? The photographers’ shared association also helps explain the repetition of location and in a few cases the strong resonance between images. I do not wholly agree with Dannin’s comment that photographs can communicate an “unvarnished reality”. As any good historian knows, every source whether visual or otherwise, is the product of its author’s individual experience taking place in a specific historical time. To promote it as anything else is folly.

Providing us with this contextual information would not lessen the power that these pictures undoubtedly retain. It is often argued that the proliferation of pictures of recent conflict in the media weakens our sensitivity to their power. However, the creativity and conviction of the photography in Rethink demands our attention.

Rethink appears to have originated in the work of the photographers. The editors have attempted to make it something bigger than the scope of their work allows. If the intentions of the publishers were to bring Rethink’s message to a wide audience, they would have benefited from a more disciplined editorial policy: declaring its true identity, condensing the text and ensuring greater clarity in the structure and design. In his slim introduction, Giorgio Baravalle says the book can be used as a weapon or a treasure. There are treasures to be found here – but with more guidance and better organisation it could have been a much more effective weapon.

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title: We Did Nothing. author: Linda Polman published: Penguin www.penguin.co.uk cost: £7.99 (paperback) During the 1990s, freelance journalist Linda Polman reported from United Nations peacekeeping missions in Somalia, Haiti and Rwanda. Assigned to report on the machinations of member states, Polman recalls the memorable words of one American diplomat: “UN resolutions are like hotdogs. If you know how they make ’em, you don’t want to eat ’em. You just swallow. No questions asked.” That response and others like it that were the inspiration for this book.

The bloody civil war in Somalia would have long-term implications for all future UN missions. The UN found little respect for its mandate. The clans went about their business as usual, safe in the knowledge that the “blue helmets” would not and could not intervene. The shame of the inadequate intervention in Rwanda is also well documented here, and the mistakes that were made with devastating consequences. But Polman also recognises the UN’s hidebound circumstances and evokes our understanding for its “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” condition.

There’s even some humour in her account.

As mighty as the UN is with its fleets of gleaming white Land Rovers, and generous per diems, it is an organisation that always seems to be on the back foot, always the object of criticism and over analysis. After reading We Did Nothing, it is hard not to have some sympathy for its position. The question remains however, how can the UN have power and authority without being seen as a force of occupation?

Perhaps that is for the sequel.

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what: 1001 Nights, Antoine d’Agata where: FOAM Gallery Amsterdam when: Until 13 June The title comes from the classic Arabian adventure, and although presented as a narrative, the similarities between the two seem to begin and end there. Two large collages, resembling negative strips, span the entire length of the walls of the first room in the FOAM Gallery, Amsterdam.

A closer look reveals a seemingly random piecing together of various black and white and colour prints related by their blurred and grainy texture. Scenes of drug use, prostitution and nudity are juxtaposed with barren yet beautiful landscapes.

These scenes are the result of d’Agata’s wanderings through the streets of Amsterdam, Paris and Cologne, recording and experiencing what the night has to offer. The images are captured with a hand-held camera without an artificial light source, producing the blurred and sometimes unrecognisable shapes that the naked bodies take on. Viewing the few explicitly sexual scenes leads to a questioning of the photographer’s presence.

The exhibition’s second room provokes an entirely different impression. Framed images are lined up floor to ceiling. Many photographs are repeated from the first room, yet when viewed within this entirely dissimilar context they resemble less of a narrative; the four chaotic walls leave you struggling to focus on one image at a time.

The effect is shocking and claustrophobic.

Viewing the exhibition becomes, then, a confronting experience, as intense as d’Agata’s own. Its success lies in its ability to demand reactions as direct and evocative as its subject matter.

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BRIEF: title: Etat de Siège author: Mahmoud Darwich. photographs: Olivier Thébaud. published: Actes Sud/Sinbad. www.actes-sud.fr cost: 23.90eur

A beautiful collection of poetry by this Palestinian writer set off by graphic and evocative black and white photography.

Thébaud is the founder member of the progressive French photographers’ collective Tangophoto and this book extends his repertoire in applying photography to a broad range of media.

Photographs by – clockwise from left– Sunil Gupta, Pictures From Here. Ingrid Pollard, Postcards Home (2).

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title: Pictures from Here author: Sunil Gupta title: Postcards Home author: Ingrid Pollard published: Autograph/Boot www.chrisboot.com cost: £19.95 ea (128pp hardback) he British are currently engaged in a roaring debate about immigrants to their green and pleasant land. Or so the nation’s press would have us believe.

In studying two titles in the new series of monographs from Autograph, it has been much more illuminating to witness the experience of Ingrid Pollard, who made the transition from Georgetown, Guyana to England when still a baby, and Sunil Gupta, whose diasporic journey from India has encompassed New York, Montreal and London.

Pollard has deployed her cinematic vision in an intensely personal, stridently political investigation of the black experience in the UK, often using landscape to express ideas of otherness. Gupta has focused on the body as primary referent to achieve an equally absorbing corpus, challenging attitudes to “difference”.

From Delaware Dykes to Birmingham Black Sisters, Pollard documented the powerful political movements of the 1980s, demanding recognition as a black woman, as a lesbian, and certainly achieving it as a photographer in 1987, with a series of pictures called Pastoral Interlude. Using a highly stylised image of a lone black figure in the unexpected landscape of the Lake District, her intention to surprise still succeeds; we see clearly why she “wandered lonely as a black face in a sea of white”. To this day, the association of a black face with an urban environment persists.

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In Seaside Series, Pollard sets herself up as the subject of her pictures, appearing tiny and insignificant in the streets of Hastings, and then juxtaposing these images with cutouts of the usual tourist tat, which promotes England’s matchless feudal heritage with a vulgar pride.

The one failing is that to find the date of particular picture, we have to turn to the index, where this important information is secreted away at the back of the book. When confronted with an image of a young Maya Angelou or Alice Walker, we want to place it at once on our inbuilt historical timeline.

This is a relatively minor quibble in a book otherwise so rich in information and ideas. Its finest moment arrives with the dream-like sequences of the series Self Evident. Here, Pollard puts a unique stamp on her work and her world, ensuring everyone knows she existed, and possibly proving it to herself.

Sunil Gupta grew up in India in the 1960s. The family had no television, so Gupta’s visual heritage is pure Bollywood, strong on narrative, high on colour. His occasional forays into the black and white oeuvre have equal impact, as shown in his insightful series Reflections of the Black Experience. The portraits have depth and intimacy, capturing what it means to feel “fear” in the picture bearing that stark title, to be gay, to be an immigrant, to be elderly (in this unforgettable image, the black woman seems to be enjoying life considerably more than her white companion).

Embracing gay lib wholeheartedly as a student in 1970s New York, it wasn’t until Gupta studied at London’s Royal College of Art in the 1980s that he began to examine his sexual orientation in tandem with his race. Where were all the gay Indians? We discover them in Exiles (a commission for

The Photographers’ Gallery) on the peripheries of Delhi society, separated from their culture by their sexuality. Unwilling to “spy” on unsuspecting men, Gupta honed his skill of “creating subjective reality in a real place”. Tremendous tenderness is palpable in the picture Lakshmi, where two men in dresses worthy of Bananarama embrace under a picture of Shiva. Yet Gupta sensed a lack of critical engagement with the pictures and, tellingly, when one of the images from this series reappeared in an exhibition at Tate Britain, it took its place in the black artists’ room, not in an adjacent room depicting images of the body.

In Trespass, a three part series which took years to complete, Gupta experiments with murals and photomontage to find new ways of expressing migrant culture and thoughts of love. Before completing the series, Gupta discovers he is HIV positive.

The final series chosen for Pictures from Here, Homelands, is an ode to youth and age, beauty and decay, doom and hope, India and the West ... finally the landscape takes on the same importance as Gupta’s inner life. These beautifully realised pictures trace his journey back to his father’s village in Uttar Pradesh, to downtown Montreal, back to Chelsea, New York. With them comes a sense that Sunil Gupta has finally arrived.

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title: René Burri Photographs editor: Hans-Michael Koetzle publisher: Phaidon cost: £59.95 (448pp hardback) contact: www.phaidon.com nterviewed by critic and editor HansMichael Koetzle in the introduction to this substantial retrospective of his life’s work, René Burri articulates what he believes makes a good photograph: “What counts is putting the intensity that you, yourself, have experienced into the picture. Otherwise it is just a document. But if you are truly successful in capturing the pulse of life, then you can speak of a good photograph.”

Swiss-born Burri’s path towards creating “good photographs” began with formal training in 1950 at the Zurich School of Arts and Crafts, primarily under the austere tutelage of Hans Finsler, a devotee of the photographic school of the “world of things”, realised in spare images reduced to their bare essentials.

Finsler’s influence on the young Burri’s photographic outlook is particularly evident in the image Still Life, southern Bohemia, 1955, a study of drinks glasses on a table using natural light, and Shell of the Chapel, Notre-Dame du Haut, Ronchamp, 1955, the interior of the chapel photographed into the shafts of light created by the building’s windows.

As invaluable as Burri found his schooling in providing him with the formal and technical means to create images, he longed to practice a more engaged mode of photography however difficult that might prove to be practically. “When I left school, where we photographed only coffee cups in light, I suddenly had to chase after my pictures. It took a while before I could move at the right pace, swim with the current.”

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Once in the water, Burri soon became an adept swimmer. Barely out of school he was published in Die Woche, a Swiss magazine, followed by reportage appearing in Life and Camera and later in his most prolific decades 1960-1990 Paris-Match, Stern, The New York Times, and The Sunday Times magazine among others.

The numerous reproductions of his work are testimony not only to its quality and the esteem in which he is held by picture editors, but also to his capacity for travel and his desire to get himself to the scene of the action. Over the past 50 years, he has invariably put himself in the right place at the right time: Churchill in Zurich (his first ever photograph), the Suez crisis, Cuba 1962, the Vietnam War, President Nixon’s meeting with Chairman Mao, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the Tiananmen Square student uprising in China.

Throughout these monumental events Burri’s humanity has always been evident.

As Koetzle notes, nowhere in more than 500 photographs reproduced in the book is there one image of a dead, dying or mutilated body – and that is not to say he didn’t photograph war. Witness Burri’s image After the Six Day War, Sinai Peninsula, 1967, where photographed from a distance two tanks in the desert, their gun turrets pointing in opposite directions, resemble children’s toys rather than killing machines. What could better stress the sheer folly of war?

In this instance Burri’s take on the war says much about his approach to his subject matter and how he aims to capture the truth in a situation while simultaneously allowing the photograph to reveal the significance of the moment in time. The critic Jan ThornPrikker explains it thus: “His pictures are filled with mysterious meaning that springs from a documentary base. Even though his

images are exceedingly beautiful, his symbols never dissolve into aesthetic objects.”

Witness American GIs in Club, Tae Song Dong, 1961 (above), where Burri’s “symbols” – the GI and Oriental woman – invite the reader to interpret the relationship as she whispers in his ear. The image is stunningly beautiful and loaded with significance at a time of East/West tensions that culminated in the Vietnam War. Is she a prostitute and he a punter and if so who is controlling and using whom?

What is the confidence they are sharing and is it genuine? Is there a price to pay for the transaction, and if so what is it?

Similarly, in one of Burri’s most famous images In the Ministry of Health, Rio de Janeiro, 1960 (left), his craft – composition, architecture, lines, light – fuses perfectly with his ability to capture the pulse of life.

We see this in the self-assured stride of the women walking, the louche confidence of the ogling men, and it is underscored by his “symbols”: the dress and demeanour of the men, the confidence of the women, the light and the straight lines created by the image that speak of a modernity and a newly found self-confidence of a nation on the cusp of a brave new world – the 1960s – however illusory that may have turned out to be.

For this reader, Ministry of Health is the apotheosis of Burri’s craft in a retrospective that does justice to his integrity and commitment of half a century’s standing.

Compiled by Koetzle, with evident devotion and care, and also by Burri himself, this collection is a historical document of second half of the 20th century. Its key events are witnessed, its significant players – Churchill, Castro, Gorbachev, Guevara, Sadat, Picasso, Mao, Kennedy – recorded for posterity, and all undertaken with enormous humanity, humility and skill.

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FOCUS

n a tough, competitive industry, it’s not always easy to make that crucial first impression that gets you noticed, let alone create an income. Raw talent is only one in a long list of desirable attributes for the successful photographer, which includes: determination, creating contacts, developing a thick skin and, of course, a real passion for your work.

The path of the photojournalist or documentary photographer is not an easy one to tread. But every year, a handful of graduates push on, keeping their professional goals in mind, and manage to secure a footing in the industry. There will be knockbacks along the way, but a good tactic for preventing at least half of them is to recognise your market and audience, and edit your body of work accordingly.

I

Tobias Zielony Tobias Zielony, 31, is a documentary photographer from Wuppertal, Germany, who was inspired to come to the UK to study, after seeing an exhibition of contemporary British photography, that included work by Paul Seawright, Martin Parr and Clive Langden. Zielony won a place on the BA Documentary Photography course at Newport, University of Wales, in 1998, and during his time as an undergraduate, he entered his work into exhibitions and competitions.

His perseverance paid off: his work was exhibited at the Hereford Photography Festival, and he gained second prize in the 2000 Observer Hodge Award, finally graduating with a first class honours degree from Newport in 2001.

It was a conscious decision at an early stage of his career not to approach news or photojournalism agencies, but rather to channel his work towards an artistic context.

He says: “I feel more freedom in the art context, since I do not have to serve the idea of news, actualité or current trends. I like to focus on the lack of events and more undercurrent developments.”

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One of Zielony’s degree projects involved documenting the lives of young people under a police curfew in Bristol and Newport. His interest fixed on the urban environments that confine and frustrate disaffected youth, and this theme has become something of a leitmotif in his later work.

After graduating, Zielony was granted a scholarship from the Heinrich Boell Foundation, which enabled him to join a five-year diploma programme (the equivalent of an English MA) at the Academy of Visual Arts, Leipzig.

Shrinking Cities Since 2002, Zielony has been involved in an arts project funded by Leipzig’s Gallery of Contemporary Art. The project aims to chart the decline of the “shrinking city” of Halle Neustadt, once the heart of the former East Germany’s chemical industry but now experiencing a sharp population decrease.

The flipside of Shrinking Cities is to depict the creativity flourishing amid the urban decay. Consequently, Zielony met and worked alongside many musicians, filmmakers and architects while he was working on this project and living in situ on the 19th floor of a tower block.

Recent projects include a book, Behind the Block, which will be published later this year.

“Behind the Block aims to find a European identity on a level where local or national identities become almost inseparable in terms of architecture, clothing, boredom,” he says.

Zielony’s latest commission is also funded

by Shrinking Cities; he is currently hanging around petrol stations with teenagers who increasingly have nowhere else to go to meet up with each other as one coffee shop after another closes its doors for the last time.

Tobias Zielony’s chronicles of marginalised youth and other work are available through the Fiebach Minninger Gallery, Cologne. www.fiebach-minninger.com

ZIELONY: BREAKING THROUGH

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SCENE

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CARNIVAL

by Liz Johnson-Artur

MY FIRST CARNIVAL in 1990 was quite a revelation. The event has changed, of course, over the years, but the essence is the same. A perfect Carnival for me is a combination of good weather, hanging around different sound systems (I always go to Abba Shanti) and watching people.

This picture is typical of how I work – I like to shoot crowds, but I also like to watch people individually – and the image just happened because I spotted this guy as I

passed; I think he had been there for quite a while. It shows how people have a personal way of being at Carnival; he looks so mellow, really comfortable. He had chosen his spot and he was enjoying what was going on around him. I’ve noticed that the older guys do this a lot, and in fact I do the same as the years pass. We don’t feel the need to get right in the thick of it, into the madness; we just find our spot and hang out.

I can’t remember exactly what year this

picture was taken – either ‘95 or ‘96, but it represents every year for me. Carnival is a big thing for the black community of all ages, but it’s a totally mixed crowd and I can’t imagine a white person feeling out of place there. It emphasises that London is a mixed city. I always have a good time at Carnival, everyone is up for it, there’s always a vibe.

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