Volume 4 Number 1

EI8HT PHOTOJOURNALISM TSUNAMI MIDNIGHT GEORGIA ROMANIA UZBEKISTAN ELECTIONS GET CLOSER UXB HYENA MEN BUM HILL LOST PROPERTY VOL.4 NO.1 JUNE 2005 £8 WWW.FOTO8.COM

EI8HT PHOTOJOURNALISM V4N1 JUNE 05

CALUMET SUPPORTS PHOTOJOURNALISM

CALUMET IS PROUD TO SUPPORT STILL STANDING A PHOTO STORY BY TIM HETHERINGTON

CANON, NIKON, KODAK, FUJI, POLAROID, EPSON, OLYMPUS, MANFROTTO, LEXAR

08000 964396 www.calumetphoto.com

p03EI8HT_advert_02

28/4/05

3:05 pm

Page 3

Subscribe

Buy

foto8 bookshop

EI8HT magazine

Exclusive savings, special editions, and signed copies available now from foto8 on new photography books published by:

Begin a FuturePay subscription before 30 June and save 20% off the newstand price.

Plus, to get you started we will send you the celebrated Vol.2 No.4 issue with our compliments

Chris Boot Dewi Lewis Steidl Trolley Self-published photographers

You can now browse titles, read reviews and buy books online at:

www.foto8.com/bookshop/

Subscriptions from: £25 + postage, annually Back Issues from: £8 incl postage

Telephone +44 (0)20 7636 0399 Email subscribe@foto8.com

You can preview current and back issues of EI8HT and begin a new subscription online at: www.foto8.com/ei8ht/

‘when I open EI8HT I find a fresh angle, power, compassion and humanity’ Richard Williams EU Representative European Council on Refugees and Exiles

Editor Jon Levy Features Editor Max Houghton Associate Editor Lauren Heinz Picture Editor Flora Bathurst Interns Ellie Columbine, Emily Schwarze Contributing Editors Sophie Batterbury, Colin Jacobson, Ludivine Morel Managing Editor Gordon Miller Reviewers Bill Kouwenhoven, Sophie Wright Design Rob & Phil Special Thanks Maurice Geller Reprographics John Doran at Wyndeham Graphics Print Stones the Printers Paper Galerie Art Silk: cover 250gsm, text 130gsm Distribution Specialist bookshops & galleries – Central Books 020 8986 4854, Newstrade – Comag 01895 433800 ISSN 1476-6817 Publisher Jon Levy More information W: www.foto8.com T: +44 (0)20 7636 0399 F: +44 (0)20 7636 8888 E: info@foto8.com Subscriptions/Back Issues 2 years £45 +postage 1year £25 +postage Back Issues from £8 (incl. p+p) Story Submissions www.foto8.com/drr/ Advertising rates www.foto8.com/media/ Disclaimer 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 foto8 Ltd 18 Great Portland Street London W1W 8QP United Kingdom

Editor’s Letter

“The way we live our lives” – this is the predominant theme of this issue of EI8HT. Our stories cover a mixed bag of photographic styles: portraiture, landscapes, still life, reportage, yet they all take a point of view on how people lead their lives and the forces at work that may challenge or change their existence. Sometimes triumphant, sometimes defeated, what the photographs in this issue do share is a yearning for self-determination.

In Georgia, a country shaking off the shackles of the past, we glimpse a nation stumbling over memories even as it heads towards a new future. We can see this too in the daily life of a community in Laos, the recent past buried dangerously close to the surface – bombs and bomblets littering a whole village’s future.

In Midnight’s story, it is a man’s psychological landscape which seems pitted with craters. Living with schizophrenia has directed and moulded Midnight sometimes beyond recognition and a stable existence by others’ standards is out of reach.

Reaching for life is a theme taken up by Uzbekistan, a nation ill at ease, full of people dreaming of moving or returning to another country; and Romania, where a mountain community strives to retain its age-old way of life against the influences of new found wealth.

And lastly but by no means least, we are reminded, in Banda Aceh, of how precarious all existence on this planet really is. Witness a force of nature of such incredible power that it washes away all life. Leaving behind a canvas so bleak that a simple lone house is able to somehow remind us of what makes life worth living.

JL Contributors Tessa Bunney Exhibition of this work at Impressions Gallery, York, in Autumn 2006. www.tessabunney.co.uk Richard Evans www.mrrichardevans.com Richard Gilligan rgilliganphoto@yahoo.co.uk Arlene Gottfried Midnight, the book,is published by powerHouse Books www.powerhousebooks.com Tim Hetherington www.mentalpicture.org Rip Hopkins Galerie Le Reverbere, Lyon. Désplacés is published by Editions Textuel, France www.editionstextuel.com www.agencevu.com Pieter Hugo www.pieterhugo.com Sean Sutton www.panos.co.uk or www.mag.org.uk Vanessa Winship www.vanessawinship.com

4

Contents Vol.4 No.1 June 2005

>Moments >22 Desire Lines Richard Evans – The indelible tracks of those handy shortcuts >30 Cinderella Moments Richard Gilligan discovers lost treasures buried in a Baker Street office >58 Hyena Men Pieter Hugo – Walking with beasts, and tales of mystical spells

58 >Features >06 Living with the Bomb Sean Sutton – Having survived the war, a village in Laos must now survive the bombs >14 Still Standing Tim Hetherington’s solemn monuments in Banda Aceh >24 Midnight Arlene Gottfried – Body beautiful to muddled mind, the chronicle of a man and his illness >42 Voices of the Quiet Revolution Vanessa Winship – Memories and myth: the building blocks of a new era in Georgia >50 Exodus Rip Hopkins in Uzbekistan reveals a multi-ethnic dilemma >60 Hand to Mouth Tessa Bunney – Romania’s rural idyll

50

>Essays >32 Democracy Stinks John Sweeney reports on the circus, otherwise known as election time >36 Close Enough Max Houghton gets in, gets close and gets the real story >41 Dear Jon Paul Kenyon, investigative journalist, responds >Inside >66 Chris Boot – Book publishing: the medium and the message

60

>Reviews >68 Viêt Nam at Peace, The Face of Human Rights, Acts of Charity, No Man’s Land, ShadowHome, Photolucida, Society for Photographic Education, Adriana Groisman, Recreation, Vanishing, 51Months, Painting with Light, Dalit Lives, Call Me by My Name, The Road to Coal, For Every Minute you are Angry you Lose Sixty Seconds of Happiness >Diary >80 The 2005 summer season of UK college art and photography degree shows, photography festivals, events and competitions

42

>Listings >82 Picture Agencies and Professional Services >Scene >90 Rainbow Warriors John Novis looks back on the fated voyage of the Rainbow Warrior and remembers a fallen campaigner

>Cover Midnight © Arlene Gottfried 5

Living with the Bomb

More than three decades after the end of the Vietnam War, the Laotian village of Phanop is still living with the bomb. Its location at the most northerly artery of the Ho Chi Minh trail meant it formed a bottleneck for Vietnamese soldiers crossing the border into Laos.

The relentless six-year US bombing campaign – there were 36,000 missions in the Bourlapha district alone – has left its deadly trail everywhere. Huge craters disrupt the contours of the now peaceful hillsides. Unexploded ordnance lurks in shallow graves, waiting to be unearthed by inquisitive hands, to kill and dismember now as then.

Yet, the villagers of Phanop, like their similarly inventive compatriots, have shaped their landscape with the deadly remnants of war to remarkable effect. Boats are fashioned from the drop tanks – fuel tanks – of US fighter bombers. More than a hundred of such vessels are in daily use on the river at Savannakhet, readily identifiable by their stabilising tail fins, used for fishing and ferrying people up and down stream.

Casings from cluster bomb units (CBUs) have a myriad of uses: they are commonly seen used as weights on roofs or to surround the base of houses to stop rainwater eroding the ground; they have metamorphosed into lanterns and pig troughs. Buckets and watering cans are made from aluminium rocket canisters and flare tubes, many with warning stickers – “Set Fuses” – still attached. In another enterprising reversal of fortune, alloy tubes for dispensing cluster bomblets become ladders.

But much of this ubiquitous detritus of war remains deadly. It is rare for a week to pass without a child being killed by an interesting-looking metal ball – otherwise known as an exploding CBU. Many other explosions occur as a result of routine chores: preparing land for agriculture, digging for edible roots or searching for scrap metal. On 9 October last year, nine people were killed in one day. In one accident, Mrs Paya lost four children and her husband as the axe her husband was using to chop wood made contact with a bomblet. A neighbour’s children were also killed.

There is a solution to this ongoing carnage: to seek out all explosive remnants and destroy them, which is what landmine charity MAG has been doing in Laos for the last 10 years. It is a long, slow and painstaking task. MAG teams only recently entered this remote region of Laos for the first time. Five women technicians, a supervisor, a medic and a driver comprise the team, drawn from local workers. One of the first challenges they faced was a massive aircraft bomb. It was proving to be a big problem. At one tonne, it was much too large to move by hand and it was impossible to get a truck across the river, through the village and across the rice field to where the bomb lay. The bomb had to be “tail-fused” before it could be moved, and then the heavies were called in. An elephant called Bounmar was recruited for the job. The whole village looked on in delight as Bounmar heaved the bomb through the village.

Of course the MAG teams are able to warn the villagers that they will be exploding a bomb that day, and, as they did in the war, the people of Phanop crowd into a cavernous overhang behind a mountain. The shared experience takes on an intimacy as the older generation recounts tales from the war when they took shelter in precisely the same spot.

Nyot Keomanee is 66 years old and remembers the war with clarity. “I was wounded over there trying to get to this cave,” he says, pointing to the river and at the same time pulling up his T-shirt to show a mass of scar tissue. “It was so terrible, many villagers died.”

62-year-old Ngorn joins in the reminiscence. “I was wounded too,” she says. “We had so little food and the children cried all the time from hunger. The Vietnamese gave us rice – one kilo for 10 people per day; and the rest we had to forage for in the forest – mostly leaves and roots.

Sometimes there would be no warning. They would come as low as the bamboo, then boom! – they would drop bombs.”

Today, at least, the children, if a little scared, are not crying from hunger; their parents are calm. A voice from the radio counts down: Neung! Song! Sam! The villagers are ready.

Today, the sound of an exploding bomb means survival 8 Living with the Bomb Sean Sutton

8

9

10

11

12

13

What happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object? Tim Hetherington’s photographic essay works as a meditation on what happened to Banda Aceh on Boxing Day. He arrived two weeks after the tsunami struck the Indonesian province, commissioned to make a film for aid organisation Plan International, filming the rescue operation as it moved up the coast, part of the pursuant global press pack.

The magnitude of the tragedy meant that the devastated landscape became instant public property; the worldwide desire for statistics and images increasing exponentially with the numbers of fatalities reported and the amount of aid pledged.

Having witnessed the immediate aftermath of “9/11” and the subsequent invasion of Afghanistan, Hetherington was seriously considering whether he could add anything to the proliferation of images shooting down the wires. His solution was to spend five days alone with his camera. The lonely monoliths shown here struck Hetherington as a metaphor, not so much for what had happened but for what happens next. After the catastrophe, the grieving. The speed of events at first is breathtaking – a network springs into place and provides relief and support in whatever ways possible.

The acute pain of death and loss subsides, only to make way for the ache of abandonment. These former family homes are still standing; at first glance they look much as they always did on the outside, but inside they are hollow.

The pictures do not presuppose any answers, but that is not their purpose. If the images from the wires that make front-page news bring us the bare and brutal facts, then photographs such as these have a different intention. They are quite literally the calm after the storm. That they are in themselves exquisitely beautiful should serve to deepen, not diminish, our understanding of catastrophic events and remind us that the journey between beauty and horror is the precise dialectic of life 8 Max Houghton

Stil Standing

Still Standing Tim Hetherington

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

>Moments Desire Lines Richard Evans Desire Line – A direct physical reflection of human nature and aspirations. Scars of the old adage “safety in numbers” as we follow each others’ shortcuts and create paths across urban greenspace.

These lines are the physical evidence of our need, want and desire to save time and expend less energy.

As our cities swell and as flora becomes increasingly sparse, cutting across the garden is one of the few interactions the urban dweller has with nature. From lipstick sparkling patent leather pumps to the sturdiest of worn walking shoes, they are all muddied by their wearers to create the continually evolving lines of desire 8 Hilary Marett

24

Midnight

When Arlene met Ismael, she was making a living as a photographer in New York, taking pictures for magazines such as Life and Fortune, and he was a dancer. Throughout their 20-year friendship, Arlene continually photographed the man she knew as Midnight. Just a few years after they became friends, Midnight was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. He would have good days and bad days and could disappear for months at a time, turning up in far-flung locations across the States, but their friendship remained intact. The photos she took were never intended to be a chronicle of an illness, but simply intimate portraits of her gorgeous, flamboyant, unpredictable friend.

“We met in a cafe and we started going out on some trips to the usual places – Coney Island, Staten Island,” recalls Gottfried. “He was part of the arts scene on the Lower East Side and we’d go to parties together, where he’d be dancing. He was attractive, and he always dressed really well, so I just started photographing him.

“I read his Chinese horoscope once, and it said he was eccentric and unusual with a vivid imagination – and that’s all true. That was his character. In some of the pictures where he’s being theatrical, that’s just him – nothing to do with his illness. I first noticed something was wrong when he started to become withdrawn. And it’s an odd thing, but as he started to become delusional – talking about Pontius Pilate and all kinds of religious imagery – he started to look like Jesus too.

“He was diagnosed after the police rescued him from the top of the Williamsburg Bridge. He was hospitalised after that, and from that time on it was a cycle of being in and out of hospital for weeks at a time. It was extremely upsetting, but he’d still come by my place and we’d just go get coffee. I remember one time he came round on Hallowe’en in the early ’90s, wearing an eye patch. He didn’t stay too long that day. I took a picture of him in my elevator as he left. He never minded my taking pictures. It was what I did, and he understood that on a deep level. He had a complete understanding and acceptance of my work. It can be hard taking pictures of people; they can get it so wrong. Midnight never got it wrong.

“There were periods where we were still friends but he would be distant. We’d go out for walks but I was with someone who wasn’t present.

Then he’d disappear physically too. He’d always show up again in the end. A couple of times, he’d shock me with how bad he looked. The day he came round wearing the red hat and the white coat, he was really sick; quite a sight. I’d never seen him look so bad.

But we just went to a coffee shop; he had a donut and then said he had to go.

“Another time, I saw him on 14th St from the bus. I got off and he said he’d been staying in a men’s shelter. He’d really cleaned himself up: he was wearing a smart beige coat and he’d even shaved his head. I called this his ‘English Gentleman’ phase.

“Because of the cyclical nature of his illness, and probably because of his medication too, his weight would fluctuate. Sometimes he’d be very thin, his cheeks would be sunken. Now he’s older, when he’s more stable, he gains weight. He lives in a residency, and has a part-time job in a newspaper production department. He’s still a beautiful man. He’s had a really hard life, but he has stories galore of his experiences far from the mainstream. Was he more joyful years ago?

Probably. Probably we all were. Every individual has dreams and I guess everyone’s dreams don’t turn out they way they hoped.” 8 Arlene Gottfried was talking to Max Houghton.

Midnight will be exhibited by Autograph, at The Space Studios Gallery, 129 – 131Mare Street, London, E8, from 10 June – 16 July, with a talk by the artist on 11June Midnight Arlene Gottfried

25

26

27

28

29

>Moments Cinderella Moments Richard Gilligan I’d wanted to get into the Lost Property offices at Baker Street for ages.

Everything that gets lost on the Underground gets sent there and the staff log it and label it and look after it until you go and claim it back. They don’t have a phone number, so I wrote and faxed and emailed to try to get permission to go and photograph there.

Summer came and went and I’d pretty much scrapped the idea. Then I got a call out of the blue inviting me to go down. I was jumping around! I was at college at the time, on the documentary course at Newport, with Ken Grant and Paul Seawright, so I went in and borrowed a 6x7 camera and some studio lights and the next day I was on the train.

I arrived at Baker Street at 9AM and already the staff were down there, sorting stuff. They showed me some of the rooms. There’s a whole room for umbrellas – they’re the most frequently lost item, so there’s thousands of them, all different colours. In the dolls room, I could just imagine little girls bawling their eyes out when they realised they’d lost their favourite dolly. There’s a mobile phone room, of course, and that’s organised really clinically. You can hear phones and alarm clocks going off the whole time, usually from inside suitcases. After an hour or two, you feel like you’re losing your mind. The scale of the place is extraordinary. It’s so far underground that it smells a bit damp and musty, like an old cellar. What’s most amazing about it is that two thirds of the stuff ends up back with its original owner; the staff really take a pride in that.

One of the weirdest items I photographed was a wedding dress – it was just hanging there next to the artists’ portfolios. In a way it’s the saddest of the pictures; I really wanted to know the story. Did someone get cold feet?

But my favourite picture of all has to be the teeth – it’s just so gruesome. I’m not sure how someone loses their teeth but I know that when my granny falls asleep, her teeth slip out. When the pensioners come to claim them, the only way they can know for sure they’ve found their teeth is by trying them on. I suppose it’s their Cinderella moment 8

32

Democracy stinks, I hear the man at the back say, and there is no better evidence of that than the pantomime of elections that happen every now and then to keep the confidence trick going. I’ve covered three British elections up close and personal in which I’ve lost £100 on betting that Neil Kinnock would beat Mrs Thatcher (1987), been thrown off John Major’s coach for bad behaviour (1992), and punched in the guts by one of John Major’s security men for no good reason (1997). I’ve driven to somewhere hideously uninteresting in the middle of the Ohio flatlands and watched a man who I described in The Observer as “having the mind of a duck” giving an election meeting and then going on to become the President of the United States, despite him getting less votes than his opponent.

Democracy stinks? Yes, well, maybe. But you should smell the alternatives. My very real difficulty is that I’ve also been to a whole bunch of countries where good people are routinely tear-gassed, tortured and butchered fighting for the right to do something several million Britons can’t be bothered doing come the election.

It’s thanks to the not so nice guys in places like Zimbabwe, Chechnya and Algeria that I don’t believe in apathy. I’m dead against the “I’m not bothering to vote because it only encourages them” line. If you have a vote, you should use it.

When people moan about British politics, I think of my fixer in Chechnya who smuggled me into his bomb-blasted country, my cover a hungover Canadian accountant for the Salvation Army. Unconvincing? I did the hungover bit well enough. And it worked. Someone got on his case and the fixer has now vanished from the face of the earth. The Russian secret police would be the most likely candidates for putting that particular X down. They don’t like voting that much, either.

And Tichaona Chiminya, Morgan Tsvangirai’s driver, burnt to death in his car for being a supporter of the Movement for Democratic Change in Zimbabwe during the 2000 election. He would have liked to have voted in a fair and honest election.

Elections matter, and are better than not having elections.

Not all the lies, the deceit, the spin-doctoring, the let-downs, the disappointments, the sell-outs to Big Tobacco or Big Oil or whatever, have quite ruined the beauty of democracy for me. It is still an amazing moment, when you enter the chapel-quiet of the polling station and go behind the curtains of the polling booth and scribble your X by the name of the man or woman you wish to send to Parliament.

John Sweeney

Democracy Stinks 33

Tony Blair, the British Prime Minister, (previous page) holds a news conference, 18 April 2005, on health as he campaigns for a third time in office REUTERS/Toby Melville The late Screaming Lord Sutch (right), who opened the floodgates to ‘alternative’ candidates with his Monster Raving Loony Party. He demonstrates, 26 September 1996, at the annual MRLP conference how the Conservatives stole his ‘Loony Eyes’ platform for their own ‘Devil Eyes’ pre-election poster campaign. REUTERS

That is the best bit, when you make love, or not, to those in power. But it feels a little bit schizophrenic trying to maintain one’s love of democracy as the greatest system of government the world has ever known when faced with the sometimes sordid, sometimes silly reality.

My favourite election meeting, ever, took place on 22 April, 1997, when ex-BBC warhorse Martin Bell was standing in his white suit against Neil Hamilton – not forgetting his battleaxe missus, Christine. The battle caught the fascination of the world’s media, who called it Planet Tatton. And for that reason a whole bunch of other candidates came piling in, some with very strange views indeed.

The candidates trooped on stage, Bell, independent, on the left; then, to the right of him, Ralph Nicholas, also independent; Michael Kennedy of the Natural Law Party; David Bishop, poet of the Lord Byro Versus the Scallywag Tories party, sporting a top hat with with a sleaze special offer, “Poet for Sale, 10/6,” tucked into the rim; Miss Moneypenny, a six foot four transvestite sporting yellow bridal dress and birdcage headgear; and John Muir, of the Albion Party.

For the audience, the below-the-belt view beneath the table provided an interesting contrast. Miss Moneypenny’s black and yellow hooped knees were clamped together, her feet apart; Muir’s knees were spread as far apart as his trousers would allow, his tie dangling at fig-leaf level. It looked like a badly cut film strip of a knee dance. The debate, such as it was, was chaired by a man of the cloth who was a dead ringer for the vicar in Dad’s Army.

Nicholas spoke first. He looked like the kind of person who is murdered in the first five minutes of a detective movie. He got the name of the constituency wrong, wanted poll tax changed – it had been – and gave the impression of one of those people who have been abducted by aliens and suffer “time lapse syndrome”.

The man from the Natural Law Party looked like an alien and believed in yogic flying but, boringly, did not yogically fly. Lord Byro read a poem, which began: “Land of PurgaTory, home of BSE,/ scoff your Sunday dinner laced with CJD…” John Muir of the Albion Party was asked for his position on the Alderley Edge by-pass and replied: “The first measure that I would like to see introduced would be a new Bill of Rights”.

“Your position on the Alderley Edge by-pass?” reminded the vicar.

Miss Moneypenny revealed that he/she had, in fact, a first class degree in chemical engineering. The hall gasped.

An elderly gent with a fine head of silver hair and a neatly groomed moustache got to his feet. He spoke with deliberation: “First of all I’d better admit that like the last speaker,” – surely not – “I’m also a graduate chemical engineer but I’m sorry, I didn’t bring my bridal dress too. I’d like to know why Miss Moneypenny is standing.”

Her voice cracked a little, then out came a mannish simper: “I have as much a right as any of these people here to stand.”

The hall sat in silence, and then we all burst into applause.

It was an affirmation of the democratic principle; what elections are all about. That it came from a tranny with a birdcage on his/her head made it no less moving 8 John Sweeney is a special correspondent for the BBC

34

35

“If your photos aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough.” Capa’s famous dictum still resonates but even the most dedicated member of the frontline club would be hard pushed to defend it as a singular modus operandi now. The “f8 and be there” mentality has its place, but the mass media’s approach to reporting – journalistic, photographic, televisual – has greedily adopted the wow factors of speed and proximity at the expense of context and understanding.

So reporters become battery hens, fed junk which they have to process and then reproduce as something else, something that was once seen as having nutritional value. Why did the chicken cross the road? To get away from the publicist.

Such is the state of vast swathes of contemporary “journalism” that some media theorists are calling for the death of the journalist in favour of amateur blogs and private pictures.

Let’s not forget the 73 journalists and media workers who died last year in the line of duty, 23 of whom met their deaths trying to report what was really going on in Iraq. But more than ever, we need serious, committed story tellers – writers, photographers, filmmakers – who are prepared to go that extra mile, commissioning editors who will support them to do so, and an audience that wants to be informed as well as entertained.

Constrained by time, money and the commercial imperative, it is all the more satisfying when a journalist manages to buck the trend for the quick-fix solution and produces a body of work that changes how we think about the world.

David Notman-Watt is a director and producer for Brighton based back2back Productions who produced the acclaimed documentary Leo and Zé, one of a series of three films on cocaine, commissioned and broadcast by Channel 4 earlier this year.

Director Angus McQueen needed an “in” to the notorious drug gangs of the favelas of Rio de Janeiro – the Brazilian city is the key transit point for cocaine leaving Latin America. He knew Notman-Watt by reputation as someone who had filmed extensively in Brazil – having grown up there as a young boy after his family relocated there from the UK in the course of his father’s work.

Both men knew the stakes when they met to discuss the project: the last journalist to get close to the gun-wielding teenage drug commanders was Tim Lopes who worked for the popular Brazilian channel TV Global. Lopes had spent a good deal of time gaining trust, getting in, and creating a highly revelatory series . But he wanted more information, and his decision to go back into the favelas – this time with a hidden camera – proved to be a fatal mistake. His equipment was discovered and Lopes was abducted, tortured, and finally burnt, his charred remains sent back to his TV station.

Among Notman-Watt’s earliest memories as a child growing up in Rio are of drug gangs, who in groups of 20 or 30 would form dragnets on either side of the street and then charge forwards, pausing only to rip jewellery from terrified victims, or to beat those who put up a fight.

“In those days, they were intimidating – 36

Close Enough

Max Houghton

All pictures courtesy of David Notman-Watt

‘... you can’t just walk up to them and say “Hello Mr Drug Gang Member, I’m David. How do you do?” ’

I remember vividly my mother crying and holding me really tightly – but they would have only been armed with pistols. The cocaine trade has entirely financed the guns and grenades they have now. It’s a city at war.”

It was obvious at the outset the filmmakers would have to be explicit about their motives; undercover work in this case was absolutely out of the question.

“I didn’t know if I’d be able to do the film at first; I gave it a 50-50 chance. Of course, it was a heck of a challenge because of what happened to Tim Lopes. I had to insist that if at anytime during the filming, I felt it was getting too dangerous, I could pull the plug.”

So, Notman-Watt made the first of several trips from England to the city he had known intimately as a boy, and for weeks encountered walls of silence from police and politicians. He was beginning to get frustrated.

“I’d been to dozens of favelas, but I hadn’t been allowed to meet the gangs. I’d seen them, but you can’t just walk up to them and say ‘Hello Mr Drug Gang Member, I’m David. How do you do?’ One fine day, my driver – who I’ve used for years; he’s my blood brother – said he knew someone I should meet. To his credit he didn’t tell me anything about his background.”

The huge man with the shaved head who he met the following day was Zé, who turned out to be one of the only drug commanders in Rio who had managed to get out of the game alive.

Just. Although these days he worked two jobs, his daily profit in the cocaine trade exceeded his monthly wage now. So why did he get out?

And why did he want to talk to the Englishman who spoke Portuguese like a local?

“All I knew at first was that I had to gain his trust,” says Notman-Watt. “It was obvious to me from the word go that I could not lie to him at any stage because he’d smell it. I didn’t have to make him any promises. I just told him I needed to meet the drug gangs because I wanted to make a film about them. I think really we just genuinely liked each other and we started to form a bond. As we started to meet these kids, I was dead honest with Zé about how I felt. I’d start shaking and say ‘Look, Zé, I don’t like this – I’m really scared.’ And he’d talk me through it. Time and time again, he’d stand in front of me when the kids started pulling guns and getting aggressive. He’s such an impressive physical presence for a start, but they had huge respect for him because of who he was and because he got out. If it got tense, he’d just turn the mood.”

Slowly, Notman-Watt began to appreciate Zé’s personal motivation for wanting to talk. The day his world changed was when he got shot in the spine by rival drug gang members – the bullet is still lodged inside him – and despite crippling pain, losing control of his bowels, and fading in and out of consciousness, Zé clung on to the underneath of a bus and somehow made it home to his favela and his wife. There and then he made a promise to her and to God that if he survived, he’d walk away from the drug scene for good.

“We noticed that being part of this film was becoming a real release for him. He’s a born-again Christian and it became his mission to try to stop his nephew Leo from becoming

37

embroiled in the gangs.”

To begin with there was no intention that Zé should appear in the documentary. He was paid as a “fixer” and Zé said he’d do what he could. “Within the space of three or four days, I’d met every single drug commander in Rio,” recalls Notman-Watt, who made a point of walking around entirely unfettered during initial tense meetings with the drug gangs – no notebook, no tape recorder, just him and his flip flops. They graduated to drinking beer, playing football, talking about girls, and as they got used to his presence, the boys started to relax. Relaxation was not part of the deal for Notman-Watt.

“I’d never be naive enough to think they were my mates. They’re not my mates; they’re murderers. My big concern was that while they were cool with me being around, what was going to happen when I came up the hill with a great big TV camera and the crew?”

With just a few weeks before the crew were due to arrive, Notman-Watt needed a strategy. He had a pocket digital camera with him, and as he started taking occasional pictures of the scenery, and showing them the results on the screen on the back of the camera, their interest grew.

“They’d never seen themselves like this before and they thought it was amazing. They started asking if I’d take pictures of them and their guns. At first I’d delete the images straight away but they really liked seeing themselves – so that’s how I sold the film idea to them: ‘Wait ’til you see yourselves on the big camera.’ One of them said to me ‘This’ll be better than City of God.’” Over a period of time, Notman-Watt had identified what these teenage drug commanders, high on cocaine, knocked out by weed, caressing their AK47s, most wanted from life: to be famous.

From Romford to Rio, the cult of celebrity recruits the most unlikely candidates. It’s this kind of insight that turns a decent premise into a great story. Without any kind of deception, bribery or coercion, when a journalist persuades someone to talk or be filmed or collude in a project – this is their decisive moment.

Award-winning investigative journalist from The Guardian, Nick Davies, whose long career has brought him disturbingly close to pimps, paedophiles, even politicians, says the real skill and excitement of being a journalist flows from that moment.

Although he thinks undercover work can be used as a last resort, the building of relationships is where it’s at.

“The most extraordinary thing about being a reporter is how you can build relationships with people who appear impossibly inaccessible. I did a lot of work on a paedophile ring in Amsterdam. I was particularly interested because I believed they were having sex with boys as young as 10 who they’d shipped in from Eastern Europe. I believed they’d been selling them through brothels and making films with them and even killing some of them in front of the camera.

When you’re trying to deal with someone very secretive, very fucked up, very paranoid, you think you’ll never be able to get them to talk – but you can. One of the odd things I learnt was that each individual paedophile wanted to believe that he was a good 38

‘The most extraordinary thing about being a reporter is how you can build relationships with people who appear impossibly inaccessible’

Scenes from Leo and ZĂŠ in the favelas of Rio. ZĂŠ is pictured top right with his mother, Dona Preta. Leo is pictured facing the film cameras on the page 41

39

man and that he treated his boys well. He’d say he loved the boys, and that he treated them with love and respect… this was the story he was telling himself in his head. So if you took advantage of that, you could get him to talk about others in a really lacerating way. By denouncing so-andso down the road, he’s made himself feel better. No one wants to feel bad about themselves.

“The other thing to be aware of is the extraordinary way in which people change their concept of what’s normal.

I had to doorstep a man called Rudy Van Damm for this story, who was then the biggest producer of child pornography videos in Holland. He let me in and inside it was a classic north European bourgeois house with this very dark wood dining table and dark wood sideboards round the edge of the room.

“He was a rather scholarly-looking man – he struck me as an elderly academic with slightly long white hair coming over his ears in nice waves and glasses on a string hanging on his chest.

We sat at the table and I asked questions and he talked in a very sophisticated and intelligent way. All the time he was talking, there were two monitor screens on the sideboards behind him, sound turned down, playing pictures of boys being fucked up the arse, non-stop. He had no consciousness of how weird that was. It was as if to him, it was no more remarkable than having a bowl of flowers on the sideboard.”

Upfront or undercover, embedded or independent, getting close is unlikely to be a comfortable experience for the journalist, or an easy ride for the audience. Suddenly you are face to face with the unpalatable, the unacceptable and inevitably this newfound intimacy raises questions, many of which are unanswerable. What makes a bright young boy like Leo turn into a feared drug commander who doesn’t reach his 20th birthday? How is the child pornography industry able to function with such seeming ease?

The news consumer does not necessarily have the stomach for such information, because it’s not even on the menu anymore. By getting closer to what’s really going on in the world, we might not always find the answers but at least we can ask the right questions 8

David Notman-Watt – www.back2back.tv (Cocaine: Leo and Zé) Nick Davies – www.guardian.co.uk (When Sex Abuse Can Lead to Murder)

40

Uncovering criminal corruption is the most important aspect of investigative journalism. I feel very strongly that it is a journalistic pursuit … up to a point – and then we’ll hand it over to the police. The whole premise for the BBC series Kenyon Confronts was undercover reporting and that was because there are certain types of investigation that can’t be done by traditional methods, such as documents or evidence from whistle-blowers. We take a great deal of care over our methods: we have to get prima facie evidence that what we want to uncover is anti-social or criminal.

There are several layers of bureaucracy at the BBC – we have to go to the editorial policy department and present our evidence. We might include a briefing from a police officer or an investigating agency, and if the weight of evidence is sufficient, we’ll go in.

When we did a programme about horse race fixing, we were sure that there was no other way of getting to the bottom of it. No one would admit they’d fixed a race. We had strong anecdotal evidence from three well-known trainers but you can’t just film someone saying they saw it happen. You have to be there when it’s done.

We set up a prolonged sting in which we bought a racehorse. The man we suspected was very quick to offer up various facilities that meant the horse didn’t run straight. Just because we had anecdotal evidence didn’t mean we automatically assumed his guilt.

Our point was to see if the anecdotal evidence stood up, and it did.

The question of why – once we knew a race was fixed and filmed it being fixed – we didn’t go straight to the police is a very delicate area, but ultimately it’s a public interest argument. Our intention was not simply to say that one race had been fixed and it was illegal, but to expose the full dimension of the corruption and to show it was a systemic problem. If we tipped off the police at that point, they would have only been able to take action on that one race. When it’s a matter of public interest like that it’s worth a whole lot more digging.

But when we were doing a story on paedophiles, we made a decision to inform the police instantly if we saw a child at risk with a paedophile. We were filming these men, who had just been released form prison and were back working with children, and one of my colleagues saw a young boy go into a paedophile’s house.

Against his journalistic instincts – bearing in mind that if the paedophile is arrested that’s the end of the programme because the story goes sub judice – he called the police. They found the boy naked in the paedophile’s bed. As it happened, charges weren’t brought as a result of that particular incident, but whether or not our programme had been ruined, the safety of the child was where the buck stopped 8 Dear Jon

Yours, Paul

Paul Kenyon is an investigative reporter for the BBC

41

Voicesof theQuietRevolution

After the Rose Revolution of November 2003, Vanessa Winship made the first of successive visits to Georgia from her current home in Turkey. Since the fall of President Shevardnadze, a democratic voice competes with echoes from the past; the ghosts of the Soviet era intoning their secrets like incantations

44

Voices of the Quiet Revolution Vanessa Winship

Like Jason and the Argonauts arriving in ancient Colchis, Vanessa Winship went to Georgia on a quest.

Her many-layered images blur the boundaries of fantasy and reality and are suffused with the history of the country where in legend the Golden Fleece was found. Like Jason, Winship was led to Georgia by a messenger, “Gilda”, a child with an angel’s face, who showed her the way to his homeland. The treasure she found there is less tangible than a trophy; it is an exploration of a people, of their pasts, their lives and their desires beyond it all.

Who is the glamorous woman in the fur coat in Gelati Cathedral? From the fresco behind, the kings and queens of a former age look on, silently, at Georgia’s new aristocracy. In Tbilisi, two sisters, Natela and Eteri Veshapidze, who led an elegant life in their youth, now live out their later years in one room, surviving on less than £10 a month. Their life savings worthless, they keep the few valuable artefacts from their former existence in an uninhabited room, a shrine to the past. The sisters imagined that in their old age they would be catered for and they are deeply embarrassed and ashamed that their lives have come to this.

The exquisite dancers from the Sukhishvili dance company, backstage at a theatre in Gori, prepare for a performance in honour of their founder. They are dressed as Georgia’s famous Queen Tamor, but the stage whispers reveal another story. Their choreographer, a feted man, the world at his feet, had gone on tour with his wife, a young and beautiful dancer. One night after a show, the group had gone out to celebrate. They were strangers in that town and didn’t know the streets. A robbery occurred, his young wife had her jewellery snatched. There was a fight and in the fray, a terrible and fatal crime occurred. The choreographer has fallen into a deep and impenetrable depression. No one knows what to do or how to console him.

Across town, a group of Gori’s not-yet-famous sons – Stalin was born there – are preparing for a wrestling competition at a sports academy as young gymnasts practice their routines in another room. It is those who look most vulnerable who are the most aggressive during the wrestling training.

Soso Tolordava, the young boy on the sofa, is disabled and has spent most of his 16 years confined to the hotel room that has been his home.

A refugee from Abkhazia’s civil war in 1992... does he too dream of other places?

Jason and the Argonauts navigated the Black Sea to enter Colchis via the Phasis River, now the Rioni River. The modern unfinished bridge across the Rioni represents many things, not least Georgia’s post-revolution stagnating economy and lack of infrastructure. But its symbolic significance, like the river, runs deeper: “The bridge was built during the day and destroyed at night by the spirits of the water. It demanded a sacrifice. Let someone come who is willing to be sacrificed in the piers of the bridge, the bards sang. The monk, sure that no one would volunteer, was aghast to learn that Murrash Zenebisha, an average local worker, had been immured into the bridge’s first arch in the night, his face still visible, staring out from the bridge, where his corpse could be made out beneath a veneer of plaster. It was something that violated everything we knew about the borders of life and death. The man remained poised between the two like a bridge, without moving in one direction or the other. The man had sunk into non-existence, leaving his shape behind him, like a forgotten garment.” (Ismail Kadare, The Three-Arched Bridge) It remains to be seen how Georgia and its people will cross the bridge from communism to democracy. It will be a tale no doubt quick in the telling but long in the doing. Such transitions never come easily and they never – except in fairytales – happen overnight 8 Max Houghton 45

‘The messenger’. In Turkey, a young Georgian boy (above), christened ‘Gilda’

by Winship, who planted the seed in her mind of visiting his homeland Who is the face in the fur (below) in the 12th century Gelati cathedral? On the walls behind her, frescoes depict the kings and queens of a former age, looking out on Georgia’s new aristocracy Waiting for a train that may never come (previous page) … Tbilisi railway station

‘Let someone come who is willing to be sacrificed in the piers of the bridge, the bards sang.’ The unfinished modern bridge across the Rioni (right) is an eloquent symbol of post-Soviet economic stagnation and decay

At the sports academy (below) in Gori – Joseph Stalin’s hometown – young gymnasts practise their routines and wrestlers prepare for a competition.

Who knows where success may lead them? There are no such prospects on the horizon for Soso Tolordava (bottom), disabled and a refugee since the civil war in Abkhazia in 1992, who has has lived for most of his 16 years in a hotel in the suburbs of Tbilisi. Thousands of refugees are still housed in similar accommodation

46

47

As visiting dancers from the Sukhishvili company (facing) prepare for a performance, backstage whispers tell of an attack on their choreographer and his wife in Gori’s unfamiliar streets. Her jewellery was snatched, there was a fight: the outcome was fatal and the choreographer has fallen into a deep depression

That it should come to this. Ariadna Maisuradze, (below) a disabled pensioner, in her one-room rented apartment in Tbilisi. Mentally handicapped children (centre) with a carer at an institution in the capital – like all such establishments, it suffers from chronic lack of funding. And Natela and Eteri Veshapidze (bottom), two elderly, once elegant, sisters, who eke out their existence on a pension of £10 a month

48

49

Exodus Rip Hopkins The former Soviet republic of Uzbekistan is haemorrhaging citizens. Recent political upheavals are only part of the story. The connection between the Uzbek identity and Uzbekistan is very much a Soviet matter‌ (page 56)

50

51

In a factory in Tashkent, a group of workers play dominoes. Their stories neatly spell out the Uzbek condition (above from left). Sergey Ni, 45, is Korean and wants to leave Uzbekistan. Khamski Xanskinch is 27. His parents are from Ukraine and came to Uzbekistan in 1952.

He would like to leave for Odessa, Ukraine. Yetgem Ebremil is 54. When he was three years old, his family emigrated to Tashkent from Kazan, Tatarstan, which is where he would like to return.

Fifteen-year old Tashkent-born apprentice Alexandr Galinov Rifkatovich is Tatar. He wants to go to Russia when he finishes school. Famil Mingrinov, 53, came from Tatarstan to Uzbekistan with his parents, sent there by the Soviet authorities to help rebuild Tashkent after the earthquake of 1966. He wants to go back to Tatarstan. Kirill Galimov, 51, is Tatar and hopes to soon leave for Russia.

Takhir Azizov Tolipovich, 50, is Tadjik. He does not want to leave Tashkent

52

At Uzbekistan’s Science Institute in Tashkent (left), a scientist from Kiev has put a Ukranian good luck charm of a plant cutting in his office Dilbara Asanovna, 60 years old, (previous page) in the entry hall of the Railway Museum in Tashkent, where she works. She was sent by Stalin to Uzbekistan from Russia with her parents in 1952. She wants to return to Russia but no longer has family there or the money for the journey

Dina Djamaletdinova, 19 years old, (above) sits in her parents’ apartment in Tashkent. She is studying economics at Ulugbek University. Her father is Uzbek and her mother is half Ukrainian, half Tatar. She wants to go to England when she finishes her studies As Dina sat on the bed (left), her friend Mishel Fedorach adorned her shoulder with a – temporary – black tattoo

53

Ravil Tukhvatulin (top left) attends to Petrushin Valeriy Fedorovich after an operation to remove a tumour in his lung at the Tahtapul Oncology Hospital in Tashkent. The 42-year-old surgeon’s parents fled Tatarstan and Stalin to live in Uzbekistan in 1944. He would like to go to St. Petersburg, Russia. Petrushin, 57, came from Russia in 1944 to escape the famine. He does not want to leave Essential kit (left): the laboratory at the Farovon Vodka Factory in Tashkent

54

At the vodka factory (above), Irina Zaharova passes the time of day with Igor Rjevskiy and Sergey Gavrilin Yuryevich. Irina is 23 and the secretary of the director of the factory. Her father is Russian and her mother is half German, half Polish. She’d like to go to Germany one day. Truck driver Igor is Russian, and would like to return to Russia. Truck driver Sergey is also Russian but does not want to leave Uzbekistan A Tashkent apartment (left) sports a framed – if cracked – photograph of the Ukbek President, Islam Abduganiyevish Karimov

55

Deemed part of the Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic of Turkestan by the Bolsheviks in 1917, the map of Uzbekistan was redrawn in 1924 on “ethnic grounds”, resulting in not only a homeland for the Uzbeks, but an official identity and literary language.

Yet Stalin’s edicts were often drawn across ethnic lines rather than along them. In the Fergana Valley, majority-Uzbek Khujand ended up in Tajikistan, and majority-Uzbek Osh in Kyrgyzstan. Many Tajik-speaking towns – Samarkand, Bukhara, Qarshi and Termez – went to Uzbekistan. Centuries of migrations and invasions, as well as its location on the Silk Route, have ensured Uzbekistan’s ethnic diversity. A trip across the country reveals an array of faces – their features betray Turkish, Slavic, Chinese, Middle Eastern, even Mediterranean heritage.

Before the revolution, Uzbeks usually identified themselves ethnically as either nomad or sart (settled), as Turk or Persian, or simply Muslim or by their clan. Later separate nationalities were “identified” by Soviet scholars – under Stalin’s orders. In this way, the Uzbek language was formed when Central Asia’s linguistic continuum was artificially teased apart into five standardised languages; a whole host of dialects lost in the process. Distinct and carefully crafted “traditions” were formulated and parcelled out to each of these nationalities, mostly to prevent any panIslamic or pan-Turkic tendencies.

Today, Uzbekistan is a secular state comprising some 20 minority ethnic groups. Trends towards pluralism evident in other Central Asian republics are absent here. Mosques are no longer permitted to broadcast the Azan (call to prayer) and in each area, a Mahalla committee reports on residents who attend mosques or wear Islamic garb. What unites many of the people is a desire to return to their motherland.

Of the 2,600,000 Slav population, 60,000 are emigrating each year. Most of the 200,000 Germans have already left, along with 3,000 Poles and almost the entire Jewish population. Even the ancient Bukharan Jewish community, whose roots date back to the 9th century, have largely departed, headed for Israel or New York. Korean and Tartar communities are diminishing at a rate of 30,000 a year.

Uzbekistan’s colourful multicultural history and identity is draining away. As non-Uzbeks follow their dreams back to their original homeland, they leave behind ghost towns inhabited only by the aged, those too poor to leave and those who have not left yet 8

Exodus Rip Hopkins

56

Zitriy and Sofiya Beridze (above) in their house in Sindarabad. Zitriy, 82, is a retired lorry driver. Sofiya, 79, was a housekeeper. They are Turkish meskhats, originally from Georgia, but sent to the Sirdariya region by Stalin in 1944. They don’t want to leave In one of the grimmest ecological disasters of recent times, the Aral Sea has been drying out. Muynak (left) was an ancient fishing port – the fishermen were traditionally Russian and Ukrainian immigrants – but today it sits more than 100km inland The bedroom (far left) of Natalie Popova.

She is 54, her mother is Belarus, her father is Russian, and they were sent to Uzbekistan by Stalin in 1934. She wants to go to Russia

57

>Moments Hyena Men Pieter Hugo Abdullahi Amadu was 15 years old when he joined his father’s business in a small town called Mullumpashi in Katsina State, Nigeria. Following in his father’s footsteps meant that he needed his own hyena. After all, that’s how his family made a living: they worked as entertainers – accompanied by hyenas, snakes and monkeys – and sold the fetishes and herbal medicines that are popular in Nigeria.

Abdullahi leant how to go to the caves and bushes of Bauchi, Yola, Plateau and Taraba States in central and northern Nigeria to capture hyenas with traditional African tranquilizer, a powdery substance which intoxicates the animal and renders it senseless.

“To be successful when hunting for hyenas and other dangerous animals,” Abdullahi, 32, says, “we arm ourselves with various types of fetish charms, amulets and the tranquilizer.”

Abdullahi is one of a group of 10 entertainers who traverse Nigeria with three hyenas, two rock pythons and four monkeys. Each member of the party has sores and scars on their faces, legs and hands – legacies of times when the animals suddenly turn hostile and pounce on their handlers.

“We use a heavy stick to hit the hyenas on the head when they misbehave,” Abdullahi says. “We knock them down on the ground. All of us hold the sticks in case the animals become aggressive.”

Abdullahi allows his six-year-old daughter to play with the animals. “She cannot be harmed,” he says. “It’s the same thing with the other animals. She has partaken of a potion of traditional herbs and has been bathed with it. So her safety from them is guaranteed for the rest of her life.”

The animals are good for business: the family had sold traditional potions and charms for many years, but trade increased dramatically after the acquisition of the hyenas and other creatures. “We parade the animals on the streets,” Mallam Manteri (far right), the owner of a 13-year-old hyena nicknamed Mainasara says. “They can be very funny and the public showers them with money.”

The hyenas feed on scraps of meat purchased from abattoirs (a goat every three days or so helps prevent the animals becoming aggressive).

Maintaining good relations with the animals, Abdullahi says, requires both skill and tact. “They hate hot environments so they’re kept in a cool place,” he explains. “When necessary, cold water is sprinkled on their bodies to comfort them. They’re very sensitive creatures” 8 Adetokunbo Abiola

58

59

Since 2003, I have visited Romania’s Carpathian Mountains five times to document rural life in the different colours of the seasons. Pastoral farming has survived against the odds in the Maramures region, close to the Ukrainian border, and the practice of transhumance – moving livestock for long periods between summer pastures and upland areas and winter pastures in lowland areas – flourishes.

In May, the Measurements of the Milk festival takes place, marking the ascent of the shepherds and the village’s entire sheep flock to the hills. It is an integral part of rural Romanian culture and many traditions, dishes, songs and indeed landscapes have their roots in this long-established practice.

The shepherds calculate how much milk and thus how much cheese each family will get for that year. During the summer, a villager may be dispatched to find their shepherd, and bring back a brînza – a whole cheese – for their family. The villagers, in return, take some meat to the shepherds to supplement their frugal diet. He will be surviving largely on mamaliga, a traditional dish made with yellow maize, and urda, or whey.

The farming communities of Maramures are virtually selfsufficient. Now, as 50 years ago, they spin their own wool to make handmade jumpers and socks; they grow beans, corn, potatoes, and lettuce, and buy other produce such as eggs and fruit from the weekly market. Horseradish, mushrooms and nettles are all collected from nearby woodland, and the sheep provide everything from whey to mutton.

Each family in Botiza, a village of some 3,000 people, owns five sheep as well as an orchard. Much of the fruit – apples and plums predominate – is used to make horinga, a type of brandy which is produced locally and consumed liberally in the fields.

This way of life is absolutely dictated by the seasons.

During my travels, I noticed an absence of individuality among the community. There is almost no scope for doing what one wants to do – one just does what one must. I was drawn to photographing people’s hands as a result of this communal consent: depending on the time of year, everyone will be shelling beans, grinding corn, or milling flour. And if there is a death in the community, as many as 200 special funeral loaves are made, to be distributed to anyone who is in the area at the time. It’s not a task that’s relished, but everyone does it all the same.

Maramures is the last place in Romania where life is like this. Miraculously, under the dictatorship of Ceausescu, the region wasn’t collectivised because it was not seen as “good” land and has therefore belonged to families for generations. In other parts of Romania, young people are joining the post-Communist diaspora, moving abroad to work and earn money to bring home. When they return, with their new-found wealth, they build houses that wouldn’t look out of place on a Hollywood boulevard. This phenomenon has not yet been seen in Maramures.

A local person told me that they weren’t stupid enough to let their land disappear, and it’s true that more young people continue the traditional way of life in Maramures than anywhere else. But whether that idealistic attitude will still prevail in 2007, when Romania is expected to enter the EU – not known for its commitment to small-scale farming methods – remains to be seen 8 Hand to Mouth Tessa Bunney

Hand toMouth 60

61

62

63

64

65

>Inside

In the latest of our regular interviews with an industry insider, EI8HT talks to book publisher, Chris Boot, about Wandsworth’s Photo Co-op, Magnum and the life-changing advice he received from Martin Parr EI8HT: How important was your education to your career?

Chris Boot: Very important.

I studied at PCL, now the University of Westminster. It was a theoretical course: semiotics, Marxism and psychoanalysis, with some practical photography.

I didn’t want to be a photographer, so I was okay with all the theory, but funnily enough by end of it I had acquired a taste for the history of photography, which the course didn’t deal with whatsoever. In a sense my future path was a reaction to the course, but it was still a great thing to have done.

8: You were working in the “real world” at the time, too, at Photo Co-op in Wandsworth. Did your learning feed into your career?

CB: I remember a key moment when Victor Burgin was teaching Lacan and Derrida, and I was struggling with these texts and as it happens at the same time I was

photographers involved in campaigning work. It was the cooperative idea, and the political involvement that was attractive.

dealing with some business problems at the Photo Co-op. I went on a business course where it was an absolute revelation to learn that one plus one could equal two. Any temptation to go down the academic route was scotched by that point.

8: You left Photo Co-op in 1989 and started working at Magnum in 1990. That’s quite a leap. Was the door open, or did you have to push hard?

CB: I was looking specifically for a job where I could learn new things – the job advertised was PA to Neil Burgess and I was much more interested in Neil Burgess than I was in Magnum. I’d seen him talk at a photography conference comparing grantfunded photography with the private sector that was very influential to my thinking at the time. He’d moved from the Open Eye Gallery to set up Magnum in London. I worked as Neil’s PA for a year then I looked after the editorial sales department, and then I became a director in London, then New York.

8: Was your first interest in the medium or the message?

CB: It came through politics – I was much more interested in how you change society. My age is very important here – I’m nearly 45 – so I was raised in the punk era on Rock against Racism and the Anti-Nazi League. I didn’t immediately make a connection between that and photography but I knew I wanted to be involved in a media organisation that campaigned for change. So in the early ’80s when Ken Livingstone was leader of the GLC, I saw an ad in City Limits for an administrator at a co-op of

8: What was happening at Magnum in the ’90s? Was its role in question?

CB: I don’t think its role ever changed. I think the systems by which it made decisions improved. Magnum had got a lot bigger in the ’80s but it didn’t address how it needed to change its structure. So when I arrived, the meetings were incredible, amazing, but practically nothing ever got decided. You got a lot of different perspectives arguing about which direction they thought the organisation should go in or about the values of photography. They were

66

tremendous experiences.

8: When Martin Parr joined, there was a tremendous amount of soul-searching about the direction Magnum was taking.

Would you say this was a seminal point in Magnum’s history?

CB: Personally I think Harry Gruyaert’s entry almost 10 years earlier was the key moment when essentially you could no longer say Magnum was a group of photojournalists. Although there was a documentary aspect to his work, he really wasn’t motivated by documentary and he would work in colour rather than black and white. But Abbas joined just a couple of years later so it wasn’t Magnum saying “We want a change in direction’ because on the one hand, there’s Abbas, a real solid newshound/ photojournalist, and then you’ve got Harry Gruyaert, who was much more the art student of photography. Martin’s entry was more talked about. Essentially they’re the same issues several years later but the mould had been broken when Harry joined.

8: So you left Magnum in New York and went to work for Phaidon in London for two years before starting your own publishing company. Do you think young photojournalists should be aiming to be published in book form?

From Meetings by Paul Shambroom (below) and James and Other Apes

by James Mollison (right)

‘What I’m looking for is bodies of work that advance the story of the medium in some way.

The subject of what I’m doing is really photography itself’

CB: Not necessarily. Of course, photographers need tools to market themselves and to communicate what it is that they bring and if they aren’t getting that with the way their work is being used in magazines, then they need some other tool to do that.

I think the natural place for photographers, for the photo story today, is the book.

8: Do you think there is a sense among the book-buying public that they are being short-changed by a book of photos?

CB: I was talking to the press in Minneapolis recently about Paul Shambroom’s book Meetings – he’s from Minneapolis – and the arts editor said “I’ve never seen a book like this – what is it?” It’s really interesting – an intelligent, literary art-educated person who didn’t encounter things like the book. After a dialogue by email,

where she was speculating about its purpose, she said she saw it as literary publishing but in pictures rather than words.

I think there is a large potential audience for photography books that hasn’t yet been reached.

Martin Parr’s Photobook series is tremendously helpful in articulating what it is that’s interesting – that project alone will help grow this market. Even for me, I didn’t really start buying photography books until relatively recently. It’s not to do with what you can afford. You look at them in the shop and once you’ve looked at them, why do you need them? And it’s true that most of the looking at photography books happens in the shop before I buy it and then it goes on my shelf. But it’s a cultural thing and actually I put a lot of it down to Martin … this is going back about 10 or 12 years and Martin had to explain that if you look at it and you like it – then you have to buy it! Just buy it!

8: Photography-wise, what makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand on end, generally and specifically?

CB: What I’m looking for is bodies of work that advance the story of the medium in some way. The subject of what I’m doing is really photography itself. In terms of contemporary photographers’ work, with Paul Shambroom, Stephen Gill and James Mollison, in each case there’s a bit of reinvention of the language of photography going on. In James’s case, above everything, it was the impact of the images: I can divide my view of the world pre-seeing these pictures and post-seeing those pictures.

8: Is there a theme of ironic humour in the work you like these days?

CB: Yes and no – I would say several projects I’ve done are an attempt to produce something that’s post-ironic.

Shambroom’s initial proposal for the text was to reproduce extracts from the minutes of the meeting. But you’d end up with an ironic juxtaposition.

So to run the complete minutes would be kind of “neutrally documentary”. With Gill, he’s brought a new twist by his absolute sincerity.

67

8: If we’re post-irony are we postpolitics as well?

CB: No. I think photography has always got a political dimension, social subjects. Mollison’s work has a political position in relation to the environment as well as everything else, Gill perhaps less so, but the Shambroom book’s subject in its broadest sense is democracy. It’s not campaigning work, but I don’t rule it out. I did Gideon Mendel’s HIV in Africa which is documentary; a storytelling book. It probably sold 1,000 copies through bookshops but the print run was 12,000 and 11,000 were probably used as campaigning tools by organisations worldwide.

Gideon’s book wasn’t a reinvention of the language of photography but very good work in a traditional manner. In fact I’ll go further – I think it was the best work I’ve ever encountered on that subject. Gideon has a talent for drawing out stories and information that I think most photographers don’t. What I liked about that project is that I thought Gideon was really using photography to communicate.

A lot of the time, people present projects as if they’re really about information but they’re not.

They’re actually the photographer wanting to publish their portfolio.

8: Can an unknown approach you with a book project?

CB: Yeah, but they may not get the attention or even the answer that they want. I’ve originated 100 books one way and another two have come through cold calls – James and Other Apes and Roger Ballen’s Outlands. Mostly things come out of relationships rather than out of the blue. It’s the concept and the manner of its application and what it adds up to as a complete thing [that matters].

There’s lots of poor projects made up of great photographs, and lots of great projects made up of poor photographs.

8: Are you optimistic about the future of photography and photography books?

CB: I’m definitely optimistic that our visual culture gets more and more sophisticated and exciting all the time. There’s an old cliché but I think I fundamentally agree with it: pictures are the universal language 8

reviews_text_v4n1

28/4/05

1:13 pm

Page 68

>Reviews >Diary >Listings >Scene

68

Viêt Nam at Peace Philip Jones Griffiths Published by Trolley www.trolleybooks.com £39.95 (312pp Hardback) Where does one start with a book of such apparent value as this, bringing into view 30 years of post-war Vietnam? One could start with the price, just £39.95 for more than 550 black and white images exquisitely laid out and hand bound in over 300 pages. In Viêt Nam at Peace, Philip Jones Griffiths presents the truth behind one of the most – if not the most – inaccurately reported, politically lied about and visually misrepresented acts of genocide in the history of mankind. When other photographers moved on – some from their news bureaux in Saigon to the White House Press pool – finding their interest in the story had dissipated after the war, Philip Jones Griffiths begins. His previous book Vietnam Inc., photographed during the war years, is widely regarded as the definitive book of photography about the war. But for Jones

Griffiths and more importantly for the Vietnamese themselves, the story did not just stop with the hurried withdrawal and military defeat of the Americans. It was the start of the arduous and painful period rebuilding the Vietnamese identity and the cultural rehabilitation of an entire nation. Although “at peace”, Vietnam has spent the intervening years grappling with the devastation wrought by cultural and economic destruction and killing on an inhuman scale by the United States and its allies. This is a book of unrivalled significance and photographic power.

Growing up in Wales, Jones Griffiths cites his childhood experiences of the English as a

reviews_text_v4n1

28/4/05

1:14 pm

reason for a heightened sensitivity to the fate of the Vietnamese and the desire to understand and document their struggle. Jones Griffiths recounts how the English sought to extinguish the Welsh identity by banning the native language in schools, and later, how they reinvaded the land in the guise of holiday-makers. As they trod the culture further into the ground, they consumed and discarded Wales as though it were just another flavour of ice cream or another cheap souvenir to be bought. Another childhood memory sowed a seed of scepticism that shaped the man.

He recalls the day US serviceman came to his school during WWII to distribute candy. “It made no sense,” he says. Out of this grew his deep-rooted distrust for those in positions of power who wish to been seen as doing good.

Making a success of the war was the preoccupation of the politicians and generals during the ‘60s and ‘70s. In an Aryanesque twist of reason, the centuries old fabric of Vietnamese society was determined to be the real enemy and the man-made fibres of consumer capitalism the saviour.

Might and blood was to be the best conduit for redemption.

Assisting in the transition from one way of life to another was the military, levelling vast swathes of the country. Most notably singled out for destruction was rural life where the particularities of Vietnamese tradition had quite literally kept existence in equilibrium, despite previous invasions and colonisations, for 3,000 years. Bombing, burning, killing and looting imported by the invaders robbed the countryside of its balance. Some 10 years later, with the collapse of the Soviet financial support in the 1980s, the country was forced to, in some ways, accede defeat to the global über-culture of commerce.

Page 69

airforce. The pictures are perhaps his most vivid and explicit in their condemnation of the United States and the war. Disfigured men, women and children are the legacy of the West’s march of progress. But beneath the horrific imagery is a larger story, of victory, defeat and an indomitable resilience. In Viêt Nam at Peace we see the other parts of the story, victory parades, American Vietnam vets , and more recently the businessmen and the billboards for western products, all conspiring to remake the country in their own image.

Viêt Nam at Peace has been conceived and printed with the utmost care. Steven Coleman, the designer, and Trolley, the publishers, have succeeded masterfully in evoking the passion and grace of Philip Jones Griffiths and his photography. A muted pastel green underpins the design allowing whole pages to explode with his wondrously rich black and white photography. “Once the initial structure was in place the images were pretty much decided” says Gigi Giannuzzi, Trolley’s director. “Phillip had printed over 1,000 images, over the course of the years. After Agent Orange was released he showed me his idea for the book.

That was last September, within six months we had the book done.” Accompanied by an essay from John Pilger, Viêt Nam at Peace is the real story, one that can only be told by a man who has dedicated so much of himself to the country he chronicles. It marks the passing of time in the lives of others and equally powerfully forces us to look at the present in our own lives.

Or, as Giannuzzi puts it: “Today the US masses troops on the border with Iran, and seeks to justify the comprehensive destruction of Iraq…this is a book that deals with the consequences of these things.”

JL

In 2004 Philip Jones Griffiths released another book, dedicated entirely to the effects of the chemical decomposition of life: Agent Orange. In it he chronicles with unflinching honesty the reality of death and deformation made and bottled by the world’s most celebrated corporate killers, Dow Chemical, Monsanto and the US

69

28/4/05

1:14 pm

Page 70

El Salvador, Cuscatlancingo, 1982: Guerrilla being dragged through the street. © Susan Meiselas/Magnum Photos

reviews_text_v4n1

The Face of Human Rights Published by Lars Müller www.lars-mueller-publishers.com

f45 (720pp Hardback) What happens when a publisher with a background in design and two leading international law theorists come together to create book dealing with the not-soslight topic of human rights? The Face of Human Rights is a hybrid form of a textbook, which could become a new trend in dealing with such academic topics. The foreword proclaims the intentions of the editors in their attempt to encompass as much of the issue as possible in one volume – meaning not as much as they had hoped – yet does not lend any clues as to why the project was undertaken in the first place.

Easily navigable – complete with red ribbon to mark your page – the book is divided into sections, each one dealing with one of the 13 human rights as outlined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, ranging from the broad “Right to Life” to less recognised and sustained “Right to Housing”.

For ease of reference, these sections are also colour-coded.

Interspersed between are white pages, which contain various essays, reports and profiles of leading activists. Apart from these, the remaining 700 odd pages of the book are visually saturated with photos and text extracts.

With regard to image choice, the eclectic mix seems to be haphazardly scattered throughout, with a noticeable over-presence of Magnum

photographers. It seems that what was missing in this team of editors was one with experience in picture-editing. This is evident from the outset; the initial double page spread, a young girl strolling through a market in Nicaragua, is a curious choice and not that clear, both in terms of focus and meaning. Nevertheless, the book is based on facts and figures, and the majority of images chosen reiterate this.

The images work as they are intended, to illustrate the text, and in all fairness must have presented quite a task in researching and editing.

Traditional “newsy” images predominate, with a fair amount of blood and horror – children in El Salvador watching a guerrilla being dragged through the street to his death, the aftermath of a bomb that exploded in a crowded market in Kosovo. But in the editors’ stated attempt to balance the debate, almost half of the images illustrate the enjoyment of human rights – from Martin Parr’s iconic, yet still cringeworthy, reportage on the excessive lifestyles of Brits and Americans, to activists freely enjoying their right to protest. The most thoroughly researched element is the text. We become witness to an overabundance of extracts ranging from court cases to reports from governmental to non-governmental organisations’ websites that have been put forth,

70

spanning from the historical to 2004. Many have set familiar precedents but the depth of their injustice still resonates today – from the genocide in Rwanda to cases dealing with abortion laws.

Thoughtfully chosen quotes by venerable historical and modern theorists are interspersed between international doctrines.

The following left a lasting impression: “You are never dedicated to something you have complete confidence in. No one is fanatically shouting that the sun is going to rise tomorrow. They know it is going to rise tomorrow.

When people are fanatically dedicated to political or religious faiths or any other kinds of dogmas or goals, it’s always because these dogmas or goals are in doubt.” Robert M Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, 1974.

The lesser-known injustices are perhaps the hardest to digest, especially when noting the recent dates of atrocities. Take, for example the issue of homophobia in Southern Africa, located in the “Prohibition of Discrimination” chapter, as illustrated in one horrific account of an HIV positive lesbian, Joyce. “My daughter was raped when she was six because of my coming out and telling people about HIV. They were trying to shut my mouth.” This was in 2003. Or a young girl’s experience of being born into

slavery in Mauritania: she is one of the lucky few who got out and could tell their story. Nor, of course, is it only the lessdeveloped world where such atrocities occur. In the essay, “Inside Death Row, Huntsville, Texas”, Margrit Spencer exposes the inhuman daily living conditions that are endured by inmates.

Although there is no mention of Guantanamo Bay, it immediately springs to mind. Another essay directly following this, “Brotherhood and Unity” by Slavenka Drakulic, depicts life inside Scheveningen detention unit in The Hague, where Milosevic and fellow “detainees” (not criminals) enjoy a carefree existence in their luxury accommodation.

One of the things I found most curious about this book is the title.

The “face” of human rights? It’s a simple enough phrase, but how does a word like “face” even begin to encompass the issues taken on in this gutsy project. If you take “face” to be defined as more of “façade” then the whole premise of the book begins to make sense.

International law is a virtually ineffective institution that lacks a solid means of enforcing any of its charters and declarations that serve merely as guidelines. Take the first few rights as mentioned in the book: “A protection of life in armed conflict” and “The

reviews_text_v4n1

28/4/05

1:14 pm

Page 71

Kenya, Nairobi, 1988: Jockey Club. © Stuart Franklin/Magnum Photos

swirling images brilliantly conjure up the sensation just prior to fainting or vomiting, and as such would not be out of place in the “horror” section of an avant-garde bookshop. A more savage edit, one feels, would have rendered the book entirely unclassifiable.

Acts of Charity Mark Peterson Published by powerHouse www.powerhousebooks.com $35 (160pp Hardback)

prohibition of genocide”. It’s not easy to escape the irony. Despite this – and this is one of the book’s most interesting qualities – the editors seem to take a largely optimistic view on the issues. At the end of each chapter we are reminded of what both the international and civil society are doing to overcome injustice, the latter usually having more examples to support it. There are even extremely hopeful suggestions for world improvement put forward. One recommendation from the Food and Agriculture Organisation website that rice farmers also use their fields for harvesting fish, sheds new hope on the international crisis of food production and hunger.

This important work of literary and visual significance is one that needs to be experienced and grasped on a personal level. As suggested in the foreword, every person reacts to the news of human rights violations in a different manner and “Depending on our character we get sad, angry or have to avert our eyes as these events become insupportable.” This piece is no different. Due to its magnitude, you will take out of it only the issues and instances that profoundly move or disturb you.

Although dedicated to the human rights activists of the world, the editors do not force guilt of inaction upon the reader. Through the compiling of this information, education is at the forefront of understanding and advocacy. LH

The ghost of Hunter S. Thompson is calling. This hallucinatory set of images of the American charidee scene enthral and appall in equal measure. Peterson has lent us the key to a garish, nightmarish world, where New York’s über-rich siphon off a little of their richesse, and via an elaborate theatre of gala dinners, fire and ice balls and celebrity endorsement, indulge freely in the gift of giving.

Small dogs in couture outfits wolf down delicate amuse-bouches, while their owners save the world with due pomp and ostentation.

Diners at a benefit do not seem to notice that the centrepiece on their immaculately-laid table is a dead fox ... and what’s more, it’s wearing a hat. Another reveller appears to be showing a gorilla the merits of a pure silk tie.

Despite the good intention that must underpin a charitable act, a quiet menace pervades these pictures. Malevolence creeps into the most innocent of scenes … and to give Peterson his due, this is no simple hatchet job. The lurid,

71

As well as the giddy pictures, there are two text sections, which provide a context for Peterson’s photographic exploration. We learn that Americans spend almost twice as much per year on charitable donations ($900) as they do on fast food ($500). That’s laudable – butt-diminishing, even – yet you can’t help but wonder if there isn’t a more direct way of redistributing wealth, as Philip Weiss points out in the introduction. In 2001, Iraq pledged $93million in aid to “poor Americans”. Have you heard George W shout about that one recently? We also learn that in an overwhelmingly Christian land, Americans still possess a moving faith in the power of money, as is evident from the following quote

by Lilly Tartikoff, party organiser: “I was in billionaire heaven.

Ronald Perelman, Mr Giorgio Armani and Mr Rupert Murdoch ... I was thinking ‘God, you could cure cancer with these three gentleman.’”

In Acts of Charity, we sneek a look at an elite slice of American life, preserved for posterity, hilarity or just sheer vulgarity. Hunter would have approved. Pass the mint juleps.

MH

reviews_text_v4n1

28/4/05

1:14 pm

No Man’s Land Larry Towell Published by Chris Boot www.chrisboot.com £50 (144pp Hardback)

I first met Larry Towell at a National Geographic seminar in Washington. We were both speakers in the imposing institutional auditorium at the Geographic headquarters. I had compromised my normally dishevelled urban appearance for the occasion, wearing a suit, but Larry appeared in his standard gear – farmer’s blue jean dungarees, complete with braces, a check shirt and a battered straw hat. Gripping both sides of the podium, he informed the traditionally inclined audience of employees and associates, “I’m holdin’ on here for grim death ’cos I’m afraid I might pee my pants”. Of course, behind this public image of a simple, uncomplicated country hick lurks a creative artist with the strength

Page 72

and determination to know what he wants to say and how he wants to say it.

We discover from Robert Delpire’s affectionate introduction to No Man’s Land that Towell farms 75 acres of farmland in Canada, is a poet who believes more in the influence of the word than in the power of the image, plays folk guitar and several traditional instruments and performs internationally as a whistler (sic). Looking through the photographs, Delpire concludes, “(he) is a giant among photographers, such is his understanding of human suffering, his empathy at people enraged at being unable to live a normal human life”.

This book was co-produced by the publisher Boot and the Archive of Modern Conflict. The Archive also gave Towell some financial assistance to help him complete the project. It has been in existence since the early 1990s, concentrating on the way in which the creative arts, especially photography, can emerge out of conflict and express some of the important aspects of a particular struggle. The founder, Timothy Prus, was motivated to start the collection because of his interest in what he calls “the lost stories”, those aspects of ordinary

72

people’s lives that seldom get much coverage in the international press. It is easy to see why Towell’s poetic approach to photography, and indeed life in general, would appeal to Prus’s imagination.

handles and locks from destroyed houses in Jenin and Rafah Refugee Camp in Gaza. The journey from homemade weapons to mass destruction of houses has been swift and terrible.

The opening and closing images contain a dreadful internal narrative. Abstract in style, they represent what photography theorists like to call “the absence of presence”. In 2000, Towell photographed still lives of the rather innocuous looking slingshots (catapults) used by children protesting in Ramallah on the West Bank. Four years later, he is concentrating on door

The progression of Towell’s photography also seems to have shifted with the volatile political and military realities. In his early visits to the region, he appears very close to the action, frequently portraying small groups, young demonstrators, stone throwers, or larger gatherings, at funerals or in morgues. Progressively, he tends to concentrate on individuals, isolated in their

reviews_text_v4n1

28/4/05

1:14 pm

Page 73

Muslim woman, revellers at the love parade, the Brandenburg Gate and Berlin’s new architecture – collectively denoting signifiers of the future. In a mix of references – a picnic, a Chinese restaurant, German sweets, tourist spots – the final chapter is a take on leisure time and diversity of life in contemporary Germany.

ShadowHome Bastienne Schmidt Published by jovis Verlag www.jovis.de f29.80 (144pp Hardback)

brutalised environment. As the Israeli army’s tactics became more indiscriminate, we see people lost among the rubble of their former homes. Towell pushes himself towards a disconcerting view of the inanimate as the conflict becomes inexorable. We see vast apocalyptic urban landscapes, in places where it is more and more difficult to identify what had once been a street, a road or a row of houses.

Every now and then, Towell takes a side step and photographs some almost irrelevant scene, a shaft of light on cobblestones, symbolically illuminating a stone, a pigeon wandering in the sun by the Wailing Wall while an Orthodox Jew prays, young Hasidic children curiously observing jewellery in a shop window. It’s almost as if he needs to remind himself that there is a semblance of the poetic to be found in pockets of this troubled land.

The final images in the book show the “separation wall” built by the Israelis in East Jerusalem, a supremely ironic visual symbol some 15 years after the free world celebrated the end of the Berlin Wall. This new wall, of course, is to keep people out rather than keep them in.

CJ

In ShadowHome, Bastienne Schmidt, a German-born photographer based in New York, creates an autobiographical photographic meditation on “home”, from both personal associations and through a wider exploration of a returnee’s vision of contemporary Germany.

Her diverse collection of black and white photographs evokes the randomness of memory.

Captions are left until the end, allowing the reader time to explore the visual references free of preconceptions. Two essays, one on the many connotations – past and present – of “heimat” (home), the other a description by a fellow German, living in the United States, of his own feelings towards his birthplace, are placed at the centre of the book.

material construct and emotional centre, created by bonds of love and family.

Chapter two explores Germany’s history with pictures of an East German guard’s uniform, a stark interior of Nazi architect Speer’s studio and the oblique concrete landscape of a Nazi stadium and concentration camp. In chapter three the swimmer of the cover, a sturdy Germanic cliché, is grouped with hip young things in Berlin’s Potsdamer Platz, a young

Divided into four chapters, the images are loosely grouped in what it is tempting to define as personal, historical, portraiture and pastimes or place. A rainswept window-pane, a pile of family photographs, a doll’s house and a rumpled cushion open the book. Across a double page, a tender portrait of a child being breastfed is a significant self-portrait of the author.

Reproduced as they are, these images resonate with meaning – an image of tree roots nestles among other pictures explaining her own sense of rootedness.

Home, the author suggests, is our place of belonging and of rest, a

73

Schmidt’s accumulated images, stylistically playful, both abstract and literal, are not particularly artful in themselves, but arranged as they are and combined with two thought-provoking essays, they are greater than the sum of their parts. This book is an interesting exploration of the artist’s own sense of belonging and a suggestion of what it is to be German in the 21st century. SW

reviews_text_v4n1

28/4/05

1:14 pm

Page 74

Portfolio reviews such as at the recent Photolucida and the Society for Photographic Education’s National Conference can only be described as speed dating for photographers. Each photographer has 20 minutes to try to make a connection with a reviewer, whether they are a museum curator, gallerist, publisher, or collector. Just like real speed dating, each photographer is judged on deportment, quality of presentation, valuable skills and various intangibles like charm and finesse. There’s an exchange of ideas, criticism or other commentary, cards, and vague promises of future shows or publications. Sometimes, indeed often, things actually happen between the reviewer and reviewee and the work will land in a gallery or in print in a magazine or book. Occasionally, there are direct purchases of photographs.

With five or more portfolio reviews per day for a photographer and more than 18 or so for a reviewer, not counting unofficial reviews in the lobby or hotel bar, over a five-

day period, it is an unbelievably grueling emotional roller-coaster for everyone involved, These organised review sessions, at Portland’s Photolucida, Houston’s Fotofest, and Birmingham’s Rhubarb-Rhubarb, have become a most important part of photographers’ attempts to get their work on the walls and in print. For the reviewer, too, there is the chance to find the next big thing.

In the beginning, of course, was Lucien Clergue’s Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie in Arles, France, founded in 1974. Ten years later, Fred Baldwin and Wendy Watriss of Houston took up the idea, formalised it with invited reviewers and actual appointments, and the Houston Fotofest was launched to great success. Sensing a need for more review opportunities, Gregg Mankiller, former director of Fotofest’s Meeting Place, started PhotoAmericas with Portlandbased partners Guy Swanson and Chris Rauschenberg. After various teething troubles, PhotoAmericas emerged as Photolucida, a biennial photography festival held every

74

other March in Portland, the City of Roses.

Photolucida gathers together some 40 reviewers from Europe and the Americas and around 300 reviewees who pay to be matched with potentially appropriate reviewers. The elaborate software assigns documentary or landscape photographers to reviewers with those interests far more

accurately than any dating software. A lottery system is invoked in case of overbooking of the most important reviewers, say someone from a major publishing house or institution that actively collects work. Photographers spend 20 minutes explaining their work, usually in portfolios of 10 to 20 well-edited images, get feedback, make connections, and do it over and over again.

Almost no information is wasted.

© Elaine Ling

Photography is often a lonely vice.

The photographer often conceives him or herself as a voyeur, a flâneur, or an outsider moving through jungles both concrete and real. This is true, not only for photojournalists, of course, but for others as well.

Even studio photographers concentrate on their vision and, despite the assistants and models, view themselves as detached eyes, rendering judgments and shaping beauty after their own fashion. Yet photographers need to congregate to compare notes, check up on the competition, and to seek opportunities. The burgeoning portfolio review scene draws upon this need. Two events in Portland, Oregon, in the Pacific Northwest of the United States, typify the scene.

© Mark Klett

Photolucida 2005 12-16 March Portland, Oregon www.photolucida.org Society for Photographic Education National Conference 17-20 March Portland, Oregon www.spenational.org

reviews_text_v4n1

28/4/05

1:14 pm

If one reviewer can’t help they will usually point the photographer to another potential reviewer. There is also a lot of “horse-trading” by photographers for coveted review slots.

Although the photography ranges from beginner to museum grade, the quality of work is generally quite high. Part of this is a factor of money. It costs money to come to Portland and to pay for the reviews, and that money goes towards accommodating the reviewers. This whole expense demands complete dedication to photography on top of whatever “day job” one might work at, so mostly only people with a significant financial and emotional interest in their imagery apply to show their work at events like Photolucida. It is also an event that builds on prior experience, and that experience is transferable to many of the other review-oriented festivals where many of the same reviewers attend year after year. The ability to network, and to know who is who, is as important as developing a portfolio over the years.

Beyond the hurly-burly of the portfolio reviews, Photolucida’s reviewers honoured Elaine Ling as the “Photographer of the Year” for her new series of portraits from the Mongolian steppes. A gallery walk-through allowed all participating photographers to show work to everyone present during two shifts on the fourth night of the festival. Finally, in addition to all this speed dating, Photolucida offers an on-going, on-line review process, Critical Mass, that facilitates portfolio reviews once a year and results in a travelling show and book project.

If Photolucida manages to keep up the good work, it all but guarantees that photography will take firm root in Portland, and as for the photographers, one may only hope that everything will be “coming up roses” for them in the years to come.

Page 75

students to meet with each other in something that resembles a combination group therapy session and job course.

In recent years the SPE has become more of a forum for the discussion of photography and the inclusion of student photographers has provided a real opportunity to share experiences and feedback while potentially advancing one’s artistic and professional career.

This year’s theme, “Passage”, evoked metaphysical reexaminations of photography’s role in the development of the American West and photography’s own development from silver salts to pixels.

Highlights included Mark Klett’s current Yellowstone project that takes his re-photography work, that traced the great railroad photographers of the 19th century, to show changes wrought in the intervening 100 years further into the 21st century’s multi-media, multidisciplinary approach. Other presentations featured lectures by David Bate from the University of Westminster on Stieglitz’s famous image The Steerage, panels on transgender and transsexual people by Dean Kotula, Mariette Pathy Allen, and Cherie Hiser, as well as all manner of panels and workshops on photography in the digital age.

The SPE and its national conference reinforce their regional events like the old camera clubs of yore, but beyond the networking, criticism, and therapy, they do offer the indirect benefit of exposure and job opportunities. For younger photographers and photo students young and old, it adds another arrow to one’s professional arsenal. Next year’s event is to take place in Chicago in March 2006. The announced theme is “A New Pluralism: Photography’s Future”.

BK

Tango: Never Before Midnight Exhibition by Adriana Groisman Leica Gallery, New York 25 Feb – 02 April If Diego Maradona is Argentina’s most famous export of the 20th century, then the tango must surely be the second. Invented in the piano bars and brothels of the late 1800s in Buenos Aires, the tango began as a dance of gauchos, petty criminals and prostitutes among the Porteños.

After seeming to die out after the 1940s with the onset of rock and roll in popular culture, the tango has become a resurging phenomenon in such far flung places as New York, Berlin, and, remarkably, Helsinki which bills itself as the capitol of tango culture outside of Argentina. The late, great Jorge Luis Borges, reminiscing about the tangoes sung and danced before his time, inevitably had the protagonists share a quick knife fight in a darkened bar after a night of too much passion, alcohol, and cigarettes. These days the tango has been somewhat domesticated, refined even, and the knives have been put away.

The passion, the cigarettes, and the alcohol remain, though, in the milongas, or tango parlours, of the world.

Adriana Groisman, a Contact Press photographer, was born in Buenos Aires and now lives in New York. She has photographed tango dancing for more than 15 years in her home town. Her pictures eschew the overt clichés of tango that one sees in bright musicals like Tango

The Society for Photographic Education’s (SPE) annual general conference also provides a great networking moment for photographers, educators, and

75

Argentino. Rather, she sweeps us with her deliciously dark images into the grainy, smoky world of the milongas and the dancers. Her work, which received a Mother Jones International Fund for Documentary Photography Award in 2000, is not about showy dips and sweeps but about the passion of waiting, of advance and hesitation, and of emotion contained and, sometimes, released. The images perfectly capture the most basic sides of the Porteño: desire, melancholy, frustration, and a hope against all hope. She moves with the dancers like their third shadow. She photographs the preparations, the meetings, the glances, the moves, the excesses, and the stories.

Groisman gives us with absolute sincerity the power of the dance between a man and a woman.

She notes, “Embellishment comes from the woman’s needs to caress the man with her legs.

Men tell you little stories with their knees.” Her work takes us directly into the heart of the Porteño’s darkness where the milongueros and the milongueras meet to share a three minute long infinity together.

BK Tango: Never Before Midnight is published as a book by Ediciones Larivière, Buenos Aires, 2004. www.adrianagroisman.com

reviews_text_v4n1

28/4/05

1:14 pm

Vanishing Antonin Kratochvil Published by de.Mo www.de-mo.org £30 (233pp Hardback) The first thing that strikes one about this impressive book is its size and format: printed landscape with the binder and pages opening upwards it was significantly hard to hold or to read. Rather like a car with gullwing doors, the effect is to obstruct one’s view and make it unfamiliar to operate. Added to this, the photographs are invariably printed on the upper portion of the page and one is left leaning over a full blank page to look at the bending underside of the top page precariously held open. The publisher, Giorgio Baravalle, continues to push the boundaries of photography book design and his recent successes have all in some way reinvented the alignment, positioning and functioning of texts, pictures and the pages themselves. It is refreshing to see a book treated so uniquely and the design to be so conceptualised. But in some instances the predominance of style and structure at the expense of narrative is overbearing and unwieldy.

For 16 years Kratochvil has been variously assigned to cover stories for magazine and

Page 76

environmental clients. In Vanishing he has compiled 16 of his “stories” from these years to focus our attention sharply on the things he feels are not good with the planet. Indeed the introductory page opens with a polemic about the measure of all things good and bad: “How are things?” he asks. “Not bad,” is the presupposed reply … “Not bad? Huh, let me tell you,” is the implied conversation that follows … and with that Kratochvil begins his “tour through endangered lifeforms and ruined environments, human catastrophes and destruction, resulting in vanishing cultures” (and Vanishing the book).

The images are dark, as is Kratochvil’s preference for his black and white photography, and the printing is slightly warm toned – even the pages are a gentle shade of nicotine yellow.

Following in his footsteps we trace his 16 man-made disasters as we travel from Beirut to Cambodia and Bolivia to Zimbabwe, each place with its own particular experience of human and environmental injustice. Yet in Azerbaijan we are treated to a solitary image of a sturgeon being held up as a trophy by a bunch of shadylooking men. Are we expected to equate this with the environmental destruction of the species?

76

In Prague, anti-globalisation protests are treated in much the same way as the oily scarred landscapes of Iraq. The horizon is off kilter and the heavy black of the photograph’s shadow areas sucks the light out of the image.

The fact that one story supposes to tell of resistance and public action whilst the other tells of corporate and global exploitation seems irrelevant to Kratochvil’s approach. Protest is portrayed as pollution and the pollution itself as his own protest in the setting of this book.

The most successful images, for me, were undoubtedly the chapters on Ecuador and Bohemia. Kratochvil has taken the landscapes of these places and made them his own, infusing them with both beauty and ugliness. The pristine jungle is obscured by his contaminating lens as he exposes the wanton waste and toxicity of man’s quest for oil, whilst across the globe another view is exposed. Behind the Iron Curtain he shows us a land that has been plundered and defiled. In the Czech Republic acid rain falls on the colourless grime of Brux in central Bohemia.

Kratochvil’s style is the perfect accompaniment to this drab inky landscape. There are many other memorable chapters: from the tin mines of Bolivia to the diamond mines of Angola, Vanishing is an important chronicle of the rape of our planet.

It is a shame, therefore, when the impact of the book is unavoidably weakened with less suitable images. Some stories such as “Home Grown Fear” – Kratochvil’s version of New York under siege post 9/11, with its obscure blurred views of police barricades, the Statue of Liberty and the railing outside the mayor’s residence – do little to extend the argument and their inclusion is confusing.

No doubt the images are atmospheric and emotionally charged, yet their relevance alongside the stories of animal traders in the Congo or cyanide mining in Guyana was lost on me.

Nevertheless, the book impresses the reader with is purpose to unsettle. Facts and pertinent quotations add to our outrage when viewing the images: oil companies, mineral extractors, dealers and global financiers are all so obviously guilty of the destruction, Kratochvil points out.

Yet by his own admission he offers no answers, just the question: “How are things?” And then the finger points at us, the readers, for having the gall to reply “Not too bad.”

JL

reviews_text_v4n1

28/4/05

1:14 pm

Page 77

example, were only just being created – it opened in 1971– leaving us largely to make our own entertainment.

Recreation: American Photographs 1973 – 1988 Mitch Epstein Published by Steidl www.steidlville.com £40 (144pp Hardback) Mitch Epstein’s Recreation, American Photographs 19731988 captures a time when we were more naïve if not more innocent. This theme is encapsulated in Plate 41: “Miami Beach II” in which we see two bikini-clad pubescent girls making a phone call while two adult men leer at their flesh. It’s an era when our “leisure expectations” were not so great and theme parks on the scale of Walt Disney World, for

Epstein’s reflection on the America he photographed is one of loss, a lament for a less cynical epoch than the one in which we live today. He has said of Recreation, “To me, the whole project represents the loss of something. It shows a time when we were more optimistic. There was a sense of freedom and the camera was less intrusive.”

Perforce it was also a time of greater individuality with less ovine tendencies to have and to own the latest gizmo. But for all the individuality captured by Epstein there’s a sense of incongruity evident too. For example, Plate 9: “Funeral Home Opening”. An unattended young girl, approximately five years old, is standing in front of an open – though empty – coffin. Is this her parents’ idea of recreation circa 1974 or is symptomatic of a time

when children were less cosseted, treated as adults at a younger age?

Its strangeness aside, the image reveals Epstein’s eye for composition and his ability at once both to appreciate and capture the bigger picture. The young girl is wearing pink tights and a dress of the same hue as the satin brocade lining the inside of the open coffin, alluding to life’s all too short journey from birth to death. The overall effect renders one not only intrigued and perplexed, but also inspired by Epstein’s aptitude and profound insight.

The image’s thoughtfulness is one of 66 similarly well-conceived and executed photographs reproduced here, each one a sumptuous tableau measuring 43 x 28cm. Presented as a single image on every right hand page (the left-hand page is blank except for a discreetly placed composition title) the reproduction quality is notable,

77

doing justice to what is a significant body of work that says as much about how we like our leisure time today as it does about how we took our recreation in the ’70s and ’80s. In Epstein’s own words: “It is about the pursuit of pleasure before pleasure was commodified. Now everything is so packaged.”

GM

reviews_text_v4n1

28/4/05

1:15 pm

Page 78

powerful work. The book opens with an introduction by Magnum photographer Gueorgui Pinkhassov, one of Nikolai’s closest friends, and closes with a text by his wife Juliet Butler – both rendered all the more poignant by the fact that Nikolai died last year.

51Months Carrie Levy Published by Trolley www.trolleybooks.com £24.95 (160pp Hardback) Carrie Levy began taking photos of her family when she turned 15 and her father, Glenn, was incarcerated for over four years.

The book begins with a short statement written this year; nine years after Carrie began her “diary of his absence”. She did not want to know then what crime he was guilty of, and still does not to this day. Her way of dealing, at such a sensitive age, with the changes that were occurring within her life was to distance herself from behind a camera lens.

The image chosen for the cover, a photo of the Levy family home, seems to be the most appropriate way of introducing the story – we are invited to enter their private domestic space and voyeuristically witness aspects of their life together – everything from sleeping to ironing and vacantly staring out of the window, deep in thought – only leaving the home to document the trips to visit Glenn at Allenwood Federal Prison Camp.

The 90 colour images within represent glimpses of allAmerican, middle-class family life, not unlike a typical family album of snapshots, yet with a noticeable emphasis on details and objects.

The dark and saturated photos attempt to reveal an absence and a sluggishness of time – a wedding portrait lying abandoned on a bare mattress in a shadowy

room or the recurring series of the backyard and its guises shifting with the seasons. These observations are repeated throughout, yet a sense of the longevity of 51months of time passing is not all that obvious.

In the second half of the book we see Glenn enter into the camera frame and return to family life. His homecoming is treated with a journalistic approach – Carrie is able to remove herself from the situation so as to render the images virtually devoid of emotion, not least evidence that they were captured by his daughter. This is an abrupt end to the story, we are not left with any clues as to where life has gone since then, only provided with a limited chronicle of a rough period of time, which finishes with Glenn’s account – his time in jail and his feelings towards Carrie’s insistent photographing during his homecoming – it is half of his apology to her.

Such a personal project as 51 Months can only be entirely significant to Carrie herself and her family members. The purpose behind its publishing remains as ambiguous as the crime that resulted in its conception.

LH Painting with Light Nikolai Ignatiev Published by Luminous www.luminous.co.uk £15.99 (60pp Softback) This intimately produced book offers a small but well-edited selection of Nikolai Ignatiev’s

78

Painting with Light was not intended to be the last ever publication of Nikolai’s work and I am sure I am not alone in thinking that it is very sad that it has become so. I was lucky enough to work with and be a friend of Nikolai, and I will always remember him as a great photojournalist as well as a fantastic dancer.

Faith and passion are the chief concerns of this richly produced book; the stories are well-built and interesting and some have never been published until now – such as the Velikaya River pilgrimage, a personal favourite of his. Though we are treated to an amazing colour palette, some of the printing – notably in the image of the little girl’s face against the window – doesn’t do it justice.

But the shots themselves are dreamy. As we travel with Nikolai through some of the most beautiful areas of the world, to the Kumbh Mela festival in India for example, we see it through his wonderfully journalistic eye.

The absence of captions sets the imagination free, allowing the pictures to speak for themselves; their function aesthetic rather than following a narrative development. As for the book’s title, it leaves me with a rather bitter taste. I feel it is so often the case when photos are extremely good, they have to be compared to the art of painting – an unfair and diminutive comparison, I believe. We are lucky to have these beautiful pictures to remember him by. He is greatly missed. `LM

Leven als Dalit/Dalit Lives Paul van der Stap and Elisa Veini Published by Titojoe Documentaries www.titojoe-docs.nl f17.50 (99pp Softback) In the hierarchy of the traditional Hindu caste system, still an influence in contemporary Indian society, to be a Dalit is to be an outcast, an untouchable. “Castes are the basis of our society. If the caste system loosens up, the whole society will fall apart” is the explanation offered by a municipal officer from Gujarat, interviewed in Veini’s informative introductory essay, for the Dalits’ continued suppression.

Published in Dutch and English, the essay recounts the origins of the Indian caste system, combining comment from individuals involved in awareness groups, working to improve the situation in the south and west of the country, with descriptions of specific cases of abuse to portray the desperate plight of a people forced into the lowliest of occupations.

Van der Stap’s photographs portray this “hidden apartheid”.

The cover portrait of Misala Arjamma, a 36-year-old Dalit who has been cleaning toilets in her village for the past 20 years says it all – prematurely aged, the hardship of this woman’s life is written all over her face. Barefoot scavengers and families employed in hard labour on rubbish dumps, building sites and salt mines are recorded; a seemingly innocuous photograph

reviews_text_v4n1

28/4/05

1:15 pm

of a tea stand illustrates that Dalits are not allowed to drink from the same glasses as the other customers.

In a densely populated country, with huge pressure for jobs, land and recognition, the Dalits’ position is slow to change and any attempt to move out of their lowly status in society is seen as a threat. It is shocking to be reminded that such abuse exists alongside the modern India, one of Bollywood and thrusting computer and telecommunications industries.

Maybe documentary work like this will shame the country into doing something about it.

SW Call Me By My Name Photographs by Luna Published by Handicap International and Luna www.lunaphotos.com www.handicap-international.org

£12 (71pp Softback) I remember the discomfort I felt, searching for a response to Roland Schneider’s Entre-Temps (1989). As an account from within, the book mapped Schneider’s own observations, relationships and routines within the mental hospital in which he was resident.

It was a work that seemed unaware – or dismissive – of the knowing dynamics of the conventional photoreportage often visited on such a space. It was awkward, frustrating, starved of light, even repetitive, and it consequently haunted me as a work of rare authenticity.

Occasionally, photography appears that it is hard to ignore.

It’s an oblique, but useful foundation from which to explore the current project by Luna. Call

Page 79

Me By My Name sees the recently formed photographers’ association respond to aspects of disability in south-east Europe, and carries the ambition to “observe the world from another viewpoint”. Yet the book adopts familiar strategies. A series of photo-essays are introduced by emotive texts that advocate general principles of visibility and dignity. The format of the book clearly demonstrates the challenges of trying to accommodate distinct bodies of work. The layout is perhaps one of unhelpful rigour. Sometimes images are paired, and are occasionally in busier company.

When photographs are given greater space, the selections are often curious, the more complex and engaging images remaining modest and under-grown on the page.

The region itself, immersed in political and civil re-negotiation, should perhaps be louder in the work, yet it seems to simply provide a site for the photography. Ultimately, the book fails to offer any challenges to the dominant portrayals of disability that have sustained debate over recent years. Sadly, there are few surprises here, few attempts to reach out and make responses as challenging and complex as the lives considered.

Ken Grant The Road to Coal Patrizia Bonanzinga Published by hopefulmonster Editore www.hopefulmonster.net $45 (112pp Hardback) The Road to Coal takes as its heart the world’s largest mining industry. China, in Patrizia Bonanzinga’s photographs, becomes a soot-dusted terrain of small communities, isolated settlements and singular physical toil. The earth is as scarred as the cities are monotonous and

remote. In an attempt to mark a response to the dense pungent omnipresence of coal, the photographer has travelled through Shanxi Province on journeys made intermittently since 1995.

The book seems to be driven by travel, and becomes a series of notations and brief encounters made across the region. Workers are met. Then they are gone, sometimes offering the gentle smile often kept for visitors.

Activities are photographed, yet the pictures betray little of the process of mining – or of the physical and social implications of an awkward and poisonous occupation. Domestic and social spaces are included, but are less successful, and generously edited.

Bonanzinga is at her best when she engages with the simplest moments. Her pictures become denser, more intriguing and thoughtful. Through a coal black window frame a man cradles a child and stares ahead, in shadow against his home and landscape; an interior wall presents an abundance of photographs: the family, the state and the future. When approaching the wider rural landscape too, the photographs acquire an authority. We begin to experience a sense of land use, of opportunity and struggle. These, and the still lives which punctuate the work, become rich, evocative meditations that resist the transient detachment of the passing observer.

KG For Every Minute you are Angry you Lose Sixty Second of Happiness Julian Germain Published by Steidl MACK www.steidlmack.com £19.99 (72pp Hardback) As the title suggests, this book offers a philosophy for life – prompted by the photographer’s chance meeting with an elderly man in Portsmouth in 1992. The images introduce us to Charles Snelling, who spends his time preserving his love of flowers, music and memories and thus teaching us to enjoy what we have.

79

Charles is presented as a contemplative man and is pictured in various locations, absorbed in his own solitary activities. Yet in attempting to represent Charlie as fulfilled and content, recurrent images of his solitude reveal and intensify his isolation. Elements within his environment, such as semi-bare cupboards and dusty, plastic dog-heads hanging on his wall, are presented as evidence of his humility but actually reiterate a tired neglect. Carefully selected details display subtle characteristics of Charles’ life and pages of his photo album filled with pictures of his departed wife demonstrate his apparent indulgence in the past … and withdrawal from the present.

Despite an evident bond of trust with the subject (who appears to be perfectly at ease with the camera) and a large portfolio of images, the book fails to explore more than the surface level. The multi-dimensional Charles is absent. We are left to view him as we see the images of his photo albums, like outsiders looking at a collection of memories.

EC

Buy many of these books and other newly released photography titles from the online bookshop at foto8 Exclusive Discounts, Special Offers, Limited Editions & Signed Copies available www.foto8.com

>Diary

photography in Germany. Ten of the main museums and institutions will participate under the theme of ‘Archive of the Presence,’ with symposiums and lectures, including meetings of different professional photographic societies. www.phototriennale.de

>UK College Degree Shows and Exhibitions

Royal College of Art Kensington Gore London SW7 The Show: One 21postgraduate photography students.

27 May – 5 June www.rca.ac.uk Sutton Coldfield College Design Centre 90 Upper Holland Road Sutton Coldfield West Midlands B72 1RD Final National Diploma projects.

21– 30 June www.sutcol.ac.uk Free Range 2005 The Old Truman Brewery Brick Lane London E1 www.free-range.org.uk A summer season of graduate art and design exhibition, including the following photography shows: Reading College Fusion 05 BA(Hons) Professional Photographic Imaging Atlantis Gallery, 2nd Floor 09 – 13 June www.reading-college.ac.uk South East Essex College I am...

HND Photography, BND Photography & A2 Photography The Terrace 16 – 20 June www.southend.ac.uk Surrey Institute of Art & Design The Well 16 – 20 June www.surrart.ac.uk Falmouth College of Art & Design BA (Hons) Photography Studio 95 16 – 20 June www.falmouth.ac.uk West Kent College Ephemera HND Photography Brick House 16 – 20 June www.wkc.ac.uk University of Lincoln Interpretation BA (Hons) Contemporary Lens Media G3 Gallery 16 – 20 June www.lincoln.ac.uk

Rencontres d’Arles 05 July – 18 September In its 36th year, the 2005 Rencontres in Arles, France, will feature Brazilian photography and also include many more retrospectives of great photographers than ever before. The review period for this years event falls between 05 –12 July during which time reviewers will be present to look at portfolios. www.rip-arles.org

© Nick Waplington/Trolley Gallery

The Arts Institute in Bournemouth The AOP Gallery 81Leonard Street London EC2A Peep FDA in Professional Photography.

05 – 09 July www.peep2005.com www.aib.ac.uk

Oxford and Cherwell College 33 Views BA (Hons) in Media, Photography & Video, HND/C Photography and Imaging & HND Media Production Dray Walk Gallery 16 – 20 June www.occ.ac.uk Swansea School of Art & Design Blown Up MA Photography The Terrace 23 – 27 June www.sihe.ac.uk Thames Valley University Studio 95 23 – 27 June www.tvu.ac.uk University of Westminster Atlantis Gallery, 2nd Floor 23 – 27 June www.wmin.ac.uk Swansea Institute of Art & Design Manifesto BA (Hons) Photography in the Arts, BA (Hons) Photojournalism Brick House 23 – 27 June www.sihe.ac.uk/art/home City of Westminster College The Well 23 – 27 June www.cwc.ac.uk Salisbury College Pay & Display BA (Hons) Photomedia G3 Gallery 23 – 27 June www.salisbury.ac.uk University of Portsmouth T3 Gallery 14 – 18 July www.port.ac.uk

>Summer Photography Festivals and Events 7. Internationale Fototage 16 June – 10 July Germany’s largest photography festival will take place this year in Mannheim and Ludwigshafen, in the southwest of the country. Announced themes include ‘Contemporary American Photography’ and ‘The Art of Being German.’ More than 120 individual shows will be

80

presented, with portfolio reviews, seminars, and workshops featuring photojournalism as well as fine art photography and retrospectives. The festival takes part in the context of the Month of Photography in the RhineNeckar Triangle, a general celebration of everything photographic. www.internationalefototage.de PhotoEspaña 2005 01June – 17 July In its 8th year running, PhotoEspaña 2005 will stage more than 50 exhibitions throughout Madrid, revolving around the theme of ‘The City’. Visitors will be able to enjoy the work of over 100 international photographers and visual artists who will reveal their vision of the city life. Madrid will continue to open its doors to the visual arts by embracing film and video in their relationship with photography. www.phedigital.com/campus Photo-London 19 – 22 May Involving over 50 galleries and institutions, Photo-London 05 provides a platform for photography, film and video from the entire history of the medium. With works ranging from £500 – £500,000, visitors at the Royal Academy of Arts will have the chance to invest in, and talk to, photographers and artists. www.photo-london.com On 13 May from 6 – 10pm the following galleries will be presenting a special evening of events to kick off Photo-London: Curator Space, Gt. Eastern Street, Benjamin Alexander Huseby/Will Mcbride, opening night reception in the presence of the artists.

Counter Gallery, Charlotte Street, Gareth McConnell, existing exhibition and special late opening in the presence of the artist.

Scout Gallery, Mundy Street, films by Christopher Doyle, special exhibition.

Museum 52, Redchurch Street, video work by Tom Gallant.

Trolley Gallery, Redchurch Street, Nick Waplington, book launch in presence of the artist, (photo above).

3rd Triennial of Photography Until 19 June From the 14th of April to the 19th of June 2005, Hamburg will be the centre of

Rhubarb-Rhubarb 5 – 7 August Photographers would also do well to consider attending Rhubarb-Rhubarb’s 6th portfolio review schmoozathon to be held in early August in Birmingham, England, just a few weeks after the latest version of the Rencontres. www.rhubarb-rhubarb.net Visa Pour L’Image, 17th International Festival of Photojournalism 27 August – 11September The annual festival in Perpignan again features a vast range of press photography and a large gathering of industry professionals from around the world. Also open to the public, the festival is comprised of evening screenings, awards and exhibitions throughout nine various locations. www.visapourlimage.com

>Competition and Scholarship Bulletin Dimbola Lodge Museum, Island’s Heritage Photographic Project Competition Entries deadline: 28 July www.dimbola.co.uk Ian Parry Award 2005 Entries deadline: 21June www.ianparry.org The Observer Hodge Photographic Award Entries deadline: 22 July www.observer.co.uk/hodgeaward Schweppes Photographic Portrait Prize Entries deadline: 22 July www.npg.org.uk/schweppesprize Travel Photographer of the Year Entries deadline: 09 September www.tpoty.com

81

Advertising_final

28/4/05

1:42 pm

Page 82

Picture Agencies

Presents Seamus Murphy - ‘Paradise Now’ The Film T: +33 (0) 676 499 840 - mail@ashleywoods.com - www.ashleywoods.com

Advertising_final

28/4/05

1:42 pm

Page 83

Picture Agencies

Darfur ©

panos pictures

tel +44 20 7234 0010

EXILEIMAGES

fax +44 20 7357 0094

email pics@panos.co.uk

PEP BONET

|

PANOS PICTURES

web www.panos.co.uk

PHOTOGRAPHERS FOR EDITORIAL AND COMMERCIAL ASSIGNMENTS

© Max & Douglas/Grazia Neri

ALESSANDRO ALBERT, MARCO ANELLI, PABLO BALBONTIN, ALBERTO BEVILACQUA, LORENZO CASTORE, GIANCARLO CERAUDO, RENATO CERISOLA, GIOVANNI DEL BRENNA, Tsunami survivor, Batticaloa, Sri Lanka © H.Davies/Exile Images

GUGLIELMO DE MICHELI, MARCO GAROFALO, ALBERTO GIULIANI, ZIJAH GAFIC, PAUL LOWE, EMILIANO MANCUSO, MAX & DOUGLAS, SEBA PAVIA, GIADA RIPA DI MEANA,

SEARCH ONLINE

VIEW NEW GALLERY

www.exileimages.co.uk T. 44 (0)1273 208741 F. 44 (0)1273 382782 E. pics@exileimages.co.uk

ALESSANDRO RIZZI, RICCARDO SCIBETTA, MASSIMO SESTINI

Agenzia Grazia Neri Via Maroncelli, 14 - 20154 Milano - Italy Tel. 3902-625271 www.grazianeri.com photoagency@grazianeri.com desk@grazianeri.com

Advertising_final

28/4/05

1:42 pm

Page 84

Picture Agencies

www.bilderberg.com +49 40 4328440 Foto © Peter Ginter

IPMMBOETF IPPHUF SFQSFTFOUT UPQ QIPUPKPVSOBMJTUT PG UIF OFUIFSMBOET

© Pavlos Kozalides

XXX IPMMBOETF IPPHUF OM

Advertising_final

28/4/05

1:42 pm

Page 85

Picture Agencies

Advertising_final

28/4/05

1:42 pm

Page 86

Picture Agencies

Advertising_final

28/4/05

1:42 pm

Page 87

Picture Agencies

Advertising_final

28/4/05

1:42 pm

Page 88

Picture Agencies

Advertising_final

28/4/05

1:42 pm

Page 89

Galleries | Pro Sevices

For more on this story visit: www.greenpeace.org/rw20/thenandnow/

The photograph I have chosen, to mark the 20th anniversary of a seminal moment in Greenpeace’s history, shows the crew of the Rainbow Warrior sailing from Honolulu in April 1985. They are bound for Rongelap, a coral atoll in the Marshall Islands in the northern tropical Pacific, contaminated by radioactive fallout from American nuclear bomb tests at nearby Bikini atoll. The mission was to evacuate the inhabitants to an uncontaminated island called Mejato, 120 miles away.

This must have been one of the first pictures taken by Fernando Pereira, a DutchPortuguese photojournalist who had been commissioned to document the voyage and had just joined the ship.

Fernando decided against a formal group shot choosing instead to capture a moment when the crew were relaxing, on deck, in the Pacific sunshine. Weeks later, on 10 July, two explosions ripped through the hull of the ship in Auckland Harbour, New Zealand. This act of state terrorism by the French government cost Fernando his life and Greenpeace lost a dedicated campaigner and friend.

Since the first voyage to Amchitka in 1971, Greenpeace has supplied news picture agencies with images of its innovative actions and protests. The voyage to Rongelap was no exception. Fernando’s job was to document the campaign. In the ship’s tiny darkroom he would print 10 x 8 photographs, fasten them to an AP Leafax rotating drum transmitter and send them to the wire services. Fernando’s pictures were splashed across newspaper front pages all over the world, exposing the realities and consequences of nuclear testing.

Now, two decades after it was taken, this image continues to reflect the spirit of the organisation. Photography is as crucial as ever in disseminating news of the tireless efforts Greenpeace undertakes exposing environmental abuse and helping to safeguard the future of our planet 8 John Novis is Director of Photography for Greenpeace International >Scene Rainbow Warriors John Novis

90

CALUMET SUPPORTS PHOTOJOURNALISM

CALUMET IS PROUD TO SUPPORT STILL STANDING A PHOTO STORY BY TIM HETHERINGTON

CANON, NIKON, KODAK, FUJI, POLAROID, EPSON, OLYMPUS, MANFROTTO, LEXAR

08000 964396 www.calumetphoto.com

EI8HT PHOTOJOURNALISM TSUNAMI MIDNIGHT GEORGIA ROMANIA UZBEKISTAN ELECTIONS GET CLOSER UXB HYENA MEN BUM HILL LOST PROPERTY VOL.4 NO.1 JUNE 2005 £8 WWW.FOTO8.COM

EI8HT PHOTOJOURNALISM V4N1 JUNE 05