Volume 4 Number 4

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EI8HT PHOTOJOURNALISM V4N4 MARCH 06

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EI8HT PHOTOJOURNALISM MAOISTS PEASANTS RELICS NEW ORLEANS CHERNOBYL REVEREND MINES EARTHQUAKE FOOTBALL MONGOLIA WALLS TIM MINOGUE JOHN O’FARRELL DAVID PRATT JOHN VIDAL VOL.4 NO.4 MARCH 2006 £8 WWW.FOTO8.COM

MAY Yann Mingard Landscapes

© Alexander Rodchenko

in this work and who had a collection. I showed this for the first time at the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow in 1996. It was the first show of Russian Pictorialism since 1935. This movement and the artists had been completely forgotten. They were also completely forbidden: Rodchenko’s Pictorialist pictures, which he printed in big sizes, had never been shown before. He proposed to show them a few times in the late-1930s and 1940s. Everybody refused him.

We then started doing a lot of private shows to make the artists known. We were the first to show Grinberg seriously in Moscow in Paris. In 1997, in time for our first anniversary, we asked Moscow to give us the money to buy Grinberg’s work. We had no money then. We presented the first part of the Grinberg archive.

Then we went step by step in order to prepare everything. We showed Yuriy Petrovich Eremin (1881–1964) and Sergei Alexandrovich Lobovikov (1870 – 1941) as well as more Grinberg.

A year ago when we did a show in Italy, I came up with the name that explained all of this to me: “The Quiet Resistance.”

When I started to analyse why Russian Pictorialism started to explode in the 1920s and 1930s, at a time when it had been long dead as a movement elsewhere, I thought that it had to have been some kind of protest against the aesthetic of the revolution which was first Modernism and Constructivism followed later by Socialist Realism that dominated Soviet power and Soviet life in the 1930s. The Pictorialists never

wrote manifestos or demonstrated. They picked private themes, nudes, portraits, and landscapes.

8: Was Rodchenko’s move away from the politically risky subject matter another form of resistance?

OS: I think it was for him. When I compare him with other artists, they also went into Pictorialism.

When the first ideological oppression really started in the early-middle 1930s and Socialist Realism began, the artists were “eating” from the government.

They were sponsored and licensed by the government, but they did not know the forms of what was allowed or what might not be allowed later. At that time when Modernism and Pictorialism were criticised, many people wanted to do what those in power wanted in order to survive. It was not so easy for the Pictorialists. In this show you can see how some of them made images in the themes of Socialist Realism but not the way they might have wanted. The image by Nikolai Andreev (1882 – 1947) of a statue of Lenin (1930s) looks more like Rodin’s Balzac or Hamlet’s father. It is a very mysterious image. It is in no way objective or “realistic.” If you look at Andreev, you will see that he is mostly seen as a realist photographer in the way of 19th century Russian painting. This was more typical of Russian Pictorialism than European Pictorialism. It was more directly based on painting – especially Andreev and Piotr Klepikov (1844 – 1960) were more “Russian” than

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others. Eremin looked mostly to Italy, and Grinberg to Germany.

Russian court photography was also influenced by Russian painting. Andrei Karelin (1837 – 1906), the first big photographer, was a member of the Academy of Fine Arts. His “Photographs from Nature” of the 1870s was based on Russian painting of the period. They were like academic paintings, but they were about simple people. They photographed the people in jobs and everyday life. They photographed like this into the 1930s.

8: Some of these pictures were made about the time of the big collectivisation in Ukraine. Did photographers take pictures there in any kind of Pictorialist way?

OS: There were some people doing that work. Only a few images survived, and I have no vintage prints. There are some images in the KGB archives though. I did research on the Great Famine: these images were documentary journalism done by the government. These stories were only done by a few people who had commissions from the government. Lenin had nationalised photographers and closed the private studios. The only things that were done in the studios were marriage portraits, families, children. Photojournalists needed cameras, film and paper, so of course they were working for the government newspapers and magazines. There were a lot of them. Soviet power in the 1930s needed to have documentation about the

collectivisation, the famine and the cannibalism. None of the big artists could go there because they would have had to know the reality. They therefore didn’t get commissions to photograph there. So the KGB sent in their own photographers. We don’t know their names. The images were of very bad quality, but some survived in the KGB archives. Those archives were partially destroyed during the time of Perestroika. There was a great deal of disorder. The Modernists were like photojournalists and ate the government’s bread.

Photojournalism in Russia was mise-en-scène mostly. The reality was the pretext to create a scene to create a mise-en-scène to suit the political purposes of that specific time. Russian photojournalists had to give an image of reality and show the ideological message.

Pictorialism was centred in a metaphysical sense of a private life. Reality today looks to me very similar to what we had in the early 1930s where we found the first enemies. They were first the enemies of Soviet power. Now we have the enemies of the whole world everywhere. There is a big fixation on the idea of the enemy.

It is very dangerous. It is the sign that totalitarianism can arrive tomorrow in some different form.

8: This idea is used to control us.

OS: Absolutely. It is used to kill our liberties. The “Quiet Resistance” I want to show did not make demonstrations or engage in open discussions with power but did so in a very private way in order to survive. We are completely ready to participate in this idea of the common enemy, the terrorists. We are talking about it all the time. I want to show that there was another way: to show a private resistance.

Everybody can do this. It doesn’t need organisation or demonstrations. It is only in this private way that we can have a sense of humanity 8 The show Quiet Resistance: Russian Pictorialist Photography, 1900 – 1930s is on display at the Gilbert Collection, Somerset House, Strand, London WC2R 1LA, until 26 February 2006. www.gilbert-collection.org.uk

CALUMET SUPPORTS PHOTOJOURNALISM

CALUMET IS PROUD TO SUPPORT ANNYA: CHERNOBYL CERTIFICATE NO. 000358 A PHOTO STORY BY ROBERT KNOTH

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

08000 964396 www.calumetphoto.com

As we go to print with this issue, Mia (left) celebrates her first birthday.

Her brother Louis is now just over four years old. For them, like the magazine, everyday marks a milestone of learning and exploration. Along with their mother, Alice, I celebrate their achievements, and, of course, I also share their disappointment or pain when things go wrong. If the magazine is our ‘baby’ with the staff and I acting as its parents then you, the reader, are a cherished member of our family.

It was thanks to one such family member that we found out about the following unexpected incident. I am disappointed to have to tell you that the story we published on ‘cloud formations before hurricane Katrina’ was not truthful. We were deceived by an amateur – a so-called photographer – who thought it was good sport to steal someone else’s images and make up a false story in order to discredit our publication. I can only offer my apologies to you and to the real photographer, Mike Hollingshead, whose images had been intentionally and maliciously misappropriated.

The news is not all bad. As the magazine grows so too does its command of language. To complement the photography I am happy to introduce in Vol.4 No.4 four new regular columnists; highly respected writers whose commentaries we are looking forward to featuring in our pages.

It’s something new for us, a coming of age as I see it, as EI8HT seeks to enliven debate on issues both in pictures and in words. These comment columns are designed to be informative and authoritative opinion pieces just like the photo stories, reviews and interviews on our other pages.

I hope that you will enjoy reading, as well as looking at, this issue. And I also encourage you to reply to us with your own letters, to keep us, like every anxious parent, perpetually vigilant.

JL Editor’s Letter

Contributor Links Christophe Agou www.nousyork.com Claudio Cricca www.claudiocricca.com Represented by Redux Pictures www.reduxpictures.com Raphaël Dallaporta www.raphaeldallaporta.com

Editor Jon Levy Deputy Editor Lauren Heinz Features Editor Max Houghton

Tomas van Houtryve www.tomasvanhoutryve.com www.digitalrailroad.net/reflexionphotos Robert Knoth Certificate No. 000358 is published by Mets & Schilts and Edition Braus. www.metsenschilt.com www.editionbraus.de www.robertknoth.com Mary Jane Maybury www.mjmaybury.com

Contributing Editors Sophie Batterbury, Colin Jacobson, Ludivine Morel Reviewers Ken Grant, Bill Kouwenhoven, Sophie Wright

Picture Editor Flora Bathurst

Advertising Bern Toomey adverts@foto8.com

Editorial Assistant Lally Pearson

Design Phil Evans & Rob Kester

Columnists Tim Minogue John O’Farrell David Pratt John Vidal

Special Thanks Andy Ferguson, Maurice Geller, Leo Hsu, Sharon Raizada Reprographics John Doran & Adam Harvey at Wyndeham Graphics

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Livia Monami www.liviamonami.com Martin Roemers martinroemers@wanadoo.nl Goran Tomasavic Represented by Reuters www.reuters.com Perry Walker The Reverend is published by University Press Mississippi www.thereverend.com www.jamesperrywalker.com

Print Stones the Printers Paper Galerie Art Silk by MREAL cover 250gsm, text 130gsm Distribution Specialist bookshops & galleries – Central Books 020 8986 4854 Newstrade – Comag 01895 433800 ISSN 1476-6817 Publisher Jon Levy Subscription/Back Issues 8 issues, 2 yrs: £53-uk, £61-eu, £75-row 4 issues, 1yr: £29-uk, £33-eu, £40-row Back Issues from £9 (incl. p+p) subscribe@foto8.com

Erratum Riding out the Storm,Vol.4 No.3: It has been brought to our attention that these images in fact belong to Mike Hollingshead, a US storm photographer ,and have been stolen and wrongly published on numerous occasions. To see the full story vsit: www.extremeinstability.com Please also see editor’s letter above.

Kablare, Vol.4 No.3: The Kosovan Roma family described had been in the Kablare camp for two years.

More information W: www.foto8.com T: +44 (0)20 7253 8801 F: +44 (0)20 7253 2752 E: info@foto8.com Advertising rates www.foto8.com/media/ Disclaimer The views expressed in this magazine are not necessarily the views of EI8HT or foto8 Ltd. Copyright © 2006 foto8 Ltd. All rights reserved. No part of this magazine may be copied or reproduced without the prior written consent of the publisher EI8HT is published by foto8 Ltd 1-5 Honduras Street London EC1Y 0TH United Kingdom

Contents Vol.4 No.4 March 2006

>Moments >16 Out of Sight The gaze of a child reminding us of the daily struggle for survival after Pakistan’s October earthquake by Goran Tomasevic >26 Extra Time Claudio Cricca’s story of healing sport and friendship >58 Crack of Whip Travelling through Mongolia, Livia Monami beheld this remarkable sight

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>Features >06 Facing Silence Christophe Agou returns to the rural French landscape of his childhood and finds the change of pace a welcome antidote to New York life >18 Red Mountain Tomas van Houtryve continues to document the volatile situation in Nepal since his first visit as a philosophy student nine years ago >30 Annya: Chernobyl Certificate No. 000358 Robert Knoth has photographed the effects of nuclear disasters across the Caucasus, here we focus on one girl’s tragic story >38 Relics Martin Roemers seeks out “monuments” of the Cold War >50 Reverend Perry Walker captures the faith and community inspired by a remarkable preacher in America’s Deep South >60 Anti-Personal Raphaël Dallaporta’s stylistic approach to the brutal truth about landmines >64 Watermarked Mary-Jane Maybury visits New Orleans and witnesses the homecoming of residents to their damp and devastated houses

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>Essays >44 Peacelineswarwounds John O’Farrell studies Belfast, a city divided by peace lines and war wounds >Foreign Affairs Column >47 In the Shadow of the Wall David Pratt’s emotive view of Palestinians living alongside the Israeli security fence as its construction continues

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>Environment Column >28 Chernobyl Forever John Vidal laments the legacy of Chernobyl as a deadly permanent scar on the earth >Inside >70 Olga Sviblova talks to EI8HT as she marks the 10th anniversary of the Moscow House of Photography and about her role as curator and founder

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>Reviews >73 Katy Grannan, China, 1977, One Step Beyond, Unembedded, Mongolia, Far Cry, Hackney Wick, A Life Full of Holes, PositHIV+, Coal Hollow >81 Photography exhibitions and events >Listings >82 Picture agencies, special notices and professional resources >Scene >90 2006 Year Planner Tim Minogue predicts tomorrow’s headlines

>Cover Relics © Martin Roemers 5

Facing Silence

Between youth and age, between the private sphere and the public arena, between the life we live and the life we want to live, we are all caught between two worlds

Jean

In revisiting the maps of his childhood, the fields and verdant forests of France’s agricultural heartland, the Massif Central, Christophe Agou found something that was missing from his New York life: silence.

The simplicity and authenticity of the farmers, these isolated rural people who inhabit his earliest memories, their shrewdness and their intuition became a great life force for him.

Although he had been living in the United States since 1992, it was the life-altering effect of what happened in New York on September 11, 2001that catapulted him from the city hustle to peace and tranquillity.

The more he thought about it, the more he felt a yearning for his homeland, so much so that it was like having a lover in another land, someone you missed and longed to see again. He began to “go home” as often as his schedule permitted, for three or four weeks at a time, reacquainting himself with a way of life that could not exist in his adopted city.

Agou’s view of the farming community he left behind is not rose-tinted by sentiment. He knows the lives lived here are not predicated by choice but by necessity. Lives are blighted by poverty – no one exists to make a profit – or the loneliness that can quickly draw down on a dark evening when your nearest neighbour lives five kilometres away, and illness – the high starch diet brings with it a high propensity for developing diabetes.

And yet. Agou takes comfort in the reassuring manner and deep compassion of Bernard, the vet, a man of a similar age who has become a great friend. He is entirely charmed by Claudette, who never forgets a slick of lipstick if a visitor is expected. He sees the little children playing with a four wheel cart, and sees his younger self.

“This place makes my eyes and ears open. I am always looking for creative energy and I find it here among my candid and intuitive friends. They are totally in tune with birth, death and life; they exist fully.

“As long as I live and breathe I will go there, to talk and to listen to them” 8 Facing Silence Christophe Agou

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Jeanne

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Claudette

Paul

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>Moments Extra Time Claudio Cricca Fabrizio Maiello had a glittering career ahead of him. He was destined to fulfil every boy’s dream: to become a professional footballer. At just 17, a knee injury put a sudden and devastating end to his career. It sparked a downward spiral in his mental state and drug dependency led to a prolonged spell in the limbo of Italy’s institutions for the criminally insane. Photographer Claudio Cricca met him several years later, in 1999, while working on a project on the prison and mental health system.

Cricca rarely encountered Fabrizio without a football, whether bouncing it to keep it in the air for as long as possible, balancing it on his head or controlling it expertly with his foot.

and was slowly giving up on life. Fabrizio willingly took on the physical and emotional needs of the older man, and in so doing, according to one of the institute’s nurses, saved both their lives.

The perfect equilibrium Fabrizio achieved with his football allowed him to find a balance within himself which became more apparent when he met Giovanni, with whom he shared a cell.

An old man, Giovanni was utterly dependent on others for all his needs

This picture is a record of their friendship. Both men have since been released from the prison hospital and are pursuing independent lives 8

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Red Mountain

Tomas van Houtryve has been immersed in documenting Nepal’s political turbulence since visiting Buddha’s birthplace as a philosophy student in 1997. As the conflict grows bloodier, he remains fascinated by one of the few countries in the world where an ideological revolution still seems possible

Since King Gyanendra brought the country back under his direct rule in February 2005 and declared a state of emergency, the rift between Maoists, monarchists and mainstream political parties in the Hindu Kingdom of Nepal has been deepening.

January 2006 saw the power struggle being played out on the streets of Kathmandu, after a four-month voluntary ceasefire declared by the Maoists collapsed. The King’s response to the violence that flashed through the capital was to impose a curfew on the city’s residents and to place his opponents under house arrest; a situation that was reversed as suddenly as it was implemented. Demonstration calling for the reinstatement of democracy have been met with an uncompromising response from the King.

Where Kathmandu sports internet cafés and shopping malls like any other capital city, the living conditions in outlying rural villages are basic at best. The caste system builds gaping inequalities into an already impoverished society, thus rendering the concept of revolution an attractive proposition for those at the bottom of the pile. Municipal elections scheduled by the King for February 2006 were never likely to stem the will for change – particularly since just 15 per cent of the population are eligible to vote. To compound tensions, in the same month the People’s Liberation Army marks the 10th anniversary of its formation and its ensuing struggle for revolution in the Kingdom.

Maoists and monarchists have both been criticised for abuses against civilians. The Maoists “regularly abduct students from schools for political indoctrination” 1 and have been accused of using children in combat. Meanwhile, Nepal enjoys the grim distinction of having the largest reported number of enforced disappearances in the world, and “in almost all cases, the disappeared persons were last seen in the custody of government security forces” 8 1. Human Rights Watch World Report, January 2006

Nabin Pun (previous page), a Maoist rebel soldier of the People's Liberation Army, raises the communist flag from a tree above the village of Rukumkot

A rebel soldier wearing a Britney Spears T-shirt (above) stands among a batallion of other members of the People's Liberation Army, First Brigade, Mid Division, during a drill in a schoolyard in the village of Gairigaon

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A column of rebel soldiers (right, top) treks up the trail to toward the village of Mahat

Comrade Mukti (centre), a commander in the People's Liberation Army, leads children in physical training in Thabang, the capital of Nepal's Maoist-held areas.

The rebels have built a school where they teach students according to a Marxist-inspired curriculum

A Maoist supporter (bottom) dances among a crowd gathered for a celebration marking the 9th anniversary of the start of “the Maoist revolution�, in the village of Pipal, in February 2005

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A formation of police prepares to face protesters in Kathmandu (above) in April 2004. Weeks of clashes between police and protesters calling on the King to reinstate democracy led to thousands of arrests and left hundreds injured

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During the confrontations, which showed no sign of abating throughout April 2004, protesters throw torches, (left, top) at charging police in the capital

Police forcefully arrest an anti-monarchy protester (centre) as the clashes continued in Kathmandu. Finally, bowing to pressure, in June 2004 the King reinstated the most recent prime minister who formed a four-party government. But King Gyanendra once again assumed absolute power in February 2005

A girl stands behind two fire damaged homes (bottom) near a Royal Nepal Army armoured vehicle in the village of Halanagar, in the Kapibastu region of Nepal, in March 2005. An anti-Maoist mob, calling themselves a “retaliation committee�, burned down hundreds of homes in the village, charging the inhabitants with sheltering communist rebels. Since the incident, the Royal Nepal Army has been working together with the mob in joint operations

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A Maoist party leader (above) holds a speaker playing a recorded speech of Maoist Supreme Commander Comrade Prachanda during the celebrations for the 9th anniversary of the revolution in Pipal in February 2005

Villagers (right, top) using simple hand tools work on a road construction project in Rukum district, a base area for Nepal's Maoist rebel insurgents. The workers are paid with food by the German donor agency GTZ

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Soldiers (middle) of the People's Liberation Army load rocks on their heads during construction of the Martyrs' Road near the village of Nuwagaun in the Maoist-controlled district of Rolpa. The rebels required one person from each household in Rolpa and Rukum districts to contribute to the construction of the road for 10-15 days.

The road, built completely by hand labour is the first one to connect to the rural villagers in this area

Laxmi Shahi, 31(bottom), who fled a Maoist-controlled region, nurses a child while another refugee picks lice out of her hair in the Kirin Khola Camp for internally displaced persons

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>Moments Out of Sight Goran Tomasevic

This child is a survivor of the earthquake in Pakistan and India that killed at least 80,000 people and left nearly 3 million homeless in October 2005. She is standing in a shelter in the village of Kalrahi, 55km, southeast of Muzaffarabad in Pakistan-administered Kashmir. A landslide from a nearby mountain blocked two streams and created two lakes in the Chakkar area, threatening the fragile refuge offered by the scattered housing that remains in the area.

Goran Tomasevic was in Pakistan for Reuters news agency. Although there were – and indeed are – agency photographers working in the region, the sparse coverage of the disaster in Pakistan has been the subject of much discussion in the photojournalism community and the news media. Given the magnitude of the disaster, relatively few images have appeared. By publishing one image, we cannot redress this balance, but at least we can, through this child’s eyes, remember what has been lost and remain mindful of what is occurring 8

SUBSCRIBE NOW AND SAVE MORE THAN 30% EI8HT is the award-winning magazine of photojournalism.

Each quarterly issue features the work of pre-eminent photographers and distinguished writers who look beyond the news headlines to uncover real stories of political, social and environmental importance.

For more information and to take advantage of this special offer visit: www.foto8.com or telephone +44 (0)20 7253 8801 Cover reproduction of EI8HT Vol. 4 No.3 (December 2005). Photograph by Bruno Stevens

>Environment Column Chernobyl Forever John Vidal

The world’s worst man-made catastrophe took place at 1.23 in the morning of April 26 1986.

The Chernobyl nuclear power station, one of the biggest in the old Soviet Union, had been providing electricity to the city of Kiev since it was opened only eight years earlier. But that night, the young operating crew was asked to test whether the turbines could produce sufficient power to keep the pumps running in the event of a loss of power.

It was routine, uncomplicated work that had been done before without problem. To prevent interruption during the test, the safety systems were temporarily switched off and the reactor was powered down to 25 per cent of capacity. But for still unknown reasons, the power level suddenly fell to less than 1per cent. Thirty seconds later there was a massive, unexpected surge of electricity.

In less than half a second, No 4 reactor was out of control. There was a violent explosion. The great 1,000-tonne concrete cap that sealed the reactor building was blown off. The reactor core heated to 3,000C and melted the fuel rods. Fires raged. A plume of radiocative cerium, caesium, zirconium, niobium and ruthenium, along with americium, strontium 90 and plutonium soared a mile high, drifting over the Ukraine and Belarus, central Europe, Scandinavia and Britain.

In all, somewhere between 50 and 250 million curies of radiation – roughly the same as 100 medium sized atom bombs – was unleashed.

The cause of the accident is still described as “a fateful combination of human error and imperfect technology” but the consequences will be felt for hundreds of thousands of years.

The next morning was said to have been the first and loveliest day of spring in the town of Pripyat, just three km away.

People basked in the sunshine, not realising what had happened, or the danger they were in. The authorities, desperately trying to put out – and hide knowledge of the fires, were in a state of shock.

It took them 36 hours to even begin to evacuate the 45,000 people from Pripyat and weeks before they faced up to the truth.

More than 300,000 people were eventually moved out, never to return, and a 30 km area around the reactor – known as “the zone” – was cleared.

Twenty years on, Reactor No 4 has been encased in walls of concrete and steel six metres thick and is now called the sarcophagus. The rest of the station, which was allowed to continue producing electricity for another decade because there was no money to decommission it, has finally closed. There are people living in The Zone. But even though the whole area is a laboratory for scientists to study the effects of radiation, there is no agreement on what happened, what were the exact health consequences and who was to blame.

But the world does know this.

Officially, only about 50 people died in the initial blast. But at least three million people, including one million children and adolescents, were seriously exposed to radiation.

There is a growing consensus that at least 1,800 children have now contracted thyroid cancers.

This figure could reach 100,000 in the next 30 years. Meanwhile, breast cancer and other tumours are increasing throughout the region.

The environmental damage, too, has been immense. Some 9,000 km sq of pine, birch and oak forest, fields, pasture, orchards, villages, swamps, rivers and reservoirs were – and still are – severely contaminated and unworkable. In Belarus, which received 70 per cent of the fallout, about 22 per cent of the land was – and still is – contaminated with caesium137. There are an extraordinary number of albino birds.

Pripyat is now a ghost town, with the forest encroaching bit by bit on the high-rise housing in which no one will ever live again. The small and ancient village of Chernobyl, with its apple trees, will always be empty. Beyond the

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dead Zone, few people want to live in the region. There is a desperate shortage of teachers and doctors in Belarus, and the few young people all try to leave.

Companies and farms have had to close because they cannot find skilled workers. Those people who have been resettled as a result of the catastrophe, are said to find it hard to find a partner, because of a great fear of congenital anomalies. Life expectancy has fallen by seven years, and the birth rate is dropping. Economists suggest that the economic damage already is close £100 billion.

For 20 years, Chernobyl all but halted the development of civil nuclear power in the West. But as concern mounts over climate change and as oil production peaks, there is massive pressure to go down the nuclear route again. The new generation of nuclear stations is said by scientists to be safe, cheap and reliable – just as they said it was 30 years ago. This time they say that nuclear power will assist in the fight against climate change because its emissions of carbon dioxide are so low.

The nuclear industry has a long legacy of less serious accidents and no scientist will dare say that one on the scale of Chernobyl could never happen again, or that it will not be worse. If they are right about Chernobyl, then the great quantities of deadly plutonium 239 left in Reactor No 4 are safely interred and will never get into the water courses or leak.

But it‘s a very big if. In 24,000 years – far longer than any civilisation has ever existed, far further in the future than is presently imaginable, way beyond the life of concrete and steel which is supposed to contain it – half of the world’s most dangerous materials will still be there in Reactor No 4. Chernobyl lives, it could be said, for ever more 8 John Vidal is the Environment Editor for The Guardian

Annya Chernobyl Certificate No. 000358 Pictures Robert Knoth Words Antoinette de Jong

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“When she was only four years old, trying to be a good girl, sitting up straight eating her food nicely, little Anna Pesenko would sometimes just pass out and fall flat onto the table. “Annya”, as she is called, could not explain what was wrong with her. Her mother Valentina took her to the doctor who discovered a tumour in the girl’s head. The cancer was removed, but Annya never regained her health and has seen so many doctors that she gets terrified whenever she sees a white coat. Even so, a committee of such doctors decided she should have a “Chernobyl certificate” because Annya’s father Vachlav was from a village that was contaminated in the wake of the Chernobyl disaster.

Zakopytye village was destroyed and buried. Annya carries certificate no. 000358. It reads: “This person has the right to the privileges that are given by the government of the Republic of Belarus for the victims of the Chernobyl catastrophe as specified under article 18 / issued by the Gomel Municipality.” The much sought-after piece of paper gives the holder access to certain health institutions, a selection of free medicines, a 50 percent discount on utilities bills and free public transport. Now, at 15, Annya still tries

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very hard. When she is strong enough she studies with her teachers who come and visit her at home. “Our republic is rich in resources: calcium, salt, chalk and petrol are amongst them,� Annya wrote down

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during spring. A week later the neat regular hand writing continued: “The Russian scientist Mendeleyev invented the periodic table of elements. The city of Gomel has a chemical plant�. There are no recent

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entries. Annya was rushed into hospital and kept on artificial breathing at the intensive care unit for 17 days. Back home, she lies back into her pillows, wilted and too weak to move, surrounded by her

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cuddly animals. At night, Valentina and Vachlav Pesenko sleep on the floor next to their daughter’s bed, as Annya has to be turned every 15 minutes to prevent bedsores. The girl needs help with everything.

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While Vachlav washes the soiled sheets by hand, Valentina carefully replaces them from a pile of freshly washed and pressed linen, stacked in a corner. Nobody in the family gets much sleep; all three are

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exhausted. Each night, Valentina takes a picture of the Holy Anna, her daughter’s namesake, and, bending close to Annya’s ear, whispers a prayer 8 Robert Knoth’s book, Certificate No. 000358/Nuclear Devastation, which includes work from Belarus, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, the Urals and Siberia, will be published in April. An exhibition of his work will take place in Kiev, 8 April – 15 May, at the Museum of Contemporary Art and in London from 18 April – 14 May at the OXO Gallery 8 extra: More images from Robert Knoth’s wider project can be seen online foto8.com/8xtra

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Relics

When wars end, monuments and memorials are built to celebrate the victorious and to honour the dead.Precious few edifices mark the end of the Cold War but its relics – trashed bases, abandoned defences, deserted missile silos – become eloquent monuments

For the past six years, Martin Roemers has been searching for traces in the Eastern European landscape, for shreds of the evidence that the Cold War marked such a significant period in the shared history of East and West.

Seeking guilty ground, Roemers visited bunkers and barracks long since deserted by Soviet armies. He found a desolate beauty in what remains, like the former Soviet naval base, seemingly adrift in the Baltic sea. In the former East Germany, a social-realist mural adorns the staircase of a pilot school, the power of a Soviet Sputnik undiminished here. An upended gynaecologist’s chair in a massive army barracks that housed whole families lends a more sinister mood.

Yet in Poland, a silo for nuclear warheads in the middle of dense woodland may incite a shiver in those who understand its former purpose.

But for two local children, it’s the perfect place to make colourful graffiti; marking their own existence, their own place in history 8 Relics Martin Roemers

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An old bunker lies in the Baltic Sea (previous page) at the former Soviet naval base in Liepaja, Latvia An icon of the space race (above left), this mural of Soviet Sputnik adorns the wall of a former pilot school of the Soviet air force, Altes Lager, east Germany Deserted hospital of the Soviet Army (above) in Juterbog, east Germany The Soviet Navy’s former submarine base (facing) in Balaklava Bay, Ukraine, on the coast of the Black Sea

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Portrait of a gravestone in a Soviet army cemetery, Potsdam, east Germany In Brzeznica, Poland, children play near a former Russian silo used for storing nuclear missiles during the Cold War Ozymandias I met a traveler from an antique land Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read, Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed, And on the pedestal these words appear: "My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings: Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Percy Bysshe Shelley 1792 – 1822

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Partitioning Peace Belfast’s ‘peace lines’ serve to fuel religious divisions rather than dampen them, says John O’Farrell. In interface communities, people’s life stories are interrupted, left unfinished, and murders remain unsolved. Only one thing unites the city’s residents: poverty 44

>Essay Peacelineswarwounds John O’Farrell

In his 1996 novel Eureka Street, Robert McLiam Wilson leaves his characters and caricatures to sleep and takes the reader on a transcendent trip over and through Belfast. “The city rises and falls like music. The sleeping streets feel free.” Past the bored policemen, the threeletter terrorist grafitti, the flags, “a thousand flags, but five mere colours and only two designs”, the wilting flowers in doorways or between railings to mark a site of murder. “This is a city where people are prepared to kill and die for a few pieces of coloured cloth.”

Wilson was writing in the aftermath of the ceasefires called by the IRA and their loyalist equivalents in autumn 1994.

There was, then, a mood like a stunned silence over Belfast, as if it really was over, but everybody knew that whatever happened next would be slow and sordid.

And yet the absence of random murder, the knowledge that there were people alive who would otherwise not be, created a mood of celebration, not least from Wilson.

“The city’s surface is thick with its living citizens. Its earth is richly sown with its many dead. The city is a repository of narratives, of stories. Present tense, past tense or future. The city is a novel.”

Wilson is preparing us for the following chapter, in which a bomb slices its way through a sandwich shop and its

customers. The tragedy of murder, he writes, is that it truncates someone’s novel into a short story. “Some stories had been ended. A confident editorial decision had been taken.”

Flash forward 10 years. An agreement of sorts has been reached. The paramilitaries who plotted atrocity for three decades have been brought into “respectable” politics or “ordinary decent” crime. Belfast is awash with swish office buildings, cosmopolitan café bars and cultural quarters. Glass, and lots of it, is the main architectural motif, after years of fears about snarling shards. Whenever an “initiative” is being boosted, the launchpad of choice is the Waterfront Hall, circular and gleaming and as far from a bunker as is possible to construct.

To the weekend visitor, it is as

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exceptional as any other provincial city, but there is one specific attraction that Cardiff or Carlisle does not have, nor would ever want to have. Much of the money used to rebuild Belfast has come from the European Union, and at the time of the ceasefires, the then EU Commission President Jacques Delors expressed his wish that the cash would help remove the physical barriers that were then dotted around 15 sectarian flashpoints.

At the last count, there are now 27. They are bigger, thicker and taller. They block streets and line back alleys. They cut across playing fields. Some are there for so long that they have become colonised by weeds, plants and shrubs. The older ones are so taken for granted that few remember that a “mixed” street once lived there. Some have

become concrete canvases for muralists and graffiti artists.

They all do exactly what they are designed to do. To make permanent the divided loyalties of the citizenry. To corral contention.

To warn the other side to keep away. To keep the inhabitants habituated into “their” side, with one history, one future, one narrative. They are a static reminder of the intrinsic hostility of those on the opposite side of the wall and the pristine victim-status of the neighbourhood.

They end stories. They inhibit expression. They act as roadblocks on narrative and imprison stories that can and should be shared. They are the final installment. If people’s lives are potential novels, then half of the story is missing. What remains unwritten is censored by fear of the “other” narrative, or selfedited by loyalty to the overbearing ‘community’ narrative.

They do not work. They do not protect the people who live in proximity to the walls, and they never have. In the early 1970s, when the British Army first erected basic barriers made from corrugated iron and barbed wire, it was easy for assassins to slip through gaps in the fence, shoot the first male they came across and slip home, sure that their victim was the “right” sort of target based on locale.

Someone called them “peace lines”, a visible border within the city, the point at which “they” will not pass, an outerzone of

dragon’s teeth and stinger devices. They traced across the face of north and west Belfast like stress wrinkles, like the earned lines on the visage of a dedicated smoker, like the scars of old wounds.

When more permanent structures went up, palisade fences with fewer gaps, cars and motor bikes were used for drive-by shootings and grenade attacks on pubs.

Contrary to the perception that most perpetrators came from “just over the fence”, later analysis showed that what became known as “interface communities” were more likely to be victims than killers. They were the “front line” of the “hinterland”.

They were human shields.

Research carried out for the Belfast Interface Project in 2004

by Peter Shirlow of the University of Ulster reached an eye-popping conclusion. Two-thirds of all violent deaths in Belfast between 1966 and 2004 happened within 500 metres of an interface; 85 per cent were within 1km of a peace line. It goes without saying that most of these were not paramilitaries, or the Army or the police, but civilian deaths. Shirlow also found that most murdered civilians were killed within a few hundred metres of their home – one third were killed in their own house, in front of family members.

These are real and raw memories.

More than 1600 murders remain unsolved. There is scant closure for these enclosed people. The mystery about the perpetrators leads to speculation, accusation

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and belief in murky conspiracies.

There are enough cases of clear collusion, of at least a blind eye being turned, or a road block being lifted just before a car filled with murderous intention entered an interface area, to justify suspicions. But conspiracies also bring an abstract comfort, that one’s loved one died for some reason, rather than being the random stroller who was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

These stories help generate both community cohesion and selective victimhood. They become sites of commemoration as well as attrition. The wilted flowers stuck between railings become plaques that are memorialised annually with band parades or calls for inquiries. They draw the community together, but also act as warnings against fraternisation.

There are no mixed messages in the walls or in the messages that come from these places. And it makes possible the myth that paramilitaries only exist for the protection of “their” people. “But deep at night Belfast whispers in cool breaths that hatred is something like God”, writes Robert McLiam Wilson. “You can’t see what you can’t see, but if you fight and follow it blindly enough, it will keep you warm at nights.”

Such are the approved narratives of interface living. One shared history in conflict with another, completely contrary, shared history. They are divided by religion, nationality, ethnicity, foundation myths and dreamlike

endgames. “Some call it religion, some call it politics. But the most reliable, the most ubiquitous division is money. Money is the division you can always put your money on.”

Put simply, people don’t live in interface areas because they are filled with such an all-consuming hatred of the other lot that they enjoy the proximity to them. There is no evidence that these people are more or less sectarian than anybody else in the province.

They are not willing human shields. They are poor. They are twice as likely to leave school with no qualifications and are almost three times as likely to be unemployed. Only 5 per cent have an A level or higher qualification. Four-fifths are economically inactive.

What these parts of north and west Belfast (along with the interface around the catholic enclave of Short Strand in the east) are best known for is rioting.

Some are very proud of their reputation. In 1996, as nationalist areas exploded after the Drumcree Orange march was forced through in Portadown, one participant grinned, “we may be second class citizens, but we’re first class rioters!” During the predictable times of tension, such as the marching season, scores of teenagers travel to certain flashpoints, guaranteed of the thrills, scares, comradeship, catharsis, venom, or whatever you want from a riot.

The term “recreational rioting” has been coined for this pastime.

While not all those lobbing rocks and petrol bombs at the police (contact with the “others” is quite rare) are from the locale, everybody who lives in proximity is affected. Their streets are locked down, their cars and shops are torched, their homes are stoned by teenagers and raided by the security forces, their children are traumatised, and then inculcated into the hyper-normality of the situation.

Mobile phone networks have been set up so that residents on one side can try and reassure their opposite (phone) numbers that trouble may be brewing and can be stopped before the spiral takes hold. That works to dissuade kids from stirring things up, but it is acknowledged that riots orchestrated by paramilitaries cannot be prevented. Nevertheless, it is possible to talk quietly to an opponent, to develop mutual

respect, to listen to the timbre of the human voice, to hear doubt, worry, familiarity, humour, eventually affection.

Meetings happen, but in a “neutral” space, away from their homes, unseen by their neighbours who may disapprove, in rooms cleared of contentious symbols or pieces of coloured cloth. From such necessities, bridges are built and windows are opened in the walls for those who choose to see them.

Eventually, doors are opened and a new chapter starts in the stalled stories of previously constrained lives.

But such stories are too few, and are beyond the comprehension of the most entrenched, the young men and women who have spent all of their conscious lives in the shadow of the walls and the sweaty embrace of a sectarian comfort zone. These are the

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majority of “interface” teenagers who have never had a meaningful conversation with a peer on the “other side”, or even a banal chat about school, or music, or boys and girls. It is that generation, toddlers when the ceasefires were called, who provide this generation’s riot fodder, whose stories have been edited for them from birth. They are most likely to look askance at their older neighbours who strive to open doors and windows in the walls, and are at one with the octogenarian Rev Dr Ian Paisley that the problem with bridges is that “they go over to the otherside”.

John O’Farrell is Communications Officer of the International Conflict Research Centre at the University of Ulster www.incore.ulster.ac.uk These images form part of a series taken between 2002 and 2005 at over 46 interface locations in Belfast © Frankie Quinn

Partitioning Peace Declared illegal by the International Court of Justice, the ‘security fence’ being built by Israel redraws the country’s borders ignoring the 1967 lines.

Criticised from all sides, it is also dividing once united Palestinian towns, says David Pratt >Foreign Affairs Column In the Shadow of the Wall David Pratt

“THESE are a way of life here,” says Alon Tuval, loading bullets into the magazine of his Beretta pistol. Feet apart, arms locked, one eye closed, he takes aim.

After a few minutes he puts down the gun, and takes me forward to check the results of his shooting.

“One dead terrorist,” he says smiling, the paper target showing three good head shots and a cluster of ripped holes “well grouped” around the chest.

Having passed with flying colours, Tuval returns to the main gunshop attached to the shooting gallery, where the owner renews the licence for the Beretta, and sells him a fresh box of bullets.

“Winchester – Full Metal Jacket” says the writing on the box. In the display case beneath the counter is an assortment of other guns, sawtoothed “special forces” knives, knuckledusters and telescopic batons for sale. Next to us an elderly Israeli woman, who a few seconds earlier was going though her own lock-and-load routine like a veteran SAS man, is now perusing a selection of “discreet gun pouches” which the manufacturer insists are the “Best home your weapon will ever find”.

“Be sure to wash your hands, you don’t want to get lead poisoning,”

Tuval tells me as I pick up one of the tiny copper-coloured bullets from the table to take a closer look.

A journalist and researcher by profession, Alon Tuval is no more a Zionist fanatic than Hassan Akramawi is an Islamic terrorist.

Both men, one Israeli, one Palestinian, live barely a few miles apart on either side of Jerusalem’s “green line”.

Their lives, like countless others here, are etched with fear and uncertainty by conflict. But today the decades-old suspicion and division between their respective worlds has become more tangible than ever with the slow severing existence of what many simply refer to as “the wall.”

This “wall” or “barrier” that Israel is building to cut itself off from the occupied Palestinian territories of the West Bank has come to symbolise the divide between the two peoples at the heart of the Middle East crisis.

Hassan Akramawi is a shopkeeper on what used to be the main Jerusalem to Jericho Road. When I meet him he is suffering from flu, worried about who will pick up his kids from school. Perhaps it’s the effects of the illness, but there is a real sense that this is a man hovering on the edge of breakdown.

“My business is dead because this wall has cut the street, cut people off from each other and their own

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families,” he says. The wall runs right across the road outside Akramawi’s shop; 12 metres high, it slices through the community, severing Jerusalem from the West Bank village of Abu Dis. “If you want security for your house you build the wall in your own garden not in your neighbour’s,” he complains, increasingly fired up.

The wall’s ugly grey cement is pockmarked where rocks have been thrown at it in anger. In bright red painted letters someone has daubed “From Warsaw Ghetto to Abu Dis Ghetto”. Someone else points out that it was “Paid for by the USA,” while another asks, “Is this the work of a man of peace?”

A few children negotiating a checkpoint that crosses from one side of the wall to another on their way home from school, stop by Akramawi’s shop for some sweets. “This is all I sell now for a shekel or two to the kids. I even take the light bulbs out because I have to save some money, life is too difficult to live any more.”

It’s hard to overemphasise the sheer injustice of this concrete scar that gouges its way across olive tree orchards, family homes, grazing areas, places of work, schools and anything else that, frankly, the state of Israel decides to confiscate. When completed, the wall is expected to be at least four times as long and in many places twice as high as the Berlin Wall. For this is no ordinary wall; it is more accurately described as a system of control that includes concrete barriers, watchtowers, trenches on either side, military patrol roads, trace paths to register footprints, an electronic warning or “smart” fence, and a concrete barrier topped with barbed wire.

Its sheer physical presence bears down when you are near it.

Walking beside it, on either side, you can see Palestinians trying to live their lives under its weight.

Like the South African regime during apartheid, the Israelis are well on the way with their policy of containment to creating the equivalent of the infamous Bantustans, where most black

South Africans were forced to live.

The humiliation of Palestinians is made all the worse by the employment of some of their men by private Israeli security firms to guard other Arab labourers who work on the wall’s construction.

“I know they blame us for this,” says one guard when asked what he thinks of the Palestinian villagers who stand nearby watching as a bulldozer digs up their back garden to lay cables used for high-powered security lights and fencing fixed with electronic warning devices.

Elsewhere, other Palestinian labourers can be seen daily running the gauntlet of army patrols to cross gaps in the wall before being picked up by Israeli employers to work in a variety of “dirty jobs” inside Israel itself. A useful source of cheap labour, few of these Israeli employers seem concerned by the security risk involved, or that one of their workers just might be a suicide bomber.

In these desperate economic times, most Palestinians have no choice but to take what they can that offers them a living. Even sometimes at the risk of being called a collaborator.

Why, most ordinary Palestinians ask, has the outside world been so quiet in its condemnation of the security wall despite the International Court’s ruling that its construction is illegal? Why is it called a “security” wall at all, when instead of just separating Israel from the West Bank it separates Arab from Arab? Indeed, how can a people whose history is full of terrible ghettos, now themselves be building one?

As these questions continue to be ignored, above Abu Dis village stands what was once the Cliff Hotel. As a struggling freelance correspondent and photojournalist covering the first intifada in the 1980s, this was my home on and off for many years.

At the Cliff I met fellow journalists and aid workers, celebrated Christmas, held an engagement party, and made friends from among the Palestinian community

and around the world. Some of the memories are among the fondest of my life.

It is difficult to explain the feelings I had when during a recent return visit, I found that the wall had cut right through its grounds, and the building itself was now an Israeli army base and checkpoint.

According to one local man who asked to be called Abu Hamid, a few days before my arrival following a suicide bomb attack in Jerusalem many Palestinians carrying green West Bank ID cars and returning from the capital, were arrested and detained at the Cliff.

One man is said to have been badly beaten by soldiers, who urinated in his mouth before pushing him from a second storey roof. While corroborating such stories can be difficult, such human rights abuses are not uncommon in the occupied territories.

“We have been here since 1958.

First they confiscated the hotel when we would not sell, and now they cut us off from the rest of our family just over the other side of the wall,” explains Ali Ayad, whose cousins are owners of the one-time hotel.

Already, Ayad has paid the equivalent of £1700 to a lawyer to take up his own case with the Israeli authorities, but admits it’s probably hopeless given that a military confiscation order was

signed, from which there is no right of appeal.

Knowing this, why then did he pay the lawyer money? “Like a blind man who cannot move you take whatever guidance you can get,” he says. Today, to visit the rest of his extended family, Ayad has to travel 10km of Israeli checkpoints and harassment for the sake of the few hundred metres that separates him from his in-laws because of the wall.

Does he think that one day he might see the wall come down?

“If the Europeans and international community stand with us, it will come down. The Berlin Wall fell and who would have thought that possible?” he says, echoing the eternal optimism that characterises many Palestinians. If indeed the wall is to fall, then a political solution with or without the pressure of the intifada must be found. But as many Palestinians are quick to admit, patience among the up and coming generation who have watched friends and families suffer at the hands of the Israelis is in seriously short supply.

One Palestinian activist told me how in Nablus, the skills and language of bomb making has become commonplace among young men and women, many having learned their skills from elder brothers or the internet. “Um Albed went to Jerusalem today,” they say. “Um Albed” being a nickname for homemade

nitroglycerine and the equivalent of saying “John Smith went to Jerusalem today”. Some youngsters also joke and talk disparagingly of al-Kahta – a small or insignificant thing – when referring to pipe bombs.

The very existence of this new generation of angry embittered Palestinian apprentice bomb makers is precisely why the “security barrier” is needed, argue its Israeli advocates and supporters.

But the course of the wall as well as its effect on the Palestinians belie that claim. Instead of simply following the demarcation “Green Line”, between Israel and the West Bank, in some areas, it meanders six kilometers east, bisecting some towns, separating villages from their land and water wells, and isolating hamlets from the neighbouring towns that provide them medical, educational and social services.

“This used to be a beautiful place, now I live in the shadow, no sun, no light, even the air seems bad,” was how one Palestinian farmer from Abu Dis put it to me one day, struggling to make himself heard against the deafening sound of bulldozers working on the next stretch of wall nearby.

Back in Israeli West Jerusalem the afternoon following his gun licence “refresher course”, I asked Alon Tuval whether he thought the completion of the wall would one

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day guarantee security for Israelis, enabling him to live his life without the need to carry a Beretta pistol.

“The barrier is important for our safety, but if you are asking me if it will bring peace, then the answer is no,” was his only reply.

David Pratt is Foreign Editor of the Sunday Herald. This article is an abridged extract from his new book, Intifada: The Long Day Of Rage, published in March 2006

by Sunday Herald Books Beginning construction of a concrete wall – part of the separation barrier Israel is building in the West Bank – dividing the West Bank from the Jerusalem area, near the Palestinian village of Hizmeh © Ahikam Seri / Panos Pictures

The son of a Southern segregationist atheist and an Irish Yankee Catholic abolitionist, born in pre-civil rights Marshall County, Mississippi, Perry Walker knew more than most that there was no such thing as a seamless point of view.

Growing up in a predominantly black state, the perceived wisdom was “separate but equal�, but Walker knew differently. His personal choice was to spend time with his neighbours and eventually to document their spiritual inspiration

Reverend 50

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‘The young man’s dreams mean just as much as the old man’s, and they could show him the same things, if he had a mind to listen. But the young man, he is all wrapped and tied up in the world. He gets up in the morning and he goes, and he throws off his dreams like he throws the cover from his pallet’ Rev. Louis Cole

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The rural church was both refuge and community stronghold – for the black inhabitants of Mississippi and for Perry Walker – and in one corner of the state this was largely due to the vitality and dedication of the pastor, Reverend Louis Cole. Converted at the age of fifteen and ordained at ninteen, Reverend Cole was as a circuit preacher who reached congregations at four Baptist churches. The first time Walker heard a sermon by Reverend Cole in the late 1960s, he was captivated by his use of language; it was so concrete, yet so poetic, rich in metaphors of the land.

Nearly a decade later, Walker went back to document the community that had the most profound influence on his life (another local white boy was similarly affected by the vibrancy of black culture: Elvis Presley grew up just 60 miles away in Tupelo). Reverend Cole died in 1981, but his legacy endures and through these pictures we can experience communion with this private culture 8 The Reverend, is published in March by University Press of Mississippi Reverend Perry Walker

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‘Reverend Cole sustained a theology liberated from folklore and superstition. He preached a doctrine of faith, submission and perseverance with expectancy.

He practised and guarded a rite that, so delicately balanced between law and spirit, seems a perfect fruit of the passion of the Reformation: strong, independent churches fostering an individual relationship with God’ Perry Walker

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>Moments Crack of the Whip Livia Monami

When Livia Monami encountered Mongolia for the first time in 1997, she felt she had gone back to the earth’s beginning. Since then, she has pursued an ancient nomadic path from Mongolia into Siberia. Soon, she will cross the Baring Strait to spend time with the Inuit of Alaska, thus realising in one lifetime a journey that took millennia On this September day she was in Dornod, eastern Mongolia. For a long time, all the eye could see was earth. A caravan of camels and wagons appeared on the horizon and went on

its way. A lone wolf trundled through the long grass of the Steppe.

The brilliance of the morning faded to a cloudy afternoon. The small party – an Italian photographer, her assistant and a Mongolian guide – decided to head back to camp. Then the sky turned pink.

Everything was illuminated. The earth began to tremble beneath their feet. It was not the earthquake they feared but the all-pervading sound of thunder in a wide open space.

Only the horses were silent 8

Anti-Personal Raphaël Dallaporta

The Ottawa Convention of 1997 banned the use, stockpiling, production and transfer of anti-personnel landmines, tools of war first used in WWI that are designed to maim rather than to kill. To date, 148 governments 1 are signatories and international pressure is mounting on countries such as Egypt and the US to join in 2006.

It was during a visit to Bosnia in 1997 that Raphaël Dallaporta first witnessed the work of landmine clearers. He was struck by the continual presence, yet total visual absence, of landmines embedded in the earth of this ravaged country. Through many meetings with victims of landmines as well as the landmine clearers, Dallaporta knew he wanted to draw attention, through documentary photography, to not only the humanitarian aspect, but to the political and ecological impact of these unseen weapons.

He considered photographing empty landscapes, or recording the bravery of the landmine clearers, before deciding to proceed via direct contact with his chosen subject. It took a year and a half to gain access to the French Army’s recovered landmine collection at school of landmine clearance in central France.

In treating the landmines as products and rendering them generic rather than unique, Dallaporta has achieved a campaigning journalism by way of advertising photography. This cataloguing technique – using a 1:1scale against a simple black background – allows the viewer the space to connect the brutal technical specification with the many thousands of amputees and disfigured or disabled victims throughout the world 8

1. ICBL (International Campaign to Ban Landmines) January 2006 www.icbl.org

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BLU-3/B, USA Weight: 785g Diameter: 140mm Height: 180mm On release from a CBU-2C/A bomb this 785g submunition – known as the “Pineapple” – is stabilised and slowed in its descent by six fins. Each CBU2C/A contains 409 BLU3-Bs, of which nearly 25 percent do not explode on impact – creating another job for the landmine clearers

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PMR-2A, Yugoslavia Weight: 1.7kg Diameter: 66mm Height: 140mm The 100g of TNT contained in the PMR-2A fragmentation stake mine is detonated when approximately 3kg of pressure is exerted on a camouflaged, plastic-coated tripwire. The steel body of the mine (mounted on an unpainted wooden stake) is cast with nine rows of grooves that create greater fragmentation on detonation. The mine saw use in Namibia, Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo

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OGRE F1, France Weight: 244g Length: 45mm Height: 90mm An Ogre F1155mm shell – containing 63 dual-purpose bomblets, each weighing 244g – can be fired up to 35km. Each shell leaves a footprint of 10,000-18,000 sq m, depending on range. Manufactured by Giat Industries, based in Versailles, the Ogre F1is currently in use with the French Army

TYPE 72B, China Weight: 150g Diameter: 78mm Height: 38mm Type 72 blast mines are said to make up 100 million of China’s 110 million antipersonnel landmine stockpiles.

Manufactured by China North Industries Corporation (NORINCO), Type 72s are reportedly priced at $3 each. The Type 72B includes an anti-handling mechanism that makes it impossible to neutralise or disarm – if the mine is moved more than 10º from the horizontal it will explode, amputating the limb that actioned it

Artisanal Landmine, Bosnia Weight: 500g Diameter: 60mm Height: 150mm This homemade antipersonnel landmine was found in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

The detonation mechanism mounted on an explosive-filled plastic jar comes from a Yugoslav PMA-2 blast mine.

During 2003 – eight years after the end of the war – these landmines killed 23 people and injured 31

AO-2.5RTM, Russian Federation Weight: 2.5kg Diameter: 90mm Height: 150mm A Soviet-era submunition, each AO-2.5RTM is armed by centrifugal motion in descent and has a destructive area of 210 sq m. An RBK-500 disperser, holding 108 AO-2.5RTMs, is used to deliver the bomblets, which are believed to still be in use by the Russian Federation in Chechnya

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Returning to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, photographer Mary-Jane Maybury encountered a city covered in a thick, grey dust. The cadence of kids, cars and city life had all but disappeared, leaving a silence as eerie as the lingering tidemark that held each wall, each door, in its dank grip

Watermarked

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With as many as 100,000 houses, often those in the poorest quarters, wrecked and rendered utterly uninhabitable by the disaster, Maybury sought to accompany residents as they ventured back to their houses for the first time. She witnessed the looks of panic and desperation that crossed each wary face as people saw what was left of their homes.

“It was hard to even open the doors, as the wood was still so swollen. There was a lingering smell, a musty, awful stench of sewage and rotting carpets, which clung to everything.

“What was shocking was to witness the randomness of the things that escaped destruction. One man, in his 60s, was desperate to find his gumbo pot, because it reminded him of all the parties he’d held for Mardi Gras. He found it, full of filthy water but undamaged. In another house, miraculously, an entire glass cabinet of full of crystal remained absolutely intact. The wood had warped, but not a single glass was broken.

“Then there was Gracie’s red sofa. It was sodden, but still upright. The house, which had belonged to her grandparents, was a complete wreck. At least she was young enough to start again” 8 Watermarked Mary-Jane Maybury

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>Inside

To mark a major Pictorialist exhibition in London, EI8HT talks to Olga Sviblova, the creator of the first Russian photographic archive and the Moscow House of Photography Interview by Bill Kouwenhoven EI8HT: Can you tell us what led to the founding of the Moscow House of Photography?

OS: In the mid-1980s I organised a one-day show at the Union of Artists in Moscow, with relative freedom from the controls of those in power. It was the beginning of Perestroika. In 1987 I started my first official exhibition, the May 17th Exhibition of Young Artists. It was the first time that underground art was shown openly and officially. I had made a documentary film about Russian underground art, called Black Square, and in 1987 I was able to travel to the first festival of Russian underground art in Finland. I also put on the first big official show of Alexander Rodchenko [the Constructivist painter and photographer, 1891-1956].

At this time I was occupied with Russian contemporary art and with Russian artists abroad and foreign artists in Russia, such as Donald Judd. It was a big international exchange. In 1991, I put on a big programme of Russian contemporary art at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. I knew nothing about Davos – it meant Thomas Mann and The Magic Mountain to me. I did a project called “Art Like Money, Money Like Art”. Money at that time was the subject of our artistic games. We used to make

fires with the small sums we received. We didn’t want to be in a relationship with money. We were living in another world.

At the same time I was making documentary films: in 1991I came to Paris to look for a distributor for the film, In Search of a Happy End, about the putsch. But by the mid-1990s I started to get tired of contemporary art because it was becoming too conceptual. It began to lose visual contact with reality. We were looking for a new contemporary art and turned naturally to photography.

At the same time I had the feeling that in Russia we didn’t have the real history of our country. We did not have any material indication or evidence of our history; the artifacts and the environment were destroyed during the 70 years of Soviet power. There was the civil war, the Second World War… the whole country was in turmoil. We knew nothing about history because we had only the school books which only presented the Soviet version of Russian history. There was no context and no pictures. Typically we only had two photos in the school books: one was of Lenin and Stalin sitting on a bench – retouched at that – and the other was of the Winter Palace from the Eisenstein movie. From that time we had almost nothing from how

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© Yury Yeremin

>Reviews >Listings >Scene

the city looked, how people were dressed, how they smiled. We lost these materials.

In 1994, by chance on a Paris street, I met the people from the Russian government Committee of Culture. They were there to establish cultural contacts between Moscow and Paris and they asked me to help translate.

So, I proposed to the committee that they establish exchanges of photography shows and that they create an “International Month of Photography” in Moscow. They accepted this proposal – they didn’t understand at that time what they had accepted, but they saw what Paris was doing, and they thought it was not too bad ...

I knew the moment was ripe. We started to open people’s eyes to photography.

Photography at that time received its first commissions because publicity and advertising were exploding, as well as many new magazines. Russia after the first crazy years of Perestroika and the collapse of the Soviet Union started to think seriously about her future. One of the biggest needs was the examination of the national history. Photography could return the history and a historical point of view. We had Soviet history, anti-Soviet history, special history, and I wanted to open history through photography.

Even if major parts of the archives were destroyed by the chaos of those years, we had something left over that could give us some feeling of the history. In 1995 I started to prepare the first Photo Biennale. That was the moment

when I could show photography and contemporary art dealing with history and the history of Russian photography. It was interesting in both directions.

8: Would you say that that was the mission of the Moscow House of Photography?

OS: The history of Russian photography had been completely forgotten. It had never been presented in a good way.

Almost no Russian museum had ever shown a photography exhibition even if they had the material. Imagine that! There weren’t any photography galleries. When people started to talk about photography, they smiled and said it was only about nude girls … We needed to make a big show.

We started with “Forgotten History.” There was something commemorating the discovery of cinema. There was also the theme of “New Trends in Contemporary Photography.” It gave us the possibility to show photography in context in a country that had been isolated from the outside world and art since the middle of the 1930s. We needed to show the work to the public and to study the art and the artists.

We had to have a big festival, and it had to be very well prepared. Fifty per cent of the show was internationally based.

There was the big CartierBresson show, a big Magnum exhibition … We had the Centre National de la Photographie show on Fritz Lang’s Metropolis

8: How did you start?

OS: We had a small budget from the government, but when we started prices for Russian photography were very low. We buy through families, estates and dealers, mostly in Russia and we have collected more than 80,000 pieces. These include the negative archives. They are very important to the history of

© Miron Sherling

because it was the biggest Utopian vision in cinema – Russia had also tried to create the ultimate Utopia under the Soviets…

During the preparation for the festival, though, I understood that the country needed a museum. I began the festival in two rooms of my apartment in a big communal apartment. The rooms were full of pieces, and it was impossible to breathe – we had some 92 pieces grouped around themes.

There were no photography museums in Russia at all. So I proposed to the Moscow government that they create one.

The museum would collect historical and contemporary materials. They said that if the biennale were successful, they would fund the museum. I chose the name, Moscow House of Photography – the word “museum” was for me somehow too precious: I wanted to have something lively, full of the public and open to the people. It had to be open late unlike normal museums so that students and workers could actually see the shows after work or school. We invested all our hearts and our jobs so that we can see the pictures without paying a big entry fee. We are the only museum in Moscow that is open till 9 pm in the evening. The idea was to create something with a life around photography. It was my homage to the Maison Européenne de la Photographie that had so impressed me and provided a model of how such an institution could exist.

The museum was founded in 1996. We had only a small space, but very well located near the Pushkin Museum. We started with 20 sq m. We now have 3500 sq m and have occupied two buildings with the help of the Moscow city government. During these 10 years we have built up a collection.

School books had one picture – of Lenin and Stalin – and that was retouched Russian photography because many things didn’t survive. Half of the archive is made up of vintage prints. We collected from the middle of the 19th century. We have many contemporary pieces and commissioned work. We buy a lot and have instituted several programmes on Russian photography. So we have the history of Russian photography and the history of Russia in photography. We are working with archives in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and in provincial cities. We have a programme of commissioning Russian photographers to photograph in all the regions of Russia to document contemporary history.

We also have an annual competition for the best photo reportage about Moscow and award a “Silver Camera”. We distributed $50,000 this year and Moscow gives $5,000 in three fields. We support three movements in photography: street photography, fashion photography and art photography.

8: Let’s talk about “Quiet Resistance,” the Russian Pictorialism show now on display at Gilbert House and the forthcoming festival celebrating

the 10th anniversary of the Moscow House of Photography.

OS: The festival presents a special story; obviously, we will celebrate our anniversary. We chose the three themes: Conflicts, Trips and Seduction.

We are examining these themes in a grand sense. Seduction can be about the body, power, money, food, nature and so on.

Conflicts can be classical, national, war, psychological, physical, etc. There will be 100 exhibitions, 50 from Russia and 50 international ones.

8: Will you be doing anything with the Soviet Press Archives or with Dmitri Baltermans or Yevgeny Khaldei?

OS: The archives are terrible. I am doing a big show with Guerorgui Pinkhassov. He is the lone Russian photographer working with Magnum. Of course like all festivals we shall show the history of Russian photography – so, of course, we will use the archives.

We have a new show of Rodchenko from the archives.

There will be shows with 19th century colour photos, and there will be a show about kitsch. We might do something with Dmitri Baltermans. We have found some new pictures. We have shown the work that he had printed himself in group shows and a major retrospective with more than 400 images. I have shown Khaldei so many times. We have a huge collection and have shown many series of his work. I am not sure if we will show him this time. People only know these two names. I prefer to have some surprises…

8: Do you have anything on Chechnya or Afghanistan?

OS: We’ll show a lot of pieces about war including Chechnya, Afghanistan and Iraq. It will be a big programme that will include many conflicts photographed by Russian and foreign photographers.

8: How did the Russian Pictorialism show come about?

OS: The idea for this show came about 10 years ago when I saw my first Pictorialist picture by Rodchenko. It fascinated me.

They were very small prints. There were the classic dance and classic ballet the way Alexander Grinberg (1885-1979) was doing

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in the 1920s. It was so strange for me. We know Rodchenko as the biggest pioneer of Russian Constructivism. He wrote a manifesto against Pictorialism. Yet he started to use the styles and themes of his aesthetic enemies.

This was totally strange. Classic opera and ballet were where the biggest avant-garde artists were active. In the late 1930s and early 1940 he started on his circus work. The big job was between 1937 and 1941. He prepared commissions for the magazine USSR under Construction, and he was doing design with his wife Varvara Stepanova. That last issue was never published because the material arrived at the printers just days before the beginning of the War. He had started the theme in the second part of the 1930s, and that was very interesting to me. It was the most awful moment in the history of our country. There was the greatest repression and the famine in Ukraine. At that time he returned from his third trip to the White Sea canal.

8: That work was also very strange. The canal was built with Gulag labour. Rodchenko knew that, but his pictures don’t really show it.

OS: Rodchenko’s conscience was very perturbed because when he was there in 1934-1935, it was the time of the first crackdown on Modernism. He then started to use Pictorialism as his style. Both Constructivism and Pictorialism were criticised at that time, but Pictorialism was more so. It is strange… he used the techniques of those who were most criticised. The Modernists were not sent to prison then.

Grinberg was sent to prison in 1935. Other Pictorialists lost permission to photograph and couldn’t get materials. They also lost permission to live in Moscow and Leningrad and were sent into internal exile or worse. There was no logic for Rodchenko to use this aesthetic.

I started collecting in the mid’90s. It was hard because we didn’t have the specialist art markets. Some of the archives had left Russia. Some had been destroyed. Nobody knew the notes and the dates of anything. I found a photographer, Mikhail Golosovsky, who was interested

© Alexander Rodchenko

in this work and who had a collection. I showed this for the first time at the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow in 1996. It was the first show of Russian Pictorialism since 1935. This movement and the artists had been completely forgotten. They were also completely forbidden: Rodchenko’s Pictorialist pictures, which he printed in big sizes, had never been shown before. He proposed to show them a few times in the late-1930s and 1940s. Everybody refused him.

We then started doing a lot of private shows to make the artists known. We were the first to show Grinberg seriously in Moscow in Paris. In 1997, in time for our first anniversary, we asked Moscow to give us the money to buy Grinberg’s work. We had no money then. We presented the first part of the Grinberg archive.

Then we went step by step in order to prepare everything. We showed Yuriy Petrovich Eremin (1881–1964) and Sergei Alexandrovich Lobovikov (1870 – 1941) as well as more Grinberg.

A year ago when we did a show in Italy, I came up with the name that explained all of this to me: “The Quiet Resistance.”

When I started to analyse why Russian Pictorialism started to explode in the 1920s and 1930s, at a time when it had been long dead as a movement elsewhere, I thought that it had to have been some kind of protest against the aesthetic of the revolution which was first Modernism and Constructivism followed later by Socialist Realism that dominated Soviet power and Soviet life in the 1930s. The Pictorialists never

wrote manifestos or demonstrated. They picked private themes, nudes, portraits, and landscapes.

8: Was Rodchenko’s move away from the politically risky subject matter another form of resistance?

OS: I think it was for him. When I compare him with other artists, they also went into Pictorialism.

When the first ideological oppression really started in the early-middle 1930s and Socialist Realism began, the artists were “eating” from the government.

They were sponsored and licensed by the government, but they did not know the forms of what was allowed or what might not be allowed later. At that time when Modernism and Pictorialism were criticised, many people wanted to do what those in power wanted in order to survive. It was not so easy for the Pictorialists. In this show you can see how some of them made images in the themes of Socialist Realism but not the way they might have wanted. The image by Nikolai Andreev (1882 – 1947) of a statue of Lenin (1930s) looks more like Rodin’s Balzac or Hamlet’s father. It is a very mysterious image. It is in no way objective or “realistic.” If you look at Andreev, you will see that he is mostly seen as a realist photographer in the way of 19th century Russian painting. This was more typical of Russian Pictorialism than European Pictorialism. It was more directly based on painting – especially Andreev and Piotr Klepikov (1844 – 1960) were more “Russian” than

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others. Eremin looked mostly to Italy, and Grinberg to Germany.

Russian court photography was also influenced by Russian painting. Andrei Karelin (1837 – 1906), the first big photographer, was a member of the Academy of Fine Arts. His “Photographs from Nature” of the 1870s was based on Russian painting of the period. They were like academic paintings, but they were about simple people. They photographed the people in jobs and everyday life. They photographed like this into the 1930s.

8: Some of these pictures were made about the time of the big collectivisation in Ukraine. Did photographers take pictures there in any kind of Pictorialist way?

OS: There were some people doing that work. Only a few images survived, and I have no vintage prints. There are some images in the KGB archives though. I did research on the Great Famine: these images were documentary journalism done by the government. These stories were only done by a few people who had commissions from the government. Lenin had nationalised photographers and closed the private studios. The only things that were done in the studios were marriage portraits, families, children. Photojournalists needed cameras, film and paper, so of course they were working for the government newspapers and magazines. There were a lot of them. Soviet power in the 1930s needed to have documentation about the

collectivisation, the famine and the cannibalism. None of the big artists could go there because they would have had to know the reality. They therefore didn’t get commissions to photograph there. So the KGB sent in their own photographers. We don’t know their names. The images were of very bad quality, but some survived in the KGB archives. Those archives were partially destroyed during the time of Perestroika. There was a great deal of disorder. The Modernists were like photojournalists and ate the government’s bread.

Photojournalism in Russia was mise-en-scène mostly. The reality was the pretext to create a scene to create a mise-en-scène to suit the political purposes of that specific time. Russian photojournalists had to give an image of reality and show the ideological message.

Pictorialism was centred in a metaphysical sense of a private life. Reality today looks to me very similar to what we had in the early 1930s where we found the first enemies. They were first the enemies of Soviet power. Now we have the enemies of the whole world everywhere. There is a big fixation on the idea of the enemy.

It is very dangerous. It is the sign that totalitarianism can arrive tomorrow in some different form.

8: This idea is used to control us.

OS: Absolutely. It is used to kill our liberties. The “Quiet Resistance” I want to show did not make demonstrations or engage in open discussions with power but did so in a very private way in order to survive. We are completely ready to participate in this idea of the common enemy, the terrorists. We are talking about it all the time. I want to show that there was another way: to show a private resistance.

Everybody can do this. It doesn’t need organisation or demonstrations. It is only in this private way that we can have a sense of humanity 8 The show Quiet Resistance: Russian Pictorialist Photography, 1900 – 1930s is on display at the Gilbert Collection, Somerset House, Strand, London WC2R 1LA, until 26 February 2006. www.gilbert-collection.org.uk

>Reviews >Listings >Scene

Model American Katy Grannan Published by Aperture www.aperture.org £22 (112pp Hardback) The latest season of photography in London has offered a wide survey of the staged, indulgent, gratuitous and earnest throughout galleries and museum spaces. At the V & A, Diane Arbus was appraised once again as the outsider, her psychology central to her craft while, on the walls, her photographs related something of the people that were to become her preoccupations. The pictures offered a clear archaeology of the time in which she was working.

The visibility of late1960s conflicts, the endless on-screen footage of battle, of dissent and patriotism must have moved Arbus. How else could she work with singularity and formal risk, both in the street and the private spaces of the people who made up her understanding of America?

Katy Grannan’s Model American is an approach towards a contemporary America. Unlike Arbus, there is no sense of overt violence or physical extremes. It is a changed country, perhaps

fractured, this time quietly troubled. This is the first major collection of Grannan’s work, and it’s a challenging one. Parallels to Arbus are appropriate in that the photographs appear remote from the photography that holds contemporary currency. This book marks her work as a singular and astute observer in a complex time. This is an America where war has returned but is managed and remote, where the civil division between rural and urban create separate states, where the retreat into the private spaces afforded by dislocating work patterns and the internet can create isolation, fractured identities, and the briefest of intimacies.

Grannan works with portraiture.

A former student of the Yale School, her photographs have been made in a climate of highly choreographed dramas.

Beyond the risk-taking of reportage or long-term documentary projects, the last decade has regularly seen the foregrounding of the visual tapestries of Jeff Wall, for example, or the twilight domestic fictions of Gregory Crewdson.

Yet while these are elaborate and highly stylised productions, Grannan’s work has nothing of the indulgence of melodramatic narrative. Somehow, she is able to move out into the nervous territories of silent America.

her photographs are emotionally complex yet formally direct.

Looking at these pictures, there is a clear sense of temporary intimacies. Often, the writer Richard Yates, who worked in a similar territory, created a quiet space within narratives for the complexities of emotional life, evoking tension but needing to say very little. Grannan comes close to this. Bodies betray imperfections and are often youthful yet pale. Her sitters are regularly unclothed or in states of undress. In Poughkeepsie Journal, strangers are incongruously naked against their domestic spaces, and appear awkward in their own rooms.

Homes are sparse, almost empty environments of mock brick cladding, timber and laminate, somehow without warmth or softness. Occasionally natural light is overlaid with flash, the sitters becoming remote inhabitants in a world of uncertain scale. The pictures relate a sense

She photographs people she doesn’t know, engaging in brief liaisons that map an imperfect and aching country. It is an emotional trespass, urgent and then gone, and it speaks of these times. Whether indoors or in the unkempt lanes of small towns,

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of isolation – there is little sense of community and rarely togetherness. The work is anchored by journal extracts that relate something of the photographer’s position in the development of the work. It could be insignificant, yet it becomes everything, suggesting the hidden and painful dramas of a very real American life. The work becomes layered, multi-vocal, and particularly successful in Sugar Camp Road, where subjects flail, falter or repose awkwardly against the richly coloured bushes and creeks of their homeland. It’s impossible to look at these bravely structured and compelling portraits and not feel wider American tensions. Model American conveys the strength of a singular voice in an era that appears to reward mediocrity.

The work has legitimacy, and a sense of truth – a truth that, like silence, often comes after the crowds have gone.

Ken Grant

Manufacturing and Urban Renewal. His photographs record both the pace of progress and the accompanying side effects of mass obsolescence in old industries and the destruction of traditional ways of life. It is both coffee table book and awarenessraising photo-essay.

China Edward Burtynsky Published by Steidl www.steidl.de £45 (180pp Hardback) Taken over five years, this collection of epic photographs by Edward Burtynsky documents the rapid industrialisation and modernisation of China as it rushes to embrace 21st century commercial production. The aweinspiring scale of so much of this formidable country’s endeavours are portrayed in sections of images on the Three Gorges Dam, Steel and Coal, Old Industry, Shipyards, Recycling,

Three contextual texts provide a preface to the work: the first, by curator and writer Marc Mayer combines his personal response to and a broader art historical critique of the work. Journalist and author Ted C. Fishman concentrates on the expansion of Chinese cities in a political/historical context and Mark Kingwell places them within a debate on photographic truth in which he asks whether Burtynsky’s pictures “are critiques of landscape degradation and the costs of technological fetishism, or merely glossy celebrations”.

Burtynsky’s artist statement at the front of the book talks about the environmental effects of Chinese

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development, yet one also gets a real sense of his wonder at and engagement with its visual manifestation. These are both documentary photographs and beautiful formal compositions.

As in the exhibition at the Flowers East gallery, London, the plates are reproduced luxuriously large.

They appear as if in a commemorative photographic portfolio from the 19th century, like those commissioned to record large-scale industrial projects in the first age of industrial revolution. This is probably not entirely accidental as the scale, reach and type of construction, although bigger than anything that could have been imagined at that time, is similar to the concerns of industrial development in the West in that Century. As a counterbalance the captions at the back of the book are incredibly informative, introducing the facts and figures relating to each section beside small reproductions of each image.

Burtynsky’s first trip to China was planned to document the Three Gorges Dam project. Located on the Yangtze River, this is the world’s largest and most powerful hydroelectric dam. Two km across, its completion, planned for 2009, will result in the creation of an adjacent 600 km lake. More than one million people are being displaced as land is cleared to make way for the flood. The huge architecture of the dam itself and the vast clearing operation of the settlements in its path are both depicted in great detail. Looking closer, among the mighty machinery and demolished, almost post-atomic, townscapes, small figures get on with their work or their daily lives, a reminder of the human struggle at the heart of this project.

Steel and coal are the raw material for China’s vast construction industry. Focusing on one location, the Bao Steel plant, Burtynsky hints at the scale of production by recording the huge pipelines and furnace

inscribed in the subjects’ every tiny gesture, brings the photographs to life while Mattioli’s attention to the details of their style – the leather jackets, haircuts, skinny ties, T-shirts, and badges – sets them in their historical moment. Collectively the photographs reveal the photographer’s affection for his subjects and the subjects’ ease suggests that the feeling was mutual. The direct flash, straight on mug-shot aesthetic of Mattioli’s portraits – a look to which we’ve become accustomed through the advertising styles of the past 25 years – was an anti-aesthetic when Mattioli used it in 1977, a rejection of prevailing notions of photographic “beauty” in favour of honesty.

chimneys, and in a series of images, plays with the formal elements in the volcanic landscape of gigantic coal piles.

Old industrial zones are suffering due to China’s economic restructuring. Burtynsky depicts the huge decaying shells of factories in the city of Shenyang to the North East of China in what was once the country’s industrial heart. These are desolate empty structures, their furnaces, and kilns crumbling back into the ground, or being slowly dismantled.

Shipbuilding is one of China’s biggest growth industries.

Burtynsky depicts the production line of construction in the port of Qili, where on any day there can be up to 100 ships in various stages. Impressive in scale, this operation also retains traditional tools such as the bamboo ladders propped up against the sides of boats. Small, basic huts built from concrete blocks serve as office and storage for the workers whose main mode of transport still appears to be bicycles. In this ants’ nest of industry, the ships hulls line up along the water’s edge at every stage of construction. Burtynsky echoes the production line in a sequence of images of the prows of the boats and zooming in to

capture the reds, blues and rust of the metal and the welding marks incised in its surface.

Recycling gives him the chance to show the sheer scale of wastage through vast piles of scrap metal – radiators, telephone dials, wiring and circuit boards – separately depicted, each taking on their own distinctive texture. In Manufacturing, one cannot help but think of Andreas Gursky in the repetitive architecture of the factory buildings – except Burtynky’s are not manipulated.

A block of flats has an array of pastel coloured shirts hanging out to dry on almost every one of its uniformly sized balconies, hundreds of workers in their pastel uniforms sit at identical tables in a huge canteen or go about their tasks on massive production lines.

These are fantastic pictures.

The depiction of scale, repetition and attention to detail effectively portray the huge industrial production line that is China. This is an interesting and timely record both beautiful and rather terrifying – for who knows where China’s unchecked development will lead. Clearly Burtynsky is fascinated by this country and we may yet see other publications on his explorations.

SW

1977 Pietro Mattioli Published by Edition Patrick Frey www.editionpatrickfrey.com $58 (122pp Hardback) You can sometimes tell when the subject of a photograph has a special relationship with the photographer. This kind of a connection is clear in Pietro Mattioli’s 1977 portraits of his friends, partygoers at Club Hey, a gay disco in Zurich. The connection between photographer and subject, as

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The 1977 portraits are interrupted twice by groups of colour photographs of unpeopled scenes of the exteriors of Swiss housing estates, made between 1985 and 1997. A window is open, half of a car is revealed, water has stained one of the walls. Mattioli approaches these subjects with again an interest in detail, the recognition of a transient moment in time, and a will to allow the subject to speak for itself. As a result, Mattioli both critiques the blandness of the concrete environments and poignantly recognises that lives are lived in these places, if evidenced only by a red curtain in an otherwise grey building. The two works combined offer a powerful meditation on time’s flexible character: clubbers fully occupying the moment set against grim estates unable to move through time any more quickly.

Leo Hsu

single face, a study of which proves far more interesting in attempting to read emotions than gaping at a dismembered body.

The detail and expressions more telling of the person’s ordeal than seeing the actual result of the pain in their deploring gazes.

One Step Beyond: The Mine Revisited Lukas Einsele Published by Hatje Cantz www.hatjecantz.com £19.99 (280pp Softback) The subtitle of Lukas Einsele’s One Step Beyond, “The Mine Revisited”, discloses the aspirations of this book. By taking on the humanitarian crises associated with landmines, due to the world’s still enormous stockpile, Einsele is not examining an old subject but calculatedly attempting to shed some new light. Landmines are known the world over as being an instrument of war that, often years after a battle has concluded and “peace” established, are discovered by innocent civilians, with tragic consequences. Einsele has created a sort of beautifully designed resource on the subject, its exterior resembling a topsecret document, while at the same time serving as a tribute to the many people whose stories he sought out and also the many people who tirelessly work for the de-mining cause. The resulting work is a collection of personal accounts, along with portraits, essays, informational statistics and documentary images focusing mainly on Cambodia, Afghanistan, Angola and Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Twenty-six-year-old Dejan Babalj from Sarejevo, half-heartedly smiles into the camera. He tells how, when he was 18, he and some friends went to look at some old planes in a field after school. “I have this picture of my shoes and my jeans, because when I stepped on that mine, it blew my leg off. I remember how the shoe looked … The tattered jeans on my right leg. I still have that picture in my mind…”.

To support these tales with an additional level of personal significance, each person interviewed was asked by Einsele to draw a map locating the spot where they had trodden on the mine. This way of including the victim in the creative output becomes more an homage to their ordeal than merely stating the facts of the accident. As described in Einsele’s biography in One Step Beyond, “The central

What sets Einsele’s approach apart, in looking at individual cases, are his large format black and white portraits of the victims.

Instead of framing each shot to include the whole body, emphasising the loss of a limb, the entire frame is devoted to a

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aspect of his work is remembering as an act, as an active process that generates images, as a process in which individuals relate to and appropriate their environment”.

Juxtaposed against these personal tales of tragedy are the highly technical descriptions of the exact models of mines, from their country of origin to exactly how the bombs are detonated (not unlike the story by Raphaël Dallaporta featured in this issue).

In this way, One Step Beyond becomes more a forensic study of a crime scene.

Other images focus solely on the extensive mine-clearing and rehabilitation teams that devote their lives to the cause. The large-format images almost look surreal with a pervading stillness of atmosphere – a sole mine clearer, in his bright blue suit, sits in front of a possible landmine ready to inspect the sandy ground; Cambodia’s national volleyball team posing on the stands, each one with a missing limb; tranquil pictures of wooded areas where a mine has once maimed someone.

In relation to the pieces of writing included, the essayists and subsequent topics of consideration, indicate a vast array of specialists from surgeons to architects who are able to comment on the subject of landmines.

All of these facets are included in this deceptively small book, as well as definitions of words associated with mine clearance running above the main text, index ribbons to remind you of your place in the book (very useful when trying to navigate from English translations and back to pictures), a comprehensive and engaging use of typography throughout, and an accompanying website (www.one-step-beyond.de) that allows the work to be accessible to a larger audience. The fact that all of these documentary elements have been accumulated together in such a artistic and creative way is what makes One Step Beyond all the more momentous and vital as a work of thorough reference.

LH

© Kael Alford/Panos Pictures

Unembedded Published by Chelsea Green www.chelseagreen.com $50 (176pp Hardback) Iraq is not so much a country now, in the western mind’s eye, as it is a by-word for chaos.

Reporting the country’s conflict has cost numerous lives and been fraught with difficulty; a web of managed information, propaganda and lies. The option to be ‘embedded’ with a troop was often all that was available to journalists wanting to report from the region, but the four photographers whose work is featured in this excellent book sought more. They are drawn together by an instinct to document the everyday lives of people they witnessed and met in Iraq, as well as the pain and wreckage of bombs and shootings.

The photographs of Ghaith Abdul-Ahad from Iraq, Kael Alford from the US, Thorne Anderson from the US and Rita Leistner from Canada unite to become a whole body of work with which to construct this document. An image by Thorne Anderson in Baghdad, April 2003, shows a group of local boys laughing with glee as one aims a jet of urine on the head of a fallen Saddam statue. What is touching is the

schoolboyish delight in the act; the exuberance. Anderson’s understanding of the complexity of emotions in the city at the time leads him to add: ‘There were also chants of “Down, Down America!”’.

In another image from Baghdad in April 2003, taken by Kael Alford in Yarmouk Hospital, a man stares into the camera and covers his mouth with a hand in desolation and heartbreak. His wife and two children have just been killed by a missile hitting their house. In Falluja, Anderson takes a picture through an X-ray of a nine-yearold boy’s skull and captures his little sister similarly clasping her mouth in shock. America’s ‘shock and awe’ tactics are shown here to be working – against the citizenry.

Some of the most vivid images of fighting, fear and death are taken

by Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, who filed reports for The Guardian, and whose writing, with that of the other photographers, complements the images with spare and straight commentary.

In a series of two pictures we see a group of injured men shellshocked, sitting up, and then slumped dead on Haifa Street, Baghdad. Abdul-Ahad describes his guilt in taking the photographs.

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The book benefits enormously from two of its four contributors being women. Alford’s picture of a big water fight in the Euphrates River between female cousins as they hitch up their skirts is joyous, while she also shows sophisticated young women, made up in a Baghdad restaurant, and a bride-to-be getting ready.

Rita Leistner, who hiked into Iraq over the Turkish border, has made some remarkable portraits of her Kurdish smugglers and one of a female Kurdish separatist guerrilla, dressed in uniform, headscarf tied and nails painted, smoking a cigarette and being chased around by her two daughters at a secret mountain camp. Her pictures of women at the Rashad Psychiatric Hospital are unsettling, respectful, and are at times, beautiful.

Unembedded is a hugely valuable portrait of the people of Iraq and has been published with modesty and sensitivity. If its structure is sometimes confusing, every image is well captioned and offers a significant insight into the lives of Iraqis struggling to survive and get by as the world watched.

Ruth Hedges

a race memory is a reminder of the old. A shot of two glowering young women, one in a stylised pin-stripe top, her arm slung round her companion, a skinhead with a swastika emblazoned on her chest, appears shortly before that of a Kazakh eagle hunter in Bayan-Olgii province, his studded belt and fur hat recalling centuries of tradition. Elsewhere, Kazakh old-timers pose in patterned headscarves, and miners puff cigarettes to their stubs as they lug sacks into snow-capped shafts. In one joyous scene, a group of women gleefully pummel and scrub the innards of a horse – their beaming faces a glowing contrast to the sombreness of most others in the volume.

Such hopeful visions of man, and woman, in communion with nature are juxtaposed with harsh reminders of the country’s decaying industrial past. On neighbouring pages, we find a crumbling Brutalist tower block or the inner workings of a deserted factory cast in a dull copper sheen, resembling the twisted metallic-organic visions of HR Geiger or a set design for Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.

Mongolia Marco van Duyvendijk Published by Artimo www.artimo.net f35 (96pp Hardback) The prospect of a book of photographs depicting scenes of everyday life in Outer Mongolia may conjure up expectations of endless images of nomads in yak wool driving weary caravans along dusty desert trails or over snowy steppes. But no sooner has one ventured into Marco van Duyvendijk’s comprehensive portrait of this oddly underchronicled country than all memories of the wistfulness of The Story of the Weeping Camel – not to mention the barbarism of Genghis Khan - are banished.

From the outset, it is clear that this compendium of images, rural and urban, industrial and pastoral, is intended as a snapshot of a culture in transition. A trio of pictures of newly born infants at the Centre for Mothers and

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Infants in Ulan Bator symbolically makes way, after a brief written introduction, for exactly the kind of stark landscape one normally visualises when mention is made of Mongolia. But this barren, painterly shot of a hitching post for horses, near the Amarbayasgalant monastery, Selenge province – notable for the absence of horses, and, for that matter, monastery – comes about as near to a classical depiction as the book ever gets.

From here on in, it is the conflicting legacies of communism and Buddhism, and the latter-day encroachment of Western materialism, that dominate: images of crumbling Soviet-era tenements and abandoned factories are interspersed with portraits of novice monks in scarlet and orange robes and surly looking teenage girls with pierced lips and tattooed navels.

For every few images of the new Mongolia, haunting the book like

While the subjects of van Duyvendijk’s scrutiny vary widely from page to page, all but a handful have one quality in common: a sense of stillness. As ‘documentary-style’ photographs go, the people shots are about as far removed from fly-on-the-wall portraits as it is possible to get.

With few exceptions, they appear self-consciously posed: boredlooking kids perch on rusty gates or lean against fruit machines, casting sullen gazes at the at the camera; child gymnasts contort elastically, their eyes flicking sideways to check their feats are being captured in the frame.

Commissioned by the Mongolian Consulate to catalogue the nation’s shifting identity, van Duyvendijk, a self-taught Dutch photographer who trained as a psychologist, casts his images in soft yellows, ochres and browns.

For all the warmth of his pallet, though, there is something avowedly clinical and detached about his eye.

James Morrison

swing between the private and public. Occasionally, still lives sit within the flow of the work, and they do so effortlessly; a peacock is almost lost against a pockmarked Lisbon wall, three single shoes dance in a Vienna shop window, threadbare children’s toys occupy a discarded chair.

These are haunting, ink-soaked, melancholic images.

Far Cry Paulo Nozolino Published by Steidl www.steidl.de £30 (136pp Hardback) Near the opening of Paulo Nozolino’s book, Far Cry, a young boy looks from the back of a car into the night that shrouds a Lisbon garage. The child is composed, singular and still as the rough world revolves around him. It is a thread that follows throughout this collection, published by Steidl in collaboration with the Museo de Arte Contemporanea, Oporto.

Children recur, and they are fragile, dwarfed by the world they occupy and never far from shadows.

I am reminded of a Robert Frank photograph in which privileged boys are shielded from the city as the photographer searches, against the grain, for his truth.

Even in Nozolino’s busier photographs, we often come to rest on an individual who seems to carry the weight of the wider situation; a man is separated from a crowd through heavy printing; children appear isolated as their carers fall outside the dense black frames that comprise this work.

It is as if Nozolino’s world is forever candle-lit. It is a platform of half-light from which his subjects emerge, and they are the universal human subjects: the urgencies of sex, the intimacies of motherhood, the pain of lives and the lack of any kind of civil stability.

These moments are elaborated upon by a photographer whose strength is in the creation of concise, emotive sketches that

The integration of Nozolino’s family pictures with those which relate a wider sense of Europe (and beyond), is a difficult strategy to master. While the personal photographs appear insular, much of Nozolino’s work has been created around sites of wider conflict. Somebody’s child lies dead in Sarajevo, buildings are pitted and skeletal in Beirut, visitors mill at the entrance to Auschwitz while (a few pages earlier) Nozolino’s father reveals his ageing and scarred torso. In accommodating such diverse material, the sequencing of the book occasionally feels abrupt, and some of the familiar zones and atrocity sites surface, as they so often do in photography.

Closing the book, prosaic observations by Rui Nunes pick up on the details and motifs that weave throughout the work with reverence, as if solemnly relating the majesty of a Pieta to a humble audience. It might have appeared overplayed, but a wonderful picture of children sleeping under sackcloth, as still as stone, convinces me of the photographer’s strength to mark what is truly of worth.

KG

Hackney Wick Stephen Gill Published by Nobody www.stephengill.co.uk £28 (120pp Hardback) Stephen Gill’s deceptively ordinary photographs can look on first appearance like a set of prints your mum picked up from Kall Kwik – some hopelessly blurred, a few quite nice ones of some flowers and an attempt at a closeup of a bird in flight without the benefit of a zoom lens. Yet it is this very ordinariness that illuminates Gill’s work and its subjects with the bright light of insight, resulting in an important work of social commentary.

Gill is less a photographer and more a poet with a camera (in this case a plastic one bought for pennies from the car-boot). His eye for the melancholic, the tender, the beauty-in-ugliness, is matched by a Beckett-like appreciation of the absurd.

Against the backdrop of sprawling Sunday market, which to all intents and purposes resembles a rubbish dump, a Sikh man stands incongruously by an abandoned fridge, holding a blue carrier bag. That he is being watched by a fellow trader lends an unexpected air of menace to the image. A man

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holds a plastic globe up for the camera, as Gill evokes a Blakean metaphor. An ice-cream vendor leans from her serving hatch to pin a poster on her van, yet in Gill’s portrayal this scene too becomes deeply unsettling. The woman looks like she’s fallen and died. Sometimes, it seems, all that’s missing is the circling vulture.

As we witness people scrabbling in the dirt for bits of brightly coloured plastic, standing waisthigh in a skip, scrutinising cast-off white goods, the realisation that this is London in the 21st century is cause for concern. Yet as the gap between rich and poor widens, so nature steps in to fill it.

In this littered urban wasteland, rambling roses cascade down the canal-bank; cow parsley encircles a graffiti-riddled bench and ferns soften a concrete path.

Interestingly, an irony not lost on the all-seeing Gill, this deprived area of East London will be in some way transformed for the world’s TV cameras when the 2012 Olympics come to town.

As the roses go the way of the capital’s unwanted possessions, what will happen to the people who can’t afford a new pair of shoes?

MH

A Life Full of Holes Yto Barrada Published by Autograph ABP www.autograph-abp.co.uk £19.95 (72pp Hardback) This small and simply designed publication features work by the French/Moroccan photographer Yto Barrada, a member of the Autograph agency. A Life Full of Holes, a project involving photographs, film, text and installation, explores the unique character of The Strait of Gibraltar, the main route for illegal immigration from Africa into Europe, using Barrada’s native city of Tangiers as the focal point.

Issues such as migration and diaspora, access and exclusion are touched on in these photographs, which have gained her a place on the 2006 Deutsche Borse Prize shortlist.

Barrada’s style is documentary but at its most artful, capturing the atmosphere of this transitory place in oblique images. Mostly square format and colour, her lyrical pictures are simply reproduced with small captions on individual pages. At the back of the book two short texts, reproduced in both French and English, one by Barrada and one featuring the artist in conversation with a philosopher, explore the issues raised by the project.

Mohamed V. – Casablanca, 2001” in which a youth sits waiting, his face a blank gaze, his back to the closed metal shuttering of a shop – he appears to be shut out and going nowhere. She is fond of such visual metaphors. In another, two boys exit a football field through a hole in a fence, echoing the more direct image of escape depicted in “Illegally crossing the border into the Spanish enclave of Ceuta, 1999”. Barrada also documents the city itself in transition, a limbo of vacant lots, dereliction and half-finished development. “Foundations – Abandoned construction site – Asilah, 2003” is a clever landscape composition of rusting steel pilons that follow the edge of a waterway like reeds. Another surreal amalgam “Vacant Lot – Tangiers, 2001” depicts a pastoral scene – a sheep-strewn field, with animals dozing in the sun – overlooked by a rock face of raw unfinished wall from a housing development.

In her intriguing, dreamlike compositions, Barrada has successfully captured the strange mix of tension and lethargy in this peripheral location. In one of her texts she asserts that “A Life full of Holes” is full of unresolved violence and that “there is no pleasure in these images”.

However, this cannot be interpreted literally. There is a sense of the unresolved in her compositions of the half finished and partially hidden, but these images are still too beautifully composed and reproduced for one not to take pleasure in them.

This is no urgent manifesto, more a gentle meditation on the nature of migration and transition, its pace suiting the subject of her exploration.

SW

PositHIV+ Pep Bonet Published by Rozenberg www.rozenbergps.com £20 (120pp Hardback) PositHIV+ is the result of a collaboration between Pep Bonet, Rozenberg Publishers, Médecins Sans Frontières Holland and MSF Spain, which aims to show that HIV+/AIDS is now a treatable disease.

There is no straight and limiting constructive narrative in Bonet’s work here. Instead we have strong single images documenting the support that MSF provides to the daily life of HIV+/AIDS patients living with antiretroviral (ARV) drugs in six different African countries; Zambia, DRC, Angola, Rwanda, Kenya, South Africa.

ARV drugs allow HIV+/AIDS patients to regain their everyday life, allowing them to go back to work, earn money, look after their family and bring new hope for their future.

Many of the faces and identities of her subjects are hidden, their backs turned towards us – as if they are moving away, drawn towards the promise of a better life by the water of the Strait.

Ennui and frustration are portrayed in pictures such as “Man Sitting – Boulevard

What I like the most about Pep Bonet's work is the positivism and the simplicity of his beautifully composed images. The photos are charged with honesty.

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The book is smartly designed, small and square, easy to flick through and to handle. The pictures have greatest impact in the first half of the book printed on a black background; the second half printed on a more classical white paper. The mix of rich colour images and black and white photographs works harmoniously, as does the mix of 35mm and medium format pictures. Accompanying the photographs is an essay by renowned journalist John Carlin as well as a story by writer Maria Goos, reporting on her 12 days in Nchelenge in Zambia.

The real hope and challenge presented to us so eloquently here by Pep Bonet – to MSF, to picture editors, to audiences – is to make positive images the norm from the African continent rather than the exception.

LM

for Today, Vol.4 No.3] Not for nothing is Melanie Light’s introduction entitled “Slag” after mining’s waste products.

Coal Hollow Ken Light Published by University of California Press www.ucpress.edu £22.95 (151pp Hardback) Classic American photojournalism in the style of Walker Evans and James Agee or Dorothea Lange and Paul Taylor has become increasingly rare.

Either it heads off into documentary or art territory like Robert Adams and John Gannis or it becomes more monographic like Mitch Epstein. Ken Light, director of the University of California, Berkeley, Graduate School of Journalism Photography Department, hews more towards classic photojournalism. Known for his work on prisoners and the American Deep South, Texas Death Row (1997) and Delta Time: Mississippi Photographs (1995), his new book, Coal Hollow, created in collaboration with his wife Melanie Light, an oral historian, is a tour de force of the human face of the dark underbelly of American capitalism.

The extractive industries, mining, oil production, and so on, are the hardest, most dangerous laborious jobs imaginable, and

coal mining is probably the worst.

The work is brutal and the economics vicious. Human labour is expendable. We see this on a daily basis as miners die in a flash of methane or rush of water in China and elsewhere in the developing world. One forgets that coal mining in America is also subject to the brutalities of global capitalism. Warren McGraw, Justice for the West Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals, and one of Ken Light’s subjects, says West Virginia is “a mere colony” where workers “are exploited for what [they] can do for people in other places.” Those people in other places, New York, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Amsterdam and elsewhere, control both the economics of the coal industry and the politics of the region.

With global competition from other low wage areas, it is not surprising that the outside owners, the true colonists of West Virginia, treat the miners and the environment there as mere costs on a bottom line reckoned in plush board rooms and outsourced accounting offices.

The people and the environment, the miners and the mined, are treated like exploitable resources.

When the job is done, they are disposed of [see also Louie Palu’s story on mining in Canada, Living

In an interview Ken Light remarks: “The idea is that this project is … about the human slag that is left after the mechanisation of coal.

The real story is about the people, their life and humanity. This is a book that shares the faces and lives of this part of Appalachia. If we had a more visual story telling about this region rather than just statistical government information, maybe we would realise that we are talking about flesh and blood Americans, maybe our leaders and citizens would actually take a look.” As a result there are no numbers in Coal Hollow, a composite portrait of the region, only beautiful, compelling portraits. The statistics, though, are damning.

According to official West Virginia and U.S. Government figures from 2004, West Virginia ranks last in college graduates, more than 50% households have someone suffering from disabilities, least in average income per household, and worst in terms of unemployment in the United States.

Ken Light’s images are darkly beautiful portraits of miners, industry people, and their families taken over a period of four years.

He gives the viewer the human faces of the people whom the industry and its representatives treat like so much slag. There are very few establishing shots here, just some ramshackle homes and poverty stricken towns hanging on to the sides of mountains with raw sewage pouring into creeks.

Somehow, the legislators in Charles Town, the state capital, and in Washington, have found it all but impossible to build up the necessary infrastructure for its citizens. Then again, that is typically how the colonists have always treated those they exploit, in the diamond mines of South Africa or in the coal filled hills of West Virginia.

BK

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Exhibitions and Events HOST Gallery, 1Honduras Street London EC1Y 0TH HOST gallery launches its new season of photojournalism exhibitions featuring iconic New York street photographer, Weegee, and the geopolitical landscape photography of Yann Mingard. For further information and dates see www.hostgallery.co.uk London Photograph Fair 26 February Historic Images, books on photography and contemporary photographs. www.photofair.co.uk London Book Fair 5 – 7 March The largest publishing networking forum in Europe in Spring, concentrated over three days. The London Book Fair has hundreds of exhibitors as well as programme of social events and seminars. www.lbf-virtual.com Birds Eye View: Emerging Women Film-Makers on International Women's Day 8 – 13 March A programme of the best short films by female directors to celebrate International Women's Day, held at various venues throughout London. www.birds-eye-view.co.uk Dark Sides of the War – Paul Preston 16 – 30 March Documentary screenings and discussions on the Spanish Civil War at the Instituto Cervantes, London. www.londres.cervantes.es Robert Knoth, Fallout 18 April – 14 May Presented by Greenpeace UK and Panos Pictures, Knoth’s project on nuclear devastation will be on at the OXO gallery in London. www.oxotower.co.uk Dfoto 2006 4 – 7 May International Contemporary Photography and Video Fair held in San Sebastian, Spain. Promotes a forum on the basis of which to boost private and corporate collecting, offering a space for interrelation and dissemination with a view to consolidating photography and video in the art market. www.coff.es/es/dfoto06

Buy many of the books reviewed on these pages at foto8.com/bookshop Look out for amazing discounts and buy pre-released books before they hit the shops.

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Scene

2006 Year Planner

Tim Minogue

January

February

March

April

Week 1— 5

Week 5 — 9

Week 9 — 13

Week 13 — 17

What will make the news this year?

With a little help from the newsdesk favourite, the “yearplanner”, Tim Minogue doesn’t need a crystal ball to see into the future … it’s already been written.

Newspapers love anniversaries. They are a cheap way to fill plenty of space with re-hashed old stories and photographs. And there’s a good chance that everyone involved is dead, so the risk of a writ is minimal. I am all in favour of this. It’s fascinating to watch yesterday’s news slipping into history, and to look again at historical events as if they were news.

It’s also very revealing which events are considered worthy of revisiting in this way. When researching this article I consulted the 6 January edition of Press Gazette, journalism’s trade paper, which provided a year planner containing a list of key anniversaries coming up in 2006. While it is, of course, vital to note the 120th anniversary of the invention of CocaCola, ditto of the tuxedo, and the 20th

of the Sunday Sport (not to mention the Independent) it seemed perverse for Press Gazette to omit two worldshaking events that have their 50th anniversaries this autumn – the Suez Crisis and the Russian invasion of Hungary. But perhaps at PG they know that today’s editors will see more mileage in the 60th anniversary of the Biro going on sale in the UK than in a couple of missed opportunities for Armageddon.

Looking back on Suez induces déjà vu in spades: Britain gets involved in a disastrous war in an Arab country which shatters the credibility of the prime minister – especially as he has spent the past few years harping on about how his mission in life is to secure peace based on respect for the rule of law. Today Anthony Eden is remembered mainly for attacking Egypt to secure the Suez Canal, his earlier distinguished career all but forgotten. Tony Blair please note. But, then, if not for Iraq, will the compilers of 50-years-ago columns in 2056 have anything worth saying about Tony at all?

May

June

July

August

Week 18— 22

Week 22 — 26

Week 26 — 31

Week 31— 35

Four days after Britain started bombing Egypt, on 4 November Russian tanks rolled into Hungary to crush the movement for democracy and independence there. Thousands were killed, a quarter of a million fled, and the West, in fear of nuclear war, looked the other way. The popular prime minister, Imre Nagy, was executed after a secret trial.

For some reason the Nobel committee didn’t feel it appropriate to award a peace prize that year. (It’s one less anniversary to mark, anyway.)

One suspects that Mr Nagy’s doomed flirtation with freedom will result in many fewer column inches this year than the fact that, 50 years ago on 22 February, Elvis Presley first entered the pop charts, with “Heartbreak Hotel”. Make of that what you like – the newspapers certainly will.

The significance or otherwise of anniversaries depends rather on where you’re sitting at the time. On 31 January 1956, the day that AA Milne, creator of Winnie the Pooh, died in Sussex, John Lydon was born in London. The death of innocence and the birth of, er, the Antichrist? The newspapers will no doubt devote plenty of space to the 30th anniversary of punk and the night in December 1976 that the Sex Pistols called Bill Grundy “a dirty fucker” on TV. Yet, at 50, having appeared on I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here! and reinvented himself as a TV wildlife presenter, the erstwhile Johnny Rotten is in danger of joining Milne as a national treasure. Perhaps before long their synchronised exit and entrance may be seen as proof of the transmigration of souls.

September

October

November

December

Week 35 — 39

Week 39 — 44

Week 44 — 48

Week 48 — 52

A hundred years ago, optimism was in the air. People went crazy for technology. Reginald Fessenden made the first radio broadcast. The first feature film was made, the first cinema opened, and William Kellogg invented the cornflake. The Piccadilly Line was opened in 1906 by the Old Goat himself, David Lloyd George.

We may hear more about these centenaries.

We will certainly read a lot about the San Francisco earthquake which killed 3,000 people on 18 April 1906; but probably nothing at all about the tsunami which struck Hong Kong five months later and killed at least 10,000.

John Betjeman was born in 1906, as was Adolf Eichmann, and Samuel Beckett. He’d better have the last word: “Nothing happens. Nobody comes, nobody goes”. The editor’s worst nightmare ...

Tim Minogue writes for Private Eye magazine

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