Volume 6 Number 2

November 2007 From Horden to Shinjuku Chris Steele-Perkins From Horden to Shinjuku reveals two distinct yet congruent sides to Chris Steele-Perkins’ photographic brilliance: in Horden, Northumberland, a nostalgic and investigative story on life in rural England, and in Shinjuku, Steele-Perkins reveals the streets of his Tokyo.

9-771476-681000-22

DIRTY

EI8HT

EI8HT V6N2 AUTUMN 07

© Chris Steele-Perkins/Magnum Photos

VOL.6 NO.2 AUTUMN 2007 £10 WWW.FOTO8.COM

Both of these projects have recently been published separately in book form: Northern Exposures and Tokyo Love Hello. HOST brings the two series together to contemplate and admire the character and personality of these subjects as well as the photographer.

NURTURING THE PASSION

# 7830556 # 7830556 © Bryan © Bryan Denton/drr.net Denton/drr.net# 5663141 # 5663141 © Natalie © Natalie Behring/drr.net Behring/drr.net

# 6213502 # 6213502 © Clark © J. Clark Mishler/Mira.com/drr.net J. Mishler/Mira.com/drr.net

SEARCH SEARCHFARTHER FARTHERFRESH FRESHIMAGES IMAGES SEARCH SEARCHDEEPER DEEPERUNIQUE UNIQUEIMAGES IMAGES

# 7222603 # 7222603 © David ©A David Barnes/drr.net A Barnes/drr.net# 673362 # 673362 © Rich©Clarkson/NCAA Rich Clarkson/NCAA Photos/drr.net Photos/drr.net

# 9117549 # 9117549 © Robert © Robert Leslie Leslie 2007/drr.net 2007/drr.net

Searching Searching forfor Images?

Images?

FIND FINDMORE MORERELEVANT RELEVANTIMAGES IMAGES

® ® TM TM Digitalrailroad Digitalrailroad Marketplace Marketplace is your is your single single point-of-access point-of-access to fresh, to fresh, relevant, relevant, andand globally globally diverse diverse images images from from members members in 70 in 70 countries countries on on 6 continents.

6 continents.

New New images images areare being being added added every every day. day.

ESTABLISHED 75 YEARS Rights-Managed Rights-Managed andand Royalty-Free.

Royalty-Free.

Search Search now. now.

Creating Creating Images?

Images?

GET GETMORE MOREGLOBAL GLOBALIMAGES IMAGES THE THEWORLD WORLDAWAITS AWAITSJOIN JOINUS US

Take Take Control.

Control.

A Digitalrailroad.net A Digitalrailroad.net archive archive letslets youyou manage, manage, market, market, andand sellsell your your images images directly. directly.

Digitalrailroad.net Digitalrailroad.net Marketplace Marketplace extends extends your your reach reach to photo to photo buyers buyers around around thethe world. world.

And And every every time time your your images images areare licensed licensed through through Marketplace, Marketplace, 80% 80% of the of the feefee is returned is returned to you. to you.

Join Join us.us.

Get Getthe thePicture.

Picture.Digitalrailroad.net Digitalrailroad.net CANON, NIKON, PROFOTO, HASSELBLAD, LEAF, FUJI, EPSON, GITZO, LEICA, KATA, SANDISK & APPLE 08706 03 03 03 WWW.CALUMETPHOTO.CO.UK

www.digitalrailroad.net www.digitalrailroad.net

877-203-3772 877-203-3772 (toll(toll free) free) • +• 1-212-537-3512 + 1-212-537-3512 (int’l) (int’l) sales@digitalrailroad.net sales@digitalrailroad.net

# 7830556 © Bryan Denton/drr.net

# 7222603 © David A Barnes/drr.net

# 5663141 © Natalie Behring/drr.net

# 673362 © Rich Clarkson/NCAA Photos/drr.net

# 9117549 © Robert Leslie 2007/drr.net

Searching for Images?

Digitalrailroad® MarketplaceTM is your single point-of-access to fresh, relevant, and globally diverse images from members in 70 countries on 6 continents. New images are being added every day.

Rights-Managed and Royalty-Free. Search now.

Creating Images?

Take Control. A Digitalrailroad.net archive lets you manage, market, and sell your images directly.

Digitalrailroad.net Marketplace extends your reach to photo buyers around the world. And every time your images are licensed through Marketplace, 80% of the fee is returned to you. Join us.

Get the Picture. Digitalrailroad.net www.digitalrailroad.net 877-203-3772 (toll free) • + 1-212-537-3512 (int’l) sales@digitalrailroad.net

Contributors in this issue Editor-in-Chief Jon Levy Editors Lauren Heinz Max Houghton Contributing Picture Editors Flora Bathurst Sophie Batterbury Contributing Editor Maurice Geller Columnists Tim Minogue John O’Farrell John Vidal Regular Contributors Ken Grant Bill Kouwenhoven Jeremy Leslie Marketing/Membership Director Lally Pearson Online Development Director Leo Hsu Art Directors Phil Evans & Rob Kester Reprographics John Doran at Wyndeham Graphics Intern Josh Lustig Advertising adverts@foto8.com Print Stones the Printers Paper

By M-real: Cover – Galerie Art Silk 250gsm Features – Galerie Art Silk 130gsm Reviews – Era Print 90gsm Distribution Specialist bookshops & galleries – Central Books 020 8986 4854 Newstrade – Comag 01895 433800 ISSN 1476-6817 ISBN 90-5330-561-4 Publisher Jon Levy, Foto8 Ltd Subscription/Back Issues 8 issues, 2 yrs: £60-UK, £68-EU & USA, £82-ROW 4 issues, 1 yr: £35-UK, £39-EU & USA, £46-ROW Back issues available www.foto8.com subscribe@foto8.com 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 © 2007 Foto8 Ltd. All rights reserved. No part of this magazine may be copied or reproduced without the prior written consent of Foto8 Ltd

>Editor’s Letter

Stephen Connell connells@merseymail.com Dean Dampney www.submerge.com.au Andrea Dapueto www.andreadapueto.it Alessandro Franzetti www.alessandrofranzetti.it Sophie Gerard An exhibition of this work will be on at Flowers East gallery, London from 03 August – 08 September, 2007. www.flowerseast.com www.sophiegerrard.com Alberto Giuliani Represented by Grazia Neri. www.grazianeri.com Guillaume Herbaut Represented by Oeil Public. www.oeilpublic.com Jacob Holdt United States 1970-1975 is published by Steidl. www.steidl.de www.american-pictures.com Justin Jin Represented by Panos Pictures. www.panos.co.uk Q Sakamaki Represented by Redux. www.reduxpictures.com

In the blue corner stands the stalwart of photography, a ruggedly obstinate but reliable comrade in the struggle for free speech and better conditions for all. He champions the independent voice and supports the camera in its quest to unearth the truth and present the facts, however unpalatable, for the public record. His pockets are lined with the names and numbers of friends who, though not wealthy, are ready to stand up and be counted so that the truth can be told.

In the red corner stands the darling of the rich and powerful, an obliging companion who dutifully moulds to your every flight of fancy. His role in society is quite undefined yet his influence extends into the halls and drawing rooms of the eminent and influential. His jacket pocket contains an invitation to a gala ball and a list of all the names of his patrons’ children so that he may never make a faux pas in such esteemed company.

The two, journalism and art, face each other in today’s world of photography. Both seek the same prize – acclaim, attention and a place in history. Into this face-off steps a third party, EI8HT, a self-appointed referee, whose job it is to mediate the protagonists in their ensuing struggle for supremacy while maintaining that photography must have meaning as well as form. In the heat of this debate it is easy to loose sight of the goal.

Does art really stand in one corner and journalism in the other? It no longer looks as though the two are so opposed but I do know that when it comes to photography it’s art that needs photojournalism more than photojournalism needs art.

And so to Dirty, the issue that sits before you. Thanks to the dedication of our contributors and the care of the people at EI8HT, the magazine continues to showcase the very best of photography anywhere in the world today. In the toxic towns where your old computer contaminates the people and environment of India, to the workshops where a blue mist heralds a capitalist dream as Chinese workers distress your latest pair of jeans. In the mud that we celebrate and the muck of politics that we wipe off our conscious – this issue is an exploration of dirty and a celebration of photography JL

EI8HT is published by Foto8 Ltd 1– 5 Honduras Street London EC1Y 0TH United Kingdom

4

> Contents Autumn 2007

24

> > Volume Number 6 2

>Features >06 Rags to Riches Justin Jin >14 Body of Evidence Guillaume Herbaut >24 What Immortal Hand? Q Sakamaki >34 A Room of Their Own Andrea Dapueto

>42 Toxicity Sophie Gerrard

>52 Cry for Me Alberto Giuliani

>60 Close Encounters Jacob Holdt

BEST DESIGNED MAGAZINE OF THE YEAR

Columns > >46 Dirty Tricks John O’Farrell >48 Glorious John Vidal >50 Obsolescence Tim Minogue

52

Moments > >22 All Comsuming Dean Dampney >32 Blood Orange Alessandro Franzetti >40 Light Night Stephen Connell

Off the Wall – HOST Gallery > >64 Laurie Fletcher, Tom Lemke and Borut Peterlin

Inside > >68 Nick and Marc Francis, directors of Black Gold

60

>Borrowed >51 Might Magazine

Reviews > >71 An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar, The Day-to-Day Life of Albert Hastings, Beat, Motherland, Daddy Where Are You?, The Black House, Silesia, Invisible Cities, Wall, India Notes, Finding Transmitting Receiving, Borders, Bauwagen, The Garden, Phantom Shanghai >84 The Magazine Report by Jeremy Leslie

Listings > >86 Picture agencies and media associations

On My Shelf > >98 Ian Denning

Cover > © Justin Jin 34

5

RAGS TO RICHES China, the ‘factory of the world’, is now also the major producer of blue jeans. To meet production demand, thousands of workers sweat through the night scrubbing, spraying and tearing for a perfect distressed finish

6

7

The ubiquity of the label “Made in China” inspired photographer Justin Jin to try to understand Chinese work culture, as well as giving him a reason to spend time in the country of his ancestors.

On returning to Guangdong, a region he visited with his parents on a trip to meet relatives in mainland China 15 years ago, Jin noticed striking changes:

“It was all paddy fields and mud roads, or paved roads full of potholes,” he remembers. “And now, in the last decade and a half, the area has been transformed into a megacommercial sector, a glittering stadia of factories and restaurants.”

After visiting toy and electronics factories, Jin decided to direct his attention to the garment industry. He set about gaining access, not just to factories, but to smaller workshops, too, where working conditions are still harsh.

“Some factories were happy to give me an inspection tour, but I wanted to stay there at night, which is a totally different proposition. For every 10 factories I asked, one gave me permission. And not all of them were interesting, photographically speaking.”

Indeed, Jin found himself chased out of one, caught photographing the workers still toiling at midnight. Jin’s atmospheric images appear as stolen goods, spirited away in the dead of night from an other worldly blue grotto. While others sleep, or drink, or watch a movie, sinewy-fleshed men scrub acre upon acre of blue cloth, in order to make it appear “distressed”: the vintage look is in.

So, in the name of fashion, motorised grinders are taken down from the ceiling, and used to shear layers off the denim.

Sticky blue dust sticks to surfaces, skin and lungs. Every scratch has to Rags to Riches Justin Jin

be inscribed so that the size, shape and location imitates real-life abrasion. The heat is on, not least because, for every pair of jeans they scrub, the workers get one euro cent. Chinese labour laws are very strict, but the interpretation of them is very flexible, Jin found, with workers often on the go for 12 – 14 hours a day without a break.

“The older generation are resigned to it,” says Jin. “They’ve come from the fields and this is their mentality, to slave away. They can take a lot of hardship. What’s just as interesting to observe is the younger generation. They have a lot of optimism; they see themselves as bosses and managers of the future. It’s a key point I want to make with my story: it’s not a case of workers: good, bosses: bad. The bosses are the workers ‘made good’, if you like.”

Huang Dehong is one such worker made good. He was the son of a poor farmer from Sizchuan, who rose through the ranks at a time when hard work and ambition paid off on China’s economic gold coast. Now he is a fully fledged business man, out celebrating his good fortune with friends, while his workshop churns out pair after pair of distressed jeans, up to 10,000 pairs per day.

Huang, surrounded by friends and the remains of a feast, raises his glass in a toast: “To the millionaires of Zhongshan!” 8

8

Pumice stones are used in the washing of jeans to achieve the stonewash look (previous pages).

China is now one of the world’s largest producers of jeans ‘To the millionaires of Zhongshan!’: bosses from jeans factories (left) raise a toast

A pile of jeans (below left) is carried out of a garment factory, which displays Chinese good luck banners on the gate Workers (bottom and below right) take a break at dawn after scrubbing jeans all night using a sanding machine

9

Jeans are sewn at a factory (below left) while a young child sleeps nearby

Jeans are put into washing machines for stonewashing (bottom)

Workers play cards (below right) in Huang Dehong’s factory in Zhongshan city

10

A worker drills holes in a pair of jeans (below left) at Huang’s factory

A truck picks up jeans (bottom) from Huang’s factory

Textile workers wearing face masks (below right) distress jeans using sanding machines at a garment factory. This factory, which specifically carries out the wear-and-tear process for the sought after look, produces 10,000 pairs every day

As dawn breaks, a textile manager (next pages) contacts a client to inform him that an order is ready

11

12

13

BODY

14

Y OF EVIDEN CE

15

16

Body of Evide nce Guillaume H erbaut

Over the last fiv e years, Guilla has been wor king on a phot ume Herbaut ographic project in whi ch places where he visited seven different so happened, so mething dramatic mething that would change th e destiny of th From his gran ose dmother’s ap artment in the who encountered it. after her deat Fr h, to Shkodra in Albania, city ench town of Livry just (featured in EI of the vendetta 8HT V5N3), w ha intimate or un iversal, is that t links these stories, wheth er they force us see the world to change the . way we

Herbaut’s inve gruesome, unre stigative approa so ch to the mirrors press ph lved murders of women in C iudad Juarez, M otographers w orking on a new exico, documents of importance fro s story, recove m rin (récup, in Fren ch). The result the victim’s family or from the g is a compelling, police that seeks as m forensic-lookin uch to questio g reportage n as to provide information 8

Portrait of Aleja ndra Medrano dead (left). Sh , e was murdere d on January 26 , 2005. From th e newspaper El Norte

The Northern cemetery of Ciudad Juarez (top left). Man y bodies of mur dere unidentified wo d and men are burie d here

The body of a wo found at the Ro man was yal Hotel (top) .

She had been strangled between 6PM and 2AM. She was between the ages of 20 and 22. Dark skin, thin, blac k hair. It was th e third case in this downtown ho tel. From El Norte, dated November 15 , 2001

17

In the desert ou tside Ciudad Juarez (previo us police crime sc pages), a ene, where th e bodies of thre e raped and murdered wo men were discovered in 2004

Envelope wh ich contained an anonymous let te left) sent to Ar r (below acely Esmeralda M ontanez’s mother whos e daughter was murdere d in The letter gave 1995. the name of the person the claimed murde writer red her daughter

An article (belo w about the deat centre) h of Montanez, wh ose body was found on July 3, 1995. The artic le was kept by her m other

The discover y of body of a wom the an right) on March (below 29, 2007, in an abando ned not far from do house wn Ciudad Juarez town . The body was 70 per ce nt burned

The body of a wo (right) murdere man d from the news in 1998, paper El Norte

Since 1993, ab brutally murde out 400 re city in Mexico, d in Ciudad Juarez. Juarez women have been is the fourth la a town of 1.5 m rges of one of the m ill ost important ion inhabitants. It is the stro t Latin American boasts one of nghold th dr US. Juarez ac e world’s busiest border po ug cartels, and commodates ints, crossing hund into the employed in 25 0 maquiladora reds of thousands of wor kers, the desert bo rderline. Thes s, or vast factories, located e assembly pl al North Americ ong ants, relocate a, Asia or Euro d from pe Mexico. Most of these migra , attract workers from all ov er nts are young, who always ac underqualified cept hard wor k city’s outskirt w s. More than 10 and are stacked up in slum omen s on the victim, discov years after the ered in the de murder of the sert first authorities still cannot set ou between the US and Mexic t those respon or give a conv o, the incing explan sible for the m ation for the tr assacre, agedy

18

19

Cynthia (belo w) was six when her siste r Aracely Esmeralda M ontanez, whose portrait she holds, was murdere d. No 18, and doesn’t w she is want to be recognised fo r fear she may be killed the same way her siste r was

Three men ar e pa the press (righ raded for t) by the police, suspec te having murde d of red a drug trafficker an ho ur earlier

Comics graphic ally portraying mur de women (far rig rs of ht) are published da ily in a local newspaper

Settling of sc ores during the day (below right) between drug traffickers on one of the main avenues of Ci udad Juarez. Two pe ople are left dead, one wounded

20

21

>Moments All Consuming Dean Dampney This is Whytes Gully Waste Depot near Wollongong, in New South Wales, Australia, where local inhabitants’ nonbiodegradable waste ends up. Sea birds, like these pelicans as well as great flocks of gulls, have been descending on this waste site en masse, despite its location 25 km inland, in search of a morsel. The local council is managing the operation as efficiently as it can. But the desire to consume appears to be unquenchable at every level of society… 8

22

23

24

what immortal hand?

The image of a Sri Lankan government soldier (previous page) overlapped with a Tamil girl at a battered church in Jaffna, where the long civil war has devastated lives and the Sri Lankan economy In Jaffna, Tamil are forced to leave their bus (right) to be checked by Sri Lankan soldiers. The town is a central battleground as the political violence between the government and the LTTE – the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (Eelam means homeland in Tamil) – continues to escalate

Tamil civilians (far right) take part in military training in Kilinochchi, a stronghold of the LTTE rebels. Some participants come from government-controlled areas, such as the capital Colombo, to join the training. They drill with sticks and branches instead of guns during training but rebels have distributed firearms to the civilian population A soldier at the funeral of Major General Parami Kulathunga (below right) allegedly killed by an LTTE suicide attacker two days before

The teardrop isle at the tip of India once had all the hallmarks of an earthly paradise. A decades-long civil war has destroyed every last vestige of peace as the government-backed ethnic Sinhalese majority and the ethnic Tamil minority tear apart the fabric of each other’s society. As for natural beauty, what hadn’t yet been ravaged by war was largely obliterated by the tsunami in 2004.

It is on Sri Lankan soil that the phenomena of the suicide bomber has its origins. Since 1987, the Black Tiger unit of the Tamil Tigers has carried out as many as 150 attacks, by some estimates; victims include the then Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1991, as well as Sri Lanka’s own president, Ranasinghe Premadasa in 1993.

Q Sakamaki has photographed many of the world’s bloodiest war zones, working as a photographer on assignment, yet he admits to finding the situation in Sri Lanka during the summer of 2006 particularly tense.

“Jaffna was totally war-torn,” he says. “It looked like Afghanistan.”

One morning in mid-June, he was in the north of the country when reports started to come through of an attack on a bus in Kabithigollewa, in Anuradhapura district about 100 km away. He knew at once the situation was serious, and headed south. When he learnt 64 people had died in the attack, he knew he needed to stay, to visit the hospitals and schools affected by this new crisis, and to attend the funerals. “I felt I needed to make images, to convey what was happening all around,” he says. His photographs speak for themselves.

One year on, and Indian newspaper The Hindu reports at least 14 government soldiers killed and 34 injured during heavy fighting in the capital Colombo, while the lead story on the Tamil.net website details the destruction by the army of the only hospital in the Tiger-held area Vavuniya amid sustained rocket fire.

The fearful symmetry of these eye-for-an-eye attacks renders the 2002 ceasefire agreement as toothless as a paper tiger 8 Max Houghton What Immortal Hand?

Q Sakamaki

26

27

A government soldier (below) watches over funeral services at a mass grave following the June 15, 2006 bus attack which killed more than 64 people. The Sri Lankan government accuses LTTE of the terrorist attack, but the Tamil political organisation denies the claim. The situation has brought the two sides to the brink of a new war

In Kilinochchi (bottom left), Tamil woman Kandiah Sinnamma, 62, stands near the portraits of her sons – Periya, then 19 who died in 1987, on the left, and Sinna, then 18 who died in 1991 – who committed suicide attacks

Family members (far right) of Sinhalese victims of the June 15 bus attack mourn before the mass burial

At a funeral home in Anuradhpura, North Sri Lanka (bottom right), workers attend to the victims, many of them children, of the June 15 bus attack to prepare the bodies for mass burial

28

29

A Sri Lankan government armoured vehicle patrols a neighbourhood of Jaffna (top). The ancient, largely Tamil-speaking city, once a stronghold of the Tigers, has been under government control since the mid1990s A Tamil mother and daughter walk through Mutur (above), in the north-east of the island, while a government soldier stands guard

Muslim girls attend Sunday school under a tent in Mutur (top right) which was ravaged by the 2004 tsunami

Tamils draw water (right) from a well in war-torn Jaffna. ‘It was like Afghanistan’ said the photographer Sakamaki

Tamil children (top far right) who have lost parents through the civil war, live at Kurukulam Children’s Home, funded by the Tamil rehabilitation organisation

30

31

>Moments Blood Orange Alessandro Franzetti Every year, the quietly historic northwest Italian town of Ivrea, near Turin, turns orange overnight.

According to one version of the local legend, the annual orange fight was established to commemorate a people’s revolt against local aristocrat Count Ranieri. The count, it was said, would claim the right of ‘jus primae noctis’ to lure young brides to his bed and take their virginity on their wedding night. It took a brave miller’s daughter to put a stop to the reign of terror: Violetta beheaded him and paraded his head around the town. The townspeople showed their contempt by pelting it with stones. The stones they hurled have since been replaced with oranges (some say to represent the duke’s chopped-off head).

However, the official website for the four-day festival, which takes place every February in the run-up to Lent, describes a nameless feudal lord from the middle ages, who donated a pot of beans to every poor family in Ivrea. As a mark of disrespect for his paltry offering, they hurled the beans back at him.

The oranges, so this version goes, only came into the picture between 1930-1960, when girls threw them from their balconies down onto parade carriages below.

Perhaps history is always cleansed in the end. At least oranges stain for a while 8

32

33

A Room of Their Own 34

35

36

“Yes, I’ve got my sofa behind the road.

Please park the car. Let’s go.”

One morning, as he was riding his scooter around the outskirts of Rome, Andrea Dapueto had his eyes opened to a flurry of early morning activity that was to its participants as quotidian as bird song. While Dapueto decided to take an early morning ride, bored of his commission for the CEI [Italian Episcopal Conference] to make a series of architectural photographs of churches built after 1945, other workers were engaging in a bit of early morning sex with a prostitute to start the day. This was not the surprise.

Unlike in Amsterdam, where the red light district is as much part of the city’s culture as the Van Gogh Museum, in Rome, just a few kilometres from the holy Vatican city, the sex trade is kept well-hidden, like a very dirty secret. Behind a couple of scooters and maybe a small, slightly scruffy company car, behind the bushes that bordered the roadside, enterprising prostitutes had set up home, or at least bed, or sometimes just mattress, a makeshift al fresco room of their own.

“In relation to prostitution, the government has salami on its eyes,” says Dapueto. “Italy needs to wake up about this situation. Prostitutes are able to work inside even in developing countries. They have no access to running water. After 10 clients in the 40 degrees sun, you imagine what that is like. There are empty cans of Red Bull, porn magazines, used condoms all over the place; it is not hygienic for the women or their clients.”

Dapueto discovered that the women sell their services for an incredibly small return. Prices ranged from Eur15-30, in order to cater for workers at nearby factories. And it was not just in Rome, of course, that these outdoor boudoirs exist. As he travelled around more of the beautiful cities and historic sites of his homeland, Dapueto found similar scenes in the suburbs of Milan, and in Turin by the famous Stupinigi castle. More are waiting to be discovered throughout the south of the country.

“I have always wanted to find a way to tell the story of prostitutes. I want to show it to the government ministers who speak so many times of ‘finding a solution’. My research has become quite anthropological. You start to understand their behaviour. Most of the Italian prostitutes are transsexuals, as are those from South America. They tend to use chairs for their clients, and you’ll often see a sentimental novel lying around that they are reading. The others tend to be women from Romania, Bulgaria, anywhere in Eastern Europe and they prefer to use blankets and will often tie a plastic bag to a tree to contain their rubbish. Nigerian women like to use a mattress.”

Dapueto’s three-year project is necessarily seasonal. He needs to arrive on light spring and summer mornings at these desolate woods early in the morning before the activity starts.

With a resigned sadness, he says this will be his last work on Italy. “I can’t publish my story here – there are people from the Church everywhere!” 8 Max Houghton A Room of Their Own Andrea Dapueto

37

38

40

>Moments Light Night Stephen Connell The night is no longer dark. Light pollution in the UK, wasted light from towns, cities and industrial locations, floods the night sky, overpowering the stars, indeed the entire Milky Way. And yet‌ while astronomers rightly protest at this loss of natural beauty, industrial landscapes, grey and unprepossessing by day, are transformed into radiant futuristic palaces, basking in their spotlight under cover of the night  8

41

42

The world, we know, generates as much as 50 million tonnes of electronic waste a year, from PCs to cellphones, shunted away to make space for the next generation.

Much of our once shiny, now redundant hardware, houses still valuable components: ‘recycling’ them spawns corrosive pools of mercury and rusting chips – a poisonous legacy of innovation

43

Toxicity Sophie Gerrard

Each year, thousands of tonnes of old computers, mobile phones, batteries, cables, old cameras and other e-waste are dumped in landfills or burned.

Thousands of tonnes more are shipped, illegally, from the West to India and other developing countries for ‘recycling’.

Some is sent as scrap, some as charity donations.

This toxic trade is in direct violation of the Basel Convention, to which the UK

and India are signatories, and which bans the transportation of hazardous or toxic waste from the developed world to developing countries. But India has become one of the world’s largest dumping grounds.

Many of the heavy metals and contaminants found in e-waste – lead, cadmium, mercury, tin, gold, copper, PVC and brominated, chlorinated and phosphorus-based flame retardants –

are extremely harmful to humans as well as to animals and plants.

When the hardware arrives in India’s ports, it is dismantled by hand, incinerated and soaked in acid by workers in backyard recycling scrap yards on the outskirts of many major cities. The workers have no health and safety protection, they work in closed workshops with no gloves, masks or eye protection and their employers have

44

no regard for the environment. Once the valuable materials including copper, gold and lead have been removed, the unwanted parts are dumped in rivers and wasteland or sent to landfills where lethal toxins contaminate the soil, groundwater and air 8

Acid left over from soaking computer parts (previous page, left) to recover valuable metals Mother boards (previous page, right) are treated with hydrochloric acid to recover copper

A pool of polluted water (left) containing discarded circuit boards Used acid is poured into streets, fields and waterways and the unwanted plastic boards discarded (right)

45

46

New York Times / Redux / eyevine

> Dirty Tricks > John O’Farrell One of the great unprovable gables of American political lore is also unimprovable. The story concerns the most underappreciated US President of the 20th century, Lyndon Baines Johnson. In the 1940s, Johnson was running for Congress in Texas. His opponent was a man of varied commercial interests, one of which was the cultivation of swine. As his opponent liked to depict himself as a horny-handed son of toil, as opposed to the urbane and therefore effete LBJ, who was born into a Texas political dynasty, Johnson decided to use the underbelly of rural life as his own underhanded weapon

“Just suppose we let out a rumour that he’s, um, getting intimate with his herd,” Johnson was supposed to have mused to his campaign manager. The manager was appalled. “Lyndon, you know that he doesn’t fuck his pigs!” Johnson is supposed to have replied: “I know that. I just want to make him deny that he’s a pig-fucker.”

Naturally, a mind like that is going to end up in one of two places. Prison did not beckon, so Johnson instead became the 36th President of the United States.

Johnson was a master of political dirty tricks. He looked after his friends, he ruthlessly served his party and his leaders, from Roosevelt to Kennedy, he became the sternest chief whip the US Congress ever saw, and he duplicated and manipulated intelligence material to sidestep the constitution and intensify a war that turned out to be a catastrophe for his presidency, his party, his country and, most of all, the people of Vietnam.

The same man, however, used all of his political skills and underhandedness to shove through a reluctant Congress the most important legislation for African Americans since the repeal of slavery a century earlier. Knowing that southern Democrats were not only concerned about losing white voters, but were actively complicit in segregation, knowing that the sinister Kennedy brothers were not interested, knowing that J Edgar Hoover, the crosswired paranoid at the FBI, was convinced that Martin Luther King was both a compulsive philanderer and a closet communist (and had the tapes to prove one of those assertions), knowing all that, Johnson went ahead and forced through the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act. As he signed the former, in 1965, he turned to an aide and said “we have lost the South for a generation,” but still he signed.

This huge political gamble, this enormous act of human decency, this outstanding redress of centuries of injustice and cruelty and savagery, was achieved using his full array of filthy political tactics and lies.

Johnson’s preferred method was very up close and personal. It was described by a contemporary journalist who witnessed what has passed into legend as The Treatment: Its tone could be supplication, accusation, cajolery, exuberance, scorn, tears, complaint and the hint of threat. It was all of these together. Its velocity was breathtaking, and it was all in one direction.

Interjections from the target were rare.

Johnson anticipated them before they could be spoken. He moved in close, his face a scant millimetre from his target, his eyes widening and narrowing, his eyebrows rising and falling. Mimicry, humour, and the genius of analogy made The Treatment an almost hypnotic experience and rendered the target stunned and helpless.

Johnson and the cause of civil rights is an 47

example of good actions resulting from bad behaviour. Johnson and Vietnam is an example of the best intentions resulting in upwards of four million dead Vietnamese, alongside the more familiar figure of 59,000 dead Americans. Johnson believed in the Domino Theory: “If we allow Vietnam to fall, tomorrow we’ll be fighting in Hawaii, and next week in San Francisco.”

From the Gulf of Tonkin incident to the Tet offensive, a chain of misrepresentations and bullying marked the escalation of the war. One of Johnson’s other weapons was the sainted memory of JFK. “It’s what Jack would have wanted.” Unlike civil rights, it probably was what Jack would have wanted.

A few months before his date with destiny’s bullet in Dallas, Texas, Kennedy authorised his last major “wet job”, the overthrow and murder of President Thieu of South Vietnam, and installation of a regime that would have no truck with North Vietnam.

By 1968, Johnson was seriously ill, embattled in his party and, contrary to popular memory, squeezed by hawks as much as peaceniks. The polls that he relied on so much constantly told him that the preferred option of most Americans was not to withdraw, but to nuke the commies into radioactive powder. His peace talks in Paris, designed to give his preferred successor, Hubert Humphrey, a push in the election against Richard Nixon, were undermined by a back channel from the South Vietnamese government that Kennedy had bequeathed, and one of the negotiating advisers on the US side: Henry Kissinger.

With those talks scuppered, Kissinger went on to a greatness of sorts under Nixon, whose black aura attracted a new kind of political operator, one still with us today. “I would run over my grandmother for Richard Nixon”, said one fanatic, Charles Colson, who was eventually imprisoned for his vandalism of democracy and started a new trend. On his emergence from chokey, Colson published a barnstorming memoir entitled Born Again, and became fantastically rich by writing and lecturing and preaching about the redemptive powers of prison. In turn, he became a close friend of a very sympathetic biographer of Nixon, Jonathan Aitken, who now describes Colson as his “spiritual adviser”.

If Aitken is a shabby British version of Colson, who do you imagine is the British LBJ? Not a bad domestic record on poverty; sound on civil rights for women, minorities and gays; a bit over-fond of controlling the message; contemptuous of Parliament; too reliant on the advice of spooks and cops; honest exporter of civilised values; dishonest disseminator of facts to escalate a war. Who does that sound like? 8 John O’Farrell is Communications Officer with the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, based in Belfast

‘A rite of passage akin to tribal bonding in West Papua’: a reveller slides in the mud during the Glastonbury Festival, June 22, 2007 © Dylan Martinez/ Reuters

48

> Glorious > John Vidal The Java mud volcano is one of the natural wonders of the world. For 15 months now, unimaginable amounts of hot brown mud have been spewing out of a fissure in Java, Indonesia. Miles of land are now deep in the mire. Eleven villages, 20 factories and prawn farms have so far been engulfed in mud up to 16 ft deep by the Sidoarjo mud flow.

Great dams have been built to try to keep it in check and scientists, priests and geologists have come from all over the world to try to stop this strange eruption known locally as Lusi. No-one has seen anything like Lusi before, and the consensus is that it could go on for years and years. It makes Glastonbury look like a puddle

Mud on this scale is horrifying, but our attitudes to even small amounts are strange.

Here is some of the most valuable, interesting, useful stuff known to man, yet it is increasingly associated with poverty, disorder, chaos, waste and primitiveness.

We call people who will not change, “stick in the mud”; politicians are said to “fling mud” at each other when they insult each other; mud huts are where the poorest people live; developers and governments will go to great lengths to cover mud up.

Mud is mucky, mud is miserable, mud – we are told – is dark and dirty and must be kept out of our homes and lives. Mud may even be said to threaten progress, which is seen these days as aspiring to be clean and light.

There are exceptions. Adolescents go to Glastonbury Festival for the ritual mud experience, shedding inhibitions by the bucketful for a day or two as they wrestle or bathe in the mud or smear it over themselves. It is a rite of passage akin to tribal bonding in West Papua.

And then, of course, all children have a special affinity with mud. I know this because I was brought up on the estuary of the River Yar in the Isle of Wight and we spent all our time knee deep in the stuff.

When it came to naming our little boat, it was, naturally, The Mudlark.

We knew then what the ecologists are telling us now – that mud is the most undervalued and forgotten environmental resource. Down here, in this mucky world that seems on the surface to be devoid of life, is actually the start of the food chain.

It’s here that man is believed to have taken his first steps as he walked out of the ocean and on to the land. This is where bacteria and worms, crabs, snails, shrimps, clams and oysters live, in turn providing food for fish and birds.

But will someone tell the developers, industrialists and government who seem to regard all mud as waste land? Mudflats, marshes, wetlands, intertidal habitats – these spongy places that lie between water and land, yet are neither one nor the other, have many names and are all in grave danger.

They keep river levels normal and filter and purify the surface water, control flooding and can break down contaminants like heavy metal. But they have been systematically drained, dredged, diked and filled in to make way for buildings, roads, carparks and farming. Mostly they are degraded by the effects of fertilisers, pesticides and oil runoff.

It’s criminal. Large mud flats, like the ones that defined Cardiff before they turned the bay into a lake by building a barrage, may seem to stretch to the horizon, and reflect the colours of the sky in the convoluted patterns of shallow pools of water. They look empty, but they are full of the most extraordinary diversity.

49

Britain ranks as one of the worst nations on earth for destroying mud. With all that coastline, and all those moors, bogs and rivers draining one of the wettest corners of Europe, we should have plenty of mud for everyone. But we’ve already destroyed nearly 70 per cent of all our wetlands and now we are eyeing up much of the rest.

In the last few months there have been serious attempts to revive plans to put barrages across the Wash, Morecambe, the Solway Firth, and the Severn and Humber estuaries. Yes, they would temporarily provide loads of green electricity but in the act they would destroy forever vast areas of mud – and wildlife.

Long live mud. Though perhaps not mud volcanoes 8 John Vidal is the Environment Editor of The Guardian

> Obsolescence > Tim Minogue When was the last time you telephoned anyone from a public call box? Five years ago? Ten? Perhaps, if you’re under 30, you never have. In my case it must have been about 12 years ago, at a motorway service station. I was driving from London to interview someone in Hampshire and my ancient VW Beetle broke down on the M25. In 1995 it still wasn’t unusual not to own a mobile. I couldn’t just call and tell the interviewee I was going to be late. I had to tramp along the motorway to an emergency phone, wait nearly an hour for the RAC to turn up and fix the car and then drive another half-hour until I found a service area so I could phone my interviewee. Being 90 minutes late wasn’t a problem on that occasion, but it could have been. It was my cue to join the modern world. When the Beetle broke down, terminally, on the M25 a year later, late one November night with my eight-months-pregnant wife on board, we were rescued much more quickly, thanks to a newly acquired mobile, and the people we were going to stay with weren’t left wondering what had happened to us.

All I had to buy after that escapade was a new car

I thought of this when I saw a picture of a BT phone box the other day in The Sun. It stands in the village of Compton Bishop in Somerset where, like everywhere else these days, every man, woman, child, dog and chicken has a mobile phone. Although Compton Bishop’s public phone is still in perfectly good working order, nobody uses it very often. You can tell because ivy has invaded the box and grown up the glass on the inside and over the coinbox and the shelf, so it looks like some ancient artefact discovered by machete-wielding explorers in the Guatemalan jungle. But when you pick up the handset there’s still a dialling tone.

I like this story because it illustrates a process which normally happens very, very slowly taking place almost before one’s eyes – a completely mundane, everyday thing transmuting, almost, into a piece of archaeology. Very soon telephone boxes, like once-common objects such as horsedrawn ploughs, box cameras, suits of armour and typewriters, will only be found in museums, along with artefacts from the more recent past such as transistor radios, video recorders, record players, Amstrad word processors, Ford Cortinas, black and white televisions and ashtrays; the detritus of departed worlds. It’s curious that this list of soon-to-be museum-pieces consists of so many items that, like the penny-farthing bicycle and the steam-powered car, were only the day-before-yesterday in the forefront of technology. It’s a paradox that most new and exciting things quite soon cease to be new and exciting and become clapped out and passé, while stuff that has been around so long that we take it for granted usually sees off upstart rivals pretty quickly. The book, for example.

Among the ruins of the ancient port of Ostia, near Rome, preserved in mud for 2,000 years after the coastline subsided and the harbour silted up, you can go into the Thermopilium bar, dating from the third century BC. It has a broad marble counter with shelves behind it, where glasses and bottles were kept, and behind them there’s a fresco in which you can just make out the shapes of olives, eggs and cheeses – the bar snacks menu. One can imagine the traders and soldiers leaning on the bar and sitting on the benches knocking back the vino after a hard day around the harbour, only instead of talking about football, arguing about the merits of rival gladiators. It’s just like a 21st century bar. But why wouldn’t it be?

(Although hopefully one wouldn’t find a neck collar inscribed “Tene me ne fugia fugio” – “I am a runaway slave; don’t let me get away” – in a back room at All Bar One.) In ancient buildings across the world it’s the signs of ordinary everyday life, the graffiti in the lavatory, the cooking arrangements, that fire the visitor’s imagination as much as the architecture, or the rise and fall of 50

empires. The obvious yet still startling fact that the long-dead had mundane needs and appetites just like our own – the latrines in a medieval monastery; the signpost to a brothel in a Roman city – grabs us as much as anything we may discover about ancient politics or culture.

It isn’t only everyday objects that find themselves on the shelf of history. For centuries Britain provided honest employment for generations of fletchers (arrow makers), blacksmiths, grooms, stable-lads and lamp-lighters. They have gone the same way as the sperriter (keeper of sparrow-hawks), the vaginarius (a scabbard-maker, in the days when “knife culture” really meant something) and the amanuensis (a copier of manuscripts and taker of dictation). Men no longer go to see their wig-maker and there is, sadly, little employment these days for bodgers (itinerants who travelled around country areas making and mending chair legs). The 20th century saw the back of the bus conductor, the gamekeeper, the typist, the scullery maid and the linotype operator.

Who’s next? The shop assistant? The estate agent? (Hurrah!)… The web designer?

Happily the photographer looks likely to be with us a little longer, although more than a year ago this column noted the status anxiety of some members of the profession (profession? trade?) at the spread of easyto-use, affordable digital cameras: “Can we have some legislation to stop people picking up cameras and calling themselves photographers?” as one worried writer to the British Journal of Photography put it.

Photographs are so much of the moment, and because of that date very rapidly – much more so than anything that is written or painted. Today’s news photograph is tomorrow’s historical document; while the work of the photojournalist, particularly when it finds its way into a gallery, occupies an uncertain territory between reportage and art. But that’s another subject, and I think I can hear my mobile ringing 8 Tim Minogue writes for Private Eye

> Borrowed A past piece plucked from history for posterity Might Magazine, July/August 1997, edited and written by Dave Eggers

51

CRY ME

52

“The Argentina I know has two personalities, it’s like it’s schizophrenic. In the past century, many, many people from Italy and Spain have tried to go and live there. They tried to become rich but it didn’t happen. Most people treat the country as a temporary place, but then they realise the possibility of returning to Europe has vanished.

My mother was born there, but moved back to Italy at the age of four. It’s complicated, but the rest of the family couldn’t follow. Her sister died, my grandmother got sick, my grandfather went to Kenya and became a prisoner, so my mother arrived in Italy and was adopted by another family, but really she grew up alone.

In 1995 I was involved in a project taking photographs for a global child welfare forum. My friend [the Magnum photographer] Alex Majoli went to India and I went to Argentina. I had grown up with this idea of family there. I knew that my grandfather was there, sick and old, and I felt very strongly about going to meet him for the first time, but I also carried with me a sense of sadness. It seemed as though no one wanted to remember our history. It was as I was flying to Buenos Aires in 1995 that my grandfather died – so I never met him after all.

I did discover a good friend there, who is a psychologist, and I was able to work with him and groups of street children. It is not surprising that’s his job – Argentina has the highest number of psychologists per capita in the world, 1 per 1,000 people. Even in the US, it’s 1 per 1,300. Over the next few years, I returned to Argentina, I even fell in love with a tango dancer. Like all dancers in that society, she was from the lower middle classes. To be on stage is like a revenge.

Argentina is more than a project, it’s my story. I find the country and its history dramatically funny and interesting. If Italy weren’t in Europe, it would be in Argentina. The duality runs through the country even geographically. More than half the population live in Buenos Aries, and then to the south and the north there are all these provinces where nobody lives! It’s like being on an island in the middle of the sea. No one has even decided where the borders are. Sometimes I think no one really cares.

Everyone knows they don’t have a future, and it isn’t just down to the next political or economic crisis (and of course there will be one). I believe it’s because people are not able to talk to each other. There’s no real social structure. It’s a very young country; they need to make their own history now. Talking as an Italian, we never had successful colonies because we go with the idea of coming home. It’s the same with Argentina. When they talk about Italy, everyone cries.” 8 Alberto Giuliani was talking to Max Houghton Cry for Me Alberto Giuliani

In journalism and elsewhere, a pull-quote or liftout quote is a quote or excerpt from an article that is placed in a larger typeface on the same page, serving to lead readers into an article and to highlight a key topic.

In journalism and elsewhere, a pull-quote or liftout quote is a quote or excerpt from an article that is placed in a larger typeface on the same page, serving to lead readers into an article and to highlight a key topic.

In journalism and elsewhere, a pull-quote or liftout quote is a quote or excerpt from an article that is placed in a larger typeface on the same page, serving to lead readers into an article and to highlight a key topic.

53

Short story, Borges and I, as printed in Collected Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges. Published by Penguin Books, 1998.

Used with permission

54

55

56

57

“My photographic hobby is really, when all is said and done, nothing more than an exploitation of the suffering, which will probably never come to contribute to an alleviation of it.” So wrote Jacob Holdt, a young Danish man who arrived in the US in Nixon-era America in 1970.

His self-deprecating words may well be true, but his remarkable photographs taken as he hitchhiked more than 100,000 miles across the country over the ensuing five years, photographing whites, blacks, drug addicts, prostitutes, transsexuals, starving children, murderers, corpses, the desperate and sometimes the very rich, reveal an unspoken contract of trust between himself and the people who became his friends, confidantes and lovers.

On his eventual return to Denmark, he had 15,000 slides and in 1977 he agreed to the publication of a book, American Pictures, which he filled with letters, eye-witness accounts and texts to accompany his images. Since then he has toured Europe and the US, giving lectures on his unforgettable body of work. In recognition of the enduring quality of these darkly brilliant photographs 30 years later, Steidl has published a new collection for a new generation, who look towards America with the same horror and fascination 8 Close Encounters Jacob Holdt

Close Encounters 60

61

62

63

Off the Wall A season of portrait photography at HOST Gallery

64

Every day thousands of people travel on the London Underground, where etiquette demands that people do not speak to their fellow travellers and rarely even hold eye contact. Amidst the people pushing, pulling, tutting and the general frustration, one voice remains polite and calm; “Please mind the gap between the train and the platform.” This was the inspiration behind Laurie Fletcher’s project, a project that puts a face to those voices that speak to and connect us all.

Whether it’s: “Day 35, 8:58 in the Big Brother house”, an apologetic response to a misdialed number, or the final score of your football team read out on the radio, Laurie Fletcher reveals the person and the personality behind the voice that we feel we already know.

HOST gallery together with photographer Laurie Fletcher presents “Sorry we cannot connect your call” – a collection of portraits accompanied by the sound of each person’s voice.

“Sorry, we cannot connect your call” Laurie Fletcher 07 – 31 August

65

Left: James Alexander Gordon, the voice of radio football scores Below: Brian Cobby the voice of the speaking clock

Slovenian photographer Borut Peterlin presents his series of portraits, commissioned by Mladina magazine, for their weekly section portraying creative figures working in Slovenia. Peterlin’s portraits attempt to completely “strip” his sitters of their public relations image, seeking a conceptual factor that will allow the image to stand out. As Slovenia takes over the presidency of European Union this year, this show will be a unique look at the true artists of Slovenian society.

Emerging Slovenia Borut Peterlin 24 October – 03 November

The Portrait Series Tom Lemke 21 September – 06 October

Top: German photographer Andreas Gursky Below: Fashion stylist Ainur Otyakmaz

66

> Inside Reviews Listings OnMyShelf

Inside The success of Black Gold, a feature length documentary about the coffee industry, has taken even directors Marc Francis and Nick Francis by surprise. The film has been shown in the House of Commons and the World Bank, been criticised by multinational companies and as a result of it, the price of Ethiopian coffee has risen.

Max Houghton caught up with the Francis brothers just after the London premiere of the film

EI8HT: After bumping into Marc once a year or so at Brighton station, I get the impression that Black Gold was a project that started small and spiralled into something massive – has this been the case?

Marc Francis: Yes. Nick had been in Ethiopia about 10 years ago, when it was on the radar. That’s when he realised the country was not like it was perceived to be and also that coffee was such a strong cultural element there as well as an important export. Then, a few years ago, we heard Ethiopia was going through another food crisis and, this time, the farmers, who were producing some of the best coffee in the world, were caught up in it. So we thought we’d try to make this film, try and tell this story – the coffee industry has boomed yet these coffee farmers are struggling to survive. So we just upped and left, in 2003.

From there we went to Mexico to film the WTO talks, which were also happening at that time. Then we came back and thought – let’s try to make this into a bigger film.

8: It was obviously a conscious decision to challenge perceptions about Africa, or a specific country in the vast continent of Africa. The success of the film seems to lie in your effort to expose the cultural link via coffee between affluent Western lifestyles and the lives of the people in Ethiopia who grow the coffee. Was this a frame by frame decision or an overall ethos?

Nick Francis: One dimension was to fight against the portrayal of Africa as a barren landscape, a barren narrative, even, which puts an entire continent in a context that’s nothing to do with us – nothing to connect those two worlds. Running through the film, it was very important to bring out the natural beauty, the lush greenery, of Ethiopia. It’s a stunning country, so yes, that was absolutely at the forefront, and it runs as a thread throughout the film. A lot of people said after they had seen the film: “I never knew Ethiopia was so lush!”.

By the same token, that was why we cast Tadesse Meskela, as the main protagonist in the film, why the film hangs around his story, because he’s an Ethiopian protagonist who’s trying to do something about the situation faced by 75,000 coffee growers.

Again, that’s not a narrative that you see on the daily news. The story comes from the other perspective, which is about Western aid agencies or governments going in and “solving the problem”. So the narrative aims to subvert that stereotype as well.

8: Can you tell me about meeting Tadesse for the first time and realising he could be the key to the film?

MF: We did some initial research to find out who was doing things in Ethiopia for the coffee industry and his name kept coming up as someone who was campaigning to get the country’s coffee sold for a better price, 68

in his role as the manager of the Oromia Coffee Farmers Co-operative Union. So we went to meet him, interviewed him, and learnt he was off to London, America, all these other places to meet people directly.

And we thought, wow – this is a brilliant idea, let’s stay with Tadesse, follow him, and let his journey become the guide to try to navigate this complicated narrative. And, as Nick said, it’s not often you get to see an Ethiopian protagonist in films.

8: The recent success stories in the featurelength documentary genre from Michael Moore to Morgan Spurlock all rely on the presence of the director as the main protagonist. Did you ever consider putting yourselves in the frame, as it were?

MF: Only if you could have had a cameo!

Seriously, we didn’t consider it because one of our main objectives was to “humanise” Ethiopian people. We feel they are dehumanised by the way in which the news media has portrayed them over the years.

We wanted to bring a human face to this story, and to the whole concept of “Fair Trade” – people aren’t always sure what that phrase means. We wanted to have all the attention on the people involved.

NF: There’s a bit of irony involved as well.

The whole Michael Moore genre, the whole form and structure and style relied on there being someone to guide you through. If we were in the film I think it would have defeated our purpose to try to connect the audience to the story. If we were in it, it would have reflected and echoed everything you see about Africa all the time – a white presenter going in and doing stuff. It actually has the effect of distancing the audience.

8: Black Gold adds to a really interesting discourse about how we perceive and talk about Africa. Even in some great films recently – like The Last King of Scotland – it’s as though filmmakers believe the audience has to have a white mediator in order to understand these curious African folk. Of course that was a fictionalised account of events and people in Uganda … which brings me to something I wanted to ask you about Dave Eggers, and his approach to wanting to write about Sudan. He wanted to tell the story entirely through the words and experiences of his main protagonist, Valentino Achak Deng, but eventually decided to fictionalise the account, basing it on Deng’s experiences for his book What is the What. So, do you think there are things you can do in fiction that you can’t do in documentary? And did you ever think about turning Black Gold into a work of fiction?

MF: Our background is in photography, journalism, and film-making, so we were committed to using those skills to make a documentary. Also, we wanted to show it as fact, because it is fact. We didn’t question doing it otherwise. However, now we’ve

made Black Gold, we’re in development to make a very big fiction version of the documentary. There are things you can do in fiction that you can’t do in documentary.

There’s so much of our story we want to expand outwards, play with, that you just can’t do when you’re sticking to the facts.

For example, in a fictional account, we could have all the coffee farmers going on strike and say we’re not supplying coffee any more. It would have made great footage – but it didn’t actually happen!

NF: I think it’s more about “Can you imagine a world where this happens?”. In a documentary you are limited by reality; but you can start to stretch that, when you work with fiction, and you can imagine a reality.

Also, there are some things you can’t tell at all in a documentary – like what’s going on in some of the boardrooms of these huge companies. We can imagine it, we know what’s going on because we see the effects, but we’re not always able to be there. The scale, the possibilities, the stories, the tensions, the conflicts – they can all be brought much more to the forefront.

8: In the film, there was a very effective on-screen leap from the people who were cultivating the coffee and sorting the beans in Ethiopia, to the commodity exchange in the US. For me, it was the coffee traders who appeared as “other”, jumping around and screaming in their blue blazers, not the Ethiopians. Was it a culture shock for you to be immersed in this frenetic activity after spending so much time in Ethiopia?

MF: We made the film in a way that tried to reflect our own extreme experiences, from the fields of Ethiopia to the streets of Manhattan, with everyone gulping Starbucks down their throats. One of the main points of the film is to show how disconnected our world is from the world of people in Ethiopia, but at the same time we’re so intricately linked through the economy. Seeing how immersed those guys in the exchange in New York were was just another reminder of the separate worlds we live in, yet how much of an impact their decisions have on the lives of millions of people on the other side of the world.

8: Was it hard to get permission to film the traders?

MF: Yeah, it takes a long time, but we got there in the end. We thought we’d have access down on the floor, but they said no, shoot from the gallery. When we got up there, we asked if they would open up the windows [onto the floor]. They couldn’t find the key, so we couldn’t get our lens out and all the sound was shut off! We had to send our sound man down into the pit, and radiomiked him up to pick up the sound and relay it back into the camera. We had to clean the windows as much as possible to try to create the feeling of being right in there.

8: One of the keys to the success of the film is that it is not preachy. You don’t demonise individual companies, and you don’t feel you’re evil for drinking coffee after watching it. How did you avoid clanging the judgment bell?

NF: We wanted to reach an audience who aren’t necessarily aware or connected or concerned with the story itself. We didn’t want to make a film with a presumption that people are already on our side. Just because we think that what’s going on is a shocking scenario, if you tell people about it in a loud screamy way, it won’t do anything to bring the audience together, or unite on the fact that what’s going on is completely fucked up! The reality is enough. We don’t need to ram it down people’s throats, nor do we want to go after one company. The story is much, much bigger than one company.

8: Starbucks is practically shorthand for “evil coffee company”… yet of the four or five major players you do list, there are names that most people don’t associate with coffee, like Sara Lee, and Kraft.

NF: Yes, no one realises because they’re 69

Film stills from Black Gold: Coffee pickers in Ethiopia The New York Commodity Exchange

not the brand names on the shelves. Even though we don’t demonise them, what we want is that at the end of the film, people are outraged! It’s in the seeing of the juxtaposition of these two worlds that makes people feel emotional about the disparity of the situation. Often they hadn’t made the connection. Secondly, they ask how can it be that these companies are so complicit in what’s going on. These companies that they buy their toiletries from, their soap from, or their morning triple frappacino wappacino or whatever it is. Then alarm bells ring, and people want to find out more. However, the way some of these companies have reacted would suggest we have made the film in the exact opposite way to that you describe!

Starbucks mounted a PR campaign to discredit the film publicly…

MF: Actually in the global coffee industry, they’re a small player. It’s just they have a presence on the street in every capital city in the world, it seems. It all started

Tadesse Meskela, talking to coffee farmers

when we launched at the Sundance film festival and the vice president of Starbucks North America phoned us up and said “Can we have a chat?”. They sent people to our screening every night and started to tell everyone how good the company is. Journalists described it as a “charm offensive”. Then just before our Seattle screening, Starbucks flew out Tadesse and five other African coffee producers and they mounted this whole event called Africa Coffee Celebration Day. We found out that this was a deliberate attempt to distract attention away from our film. So we went to meet them at their global headquarters, and sat round the table with the senior executives, who gave us a show about how good they are. That gave us the opportunity to ask some searching questions…

8: Like how much of the coffee they buy is Fair Trade?

MF: Yes – less than 6 per cent. The key question we asked – which they didn’t answer – was how much do you pay the coffee growers for a pound of coffee? They wouldn’t answer and nor do any of the big companies. Then when we had a screening in London, they sent press releases to all of their employees and to journalists saying that our information was inaccurate and incomplete. We actually spent six months trying to get Starbucks involved in the film and then they say it didn’t show their side of the story. They said to us subsequently that they regret not being involved in the film in a formal way, and they’re “reviewing their systems” or whatever. When the film got a really big review in the Los Angeles Times, Starbucks responded by putting something on their website saying that Black Gold is coming out at the cinema, but we urge you to feel good about drinking Starbucks coffee.

8: Wasn’t all this flak actually really exciting in that it must have begun to become

obvious the film was having a huge impact?

MF: You get so immersed in what’s happening with the film that it’s difficult to get that appreciation. I think we need more time to pass by. Obviously it’s good a film can have that impact, but that’s just one example of many. Tens of thousands of dollars have gone back to the coffee growers featured in the film, which has helped them to finish off the school they’ve been building, because people have given donations after seeing the film. We’ve debated the issue on BBC news with Kraft. Tadesse Meskela met Tony Blair and took his message straight to 10 Downing Street. They had a screening at the House of Commons and at the World Bank. Nick went to the EU to be part of panel discussing trade policy. We’ve had hundreds of emails from people around the world telling us they want to start changing the way they consume, and start asking more questions of the people they buy from. And we’ve had major international development organisations using Black Gold to change trade rules and to campaign towards multi-national coffee companies.

One in particular used Black Gold to get Starbucks to recognise Ethiopia’s trademark in coffee, which it was blocking. We heard a week ago that it had backed down. Tadesse himself has become a hero in the coffee industry – and his negotiating power has increased: his prices have gone up. People in the industry are going to him and asking what they should do to change the situation.

It’s been quite unbelievable. And it’s still going. To answer your very first question: no, we never expected it to happen!

NF: We didn’t, but it does underline our general philosophy about communicating to a global audience, and how film can be one of the most effective ways of doing that.

8: Was it a distributor’s decision to use subtitles? For me, Tadesse’s English was excellent, yet he was subtitled. Without 70

wishing to sound horribly politically correct, couldn’t that be perceived as offensive?

NF: I agree with you.

MF: I don’t actually think you can clearly understand Tadesse speaking English, especially when he’s in the loud factories, with lots of background noise. So do you run the risk of somebody not understanding what he’s saying when he says that people are getting paid half a dollar a day, or for a pan of coffee they’re getting 25 cents. Do you run the risk of people missing important points over being politically correct?

NF: We did a few test screenings, and given the fact that film was released in the United States first, the general sense was people aren’t necessarily tuned in to different accents. Also, there’s a big difference between hearing it in a surround-sound cinema than on a DVD at home. The vision is a global one, and so the subtitling covers all scenarios.

8: Did Tadesse mention it?

MF: No. He may have felt it but he didn’t ask it. I think I’d rather be accused of being politically incorrect than have anyone not understand it.

8: A couple of other elements in the film stand out as well as the landscape. Music is used in a particularly powerful way, and also you use a device of type appearing across the screen in real time as a way of conveying crucial statistics about the coffee industry.

I found this to be very effective, almost like captioning a photograph, as an aid to memory and of course context.

NF: In the same way that landscape became like a character in the film, we wanted to give a personality to what was going to become a key element of the film when a piece of information was being delivered.

We found a really amazing company, Why Not Associates, who came up with the device for us, as well as other image branding.

MF: As for the music, we wanted people to feel they were going on a journey: 50 per cent of a film is what you hear, so we wanted to make sure the music could have a role.

There were elements of Ethiopian music.

Sundance part-funded this film, so with that came the opportunity to do film making workshops in the States. We eventually chose Andreas Kapsali, who worked really hard to create a caffeine-fuelled score, using samples of Ethiopian music.

8: Aside from the feature film in development, what’s next?

MF: We’re working on a film about the Chinese expansion into Africa, in which we’ll be able to take the ideas of Black Gold to the next level. We want to continue to explore how we take things for granted, and open up a much bigger picture of the world through film 8

An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar

Reviews

A field in Knoxville, Tennessee, is strewn with decomposing corpses. Some of the cadavers are simply unclaimed bodies – lost property, so to speak; others have been donated to science. The gruesome harvest is part of the Forensic Anthropology Research Facility’s study of the decay of human flesh.

In Arkansas a mentally retarded White Tiger, named Kenny, has difficulty breathing, walking and even closing its mouth. His cross-eyed and knock-kneed siblings bear witness to the effects of selective inbreeding in captivity.

Stridently modern, abstract artworks adorn the walls of the CIA Original Headquarters Building in Langley, Virginia. The agency’s enthusiasm for the avant-garde dates from the Cold War when the promotion of American painting was pursued as a cultural and ideological counterpoint to the staid conventions of Soviet Socialist Realism.

These are just three of the subjects and sites photographed by Taryn Simon for her literally extraordinary book, An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar. The publication is the culmination of a project initiated, in the aftermath of 9/11, in reaction to forces within the United States which clamoured for the investigation of the secretive and the unknown in foreign territories and cultures. As Simon puts it: “There was this investment by the power structure in America to unearth the hidden and the unfamiliar beyond its borders. I wanted to look for that inside our borders”.

Over a five year period of brainstorming and Googling, Simon worked with three different producers to compile a fascinatingly heterogeneous list of (among other things) forbidden laboratories, vaults, headquarters and military bases. Despite the diversity of its subjects, the Index suggests that they are all part of a common

Taryn Simon Published by Steidl www.steidl.de £40 (70pp Hardback)

culture. For Simon, “all these different domains weave together… Hollywood intersects with politics which intersects with security and science…”

This remarkable series of photographs was shot using a large format camera and colour film. The elaborate staging and perfect lighting serve to distance the work from traditional documentary or reportage photography. Similarly, the sombre tone of Simon’s restricted “autumnal” palette heightens the pictures’ uncanny artificiality.

The effect is enhanced by her eschewal of drama and spontaneity in favour of the muted and the posed. While these are aesthetic strategies with obvious pictorial consequences, they are also part of Simon’s continued negotiation with the ethics and politics of photographic practice. Her previous work The Innocents, for example, explored the role played by identification photographs in securing the (wrongful) convictions of suspects. The formal devices Simon employs in the Index are a means of establishing her detachment and distance from the subjects she portrays: “I’ve always avoided in my work anything that’s emotional or that pretends I am at one with my subject, or that I am in full understanding of what the subject is doing, or functioning as… and I like to demonstrate that distance through the way I photograph.”

As its title suggests, the Index is modelled on the austere design of scientific publications (with their attendant overtones of objectivity), and in particular the books of early exploration that documented the fauna of the New World. Simon’s pictures are accompanied throughout by extensive, putatively impartial, caption information that establishes a precise context for each picture and which – once read – obliges the viewer to re-engage with the photograph.

71

Not least among Simon’s achievements in this important and often stunning book is the access she secured to her subjects – to the Ku Klux Klan and the CIA, to underground surveillance posts and nuclear submarines. But not, it seems, to Disneyland. As a coda to the photographs, Simon includes Disney Publishing’s letter refusing access to their parks: “Especially during these violent times… the magical spell cast on guests who visit our theme parks is particularly important to protect and helps to provide them with an important fantasy they can escape to”. It is a measure of the ambition and accomplishment of American Index – of its conceptual, photographic and ethical integrity – that it can so effectively break spells and so thoroughly dispel fantasies. Especially during these violent times.

Guy Lane An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar is on at The Photographers Gallery, London, from 13 September – 11 November

Research Marijuana Crop Grow Room, National Center for Natural Products Research, Oxford, Mississippi ©Taryn Simon / Steidl / Gagosian

www.foto8.com/bookshop

The Day-to-Day Life of Albert Hastings KayLynn Deveney Published by Princeton Architectural Press www.papress.com £10 (116pp Hardback)

On a splintered sill, against ageing mildew and the imperfect glazing of a modest Welsh apartment, a wind-snapped daffodil is held upright in a teacup by taut rubber bands. Wounded while in flower and almost insignificant, it has been saved by the caring, purposeful hands of the retired Albert Hastings.

When KayLynn Deveney first met the elderly neighbour who has given his name, by frail yet dignified hand, to the cover of her first book, she was living in a basement flat in Newport, South Wales.

Amid the transient carelessness, urban disassociation and abrasion of another town negotiating its place after industry, Albert’s gentle nurturing of the simple garden and animals surrounding his home became a singular and life-affirming interruption to the photographer’s daily routines. A friendship developed between the two that has resulted in a rich collaboration of photographs and thought. While the book rightly marks a full and layered life, it hits another level, expanding to speak of the uses of photography, of what we value, and the possibilities of long-term committed documentary practice.

When the two met, Albert Hastings had already lived a full and difficult life. Living through World War Two, he became an engineer and enjoyed a marriage that was then cut short by the early death of his wife in the 1950s. Despite her absence, the family photographs that are represented here (in balance with Deveney’s carefully made and sensitive colour pictures) create a clear bridge to the present. Albert’s hands for example, always busy, cut bread for the pigeons he tries to tame “for the camera”, as across the page (from a long-past decade) his daughter charms Albert and the birds on a winter’s day out.

Alone, Albert made much of his own www.foto8.com/bookshop

time and the routines and preoccupations that isolation must generate. Such interests are well presented in the book, becoming interruptions that hint at a charged and thoughtful mind. On stained card Albert’s biro plans of clocks and their workings become surrogate photographs, precious keepsakes, their line and narration echoed in the patterns of dampness and ageing that the photographer relates in the elderly man’s home. The work talks of organisation, of the patterns and punctuations of a man ably moving between the mundane acts of survival and stimulation. On cardboard, before passing the magazine to a friend down the street, Albert copies the times and titles of the week’s TV programmes that will get him through the quiet, whisky-nipped evenings. KayLynn is sometimes there too, stopping by, with her camera resting on her lap for steadiness in the twilight. The snooker, Richard and Judy, confessional TV, overloaded plug sockets on plain walls… these are beautiful pictures from nearly nothing, complementing her studies of laughing, thinking, and shaving that are both charming and profound.

It would be easy to challenge this work as a project set away from the more pressing agendas. How can a piece of work about one man speak of anything more? Yet this book is not so easy to dismiss. Each picture selected was pasted to a lined paper sheet, on which Albert was invited to comment.

Though the photographs alone are strong enough, Albert occasionally takes them elsewhere. As much as Larry Sultan, exasperated at his mother’s pretence of sleep and unwillingness to release control, recognised a way of talking about the tensions behind relationships, Albert Hastings relates an agility of mind through notes that range from innocence and pathos to conspiracy and confession. After 72

a stroke, still and pensive, he notes that he is waiting in a bay in a hospital that struggles to find a bed. The shortcomings of the wider economy are lapping at this man’s world.

Moving through this intimate book, through pictures that bring us so close to Albert and his small home with its modest and gentle logic, we can’t help but care for him and those alone like him. Deeply.

KG

Beat: Photographs of the Beat Poetry Era Christopher Felver Published by Last Gasp www.lastgasp.com £18.99 (347pp Hardback)

The first thing that strikes you on opening this charmingly chaotic collection of images, verse, correspondences and assorted ephemera is its resemblance to a scrapbook.

Yet this somehow seems suitable, given its subject: the rise and fall, and periodic rise again, of the Beat generation.

Adopting a broadly chronological approach, it opens with a succession of missives – most typed, others crazily handwritten – from defining names of the Beat poetry movement. There’s a rambling letter home by the late Neal Cassady, immortalised as Dean Moriarty in On the Road, written on headed paper from a Californian drugs rehabilitation facility in 1958. His wife, Carolyn, contributes a lengthy treatise on Allen Ginsberg’s infatuation with her husband, while from Christopher Felver to her there’s a probing email, asking intimate questions about this relationship.

The opening salvo is a scribbled note

by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, founder of San Francisco’s fabled City Lights bookstore.

In it, he repeats his belief (oft-stated in interviews, including one with this writer) that, in today’s world, the “word of dissident, non-violent, crazy wisdom and beatitude” encapsulated in the “Beat message” is needed more than ever.

So how does the book communicate this message? In the only way the Beats knew: through a jumble of words, rhymes and images. Aptly, Felver relates the Beat story, from its origins at the seminal Six Gallery poetry event in October 1955 to the present day, like the director of an existential road movie. The ghosts of Kesey, Kerouac and, especially, Cassady haunt this book.

Fittingly, Felver steers us through their picaresque misadventures as if looking through the lens for Fellini.

Far from allowing this reflective odyssey

to become stream-of-consciousness, though, as so easily could have happened, he reins in his prose. It’s punchy, precise and all the more evocative for that. Take his recollection of a reunion with Surrealist poet Ted Joans: “Ted Joans was passing through town from Paris and needed a place to stay. He made it his raison d’être to know just about everyone. When we met in San Francisco he told me, ‘keep movin’, kid’. I liked his philosophy.”

But enough of the prose: what of the photographs? The one disappointment (to some extent inevitable, given Felver’s belated personal introduction to the Beat, at the tail end of the Seventies) is the lack of early material. There are scarcely any images here from before the 1980s. It’s as if the participants, not to mention spectators, were all so addled that they simply forgot to take pictures – or, at least, any worth reprinting. Either that or the whole thing really was, as it must so often have seemed, some kind of collective hallucination.

This criticism aside, in tailing the Beats through their dotage, Felver produces some unforgettable images. A full-page portrait of Ginsberg, taken a year before his death in 1997, sees him stooped in a bookshop beneath the presciently worded sign: “Beat literature upstairs.”

In many of his photos, Felver captures a stubborn refusal in his subjects to grow old in spirit, whatever their bodies might be telling them. The longer the beards, the thicker the specs, the more youthful the stares. Two juxtaposed photos of George Whitman epitomise this paradox: in one, taken in 1994, he poses in a library wearing a tweed jacket and tie – the picture of a country gent. In the next, shot a decade later, he sports a leonine mane and long velvet jacket: the bohemian reborn.

Felver’s tribute to the Beats is witty and 73

heartfelt. Messy and erratic it may be at times, but would Ginsberg, Kerouac et al have wanted it any other way?

James Morrison

www.foto8.com/bookshop

Motherland Simon Roberts Published by Chris Boot www.chrisboot.com £25 (192pp Hardback)

Russia, despite its fascinating history, straddling Europe and Asia, east and west, old and new, remains a country whose heartlands are rarely visited by Westerners.

A lifelong fascination with this inspiring place led photojournalist Simon Roberts and his wife Sarah to pack their bags and spend a year travelling around every nook and cranny of the world’s biggest country, covering over 75,000 km and crossing 11 time zones.

The book contains both landscapes and portraits and Roberts has chosen to move away from his usual “shoot-from-the-hip” reportage style and concentrate on posed portraits. The photographs are laid out chronologically, following Roberts’ journey, which began in August 2004 in Magadan in the Russian Far East and ended in Moscow in July 2005, and are interspersed with quotes by literary and political figures that have shaped Russia’s modern identity.

Many of the portraits are very intimate and even a little exotic, such as the one of wrestler Zhenya Seychov, from the “FarEastern Academy of Physical Education” in Khabarovsk, giving the book an anthropological feel. I am enthralled by the photograph of the “Provodnista” (female train attendant), Tatiana Hozhenest. Not only does she smash the stereotype of the drab Provodnista with a “drag queen” style hairdo, she is also gorgeous. And I can’t help but smile at the photograph of a young Siberian teenager wearing an Eminem hoodie (I wonder if they have Asbos in Russia too); nowhere in this world is immune to the reaches of American popular culture. The “sexy” uniform worn by the young student waitress who works at the Café Pilot in Magadan, wouldn’t look out of place on the pages of FHM magazine and seems entirely at odds with the rather sedate and bland interior of the www.foto8.com/bookshop

café itself on the opposite page. Roberts wanted to create a “visual statement about contemporary Russia”, and indeed manages to avoid the obvious and clichéd images of drunk Russians falling over or drug-addled youngsters in drab Siberian towns, with the exception of one photograph of a distinctly shabby woman and her worse for wear male companion in the Jewish Autonomous region of Birobidzhan, in the Russian Far East. However, elsewhere, the frequently posed portraits can sometimes feel staid and repetitive.

Many of the landscape photographs have a painterly quality to them; the frozen warship in Murmansk, (which bares an uncanny resemblance to German rock group Rammstein’s Rosenrot album cover) and Alexandrovsk-Sakhalinsky Port on Sakhalin Island. These are also the most haunting photographically and the ones where the quality of the medium format camera he shot them on can really be recognised. They demand to be seen blown-up large and hung in a gallery. Oddly enough the images of destruction and displaced people in wartorn Chechnya are both the least interesting and most stereotypical. These are images we have all seen before in the news.

The book is well designed, with the single page images just about big enough to do them justice. The inclusion of a map and list of the places Roberts visited at the beginning, along with the clear captions that accompany the images throughout, help you to travel around Russia in your mind and make a mental connection with this vast country without ever having to leave your living room. However I can’t help feeling a little greedy in wanting to see even more images, to know more about the people’s lives. Maybe it is just too difficult to cover such a vast topic in a 192 page book. Lecturer, translator, and expert in 74

all things Russian, Rosamund Bartlett’s in depth explanation of the meaning of the word Rodina (Motherland) at the beginning of the book is not only too heavy on the literary history but also about five pages too long. Roberts’ own story of his epic journey (detailing the discovery that Sarah was pregnant halfway through their trip!) would have been a far more appropriate and interesting introduction. Instead this is tucked away at the back with the acknowledgements.

While the “lifelong fascination” with Russia I share with Roberts is not necessary to appreciate the photographs and the amount of work that went into this compelling document, some knowledge of Russia and its history will certainly make it a more enjoyable experience. Lydia Bigley

Daddy Where are You? Tierney Gearon Published by Steidldangin www.steidl.de £50 (156pp Hardback)

These are disturbing, unsettling, visceral images, clothed in canary yellow, played out under bright American skies. Daddy, Where Are You? is at its heart an exploration of Tierney Gearon’s relationship with her mother. There is a sense that in capturing these often brutal but always honest images of her, she is coming to terms with a fathoms-deep bond that is changing as both women age. While the book does not suppose itself a portrait of her mother descending into the slough of mental illness, it cleverly invites the reader to judge where those invisible borders lie that delineate the mad from the sane.

An image of a slightly ramshackle but resplendently yellow house (Gearon’s mother’s home) opens the book, softly backlit on one corner, looking for all the world like the portraits of Mother that come later. Next, a single red rose stands proud and erect amid undergrowth… the air is thick with symbolism. Then, startlingly, provocatively, the first image we see of Mother is locked in a lovers’ embrace with her daughter. Straddled across her seated mother, pulling her face towards her in an urgent kiss full on the mouth, Gearon often puts herself in the frame, her roles colliding as narrator, participant and observer, mirroring the jostling for position of the id, ego and super-ego.

Through a mix of staged images – usually Mother hidden behind various grotesque masks – and stolen moments, Gearon creates something quite extraordinary with her formally composed, colour-saturated images. She mines the bottomless well of the unconscious and comes up for air holding jewels from the depths. That she does this through photography is auspicious for the medium; its great subtleties, its capacity to reveal more than “reality”, its ability to hint at what’s hidden are masterfully employed

by Gearon here. She knows the power of capturing her own naked body alongside that of her mother. Freud has devoted much time and writing to the subject of transgenerational inheritance in which “the repetition of the same features or character-traits or vicissitudes” is uncannily in evidence. By often adopting the same physical poses as her still-supple mother, we see mother and daughter as part of an unbroken line. That Gearon is herself pregnant in some pictures adds to this sense of maternal lineage.

In a society where we habitually see airbrushed images of physically “perfect” women, it is a shock to see the naked body of an older woman. Gearon invites us to stare at soft, pendulous breasts, a sagging belly with a map of childbirth etched into the skin, legs that can still reach back over the body and behind the ears. It is still more difficult to comprehend two images positioned together across a double page: in the first, a naked Gearon holds her mother in a tender embrace, sitting together on a bed, an empty bed next to them. In the opposing image, Mother occupies the previously empty bed, watching her daughter, still naked, straddling the only man present in these photographs. The title of the book comes back to haunt us here.

Gearon’s children are present in this collection; her muses, she calls them, but our attention is always drawn back to the power of Mother, never more so than in a series of four close-ups, in which she is seemingly gripped by a whirling, disorienting confusion. Elsewhere, arms outstretched, eyes closed in reverie, she is as free and joyful as a child herself. The book’s closing images find her as erect as the fir trees that provide a backdrop, then we see her retreating in to the woods, and, finally, hidden once more, in a strange, silicone75

type mask that distorts her features into LaLaLand lips and Groucho Marx eyebrows.

Mother, who are you?

After Gearon’s professional list of acknowledgements and thanks at the end of the book, Mother returns with great force to tell us exactly who she is. The canny woman in the flowered grass green shawl under a sprawling blue sky points directly at the camera, a knowing smile illuminating her features. This profound book feels like a victory for the power of photography and for the human being in all its bewildering, fragile, conflicting states of mind.

MH

www.foto8.com/bookshop

The Black House Colin Jones Michael Hoppen Gallery 1 – 27 June 2007 www.michaelhoppengallery.com

Colin Jones’ The Black House looks considerably different now from when it was first exhibited 30 years ago. History has caught up with the bravado of the men and women therein and our worst fears have been realised.

We approach these images today with the knowledge that more than half of the black youth interned at the Harambee project during the first half of the 1970s, and photographed for this series, now reside in mental institutions. These photos then are a record of the failures of governmental intervention, of social services, of the destructive forces of scapegoating, ostracism and our society’s love of a primordial form of exhibitionism.

In 1977, these photographs might have been taken as an attempt to raise awareness of the facts of social injustice and to humanise the disenfranchised black youth of Harambee – and Jones must have been seen as a maverick photojournalist; but today Jones’ position is seen differently. As documentor of the victims, his responsibility has changed.

The photographs in the exhibition The Black House first came about as a commission for the Sunday Times. The first pictures accompanied an article published under the title On the Edge of the Ghetto.

There is a problematic tinge of exoticism, exhibitionism, and voyeurism even contained in this title. What is the original purpose for Jones’ photographs? Shock, scandal, exploitation or awareness?

Jones’ portfolio takes its name from the historic Black House in north London where the black empowerment activist and murderer Michael de Freitas, also known as Michael X, briefly set up a commune in the early 1970s. The Harambee project, located less than a mile from the original Black House, was a government-subsidised www.foto8.com/bookshop

halfway house for vulnerable black youth, who were mainly second-generation AfroCaribbean migrants, and who experienced discrimination in employment and housing. The name “Black House” stuck with journalists but also residents of the hostel who pandered to the media attention regardless of whether it portrayed them as rogue or delinquent, when few if any social opportunities were allowed to them.

Jones’ photo project can then be seen as an effort to reclaim and redefine a uniquely black identity as expressed in Harambee house in Holloway. In the photos, we see a community of black youth trying on different identities like the clothes that seem to slip off them in the pictures. This is their timelessness. They don’t seem trapped in the fads of the moment.

But the faces of the people in Jones’ pictures are different perhaps from what he intended. They want to be left alone and feel as if they should be. Jones’ presence in the Harambee project, where he occasionally slept, is necessarily an intrusion, and he knows this. But one worries whether Jones is stealing what little privacy these people have left.

Artistically, what should have been the greatest strength of Jones’ project – that it was shot with “no light meter and no artificial meter”– is actually its greatest weakness. While the photographs professes to align themselves with a tradition of Walker Evans, they are taken impatiently, not removed from the weight of their circumstances. Realising Jones’ limitations, we may imagine that he could have benefited from the accoutrements or re-touchings – which he shuns – that can so often deliver a larger commentary in antithetical relief to a “bright light”. In the end, we are left with the impression that the story has yet to be properly told.

76

The photographs can also be said to lack variety, a variety of perspective and angles, and we are strained at times to even involve ourselves in what we accept as an “important event” demanding our attention.

In the portraits, Jones tries to capitalise on the idea of capturing an “important time capsule”, but instead strives for an epic style. The situation becomes increasingly frustrating when his “observations” do not always bring us closer to the mental lives of the victims and so we watch apparently immobilised as these faces evaporate from history.

The photographs that function best and reveal a poignant artistry are his group shots. Emblematically, a bunch of men are hunched over a table playing cards with their backs to the viewer. They are shrouded in darkness and their faces appear only to be partially in focus. One man looks back vaguely in the camera’s presence acknowledging its presence but also shying away from its oppressive gaze.

Jason Ranon Uri Rotstein

Silesia Michal Cala Published by Galeria Zderzak www.zderzak.pl £12 (136pp Hardback)

One of the pleasures of going to meet photographers in far-flung places, in this case at Foto Festival 07 in Lodz, Poland, is encountering brilliant bodies of work one would never have found. The astonishing rise of Malick Sidibé, from studio photographer in Bamako, Mali, to winner of this year’s Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale, in 13 years, is a case in point. The work of Polish photographer Michal Cala is impressive, not merely for the strength of his elegiac black and white photography from coal mining areas of Silesia which resemble the best of Robert Frank’s work from Wales, but also for their documentary power in depicting an era and an industry now fast disappearing, the industrial Poland of the 1970s and early 1980s before the fall of Communism.

Born in Torun in 1948, Michal Cala studied in Warsaw then moved to Tychy where he co-founded a photographers association KRON and became a member of the Union of Polish Art Photographers.

From the mid-1970s he photographed the industrial landscape of Walbrzych, Silesia in south-western Poland. Photographed with wide-angle lenses to show the immensity of the coal industry, then at its peak, Cala depicts the superhuman scale of factory buildings and slag heaps towering over tiny humans and their small ways. It is both a metaphor for the giganticism of Communist era production and an elegiac document of the people who helped build the country.

Cala captures not just the perfectly shaped slag heaps silhouetted in black against the white of a polluted sky, an image that looks like pure abstract art, but he also examines the houses and people living in the shadow of those mountains of waste. The brick fronts of city buildings with children, playing in the streets or posed in the middle of the road on their way back from school or

shopping, puts a human face on the working families of the state of workers and peasants as the ruling party liked to describe Poland.

The images are familiar to anyone who has seen pictures from similar factory towns be they in Pittsburgh or Essen or Wales.

The work was murderous whether under capitalism or communism, the human cost uncountable. Yet Cala, like W Eugene Smith or Josef Koudelka, is able to find a lyrical beauty in the darkness. In one image a swan glides across the lake by a power plant, its belching stacks mirrored in the placid and undoubtedly toxic water. Birches glint in weak sun before a range of slag heaps. Great black factories, dark Satanic mills each and every one of them to be sure, are set off against snow-covered fields. Cars emerge from garages or curve their way past the massive factories. Great cooling towers loom over tiny buildings, their windows reflecting almost supernaturally in uncertain light.

Rivulets of water wend through fields of waste or retreat from parched landscapes.

Cala’s images can be starkly beautiful.

After the fall of Communism in the last years of the 1980s and early 1990s, the industrial policies of Poland, as elsewhere in the East, changed. The mines, mostly depleted, were closed in the 1990s. In 1995 a Museum of Industry and Technology was built, a post-modern gesture seen everywhere in the West where old industries have been abandoned. Walbrzych, the former Waldenburg or “Forest Castle,” is slowly becoming a tourist centre and the site of new investment by the likes of Toyota even as its citizens emigrate because of 23.6 per cent unemployment (the official figure from December 2006). Now, after years of cleaning up, Walbrzych describes itself as one of Poland’s greenest cities. Cala has left us with an amazing document of a bygone era.

BK 77

www.foto8.com/bookshop

Invisible Cities

Wall

Paul Seawright Published by Ffotogallery www.ffotogallery.org £25 (128pp Hardback)

Kai Wiedenhofer Published by Steidl www.steidl.de £20 (104pp Hardback)

It’s difficult to get through a newspaper these days without coming across a reference to China’s inevitable world domination with its unstoppable population growth and economic expansion.

Meanwhile the population explosion in various cities across Africa is relatively underplayed in media reports. The fact of it is, however, that the number of people living in cities in Africa has risen nearly tenfold from 1950 to 2000 ( from 32.7 million to over 309 million) and by 2025 this number will again be doubled, with cities like Lagos housing more than 20 million people. Lagos, Johannesburg, Lusaka and Addis Ababa are the four cities that Paul Seawright sought out in his new book, Invisible Cities.

As a document of the transformation of the 21st century city in the developing world one would expect scenes of mass chaos, traffic, endless buildings and hordes of people but this is not the case in Seawright’s photographs. Approaching his work from an intellectual perspective, Seawright does not see himself as a photojournalist as such, at least definitely not one about to reiterate the post-colonial discourse with a set of pictures on yet more starving Africans. Seawright’s work, as with his project on Afghanistan, goes beyond this to comment on a deeper scale.

The images in Invisible Cities form a sort of quiet prelude to the chaos that you would expect. The pictures here are captured on the outskirts of the cities, in the slums and shantytowns, where the majority of people live. And rarely are people pictured in Seawright’s work; they function as more of a backdrop than a focus and yet the images feel so openly intimate. Neither do we know which city we are in, each photograph melding into a representation of African life in general. Inside a dark bar, a woman and child sitting inside an empty medical waiting www.foto8.com/bookshop

room or a nondescript office entrance, with the words “Knock ‘N’ Wait Outside” handwritten on the door, the images imbue a strange sense of calming familiarity and somehow these places do not seem so foreign to our own cities after all.

The essay by John Reader acts as an introduction to the methodology behind the book and outlines the history of “the city”, providing the work with quite a broad context but allowing facts and figures to stress just how alarming the situation is.

Major cities in Africa continue to expand and bulge to accommodate the exodus from the rural areas but ultimately are not sustaining their inhabitants. Although people here are better off than in the country, they are still barely surviving. In the case of Nairobi, its design as part of a colonial experiment allowed for an overabundance of greenery in the city centre, which for some time was a blessing for its starving residents by use of urban agriculture. Soon enough this was made illegal lest outsiders see the city as the sprawling slum that it is, upholding African politicians’ tradition of keeping up appearances.

The quiet beauty of Seawright’s vision of these African cities confounds us. This is not the Africa we think we know; it is less foreign though its problems no less troubling. Even the shape of the book is unexpected (37cm long by only 24cm wide), again causing the reader to think twice. Additionally, the way in which the images are titled in the back of the book (as opposed to captions appearing alongside each image) distances his work from traditional documentary photography. This is not a didactic work, rather a thoughtful, questioning approach to the shared global responsibility of living in the 21st century.

LH

78

Wiedenhofer’s new book, built around the austere concrete wall that partitions Israeli and Palestinian territories so aggressively, embraces two discrete panoramic strategies to relate the impact of this sheer and polarising structure. In the first approach, ample and engaging reportage fully exploits the extremes of a wide frame. Uneasy scenes become heavily peopled frames of protest and unrest, rendered as rich charcoal tapestries. They are notable for their precision and successfully dramatic evocations of the tensions that seem to pace daily life in the region. The incongruous presence of soldiers amid inconsequential domestic affairs serves to emphasise oppression and disquiet at each turn.

Though using a format that can so easily become a mannerist trap for photographers – leaving spare and redundant space within frames – Wiedenhofer works with dexterity. A family steps through shadow at a checkpoint, awkwardly close to dangling and booted soldiers legs; through silhouettes, railings and doors decorated with black hearts, groups of men stand and look at the wall as others compress the tarmac on a new and abrupt road layout.

In such a sterile, inorganic scene, only a few trees that dwarf the concrete wall seem capable of weathering history. Wiedenhofer plays with this motif more thoroughly in the second strategy he employs, where withdrawn, topographical colour photographs place settlements in context against the wider contested terrain.

Following the fall of the land, the wall cascades through an uneven landscape.

Groups of men pray against stony ground at the foot of a sweeping hill as olive trees mask shaded, inanimate observers. These photographs become quieter in style, the photographer seeming to prefer looser colour frames. In design, merging the

India Notes Raghu Rai and Tiziano Terzani Published by Editions Intervalles www.editionsintervalles.com £29 (142pp Hardback)

two styles isn’t seamless – it’s a difficult bridge to cross, and layout decisions seem to acknowledge this, strangely requiring a tilt to read rare and tall vertical inclusions.

Yet the work remains a pertinent, cohesive mapping of a troubling addition to a nervous and unsettled land.

KG

“For many India is a mental image, a fantasy kingdom, a castle in the air.” This is how Armand De Saint Sauveur begins his introduction to India Notes, a compilation of photographs by renowned chronicler of India Raghu Rai and words by the late Italian journalist Tiziano Terzani. This vast country, one of wonder, of contradiction and of disparity, India indeed occupies a unique place in many people’s imagination.

Nominated to join Magnum Photos in 1977 by Henri Cartier-Bresson, Raghu Rai’s photographs span over two decades, presented in both colour and black and white, covering the length and breadth of the country. Born in what is now part of Pakistan, Rai shows through his images a deep understanding and affinity with India’s complicated national psyche and its people. Rai captures a man at the exact point that he throws himself off a high wall into a pool of water, two others gazing up from the water. The structure he is leaping off appears to be crumbling; old jagged bricks jut out at different angles. In the background, three high-rise housing blocks dominate the skyline. India, old and new, is brought together with an immense sense of freedom. Rai’s photography distils complex contradictions with seeming ease. In the cold dawn light of another image, a barechested man wades into a wide, sweeping river. Ahead of him a line of trees is reflected in the still water and in his hands is a dead baby. Beneath the surface beauty of these pictures, there lies a cruelty.

The images are interspersed with text by Terzani, whose time as foreign correspondent for German weekly Der Spiegel and Italian newspapers Corriere Della Sera and La Repubblica saw him become one of the best-known journalists in Italy. He was a man of conviction and passion, fighting tirelessly throughout 79

his career to put an end to totalitarianism and what he saw as the great evils of the world. His writings in India Notes are full of tenderness and humility for a country that was to become his spiritual home. His journalistic musings and notes about his life in India are coupled with extracts of Indian folk stories and tales from the Bhagavad Gita and Upanishads that complement Raghu Rai’s narrative photography.

And yet, together, for all their combined beauty and wonder, the photographs and written extracts seem to lack any real purpose. The title of the book seems apt.

These are indeed only notes; notes that seem to fall short of creating a concise body of work, either literary or photographic.

The brush strokes are so broad that there is a sense that both men’s talents are being somehow wasted. Neither Rai’s extraordinary photographs nor Terzani’s text is given the space to breathe. You want both to say more, and yet by the very nature of India Notes, you are only allowed to scratch the surface, rendering India forever “a fantasy kingdom.”

Josh Lustig

www.foto8.com/bookshop

Finding, Transmitting, Receiving

Borders

Hannah Collins Published by Black Dog Publishing www.blackdogonline.com £29.95 (306pp Hardback)

Centre de Cultura Contemporania de Barcelona 3 May – 30 September www.cccb.org

Finding, Transmitting, Receiving is the first book to examine nearly two decades’ worth of work by expatriate British photographer and filmmaker Hannah Collins. A former Turner Prize nominee, she graduated from the Slade School of Fine Art in 1979 and since then has used photography as a means of conducting an exploration of such recurring themes as home and homelessness, social marginality and the urban spaces of modernity. Collected here are pictures from projects undertaken in Spain, Poland and the Eastern Bloc; found photographs from Central Russia; and scripts from films made with rural and gypsy communities.

The photographs on the front and back cover of this anthology are of caged goldfinches hanging outdoors in an anonymous social environment. Seemingly innocuous images, perhaps. However, they serve to introduce concerns that surface throughout much of Collins’ work. The caging of wild birds is, for example, part of the traditional life of a gypsy community inhabiting the vast, Franco-built, housing estates on the periphery of Barcelona with whom Collins has spent over a year photographing and filming. In the context of this book, her Spanish photographs emerge as part of a larger project examining lives and locations marked by an ambivalent relationship to modernity. The caged birds, then, function as emblems of a gypsy way of life with its own traditions which, she has said, “create such a separate and often alienated position in relation to the dominant forces at work in an urban Spanish context today”.

In a similar vein Collins has photographed the makeshift homes of the impoverished and the itinerant. In “A Home in three Places (Israel)”, a single, unfinished, dwelling is pictured against a wall of highwww.foto8.com/bookshop

rise commercial property. And in “Love Home, Calcutta” a speeding train thunders above the improvised roofs of a row of home-made wooden shacks. Both pictures invite reflection on the relationship between the modern and those it remainders.

A bonus of the opportunity to present her work in book form is that Collins can present a provocative juxtaposition and interweaving of pictures and themes from different stages of her career. But the monumental public scale of her photographs – and their testing of the boundaries of photographic display – is unfortunately lost in the translation to the printed page.

This challenging and sometimes difficult work undertakes a representation of some of the pockets of resistance to modernity – the awkward squad, if you like. A mark and a strength of Collins’ book is that it does so in a language adequate to the critical nature of that undertaking.

GL

80

We live in a time when millions of human beings are crossing frontiers while others find themselves cut off by those very same borders. Frontiers exist in many different forms from the physical or political to the cultural or psychological, an ever-present fact of contemporary living, a space which both divides and joins.

The exhibition at the CCCB curated in collaboration with Michel Foucher shows a series of eight “worlds”, each one focusing on global hotspots, where frontiers represent points of conflict, or of contact, between different countries, cultures and people. For each zone, six photojournalists have been invited to show their work in order to dissect the phenomenon of the frontier. It resolves into a unique visual record that perhaps helps us gain a better understanding of the consequences and long-term effects of borders on the people and places directly surrounding them.

The first room examines Europe, a region where frontiers have historically been a source of internal problems, but since 1957 and the emergence of the European Union, have posed a new question: where does Europe really begin and end? The idea of “Europe” is in a constant state of flux as new global realities force us to redefine its limits.

This part of the exhibition takes us along the external borders of countries which have recently joined the European Union and as such find themselves on the very edge of the western front. Frédéric Sautereau’s photographs, despite being aesthetically underwhelming, convey this interesting geopolitical history that is still very much in the making.

The next section addresses the more than 185 million people in the world who have abandoned a past, a culture, a family in search of a better life abroad. Olivier Jobard’s stunning selection of photos

Bauwagen

© Olivier Jobard

Stefan Canham Published by Peperoni Books www.peperonihaus.de Eur35 (144pp Hardback)

recounts the life of just one such immigrant.

Having met 22-year-old Kingsley in Cameroon the photographer accompanied him every step of the way on his epic journey from his country of origin in May 2004 to the final destination, France, some six months later. Image after image, Jobard’s photos bear witness to both the hardship and the hope of his subject’s experience.

It is a telling story of African clandestine migration through Europe’s main artery of access.

Other border zones seen through the looking glass are the ones, for example, which remain closed between North and South Korea, the land disputes in the contentious region of Kashmir, the frontier being formed between Israel and Palestine and the economic challenges of the borders arising from globalisation as is the case with Mexico and the United States.

Perhaps one of the most insightful parts of the exhibition is Eric Roux-Fontaine’s archive of images that he has built through turning his camera on a community that can be described to be “borderless”: the gypsies, dispersed throughout Europe and facing historical prejudice that suggests that the concept of the border is often as much a frontier of the mind as a physical barrier.

Tim Clark

In the autumn of 2002 German police evicted “Bambule”, one of Hamburg’s alternative trailer parks, which had been tolerated by the local authorities since 1994 on a centrally situated plot of wasteland owned by the city. In the months to follow, the inhabitants and their supporters organised weekly protest marches through Hamburg. While media coverage was intense, its focus was on the police and demonstrators, rather than the trailers themselves. Consequently, it is from that date that photographer Stefan Canham’s interest in documenting the topic – by purely focusing on the homes themselves – was first aroused.

According to Canham, “Bambule” is part of a nationwide phenomenon. In the 1980s people began to use “Bauwagen” – narrow caravan-type trailers originally built to house builders on building sites – and there are currently over 100 such sites in German towns and cities, from Flensburg up on the Danish border down to Tuebingen and Munich. It is estimated that there may be as many as 10,000 people living in “Bauwagen”.

The book is effectively split into two parts: interior shots taken from a central point of view in colour (making up the majority of the book), contrasted with exterior views shot in black and white. Canham’s photographs of interiors are clearly meant to show how homely these trailers can be.

They range from the ramshackle student kind of bedroom filled with books, guitars and all other kinds of junk with wires and cables hanging from every corner, to those that have been meticulously put into good order. All show the unique “personal touches” of the owner and each shot cleverly lets the viewer build up a picture of what the owner might look like, without revealing their identity. What is also remarkable is 81

how different each trailer looks given their meagre dimensions, and how well equipped most are – many have stoves, stereos, telephones and computer equipment.

The exteriors, for the main part, offer a more stark contrast. The trailers are positioned on wasteland on the outskirts of cities and towns, obscured by clumps of trees and foliage or hidden by dilapidated buildings. These are homes on the margins of German society – as are their inhabitants, according to traditional prejudices.

The central idea behind Canham’s photographs is that people should reserve judgment about the inhabitants and judge these homes on their own merits – as alternative homes in alternative surroundings. Canham’s pictures overwhelmingly point out that these inhabitants –which include students, musicians, punks, hippies, actors and Tai Chi teachers – can be as house proud as those people who live more conventionally and can equally be defined as a community as those living in a tower block. Neil Hodge

www.foto8.com/bookshop

The Garden

Phantom Shanghai

Arno Fischer Published by Hatje Cantz www.hatjecantz.com Eur50 (92pp Hardback)

Greg Girard Published by The Magenta Foundation www.magentafoundation.org £25 (244pp Hardback)

A fragile branch suspended against a pink sky. A leaf lapping up the light of dusk. A stone with a human face upturned and exposed through the changing seasons, constant through sunshine, leaf-fall, frosttopped snow. Fischer’s garden portrays a wild love domesticated through the camera, enchantment held still, a visual meditation on retreat, sanctuary, duration. Each image acts like the line of a poem gradually evoking memories, stories and microscopic sagas as the pages turn; mimicking a slow turn round the garden of an old friend or relative, the muted fuzzy remembrances of a somnambulist aware only of colours merged and blurred. Images that murmur “we must be still and still moving” like wind or water, as TS Eliot wrote.

It’s fitting then that the book is virtually textless, without title-plates, explanations or literary excuses. It’s enough that it’s simply prefaced by a few lines of Eliot alone, perfectly conveying the allegory explored

by Fischer in this series of stills that home “is where one starts from”; a platform for departure in a metaphysical sense, a space which allows you to roam and dream without ever physically going anywhere or leaving at all.

Having spent 30 years photographing the farmhouse garden where he has lived and worked, you gain a sense of deep intimacy looking at these photos, of spending “an evening under lamplight” with Fischer, “an evening with the photograph album” as Eliot put it. Laid out on the page to resemble the original polaroids, the spot UV varnish enhancing the depth and colour of the actual images, you come to feel almost as if you’re sat on the garden porch with Fischer, fireflies flitting through this personal revelation of a life’s work.

The Garden acts as a considered recreation of those intangible moments www.foto8.com/bookshop

most of us recall as a mood or tone of a special time, but fail to record – as much as it celebrates and plays with perfecting the art of the polaroid itself. The fleeting moments set in sequence here are certainly not as accidental or ephemeral as they appear to be. Precious but never prissy, Fischer’s crystalline reflections of the quiet life are simultaneously an exploration of and exercise in the constraints of working within one format.

Shot entirely on polaroid, there’s a trickery behind the ruse of spontaneity that proves tricky to expose. Yes, some of these photos have been multiply processed, colour enhanced, manipulated in the lab.

But there’s no doubt that any attempt to investigate or pin down quite whether or how Fischer’s photos have been fiddled with is to also deny them the chemical magic they so quietly, and beautifully, insist upon.

Colette Meacher

82

Time is the essence in Canadian photographer Greg Girard’s images of a fading Shanghai. Girard’s intensely rich, and yet ghostly still lives capture a moment that will soon be over. His scenes are of a Shanghai that has steadily been demolished under the relentless march for progress: documenting the ramshackle alleyways and crowded, chaotic housing of bricks and wood cleared for slick highrises.

His long exposures bathe in the halflights of twilight and soak up the coloured glow from street lights, lending hues of pink, purple, green and blue to many of the images. Figures are predominantly absent, appearing often as a dark blur, most movingly in Scrap Collectors, Zhongshan Nan Lu. In a great pile of rubble, beneath a dormant digger, people rake through the pickings of another day’s demolition. In the distance are the bright lights of the modern city, as if the battle is for dominance of the night sky and what can be salvaged in the shadows.

Electricity is a current that runs throughout the book. Within the old housing, where narrow spaces are cramped with pieces of furniture, towels, flasks, brooms, fly-swats, pots, pans and baskets – the basics of living – cables run precariously up the walls, dangling and tangled into loose order. In one close-up shot, we see a spaghetti mess of wires fixed to a grubby wall, thick with grime and peeling with damp. The makeshift nature of life within these walls clearly draws Girard in; lured by the mystery and human stories that have adapted their needs to the environment with necessary inventiveness. The windows glow warmly and invitingly from the pavement.

Outside, electricity cables score against pale blue skies, running along streets, echoing the spindly branches of trees. These solutions which have served the millions

Other photography book releases

living on the cusp of old and new, will soon be eradicated for efficiency and uniformity: capitalism and communism in perfect synergy.

There is a sense of loss and melancholy that permeates the pictures, something inherent in any place where people have been forcibly moved on. Think of deserted crofter cottages abandoned in the Highland clearances or the mining towns of California, left to crumble when the gold ran out. By taking the majority of images in the evocative dusk Girard takes the risk of erring on the side of romanticism or nostalgia.

However, the interplay between natural and neon light serves a purpose beyond just atmosphere – it captures the transitory nature of these homes, shops and buildings on the edge of their destruction. Twilight is the very state of these communities.

Girard takes us inside to show the details of lives that constitute the buildings. In clear, crisp interior views, he frames a wooden cabinet on which stands a ghetto blaster, draped with a lace doily and topped by three souvenir koalas; a family picture hangs above where the group are dressed in communist-style shirts. Modest possessions that represent day-to-day living and personal histories; in essence, a home.

There is an evident stubbornness – a “we shall not be moved” stance. Girard reveals structures where residents have refused to budge, despite being surrounded by rubble, until the last moment when electricity is cut and the bulldozers move in. Sadly, the “benign neglect” of communism in the latter part of the 20th century is not mirrored with any sort of benign restoration postglobalisation. Girard’s collection is an elegant document of a world that no longer holds a place in Shanghai’s heart, though it clearly does in his own and for the many people whose home it is and was. Ruth Hedges

No stranger to documenting the English way of life (you may be familiar with his book on Working Men’s Clubs) Chris Coekin plays a more interactive role in this project, as he takes to the road as a hitchhiker, with The Hitcher. The first half of the book is comprised of self-portraits, taken with a self-timer as he stands at the roadside with his handmade signs. The second half is portraits of the people who have bravely decided to give him a lift, accompanied with their handwritten explanations as to why they picked him up. The book is a graphic delight with the handwritten elements and images of objects that he came across. Definitely a great present for that hitchhiking enthusiast in your life. www.photonet.org.uk

NEXT ISSUE OF EI8HT: “WATER” We welcome your written and photographic contributions on this idea or any projects you think may be suitable for EI8HT. See www.foto8.com/drr for full details on how to submit your work FOTO8 SPECIALIST BOOKSHOP Buy many of the books featured on these pages and browse our unique selection of out-of-print and rare photography titles. www.foto8.com/bookshop

Ian McDonnell’s tiny, cardboard-bound book, I Like Aerials, is the result of his meticulous obsession with television aerials, documenting them from London to New York. Not printed as photos as such but more greyscale outlines of the weird and wonderful shapes made by these innocuous objects, the patterns created with the layout make each page its own little work of art, with the captions in the back detailing where each of these can be found in case we would like to visit in person. www.emp-london.com Horst Friedrich’s images from his time in Venezuela are compiled into this book, Dona Maria und ihre Traume, which is published in German. His stunning black and white photographs capture the everyday life of people like centenarian Dona Ruperta, living in small villages. With perhaps a bit more text than necessary, hopefully an English version will be published soon. www.frederking-thaler.de 83

www.foto8.com/bookshop

032c www.032c.com Amelia’s Magazine www.ameliasmagazine.com Daniel Battams Fan Club www.danielbattamsfanclub.com Karen www.karenmagazine.com Purple www.purple.fr Qvest Edition www.qvest.de Self Service www.selfservicemagazine.com Slash Magazine www.slashmagazine.com

I sometimes get asked how I feel about the imminent death of magazines and the impending victory of web over print. The assumption is that the one medium will replace the other. In reality, the two are learning not only to exist together but are helping each other develop, and in some cases becoming reliant upon each other.

While mainstream publishing is finally catching up with the web, it’s the independent magazines that first grasped its power. The magazine you’re holding in your hands now is one example of how print and web can combine to provide a breadth of service well beyond “just” a magazine or “just” a website. EI8HT magazine works alongside its website and gallery space to provide much more than the magazine alone could do for its readers. Indeed, long-time devotees will recall that it was the website that came first; the magazine was added later to build on the success of their site and help broaden the community that had grown around it. There was also a desire to show work in print, something of particular relevance to photographers but by no means exclusive to them .

At its most basic level, the web has provided a partial solution to the problem of distribution facing independent magazines.

The first magazine I ever produced, an early ’80s music fanzine, was sold by hand at gig venues in south London. Today, a magazine like that could also be sold via the web, meaning not only potentially larger sales but www.foto8.com/bookshop

It’s weird being introduced to people you’re already familiar with. Occupational hazard, of course, but it’s the whole ‘meeting your idols’ thing. Don’t do it, and all that. Herman Dune aren’t my idols, but I like them, a lot, and have done for a while – so I’m a little nervous at the prospect.

Liverpool Street Travelodge is where it begins. David Herman Dune and Neman Herman Dune are relaxed, relaxing people; both with excellent facial hair. David is chief songwriter, singer and guitar player. He is tall and wearing a locket around his neck. “It has a picture of my girlfriend in one half, and a picture of a teddy bear in the other,” he reveals. As will become increasingly apparent, he is a sweet, gentle man.

They’ve been regulars to London over the years, primarily because their highly personable folk music was a favourite of John Peel. They’ve never been to the east end though. “I hadn’t realised they have bagels here. Have you seen that shop (on Brick Lane) where they have an ‘ei’ instead of an ‘a’ in the word Bagel?” David asks.

I tell him yes. His love of words and word play shines. His music imitates his personality – exciting, excitable, fresh and inquisitive. He continues: “Have you seen that other shop (on Cheshire Street) that sells shoes, like Keds, for five pounds?

Where the guy is rude and just hands them over in a bag?” I tell him yes. His enthusiasm makes me happy. His personality sparkles. He’s a thoughtful conversationalist. He even has nice things to say about their modest accommodation: “whenever Bob Dylan goes on tour, he stays in Travelodges. So before, I had to stay in them for financial reasons; and now – I just have to.”

He’s more forthcoming than Neman – percussionist – his slightly shyer, handsome counterpart, who bides his time. They are very much a duo having known each other for the best part of fifteen years, and they carry the same adopted surname.

“We weren’t born ‘Herman Dune’, but I’d say it’s our surname because we chose it a long time ago,” explains David, slightly mysteriously.

The bands nationality is, apparently, a matter of confusion. Their Wikipedia entry

016

also wider sales. In theory I could have sold my magazine to music fans across the world.

Globalisation and the web have gone hand in hand to create new markets for many industries, and so with it magazine publishing. It was Wallpaper* magazine that first established the idea of the truly international magazine. Launched as an independent by Tyler Brûlé in 1996, Wallpaper* could never have survived without an international reach. Deliberately elitist, it set out to appeal to a quite specific and small group of affluent, style-conscious young people. The clever part was the calculation that if there were only, say, 1,000 such people in London, there were another 1,000 in Paris, in Berlin, in Madrid, New York, Melbourne… and so on.

Wallpaper* addressed it’s audience as a select international set, and in the process launched a new model for publishing. Selling a few hundred copies in one city will never work; sell a few hundred in 20 different cities and you have the beginnings of something.

There’s a whole range of magazines relying on just such an international audience now.

Sold in specialist stores such as Magma in London, MagNation in Melbourne and Universal News in New York, they have not only been helped commercially by the internet but their creators have also been emboldened by the web’s approach to content, more of which later.

So what are these magazines? Most are either quarterly or biannual, and the 84

states that ‘the band is often mistaken for being Swedish.’ This is weird. Here are the facts: David is Swedish and Neman is French. See? Neman: “we play around with the nationality thing a bit, we don’t really see it as important.” Point taken – so remember that, and shut up about it…

Herman Dune’s core membership has recently been reduced to two, since Andre, David’s (blood) brother, departed.

“He’s gone solo. He won’t be on the next record, he’s gone for another project,” is the abrupt explanation. Thankfully it hasn’t tainted their desire to remain touring and recording as the band. This time round, they’re recording a session for Rob Da Bank’s Radio One show at Maida Vale.

En route to the studios we pick up The Wave Pictures – two dudes, Dave Tattersall (guitar) and Franic Rozycki (bass), who will play with David and Neman for the session. In the taxi we talk about Herman Dune’s new single I Wish That I Could See You Soon getting played by Jonathan Ross on Radio Two – a somewhat remarkable feat for a band so firmly routed in the ‘underground’ sector of musical fandom. Dave Wave Picture explains who Ross is, describing him as “having a lisp”.

David thinks about this for a second before surmising: “cool, like Tom Waits.” We explain that he is really rather different to Waits, but some influences are emerging. Waits/Dylan – romantic, chameleon-like, travelling craftsmen. What fine company to occupy your mind with.

They know Regina Spektor’s boyfriend too, but Neman doesn’t know they’d hooked up: “no way!” he exclaims, before sitting back thoughtfully in his chair. He is the reflective contradiction to David’s open amiability. I like him a lot.

Maida Vale is a strange maze of studios and corridors. It’s bizarrely quiet considering everyone there is making music. It has an aura of greatness.

Neman ushers me over to look at a full orchestra playing in a studio so big you could fit a ferry in.

Massive it is.

I ask him if he’d like to play with an orchestra. “Yeah, but I wouldn’t know how. I really love Joanna Newsom’s new record with the orchestra, but we’d have to get an arranger

words } Tom Howard, photography * Amelia, illustrations ~ Nicolas Burrows, thanks to ^ Richard at Happy Retouching

Magazine Report

07 S/S 2007 £10

established players tend to be fashionfocused. Paris-based Self Service and Purple are long-standing and successful examples.

Recent issues of both have weighed in at over 350 pages each, the majority of those pages featuring photography by the likes of Juergen Teller and Terry Richardson. They also feature English-language interviews and profiles of architects, designers, photographers, and in the case of Self Service, other magazine makers. These are the magazines of record for a certain vein of the creative establishment: William Eggleston, Chloë Sevigny and Teller seem omnipresent.

The Berlin-based 032c covers a similar beat, but with the balance shifted more toward art and culture. The latest issue, number 13, features Andreas Gursky, Jeff Koons and Simon Norfolk alongside fashion

by Paul Wetherell and Serge Leblon. Typical of 032c’s more questioning approach is that for this issue editor Joerg Koch has dropped its previous modern, tasteful (safe) design, and brought in art director Mike Meiré to provide an experimentally and deliberately clumsy page design. Much of the magazine is almost ugly, whereas Purple, for instance, uses current graphics stars M/M Paris to give its pages a stark, modern look. Koch is also a consultant to new title Qvest-Edition.

Within its 450 (!!) pages you’ll find new work by Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson, US graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister and photographer Wolfgang Tillmans. Yoko

K

Emerging as the most provocative new menswear voice in an era defined more by absence (Lang) and departure (Slimane) than by invention, Aitor Throup is conjuring fantasy creatures somewhere between ravers and shamen. His first collection, When Football Hooligans become Hindu Gods’, saw him courted in Italy by CP Company. But in suburban Tokyo, his designs have become the stuff of obsession and of twisted Murakami Noir.

£priceless

# / . 4 % - 0 / 2 ! 29 ¬ # 5 ,4 5 2 % 13th Issue Berlin Summer 2007 D €10 EU €12 US $15 www.032c.com

a magazine made out of the ordinary

The Elephant Vanishes Clang

Untitled-1 1

13/7/07 5:12:39 pm

Unbenannt-1 1

Ono, Tom Ford and James Nachtwey are also featured.

These magazines don’t have extensive online presences. They are, if you like, the Web 1.0 of magazines; they revel in their highly designed, slickly printed pages that mix gloss and matt papers while their websites feature sample pages and back issues for sales but they have little, if any, additional content online. They have used the web commercially but not taken advantage of its creative possibilities.

It’s the next generation of independents which have developed with the growth of user-generated content and Web 2.0 that have taken better advantage of what the internet can offer.

New York’s Slash magazine has subtle links with the web. Its page designs have a looseness derived from the way HTML code can cause clumsy combinations of text and image in a way that the better controlled print layout programs would naturally avoid. This isn’t a deliberate attempt to mimic the web in print, simply a nod toward a current common visual cue. Apparently random placement of images across pages and mono-space fonts emphasise the way much of the content is collected by editor Kyle Hinton – a highlight for me of each issue is a collaborative piece featuring photographs collected from readers/friends across the world. User-generated content?

Very web 2.0.

Other magazines are more directly

Michael Philouze

29.04.2007 20:09:18 Uhr

related to how the web works, their editor/publishers inspired by community networking sites and blogs to create and publish material. Despite the ease of blogging, it seems many still have a desire to move on to print. It has long been a popular trait among mainstream publishing to name a magazine after a person. From Jackie to Marie-Claire, the names are symbols for the reader rather than actual, real-life people.

Now, though, there are small independent titles actually about one person. There is a fine distinction to be made here; all magazines bear the voice of their editor, and Slash, for instance, is absolutely about what Hinton wants to say and share. But by giving his magazine a name of its own he has separated himself from what he prints.

There are other magazines, however, that take the willingness of bloggers to directly link their names to their comments and name their magazines after themselves.

A title like Amelia’s Magazine revolves around just as personal a view of the world as Slash, but the use of its editor’s name in its title serves to emphasise the personal nature of the content. Former photographer Amelia Gregory works fulltime on her magazine, covering her own taste in music, art and fashion. She publishes, edits and designs the whole thing (230-plus pages) with help from interns, which is some feat.

Similarly, Daniel Battam’s Fan Club is a magazine about the eponymous Daniel. But while Amelia’s Magazine is more traditional 85

in content, subscribers to DBFC become fan club members and can contribute items of interest that appear alongside Daniel’s news. It’s a clever concept, a community magazine for a virtual group of “friends”, but the best material is the everyday reflections on Battam’s life, with the other content often being just too random. We hear about Daniel’s decision to downgrade his mobile phone contract, and about the day he saw Mick Jagger walking down the street.

Daniel’s obsession with the everyday is shared by Karen, a magazine published from Bristol by… Karen. Now on its third issue, Karen is a wonderful antidote to both mainstream celebrity culture and the pumped up stylishness of some of the fashion/culture titles listed above. Each issue is a mixture of news about Karen’s friends, her experiences and overheard snippets of conversation. The latest cover features a half-eaten bread roll and a polystyrene cup of tea on a plastic picnic table, a truly English image. There’s an interview with the staff from the local butcher’s shop (“Everyone calls me by first name, tell me stories about themselves. I get to ask how their family is”), plus the obscure question “Do wolves eat raspberries?”.

It’s all presented in a no-nonsense, direct manner that gives the content a weight that would be lacking were it presented online.

And that, I believe, helps explain why magazines will continue to thrive alongside the web.

Jeremy Leslie www.foto8.com/bookshop

The Art of Lee Miller Sponsored by

86

15 September 2007 – 6 January 2008 www.vam.ac.uk u South Kensington Women with Fire Masks, London, 1941 Š Lee Miller Archives, England 2007. All rights reserved.

Agency Listings

87

Agency Listings

88

Agency Listings

8ljkiXc`XĂ‹j Y\jk g_fkfaflieXc`jd

nnn%]X`i]Xog_fkfj%Zfd "-( ) 0)/) )+)0 ]X`i]Xog_fkfj7]X`i]Xo%Zfd%Xl

8e 8ljkiXc`Xe ZfXc d`e\i# Yp A\jj`ZX ?ifdXj

half_pg_Ei8ht_Mag.indd 1

3/7/07 11:57:48 AM

PHOTOGRAPHERS FOR EDITORIAL AND COMMERCIAL ASSIGNMENTS Alessandro Albert, Marco Anelli, Pablo Balbontin, Alberto Bevilacqua, Giorgio Barrera, Giancarlo Ceraudo, Guglielmo De Micheli, Giulio Di Sturco, Massimo Berruti, Giovanni Del Brenna, Andrea Frazzetta, Marco Garofalo, Gianni giansanti, Alberto Giuliani, Nicola Giuliato, Mattia Insolera, Paul lowe, Max & Douglas, Seba Pavia, Giada Ripa di Meana, Alessandro Rizzi, Filippo Romano, Massimo Sestini

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

Massimo Mastrorillo/Grazia Neri

89

Agency Listings

90

Agency Listings

91

Agency Listings

92

Agency Listings

93

94

Agency Listings/Media Associations

BRIGHTON UNIVERSITY OF BRIGHTON GALLERY .0/

+6-:

VOUJM

'3*

"6(

>VÕ ÌÞÊ vÊ ÀÌÃÊ> `Ê ÀV ÌiVÌÕÀi]Ê À> `Ê*>À>`i]Ê À } Ì Ê ÓÊä 9Ê /\Êä£ÓÇÎÊÈ{Îä£ÓÊ7\ÊÜÜÜ°LÀ } Ì °>V°Õ É}> iÀÞ Ì i>ÌÀiÊ

OXFORD OVADA OXFORD VISUAL ARTS DEVELOPMENT AGENCY 4"5

4&1

VOUJM

4"5

/07

Ó£Ê ÕViÃÌiÀÊ Àii ]Ê"Ýv À`]Ê"8£ÊÓ + /\Êä£nÈxÊÓä£ÇnÓÊ \Ê v J Û>`>° À}°Õ Ê7\ÊÜÜÜ° Û>`>° À}°Õ

Ê V> Ê* ÌÊ > iÀÞÊÌ ÕÀ }ÊiÝ L Ì Ê«À `ÕVi`Ê ÊV >L À>Ì ÊÜ Ì Ê iÀViÀÊ ÀÌÊ > iÀÞ]Ê,Õ}LÞÊ ÀÌÊ > iÀÞÊEÊ ÕÃiÕ ]Ê-Ìi« i Ê >ÜÀi ViÊ > iÀÞ]Ê 1 ÛiÀà ÌÞÊ vÊ À } Ì Ê > iÀÞ]Ê"6 Ê­"Ýv À`à ÀiÊ6 ÃÕ> Ê ÀÌÃÊ iÛi « i ÌÊ }i VÞ®Ê> `ÊÃÕ«« ÀÌi`ÊLÞÊÌ iÊ ÀÌÃÊ Õ V Ê vÊ } > `Ê> `Ê1 ÛiÀà ÌÞÊ vÊ iÀLÞ°Ê

95

Foto8 2008 year planner coming soon.

Available from Autumn 2007 Reserve your copy today www.foto8.com/ planner/

EI8HT magazine in association with HOST gallery announces the first annual Summer Show.

A celebration of the best in reportage, portraiture, and landscape photography, where emerging and established photographers come together to exhibit their work and sell prints in London in 2008.

For details on particpating as a photographer or to find out more about the Summer Show and the curators behind the inaugural year see foto8.com/ summershow/

HO ST.

BEST IN SHOW ÂŁ10,000*

*or less

97

> On My Shelf

> Sources of Inspiration > Ian Denning

The titles I’ve chosen are not strictly classic photography books, apart from one.

I’ve chosen them because they influenced me and also represent times and people in my life when I was learning about what I do. My first choice is Purnell’s History of 20th Century, and the editor in chief was the historian A J P Taylor. It came out in 1968 as a six-volume partwork, when I was 11, and I pleaded with my dad to let me buy it. I can’t remember how much it was – 2/6 or something – but it was quite a lot of money for an 11-year-old. We were a typical working class family living in Bristol – my father was an engineer in a gear manufacturers – and as such we didn’t have a lot of books in the house; some reference books, but no picture books. So looking at Purnell’s was a revelation to me, because it was so visual. It was a combination of really good historical photography and painting and objects – it made a huge impression on me. After a few weeks, my dad decided it was too old for me, and if you read it, it is incredibly dense political analysis – it’s A J P Taylor for God’s sake! – and he stopped it. I certainly wasn’t reading every word, but I was looking at the pictures and reading the captions, reading the pictures if you like. Years later I got hold of the whole set; I saw it in the window of an Oxfam shop on Highbury Corner, and bought it for about a tenner.

I was the classic working class boy who went to grammar school. One day, I went to the art room, and I just remember seeing piles and piles of colour supplements for us to cut up and make montages. I’d never seen anything like them, so my introduction to the middle class world of photography, art and cheap wine was going through these. I thought they were marvellous. Two particularly stick in mind, from the Sunday Times from 1973: one was a cover on the designer Leon Bakst; the other was by George Grosz who made extraordinary photomontage.

I went to the Central School of Art, a three year graphic design course, where I was taught by a great designer and brilliant typographer called Richard Hollis in my second year. Richard got in some great working designers, including someone called David King. As soon as I saw his work I knew that this was exactly what I wanted to do. So my second choice is David’s book on Trotsky, published in 1972: Trotsky, A Documentary by Francis Wyndham and David King. His work was very influential to me as a designer and layer-out of pictures, as was Michael Rand as an art director, who subsequently taught me everything I know about magazine art direction. It’s the title of this book – calling it a “documentary”– that’s such an interesting way to describe a book of photographs; it’s a cinematic term. What interests me is the use of pictures – he uses extreme close-ups and then he goes back to longshots. David’s overriding concern is 98

content. In magazine layout, it’s essential to actually read the feature. It’s shocking how many designers I’ve come across who think they can lay out without reading the piece!

My philosophy is that if you look at the pictures, read the captions and read the story without really noticing what I’ve done, then I’ve done my job. Content comes first.

In the summer of my second year, in 1978, I needed to get some work, so David suggested I rang up the Sunday Times magazine, where he was art editor from 1965-1975. Fortunately for me, the Sunday Times was just putting together a series called Photodiscovery. My third choice is the book that came out of that series: The Sunday Times Book of Photodiscovery

by Bruce Bernard, who was the picture editor at the time. It’s a marvellous collection that starts at the beginning of photography and goes up to 1940. Nothing had been done like it before. It was when photography collecting was just starting. One of the rules was to print the pictures with the colours as they actually were because Bruce was so struck by the quality of the original colour. Most early books on Fenton or Fox Talbot for example were printed in black and white or printed as “sepia”, where they just printed them in brown ink. Bruce was also a secret painter, and a photographer in his own right, and he also wrote beautifully about photographs.

I thought I should choose a book by an individual photographer. I have so many, but the one that really stands out for me is Rome

by William Klein. I bought it almost by accident; I was just rummaging around a junk shop, and I bought it for £3. It’s worth a great deal more than that now. Apart from being a great documentary photographer, Klein is also quite a good graphic designer.

He laid out this book himself. The printing is wonderful – it’s what I’d call soot and white wash and it suits the pictures so well. It’s a book I come back to time and time again.

Rome is a city I know very well, so it has that added attraction.

Finally, over the last few years I’ve started collecting magazines from the ’30s. I’ve narrowed down my choice to a single issue of USSR in Construction. It contains some of most wonderful examples of picture layout I’ve ever seen. This one was designed by Alexander Rodchenko, for December 1935, and it’s known as “the Parachute issue”. He used a sensational fold-out, where the parachute opens like an origami flower. The form of the pictures, often using circles, is a joy. It’s basically state-subsidised propaganda, but it’s luxuriously good. I love looking at old magazines 8 Ian Denning, who teaches on the MA Photojournalism at Westminster University, was creative director of LIFE magazine in New York until it finally closed and spent 13 years as Associate Art Editor at the Sunday Times magazine

NURTURING THE PASSION

# 7830556 # 7830556 © Bryan © Bryan Denton/drr.net Denton/drr.net# 5663141 # 5663141 © Natalie © Natalie Behring/drr.net Behring/drr.net

# 6213502 # 6213502 © Clark © J. Clark Mishler/Mira.com/drr.net J. Mishler/Mira.com/drr.net

SEARCH SEARCHFARTHER FARTHERFRESH FRESHIMAGES IMAGES SEARCH SEARCHDEEPER DEEPERUNIQUE UNIQUEIMAGES IMAGES

# 7222603 # 7222603 © David ©A David Barnes/drr.net A Barnes/drr.net# 673362 # 673362 © Rich©Clarkson/NCAA Rich Clarkson/NCAA Photos/drr.net Photos/drr.net

# 9117549 # 9117549 © Robert © Robert Leslie Leslie 2007/drr.net 2007/drr.net

Searching Searching forfor Images?

Images?

FIND FINDMORE MORERELEVANT RELEVANTIMAGES IMAGES

® ® TM TM Digitalrailroad Digitalrailroad Marketplace Marketplace is your is your single single point-of-access point-of-access to fresh, to fresh, relevant, relevant, andand globally globally diverse diverse images images from from members members in 70 in 70 countries countries on on 6 continents.

6 continents.

New New images images areare being being added added every every day. day.

ESTABLISHED 75 YEARS Rights-Managed Rights-Managed andand Royalty-Free.

Royalty-Free.

Search Search now. now.

Creating Creating Images?

Images?

GET GETMORE MOREGLOBAL GLOBALIMAGES IMAGES THE THEWORLD WORLDAWAITS AWAITSJOIN JOINUS US

Take Take Control.

Control.

A Digitalrailroad.net A Digitalrailroad.net archive archive letslets youyou manage, manage, market, market, andand sellsell your your images images directly. directly.

Digitalrailroad.net Digitalrailroad.net Marketplace Marketplace extends extends your your reach reach to photo to photo buyers buyers around around thethe world. world.

And And every every time time your your images images areare licensed licensed through through Marketplace, Marketplace, 80% 80% of the of the feefee is returned is returned to you. to you.

Join Join us.us.

Get Getthe thePicture.

Picture.Digitalrailroad.net Digitalrailroad.net CANON, NIKON, PROFOTO, HASSELBLAD, LEAF, FUJI, EPSON, GITZO, LEICA, KATA, SANDISK & APPLE 08706 03 03 03 WWW.CALUMETPHOTO.CO.UK

www.digitalrailroad.net www.digitalrailroad.net

877-203-3772 877-203-3772 (toll(toll free) free) • +• 1-212-537-3512 + 1-212-537-3512 (int’l) (int’l) sales@digitalrailroad.net sales@digitalrailroad.net

November 2007 From Horden to Shinjuku Chris Steele-Perkins From Horden to Shinjuku reveals two distinct yet congruent sides to Chris Steele-Perkins’ photographic brilliance: in Horden, Northumberland, a nostalgic and investigative story on life in rural England, and in Shinjuku, Steele-Perkins reveals the streets of his Tokyo.

9-771476-681000-22

DIRTY

EI8HT

EI8HT V6N2 AUTUMN 07

© Chris Steele-Perkins/Magnum Photos

VOL.6 NO.2 AUTUMN 2007 £10 WWW.FOTO8.COM

Both of these projects have recently been published separately in book form: Northern Exposures and Tokyo Love Hello. HOST brings the two series together to contemplate and admire the character and personality of these subjects as well as the photographer.