"It's a theme park for Europeans looking For exotica out of mainstream Tourism - not my Tea" ~ Max Pam in his Indian Ocean Journals (Steidl), referring to Lamu island
Writers and photographers alike have amply covered both the 'well trampled tourist trail' and the 'off the beaten track', but Pam is on another trail and his book, Indian Ocean Journals, guides us through his haphazard, non-linear journey.
But like Gracielle Iturbide (I wouldn't go much further in comparing them!), the success of his work depends on its ability to discredit exoticism, though, simultaneously depending on it. Pam travels extensively around the periphery of the Indian Ocean to compile his journals, and there is something of the travelers log in them, but he's mixed his encounters up, matching disparate images in pairs, linking elements of composition or gesture, confusing expectations, and therefore building a new and undiscovered micro world of poetically arranged shards.
Unlike, say Cartier Bresson, to pick the obvious, who is invisible, Pam does not hide his presence, necessarily, and often his subjects are reacting to him in a sort of east/west blend which has the effect of equalising the much frowned upon western relationship with the 'Other' (they are often looking in at him). But, then, beside the almost predatory male gaze, heightened by the buzz of hookah smoke, he brings out a girl, in half light, innocent or is it vulnerable!
Pam also made the classic book 'Going East', which unfortunately I haven't had the pleasure of seeing save in the hotlist of top collectibles by Martin Parr's book on books, but I'm far more enraptured with this one, it being close to home for me. I have read his conversation with Pablo Ortiz Monasterio, Conversations with Contemporary Photographers, where he confirms my suspicions that there was something of Peter Beard in his work, whose influence seems to have stretched far into the minds of quite a few contemporary photographers (I'm thinking of Bill Burke), however it's here that his work is at risk of falling, according to my sensibility, beneath too much decoration, though he has not smothered his book in it. Peter Beard might be a dangerous one to be influenced by, while artistic devises are easily carried between artists, using Beard's might easily become an imitation.
I'm solacing myself, while Christies sells books for 10's of thousands of dollars, that it is still possible to find unnoticed but valuable books buried and lost among the dusty shelves. And, I'm solacing myself, that while the over-interlectualised banal threatens in every corner of contemporary photography, there are still photographers like Max Pam fighting the good fight:
"Like, for instance in my town, right? In the Art Gallery of Western Australia they paid a quarter of a million for a Jeff Wall picture 2 years ago, and it's a picture of a guy polishing his shoes, and it's totally banal! You stand in front of it - I'll stand in front of it - and we will both - because i've had this conversation and because you can't be unaware of that, because it's on the front page of a newspaper - we both say, "What's it about? What's the point? You know, why? I polish my shoes as well, okay, tell me something I don't know."
~ Max Pam, from Conversations with Contemporary Photographers (Umbrage)
Submitted by Philip Cartland on 12 April 2008 - 8:48pm.
Pablo San Juan's photos are buried away beneath the ever increasing pile of photographers found on Zone Zero.
As far as I am aware there are no books, no buzz, no fame no fortune, surrounding him, and I'm sure if current flavors of the month are anything to go by, there may be little surprise in that either. I'm glad it's that way, I'd hesitate to say anything myself if I were not so much in awe.
There are about 27 photos, if I have counted correctly, in this series all connected in one way or another to the theme and title: 'Monsoon'. At irregular intervals, perhaps attached to specific images, we're given a quote, for example this one:
"Little by little I feel sleep coming on, made drowsy by the sweet novelty with which the tropics receive their travelers before showing them the claws of their petrifying desperation." ~ Carlos Fuentas
If you've made it far enough to have read a quote, there is little point in me breaking it down further, you'd have to be a cold stone not to be then moved by San Juan's wind and rain, joy and sadness.
According to Nuria Enguita, who wrote the statement,
"Pablo San Juan travelled for three consecutive years in search of the living image of the monsoon, uniting within his photographs specific times and places and those already mentioned moments of a more abstract, more diffuse condition."
I'm reminded that it takes as long or longer to create, and luck may only allow half the coherence, half the poetry or music. Sadly Pablo's images may well be glanced over a thousand times by eyes that are attuned to the speed of change, the endless cycle of topicality and trends, or the obsession with originality. We don't need a biography, a statement by the photographer, nor an interview, it's all available there before your eyes in the images themselves.
Submitted by Philip Cartland on 2 March 2008 - 10:27am.
I've been meaning to write something about Kenya, but I've felt rather wordlessly caught between knowing that decades of political neglect and carelessness would inevitably bring the country to its knees, as it has, and the shock and horror of seeing those faces I know so clearly being brutally hacked in bouts of senseless mob madness. The politicians are taking so long to wrangle this out and we're all waiting and waiting. But, anyway, the wounds are too deep to be solved by a single political agreement. It's been festering for a long time.
There is one story in particular, in all this, that caught my attention. By chance it calls on that tired old issue, should photojournalists distance themselves from the violence they witness or should they intervene when a life can be saved?
Recall Kevin Carter from the Bang Bang club? The man who photographed a vulture about to hobble over on to a starving child? Recall the flack that he got for not intervening? Today I'd like to bring you this story of 31 Jan 2008, a Kamba man Saved From a Lynching as reported by the amazing Vigilante journalist.
Shortcut to the slideshow >>
Submitted by Philip Cartland on 1 February 2008 - 5:58pm.
In 1998 Tacita Dean set out for the 'prim tax haven', Cayman Brac, a Caribbean island, in search of Donald Crowhurst's trimaran, the Teignmouth Electron. The Cayman net news outlines its history prior to Dean's journey as follows:
"After Crowhurst’s suicide, the Electron was taken by salvagers to Jamaica and bought from auction in 1969 by Kingston hotelier and businessman Larry Wirth.
The Electron stayed in the Wirth family until 1973, when she was purchased by Bunnie Francis, a charter operator based at Trelawny Beach Hotel, near Montego Bay. Francis adapted and operated it as a tourist boat.
By 1978, the Jamaican tourist trade had been hit by political unrest and the boat lay in dry dock up for sale. It was purchased by George McDermot, who was living in Jamaica at the time, in 1975. He later sold her to his brother Winston."
During Winston's ownership, when Ms Dean arrived. she found the yacht lying battered and weathered upon a beach, shadowed by a solitary palm, and looking, perhaps, like the washed up bones of Crowhurst himself. She filmed and photographed the wreckage, drawing on Crowhurst's loneliness, his manic time madness, his 'Sin of Concealment', his final countdown.
While on the island she also filmed another of her, particularly quirky, coincidental discoveries, the ruined 'Bubble House' built by a Frenchman who was imprisoned for fraud and therefore unable to finish it; Dean writes:
"Deserted, and half-completed, the bubble house stood like a futuristic vision; like a statement from another age. We thought it was a temple belonging to a sect, or a church constructed by the Mafia
We knew we had come across something other-worldly; the perfect companion to the Teignmouth Electron."
To me her Teignmouth Electron work is an exotic memorial, if you like, to madness, folly and failure, as expressed in the Crowhurst tragedy.
One must know Crowhurst's story to fully appreciate Dean's work and if the story does catch you, like it did me, the essential viewing should be the documentary film 'Deep Water' directed by Louis Osmond and Jerry Rothwell.
While this film tells almost all there is to know - making, too, an interesting parallel with Bernard Moitessier who in contrast both mastered the sea, and more importantly, himself, while forfeiting the possible glory and media heroism of winning the race, to 'save his soul' - the essence of Deans exotic bone sifting archeology, besides the artified journalism, is her tangential personal journey to the island and her driftings through the works of JG Ballard and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, in search of the unknowable truth behind Crowhurst's predicament.
Sources:
Tacita Dean Synopsis
Brac's Land wreck makes TV fame
Submitted by Philip Cartland on 18 January 2008 - 8:35pm.
David Goldblatt's, 'South Africa - The Structure of Things Then', published in 1998, is about homes, shops, churches, memorials, ruins, anything that resembles a structure in South Africa, and is illustrated with the clarity of a large format camera and a thinking eye. A considerable caption is attached to each image and through it we compile a mental picture of the roots and ideological structures of Apartheid South Africa as expressed through the architecture.
But by describing the subjective mental states of the Volk (Afrikaners, chosen by God) as manifest in their buildings Goldblatt steps himself out on a subjective limb. Most notably, he discovers a 3-stage change in the architectural design of the Afrikaner protestant churches beginning with the decorative and graceful eloquence of the Gothic churches of the late 19th century, through the powerful dominating, radically vertical and triangulated churches of the late 1940's to 60's, and into the enclosed womb like churches of the 1970's and 80's.
Goldblatt suggests these stages mirror the gradual growth of confidence and rootedness of the Volk, peaking after the 1948 victory of the National Party; defenders of "Christian National values against Atheism, communism, liberalism, humanism and racial miscegenation".
The 50's and 60's where periods of huge power, dominated by fiercely skyward architecture, an Afrikaner renaissance, if you like. But as the system of Apartheid gradually came under attack, through the 70's, 80's and 90's, the churches became more inward looking, withdrawn, allowing only, for example, a minimal number of small windows opening to a hostile world, comfortably cocooning the Volk among their own company.
Though Goldblatt finds little corroboration among the church architects who, perhaps, built according to accepted requirements of the time without full awareness of any parallels in the historical course of events, in light of his comprehensive coverage throughout the book - of which this is only one tiny piece of particular interest to myself - he makes a very compelling case.
This book brings far less attention to itself than it deserves.
Related post >>
Submitted by Philip Cartland on 13 January 2008 - 9:46pm.
For Timothy O'Sullivan reality was more than the literal, direct and 'physical' reflection of the world. Truth, was simple and direct, but came from small adjustments in the literal reality that brought into play the subjective. His camera portrayed the way a place seemed rather than how it actually was.
O'Sullivan learn't his technique from documenting the American civil war. Cameras of the period could not catch the action, as they do today, and this fact forced him to build a reality of war from mundane scenes that stood around the action; the context of war.
Later in 1871 O'Sullivan joined the United States Geographical Surveys West of the One Hundredth Meridian led by Lt. George Wheeler. The purpose was to survey the land for possible future occupation, while also gaining a consensus of the Native American population. His photographs were to be used to prepare the 'Wild' West as an inviting destination for progress, not only for the sake of civilization, but for the continued funding of the surveys.
Leaders of the surveys such as King, Lt. George M. Wheeler, and J.W. Powell tended to use the beautiful, picturesque, and sublime ideologies in writing their survey reports, and hence their hired photographers usually resorted to them as well. But O'Sullivan was unique. While fulfilling the requirements of the survey he was also able to pursue his own instinct for truth and art using devices he had learnt during the civil war.
Though he photographed completely without public acclaim during his life time, he is now renowned for his ability to amplify the telluric beauty of the geological Western American landscape by means of very simple but understated techniques. For example, the top photograph in the accompanying strip of images, depicts Canyon De Chelly, New Mexico, 1873, and shows how he ever-so-slightly tilts the camera's angle to exaggerate the great towering rocks height and weight over the tiny encampment below in the valley.
Jonathan Green in "American Photography" presents Timothy O'Sullivan as something of a photographic renegade. Unlike Muybridge, for example, who added clouds to his picturesque scenic images by using his 'Sky Shade'(1) technique, O'Sullivan seems to accept the limitations of his medium. He exploited, instead, the starkness arising from the wet collodion processes lack of sensitivity to blue, by sometimes integrating the white sky into a series of balanced shades and planes of the geology creating an almost abstract image (image 2).
If there is an answer to endless question: what is reality, surely here we have it in O'Sullivan's images, and as valid today as it was then.
In Elizabeth Paul's words:
"His approach accepts the limitations of subjectivity and photography to discern and portray the whole truth or reality of a subject, and seeks, instead, to gain and portray an impression of the subject truthfully, accurately, and effectively." ~ see her excellent thesis on the subject
(1) Muybridge solved the problem using two different methods:
a - He combined a negative of clouds with a negative of a landscape, when making a print.
b - Muybridge also used a board flap inside his camera to block the brighter light from the sky during a portion of an exposure. He called the feature a sky shade.
Submitted by Philip Cartland on 7 January 2008 - 8:31am.
Cristóbal Hara has published two books of an intended trilogy 'The Imaginary Spaniard' and 'Autobiography'.
Bloody scenes (like the pictured car accident), funerals and images of dead animals may be discouraging at first, I must admit it took me a couple of goes before I was hooked, and, one could easily be forgiven for mistaking Hara for just another photojournalist with what at first may appear fairly striaght forward images, but on closer inspection a specific symbolic sequencing of images emerge, giving the books their own particular meaning.
'The Imaginary Spaniard' consists of 100 or so pages of both darkness and humor. A priest stands holding forth a crucifix while a wooden penis hangs out from beneath his robe. Another's robe is adorned with a topless woman more likely to be found in a cheap men's magazines. Catholicism is defiled, it seems, but by the costumed faithful themselves.
Bullfighting, another theme, is far from glorious and heroic. The bullfighters are neither tall nor handsome nor caught in perfect posture. The bulls die ingloriously, hampered by a pack of snapping dogs, and then their bodies are dumped by bulldozer. Death, sex, power, nature and religion entwine in this fiesta-like setting, broken only by the dullest of street scenes, empty of people, interludes, like chapters.
The parting image is sad, under the baking sun a downtrodden dog looks back at us, perhaps it is on the brink of starvation.
'Autobiography', the second of the books, raises the temperature a little. Horses feature throughout, often in panic mode, while shirtless handlers display their power over them, tender only with the foals. Among this apparent chaos a picture shows two horses in private and tender fornication.
Jesus appears frequently, mirrored by wild trees or celebrated by white cloaked people from the holy processions of Easter, either look ominous or disheveled, certainly not as the tourist would wish to see. Death and sex, religion, violence all the same themes hit the stage as the book builds to a crescendo of horses leaping through flames during what appears to be the traditional 'Luminares' fiesta on the eve of Saint Anthony's day, the patron saint of four footed beasts. Riding the horses through the flames purifies them.
The final series of the book leave us with burnt out effigies, paper mache and plastic cartoon like dolls, with super sexualized parts burnt, smoldering into the night. Again we are led to find out for ourselves that these effigies are burnt after March 19 celebrations, St. Joseph's Day, eve of the vernal equinox, and the beginning of Spring. This is all leading me to believe the book is modeled loosely around the various seasonal festivals.
I really like these books, but too much is spent on the burnt out effigies and throughout the carved images of Jesus, both which may have been best applied in small ammounts.
I'm looking forward to the 3rd in the series.
Submitted by Philip Cartland on 1 January 2008 - 12:01pm.
A while ago I visited the photographer's gallery and saw Guy Tillims pigment printed series, 'Leopold and Mobutu" (2005 I believe, how time flies). I also bought the book of the same name. It's a tall washed out book of mixed color and black and white photographs compiling snippets of physical evidence of Mobutu's lost grandeur and King Leopold's great colonial land grab (spearheaded by his agent the explorer Henry Morton Stanley).
The preface of the book couldn't be written by a more authoritative man than Adam Hochschild whose short text summarizes a piece of what he has covered in depth in his own book, King Leopold's Ghost, namely the extraction of ivory and, subsequently, wild rubber by means of a brutal system of forced labor, to feed a booming Western appetite (arising from advent of the bicycle tube and later the automobile).
While untold millions of Congolese (estimated to be 10 million!) died and Leopold is said to have generated todays equivalent of one billion dollars of profit, in modern times, Mobutu still managed to exceed Leopold's monetary feeding frenzy 4 times over in his 32 yrs. of rule.
Tillim's images string the past and present together: Stanley's barely discernible veranda overlooking the Congo river beside side Mobutu's looted and abandoned palace veranda, while in the foreground/present UN helicopters fly in and out and child soldiers train to kill.
Images of intense Graham Green-like atmosphere and masterful 'accidental' composition, particular to Tillim, fall between the dead scenes.
At a time when it feels more comfortable to forget about Africa - its heart draining lunacy swinging simultaneously with its seduction - Tillim manages to bring alive a neglected chunk of history, renewing the 'traditionional' 'Heart of Darkness' spirit and blending it with historical fact. It's a semi softcover book printed in subdued color and matt texture matching its content.
Images >>
Submitted by Philip Cartland on 31 December 2007 - 9:38pm.
The City of Shadows, compiled by Peter Doyle, brings us a selection of Sydney police photographs from 1912-1948.
Many of the book's images have no accompanying details and so Doyle might gladly be excused for therefore attaching them to the art world. However, is this premise enough for a book, and by making them objects of meditation are we not losing something?
Take photograph #5 and its caption for example:
Probably 1930's, details unknown
Some pleasure, I concede, in the mystery, but was it taken to give us pleasure and does it not raise more questions than it answers?
Particularly with these images, taken as crime photography, the argument that the absence of context brings alive ones own imagination feels like a defilement of the police department's intentions, their purpose, I would presume, to document for the purposes of evidence.
In many cases, though, as in the photo #1, I see shades of character behind the eyes, a wary, withdrawn or even slightly defiant look. I see, clothes and indications that provoke my detective spirit. Here we have a phychological document, though soon we're back again to the, who, why, what, where, when? How can I make a case, or be judge?
It's easy to dump these images at the door of art, like the recent flurry of homeless vernacular photography turned arty-fact, ie into art books. Images of these sorts appear so well composed or anti-composed, even modern (save the sepia) and they all contain the holy grail of 'documentary' photography: authenticity, precisely because they were made without artistic intent... we think anyway.
One or two further observations: The book is 233 pages long, many pictures take on the double spread, some are full page. The question is, considering how many pictures there are in the archive and how difficult it must have been to break down to the final choice, why were so few images chosen and expanded over so much page spread? There are other petty niggles, but otherwise, there is pleasure in at least partial knowledge of an old criminal world, a shiver or two at the thought of what might have happened. There is some gain too, for the photograhers eye, for an artistic intention.
Most of the images can be dug out here: http://www.pictureaustralia.org
Submitted by Philip Cartland on 31 December 2007 - 10:23am.
It should be common knowledge now that around the time when Darwin was thinking about the origin of the species by natural selection (1850s), Alfred Russell Wallace, who was collecting specimens in the Malay Archipelago had already sent a letter to Darwin putting in very succinct terms the 'survival of the fittest' idea. Perhaps because of Wallace's quiet and shy manner and his poor background, his emergence as an unsung hero is additionally emphasised. And so we have books, such as the Spice Island Voyage by Tim Severin, which traces Wallace's travels around the Malay islands. One of Severin's missions was to observe how the natural environment has changed since the time of Wallace. Wallace's own much quoted words, referring to the King Bird of Paradise which he had seen, are cited:
'I thought of the long ages of the past, during which the successive generations of this little creature had run their course, year by year being born, and living and dying amid these dark and gloomy woods, with no intelligent eye to gaze upon their loveliness; to all appearance such a wanton waste of beauty. Such ideas excite a feeling of melancholy. It seems sad, that on the one hand such exquisite creatures should live out their lives and exhibit their charms only in these wild inhospitable regions, doomed for ages yet to come to hopeless barbarism; while on the other hand, should civilized man ever reach these distant lands, and bring moral, intellectual, and physical light into the recesses of these virgin forests, we may be sure that he will so disturb the nicely-balanced relations of organic and inorganic nature as to cause the disappearance, and finally the extinction, of these very beings whose wonderful structure and beauty he alone is fitted to appreciate and enjoy. This consideration must surely tell us that all living things were not made for man.?
Interestingly I found the same extract in the preface of my rare copy of, The Gardeners of Eden, by Alistair Graham a book analysing and laying uncomfortably bare the often aggressive motivations behind game saving.
Though Wallace shot his Bird of Paradise knowing it would be of value to science and worth money back in England as a stuffed specimen we do not take this action as a hypocrisy; a bird in hand can be worth two in the bush when it comes to preserving species. And so today Wallace is acknowledged as a pioneer of environmental awareness.
So what changes did Tim Severin find around a 150 years later? What is left of the Flora and Fauna in the islands where Wallace meticulously indulged his collecting? Well it's a mixed picture, thriving diversity here, and wanton environmental exploitation there. But most importantly there is still a chance. His Birds of Paradise will continue to exist if the proper steps of protection are taken. However, if Wallace had accompanied Severin on his spice island voyage, his worst shock would not have been in the teeming city streets nor in the forest. It would have been when he looked over the side of our little Prahu (Severin's tradition sailing craft) as we sailed into Ambon Harbour. The exquisite underwater coral garden, which he had described with such enthusiasm, was irretrievably gone.'
Submitted by Philip Cartland on 30 December 2007 - 11:00pm.
Imagine a pacific island.
Palms and blue sea, fruits and jungle-embraced mountains; a little island paradise.
Inhabit your island with 15 men and 13 women, 5 Tahitian men and 10 English sailors - the women: Tahitian. Men outnumber women, but bear in mind Tahitian women are quite 'liberal' and under certain cultural circumstance allow the indulgence of multiple sexual partners.
Our islanders have not simply appeared upon the stage out of no where, so lets allow them a ship in which to arrive. However, shortly the ship is set alight and all thoughts of return to whence they came are cancelled. Why? Well, because a return to the outside world would, for some of them, in all likelihood synchronize with a waiting hangman's noose; they are mutineers and have cast adrift their captain.
Now forget our mutineers for a while, say, 18 years.
At last, Captain Whatsisname is sniffing about the pacific. 18 years have passed and he stumbles across the island. He steps into a waiting canoe and once ashore discovers quite a few women and kids but only one man! He subsequently learns that the particular shortage of men arises, not by the hand of natural calamity, but largely by consequence of murder.
Idyllic!
Those of you who know the story will have guessed by now that I am talking about the Pitcairn Island occupied by the Bounty mutineers in January 1790. A true story quite well investigated by Trevor Lummis in his book 'Life and Death in Eden'; an intriguing and gripping account, apt to blow away any funny ideal of a utopian society in Paradise.
I have come across various other stories, differently flavoured, but which basically throw light upon similar themes: man against nature or man against man. One of my favorites is 'The outpost of Progress' by Joseph Conrad; two men trapped in the jungle of West Africa are waiting for a supply steamer that doesn't come. They end up killing one another over a bag of sugar! (Huuum, reminds me of the company I worked for a few years back; it was a shared ownership and my two bosses could not sit in the same room together without screeching and scratching over nothing!)
Anyway, I write only to pass on my enthusiasm and to leave you with the mythologised version of the Bounty story as painted by John Hagan.
You may also be interested to know that the descendants of the original mutineers continue to live on the Pitcairn islands, are connected to the net and are selling all sorts of curios, stamps and novelty .pn domains.
Submitted by Philip Cartland on 29 December 2007 - 9:16am.
1900 71.1 million
1950 166.3 million
1970 275.1 million
1985 419.5 million
2000 626.6 million
2025 1,172.6 million
Source
Are the effects and importance of human encroachment on habitats, given back seat to campaigns to save animals within ever decreasing national parks?
"In terms of elephant ecology, a single elephant pooulation in a national park is as incomplete a phenomenon as a single elephant in a zoo enclosure." Ian Parker - 'What I tell you three times is true'
"Tourists may be as malign as a multitude of poachers in their multifarious influences upon animals and habitats" - Ian Parker
Just some thoughts to keep you on your toes.
Submitted by Philip Cartland on 28 December 2007 - 11:00pm.
I've spent much time gathering together old images, ones from my past, a departed world. I've recycled them, varying their associations, but the process has almost always been a way of rejecting my new world, pampering feelings of loss.
Here, that is London, I see no exoticism or I refuse to see it, only cars and fumes and paved roads and rubbish stuck in corners, and people, well, like me - I've never had much interest in self-portraits. I walk down the road and I feel blind.
So I've been looking at defining exoticism as a way to put less value on it, I've read stuff about Graciela Iturbide, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, I've dug around and read some intellectual papers on the topic of exoticism and photography - a topic well covered since the 1920's. I've discovered many other photographers similarly prompted to defy the exotic whether by technical means, irony, or choice of subject. Most of the successful ones, though, have somehow retained that part of exoticism that is not about possession or escapism, that maintains a platform for meditation, that retains the seductive appeal and, finally that can be applied anywhere to any subject.
The prize of all my researches is Lewis Koch who many of you will know from his Touchless Automatic Wonder, but it is his Notes from the Stone-Paved Path: Meditations on North India, that really hit home for me.
Photo by Lewis Kock
Here's a blurb:
"The significance of Koch's superbly printed images lie in precisely not reproducing the tourist mentality toward that over-exoticized land, India, as found in much color photography by both Indian and Outsider alike. Dayanita Singh, a prominent Indian photographer, has bemoaned the fact that some of her own work caters to Western eyes. And reviewers have pointed out that Robert Arnett's recent book India Unveiled still treats us (in his text) with the Eurocentric myth of the Aryan invasion of India in 2500 B.C. and (in his photographs) with hot, vivid color we Westerners usually associate with India. But Koch's self-conscious personal documentary aesthetic eschews color; shot in black and white, they ignore the stereotypical exotic National Geographic subjects. Instead, this photographer, working within the "snapshot aesthetic" of street photography (whose purity he "ruins" with his textual asides), frames the seemingly banal, the lucky finds, the neglected, and the accidental occurrence. It is almost as if we are seeing India through an Indian flaneur's eyes. This is hard to do given the daunting accretion of texts and documents, fantasies, legends, jokes by indigenous and foreign peoples concerning that vast land. Koch reminds us of this by pairing some of those diverse textual fragments with his images." ~ Lewis Koch Gallery - More interesting stuff said about him in the link.
Photo by Lewis Kock
But you'll find what appears (I say appears because I've seen some images of the same series that aren't included) to be the whole book Notes from the Stone-Paved Path: Meditations on North India here (note the images can be enlarged, see the left hand column), the Jewel of this post!
Submitted by Philip Cartland on 27 December 2007 - 11:18am.
If by participating in life, somehow, regardless of your intentions, you inevitably participate in its decline, what can you do to transcend it? My answer: you can describe it. In this sense I feel the images below by Antoine D'AGATA, as presented in threes and fours here on the web (they may well not have originally been intended to display this way, and I know there are many more from the series ) do exactly that.
When finally one tires of scientifically defining life (who knows we may at last come to know this is impossible), and projecting its future (we already know the universal answer to that) all that is left that works for me is visual poetry, and these photos are bitter-sweet poetry.
The series "Mala Noche" shows life in the Mexican slums.
Submitted by Philip Cartland on 26 December 2007 - 8:00pm.
I read The Bang Bang Club by Greg Marinovich and Joao Silva in one sitting.
Before you've even hit the second page, you're immersed, bullets singing past you, rusty bars and heavy knives jabbing at you, and the smell of petrol on flaming flesh.
The insanity of racial violence bought to you by way of 'beach bum' photographers and, dowsed with dollops of intimacy and history; girl friends, mandrax and bhang parties, Reuter contracts, suicide and Afrikaner gunslinging racists (itching for a full on battle to the death with black people). Out of this chaos emerge images that win the pullizers, sell newspapers and signpost history.
But the awe dies, you've realised, that in fact, bringing yourself to within a hairsbreadth of death (yours or someone else's), might not be so heroic after all, its like voyeurism into lunacy, but once you've seen it, an apathetic deadness sinks in, faith in life destroyed when you see how much is now left to repair.
Apartheid has barely faded and the Rwandan genocide is coming alive and then Iraq and Iraq, and shit you know I've missed some. bang, bang, bang!
Submitted by Philip Cartland on 25 December 2007 - 11:00pm.
I've just bought the following book: South Africa: The Structure of Things Then, by David Goldblatt. Rather than go into the usual review I thought I would take one image and its caption (images are extensively captioned in this book). I'd first say that Goldblatt takes great pains to avoid the decorative, and further pains to make sure the full context is there. This book documents and informs thoroughly and therefore is priceless, in my opinion, not only as a record of the effects of Apartheid in South Africa, but also as a model for other documentary photographers to work with, while also acting as an antidote to the hysteria of mass market photojournalism.
"Khaki clothes for sale here': Orania settlement for the Afrikaner volk. Orania, Cape, 25th Sep 1992.
"The significance of khaki has changed for the Boers. During the Anglo-Boer war of 1899-1902, khaki, the uniform of the kakies or tommies, was identified with British imperialism, the name kakiebos, khaki bush, was given to one of the more unpleasant weeds, the seeds of which were imported for the first time with fodder for the British forces in that war. But to right-wing Afrikaners of the 1980s and 90s, who regard themselves as the upholders and defenders of Boer republicanism, khaki has taken on an entirely different symbolic value. Khaki pants and shirts are the working clothes of many Afrikaners farmers; khaki symbolises the attachment of the Boer to his land. Khaki became the uniform of right-wing activists in such movements as the AWB [link to a pretty grusome image taken by a member of the so called Bang Bang club and marking the final days of Apartheid].
Here in Orania, a settlement established by right-wing Afrikaners as the nucleus of a proposed Afrikaner state or volkstaat, the khaki clothes for sale at a house in the village were therefore a means of demonstrating identification with certain values. They stood for Afrikaner mobilisation in the fight for their 'heritage', their land and as working clothes they signified the ideal of 'self-labour', which was embraced by these who came to Orania. There were to be no Blacks in Orania; there was to be none of the culture of dependence of Whites on Blacks for physical work that had been endemic in South African society since its origins in the economy of slavery at the Cape.
Before coming to Orania the man of this house held quite a senior job in the city of Bloemfintein. Now he earned a fraction of his previous income but declared that he was very happy, 'I get by on very little here and I don't have to worry about Kaffirs, communists, and trade unions'."
There are more pictures from the book here
Submitted by Philip Cartland on 30 November 2007 - 9:00am.
Phaidon publish a series of little books, called '55'. Each contains 128 pages dedicated to a 'master' photographer.
Though they don't cover a huge range of photographers, I like them because they're compact and the images are accompanied by explanatory captions and some background in the introduction. I keep them as a reference. Currently I'm disecting one dedicated to Graciela Iturbide.
All of the images in this volume show her interest in animals and their relationship to people. Some animals appear incidentally, and others quite intentionally, but collected together as a whole, in one volume, we can see Iturbide's special interest, namely: how "...different people around the world reflect on the finite nature of their existence as revealed in their dealings with animals, objects, ritual and daily existence..."
While we may classify her images loosely as documentary, her limited coverage of cultures and subjects show no particular scientific rigour to that aim. And so, instead, a very nice term: anthropoetry, quite aptly expresses her spirit, I think.
The book also suggests that Iturbide was aware of the exotic (the dangers of its appearance in photography of 'traditional cultures') and either avoided it or parodied it. Cuauhtemoc Medina, a critic and historian who wrote the intro, suggests that exoticism arises, not from the photographer but from Western eyes; the main consumers of her images. I nevertheless sense her images tainted slightly - poetry seems to use the exotic, sometimes, as a visual stimulator. I see her eyes as 'athropoetic Western', influenced by the same passion and tradition of some of the major photographers of her period. But I question whether that hint of exoticism is harmful at all. Is it one of those words that everyone knows is bad, having had it passed to them that way, but without knowing actually why?
Anyway, Iturbide is found not guilty on all counts of the exotic in the intro. I suspect, I'm not really in the know, someone may have to knock me into line.
Links:
Submitted by Philip Cartland on 29 November 2007 - 10:18am.
Take this question put to Guy Tillim:
PM: At the same time you admit to capturing the 'worthy moment', which also points to all the countless moments of truth which go undocumented. Are there any photographs you have taken, which beyond the notion of looking for the photographic moment, have amounted to a visual lie?
and the answer:
GT: Yes, but I won't tell you which ones! Perhaps in this context there are no lies, but then there is no truth either.
Then you look at Tillim's images.
We only need half a brain to realise images lie (even quite as badly as say, the british media), and quite substantially more than a brain, bordering on superhuman abilities, to find the lie. If there is any judgment to be planted perhaps it should be sown near the intentions of the 'peddler'. In the case of the british media, the sentence? Life. In the case of Guy Tillim? The right to lie.
Submitted by Philip Cartland on 27 November 2007 - 12:00am.
Probably it was when a friend gave me a book of stories by Flannery O'Connor that my imagination was invaded by the cocktail of religion, sex, death, loneliness, hopefulness and hopelessness, beauty and criminality that generally appear to make up certain inner recesses of the southern US imagination. I read Poachers stories, by Tom Franklin and Truman Capotes "In Cold Blood", I've recently watched the documentary 'Searching For The Wrong-Eyed Jesus', we all know Shelby Lee Adams (You've got to check out his blog) and there's the poetic "Sleeping by the Mississippi" by Alec Soth (look for the articles and related footnotes at the end of the slideshow).
Submitted by Philip Cartland on 24 November 2007 - 9:43pm.
What I'd call 'the American traveler photographer mystic' is a strain of photography particularly infectious (to me) and seems to have become a process, originating in Evans, where the face of America is redefined each time someone photographs it in a new way.
'Ordinary' America, in this tradition, appears, largely, to be the subject matter, whether by direct portrait, mundane streets or odd suburban paraphernalia. Ironically the audience, generally speaking could not be further from this apparent 'common' world, yet it is amongst this audience and through its media where the identity of America is actually defined and reflected visually.
Photo by Stephen Shore, from Uncommon Places - Houk Gallery
If they (our folk outside the photographic sphere) get to see these works at all, would they not be looking at themselves and their pictured environment with perplexity rather than recognition? I suspect, too, that they would be too busy living their ordinariness to waste time on a photograph. Perhaps they won't even be aware, 20 years from the shutter's moment of truth, that via a gradual cultural osmosis, photography will have given them a new face and called it America.
Because cultures don't really model themselves on the photographic image; they develop instead along their own lines of traditions and norms, we may find the public visual map of America, widely differing from its actuality and that the pictorial definition is far more about the photographer (and his following) than the subject and their identity, however noble or ideal the pursuit.
Was America ever like Stephen Shore's vision, if so is it still that way? For those of us that aren't in that world we may really think it is, if we don't carefully notice that the dates say 1973-1979, or when at some point we are shown a differing image by a new generation of photographers.
We've tired long ago of the oft repeated 'superstitious' fear claiming that the camera steals one's soul. Perhaps though, it's really true, well in so far as it substitutes it with a select fake?
Submitted by Philip Cartland on 15 October 2007 - 5:06pm.
