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.
