"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)
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.
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:
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.
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.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.
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.I'm interested when photography falls off the literal radar into the subjective. Part of looking at photography requires something to meditate on. But, I suspect, it's here that the common (in fact not so common as we commonly might think) audience jumps ship. Particularly reflective of this 'jumping ship' is a recent comment on a blog by Tim Atherton regarding Fumimasa Hosokawa's conceptual project, where,
"...the artist researches public records going back 100 years to find obituaries of people who died on the streets in and around Tokyo in accidents, fights or from illness. Hosokawa visited the locations--determined from the descriptions and addresses in the obituaries--and photographed the sites in black and white in an "official-looking" documentary style."
Denizen's comment says:
"Can you tell me what's the connection between the fact that somebody happened to die in these surroundings a hundred years ago and a b&w picture taken today when even the oldest trees are unlikely to have been around at that time?"
At what point does the conceptual become so remote that it loses touch? Judge for yourself among some of my favourites below.
Nadja Groux says, regarding her pictures:
"...in my work the birth canal relates to the birth of oneself. The bruise and scars on the body are a metaphor of the difficulty of this process and show the element of madness in an apparent peaceful environment of floral wallpapers."
Roni Horn's images of the Thames cause us to reflect on the darker side of the river:
"The Thames attracts a very high number of suicides, many from other countries, and a significant number of so-called deaths by misadventure and death by extremely violent means - lots of dismemberment and so on."
Invisible structures by Xavier Ribas
"At first glance, these images make us think of a wild space, natural, undefined, as if without motif. However, this disorganised and entropic space is, in fact, a historical site, the site (niche) of a buried city beneath the rainforest floor...The memory that is represented in these images is not the monument, but a projection, a threshold, a memory 'which is not yet', or that is as yet 'unthought', as in a state of 'inversion' (Robert Smithson). Or, a memory which, simply, does not let itself be thought, as if the rainforest was not only the direct consequence of the desolation and the crumbling of a civilisation, but also the necesary strategy for the preservation of its fragments: we could say that it hides itself, that it buries itself and that it eludes us."
Reflections on Frankenstein, The Arctic Circle, and The History of Science, an exhibition of a new three-part series of large-scale photographs by Catherine Wagner that examines the synthesis of science, nature, and humanity in contemporary society and is inspired by Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.
Final notes:
Maybe photography has run out of space, forcing photographers to dig deeper, to squeeze every ounce of use from it, or, perhaps photography is a useless story telling medium, with nothing like the fluidity of film, where gaps must be filled by metaphorical linkages.
Submitted by Philip Cartland on 29 May 2007 - 8:31pm.From Peter Beard's 'End of the Game'.
There's some pretty hard hitting connections with the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya during the 1950's early 60's. in this spread of Beard's book. In the far mid right is a portrait of Dedan Kimathi who 'lead' the Mau Mau in the mountainous Aberdare forest and was finally captured and executed. The Trial of Jomo Kenyatta (pictured to the left of carcass), conducted by the British, implicated Kenyatta as the political motivation behind what were brutal tactics of the Mau Mau. Presumably the dead Zebra covered with flies is something of a symbol representing the horror of this period in Kenya's history? Is it a criticism of Kenyatta. Note Karen Blixens (Isaac Dinesen) profile beside that of Tutankhamen and a tribeman, the old East African coin, the elephant, Ahmed, on the left had tusks so big, I've heard it said, that it had to walk up a hill backwards! An xray of the bullet that ended Ahmed's life is at the bottom left.
Coming from a rather 'information sheltered' upbringing in Kenya, I was exposed rather late to the photographers who make it into the history of photography compilations. Those that I was exposed to, seem unremarkable in comparison. Their work mostly graced the coffee table, or the touristy section of the bookshop, with titles like, Beautiful Kenya, or Vanishing Africa (some of them awesome photographers in their own right).
One of these photographers, Mo (Mohamed Amin), made it really big though.
I remember him for two things, his pictures of sunsets - some that showed the sun so high in the sky that the scene could never have been so orange, as though he'd not been bothered to wait, and had thrown on an orange filter to get the effect - and for his images of "His Excellency President for Life, Field Marshal Al Hadji Doctor Idi Amin, VC, DSO, MC, Lord of All the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Sea, and Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in General and Uganda in Particular."
But neither of those are what made him big, big. In 1984 he hit the world stage with what might as well be one of the first links in the chain of starving people pictures.
Aidan Hartley in his absolutely ripping book 'Zanzibar Chest' (see images from the book here) writes:
"His greatest triumph was TV footage, voiced over by the BBC's Michael Buerk, of the first pictures to break the 1984 Ethiopian famine. Mo's pictures whipped up publicity, rock songs and concerts that raised funds for food that probably saved a further two million from hungry deaths. He may have seemed diffident but he was as conceited as hell and never let you forget about his fame
"Mo proudly showed me his office. Covering the walls were framed snaps of Mo with Bob Geldof, Queen Elizabeth giving Mo his MBE medal, Mo with Sidney Pointer, Mo with sundry Third world despots, honorary degrees, TV awards and a platinum disk of the song 'We are the world'."
In Africa one has to be able to face blood and guts. Facing the whimsical Idi Amin is likely to make you shake your head in disbelief, while expecting at any moment a sudden death sentence after a joke turned sour. The last scene in this quite long video shows the shifting paranoid eyes of this buffoon. Somewhere about midway, Mo is filmed together with Castro and Idi Amin together.
Mo had one major talent of many, he was always on the spot:
'He was no media cowboy, no thrill seeker.... he was brave and committed, and his genius was being there when it happened.' - Michael Buerk
He died in the hijacked Ethiopian Airlines Flight 96 crash (amateur footage from cnn), November 23, 1996.
Submitted by Philip Cartland on 21 December 2006 - 1:09pm.I'm lookin through this bookshop and I see this book Storylines and it sounds just like what I like. I open it and I just don't know, quickly, without cheating and reading the whole thing in the shop, what the fck it's about. Robert Frank, why does Storylines sound like what I'm looking for, but I look in it and can't see what I thought I was looking for and I don't know what it's all about, so I'm not sure? So I go and look him up and I find this old article and read him say:
"'People want to know so much now,' ... 'All the time, this wanting to know. Where does it lead? Nowhere.' ... 'Pictures, huh?' ... 'We'll see, we'll see'."
But then, afterwards, I find Jack Kerouac talking and Robert Frank filming but it's Jack who infects me, long enough anyway, for me to out this post, weirdly.
Now I'm satisfied, I want out, it's not what I'm looking for, all this poetic decoration, so far away from the poetic plain speaking that photography is so good at, maybe.
Submitted by Philip Cartland on 12 December 2006 - 1:27pm.I'm a bit of a schizophrenic person. One day I like this then another day I like that. I really used to get heavy under the eyes with portrait photography, I'm also, like, a little bit very much misanthropic. Then the portrait turned modern (contemporary...or whatever). Well what does that mean? I really am going to avoid talking about Avedon, I might just nod off (sorry)...... I guess, what I mean is, suddenly you get your subject standing in the middle of the frame, kind of like in a measured way, just standing there almost as though to say I am what I am, here I am. That's why I suppose I like Pieter Hugo's 'subdued' portraits besides the obvious nature man in his environment thing. It's refreshing for me not to see an old car, a signboard, street, a mundane sparsity or a weird over ambiguous 'meaningful' gesture.
These images remind me of a guy I knew called James, last time I saw him he'd got into a drunken fight and lost two of his front teeth. James was not to bright, in the 'educated' sense of the word, i.e. he couldn't read nor write. He had trouble putting a three pronged plug into a wall socket, he spent an awful lot of time, in an HIV world, sleeping with prostitutes and anyone else available (consequently he found himself followed by a string of kids), and he spent every penny he earned the same day he received it. But he'd come from another world completely. Give him a panga (big chopping knife) and a thick branch and he would carve out the most delicate cooking spoon. He knew all about honey and bees and what fruit certain birds liked and what animal made such and such mark on the ground. He was, just, like so many Africans today, being crowded out by a world that has enforced western style education and lifestyle.
Submitted by Philip Cartland on 11 November 2006 - 1:29pm.The photographers gallery has an exhibition by Zineb Sedira .
The exhibit, called 'Saphir', made me acutely aware how different seeing the clarity of a nice enlarged image, is, from viewing images online or in a book - the books and the catalogue were completely unsatisfactory; like they were just further coverage, on low budget, rather than exhibits in themselves. Here is a snippet about the series from the gallery's site:
"The exhibition contrasts Sedira's re-encounter with the sights and sounds of Algiers with an awareness that while she, like other people from France, is enjoying her return to the city, some of its other residents, disenchanted young men in particular, often dream of escape across the water to Europe."
I particularly like Sedira's idea and the mood evoked by the images, despite feeling there were simply too few images and some not of high quality (i.e. one was blurry, unnecessarily, I felt, though standing further back helped). In the same turn, perhaps, because there were so few, I was not overwhelmed. The scarcity increased the value.
The accompanying film, which is viewed on two screens, side by side, almost like two stills, was stunning, and probably this is where most of her energy was spent. Here's more about it:
This play of meaning is extended through two central characters. The first is an Algerian man who walks across town, with no apparent purpose, and silently watches the daily ferries arrive and depart from the port. His image is counterpoised by that of an older woman � a daughter of the pieds noirs (a term for European settlers who left Algeria after its Independence). She inhabits the Safir Hotel, one of the grand landmarks of French colonial Algiers. Whose imposing architecture is a powerful and resonant reminder of a past that still casts its light, and shadow, over the city. Gazing out to sea from its balconies, before withdrawing to the faded grandeur of its lobbies and halls, the woman echoes the man's movement and reinforces a wider sense of languor, inertia and enclosure. Both characters circle within their own separate but parallel worlds, their paths often appear to intersect but without any conclusion.
Despite my enthusiasm I've already forgotten the film. Film seems to move through me while stills hold me. The two images above grab me, enough to allow faults I find blow away.
I really like 'Saphir'. It's universal, in the sense that we are all looking across the waters, escaping to that dream world which, in all likelihood is not what we imagine.
Submitted by Philip Cartland on 27 October 2006 - 6:58pm."Obviously there are far more areas of black than white in my vision, and the space that I'm so interested in looking is to be gotten through my use of Black as a POSITIVE space rather than a negative - (The way most photographs dict[tate]"?
Page from Gibson's diary describing his experience press checking the 'Somnambulist'.
Source: archives of the Center for Creative Photography (Univ of Arizona), I am the fortunate owner of a book, describing the best of these archive, called 'Original Sources'.
'Original Sources' has lots of interesting and rare info, including diary entries, collected pamphlets, letters and paraphernalia that reveal otherwise hidden motives and ideas behind the photographers and their images.
This week I found a translation of written works by Japanese photographers, called 'Setting Sun' (book sale link, short review). A cursory glance convinced me it might be worth buying.
There is too much to go into here but I thought, over the next couple of posts, I'd say a thing or two about 3 of the photographers that stood out - things perhaps, that you wouldn't pick up just by viewing a few images alone.
Ordeal by Roses
Eikoh Hosoe, quite a well known and regarded photographer on this side of the world, writes about his photo session by invitation with Yukio Mishimi (pictured in the thumb, a prolific writer, who is considered by many critics as the most important Japanese novelist of the 20th century). The book arising from this was called 'Ordeal by Roses' (Barakei) and expressed the themes of Life and death. Now, here's the story as written by Eikoe Hosoe himself:
"Despite the fact that 'Ordeal by Roses' was a document about life and death, I felt it taboo to mention the word 'death'' in regard to the theme of the book, until the fall of 1970. At the end of that summer, we changed the sequence and layout of the work for publication of a second edition. Mishima chose the titles for each section and called the final chapter "Death" then asked for my approval. I accepted the suggestion at once, having known all along that the essence of the last section was morbid. Shortly after this decision, on November 25, 1970, Mishima committed suicide by seppuku [ritual suicide, was an intregal aspect of feudal Japan. It developed as an intregal part of the code of bushido and the discipline of the samurai warrior class.] at Ichigaya Heights."
Later Hosoe writes:
Several of the photographs were blown up and used in the exhibition [called 'Yukio Mishima', held in October, a month before his death] in a section that Mishima titled 'River of Flesh', beside which he wrote: "I will never admit the decay of the flesh"
Its worth getting hold of the book to get the subtleties and details.
"In tokyo he is high-fived by men in the street and mobbed by young women clamoring to be photographed by him (a Japanese game show even offered that privilege as a prize); he receives letters from women telling him, what they are prepared to do in his pictures, out grossing each another in what appears to be a frenzy of exhibitionism."
It's easy to recognise who David Chandler is talking about in his review in the November issue of photoworks. There's an exhibition of Araki's images at the Barbican and I'm wondering if the gallery's not just another of the clamoring masses desiring to host or be hosted by this man's manic produce. I'm not against him totally or 'for' him for that matter - just annoyed.
There was a time when I would pick up one of his books, but absorbing the sheer number of his images is like trying to view a landscape through a shattered pane, or trying to stick your hand into a shoal of fish in the hopes of catching one. And all his women wrapped in ropes, I'm sick of it really. The analysis below by David Chandler says it nicely:
"But the addict is ultimately a bore; too immersed in himself, too tiring to be with, too reliant on the delusions and compliance of others around them. Most great art comes from a singular and obsessive attention to things, it is borne of an urgent desire. Yet great art also opens out from that point. Spending time with Araki's work is, for me, like being confined to an addiction, like being dragged on an interminable journey of the self with photography as a desperate and continual means of personal re-fabrication and with photographs as a gaudy and pale replacements of life" - David Chandler
P.S - "Arguably Japan's greatest living photographer"? Huuum..?
Submitted by Philip Cartland on 27 December 2005 - 12:00am.