Suginami : a book by James Luckett

James, author of consumptive has been around since the beginning of time in photography blog years and I'm happy to announce his book, subtle, beautiful and understated.

7x7 inches / 78 pages / 68 tritone photographs
hardcover with dust jacket

Available for purchase from Blurb.com: http://tinyurl.com/BlurbSuginami

all the photographs from Suginami can be previewed on Flickr:
http://tinyurl.com/SuginamiPreview

also see an interview by Stacy Oborn at her blog The Space In Between:
One Thing Done Two Ways: Elijiah Gowin and James Luckett on Making a Book.

Maya Goded - 'Good Girls'

Picture 01 - Mexico city. 1999. Patti, 16 comes from Chiapas. When she arrived in Mexico city, she was raped by several men. She was rescued by the police who asked her to testify against her rapists. Afterwards, one of the police and her lawyer put her on the streets and became her pimps. 

Picture: 02 - Mexico city. 2000. Afrodita is getting ready for her first communion by her mother, a prostitute. her father is the pimp of her mother

So you want to be a photographer?

The question of cash for writing reminds me of Paul Theroux; a while ago i read his book 'Sir Vidias Shadow'. Some writers, as Paul Theroux reveals about himself in this book, often have a sense of having to 'hide' (or at least not reveal, solidly) the fact that they are writers until they achieve some form of recognition (this is also true for photographers, as noted by Robert Adams who felt apologetic for being a photographer until he was earning money).

Saying that you want to write, or you intend to be a writer is not the same as saying, with confidence and absolute self belief, 'I am a writer.'

Publishing a book is one kind of recognition; a form of ritualised initiation, receiving acceptance from a successful writer is another (Naipaul accepts Theroux as writer). Any writer would be satisfied with this, but a little something is missing: would our writer not want to establish absolute certainty? Money may or may not be forthcoming - but gladly accepted if and when it does, it is the cherry on the cake, a final recognition; a medal of achievement from the reader. Money means that a writer can do writing all day and everyday if it so pleases him. When someone asks, ‚"What do you do?" you reply with comfortable finality: "I am a writer"

Had Theroux not achieved his recognition, would he have eventually stopped writing, I wonder? Probably not, but would he have called himself a writer? I propose, he would still be calling himself a teacher of English.

Ultimately it is the reader who bestows the title and money is one gauge of this, but writing from the heart does not require a title, nor recognition - except, surely, by at least one reader.

There is another perspective though, one where writing is a necessary skill for everyone. A journalist is a writer, a traveller can be a writer. Sebald, a master of writing (and found images - which he splices amongst his texts) himself, finds scientists to be better writers that bona fide 'writers'. Come to think of it, my favourite books are not written by writers but by journalists, scientists, investigators and the new writers of the age bloggers.

It seems this line of thought may also be true - we all now have a camera of sorts - for photgraphers. So you want to be a photographer? Perhaps this is good advice:

Don't, whatever you do, take a fine arts degree in photography, take a science degree (or a degree covering your subject matter to be, anything but photography) such as zoology, ecology, biology, agricultural science, or perhaps even an athropology degree, - being a doctor, too, would be ideal. This way your profession will pay for you, take you to interesting places and while your out there you can do photography.

Reflective reality and Ryszard Kapuscinski

I heard somewhere that journalists are second only to politicians and estate agents as the most hated among the British public. Who actually proposed this and what survey (everything has to have a survey attached these days) provided the evidence, I don't know, but I do know my own thoughts:

If by participating in life, somehow, regardless of intentions, you inevitably participate in its decline, what can you do to transcend it? Well i think, you can, at least, describe it.

Describing is what journalists do, so I don't feel so bad for liking and aspiring to the best of journalism. There is, though, a wide margin between the endless conveyor belt of cheap shots thrown out by newspapers forced to scratch out content on a daily basis (many blogs fall in this category by sprouting their particular versions of instant drama), and what could be termed literary reportage; well documented, described, commented upon, stories.

For me, regardless of actual possibilities of photography, the interesting thing about the medium is its ability to capture, for lack of a better term, a reflective reality. This is a kind of journalism, a report on perceived reality. It may only be a fraction of a second, but it's a story nevertheless, and when done in a certain way faithfully reflects reality. This kind of journalism does not cancel out imagination, neither is it separate from art.

There is one particular journalist who fits the bill for me, and there are moments in his descriptions that could easily have been photographs, they are in any case photographs etched on the memory and conveyed by words. The journalist is Ryszard Kapuscinski.

Very memorable for me, in the context of photographic lucid imagery in a written form, is his description of dogs in Angola, in his book: Another Day of Life (1976), a unique and closely observed account of the collapse of Portuguese colonialism in Angola. The particular scene occurs after the departure of all the wealthy Portuguese from their suburb properties in Luanda:

The dogs were still alive.

They were pets, abandoned by owners fleeing in panic. You could see dogs of all the most expensive breeds, without masters - boxers, bulldogs, greyhounds, Dobermans, dachshunds, Airedales, spaniels, even Scotch terriers and Great Danes, pugs and poodles. Deserted, stray, they roamed in a great pack looking for food. As long as the Portuguese army was there, the dogs gathered every morning on the the square in front of the general headquarters and the sentries fed them with canned NATO rations. It was like watching an international pedigreed dog show. Afterwards the fed, satisfied pack moved to the soft, juicy mowed lawn of the Government Palace . An unlikely mass sex orgy began, excited and indefatigable madness, chasing and tumbling to the point of utter abandon. It gave the bored sentries a lot of ribald amusement.