Leopold and Mobutu - Guy Tillim

A while ago I visited the photographer's gallery and saw Guy Tillims pigment printed series, 'Leopold and Mobutu". 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 summarises 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 >>

Looking for Storylines

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.

Final resting place - paradise...

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-Exupry, in search of the unknowable truth behind Crowhurst's predicament.

Sources:

Tacita Dean Synopsis

Brac's Land wreck makes TV fame

Timothy O'Sullivan

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.