Paul Seawright's Invisible Cities
Seawright in conversation with Russell Roberts:
RS: For some your work might be in danger of creating a neo-colonial perspective as it is firmly situated within the narrow confines of the Western art world. Is this something you have considered?
PS: Obviously I have considered it, worried about it even. After my first trip to Africa I considered moving on to something else, uncertain how to resolve what was inevitably going to be problematic, no matter how I approached it...
...I'd argue that an external perspective has value and maybe is even enhanced by a post-colonial perspective, or at least a perspective that rejects the dominant Western iconography of the African continent.
Seawright recognises that Africa is a photographers trap. His method, which give priority to a 'neutral' and muted stance, attempts to deny dramatisation
I wonder though, if, by rejecting the dominating iconography, by stepping into his specialised world of art, and succeeding, that by this very action, he stumps himself. Perhaps, with this book, he'll fail to find appeal, and so also fail to inspire the prerequisite deluge of imitatative imagery straining to establish its own domination (Africa is to be avoided like the plague, I've noticed). No, I doubt it. I detect, even in Seawright's desolation, his vacant spaces, a faint pictorialism, a seductive aura, even if it is conceptual, that inspires us viewers, even while our attention is called to notice the buzzing electricity that bypasses the shanty town
This book contains an introductory text by John Reader, and, at the back, a coversation with with Russell Roberts. I would set it right beside Guy Tillim's Avenue Patrice Lumumba on the shelf.
4 March 2009 - 11:26pm — AdminFig. Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin
"Styleistically, they [Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin] avoid the overtly creative, opting instead for a paired down, formal approach bordering on neutrality"
Take the book Fig. Now I really think this is a great book, and hearing the authors speak has only confirmed to me that they are onto something new, they're breaking conventions and they're a smart pair. But I hardly ever pick up the book.
Does theory overwhelm me? Do I need to cognitise pain and suffering and injustice to renew it's effect on me? This covert description of suffering is still feeble, humans will do what they do, we don't need a conceptual memorial, we just need the killing, and therefore the recording of it, to stop.
Picture 01 - Room 202, Hotel Des Mille Collines, Kigali, Rwanda, Picture 02 - Heather Models 1, London UK
Yet there is more beauty in the passport blandness of the image on the right than anything to be found in Vogue. While there is no artifice in the technique, at least we can say that nature itself ignored such constraints entirely in the case of this girl and for a brief respite we can daydream
2 March 2009 - 11:11pm — AdminFrancoise Huguier - Kommounalki
I came across Francoise Huguier's book, Kommounalki which presents images taken while renting a room in a communal apartment (Kommunalka in Russian) in Saint Petersburg. This book, with French texts, is a rarity, which you can purchase for only £20.
In her own words:
My very first days in these communal apartments in St Petersburg were absolutely perplexing, and I realised it would take me several stays and an inside contact to get to the bottom of these weird, closed-off environments.
Over several years I photographed the place and the daily life of the residents – and especially of Natacha, who set the rhythm of my visits. Implicitly, and without my realising it, she became the main strand in my narrative and in my desire to be there and stay there. She embodies the quintessence of these communal worlds and the magnetism of a city that has been gnawing at me for so many years. How many times have I stood simply hypnotised by these disturbing visions of light and shade?
Who spoke to me of ghosts? Who told me that at night in St Petersburg you can see the invisible and dream of the unutterable
6 November 2008 - 2:16pm — Admin
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
7 October 2008 - 9:52pm — AdminLiu Zheng's, The Chinese
"The Chinese" Liu Zheng's vision of - something akin to Robert Frank's over indulged "The Americans"- is something of a retort to an enduring party line of perfect people with a perfect future under, of course, a perfect leadership, who might even be so bold as to claim immortality were their optimism not already spouting beyond capacity.
In Liu Zheng's tragedy we have Chinese who actually get old and die, have accidents or live in a less than perfect world, among a wide cast of subjects, from strippers, to beggars, to predatory business men to entertainers and asylum cases. If the 'perfect leadership' were to actually spend a moment or two reading this book they might find themselves having to sweep quite a few, well, marginal folk, up, in preparation for their perfectly happy olympics.
Liu Zheng's dedication to what appears to be a rather too true reality, allows us to register our own impermanence - we all share the same fate - while also questioning whether these Chinese are in fact marginalized and on the fringe, perhaps they are rather more the diverse norm, there might even be something of them in us.
An exceptional book, really, and in my view transcending by far Frank's self obsessed work. I always get the feeling that Frank describes something not even there. By not allowing his own interpretation - he does have one doesn't he - he's kind of letting the storm carry his work where it will.
Furthermore, while Frank seems to heavily criticize, there's always a statement to be found somewhere in his work, Zheng allows his subjects to speak. His images reflect people in a world that really exists. Were it not for the notoriety of the 'Americans', perhaps there should not even be a comparison, save the stringing of images bit. Maybe we're really looking more in the line of Diane Arbus, without the freakery side.
17 September 2008 - 8:51pm — AdminReflective 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:
17 September 2008 - 8:49pm — AdminThe 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.
Max Pam - Indian Ocean Journals
"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)
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:
Brac's Land wreck makes TV fame
17 September 2008 - 7:44pm — Admin3 states of mind
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.
17 September 2008 - 9:37am — AdminCity of Shadows
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 #4 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
17 September 2008 - 9:35am — Admin