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.
17 September 2008 - 8:53pm — AdminLooking 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.
17 September 2008 - 7:49pm — AdminFinal 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 — AdminHearts of darkness
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).
17 September 2008 - 7:42pm — AdminThe frontline
One of the things that interest me about 'weeds' is that they are like rebel plants. You'll find them taking root in the most obscure and remarkable places throughout London. They are living evidence of nature in defiance against management.
There are very few aspects of the British landscape that are not 'managed.' One weird consequence of this is the abundance of funny shaped trees everywhere, trees that have had their branches lopped off to keep them within the urban safety requirements.
Lakes and ponds are particularly well managed. I was once very disappointed to learn that the fish in a lake I was fishing were restocked annually and, furthermore, were infertile.
Nature management is as old as the hills in England and spread far beyond its own borders. When England carried its mastery over nature to Africa through the colonies, suddenly the wilderness was defined, and ownership of its creatures established. Locals who had hunted as a livelihood became poachers and so started the whole african wildlife legacy we have today.
Perhaps this legacy began in such a place as Epping forest (that is if we don't go back into the psychology of the Garden of Eden) where, in the 12 century, Henry III asserted royal ownership and hunting rights over all the wild deer. The forest commoners where allowed to gather wood and foodstuffs, and to graze livestock, but the wild part and the right to destroy it, the valuable part, was Royal.
In Tudor times Henry VIII and Queen Elizabeth I hunted in the forest from the Queen Elizabeth's Hunting Lodge which still stands today as a museum.
The forest was saved from encroachment by the Epping Forest Act passed in 1878. The act stopped all illegal enclosure, halting the shrinkage of the forest that this had caused, and the Crown's right to deer and venison was terminated.
Until the outbreak of BSE in 1996 commoners still exercised their right to graze cattle and every summer herds of cattle would roam freely in the southern part of the forest.
Long horn cattle were reintroduced in 2001, to restore the balance that grazing had provided, but their movements are tightly restricted or should I say managed (as are the deer of the forest) to reduce conflict with traffic resulting from the increased urban population density.
It is extremely presumptuous of us to believe that 'nature', in its entirety, can be managed, especially against the sheer human weight that lies on its borders. The need to define, categorise, measure, control, conserve, contain has done little to prevent our awesome impact on the environment as a whole. Those nations with the greatest ethic of conservation have actually contributed the largest part of that global impact.
Maybe we shouldn't despair; as much as we feel that we have control over nature, it'll still live on, in its wild state, taking seed in the darker recesses of our world and mind, and I guess will choose to appear in the most unlikely and unexpected of places, the moment we run out of steam.
17 September 2008 - 9:26am — AdminFatal impact
The following story was bought to my awareness by Blaine Harden's book, Africa - Dispatches from a fragile continent, and appears to be corroborated by many other bits and bobs of info, reports and research articles, that I've found dotted over the net. The story remains one of the classic examples of do-gooders, with the best of intentions, messing up. I've included a few images of my own taken in the region. You should also click on the satellite image thumb below for an awesome view of this desert lake.
The oil rich Norwegians, being a seafaring nation and rather good at fishing, were asked by the Kenyan Government to help the Turkana turn a virtually unexploited fish resource into hard cash. Lake Turkana is a ecologists paradise, with 47 species of fish, seven being endemic, but the Norwegians were interested mainly in the Nile Tilapia, a fish that breeds in the shallows of Ferguson's Gulf by the ton.
Once the Norwegian International Development Agency (NORAD), had completed the appropriate investigations and plans, the Turkana Fishermen's Cooperative (TFCS, 1965) in Kalekol was called into action to begin the first commercial fishing scheme on the lake by enticing more pastoral Turkana with promising incentives. They were encouraged to take up donated fishing nets and boats and taught the best modern way to fish. A research vessel, transported all the way from Norway to Mombasa was hauled overland to Ferguson's gulf.
Then came the road , an all weather road, connecting the main highways of Kenya with Lodwar, the nearest town to Kalakol on the lakes shore. By the early 80's NORAD had also completed their crowning achievement, a Ksh30 million fish processing factory to assist the TFCS.
As many as 20,000 fishermen were employed by the early 1980s, including a large component of migrants from shores of Lake Victoria who came to partake of the boom. But the refrigeration unit didn't last long, a couple of days in fact before it was closed down. Bringing the temperature down from 100 degrees required far more expense in diesel generated electricity than frozen fish fillets could bring in return, and far more clean water was required than was available (Lake Turkana is extremely brackish, drinking it is like drinking soapy bath water)
Then came the drought that was already causing hunger on a mass scale in Ethiopia. The Omo river fed by the now failed rains of the catchment area in Ethiopian highlands, reduced its input dramatically. The Ferguson gulf shallows promptly dried up, the shore receded 2km away and the fish moved to deeper waters or moved elsewhere to better breeding grounds. Out of practical reach without more mechanisation, further proper storage facilities and yet more revenue to compensate for the increased difficulties! In 1986 the processing plant was shut down completely and has not been used since.
Fishing had enforced a settled way of life. Those who couldn't leave to resume their pastoral existence were stuck without a renewable resource. Their livestock had grazed the land in the reachable vicinity to the roots while trees had been chopped down for firewood. They were left little alternative but to accept food aid or scrape by on fish which traditionally was a last resort anyway and considered the livlihood of a failure. When I went to Kalekol in the 90's they were selling trinkets made from fish bone to a trickle of tourists passing through to view the 'traditional' Turkana village.
In the review of their failures, NORAD belatedly discovered in the records at Lodwar, evidence that this was not the first time the bay had dried up. But more importantly, the Turkana, who had never actually been asked in the first place, revealed that their interest in cows (like the Masai they believe all cows of the earth to be their own) was a well founded, tried and tested, survival adaptation, finely tuned to the whims of spotty rainfall and regular drought. Already the best solution to a crap situation.
Besides the fact that Turkana livestock are extremely hardy, the Norwegians learned, further, that cows link family (dowry being the most basic of example) to family, clan to clan, that in time of drought they might shift their herds away from affected areas, to relatives in less affected areas, responding to the whim of the rainfall, thereby watering down the risk. Mobility in harsh environments is key, any semi desert region will show just that, and Turkana cows are a highly efficient way of extracting available energy and storing it.
And so this ambitions plan to pull the Turkana out of their misery, was a flop. Planning and organisation and an insurmountable number of consultations and Nordic knowhow, all went to nothing before two very basic and crucial facts, that the lake dries up and Turkana live for their cows (literally).
This legacy continues too, with irrigation schemes and their unconsidered effects. I also discovered that a new plant, Prosopis juliflora was introduced and now there are many negative reports, one being that the bush is over running Northen Kenya and causing causing teeth problems among livestock that eat it, ie their teeth are falling out (see: Mwangi, Esther & Brent Swallow, June 2005, Invasion of Prosopis juliflora and local livelihoods: Case study from the lake Baringo area of Kenya. ICRAF Working Paper - no. 3. Nairobi: World Agroforestry Centre). Again, the Turkana have their own way of managing trees, as revealed by this study. Finally, as of 2003 NORAD has been funding the Turkana Livestock Development Program (PDF) the main input being vetinary services, I'd really like to investigate this one.
Judging by the sheer number of research papers and complex reports spouting out of Africa, many of them turning over the same old ground, it is hardly surprising that more harm is being done than good.
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Notes: I have tried in the post above, short and webloggy as it's meant to be, to cross check facts from as many sources available to me, but with my limited access and time there are questions that I cannot answer. Consider this a work in progress which I'll add to over time, after all this is just one piece of a long story.
Finally as a point of interest, while digging through all the info I have, I came across this snippet from a letter (RTF file) which appears to have been written to send to the Human right commission and posted on a minority right group website.. Demands include include:
"The natural resources that exist in the district have not yet been exploited. (There are mineral water sources at Elliye springs, precious stone such as gypsum in Napusmor and green garnet in Horiu, including Lake Turkana's fishing grounds). A Norwegian fishing venture was abandoned in the 1980s due to political disagreements between the Kenya and Norway and the government to date has not done anything about the structures that were put in place by the Norwegian government."
The political disagreement bit is true, but not the primary reason why the plant was closed, I believe the Kenyan government felt Norwegian aid was in fact aiding the opposition and the Government wanted all cash through them and only them. But the desire to have the fish factory thing restarted is ludicrous.
Other notes: The water level of the lake has been dropping steadily for some years: a decline of 10m was recorded between 1975 and 1993, primarily due to reduced inflow from the Omo River in Ethiopia due to irrigation and drought upstream
However, following the El Nino rains in the Ethiopian Highlands in the last two years, the Ferguson's Gulf - a protected cove to the North-west of the lake has again filled up and fish catches have suddenly increased, making the lake the main source of fish in the country. (1999 Nation). No sign of the processing plant coming alive.
Other great sources:
17 September 2008 - 9:24am — Admin"Projects are frequently based on the assumption that Western ideas and behaviors form appropriate models for the pastoral situation or that what pastoralists say they do ("ideal behavior') and what they have been observed to do ('ideal behavior') are accurate representations of the pastoral system."
But, what does it mean?
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.
17 September 2008 - 9:23am — AdminThe Quiet Naturalist
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. 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 Severin's tradition sailing craft as he sailed into Ambon Harbour. The exquisite underwater coral garden, which Wallace had described with such enthusiasm, was irretrievably gone.'
17 September 2008 - 9:20am — AdminLife and Death in Eden
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 nowhere, so let's 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 **** 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 my two bosses fighting over nothing!)
Anyway, I write only to pass on my enthusiasm.
17 September 2008 - 9:18am — AdminGoing backwards
I was looking at some vernacular photography some of which was so charming I began to feel a great loss. Where is the wonder and humor among the endless reams of obsessively 'placed' large format portraits and images of dumpy places, derelict buildings, vacant wastelands - the intentionally 'odd' or inexplicable or downright boring, stuff?
Perhaps its about temperament; I'm by nature a reductionist, who must get rid of all the clutter (coming from a cluttered mind no doubt), back to basics, who needs the sanity of the natural and the poetically 'real', who doesn't like the bombardment of modern culture and all it shiny junk, precision and flashy attention seeking - who wishes to seek the zen simplicity, the old, the rare.
The two images above came from the small book, "photo trouvee" with snaps collected by Michel Frizot and Cedric de Veigy. Its easy not to notice the cat in the second one.
The image below is one of my own, of my father at a agricultural show in Kenya. Humorous as it may be it also has a very sad streak, of course you wouldn't know from the image, but when I was 15 and away at boarding school, a car he was working on fell off its supporting jack (there were no safety blocks), onto his chest and he died.
