British Journal of Photography - November 2016 by British Journal of Photography

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Portrait of Britain: Cover Story

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Cover story: Portrait of Britain

Editor’s Introduction The Community Issue

There’s no hurrying Peter Mitchell or Chris Dorley-Brown, who, without hype or fanfare, have created profound bodies of work made over years in response to the communities in which they live. In the case of Mitchell, whose work first surfaced in the early 1970s in one of the earliest exhibitions devoted to colour documentary by a British photographer, his subsequent obscurity is a badge of honour. Dorley-Brown, meanwhile, has continued over 30 years with little recognition, recording the changing face of the East End of London. And nor does he expect any. “I’m probably taking pictures for people who haven’t been born yet,” he says. “I don’t think they’re going to come into their own for maybe another 30 or 40 years.” Cocooned in their sense of purpose, their images defy easy categorisation, and their slow photography approach is evident in the work of others elsewhere in this issue. CJ Clarke’s 10year project provides a more nuanced picture of his hometown of Basildon than the easy Essex stereotypes. Victoria HelyHutchinson’s take on everyday life within Britain’s elite public schools, captured over eight years, is very much an insider’s account. And Klaus Pichler presents two very different aspects of Austrian society, captured in contrasting style and approach. In our Intelligence section, we talk to Ali Taptik about the challenges of capturing a community in a fleeting two-week glance during his Elliott Erwitt Fellowship. And Aubrey Wade tells the story of how his portraits of German neighbours who have taken refugees into their homes became a much larger project, backed by the United Nations. Good things come to those who wait. Simon Bainbridge Editorial Director Introduction: November 2016

Featured

Featured: November 2016

36 – 41 Planet Yorkshire Peter Mitchell has been quietly making photographs in his locale for more than 40 years. With a reappraisal of his work at Impressions Gallery, the self-confessed recluse of the North has finally found the public recognition he deserves, but never craves.

42 – 49 East End Archive Through his layered cityscapes, full of intriguing details, Chris Dorley-Brown’s decades-long work documenting the changing face of Hackney and its environs is an important record of shifting communities and socioeconomic drift.

50 – 66 Austrian Folk Klaus Pichler’s playful photographs observe and critique two very different subcultures – the denziens of Austria’s remaining dive bars, and the peculiars of the esotericism industry.

69 – 75 New Town CJ Clarke devoted 10 years to creating an honest portrait of his hometown, Basildon, challenging some of the easy steroetypes of about Essex without ignoring the new town’s problems. Featured: November 2016

INTERNATIONAL PRINT EXHIBITION 5

www.rps.org/ipe159

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909.jpg giving a fascinating insight into the range and diversity OKbeing 53created today. of photographic work An eclectic mix of work, from a worldwide open call,

PRIVATE VIEW:

“So much within photography has changed 913.jpg OKin 53 the 162 years that

Thursday 13 October 2016 6pm-9pm

the RPS International

14-18 October Friday-Monday 10am-6pm,

Print Exhibition has been

Tuesday 10am-4pm

in existence, but what

VENUE:

remains unchanged is the

PHOTOBLOCK The Old Truman Brewery

enduring power of the

F Block G4, Brick Lane E1 6QL

still image.”

PHOTOBLOCK is part of PHOTOMONTH 2016, East London’s International Photography Festival - one of the largest and most inclusive photographic festivals in the UK.

SELECTOR: GEMMA PADLEY Freelance Photographic Journalist & Editor of Britain:Yogananthan Cover Story TellingPortrait Tales: Vasantha

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Index

Agenda We preview Paris Photo’s 20th edition, alongside the many satellite events that make the French capital the place to be this November Any Answers: French curator Clément Chéroux on his life in photography and his new role at SFMoMA, replacing the legendary Sandra Phillips A Matter of Memory, a new exhibition at Eastman Museum, examines how the gradual decline of the physical photo is affecting our relationship to memory David Barnes continues his examination of South Wales for a Ffotogallery commission Deirdre O’Callaghan’s love of rhythm inspires her latest photobook, The Drum Thing

Projects 23 Scott Brauer’s caustic take on the US primaries, from pitstops at gun shops and meetand-greets in town halls, to the fanfare of the campaign 28 Greg Miller’s 12-year project documents Americans on Election Day, capturing portraits of voters and registrars at polling booths 6

Index: November 2016

Features 36 Four decades on from his last show at Impressions gallery, Peter Mitchell gets his first major retrospective, and a much overdue reappraisal of his work and influence 42 From decrepitude to Hipsterville, Chris DorleyBrown’s East London archive provides an important record of our socio-economic times 50 Two very different communities. Two very different approaches. Klaus Pichler continues his observation of community with two projects focused on the fast disappearing dive bars in Vienna, and the strange world of the esoteric 69 CJ Clarke returns to these pages with a project we first featured a decade ago. Ten years on, his portrait of an Essex new town is finally complete. And it has something pertinent to say about Brexit Britain 76 Victoria Hely-Hutchinson goes back to her youth with an intimate study of life within Britain’s elite public schools Intelligence 83 We talk to Elliott Erwitt about a new fellowship he created with Havana Club. And we find out the challenges faced by its first recipient, Turkish photographer Ali Taptik 89 We talk to Aubrey Wade about how a generous act of humanity developed into a campaigning portrait series backed by UNHCR media 94 Creative Brief: Phil Lee from XL Recordings

20 – 21

23 – 27

83 – 87

Technology 97 Introducing the Canon EOS 5D Mk IV 99 Find out why the Pentax K-1 is good enough to challenge Canon, Nikon and Sony 104 The Laowa 12mm f/2.8 Zero-D makes a big impression 108 Our pick of the eight best superwide lenses Archive 114 Bill Brandt’s Bournville commission rediscovered

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www.wetransfer.com 4

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Sunshine gets me in the flow artwork by Malika Favre

of Britain:Yogananthan Cover Story TellingPortrait Tales: Vasantha

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Contributors

The Community Issue November 2016 Issue 7853, Volume 163 Cover Spiked Orgon Helmet © Klaus Pichler.

Greg Miller “When I was about nine or 10, I drew a picture and mailed it to Gerald Ford, our 38th president,” says Miller of his first direct encounter with US politics. “He – or more likely, his secretary – wrote a lovely letter back to me on White House stationery saying how much he and Betty enjoyed the picture. Ford was not the coolest president to get a letter back from but, at the time, I was very pretty proud of that.” Not that he was starstruck, because while his work in this issue concerns his country’s election of a new president, his focus is on the humble voter, and the volunteer registrars they encounter at the polling booth. Having photographed the process since 2004, he’s now preparing to do it all over again on 08 November. But it’s fair to say he’s unimpressed by the current campaigns: “This election cycle is a circus, and I sit through it with a stomach ache, like everybody else. But it’s not the real part. The part I photograph, where people cast a vote – that’s the real part.” gregmiller.com

Klaus Pichler “It has kept me busy for four years and has become dear and incredibly important to me due to the people involved and the amounts of comedy, melancholy, tragedy and laughter in it,” says the Austrian-based photographer of Golden Days Before They End, which records the people and interiors of Vienna’s remaining dive bars. The work won him this year’s Cortona on the Move award, and the book is now on its third reprint. Next up, Pichler will publish the second of two series featured in our November issue, about new age esotericism, which appears on our cover. This will change your life forever is, in his words, a “harsh criticism of this system based on irrationality, betrayal, quackery and a cynical prospect of salvation”, captured in lurid pastels that echo a commercial assignment for Schock that featured in our May issue. kpic.at

CJ Clarke “It’s fantastic to get the work out there at a time when its themes – Englishness, identity, working class communities, urbanism: the roots of Brexit – are being talked about so much,” says Clarke, whose Magic Party Place first featured on these pages a decade ago. Ten years later, he’s developed the project into a book, published by Kehrer. In the meantime, he has moved to India, where he works as the Asia multimedia producer for Save the Children, and where he is one of the cofounders of Just Another Photo Festival, which takes visual storytelling to the street. Now he’s working on completing a sequel to his first book, titled Loyalists, focused on Northern Ireland, which he hopes to publish in the coming months. cjclarke.com

Sophie Wright “It was overwhelming, unlike anywhere I have ever been before,” says Wright of her first trip to Cuba, where she interviewed Ali Taptik, the recipient of the inaugural Elliott Erwitt Havana Club 7 Fellowship. “Travelling brings you so much closer to a photographer’s way of working, and while you’re not necessarily sharing their vision, you get to feel the environment the photographs are taken in,” she explains. “The process of being with someone whilst they are in the midst of working out what it is they’re doing is a completely different ball game to speaking to them on the end of a phone line, or after a project is all packed up and ready to go.” sophiewright.berta.me

Colophon: November 2016

Editorial Director Simon Bainbridge Executive Editor Diane Smyth Online & Social Media Editor Tom Seymour Creative Director Mick Moore Senior Designer Nicky Brown Editorial Assistant Izabela Radwanska Zhang Contributors Rob Alderson, Gerry Badger, Taco Hidde Bakker, Emma Bowkett, Laurence Butet-Roch, David Campany, Federica Chiocchetti, Lucy Davies, Damien Demolder, Martin Evening, Marc Feustel, Jessica Gordon, Michael Grieve, Peter Hamilton, Lauren Heinz, Nadav Kander, David Kilpatrick, Richard Kilpatrick, Stephen McLaren, Donatella Montrone, Colin Pantall, Juan Peces, Rachel Segal Hamilton, Maisie Skidmore, Ahmed Shawki, Shana Ting Lipton, Eliza Williams, Paul Wombell, Sophie Wright Editorial Enquiries editorial@bjphoto.co.uk Sales Enquiries sales@apptitudemedia.co.uk Head of Commercial Pax Zoega Advertising Manager Monica Chopra Marketing Director Marc Ghione Head of Events Lisa Farrell CTO Tom Royal Founder & CEO Marc Hartog Subscription Enquiries 01795 414682 bjp@servicehelpline.co.uk Distribution & Marketing Enquiries marketing@apptitudemedia.co.uk

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Agenda

Over four days in November, the undisputed capital of photography celebrates the image past, present and future Paris Photo, etc

Words by Izabela Radwanska Zhang

One year after Paris Photo was unexpectedly shut down in the immediate aftermath of the terror attacks on the French capital, the fair returns to the Grand Palais for its 20th edition, accompanied by several independent satellite events riding on the back of what has undoubtedly become the key art event in the global photography calendar. Some 180 galleries and publishers (of which 42 are new this year) will pitch up inside the glass-topped, Beaux-Arts exhibition halls, alongside curated shows and a packed four-day programme of activities, running from 10-13 November. “The goal is to show the largest panorama, from the mid-19th century to today,” says Florence Bourgeois, director of the fair since February 2015. She and Christoph Wiesner, appointed artistic director at the same time, have shifted the focus a little, moving away from curated exhibitions giving special focus to particular countries and regions. “We don’t want to give it a theme any more. We think variety is important, and it’s our job to pull out topics

we find interesting and want to highlight.” Among the highlights is an exhibition titled The Pencil of Culture (referencing the first photography book, The Pencil of Nature, published in six installments by William Henry Fox Talbot between 1844 and 1846), held in the Salon d’Honneur on the upper floor the Grand Palais. Curated by Clément Chéroux and Karolina Ziębińska-Lewandowska, it observes a decade of photography acquisitions by Centre Pompidou, featuring the works of more than 40 iconic imagemakers, including Brassaï, Richard Avedon, Wolfgang Tillmans and Anne Collier. Running alongside it is Prismes, an area given over to larger-scale presentations of major bodies of work (often lacking within the booths hired by individual galleries) and special commissions, now afforded extra space since its introduction last year. Here, Thomas Zander gallery from Cologne will display work by Anthony Hernandez, the Californian artist whose work is receiving widespread reappraisal at the moment, including a current retrospective at SFMOMA (BJP #7851). A dozen further shows include works by Andreï Tarkovsky, Penelope Umbrico, William Klein [1] and Noémie Goudal, an emerging artist known for experimenting with the physical manipulation of a photographic print (BJP

Clément Chéroux features in this month’s Any Answers, alongside Deirdre O’Callaghan’s interviews with 100 drummers. Plus, we preview Paris Photo and upcoming shows at Ffotogallery and Eastman House Agenda: Art Fair

Le petit magot, Armistice Day, 1968 © William Klein, courtesy Polka Galerie.

The Reception, 1985 © Tina Barney, courtesy of Paul Kasmin Gallery, JP Morgan Collection

Light, 2015 © Erwin Olaf for Maison Ruinart Champagne.

Collapse in a Garden, 1995 © David LaChapelle, courtesy Staley-Wise Gallery.

Sancho Zango, Jameson Brand Ambassador, Pernod Ricard Mozambique © Omar Victor Diop, courtesy Pernod Ricard.

Fiesta Fence, 1979 © Thomas Barrow, courtesy Anne de Villepoix.

The interior of the Grand Palais. Image © Marc Domage, courtesy Paris Photo.

3 5

Agenda: Art Fair

#7805), who is producing a bespoke body of work specifically for the space. “This was the main objective of Prismes,” says Bourgeois. “It was to show the artists that you wouldn’t find in the classic booths. Last year we felt there was a real interest in that section, so we wanted to enlarge it this year.” A notable Japanese presence can be felt in the choice of displays this November, with an exhibition of Issei Suda’s work within Prismes, coinciding with Provoke: Between Protest and Performance – Photography in Japan 1960-1975 at Le Bal in the 18th arrondissement, and an open discussion about Provoke (the short-lived Japanese magazine featuring photography of the postwar era) led by the exhibition’s curator, Diane Dufour. Elsewhere, galleries big and small across the capital will be presenting photography exhibitions, such as a Louis Faurer retrospective showing at Fondation

Henri Cartier-Bresson, a group show titled Uprisings at Jeu de Paume, and images made in France by Richard Avedon at Bibliothèque Nationale de France, showing alongside a first retrospective of Nicolas Yantchevsky that captures Paris in the 1950s. There are also various solo shows supported by international institutions, including Gábor Arion Kudász’s Human, created on the back of winning the 2015 Robert Capa Medal at the Hungarian Institute, Hannah Starkey’s Women at the Irish Cultural Centre, Yann Gross’ Jungle Show II at the Swiss Cultural Centre, and Ruud van der Peijl’s Classix Nouveaux at Atelier Néerlandais, where the photographer is collaborating with French interior designer Pheromones. However, Mois de la Photo, the biannual celebration of photography that brings together many of the city’s major cultural institutions to stage exhibitions across

the capital, has moved dates from this November to next March, with a new focus on including venues in greater Paris and its environs. Even so, there is still so much going on in Paris over the four days, you’d be hard pushed to see it all. Offprint, the independent publishing fair returns, this time with a focus on the arts business and advice on self-sufficiency in the publishing world. Fotofever, a smaller contemporary photography fair taking over Paris Photo’s former home at the Carrousel du Louvre, is back for its fifth edition, focusing primarily on emerging talent, both in photographic projects and among collectors’ networks. It’s also the fifth anniversary of Photo Saint-Germain, where more than 40 largely Parisian galleries and cultural centres from the ‘Rive Gauche’ will come together to fill a programme of exhibitions, screenings and library events, including the Galerie Insula, with a show of a selection of works by Olivia Lavergne. The festival focuses on the emerging issues of contemporary photography and includes an intimate installation looking at couples in prison in suburban Rome, titled Peines Partagées, at the Abbey of SaintGermain-des-Prés by Israeli artist Assaf Shoshan, and a night screening at the Christine 21 cinema dedicated to the works of American documentary photographer and filmmaker Robert Frank. In association with Saint-Germain, Polycopies, a hub for collectors, photographic publishing enthusiasts, writers and editors founded by Laurent Chardon and Sebastian Hau, transforms the Bateau Concorde Atlantique into a floating book shop. As always, back in the Grand Palais, there will be a series of book signings and other talks hosted by The Platform, a forum to encourage debates according to topics such as ‘Photography beyond the image’, an examination of how more and more artists are looking at the physical quality of the photograph as object, led by Jens Hoffman, deputy director of the Jewish Museum in New York. It is also the fifth anniversary of the Photo-Aperture Foundation Photobook Awards. The packed programme encourages a new audience to spend time at a fair that boasts an eclectic market, as well as a fulfilling exhibition. The art has even spilled out on to the streets; a large-scale installation of Raphaël Dallaporta’s imagery at the Gare du Nord will tease and welcome visitors to the French capital. “It’s the place where photography was born,” says Bourgeois. “So that helps.” parisphoto.com

Agenda: Art Fair

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Cover story: Portrait of Britain

As America prepares to vote, we feature two projects that capture two very different aspects of the political process. Scott Brauer provides a caustic take on the circus of the campaign, while Greg Miller focuses on humble voters and registrars at the voting booths themselves. Interviews by Simon Bainbridge and Donatella Montrone

Projects

Ten years into his career, Boston-based photographer Scott Brauer felt he’d reached a “plateau” and was “approaching the same sorts of stories in the same sorts of ways”. He wanted to try something different, and the break came literally. He busted his arm up badly in an accident and, unable to work for seven months, it gave him a lot of thinking time. Eventually, when last July he was able to bend his arm enough to press a shutter again properly, he wasn’t looking for much else other than a project he could shoot locally “to practise using a camera again”. Although he’d not photographed politicians much previously, he felt he had something to say about the coming elections, and the nearby New Hampshire primary (the first in a series of state elections to help decide presidential nominees for the Democrat and Republican parties, and therefore a bellwether) offered ample photo ops. “If I screwed something up or couldn’t handle the work, I knew there would be another few hundred similar events to photograph. So, it really started out as a sort of low-stakes physical therapy, but with an eye towards turning it into a bigger project.” In fact, the project presented itself on a plate, and an idea quickly evolved into a caustic take on the political process, one step removed from the usual press photos captured within roped-off pens, yet seemingly much more revealing. Titled This is the worst party I’ve ever been to, the name aptly describes his first

impressions of the campaign trail, after which everything fell into place almost immediately. “Last-minute decorations, ill-fitting suits, bad food, too many cameras, the guest of honour is always late, the events are either too crowded or no one shows up, half the people are wearing khaki, everyone wants to talk about politics and religion… It goes on for months.” He had no interest in shooting conventional press shots, but had always been drawn to finding the “weird moments off to the side of things”, of which there were plenty, and settled on the harsh, direct flash style “literally within the first few exposures of the first event I attended”. And while he didn’t set out to be directly critical of the politicians he photographed – Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders and Ted Cruz among them – he does question the media’s role in the circus, blaming newspapers’ lack of space for considered photography and their fear of appearing biased. “The end result is that pretty boring images are usually published that do nothing more than show exactly what the candidates want to be shown of themselves, with a patriotic background and nice lighting.” He had the same access as any press photographer, saying, “I was usually standing elbow-to-elbow with wire and newspaper photographers. They took their pictures, and I took mine.” So it wasn’t so much about “stepping away from the designated photo ops, but instead an attempt to subvert what was being shown and look behind, deeper

Scott Brauer Projects: Personal

Projects: Personal

into, or next to the main event,” he says. “The flash was my main tool in doing this. I could overpower any lighting that was provided, and the added depth-of-field allows me to work more with backgrounds and other extraneous elements that would usually just be a pleasant blur around the candidate. I also used my lenses in ways that I haven’t before. I’d use a long lens like a wide lens in close situations to really play up the claustrophobia.” His warts-and-all take on the primaries has struck a nerve both at home and abroad,

Projects: Personal

published in Time, Esquire and Le Monde, and exhibited at festivals across Europe this summer, in Hanover, Germany; Kaunas, Lithuania; Sofia, Bulgaria; and Zagreb, Croatia. “Starting a project like this is no small task,” says Brauer, who is the co-founder and editor of photojournalism blog, dvafoto, and has always shot personal projects alongside editorial assignments for the likes of Fader, Bloomberg and The New York Times. “It takes a lot of money and time, so it’s really a gamble on whether it pays off. And unlike some of the

personal travel work I do, if it doesn’t sell, I can’t say, ‘Well, that didn’t go anywhere, but at least I had a nice trip.’ If this didn’t work out, I’d have attended a bunch of pretty boring speeches for nothing.” Thankfully, that’s not been the case. And besides the shows and the coverage, he says it’s got him in front of editors and publications he’s never worked with before; his convalescence proving that a break really can be as good as a rest. mscottbrauer.com

Carly Fiorina in Labor Day parade, Milford, NH.

Americans for Prosperity, Road to Reform conference, Manchester, NH.

Hillary Clinton rally, Portsmouth, NH.

Bernie Sanders town meeting, Berlin, NH.

Lindsey Graham townhall, Wyndham, NH.

Donald Trump rally, Laconia, NH.

Ted Cruz campaign kick-off, Manchester, NH. All images from This is the worst party Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve ever been to ÂŠ Scott Brauer.

Projects: Personal

Klaus Pichler has tapped into two very different subcultures for his latest books – old dive bars in Vienna that are rapidly dying out, and the ‘cultish’ world of esotericism. Words by Colin Pantall

Austrian 50

The Community Issue: Klaus Pichler

“They are places you go to when you’ve lost everything – but not before,” says Klaus Pichler of the Viennese bars that feature in his latest book, Golden Days Before They End, released in June and now in its third reprint. It’s one of two books Pichler has made this year. The other, This Will Change Your Life Forever, currently in the design stage and due to be self-published next March, is a sarcastic critique of the esotericism industry and the photography that feeds it. Pichler collaborated on Golden Days with journalist Clemens Marschall, who was familiar with Vienna’s rapidly disappearing old dive bars and the often ‘colourful’ patrons that clung to them. “Clemens has always gone to these bars,” explains Pichler. “He doesn’t like to go to fancy places. Five years ago he noticed that these bars are beginning to close down because of increased regulation, an inability to adapt to a changing city, and a dying clientele.” It seemed like an ideal photographic subject, but Pichler had to think hard about how to get started in an environment in which he felt uncomfortable. “The first time I went in, it was like the cliché of a man who walks into a bar and suddenly The Community Issue: Klaus Pichler

The Community Issue: Klaus Pichler

“Esotericism is about selling things to people who are in crisis. It’s about people building their careers on the faith of people who find themselves in difficult situations”

the music stops, everybody turns and looks at him and you can hear a pin drop,” he says. “On that first visit, two people punched each other in the face; by the third or fourth visit, I began talking to people. I thought, OK, I have to be open, I have to tell people what I’m doing and then it won’t be a problem any more. On the fifth or sixth visit, I took out my camera. Then people became interested. They knew this generation of bars is coming to an end and were really happy to have somebody interested in them.” The thing that makes Golden Days different from other bar projects from the region, such as the classic but little-known Weinhaus by fellow Austrian Leo Kandl, is that Golden Days chronicles a bar culture that is dying, a clientele that is dying and, ultimately, a working class that is dying. “We met Kandl and he was really shocked by the images. He said: ‘It’s crazy, you can’t compare them with mine.’ He said the people in his book all had jobs and went to the bars after work, while the people in my book don’t work. Mine is something different, because the job isn’t important any more since nobody has one.” The other thing that makes Golden Days unusual is the role of the camera. “In a classic book like Anders Petersen’s Café Lehmitz the guests are often not aware they are being photographed,” he says. “In my case, the camera became the centre of the room.” So you see people wrestling, people getting naked, people reliving William Tell in front of a dartboard. “The images show what fits into the array of allowed behaviour – that you can get naked here, that you can stage fights. It was like a performance space. They all have cellphones and are always posing in front of the cameras of the other regulars. I wasn’t their first audience.” Working with a writer was important for Pichler – it helped give his images a cultural grounding and elevated them above the superficial. “We made a clear decision that 56

The Community Issue: Klaus Pichler

we wanted to tell the story from both sides of the bar, so Clemens interviewed the owners and I photographed the regulars. We thought the two layers of the story would confront each other. We knew the owners just wanted to make money and have everything run smoothly, and the guests wanted to freak out. They wanted an adult playground.” Swarm theory In This Will Change Your Life Forever, Pichler puts himself centre stage. “Two friends of mine disappeared from my life through esotericism: one through meditation and the other through a psychological crisis, where he began to feel energies and thought these energies were entities,” he says. “I was so shocked at how people who were very close to me had been duped, how they changed in such a short time, and how they became unapproachable on a rational basis.” So Pichler began to research esotericism – orbs, auras, energies and ectoplasm – and investigated how easily the gullible can succumb to it. Then he set out to reproduce this in book form, creating a kind of guide to the photographic language of this world. “In my opinion, esotericism is about selling things to people who are in crisis,” he says. “It’s about people building their careers on the faith of people who find themselves in difficult situations, which is really, really shabby, if you ask me. There is a Japanese professor who thought water has memory, so he decided to freeze water and photograph the ice crystals. It’s complete rubbish, of course, but he did these experiments to see how ice would reflect its memory of pieces of paper with different writing on it: I love you, I hate you, Adolf Hitler, Dalai Lama, war, thank you. Or he’d play music to the water and photograph what he believed were the patterns the ice crystals made, depending on the content. Play Mozart and it would make beautiful crystals; in the case of Adolf Hitler, the water didn’t freeze

because Hitler was so evil,” explains Pichler. “Esotericism is always about oneself, it’s not about helping other people,” he continues. “It’s this big ‘ME’ thing, so I thought this project would only be credible if I put myself into it and claimed to be a hardcore esotericist. It’s so stupid and so shallow. I found that everything is just a trick: look at the angel appearing on a hill [page 66], for which I’m actually standing on a 3m-tall pile of soil on a construction site. For this I went to the pharmacy and asked what is the most embarrassing cream people buy, and the pharmacist said, ‘It’s haemorrhoid cream. People are really ashamed to buy that.’ So I bought some haemorrhoid cream and put it on the lens, then I bought some reflective tape and put it on a training suit and photographed myself. And because of the haemorrhoid cream on the lens, there are these kinds of rays coming off me. And that’s how esoteric photography works – with reflections and dust motes and long exposures with mysterious foggings. It’s so stupid, and it’s so easy to reproduce.” Pichler then uploaded the images on various esoteric Facebook pages and watched incredulously as the likes and the comments piled in. His angel images immediately gained 79 likes and comments that expressed envy at Pichler’s power to get wishes granted from his haemorrhoid cream-inspired angels. For Pichler, it’s evidence of what he calls the “swarm stupidity” of the digital age. “In terms of social media and the internet, everybody talks about swarm intelligence, but I talk about swarm stupidity,” he says. “Swarm intelligence is when you post a question or a problem on the internet and people help you find a solution or answer the question. But then if you post something like “gravity is an illusion” you’ll find 10 idiots who support you and 100 idiots who are in the mood for being convinced, and suddenly it’s a movement.” kpic.at

The Community Issue: Klaus Pichler

1-5

From Golden Days Before They End.

Sheilding Cap For Your Mind. This photograph and all subsequent images from This Will Change Your Life Forever.

Earth Healing Ritual.

Meditation Head Pyramid.

9-10

Orgon Accumulator.

Penis Enlargement Elixir.

Mystical Spiritual Oil To Keep Police Away.

Energy Key (Aura Quartz).

Worry Stone – Heart Chakra.

Feng Shui Spacer For Cars.

The Community Issue: Klaus Pichler

Next issue December 2016 We focus on food photography, and what it says about our culture. We speak with Martin Parr about his ongoing fascination with food and his adventures into live catering with The Art of Dining. The editors of new-wave food magazines Lucky Peach, Put A Egg On It, The Gourmand, Alla Carta and Gather talk through their approach to a onceSubscribe for just £39 for the next by Direct Debit; thereafter paying £65.95format. annually (still saving 31%).give You’ll alsoan receiveinsight into the history of food tired We a free Tote Bag worth £10 with UK orders only, upon renewal (your second payment). Promoted offer is redeemable by UK photography via writer Susan Bright and editors Florian Bohm subscribers only. Price and savings may vary depending on the country, payment method, subscription term and product & Kamali. And we revisit a once-mothballed book type;Annahita ie, Print, Digital or Pack. Images used are for illustrative purposes only. Offer ends 06 January 2016. of food photography and recipes featuring work by Richard Avedon, Stephen Shore, William Eggleston and Minor White. On sale 02 November 2016

Intelligence: New Media