spring 2007 / #10
www.foammagazine.nl
Larry Burrows Alessandra Sanguinetti Suky Best Raphaël Dallaporta Hunter S. Thompson Wendy McMurdo
NL/IT €12,50 • E € 14 • AUT €16 Dkk 150 • PTE CONT €14
foam magazine #10 / stories
editorial / contents
Editorial
Contents
Marloes Krijnen, director Foam_Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam
Foam Magazine is proud to present the tenth edition of its quarterly magazine, the second issue since our relaunch in December last year. The many responses to this relaunch can only be described as heart-warming. All the positive reactions we have received and our many new subscribers are a tremendous encouragement, and a huge boost to our joint efforts to take the magazine forward. Foam_Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam and Vandejong Communications, the originators of Foam Magazine, would like to thank everyone for their support. The essence of Foam Magazine remains unchanged, presenting a single theme that unites six different portfolios of sixteen pages each. Each portfolio has been compiled with great care, wherever possible in close consultation with the photographer. The diversity of the portfolios is very important and a core feature of Foam Magazine. The contrast between the six makes it possible to offer a multifaceted and innovative interpretation of the chosen theme, to transcend genres and to establish new relationships between works with very different backgrounds. The central theme of this issue is ‘Stories’ and it concentrates specifically at the kind of work in which the photographer deliberately intends to put a story across. The ways in which this can be achieved are quite diverse, as these six portfolios demonstrate. The historical photo essay is represented by a famous example from Larry Burrows, in which he reports on an American army helicopter flight over Vietnam in 1965. A work in an entirely different category is the love story by British artist Suky Best. In her three photo novels, published between 1995 and 1997, she shamelessly exploits the visual language of cheap photo novels. The relationship between text and image is also a key aspect of the work of Raphaël Dallaporta and the way he presents his gruesome stories about abuse of power and modern forms of slavery. Wendy McMurdo concentrates on a specific place with a history all its own, namely Scapa Flow, a body of water in the Orkney Islands off the northern coast of Scotland where in June 1919 the German High Seas Fleet was scuttled to prevent it falling into the hands of the allies. No less historic are the unique photos by renowned journalist Hunter S. Thompson. Shortly before his literary breakthrough with Gonzo journalism he wrote a book about his experiences with the Hell’s Angels in California. Foam Magazine presents a selection of photos Thompson made during his meetings with the Angels. Finally, in the work of Alessandra Sanguinetti the story takes place both within the frame of a single picture and in the long series she made about the cousins Guille and Belinda. As ever, a text by an authority in the field of photography accompanies each portfolio. We are particularly proud of the content of the two new features introduced in the previous issue. The first is a lengthy interview, this time with Manfred Heiting who talks about his extensive and important collection of photobooks. In the regular feature On My Mind... we ask six people from the world of culture to choose an image that has been occupying them particularly of late. We are extremely pleased with the surprising choices made by Helmut Lang, Hellen van Meene, Rhonda Wilson, Terry Jones, Kerry Warn and Martin Barnes. This issue begins with an essay by Marcel Feil, curator of Foam_ Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam, and includes information about Foam’s exhibition programme and reviews of recently published books. +
On My Mind... images selected by Martin Barnes ~ Helmut Lang ~ Rhonda Wilson ~ Hellen van Meene ~ Kerry Warn ~ Terry Jones
Pages 016 - 021
Interview with Manfred Heiting The Completist: When It Comes to Photobooks, Manfred Heiting Wants It All by Eric Miles
Pages 022 - 026
Stories:
Theme introduction Do You Read Me? Photography and the Narrative by Marcel Feil
Pages 027 - 034
portfolio: Larry Burrows ~ One Ride with Yankee Papa 13 text by Ken Grant
Pages 035 - 054
portfolio: Alessandra Sanguinetti ~ The Adventures of Guille and Belinda and the Enigmatic Meaning of Their Dreams text by Laura Noble
Pages 055 - 074
portfolio: Suky Best ~ Photo Love, Vol. 1, 1995 text by Arnoud van Adrichem and Jan Baetens
Pages 075 - 090
portfolio: Raphaël Dallaporta ~ Domestic Slavery text by Raphaëlle Stopin
Pages 091 - 110
portfolio: Hunter S. Thompson ~ Hell’s Angels text by Ariejan Korteweg
Pages 111 - 130
portfolio: Wendy McMurdo ~ Wrecks of Scapa text by Vikki Bell
Pages 131 - 150
~
Foam_Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam James Nachtwey ~ Testimony text by Alain Mingam Foam Exhibition Diary
Pages 151 - 165
Photobooks by Tanja Wallroth
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Pages 168 - 171
La Luz, 2005
Larry Burrows ~ One Ride with Yankee Papa 13
In the work of Alessandra Sanguinetti the story takes place both within the frame of a single picture and in the elaborate series she made about the cousins Guille and Belinda. The dreamlike images are enigmatic, alienating and imbued with a casual magic that is typical of South American storytelling.
She said OK.
I asked her if she would stay
Alessandra Sanguinetti ~ The Adventures of Guille and Belinda and the Enigmatic Meaning of Their Dreams
your romantic dreams into practice
Your fantasies will be vivid, put
but be discrete,
who need to know.
tell only those
She took me to the cafe
to last minute suggestions.
Pleasure will come,
and throw yourself open
when you abandon plans
So I walked up to her
asked where I could get something to eat
and she showed me where.
In 1965 British photographer Larry Burrows joined an American army helicopter flight over Vietnam. The result is a prime example of both the horrors of war as a ‘rite of passage’ for young soldiers and a classical photo essay, a genre that reached its peak in the mid-twentieth century with picture magazines such as Life.
The Dreamer, 2002
In 2001,
Legba, a 30-year-old woman from Togo, accepted a job looking after children in France. ‘‘I arrived on March 25, 2001. They came to pick me up at the airport. The first thing they said to me was: Give us all your documents.’’ In a modest apartment in Élancourt, a Parisian suburb, Legba became a prisoner. ‘‘I could only go out to do the shopping. They timed me. If I took too long, they shouted at me. I was banned from talking to anyone in the street. They said: If you do that, you’ll go to prison.’’ Each day, Legba suffered humiliation at the hands of her bosses. ‘‘To eat they gave me crushed rice meant for dogs. When I met the man in the corridor, he would push me against the wall and shout, ‘You smell bad!’ When I went out with the woman, she would say: Walk behind me, you’re not worth as much as me.’’ Legba fled. ‘‘I shouted, ‘I want to leave!’ The man screamed, ‘No!’ He followed me down the stairs; made me fall from the first floor down to the ground floor. When I was on the ground, he kicked me. Then he hit me, hit me, hit me. It hurt so much that for a long time I couldn’t walk anymore. But they refused to take me to the hospital.’’ After a year, Legba was freed thanks to the intervention of a neighbour. ‘‘He had to go and see the police four times; they didn’t believe him.’’ The couple was convicted and ordered to pay a `10,000 fine; they paid only `3,000.
Suky Best ~ Photo Love, Vol. 1, 1995
RaphaĂŤl Dallaporta ~ Domestic Slavery
In her three photo novels, published between 1995 and 1997 – of which Volume 1 is reproduced here – Suky Best shamelessly exploits the visual language found in the kind of cheap photo novels that were still on sale until a few years ago at many supermarket checkouts. Best appears as both the narrator and the central character of the sentimental love story that unfolds before our eyes.
The relationship between text and image is a key aspect of this body of work by RaphaÍl Dallaporta and the way he presents his gruesome stories about abuse of power and modern forms of slavery. His cool, objective recordings of buildings in French cities are given a horrifying twist by the accompanying texts, that explain what took place behind these anonymous façades.
Hunter S. Thompson ~ Hell’s Angels
Wendy McMurdo ~ Wrecks of Scapa
Shortly before his literary breakthrough with Gonzo journalism Hunter S. Thompson, known to a broad public through the 1998 film version of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, wrote a book about his experiences with the Hell’s Angels in California. Foam Magazine presents a broad selection of the photos Thompson made during his meetings with the Angels.
In June 1919 German Rear Admiral Von Reuter gave orders to sink the German fleet at Scapa Flow, a body of water in the Orkney Islands, to prevent it falling into the hands of the Allies. By using various forms of visual and written records, Wendy McMurdo attempts to reconstruct this dramatic incident and the wide range of stories it involves.
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foam magazine #10 / stories
Six well-known figures from
the cultural world selected an
image that has recently been
on their minds...
co-editor: Addie Vassie
On My Mind...
David Maisel, from the series Library of Dust, 2006, C-type print,
Martin Barnes David Maisel brought his portfolio for me to view at the museum one summer afternoon last year. I remember him unrolling his prints on the large, clean table in the quiet daylight of the Prints and Drawings Study Room. The impact of his images and the story that lay behind remained with me for months. They sank into my consciousness like the portentous objects in a dream. This photograph is from his recent series, Library of Dust, that I saw that day. The series shows cans containing the cremated remains of patients who died in the Oregon State Insane Asylum sometime between 1883 and the 1970s. Since the patients were often social outcasts, few relations came to claim the ashes. But the Asylum diligently stored them anyway, in neatly labelled and numbered cans. Perhaps they expected future claims from descendants?
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165 x 122 cm, Victoria and Albert Museum collection © David Maisel
Variations in the chemical composition of the human ‘dust’ caused the copper canisters to corrode differently. (Tangentially, I thought about how the first photographs, daguerreotypes, were formed as chemical deposits on the surface of copper plates). Over time, each can became as individual as its occupant had been in life. Their ‘life force’ somehow continued even after death, breaking through, encrusting the cans with evanescent swirls of pattern and colour. The beautiful blooms suggest the appearance of the earth seen from space. Maisel’s work often deals with the charged threshold between ethics and aesthetics. And his Library of Dust could not be more effective or poignant in expressing that boundary. This picture now hangs in the Photography Gallery at the V&A. +
Martin Barnes is Curator of Photographs at the Victoria
and Albert Museum, London.
foam magazine #10 / stories
On My Mind...
Lise Sarfati, Sink, Brooklyn, 2001, from the Louise Bourgeois series © Lise Sarfati
Helmut Lang When I started to look through the Magnum Photos archive for a project that I am currently curating for this famous institution, I got somehow caught by the photographs of artist’s working spaces. It is under the best circumstances, an insight into the soul of the artistic determination and self-doubt, a room where physical force and emotional sensibility seem to live like an invincible married couple. In particular I return to the photograph with Louise Bourgeois’ sink, partly of European sentiment, friendship and admiration and partly of our shared fear of abandonment. It seems the sink didn’t want to loose things either, and has collected paint, pain, plaster and dirt throughout the years, and so collected important DNA of what has happened, somehow making the dirt as much telling as the art that has been created.
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It reminds me also of my friend Kurt Kocherscheidt, an Austrian painter and sculptor who died some years ago. He used to make constant trips between the piece he worked on and his sink to put out a cigarette or take his medication or just use it like an oracle to ask for answers when he was alone in the studio fighting with himself and what he wanted to express. Somehow the sink becomes a silent companion, a place for beginnings and endings. It is the giving and receiving element, which defines the interactive quality, the rules of engagement. The artist studio is maybe the last underground; I definitely like the idea that there is one. The realities that where born there are still what they are supposed to be. +
Helmut Lang is currently working on art projects in New York and Long Island.
foam magazine #10 / stories
On My Mind...
Hyung Geun Park, Untitled, from the series Untitled 2003-2004 © Hyung Geun Park
Rhonda Wilson There is something strangely unsettling about this photograph. At first glance it’s an image of nature which is ordinary and familiar, but there is something unsettling, even chaotic, below the beauty of the scene. Something uncannily powerful and mysterious is at play. We want to reach out and touch those stars, move away the branches and see what lies beyond, or follow them into the depths of the lake to find out what lies beneath. When I see this image, I become quite childlike. I marvel at the scene and there begins a type of fairy story, which has the characters off in the distance on a boat, leaving the stars to shine and light my heart.
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Sometimes, when I am working hard, I have this picture nearby – a very small version in a catalogue. It soothes me. Takes me away. And brings me back more enlightened. I know the image is layered, I know things are not what they appear to be. But for me this photograph is the essence of what I love about photography. It’s magical, compelling, spellbound. There is the imagination of the photographer before me and he has done his work well. +
Rhonda Wilson is Creative Director of Rhubarb Rhubarb, the UK’s Festival of the Image. She was awarded an MBE (Member of the British Empire) in 2006 for her services to Photography and International Trade.
foam magazine #10 / stories
On My Mind...
Hellen van Meene New York, 2 February 2007, a cold morning at a flea market. Bought four beautiful photos, found in an old suitcase filled with yellowed envelopes containing photos of various families. In the envelope, a family with a daughter and a little dog. So lovely, how the girl is standing there with her father, with the dog and her mother in the next one, and then with all three, but the dog had had enough of it.
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Photographer unknown
While looking through those old envelopes, you really hope to find something special. A photo that is more than an ordinary family snapshot, to find a photo that could also be interesting to me, even without knowing those people. For an image to be good, you don’t need to know someone personally. A good photo is interesting to me if it can touch me, if it affects me in some way. I can envisage myself in these photos. These images are so recognisable and therefore so moving. + Hellen van Meene is a Dutch photographer whose portraits of teenagers have brought her international success. In February her solo show Polaroids opened at Van Zoetendaal Gallery in Amsterdam. Courtesy Van Zoetendaal gallery, Sadie Coles HQ , London. (www.hellenvanmeene.com)
foam magazine #10 / stories
On My Mind...
Antoni & Alison, Sequined Sausage, 2002, from the Meaningless Ideas Series
© Antoni & Alison, courtesy Gallery Vassie, Amsterdam
Kerry Warn Recently I bought a house in London and I’ve been unpacking and dressing the rooms for the past few weeks, which is how I came to have this particular image in mind. For some time I have had a postcard of this image in a little frame on my desk in my New York apartment and I’ve been thinking recently that I would love the real thing on the wall of my new house in London. There’s a rough raw brick wall and I think that the sausage would look rather good there. I love this image. I am fascinated by all of Antoni & Alison’s work and this is one of their iconic pieces, which is beautifully lit and full of humour. Here they have taken a perfectly everyday object – something that I eat at least once a week – a bog- standard thing, and absolutely glamourised it, by simply covering it in sequins.
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This is an image that really makes me smile. It’s a happy image to me, and one that seems to lighten up my day. However, a friend of mine bought this image for his wife last Christmas because he knew that she loved it, she thought it adorable and cute, but not humorous. So, the Sequined Sausage is obviously an image that offers different things to different people. As everyone seems to see it differently, which perhaps makes it more alluring to me. But, I suppose, quite simply, that this image absolutely appeals to my glamorous side, as I’m a true sucker for glamour. +
Kerry Warn is Miss Nicole Kidman’s personal hairdresser, international creative consultant to John Frieda and Hair Designer for the forthcoming Baz Luhrmann film. He’s a photography collector.
foam magazine #10 / stories
On My Mind...
Tricia Jones, Heart Tree, 2005 Š Tricia Jones
Terry Jones What I love about this picture is that it was taken by my wife Tricia, whilst we were having a break in Africa, just after both of her parents had died. When we saw this image we both loved the fact that we were seeing a tree in a heart shape in nature.
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At first glance we thought that leaves made up the heart, then we realised that the leaves were in fact swallows, with some about to take flight and that the swallows made the heart. It was simply something that we saw, that became an iconic image in my mind. We even sent it out as a card with a New Year message last year, as we thought it so special. Basically, we both felt that this picture was very poignant, a natural heart. It was one of those chance images that shows the spirit of life and that love is the answer. +
Terry Jones is founder and creative director of i-D Magazine.
foam magazine #10 / stories
interview
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foam magazine #10 / stories
interview
~ The Completist: When It Comes to Photobooks, Manfred Heiting Wants It All ~
by Eric Miles ~ photography by Todd Hido
When it was acquired in 2002 by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the photographic collection of Manfred Heiting – numbering over 4,000 prints – was one of the finest of its kind ever assembled by a private individual. Encyclopedic in scope and renowned for the quality of the photographs, it would be virtually impossible to replicate today as much of it was assembled at a time when both the market for photography and the institutional structures supporting it were still in their infancy. The collection has been described as an ‘unparalleled visual record of the people, places and events that define the Western world, beginning with the early 1840s ’ – and continued until 2000. Having closed that ‘chapter’ of his collecting, as Manfred Heiting said, for roughly the last eight years, he has shifted his efforts to photographic books, which has allowed him to collect with the focus, depth and quality for which his print collection is celebrated. His desire to preserve and document the history of photographic literature underlies a dedication to bibliographic detail that is both passionate and meticulous. I spoke with him for several hours in the library he has built in his house in Malibu, California. When did you begin to focus on collecting photobooks as an independent area distinct from your print collecting? Collecting is different from simply buying. I have been buying photobooks since the early 1970s just to have references for specific photographers and the history and themes I became interested in through my work. I was also given many books by the photographers I worked with. But as a passionate collector of stamps, ceramics and works on paper from an early age, I was careful enough not to crack them open when in use. I also preserved the wrappers and protection, so on the whole they kept their virginity. So you used them just for reference initially? Yes, mostly for image reference. I worked for nearly two decades at Polaroid, so I had contact with many of the photographers who were interested in instant photography. In the 1960s and 1970s there was little interest in collecting photography. Because of my personal relationships with many of the photographers, I received many books signed and inscribed. That is where a lot of my books from that period came from.
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And when did this begin to change for you? When did your photobooks become a more active pursuit? I met Martin Parr in 1984 in Frankfurt, where I had just opened the Fotografie Forum Frankfurt and he was receiving his first award. While working at Photokina in Cologne I was involved in organizing the exhibition The Printed Photograph in 1984. Then, in 1986, I curated the exhibition The History of Modern Color Photography. Both exhibitions drew the information from books I had acquired. Over the years I learned of Martin’s passion for photobooks and, in particular, his keen interest in Japanese photobooks. I also started acquiring earlier German photobooks. But there was one exhibition that fundamentally changed my attitude and perception and broadened my horizon: Fotografia Pública (Photography in Print) 1919-1939 in Madrid, in 1999. The catalogue for that exhibition opened my eyes. Although it focused primarily on European books, it really showed the wonderful marriage that existed between photography, design and book making at that time. Since I am a graphic designer by training, it resonated with me – it was a pleasure to look at. So, I started going after these books in a very swift, focused and resourceful way. What have your areas of interest become? Are you focused on specific photographers, time periods or locales? Basically, I collect the printed photobook, avoiding original photography – that chapter of collecting I’ve closed – beginning around 1875 with John Thomson. I collect American, Russian, Czech, Italian, French, Dutch, Scandinavian, but especially German and Japanese photobooks. I value every book in which content and presentation together warrant attention, from 1875 up to the 1970s, which, in my view, is the most important period for the photobook. After this period my collection becomes very subjective and I stay primarily with books I acquired at the time, with very few additions. I also do not consider a book made after the death of the photographer relevant to my collection since I believe the intent of the maker is lacking. Of course, there will always be exceptions for books that are made posthumously yet are the only publication about a particular photographer’s work, like Florence Henri. Or Karl Blossfeldt, where the publisher planned books before his death, but published some of them at a later date. For a number of photographers,
foam magazine #10 / stories
interview
Manfred Heiting at home in his library, Malibu, California, photographed by Todd Hido
I would like to obtain all publications that include their work: Albert Renger-Patzsch, Karl Blossfeldt, Emil Otto Hoppé, Alvin Langdon Coburn, Ansel Adams, Dr. Paul Wolff, William Klein, Robert Frank, Ed van der Elsken, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Laure Albin-Guilot, Nobuyoshi Araki, Daido Moriyama and, last but not least, Josef Sudek. This includes every edition, every language and every version. Last but not least I am concentrating on German books between 1918-1938. This is the most productive period of photobook making in the 20th century – in terms of the number of publishers, subjects, editions, and variations, as well as avant-garde photography and design. The most unique publishing venture undertaken during this time, of an unparalleled scope and quality, was Orbis Terrarum, published from 1922 up until the 1960s. Compared with the West, the extraordinarily rich photo culture of postwar Japan is reflected to a far greater extent in its books. What do you feel are the key Japanese books from this period? Most Japanese photographers up to the end of the 1940s and beginning of the 1950s were very traditional in their style and subject matter. As in Europe during the mid-1960s, Japan was struggling to define their postwar history, particularly the post-Hiroshima and Nagasaki history and the American occupation. The two bombings were commemorated in several phenomenal publications: Hiroshima-Nagasaki Document 1961 by Ken Domon and Shomei Tomatsu (1961), representing a more traditional photographic view and style; The Map by Kikuji Kawada (1965) and 11.02 Nagasaki by Shomei Tomatsu (1966), representing a new approach and photographic style from a younger generation. This ‘eyewitness photography’ was at the heart of the 1965 demonstrations by students and farmers against the government’s actions in building the Narita airport. These intense, large-scale uprisings were captured by students with their cameras, resulting in numerous books and student publications, most of them privately published. A group of young photographers from this time formed Provoke, a short lived, but very influential movement with its own publication that first appeared in 1968. These kinds of fast, underground activities, happening mostly in and around Tokyo, met with disapproval from the official photo clubs. I have over 100 publications from this very productive period. But in my view the three books I just mentioned, and Provoke, I consider the key to any Japanese photobook collection. Can you outline some of the general criteria that guide your collecting? What are some of your aesthetic and bibliographic priorities? Just how important are all the accoutrements like slipcase, belly band or publisher’s ephemera, with which a book might have been published? My overriding credo is ‘complete as published’. Yet this is also my curse: how do we know what is complete as published? There are two publications for German books which together come close to providing most of the information needed: Börsenblatt des Deutschen Buchhandels pub
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lished daily from about 1896 until 1970 – and still published today on a weekly basis for all German language books – and Frank Heidtmann’s Bibliography of German-Language Photographic Publications, 18391984. To my knowledge, there was nothing like [the Börsenblatt] in any other country before the Library of Congress numbering system established in the 1960s, though there might have been a similar system in France based on the famous Napoleonic law which stated that one copy of any multiple belongs to the state (hence the Bibliothèque Nationale de France). Yet these sources do not include the books’ special attributes: binding, foreign editions, dust jackets, etc. By far, the best illustration of the rich variety I am describing are books by Karl Blossfeldt, published originally by the famous Ernst Wasmuth Verlag in Berlin, and the series Orbis Terrarum, also published initially by Wasmuth. Blossfeldt’s three main titles have been published in five languages, most of these in three types of bindings, each in up to five different printings, some in different colors, all with dust jackets and slipcases – all of this over a period of 25 years. Even more complex is the Orbis Terrarum series. Beginning in 1922 with books about Spain and Greece – all printed in sheet-fed gravure – and following in 1924 with China, North Africa and Scandinavia this series was the most elaborate and long-lived series of country profiles ever undertaken. It was eventually taken over by the photographer Martin Hürlimann who also owned the publishing house and magazine Atlantis. Prolific photographers like E. O. Hoppé, Kurt Hielscher, Albert Renger-Patzsch, Hürlimann himself, and many others were commissioned – or their existing images were used. Successful titles were published until the early 1980s. There are about 35 titles; each come in six different bindings and presentations, including dust jacket and slipcase. There are up to 15 editions of most titles; most have been published by two, sometimes six, different publishers in up to four languages. With all this in mind I have come to the conclusion: you only know a book, its various editions and styles, exists... when you have it in your hands. Unfortunately, most respected dealers are not very helpful,
foam magazine #10 / stories
interview
~ I don’t find books anymore – books find me ~ either through lack of knowledge or care, or by not revealing information. They’ll say, ‘I have never seen it’, or they’ll be plain misleading. Above all, I am also trying to find the best quality objects available. In real estate, the three most important issues are: ‘Location, Location, Location!’ In collecting photobooks as objects, the three most important issues are: ‘Condition, Condition, Condition!’ Regarding the many variations and editions of Blossfeldt and Orbis Terrarum you describe, how do you account for all these different versions? Do we see such variation in the US as well? There are indeed a few factors that influenced the enormous variety of editions, particularly in Germany during the inter-war years. In spite of the sociopolitical situation there, publishers were very passionate and creative, very market oriented. Most books were offered at three price points. Plus, they had the best printing industry of that time at their disposal. Many books reached a production of 100,000 copies, but they would only be finished and bound depending on sales results. Over time, tastes, price points, technologies, and publishers changed; books would be bound and finished with different materials and colors. Sometimes a publisher’s stock would be bought by another publisher, who would place his own imprint on the book. The letterpress, sheet-fed gravure, and later rotogravure techniques were invented or refined in Germany. The photobook was the best product to show off advances in these technologies. A photographer like Dr. Paul Wolff published more than sixty different books in many variations during this period. On top of this many German publishers were also printers and very often binders as well. In retail terms, a book normally was offered at the equivalent of two dollars at the low end, and up to sixteen dollars at the high end – eight times the price! In today’s terms, it would be 40 dollars versus 320 dollars – quite staggering. In the US the situation was entirely different. Though photography was certainly recognized as an art form, thanks in large part to Alfred Stieglitz, good books were produced on only a limited scale with virtually no variation in their presentation. For all of the interest in photography here in the 1920s and 1930s, very little was published by the important photographers: Alfred Stieglitz published Camera Work, but little else. The great Edward Weston published only two books during this period; Walker Evans one catalogue of his exhibition at MoMA – but in several editions. Paul Strand and Imogen Cunningham published only later in their careers. A very different scene. What are some of the challenges you face when one of your goals is bibliographic completeness? The biggest problem with 20th century books starts with the lack of reliable visual information. The libraries in general have, in my opinion, never addressed the problem of the photographic book from this period. In contrast to books in other fields, the dust jacket of a photographic
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book is an integral part of the author’s concept and presentation. I know of no library with holdings of photographic books that has systematically kept dust jackets – except, that is, after the 1970s; but even then, they would be stored separately. The reasons for this are understandable: books in libraries are there for everyone to handle. Original dust jackets presented a problem and were ‘disappeared’. ‘Why should we buy other editions and variations of the same book,’ a librarian might ask. And so, in most cases, the knowledge of dust jackets, editions and variations has disappeared as well. Therefore, I need to spread the word, watch, and wait. Are you planning a book on your collection? Eventually yes, of a very small and specific selection. With an estimated 25,000 photobooks – including most likely a few thousand duplicates – a DVD or web site would probably be more appropriate, but it will be a work in progress for a while. Without technology it would be impossible to sort, compare and select the best copies. For the final data base, every book is photographed: dust jacket, binding, slipcase – on all sides – as well as all relevant ephemera for each book. The database has to be as complete and as perfect as it can possibly be. It is my intention to have the information available – free of charge – on the web through the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston so that the next generation of collectors and scholars won’t have to struggle to find it and are no longer dependent on what a dealer tells them about a book. But this is still a few years away. Are you at all interested in artists’ books, small editions of, say, ten or twenty copies? Do you think they are to be judged any differently than a photographer’s monograph? I do collect photographic artists’ books, primarily from the 1960s until around the 1980s, though I do not see them as a main part of my collection. In my opinion this is the most creative period for them, beginning with Ed Ruscha in America, but also in Italy, France, Holland and Germany. These works were sometimes produced in editions of less than ten and might have included original prints. Yes, they are a different field altogether, and although they are often quite rare, there is more information and documentation available. Lately there is a tendency among young photographers to take a recently published book of their work and create a ‘new’ package especially for the collectors’ market with an additional original print at ten times the price of the original book. I am very hesitant to embrace this marketing technique. To what extent are you interested in signed or inscribed books? Very much so, but in no way as an alternative to quality. If a signed or inscribed book has any deficiencies, wear and tear to any parts – I am not interested. Signing photographic books has always been more common in America than in Europe – unless the book was part of a limited
foam magazine #10 / stories
Todd Hido is a San Francisco Bay Area-based artist whose work has been featured
in Artforum, The New York Times Magazine, Eyemazing, Metropolis, The Face,
interview
i-D, and Vanity Fair. His photographs are in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of Art, the Guggenheim Museum, New York, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, as well as in many other public and private collections. Hido’s work has been featured in solo shows at the Cleveland Museum of Art and at the Kemper Museum of Art. In 2001 an award-winning monograph of his work, entitled House Hunting, was published by Nazraeli Press and followed by a companion monograph, Outskirts, in 2002. His third book, Roaming, was released in 2004. His latest book – Between the Two, focusing on portraits and nudes – was published earlier this year by Nazraeli Press. Eric Miles is a writer and bookseller specializing in photographic literature. He is based in New York and Santa Fe, N.M., where he is the in-house rare book specialist for photo-eye Books & Prints (see www.photoeye.com/auctions).
edition, which was very common in France. You will very rarely find a signed August Sander Antlitz der Zeit, but it is quite common to find issues of Camera Work signed by Alfred Stieglitz or by the photographers published in them. There are dealers who argue quite convincingly that provenance should be valued more highly than condition. This is very self-serving; most likely they would not follow their own advice if the sale were reversed. What effect do you think Andrew Roth’s The Book of 101 Books. Seminal Photographic Books of the Twentieth Century and the two volumes of Martin Parr and Gerry Badger’s The Photobook: A History have had on the imaginations of serious collectors? I hope not much on the informed and serious collector; but all three publications are a powerful force and have created an entirely new market. They have attracted new collectors; many, unfortunately, who collect with their ears and not with their eyes. But for the serious collector, myself included, they are very helpful. In the future, books of this nature will have to live up to the subjective standards created by these publications. The Book of 101 Books certainly captured the American market; it was the first such book to appear here. As I mentioned before, Fotografia Pública was two years earlier, but it was not widely distributed here. The facts in Roth’s book were not well researched, but it was a sumptuous production – in three editions! The information in the ParrBadger books, particularly in Volume I, is an enormous improvement. The text by Gerry Badger is brilliantly written and demonstrates a wealth of knowledge about each book. Roth, after all, is a dealer who wanted to sell the books he knew best; Martin Parr is a passionate and knowledgeable collector whose collection – as far as I know – is not up for sale. I see Volume I of The Photobook as a fundamental guide to the field; Volume II is a transitional addition, more subjective and less convincing. But the areas and periods it covers are so damn overwhelming that similar attempts by anyone would have similar results. In the end all these and future publications will support the photographic book and photography in general – and that is great for all of us. How do you feel about the influence that these books have had on the market and, more generally, on the hype surrounding photobooks? I really do not care! Most of the books included in these publications are important, but not all of them are rare. They are rare in perfect and complete condition – some more than others. And to know what is complete, of course, takes a lot of experience and knowledge, acquired only over years of looking and comparing. It is a bit funny to see dealers – even serious ones – who never gave a dime about photographic books, suddenly having them on their shelves. They will have the appropriate Roth or Parr-Badger citation but with few other clues about the book if you ask a more specific question – other than the latest price from the most recent London auction. Fortunately, the internet can at least help
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to level some of the excessive prices. My point of view: if you see an important photobook in perfect condition – in particular from before World War-II – it is, within reason, worth paying a higher price. Everything is about quality: otherwise do not even think about buying it – unless you know why and what you are doing. The title of a photobook alone is not a good investment. Without revealing sources, how you make your most significant acquisitions? Do you still go to bookstores, or do you work mainly with private dealers? I have built up a network of about fifteen dealers in Europe, Japan and America – with different levels of knowledge and areas of expertise (and sometimes integrity) – who know what I am looking for, what my criteria are, and who will offer books with all the information to me. I have stopped working with dealers who do not stand behind the books they are selling and have a problem with taking books back when something is not right with the condition – or their own description. In addition, building a collection in this field is a process of constant ‘upgrading’; a serious dealer will always ‘participate’ and assist in building your collection and will also help to return your duplicates back to the market. He should be in for the long haul. I detest the ‘take the money and run’ attitude. Anyway, I don’t find books anymore – books find me. Regarding contemporary photobooks I do look at bookstores and at fairs, but I basically decided to put all my marbles in three baskets – with three trusted experts: Markus Schaden of schaden.com in Cologne; Chris Pichler of Nazraeli Press and Gerhard Steidl of Steidl Publishers. I basically rely on their judgment and selection. Susan Sontag once described her library as ‘the inside of my head. It’s a map of my brain’. How would characterize your library? Above the door to my library is a plaque my wife has made for me. It reads: ‘Paradise for me has always been a kind of library’. This says it all. The quote is from Jorge Luis Borges. +
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Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Wellfleet, 1993, plate 43 from: A Storybook Life, Twin Palms Publishers, 2004 Š Philip-Lorca diCorcia, courtesy the artist and Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York
~ To convey the story effectively, much use was made of readily identifiable symbolism ~
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Do You Read Me? ~ Photography and the Narrative ~
by Marcel Feil ~ curator Foam_Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam
If it’s true that a picture is worth a thousand words, then photography is essentially a narrative medium. And sure enough, from the very beginning , photographers have felt the urge to use their medium to tell stories. The ways in which this is done – or suggested, as is currently most often the case – are highly diverse and have developed along different paths over time. One can generally distinguish two principal categories: narrative photography that uses multiple images to present a pre-established story in a linear fashion, and photography that presents a story in a single image. Aside from a few conceptually oriented artists from the sixties and seventies and the photographic series and reportages in which the sequence of the individual images is of lesser importance, the linear narratives are primarily photojournalistic reports of actual events. Presented as ‘photo essays’ in so-called picture magazines, this genre reached its peak round the middle of the last century; for decades, such photo essays formed the most important window on the world for most people. In contrast, the ‘single-frame narratives’ are often open to various interpretations that rely on our own imaginations. Instead of a univocal narrative prescribed by the photographer, these images offer us ample room in which to create our own fantasies. They sometimes refer to existing stories or works of art that are part of our collective consciousness. This sort of photography is often described as ‘tableau’ or ‘tableau-vivant’ photography. Although this genre has really taken off in the past twenty-five years, its roots lie in the early years of photography. Picturing the narrative, narrating the picture Shortly after the pioneering experiments in capturing a representation of reality with a camera, photographers realized that their new techniques could also be used to depict fiction. Most early photographic works recorded staged events. The first cameras were heavy and cumbersome, and the long shutter times required the models hold a pose for minutes at a time. This produced artificiality, an exaggerated theatricality and an inordinate amount of attention to the staging. Often everything was thought out in advance to the smallest detail and each element, from the lighting to the attributes, had a specific function within the representation as a whole, so that the photographer functioned as a director. It is hardly surprising that much nineteenth
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century photography is strongly narrative, furnished with captions referring to known stories, fairytales or poems. To match public general knowledge and to convey the story effectively, much use was made of readily identifiable symbolism. Two frequently cited examples of such a combination of theatrical performances and narrative content are Oscar Gustave Rejlander’s Two Ways of Life from 1857 and Henry Peach Robinson’s Fading Away from 1858. Each in its own way, these are exemplary for many photos from the Victorian era. Both freeze their principal figures on a horizontal line on a shallow stage. With its explicit moralistic message (i.e. the struggle between virtue and vice), Rejlander’s complex allegorical work is indebted to the theatre; the actors stand on a theatre stage confined by heavy curtains and a wide painted backdrop. The decor and the poses of the actors imitate Raphael’s famous painting The School of Athens. Rejlander had to combine thirty negatives to create a single image in this heroic attempt to surpass painting. Where Rejlander looked back to classical representation laden with literary and painterly allusions, Henry Peach Robinson gave what in his day would have been a contemporary representation. We see a young girl clothed in virginal white shortly before she breathes her last. The principal figures are evenly spaced across a theatrical set; reclining in an armchair, the girl is positioned centrally, while another girl stands behind her and an older woman sits at her feet with a closed book on her lap. Nearby a man stands with his back turned in the foreground, leaning against the half-open window. For Robinson’s contemporaries the narrative was instantly clear; the young girl is dying of tuberculosis (the open window), surrounded by her immediate family , the father is unable to bear his emotions, the mother is sitting resignedly with her Bible closed on her lap. Despite the realism that demanded the viewer identify with the scene portrayed, the obviously painstaking staging and the explicit allusion to a poem by Shelley assure the viewer that this is an artistic fancy and not the registration of any real event. >
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Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Los Angeles, 1997, plate 44 from: A Storybook Life, Twin Palms Publishers, 2004 Š Philip-Lorca diCorcia, courtesy the artist and Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York
~ The viewer is certainly aware that a story is being told, but there is no single precise way to interpret the content ~
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The grouping of models in a narrative tableau was at the core of Victorian narrative art. Later in the nineteenth century and in the first decades of the twentieth, Pictorialists such as F. Holland Day, Gertrude Käsebier and William Mortensen continued to elaborate on this genre. While their subjects were just as sentimental and sweet as those of their Victorian predecessors, their manner was more polished and less cloying. The lighting was more intense, the decor more exuberant, the form more pronounced. The preference for exotic, biblical and classical themes call to mind the epic productions of the first major Hollywood studios. Such highly moralistic allegories demonstrate that the Pictorialists remained defenders of Romantic ideals. Contrary to the prevailing taste of that era, they continued to prefer clichéd sentimental subjects to the clear, sharply lined abstractions of the New Objectivity or the fantastic and often disturbing imaginative powers of the Surrealists who were at that time quickly gaining in popularity. With the decline of this narrative staged photography indebted to painting, theatre and literature, a new form of photography emerged; the journalistic photo essay was its opposite in content, technique and form, yet it expanded the narrative qualities of the medium. Show me your story: Photojournalism and the photo essay It was primarily the technical development of the medium that brought radical changes to the kind of images that were made. As cameras became smaller and more manageable and film faster, photographers grew more and more capable of recording real life directly. A range of noteworthy events was registered by photographers, and those photos were disseminated among the masses through the printed media. By the end of the nineteenth century it was possible to reproduce photographs in books and magazines. The so-called illustrated magazines soon came into being, affording the masses an opportunity to see people, places and events that they had previously only known of by hearsay. Magazines like L’Illustration, La Vie Illustrée and Vu in France, Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung in Germany and The Illustrated London News in Great Britain were among the very first photojournalistic magazines. As their titles implied, the photographic images in these magazines were limited for the most part to illustrations accompanying the text. The popularity of these illustrated magazines soared; a wide low-priced range appeared on the news stands. The competition among those magazines was stiff. With issues devoted to particular themes, appealing covers, rousing headlines and a dynamic design that did justice to modern life, each magazine attempted to seduce buyers. By the late twenties the public had become more receptive to visual material and the image achieved a commanding position in the printed media. The subject matter was no longer the central factor; the power of the image was paramount. Images carried the message; text was limited to appealing titles and captions. Editors selected photos for the attractiveness of the image regardless of whether an image did justice to a particular event. The primacy of visual editing, design and titles was evident and many editors were hardly endeavouring to achieve journalistic objectivity.
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In the thirties, illustrated magazines were introduced in the United States as well, bearing titles such as Life, Look and Ken. Look’s slogan was catchy: ‘Keep informed … 200 pictures … 1001 facts’. Many worldfamous photographic narratives were published in those years, for example those of the battle of Iwo Jima by W. Eugene Smith, the coronation of the British king by Henri Cartier-Bresson and the renowned narrative of the Spanish Civil War by Robert Capa. The publication of Capa’s photos in Regards and across a twelve-page spread in Picture Post was pivotal. The interplay between text and image, the irregular arrangement of storylines and the seemingly random placement of the images set a new standard both in terms of design and visual editing. Life’s overwhelming success ensures it remains the prototypical photojournalism magazine. Generations have been raised on the images from Life, which at its peak reached over 20 million readers world-wide. Life had a large stable of photographers on its payroll and a strong commitment to innovation. Its use of text declined over time and its exploitation of images remained surprising and daring. The public recognized this and identified with the magazine’s positive tone. While the pre-war photo magazines had hardly been paragons of journalistic objectivity, Life pushed a concealed but extremely powerful and effective ideology. Like no other its founder and owner, Henry Luce, understood the power he had over his readers and was not afraid to wield it. He took every opportunity to convey his conviction that ‘no nation in history, except ancient Israel, was so obviously designed for some special phase of God’s special purpose.’(1) A messianic faith in the United States, an equally fervent belief in the blessings of capitalism and a hatred of Soviet and Chinese communism made Luce – and with him Life – the perfect spokesman for the expansionist American culture of the fifties. And the photo essay, a sequence of images with a clear beginning and end, was a fitting instrument for this Photographers however became uncomfortable with the idea of being deployed for the story that their editors wanted to tell. The bestknown example of a Life photographer who found it increasingly difficult to live within his editor’s expectations was W. Eugene Smith. Photo essays were no longer the work of an individual photographer, but rather produced by a large group of people. The photographer provided the images, the editors made the story. W. Eugene Smith’s demand to have a voice in the publication won him the esteem of his confreres but met with little understanding from Life. As a photographer he wanted to show his social and political engagement by ‘giving his voice to those who did not have one themselves’. Smith acted on behalf of the poor, fought for his humanitarian convictions and attempted to convey a personal message. In 1955 he transferred his allegiance to the photographers’ collective Magnum, the co-operative of numerous other photographers who had likewise had enough of being patronised by editors and wanted to have control over the use of their own work. >
>> Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Hartford, 1979, plate 45 from: A Storybook Life, Twin Palms Publishers, 2004 © Philip-Lorca diCorcia, courtesy the artist and Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York
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The desire to retain exclusive control over the selection of the photos and their ordering in a particular sequence, plus the layout of their work gained strength among many photographers in the fifties and sixties. Photographers wanted to work independently of editors and publishers; they wanted to edit their own work and to publish it, preferably in book form. As Robert Frank said: ‘I wanted to follow my own intuition and do it my own way, and not make any concession, not make a Life story. That was another thing I hated. Those goddamned stories with a beginning and an end.’ The books of William Klein, Robert Frank and Ed van der Elsken are familiar examples of highly personal narratives. The difference between their work and the vast majority of photo essays was clear; there no longer had to be a clearly delineated subject, a clearly identifiable central figure, a clear time and location of action or a text that was supposed to explain the images. The story could now be told in a non-linear, intuitive and associative way, without making concessions to potential readers. The photographer wanted to tell a personal story himself, and what the reader thought of it was of lesser importance. Increasingly, photographers began to demand more of the imaginative powers and associative capacity of the reader. Single-frame narrative: The tableau vivant revisited In the sixties and early seventies, television and other media took over the role of the illustrated magazines, and the importance of the classic photo essay quickly faded. Likewise, conceptual art and performance, which formed the mainstream within the visual arts, left little room for narrative photography. Video was emergent, not merely as a way of recording performances but also as an art form in its own right. The renewed interest in film led among other things to Roland Barthes’ influential essay The Third Meaning, in which he defines film as a meaningful combination of various different elements. Film stills, unlike photos, are therefore narrative fragments or quotes. In Barthes’ view, they offer the potential for associations that go much further than the main storyline. This perspective had an enormous impact on a new generation of artists who had begun to investigate the narrative capacity of the photographic image once again. The standard-bearer of this generation was the Canadian artist Jeff Wall, whose fascination for the medium of film is most evident in his early work (e.g. Movie Audience from 1979), which also emphasises the renewed interest in theatrical, staged photography. But in addition to this cinematographic influence Wall’s work demonstrates that he understood which techniques painters used in past centuries and that he had studied the tableau photography of the previous century. Wall constructs his images meticulously, trusting in the capacity of the viewer to recognise a story. A crucial difference is that now, however, much less use is made of univocal symbolism. Indeed, while the viewer is certainly aware that a story is being told, there is no single precise way to interpret the content. This forces the viewer to search for something tangible, for details that could give the idea that one understands how to ‘read’ the image. Fact and fiction are constantly at odds with each other. All elements – the positioning of the figures, their posture and interaction, the allusions to other images, the use of light and colour – seem to have been deliberately constructed and appear to fit together like the pieces of a puzzle. And yet the meaning of the whole remains ambiguous. The enigmatic character of Wall’s tableaux offers the viewer the chance to lose himself in the work each time and to discover new readings and narratives. Wall’s presentation of his work as monumental, life-sized light boxes also reinforces the spatial, physical presence of the representation.
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Philip-Lorca diCorcia is another artist who has found a method for further developing the narrative in contemporary photography. Even more than Wall, diCorcia operates in the void between post-modern fiction and documentary factuality. His images at first seem to be ordinary spontaneous shots, in part because in many of his works he refers to the snapshot tradition of street photography. But just as in Jeff Wall’s work, they are the result of lengthy preparations and an exceptional command of every element in the image. His characteristic use of light has often been labelled ‘cinematographic’. This is neither an end in itself nor a mere stylistic device, however. DiCorcia leaves no instrument or lamp unused in his efforts to gain precisely the result he needs to achieve a balance between realism and fantasy. As a result the public accepts the work as a constructed narrative and is willing to be carried along by the story. DiCorcia is pre-eminently interested in the possibilities that contemporary photography offers for telling stories, as the title of his book A Storybook Life, which appeared in 2004, shows. This book contains a series of seventy-five separate images seemingly without a clear chronology, storyline or internal logic. Can we really speak of a ‘storybook’? DiCorcia says the following about this particular work: The disparate photographs assembled here were made over the course of twenty years. By ordering and shaping them I tried to investigate the possibilities of narrative both within a single image and especially in relation to the other photographs. ‘A Storybook Life’ is an attempt to discover the possibilities of meaning in the interaction of seemingly unrelated images in the hope that content can constantly mutate according to both the external and internal condition of the viewer, but remain meaningful because of its inherent, but latent content. The conscious and subconscious decisions made in editing the photographs is the real work of ‘A Storybook Life’. DiCorcia’s fascination with the importance of editing large quantities of images is just as apparent in his latest book, which will be published by Steidl later in 2007. Entitled Thousand, it comprises one thousand Polaroids that diCorcia has made over the course of his career. This time it is not diCorcia who determines the sequence, but a specially developed computer program. The idea to let coincidence and arbitrariness tell the story, and to grant viewers even more freedom to develop storylines on their own by means of associative thinking has perhaps been inspired by the staggering amount of digital visual material to which one now has access via the Internet. The determining role of the photographer in the use and understanding of his work seems to be rapidly fading. More than ever, it is up to us to be the editor of our own story. + John Kobler, Luce: His Time, Life and Fortune, New York: Doubleday & Co., 1968, p.5
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Larry Burrows
This photo essay was reproduced directly from
Life magazine, 16 April 1965.
Photographed by Larry Burrows, assigned and
first published by Life magazine © 1965 Time Inc.,
reproduced with permission.
Larry Burrows (1926-1971) was born in London. At sixteen he started working as a darkroom technician in the photo lab of Life’s London office. He did many different jobs, mainly drying films and running errands for famous wartime photographers, including Robert Capa, whose films he processed. His own photographic career started around 1945 when he photographed celebrities such as Ernest Hemingway and Winston Churchill for Life. Although Burrows photographed many stories – tribal fighting in the Congo (1960), the war between India and China on the Himalayan frontier (1962), the Olympic Games (1964), birds of paradise in Indonesia (1965) and the temples of Angkor Wat in Cambodia (1970) – his name will always be associated with the Vietnam war. Burrows first went to Vietnam in 1962, in the earliest days of American involvement. It was the first war he had ever covered, the sort of assignment he had been longing to do. His first big Vietnam story was published in Life in January 1963. It immediately established him as a master of
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Vietnam reportage. He covered the war for another nine years. On February 10, 1971 he was killed near the border with Laos when the helicopter that he and fellow journalists were flying in was shot down by the North Vietnamese. Burrows’ photographs have been published widely, most notably in the books Larry Burrows Compassionate Photographer, by the Editors of Life, and Larry Burrows’ Vietnam, which won the 2002 Prix Nadar as the Best Photography book of the year.
Ken Grant is a photographer and Course Leader in Documentary Photography at the University of Wales, Newport. He is an associate member of the Network photo agency. A book collecting this work was published as The Close Season by Dewi Lewis Publishing in 2002.
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Yankee Papa 13: ~ Pictures from a Rich Man’s War
by Ken Grant
Late last year, I sat before dawn in a Paris hotel room, waiting for heavy rain to clear. Flicking channels, I stuttered through the experts, economists and extremes of cable television. Eventually, I happened upon CNN where, instead of the manicured concern of another news anchor, young medics were working on even younger soldiers somewhere south of Baghdad. In terrible detail, amongst the confusion and instability of a contemporary ground war, a camera crew filmed in a temporary Emergency Room as a terrible sequence was played out. Steadily, a flow of maimed, bleeding and blistered soldiers were tended and sedated. Whimpering, angry, sweating, some as quiet as lambs, the wounded struggled through shock as anxious surgeons – inches from their patients’ faces, so as to be understood – repeatedly diagnosed amputation. I expected the footage to cut away, to temper the trauma of a day that wasn’t meant to happen, in a war that doesn’t make sense, but it did not. Instead it continued, horrifying and bewildering, remote from the neat rhythms of commercial television; something this urgent ran to its own schedule, and by its own rules.
Looking at the photographs Larry Burrows made forty years ago for his Life story One Ride with Yankee Papa 13, as they reach their repetitive and traumatic conclusion, I’m reminded of how little our world has changed. Yankee Papa 13 seems to begin regularly, shadowing another day of battle, but ends awkwardly and in human breakdown, as if attempting to commit shock to the printed page. The writer Max Kozloff once wrote of how by the end of the 1960s a generation of young artists had been exposed, as never before, to violent tragedies they were bound to carry with them through life. The impact of the conflict in Vietnam, witnessed through printed and televized media, through street protests and boycotts across a troubled world, would contribute to a very public disenchantment. Such discord, Kozloff seemed to suggest, would manifest itself in the temperament of the artworks and cultural responses that followed. Wasn’t it present, for example, in the psychological weight of Diane Arbus’ pictures of deviance and polarisation made towards the end of the decade? Didn’t it augment the refrain of the Rolling Stones’ Sympathy for the Devil at Altamont as Hell’s Angels attacked people in the audience; a world away from a summer of love? If this is the case, one might cite the photo stories Larry Burrows made throughout the Vietnamese conflict, as a regular and pivotal contributor to such a climate. Burrows first substantial Life picture story on Vietnam was published in January 1963. Six months of photography was distilled into a fourteen-page feature, The Vicious Fighting in Vietnam. It included a fold-out cover and fold-out pages that expanded both the scale and urgency of the photographs. Yet, after such extensive projects, timetabled and developed over the months before publication, an edit of nineteen pictures from a single day, March 31st 1965, would provide an abrasive and unsettling promise of the future direction of the war.
Paul Fusco, East Orange, New Jersey, April 3, 2004, from the series Bitter Fruit © Paul Fusco/Magnum Photos/Hollandse Hoogte
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One Ride with Yankee Papa 13 related an unfolding mission to recover a battalion of Vietnamese infantry from an area known as a rendezvous point for the Viet Cong. Shot in black-and-white (although Burrows was also masterful with colour), the work follows a temporal framework: from the calm briefing of the youthful 163 Squadron crew, the sequence moves into the air... and then lifts off into chaos. The journey would end in death and helplessness. In a helicopter similar to the one in which Burrows would eventually lose his own life, the photographer emphasizes the effect that war has on the individual. He had devised an apparatus that allowed him to photograph the side-door machine-gunners closely as they leaned precariously out of the aircraft. Made in a matter of hours, Burrows’ story could be seen as a departure from his earlier extended essays. Such styles of storytelling – paternal and often simplifying tense and complex political conditions – had enjoyed a buoyancy in Europe and America since the 1930s. Generally, extensive pages of grouped photographs were tethered to a written commentary which centralized the experiences of real lives. The picture story would often comprise regular types of pictures – the establishing shot, which signalled the ambition of the story; the relationship picture showing interaction and dependency, giving space to the detail; finally, single portraits and pictures of working people in their most appropriate combination allowed the story to be told with diversity and authority. Seemingly urgent, the photographs would regularly run over the margins of the magazine and extend the possibilities of scale whilst creating distinction between pictures. Text, though always close to the pictures, was subdued on the page – in font, if not in message.
When laying out the work, one can imagine regular imperatives; the photographs must formally live together on the page, ensuring that the properties of one are not to be diminished or compromised by the placement of others. Laying pictures together with differing perspectives or tonality allows the viewer to dwell on one without the interference of another. In Yankee Papa 13, Burrows’ use of black-and-white film renders the interiors of the helicopter dark and relentless, and tempers them only with rare glimpses of a brighter elephant grass terrain – that meant exposure rather than sanctuary. Secondly, how does the text work in relation to the pictures, and how can these elements conspire to tell the story that the editor wishes to be told? In the 1970s the sociologist Stuart Hall reappraised the photo story and recognized a manner of storytelling that showed the prevailing conditions, without ever foregrounding the political decisions that had created them. Looking at the distressed scenes that unfold in Burrows’ account, it’s easy to overlook the fact that there is little mention of policy, futility or rethinking in the accompanying narrative. Editor Henry Luce’s Life magazine offered an unconditional endorsement of the American position in Vietnam. Perhaps not unlike Roy Stryker, whose co-ordination of the Farm Security Administration thirty years earlier had rejected unsuitable or ‘off-message’ work. Luce demanded a forthright humanism that had found its form so successfully in magazines like Picture Post and Liliputt. The European picture magazine tradition stretched between the mapping of a northern Britain by Bill Brandt and the Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung (Workers’ Illustrated News) that sought to promote, according to contributor Edwin Hoernle in 1930, ‘no camera without a proletarian eye’. It’s a contentious notion, perhaps, that some photographers wanted to tell a different story to the one financed by their bosses, but one that
Paul Fusco, Bronx, New York, February 6, 2004, from the series Bitter Fruit © Paul Fusco/Magnum Photos/Hollandse Hoogte
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Life editors experienced most notably with Eugene Smith, and one that continued long after the centrality of the picture magazine had waned. In 1982, photographer Don McCullin was refused access to cover the unfolding Falklands war by a British government nervously learning to manage the media in the shadow of very public American mistakes in Vietnam. In the US six years later the Washington Post reflected on Bill Couterie’s Dear America: Letters home from Vietnam. Made at the end of a decade of rekindled Hollywood interest in Vietnam, the film was unorthodox – remote from the conventions of storytelling and populist box-office strategies. It fused actors’ voices reading soldiers’ letters, and a contemporary drug-tinged rock soundtrack with news and amateur footage. The work became a multi-faceted presentation so emotive and layered, that it seemed to extend the reach of documentary. It somehow affirmed Robert Frank’s mistrust of the language and structure of magazines that had been significant in bringing the war into the home. There was nothing neat or ordered about the lives of the young people featured, and perhaps that should be reflected in any response. Documentary storytelling, it seemed to imply, need not or could no longer simply be ‘embedded’ field accounts, or dispatches from the frontline. It is not surprising that photography’s relationship with the photo story has diminished in recent decades. Life magazine ended regular print production in 1972, and the responsibility for war coverage shifted to network television. Photographers have held onto the photo story, but moved to engage with other appropriate strategies. For the Italian Paolo Pellegrin for instance, the photobook has become a site in itself, as it has for Luc Delahaye, in his recent History project. Pellegrin re-
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mains engaged, building narratives through which to explore the complexities of Kosovo. The bold layout of this work seems reminiscent of the urgency of the magazine format, whilst expanding towards a dark and evocative detailing of civilian lives, shadowed and displaced after the fighting. Delahaye stands further back, using subtlety and layered information, to build archaeologies of contemporary unrest; smart strategies in a time of smart warfare. Shortly after Yankee Papa 13 was published, Burrows received correspondence from the mother of James Magel, the door gunner who was fatally shot on the mission. She spoke of her shock, having eventually seen the Life cover which showed her son mortally wounded on the floor of the helicopter shortly after she had buried him. She may not have understood Burrows’ actions, but she surely would have been unaware of his revolt against the conventions of the tidy, mannered photo essay, as he photographed the young door gunner Farley over and again until he collapsed in grief – as if anything else was possible. As I write, the photographer Paul Fusco has recently uploaded his Bitter Fruit project to the Magnum in Motion website. Photographing the funerals of American soldiers killed in Iraq, he is working in the small towns of America, where war lives. Largely ignored by the American news media, Fusco uses Google to search for eleventh hour funeral announcements. He has created a body of work in the faltering voice of a witness who has seen too much. The photographs, direct and relentless, have nothing of the diversity and balance of a Life story. Like his important RFK Funeral Train project, they are repetitive, painful, and occasionally heartbreaking; and like the CNN reporters following a young female medic as she struggles to wipe pools of blood from the Emergency Room floor, it would be easy to understand if Fusco had turned away. But he did not. +
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Alessandra Sanguinetti The Adventures of Guille and Belinda and the Enigmatic Meaning of Their Dreams
The Black Cloud, 2000
The Mirror, 2001
Ophelias, 2002
The Couple, 1999
The Book, 1999
La Luz, 2005
The Dreamer, 2002
To the Past, 2000
The Black Cat, 1999
Summer, 2004
Christ is the Answer, 2002
The Reflection, 2003
The Chicken Thief, 2002
White Cat, 2002
The Models, 2000
Unearthed, 2005 All images: Cibachrome Prints, Š Alessandra Sanguinetti, Courtesy Yossi Milo Gallery, NYC.
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Alessandra Sanguinetti
Alessandra Sanguinetti (1968) was born in New York, of Argentinian origins. Nowadays she divides her time between both places. In the past years she has been working on two major series, The Adventures of Guille and Belinda and On the Sixth Day, both photographed at the same farm in remote Argentina. In On the Sixth Day, published by Nazraeli Press in 2006, Sanguinetti does not focus on specific characters as in the series on Guille and Belinda but visualizes – in a similar magical, fairytale-like way – the symbiotic relationship between nature, farmers and their animals, and the century-old rituals surrounding birth and death. Sanguinetti has held solo exhibitions at Yossi Milo Gallery, New York, Museum of Modern Art, Buenos Aires and Lightwork, Syracuse NY among others. Her work was included in the Rencontres d’Arles festival in 2005 and then again in 2006, when she won the Discovery Award. Her work has been shown in many group exhibi
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tions, including Ecotopia at the International Center of Photography, New York, MoMA, New York and the Joop Swart Master Class of World Press Photo. Her photographs are included in the permanent collections of many prestigious institutions, including ICP, New York, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, SF MoMa, San Francisco and the Museum of Modern Art, Buenos Aires.
Laura Noble is an artist, writer and consultant. She is the author of the book The Art of Collecting Photography, published by AVA Publishing in 2006. She regularly contributes to photographic magazines, including Next Level, EyeMazing and Image and she writes a book review column for London Independent Photography.
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The reality of a pretend world ~ On the dreams and adventures of Guille and Belinda
by Laura Noble
As adults we often forget just how real a pretend world can be. With just a pinch of the ample imagination that is an integral part of childhood the most modest plain garden can be transformed into an Amazonian jungle. Argentinian photographer Alessandra Sanguinetti – who has been working on the series entitled The Adventures of Guille and Belinda and the Enigmatic Meaning of Their Dreams since 1999 – offers us a glimpse back into that world. By exploring the relationship and play of Guille and Belinda on their farm in rural Argentina, Sanguinetti captures in vivid colour the awe and excitement felt by the two girls. We become privy to the wonderment of the dreams and adventures acted out by them.
Sanguinetti visibly references female photographers of the past, most notably the women pioneers of Victorian photography, in the enigmatic poetry of her imagery. In particular, we can trace a lineage from the work of Julia Margaret Cameron and Lady Clementina Haywarden, who often used domestic settings to portray figures from history, poetry and painting. Using her daughters, husband and servants as models, Haywarden created mise-en-scene with minimal sets. By using family members, rich emotional connections shone through in her work. Conjuring evocative poses and gestures, together with simple costumes and props, such as mirrors and household furniture, her models both imitate and reinvent characters from specific works of art. The simplicity of technique required to evoke familiar imagery from the Fine Art canon is quite affecting. One such photograph emulated a painting by William Holman Hunt titled The Awakening Conscience, whereby the distinctive pose of the model was all that was needed to summon up its influence. This early experimentation in the photographic genre was rich with symbolism and visual beauty. Without going to elaborate lengths, Haywarden’s sparse interpretations left room for the viewer to form their own analysis rather than being dictated to by the artist. Perhaps in the case of Haywarden and Cameron, such domestic reinventions and intimate theatrics were a necessity borne of limited means, but the gentle intrigue and subtle symbolism of such imagery has proven to be an attractive quality that many contemporary photographers seek to recapture.
Alessandra Sanguinetti, Immaculate Conception, 1999, from The Adventures of Guille and Belinda and the Enigmatic Meaning of Their Dreams, Cibachrome Print © Alessandra Sanguinetti, courtesy Yossi Milo Gallery, NYC
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Alongside Sanguinetti, re-interpretations of classic themes are often used by photographers such as Gregory Crewdson, whose grand Ophelia was created with a large budget, the scene more akin to an elaborate stage set than a simple assembly of props. Conversely, Sanguinetti’s version of the story is crafted within the Victorian traditions of marshalling the available surroundings into a rich spontaneity, the antithesis of Crewdson’s meticulously planned setting. The two girls float alongside each other in the water, each mirroring the others’ pose. Belinda resembles a shadow of Guille, almost merging with the water as the form of her cousin dwarfs her small frame. Posed together, the girls become dual Ophelias, displaying just how deeply the experi-
ences of Guille and Belinda are shared even when depicting a classic image so associated with a lone figure. Lucid dreams and adventures come to life in the gestures of Guille and Belinda with evocative results. The role-play of the girls is disarmingly relaxed and natural to the point that the viewer begins to feel a creeping sense of voyeurism in Sanguinetti’s photographs, as the profound depth of Guille and Belinda’s feelings are laid bare before the camera. Sanguinetti’s own guiding presence is rarely felt. As a photographer, she deftly puts the viewer in her place, her influence on the girls seemingly intangible – it is as if the images have been conjured directly from their own imagination. The closeness of Guille and Belinda’s friendship is unmistakable. This is sometimes shown straightforwardly, as in when they embrace each other looking out towards the looming dark skies in The Black Cloud. Once again, Sanguinetti’s presence seems to go completely unnoticed as they face away from the camera. This intimate moment that only they can truly savor seems almost intrusive. The thoughts of the girls are unclear, but whatever the darkness may bring, one thing is certain, they will face it together. As they are both wearing swimming costumes, it may well be a short wait till they can dance in the rain and enjoy what the blackness has to offer them. The simplicity of enjoying the natural elements illustrates the connection they have with the natural world, turning a supposed negative into a positive. By watching this there is a twinge
Alessandra Sanguinetti, Untitled, from On the Sixth Day, 1996-2004, C-print © Alessandra Sanguinetti, courtesy Yossi Milo Gallery, NYC
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of jealously of a friendship that is so intense it is all-important at an age where the responsibilities of life have yet to be endured. Photographing children as they grow is something we all accept as part of modern life, but exploring their world with such focused intensity is to come face to face with our own childhood. The directness of a child’s gaze can be surprisingly intimidating. A photographer who examined her own children’s development and complexities is Sally Mann. Her observations of play and children’s absorption in their games within their rural surroundings still causes controversy today as the vulnerability of her children is revealed with a touching and often unnerving honesty. Sanguinetti also touches upon the changes all young girls experience. Their burgeoning sexuality is ever-present as the series records their maturation since 1999. Their young bodies are primed for adulthood and even at this age the natural seductiveness of womanhood is distinctive. This Lolita element can be uncomfortable for an adult to look upon, particularly as they are so blissfully unaware. Since the start of the project, when Belinda was nine and Guille ten, adolescence looms and time passes, but their sense of play shines through. The humorous side of impending adulthood is evident as Belinda stands with a ball underneath her dress as if expecting. This shared tenderness presents itself throughout. Paradoxically Guille’s adoration for her older cousin appears as a touching reflection motherly love. Although younger, Guille often appears protective of her older cousin. Her larger physique has a stabilizing effect. In The Book she sits on the bed, her stocky figure providing a grounding presence on the otherwise flighty figure of Belinda who lies down with a teddy bear resting on her, a childhood creature of comfort. Guille wears a white coat like that of a doctor, playing out the role of her carer and protector. The trust between them is palpable. Here we are reminded of their parents’ absence by the wedding photograph on the wall above and momentarily reminded that there is a family outside of their fantasy world. After sharing so much time in their sole company, this revelation almost seems to come as a surprise. Home comforts may be basic but they provide ample material for Guille and Belinda to have fun and create games to play. The pictorial symbolism in religious art told stories from the Bible to a largely illiterate world. What may now appear to be a childish form of communication is actually still in use in our own society, which is so immersed by images that we frequently have difficulty picking out those
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that have meaning for us. By using biblical themes such as the Immaculate Conception, Sanguinetti turns back to times past to reconsider faith and belief, something so abundantly present in all children but inevitably questioned in later life. By photographing these two young girls Sanguinetti reminds us of innocence lost but not forgotten. The lyrical influence of painting is threaded throughout this series. Sanguinetti’s use of light, which is symptomatic of Dutch Realism, quietly dancing across each scene amplifies the magical quality of Guille and Belinda’s surroundings. A palette of blues, browns, green and yellow complement each composition just as they would in a Vermeer painting. Celebrating the simplicity of rural life together encourages the potential for fairytales and fantasy as Guille and Belinda explore the possibilities that their environment has to offer. With wild flowers in full bloom, allegorical adventures are poised to present themselves with the mischievous collaboration of the girls. They appear to emerge from the undergrowth like spring bulbs waiting to flower in Unearthed. Flowers have an enigmatic place in art, often used as symbols to pass on deeper meanings too complex to depict graphically in a single image. By employing their associated meanings symbolically the seemingly incidental presence of plants and flowers can import elaborate layers of signs and signifiers. The iconography in Sir John Everett Millais’ Ophelia has produced many detailed studies. The entire Shakespearean tragedy is told through the symbols and flowers that surround her body. Sanguinetti quietly tells Guille and Belinda’s stories in a pared down photographic form, but this makes it no less poetic. Playing grown-ups is something that all little girls do. In a way it is a practice run and a ‘trying on’ of things to come. As with all human development mimicking our parents is one of the ways we learn. To the Past shows them raising a glass to toast the past as they imagine their parents would. Of course this doesn’t mean we get it right the first time and practice makes perfect so they say. There are stumbles along the way. The awkwardness of Guille’s physique which seems to be bursting out of her dress in White Cat displays her lack of maturity as she sits in a less than ladylike fashion, revealing the tops of her hold ups and the white high heeled, peep toe shoes which are not altogether feminine on her. Dreams materialize in the form of a wedding cake in The Black Cat as Guille leans against an upturned bench staring at it dressed for the occasion but with no groom in sight. This halfway point of adolescence, however, is portrayed in a charming light by Sanguinetti, who does not set out to ridicule the girls but rather to share in their dreams and expectations. Their lack of cynicism is refreshing as they each strike a pose in The Models, bathed in light, looking downward, lost in their thoughts. Playing dressing-up, however, need not be relegated to female stereotypes. An element of the absurd is present as Guille skulks across the landscape, poultry dangling from her left hand, wearing a false nose and red beret in The Chicken Thief, creating a somewhat surreal image. Above all, Sanguinetti, Guille and Belinda remind us that the ability to loose oneself in games and imaginings should be indulged. We could all benefit from a romantic vision of the world from time to time: ‘To sleep perchance to dream…’ +
Back Cover
MADE IN LONDON
You can be sure that whatever happens now, it'll all be for the best.
VOLUME ONE
Front Cover
Photo Love
Suky Best Presents
reconsider your options.
When it comes to your job
you're determined
Lyrics from "24 Hours From Tulsa" by Hal David & Burt Bacharach reproduced with permission from MCA Music Ltd.
Edition: 500
Š Suky Best 1995
to go your own way.
Beneath that cooperative exterior,
I had to write to say that
I won't be home anymore. . .
I can never, ever, go home again.
Dearest, Darling,
What can I do?
in your life.
especially around midweek.
with theunder unexpected, pressure,
Keep smiling and you'll sail through.
you have to achieve something
At homeYou she'may ll have be to cope
Something happened to me,
I hate to do this to you,
I love I'but m not thesomebody same any new. more.
while I was driving home and,
hemmed in by,
In LOVE, you'll take
close to your chest.
know it alls.
determined not to be
but will keep secrets
a guilt free approach,
You'll turn on the charm this week
told her I'd die before
to rest for the night
I saw a welcoming light and stopped
and I caressed her, kissed her
and that is I saw her.arms. I would letwhen her out of my
If so, not everyone will be in your way willhappy. be mechanical difficulties.
this weekend.
romance wise and the only obstacles
your ambitions,
You could get a good result
You'll be pursuing
She was there. all of a sudden I lost control as I held her charms.
as we were dancing closely,
As I pulled in outside of the small motel,
by tasty offers.
when you abandon plans
you'll be seduced
to last minute suggestions. suggesting that
in your house of money,
and throw yourself open
The new moon now falls
Pleasure will come,
The jukebox started to play and
nightime turned into day. and she showed me where.
asked where I could get something to eat
So I walked up to her
your romantic dreams into practice
Your fantasies will be vivid, put
but be discrete,
who need to know.
tell only those
She took me to the cafe
She said OK.
I asked her if she would stay
suggesting that
in your house of money,
and throw yourself open
by tasty offers.
when you abandon plans
you'll be seduced
to last minute suggestions.
The new moon now falls
Pleasure will come,
The jukebox started to play and
nightime turned into day. and she showed me where.
asked where I could get something to eat
So I walked up to her
and the only obstacles
so, not everyone will be happy. in your If way will be mechanical difficulties.
this weekend.
romance wise
your ambitions,
You could get a good result
You'll be pursuing
She was there. all of a sudden I lost control as I held her charms.
as we were dancing closely,
As I pulled in outside of the small motel,
hemmed in by,
In LOVE, you'll take
close to your chest.
know it alls.
determined not to be
but will keep secrets
a guilt free approach,
You'll turn on the charm this week
told her I'd die before
to rest for the night
I saw a welcoming light and stopped
and I caressed her, kissed her
thatlet is when Iand would her outI saw of myher. arms.
in your life.
especially around midweek.
with the unexpected, under pressure,
Keep smiling and you'll sail through.
you have to achieve something
At home she'll have to cope You may be
Something happened to me,
I hate to do this to you,
but lovethe somebody new. I'mI not same any more.
while I was driving home and,
reconsider your options.
When it comes to your job
you're determined
Lyrics from "24 Hours From Tulsa" by Hal David & Burt Bacharach reproduced with permission from MCA Music Ltd.
Edition: 500
Š Suky Best 1995
to go your own way.
Beneath that cooperative exterior,
I had to write to say that
I won't be home anymore. . .
I can never, ever, go home again.
Dearest, Darling,
What can I do?
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Suky Best
Suky Best (1962) is a London-based artist working with print, animation and video. She has recently exhibited at ArtNow Lightbox at Tate Britain (works made in collaberation with Rory Hamilton) and had a solo exhibiton The Return of the Native at the Pump House Gallery in London, which was accompanied by a publication. In 2007 her work will be included in an exhibition on the collection of Fotomuseum Winterthur, Winterthur. In the past her work was included in exhibitions at Photo Espana 2006, Danielle Arnaud Contemporary Art, London, the National Portrait Gallery, London, Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst, Berlin and Camera Work, San Francisco. She is currenlty working on a moving image commission for The Great North Run in Newcastle, and on a permanent sculptural piece for the Devils Glen in Ireland. In recent years she has made several works in commission, among others for INIVA’s Travellers Tales for which she made a 40 second film.
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Arnoud van Adrichem is a poet and editor-in-chief of the Dutch literary magazine Parmentier. He is a member of the editorial board of Dietsche Warande en Belfort. His poetry debut will be published at the end of 2007 by Contact Publishers in Amsterdam. Jan Baetens is professor at the Institute of Cultural Studies of the Belgian university KU Leuven. His special interest lies in French theory and poetry and in popular genres like comic books and photo novels. He is also co-editor of the online magazine Image (&) narrative (www.imageandnarrative.be). Van Adrichem and Baetens recently compiled two special issues of Parmentier, (2007, no. 1 & 2) about the photo novel, entitled Lichtschrijven. The issues feature contributions by Penny Allen, Giovanni Fiorentino, Ine Lamers, Els Vanden Meersch, Sandrine Willems and Marie-Françoise Plissart among others (www.literairtijdschriftparmentier.nl).
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Snapshots of the sentiment ~ On the iconographic bourgeoisie of Suky Best
by Arnoud van Adrichem and Jan Baetens
The photographs shown here do not come from one of the scores of often indistinguishable photo magazines of the 1950s and 1960s so popular among teenage girls. Nor did we find them in one of those lonely hearts columns where people advertise their sexual preferences. They come from Photo Love Vol. 1, the first of the three photo novels that London-based artist Suky Best published between 1995 and 1997 and is here reproduced in its entirety at exactly the same size as the original. It’s a reasonable guess that Best herself, as a teenager, immersed herself in the slick, sugar sweet photo stories about the eternal romances and heartaches of her pictorial heroes and heroines. The genre caused Roland Barthes to sneer: ‘Faced with certain photo novels, I personally experience that minor trauma of significance: it’s their stupidity that touches me.’ The French thinker was and is echoed by many: the standard photo novel barely transcends the level of any TV soap opera or romantic novel. It is therefore no exaggeration to say that the photo novel has always faced an image problem. All kinds of
social and cultural prejudices keep overtaking the genre, right up to the present day. The photo novel has been accused of being escapist, artificial and primarily focused on passive mass consumption, in fact no better than kitsch. Best appears to be exploiting the Barthesian trauma in her photo triptych by using Photoshop to magnify her embarrassment about her former ‘stupid’ reading habits, almost as a means of public penance. In any case, she is anything but defascinated – to borrow a word coined by the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk. On the contrary, she chooses to showcase this sin of her youth in painstaking detail, employing just about every prejudice she can find that is associated with the art form. So are we looking at a parody or homage; or some mix of the two? The ruthlessly formal imitation of the genre suggests parody. Best’s photographs appear to end in exclamation marks – or perhaps question marks. In this approach she follows in a long tradition of parodies of the genre of the photo novel. The Situationists, for example, invoked its code repeatedly in their magazine Internationale Situationniste, reissued by Fayard in 1997. Best’s clearest source of reference – at least nominally – is the photo novel magazine Photo-Love. This magazine is no longer published and was very different from the classic photo novels, which have existed since 1947. So Best’s work is based on an atypical example, which would seem to be an obstacle to her presumed attempt at parody. In 1947 the first ‘official’ photo novel – Nel fondo del cuore (Deep in My Heart), starring Gina Lollobridgida, yet to find her movie career – appeared in the magazine Il mio sogno (My Dream), and the formula was such a success that very soon new magazines emerged that devoted most of their pages to the new genre. The formal and thematic
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Photo Love, Vol. 2, 1997, p. 15
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features of this type of classic photo novel – sentimental, popular, low budget, aimed at an audience of housewives – would be maintained for decades and the few examples that continue to be published today – like the French Nous Deux (Both of Us) – are still much indebted to the aesthetics and ideology of the first photo novels. There are a number of reasons to assume that Best’s work would better be interpreted as a post-modern homage than as a parody. For one thing, Photo-Love turned away from its initial audience of housewives and found its readers among teenage girls instead. Other features included in the magazine alongside the photo novel focused on other aspects of girls’ lives, like pop music and age-related consumer goods. But Photo-Love belonged to an already outdated genre; by the time the first issues came off the presses in the seventies the photo novel was largely a thing of the past. Another reason to see the work of Best as a homage is that Photo-Love was in black and white (only the cover was in colour) and printed on poor quality paper, while Best’s photo novels look like small glossy magazines. A further departure from the traditional format is
her fragmentary use of the human body. While the classic photo novel makes lavish use of close-ups and medium-range shots of the protagonists, Best goes to great lengths to show only parts of them in order to evoke a fragmented experience of reading and looking. An additional difference between the two photo novels lies in the location and editing of the photographs. In the original, we distinguish between two kinds of photographs: close-ups of the characters and atmospheric shots in which the same characters appear. Best pulls these two layers apart. She substitutes the atmospheric images with metaphors containing elements of parody, in both form and content. Take, for example, the deliberately hackneyed flower metaphors, complete with astrological advice (see Photo Love Vol. 2, p. 15). Here we recognize a parody of the content, while at the same time the form is parodied in Best’s garish colour palette. Finally, there is a difference in the unusual size of Photo Love. Most photo novels are in fact novellas rather than novels, with no more than six pages. The three volumes of Photo Love published by Suky Best, however, are respectively 24, 32 and 32 pages in length. Hers is an extended story whose main subject is love and all its associated whims and connotations; a post-modern hybrid that casts doubt on the genre codes. In the visual arts, post-modernism is often characterized by a somewhat ironic return to figurative representation in opposition to the outworn dogmas of abstract art, with particular preferences for themes from popular culture, for the narrative element in painting and for a deliberate mixing of styles and periods. This makes post-modernism radically different from pop art, a genre that quotes mainly from contemporary mass culture. >
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Photo Love, Vol. 2, 1997, p. 11
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In any case, Best opts for a hyperbolic idiom. Her protagonists, whom she presents as iconographic representatives of the contemporary bourgeoisie, are guilty of exaggeration and overacting, which magnifies the artificial character of the photo novel. The actors hold up to us a distorted reflection of the genre. Best’s diffuse pictorial vocabulary defies one-dimensional categorization. She derives her imagery not only from the photo novel but also from soap opera series, glossies and gossip magazines – all examples of low-culture media which, in Best’s post-modern game, acquire the status of high culture. One might call them glossies for the gallery. In fact the photographs in Photo Love Vol. 1 are inspired by the essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema by Laura Mulvey. Mulvey gives the male protagonists a three-dimensional space to move around in, while the females are depicted as icons in two-dimensional close-ups. Best illustrates Mulvey’s criticism of the male way of looking by turning her women into objects, but she also takes the criticism on board, which is why she subjects her males to the same ‘objectization’ as her females. Best’s feminism, like Mulvey’s, does not get stuck in criticism of phallocracy, but tries to redefine the representation techniques themselves. In cutting and pasting her images, Best behaves more like a film director than a photographer. She seeks the movement, the dynamism of the images. Her photographs are streaming, seeming to flow into each other, to melt together right through the comic strip framework. What, for example, does the run-up to a kiss look like? Best’s method also calls to mind the film stills of Cindy Sherman (1954). Sherman herself is the main subject of her art; she is both photographer and model. In Photo Love Vol. 2 Best likewise takes on two different roles, those of the Jackie O.-type wife and the Marilyn Monroe-type mistress.
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She plays the same post-modern game in her texts, most of which derive from low culture. For Photo Love Vol. 1, for example, she used the lyrics of 24 Hours from Tulsa by Burt Bacharach and Hal David on the right-hand pages, while horoscopes are printed on the left-hand pages as a form of internal dialogue. In Photo Love Vol. 2 she again draws on the phraseology of the stars, complemented by the attention-grabbing headlines of such gossip magazines as Hello! and OK!: ‘The dream couple were living a private nightmare’. Best presents the wedding of the century in a photograph from an imaginary gossip magazine (see Photo Love Vol. 2, p. 11). The characters appear to have stepped straight out of a film set. They are royal celebrities in a world of glamour and glitter. In terms of subject this constitutes an important step away from the traditional photo novel, which conventionally presents ordinary people dreaming of the better life they may be able to achieve by marrying a doctor, a lawyer or an advertising executive. By contrast, Best chooses to show us celebrities, the rich and famous. She adapts their iconic and mythical status while also looking beyond the façade. The mask hides a further mask. The Las Vegas dreams are shattered – Cupid does not consist of flesh and blood but is made of plastic. We do not intend to neutralize Best’s work by classifying it as, for example, an indictment of excessive contemporary commercialization. What is clear, however, is that her snapshots of the sentiment are intended to make the viewer think. This thinking should be about prejudice, about cliché, about the relative value of genre categories – and especially about irony. Photo Love Vol. 1 was originally published in 1995, Photo Love Vol. 2 in 1997, both by Festermann Press, UK.
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RaphaĂŤl Dallaporta Domestic Slavery
At the first trial,
the couple’s lawyer underlined that, even though Henriette hadn’t been legally declared and hadn’t been paid, she had benefited from ‘‘affection and love’’ in the home of her employers and had lived in a ‘‘familial and warm’’ atmosphere. For four years, from 1994 to 1998, Henriette worked 12 hours a day, seven days a week. She slept on a mat on the floor of the children’s bedroom, getting up during the night to give the baby its bottle. Her food was one box of cornflakes a month and the ‘‘permission’’ to scrape the leftovers off the family’s plates after meals. At the second trial, the people who ‘‘took in’’ this 15-year-old from Togo, who had arrived in Paris without papers, defended their reputation as humanists. The husband ran a large publishing company that, in the past, had shown an ethical editorial line ‘‘inspired by Christianity.’’ If Henriette hadn’t been paid, if she hadn’t had the right to go out, it had all been to avoid her being ‘‘ripped off.’’ The husband and wife held many dinner parties in their large apartment. Henriette – who waited on the guests, but wasn’t seated at the table – was presented as a ‘‘cousin.’’ Four years passed before a neighbour noticed how thin she was and alerted the police; five years of legal proceedings passed before the couple was finally punished.
The apartment was huge,
situated on one of the most beautiful avenues of Paris’s 16th arrondissement; its owners were extremely rich. The man, the CEO of a number of Saudi gas and oil companies, spent his time on business trips; the woman didn’t work. She spent her time moving between Saudi Arabia, the UK, Spain and France, where the couple owns several properties, and acting as absolute monarch over her army of household staff. ‘‘I have so many people working for me in Saudi Arabia and all over Europe that I sometimes forget their names,’’ she told the police. In October 2002, Angha, 42, had been part of the ‘‘staff ’’ for two years – and been locked in the Paris apartment for five months. Recruited in Goa, India, and the holder of a domestic worker diploma, she applied to a recruitment agency to work in a family. She then followed the family as it moved around. Once she arrived in Paris she received no pay for her domestic tasks, which she carried out every day from 7.30am until 2 in the morning. Her passport was confiscated and another employee was given the task of watching her and locking her in every evening. Every day her ‘‘boss’’ beat her. ‘‘She hit me with different objects, such as shoes; she pulled my hair and pushed me down stairs. She broke my nose,’’ remembers Angha. In October 2002, Angha no longer had a choice. Taking advantage of a moment alone she rolled up some sheets, tied them together, knotted them around the edge of the balcony and managed to escape through a window on the third floor. The police officers who picked her up found her body covered in wounds and bruises. Helped by the CCEM, the Committee Against Modern Slavery, Angha was able to return to India, as she wished, and see her mother and sisters again.
Hina’s story
was widely covered in the media, reported on by newspapers, television and radio stations. Professor Bernard Debré, an internationally renowned urologist, whose department treated the badly wounded girl, denounced this ‘‘act of barbarity’’ to the press. ‘‘I have never seen anything like it in 20 years of medicine,’’ he said. A member of the medical team specified the physical abuse suffered by Hina, ‘‘the wound is a perforated cut, beginning in the area between the urethra and the clitoris, to a depth of between three and six centimetres, between the mucous membrane and the skin. It was done as if to remove the vagina, and was probably inflicted with a bladed weapon.’’ Hina told a member of the CCEM, the Committee Against Modern Slavery, that, ‘‘My employer and a doctor – a friend of my employer – drugged me and cut the bottom of my body so that I wouldn’t become pregnant.’’ After that she would say no more about the mutilation. ‘‘Somebody wounded me,’’ she simply repeated to the police. Hina fled the house of her employer, a highly placed diplomat at the Indian Embassy in Paris, at the beginning of September 1999. She explained that she had been locked inside for eight months, working every day of the week, from 6am until midnight, without pay. She said that she had regularly been beaten, humiliated and threatened with death. She was 17 years old. The Indian media quickly seized on the affair. The Indian Embassy in Paris, however, denied any accusations of mistreatment, instead accusing the French police and the CCEM of being responsible for Hina’s wounds. Hina’s story became an affair of state, attracting a lot of attention. Well, at least for a few days; then, silence. Her employer had nothing to worry about: protected by diplomatic immunity, he refused to answer any questions from the French police.
For four years
Violette slept without a mattress on the tiled kitchen floor of an apartment in the 13th arrondissement in Paris. Her work timetable was carefully planned. In the morning, she got up at 4am to prepare breakfast for Sahondra, her ‘‘boss’’, and her son; afterwards, she travelled into central Paris where at 6am she began work for a cleaning company run by Sahondra’s brother-in-law; at 10am she returned to Sahondra’s apartment where she did the housework and prepared lunch and dinner; at 4pm, she travelled to Massy-Palaiseau (about 20kms from Paris), where she cleaned the apartment of Mamy, Sahondra’s brother. When she returned to the 13th arrondissement around 10pm each day, there was more work: a pile of washing-up or ironing kept her busy until midnight, either at Sahondra’s or in her sister’s next-door apartment. For four years, during which time she was hardly fed, Violette worked 18 to 20 hours a day. She had left Madagascar aged 22 in the hope of earning enough money to feed her child, who she left behind. During the whole ordeal her four employers paid her nothing. With the aid of the CCEM, the Committee Against Modern Slavery, she took her ‘‘employers’’ to court. Her case was heard in 1999 in Paris and it became the first ever case of modern slavery dealt with in France under penal law. Her ‘‘employers’’ were ordered to pay Violette €22,900 in damages and interest; they were also fined and given suspended sentences.
A doctor examined
Bernadette before the trial. The medical report he produced revealed, ‘‘Round scars the diameter of a cigarette were found on the hands and the forearms (around 10). On the feet were punctiform scars (around 20). On the forearms were permanent, rectilinear scars (8 on the left arm), both larger scars (8mm) and longer (6cm for one; 4cm for the other), plus a scar measuring 3cm by 8mm caused by a deep knife wound. On the back: multiple scars, six rectilinear, 11 round and a more serious one measuring 5cm in length and 1.5cm in width. On the face, three thin scars near the eyes: two on the right and one on the left.’’ At the trial, Bernadette told of how, ‘‘It began with slaps, punches, then she hit me with a broom. She crushed my feet with her high-heels or put out cigarettes on my arms. Twice she put an iron on my forearm. Once, she pushed my hands onto the hot electric hobs; she held them there until they were swollen and were oozing liquid. Once she took my forearms and sliced them 11 times with a knife. Three times she forced me to undress, opened up my vagina and put chili purée inside.’’ Locked inside an apartment in a building in Gennevilliers, about 15kms from Paris, Bernadette’s torture lasted for 10 months. When she escaped, her torturer found another Togolese ‘‘good-for-everything’’ and inflicted the same physical abuse. On April 4, 2006, a court in the Hauts-de-Seine sentenced Mimi Télé Mensah to six years in prison for rape and sexual violence with torture.
When Indra’s employers
learned that she was suffering from a uterine tumour that required immediate surgery, they wanted to send her back to India. ‘‘I didn’t want her to have the operation in France, because I was under no obligation, and I wondered who was going to look after her,’’ Madame G. later admitted when asked by the police. In India, Indra would probably not have been able to find treatment because after having worked for two years as a ‘‘household helper’’ at the house of Madame G. and her companion, Indra had never been paid and had no other means. Indra, 41, arrived in Paris in 1996. Her exemployer, a French diplomat posted to India, no longer needed her and so introduced her to Madame G. For two years, Indra worked between 15 and 18 hours a day. When she wasn’t doing housework, she helped Madame G., a designer and couturière, in her luxury ready-to-wear store on Rue Saint-Honoré in Paris. ‘‘No one asked her to work; it was her who wanted to work,’’ Madame G. told the police. Indra disagrees. ‘‘I was forced to obey the orders of my boss, who is a very rich and very powerful woman in my country. She confiscated my passport; she said terrible things to me, told me that I worked badly, sometimes told me that she was going to kill me.’’ Indra fled and, with the help of the CCEM, the Committee Against Modern Slavery, was quickly housed and underwent the operation. In 2001, Madame G. was found guilty by a court in Paris and sentenced to pay Indra damages and interest.
In 2001,
Legba, a 30-year-old woman from Togo, accepted a job looking after children in France. ‘‘I arrived on March 25, 2001. They came to pick me up at the airport. The first thing they said to me was: Give us all your documents.’’ In a modest apartment in Élancourt, a Parisian suburb, Legba became a prisoner. ‘‘I could only go out to do the shopping. They timed me. If I took too long, they shouted at me. I was banned from talking to anyone in the street. They said: If you do that, you’ll go to prison.’’ Each day, Legba suffered humiliation at the hands of her bosses. ‘‘To eat they gave me crushed rice meant for dogs. When I met the man in the corridor, he would push me against the wall and shout, ‘You smell bad!’ When I went out with the woman, she would say: Walk behind me, you’re not worth as much as me.’’ Legba fled. ‘‘I shouted, ‘I want to leave!’ The man screamed, ‘No!’ He followed me down the stairs; made me fall from the first floor down to the ground floor. When I was on the ground, he kicked me. Then he hit me, hit me, hit me. It hurt so much that for a long time I couldn’t walk anymore. But they refused to take me to the hospital.’’ After a year, Legba was freed thanks to the intervention of a neighbour. ‘‘He had to go and see the police four times; they didn’t believe him.’’ The couple was convicted and ordered to pay a €10,000 fine; they paid only €3,000.
Aina’s boss
gave her a list of words : ‘‘Yes, thank you, hello and good bye.’’ These were the only words that Aina, then aged 18, had the right to say. Her day began at 6am: preparing breakfast for the family’s two children, then ironing, vacuuming, laundry, washing up, gardening and cooking. Her day ended at midnight. Aina ate the family’s leftover food from a ‘‘separate’’ plate; she slept on the tiles of the bathroom floor. Aina left Tananarive, the capital of Madagascar, on a promise: ‘‘A job, money to send back to my family, the chance to continue with my studies.’’ Held prisoner for two years, she was beaten, threatened and never paid. A neighbour finally noticed this ‘‘young, thin girl who didn’t speak’’ in the garden. She gave her some cream to help her hands deformed by cracks and called the CCEM, the Committee Against Modern Slavery. Today, Aina works as a nurse near Paris; her ‘‘employers’’ were given a six-month suspended prison sentence and fined €4,500.
© Photographs: Raphaël Dallaporta © Text: Ondine Millot, translation: Tom Ridgway
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Raphaël Dallaporta
Raphaël Dallaporta (1980) lives and works in Paris. In 2002, after he graduated from Les Gobelins in Paris, he was awarded a year’s residency at La Fabrica, Benetton’s research centre on communication in Italy. Dallaporta’s series Antipersonnel was selected by curator Martin Parr for the 2004 edition of the Rencontres d’Arles festival, and was published as a book by Punctum editions in 2004. His most recent body of work, Domestic Slavery, was presented in the 2006 edition of Rencontres d’Arles, this time curated by Raymond Depardon. The series was also published as a book by Filigranes Éditions as Esclavage Domestique. Raphaël Dallaporta’s work was included in the ReGeneration: 50 Photographers of Tomorrow 2005-2025 exhibition at Musée de l’Elysée in Lausanne, Switzerland in 2005 and the accompanying catalogue
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published by Thames & Hudson. His photographs are in several collections including the Fonds National d’Art Contemporain, France and The Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris.
Raphaëlle Stopin graduated in Art History from La Sorbonne University. Based in Paris, she works as a curator for the International Emerging Photography Competition at the Hyères Festival. Her writing on photography has been featured in various publications. Recently, she has contributed to the monographs by Loan Nguyen, Charles Fréger and Joël Tettamanti.
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Silent Façades ~ On Dallaporta & Ondine Millot’s Domestic Slavery
by Raphaëlle Stopin
Behind the neatly trimmed cypress shrubbery, a blooming red beech and, through its foliage, the window of a small house in the suburbs. Sunlight falls on the white wall. All is peaceful. One can sense, if anything, a late-summer suburban torpor. Nothing else. For a long time, passers-by and neighbours did not see anything either. No one saw Aina, a young Madagascan girl, confined, undernourished and ill-treated for two long years behind those walls. Until the day a neighbour noticed her and contacted the Committee against Modern Slavery. The image reveals nothing of what the cypress hedge helped conceal; what speaks are the accompanying words. Raphaël Dallaporta photographed and Ondine Millot wrote; together they recorded and reported. Their object of study: a modern form of slavery, domestic enslavement. The project, done jointly with the Committee against Modern Slavery, presents a score of cases the organization has dealt with. And the Committee’s files are numerous. Since 1994, the year of its inception, it has received some 300 reports per year.
F1, France, Weight: 244g Length: 45mm Height: 90mm An Ogre F1 155mm shell – containing 63 dual-purpose bomblets, each weighing 244g – can be fired up to 35km. Each shell leaves a footprint of 10,000-18,000m2, depending on range. Manufactured by Giat Industries, based in Versailles, the Ogre F1 is currently in use with the French Army. From: Antipersonnel © Raphaël Dallaporta, 2004
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The photographer, initiator of the project, teams up with a journalist specializing in social matters for the French newspaper Libération and well acquainted with the Committee’s actions, to give voice to the victims’ plights. Together, they research and delve into the files, restricting the perimeter of their activity to the Ile-de-France region. Millot dissects the minutes and the testimonies, meets with past victims and assists with ongoing trials. Dallaporta visits the sites of the misdeeds. Both of them voice their unrest about the similarities between many cases. The pattern becomes all too familiar. Most often the slave is a young woman, and here, sadly, history repeats itself, African. She came over to France hoping to study, to earn some money and send it to her kin back home. She finds herself ‘taken in’ by a family – sometimes even her own – which promises her a loosely defined job of housemaid or jeune fille au pair. In every case, upon arrival, her identity documents are confiscated. She is confined by menaces and by a fear of the outside world carefully fostered by her keepers. She rapidly becomes the ‘maid of all work’, forced to work from six a.m. to midnight seven days a week. She is allowed no rest and receives no salary. Invariably, she is obliged to eat from a ‘separate’ dishware the food scraps of her ‘patrons’. Her bed is a corner of the kitchen floor. The sole gesture given unsparingly – if she’s in luck – is a slap in the face. The self-proclaimed patrons have widely diverging profiles: rich Saudi Arabian businessman, Parisian publisher, Indian diplomat, Malian housewife. The modern slave master is concealed in the high-rise buildings of Paris’ 13th district, behind the well-off façades of the 16th, in the housing projects of Champigny-surMarne or the quiet suburban houses of Cergy. Often the stories told are hard to believe, but always they are unbearable. The authors respond to the temptation towards pathos by choosing to keep their distance. The words are neutral, impassive and pre-
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cise. The images are frontal, systematic, self-disciplined. They both adhere to police logic: go back to the sites, return to the source, collect statements. The two authors push the bureaucratic language until all their stylistic signatures have vanished, until they themselves disappear. The resulting document trims its minimalist rigor with Occam’s Razor. Would one need call for compassionate discourses to emphasize the blatant injustice these women have suffered? On the opposite sidewalk, the photographer positions his 4x5 camera then frames the building in question. He takes a picture, giving only one perspective on his subject matter, the passer-by’s point of view, the viewpoint of a stranger. The static large-format camera imposes its lack of mobility on the photographer. There he stands, at a distance, behind his tripod. He will not attempt to creep closer unnoticed to steal images. He will neither enter the lobby nor approach the door. He has chosen the month of August with its flat light and empty streets. The photographed façades will remain silent. None of his empathy will show through; there, on that sidewalk, he will undoubtedly be the only one to see something more than a pastel-coloured façade, the only one to imagine the lives behind those silent walls. The manner is precise, the approach is exacting. Nonetheless, the subject remains absent and the photographer assumes the paradox wholeheartedly. His image remains mute because his subject matter is, as he himself will state, ‘impossible to document’: the events have happened, in some cases years have passed; there are no witnesses; the condition of the victims demands their anonymity. There are no faces in the image, no shadow of a presence appears in the frame. The subject’s invisibility
M18A1, USA, Weight: 1.58kg, Width: 35mm, Length: 216mm, Height: 82.5mm The Claymore directional fragmentation mine releases 700 steel balls when it is detonated by a hand-turned dynamo or by a tripwire. (Multiple Claymores can be linked together using a detonator cord.) A 1966 Department of the Army field manual states that, ‘The number of ways in which the Claymore may be employed is limited only by the imagination of the user.’ In September 2002, Claymores made up 403,096 of the 10,404,148 landmines stockpiled by the USA. From: Antipersonnel © Raphaël Dallaporta, 2004
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lies at the heart of Raphaël Dallaporta’s photographic endeavour. Impartiality and reserve in the face of the emotional charge of his subject matter were already the rule in the artist’s previous work: a series on landmines depicted – in the words of Martin Parr, who had it exhibited in the Rencontres d’Arles festival of 2004 – ‘as bottles of shampoo’. Here, the settings of the abuse are depicted in a way that stresses their lack of any particular attribute. They are, in their banality, reminiscent of real estate pictures. Where is our gaze supposed to linger? What are we being shown? Which window, among all the rows in this building, should be the object of our attention? No ‘here and now’, then. Only a sense of ‘there it happened’, something that went unnoticed by everyone. The image is indifferent. Dallaporta proposes a tautology: the photographer’s quotient of interpretation regarding his motif amounts to nothing just as the citizen’s feelings of responsibility for his fellows, in this case a next-door neighbour, approaches zero. What are we to do with an image that does not tell us anything? The muteness of the photograph calls for the text, which is presented, both in the book and in the exhibition, side by side with the image as the foil of the picture’s innocent appearance. Each text is short, for swift reading. The photographer has taken all necessary stylistic stances so that his images remain, in themselves, insufficient. Out of respect for the life stories exposed, the journalist has taken precautions to prevent the explicit context of the pictures being skimmed by a hasty reader. We discover, in a handful of lines, the story of each of the women who has lived behind those walls, the unkept promises, the violence endured, the outcome of the trials. All the essential details are there. The writing is strict, a sober statement of the facts. In 1975, Martha Rosler presented The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems, an installation that combines image and text on
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the subject of alcoholism. One expects a fundamental intersection between the juxtaposed elements, yet they do not meet; the images are not informative and the texts, made of sparse fragments gathered from the media, do not attempt an explanation. One after another fails to describe the complex reality of the social disease. How is one to render the violence of the events and transmit the urgent need to take action? What kind of document could respond to such expectations? Raphaël Dallaporta and Ondine Millot have delved into these questions. They will not rely on a fit of indignation, on the virulence of their revolt. That would be far too simple. The journalist’s tone is calm. In her writing, facts are punctuated here and there by reported speech. The text coldly renders the hysterical violence unleashed on the young women, the denial of their humanity. If the words are cold, the conclusion is even colder: a small fine will pay off years of moral and physical tortures. The journalist, like the photographer, observes a respectful restraint in her approach to the victim. She researches, contacts the victims and spends time with them, listening. Then she forces herself to transcribe very little, to stick to the facts and hold all emotions at bay. Her prose, however, only resembles that of judicial minutes, for the real names of the girls have been changed, the identities of the enslavers are not revealed, and the locations are evoked only vaguely. None of these omissions alter the edifying substance of the stories. Often too, confronting the repetition of gestures and situations, she admits to leaving out some episodes so that the stories do not appear too similar. She is keeping her reader in mind, for her imperative
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lies in the transmission of the story. It guides her writing in the same way it dictates Dallaporta’s images. A relationship is clearly established: the story told, its pertinence for the project as a whole is the criterion for selection of an image. The text chooses the image, which will strive only to illustrate. At a time in which commitment in photography is increasingly rare, Raphaël Dallaporta presents a tribune to these women and succeeds in building, with Ondine Millot’s words, a device to heighten public awareness. A document exists, now. It is there, unavoidable. Those who have seen it will have listened to it too. The date today is February the 15th, 2007. Since the year began, the Committee against Modern Slavery has received twenty-eight reports for the French territory. According to International Labour Organization estimates, child domestic slaves in the World amount to ten million, ninety per cent of them girls. + Esclavage domestique Photographs by Raphaël Dallaporta, texts by Ondine Millot (Filigranes Éditions, 2006, ISBN: 2-35046-060-6) CCEM, Comité contre l’Esclavage moderne (www.esclavagemoderne.org) Anti-Slavery International (www.antislavery.org)
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Hunter S. Thompson Hell’s Angels
All images and texts by Hunter S. Thompson. © The Estate of Hunter S. Thompson / The Gonzo Trust / courtesy AMMO Books, Los Angeles. Hell’s Angels was first published in the US by Random House (1966) and in Great Britain by Penguin (1967). All photographs in this portfolio, and many more, are published in the limited edition title GONZO by Hunter S. Thompson (AMMO Books, 2006).
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Hunter S. Thompson
Hunter S. Thompson (1937-2005), variously known as ‘Dr Gonzo’, ‘the Good Doctor’ or ‘Dr. Hunter S. Thompson’, got started in journalism during his time with the United States Air Force in the late 1950s. Later he worked as sports editor for a newspaper in Pennsylvania, and subsquently moved to New York where he took classes in short story writing at Columbia University. In 1960 Thompson moved to Puerto Rico, and in the following years travelled in the Caribbean and South Amercia writing for several American newspapers. His legendary book on his experiences with the Hell’s Angels was first published in 1966. In the 1970s he was closely involved with the rock-and-roll magazine Rolling Stone, for which he wrote his most popular and acclaimed work. His first article in Rolling Stone was about his campaign running for sherrif of Aspen in Pitkin County. Despite the publicity, Thompson ended up narrowly losing the election. Thompson is best known as creator of Gonzo, a wildly outspoken and highly personal style of journalism that blurs distinctions between fact and fiction. The term Gonzo has since become synonymous with other forms of highy subjective expression. Thompson has been por
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trayed by actor Bill Murray in the movie Where the Buffalo Roam (1980), and by Johnny Depp in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998). Thompson retreated more and more into his fortified compound Owl Farm in Woody Creek, Colorado, where he shot himself on February 20, 2005. He was 67 years old. On 21 August 2005, Thompson’s ashes were fired from a canon during a private ceremony on his estate; fireworks were launched along with his ashes. The limited edition title GONZO, published by AMMO Books in 2006, features hundreds of personal photographs many taken by Thompson himself and never before published. Accompanied by writing and memorabilia, this visual history chronicles Thompson’s numerous adventures. With an intoduction by Johnny Depp. GONZO can be ordered online at www.ammobooks.com.
Ariejan Korteweg is deputy editor-in-chief of de Volkskrant, a national daily newspaper based in Amsterdam. >
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‘You swim with sharks, you’re going to get bit once in a while.’
by Ariejan Korteweg
Gonzo, a limited edition luxe coffee-table book with photographs of and by Hunter S. Thompson, includes a page of contact prints of a particularly significant day. Hunter Thompson probably never came closer to Gonzo in his life than on Labour Day 1966. It makes you wish a few more shots had been taken on that Kodak roll, between numbers 18 and 19, so you could see the whole scene, captured with searing realism, from a low perspective, first sitting, then rolling, then lying on the ground, the lens pointed up at an angle. The unconcerned expression of a Hell’s Angel looking down at you; pairs of sunglasses in the distance. Next a panorama shot: young man stumbles to his car, Angels reach indifferently for their beer. Then an image of a bleeding Thompson at the wheel of his car as it lurches towards Santa Rosa, where the first-aid waiting room seems to be full of Gypsy Jokers. Close-ups of their injuries, the result of an encounter earlier that day with the same Hell’s Angels.
Self-portrait by Hunter S. Thompson © The Estate of Hunter S. Thompson / The Gonzo Trust / courtesy AMMO Books, Los Angeles.
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Unfortunately the person who should have been clicking the shutter wasn’t in a position to do so at the time. On the same Kodak roll he’d already taken snapshots of gleaming engine blocks, saddles, a parked chopper, and bikers wearing denim jackets with cut-off sleeves and embroidery on the back reading ‘Hell’s Angels California’. A few of the same men appear in photo number 18, looking surly, holding cigarettes or beer bottles. Then suddenly we’re at photo 19: a young man stripped to the waist. He’s far less fleshily built than the Hell’s Angels, who after all spend most of their lives sitting down. The young man looks into the camera. Although you could hardly call it looking. His expression is vacant, fear courses through his bloodstream. A swelling has forced both eyes almost shut and he has a thick upper lip. Hunter S. Thompson had completed his work. For a year he’d hung out regularly with the Angels. He rode with them in motorcycle parades, camped where they camped, drank and smoked as much as they drank and smoked. Then he wrote a book about it, Hell’s Angels, which made him and the Angels famous overnight. And – the way it sometimes goes with people you meet on a job, if you hit it off you go on seeing them – Thompson continued to meet up with the Angels. Just to see how they were getting along. In the postscript to the book he describes what happened. ‘On Labour Day 1966,’ he writes, ‘I pushed my luck a little too far and got badly stomped by four or five Angels.’ First a blow, then a thwack to the back of the head with a hard object. ‘Heavy boots were punching into my ribs and jolting my head back and forth.’ His assailants were not people he knew very well, he hastens to add. It was Tiny, of all people, an Angel who had always struck fear into him, who made sure he didn’t get his brains bashed in with a rock. It was one of the toughest clashes with reality that Thompson, founder of hard-boiled journalism, ever had to endure. Yet his report of this ‘stomping’, as the Angels with their usual feeling for understatement refer to such a settling of scores, is sober in tone. It’s 1965 and Gonzo journalism has yet to be invented. Not until Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved would Thompson put his narrative style into overdrive. That panicky, full of itself, shamelessly egocentric writing, which invariably gives a more or less heroic starring role to the reporter in question and where facts are worked up to fever pitch so that they can cross over seamlessly into fiction, that kind of writing was still in the future. But even in the Hell’s Angels book there are moments when the mind becomes razor sharp. At night, riding his own motorbike, ‘...bent forward, far back on the seat, and a rigid grip on the handlebars as the bike starts jumping and wavering in the wind. Tail-lights far up ahead coming closer, faster and suddenly – zaaappppp – going past and leaning down for a curve near the zoo.’ That could hardly be described as factual reporting.
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With the Angels the Gonzoman knows when to shut up. He doesn’t report the beating, leaves the incident out of the main body of the book and doesn’t let it noticeably influence the tone of his writing or his attitude towards the Angels. Hunter Thompson approaches the Angels like an anthropologist studying a primitive tribe, a method known to science as participatory observation: full of understanding and empathy, with an eye for details and for the broader context, but above all enormously curious about the causes of their behaviour. Thompson displayed this same attitude – in his prime – towards any subject he fastened upon, from presidential elections to football or horseracing. Even in retrospect Thompson refuses to make too much of it. ‘You swim with sharks, you’re going to get bit once in a while,’ he said in an interview in 2003. All his life he regarded Sonny Barger, the charismatic leader of ‘his’ Hell’s Angels, as a friend.
In a later photo in the same series you see this attitude return. His eyes still express alarm, his ribs are black and blue, every sinew is pervaded by the memory of that moment when he lay on the ground and might have been on the point of becoming a permanent invalid. But fear no longer predominates. His expression has regained its will-power. Okay, this had to happen at some point. But swellings go down and life goes on. See, it even looks as if the camera has come through the fight unscathed. All his texts are imbued with that same confidence that things will work out in the end. Thompson is a verbal cartoonist. People fall off motorbikes, are hit with lead pipes, kicked with heavy boots until the soles give out. Whereupon the victim struggles to his feet, brushes the dust off his clothes and sets out for home, or if necessary the hospital. Under his own steam and without moaning. Myths arise from exaggeration. With Hell’s Angels Thompson created two myths at one stroke. First there were the Angels. Even though he describes them as ‘white trash’, the descendants of poor immigrants from Oklahoma and Arkansas, who took great pleasure in terrifying ordinary citizens but rarely started trouble themselves, making them essentially good guys, if none too clever – it was all to no avail. After Thompson the Angels were worse than the Goths, worse than Genghis Khan. This myth is extremely powerful. The Dutch Angels who appeared in court in February charged with belonging to a criminal organisation looked exactly like Thompson’s Angels. Forty years back. Their defence was interesting. ‘We’re not criminal or violent at all,’ they told the press. ‘But because of all those books and films a myth has grown up. And we’ve done nothing to correct it. We’re paying for that now.’ >
Hunter S.Thompson shooting typewriter, photo by Paul Chesley © Paul Chesley, The Estate of Hunter S.Thompson / The Gonzo Trust / courtesy AMMO Books, Los Angeles.
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The second myth was Thompson himself. The man who invited participatory journalism to hop on the back of his Harley, who gulped down six-packs shoulder to shoulder with the most feared men in California and who, come to that, was not averse to the occasional fracas himself, that man leapt to fame with Hell’s Angels. There’s a certain amount in common, in fact, between writer and subject. Born during or just before the war, with the usual quirks of those inspired by the endless possibilities that revealed themselves in the 1960s, and with no desire for a bourgeois existence in the suburbs, the Angels were the bad dream of the flower power generation. With the hippies they shared the long hair, denim jackets, drugs and music (The Grateful Dead), but they were also unreasoningly partial to swastikas and Wehrmacht insignia, treated their women like doormats and were free with their fists. Thompson terrified the middle classes as well. For a time he was an icon of the alternative left, but that was hard to reconcile with his strange predilections. Just take his friendship with Pat Buchanan and his great love of firearms. ‘Machine guns are kind of nice. You can have a lot of fun with them. It’s like watering the lawn.’ In 2005 he shot himself in the head while his son Juan was photographing his wife and small son in the next room as they played a game together. Thompson had had enough. Just as his admirers were beginning to feel they’d had enough of him. He was magisterial in the sixties and seventies. Then the myth took over once and for all. A myth can only survive by repetition. For the last twenty years of his life Thompson did nothing but recycle old songs. What do the photographs add to his legacy? Thompson was no double talent; his photos are hardly more than snapshots. He doesn’t how to handle light and shadow, shows little instinctive skill at framing a picture or at composition and hasn’t much time for the outside world. His main subject is himself.
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What the photos show above all is the creation of a myth. Even in the early sixties, when the world still knew nothing of the Thompson phenomenon, he had himself immortalised at the typewriter, the eternal sea behind him, the eternal cigarette in the corner of his mouth. Later you see him in cars, standing next to a captured wild boar and with firearms, lots of firearms. In that sense the photos reflect his own development. Increasingly the author pushed his subject into the background. And he knew it – perhaps that’s what drove him to suicide. In his own words, ‘Somewhere along there I became a public figure. Somehow the author has become larger than the writing. And it sucks.’ It was different in his Hell’s Angels period, which was also when he took his most journalistic photographs. In a sense that’s a pity. Thompson is a man of make-believe. He creates his own reality after the fact, a reality so convincing that you’re prepared to regard it as the only legitimate version. Whether he does justice to what actually happened is less important. In Hell’s Angels Thompson maintained a precarious balance between fact and fiction. A balance that lasted for forty years. Since the photos emerged, Hell’s Angels has tilted to one side, towards the facts. Which is good for the Angels, and also for Thompson the journalist. +
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Wendy McMurdo Wrecks of Scapa
< Salvaged pipe, Stromness Museum, Orkney > Salvaged sailorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s cap (S.M.S. Hindenburg ), Stromness Museum, Orkney > Salvaged photograph of young sailor, Stromness Museum, Orkney
< Salvaged logbook, Stromness Museum, Orkney < Salvaged beer mug, Stromness Museum, Orkney < Salvaged bell (S.M.S. Friedrich der Grosse), Stromness Museum, Orkney > Salvaged cup, Stromness Museum, Orkney
> S.M.S. Hindenburg, sitting on the bed of Scapa Flow, photographed shortly after the scuttling (courtesy Imperial War Museum) > German cruiser turned turtle, Scapa Flow, 1919
‘We set off on the Flying Kestrel with a
go to the Victorious, which we
children, and we were all very
very excited company of children and
preceded to do and by this time we
frightened and anxious about it all.
soon were passing between two rows
were among the ships, which were
When we reached the Victorious, there
of destroyers. The destroyers were
sinking on all sides, in all shapes –
we saw a trawler, and in between, in
German destroyers and lay in pairs
some were up-ending, some were
the triangle that we made, was a barge
and we were so near to them that we
settling in the water, some were
which held the officers who had been
could read their names and see the
turning over and the sea itself was
collected from the ships by the
men on them but we had been warned
boiling and swirling with the pressure
launches and they were held at
to make no sign to the men as we went.
of the water. The men were scrambling
gunpoint. It was some time and we saw
We continued on our way for some
on boats and on rafts and some were
a great many people, the ships and
time… until we met a trawler… and
swept overboard by the pressure of the
destroyers, and had their names
this trawler sent over a message to say
water from the ships. We also knew
recorded. We returned home to find
that the German fleet were sinking.
that the destroyers were gradually
every pier in Stromness crowded with
We had set out with hope of seeing the
going down and down and one thing
anxious parents who were longing to
British fleet and the German fleet but
that we saw quite distinctly was that
see their children and to know that
the British fleet were out on exercise
before they left their ships every one
they were safe.’
and the German fleet were now
had their flag at topmast. It was sad – a
sinking. The captain received orders to
sad sight, we thought – even as
Peggy Mathieson
‘Well. Of course, a school trip had been
excited to see them and in the process
ships – you could see some of these
arranged. There was a water-boat
of watching them… it came to be
boats and rafts floating on the water
stationed here to carry water down to
gradually realized that some of the
and I remember hearing at least one
the ships that were in the Flow at that
ships were sinking a bit lower in the
rifle shot. Everything was beginning to
time... it was called The Flying Kestrel I
water. At the same time we noticed a
get very exciting at that time – like a
think and all the secondary children –
lot of activity on the ships. I remember
kind of slow-motion picture, the ships
and probably some of the upper
some of the sailors dragging their kit
then began to sink… sink lower in the
primaries – in total I should say 150-
and some of them dragging rafts and
water, to turn turtle. Some of them
200 children were carried down in this
throwing them over. Everybody at this
went down by the stern and everybody
ship to the Flow, the object being to see
time was getting very excited and
of course was almost speechless with
the German fleet at anchor...
wondering what was happening. It
excitement, all eyes watching what was
Well, so far as the weather is con
slowly dawned on us that something
happening.’
cerned, first I should say it was a lovely
extraordinary was happening and that
summer day and we all enjoyed the
the ships were actually starting to sink.
trip very much. We got down through
British destroyers began to steam
the boom gates at Houton and then we
round, some British trawlers came as
sailed right into the midst of the
well… I remember some of the sailors
German fleet. Of course we were all
jumping down onto the rafts from the
British fleet at anchor in Scapa Flow, 1917
William Groundwater
> School group witness to the scuttling, Stromness Primary School, 1919 > School group witness to the scuttling, Stromness Primary School, 1919 > View of interned German fleet, Houton Bay, Orkney, 1918
‘At this stage, we were ordered back to
turtle and we had to stop, I remember,
seemed to be a number of people
were giving orders – probably to the
the depot ship, to get orders as to what
at one stage, and then evidently were
waving to us and anxious to know
men to go back to their ships to stop
to do, but as we went to the depot ship,
given directions on how to get back to
what was going on… we only realized
them escaping to the land. I would
I distinctly saw the Seydlitz turn turtle
the depot ship, we stayed there for a bit
then that we had been in a dangerous
think that would be what was
and the water come streaming out of
and then the captain seemed to get
position I suppose. And we came back
happening…’
the sea cocks and the activity was just
some orders to go a different route
into Stromness and the pier there was
tremendous… men in boats… and I
back because we went way outside
crowded with people and anxious
definitely saw one man get shot and he
where the ships were the next time but
parents from all over asking us what
dropped right off the stern of the boat
to us it just seemed to be an adventure
had happened, what we had seen and
and the other men were standing with
story we had been reading – we didn’t
the whole story was dragged out of us
their hands up. I presume it was
understand that it was a piece of
then and we felt quite important really
‘surrender’ and we were evidently in a
history we were seeing enacted. We
– and it was only then that it dawned
difficult position or in danger when we
thought probably it was it was just put
on us that we really were of some
were ordered out of the way… we were
on for our benefit, as school children.
importance – we had been the only eye
just right in amongst them – they were
No, I don’t think anybody was afraid…
witnesses – civilian eye witnesses. I
sinking at each side of us… The
just wide-eyed wonder, that about
wasn’t aware of anybody (else) but the
Seydlitz would be a few hundred yards
explains it… but as we came to
destroyers and a few trawlers and
away from us then when they turned
Houton, up where the boom was, there
(would it be small launchers?) that
Scapa Flow with British fleet on the horizon, 1917
Rossetta Groundwater
Salvaged brass instrument, Stromness Museum, Orkney
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Wendy McMurdo
Wendy McMurdo (1962) studied at the Pratt Institute in New York in the mid-1980s, where she first became interested in photography. She completed her M.A. at Goldsmiths College in London in 1993. In the mid-1990s she became particularly interested in digital media. With the assistance of a Henry Moore Foundation Fellowship, she produced a body of work called In a Shaded Place, which examined the impact of digital technologies on traditional representational photography. Subsequently, McMurdo developed a number of projects examining the interface between traditional and non-traditional forms. From 1995-2000, she developed a series of works which examined the ways in which technological developments in the bio-medical sciences affected our view of ourselves. She has been commissioned by the Science Museum in London and The Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh in association with the Roslin Institute, Edinburgh.
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A number of her major projects were documented in 2001 by the Centre for Photography in Salamanca, Spain. Her work has been the subject of documentaries for BBC 2 and Channel 4 in the U.K. and is included in The British Library Sound Archiveâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Oral history of British Photography. She lives in Edinburgh where she is currently Fellow in Photography at Napier University.
Vikki Bell is Reader in Sociology at Goldsmiths College, University of London. Her most recent publications include Culture and Performance. The Challenge of Ethics, Politics and Feminist Theory (Berg Publishers, Oxford, 2007).
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On Wendy McMurdo’s Wrecks of Scapa
by Vikki Bell
On a trip to Orkney to trace something of her maternal grandfather whom she had never met, Wendy McMurdo found herself drawn to quite another story of the past, one tantalizingly glimpsed through the objects that were displayed in the local history museum at Stromness. A little pipe still lying in its raspberry-pink case, a barnacle-clad cup, crockery with a German crest, a sailor’s cap with ‘S.M.S. Hindenburg’ embroidered on its band. These objects bore the distinct signs of having lain deep in the sea, exposed to the indiscriminate power of salt-water and marine life. McMurdo has based several of her previous photography projects in museums; she is keenly aware of the peculiarities of encasing the past in display cabinets. There, using digital manipulation, McMurdo explored the museum-goer’s gaze. In one image, Girl with Bears (1999), the girl crouching by the glass is reflected twice; looking in at the bears, her reflection is joined by a further, impossible reflection. The effect is
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both haunting and humorous. What is at stake in the act of observing these wild beasts? The pedagogic strategies that accompany taxidermy all but remove human reactions and instincts – of awe, fear, survival – in producing an encounter which is as far removed from the reality of a child-bear meeting as the tale of Goldilocks. But that is precisely the point; to imagine the beast, one has to enter into a fantasy-state, as does the reader of a fairy tale, and make the beast roar through the power of human imagination. Here, in Orkney, McMurdo again found herself confronting objects behind glass, objects that she felt were ‘somehow linked to my own futile trip to recover the past’ and that would return her in different ways to these themes. Like a pun on Magritte, the little pipe in Stromness ‘n’est pas une pipe’. For if Magritte refers us to the risk of the gap between image and text in a calligram, this little pipe refers us to a gap that potentially yawns between the object and the story, between the visible and the imagination. The museum exhibits narrate the story of a dramatic event: the scuttling of the German fleet in Scapa Flow. Under the Armistice, the German High Seas fleet was interned in Scapa Flow in November 1918. Disarmed and manned only by skeleton crews, the warships remained at anchor there for seven months while negotiations at Versailles dragged on. While they awaited news of their fate, the Germans were not allowed ashore and conditions on the ships meant many fell ill. Archival photographs show what must over those seven months have become a familiar if still startling scene to the people of the Orkney. There were 74 ships in total, including five battlecruisers (among which
Wendy McMurdo, Girl with Bears, 1999 © Wendy McMurdo
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the Hindenburg) and eleven battleships, anchored around the little island of Cava and towards Houton Bay. But on June 21st 1919 that scene was altered irrevocably. Vice Admiral Von Reuter, concerned that the peace terms would mean the ships’ seizure by the Allies, ordered his men to scuttle every one of their ships in a breath-taking act of defiance. Hatches, sea cocks and watertight doors were thrown open, and the ships began to reel and rock. By all accounts the first of these impressive war machines to go down was the Friedrich der Grosse, which began to list and settle at around 1 p.m. The Daily Mail reported how the others followed: ‘Here a destroyer would disappear amid a cloud of steam; there a battleship would take her last plunge and disappear in a tumult of spray. One would settle down by the stern, another would heel over until only her keel showed above the water.’ Anchor chains snapped, steam and oil belched out and trapped air had the sea aboil, the ships turned turtle and slipped out of sight, stood on end for a moment before
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descending or else came to rest on the sea-bed at an even keel. The British squadron raced back to Scapa Flow from their routine exercises, but there was little the Navy could do to halt this display of defiance. As boatloads of German soldiers left their ships and tried to land on the surrounding islands, shots were fired. Nine German soldiers were killed; as far as we know the rest (some 1800) became prisoners of war. As captured in some of the archival photographs, the vast hulls afloat resemble whales, imagery that did not escape contemporary observers. The local paper, The Orcadian, published a report a few days after the event: ‘as the afterpart of the ship disappeared, the bows and a hundred feet or more of the hull projected sheer from the sea, looking like some huge whale leaping through space’. Alongside the still images of the scuttling, eye-witness accounts convey the drama of what took place that day in 1919, and in the absence of the moving images that would abound if so dramatic an event were to happen today, these accounts help us to imagine the scale of this unprecedented act. Incredibly, a group of school children was aboard the pleasure cruiser The Flying Kestrel on a trip around the German ships at the time of the scuttling. In their innocence, a woman remembers, they at first ‘thought probably it was just put on for our benefit’; a man, recalling the day, likens the experience of being amidst the fleet to watching ‘a kind of slow-motion picture, the ships began to sink... to sink lower in the water, and turn turtle.’ Passing between the German destroyers, the children who had been taken to observe – indeed, one remembers that they were explicitly warned ‘not to make
Wendy McMurdo, Boy with Bubble, Science Museum, 2000 © Wendy McMurdo
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any sign to the men’ – became participants in this scene, and an especially poignant source for cultural memory. The children, freed from any adult sense of the event as one of either treachery or supreme naval pride, marveled at the scene; some were saddened by the sight of these sailors in distress, scrambling to get onto rafts and boats, carrying minimal possessions, a few being swept away, and the officers being held at gun-point by the British. ‘It was a sad, sad sight’. These children’s accounts were only recorded for the local library’s oral history project thirty or forty years after the event, suggesting that it was only at this time that there was a sense that the accounts, too, might slip away and succumb to the passage of time. What of the ships themselves? Over the years, salvage operations have raised many of them for their high scrap value. But some eight ships remain in Scapa Flow today, slowly rusting, home to sea life and adventure parks for divers who come from all over the world to dive among them. It is this idea, that the ships remain there, unsuspected by the uninformed observer who sees only the surface, that appeals to Wendy McMurdo. ‘Out on the Flow now,’ she says, ‘all you can see are wide open expanses of water. You might never guess that you were sitting atop one of the largest naval graveyards in the world, but for the dozens of dive boats constantly circling the area. There’s something very powerful about the idea of these large masses lurking, invisible, below the surface. Standing today on the hill above Houton, you can imagine how strange and surreal the landscape would look if you could simply pull the plug on Scapa Flow. Drain all the water away.’ Of course, many divers have taken photographs of the wrecks. Wendy McMurdo teamed up with diver-photographer Tom Easop to explore her ideas for making new kinds of photographic images of them. Easop had previously shot the wrecks in black and white, in highly detailed, carefully composed ‘still lives’. These provided the basis for a discussion of composition. Shooting on new equipment (a Hasselblad body with a fairly “wide 80mm lens as opposed to the 5x4” camera that he had been using) and on colour film, Easop was able to take some images that McMurdo could then work with in the studio. The first results of that work are shown here. These beautiful, intriguing images are in full colour, many are enhanced digitally, and many are ‘fictions’, that is, they are composites of the wrecks that McMurdo has created from several shots. These new images are not simply ‘the present’ that seeks to update a story of past events, forming a linear time-line from archival photographs to the present day. Rather, suggests McMurdo, the images relate to the archival images more as colour relates to black and white in the Wizard of Oz, ‘when Dorothy steps out of her black and white Kansas homestead into a colour landscape of her dreams.’ Not past and present, but the pedestrian and the fantastical.
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One might say, then, that these images both are and are not the Wrecks of Scapa. On the one hand, photography’s principle of indexicality remains crucial here; the expense of getting these images alone indicates the importance of this to McMurdo. They had to be images of what ‘really is’ down there. On the other hand, the subtle manipulation of the image that accentuates and develops details – intense colour has the sea-urchins aglow, neon-pink jewels amidst the turquoise green waters, while the prehensile arms of a nearby millepede star-fish are bathed in an impossible gold – or that builds a composite image that communicates the sheer weight and awesome size of these wrecks, attests to a different creative project. This is not simply about illustrating what the photographer’s technologies can now achieve – although the fact that such images can be produced cannot fail to impress – it also becomes a meditation on fantasy. McMurdo’s images do not ask the viewer to imagine ‘the present’, as an archival photograph ‘asks’ one to imagine ‘the past’; its requests instead a meditation on the possibility of imagination itself. The proximity of the ships to the shore at the time of their internment meant that when the German brass-band played, they say the music could be heard by the islanders; now, long after those same trumpets were washed ashore, that proximity remains, but silently and invisibly. What is proximate but at a depth could stand as a definition of the unconscious; we meet it in our dreams, where one small detail in our emotional lives can be accentuated such that our senses are allconsumed by it, and our dreamworld actions uninhibitedly drawn by its unfathomable lure. When we receive glimpses of it in our waking life, there is an uneasy recognition. It is not a glimpse of the past, but an uncanny reflection of our own selves. + Special thanks to Creative Scotland, The Scottish Arts Council and to The National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts.
Archival photographs for this project are te be found at The National
Maritime Museum and The imperial War Museums, London; The National War Museum and The National Library, Edinburgh and The Stromness Museum and The Orkney Public Library in Kirkwall, Orkney.
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Foam_Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam
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Foam_Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam Foamâ&#x20AC;Żexhibits all genres of photography: fine art, documentary, applied, historical and contemporary. Alongside large exhibitions of established (world) famous photographers, Foam also exhibits emerging young talent in smaller short-term shows. Keizersgracht 609 1017 DS Amsterdam tel +31 20 5516500 www.foam.nl Open daily from 10am to 5pm Thursday and Friday from 10am to 9pm Foam is supported by the VandenEnde Foundation, Stichting DOEN and T-Mobile
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New York, 2001 ~ Š James Nachtwey
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James Nachtwey ~ Testimony ~
30 March - 20 June 2007
by Alain Mingam
more than twenty years, James Nachtwey has been the most highly For awarded photographer in the world, continuing to work to this day as a photojournalist with undiminished passionate determination and without ever compromising his standards. What he stated as far back as 1985 still applies today: ‘Why photograph war? There have been wars since the beginnings of mankind. And as man has become more “civilised”, so the methods aimed at exterminating his fellow man have become more effective and brutal. Today, the world is constantly at war, with few reasons to hope for a change. Can photography affect historical human behaviour? A ridiculously pretentious ambition, one may think. And yet it is this ambition that motivates me to photograph war.’ All the force – and secrecy – of a real movement is there, and it has only strengthened with time. His true courage, ethical as much as physical, naturally pushes him to constantly be at the heart of the action. His clear convictions and steadfast professional commitment lend his truth-drenched compositions their power and balance. James Nachtwey remains loyal to his first creed: Declare war ... on war itself. From Grozny to Ramallah or Bagdad, and with an extraordinary calm exterior in the face of any armed conflict, this courageous man is always driven by an unfailing professional concern that remains the core of his work: preserving the dignity of victims in forgotten or resumed conflicts. James Nachtwey sets out to bear witness and, consequently, to do what he can to position himself as the ‘spokesman for all victims’. He wants his images to ‘speak’ for them, mixing civilians and soldiers, without taking sides. He wants his work to plead and howl so that the pain and distress can be heard from Kabul or Jenin or Bagdad to New York, so that the victims will not die another death, killed by the indifference of the media who ignore or forget their plight. Nachtwey works slowly and takes the time to approach his subjects with sensitivity. This creates a kind of mutual respect allowing him to bridge the distance that would normally keep a photographer one step removed. He is right there on the ground, on the blood-stained and tear-soaked earth with those anonymous victims in the improvised cemeteries of Kosovo or in the burning bowels of the WTC – the first ‘live’ media tragedy of the 21st century. In the glare of rescue lights, only the skeletons of the Twin Towers remain in his survivor sight, becoming steel cathedrals of an America that has followed its ‘Via Crucis’ since Pearl Harbour, now struck for the first time on its own ground.
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He has never shown any sign of becoming jaded or immune to horror or tragedy, which would obviously erode the power of his testimony and perhaps expose him to accusations that he is exploiting the tragedy of other people’s lives for his own ends. He is in fact obsessed by this issue, and some even see him as deliberately cultivating a certain naivety in response to this. He remains irreproachable in his conduct, as well as in the rigorous way in which he frames his images down to the last millimetre. No matter what, if there is one thing Nachtwey cannot endure, it is the obscenity of death, were it of a single individual. ‘The major problem I am confronted with in my work as a war photographer is the risk of benefiting from other people’s suffering. This thought haunts me’, underlines Nachtwey. ‘It worries me day after day, but if I let my career and the money override my compassion, I would be selling my soul.’ A dedicated admirer of Goya and Caravaggio, James Nachtwey brings the representation of human mourning to its paroxysm, what makes it unbearable – a reason itself for the spontaneous, morbid and necessary aestheticising that enables him to document real life horrors. Nachtwey places his sense of image at the service of a humanism that takes its ‘raison d’être’ from the lessons of continual conflicts. Ever since his beginnings in Dublin, at the time of the first catholic demonstrations in support of Bobby Sands on hunger strike, until Iraq in November 2006, all his images have drawn us into the spectacle of horror. To better call upon our conscience to not – to no longer – accept it. How to depict evil without ever dissipating it? This is the everpresent question between politics and aesthetics put to us by James Nachtwey’s work. He follows in the footsteps of the likes of William Eugene Smith, Robert Capa and Larry Burrows whose work has been so important in showing him the enormous gap between reality and what politicians would have us believe. The images are all central features of televised Guernicas beamed live across the world by CNN or Al Jazeera. Actually, each cliché from James Nachtwey allows us, as citizens of the world, the time – following television – to make our memory a place for powerful moments from the blazing news in the making. ‘We have art so as not to die of truth’, wrote Nietzsche. We have James Nachtwey’s photos to prevent us from sinking into ignorance or lack of interest and to fight against oblivion. + Alain Mingam is a photojournalist and member of the board of Reporters Sans Frontières (RSF) and Bayeux WAR Correspondent.
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New York, 2001 ~ Š James Nachtwey
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New York, 2001 ~ Š James Nachtwey
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Afghanistan, 1996 ~ Š James Nachtwey
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Afghanistan, 1996 ~ Š James Nachtwey
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Iraq, 2003 ~ Š James Nachtwey
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Iraq, 2003 ~ Š James Nachtwey
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Iraq, 2003 ~ Š James Nachtwey
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Iraq, 2003 ~ Š James Nachtwey
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Foam_Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam
9 March - 11 April 2007
Foam_3h: WassinkLungren ~ Empty Bottles
The Dream (Veiled Woman), 1910/1975 ~ Photograph by
Imogen Cunningham ~ © The Imogen Cunningham Trust
16 February - 15 April 2007
As part of the Foam_3h programme Foam presents the latest publication and accompanying exhibition by WassinkLundgren, Empty Bottles, a series that takes a concentrated look at the daily rituals of China’s refuse collectors. Beijing and Shanghai form the backdrop to a series of photos of 24 bottle collectors taken with a technical camera: part-time scavengers, full-time collectors and cleaners, one after another. These are clinical images in which the last remains of refuse are removed by random passers-by. In the publication the pictures accompany essays by de Volkskrant’s China correspondent Hans Moleman and Sinologist and former NRC Handelsblad’s China correspondent Floris-Jan van Luyn. The design is by Kummer & Herrman design agency. WassinkLundgren is a joint project by conceptual documentary photographer Thijs Groot Wassink (1981) and Ruben Lundgren (1983), who graduated at Utrecht college of art (Hogeschool voor de Kunsten Utrecht) in 2005. Shortly after graduating both received an initial grant that enabled them to work for an extended period in China.
Oog – Eye ~ The Dancing Bear collection of W.M.Hunt At an auction in New York thirty years ago, W.M. Hunt made a spontaneous bid on a photograph: Imogen Cunningham’s The Dream (1910), showing a woman with a white veil covering her face. For the former actor, who had a keen interest in photography, this acquisition was the start of a thematic collection that now includes over a thousand items – thematic because all the pictures in the collection have one thing in common: the subject is not looking into the lens. By showing people with their eyes shut or looking down, veiled or wounded, or with their faces or bodies turned away from the camera, even those in close-up, the photos prohibit any sense of contact between the viewer and the subject. The photos in Hunt’s unusual collection are from a wide spread of genres, including photojournalism, art, science and documentary photography, covering the entire historical range of photography, from the first daguerreotypes to contemporary forms. Anonymous work and pictures of little or no market value are shown alongside work by the great masters of photographic history. The nineteenth century is represented in work by Nadar, the Alinari brothers, Julia Margaret Cameron and Disderi. Twentieth-century icons in the collection include Edward Weston, Man Ray, André Kertész, Bill Brandt, Richard Avedon, Diane Arbus, Irving Penn and Robert Mapplethorpe. Among the major contemporary artists in the collection are Cindy Sherman, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Duane Michals and Philippe Pache.
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Empty Bottles, 2005 ~ © WassinkLundgren
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Boy from Xhosa tribe, South-Africa, 1992 ~ © James Nachtwey
30 March - 20 June 2007
James Nachtwey ~ Testimony Rwanda, Afghanistan, Bosnia, Northern Ireland, Romania, Somalia, Chechnya – for over 20 years, James Nachtwey has been taking photographs in the crisis regions of the world. He is one of the most influential and most frequently published contemporary photographers documenting wars, disasters and their consequences. His photographs allow us to see into the background of power and he distills anonymous horror into individual fates. The images lend unforgettable faces to abstract crises, faces that boldly demand humanitarian assistance. Despite their documentary intent, Nachtwey’s photographs are not snapshots; they show artistic method. The object is brought out clearly, perfectly in fact, in technique and composition. The photographs are aesthetically pleasing works of art, but their contents are shocking and repulsive.
13 April – 9 May 2007
© Joan Colom / courtesy Foto Colectania
16 March - 20 May 2007
Joan Colom ~ El Raval A remarkable selection of work by Joan Colom, a photographer still relatively unknown outside Spain. The exhibition features 84 black-andwhite pictures from the years 1958 to 1961, all taken during Colom’s many visits to the Barrio Chino district of Barcelona, known today as Raval. In this period the neighbourhood was a centre of prostitution and crime. For almost three years Colom took photographs here almost every weekend. To remain incognito he usually made his exposures without looking through the lens. His subjects included the residents of the area: prostitutes, lovers, children and street vendors. Colom’s uncompromising photographs are characterised by his unusual perspective, dynamic settings, sharp contrasts and rough grain. In 2002 Joan Colom received the Premo Nacional de Fotografia and in the following year his first monograph appeared. This show was made possible by the support of Fondació Foto Colectania in Barcelona and Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris.
Foam_3h: Rommert Boonstra ~ Just like grass This spring Dutch photographer Rommert Boonstra will turn 65 years old. Both as an artist and a writer he was influential in the seventies and early eighties to get photography accepted as an important medium within the general field of the visual arts. To celebrate his birthday Foam presents a small selection of Boonstra’s recent work.
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Untitled, 2006 ~ © Rommert Boonstra
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Foam_Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam
20 April - 17 June 2007
Raimond Wouda ~ School Raimond Wouda has taken photographs at Dutch secondary schools over a period of several years. Wouda feels that the public debate about how secondary schools function is of little relevance to most pupils and in many schools it plays no role at all. For pupils, secondary school is a relatively safe place where they meet friends and discover their own identity. At the same time school is a place where various aspects of youth culture visibly thrive, with diverse codes of behaviour and modes of cultural expression. This is most obvious during break periods and in other activities that take place outside the classroom. Wouda has photographed these moments from high vantage points to give the viewer a sense of both the individual pupil and the dynamic of the group. The result is a modern version of the group portraits of the Dutch Golden Age, highlighting different aspects of youth culture and providing a documentary picture of young Holland.
Buys Ballot College II, Goes, 2005 ~ © Raimond Wouda
11 May - 20 June 2007
Sloane #30, 2003 Oakland, CA ~ © Lise Sarfati / Magnum Photos
25 May - 8 July 2007
Lise Sarfati ~ La Vie Nouvelle From 25 May to 8 July Foam presents the work of French photographer Lise Sarfati, La Vie Nouvelle. In 2003 Sarfati travelled around the United States making portraits of adolescents in their own surroundings. The result is a series of photos that show these young people’s complex attitudes in subtle ways. Sarfati’s sumptuous colour photos reveal their sense of isolation, distance and emerging sexuality. With her balanced compositions and intense colours, Sarfati’s documentary photos are almost like snapshots in a story. Sarfati came to prominence with a series that she made in the 1990s about life in Russia following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Adolescents in big cities also play a significant role in this series, in which Sarfati captures the sense of awkwardness and alienation that these youngsters feel in incisive and intuitive ways. Photographers have explored the fascinating theme of adolescence in many different ways: identity crises, physical metamorphoses, psychological instability, and burgeoning sexuality. All these issues are referred to indirectly in La Vie Nouvelle. Sarfati is especially interested in the period in teenage life when emotions are always close to the surface. The young people she portrays in her work seem almost unaware of the photographer’s presence. Their expression is often pensive, serious or bored, troubled by the feelings that accompany this new phase in their life. The exhibition features a series of photos and a slide show with music.
Foam_3h: Awoiska van der Molen Awoiska van der Molen is attracted by places that are secluded: isolated from their environment. She photographs in and around cities that lack vibrancy, cities that feel uncomfortable. In her work Van der Molen depicts an awkward world that has a strange atmosphere about it, pervaded by a theatrical tension.
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Untitled, 2006 ~ © Awoiska van der Molen
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Foam_Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam
22 June - 15 August 2007
Foam_3h: Rob van der Nol Rob van der Nol photographs young people, adolescents. He is attracted to the process of change and transition in their lives. It reminds him of what is known as the experience of transit, of moments that lie between waking and sleep, night and day, sites of delicate exchange and metamorphosis. This new series has been made on the streets of Berlin, where Van der Nol lived for a couple of months.
22 June - 19 August 2007
Jacques-Henri Lartigue This exhibition is a retrospective of the work that French photographer Jacques Henri Lartigue made in the first half of the 20th century. Lartigue (1894-1986) began photographing when he was only six, taking his own life and the people and activities of his particular circle as his main theme. He also took photographs of numerous sport events, including car races, French tennis championships and the first manned flights by French pioneer aviators. Although rarely exhibited as such, most of his famous early photos were originally made as stereo images. In addition he produced many photographs in a wide variety of formats and mediums, including glass plates of various sizes, some of the earliest autochromes and, of course, 2 1/4 inch square and 35 mm film. His greatest achievement is a set of around 120 photobooks that form one of the most impressive visual autobiographies ever made. With a range of vintage prints, including remarkable stereo pictures and personal documents, Foam offers a unique impression of the life and work of this pioneer of photography.
Mitch Epstein, Flag, 2000 ~
© Mitch Epstein, courtesy Galerie Thomas Zander, Cologne
29 June - 19 September 2007
Mitch Epstein ~ American Work
Ma nounou Dudu, Paris, juin 1904, Jacques Henri Lartigue ~
© Ministère de la Culture - France /AAJHL
165
Mitch Epstein is a leading contemporary photographer. His work has been exhibited around the world and is represented in the foremost photography collections. American Power is the ambiguous title of his latest project. It focuses on the complex relationship between American energy supply, the status of America as a world power and the American landscape. Foam is the first European museum to show a selection of the monumental works from this ongoing project. They are combined with photographs from Family Business, the story of Epstein’s father’s furniture company which collapsed when a merciless legal system dragged his hardworking father into bankruptcy , at a time of economic malaise when waves of new migrants were arriving in the impoverished inner cities. +
foam magazine #10 / stories
books
1
3
2
Andreas Gursky
Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin Chicago
In the opening sequence of this immaculately produced monograph the viewer is gradually removed from the picture until a staggering sight
Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin’s
of the innumerable stones of the
Chicago is a make-believe Arab city in
piramid of Cheops comes into view.
the middle of the Negev desert that
It clearly shows how Andreas Gursky
serves as a training ground for the Is-
is a master of the bird’s eye perspec-
bizarre ghost town has been furnished
Anna Clarén Holding
with imitations of streets in Beirut and
Last year this wonderful but also per-
Gaza city or any other place, depending
turbing book by Swedish photographer
on the phase of the war and the subse-
Anna Clarén won the prize for best
quent ‘needs’ of the army. In this book
Swedish photobook. The title refers to
Stephen Shore The Nature of Photographs
Broomberg and Chanarin – with their
the basic human need for security and
In The Nature of Photographs Stephen
clear, precise style of photography and
physical contact, and the fundamental
Shore explores the seemingly sim-
Kunst in Munich, the first of its kind
critical texts that precede each series
feeling of being displaced and alienated
ple question of what’s the difference
since his celebrated exhibition at the
– offer a highly original visual analysis
when this is lacking during childhood.
between a photo and the reality that
MoMA, NY. Gursky is regarded as the
of contemporary Israel. They photo-
The majority of the people portrayed
it portrays. In a very coherent way
‘superstar of global art photography’
graphed Chicago but also the typical
are friends and family of the photo-
– Shore obviously avoids unneces-
and his works fetch astronomical prices.
Jewish hilltop settlements that rise up
grapher, who also frequently caught
sary complex terminology – and with
The exhibition and accompanying
like fortresses above the surrounding
herself in front of the camera. Every
reference to a wide range of photos of
book present many new works, a large
countryside and the system of ‘bypass
now and then people hold and comfort
both world famous and anonymous
number from 2007, including images
roads’, a complex network of highways
each other, but they seem more natural
photographers, he describes a photo-
of massive propaganda celebrations in
bypassing Palestinian areas that only
and at ease with their pets. The portraits
graph’s physical and formal proper-
Pyongyang, and huge composed tab-
Israeli citizens are permitted to use.
are interspaced with extreme close-ups
ties. These combine to form the ‘visual
leaux of groups of mechanics crowded
The photographers, both with Jewish
of almost translucent human skin,
grammar’ of a photo, and they are the
around racing cars at a pit stop during
roots but neither raised in Israel, give a
several dishevelled interiors and also a
photographer’s tools for interpreting
a Formula 1 race. Recognizable sub-
merciless exposé of how Israel, fed by a
few idyllic summer nature scenes. The
the depicted reality and giving mean-
jects, but Gursky’s work has little to
‘culture of victimhood’ and fear of the
book as a whole has a profound feeling
ing to the work. It is evident that Shore
do with faithfully reproducing reality.
‘enemy’ that surrounds it on all sides,
of loneliness, which is intensified by
is an experienced lecturer; the book is
His images are entirely digitally com-
entrenches itself ever more grimly,
the estranging effect of the ‘bleached’
the result of many years teaching ex-
piled, as stated by his motto: ‘Reality
clinging to the myths surrounding its
colours that give the photos an unreal,
perience at Bard College in New York
can only be portrayed when one con-
own origins.
almost hallucinating character.
State.
structs it.’
raeli Defence Forces. Over the years this
SteidlMACK,
Journal,
tive. In many of his photographs every detail demands attention at once and
Phaidon,
the eye can no longer differentiate. ‘I approach things from a distance in order to retain an overview,’ he once said. In February of this year an extensive retrospective opened at Haus der
Snoeck Verlag,
ISBN 3-86521-307-3,
ISBN 978-91975-7704-5,
ISBN 0-7148-4585-X,
ISBN 978-3-936859-50-8,
156 pp, € 45
168
116 pp, € 57,30
136 pp, € 39,95
160 pp, € 68
foam magazine #10 / stories
books
4
5
Duane Michals Foto Follies. How photography lost its virginity on THE way to the bank
Vanessa van Dam & Martine Stig Any Resemblance to Existing Persons Is Purely Coincidental, Stories of Mr. Wood.
Erik Kessels/ Marion Blomeyer In Almost Every Picture #5
vided with hand-written texts and a
Cuny Janssen There is Something in the Air in Prince Albert, South Africa
In this fifth volume in the In Almost
grapher Martine Stig team up during
healthy dose of humour. In Foto Follies
This is already the fourth photobook
Every Picture series of amateur pho-
this project to investigate the con-
he uses every bit of his sarcasm and wit
that Cuny Janssen produced in the
tography, edited by Erik Kessels, we
ventions of a classical film scenario.
to rant against the present-day art world
past five years. Just as the last two, this
follow one of the – thanks to Disney
In Bombay and Los Angeles, cities
in which ‘Superstars’ take the stage,
publication has been beautifully de-
– most beloved children’s friends of all
known particularly for their thriving
hiding behind pseudo-intellectual the-
signed by Dutch designer SYB. Again
time: a black-and-white spotted Dalma-
film industry, they create two versions
ories to market their work. Following
Cuny Janssen has combined portraits
tian. We watch this cheerful creature
of the fictive character Mr. Wood,
a number of shamelessly oversimpli-
of young children with timeless land-
frolicking freely in an idyllic garden,
whose identity is dictated completely
fied postulations on photography, such
scapes laden with history, this time
going on numerous excursions to the
by chance. The first man to be ‘spot-
as: ‘Never trust any photograph so
photographed in and around the town
seaside, the mountains and famous
ted’ in the city’s most well known
large that it can only fit in a museum’,
of Prince Albert in South Africa. The
monuments – mostly accompanied by
park at 12 o’clock with a newspaper
Michals puts himself in the place of
immensely spacious, arid emptiness
its doting owner, an elderly lady. As in
under his arm is Mr. Wood – of which
various artist colleagues and indulges
of the South African landscape calls to
previous episodes of In Almost Every
Mr. Wood himself is blissfully una-
in a number of delirious parodies. The
mind the colour photos of David Gold-
Picture, you invariably wonder: Who
ware. He is then followed and secretly
photographers of the so-called ‘Becher
blatt, but in contrast to Goldblatt, Jans-
are these people? Where do they live?
photo-graphed until he disappears
Schule’ and Cindy Sherman are given
sen is decidedly not in search of signs
How do they relate to one another? As
in the crowd. The time at which this
a particularly hard time (for example,
of human intervention. The layout is
Erik Kessels said in a recent interview:
occurs subsequently determines the
the latter is caught while trying, played
very strong and not like any classsical
‘Individual photos don’t mean that
nature of Mr. Wood’s identity: his
by Michals in a blonde wig, to steal a
photobook, with two photos on every
much to me. I’m looking for a story.’
profession, place of work, colleagues
treatise by Wittgenstein) but the older
page: one is printed in full while the
With this wonderful little book, he
and dreams are the result of a detailed
generation of conceptual artists such
other has been ruthlessly sliced in
again succeeds in offering insight into
questionnaire that leads to a search
as Bruce Nauman and Ed Ruscha
two; on the back, the same pictures
the world of ‘just another’ woman
throughout two cities. That journey,
don’t get away unscathed either. It’s a
appear but this time the other photo
with her dog, who becomes special to
documented in photos and written re-
good thing this book isn’t very thick,
is cut. This creates an extraordinary
us because we witness the moments in
ports is presented in this book, creat-
because of the inevitable risk of ‘over-
rhythm – the images pass by as if in
her life that were significant to her, sig-
ing an intriguing mix of travel guide,
doing it’ – but it is nearly impossible to
a film, continually forming new rela-
nificant enough at least to have them
criminal investigation method and
keep from laughing out loud.
tionships with each other.
recorded by camera.
film scenario.
Revolver,
Duane Michals earned his reputation through photo sequences, often pro-
Steidl,
Snoeck Verlag,
KesselsKramer Publishing,
Designer Vanessa van Dam and photo-
ISBN 3-86521-275-1,
ISBN 978-3-936859-49-2,
ISBN 978-90-70478-13-1,
ISBN 3-86588-311-7,
96 pp, € 22,50
169
64 pp, € 38
146 pp, € 24,95
480 pp, € 25
foam magazine #10 / stories
books
9 7
8
10
6
Todd Hido Between the Two
Boris Mikhailov Yesterday’s Sandwich
Useful Photography #006
This exceptional Phaidon publication
This is the sixth edition of the ‘maga-
consists of a fold-out grey box with
zine’ Useful Photography – a project
55 large photo-cards of 34 x 23 cm in-
by Erik Kessels, Hans Aarsman, Julian
side. The photos are the result of two
Germain, Claudie de Cleen and Hans
Gillian Laub Testimony
random transparencies being sand-
van der Meer presenting ‘useful’ pho-
Gillian Laub, winner of the 2005
wiched together, creating an entirely
tography, always in a unique way. This
Nikon Storyteller Award, depicted
new story, often with a strongly sur-
time the publication takes a fresh look
the inhabitants of Jerusalem, Haifa,
realistic feeling caused by the bizarre
at the principle of ‘before-and-after’, so
Ramallah, Nablus and other locations
combinations of images. Mikhailov
familiar in the world of commercial
in Israel and Palestine. All those por-
This is Todd Hido’s fifth photo book.
describes his working process for
advertising. But for a change the focus
trayed, among them many adolescents,
His first monograph, House Hunting,
this series – which came about in the
is not on sparkling kitchens which
are each in their own way scarred by
was followed by Outskirts, both of
1960s when he accidentally projected
have just been worked over with the
the war – whether or not due to visible
them now available only on the rare
two slides at the same time – as ‘the
latest miracle cleaning product, but
wounds. From the outset the photo-
book market. His latest book, Between
deliberate pursuit of chance’. The se-
rather on less hopeful examples where
grapher was aware that for this series
the Two, also published by Nazraeli
ries could never be exhibited publicly
the subject is in general much worse
photographs alone would not suffice
Press, was sold out almost immedi-
during the former Soviet regime, as it
off ‘after’ than ‘before’. Thailand before
to tell the story she had in mind. She
ately on its release in 2007; a second
did not comply with prevailing aesthet-
and after the tsunami, the Ukrainian
wanted to do justice to the complexity
edition will be available in April this
ic sensibilities. For 35 years, the series
politician Yuschenko before and after
of the situation which called for more
year. In this series, the themes of lone-
existed only in the form of projections;
he was poisoned or the empty hole in
than just her own portraits. She there-
liness and isolation, so evident in all of
it was not until the late 1980s, when he
the mountains after Taliban fighters
fore asked her subjects to write a brief
Hido’s work, are presented in a totally
was in the West, that Mikhailov first
blew up the famed Bamiyan Buddha
statement in reaction to the Polaroid
new light. For the first time Hido com-
printed the images. In the meantime,
statues. Fortunately, things often also
she gave them of the shoot, as if it was
bines his photos of abandoned houses
however, he had become more inter-
turn out well: a bit of make-up really
‘their last will and testament’. These
and interiors with portraits. He photo-
ested in capturing harsh reality than
can work wonders, and the dazzling
texts are printed next to the portraits
graphed anonymous models – mostly
in creating an imaginary dream world,
smile of the high-school queen be-
and give a penetrating insight into
naked – in impersonal, dingy hotel
so it took till 2007 for the work to be
comes even more dazzling without
how this endless conflict affects the
rooms.
published.
those unsightly braces.
daily lives of young people.
Nazraeli Press,
Phaidon,
KesselsKramer Publishing,
Aperture Foundation,
ISBN 1-59005-176-9,
ISBN 0-7148-4636-8,
ISBN 978-90-70478-12-4,
ISBN 978-1-59711-012-9,
76 pp, $ 75
170
128 pp, € 59,95
88 pp, € 20
104 pp, $40
foam magazine #10 / stories
books
14 12
13
William Eggleston 5x7 11
This latest monograph of William Eggleston is published by Twin Palms – publisher of many exceptionally fine photobooks
including
Philip-Lorca
diCorcia’s The Storybook Life and Lise Sarfati’s The New Life / La Vie Nouvelle. The book presents photos Eggleston shot in 1973 using a large 5x7 camera; mainly portraits made in
Tomoko Sawada School Days
the middle of the night in nightclubs from a few typical Eggleston colour
Charlotte Dumas Palermo 7
This publication by Tomoko Sawada
photographs of street scenes, the book
This is the second modest publica-
All images are covers of the books,
comprises ten class photos of Japanese
comprises some 65 of these portraits,
tion that Charlotte Dumas has made
unless numbered. Credits for the num-
schoolgirls, printed on heavy white
partly in colour but more than half in
of her photos of horses. The earlier
bered photos are:
board. The effect quickly becomes diz-
black-and-white. This is an interesting
series showed the famous Carabiniera
1/2 © Anna Clarén
zying, as all the girls posing in their
and so far little known part of Eggles-
a Cavallo Roma, now she has chosen
3 © Andreas Gursky / Snoeck Verlag
immaculate uniforms, perfectly lined
ton’s oeuvre, who is generally regarded
to photograph horse races in Paris and
4 © Cuny Janssen / Snoeck Verlag
up in rows, have the same face – that
as the ‘father of colour photography’.
Palermo. Dumas is clearly fascinated
5 © KesselsKramer Publishing
of Sawada herself. As in her previous
The photographs were always meant
by animals but shuns sentimental mo-
6 © Todd Hido/courtesy Stephen Wirtz
projects, such as ID400, consisting of
to be presented along with the black-
tives. Horses and also wolves, of which
Gallery, Rose Gallery
endless rows of passport photos, and
and-white videofilm Stranded in Can-
she recently made another impressive
7 © Boris Mikhailov/Phaidon
Omiai, in which girls dressed in tradi-
ton that Eggleston shot at the same
photo series, form very apt subject mat-
8 © KesselsKramer Publishing
tional Japanese attire offer themselves
time, but this never came about and
ter for communicating the emotions
9/10 © Gillian Laub/Aperture
up as potential brides, Sawada super-
they remained unpublished for over
she wants to highlight in her work.
Foundation
imposes her own face on the subjects.
35 years. The portraits are remarkably
Dumas is particularly interested in the
11 © Tomoko Sawada
School Days reflects the enormous so-
monumental and serene, especially
history and symbolism of certain ani-
12/13 Untitled, ca. 1973 © William
cial pressure still being brought to bear
considering the undoubtedly chaotic,
mals and the way in which they have
Eggleston/courtesy Eggleston Artistic
on young girls in Japan to conform to
loud and smokey atmostphere they
been represented in art and literature
Trust
prevailing expectation patterns.
were made in.
through the centuries.
14 © Charlotte Dumas
Seigensha Art Publishing,
he used to frequent at the time. Apart
Charlotte Dumas/Smart Project
ISBN 978-4-86152-061-4,
ISBN 1-931885-48-6,
Space, ISBN 978-90-806655-5-2,
28 pp, € 25
26 pp, € 15
171
Twin Palms Publishers, 96 pp, $ 65
foam magazine #11 / young
back issues
Missed an issue? You can still order back issues of Foam Magazine. The first two editions of Foam Magazine doubled as exhibition catalogues, to be enjoyed by those who had missed the exhibitions or who wanted to
savour the images again in a different context. Since the release of #3, Foam Magazine is no longer linked to the exhibition programme of the museum. Foam Magazine has become an exhibition space in itself. Each edition features a specific theme, which unites six diverse portfolios of 16 pages each.
Curious about a back issue? Order at www.foammagazine.nl
Foam Magazine #3 / access Jean-Christian Bourcart Peter Granser Philippine Hoegen Atiq Rahimi Chris Shaw Mario Testino
Foam Magazine #4 / set up Hou Bo Thomas Demand Joan Fontcuberta Hans van der Meer Daniela Rossell Maurice Scheltens
Foam Magazine #5 / near Bernard F. Eilers Peter Fraser Stanley Greene Annaleen Louwes Ellen Mandemaker Ken Schles
Foam Magazine #6 / sport Giasco Bertoli Robert Davies Gustavo Di Mario Charles Fréger Claudio Hils Bill Peronneau
Foam Magazine #7 / self Machiel Botman Sophie Calle Marnix Goossens Dag Nordbrenden Jan Rothuizen Jan Smaga & Aneta Grzeszykowska
Foam Magazine #8 / sidewalk Tom Wood Morad Bouchakour Raymond Depardon Trent Parke Gus Powell Nobuyoshi Araki & Daido Moriyama
foam magazine #9 / eden Joel Sternfeld Kai Wiedenhöfer Michael Reisch Stephen Gill Jessica Dimmock Ata Kando
foam magazine #10 / stories Larry Burrows Alessandra Sanguinetti Suky Best Raphaël Dallaporta Hunter S. Thompson Wendy McMurdo
160
foam magazine #9 / eden
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Photograph ~ © Anne de Vries
161
ISSN 1570-4874 ISBN 978-90-70516-03-1
foam magazine #10 / stories
colophon
Colophon Foam Magazine International Photography Magazine Issue #10, Spring 2007 Editorial Advisers Christian Caujolle, director VU, Paris / Kathy Ryan, photo editor The New York Times Magazine, New York Editors Marcel Feil / Pjotr de Jong / Marloes Krijnen / Markus Schaden / Tanja Wallroth Managing Editor Tanja Wallroth Concept, Art Direction & Design Vandejong, Amsterdam – Pjotr de Jong / Marcel de Vries / Nienke Schachtschabel / Isabelle McLoughlin Contributing Photographers Larry Burrows / Suky Best / Raphaël Dallaporta / Wendy McMurdo / Alessandra Sanguinetti / Hunter S. Thompson / Philip-Lorca diCorcia / James Nachtwey Contributing Writers Marcel Feil / Eric Miles / Ken Grant / Arnoud van Adrichem & Jan Baetens / Vikki Bell / Ariejan Korteweg / Alain Mingam / Laura Noble / Raphaëlle Stopin Co-editor (On My Mind...) Addie Vassie, director of Gallery Vassie for international photography in Amsterdam. Previously, Addie worked eight years at the Victoria & Albert Museum and was print sales manager at The Photographers’ Gallery in London. She also works internationally as a free lance curator, consultant and writer. Copy editor Pittwater Literary Services Rowan Hewison Translation Liz Waters - Pittwater Literary Services / Thomas Johnston / Terri J. Kester / Alain-Paul Mallard / UvA Vertalers / Gosse van der Leij / Iris Maher / Sam Herman Typography Marcel de Vries & Nienke Schachtschabel Lithography & Printing Drukkerij Slinger, Alkmaar - NL www.drukkerijslinger.nl Binding Binderij Hexspoor, Boxtel – NL www.hexspoor.nl
174
Paper
Arctic Paper Benelux www.arcticpaper.com Arctic de Matte / Arctic The Silk / Arctic Gloss / Pure Lynx The production of Foam Magazine is made possible thanks to the generous support of Drukkerij Slinger, Binderij Hexspoor and Arctic Paper.
Cover Photograph Alessandra Sanguinetti, The Dreamer (detail) © Alessandra Sanguinetti, courtesy Yossi Milo Gallery, NY Editorial Address Foam Magazine Keizersgracht 609 1017 DS Amsterdam - NL T +31 20 5516500 F +31 20 5516501 editors@foammagazine.nl www.foammagazine.nl Advertising Vandejong Marieke Kitzen / Marlous Beukeboom P.O. Box 92292 1090 AG Amsterdam - NL T +31 20 4622062 F +31 20 4622060 advertise@foammagazine.nl Subscriptions Bruil & Van de Staaij P.O. Box 75 7940 AB Meppel - NL T +31 522 261 303 F +31 522 257 827 foam@bruil.info www.bruil.info/foam www.foammagazine.nl Start your subscription to Foam Magazine (4 issues per year / incl. airmail) Netherlands €50,Rest of World €55,Club_Foam members / students Netherlands €40,Rest of World €44,Publisher Foam Magazine BV Foam_Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam Keizersgracht 609 1017 DS Amsterdam - NL T +31 20 5516500 F +31 20 5516501 info@foam.nl www.foam.nl Vandejong P.O. Box 92292 1090 AG Amsterdam - NL T +31 20 4622062 F +31 20 4622060 office@vandejong.nl www.vandejong.nl
© Photographers, authors, Foam & Vandejong, Amsterdam, 2007. All photographs and illustration material is the copyright property of the photographers and/or their estates, and the publications in which they have been published. Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders. Any copyright holders we have been unable to reach or to whom inaccurate acknowledgement has been made are invited to contact the publishers at info@foammagazine.nl All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or otherwise without prior written permission of the publishers. Although the highest care is taken to make the information contained in Foam Magazine as accurate as possible, neither the publishers nor the authors can accept any responsibility for damage, of any nature, resulting from the use of this information. Distribution:
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