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#18 / displaced Henk Wildschut + Roland Bonaparte & Friedrich Carel Hisgen + Jim Goldberg + Juul Hondius + Dana Popa

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spring 2009 / #18

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Henk Wildschut Roland Bonaparte & Friedrich Carel Hisgen Jim Goldberg Juul Hondius Dana Popa

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foam magazine #18 / displaced

editorial / content

Editorial

Marloes Krijnen, director Foam_Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam

The reports appear in the newspapers daily, often no more than items touched on in passing: a boat carrying immigrants has sunk off the Canary Islands, the situation in the overcrowded reception centres on the tiny Italian island of Lampedusa is appalling and no longer tenable, the Thai navy has abandoned a group of Burmese refugees on the high seas, the hunting down of illegal immigrants along the US-Mexican border continues. On a more abstract level there is the constant public debate about how to relate to ethnic minorities, the pros and cons of a multicultural society and the question of who is an undesirable alien and who is actually regarded as enriching society. The conclusion that the world’s population has been set adrift as never before seems inescapable.

The migration of thousands of people from one place to another, from one continent to another, as a result of advancing globalisation constitutes a worldwide problem to which no answer has yet been found. There are innumerable reasons for giving up family, friends, one’s own customs and culture and a familiar landscape in exchange for an uncertain future: hope of economic advancement, a bid to break free of repression or to escape hunger, war and violence. Depending on the situation, the displaced may be called refugees, asylum-seekers, immigrants, illegals or interlopers. Their status is uncertain, like their future.

In this issue of Foam Magazine we present portfolios by five photographers who are attempting to relate to this immense and complex set of problems. Instead of primarily documentary photography or photojournalistic reportage, we have chosen work that, through its imagery and its form of presentation, seeks out new ways to address an audience, ways that do justice both to the scale of the problem and to some extremely personal, often tragic stories.

We are particularly pleased with the double portfolio that Jim Goldberg has put together exclusively for Foam Magazine. Closely bound up with a bigger, ongoing project on immigration that Goldberg has been working on since 2004, he has compiled a portfolio with the title How I Dream. Dutch photographer Henk Wildschut is represented here by the series Shelters, showing the improvised tents in France, Greece and Spain in which illegal immigrants take shelter on the way to their final destination: England. The Republic of Moldova is known as one of the poorest countries in Europe and as a place where women and children run a high risk of falling into the hands of people smugglers. Dana Popa presents a large number of deeply affecting images showing victims of sex trafficking. In his portfolio Indivisuals, Juul Hondius plays an intriguing game with stereotypes, with correct and incorrect assumptions, and with the categorical nature of our perception. Through a combination of documentary and staged photography, Hondius focuses on the mental states of people on their way to unknown destinations. No less extraordinary is the historical portfolio showing representatives of the native population of Surinam as exhibited in 1883 during the first Colonial Exhibition in Amsterdam. French anthropologist Roland Bonaparte organized photo sessions, calling in local photographer Friedrich Carel Hisgen.

In addition to the portfolios and accompanying texts on the theme Displaced, this issue includes several familiar features, such as an interview with a photography specialist – this time Francis Hodgson, Head of Photograhs at Sotheby’s London – and of course our regular feature On My Mind…, a book review section and an overview of the exhibitions that will be held at Foam this spring.

Contents

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On My Mind…

images selected by Mikhael Subotzky ~ Wim van Sinderen ~ Yossi Milo ~ Carroll Bogert ~ Sarah Thornton ~ Jörg Colberg

Pages 016 – 021

Interview with Francis Hodgson

On Collecting Contemporary and Beyond

by Anne-Celine Jaeger

Pages 022 – 026

Displaced:

Theme introduction

As Long as the Horror Continues

by Marcel Feil

Pages 027 – 034

portfolio: Henk Wildschut ~ Shelters

text by Max Houghton

Pages 035 – 054

portfolio: Roland Bonaparte & Friedrich Carel Hisgen

~ Les habitants de Suriname à Amsterdam

text by Linda Roodenburg

Pages 055 – 074

portfolio: Jim Goldberg ~ How I Dream

text by Sophie Wright

Pages 075 – 110

portfolio: Juul Hondius ~ Indivisuals

text by Ilse van Rijn

Pages 111 – 130

portfolio: Dana Popa ~ Not Natasha – The Missing

text by Mark Sealy

Pages 131 – 150

Photobooks by Sebastian Hau

Pages 152 – 155

~ Foam_Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam

N Y Perspectives – Amsterdam discovered

by NY photographers

Foam Exhibition Programme

Pages 159 – 172

Je a n ba p t ist e k a-ja-roe

Henk Wildschut ~ Shelters Near the harbour in Calais, the area known as ‘The Jungle’ is actually a lightly wooded scrubland, hiding many improvised shelters built by illegal immigrants. They often travelled thousands of miles to get there, only to find that their El Dorado didn’t exist after all. Henk Wildschut photographed the shabby shelters made of blankets, plastic and cardboard – the most simple visual symbol of this human crisis.

A LIH A-k a m a

Roland Bonaparte & Friedrich Carel Hisgen ~ Les inhabitants de Suriname à Amsterdam In 1883 the first Colonial Exhibition was organised in Amsterdam, where 28 representatives from the three main groups of Surinam inhabitants were exhibited live for half a year. French anthropologist Prince Roland Bonaparte, grandson of one of Napoleon’s brothers, organised photography sessions with all these participants. He hired the local photographer Friedrich Carel Hisgen to photograph them to his instructions.

Jim Goldberg ~ How I Dream

Juul Hondius ~ Indivisuals

This double-sized portfolio, made up entirely of foldout pages, has been compiled by Jim Goldberg especially for Foam Magazine. It presents a selection of images from his most ambitious project to date which entwines the stories of migrants seeking refuge in Europe. In his distinctive mix of photography and text, presented here in a multi-layered and dynamic installation, Goldberg documents the harsh and frequently heartbreaking realities of displacement.

Indivisuals comprises a cross-section of Hondius’ photographic oeuvre.

The individual photos are inspired by media images, well-known representations of refugees, civil wars or the treatment of AIDS. Hondius’ photographs all share a carefully considered composition of people on their way to an unknown destination. The concentrated, staring figures never look you in the eye; their expressionless faces invite the viewer to project his own thoughts, desires and dreams.

Dana Popa ~ Not Natasha – The Missing The Missing is the most recent development of Dana Popa’s ongoing documentary project Not Natasha. Even though trafficked girls still form the hub of the work, Dana Popa now focuses on the families who were left behind. Families who have been waiting for years, often in vain, for the girls to come home or give any sign of life.

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foam magazine #18 / displaced Six well-known figures from the cultural world selected an image that has recently been on their minds...

On My Mind...

Awake 1, Floor 48 Flat 03, Ponte City, 2009 © Mikhael Subotzky and Patrick Waterhouse, courtesy Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg

Mikhael Subotzky As I write, I am working on a major new project in collaboration with Patrick Waterhouse. The project explores a single building in central Johannesburg. Ponte City is an iconic building that can be seen from Soweto to Sandton and everywhere between. It is a building surrounded by myth and a certain removal from reality – it was built in 1976 to appeal to young upwardly mobile whites in a year that was marked by the Soweto uprisings. In the 1980s and 1990s the building’s decline became symbolic of the decline of central Johannesburg. Ponte became notorious for suicides, Nigerian drug-dealers, and prostitution in the underground carparks. But our interviews with residents of the time give us the feeling that the building’s decline was mixed with just as much mythology as its initial aspirations.

As a part of our attempts to evoke the building’s mythology, we have been collecting a variety of archival materials to complement our photographs. Many apartments in the building were recently abandoned as developers moved in with ambitious new plans to revitalise the building. The developers went bankrupt, and the empty flats were robbed

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and vandalised with possessions and paperwork strewn all over the floors. Amongst these scenes, we found neatly stacked copies of Awake! magazine. A whole series of them were present in both English and French versions with subtly different covers. The attempts of these duplicate versions to cross cultural and racial divides were both comical and poignant. In a building which is so marked by the ambiguity between its fact and fiction, the double staged reality and identity pandering of these images evoked something of its real and imagined history – and the history of religion and colony in this part of the world. Ponte City is currently home to people from many countries in Africa with very different identities. A resident recently told us that Ponte is ‘Africa in one building’.

They would have to make many more versions of their magazine covers to have any relevance in this building, in Johannesburg, in 2009. + Mikhael Subotzky is a South African photographer based in Johannesburg. He was accepted as a Nominee by Magnum Photos in 2007. His first book Beaufort West, published by Chris Boot in 2008, received broad international acclaim.

foam magazine #18 / displaced On My Mind...

Gerard Petrus Fieret, The Hague – 14 June 2004 © Helena van der Kraan, private collection

Wim van Sinderen A portrait of an old man. He isn’t looking at the photographer, but staring into space. He doesn’t seem to be present – his thoughts are elsewhere.

Still, there he sits, serenely absent. As if he’s fully aware that at this moment his portrait is being taken: very consciously looking as unaware as possible. Photographers often dislike this, such a vain pose, while they wanted nothing more than to get a snapshot. The photographer prefers to be able to catch someone, to capture people when they’re exuberant or broken-hearted. Or simply angry. But vain posers are always on their guard. They prefer not to show their emotions. Often they are politicians, royals, writers or other types of celebrities. They sit smugly tucked into their everlasting sovereignty. So, is this old man somebody?

Certainly he is: he’s the great Dutch artist, poet and photographer Gerard Petrus Fieret, at the opening of his retrospective in June 2004, held in the The Hague Museum of Photography in honour of his 80th birthday. He died on 22 January 2009, at the age of 85, three days after his birthday.

From 1965 to 1975, Fieret was a deserving street photographer and would never have portrayed someone in this manner. His photos were

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shot surreptitiously, from the hip: raw and unrefined. Only certain young ladies were invited to pose before Fieret’s camera, preferably a mixture of innocent and erotic at the same time. And then it still was a candidcamera portrait. But all photographers are not alike. And thus the photo above is decidedly not a ‘Fieret’, but a genuine ‘Helena van der Kraan’.

She knows how to capture her subjects like unflappable monuments in chaotic and cluttered situations, always in available light and then printed on soft and now-unavailable baryte paper which is more than 30 years old. As already stated, each photographer is different. And that is the wealth that photography offers us. + Wim van Sinderen is Senior Curator of the Hague Museum of Photography and keeper of the photographic collection of the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag.

foam magazine #18 / displaced On My Mind...

Charles, Vasa, Minnesota, 2002 © Alec Soth

Yossi Milo In 2002 I received a very special, self-published copy of the book Sleeping by the Mississippi from Alec Soth. As I flipped through the pages, the portraits – such as Crystal, Patrick, Lenny and Sunshine – were especially resonant for me. Among all of the portraits, however, Charles, Vasa, Minnesota, 2002, stands out as one of the most iconic and enigmatic images from the series, and it has stayed on my mind throughout the past few years.

The ambiguity of the location, of who this person is, and what exactly is going on has been an endless source of curiosity for me. Where is Charles standing in relation to his house? Why is he dressed like an aviator or a mechanic? Even Charles’ mood is unclear, as his expression is obscured by a wooly beard and the reflection in his glasses.

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This photograph also raises questions about the extent of Alec’s involvement with the composition and with the scene. Did the situation happen naturally, or was Charles directed to hold the planes to form a perfectly composed and dynamic photograph?

That these questions remain unanswered is what makes Charles such a powerful image. + Yossi Milo is the owner of Yossi Milo Gallery in New York City. The gallery specializes in contemporary photography and works on paper.

foam magazine #18 / displaced On My Mind...

Police detain a number of Jean-Pierre Bemba supporters in Kinshasa the day after the runoff election results were announced declaring Joseph Kabila the winner, November 16, 2006 © 2006 Marcus Bleasdale/VII

Carroll Bogert At Human Rights Watch, where I work, we see a lot of difficult pictures and read a lot of tragic reports, every day. But this image really sticks with me; I can’t shake it. I think it’s the proximity of the boot and the face.

The boot recalls for me every Communist dictator, every rebel warlord, every brutal cop – every injustice that drove me into this business in the first place. And the face – the face is what keeps me here, the rictus of fear in his expression.

I remember working with the Congo researcher for Human Rights Watch, interviewing witnesses who could provide information about warlords getting rich off the international sale of gold from eastern Congo. One witness was so nervous, he could hardly speak above a whisper, although we were well-hidden in an anonymous hotel room with a lookout outside the door. Finally, after a long silence, he croaked out, ‘J’ai

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peur’, a simple phrase that nearly broke my heart. He might be murdered for telling what he knew.

Tens of thousands, millions of people had died already from the result of war in Congo. But here was one man. We provided him what protection we could; we wrote the report on gold mining in eastern Congo; we stopped two international companies from buying gold from abusive warlords. We do what we can. In this picture, a supporter of Jean-Pierre Bemba is being rounded up by cops on the day after Congo’s first democratic election in 46 years. He is just one man, one of so many. We do what we can. + Carroll Bogert is Associate Director of Human Rights Watch and a former foreign correspondent for Newsweek magazine in China, Southeast Asia, the Soviet Union and New York.

foam magazine #18 / displaced On My Mind...

On the Terrace Garden, Joe and Rosalee Segal with Cosmos Altrosanguineus, 2004 © Scott McFarland

Sarah Thornton Look at her. A woman of a certain age who sticks to the fashions of her heydey. A fading beauty who keeps her poise. She makes me smile. She’s a rose that refuses to wilt. A violet that won’t shrink. She’s a one-woman argument for the value of vanity and pride.

And the bloom to which she directs her gaze… Is it actually black?

Or just a mournful crimson? I turned forty semi-recently. I study her much as she contemplates it. Ageing is one of the many revenges of nature against culture.

What about him? He’s a property developer who helped build the Vancouver skyline in the background. He’s finished a day or a life’s hard work, so he exits stage left, passing white lilies that rival his height.

Photography is always about time, but this picture, entitled On the Terrace Garden, Joe and Rosalee Segal with Cosmos Altrosanguineus,

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seems more specifically to be about passing years – birthdays, anniversaries, annuals, perennials.

Scott McFarland, the artist who made this photograph, told me that the couple never managed to pose at the same time. The businessman and his wife come from different negatives. So the space between them isn’t simply a moment. It’s more like a duration of decades. + Sarah Thornton is a non-fiction writer and sociologist of culture who lives in London. Her new book, Seven Days in the Art World, is published by Granta in Britain and by De Bezige Bij in the Netherlands.

foam magazine #18 / displaced On My Mind...

Unknown photographer, author’s collection

Jörg Colberg One of my pet peeves has long been that often vernacular photography reduces people to being freaks or weirdos. I like looking at old photographs, but I am not very interested in seeing whether the people in them were wearing odd clothes or makeup or were behaving strangely.

For me, photography is about people – what they do or did, who they are or want to be. When I look at a portrait I always try to ‘read’ it, to search for hints of the subject’s personality.

Tintypes offer a particularly interesting kind of vernacular photo­ graphy, especially since they’re so easy to find – right now, there are almost one thousand eBay auctions offering such images. I started to collect tintypes a while ago, and I always look for interesting portraits (conveniently, other collectors are not interested in most of the tintypes I’m bidding on – and vice versa).

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Tintypes are very beautiful, despite or actually because of their imperfections. They are often scratched, partly out of focus, and unevenly exposed. Since most tintypes are small (the images above are reproduced in their original sizes) and one-of-a-kind objects, looking at a tintype is a unique experience, very different from looking at other types of photography – Polaroid images excluded. + Jörg Colberg is the founder and editor of the weblog Conscientious, about fineart photography (and more).

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foam magazine #18 / displaced

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~ As Long as the Horror Continues ~

foam magazine #18 / displaced

theme introduction

by Marcel Feil ~ curator Foam_Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam

The famous red light district ranks as one of the biggest tourist attractions of Amsterdam. Day in day out, throngs of tourists from all parts of the world trek past the prostitutes who sit in full view of everyone at the windows of their little parlours. Red neon lights out front are turned on to indicate that the lady in question is available. For many tourists this is ultimate proof of the uniquely liberal climate that prevails in Dutch society.

Little wonder that when Amsterdam comes to promote itself, it still makes grateful use of the centuries old tradition of open prostitution that was first tolerated for many years and now, since the lifting of the ban on brothels in 2000, has even been legalized.

The image of an innocent, almost folkloric phenomenon in the atmospheric and convivial district known as the Wallen is utterly undermined, however, by a recent report published by the Dutch National Crime Squad. The chilling figures in the document Glamorous Facade. An inventory of human trafficking in the prostitution sector as licensed since the year 2000 are unambiguous and describe a different, far more macabre reality. The report concludes that no fewer than 50 to 90 per cent of prostitutes working on the Wallen in Amsterdam are there involuntarily.

Depending which estimate of the number of window girls you accept, this means that on an annual basis between 4,000 and 7,200 women are forced to sit in the windows. In Amsterdam alone. Behind these disturbing figures lies an even more horrifying reality: the reality of trafficking in women, of people smuggling, threats, extortion, indescribable violence and forced abortions. A reality of fear, of reluctance to report crimes and of failing controls. No one can say for certain what the precise figures are, hence the wide margin between the lowest and highest estimates.

The figures for this single world-famous prostitution district raise the most awful concerns about the situation in other countries. Why would it be any better there? They point to the huge problem of human trafficking,

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which is often very hard to investigate. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), the UN agency that concerns itself with, among other things, the battle against human trafficking, uses a clear-cut definition: ‘Human trafficking is a crime against humanity. It involves an act of recruiting, transporting, transferring, harbouring or receiving a person through a use of force, coercion or other means, for the purpose of exploiting them. (‌) Exploitation shall include, at a minimum, the exploitation of the prostitution of others or other forms of sexual exploitation, forced labour or services, slavery or practices similar to slavery, servitude or the removal of organs.’ In essence human trafficking is a form of modern slavery, a conscious exploitation and abuse of the vulnerable position the victim is in, through violence, intimidation and deception. And although slavery has officially been abolished in every country in the world, it still exists today, in almost every country in the world, whether the country of origin of the victim or perpetrator, the transit country, or the country of destination and therefore of the abuse. It is difficult nevertheless to give any firm figures. Of course this can be put down in part to the illegal and therefore clandestine character of human trafficking, but it is undoubtedly also due to the extremely diverse ways in which countries deal with the problem and prioritise the battle against it. Still, there is an increasing realization that the problem is worldwide and rapidly growing. And with it the figures that show how sizeable it is.

Investigations in 66 countries have shown that more than two thirds of all victims are women and 13 per cent are girls. Which is almost the same as the percentage of those confirmed to be the victims of trafficking who are men (12%), although there is a generally accepted view that with men it is harder to tell whether they fall under the definition used by the UNODC. This can be explained to a large extent by the fact that at least The photos that accompany this text are from the Border Film Project.

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~ When is the camera laid aside and a helping hand held out? ~ 79% of all victims of human trafficking are exploited mainly for sex, and are therefore more likely to be women. This form of exploitation is simpler to detect and easier to prove than, for example, forced labour.

Another aspect that makes the extent of the problem hard to define is the grey area between ‘pure’ forms of trafficking and those that involve an agreement entered into more or less voluntarily – human smuggling for purposes of illegal immigration, for example. It would be a serious misjudgement of the essentials of human trafficking to regard it simply as a form of illegal immigration. Although both phenomena can be seen as undesirable consequences of globalisation, and although both traffickers and human smugglers take advantage of the desire people have to improve their lot by building a new life elsewhere, the differences are fundamental. Human smuggling consists primarily of enabling and assisting people to enter a country illegally. The violation of a specific country’s territorial integrity is the main objective. Of course it is possible that a smuggled person will ultimately be exploited, for example by being forced to hand over more and more money to continue the voyage and slowly but surely becoming utterly dependent on a shady network of smugglers – with all the attendant consequences. If the ‘voluntary’ agreement between smuggler and smuggled is the result of deception, if it involves higher and higher costs or eventually leads to forced labour, then this too is defined as ‘trafficking’. It is hard to say exactly when the one tips over into the other.

For the average citizen, illegal immigration is far more visible and therefore to many, however unfairly perhaps, it is a much more acute problem than human trafficking. On television we regularly see images of little boats packed with people who have left the African continent in an attempt to reach the Canary Islands, the Spanish mainland or the tiny Italian island of Lampedusa. For many of those on board it will be the first time they have seen the sea. The dangers of the crossing – an overcrowded old sloop or untrustworthy intermediaries – are often not realistically assessed, and anyhow seem preferable to choosing to stay behind. But choice rarely comes into it. The promise of a new beginning, of arrival in the European Union, the dream paradise where everything will come right, and the privations endured in getting even that far make all choices theoretical.

People have no choice. They go, one way or another. And if they fail and survive the attempt, then they will set out again. There is no way back.

It is mostly the tragic failures that reach a Western audience: images of barely seaworthy boats crammed with dehydrated, famished people alongside those who have already died, of bodies washed up on beaches, stared at by Western holidaymakers. Images of a group of Chinese immigrants who suffocated in a hermetically sealed truck, abandoned at

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Rotterdam harbour by its driver, who had fled. Or the images of overcrowded detention centres, of abuses that lead to protests, both by the people staying there and by local residents who gather to confront their impotent governments.

But the evidence of unprecedented, worldwide migration can also be found close to home, in the kitchen of a cheap restaurant round the corner, or indeed an expensive restaurant, in bakeries, in the fields, in greenhouses, on the assembly line, in construction, in private houses, on ships, in the cleaning trade, in night shops and abattoirs. Immigrants, legal and illegal, paid and unpaid, work, whether voluntarily or not, in almost every sector of society.

Politics is relatively powerless in the face of this worldwide and potentially explosive issue. The problem is too extensive to regulate and it oversteps national boundaries. The process of international political consultation, consensus and compromise, followed by lawmaking and an integrated plan of attack is simply too slow. Human smugglers and traffickers exploit existing differences between national legislations and the different levels of priority given to tackling waves of migration. For a transit country it may be simpler to turn a blind eye, knowing that ‘our’ problem will quickly become that of a neighbouring country.

And so a complex network of invisible lines criss-crosses the map of the world – lines that stand for routes unknown to us but followed by thousands of people on their way to an unknown future: from all parts of Africa, via West Africa, through the Sahara, to Mauritania, Morocco or Tunisia, where, or so they hope, a boat will be waiting; from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq, via Turkey to Greece, across the Balkans, to Calais on the French coast, on the way to Britain; or from South and Central America, through Mexico to the immensely long south-western border of the United States.

The only real solution, however utopian it may sound, is to remove the reasons why people leave their families, loved ones, friends, languages, cultures and religions, their customs and their landscapes. Bitter poverty, hunger, violence, repression, vast differences in prosperity, coupled with a growing awareness that life is better elsewhere, are the motives behind the decision, inconceivable to us, to leave everything and everybody behind, probably for good, and to place your fate, your dignity and your identity in the hands of others.

What is the signigificance and meaning of photography in an issue that affects us all, directly or indirectly? What can we do? Certainly photography can record the often appalling circumstances that have given people the impulse to leave. It can report on the fate of the displaced. Such photos can and will be moving, even heartrending. But heartrending photos have been made before, terrible pictures of the consequences of famine, military violence, cruelty and poverty. Innumerable pleading eyes have looked into the camera, conscious of us, the viewers, and have made a moral appeal to us to ensure they will not have been photographed for nothing. But hunger still exists and images of the violence of war still take up a large part of the news that we see. How great are the power and the impotence of photography, of photojournalism, or more generally of journalism in the broadest sense of the word?

In her famous 1977 book On Photography, Susan Sontag was markedly sceptical about photography’s ability to use images of human suffering as a truly mobilizing force. She even went so far as to claim that images have an anaesthetizing effect and that photographic images of suffering corrupt our consciousness by presenting terrible events as less than real, reducing our capacity for empathy as a result. Certainly, a photographic image cannot be regarded as equal to that which it portrays.

The photo represents a new reality of its own, one of a totally different order from the reality to which it refers. The photo can be looked at, can cause horror and emotion, and then be put away. In a society where the media are so influential and the photographic image ubiquitous, an

foam magazine #18 / displaced

theme introduction

awkward or unwanted image can be quickly laid aside; we can simply turn our backs and revert to our everyday concerns. But that does not make the reality to which the photo refers go away. Hunger and poverty do not vanish simply because we avert our gaze. In her later book Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), Sontag retracted her earlier cynical view to some extent. It is not possible to ration horror. And since the horror continues to exist, it must go on being shown. She also came to realize that people do not grow accustomed to pictures of horror by virtue of being subjected to a huge flood of images. Think of the impact of that one photo from Abu Ghraib, published in the media not long after Sontag’s book, which told a story that had already been known for some time. It took that iconic image of a man with a hood over his head to mobilize society. For Sontag the power of the image became all the more clear during the siege of Sarajevo, when it turned out that many residents of the city actually wanted their terrible plight to be recorded on film; the victims were interested in the representation of their own suffering.

This is reminiscent of an anecdote told by Dutch photographer Henk Wildschut, whose portfolio is included in this issue – with photos of the improvised, shabby shelters built by illegal immigrants during their journey to England. Often dozens of immigrants, mainly Iraqis and Afghanis, found themselves at a specific place awaiting what was to happen next. Wildschut, blond and with a camera in his hand, was regularly asked who he was and why he was there. Experience taught him not to say he was a photographer. To the immigrants a photographer was someone in a position to tell a story to the world. And therefore their story.

Wildschut’s standard often response was to say he was an artist. They left him in peace.

autonomous and documentary images, of fact and fiction. Today’s documentary photography is vibrant, crosses boundaries and speaks a universal language. For that very reason it is extremely well placed to give visual expression to an immense and complex problem such as the displacement of large parts of the world’s population, in forms that not only find an audience but have an ability to affect that audience. +

On Border Film Project Aaron Schuman, American photographer, editor, lecturer and critic based in the UK, explains how this project came about. See also www.borderfilmproject.com and the book Border Film Project published by Abrams in 2007.

Every day, approximately 3,000 people leave Mexico with the intention of illegally entering the United States via the country’s vast southwestern border. Mostly, they cross this treacherous terrain on foot, and during the long trek they risk serious injury, overexposure and dehydration; an average of 400 migrants are found dead along the border each year. Meanwhile, all along the American side of this vast frontier the US Border Patrol (now part of the Department of Homeland Security) tries in vain to police the expansive, 2,000 mile long stretch of exposed wilderness.

In recent years they have been assisted by a band of volunteers who call themselves Minutemen. These ‘concerned and patriotic’ Americans patrol the border in their own vehicles and free time looking for ‘illegals’; their ‘Standard Operating Procedure’ is to immediately contact the Border Patrol whenever they see anything suspicious.

In the summer of 2005, three friends who had recently graduated from

university – Rudy Adler, Victoria Criado and Brett Huneycutt – arranged to meet

Indirectly this touches upon a dilemma faced sooner or later by many concerned photographers: at what point does the appeal to his or her own humanity and feelings of empathy become so powerful that the photographer ceases to exist and makes way for the human being behind his professionalism. Rather melodramatically: when is the camera laid aside and a helping hand held out? The camera is probably kept working in most cases by the conviction that the best kind of help is offered by maintaining a professional distance and doing what you came to do, by not allowing yourself to be sucked into someone else’s tale of woe but above all keeping your eye on the story you want to tell as a photographer – concerned, engaged, sincere, but above all critical.

This is a struggle between ethics and aesthetics that unquestionably influences the search for the form in which the story needs to be told.

Images not only tell stories about people, they also have to be told to people, to an audience that is mostly Western, has enjoyed higher education and is familiar with visual information determined to a great degree by a specific social context. To find an appropriate visual form, the photographer must pursue a strategy that takes account of the social reality within which the images function. A coarse-grained black-andwhite series will often no longer suffice.

in Arizona, in order to make a documentary film exploring both the debates and communities that surround illegal immigration along the US-Mexico border. Adler and Huneycutt grew up together in the Southwest, and had first-hand experience with immigration throughout their childhood; Huneycutt and Criado met at Boston College whilst pursuing degrees in economics and political science, and had both focused their studies on development and immigration issues related to Latin America. Several weeks into gathering footage for their film, the three friends encountered a family in Mexico that profoundly changed the direction of the project and made them think: ‘Maybe that’s what the debate has been lacking – an actual account of immigration through the eyes of the men and women on the ground.’

Adler, Hunneycutt and Criado put down their own cameras, established the

Border Film Project (BFP), and began to recruit both migrants and Minutemen. In Mexico, they visited a number of migrant shelters, humanitarian organizations and aid outposts, distributing ‘camera-packages’ that contained: a disposable camera with instructions, a pre-addressed stamped envelope, illustrations of what US mailboxes looked like, and a gift card from Wal-Mart with $0 credit – they explained to the participants that when the camera was returned to the BFP, credit would be donated directly to the sender’s own personal card. In Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, and California they visited Minutemen camps and observations sites, handing out the same ‘camera-packages’, only with a gift card from Shell instead of Wal-Mart, as the Minutemen’s greatest expense is petrol for their endless patrols. Once they felt that

The tumultuous and extraordinarily interesting developments that documentary photography has been through in recent years are illustrative of the need many photographers feel to find new forms of presentation and new strategies for addressing an audience – but also the need for a form that does justice to a society that has become extremely complex and that has little room for unequivocal opinions and idealistic notions. So we see experiments with multimedia presentations, with intriguing interplays of text and image, with the combining of personal material and vernacular photography, and with the blending of

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enough packages had been distributed, the three friends returned home and waited.

Over the course of two years, 73 cameras were eventually returned – 38 from

migrants, 35 from Minutemen – containing nearly 2,000 images from both sides of the border. Due to both the low caliber of the cameras and the photographers’ inexperience with the medium – some of the migrant photographers had never even used a camera before – the photographs that they received were, aesthetically speaking, extremely rough and rather pedestrian. Yet precisely because of their visual crudity, a real sense of honesty and sincerity comes through in the pictures, and the remarkable complexity of the situation on both sides of the border is quietly revealed.

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Francis Hodgson On Collecting Contemporary and Beyond interview by Anne-Celine Jaeger photographs by Anton Corbijn

With his long-standing experience of both the cultural and commercial aspects of the photographic medium, Francis Hodgson became Head of Photographs at Sotheby’s London in 2005. He met with Anne-Celine Jaeger in London, where they talked about his working practice at one of the world’s biggest auction houses. Mr Hodgson explains how decisions are made about what to sell at auctions. He elaborates on the need for photographic scholarship and talks about developments in the markets of both photography and contemporary art. Anton Corbijn photographed him especially for this interview.

What does your job as Head of Photographs at Sotheby’s entail?

We run a minimum of two sales per year, which are entirely devoted to photographs. We might do up to two or three other ‘single owner sales’, that is to say, when a single collection is offered up to the market, and we are also a funnelling system for photographs going to other places within Sotheby’s, as each photograph we handle is also part of a different category; contemporary art, typography, Islamic Art etc.

On a day-to-day basis, we arrange for collectors who want to sell material to sell it through us. That is the buying part of our job – though of course we don’t actually buy the pictures. And on the selling side, we market those pictures through lots of different systems as well as we can to build up the price and to build a collecting nucleus. Clearly the core of our activity is getting things organised for the sale. The sales cata­ logue becomes the banister that guides people through the process of getting pictures out and sold. Part of my job is identifying, recognising and trying to make the best judgement about the objects themselves.

So on one level, we are serving our clients – both sellers and buyers – and trying to do our best for them. On another level, we are serving the world in which they operate, to make it easier, more profitable and more visible to trade and be interested in photographs.

Can you tell me how you go about researching artists and prints that are coming up for sale?

Because photography is still quite wrongly considered marginal, the scholarship is often lacking. It’s exceptionally rare to find a catalogue

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raisonné of a particular artist. If you are trading in 18th century engravings, or even in contemporary art, there is a whole back office of scholarship available. There is a huge amount of university-based work, but in photography that isn’t so. Photographic publishing tends to be in short print runs and with all due respect, not very scholarly. At Sotheby’s we often find we’re doing our own scholarship on the hop, which is fascinating but not entirely satisfactory as a market-making activity. Clearly, if we’re not quite sure until the moment whether something is a super picture, or a nearly super picture, we’ve got a problem. Scholarship in photography is much more rare than it ought to be.

So how do you stay abreast of what’s happening in the photographic world?

Like everybody else, I’m behind half the time. It’s very common for even a good photographer to have slipped off my radar. But I go to trade fairs; I go to as many exhibitions as I possibly can. I travel to see customers who are either selling or buying, and while abroad I also make use of the trip to see as much artwork as possible. But it’s perfectly possible for you to name ten photographers of whom I’ve not heard of six. But in a funny way I quite like that. Remember also that auctioneers aren’t supposed to be cutting edge. We are the secondary market. That’s what it’s called and that’s what we do. For something to properly cross my radar from an auctioneering point of view, it’s got to have been dealt with by a gallery sufficiently that there is still demand for it to be resold.

Therefore, it won’t ever be the youngest emerging talent.

Would a young emerging artist by definition never be part of a sale at Sotheby’s?

It depends where you place the word ‘emerging’. A really young, cutting edge artist would never be because they don’t have a place in the market place yet. We can’t take a brave risk and put twenty pictures in by somebody nobody’s heard of. On the other hand, we can make a judgement that somebody who is insufficiently well known, deserves to be in the sale. For example, we put Mitra Tabrizian’s Man Falling on the cover of the Photographs auction catalogue in November 2008. She is a relatively emerging, English-based, Iranian artist. She had a show at the Tate in 2008 and recently showed in a commercial gallery. She had one lot in the sale with a £ 15,000 starting price and it sold for about £ 18,750. Mitra isn’t really known to the collecting world, but she is clearly an interesting artist. >

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~ I think photography is the home to an awful lot of lazy thinking. ~ Can you talk me through the sequence of events from someone coming to you with a print to you offering it up for sale at auction? What determines the selection process?

There is always an element of curation in a sale. You can’t have things competing against each other. So you can’t have the same picture in a good version and in a bad version. We try to get a fair spread of 19th and 20th century material, as well as modernist etc. But we don’t always succeed. If our collectors don’t want to sell at a particular time we might have gaps.

Clearly we’re also looking for value as Sotheby’s are looking to make money themselves. We’re essentially a percentage-based business. But we’re also looking for prime examples of things, as we only ever have 200 lots. It’s not right for photographers and it’s not right for the market to have 100 mediocre pictures. It’s better to have one very good one. So there is an element of picking and choosing, where we will sometimes say to our clients, it’s a terrific picture but not terrific enough to make the sale. We also operate a sale threshold level of a minimum of £ 3,000 per lot. If things don’t reach that threshold they are not right for Sotheby’s.

What other criteria are you looking for?

Clearly at a base level, without being condescending, there is a cultural value and a commercial value. We do of course sell things which we personally can’t imagine having on our walls, but which are worth a great deal of money and that’s fine. In exactly the same way, we sometimes put someone into a sale where the artist is less well-known but where we think we might be helping to draw the attention of the market place to something which is undervalued and under-seen. There are lots of eminent photographers out there who have zero reputation in the auction market. That doesn’t mean their pictures aren’t any good, it means the secondary market phenomenon hasn’t heaved a comfortable sigh and said, ‘I can deal with that’. The transition from commercial to quote ‘art’ market is a very unmapped one.

Just think of the great, under-rated Erwin Blumenfeld, who became chief photographer at Condé Nast in New York. He was clearly a phenomenally adventurous and imaginative photographer, with roots in Dadaism and his practice in fashion photography. He was a teacher of both Irving Penn and Richard Avedon, but he has almost no presence in the auction market-place. That seems very peculiar.

As the first auction house to instigate regular sales of photographs in 1971, Sotheby’s sells all types, from salt prints and daguerreotypes to contemporary photographs – where is there currently the most interest and how much are these prints selling for?

Institutionally we’ve been considering whether we should abandon various old bits of photography for years. I don’t want to. My sense is that photography is a very broad church. I know that lots of people are rather hesitant about the 19th century market and even the early 20th century market, but my rationale for staying in it is this: when you look at the root

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impulse in collecting photographs, half of it is a real delight in the object itself. It’s because a daguerreotype has this most extraordinarily appealing surface that lots of people get sucked into photography. It’s rare for people to collect, say, pastels without being interested in pastels, but it’s not at all rare for people collecting photography to not even care whether they know the difference between a C-print or a cibachrome. I think on one level my role is to hang onto that scholarship and act as a fulcrum for those things to be seen and discussed. Every catalogue description we make has a tiny bit of indicative scholarship that these prints are objects as well as images. Ninety per cent of photography is about the images, but collectors are also interested in objects.

In terms of value, we just did the last of the sales from the great collection of Marie-Thérèse and André Jammes. He was a great French collector of 19th century material. The collection did astonishingly well. For example, we put a Felice Beato album of photographs documenting the aftermath of the Indian Mutiny at Lucknow up for sale at £50,000 and I think it sold for £96,500. To my amazement, if you were to plot a graph looking at the top 20 prices achieved in photography, it’s not as I might have expected solely contemporary pieces. The order, and I can’t do the exact order, but it would go something like: Richard Prince, then Edward Steichen, then Andreas Gursky then something else that’s old. And that’s a great comfort to me, that you can’t abandon one in favour of the other.

What advice do you give budding collectors?

I tend to say what I think. If people ask me point blank, I’ve often said, ‘I wouldn’t buy that’ and I’ve even said that about quite good things. Of course I’m also a salesman on behalf of my clients so I can’t talk down a piece which is going into our sale. But if people come to me asking about things to buy elsewhere, I’m in an odd position in that I’m quite neutral as regards the transaction. So while I’m building a relationship with that person, Sotheby’s becomes their art advisor rather than somebody else, which of course comes back in the end to be useful for us. It’s quite rare that people coming to an 18th century furniture fair don’t know their way around it. However, in photography, we have a staggeringly high proportion of purchasers in every sale who have not only never traded in photographs before, they’ve never been to Sotheby’s before. Some will be newly wealthy people who are coming to the only shared visual culture they have. It’s much easier to come to an auction of photography, which after all everybody knows something about, then it is to come to an auction of Scottish marine oils, let’s say.

But just because we see a photograph does that necessarily mean we understand it?

I do think that. It’s a hugely demotic medium. Even people who couldn’t dream of telling you André Kertész’ date of birth have seen the pictures, have understood them and have to some extent seen their effect elsewhere.

It’s perfectly normal for contemporary photographers to refer to previous photographic culture, to parody it, and to trust people’s allusive ability to get into it. The culture of photography is far more widespread than the poor cultural service that we give it. I feel the only art form that is similar to photography in terms of that broad understanding is architecture, where we all feel that we have something to say about how well a building works, even if we’ve never heard of Mies van der Rohe. Also, more than any other objects photographs change their overtones and undertones according to the context they are seen in. And of course our reactions to them change as well. It’s clear to me that an Irving Penn seen in the pages of Vogue in the 1950s is a completely different beast to an Irving Penn platinum print sold 40 years later. Most collectors start collecting because they think they know something about the subject being photographed and the process through which it became a two-dimensional representation does not frighten them. Quite a lot of photography buyers become buyers of other art forms later. It’s a gateway. >

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Are there any schools of photography which are growing old less gracefully than others? What kinds of trends are you seeing in the market place?

The things which I would have expected to become really major, have somehow not quite done it and that seems odd. Düsseldorf has done the opposite. The great hardcore, they are fantastic photographers, but then you have that sub-Düsseldorf world of not very original, not very well thought-out images, people like Boris Becker. There is no doubt in my mind that the neutral objective style of the greater Düsseldorf School is beginning to disappear. And that type of photography is being replaced by more personal, subjective work.

But on a more general level there is a missing two generations of British photographers who have not had the eminence that I would have expected when they were starting out. There is no effective national museum of photography and the various institutions which come closest to it have very different collecting and displaying intentions. As a result, there has not been a clear institutional leader in the UK to set the photographic agenda, and the effect of the development on the collecting community has been very serious. If you think in documentary terms of people like Chris Killip, Graham Smith, Edwin Smith, Ian McDonald, these are world-class photographers who have not had world-class appreci­ ation. They have not made the prices at auction; they have not got the galleries to support them sufficiently. Is that to do with the fear of their Britishness? I don’t know.

The other thing is landscape photography. All over Europe landscape photography has all but disappeared, except in subjective landscape, so you have people like Elger Esser of course, but the old-fashioned appreciation of the land, as being something which itself makes patterns – I haven’t seen that for years. And that’s rather odd.

Similarly, if you think of the great new topographics in the US… Think of Richard Misrach’s political landscapes – the Desert Cantos – this is great, great photography. It sells OK, even at auction, but that it should be worth multiples less than a Gursky seems to me not a fair reflection.

Why do you think this is the case?

To some extent the people who do well in the contemporary art market end of photography agree more or less explicitly to be identified by a rela­ tively strict number of variants. Many of them find a formula and rework it for a quite surprisingly long time, which is both quite proper and brilliantly successful but also sometimes a bit disappointing as it’s non-communicative. It used to be that great artworks were unique.

Now great artworks, in terms of their visibility in the market place and their value, are often the ones we most see. I offer you Warhol’s silkscreen series. It doesn’t matter whether you have a Liz or a Marilyn; you have a much-seen, almost branded piece of artwork. I think that applies to photographers too.

Take someone like Helmut Newton. I think his register of emotions is very slight. But the values have done amazingly well in the marketplace, and we certainly sell them. But he is somebody who limited the range of topics he felt fit for discussion as he grew older, until you got something almost like a national flag. The graphics and psychographics are endlessly repeatable with variants. It’s brilliant in terms of marketing. But if you look at early Newton, there’s doubt, exploration, hesitation, there are cul-de-sacs, red herrings… There’s a much more exciting photographic and artistic trajectory. Almost without exception, the great successes come when people restrict their output and control it, thereby making themselves known by some relatively small label.

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What effect do you think the current financial crisis will have on the art market, and in particular the photography market?

In the art market it’s already very clear. Anything which had too much heat put onto it, which was hyperbolised and over-sold is going to come crashing down to something with a so-called ‘realistic value’. In our contemporary art sale this February, you will see blue chip things hold their prices and that’s lovely. I really like the fact that we will come back to an appreciation of the best of the best and there will be value in that.

For some years now, in some sectors of the art market, there has not been much discrimination. There has been a scrum to get things, a bit like in the property market. But that’s gone and I’m delighted it’s gone.

There will be a return to connoisseurship.

The variant of that for the photographic market is that it was never actually that over-heated. Most photographic collectors have very extensive libraries of photographic books and they teach themselves, altering and developing their appreciation as they go along. It’s not that expensive compared to other art forms. So if prices are sensible, if new buyers are coming to the market-place and there are plenty of first-rate objects coming out, I don’t think the photographic market is going to be that badly affected because it’s the most demotic art form we have.

What makes a great photograph?

It has something to do with the photographer’s ability to express him or herself. If you’ve got nothing to say, then say nothing. It’s not really about f-stops and technical perfection. It’s about the photographer testing what the viewer already knows, being confident not to say the same again, but adding a bit. Take a picture of a car, lit by 40 lights for an ad campaign, that ad might be a great picture of a car but it won’t tell you what the photographer thought about the car. I think it’s hugely import­ ant for photography students to have knowledge of the history of photo­ graphy, to know what’s gone before. It’s shocking how so many students expect to be considered artists, whilst being completely illiterate in their own art form. I think photography is the home to an awful lot of lazy thinking. It’s not enough to have a great idea. If I’m going to spend 30 seconds looking at a picture, I want to meet you. I want to hear what you’ve got to say. When I see a picture that tells me what the photographer thought, suddenly I’m his willing listener. +

Francis Hodgson wrote about photography for various journals including the Literary Review and the Spectator in the 1980s. Later he became head of Print Sales at the Photographers’ Gallery in London. During the dot.com boom, Hodgson worked at Eyestorm putting photographs up for sale on the web. Later, he became creative director of the stock library Photonica, where he managed to change the perception of the kind of photography that was deemed possible to sell in a commercial context.

Hodgson was also the director of various galleries, including one he founded himself, called Zwemmer Fine Photographs.

Anne-Celine Jaeger is a British based journalist and critic. Most recently she wrote Image Makers, Image Takers: The Essential Guide to Photography by Those in the Know (Thames & Hudson, 2007), a collection of interviews with some of the world’s most established photographers as well as other professionals from the world of photography. She has written for many publications, including The Guardian, the London Sunday Times and Wallpaper* as well as Süddeutsche Zeitung and Du magazine.

Anton Corbijn is a Dutch photographer, mostly known for his portraits of musicians and other artists. He also directs music videos and shorts, designs stages and is a graphic designer. His first feature film Control, about the life of Joy Division frontman Ian Curtis, premiered in 2007 and was awarded widely, including several British Independent Film Awards, and prizes at the international filmfestivals of Cannes, Chicago, Edinburgh and Hamburg. In 2008 the book In Control was published by Schirmer/Mosel, a visual diary of the making of the film.

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Henk Wildschut Shelters

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Henk Wildschut

List of works (in order of appearance): 1 San Clemente, Spain, September 2007 2 Calais, France, February 2006 3 Calais, France, February 2009 4 Calais, France, February 2006 5 San Clemente, Spain, September 2007 6 Calais, France, February 2009 7 Patras, Greece, November 2008 8 Calais, France, January 2006 9 Calais, France, February 2006

All images © Henk Wildschut

Henk Wildschut (NL, 1967) studied at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague. He has exhibited his work in Amsterdam, Sydney, Fotofestival Naarden and The Hague, among other places. In addition to many selfinitiated, long-term projects Wildschut has photographed for Dutch magazines including Het Parool, Vrij Nederland and Volkskrant Magazine and for numerous design and communications agencies. He has made series on dock labourers, illegal immigrants, running people, choirs as well as many individual portraits of well-known Dutch politicians like Geert Wilders, Prime Minister Balkenende and the Amsterdam mayor Job Cohen. Characteristic of Wildschut’s work is a contemplative and often distant view on the people and situations he photographs which lends a balance and monumental quality to his photographs that incite the viewer to further reflect on the subject. He has published two wellreceived photobooks with fellow photographer Raimond Wouda. For Sandrien La Paz, published in 2003, Wouda and Wildschut photographed the Indian crew of the chemical tanker Sandrien La Paz, which had

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been detained in the Amsterdam harbour by the Dutch authorities for nearly two years, during which time the crew was not allowed to leave.

Wildschut and Wouda documented the deteriorating living conditions on board the ship. Their photographs helped to resolve this intolerable situation; soon after they were published the crew was allowed to go home. For the project A’DAM DOC.k, published in 2006, Wouda and Wildschut were commissioned by the Amsterdam City Archives to document Amsterdam’s harbour district. They followed the route of the North Sea Canal from the seaside all the way to Amsterdam’s western dockyards.

For more information see www.henkwildschut.com Max Houghton is co-editor of 8 magazine and course leader of MA Photojournalism at the University of Westminster. She is based in Brighton, UK, and writes about photography and the media for a variety of international publications.

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Pictures from the Jungle

by Max Houghton

‘Remember, remember always, that all of us… are descended from immigrants and revolutionists.’

Franklin D. Roosevelt Near the harbour in Calais, France, the area known as ‘The Jungle’ is actually a lightly wooded scrubland of some 500 square metres surrounded on most sides by houses. Its current inhabitants have travelled thousands of miles to get there, and their journey – they hope – is not yet over. Many didn’t make it this far. As is now well known, Calais is the final point of departure for the thousands of people who have fled their homeland – Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, or Eritrea, Somalia, Sudan or Nigeria – in search of a better life in England, the destination of their dreams. Yet their aspirations are thwarted at every turn by an invisible yet impenetrable legal infrastructure that makes them anything but welcome on English soil.

And so it is that these travellers, variously referred to as refugees, asylum seekers, illegal immigrants, or invaders (the latter is the term of choice for the far Right in England), must fashion places to live – I hesitate to call them homes – while they wait. Scattered among the ivy-clad trees rise makeshift tents of varying sizes and dimensions, each revealing something of the culture of its creator. It is such structures that Dutch photographer Henk Wildschut has chosen to utilise for the quiet yet charged documentary work he has been pursuing since late 2005, when he read an article about a Pakistani man who was stuck in Calais. His plight resonated with Wildschut for two reasons – he was stranded just 300 km from the photographer’s home in Amsterdam, and he triggered a strong visual memory. Wildschut had recently made a reportage for Médicins Sans Frontières from Pakistan in the aftermath of the 2005 earthquake, and remembered being struck by the image of tents used in the camps for displaced people which resembled the hi-tech tents used by camping enthusiasts from the West (they had been sent over in an international aid package). He also remembered the care taken even in the intolerable, freezing post-quake conditions, to position a flower at the ‘door’ of the tent in an attempt at homemaking. In researching the situation in Calais – which seemed somehow worse, more hopeless than the earlier situation he had witnessed in Pakistan – his eye was immediately drawn to the sculptural qualities of these sylvan shelters.

Highly attuned to the dramatic and often violent stories that accompany these epic journeys half-way across the world, shut up in trucks and sealed containers, at the mercy of people smugglers, Wildschut has nevertheless chosen to document the most simple visual symbol of this human crisis. Certainly these shelters are not made

The Jungle, Calais, April 2008 © Henk Wildschut

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commingling with fresher foreign scents of forest fires, damp nights and sweat. The internal journey of these invisible people cannot be known, to Wildschut, or to us. Not a single chink of light illuminates the interior: and it is out of this darkness, this lack of visibility, that the observer must engage in the work of understanding, one which is destined to remain always unfinished.

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strange, nor are they transformed by the act of being photographed, yet neither are they explained. There is where the ‘work’ begins for the observer, because from these almost ethnographic photographs of another civilisation grows an urgent demand for social change.

While the Western gaze might rest on each hut, impressed by the sheer resourcefulness of the craftsmanship, the fine handiwork of need, it struggles to extend beyond that. It is as though the structures have been hermetically sealed. There is no way in. Or out. In this way, each tent is like a closed eye, inviting the observer to question whether in fact their own eyes are open to the reality of the lived experience of the men (for it is mostly men who have made the journey, occasionally accompanied by boys as young as ten) who may even now be inside these shelters. We can only witness their outer armour, insubstantial though it is: the blankets and sheets that are remnants of their homeland, infused with the colours and, even months later, the odours of home,

Society has been taught to be afraid of immigrants. They threaten our jobs, our economy, even our sense of national identity, we are told. A lack of open debate, so essential to a democracy, has either failed to take place at all or has been polarised from the outset by angry newspapers railing about ‘tax payers’ money’. Yet without ‘illegals’, who else in Britain would willingly undertake menial jobs for less than the minimum wage, working in difficult – sometimes fatally difficult – conditions? In 2006, Amnesty International reported that if illegal workers were allowed to live legally in the UK they would pay more than £1bn in tax each year; a significant boost to the economy. As Jean Revillard, photographer and founder of Swiss agency Rezzo, who has also focused on this subject (winning a World Press Photo Award in 2008), has commented, a solution has been found for global communication – the internet – and now a solution must be found for global migration. At this moment in history, migration patterns start to look like a new form of slavery. One of the most devastating stories to emerge from the UK in recent years was that of the Chinese ‘illegals’ who drowned in Morecambe Bay in northern England, as they tried to pick tiny shellfish – cockles – from the beach, as the tide rushed in to claim their lives. Their story was eloquently dramatised on film by Nick

The Jungle, Calais, April 2008 © Henk Wildschut

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Broomfield, who used other ‘illegals’ instead of trained actors in his film.

His film Ghosts showed the absolute vulnerability of those whose existence is not officially recorded. The living conditions alone were intolerable and Broomfield effectively documented the cramped living conditions in tiny terraced houses, ten or twelve people to a room. This is also the scenario in Calais, where many of the African immigrants have moved out of the woods into squalid squats. Wildschut considered documenting the squats but again chose to stay with the immigrants in the woods, not only in Calais, but also in southern Spain, where immigrants enter Europe from Africa, and in Patras, Greece, the ‘gateway’ to Italy. Here, too, immigrants have sought out wooded areas, binding their fabrics tightly around trees. With these actions, there is a sense of the woods as sanctuary, a place for quiet reverie and contemplation.

Somewhere to hide. Yet woods – jungles, even – are also seen as fearful places. The English word ‘jungle’ is derived from the Sanskrit word ‘jangala’, meaning wilderness. Ever since Classical times, the creation of spaces in which to live has been seen as a mark of civilisation, while woods harbour the primitives who remain outside the formal structures and rules of society. European folklore attests to this powerful fear of the woods: it is where Hansel and Gretel encountered the child-eating witch; where Little Red Riding Hood was lured by the Wolf. And still today, the fear that some kind of criminal activity of some kind may be taking place in the woods perpetuates. And of course sometimes this proves true: a 31 year-old Canadian journalism student was raped in the Calais woods last summer. Her attacker was described as being of Middle Eastern origin, who spoke fluent French. While some newspapers were quick to describe him as a ‘gangmaster’ or a ‘people-trafficker’, his identity and status remain unknown. More recently, ethnic tensions in ‘the Jungle’ have lead to outbreaks of fighting between immigrants.

Yet the immigrants also have reasons to be fearful of what is lurking in

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the woods; French police make frequent night raids on the shelters, arresting the same people sometimes three or four times a week.

For Wildschut, a former psychiatric nurse, the stories from the woods belong to the genre of horror. Not the schlock and blood and zombieentrails that line the shelves of the local DVD shop, but a grimmer reality in which half of the planet has through war and famine and greed and corruption become unfit for human habitation, and the other half, which shares responsibility for this morally bankrupt state of affairs, will not share its resources or its land with those who are stranded. One man told him of how he fled Afghanistan after the Taliban threatened to kill him because he was helping the British. He has found no reciprocal assistance so far, nor is he likely to. Wildschut’s photographs do not of course resemble stills from Hammer films. Working almost to the constraints of a typology, he maintains a set distance from each tent and uses his large format camera to take in the crucial detail of a red mug, a plastic washing up bowl, discarded litter, a vivid multi-coloured patchwork, lovingly handmade by someone once upon a time. Perhaps most fascinating are the images which reveal how tree trunks become living walls. While the Afghani fabrics in the snow may look like a snug, even romantic, hideaway, the rigorously fashioned cardboard provides a starker vision. These photographs are not on an epic scale, perhaps not destined to be hung in museums and remembered beyond their time, yet they form an important part of contemporary discourse that may be an initial step on the road to find a solution to the humanitarian crisis that is playing out in ports across Europe. Unless this begins to happen, Wildschut fears for the psychological legacy of these men, who left their families and their homeland, however ravaged by war or the effects of poverty, only to find their El Dorado didn’t exist after all.

It is with the final image in this portfolio that the depth of Wildschut’s insight is revealed. This uncanny image appears to show a group of men appearing from within the trees. It is as though in their search for rootedness they have become one with nature, and have broken free of the rules and regulations of a society that excludes them. It is difficult even to tell how many men populate the picture and somehow the detritus strewn around in the earth looks as though it might at any moment transmogrify into a skull, or another dismembered body part cast aside to return eventually to the earth. These men seem to hover at the threshold, so that the photograph itself becomes a strange site of extraterritoriality, capturing a homeless, stateless moment somewhere between life and death, probably closer to the latter. +

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Roland Bonaparte & Friedrich Carel Hisgen Les habitants de Suriname Ă Amsterdam

Le s h a bita nts de sur ina me da ns L eur rotonde , a a mster da m.

Je a n ba ptiste k a-Ja-roe

a Lih a-k a m a

a bor igine s of v roegste bewoner s va n sur ina me , be sta a nde uit: a rowa k en en c a r a Ă?ben indi a nen.

fa miLLe k a-Ja-roe deva nt sa hut te .

Joh a n a Li-wa-Ja

m a roons of boschneger s va n neder L a ndsch gui a na, be sta a nde uit: auc a ner s en sa r a m ac a ner s.

ta mbour s et c a nots de s nĂˆgr e s de s bois.

r ich a r d m a zer

Joh a n ne s koJo

koJo-a-sLen-gr i

v er schiLLende t y pen va n sur ina a msche cr eoLen.

groupe de femme s cr ÉoLe s.

w iLheLmina va n eede

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Roland Bonaparte & Friedrich Carel Hisgen

The French and Dutch captions in this portfolio are copied exactly from the original book. The English translation reads as follows (in order of appearance): 1 The Surinam inhabitants in their rotunda in Amsterdam 2 Portraits of Jean Baptiste Ka-Ja-Roe 3 Portraits of Aliha-Kama 4 Group portrait of Arowaks and Carribean Indians, the oldest inhabitants of Surinam 5 Ka-Ja-Roe family in front of their hut 6 Portraits of Johan Ali-Wa-Ja 7 Group portrait of Maroons or Bush Negroes from Dutch Guiana, with Aucaners and Saramaccaners 8 Bush negro with drum and canoes 9 Portraits of Richard Mazer 10 Portraits of Johannes Kojo 11 Portraits of Kojo-A-Slen-Gri 12 Various types of Surinam Creoles 13 Group portrait of Creole women 14 Portraits of Wilhelmina van Eede All photographs: Friedrich Carel Hisgen, Amsterdam 1883, collotype, reproduced from: Roland Bonaparte, Les habitants de Suriname à

explicitly in its title. There had been many universal exhibitions in Europe, but so far they represented a wide variety of human production, including science, technology, arts and crafts in general. The title of the Amsterdam exhibition demonstrates how its primary goal was to promote the interests of the Dutch colonies, and how intertwined colonial expansion and economic interests were. From 1 May to 31 October 1883, 28 repre­ sentatives from the three main groups of Surinamese inhabitants (Carribean Indians, Maroons and Surinam Creoles) were exhibited live with their tools, fishing equipment, huts, hammocks and furniture. A rotunda, a sort of circus tent, was especially built for this purpose and enabled spectators to walk all the way around and observe the group, contemplating the physical difference between the three ‘tribes’ and of course the difference between these people and their own race. The Surinamese, most of them prominent figures in their native country, were brought here assuming they were honoured guests at this international celebration, and that they would meet King Willem II during their stay in Amsterdam – which never happened.

More information about the colonial exhibitions can be found in the book Ethnics and Trade: Photography and the Colonial Exhibitions in Amster­dam, Antwerp and Brussels by Laetitia Dujardin, published by the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam in 2007 and made possible by the Manfred and Hanna Heiting Scholarship for photohistorical research.

Amsterdam. Notes recueillies à l’Exposition coloniale d’Amsterdam en 1883, A. Quantin, Paris, 1884. Collection Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

Special thanks to Mattie Boom, Curator of Photographs; Photoservice, Rijksmuseum.

The Internationale Koloniale en Uitvoerhandel Tentoonstelling (Inter­ national Colonial and Export Exposition) in Amsterdam in 1883 was the first World Exposition that was overtly colonial and stated this so

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From 1987 – 1998 Linda Roodenburg was curator at Perspektief Gallery and the Nederlands Foto Instituut in Rotterdam. She presently works as an independent writer and curator, specialised in contemporary art photography, visual anthropology, food and culture. In 2002 she disclosed the existence of the photography collection of the National Museum of Ethnology in Leiden with a publication and exhibition entitled: Anceaux’s Glasses, anthropological photography since 1860.

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Inhabitants of Surinam in Amsterdam.

Highly regarded guests or an embarrassing legacy?

by Linda Roodenburg

In 1994 the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam bought an album of the French anthropologist Prince Roland Bonaparte. The book, which dates from 1884, contains double portraits of inhabitants of Surinam that are strongly reminiscent of police mug shots. Amsterdam’s Tropenmuseum recently published Physical Anthropology Reconsidered which questions the possession and exploitation of these kind of photographs. Both museums keep respectable photography collections, so what made one museum decide to purchase this work while the other is at a loss as to know what to do with it?

Participants Ashanti-village, Wiener Tiergarten (Vienna Zoo).

Photo: O. Schneider, 1899. Collection National Museum of Ethnology, Leiden

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There is a striking resemblance between these nineteenth-century portraits and the contemporary photography of, say, Rineke Dijkstra. While the anthropological portraits are always black and white and the prints are smaller, they both have a neutral background and a preference for awkward poses and uncheerful expressions, looking directly into the camera.

Despite this, both types have prompted very different reactions.

Visual anthropologists underline the eurocentric and racist thinking behind the nineteenth-century photographs. In their view, the photographer treated the unsuspecting sitters as objects, manipulating them into a degrading situation, and his portraits are partly responsible for the negative image of non-Western peoples.

Art experts are less concerned with the photographer’s underlying intentions or their consequences for those portrayed. They are moved by the profoundly human expression, projecting into it the tragedy of human existence or extolling the condition humaine that Dijkstra’s portraits reflect. Once again it shows how little say photographers and their subjects have in the significance others attribute to their images.

The vaults of ethnology museums still hold material directly related to this anthropometric photography: plaster casts of skulls, real skulls, bones, hair, fragments of skin and other organic human material, once collected for physical anthropological research into the different races in the world. While one museum carried on longer than the other, this form of collecting was short-lived. Around the turn of the nineteenth century, anthropology and ethnography ventured down a wholly different path. They broke away from the natural sciences that studied man within

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the greater whole of living nature on the basis of his physical characteristics. The new anthropology exchanged the notion of ‘race’ for ‘culture’. And with that the collected biological material became obsolete.

While the odd individual continued skull measuring, it became a marginal practice in anthropology. Skulls and other organic material passed into anatomic collections, but the remaining bits and pieces lie gathering dust in the vaults of ethnology museums in testimony to what many regard as a shameful period of history.

A different fate awaited the anthropometric photographs. They were left behind in the archives, inaccessible to the outside world, along with photographs of indigenous peoples, as documentation for the artefacts in the museum collection. For decades no one paid them any attention.

Until the ethnography museums discovered that their photography archives had more to offer than just artefact information. The collections were made available to the public resulting in the rediscovery of the anthropometrical photographs. This then raised the questions: can we show them and, if so, how? Are they offensive to the offspring of those portrayed? Should everyone have access to them through the website?

How can we prevent them from being put to dubious use?

Prince Roland Bonaparte (1858 – 1924), grandson of one of Napoleon’s brothers, distributed his albums and photography series on exotic

peoples to celebrated ethnology museums. In 1884 he presented to the National Museum of Ethnology in Leiden series of photographic portraits of Omaha Indians, West-Mongolian Kalmyks, and Indonesians. It was his contribution to anthropological research on the different races of the world, a hot topic at the time. The origin of man and his place in nature were the subject of heated discussions. Darwin had sparked the debate by describing life on earth in his The Origin of Species (1859) as a process of change in which not God but the laws of nature and chance determined the course of events. The living plants and animals were not created by God ‘in the beginning’, but were the outcome of a far longer evolutionary process. Just how sensitive this break with religious thinking was, is apparent from the fact that Darwin did not discuss man’s origins in this book. Years later, when the theory of evolution was well established in the debate, in The Descent of Man (1871) the unutterable was uttered: man and ape had a common ancestor, and if we went back even farther in time all men and animals were ultimately descended from an even lower form of life. In this book Darwin describes the different stages of man’s development. At the bottom of the evolutionary ladder are the lower apes, such as the baboons, with the man apes one step higher; next come the wild human races, such as the Aborigines, Papuans and Indians of the Tierra del Fuego, followed by the semi-civilised (or semiwild) savages and, arrogantly poised at the top, civilised man, the Caucasian or white European.

The youngest offshoot of the natural sciences, anthropology, took it upon itself to chart all the human races and organise them into some sort of coherent system. There was no time to lose. The most primitive

Biliamuk, a 26-year-old Aborigine. Photo: Paul Foelsche, Port Darwin 1879. Collection National Museum of Ethnology, Leiden

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peoples, in particular, might well soon die out, massacred or the victims of contact with the dominant West. It was vital to collect as much material as possible before it was too late and there was nothing left to study. Roland Bonaparte could never have supposed that some hundred years later the descendants of the Papuans would be donning their penis sheaths once again for a group of adventurers, that Aborigines in the Australian bush would be offering authentic springs and massage breaks and that the Inuit in Greenland would be organising treks for tourists eager to see the Polar ice cap before it is too late.

His collection consists of over 7,000 photographs. As a French anthropologist, Bonaparte followed the research and collecting guidelines of Paul Broca, founder of the first Société d’Anthropologie in 1859. While measuring living people was preferable, photography was highly valued for its objective representation. Heads, important for the size and content of the skull, had to be recorded en face and en profil, the body in an upright position, and without clothes. A measuring stick was placed beside the subject or else he stood against a checkered backdrop so that the researcher could calculate the measurements from the photograph.

Contrary to the impression his anthropological collection creates, Bonaparte was not well travelled. He spared himself the inconvenience of long journeys by taking his pictures during the popular ethnological expositions or Human Zoos, as they were known. From the 1860s hundreds of these spectacles toured the cities of Europe. In zoos, circuses and theatres the public would gape at the primitive behaviour and lifestyles of threatened exotic creatures. In the spirit of Darwin people wondered whether they were people, apes or something in between. The ‘missing link’, half man, half ape, was one of the many regular human attractions.

Anthropologists proved enthusiastic supporters of Human Zoos. They mediated in cases where it was difficult to get government permission to import a new group, by pointing to the scientific importance of such an undertaking. They took their measurements and photographs, toured the country giving lectures and slide shows on primitive peoples, while publications with (nude) photographs from the anthropological collections enjoyed countless reprints and attracted millions of readers. One can only dream of such a productive pact between museums, science, commerce and the general public today.

In 1883 Amsterdam was the first to host a World Exposition that exhibited living inhabitants from the colonies. On the present site of the city’s Museumplein, with the entrance just behind the almost completed Rijksmuseum, was the Indonesian village where indigenous people camped for months and could be watched as they went about their daily activities. Nearby was the Rotunda, a construction where Indians, maroons and Creoles from Surinam were housed and on show to passing visitors. Bonaparte organised photography sessions with all these participants. He hired the local photographer Friedrich Carel Hisgen (whose studio was strategically located right next to the exhibition ground in the P.C. Hooftstraat) to photograph them to his instructions.

The outcome was the above-mentioned album Les Habitants de Suriname à Amsterdam and a series of portraits of Indonesians, which he presented to the National Museum of Ethnology.

As a result of their close ties with the entertainment industry and commercial publishers, ethnographic institutions, with anthropologists like Bonaparte in their wake, greatly influenced the way non-Western peoples were perceived. But that influence has long gone. Anthropologists withdrew within the walls of the university, and in their exhibitions and publications ethnology museums kept out of the debate on the

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multicultural society. Their withdrawal has had greater repercussions than imagined. Old theories and ideas live on, in the absence of convincing alternatives, cast in ever-new forms. Today anthropologists and curators are horrified to see indigenous peoples in popular Dutch television programmes like Groeten uit de Rimboe (Greetings from the Jungle) and De Groeten Terug (Greetings Back Home) in their view being abused in the same way they were as living curiosities at former world expositions.

But it is not too late to close the gap that has arisen between science, ethnography and the general public, and to pick up where they left off.

The old photographs can give us an insight into the origins of deeply ingrained prejudices about other cultures. They are sure to generate plenty of interest once again, for, as art experts have rightly noted, they are still fascinating, as are the tales behind them.

Take the portrait of the 26-year-old Aborigine Biliamuk in the National Museum of Ethnology Collection that policeman Paul Foelsche took in 1879. Between 1877 and 1891 he produced over 260 photographs of Australian Aborigines at the request of scientists and the government.

Foelsche captured these Aborigines at a time when they still had autonomy over the land they inhabited. He wanted to show the beautiful physique of the men and women of these unknown tribes in the Northern Territory, and he submitted the pictures to various world expositions.

There are indications that his subjects experienced the photography sessions – it took nearly an hour to make a collodion exposure of one person – as an honourable ritual. To avoid strong contrasts he asked the Aborigines to rub their faces with carbon powder. Their naked pose was not humiliating as they were used to going around naked. Foelsche’s prints and presentation are of the finest quality, which is why the originals are still in excellent condition today.

Gary Mura Lee, Australian artist of Aboriginal origin, speaking about these anthropometric photographs of his ancestors: ‘We see past the measuring stick and all that it represents and we see strong, beautiful people – our people.’ +

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Jim Goldberg How I Dream

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Jim Goldberg

All images: © Jim Goldberg, courtesy Magnum Photos, Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Stephen Wirtz Gallery, San Francisco

The innovative use of image and text is one of Jim Goldberg’s (US, 1953) most typical hallmarks. He began to explore experimental storytelling with the series Rich and Poor (1977– 1985), in which differences within the American class system are efficiently exposed. In Raised by Wolves (1985 – 1995), he continued his investigation of the underprivileged, and closely documented a group of homeless teenagers in Los Angeles and San Francisco over ten years. Besides his socially engaged work, Jim Goldberg is also well-known for his fashion, editorial and advertising work which has been published in numerous magazines including, W, Details, Flaunt, The New York Times Magazine, Esquire, Rebel, GQ, The New Yorker and Dazed and Confused.

Jim Goldberg became a full member of Magnum Photos in 2006 and is a Professor of Art at the California College of Arts and Crafts. Since receiving his first solo show in 1979, Goldberg has exhibited both in the US and internationally. His work is represented in major private and public collections, including the MoMA and Whitney Museum in New York, Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, SF MoMA in San Francisco, The J. Paul Getty Museum and LACMA in Los Angeles, Museum of Fine Arts in Houston and the Art Institute of Chicago.

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Goldberg has received many awards and grants including, most recently, the Aftermath Project Award in 2006 and the Henri Cartier-Bresson Award in 2007 (sponsored by Groupe Wendel). This prestigious award offers a photographer the opportunity to carry out a project that would otherwise be hard to achieve. Goldberg’s project will be exhibited at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris: Open See, from May 5 to July 26, 2009.

From May 7 to August 31, Magnum Gallery in Paris will feature Rich and Poor. Goldberg is currently working on two books on migration in Europe to be published by Steidl. The first one, Open See, will be published on the occasion of the exhibition at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson.

Goldberg is represented by Pace/MacGill Gallery in New York and Stephen Wirtz Gallery in San Francisco.

Sophie Wright is currently Cultural and Print Room Director at Magnum Photos, London. She has curated Magnum Print Room exhibitions such as New Blood: Magnum Associates (2007), Documenting Style: 60 years of Fashion photography from Magnum Photos (2007) and Cuba: 50 years of Revolution (2008). Before that she was deputy editor of PLUK magazine.

She regularly lectures and writes on photography.

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Echo Waiting from Raised by Wolves, 1986 © Jim Goldberg

Fragmented Narratives

by Sophie Wright

Jim Goldberg’s most ambitious project to date entwines the stories of migrants seeking refuge or drawn to Europe by the promise of a better life – the frightened, dispossessed, vulnerable, and trafficked – presented in his distinctive mix of photography and text. The portfolio published here presents us with a multi-layered and cumulative installation which documents the frequently heartbreaking realities of displacement and traces his subjects’ journeys back to their lands of origin in Africa, Asia or Eastern Europe. Open See, the first of two books featuring this work, will be published later this year by Steidl.

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‘My Dream is to go to Europe’, reads the text on one of Goldberg’s Polaroid portraits. According to the International Organisation for Migration, there are over 200 million migrants worldwide and the geographic region of Europe is home to the highest number. The issue of immigration is certainly an explosive one within many European countries today – one only has to look at the Italian government’s increasingly protectionist stance or wildcat strikes by industrial workers in Britain this winter to see recent manifestations of the tensions caused by the expansion and opening up of borders within the EU. As Europe’s economies slide into recession, the juggling act between national and international interests is likely to come into even sharper focus. In today’s increasingly globalised world it has never been more relevant to assess the motivation for migration, and not just the humane and orderly economic migration to which the IOM is committed, but the political and the social reasons for this mass movement.

It is fitting that an exploration into the mythological pull of contemporary Europe, begun in 2003 with a commission from the Greek Olympiad for twelve members of the Magnum Photo Agency to create a portrait of modern-day Greece. Europe’s etymological origins can be found in the ancient Greek myth of Europa, whose name was given to the lands in central-north Greece and then extended north. For his part of this commission, known as Periplus, Goldberg was assigned to document

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Title page from Coming and Going, 1999-2003 © Jim Goldberg

the diverse immigrant and refugee communities of Greece. A grant from the Aftermath Project in 2006 and the Henri Cartier-Bresson Award in 2007 enabled him to expand his research to encompass the story of these migrants back to their home nations.

Goldberg describes his photography thus: ‘My work documents the complex ways that people struggle to affirm their dignity and integrity when social circumstances, time, or situation work against them.’ Born in 1953, and living in San Francisco, Goldberg has until recently worked predominantly in America, documenting the invisible or misrepresented in society. Past projects have included: indigent hotel residents and the wealthy in San Francisco (Rich and Poor, 1977 – 85); homeless youth in Los Angeles and San Francisco (Raised by Wolves, 1986 – 95); the elderly (Nursing Home, 1985 – 86 and Hospice, 1992 – 93) and autobiography (Coming and Going, 1999 – 2003). He joined the Magnum Photos cooperative in 2002 and became a full member in 2006.

Goldberg’s approach to documentary practice was already formulated at the time of Rich and Poor, which he began in San Francisco in the 1970s.

Over eight years he immersed himself in the lives of his subjects in both the world of transient hotel dwellers and the wealthy. Goldberg continues to build up his projects over time, layering up the photographic evidence, as if striving through its accumulation to bring us closer to the truth. This

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search for an authentic voice also convinced him at this early stage in his career to invite his subjects to write directly on the photographs. This collaborative action does not represent a relinquishing of control; these texts are still the result of the photographer’s carefully formulated questioning, but for Goldberg they offer a more balanced approach to social documentary. Combined with his portraiture they help reveal the individual in each image. By engaging the viewer with their essential humanity Goldberg seeks to undermine the negative stereotyping from which many of the communities in his pictures suffer.

Rich and Poor confronts the myth of the American dream of being able to transcend one’s economic and social conditions through hard work by exposing the harsh reality of the American class system. Goldberg’s latest project also calls into question the position of Europe in the imagination of those yearning for a better life and represents the vulnerability of people seduced by its promise. The combination of portraiture and text still remains an important element in Goldberg’s work though now the overall aesthetic is much more complex. These days he works using black-and-white and colour film in a range of formats: 35mm, medium format, large format, Polaroid land camera and 4x5, digital and video. In addition, the element of installation provides another layer of meaning and complexity to his story-telling.

Goldberg describes himself as the photographer and the editor,

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shaping and revising his subjects’ stories. ‘I have tried, consistently, to contend with the limitations of documentary photography… I tend towards sequence and use layers (visual and textual) in the form of transcribed interviews, handwritten notes, found photos and documents, as well as my own writings.’ The diverse photographic approaches combined with the scattered and dynamic installation serve to further emphasise the individuality of the stories that he weaves together. Choosing representational non-conformity over any rigorous visual system, he extracts the singular from the generic and in so doing reminds us that, this is not one reality, but many – that here is life in all its complexity.

Goldberg’s installations form fragmented narratives, a scrapbook of memory. So what is the story that he tells us here? There are so many nameless faces, a sea of people from Asia, Africa and Eastern Europe, who have travelled or hope to travel to the wealthy Western edges of this continent. Invariably much of this mass migration is illegal, with immigrants trafficked in cramped and overcrowded conditions. Indeed, many do not even make it to their destination, dying from dehydration or starvation on the way, or washing up on the beaches of the Mediterranean – a sad story repeated with too much frequency in the media. Here the undeniable beauty of Goldberg’s photography is frequently undermined by the horror of the accompanying text scrawled on his images, individuals tell, not only of the manner in which they travelled but also of the lives from which they fled.

A young Chinese man stares enigmatically from a black-and-white Polaroid, his torso overlaid with precise calligraphy. Here, unlike other Goldberg photographs, there is no translation, so the text withholds its meaning. The viewer is left to guess at the hardship of this man’s journey, the position he now finds himself in is likely little better from the one from whence he came. Tens of thousands of migrants from China, Southeast Asia and the Middle East seek to enter Western Europe from the Balkans. Organised crime has taken control of the human trafficking with the hundreds of Greek islands in the Aegean offering many possibilities for people smugglers to land their human cargo. Journeys are undertaken for economic reasons, however, migrants also flee because they feel they have no choice: many are refugees seeking asylum from political oppression or torture. Amongst these images, men of different ages and nationalities present the evidence carved into their backs. In one Polaroid, scars are highlighted in green ink with the words ‘Taliban torture me’, in another diptych an African man, with a harrowed expression, bears deep wounds, both physical and psychological from another tale of senseless brutality ‘the war came and the rebels massacred my whole village and my family (my wife and 8 children). I was shot so many times I do not know how I survived…’

Goldberg has travelled to India and Africa to document the living conditions from which these migrants seek deliverance. Their motivation is clarified by his images of hardship. Indian children scavenge amongst the birds on a rubbish dump. Like a premonition of their fate, a grown

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man in a separate image, stands amongst rubbish, barefoot and clutching the carcass of a goat. So often it is children who are the innocent victims of circumstance and many of them stare out from Goldberg’s photographs.

One can’t escape the haunted expression of a young African boy who glares up from underneath a furrowed brow, old before his time. Goldberg has also travelled to the Ukraine, where young women often fall victim to sex traffickers – prostitution in the guise of transport to the West, being the new slavery of the global economy. In a picture of innocence, girls stand hand in hand, and yet they face the danger of becoming the young women in some of Goldberg’s other images, still clutching the props of childhood, but hiding behind their hands or with their faces scribbled over to hide their identities and their sense of shame.

Beautiful but bleak, Goldberg’s work is not without evidence of hope.

From the makeshift homes in refugee camps in Africa, a young Somali boy has made it to Europe. He shyly meets the camera’s gaze. Told from the perspective of a child, his story is translated: ‘I am Raxman from Somalia, I came here on a ship. There is war there and they steal children and eat children and rob money and shops. It’s good here (in) Greece.’

For the moment Raxman may have swapped one makeshift home for another, but he feels safer, and he is young and resilient. In addition to pure escape, some migrants achieve their dream of legal residence in Europe, bettering themselves and starting anew. Perhaps, there is a metaphor in Goldberg’s beautiful image of a young Ukrainian man, wading through dark polluted water and bathed in golden light. Like salmon swimming upstream, survival instinct has always drawn travellers to the promise of a new life, be it the Promised Land, the New World or twentyfirst century Europe. Today globalisation makes this goal appear ever more attainable, although the reality is that such migrations remain as fraught with danger as ever. However, for many seeking refuge from war or political insecurity there is little choice. Goldberg’s work is a testimony to human resilience: despite everything, they still keep coming, masses of people, from many different worlds, united by the power of a shared dream. +

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Juul Hondius Indivisuals

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Juul Hondius

List of works (in order of appearance): 1 New York, 2003 2 Flight, 2004 3 Richie, 2006 4 Rainbow, 2006 5 Vosloorus, 2007 6 Noordergesig, 2007 7 Man #2, 1999 8 White-out, 2006 9 Boksburg, 2007 © Juul Hondius, courtesy Galerie Akinci, Amsterdam.

Special thanks to the Netherlands Foundation for Visual Arts, Design and Architecture and ArtAids foundation.

Juul Hondius (NL, 1970) studied at The Royal Academy of Arts, The Hague. He exhibited his work in many solo and group shows, including The Photographers, curated by Vasif Kortun at Platform Garanti, Istanbul; The Suspended Moment at Centraal Museum, Utrecht and the solo show Layers at Galerie Akinci, Amsterdam, all in 2007; Leeds City Art Gallery and Focal Point Gallery, Southend on Sea, UK; Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris (2006); In Sight: Contemporary Dutch Photography from the Collection of the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam at the Chicago Art Institute (2005) and prior to that in De Appel, Huis Marseille and Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and Museum Boijmans van Beuningen in Rotterdam, among other venues.

In 2002 an artist’s book in the format of a newspaper, A Complex Newspaper, was published by Artimo.

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For his photographic works Hondius is inspired by images from the media, especially images that have to do with mobility and borders and that are part of our collective memory – visual clichés of illegal immigration, smuggling, poverty and civil wars. At first glance his photos seem to be depicting real situations, a closer look however reveals that they are often carefully staged scenes. His archetypal images of people ‘on the move’ often have a hyper-aesthetic quality.

See www.juulhondius.com for more information.

As a writer and art critic, Ilse van Rijn regularly works together with visual artists and curators. She contributes to Metropolis M and Open, among other publications, and she is on the teaching staff at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam.

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Man #1, 1999 © Juul Hondius, courtesy Galerie Akinci, Amsterdam

In Search of Archetypes

by Ilse van Rijn

They never look you in the eye, the protagonists in Juul Hondius’ photos.

They stare, they gaze, their motionless glance focused on something that escapes you. Sometimes you can make out the eyes of a man or a girl, their contours, the wrinkles, bags and lines, the lashes, the brows that follow the shape of the eyes and give expression to a face. But the expression of that visage remains undefined by any context visible in the photo. The information that Hondius provides within his images is kept to a minimum. The child, the mother and her son, the three friends – they are all going somewhere. That much you can infer: they are on their way.

You can recognise the interior of a well-appointed bus, a steering wheel, an aeroplane window, the frame of which repeats and accentuates – or perhaps enervates – the framework of the photograph. You ask yourself, ‘Who are those travellers?’ and ‘Where are they going?’ But you also immediately recognise those as impertinent questions; you are exhibiting an irrepressible curiosity about something that is no business of your own. In fact these passers-by are oblivious to the viewer. They aren’t looking at you. Nor is any indication given as to what might have triggered the thoughts, desires or dreams of the individuals photographed. If indeed there was such a trigger.

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Indivisuals comprises a cross-section of Hondius’ photographic oeuvre.

These pieces, like much of his other work, induce a strange phenomenon: the impossibility of fully identifying with the image is precisely what makes it so appealing. The visual elements present in Indivisuals are suggestive. The concentrated, inwardly closed figures give the viewer just enough room to project his or her own life and own thoughts onto the photos. Or to let the photographed figure lead an imagined life. ‘Just like when you are sitting diagonally behind someone on a train or an aeroplane and can observe him there for hours without being noticed – or at least for as long as the ride lasts.’ That is how Hondius describes the impalpable moment that he photographs. His mental experiment, like his photos, calls to mind what Susan Sontag once remarked: ‘There is something on people’s faces when they don’t know they are being observed that never appears when they do.’1 Sontag was discussing the faith in the revealing capacity of photos taken during an unguarded moment, referring to the famous portraits that Walker Evans took in the New York subways in the 1930s. But where Evans actually positioned himself directly in front of the person he was photographing, the position Hondius describes is behind his model. And where Evans’ fellow passengers were not aware of the photographer, nor of the lens that was ‘observing’ them from between the two buttons of his overcoat, Hondius’ models are conscious fellow players in a game that the photographer is playing with them. Hondius stages most of his images.

He is not interested in any hidden aspects in the life of the individual.

In that sense he has no voyeuristic disposition. His photos are not about the people in the image. Hondius enquires of the beholder not what or whom the photo is portraying, but how the beholder takes it in.

Plastic, 2001 © Juul Hondius, courtesy Galerie Akinci, Amsterdam

Both his theoretical approach to photography as a medium and his preoccupation with the viewer’s moment of realisation with regard to the image practically force Hondius the photographer to disappear from the photo that he has so carefully staged. The question that serves as the starting point in his quest for the ultimate image clarifies his ambiguous position. It is not so much ‘Which image is going to sink in?’ but rather ‘What kind of image is most apt to stick with the beholder?’ In contrast to what his photographic works could suggest, there is a personal aspect to the origin of that question. Hondius grew up in the 1970s with Het Aanzien van…, a Dutch series of annual reviews in book form, each one telling the story of a particular year in photos. He remembers thumbing through those collections of photographic highlights on visits to his grandmother’s as a four-year-old boy and being fascinated by the ‘realistic, purely documentary images’. Each time, he would return to those photos, some of which were extremely shocking – especially for a child. While those images, by then already historical, had lost their urgency, they were not lacking expression. The testimony that media images by their nature are had subsequently and unintentionally become documents in those photographic yearbooks. In contrast to a testimony, for which the intention is essential and selected in advance, a document is ascribed a certain meaning. And, as JeanFrancois Chevrier2 emphasises, it is not directed towards anyone in particular. Chevrier’s concept of a document is relevant to the staring figures in Hondius’ works. It sketches not only the transformative moment of the documents-that-had-once-been-testimonies, such as those published in Het Aanzien van…, but it also stipulates an important pursuit inherent to Indivisuals. But what is most astonishing is that the immediate

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necessity of Flight (2004) or Rainbow (2006) is anything but absent. So what does that say about the media images that we have been served for decades now and that are currently inundating us?

Indivisuals forms an uninterrupted line, not only within Hondius’ oeuvre, but also throughout the years of media images. The series implicitly formulates a critical perspective on those same media images on which the individual photos are based. The ways in which politically precarious themes are depicted, linked for example to the policy on refugees or to the treatment of diseases or the struggle against violence or natural disasters, but also the ways wars are represented – they are all grounded on identical principles. Archetypal images keep coming back. Think of the age-old image of mother-and-child that has lost very little of its dramatic eloquence. But more recent examples would also fall under this category. The image of the collapsing Twin Towers has been indelibly impressed upon our collective retinas, for example. And who has not seen the photo of the Abu Ghraib prisoner, standing on a crate, the wires on his fingers and the black hood covering his head?

These more or less contemporary archive images are the models for Hondius’ photos. In that sense, he has joined the ranks of what we by now can call a movement of photographers and filmmakers who reflect penetratingly on the images in the media and on their consequences.

Like Johan Grimonprez and Sean Snyder, Aernout Mik and, in a different way, Thomas Demand, Hondius deconstructs the media image and subsequently recontextualises it – or at least certain aspects of it.

Dubious, or in the case of Hondius, ambiguous, forms of reporting enter

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into the foreground. But Hondius, like Demand, does not show us his source material. That is only of importance to him, he claims. After all, the emphasis in his work lies not on the sender of the message but on its receiver. The one who views it is the one who completes the story. He or she is the co-creator of the image. The viewer is likewise responsible for the image that has been constructed for him or her. Hondius includes in this distinct approach the widely ranging, circulating photos and visual stills that make up each person’s personal image archive. In a photo such as Richie (2006), for example, not only the media image serves as a frame of reference but also the language of cinematographic imagery. The conversation between the photographed friends only comes about associatively. The initiation of a common history is suggested. This suggestive aspect of the photo is accentuated in Richie by the lack of a concrete situation in the image, something that also holds for Man #2 (1999), and to an extreme degree for the conceptual photograph White-out (2006). The background is faded or blotted out; the traveller is looking at nothing in particular. He is transported into No Man’s Land. The white light is everywhere – and, like the traveller himself, everywhere the same.

‘In modern Athens, the vehicles of mass transportation are called metaphorai. To go to work or come home, one takes a metaphor – a bus or a train.’3 In travelling you become aware, not so much of the differences, but rather of the uniformity, Hondius says. There are only minimal differences around the world; variants of the same image, the same story. Hondius wants to make the fundamental, archetypal image from which all other images can be derived. An image that everyone would be

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able to read, in which everyone can recognise him or herself: ‘That would be the greatest, if it would work.’ The means of public transport, which carries with it the slumbering impression of survival and fateful dependence, would seem to be the ideal vehicle for that endeavour. But beware: the first impression is misleading. The fate of the passengers is not so much in the hands of the chauffeur as it is in those of whoever is reading the image. One of the most brilliant examples of this psychological ‘deception’ is Noordergesig (2007). Hondius created that work in connection with ArtAids, a foundation that deploys art in the fight against AIDS, set up by the Dutch author and art collector Han Nefkens. Hondius travelled to Soweto in Johannesburg and concluded that the infectious disease was everywhere, although you couldn’t see it. In contrast to his normal way of working, Hondius started creating images by interviewing those who were affected. His only question for them was ‘What happened in your life the moment you heard that you were infected with HIV?’ Their answers varied from ‘There was no one I could tell’ to ‘I simply told everyone.’ AIDS is invisible and spreading mercilessly. ‘This epidemic is worldwide and is sparing no continent,’ according the French AIDS specialist Dr Willy Rozenbaum.4 The image that clings to AIDS is decisive, and in some cases even fatal. You can’t read a thing from the face of the teenage girl in Noordergesig. Not even her character becomes apparent in her perfect visage. But she, too, could potentially have the disease. Her future, like everyone else’s, is threatened. Photographed from a distance, the unknown face in Noordergesig becomes a repository for world’s anxieties. In other photos, such as Boksburg (2007) and Rainbow, expressionless faces, or ‘empty’ forms, invite the viewer to project his or her desires, dreams or wishes.

And as stated, Hondius’ quasi-absence as creator of the image contributes to this. The subjects of these portraits make no contact with him, either. The beholder of the image is thrown even more so upon his own resources, confronted with his own position. The photographer’s presence is noticeable only in the carefully considered composition of the image. The viewer is carried away by the calm rhythm, the simplicity of the rhyming lines in Richie. The surface of the image speaks, while the boys are silent. In Vosloorus (2007) the turned face of the woman in the back of the car is lit, while the two men behind the steering wheel are resting in the shadow, their direction of view the opposite of hers. A single stanchion of the carriage work splits the image vertically in two.

The man standing in the touring car in Rainbow is carried by the lines of perspective that together form the interior of the vehicle. This formallycharged photo ultimately creates, time and again, the momentum that is denied by the staring characters. That is the eloquence of the photographic works of Juul Hondius. And the visual paradox. +

Notes: 1

Sontag, S., On Photography. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York, 1973, p. 37

2

Chevrier, J.-F., ‘Documentaire, document, getuigenis…’ in: Documentaire nu!

Hedendaagse strategieën in fotografie, film en beeldende kunst. NAi Publishers, Rotterdam, 2005, p. 55 3

De Certeau, M., The Practice of Everyday Life. University of California Press,

Berkeley, 1988, p. 115 4

Quoted in: Sontag, S., AIDS and Its Metaphors. London/New York, 1988,

p. 177

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portfolio

Dana Popa Not Natasha ~ The Missing

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Dana Popa

Captions to the portfolio images (in order of appearance): 1 Six souls living in one tiny room. The mother says she was lucky to be saved from the traffickers. The Republic of Moldova, November 2007.

2 Svetlana’s bag. Svetlana was brought back from Moscow in a coffin after eight years of being missing. Her family kept her Russian bag. The Republic of Moldova, November 2007.

3 Rooms where sex-trafficked women are brought and obliged to work as prostitutes. United Kingdom, January 2008. (this caption also applies for images 7 and 11) 4 Nina went missing six years ago. Her mother Nadejdea hopes she is still alive.

The Republic of Moldova, November 2007.

5 Valentina’s deserted house. She disappeared four months ago leaving behind a five-year old daughter. It is believed that she was trafficked through Ukraine.

The Republic of Moldova, November 2007.

6 Aurelia and Clarisa hanging around at the International Organisation of Migration shelter. The Republic of Moldova, August, 2006.

8 A 15-year-old went missing without a trace two months ago. Her room, as she left it. The Republic of Moldova, November 2007.

9 Maria’s husband abandoned her on the grounds that the baby she gave birth to after she escaped from the traffickers was not his child. The Republic of Moldova, August, 2006.

10 ‘Don’t cry little boy, Mummy is going to bring you candies’, were the last words Victor heard eight years ago from the driver of the white car that took his

Dana Popa (Romania, 1977) completed her master’s degree in Documentary Photography and Photojournalism at the London College of Communication in 2006. Prior to that she studied at the School of Journalism and Mass Communication Studies of the University of Bucharest, Romania. She is currently working as a freelance photographer in London, specializing in contemporary social issues with a particular emphasis on human rights.

In 2008 Dana Popa exhibited her work at the Noorderlicht Photofestival in Leeuwarden, at Musée de l’Elysée in Lausanne, Kiyosato Museum of Photographic Arts in Tokyo and in the exhibition Moving Walls 14 at the Open Society Institue in New York. In 2007 her series Not Natasha received the Jury Prize in the Days Japan International Photo­ journalism Awards and the Jerwood Photography Award. Her photographs have been published in several magazines including Days Japan, Portfolio, British Journal of Photography, Vrij Nederland, 8 magazine and Next Level.

Her latest work has been commissioned by Autograph ABP and will result in a book, to be published in spring 2009.

The Missing is an independent development of the ongoing project Not Natasha (2006). Even though trafficked girls still form the hub of the work, Dana Popa now focuses on the families left behind. The families that are waiting for years – often in vain – for the girls to come home or give a sign of life.

mother away. The Republic of Moldova, November 2007.

12 Dalia’s place, in a small village in the south of Moldova. Dalia was on her way to Moscow, looking for work, when she disappeared. The Republic of Moldova, November 2007.

13 Valerica, a five-year-old, keeps asking how many days she has left until she gets into the orphanage. She reassures me her Mum will come back for Christmas, as promised. The Republic of Moldova, November 2007.

14 Sacha Ivanovna has been missing for seven years. It is said that she was shot dead in Turkey or sold on to another country. Her mother still hopes to see her again. The Republic of Moldova, November 2007.

All images: © Dana Popa, courtesy Autograph ABP (images 6 and 9, courtesy Anzenberger Agency)

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Mark Sealy became Director of Autograph ABP in 1991, where he has initiated the production of over thirty publications, produced global exhibitions, alongside commissions and residencies projects. Sealy has a special interest in art and its relationship to social change and Human Rights. He is a founding CEO of Rivington Place, the first permanent visual arts space in London dedicated to issues of cultural diversity. It opened in October 2007.

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Beyond the lens

by Mark Sealy

It was not until 1993 that the General Assembly of the United Nations finally adopted the Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women. Article One reads: ‘For the purposes of this Declaration, the term “violence against women” means any act of gender-based violence that results in, or is likely to result in, physical, sexual or psychological harm or suffering to women, including threats of such acts, coercion or arbitrary deprivation of liberty, whether occurring in public or in private life.’

Human trafficking has for centuries been a lucrative business and is currently estimated to have a market value of over 32 billion US dollars.

Forced prostitution of women is the most widespread form of human trafficking today. According to professor Kevin Bales – the world’s leading expert on contemporary global slavery – poverty, deprivation, the desire for a better life and the need to escape conflict and oppression are all

vital elements that bring people into contact with traffickers. Deception and false promises are important strategies employed by traffickers.

Gaining the confidence of the targeted individuals and their families is an essential part of the trafficking process.

For the victim, hope turns to tragedy once transportation begins.

As Kevin Bales states: ‘To be without documents while in transit is to be placed immediately in the control of the trafficker.’1 The dispossession of identity is the first major act of violence aimed at the victim. Stripping away the subject’s identity prepares the ground for the subject to become a non-citizen, a person without rights or protection. It’s an act of violence that has similar echoes across the historical application of photography when focused on ‘the Other’. ‘The aim of the trafficker will be to disorientate the victim, to increase his or her dependence, to establish fear and obedience, to gain control.’2 The more they resist, the greater the brutality, until – like most slaves – their will to resist is finally crushed.

The journey towards a hopeful future quickly turns into a journey of utter despair, violent degradation, and possible death. The key question of what happens to an individual once the traffickers have no value for them, is rarely considered. Comparatively the value of human life has become cheaper, as more and more people attempt to escape poverty and conflict the easier it is to exploit them.

Photography is most suited to forms of documentary commentary and has historically been used to portray, frame and display people in both their most glorious and debased conditions. Theoretical debates on photography are racked with issues concerning photography’s ‘indexical aspect, which comes from the fact that since a photograph results from exposure to a pre-existing entity, it directly bears the entity’s imprint and can therefore supply evidence about the object it depicts’.3 Reading

From Not Natasha, The Republic of Moldova, August, 2006 © Dana Popa

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photographic images as evidence opens up debates concerning power and privileging regimes of knowledge that are rooted in debates regarding state control over the individual subject, crime, punishment and societal classification coupled with enquiries into the nature of western scopic power.

The photographs from Dana Popa’s series Not Natasha perform several tasks. As a body of documentary photographs they function to serve as a reminder of the wide reaching effects of human trafficking on the individual subject, the victim. Popa’s photographs work primarily within the classic tradition of the documentary genre where, ‘Causality is vague, blame is not assigned, fate cannot be overcome.’4 Her use of colour is a deliberate turn away from the gritty and distant realism associated with black-and-white documentary photography. Colour brings the viewer closer to the victim and effectively closes the distance between them and us.

Popa’s photographs are essentially an enquiry into an acute and pervasive form of violence against women. The loss and absence portrayed in Popa’s photographs resonate with the violence associated with forms of cultural erasure, in which names are changed, histories are re-written and deep rooted societal relationships are severed. Popa’s photographs are a tragic reminder of just how vulnerable and powerless women are globally, and the absence displayed exposes the futility of universal declarations. Popa’s photographs act as metaphorical markers on the social conditions across cultures that have served to lock women into forms of masculine servitude.

In an additional cruel visual twist, Popa invites us to recognise the other form of violence that is at play throughout this work, the ongoing misery of those who have been left behind to wait in the hope that one day the loved will return home. The portraits of those who can only wait and the photographs they cling to – of those that have been trafficked – become tragic icons of hope, as the person who has departed will never again fit the image that is held up for us to observe.

The psychological damage inflicted on those who have managed to return home is beyond the spectacle of any one photograph. The photographic image in this instance cannot carry the burden of personal experience. Popa represents the women who return home through a veiled sense of shame; their identities have to be altered for the sake of their own protection.

Popa’s extensive project, which has been several years in the making, attempts to address the wider impact that human trafficking has on the family and extended social relations. The photographs serve to memorialise those who have vanished. They also operate as tools of testimony for those who have returned. As documents, the photographs prove nothing. Instead they act as signifiers of emptiness, waiting, emotional damage and external harm. Within this body of photographs, the doctrine of any decisive moment is clearly abandoned and what is revealed is the importance of time exchanged between the photographer and the subject. There is no critical moment of entrapment or release relating to the subject in focus. These photographs offer no reprieve from the violence experienced by these women and their families. The interiority of the photographic work, the empty rooms, the dark and claustrophobic spaces, portray a chronic condition of despair and highlight the catastrophic conditions that make it possible for human trafficking to thrive. Popa’s investment in the subject is therefore

From Not Natasha, The Republic of Moldova, August, 2006 © Dana Popa

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beyond the lens. Her photographs operate as markers of her intention to take action and responsibility.

‘Catastrophe, as it is usually understood emerges, erupting as an event, sharply drawing the line between before and after, manufacturing its emergence as a riddle: How and why is this happening? Why now?

Why in this manner? What to do about catastrophe requires exhaustive research that could bring to the surface more and more facts to explain its eventuation. But the verge of catastrophe, does not emerge, it is not exactly an event, and has no power to create a difference. It exists on the surface, completely open to the gaze and yet evading it, because there is nothing to distinguish it from the surroundings in which it exists.’5 Popa’s photographic project focuses on two distinctive visual forms of violence that in essence should not be separated from each other: the violence of poverty and the violence of exploitation. By focusing on domestic interiors Popa signifies to her audience that it is not enough to simply talk about the actual victim of trafficking, that it is not enough to highlight how the victims have been abused and the personal torment they have suffered both mentally and physically. None of this makes sense unless we take time to analyse the cultural and economic conditions that make it possible for women’s lives to be seen only in terms of their potential for exploitation.

Documentary photography has in many regards taken a theoretical battering over the last few decades, however in a celebrity obsessed globalised world the real value of documentary photography is that it reminds us of our privileged self. It will always tell us as much about ourselves as it does about the subject in focus. +

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Notes: 1

Kevin Bales, Understanding Global Slavery, University of California Press,

Berkeley, 2005, p. 145 2

ibid, p. 141

3

Tom Gunning, ‘Tracing the Individual Body: Photography, Detection, and

early Cinema’, in Cinema and the invention of Modern Life, Leo Charney and Vanessa R. Schwartz (eds.), University of California Press, Berkeley, 1995, p. 20 4

Martha Rosler, 3 works, The Press of The Nova Scotia College of Art and

Design, 2006, p. 76 5

Ariella Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography, Zone Books, New York,

2008, p. 291

foam magazine #18 / displaced

paper selection

Foam Magazine’s choice of paper from ModoVanGelder Amsterdam

Je a n ba p t ist e k a-ja-roe

A LIH A-k a m a

Henk Wildschut is printed on Novatech Matt 135 g/m2

Roland Bonaparte & Friedrich Carel Hisgen are printed on

coated fine paper and board, FSC- and EU Flower-certified

Romandruk 100 g/m2 bulky bookpaper

Jim Goldberg is printed on Eurobulk 135 g/m2

Juul Hondius is printed on PhoeniXmotion Xenon 135 g/m2

matt coated paper and board with 1.1 bulk, PEFC-certified

premium coated paper and board, FSC-certified

Dana Popa is printed on Novatech Satin 150 g/m2 coated fine paper and board, FSC- and EU Flower-certified

The paper used in this magazine was supplied by Amsterdam paper merchant ModoVanGelder. For more information please call +31 20 5605333 or email marketing@modovangelder.nl

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books

2 1

Sophie Ristelhueber Fait Last year Jeffrey Ladd (of the blogspot 5b4 – Photograpy and Books) along with two

Lise Sarfati Austin, Texas Fashion Magazine

companions founded Errata Editions in New York, with the intention of making rare books accessible again by reproduc-

Four years after New Life Lise Sarfati

ing them page-by-page, with historical

revisits the girls she had previously pho-

essays, a bibliography of the featured

tographed in a Magnum fashion com-

artist, translations and makings of the

mission, but this time bringing along

original at a reasonable, as he puts it

very expensive and stylish clothes. This

‘democratic’ price. Whereas Chris Killip’s

is the fourth Fashion Magazine produced

In Flagrante, number 4 in the series, must

by Magnum and it has the look and feel

be called a book most worthy of study movies of helicopter rides over bill-

she has with a fashion designer and a

Las Vegas Studio.

Images from the archive of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown

gallerist about clothes and female iden-

of a book. The photographer brings a restless and nervous energy to her

alongside The Americans, I’m especially

boards and the old Stardust sign and

in love with Fait. Having worked through

by photographing in a deadpan,

the reproduction of her incredible book,

Stephen Shore-like style: streets, interi-

after the essay, you come upon a portrait

ors, themselves – laughing, mostly. The

of her, standing next to a jeep in the desert

Museum im Bellpark in Kriems, Swit-

in front of two burning oil wells (Fait was

A curator, an artist and an architectural

zerland, has turned this into one of

photographed shortly after the first Gulf

tity. The images are at first sight calm,

historian have together produced this

those Swiss books in which meticulous

War in Kuwait in 1991), grinning. Victori-

meditative – of course very non-fashion

wonderful show and catalogue about

design, lay-out and editing are charm-

ously? Maliciously? Happily? I think she

– but revealing a strange feeling of the

these seminal architects and theoreti-

ing and serious at the same time. So the

enjoys the knowledge that only the artist

sort of collaboration that must have

cians, by going through the archives of

clash of architecture and commercial-

can turn the signs of defeat into victory.

taken place, of just what the viewer is

their 1968 visit to Las Vegas. Back then

ism encountered by studying a city that

Her pictures are mostly aerial views of the

supposed to see and what not. They

Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown,

was deemed the most horribly ulcerous

Kuwaiti desert; others were taken close to

open up an eerieness of not being part

with Steve Izenour and ten students

by architects in those years, but having

the ground, with the camera pointed

of what is happening, not being able to

coming along on an excursion that

a good time there, all in about a hun-

downwards, and the book makes you

fathom the thoughts of the portrayed,

would last ten days, already seemed to

dred snapshot-pictures, accompanied

gain and lose dimensions page-by-page.

nor being able to enter the images in any

know that they were working on a trea-

by two essays and a discussion between

For many photobook lovers the Errata

way. A certain Virgin Suicidesque,

tise (Learning from Las Vegas) that

Peter Fischli, Hans Ulrich Obrist and

series is the most avidly anticipated and

strengthened by the soft subdued light

would mix up city planning and archi-

Rem Koolhaas make this a very worth-

promising undertaking of 2009.

makes the images very seductive.

tectural discourse forever – that is up

while book.

highly-concentrated portraits and an adamant method of working, a spark of which can be found in a conversation

Errata Editions

to today. They hugely enjoyed them-

Magnum Photos

selves by visiting Ed Ruscha on the way

Scheidegger & Spiess

Books on Books #3

ISBN 978 2 9524102 2 9

to Las Vegas, by doing little 16mm

ISBN 978 3 85881 717 4

ISBN 978 1 935004 04 2

152

foam magazine #18 / displaced

4

books

3

Gerhard Richter Wald Discussing woods in the photography of Jitka Hanzlova, Robert Adams, Yoshiko Ueda and Lee Friedlander (with quick praise for New Mexico published by

Paul Graham Photographs 1981 – 2006

mentioned this new book by Gerhard

This is the first monograph of Paul

contains some German text (scrambled

Graham’s work, lavishly printed, edited

so as to be unreadable) and a lot of

by Graham himself, and containing a

images from one small wood. One

Saying that this book by a young (26)

complete illustrated bibliography of all

doesn’t directly see the abstract painter

Dutch photographer is self-produced

his published books. With each new

at work though, these are primarily very

(possibly with the help of state grants)

book he has found new solutions to

many unartistic images of trees and

is nowadays already like handing it a

book production and pushed them to

branches in different seasons. Upon

gold medal. Few of the bigger publish-

the limits, further than most other pho-

closer inspection the formal qualities,

ers could come up with a photobook so

tographers have. The selection of images

which are not so much based on

well-produced, well thought out, care-

in this book is aimed slightly more at the

photographic techniques, become visible,

fully edited and brilliantly printed as

art world than at the more limited world

and it is overwhelming to see how

this book, entitled We would come to

of photography that has rather neglected

Richter achieves this just by cropping

Wytske van Keulen

Radius late last year) someone Richter. It is the size of a large novel and

doubt everything. And almost everyone

intrusive, with only a few dates and

him. In more than 300 pages we can

and the precise use of the light at hand.

would come to doubt. It’s about a Span-

quotes from Juan, the main character,

gainfully study his way of turning images

The images are so much less romantic

ish village and one elderly Dutch emi-

in the appendix, to present the larger

into vehicles for thought on social and

than most on this subject and yet they

gré living there, and it’s a a story about

biographical and historical picture.

political meanings and realities. I say go

have a clarity that is rare and indeed

faith and revelations, about WWII, as

Medal well-earned!

ahead and buy it!

stupefying.

much as about destiny. It takes a while to unravel the strands. The images and

Self-produced, no ISBN

SteidlMack

Walther König

portraits are distanced so as not to be

www.wytskevankeulen.nl

ISBN 978 3 86521 858-2

ISBN 978 3 86560 503 0

153

foam magazine #18 / displaced

5

books

Guy Tillim Avenue Patrice Lumumba before. Surely Fleuret draws his inspira-

Aided by a grant, Guy Tillim has travelled

tion from photographers as diverse as

to the DR Congo, Mozambique, Benin,

Lee Friedlander and Daido Moriyama

Madasgascar, Ghana and Angola over the

but it also springs from literature and

past two years and completed a series on

the kind of graphic novels listed most

habitation, administration buildings, the

interestingly on his webpage. The quote

social landscape and the architecture of

from Paul Bowles at the beginning hints

the 1960s, that brief era when a new social

at Fleuret’s intention to create from his

vision emerged from the African leaders

travels (across Europe this time) a book

who governed those states. A large-for-

that leads the viewer into an imaginary

mat book presents the work adequately,

country, five chapters taking him from

introduced by a concise text by the pho-

This catalogue by Thomas Demand

departure to his arrival at a garden

tographer outlining what the book does

comes ambitiously designed, with differ-

(which turns out to be fields, meadows

not do (condemn, be nostalgic, judge or

ent paper types, a lay-out with strong

and scrub). We are guided on this jour-

criticize) and what it does (embrace).

colours competing with the images, and

ney by following Fleuret’s chain of asso-

Tillim is the one photographer alongside

some production stills and close-ups

ciations, trusting his curiosity, and his

David Goldblatt whose works, focusing

Winogrand-like inquisitiveness as to

on his mother continent, put just about

what a camera can and cannot do. He

everything he has at stake, who works

seems to be straining to turn the cam-

with a larger scope and sees more than

Thomas Demand Cámara

slick (Prada-like), but in his long text

Bertrand Fleuret Landmasses and Railways

Demand describes his process of visiting

Bertrand Fleuret has published his sec-

era into an idiosyncratic thing that

others. This is a quieter book than its

the Nigerian ambassador in Rome and

ond book – now with the small Atlanta-

doesn’t simply spit out rational, reada-

predecessors, in which buildings, offices,

then producing Embassy, which is full

based publisher J&L Books that has

ble, or poetical pictures, but rather

public spaces were sought out to find the

of dry humour and deeper political and

emerged from Iceland Press – and it’s

images of mental and bodily experi-

voices of administration workers and res-

historical meaning.

another audacious exploration of travel

ences of travel, of displacing oneself, of

idents, portrayed here in a reserved but

and mystery. This medium-format

falling and flying.

committed manner.

from his new series, Rain, Tavern, plus recent works. The book is somewhat

Fundacion Telefonica /

black-and-white book is comparable to

La Fábrica

his debut, in which a cascade of images

J&L Books

Prestel

ISBN 978 84 89884 85 4

washes away most of what you’ve seen

ISBN 978 0 9799188 3 4

ISBN 978 3 7913 4066 1

154

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books

Eugene Richards The Blue Room Known for his work on poverty and addiction this is the first time that Eugene Richards has published a book of colour photography, other than his advertising work. The images are dense, grainy, saturated, very chemical, and were taken on commission for The New York Times Magazine and National Geographic on numerous journeys across the midwest and southern states of the US (North Dakota, New Mexico, Montana, Wyoming). Visiting deserted farmhouses his is a journey back in time, through the entanglements of lost biographies, where close-ups of decaying belongings, destruction, interiors and found photos that Richards photographs often have a formal element that bars our view. In a few images taken from the roadside a lightning bolt makes the disruptive power of fate visible. This is a sumptous, over-sized 6

8

book that’s as inviting as it is troubling.

Phaidon ISBN 978 0 7148 4832 7

Nina Strand So, how do you think you’re doing?

7

Jörg Koopmann Cat Seen A newly founded publishing house in Munich (with an equally amusing name

Text by Sebastian Hau

as another recent publisher in the US called These Birds Walk) has put into

Sebastian Hau works in the specialised

Norwegian photographer Nina Strand

print one of the series I liked best last

photography bookshop Schaden.com

has staged herself and her friends to pro-

year called The Naked Forest and com-

in Cologne.

duce a photo-novel on love and relation-

bined it with a second series, Pet Houses.

ships.Whereas one might shrink from

The latter was taken in the aftermath of

each case right in the centre of the frame,

navel-gazing, theatrics and Woody-Allen-

Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, and

with a sometimes calm, sometimes

type humour, this is a nice example of

it makes a lot more sense than, say, the

humourous, sometimes cruel formal

the possibilities inherent in this genre,

posh and utterly meaningless series by

quality that brings William Eggleston to

Credits: all images are reproductions of

beset as it is by graphic novels and

Robert Polidori. Koopmann achieves this

mind. The two series in this nicely pro-

book covers, unless numbered.

movies. Journal has produced a nice read

by photographing empty houses that

duced book work together by cleverly

Credits for the numbered:

for a ride on the subway, something that

carry graffiti tags by animal rights groups

questioning the space inhabited by, or

1, 2 © Robert Venturi and Denise Scott

is funny and entertaining, where larger

who documented the animals living in

alloted to, animals, their life and death,

questions of identity, fiction and happi-

the abandonded houses. The Naked For-

the way we see and feel them in a dis-

3 © Wytske van Keulen

ness are touched on in a light way.

est is a lengthy project aimed at portray-

tanced yet caring way.

4 © Paul Graham / SteidlMack

He also writes for the German website

ing animals (ants, an eagle, a horse

www.fotokritik.de

Brown / Scheidegger & Spiess

5 © Bertrand Fleuret / J&L Books

Journal

rolling on his back, cats, dolphins to

Book with a Beard

6,7 © Nina Strand / Journal

ISBN 978 977625 0 2

name but a few) all around the world, in

ISBN 978 3 00 026732 1

8 © Jörg Koopmann / Book with a Beard

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Untitled (Chimp 01), 2007 / Untitled (Baby deer 01), 2006 / Untitled (Donkey 01), 2006 / Untitled (Deer 01), 2006 © Daniëlle van Ark, colour print 50 × 70 cm, € 950, edition of 10.

A selection from the Mounted Life series by Daniëlle van Ark, published in Foam Magazine #14, is available for purchase at Foam Editions .

Foam Editions Keizersgracht 609 NL-1017 DS Amsterdam T +31 (0)20-5516500 W www.foam.nl E jacob@foam.nl Open Wednesdays – Fridays 1.00 pm – 6.00 pm Saturdays 11.00 am – 6.00 pm and by appointment

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Spread your talent!

Are you the world’s next photography talent? Show us your work and get published in the 2009 Talent issue of Foam Magazine!

Don’t let this chance for your own portfolio pass you by.

Go to www.foammagazine.nl for submission requirements.

Malachy Udegbunam with children, Enugu, Nigeria, 2008 © Pieter Hugo, courtesy Yossi Milo Gallery, NY / Michael Stevenson Gallery, Cape Town.

Winner of the KLM Paul Huf Award 2008, published in Foam Magazine #16 Talent.

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Foam_Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam

Foam exhibits all genres of photography: fine art, documentary, applied, historical and contemporary; a museum with international allure. Along with large exhibitions of established (world) famous photographers, Foam also exhibits emerging young 足talent in smaller short-term shows.

Keizersgracht 609 1017 DS Amsterdam tel +31 20 5516500 www.foam.nl Open daily from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.

Thursday and Friday from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m.

Foam is supported by the VandenEnde Foundation and the BankGiro Loterij

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Yellow van, from the series Night, 2008 Š Carl Wooley

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NY Perspectives ~ Amsterdam discovered by NY photographers ~

Exhibition in the Amsterdam City Archives 14 May – 23 August 2009

In 2009 New York and Amsterdam celebrate the historical link between the two cities. New York began its history as a Dutch trading post at the southern tip of Manhattan. In 2009 it is 400 years since Henry Hudson discovered the island of Manhattan and declared it to be an ideal natural harbour. To mark this 400th anniversary, the Amsterdam City Archives and Foam, in cooperation with the John Adams Institute, are organising a photo exhibition about Amsterdam, as seen through the eyes of New York photographers.

From their New York perspectives, four photographers were invited to go on their own voyage of discovery through Amsterdam. Between October 2008 and February 2009 they spent three weeks in Amsterdam. Each was commissioned to explore a different aspect of the city: the street, the night, the water and the outskirts. This resulted in surprising images which revealed an unknown side of the Dutch capital. The New York photographers were struck by Amsterdam’s small scale and peacefulness; but also by more subtle things such as the transparency of the Dutch houses with their big windows, which give every passerby a glimpse into the private world of the inhabitants.

On his nightly bicycle rides Carl Wooley (1977), while working on his series Night, did not photograph the garish electric signage in the wellknown city centre, but found himself drawn to more inconspicous and undefined places, like in his home town New York. As a result of the darkness, the glow of artificial light draws attention to the strangeness of these landscapes that are a by-product of human development. Random details are illuminated, making us wonder what is going on outside the direct circle of light thrown by the streetlight. Due to long exposures required when photographing at night, the sense of suspended animation is intensified; either something has just happened, or it is about to.

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For his series Voetganger (Pedestrian), street photographer Gus Powell (1974) was inspired to use the Dutch windows as mirrors and to play a game with interior-exterior and supposed reality. You do not always know what you are looking at in his photos – the city or its mirror image. The modern city is a community of strangers and this is how the pedestrians in Powell’s photos move through the urban space, whether in the streets of New York or Amsterdam. Everyone is in their individual universe, but the photographer connects each person’s existence to other worlds that thrust themselves on us from billboards, reflections of our private dreams.

In Richard Rothman’s (1956) work, nature plays an important role.

Autumn has always been his favourite season, when nature, in glowing colours, takes leave of the season of growth and heightens anticipation for new beginnings. For his series Water, he took precise black-and-white photos in which the foliage of the many trees planted along Amsterdam’s waterways forms a screen through which the city and the water shimmer indistinctly. Rothman experienced Amsterdam as a heavenly version of New York City, a city surrounded by water. He photographed ‘Amsterdammers’ who live in the houseboats on the water, a typical feature of Amsterdam culture.

And finally, for his series Borders Joshua Lutz (1975) explored the outskirts of Amsterdam. He found there a diverse area, with the occasional American influence: a Cadillac parked in a suburb or a ‘Sizzling Wok’ which uses brightly-lit signage to lure passing drivers to this spaceship. He encountered small communities that have withdrawn into their self-defined territory at the rough edges of the city. Just as in his book Meadowlands, about the marshy area between New Jersey and New York City, Lutz again shows here that he is particularly attracted to the unmanicured aspects of landscapes that have managed to escape the clutches of urban planners. + All images: Courtesy of the artists / Amsterdam City Archives.

NY Perspectives is supported by the Amsterdams Fonds voor de Kunst.

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Doorway, from the series Night, 2008 © Carl Wooley

Wasplaats, from the series Night, 2008 © Carl Wooley

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Handrail, from the series Night, 2008 Š Carl Wooley

T, from the series Night, 2008 Š Carl Wooley

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Amsteldijk 870, Amsterdam, from the series Water, 2008 Š Richard Rothman

Hortusplantsoen, Amsterdam, from the series Water, 2008 Š Richard Rothman

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’s-Gravelandse Veer, Amsterdam, from the series Water, 2008 © Richard Rothman

Overloopplantsoen, Amsterdam, from the series Water, 2008 © Richard Rothman

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Amsterdam: No. 0267, from the series Voetganger, 2008 Š Gus Powell

Amsterdam: No. 0504, from the series Voetganger, 2008 Š Gus Powell

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Amsterdam: No. 0279, from the series Voetganger, 2008 Š Gus Powell

Amsterdam: No. 0530, from the series Voetganger, 2008 Š Gus Powell

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Untitled (ADM 1b), from the series Borders, 2009 © Joshua Lutz

Untitled (AM✡DAM), from the series Borders, 2009 © Joshua Lutz

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Untitled (68 Caddy), from the series Borders, 2009 Š Joshua Lutz

Untitled (NYED), from the series Borders, 2009 Š Joshua Lutz

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13 February – 13 May 2009

Richard Avedon ~ Photographs 1946 – 2004 Foam is on the tour schedule of the major retrospective Richard Avedon – Photographs 1946 – 2004. Compiled by Denmark’s Louisiana Museum in close cooperation with the Avedon Foundation, this exhibition appears at just six venues worldwide and can be seen at Foam from 13 February to 13 May 2009. It features over 200 works by Richard Avedon presented in chronological order, from his first photos made in Italy in 1946 to his final portraits, made shortly before his death in 2004. This is the first retrospective of his work to appear in the Netherlands and the final chance to see it in Europe.

Richard Avedon (1923 – 2004) is recognised as one of the greatest American photographers of the twentieth century. For over fifty years he was a leading figure in photography, with a star status that never left him. He was the first to cross the boundaries of different photographic genres. Avedon made his name in the early 1950s as a fashion photographer, working for American magazines such as Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue. Besides fashion photography, Avedon also took dark, emotionally charged portraits. Avedon was one of the great innovators of modern fashion portrait photography. His portraits were radical and intense, often contrasting sharply with the subject’s public image.

Avedon created an endless series of portraits of statesmen, artists and actors, including Katherine Hepburn, Audrey Hepburn, Humphrey Bogart, Brigitte Bardot, Marilyn Monroe, Buster Keaton, Charles Chaplin, Truman Capote, Henry Kissinger, Edward Kennedy, The Beatles, Andy Warhol and Francis Bacon. He photographed each of them in his own inimitable way: against a neutral white background, detached from time and place. All that remains is the penetrating, psychologically charged image of the individual looking back at the viewer.

14 May – 23 August 2009

NY Perspectives ~ Amsterdam discovered by NY photographers To mark the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson’s discovery of Manhattan, Foam is teaming up with the Amsterdam City Archives and the John Adams Institute to organise an exhibition about Amsterdam, as seen through the eyes of four New York photographers. More information on this project on pages 160 – 169 of this issue.

#3211. Cafalù, Sicily, Italy, July 2008 © Massimo Vitali

29 May – 9 September 2009

Massimo Vitali

Richard Avedon, self-portrait, Provo, Utah, August 20, 1980 © 2009 The Richard Avedon Foundation

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The Italian photographer Massimo Vitali (1944, Como) is famous for his monumental photographs of large groups of people. These focus especially on contemporary leisure time activities: the beach, the disco, mass tourism. Typical of his work is the congregation of a large, impersonal group, in which details and individual stories can nevertheless be identified. Vitali’s photos are the result of a complex work process.

He usually uses a classic wooden Deardorff 11x14-inch camera to record everything with the greatest of precision and from an elevated vantage point. The images are then digitally enlarged to form impressive panoramas. The results are photographs with an extremely wide visual field and at the same time a high degree of detail.

The exhibition in Foam comprises Vitali’s new work, complemented by an overview of existing work.

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29 May – 30 August 2009

Guy Tillim ~ Avenue Patrice Lumumba Foam presents a broad selection from Avenue Patrice Lumumba, the most recent project from the South African photographer Guy Tillim.

In many African cities there are streets, roads and squares named after Patrice Lumumba, one of the first elected African leaders of the modern age. Lumumba won the Congolese election after independence from Belgium in 1960. He spoke out explicitly against a new neo-colonial order that would indirectly continue colonial domination. His radical views led directly to his murder by Belgian agents in January 1961.

Today, his image as a nationalistic visionary is not tarnished by the many accusations of abuse of power that are so often synonymous with African leadership.

With clear, precise and engaged images, Guy Tillim focuses in this project on the modernistic architecture that is a symbol of the original optimism surrounding the idea of an independent post-colonial Africa.

In 2008, the mostly decaying buildings represent the African inability to make Lumumba’s dream a reality. Guy Tillim started work on this project after receiving the first Robert Gardner Fellowship in Photography, awarded by the Peabody Museum of Harvard University.

In addition to being exhibited by Foam, Avenue Patrice Lumumba will be displayed by the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris, The Photographers’ Gallery in London and Serralves Museum in Porto. A book accompanying the exhibition has been published by Prestel. Tillim is based in Cape Town and was previously a jury member for the KLM Paul Huf Award.

Investigations to preserve building, Porto-Novo, Benin, 2007 © Guy Tillim

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© PoppeLoewenhaupt

29 May – 5 July 2009

Marks of Honour 08 (MoH) ~ A striking library is a homage to the photobook per se Thirteen international photographers were invited to choose a photobook that was influential in forming their work, and to pay it artistic homage.

All the participating works show a wide spectrum of enthusiasm for photobooks and the variety of inspiration sources drawn on by international photo artists. Limited to three copies, each work contains the original photobook and its complementary homage. In sum Marks of Honour 08 constitutes a singular library and a system of reference on the most enduring influences as well as the freshest in contemporary photography.

The photographers and their homage: Harvey Benge honours William Eggleston, Chris Coekin honours Hendrick Duncker & Yrjo Tuunanen, Peter Granser honours Robert Frank, Pieter Hugo honours Roland Barthes, Tiina Itkonen honours Pentti Sammallahti, Onaka Koji honours Daido Moriyama, Jens Liebchen honours Anthony Hernandez, Michael Light honours Ansel Adams, Mark Power honours Stephen Shore, Matthew Sleeth honours Lars Tunbjörk, Alec Soth honours Andrea Modica, Jules Spinatsch honours Block 2008, Raimond Wouda honours Paul Shambroom. Marks of Honour 08 will be shown in various international galleries and museums. The exhibition is a mixture of the library itself, multimedia-reproductions of the work and large format ‘inspiration sketches’.

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29 May - 8 July 2009

Foam_3h: Emilie Hudig ~ Control In the series Control photographer Emilie Hudig has recorded the process of her illness in an extremely personal way. In 2007, Hudig won The Photo Academy Award for another project and with it an exhibition in Foam_3h.

In July 2007, Hudig was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Disease for the second time. After having no signs of the illness for 13 years, the illness appeared to have returned. Hudig was 34 years old, married and the mother of a ten-month-old son. In her everyday life, Hudig is a documentary photographer and when she started treatment at the Amsterdam VU hospital, she bought a small analogue camera that she took with her everywhere. Hudig used the camera as a photographic diary to express her feelings during her treatment. Taking photographs gave her the feeling that she did not have to give up everything from her normal life. It also had a significant impact on the atmosphere in the hospital and reduced the fear.

The series about Hudig’s sick-bed is personal and uncompromising.

The way in which the story is told is documentary, but also artistic and associative. As a result of this project about her own life, Hudig discovered that for her, photography is increasingly about vulnerability and transience.

Flange, 2009 © Hendrik Kerstens, Courtesy of Witzenhausen Gallery Amsterdam/New York

11 June – September 2009

New Amsterdam / New Perspectives ~ Contemporary Dutch Photographers in New York

© Emilie Hudig

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Guest-curated by Kathy Ryan, Photo Editor of The New York Times Magazine, this exhibition that will mark the 400 th anniversary of the Dutch arrival in Manhattan features the work of contemporary Dutch photographers.

The photographers will show us their interpretations of New York.

The rich diversity, energy, tolerance, commerce, and stunning landscape that originally attracted the Dutch to New York City 400 years ago still define the city today. Through their considered gaze the participating Dutch photographers will share their interpretations of what makes this the great city it is. The exhibition will consist of portraits, landscapes, still lives, conceptual photographs and documentary photography. It will be contemporary work, firmly rooted within the Dutch tradition.

This exhibition presents New Yorkers with some of the most exciting imagery in the photographic medium being done by the Dutch. The artists featured in the exhibition range from the legendary Rineke Dijkstra to emerging artists who are just now gaining recognition. Participating artists include: Morad Bouchakour, Misha de Ridder, Wijnanda Deroo, Rineke Dijkstra, Charlotte Dumas, Hendrik Kerstens, Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin, Erwin Olaf, Jaap Scheeren, Daniëlle Van Ark, Arno Nollen and Hellen van Meene. The majority of the work in the exhibition will be created especially for this exhibition, which will be presented in the Museum of the City of New York.

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Colophon Foam Magazine International Photography Magazine Issue #18, Spring 2009 March 2009 Editorial Advisers Christian Caujolle, art director VU, Paris / Kathy Ryan, photo editor The New York Times Magazine, New York Editor-in-chief Marloes Krijnen Editors Marcel Feil / Pjotr de Jong / Markus Schaden / Tanja Wallroth Managing Editor Tanja Wallroth / Sara Despres Magazine Manager Chee Yee Tang Communication Intern Eva Valkhoff Concept, Art Direction & Design Vandejong, Amsterdam – Pjotr de Jong / Marcel de Vries / Hamid Sallali / Lucie Pindat / David Büsser Typography Lucie Pindat / David Büsser Contributing Photographers Border Film Project / Anton Corbijn / Jim Goldberg / Roland Bonaparte & Friedrich Carel Hisgen / Juul Hondius / Dana Popa / Henk Wildschut Cover Photograph © Dana Popa, courtesy Autograph ABP, London Contributing Writers Marcel Feil / Sebastian Hau / Max Houghton / Ilse van Rijn / Linda Roodenburg / Mark Sealy / Sophie Wright Copy Editor Pittwater Literary Services, Amsterdam – Rowan Hewison Translation Karen Gamester / Tom Johnston / Cecily Layzell / Iris Maher / Liz Waters Lithography & Printing Drukkerij Slinger Strooijonkerstraat 7 1812 PJ Alkmaar – NL www.drukkerijslinger.nl Binding Binderij Hexspoor Ladonkseweg 7 5281 RN Boxtel – NL www.hexspoor.nl

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Paper

ModoVanGelder, Amsterdam Postbus 49000 1009 CG Amsterdam – NL www.modovangelder.nl The production of Foam Magazine has been made ­possible thanks to the generous support of Drukkerij Slinger, Binderij Hexspoor and ModoVanGelder, Amsterdam.

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 Chee Yee Tang Foam Magazine PO Box 92292 1090 AG Amsterdam – NL T +31 20 4622062 F +31 20 4622060 chee@foammagazine.nl Subscriptions Bruil & van de Staaij PO Box 75 7940 AB Meppel – NL T +31 522 261303 F +31 522 257827 info@bruil.info Order subscriptions and single issues at: www.foammagazine.nl Subscriptions include 4 issues per year including VAT and postage The Netherlands e 50,– Rest of the World e 55,– Students and Club Foam members receive 20% discount Single issues include VAT and postage The Netherlands e 13,50 Rest of the world e 15,– Foam Magazine #1 is out of print Publisher Foam Magazine PO Box 92292 1090 AG Amsterdam – NL T +31 20 4622062 F +31 20 4622060 contact@foammagazine.nl www.foammagazine.nl ISSN 1570-4874 ISBN: 978-90-70516-13-0 © photographers, authors, Foam Magazine BV, Amsterdam, 2009.

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 contact@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.

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