Issue 26 by Foto8

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In November 2009, the book will be launched by Lars Müller Publishers at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris and the Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne.

Romanian border patrol, Maramures department. © ALBAN KAKULYA | YANN MINGARD

The Photography Biannual

Alban Kakulya and Yann Mingard’s documentary account of Europe’s external borders has been eight years in the making. An extract was first published in Vol 1, No 3 of 8.

CONTROL

I S S UE 2 6 - a u t u m n 2 0 0 9

East of a new Eden

T Th he e P Ph ho ot to og gr ra ap ph hy y B Bi ai an n nu ua al l I I S S SUEUE 2 26 3 - - a Su Pt RING u m n 22 00 00 98

panos pictures

Ed kashi curse of the black gold 9 March â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 3 april 2010

ISSUE 26 CONTROL Photographer: Guillaume Herbaut

“He who controls the present, controls the past. He who controls the past, controls the future.” So wrote George Orwell who knew a thing or two about such matters. Photography’s intriguing relationship to power has its roots in the use of the medium as a means to classify and measure in the service of ethnographic documentation. In enacting our own means of control – editing this latest issue of 8 – we have unearthed a fascinating 19th century publication The People of India, which through its depiction of the various castes and tribes of that region, has ensured its place among attempts to harness photography as an ethnographic project. Different types of technology have been used to infiltrate power relations, as seen in the recent Iranian elections. Iranians found in Twitter a mechanism to break through the stringent media controls imposed by the Ahmadinejad regime, as documented by Guillaume Herbaut. If the ways in which government seeks to control its citizens is any measure of democracy, it is interesting to observe that in a country where 17 journalists have been murdered since 2000, 95 per cent of Russians feel they have little or no control over what goes on in their country. With the publication of a new book on Georgia by Magnum photographers, the country’s media savvy president has found an effective and artistic way to control his nation’s image. On a more personal level, the human mind is also extraordinarily creative in finding control mechanisms, often carried out on the docile body, as we can see from Erica Shires’ wounding portrayal of a skeletally-thin young woman, to poet Rosy Carrick’s invocation of a woman enmeshed in a dangerously controlling relationship or Kosuke Okahara’s exploration of the culture of self-harm in Japan. Of course photography’s contemporary relationship to power is in its use as a method of surveillance. The UK is the most watchedover nation in Europe, its four million cameras invading our privacy every time we walk down the street. What does this say about our relationship to democracy? The Editors

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contents FRONT

IN WORDS

07 S POTLIGHT

145 G EORGIA ON MY MIND

Storefront Portrait Studio Russian Media Control FotoFreo 2010

15 W ORK IN PROGRESS Agnes Dherbeys

24 I NTERVIEW Jules Spinatsch

Max Houghton

152 EMBED AND BREAKFAST Peter Beaumont

154 HUMAN WRONGS John O’Farrell 156 U NPHOTOGRAPHABLES Michael David Murphy

IN PICTURES 32 T WITTER: IRAN Guillaume Herbaut

48 A MERICAN BEAUTY Erica Shires

62 IN CASE IT RAINS IN HEAVEN Kurt Tong 68 S CREEN MEMORIES Tim Hetherington

78 O UT OF CONTROL Dean Sewell

84 G UANTANAMO

158 AN INTERNET BABY Fiction by Xiaolu Guo 160 T HICKENING WATER Poetry by Rosy Carrick

162 B OOK REVIEWS Scrapbook Love Me Paul Graham The Rape of a Nation Nollywood Our Kids are Going to Hell The Photographer What We Bought

178 O N MY SHELF Corey Doctorow

Edmund Clark

102 NO LOVE LOST Michael Grieve 114 IBASYO Kosuke Okahara

102

124 AROUND BORDERS Karen Mirzoyan 131 B OOK SPOTLIGHT The People of India

Magazine Contributors

Guillaume Herbaut Guillaume Herbaut, born in 1970, is a founding member of the French photo agency l’Oeil Public. The winner of multiple awards, most recently a 2009 World Press Photo prize, the majority of Herbaut’s work is preoccupied with historical places, symbols and memory – from Auschwitz to Albania and Nagasaki. Michael David Murphy Michael David Murphy is a writer and photographer living in Atlanta, Georgia. His solo exhibitions So Help Me and The Jena Project debuted at Opal Gallery in Atlanta in 2008. “Unphotographable”, an installation based on unphotographable.com was included in Command Z at the Torrance Art Museum in 2007. Murphy’s essays and photographs have been published worldwide. Kosuke Okahara Born in Tokyo, Japan, Kosuke Okahara graduated college with a degree in education and began to teach himself photography at the age of 23. Since the beginning of his career he has been interested in ibasyo, a Japanese term meaning “the physical and emotional place where a person can exist” – a location or state of mind where a person can be comfortable and at peace. Okahara is represented by Agence VU. Erica Shires New York photographer Erica Shires is originally from Detroit and has also lived many years in Texas. She was named one of PDN’s 30 and her work has been exhibited in New York, London and Paris as well as many festivals worldwide. Commercially, she has photographed for major advertising agencies and clients such as Kodak, Nike and New York Magazine.

FOTO8.COM Chacaltaya Mountain Bolivia, Nick Ballon

They in Chongqing, Zhang Xiao

Foto8 sees print and electronic media as having a complementary relationship. We strive with both 8 Magazine and Foto8.com to present urgent concerns, strong opinions, thoughtful meditations and powerful photography. Find a new photo story online each week as well as commentaries, reviews and interviews with photographers, curators, editors and publishers. Explore our online site and archive containing contributions by some 400 photographers. The Foto8.com bookshop continues to specialise in signed, self-published and hard-to-find photography books. You can also join us, and the rest of the world, on Facebook and Twitter to find out what’s on our mind and to share what’s on yours – don’t disconnect.

PHOTO STORIES

COMMENTARIES

Chacaltaya Mountain, Bolivia

THE AFGHAN HOUND

Nick Ballon

Dispatches from our man in Afghanistan

Anything but Pop

THE END OF NEWSPAPERS

Abram Deyo

Leo Hsu

Mezcal: Por Todo Mal

INTERVIEWS

Caroll Taveras

Guy Lane with Andreas Gursky, Thomas Ruff, Mitch Epstein

They in Chongqing Zhang Xiao

Iraqi Kurdistan: Life After War Davide Monteleone

RECORDED AT HOST GEORGIA ON MY MIND Chris Boot

PHOTO FESTIVALS BRIGHTON PHOTO FRINGE OPEN Max Houghton

NOORDERLICHT Lauren Heinz

We english Simon Roberts

Liberia Tim Hetherington

The Blue Room

Eugene Richards

‘Illuminating and impressive’ – The Guardian

‘Inspirational’ – Big Issue

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Spotlight

Spotlight STOREFRONT PORTRAIT STUDIO The waypoints of our lives are marked by portraits: births, christenings, mitzvahs, graduations, engagements, weddings; annual holiday portraits when the family is together and annual school photo day. Studio portraits provided through the 20th century a ritualised sense-making of the life course and of family relations. The pictures lining the walls of our homes are shaped by a vernacular visual aesthetic that at once seeks to describe the subject as a unique individual while affirming the normalcy of the path of their lives. Brooklyn photographer Caroll Taveras has found a way to turn the idea of studio portraiture on its head while at the same time recognising and celebrating a romantic notion of the storefront photo studio as a valuable asset to a local community. For six weeks earlier this year Taveras opened a small studio on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn between Third and Fourth Avenues, in a space formerly occupied by a Domino’s Pizza outlet. The studio was open six days a week and charged $5 for a sitting, for which the sitter walked away with a 4x5 Polaroid. Taveras made other 4x5 pictures during the sitting as well, and the resulting images (for which the sitters signed releases) along with the interactive studio “installation” comprise a project that describes not necessarily ritual punctuation in the lives of the sitters, but a larger portrait of Brooklyn in 2009. Over this period, Taveras made around 200 portraits of both neighbourhood

residents who noticed (or were beckoned into) her shop and area artists who found out about her project through word of mouth and blogs. On her busiest day, a Saturday on which she made 40 portraits, sitters waited up to an hour for their turn. It took some time for the local community’s curiosity to bring them through the door (“A lot of people didn’t believe that I was really going to take their picture, or that it was really $5. They thought I was some kind of fortune teller”). But when locals started coming in, Taveras found herself hearing fascinating stories: about the couple whose apartment had burned recently and who wanted to memorialise the smoke-infused clothes on their backs that they had been wearing for weeks; from the woman who worked for an HIV support group that needed a picture for her newsletter; of the family of four that had always wanted but never had sat for a family portrait, and who ended up being her final customers. Her pictures are simple and straightforward, photographed at a close distance with a large format camera. Every detail of the subjects’ faces is revealed, lit to dispel any shadows. The backgrounds are even and the overall effect is of the sitter appearing very exposed. Taveras cites Disfarmer, Chambí and August Sander as influences. Avedon’s portraits from the American West also come to mind, as does some of the work of Stefan Ruiz (who also sat for Taveras). These pictures do not look like your old school photos; there is 7

Spotlight

no dappled backdrop, no hair light, no softening of the faces. While Taveras is an editorial photographer by profession, a job that requires the photographer to comment on her subjects, her portrait subjects do not appear to be scrutinised. Instead they are unassuming and frequently reveal a connection between subject and photographer even as the backgrounds are stark and the lighting almost deadpan. “I’m not trying to judge them or make them into someone else,” notes Taveras. “I just want to give them an opportunity to have a really nice picture that they like.” A New York native who had lived in this Brooklyn neighbourhood for two years when she began the project, Taveras is exploring the possibilities of installing her studio in Berlin and Mexico City and examining ideas of home and community in those places. But despite the mix of people that walked through her door in Brooklyn, her portraits, as a group, do not appear to make a sociological statement; nor do they attest to be a rigorous documentation. They are, rather, the evidence of an interaction. While this body of work may result in a book or exhibition, the significant output would seem to be the unique Polaroids that her subjects are happy to leave with. This outcome – portraiture that is not an inspection of the subject but rather a collaboration, “seated” in community interactions – is surely rooted in Taveras’ appreciation of the blurring of public and private that a storefront offers. “Growing up in New York, whenever I saw someone living in their storefront, I always thought, what an amazing way to live. You could put something in the window everyday and it could be your own personal installation”. And people would come in to have their pictures taken. Leo Hsu www.carolltaveras.com

Sitters, from opening page, left to right: Carter Gunn, Peter Lew, Leila Moskovi, Fatimah, Ayesha and Layesha, David Jacobson, Sonia Rivero, Roccio Caceda, Kenny Jennings and Sophia Chunlu Caracciolo

Spotlight RUSSIAN MEDIA CONTROL

The murder of crusading journalist Anna Politkovskaya in 2006 made headlines around the world. Yet three years on, her death, like those of 16 other Russian journalists slain since 2000, is unresolved, failed by the rule of law in a country where the desire for democracy seems to be evaporating. The October 2009 elections in Russia were described by the defeated opposition as “Soviet-style nonelections”, as the Kremlin appeared to tighten its grip on power. More worryingly, a growing number of Russians do not believe their country needs democracy, if a recent survey by the Levada Centre is in any way representative. The polling agency found that while 57 per cent considered their country needed democracy, 26 per cent held the opinion that democratic government was not suitable for Russia and 95 per cent believed they had little or no influence as to what goes on there.

A free press is of course a cornerstone of any democracy. According to research by the Committee for the Protection of Journalists, Russia is consistently found to be one of the deadliest countries for the press, ranked third in the world, behind Iraq and Algeria. A newly published report by the CPJ highlights one of the central problems: the fact that not only are the assassins almost never convicted, but that the criminal masterminds behind the slayings do not even make it to the courtroom. The report calls upon Russian leaders to condemn attacks on journalists unequivocally, to halt efforts to marginalise critical journalism and to hold to account law enforcement officials with regard to solving murders of or violent crimes against journalists. Paul Jenkins, a documentary maker who made the 2004 film The Russian Newspaper Murders for the BBC’s Storyville strand, welcomes such calls

Spotlight

to action but is pessimistic about anything more than lip service in the form of President Medvedev’s and Prime Minister Putin’s verbal commitment to fighting corruption and securing the safety of their citizens. “The corruption is endemic,” says Jenkins. “The political machine in Russia has institutionalised it. Before Putin, there was more opportunity to bring some of the bad guys to task. After Yeltsin’s squandering of state assets, Putin came to power on the sentiment of a free-for-all for the rich few. There needs to be serious scrutiny of business, of industrial deals, of corruption, but journalists can only operate when they have some reassurance against retribution. Without that, there can be no democracy. Most Russians would laugh at the use of the word.” Jenkins’ documentary follows the story of the two murdered editors of the independent newspaper Tolyattinskoye

Obozreniye in Togliatti, Valery Ivanov and Aleksei Sidorov, who he describes as “beacons of brave investigative journalism in the world”. Towards the end of the film, a female journalist starts working at the newspaper. She will later join Russia’s most critical newspaper Novaya Gazeta, and will become one of the four journalists to date from that organisation to be murdered: it was Anna Politkovskaya. Jenkins was asked to make a subsequent film about it for Channel 4, in which he exposes what he believes to be the central reason behind her murder: that she was investigating a slush fund in Chechnya. No one has been brought to trial. “To prosecute senior officials in Chechnya, with its close ties to Moscow, would be rather difficult,” he says, understatedly. Only in one case, that of the killing of Igor Domnikov, has a guilty verdict been delivered, showing that persistence can lead to justice, in the words of the CPJ.

Even though five men were jailed for his murder in 2007 in a landmark ruling, the masterminds behind the crime remained untouchable. With other journalist murders dismissed variously as street crime, or even suicide, many families continue to mourn their brave loved ones without justice. “I went to Russia as a tourist for the first time earlier this year,” says Jenkins, who now lives and works in Paris. “It didn’t feel at all like a police state. People are engaged in healthy, free discussion. But for serious investigative journalism, it’s a very dangerous place to be.” Max Houghton

Spotlight FotoFreo 2010

Narelle Autio, from the series ‘The Summer of Us’ 2009, Adelaide, Australia (above) David Dare Parker, East Timor, September 1999 (facing page)

In 1996 when Bob Hewitt, Max Pam, Gary Dufour and Victor France first conceived of FotoFreo, Fremantle’s festival of photography, they took the festival at Arles as a model. Les Rencontres d’Arles was then – and continues to be – one of the key nodes of the photography world. But the world has changed since 1996: nodes have multiplied and the global community of photographers is if anything a closer and larger community than it has ever been, connected by online social networks, new platforms for presenting and promoting work, and an explosion of new photography festivals. In a world that no longer has a clear centre, festivals like Western Australia’s FotoFreo play an increasingly important role in meshing regional sensibilities with those of the broader world. FotoFreo provides an opportunity for regional photographers to meet and show their work to an international audience. “We want to spread the word about the quality of our photographers,” says Hewitt, who now programmes the festival with June Moorhouse. “They

don’t have the networks to get exposure into a more international arena, and one of my ambitions is to try and network in such a way that not only do we bring work to Australia, but our photographers go to various parts of the world.” This cross-pollination is evidenced in the Lithuanian photography festival Kaunas. Photographer and curator Mindaugas Kavaliauskas, who organises the Baltic festival, had exhibited at FotoFreo in 2008. He returned to Lithuania with direct contacts to the Australian photo community and rapidly turned around an exhibition spotlighting Australian photography. (His collaboration with Australian photographers resulted in Customs Ignored: Lithuanian and Australian Photography (2009); the book includes work by nine Lithuanian and nine Australian photographers.) The FotoFreo 2010 exhibition line-up includes a mix of Australian, regional and international participation. Participants include well-known names such as Eugene Richards, Jean Chung, Tamara Voninski, Annet van der Voort

Spotlight

and Narelle Autio, emerging talents such as Viviane Dalles and Sohrab Hura and photographers who have cemented their reputations in the region including David Dare Parker, Monica Napper and Brad Rimmer. Highlights include two curated group shows: “Growing Pains: Timor Leste Ten Years On” exploring a decade of independence in East Timor, and a survey of Contemporary Chinese photographers curated by Zhang Guo Tian and Magda Zanova. Both exhibition and a speakers’ programme indicate a willingness to examine longstanding themes surrounding photography alongside photography’s shifting cultural and geographic contexts. The speakers’ programme explores the relationship of the photographer’s personal engagement and path through the world with the paths of their work, putting photo editor John Morris in conversation with Philip Blenkinsop, and Eugene Richards with Trent Parke. Panels will explore the possibilities and challenges faced by online photography; the role of photography and documentation in DIY

youth culture including skateboarding, graffiti and parcours; the future of book publishing; and photographers’ journals. FotoFreo was Australia’s first photography festival; March 2010 will see its fifth edition. Since its inception it has been joined by the Queensland Festival of Photography, the Daylesford Biennale and the Vivid National Photography Festival. It has grown rapidly since the first FotoFreo in 2002: where that cost around A$35,000, FotoFreo 2008 cost A$700,000 and drew 70,000 visitors, far exceeding the 20,000 anticipated. Moorhouse credits much of its success to the participation of volunteers who until now have produced and staffed the festival, although the size of the last festival caused organisers to recognise the need for a paid staff. Forward-thinking programming and grassroots support aside, part of FotoFreo’s success must surely be attributed to its geography. The festival can draw on talent from throughout East and Southeast Asia and the Oceanic region. The ongoing and project stories told by both foreign and East Timorese

photographers about the challenges faced post-independence present a perspective not always available to the rest of the world. Photographers in China participate in a shared history of practice that has only begun to reveal the depth of its contours internationally. Perhaps just as importantly, Fremantle, a small harbour city just outside of Perth, is itself an attractive destination, a walkable town with historic buildings, a strong arts community, picturesque boat harbour and nearby beaches. This at-first-glance similarity to Arles is not insignificant; festivals in small places allow for a concentration of interest that can easily be diffused in a large city. It may matter less now than it did 10 years ago that Fremantle is across the globe from New York, but it continues to matter that organisations like FotoFreo create a focus around which photographers can come together and not only celebrate photography, but redraw its maps. Leo Hsu FotoFreo 2010 runs from 20 March-18 April 2010 in Fremantle, Western Australia 13

work in progress

work in progress agnes dherbeys 15

Royal Thai Army troops deploy near Victory Monument in Bangkok (previous page), aware that some Red Shirts may be hidding in the buildings nearby Buddhist monks (right) wait for offerings in front of Wat Benjamabopit, near the Royal Palace

After eight years living in her adopted home of Thailand, Agnès Dherbeys’ decision to consolidate her assignment work, and to take a more focused look at the political turmoil that intermittently threatens to engulf the country and its people, marks an important development for an interesting picture-maker. Dherbeys moved to Thailand from France in 2001 and has also photographed in Nepal, East Timor and Cambodia. Increasingly, her work has been charged with the kind of energy and reflection that can only be born out of a period of extreme change. “It’s back to basics for me, now,” she says. “It’s a time to question everything, myself, my photography. I definitely reached the point where I didn’t know what I wanted to do anymore, or even what I liked. Now I’m figuring out what I want and how to move forward.” Early on in our conversation, I start to sense what it is that drives 32-yearold Dherbeys, and it’s best summed up for now as “pure feeling”. As her photographic style matures, there are 16

clues that it will become significant for its emotionality, in the way of a D’Agata or an Ackerman, yet her gaze may well retain the aesthetic that is referred to in shorthand as “photojournalistic”. It is difficult to draw her precisely on how her image-making might develop, as the conversation becomes quickly and passionately infused with the subject matter, politics and the ethics of style. “I shot them just as news pictures, you know, as stock. But I have realised that given what might happen in Thailand over the next few years, they might make better sense.” She’s sure of one crucial aspect, however: “Within the coming months, I would like to put a face to these abstract powers, raise questions and if not give answers, at least provide clues and tracks to be further debated and followed.” Through work undertaken for Newsweek, Dherbeys has accumulated a significant portfolio that encompasses news events in Thai politics. If it has a starting point, it could be fixed at the coup d’état in 2006, which saw Prime

Minister Thaksin Shinawatra ousted by his own military while he was away in New York for a UN meeting. Dherbeys was visiting Paris when the coup took place and so flew in from there to cover the turbulent scenes. The decision to shoot in black and white was entirely pragmatic: “I was shooting only in negative, and at the time we didn’t know how the situation was going to play out. If I shot in colour I may not have been able to print the films and send the pictures so I could do everything from home if I shot in black and white.” For the observer, the mix of colour work and black and white adds to the sense of turmoil that Dherbeys wants to portray. “I am profoundly convinced now is the turning point of Thai history,” she says. Thaksin’s rule leading up to the coup was characterised by its infamous and ruthless “war on drugs”. His government adopted what was effectively a shoot to kill policy in relation to drug dealers, a policy which left hundreds dead, including

work in progress

A Thai soldier near Democracy Monument after the coup dâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ĂŠtat

Oun and her child Aw, whose brain is damaged by HIV, in the room the temple provides for those strong enough to live on their own. Wat Prah Bat Nam Phu, June 2007

babies and children, and did little or nothing to stem the country’s vast drug problem. While the official reasons for the coup are still quite opaque, Thaksin’s increasingly totalitarian grip on power provoked the move for change. Though Dherbeys says her work does not aim to analyse the political turmoil, she describes her work as a need to understand the country with her own eyes, during a time when the twin peaks of information and knowledge are restricted. “The climate of autocensorship and lack of critical debate about current Thai events, are precisely the reasons why I feel totally compelled into witnessing and documenting today’s society,” she says. Dherbeys has captured many of the events that have brought the world’s attention to Thailand in recent years, from the 2006 coup, to the Red Shirt protests earlier this year, when thousands of largely pro-Thaksin supporters took to the streets of Bangkok, demanding a return to the 18

Klianssat, 30, suffers from TB as a result of Aids. She is a transexual from Bangkok. Wat Prah Bat Nam Phu, July 2007

former leader’s “democracy” and insisting that the new regime was illegally installed. The new Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva’s security forces called the victory theirs as protesters were eventually dispersed, yet the precarious and increasingly polarised situation that prevails in a country once known for its harmony benefits no one. The opposing forces are the Yellow Shirts, whose street protests led to Thaksin’s deposal in 2006 and who wear that colour to show their allegiance to the King. Their leader Sondhi Limthongkul survived an assassination attempt earlier this year. Dherbey’s has also photographed the “Day of Change” in South Thailand, perhaps the most politically unstable and volatile region. The wider work that Dherbeys wants to make will draw together these seemingly chaotic events, connecting them with a thread through history, and, importantly, framing them through a uniquely Thai mentality, that of extreme veneration for the King of Thailand,

81-year-old King Bhumibol, whose reign remains a fundamentally unifying and stabilising force. The monarch seems to embody a very specific type of nationalism that any Thai leader would be keen to exploit. It’s this sense of national identity that Dherbeys will be seeking to capture, in part through a series of portraits. She is still wrestling with the idea of achieving a coherent visual style for this aspect of the project, but mentions an earlier series of photographs, taken in Wat Prah Bat Nam Phu, the so-called “Aids Temple”, as a possible visual template. Dherbeys knows that part of her project will necessitate heading south. She talks of the difficulties of representing such complex political situations, wary of perpetuating Western stereotypes of a seething hotbed of Islamic insurgents. Rather than trying to cover news events, she wants to take a different approach, again taking Thai identity as her subject. “Successive governments are trying to

work in progress

Clockwise from top left: Red Shirts, supporters of former PM Thaksin, provoke the Royal Thai Army in the streets of Bangkok; in Sanam Luang, â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;pro-democracyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;, pro-Thaksin demonstrators gather in Bangkok; police block the road to the government house, where protesters are heading; Samak Sundaravej, the People Power party leader during the parliamentary elections campaign in Isaan

More than 20,000 antigovernment United Front for Democracy Against Dictatorship supporters (above) gather at the Royal Plaza. Bangkok, 19 September 2009 Thai Soldiers (right) near government house during the Red Shirts crisis in Bangkok

impose a kind of identity on the region that is not really Thai. Their culture is Malay and predominantly Muslim. I think it’s incredible that the government thinks it can compel them towards a particular identity – maybe that is not the right word – but try to control them like this.” Dherbeys thinks she may well begin by shooting portraits, maybe of a teacher or a doctor she knows, to try to provide some kind of entry to the complex story. When asked if she has a fixed idea of how she wants to shoot the portraits, she says no and it’s clear that such a preordained series would be anathema to Dherbeys, whose endeavour is precisely to explore the world with her camera. If she already knew what she was looking for, she wouldn’t be able to find it. “I’ve never been a fighter for a cause,” she insists, yet on hearing the strength of desire to understand the causes that underpin the political turmoil that she has lived through, I wonder if she is on

work in progress

her way to being exactly that. The cause would be communication itself. Current events in Thailand continue to keep Dherbeys occupied. Her most recent work focused on the 20,000 antigovernment United Front for Democracy Against Dictatorship supporters gathered at the Royal Plaza in Bangkok’s Dusit area in September 2009. Meanwhile, she’s looking forward to working on this long-term project, and while she acknowledges that she finds her work “overwhelming”, she clearly feels in a position to progress, a position that is strengthened professionally by her mentorship with the VII photo agency, under the watchful eye of Gary Knight. “I’m starting to find some answers about what I like in photos or what I want to do with them and that helps me to regain confidence as a person and to redefine myself or reinvent myself, however pretentious that sounds. The part of me that is a photographer and the other more private part are

feeding each other and help the other one to grow or to change. I’m very grateful to photography; I feel very indebted to it.” Dherbeys is remarkably frank about her own stake in attempting to represent a country, particularly a “foreign” one. As a child who grew up in an ordinary middle class family in a small city in the middle of France, Dherbeys believes that it is her very ordinariness that permits her to be a filter for events, thinking that if she understands it, so can others. There’s an essential humility at the core of her picture-making that partly comes from a particularly feminine sensibility that doesn’t feel a necessity to master history, but feels a need to picture it, so that others can see it too. She describes the process as an unfolding that happens in parallel with her own learning experience. Then, just as I am about to accept her claims to ordinariness, she reveals that she was adopted when she was just five months old and taken from

a Korean orphanage to the middle class French life she has just described. “It’s like a black hole. I have no information from my file, nothing at all. I never thought it was important and I was never interested, nor did I feel Korean or anything like this. But then with my mother passing away, suddenly I have this rush to go to Korea and I realise that I don’t know where I belong, really. Of course I was raised and I was educated, but there is something else. I have this expectation it [going to Korea] would change me completely. It’s not the goal – I don’t want it to change me – but I guess its going to…” Once again, Dherbeys’ willingness to put her whole self into the work, to grapple with issues that speak to her privately as well as professionally, will be the factor that renders her future work, on Thailand, on Korea, on the unchartered territory of the self, quite compelling. Max Houghton 21

work in progress

The Red Shirts (left) set alight tyres in Bangkok at the Uruphong intersection A Thai man (above), sleeps in the middle of a crowd of demonstrators in Sanam Luang

Interview GUY LANE WITH JULES SPINATSCH

During the night of the 2009 Vienna Opera Ball, Swiss photographer Jules Spinatsch used two webcams to produce over 17,000 photographs of guests attending the most illustrious event in Austria’s social calendar. He subsequently combined over half the images in an epic 30-metre wide, 720º, time-lapse panorama of the occasion. His project tests the limits of photographic possibility – the use of surveillance technology to complete a radically uncompromising, technically accomplished, and formally innovative representation of European haute bourgeoisie is unprecedented. It is a measure of the scale and scope of his achievement that, thus far, the work has proved impossible to exhibit. Related problems beset attempts to reproduce the Panorama in its entirety. As he explains, the issue of control – or, more precisely, his abdication of authorial control – was fundamental to the project.

Guy Lane: Since 2003 you have completed four Surveillance Panoramas. Your previous subjects, broadly speaking, have been the security services at work, a sporting spectacle and the democratic process. What interest did you have in the Opera Ball, and did you enjoy it? Jules Spinatsch: My idea was to create a portrait of a society, or rather, the ruling class of a society; and the Ball is one of those two or three events in Austria when half the government, lots of important people and a few celebrities are gathered in one spot. About 20 years ago, and until roughly five years back, there were occasional violent protests outside the Opera House against the rich. But this opposition hardly exists any more. The fact is that half the people in Austria hate the Opera Ball because they find it absurd; and the other half wants to be there. So if your work is about the Ball it always gets the same reaction: people either think “Oh that’s good – it shows how ridiculous this whole event

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is,” while others say “It’s good – it shows one of our glamorous traditions.” So I had to book a table; I had to pay the regular entrance fee of Eur250. I had to hire a tuxedo – I had to look like a participant. On the night everything in there felt peaceful – I felt I was among people who were enjoying themselves, and who happened to be the ruling class. It’s not a political rally. GL: This is not the first of your works to examine an area already colonised by other media – what is the relationship between them and the Vienna project? JS: In my Panorama you can look around however you like – you choose your own way of viewing it. Also, it covers the whole evening until 5 o’clock in the morning, while on television you get just the highlight, the Opening ceremony that lasts one hour. So the Panorama shows an anti-view – an alternative to the television. The TV broadcast is a guided tour which tells you what to see

and who’s in the frame; the only choice you have is to follow its timeline the way they want you to, or switch off if you are bored. Of course television is there to please: covering the glamour – that’s its duty. It adds glamour to the event and serves the needs of the participants and organisers. That’s why celebrities want to go there; or politicians – even if they are in trouble – they want to go because they can appear in a good light. But, while the event is on television, you don’t see the structure. I show the opposite: my agenda is to somehow show that structure. So in my work, while you see the architecture of the event, you don’t see much of the event itself. GL: During the eight hours of the Ball, you recorded over 17,000 images, half of which you have combined in a time-lapse 720º panorama of the proceedings. On a technical level this seems a remarkable achievement – how was it done on the night?

JS: I worked with an engineer, Reto Diethelm, who had developed the necessary computer program. We put up two computer-controlled network cameras (webcams) on a lighting rig in the middle of the Opera House. Each started photographing at the top of the left hand side and continued shooting while tilting down to the bottom, before jumping up again to the top, and then going back down. So every still shot, looking vertically, is about three to four seconds apart while, looking horizontally, they are separated by some minutes. It progresses from left to right, from top to bottom. The final Panorama has about 9,000 images and is combined half from one camera, and half from the other. There was no blind spot as the cameras’ recording overlapped. We were on the fourth tier of the rig with our computers, but it would have been possible for us to have the cameras in the Opera Ball and have been controlling them from Hawaii. 25

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GL: As with your other surveillance projects, the “eye” of your camera is remote and disembodied. Certainly your authorial involvement seems deliberately diminished. Is the process beyond your control – once you hit the Start button, do you intervene? JS: No, we don’t intervene. I mean, that’s part of the thing; as soon as the camera starts you lose your control. Of course we can predict that a certain spot will be recorded at an exact moment, but what will be happening within the frame, we don’t know. I control the space, but not the frames. So the control I’m exercising here is of a very limited and a very arbitrary kind. It’s a control that is not really controlled, a gamble. Further, everybody loses their control. It is true of all my Panorama projects that neither me, nor the event organisers, nor (in this case) the people at the Opera Ball finally control the picture. Normally the idea of going to

a ball like that is that the guests want to improve their standing, their public image. But in my Panorama it’s not necessarily true that they will appear favourably – maybe they will look ridiculous at just the moment they are photographed. They do not determine their representation, and neither do I. But, it’s not fair to say that my intention is to show either a bad or a good side. No, that’s not the case. The interesting thing is that I’m launching a process in which the way people appear is beyond control. GL: What technical challenges did you face in assembling the Panorama? And why has it not been displayed? JS: The hard part came afterwards – programming the way the single images are put together is even more complicated than taking the photographs. Geometrically it is quite difficult: they have to be distorted to

a sector of a globe, then they can be placed next to each other, and each single image has to be adapted with eight others around it. Then it has to be re-distorted to become flat again. The images are recorded so that they overlap by about 20 per cent, and the programme calculates the geometry using this common overlapping area. So, even if you are looking very closely at the finished Panorama, there are no big ruptures in the spatial rendering. While time is cut up in pieces, space is not. The idea at the time was to display it in a public space in Vienna shortly after the event but so far the work has not been shown. Because the Panorama is so big, measuring up to 30 metres wide, it has been really difficult to find anywhere for it. My proposal, or my wish, was to build a round viewing space for it, one that excluded the outside world, so that it would not matter where it actually was. A Viennese committee for 27

art in public spaces thought the project was interesting, but, for a variety of reasons, they didn’t want it in a separate structure. So since then I’ve been looking for a 30 metre wall in Vienna which would be suitable. So far I’ve not found anywhere. GL: At first glance the finished Panorama could appear almost like an honorific, official group portrait. JS: That’s the danger of it; if you show it too close to the Opera building then, because of that proximity, the project risks falling apart. It loses its critical distance. And if it’s shown within the Opera House then it would definitely look official. That’s exactly the reason why I wanted to build the round structure – to exclude that risk. GL: And now, because of the difficulties you have encountered in displaying the work, you have produced an edit of 87 individual frames extracted from the whole? JS: Initially the 87 frames were meant to help me explain the project to people, and to show a selection and a range of images that are available within the 17,000 from the night. To begin with, it was no more than that. Now though I have decided that the work can exist in other formats, and not just as the big combined panorama. For example, for a forthcoming show I will exhibit 30 or 40 individual shots printed about as large as a television screen – maybe 40 x 50cm. So I am also looking at these 17,000 images as a source for other stories. For me these close-up single images are a sensation. Because when the Panorama is 30 metres long, the individual photographs are not more than 10cm wide and they look like good quality, high resolution pictures. But when you make them bigger – say, 40 x 28

50cm – they deteriorate, and resemble images from a surveillance camera; they become grainy, and you see the pixels and so on. They gain additional content and look like covert shots. GL: How do you think this affects the possible meaning of the work? JS: Suddenly, then, the meaning of the images shifts to something related to ideas of control, surveillance, voyeurism, exhibitionism, glamour, danger – whatever you can associate with it. This element of authoritarian control – of individuals or groups – is strongest when you see the single images. They have a totally new, different quality. The attraction of this for me is that the aesthetics of this surveillance imagery creates suspicion. You know that if something is surveyed, it must have some importance – or there must have been some suspicion beforehand, otherwise it would not have been undertaken. For example, when we see a surveillance shot of a terrorist – a very blurry image, say, which is later announced to have been vital for the capture of the culprit – the picture becomes hugely important as evidence. So this aesthetic has somewhere been established as a way of providing proof. One further quality appears as well – every single, isolated image tells a short story, detached from the context of the whole. GL: Were you particularly interested in practising a form of surveillance of Austria’s ruling class? JS: Well, that is what the images look like, and that was the technology I used. So that’s part of it, yes. But if you consider the fact that I’m only taking, say, two moments out of eight hours of somebody’s life during the Opera Ball, then it’s not really strong surveillance.

It misses much more than it covers. Let’s say it covers a lot, but misses even more. But it creates a lot of unexpected collateral meanings, and that’s a very fascinating outcome. The other fact to be aware of is that my Surveillance Panoramas are a combination of three things: the classical panorama from the 19th century, modern technology and documentary recording. The surveillance camera is the ultimate documentary machine because it just records without an author. It more or less documents every moment from one spot – while the panorama shows a 180º or even a 360º spatial overview, again from one spot. So in the space, it shows everything. My work, then, is a combination of all three elements, though of course it cannot be all three at the same time. GL: In some ways here your use of surveillance, and the antipathy to other forms of media representations, recalls Temporary Discomfort – your documentation of the security preparations for the World Economic Forum. JS: I see it as a continuation of that, but it has also shifted. I have so far made four of these panorama projects, and every one has had a sub-issue which is really important. In Temporary Discomfort there was an anti-photojournalism agenda. In each chapter of that work I used a different strategy, which was adapted to the actual situation on the ground. My use of surveillance technology resulted from a feeling that walking around with a camera in a battlefield seemed to be very antiquated. I thought I must raise my game in order to be able to play on the same level as the security forces or the military. It occurred to me that wars are no longer happening where

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We don’t intervene. As soon as the camera starts you lose control. Or, I control the space but not the frames. It’s a gamble... they are controlled – or, put another way, where they are controlled, they’re not really happening. That is, they are controlled in Florida and the bombs explode in Iraq, for example. I no longer wanted to be the guy running around burning cars. And so I thought – OK, let’s use technology and survey the surveyors; let’s observe the police and security services. This required a shift of context in which the camera was moved from a web function to a new surveillance purpose. It’s the same camera, but there’s a different intention behind it. My collaborator Diethelm has cameras in the Swiss Alps which are used via the internet to see if snow conditions are good for skiing. So I took these cameras down from the mountain and installed them overlooking the World Economic Forum at Davos. They became surveillance cameras – once they surveyed the weather, now they surveyed the security forces at work. Also, Temporary Discomfort was antiphotojournalistic in the sense that it was opposed to the way in which the organisers at these events get together with the media and more or less program in advance the images that are going to happen. The founding principle of my work was to find independent images – not pictures that could be taken from one side or the other. I did

not want to be like Allan Sekula who remained among the demonstrators (even though he was only photographing periods of inaction – which is another kind of anti-photojournalism). Sekula was secure on one side. I didn’t want to be on either side. I wanted to show how images work, how they are produced, and I wanted to question the conditions of their production. GL: You have mentioned that the Opera Ball tends to polarise opinion. What do you hope a spectator of your Panorama might take from the experience of looking at the work? JS: Maybe three things... first, it is a fascinating visual – and physical – experience. Because of its size and density, you can look at it from a distance, as well as close-up, and discover thousands of details and short stories. All these little documentary fragments of reality may give a wider impression of the event, which may lead the viewer to think further. Second, the work tells us a lot about Austria today. The arbitrary nature of its portraiture exposes and questions the self-image of Austrian society, revealing the country’s links to a time of empire when it was one of Europe’s dominant powers. The Panorama shows the Austrian melancholic attitude towards its great past – but at the same time it hides

another less romantic, more traumatic past: its role in the Second World War. Whether understood as victim of – or collaborator with – Nazi Germany, that role is an unresolved issue that still splits society today. Hardly a week passes without an Austrian politician making racist or anti-Semitic remarks that provoke either applause or uproar. So the Panorama can be interpreted as a mirror of Austria’s self-deception. Third, the Surveillance Panoramas in general use a new way of constructing images. By cutting up an event in single moments and putting them together in one image, they combine contradictory elements: they are highly documentary and highly arbitrary. It should be obvious that photography – or media in general – is not neutral, but is a product informed by deliberate intentions... as indeed are its interpretations.

An early evening kerbside during a Tehran rush-hour; an insignificant scene, like countless others. Three men wait... for a bus, or a friend. Maybe a lift. Groceries in a bag on the pavement. A vehicle looks to be alight. White heat radiates a field of pixellating, saturated colours. Mousavi supporters – possibly – appear as murky forms against thickening night. Beyond, another car has been torched. Her young face is turned away; she will remain nameless. She wears the regulation clothing of a student, and the badge of an anarchist. Orange smoke – or tear gas – fills the sky, backlighting militia members... or possibly Revolutionary Guards. Maybe there is a riot shield. A joke is told in the cool of a busstop. Out of its shade, the sun hits hard. There’s a torn poster on the smeared shelter glass. Two male hands reach down to a prostrate woman, her eyes unfocused. A dark area has formed by her head; it could be hair, or blood.

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PHOTOGRAphy GUILLAUME HERBAUT TExt guy lane 33

Guillaume Herbaut’s recent photographs of election-period Iran offer two perspectives. In Daily Life he arrays a succession of nondescript urban episodes: passengers, pedestrians, shoppers and couples go about their routines. They board buses, wait at lights, open windows for air, eat out. The everyday, it is said, is “when nothing happens”. But in The Twitter Revolution he reproduces illicit photographs in which Iranian “history” is most definitely happening. Following the announcement of a government victory, supporters of opposition leader Mousavi occupied the streets. And, as the Ahmadinejad regime was forced to temporarily withdraw from Tehran’s volatile public spaces, so it sought to control – or simply eradicate – images of the protests, and of the eventual crackdown. To fill the 46

vacuum created by the ban on foreign media coverage, and to outflank the authorities disabling of opposition text communications, activists used new media – Twitter, Facebook and YouTube – to counter the bland assertions of the pro-government Fars News Agency. In less than three weeks over two million tweets were posted on the subject of the election. In the same period a small number of indistinct, dubiously captioned and low-resolution photographs, of unknown provenance, bore witness to the fleeting promise of emancipation, and symbolised the possibility of circumventing state control. As Herbaut puts it: “The new way to resist and communicate, outside the streets of Tehran, was on Twitter – people sharing details of events as they happened, exchanging pictures and shouting their anger. Since the

media were prevented from working, the only communication we had with the Iranians was through Twitter and its pixelated images taken on cellphones. Twitter remains a formidable tool of communication and freedom, but sometimes rumours are unsubstantiated and images impossible to verify.” Indeed. Perhaps at such times it is enough – regardless of verifiability, legibility, or pictorial “quality” – just to keep the lines of communication open.

AmericanBeauty PHOTOGRAphy ERICA SHIRES TExt MAX HOUGHTON

Sometimes it’s as though pictures take on a life of their own, and in so doing find an unexpected eloquence. So it was with these photographs by Erica Shires of L., a young woman working in a café near NYU, who became Shires’ first muse four summers ago. Shires’ first impression of L. was that she was beautiful. Exquisitely, hauntingly, painfully beautiful. Such is the power of extreme physical beauty; it trumps everything else in sight by its glorious excess. Yet on looking more closely, hers is a harrowing beauty, born of fragility. The visual excess is accompanied by a lack… of flesh, of substance, of life force. It is not possible to look at this work without knowing we are looking at – 50

even fetishising – the anorexic body. While it was never Shires’ intention to document an illness, she was aware that part of her desire was to photograph the effects of the condition on L.’s body. With its awkward angles and jutting bones, it is a body closer to death than is comfortable to look at, yet this sight is not itself grotesque, though the fulfilment of the implicit wish would be so. That such control can be imposed upon the body could be seen as an extraordinary feat, were its consequences not so deadly and so final. L., like many thousands of young women – and men too – in the world’s prosperous countries has restricted her eating to a dangerous extent, in the full knowledge that the damage she has inflicted on her young

body is irreversible. The pairing of these pictures of L. with those of dead animals happened by accident and finds its meeting point in the commingling of the delicate geometry shared by each body of work. Shires was printing the two works at the same time, hanging them around her darkroom, when she noticed resonances. Looking back, Shires realised she had photographed a bird with a broken wing the same day she had photographed L. for the first time. Her desire to preserve the beauty-in-death of the bird sprang from a similar impetus to somehow protect her ethereal model. The power of these photographs stems from the fact that they are pure punctum. Every aspect wounds the

observer; every snappable limb, every strand of hair, every bitten fingernail is a body blow to the onlooker, who wants to intervene. Yet the photographic intervention has already taken place, and L. remains utterly vulnerable and unprotected. The fate of the bloated jackrabbit, left for dead on a South Dakota roadside or that of the fox flattened on a Nova Scotia highway is already determined. As JM Coetzee observed in Disgrace, civilised society finds a way to deal with its dead animals, calling it natural wastage or population control. What is less easy to master is the infinite complexity and impossible contradiction of simply being human.

IN CASE IT RAINS IN HEAVEN PHOTOGRAphy Kurt Tong TExt Lauren Heinz

In traditional Chinese belief, when a person dies their descendants are responsible for providing for them in the afterlife until their reincarnation. One such way to offer up money and possessions is through the burning of Joss paper – a coarse bamboo paper decorated with seals and stamps and most usually silver or gold. Also known as “spirit money”, some believe that the offering will provide a lavish lifestyle for their ancestors in the afterlife, or can be useful for bribing the guards of the underworld in order for an early escape. Over the past 50 years, Joss paper offerings have gradually begun to take on more utilitarian forms. While paper constructed to resemble cars, servants and houses became common sights at funerals, the Joss paper products of today are far removed from the delicate gold and silver squares. Neck massagers, microwaves, scooters, McDonald’s meals, MP3 players

– practically any commercial item is readily available, in shops or online, to purchase and set alight, for the deceased to take with them into the afterlife. Most of the items are chosen by relatives as a way of memorialising their loved ones and, in a sense, as a control over their spiritual afterlife. While it may seem that capitalism has superseded the spiritual, superstition still plays a significant role in the practice. Prices for the Joss paper items, ranging from around HK$18 – about £1.50 – to HK$238 (about £19) for a near life-size motorbike, always end in an “8”, the ultimate symbol of luck in Chinese culture. Photographer Kurt Tong, originally from Hong Kong, was discouraged from undertaking the project as it’s bad luck to keep the products in your possession – he made sure to burn all of them after purchasing as an offering to his grandparents.

SCREEN MEMORIES IMAGES TIM HETHERINGTON TEXT MAX HOUGHTON

When a photographer produces a book, it is seen inevitably as a culmination of several years’ work. Its solid form and narrative drive point towards something resolved, finished, even. Tim Hetherington lived and worked in Liberia over a 10-year period, starting out as a relatively inexperienced photographer wanting to challenge his own innate Anglocentrism, becoming a UN investigator along the way, and finally becoming a chronicler of that country’s complex history, producing Long Story Bit By Bit: Liberia Retold published by Umbrage earlier this year. Through various aesthetic strategies, including an anti-chronological timeline running throughout the book, Hetherington has sought to avoid that clunking sense of completeness that can be a cul-de-sac for thought. This choice is fundamentally an ethical one, as it tacitly acknowledges the difficulties of historiography, and his own role in that process. Hetherington’s photographic approach to Liberia was rooted in trying to bring out the truths and myths of the country itself, to connect to its visceral emotionality. In order to apprehend the undigestible scenes he heard about and witnessed (General Butt Naked playing football with human heads, for example), Hetherington deliberately allowed his photographs to dwell in part in a fictional sphere. He sees his own photographs as larger than life, cartoon-like, but crucially for Hetherington, this was a response to what he saw as opposed to a predetermined stylised choice.

It is unfortunate, perhaps, that “Vanity Fair photographer” Hetherington is these days best known for a single image – the World Press winner of the exhausted US soldier in Afghanistan – and one which drew criticism from some quarters for being slightly hackneyed – “as if photojournalism hadn’t moved on since Vietnam” – when, out of context, it belies the thoughtfulness and self-scrutiny that has always informed his work. This is borne out by a video diary he has been compiling for the past year, screen grabs from which are published on these pages. His desire to create a video diary as a body of work in itself offers a further ethical response to the creation of his book. It has provided him with the opportunity to face up to one of the central challenges of documentary photography: where to locate one’s self in the work.

There was a point at which, during the editing process for Long Story, Hetherington felt the psychological weight of his own experience bear down upon him, and the need to find his own place within his work became more urgent. One way of reestablishing and reflecting on his own position was to work on editing the video, which became a collaborative process with editor Magali Charrier, whose influence brought a notable fluidity and subtlety to the work, which remains unfinished. Hetherington is pushing the boundaries of the still and the moving image to try to get to that impossible place: that of thought itself.

Interspersed between frames that are identiﬁably Liberia are other, contrasting, sometimes confusing images and sounds: a bed in Thailand; his close friend and collaborator James Brabazon, crouching to avoid being shot at; the disembodied voice of a girlfriend back in New York; scenes from Afghanistan. Its dream-like weavings in and out of time and place speak to the simultaneity of experience. The result is necessarily fractured and discordant, and its acknowledgment of the difﬁculty of even assimilating – let alone representing – war and its far-reaching effects on all involved render it a critical piece of reportage. Long Story Bit By Bit: Liberia Retold by Tim Hetherington is published by Umbrage, New York 2009

PHOTOGRAphy Dean Sewell TExt Guy Lane

OUT OF CONTROL By February 2009 Australia’s south-east was enduring of one of the most extreme, and most sustained, heatwaves in its history. Melbourne recorded temperatures of over 43ºC for three consecutive days, and a 154year high of 46.4º. For the preceding month throughout the state of Victoria, districts had received either no rain at all or were recording hitherto unseen low rainfall totals. The severest drought conditions prevailed. As if this were not ominous enough, the region’s flora and topography make the state singularly vulnerable to bushfire. And when fire did break out the 78

consequences were catastrophic: in one day alone, 173 people died; 430,000 hectares of land were burnt; 2,000 properties and 61 businesses were devastated; whole towns were destroyed. Such was the severity of the outbreaks that the fires took weeks to control: the Kilmore East-Murrindindi fire, for example, was not declared manageable until 10 March, and not considered safe until 27 April. State Premier John Brumby described events as the “largest natural disaster in our state’s and Australia’s history”. The bushfires underway, Victoria’s climatic conditions – in particular the

way in which hot dry winds from the north are frequently replaced by those from the south-west – exacerbated the disaster, making the progress of the fires impossible to predict. Moreover, thunderstorms formed in the smoke plumes, resulting in lightning and heat-generating condensation that only intensified the blazes below. Historically, state policy has eschewed mass evacuations, preferring to allow communities to decide between two options – “Prepare, Stay and Defend” or “Leave Early”. But in the wake of February’s catastrophe, forceful recommendations have been made

that the full implications, and possibly fatal consequences, of staying be more stridently emphasised. In the town of Kinglake, for instance, those who remained to protect their homes experienced – in quick succession – power failure, thick smoke filling the vicinity, darkness, embers hailing down, and the rapid spread of spot fires. The owner of the town’s National Park Hotel reflected, “There really didn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason why some buildings burnt and others didn’t. The firestorm was indiscriminate. Some people stayed to fight the fire and lost, some people evacuated and their houses

remain standing.” An hour later the fire – now 6 km wide – had reached the town of Steels Creek, where one resident later described his family’s experience: “Almost immediately, the fire front hit us… Burning embers slapped into our windows and the rest of the house… it was like being inside a washing machine on spin cycle, and full of fire and embers.” Dean Sewell’s photographs, taken in extraordinary conditions, point to the scale and ferocity of the bushfires, and to the epic desolation of their aftermath. The rampageous, unrestrained landscape and environment that he records are,

of course, utterly indifferent to their inhabitants. In the words of one survivor, “I think we have to be absolutely blunt that, once these fires are out of control, they are out of control and unless you have some form of backup plan on your property for life preservation you should get out.”

PHOTOGRAphy EDMUND CLARK TExt Guy LANE

We have come a long way. We have dispensed with the gibbet, the pillory and the wheel; the age of theatrical, public punishment has passed. In the words of Michel Foucault, “a certain discretion in the art of inflicting pain” now prevails. Behind the razor wire at Guantanamo Bay for example, in addition to routine brutalities, detainees are subject to an elaborately nuanced, micro-managed regime of privations and rewards. In Guantanamo: If the light goes out, a work in progress, Edmund Clark has explored three notions of home and control: the places where the former detainees now find themselves trying to regain control over their lives, the naval base that is home to the American community and inside the complex of prisons that was home to the detainees, and still is for about 240 men. The photographs taken inside the prison camps afford us glimpses of some of the environmental and institutional means by which this thoroughly modern form of 86

incarceration is achieved. They disclose an ethos of restraint, sterility, order, duress, force-feeding and confinement. In a separate (also ongoing) series, Letters to Omar, Clark has compiled the mail received in Guantanamo between 2002 and 2007 by Omar Deghayes, a Libyan citizen now resident in the UK. For Clark they represent a compelling “insight into the idea of a controlling and paranoiac bureaucracy”. Every card and letter sent to Deghayes was photocopied or scanned, numbered, often redacted, catalogued and kept. Deghayes was only ever allowed access to the copies; the originals remained with the authorities. Which means that languishing somewhere in Cuba are postcards of the Yorkshire Dales, historic Chester, cuddly puppies and Hull Town Hall, among others. Within Guantanamo’s economy of control, access to – or denial of – such titbits of comfort gained extraordinary importance. Clark tells of one detainee who for years reportedly received no

correspondence at all; when he was finally passed a letter by the authorities the entire document had been redacted. “The levels of control in Guantanamo were total because the experience of incarceration was part of the whole interrogation process,” says Clark. “Your interrogator was in control of everything that you could or could not get: the thickness of your mattress, whether you had blankets or not, and when you did, or didn’t, receive your post. Those items were all customised for detainees according to how compliant they were, or how important the detainees were believed to be in terms of the information they were thought to have. That extended to the positions they were allowed to stand in, or how often they were moved from cell to cell. There were ‘frequent flyers’ who were moved all the time to disorient them – whereas other people would be stuck in solitary confinement for months on end. Guantanamo is all about control.”

Camps (above): arrow to Mecca and eyelet for shackles Base (left) Home (previous spread): a letter sent to detainee after a review board

Base (above) and Camps (right)

Camps (above): camp hospital display of the products and tube used for force feeding Base (right)

Clockwise from top left: Home: detainee identification label from the bag containing items issued on release; Base: model of former refugee camp at Guantanamo; Base; Home: items issued on release; Camps: toohbrush and paste, hooks; Camps: guardâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s lavatory

Camps (right): interrogation room call button

Camps: exercise area

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NO LOVE LOST PHOTOGRAphy Michael Grieve TExt Max Houghton

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Michael Grieve invokes an unforgettable image by Robert Mapplethorpe by way of an introduction to No Love Lost, his absorbing study of the dislocation of intimacy. “Man in a Polyester Suit”, he says, is “about constraint, it’s about fear. Here we are faced with a very strong black male, with his large penis hanging out of a fabricated conservative polyester suit. It’s the idea of coming out the constraints of white society, which is all about control. It’s also about fear. He’s displaying what white males often have in their head: that a black man is an object of fear. If you look back to the lynchings, one of the excuses white men used against black men to hang them is that they’ve raped or abused [white women] – there’s usually a sexual side to it.” The photographs in No Love Lost also raise interesting questions about who might be in control in any single sexual transaction: prostitute or client, man or woman, masochist or sadist. “For the women,” says Grieve, “control is about preservation of dignity, keeping a sense of distance and finding a place for the self. They have rules and

men have to keep them in order to get their satisfaction. But control works both ways. Women are dealing with something much more fundamentally real; much more serious. Man’s control is selfish; it’s a financial thing. I have money therefore I have the control. I have a penis and therefore I can penetrate you. The woman gives – they have to maintain a sense of themselves whether they’re involved in pornography or prostitution or stripping.” What unites Mapplethorpe and Grieve’s work is the acknowledgement of the sexual object as aesthetic object. Grieve chose to uncover it in its most theatrical, least personal setting. Though this project encompasses pornography shoots, strip clubs and brothels, it’s not “about” the sex industry. Through his queasily beautiful images, Grieve communicates the difficulty of finding or maintaining a connection with another person. Though many images depict a physical engagement between people, the work points towards a lack, an aporia at the heart of intimacy. “It’s about the fragility of human connection,” says Grieve, “and the

transaction between two people who are playing roles.” It’s the role-play and the transaction that the sex industry makes explicit that Grieve sees as implicit in every sexual encounter. A diaristic work, exemplified by Nan Goldin’s Ballad of Sexual Dependency, can succeed in conveying the transactions of the private sphere, but this was not where Grieve saw possibility for expression. He wanted to go to the places where sex is the only subject, right under the spotlight. “The prostitute stands under a lamp, a red light in her window. A porn shoot is dazzlingly illuminated. Everything is about the light but the light shrouds it.” A line from Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse resonated with Grieve and informed his photographs: “I am in love’s wrong place, which is its dazzling place: ‘The darkest place, according to a Chinese proverb, is always underneath the lamp.’” The quote is from a chapter called “I want to understand” and it’s with this sentiment that Grieve’s work avoids the clichés and casual sexism of men photographing sex and thus raises the bar for any such work that follows. 105

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One day, I met a girl. She was a student from the college I had graduated from. We became good friends and spent a lot of time together. One night she said that she has been suffering from self-injury for many years and she cannot feel ibasyo, a Japanese term that I translate as “the physical and emotional place where a person can exist,” a location or state of mind where a person can be comfortable and at peace. That word touched me since I had the same feeling in my childhood. Her words resonated strongly with me, as my father is an alcoholic and there was always violence in my family, and I was always afraid of being at home. Sometimes I felt I should not have been born. There was no safe haven for me. I started doing some research on self-injury because these were feelings that I felt deep down inside of me. To be honest, I was also the one who did this to myself but before I did not know anything about other people. This was hidden and taboo, but a widespread issue in Japanese society where things are seen as meticulously perfect and tidy. For better or worse, “the culture of shame” inherent in Japan has prevented such stories from being revealed. I started to find some websites where people were posting about their anxieties and sometimes photos of their self-inflicted scars. I posted a thread about the project I had in mind with my contact information. More than 20 young people emailed or called me immediately, telling me that they wanted to share their stories with me. But many of them were living with their family, and most of their families did not allow me to photograph them. I realised that some families didn’t even know that their children were struggling with self-injury. Finally I found six girls who allowed me to be a part of their life, and 122

of their suffering. In some cases, it took me over a year of communication before I was accepted into their lives. For four years, I spent a lot of time with them. Sometimes they called me to say that they overdosed on 300 pills, and I had to run to their apartment and call an ambulance. I would live with them for weeks in their tangled lives, and I started to experience and understand what they were going through. I sometimes felt that we were finding ibasyo in each other by being photographed, and photographing through this project. These girls represent a small fraction of the people who abuse themselves to survive in a world in which they believe they don’t belong, a world from which they feel they are excluded. I’m hopeful that these girls can see their own lives through my eyes, and in time, come to understand importance of their existence.

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around borders

PHOTOGRAphy karen mirzoyan TExt Max Houghton

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If the Turkey-Armenia border reopens, as per the protocols signed at a ceremony in Switzerland by the foreign ministers of the two countries on 10 October 2009, it will mark an end to a 16-year blockade of Armenia by Turkey. Turkey closed the frontier in 1993, to show solidarity towards its ally Azerbaijan, engaged at the time in a war with Armenia over the territory of Nagorno Karabak. Yet hostilities between Turkey and Armenia have a far longer and bloodier history. The genocide of as many as 1.5 million Armenians by Turks during World War I has never been recognised by Turkey, and has been the source of 126

disastrous diplomatic relations between the two countries for a century. It remains a criminal offence for Turks to refer to the episode as genocide. Karen Mirzoyan, an ethnic Armenian born in Tbilisi, Georgia, currently lives in Armenia. His disorienting pictures, taken from both sides of the 325 km border, offer an interpretation of the chaos and confusion that circles the lives of those that live in the region’s small villages. “There is no access road and you can enter Turkey only through another country,” he says. “If the border was open I could reach the Turkish town of Kars in one or two hours. But since it’s closed, I had to take a plane to Istanbul

and it was another one or two days travel to get back to the border.” While many Armenians dream of a better future for the small, landlocked country, a lasting peace seems heavily foreshadowed. “It feels like a vicious circle with everything chaotically moving around inside it, a road that has no beginning or end, no simple way of going from A to B physically and figuratively. I wanted to show people tempted by the future and scared of the past, weary of the chaos on the inside.”

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BOOK SPOTLIGHT

THE PEOPLE OF INDIA The People of India is an extraordinary document, which was published in eight volumes between 1868 and 1875, under the editorship of Dr John Forbes Watson and John William Kaye. Its 480 plates, depicting the various castes and tribes of India, have ensured its place among the most important 19th century attempts to harness photography to an ethnographic project. The accompanying text makes uncomfortable reading in the postcolonial era, yet at the time was used to justify and reinforce the dominance of English rule. We learn, for instance, of Zahore Begum, a Kashmir Musulmani, who follows the profession of a courtesan: “As may be supposed, her character is not very respectable…” By contrast, the women grasscutters of Madras are “a very industrious and useful race”. John Falconer, Curator of Photographs at the British Library, has made an interesting study of the origins of the project. He notes that in the introduction to the first volume, credit for the patronage and encouragement of the project is given to Governor-General Lord Canning and to Lady Canning, who wanted in effect a photo album to carry home with them “which might recall to their memories the peculiarities of Indian life”. The work’s journey from a semiprivate collection to a published work remains largely unresolved, though there are some clues. Falconer records how Lord Canning’s enthusiasm for placing the project on an official footing was made known in a circular sent out by Sir Edmund Clive Bayley, Officiating Foreign 132

Secretary, in June 1861: “This memorandum, addressed to all the provincial administrations, enclosed a substantial list ‘of the more remarkable tribes to be found in India’ and requested that ‘Photographic likenesses’ be made ‘of a few characteristic specimens of such of them as exist within your jurisdiction.’” The photographers, or “persons capable of practising photography” – in the end largely political officers, military men and doctors – were asked to provide additional descriptive information, including the origin of the tribe represented, physical characteristics and general habits. Twenty copies of each photograph were requested from the photographers in the field, though often only one was received. The purpose of collecting this information was not addressed in this official missive. James Waterhouse was among the most prolific contributors to The People of India, and his detailed writings provide fascinating insights, such as how many of his sitters could not understand “why they should not move, and cannot help turning their eyes to see what is going on in the camera.” The production of the final published volume seems to have arisen out of correspondence between the two men credited as the project’s editors, Kaye and Watson. Kaye, Secretary of the India Offices’ Political and Secret Department, was inspired by a set of photographs of the races of Eastern Bengal, which had been received from India. Then Kaye learnt from Watson of a larger collection of photographs sent from

India for an 1862 exhibition. Watson worked out that £3000 had been spent on producing the photographs in India, and that for a further £400, “18 copies of a great national work, illustrative of the principal tribes of India […] may be produced”. So enamoured with the project was Kaye, that he worked through a vacation in order to edit the work, and vowed to supply anything that was lacking in order to complete his “labour of love”. Various problems and complications beset the completion of the project, but eventually in 1875, the final volume of The People of India was published. It met with a surprisingly lacklustre reception some two decades after its inception, and, according to Falconer, “of the hundreds scheduled for official distribution, more than 90 copies of the first four volumes were sent out, […] but five years after the publication of the final volume, only 19 had been delivered to those entitled to sets.” Nearly a century and a half later, Foto8 was alerted to the copy in Pete James’ archive at Birmingham library, and copies can be found both at the British Library and at New York Public Library. Meanwhile – as a contemporary form of government control is carried out by the surveillance cameras that occupy every street corner in the UK, the most-watched country in Europe – the cameras of the ruling class are turned on its own subjects, and recording many more people than “a few characteristic specimens”, less accurately for an equally confused purpose. Max Houghton

BOOK SPOTLIGHT

Book courtesy of Pete James, Birmingham Public Library. Additional research by Jason Tilley.

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Georgia on My Mind When is a photo book not a photo book? Maybe when it’s a love letter from President Saakashvili to the EU, touting for membership. Forgive me for being overly cynical here. Georgian Spring, a work of unparalleled beauty and no mean budget, featuring photo essays and written contributions by 10 Magnum photographers is of course a photo book, an exquisitely produced one at that. Furthermore, it makes no secret of the fact that it was created at the express invitation of the Georgian Ministry of Culture, a result of a unique friendship that has flourished between Magnum photographer Thomas Dworzak and Saakashvili (resulting in a Georgian passport for the former). But this explicit acceptance of the fact that people may, to borrow Dworzak’s phrase from his preface, “scream propaganda” is still at odds with the presentation of the work as an independent artistic project, free from the kind of branding that would make its true purpose the clearer. The book’s most pervasive message appears to be the familiar one that Georgia is a brave little country that’s done well to escape the evil clutches of big bad Russia. Its emphasis on feasting, beautiful women and intriguing landscapes reveals little about the complex internal politics of a country that a year ago was at war over the disputed territory of South Ossetia. Moreover, a recent EU-sponsored report found Georgia to be not only every bit as culpable for its acts of aggression as Russia, but was deemed to have started the war. The smiling president,

hagiographically portrayed by Dworzak in the book’s only really pointless essay, behaved in a criminally irresponsible manner towards his own citizens. According to the EU report, 850 people died in the attacks, and more than 100,000 fled their homes, some 35,000 of whom are still believed to be unable to return there. The dead are not documented in this book. So… was it censorship? Did the 10 fearless photographers unearth stories that would blow government attempts to appear terribly civilised out of the water but were halted in their investigative tracks? Not at all, says Chris Boot, publisher of the book, as well as the project’s independent editor, appointed by Magnum as a condition of taking on the proposal. Boot cites the speed of the project’s trajectory from conception to completion (seven weeks) as one practical reason why there wasn’t more editorial intervention. The book’s title, with its rather questionable nod to the Prague Spring, also refers to the time span of the project, which began in earnest in late February and ended in April 2009. Boot’s involvement was instrumental in that he chose the photographers and worked with them, as per his brief, to settle on an idea and bring it to fruition. His first decision was to go with Dworzak’s peer group: Paolo Pellegrin, Alex Majoli and Jonas Bendiksen; Alec Soth as Magnum’s current “big name”; then to include Martin Parr and Mark Power, as they were expressly requested by the Georgians; Martine Franck because of

her long history with the country she visited with Cartier-Bresson and where she has retained many connections, making links between past and present; Gueorgui Pinkhassov, presumably at least in part because he is Russian; and, at Magnum’s persistent suggestion, Antoine D’Agata. Boot, a former bureau chief at Magnum, had no previous connection with D’Agata and was initially resistant to his inclusion. “I wanted to do a piece of work which describes Georgia – a book with real content as opposed to what has sometimes been the case with these group projects, where photographers do their personal thing but it doesn’t mean much. I wanted this to be an informative book for the reader, for people to really learn about Georgia. I wouldn’t have chosen D’Agata. I had a suspicion about his work as an indulgent kind of egotism. But actually having met him, I’ve completely changed my view. I’m a fan.” D’Agata’s work is exquisitely rendered, as ever, and was created to fit exactly into the space allocated to him in the book. It’s a visceral, haunting essay, which might be drawn from anywhere, though his connections with regional myth are vivid. Only D’Agata could make a Soviet-style car, bonnet and tailgate agape, look like a violated woman. There’s a phrase he uses in his extraordinary accompanying text: “I’m scared of myself… I’m scared of you… we fucked without condoms” that Boot seizes upon as a metaphor for the whole project. “It’s in this line that the whole point of the book rested: to allow independent photographers to freely 145

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Circus show, Tskhinvali, Georgia. Alex Majoli

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The smiling president, hagiographically portrayed by Dworzak, behaved in a criminally irresponsible manner towards his own citizens

Market place, with Soviet frieze, Kutaisi. Mark Power

describe a country in words and pictures. If that’s propaganda, it’s very 21st century! “Actually, I think propaganda is too strong a word,” Boot continues. “We use the term in relation to communist countries or the right wing – they do propaganda. Everyone else does something gentler. All photojournalism is propaganda, all photography is too, even your family snaps. It’s all motivated. “Yes, Georgian Spring has got a slightly promotional intention. But it’s not sinister. It’s not like doing a piece for Israel, for example, or apartheid South

Africa. I don’t know if the [Georgian] president made an error of judgment [with South Ossetia]. This book doesn’t attempt to deal with that and it isn’t an apology for it, nor is it a political analysis. It’s just a bunch of photographers freely observing a small country. After all, what is its propaganda purpose? Georgia wants people to know about it.” Surely it’s a begging letter to the EU? “They do want to join, sure. you’re fundamentally right – that’s part of it. One of the things the president did is to design a new flag. Whenever it’s flown it

has to be flown with EU flag at same time. That is what it’s about. They see themselves as European but they feel very isolated wedged between Turkey and Russia. They want people to register who they are. What the Georgians wanted described was modern Georgia – if there was one thing they asked for that was it. And on that level, they didn’t get it. The photographers denied them. Mark Power does deliver the modern Georgia – but he can’t resist the past – the ‘astonishing beauty’ of the Soviet frieze in his words. He might well have come under pressure to ‘disclude’ that picture but he was determined.” Power’s work stands out in this book, for its engagement with past and present, as much as for the descriptive landscape style he has made his own, as does Majoli’s powerful essay, which takes him to the borders of South Ossetia. While the sombre, desperate mood of the photographs is informed by war, there’s no suggestion that Georgia was in any way culpable for its devastating effect. The circus image, the last in the sequence, offers a subversive interpretation at least. Dworzak’s own essay, however, is wildly partisan. Endless photographs show a thrusting young Twitter-friendly politician, gleaming with the kind of zeal reminiscent of Blair circa 1997. Dworzak’s friendship with “Misha” granted him frequent though less than illuminating access to the president. “If you want an objective assessment of Misha’s presidency, you probably wouldn’t look to Thomas to do that,” concedes Boot. “When I saw the 147

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“It was an open brief for photographers to discover somewhere on their own terms; a really rare opportunity”

Tbilisi Market. Martin Parr

photography, I needed to know how to make sense of it; I argued that it needed a conclusion. So we came up with the idea of using his [Saakashvili’s] own words. I thought it would be really revealing and I think it is. You can argue on one level that it’s hagiographic, but to find out what he thinks are the most important things he’s done and how Georgia’s changed since he’s been in power… it’s open in that you’re able to investigate it yourself.” Among Saakashvili’s soi-disant achievements is the transformation of the army, who five years ago were without food or shoes. Now the army is “one of the most trusted institutions in the country and a source of great pride,” he declares. He also cites the fact that he 148

rid the nation of the corrupt criminal gang that operated as its police force. This is indeed a laudable achievement and a fascinating one, but no mention is made of how he did it, or what has happened to these men, now presumably unemployed. I can picture an Anna Funder-style investigation of these Soviet throwbacks, encountering them lurking in cafés, nursing strong coffees and stronger grudges. There are further surprising omissions from the book – not a single image of Gori’s infamous son appears, though he is referenced in the text. The archive section is notably incomplete – there are no pictures from the civil war in 1992-93, or of the violent coup against President Gamsakhurdia. Boot

says that Magnum didn’t have anyone working in Georgia between 1972 and 1989, and bar the occasional picture of baths by Pinkhassov from that period, the cupboard is bare. One of the most contentious geopolitical issues in the world – the pipeline running from the Caspian Sea through Georgia is also invisible, for reasons surely not solely due to its subterranean location. And the tens of thousands of protesters outside government buildings on the streets of Tbilisi in April 2009, demanding the resignation of a “tyrant” is a key event of the Georgian Spring that has been overlooked. It doesn’t take much research to discover that organisations like the CPJ and Radio Free Europe are questioning Saakashvili’s tightening grip on the media (comparing it to Putin’s), or that his regime is detaining as many as 100 political prisoners. If scrutiny of the Georgian political regime yields such results, I would question the integrity of an “independent” photographer who fails to carry out similar research when their very subject matter is the presidency. Admittedly, in a collection of essays, each and every one does not have to be infused with the political – surely this is why D’Agata and even Pinkhassov were included. But when the darker side of the “jolly men feasting” trope remains hidden throughout, such omissions start to weigh heavily. And if critical responses would not have been able to appear in a publication like this, then one has to question the validity of the enterprise. There’s a prevailing feeling in the book that everyone likes the Georgians

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Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili. Thomas Dworzak

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because they are fundamentally “people like us” and it’s precisely this liberal whitewash that renders the purpose of this gorgeous-looking book ill-defined. The PR machine for this joint venture has been in full swing. The very first hand bound copies were given to US Vice President Biden, in a ceremony that can also be enjoyed on YouTube. It’s a big beast in the photography book publishing world, though how big, I can’t say for sure… “I’m afraid I won’t be called on the budget or exact print run,” said Francesca Sears, Magnum London’s editorial director. “Suffice to say multiple thousands of copies were printed in four languages with copublishers of Boot, including Kehrer in Germany, RM Editorial in Spain (published out of Mexico), and Textuel in France. The Georgians also have several thousand copies to use for promotional and diplomatic purposes in country and on the political world stage.” While Magnum has always undertaken work of this kind (it has produced books for South Korea, Greece and Turkey among others), this mega-production from the prestigious House of Boot seems a reflection of the times that in order to generate income for its photographers, it has to crawl rather closer to power than is comfortable, power that some of it members would once have sought to scrutinise. I wonder if Philip Jones Griffiths would have had any truck with Georgian Spring. Boot cites the lack of editorial interference, and believes this project 150

allowed photographers more freedom to work that any magazine ever could. “It was an open brief for photographers to discover somewhere on their own terms; a really rare opportunity.” Beyond a photograph by Parr – of a grumpy man selling potatoes out of a car boot – that Dworzak wanted removed (he got his way but it stayed in the accompanying exhibition that has so far been seen in Berlin and Madrid and is at the time of writing looking for a London venue) and a sentence the Georgians objected to (which stayed), the only “state control” imposed was the inclusion of the postcard section that precedes the main content. I – wrongly – interpreted them as a Parr-style ironic intervention. Their inclusion came about because the Georgians wanted to see their beauteous landscapes represented, and their add-on status is apparently a not untypical Georgian method. “Thomas says that if a Georgian is buying a house and there’s an aspect they don’t like, they won’t change it or pull out but will add on something new. The postcard section is our Georgian balcony,” says Boot. Readers will be charmed by the postcards of the Gelati Monastery, by Tusheti and Khevsureti, and indeed by this book, as everyone who has ever been to Georgia is charmed by the supras, the women and the vistas of this “plucky little country”. None of us is immune to the power of enchantment. But as Camus noted: “Charm is a way of getting the answer yes without asking a clear question.”

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embed and breakfast Iraq 2003. The day that British troops will finally take Basra, and a column of paratroopers is waiting to enter the city, vehicles parked up by the highway. Young men on a violent road-trip. We had been on our way to Baghdad when a colleague had called and suggested we turn back. I am walking down the line of soldiers when the press officer from the Ministry of Defence tells us in a tight and bitter little voice, “Would you mind awfully fucking off.” As unembedded journalists, he adds, we are bothering the embeds who have been waiting for weeks for the few minutes they’ll be allowed to see. As happens with these things, a major intervenes and tells us we can pull our car behind his vehicle and follow him, regardless of the fact that we are not “officially approved”. Three years later and I’m back in Basra this time attempting to escape from an embed I had joined the day before, having realised that I’d been conned by the smooth PR salesmen at the Ministries of Defence and Foreign Office who had promised a concept called “embed and breakfast” – a tacky pun – which was supposed to help us cover the elections. We were told this meant that we could sleep quite safely while pursuing our own stories. So I had asked my Iraqi driver to come down from Baghdad to ferry me around. Except of course no one had any intention of allowing me such freedom. To leave the base would be dangerous, the officers explained. Others in London called my editors to pressure me to stay 152

on the British base, expressing their concern for my “safety”. But I left in any case followed shortly afterwards by another colleague. We saw the E&B-ers a little later at local government office where we had been conducting interviews for over an hour. They were swept into the office we were sitting in, bundled in their bodyarmour and surrounded by armed guards for a quick 10-minute meeting. Seven of them. Less than two minutes a piece. Control. Sometimes it is obvious and heavy-handed. At other times subtle Occasionally not even always visible. In the war in Lebanon in 2006, the only way to get around the heavily bombed big Shia suburbs close to the airport, without being endlessly hassled, was to go on Hizbollah’s daily tours of the damage. There were instructions to assemble on a corner. A small crowd would drift in, and then the young guys with radios would appear who laid down the rules for the walking tour of devastation – when cameras could be used, effectively told what direction they could be pointed in. I remember ruined buildings in almost deserted streets, the crunching of glass like frozen puddles beneath crampons. The lingering smell of the bombs. Burst pipes and running water. Even a handful of people. What I remember too is how the scenes seemed sterile, arid, stripped of all human context. Censored of their stories. You could photograph the ruins but who was there to ask what the damage meant? To cross-examine? Only Hizbollah’s guides.

In Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza the attempt to control was absolute. With the Erez crossing closed all there was to do for most of the conflict for most reporters – save for the handful of the bravest who crossed the Egyptian border towards the conflict’s end – was to report the margins of the conflict. Inevitably to be forced, as the Israeli media managers intended, to cover the war from the Israeli side. So the television cameras settled on a ridge to watch the bombing and shelling on the far side of Gaza’s fence while print reporters made do with the horrible job of asking Gazan friends and colleagues to take the risks they could not. And the Israeli tactic backfired. It backfired not least because Gazan voices, so long filtered through by the imposed ideas of balance in the western media, were given free reign. In attempting to insist that the conflict would be defined from Israel’s perspective it became instead defined by Gaza’s. And Sri Lanka’s government, in its final, devastating campaign that crushed the Tamil Tigers, employed the same tactics. Recently I had the opportunity to ask a government official why both journalists and humanitarian organisations had been prevented from reporting on the conditions of the fighting – a prohibition Colombo managed to impose far more effectively and ruthlessly than Israel. Unembarrassed, defiant but weakly he explained: “It’s war.” While the attempts to control in these instances are obvious, however, it is

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Control. Sometimes it is obvious and heavy-handed. At other times subtle. Occasionally not even always visible

usually counter-productive. The consequences are both redoubled efforts to gain access in whatever way is possible and to view the official narrative and explanations with more than usual scepticism and hostility. Because you see, real control requires journalists to self-censor in exchange for access to decision makers, information, for leaked “secrets” that are not really secret, for opportunities. The “punishment” for infractions of these rules is the ever-present threat of having that special access denied. Of being excluded. I have been blacklisted by four countries I know of at various times, in one instance for no reason I could ever discern. I have been told by British officials that they could not talk to me because I had broken the rules of a relationship with them – what I was allowed and not allowed to report. In that case I decided I did not want to deal with an organisation and individuals that required that kind of negotiation. But in the end it is how individuals’ stories are framed and shaped – the tension between the speaker and the listener – that is the most subtle form of control. It is a quiet struggle between understanding on one side, and the desire to explain in terms framed by a person or a group’s identity and history and culture. Once, travelling in the mountains of Kosovo in 1998 during the war between the KLA and Serb paramilitary police, I came across a recently erected memorial to a dead KLA fighter. I listened as his family told me his story. Returning with

some German colleagues on the same road the following day, I heard how the family altered their account in subtle ways – although not altering the fundamental facts – to package it for a different audience. I realised then that it is not enough to listen passively – to be a stenographer of the stories others own. For if that is all you do, you will always be controlled. By the powerful seduction of other people speaking. By words. By the living tableaux we photograph and tape. Not to be controlled is always to be asking questions. Peter Beaumont is a senior correspondent on the Observer and Guardian newspapers. His first book The Secret Life of War: Journeys Through Modern Conflict is published by Harvill Secker

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HUMAN WRONGS The last time democracy fell out of fashion in any manner akin to the prevailing mood today, an age of darkness enveloped Europe and the outcome was measured in millions of corpses. That particular disillusion coincided with the growth of what the primitive sociologists of the day called “mass society”. These were newly industrialised nation-states, with primary education for almost all citizens and had recent experience of war, conquest and colonialism. After the collapse of financecapitalism in 1929, these places became perfect Petri dishes for the experiments in totalitarianism which swept like heroin through the veins of every state in Middle and Eastern Europe until democracy’s last holdout, Czechoslovakia, was betrayed by its last functioning equivalents in France and England. A decade later, most of those states had signed up to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a document whose express aim was the protection of human beings as individuals rather than as ciphers or as unwitting representatives of some geist or other. Liberal democracies had signed up to, in theory at least, the sovereignty of the citizen whose most important right was to confer the legitimacy of the state. In exchange, the state did its bit and the citizenry did their little bits. By the end of the 20th century, this was the official philosophy of almost every nation-state in Europe and much of its former colonies. It was taken for granted that, for example, if a governing party was rejected at an election, then the rulers would change without bloodshed.

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Of course, some unelected elites were seemingly permanent, but so long as their avarice was kept in check by the elected elites, then the citizenry remained content to have its say limited to trips to the ballot box every few years. But that was not enough for some, and societies were developing in manners which were unexpected and ultimately perplexing. A minority in several states desired more autonomy over their everyday lives. They wanted more choices, more avenues for selfexpression, more stuff. They wanted to be left alone by church and corporation and party. They wanted bigger shops and better orgasms and tastier morsels and celebrations without hangovers. It gained traction in the early ’60s, with slogans such as that coined by the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, who adapted the warning on IBM’s computer cards: “I am a human being – please do not punch, fold or crush.” The same messages of autonomy spread throughout the West in the following three decades, and the slogans associated with 1968 in Paris and London were heard in Manila in 1985, in Middle and Eastern Europe in 1989 and more recently in Ukraine, Georgia and even Burma. A social revolution happened as subjects graduated into uppity citizens. What started in Berkeley spread around the campuses of America and the rich West, thence into the suburban middle classes who watched with dismay and then contempt as their political masters displayed their fallibility, their

incompetence and their venality. Deference for the democratically elected evaporated, to be replaced by the notion that they were answerable to us, or as Tony Blair told his victorious party conference in 1997, “we are the servants of the people”. The people, in the meantime, had decided that they were more than the sum of their parts in our democratic adventure. They were more than part of a mass, they were not lumpen proletarians or petit bourgeois. They were part of a selection of groups that they could choose to join – and the compunction was all the more powerful because they felt compelled to join. It was like they had found a part of their consciousness which was there all along. It was part of their identity. It started as a way of deeply identifying with those who shared your gender, ethnicity, ability, sexuality, ideology or whatever brand you’re having. What began as an act of sisterhood, fraternity and solidarity with human beings you refused to see as an “other”, became, for too many, a narcissistic descent into barely politicised consumerism. It became the qualitative difference between “quality of life” and “lifestyle”. Why is this a problem? Because the quest for full equality for groups based upon ethnicity, gender, sexuality and so on forgot the poorer members of their tribe. In fact, this fitted perfectly the ideology which triumphed at History’s End in 1989. Walter Benn Michaels recently noted that, as the very rich are getting richer

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Some citizens desired more autonomy over their everyday lives. They wanted to be left alone by church and corporation. They wanted more choices, more avenues for self-expression, more stuff...

than the merely well-off and exponentially richer than the very poor, race and gender are less of an issue than is commonly supposed. “White people, for example, make up about 70 per cent of the US population, and 62 per cent of those are in the bottom quintile. Progress in fighting racism hasn’t done them any good; it hasn’t even been designed to do them any good. More generally, even if we succeeded completely in eliminating the effects of racism and sexism, we would not thereby have made any progress towards economic equality.” Taking the example of his university workplace, Benn Michaels notes that “they are less racist and sexist than they were 40 years ago and at the same time more elitist. The one serves as an alibi for the other: when you ask them for more equality, what they give you is more diversity.” Instead of spreading the wealth, many on the liberal left have been content to spread the sense of grievance. If we are all victims due to various accidents of birth, then one will invariably focus on how your gang is getting on. If things improve for folks like you, then you are supposed to feel better. When some other gang gets something, your mob must have it too. It is a zero-sum game of competing claims that crucially presupposes that the cake has only so many slices to go around. This then feeds in to the general loathing of the political classes and power elites in general, who are slammed for not looking after my selfish consumer interests or the well-being of my self-selected tribe. The heroic

statement that “the personal is political” has been flipped like an MP’s mortgage into “the political is personal”. Elections are things that I elect to participate in, or not. Not quite what “participatory democracy” was supposed to produce. As ever, this selfish view of politics started in California, with the passing of Proposition 13 in a state referendum in 1978. This resulted in a cap on property tax rates in the state, reducing them by an average of 57 per cent. The initiative further required a two-thirds majority in both legislative houses for future increases in all state tax rates or amounts of revenue collected, including income tax rates. This triumph for the identity politics of homeowners transformed US politics as radically as Roosevelt’s New Deal – in fact it signalled the demise of progressive taxation as the motor of social change through “big government”. Two years later, the former governor of California Ronald Reagan was elected US President, and the way was clear for the enormous transfer from the poor and the middle classes to the super wealthy. That the occasional member of the oligarchy christened the “overclass” by Christopher Lasch had an ovary or dark skin, may make fellow white male members feel better about themselves, but when they are presented as role models, then things are severely awry. “An obvious question, then, is how we are to understand the fact that we’ve made so much progress in some areas while going backwards in others,”

comments Benn Michaels. “And an almost equally obvious answer is that the areas in which we’ve made progress have been those which are in fundamental accord with the deepest values of neoliberalism, and the one where we haven’t isn’t. We can put the point more directly by observing that increasing tolerance of economic inequality and increasing intolerance of racism, sexism and homophobia – of discrimination as such – are fundamental characteristics of neoliberalism. Hence the extraordinary advances in the battle against discrimination, and hence also its limits as a contribution to any left-wing politics. The increased inequalities of neoliberalism were not caused by racism and sexism and won’t be cured by – they aren’t even addressed by – anti-racism or anti-sexism.” This is control with a shopkeeper’s smile and a friendly cop who looks just like you, and looks at the world just like you do. John O’Farrell is Communications Officer with the Irish Congress of Trade Unions

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Column

UNPHOTOGRAPHABLES

This is a picture I did not take of a prostitute in front of four men on a street corner at dawn, asking them a question with her hands out, to which the men replied in unison, like a choreographed dance troupe, by pulling the lining of their pockets inside-out to show they had no money.

This is a picture I did not take of a man holding down the first spot in a breadline on a cold February morning in the United States of America in the year two thousand and nine.

This is a picture I did not take of a woman in a liquor store, pushing a shopping cart filled with three gallon jugs of Gallo Wine, showing me the This is a picture I did not take of a home blade of the rusty pocket knife she security firm, housed in a fortress-like carries in her purse, and how she’s brick building ringed with wrought iron ready to use it to stab the man in front fence and razor wire in the bright sunlight of her in line, who’s drunk and trying to of an early Sunday, the security firm’s spare change a few bills from us to buy own burglar alarm ringing loudly into the a fifth of Wild Turkey on the first day of empty morning, out and over the highway mid-ninety degree temperatures on an where cars and trucks breezed by, heading otherwise unremarkable spring day in somewhere else, oblivious. Atlanta, Georgia. 156

This is a picture I did not take of a RollsRoyce parked outside a Dollar Store.

This is a picture I did not take of an airborne fistful of pennies, flung from the open window of a limousine, idling on deserted 7th Avenue, early on a warm May morning in Manhattan.

Column

This is a picture I did not take of four men standing in the DC Metro on their way to Barack Obama’s inauguration; three of them African American, in matching black leather jackets and knitted black ski hats, each hat emblazoned with the sequined word “OBAMA”, and the fourth man, Chinese, standing right beside them in jogging sweats, wearing a knitted black ski hat embroidered with “The Beatles”.

This is a picture I did not take of an exterminator in a LaQuinta Inn in Baltimore County, Maryland, methodically picking sugar-coated raisins from three bowls of Raisin Bran, plucking the raisins from his cereal as the early morning sun cut through the blinds into the Free Continental Breakfast Buffet room, where the exterminator gingerly placed three loads of raisins into the trash bin, one load at a time.

This is a picture I did not take of a bride standing in the middle of Canal St. in New Orleans at midnight, lit-up by the headlights and honks of approaching cars, and the turning sirens atop a police cruiser, in which sat her groom, who

was shown the back seat after being pulled over for revving his Pontiac at a stop-light, and then burning out to liven things up a bit on their way to the reception, but cops on Friday night don’t always have a sense of humour, and quickly pulled the couple over, so quickly the Pontiac ran up the curb on to the sidewalk, and when the cops found a plastic bag of something in the front seat and threw the groom in the cruiser, his bride, standing in traffic and holding her bouquet (her dress, an immaculate satin and shining in the police lights) had a look her in eye that said this whole marriage thing just might be going nowhere fast.

This is a picture I did not take of a woman in a snow squall on the side of a highway in Alabama, crouching beside her black Mercedes like a 2nd baseman on a 3-2 pitch, her hands out in front of her at the ready, knees bent, head alternating between looking at the ground as if trying to compose herself, and staring straight ahead into the squall as if there was something to see out there in front of her, something she’d been expecting, and now, at this moment, that thing had driven her to pull over to the side of the road and stare it down in her black pants, black jacket and black hat, crouching like a 2nd baseman beside her black car, snow blowing cold and crazed traffic flying past while she stares straight ahead into the wind.

This is a picture I did not take of an illustration of a bluebird on a page torn from a child’s textbook, nor is this a picture of the illustration as it fell from the low branches of a tree, where it had been trapped like trash beside a plastic bag, and when the page was blown from

the tree, it fell to the ground slowly, the illustration facing me like a reminder of a bluebird, and when it landed at my feet, the illustration spun a bit in the wind, as if the bird knew it wasn’t meant for this, and would try everything it could to flap up off that page.

This is a picture I did not take of a woman adjusting a sign in front of the photo studio inside a Wal-Mart in Bowling Green, Kentucky; it was a Help Wanted sign for the studio – they were looking for photographers – I had a camera around my neck, and the woman looked at me, and I looked back at her, and neither of us said anything, and we both turned from the sign and walked away.

This is a picture I did not take of a deaf man on a street corner, screaming a loud, guttural sound in response to a crowd of pro-Palestinian chanters and flag wavers who made a beeline to confront a lone man proudly and provocatively holding an Israeli flag high in the air, and as the pro-Palestinians began to jump up and chant Down With Israel in unison, getting closer and up-in-the-face of the Israel supporter (during an otherwise peaceful anti-war march) photographers descended from all directions to photograph how men look when they’re screaming in each other’s faces, while the deaf man, standing five feet to the side of this hive in his blue and purple workout jacket, opened his mouth and made a sound that startles me still. 157

FICTION

an internet baby Here are the reasons why Weiming and Yuli have to sell their baby on the internet, a baby who’s only seen the light of this world for five days. Yuli is still at school, in her first year at Chongqing Technical College. For an 18-year-old girl from a rural village, the scandal would be huge; she would certainly be expelled and lose all the time and money she and her parents have invested to get her where she is: on the way to some better life. She has lied to everyone – from the dean of her department to her class and dormitory mates. To all of them she said she had hepatitis and needed to stay at home for a while. That’s after she’d managed to hide her growing belly in a large coat for five months. And now, in a shabby and dirty clinic in a suburb of Chongqing, she’s given birth to a screaming little thing. Yuli is a determined girl. She will study, get her diploma and start a career in a big city. She won’t raise a child now. Therefore she won’t let anyone know from her village, in a mountainous region in Sichuan where the only income is from growing chilli peppers, and the villagers take family things too seriously. If they learned she’d given birth to a son, they’d come to Chongqing straight away and do everything they could to keep the child. Yuli’s mind is clear and certain while the baby is sucking her nipple with a small, wet face. She won’t keep it. Yuli’s boyfriend Weiming has one very simple motive for selling their baby: lack of money. Weiming is from the same village as Yuli. They are childhood lovers. As a 19-year-old man, he’s had trouble surviving in this city ever since he left his hometown to follow her. 158

There’s no way he can imagine helping Yuli with her college fees, sending money to his family back in the village and bringing up a baby here at the same time. Not possible. He’s already working almost 20 hours a day, on two jobs: during the day he cleans cars, private ones and government ones, and at night he stands by a door as the porter of a karaoke parlour. He can only sleep from 3 am to 7.30 am. He’s been exhausted from the day he arrived in this city; his sight is blurred from lack of sleep and his mind is as foggy as the permanent clouds hanging on the Yangtze River. But he understands: to help his girlfriend and his poor family in the village, he has to work like a donkey. A donkey can sleep while standing still, and Weiming has to learn to do that too. He has no choice. He doesn’t complain either. So the young lovers agree to sell their baby on the internet. Yuli studied computer technology at college, she knows how it works. What people normally sell online are machines, things like TV sets, Walkmans, bicycles, cameras, or sometimes a banned book. Selling a real baby is not very usual. “But what’s so different?” Weiming says. “Selling a baby is the same as selling a car, the only difference is the price. If China could sell some of its population to the West, then there would be less people starving here, and we would have more money.” Yuli takes some photos of the baby and chooses the cutest one to put online. And after a discussion with her boyfriend, she also puts up a price. Healthy newborn baby boy for sale – 8,000 yuan.

The number is Weiming’s mobile phone, given to him for his night job. Although both of them know 8,000 yuan is really much too little money for a healthy baby boy, they reason that most people in the provinces are not rich and as they are in a hurry to get rid of the baby, asking for little money could sort things more easily and more quickly. And Weiming also thinks that his girlfriend can always get pregnant again if this one works out. After putting the ad online, Yuli feeds her son a bit of milk and changes his wet nappy. What she’s worried about is that if the baby doesn’t go soon, she’ll miss her end-of-term exam, then she won’t get her diploma. The internet ad proves effective. After just a few hours, the phone starts to ring continuously. The first few people want to know whether the whole thing is just a joke, which makes Weiming shout back at them impatiently. He’s got no time to joke about life, he needs money. Sounding like a snappy businessman, he yells back that if they’re not interested he’ll just hang up, while his grumpy boss is cursing him from behind his back. But then a woman with a shaky voice explains on the phone that she’s from a seaside town near Qingdao, that she is 46 years old, her husband has been very ill, that’s why they didn’t have a child, and now he just died, and she would like to buy the baby, a boy would be ideal. She sounds nervous. “Can you pay 8,000 yuan cash in one go?” Weiming asks hastily. “Yes. But I first need to check whether the baby is really healthy.” Weiming assures the woman that his boy is in perfect shape and that he’ll call her back

FICTION

after discussing things with his girlfriend. Weiming knows that he shouldn’t say yes to the first interested person. Through negotiation, prices can always be improved. A few more useless calls later, a couple rings from Wenzhou, a rich industrial town in Zhejiang province. They want the baby as soon as possible: “We can get on the first morning flight to Chongqing and meet you.” The couple speaks on two handsets at the same time. Weiming learns that they run a shoe factory in Wenzhou, that they’re wealthy but cannot have babies. “Well, I have some other customers interested. How do you want to convince me to go with you?” Weiming asks, a clear hint that an auction is on. The couple are quick business people; they immediately offer double the price to get the boy. So the deal is done. Weiming will receive 16,000 yuan in cash. But he doesn’t want the couple to come to Chongqing where he and Yuli live. To avoid any risk of being found out by neighbours, Yuli’s school friends or his own colleagues, they agree to meet in a city where no one knows them: Shanghai. The meeting point will be Shanghai’s People’s Park, the next day at 4 pm in front of the park gate. The young couple grab a bag, wrap up their sleeping baby and hurry to the train station to get on the next train to Shanghai. Both Weiming and Yuli hardly ever took the train before and they are overexcited like children on their seats, eagerly observing every station the train passes, picturing themselves ending up working in Shanghai, thanks to those 16,000 yuan. From time to time, Yuli feeds the baby, but the moody little thing doesn’t appear to like the trip and keeps screaming all the time. Every passenger knows them and hates them. At one point the conductor even comes to ask whether they need some medical assistance. After 14 hours, the young couple arrive, pale and exhausted, in the shiny city of Shanghai. Yuli is deeply impressed. People here are more beautiful, fashionable, the houses are much taller and more luxurious than in Chongqing. But Weiming is hungry; he can’t enjoy the new city, he’s starving and feels even

more powerless in Shanghai’s busy streets than he is in Chongqing. They enter a wonton restaurant and eat two bowls of wonton soup each. Weiming swallows half a roasted duck as well. The food is eaten quickly, brutally and silently, only the baby sometimes coughs in Yuli’s arms, no one knows why. Twenty minutes before 4 pm, Yuli and Weiming stand in front of the iron gate of Shanghai’s People’s Park. The baby is crying again and Yuli has to swing him in her arms all the time, wearily, until he falls asleep. The Wenzhou shoemaker couple arrive on time. They are both about 35 and look more humble than they sounded on the phone to Weiming. He thinks they look even more sleepless than him, worn out. But as soon as they see the baby in Yuli’s arms, the couple’s eyes start to glisten. Their eyes are glued on him as if on a magnetic object. The woman can’t help but scream: “What a beautiful little boy! How cute! How sweet he is!” Her husband stretches his stiff finger, which must be overworked polishing his factory’s shoes, and touches the baby’s red cheeks and caresses his soft hair. He seems to be fond of the boy, too. The woman takes the baby from Yuli’s hands, holds him and now starts to feel how a mother feels when her son is asleep in her arms. The little baby wakes up from his nap, his big eyes stare at the strange woman who keeps kissing him and speaks some incomprehensible Wenzhou dialect. “What about the money then?” Weiming asks cautiously. The man opens his leather suitcase, takes out a heavy blue plastic bag, but doesn’t give it to Weiming straight away. Instead, he says: “Let’s get into the park. We need to check if the baby is as healthy as you said.” The two couples agree and enter the People’s Park. It is May, the willows are green, the bamboos lush, flowers blooming. Some old people are doing tai chi. Kids are flying their kites, with their grandparents running after them. The baby boy is now in the Wenzhou couple’s arms. In turn, both the wife and the husband thoroughly check him, studying him like a pair of newly made

shoes; they turn him upside down, check his ears, eyes, nostrils, fingers, legs, toes, as well as his bottom and his front. Oddly enough, the baby doesn’t cry this time. He seems to enjoy this sudden attention, and he starts to giggle. Finally, the Wenzhou woman is satisfied and asks the young couple: “Do you have a name for him?” “Not really. Just for the hospital registration we called him Wei Yu, that’s a combination of our family names,” Weiming answers. “In that case we will give him a great name, the best name a man can bear!” the Wenzhou man says in an inspired voice. They find a quiet area of the park, a lake surrounded by leafy willow trees. There, no one can watch and find out what’s going on. The water is clear, one can see red carp swimming on the bottom. Lotus plants grow lush, dragonflies are skating on the surface of the water. The Wenzhou woman volunteers to stand guard and leaves. The Wenzhou man puts his suitcase on the ground and takes out the blue plastic bag. Picking up a bundle of money, Weiming starts to count, carefully. From time to time, he also checks whether the notes are fake. It takes too long, half the money is still uncounted. The Wenzhou man begins to look impatient and Yuli gets restless, too. She lays her baby on the ground, facing the lake, and starts to count another bundle of notes. After an intense silence filled only with the flicking of the bank notes, they reach their conclusion: exactly 16,000 yuan, no cheating. Weiming starts to gather the money, when suddenly there’s a scream. “Where is my baby?” Yuli is crying in panic. The three scan the surroundings, but there is no baby around, only an empty suitcase lying on the soil. The Wenzhou woman is just returning. As she approaches, her face changes colour. All follow her look to the quiet lake. As their eyes settle on the water, they see a baby silently drowning, drifting towards the clear bottom of the beautiful lake. Xiaolu Guo has published seven books. This story was excerpted from Freedom, a new book of short stories commissioned by Amnesty International to celebrate the Universal Declaration of Human Rights 159

Poetry

Thickening Water

I shake. My eyes are stinging with tears and the blood which lies visibly under the surface of arse and thighs, around ribs, begins the pin prick trickle as you split the skin open with each timed flick of the whip. Trying to scream, cleaving, like raw meat hacked off the bone, the soaking rag gag, I have bitten through soft lower lip in two places, my position so tightly maintained. Mouth like a gutted salmon, you kneel, pull my chin up to yours, lick the salt of my eyelids, cradle the dead weight head; you let me know that you know that I’m sorry. I spit out the gag; you eat me voraciously, lower me onto my front and trail the spatters of purple and red with swollen fingers. I wince and shudder, gooseflesh spreading through spasming limbs: I am broken but we both know it’s taking me longer and longer each time. I haven’t been sleeping lately. The nights are heavy, it hurts to lie on my back: It’s never enough. I make you bind me and pick out a cane but your heart’s not in it; we quit after 160

six and settle for cinnamon coffee, and Silver Screen Legends on Five. Old scar gets lost in wrinkle as you cackle cracked teeth at the telly; your skin like a bird’s nest, you criss-cross and crease and even the homemade name on your knuckles skips back and forth from Deb to Dee. You want to put a baby inside me, you told me this morning. Oscar Stanislaus Popeye. Unless it’s a girl, in which case you don’t know. You tell me how you will pat and rub my belly, how you will make me not carry even a tiny potato, how I will be your Queen and you will be my slave. I see. You will relish this role for a week maybe, it will lapse before I am showing. You will go elsewhere for sex if I lack interest, give me a list of possible fathers and interrogate every action. You will make me do anal - so we don’t hurt the baby, I churn; I try to picture you at six but there’s no mirror to what I imagine, you have no photos. We joke on the phone but your voice is thin and you ask me to send you some money.

You’re on remand again, accused; a combination of anger and booze, We assume they’ll sentence you this time; my guts are dancing. I tell you I’m working, I smile, - I’m wiping arses in the local old folks’ home. I crook our purple phone to my ear, trace the line of tiny red dots from my elbow to wrist, - they have industrial cling film dispensers!! I say, I’m straining to crackle your laughter but nothing will break you. You tell me you’re horny so I start to bring myself off but the credit runs dry, I come to an empty line. I strip and leave the phone off the hook whilst I think about painting our bedroom and nap on and off towards dreams of you, purple and yellow. I’ve decided to test you. If you don’t spot my tactics it means you are using, I reason. I root out all of the old prison letters you’ve saved and copy the first one I find, word for word, to a clean sheet of paper. You said you’d turned a new leaf, well let’s see. Posted, I buy 20 Marlboros, Finger them, count them, crumble them up and throw them away.

Poetry

My nails stink but my willpower, fucking amazing. Court is in 28 days. I make you a card with paint and glitter, neon pens and a snippet of hair from my head. I consider the option of cutting my limbs off, one at a time and posting them to you in secret parcels, one day springing to life like a human jack in your box. It will not do. My bruises have faded, my scratches and weals have healed and there’s no one can kickstart the car like you do. I use my V.O. Against all the odds I’d stacked, you’ve noticed my home made drug test (repetition letter), - You silly girl, you say and we laugh till we’re crying like earthquakes. I’m wearing the feathery skirt like you said to. As planned, you watch as I lower fingers to crotch and run through the Cherry Popper Daddies C/P DVD I was watching last night: - I was thinking of you. A guard starts to walk our way, his right arm is raised; he waves, head shaking in your direction; We roll our eyes; I straighten my feathers and lean to your cheek, your sweat pure caffeine, you reek - I think I will eat you completely today, I whisper. I lick and jump at the whistle. The hour is over. Though I’m eating my meals from the bowl on the floor like normal, it’s rarely the same. I used the cardboard copy of you from the last time you left me alone at first but you slid and tumbled time and again, a crippled gull fumbling over its prey, you flapped and slipped on the lino and I got sick of propping you up

so I tore off your head in a rage and set my lighter on it. With no version of you at all, I can’t swallow; my belly burns with remorse. I’m knotty. I vomit every morning into my yoghurt. What will I tell you? There is this vulture in me which the Doctor is deaf to. It scales the cage of my ribs; it seethes and strangles my too full womb and shatters my bowels. Its language is lost. - Take this pill now and on Thursday return for another, she says. The first will terminate, the second expel, so I take the pill I am given and start to wait. Court is tomorrow. You’re sick of wasting your money to hear me heaving tears down the phone but my throat pulls tight against conversation; my larynx raw like bloodied bones, I choke them down. Rubbed ragged to gravel, I’m pocked; I’m rotting meat every minute, I’m scratching my ribs until nails are full to the brim with red flecked skin; I’m cracking my shell wide open. - Salt in the bath to heal a graze, mother would say, she packs me away in a suitcase, she is ashamed in the dream that chases me out of sleep: A fire. Four out of five children die and I can’t make the new ones in time. Their eyes ping out. The cat seems to have your tongue before the judge and I can’t help but titter; the notion of you, so submissive, hands like garlands of arthritic buds, gagged in cuffs on hips drawn heavy through lack of exertion and my glitter betrays the back of your neck, it bathes in your sweat and makes you pathetic - Oh - What a picture! I laugh so hard my stomach balls up, my sanitary towel spills over with clots and snot sprays down from my nose and finds a new home in between my lips -

I rise, chest heaving, keeping my thighs together and make my way to the door where you catch my eye in a second and stop my hysteria dead. I told you over the phone that night, why I couldn’t stay at the Magistrates court: it was starting to feel like a squirrel was cramming my skull with its nuts and the fear of my head splitting open was making me twitchy. You’d called with the verdict, angry, - Eighteen months, you said; - piss easy, you said; - I’ll be out in a year so don’t go fucking around, you said, then the money ran out, and the line went dead, so that was that and I tugged out the plug and crushed it under my foot. As for the bloodied sheets, and the pills and the clinic, I think I’ll forget – I’ve already forgotten; I’ve not once thought of it all day long! I’ll butterfly stitch this slice in my thigh then bleach out the toilet: I’m going to do you proud; I’ll root out my old Famous Five books I’m going to read them aloud to myself, each night a new chapter, like you did before things got awkward but first I must do the important stuff: I need to polish the paddles and sharpen the knives for when you get back and that soup I was going to make, it’ll freeze but all I’ve got is an onion and I daren’t go out without asking you first but I need new potatoes and carrots and leeks, and meaty stock to thicken up my water. Rosy Carrick is a Brighton-based poet and performer. www.rosycarrick.co.uk

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Reviews

Scrapbook Donovan Wylie Published by Steidl www.steidlville.com £22 (112pp Softback)

On cheap pastel sugar paper, the kind of paper on which, in our youthful innocence, we might have cut out and kept the loving tokens of adolescent obsessions, Donovan Wylie and Timothy Prus have laid out the cheap songs, cuttings and imperfect photographs of private Ulster homes. From the earliest clippings of the 1950s, when Cookstown boys left football pitches defeated and dazed; through the 1970s when Ian Paisley became regular and vocal on the black and white screens of British and Irish homes; to the 1980s, when leaflets that spoke of home security, threat and murder became a regular and insistent presence, their collation marks an age of separation, of religious division and 162

the curious parallels that such estranged and adjacent communities shared. The book borrows from the language of the homemade, and looks inward to details that punctuated the seasons in once uncomplicated communities – simple and joyful moments that will eventually be eclipsed by their keepers’ ageing and death notices cut from evening papers, ever more frequently as lives draw on. The publication of Scrapbook progresses Wylie’s engagement with the Ulster he was born into. His earlier responses to the decommissioning of the Maze prison and British Watchtowers both dwelt on the ordered spaces of incarceration and surveillance. In this latest work, the vernacular ephemera and occasions that interrupt and influence daily life are woven to create a more inclusive structure. Wylie has had a sustained and deep interest in such diverse uses of photography and Scrapbook is a further departure in an engaged and thoughtful practice. That said, beyond their more usual resting places, in the drawers and private albums of local families, Ulster has had its own particular association with such materials over recent decades. From the grave and naïve “collect” photographs, drawn from the homes of the dead and disappeared across 30 years troubles – for use in news broadcasts and newspapers – to the precious and imperfect photographs of the county fair singers, Orange Order parades and hunger marches, these documents have been important to our understanding of this region and urgently foregrounded to emphasise how

sectarian acts engage at the heart of the family. While fading envelopes, parade ephemera, a brace of sniper rifle photographs and other partisan artefacts are reproduced as objects in their complete form, the book draws license from more recent design to elevate fading colour photographs of parades and unrest to fully bled expanses. In doing so, it migrates from the scrapbook facsimile to a more conscious and considered photo-book. The book collects articles and reports that are in turn celebratory and dreadful. The nine sons of the Hagan family, gathered around their parents at an anniversary, stare from a grey half-tone cutting. Elsewhere, the cover of a 1974 Young Gleaners magazine gathers a crowd of children and leaders at a Wexford campsite, just across the page from a news report that describes a mother’s death in an ambush. Each employs “cheap” photographs, poorly arranged yet precious. Perhaps they, like the poetry, rough drawings and gathered details in this book are the real vocabulary of the Troubles history, a social archive speaking beyond more conventional reportages that have described Ulster in more familiar ways. The potential of this approach – though it seems like there is more Wylie will do as he continues to engage with the region – is in both authors’ recognition that, as the playwright Denis Potter once noted, “even these cheap songs, socalled, have something of the Psalms of David about them”. Ken Grant

Reviews

love me Zed Nelson Published by Contrasto www.contrastobooks.com Eur35 (196pp Hardback)

According to recent estimates, the soi-disant beauty industry is worth some $160 billion worldwide per year. Its prospects look good too: current research in the United States indicates that men are becoming increasingly vulnerable to its charms – apparently 38 per cent of them would like bigger pectoral muscles, (while only 34 per cent of American women want bigger breasts). Perhaps they would like to look like Ronnie Coleman as he first appears in Zed Nelson’s Love Me – standing strong, oiled, and improbably wide, muscles and veins bulging. Ronnie was awarded the Mr Olympia title every year from 1998 to 2005. He appears twice in the book; the second time though, he is on his knees, an oxygen mask strapped to his face – exhausted by dehydration, a punishing dietary regime and the

rigours of competitive muscle-flexing. It is a devastating reversal of that staple of the body industry – the “before and after” pictures. Love Me is the product of Nelson’s wide-ranging and long-term interest in the culture, psychology and industry of body improvement. It assembles pictures taken over the best part of a decade from over 15 countries, including the US, China and the UK, and – less predictably – Haiti, Senegal, Sri Lanka and Iran. As the succession of photographs of surgeons, bodybuilders, “aestheticians”, beauty contestants and trainee models suggests, the culture of bodily improvement is pervasive and entrenched. Besides those with a professional stake in the industry, Nelson has pictured some of its consumers: anorexics, overweight kids on fat camps, a housewife in the gym, a chest waxer, a nose jobber, and so on. This is not achieved without a degree of irony. Witness Nelson’s juxtaposition of two portraits of a prepubescent competitor in an American beauty pageant: in the first she gazes expressionless and vacant, in the second she has adopted a schooled and utterly joyless rictus smile. Once again, the “after” undermines the promised improvement of the “before”. Elsewhere the often fascinating captions and accompanying texts perform a similar function. The unmistakeable visage of Jocelyn Wildenstein (once dubbed “The Bride of Wildenstein”) is accompanied by a terse quote, “The important thing is to find a good doctor.” Another example – an X-ray shows how metal rods have

been inserted in a patient’s foot to shorten three toes. The owner explains, “I like to wear Jimmy Choos, 3-inch heels with a pointy toe.” There is, though, more to Love Me than the author’s wary irony. Through the mindful use of portraiture, still life, reportage and text – and through the global reach of his work – Nelson is able to allude to some of the industry’s ideological underpinnings. For example, he writes that the book was motivated in part by an awareness of the way in which Western ideals of the body and beauty are successfully exported around the world. So he photographs Japanese women shopping in Tokyo’s Barbie store; eyelid skin that has been removed during surgery in China to “Westernise” the eyes; and a Sri Lankan bodybuilder who idolizes Schwarzenegger. In Senegal he photographs the dark hands of a woman holding a portrait of herself in which her skin – and her face in particular – appear noticeably paler. Skin-lightening cream accounts for the disparity. Needless to say, photography itself – or more precisely, its unholy complicity with an industry geared to the control and exploitation of self-image – plays a fundamental, and questionable, role. Nelson’s achievement is to use the medium against the tide, to destabilise the “before” and the “after”. Guy Lane

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Reviews

Paul Graham Published by SteidlMACK www.steidlville.com £40 (376pp Hardback)

When I first looked at Paul Graham’s Beyond Caring work in the mid-1980s, the essence of how we photograph and what we photograph seemed at once to be called to account, waking a generation from its gentle humanism as never before. The distance between such clear, colour-laden pictures and the more usual documentary strategies of previous decades could not have been more polarised. Through these angry and troubling photographs – and they still confound me in their achievement – the possibilities of contemporary documentary practice, and the languages through which we communicate what we can’t ignore, had to be reappraised. Graham was conscious of this reformation and has always recognised the danger of treading water, instead of building ideas and taking risks. I remember his blunt assertion in Camera 164

Austria a few years later that, rather than questioning his use of colour, it was others who should justify their own continuing use of monochrome. Colour has not been the only expansion. Graham’s enthusiasm for the work of Michael Schmidt and Volker Heinze, two German photographers he visited and drew inspiration from in the 1980s, also proved influential. Both had made experimental and involved series, drawn from the experiences of living through a modern fractured Germany. It led Graham to strategies of metaphor and suggestion that would go on to govern the New Europe and Empty Heaven series and much that he has completed since. Beyond the single picture, the series – or “slippage” – across the page would knowingly expand a book’s potential. The uncelebrated (yet excellent) Television Portraits, made between 1988 and 1996 would sensitise such casual interiors as friend’s apartments – as if the smallest detail, the light from a TV screen or, elsewhere, the glimmer of a smoking man in a nightclub, could betray an age. This nourishment would lead to an extended engagement with Belfast, Zurich and several other European cities and coincided with substantial fellowships and gallery shows that considerably enhanced his position within photography. In the Paintings series, gathered from the walls of tense and claustrophobic interiors, and long before Houellebecq’s confessional shuffles through a soulless Paris reached Radio 4, Graham maps explicit and urgent communications of lust and desperation,

embedded on the scratched, coloured booths where casual lives meet and pass. SteidlMACK’s excellent new monograph draws together these series, situating them among the more widely known elements of Paul Graham’s career to date. From A1 – the Great North Road, Graham’s own rendering of the American “journey” template, to the recent A Shimmer of Possibility, Graham has been a severe and articulate presence within contemporary practice. The folios, in this well designed book, are convincing and extensive. Furthermore, the work is contextualised by serious and fluent essays. David Chandler’s text, in particular, is a layering of interview, literature and chronology, which locates the book’s extensive folios through disparate and rich influences. The book closes with thumbnails of the page layouts of all Graham’s prior publications, revealing rhythm and consistent strengths across the photographer’s career. Looking at the pictures again, both here and as they have punctuated some of the survey shows in the recent attempts to rekindle some kind of British History of Photography, I’m conscious of Paul Graham’s centrality to recent practice (and also that he has been lost to America, where he now teaches and works). The later work has grown to articulate difficult moments in history with profound depth. This valuable collection shows clearly that the photographer’s efforts to progress his medium, and its deployment, remains dangerous, brave and insistent. Ken Grant

Reviews

The Rape of a nation Marcus Bleasdale Published by Mets & Schilt www.metsenschilt.com £32.50 (240pp Hardback)

“The continuing human tragedy of Congo is not a statistic. It is a continuing human tragedy…” remarks John Le Carré in the foreword to this book. His words contain the indignation of a man who despairs at the state of humanity that allows the history of Congo to unfold unchallenged as the West looks on. “We must never turn away our gaze,” he implores. With this collection of photographs, made over more than five years, Marcus Bleasdale directs us to look. It is an emotionally demanding task to read the introductory words and turn to the images that follow. Unimaginable. Horrific. Brutal. Do these words convey my reaction to the images and the book as whole? Or do they better serve to describe my – and our – collective failure

to do something about the scenes the photographs show? Bleasdale and Le Carré point out there are moments of sanity and hope provided, on the one hand, by organisations such as MSF and Human Rights Watch who strive to make a difference, and on the other hand most importantly, by the people of Congo themselves who maintain through all their experiences a “secret gaiety of spirit and a love of life”. In Bleasdale’s first book on Congo, One Hundred Years of Darkness, 2002, I had the impression of a man who was travelling to discover a land and explore a history handed down to him in the stories he had been told. In The Rape of a Nation I see that this same man no longer travels Congo to explore and answer his own questions, he photographs it to lay bare the discovery of our complicity in the evil he has found and pose questions to us. The layout of the book plays to this intention with its unrelenting depiction of exploitation, the gold and diamond miners; of grief, at one of many funerals for a child; and of displacement, most poignantly realised in a chillingly pretty view of the flower gardens of Aveba where we are told women were rounded up and raped by the military in 2006. Le Carré’s and Bleasdale’s are not the only voices that echo throughout this humble tome. Interspersed amongst the pages are testimonies of the Congolese. Printed on delicate tabs of paper that punctuate the harshness of the black and white photography are the words of Henri, Olive, Régine, Tanzira, Madame

Lisi, and Innocent to name a few. Fathers, mothers, children, their words are short but their stories are almost too huge to take on board. These words bring us back from any imaginary space we may have wandered off to while merely looking at the photographs. Through their stories we learn that “the enemies attacked our village”, “the Mayi-Mayi kept us a slaves”, “I don’t even know how I learned to kill”… Together Bleasdale’s photography and these recounted stories are so powerful in their symbiosis that this book seems able to actually shout “Read me”. It would be too easy to rationalise this book with simplistic analysis of the photography that seems at times to embody a World Press Photo style of image making– the low-slung Kalashnikov; a half-cut head in the frame’s foreground – but aesthetic deconstruction does little justice to the work or myself. This collection of images and words, ink on paper, is in so many ways a powerful statement on the unrivalled effectiveness of photojournalism. Powerful photography collides with insightful words to construct an enduring narrative that exists both in the present as an act of witnessing and in the future as a valuable document. As Le Carré says: “To observe pain only through the prism of the boardroom and the computer screen is to sever the vital artery between compassion and action”. Thanks to Bleasdale and his publisher’s gentle, but unflinching, approach to making books it is presented here with force and purpose. Jon Levy 165

Reviews

Nollywood Pieter Hugo Published by Prestel www.prestel.com £35 (112pp Hardback)

Nollywood. The third largest in the world, Nigeria’s film industry churns out more than 1000 films annually and is worth over $250 million. The first of its kind in Africa, Nollywood, which officially came into existence in 1992, not only represents a shift in the producer/ receiver exchange between the West and the developing world, but also has become an object of debate within a post-colonial discourse. The first films to be made in Africa by Africans, with the work of Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembène did not emerge until the 1960s. The productions were defined as “art house” and were more concerned with articulating the post-colonial African experience than creating narrative and obtaining wide distribution. As a result, hardly anyone, especially not Africans themselves, saw these first attempts at creating a panAfrican identity through film. If its possible to use such a term as 166

“African film”, which homogenises the output of this huge and extraordinarily diverse continent, Nollywood comes closest in terms of dissemination and distribution. The films produced by the Nollywood industry delve into the genres of soap opera and horror – commenting on the urban experience that is confronted head-on with the traditional – and are produced and sold, straight to DVD, around the world. South African photographer Pieter Hugo’s portraits of Nollywood’s actors are not a behind the scenes glance, as such, but could even be described as stills, as the actors are on set, in costume and in character. The characters intensely stare into the camera, their stillness almost rendering them soulless, mannequin-like. A Nigerian fascination with juju and ritual, the mystical and the grotesque – is reflected in the thousands of low budget films produced here and the monsters and demons created – not to mention the gore or the sinister props. A topless woman sits on a bed, a long knife through her chest. A red-eyed vampire sits with a fresh victim in his lap, fangs dripping blood. And yet the most frightening scenes are more obscure: three young boys in a field, their bodies painted white, eyes and mouths ringed with black. A woman sits at a window, dead or possessed, coins over her eyes. The nature of Nollywood filmmaking, hinted at by Hugo’s images is one of lowbudgets, on location, use of non-actors. The “sets” that are the backdrop to the photographs are not constructs but real streets, houses, dumpsters. The varying

quality of the props and costumes attest to the improvised nature of the industry. The three pieces of writing that open the book, by Nigerian author Chris Abani, Stacy Hardy and Zina SaroWiwa, contextualise the Nollywood industry through, respectively, the use of storyboard jumping between past and present, a more factual essay and creative prose invoking childhood memories and fear as encountered in Hugo’s photographs. These various, eclectic styles and the accompanying design of the text, on its own paper stock, solidify the work. The surprising portrait of a white man in mask is a jolt towards the end of the book. The thumbnails with captions in the back tell us that this is a selfportrait, Hugo has inserted himself into the Nollywood machine, standing, naked down to his underwear in a field of rubbish, wearing a balaclava, gloves and brandishing a weapon. What at first seems like a humorous, lighthearted inclusion, in fact hints at something more telling, the always inevitable presence of the coloniser. It would be easy to trivialise this project by saying that it’s a positive take on Africa and therefore worthwhile. What it is, simply, is Nigeria, a country attempting to regain control of its image and industry, creating entertainment that has been determined by what people like and want, signifying a step towards counterbalancing the one-way movement in media dissemination. Lauren Heinz

Reviews

OUR KIDS ARE GOING TO HELL Robin Maddock

Published by Trolley www.trolleybooks.com £19.99 (144pp Softback)

“You’ll find nothing you muppets…” Not a line from The Bill or some other plodding vernacular cop show but the real thing: a suspected drug dealer during one of many Hackney police raids witnessed and recorded by photographer Robin Maddock as part of an intermittent three year project to uncover, in his words, “what was at the end of the sirens and flashing lights.” Maddock appears to have had no trouble engaging image-conscious, media-savvy coppers who not only made room in the car for him, but were happy to invite him to pre-raid briefings. They also perused, and approved, a dummy of the resulting book. As well they might – for this is no hardhitting exposé of urban crime “control,” nor is it an unflinching account of the

brutalities and horrors of a drug trade run riot. Instead Maddock has sought to portray the environmental conditions and urban landscapes against which the successions of raids, searches, questionings and cautions are played out. An iconography of an after-dark Hackney lifestyle emerges: a backstreet builders’ yard, and a shuttered bagel shop; a photo of Malcolm X, and a poster of Marcus Garvey; furniture out the front of a night-time estate; ganzies, baseball caps, handcuffs and helmets; a stash tin and a strip club; dogs who’ve mislaid their muzzles. If you ever scored in the White Hart (as was), demolished a Lower Clapton takeaway on the way home, and woke in the morning to find your telly gone, you’ll know whereof Maddock speaks. His point is that the bits and pieces of this particular East London landscape are an index of a broader social and cultural neglect, against which the Met can play only a walk-on role. Accordingly, the wryly askance, deft and astute pictures of the actual raids suggest a sense of mission fatigue – the oblique outtakes from a to-becontinued War on Drugs. We don’t see Hackney’s finest smashing the doors in, but we do get a shot of the cheap, splintered damage afterwards. When an officer searches – fruitlessly, we imagine – above some kitchen units, Maddock’s photograph shows only two uniformed feet balancing on the worktop, next to the Fairy liquid, Ribena and washing-up. Elsewhere a poster of Tupac, gun thrust down his waistband, gives the Law the finger. Another officer appears in a doorway to take crime scene pictures, armed, not with the latest

digital surveillance technology, but with a rainbow-coloured plastic disposable camera. This is not Forward Intelligence, not the Ring of Steel; this is Hackney, and we use Snappy Snaps. There are photographs too of boredlooking suspects awaiting their inevitable release – Maddock writes that the raids are rarely effective, that they seldom lead to prosecutions. But it is by no means clear that these pictures achieve the critical independence that elevates the other frames. He aspires to a studiedly neutral position, explaining that he “can’t feel empathy for either side”. But it becomes apparent that there is a precious little middle-ground to be had between 20 masked police and their target. On these occasions the imbalance of power on which the project is predicated asserts itself unavoidably. It is interesting to speculate how many of the photographs – of innocent individuals on private property – might constitute an invasion of privacy were they to appear in the press. In fact, a few miles to the east of Maddock’s patch, the Barking and Dagenham Recorder recently published photographs taken during a (similarly fruitless) police raid and, though the suspect’s face was pixellated, the paper was censured by the Press Complaints Commission in a ruling that editors “cannot invade a person’s privacy with impunity just because they have the consent of the police”. Guy Lane

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Reviews

The photographer Emmanuel Guibert, Didier Lefèvre, Frédéric Lemercier Published by Dupuis www.firstsecondbooks.com $10.99 (273pp Softback)

In 1986 Médecins Sans Frontières commissioned French photographer Didier Lefèvre to document the work of an MSF mission in northern Afghanistan, where the Mujahadin were at war with the Soviet forces that had invaded in 1979. It was Lefèvre’s first assignment in Afghanistan and The Photographer, a nonfiction graphic novel, tells the story of his journey with an MSF team from Peshawar, Pakistan to the Yaftal Valley in Afghanistan. The journey would take a day in vehicles on open roads. The direct route, however, is controlled and dangerous, and in order to minimise exposure to the Soviet army, the group travels along a route used by the Afghan resistance to transport arms from Pakistan to conflict areas, a journey that will require three weeks for the caravan of donkeys and horses. 168

The first part of the story describes preparation and the journey, during which Lefèvre comes to appreciate the MSF doctors’ expertise both in navigating Afghan customs and the brutal physical and psychological stresses of their mission. The second recounts Lefèvre’s time with the mission in Yaftal, where the doctors attend to an unending stream of wounded adults and children, sometimes operating through the night with head-mounted miners’ lamps. The wounds are appalling, as are the conditions under which the doctors work. The final section details Lefèvre’s return to Pakistan independently, a disastrous trip that could well have cost him his life. The book was produced more than a decade after this expedition and it may be this distance that allowed Lefèvre to describe his foolhardiness with humility and self-deprecation. (Lefèvre died in 2007 of heart failure.) In the last decade, a genre of graphic novels has emerged addressing the personal experience of political events. Among the best-known, and the best, are Joe Sacco’s Safe Area Gorazde and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis. More ambitious experiments such as Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers explicitly position the graphic novel in relation to both the author’s personal history and to a history of cartoon and comic book art. The Photographer expands on this model, combining Lefèvre’s narration with Emmanuel Guibert’s illustration of Lefèvre’s experiences and with Lefèvre’s photographs, and the interweaving of these three threads is very effective.

Guibert’s masterful visual realisation allows the reader to experience the story simultaneously as both first and third person narrative. Lefèvre and Guibert (and colourist and designer Frédéric Lemercier) have created a work that sets its own terms for how the reader is positioned. Just as a novel creates its own space through the reader’s experiences of the many voices, the multiple narrative methods of The Photographer create their own story space. The Photographer is also deeply affecting. The book begins and ends with Lefèvre visiting his grandmother in Normandy. All that he witnesses and endures in between these visits seems, at the end of the book, impossibly far away, but the realities of the humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan as revealed in his photographs cannot be unseen. Lefèvre recounts a conversation he has with Régis, one of the doctors, in Palandara. Lefèvre asks him how he can practice with such limited equipment. Régis, who would go on to teach a class on “Medicine in a Sanitary Wasteland” at the University of Bordeaux II, responds: “The basis of medicine, whether here or in France, is always the same, it’s clinical observation, the study of symptoms. It’s the science of reading signs. And you won’t find a better school for that than practicing in a sanitary wasteland, like what we do here.” The parallels to documentary photography are obvious, but The Photographer demonstrates that a graphic novel can also be a powerful vehicle for a study in compassionate observation. Leo Hsu

Reviews

what we bought Robert Adams Published by Yale University Press www.yalebooks.co.uk £35 (208pp Hardback)

During a period of economic growth in the 1960s and ’70s, a substantial shift in the commercial geography of Denver and the wider Colorado region began to gather momentum. Encouraged by their employees, who recognised the area’s natural beauty and the prospect of a new beginning, a number of businesses, their attendant service industries and communities of labour began to resettle in what Jack Kerouac, writing in On the Road, had called “the promised land” little more than a decade earlier. In 1995, Robert Adams returned to pictures he made throughout this time and worked with curator Thomas Weski to select the 193 photographs that comprise this small, solid and deeply affecting book. After a spell in California, Robert Adams had returned to Colorado in 1962, to teach English. He would photograph in his free time and, witnessing these migrations, had by 1967 cut his teaching by two-thirds so that his photography might progress. Over an extended period, and against a world unsettled by political unrest in Europe and war in

Vietnam, Adams steadily photographed the region and between 1968 and 1974, he produced two books. The New West (1974) and Denver (1977) both held an authority previously found in the survey photography that had marked out the West a century before. Yet there was also something more. These photographs were idiosyncratic, collecting a singular vision borne of reflection, routine and perhaps even isolation. The book is built upon what seem like contemplative, pedestrian journeys. There is a sense of walking from the edges of towns, through the grasslands, past fly-tips in unkempt peripheries, then moving through the tract housing and low-rise apartment blocks, the flat rectangular factories and arriving at the cavernous shopping areas before returning. The photographs, although diverse in form and freely made, emphasise the monotonies of architecture, the functionality of homes, the uniformity of sizes. Many pictures are spare of immediate drama; foregrounds are empty except for scrubland and concrete highways pave in whole half frames – or seem to show little but the litter that falls from cars and blows, until it is snagged on the slopes at the edges of highways. The book has been carefully reproduced, so close to the originals that it is possible to understand the effect those six inch-or-so high originals would create when stretched around galleries over recent decades. Diner windows veil dark interiors, welling to black; figures are nearly lost in the shadow of unremarkable buildings,

or fading under what Tod Papageorge would later describe, when writing about these pictures, as a light of “virtually nuclear intensity”. When he was making the work Adams moved between two cameras. The rectangle of a more traditional territorial survey initially dominates the book, before the square format becomes a preferred way to photograph the interiors of shops, offices and homes. In retail areas, adults are seen alone and often from a distance. They sit at tables in vast yet mostly empty malls. The square seems appropriate and stifling, offering no sense of how those workers, who have passed through the streets so freely until now, may ever leave the factories, thrift stores or supermarkets of this Colorado town. The effect of What We Bought is accumulative. Adams writes in the book’s introduction of “what we purchased, what we paid and what we could not buy”. It’s useful to recognise the personal inflection of the book’s title, in contrast to the detachment that announced his earlier publications. Perhaps, looking at the work 30 years on, the photographer has allowed an expression of seasoned, slowly realised anger. What many pictures include, though hindered by the hoardings, telegraph poles and trees that Adams clearly shares with Walker Evans, is a sense of the settlement’s edge. The photographs seem to map a sense of isolation, even insignificance against the wider America beyond. Gradually it becomes clear that, tucked under the tall, midday skies of this American West, the horizon promises nothing. Ken Grant 169

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On my Shelf

sources of inspiration Corey Doctorow I want to start with Daniel Pinkwater’s Alan Mendelsohn: the Boy from Mars, a young adult comic novel which I read for the first time when I was 12. It tells the story of a geeky kid who shows up in a weird and very banal suburb of Chicago and meets another kid who’s also a misfit. They end up skiving off school, going into town and discovering strange mystic bookshops where they find smeared photocopied documents purporting to explain how to control things with their minds. This leads to a series of adventures, during which, they completely change how they feel about their peers. It is a novel about the acquisition of forbidden knowledge, about the value and pleasure of skiving off. A thoroughly humane book, Mendelsohn is a lifeline to every weird kid, a hint that geeks may inherit the Earth. It totally changed me as a young person and Pinkwater remains one of my favourite writers. A bit like Mendelsohn, Jo Walton’s new work Among Others offers a kind of salvation for geeks. But it is much sweeter than Mendelsohn, much more realistic. I was reading it at the airport in a stapled manuscript format and found myself just tearing off the sheets, leaving a trail of litter behind me as I

walked through Terminal 5. I was still voraciously reading in the security queue, wanting to walk through the metal detector with it, unable to put it down. But the book of Walton’s that I really want to recommend is Farthing, her alternate history that is an allegory about the contemporary security state. Set in a Britain which made peace with the Nazis, it follows the country’s gradual securitisation as a result of its proximity to a heavily nazified Europe in which the security state has become the status quo. Britain, while theoretically retaining its autonomy, becomes more suspicious, more paranoid, puts more laws on its books and persecutes more people. Everyone is eventually guilty of something and so they all tremble under a yoke that’s very Orwellian. It’s really about the war on terror. What makes this book remarkable is the decency of the protagonists; good people who are trapped by the logic of the system into doing things that are evil and wicked. My next choice also relates to security culture – William Gibson’s Spook Country, a science fiction novel set a year before it came out, so a science fiction about the recent past. It could not be a more perfect novel about the zeitgeist of paranoia post 9/11, of state control, technology and globalism. What makes Gibson’s work science fiction is his approach to technology. Science fiction is often mistaken for a literature of speculation about technology but it’s actually an exploration of the impact of technology on society, often told through technological speculation. On a sentence by sentence level all of Gibson’s books

are superbly written and survive as pieces of observational comedy about the technological and techno-social world, at once incredibly keen textbooks and cracking stories. Everything I write is informed by having read those books so many times and not just Gibson’s, but his peers as well. Another major influence in my life is The Whole Earth Catalog, the original hippie catalogue that offered “access to tools and ideas”, written by and for people who wanted to exist outside of mainstream consumer culture. From composting toilets to people who have started cooperatives, or worked out how to put in solar panels, or invented new tools or became blacksmiths, each one is a kind of testimonial by these people explaining how they got there. These huge musty tomes are incredibly engrossing, perfect for lying out on my rug and reading. You can find everything from how to paddle a boat around the ocean, to how to have a home birth and how to play your gong from Japan. It is the web in print form – really a remarkable thing. My final choice is Mizuka Ito et al’s Digital Youth Project. As the largest project ever undertaken into the way young people use technology, it’s very thorough, but not at all dry. Most fascinating is the team’s exploration of how the adult dichotomy of “playing” online and “working” online is totally artificial. It is the “playing around” which equips us with the technical fluency to do work. Without it, we can never really understand how to use technology. Although you can read the 25 theses separately, the actual report is a breezy one hundred and something pages, which manages to distil some incredible thoughts and insights into the way that technology is used. It’s a wonderful bit of research and not, I want to stress, like taking home an eight hundred page block of jargon laden, hard-tofollow stuff. In fact I read it on the Tube, standing up. If I had another choice, it would be a graphic novel. Frank Miller’s Give Me Liberty turned me back onto comics when I was 17, so I’m especially sentimental about his work. Cory Doctorow is a science fiction author, activist, journalist and blogger. He was talking to Amelia Davies

Ed kashi curse of the black gold 9 March â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 3 april 2010

tel +44 20 7253 1424 email pics@panos.co.uk web www.panos.co.uk multimedia www.vimeo.com/panospictures updates www.twitter.com/panospictures

In November 2009, the book will be launched by Lars Müller Publishers at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris and the Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne.

The Photography Biannual

Alban Kakulya and Yann Mingard’s documentary account of Europe’s external borders has been eight years in the making. An extract was first published in Vol 1, No 3 of 8.

CONTROL

I S S UE 2 6 - a u t u m n 2 0 0 9

East of a new Eden

T Th he e P Ph ho ot to og gr ra ap ph hy y B Bi ai an n nu ua al l I I S S SUEUE 2 26 3 - - a Su Pt RING u m n 22 00 00 98

panos pictures