POYi awards Panos photographers Tomas van Houtryve, Carolyn Drake, William Daniels and Erin Trieb have been recognised with six awards at the 67th annual Pictures of the Year International competition.
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ISSUE 27 - SPRING/SUMMER 2010
Preserved fish on display in the History Museum of Aralsk, a formerly bustling fishing port on the Aral Sea. Kazakhstan. Š CAROLYN DRAKE
ISSUE 27 - SPRING/SUMMER 2010
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ISSUE 27 CROSSCURRENT Cover: Sohrab Hura
RIP Motor City, farewell then, Motown. Detroit’s illustrious past is lost to history and this rust belt city is now on the map for 50 per cent unemployment, its status as a “murder capital” and is infamous – to photographers in particular – for the faded grandeur of its abandoned buildings. And yet… countering these dismal trends are crosscurrents of possibility. What if Detroit reimagined itself as one of the first postindustrial cities? Or if the parking lots were torn up and paradise unpaved? There’s a real chance that this city could reclaim the fertile land that once gave birth to factories and turn its gravid potential into homegrown food. Our special report with photographs by Christian Burkert and Jamie Mcgregor Smith and words by Mark Dowie sees how the land lies. By the time this issue is out, it’s odds on that a new political leader will be installed in Downing Street. Crosscurrents from the Tory regime that ended so memorably in 1997, as explored through Lisa Barnard’s work on the former Conservative Party Headquarters, have informed Labour policy and will pervade the new regime with equal force. Elsewhere we look at different perspectives within mainstream news stories – Peter Beaumont and Louis Quail on Haiti, Paul Hayward on the first African World Cup, Geert van Kesteren’s new project on Gaza – along with those that are more or less ignored in the press – Guinea-Bissau’s collapse into lawlessness, Latvia’s youth as they try to find their footing, as well as a personal battle with schizophrenia in India. Such reports are a contribution to history in the making. It is in or between these social, political and cultural crosscurrents that the potential for change, for radical alternatives to the problems faced by people across the globe, exists. If a common thread can be found, it is in studying power relations that are ceaselessly at play, and navigating a path towards responding personally or politically… without basing that response on diametrically opposed choices that in their narrowness remove space for contemplation. We’re glad you could join us for our ongoing swim upstream. The Editors
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contents FRONT
REPORT
08 E XIT GHOST
83 D ETROIT REIMAGINED: LIFE
Lisa Barnard
20 Destroying the Laboratory for the Sake of the Experiment Mark Power and Daniel Cockrill
30 I NTERVIEW Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin
40 W ORK IN PROGRESS After the Ceasefires Geert van Kesteren
IN PICTURES 50 R USH HOUR Marco Vernaschi
64 O N THE EDGE Roberto Boccaccino
72 DEAD EAGLE TRAIL Jane Hilton 107 LIFE IS ELSEWHERE Sohrab Hura 120 UNDER GODS Liz Hingley 132 AFTER: LIFE Louis Quail
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Christian Burkert
94 FARMERS OF MOTOWN Mark Dowie
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96 D ETROIT REIMAGINED: LAND Jamie Mcgregor Smith
IN WORDS 146 TWO UMBRELLAS Peter Beaumont 148 W IN WIN AFRICA? Paul Hayward
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150 S IEGE MENTALITY Afghan Hound
152 IS ANYONE LISTENING? Malu Halasa 154 BOOK REVIEWS Protest Photographs Gaza Photo Album The Jazz Loft Project Room 103 Explosions, Fires and Public Order Silence War
178 O N MY SHELF
08
Simon Njami
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Magazine Contributors
Lisa Barnard Lisa Barnard completed a BA in Editorial Photography in 2005 at Brighton University, where she now teaches. Her work Virtual Iraq premiered at the Brighton Photo Biennial 2008, to much acclaim. She has recently concluded a year-long residency at the Unicorn Theatre for Children and continues to work on her own artistic practice, in both fine art and editorial photography.
Jane Hilton Photographer and filmmaker Jane Hilton started out as a classical musician but her love of photography brought her to London to work as an assistant, before going it alone in 1988. Her series of 10 documentaries on brothels in Nevada for the BBC has been aired 250 times. Her early work in American in the 1990s looked at the kitsch wedding culture in Las Vegas, a region of the world that continues to enthral her. Sohrab Hura Sohrab Hura, born in 1981 in India, grew up changing his life ambition from one thing to another. He first wanted to grow up to become a dog, which later turned into becoming a superhero, followed by veterinarian and herpetologist to a wildlife filmmaker. After completing a Masters in Economics, he is today a documentary photographer living in New Delhi.
FOTO8.COM
Past Perfect, Jason Larkin
PHOTO STORIES
COMMENTARIES
THE FAMILY
MOG’S BLOG
Stefan Bladh
Miserable Old Git rants about photography
Local: 1998-2007
AFGHAN HOUND
Lou Siroy
Dispatches from our man in Afghanistan
Past Perfect
INTERVIEWS, REVIEWS AND COMMENTARY
Jason Larkin
Leo Hsu, Guy Lane and the rest of the Foto8 team
Bing Bing and Me Rian Dundon
Marco Vernaschi Marco Vernaschi is an Italian photojournalist and writer currently living in Buenos Aires. His long-term project, West Africa’s New Achilles’ Heel, completed in association with the Pulitzer Center, documents the illegal activities, such as drug trafficking, that are fueling terrorism. His work has been published internationally in publications such as Newsweek, National Geographic and The Sunday Times Magazine.
Divided Desert: Balochistan Province Marc Wattrelot
LIVING WITH CRIME Ilan Godfrey
RECORDED AT HOST CURSE OF THE BLACK GOLD Ed Kashi
Destroying the laboratory... Mark Power and Daniel Cockrill
PHOTO FESTIVALS FOTOFREO 2010 Jon Levy
LOVE ME Zed Nelson
CAPITOLIO
Chris Anderson
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12 - 20 May 2010
COPENHAGEN PHOTO FESTIVAL “DAY AND NIGHT – ALL OVER TOWN” WWW.COPENHAGENPHOTOFESTIVAL.COM FACEBOOK: COPENHAGEN PHOTO FESTIVAL
EXHIBITIONS: DANISH ARCHITECTURE CENTRE , THE NATIONAL MUSEUM OF PHOTOGRAPHY, FOTOGRAFISK CENTER, GALERIE MIKAEL ANDERSEN, GALLERI BO BJERGGAARD, HANS ALF GALLERY, MARTIN ASBÆK GALLERY, PETER LAV GALLERY, ROHDE CONTEMPORARY, NATIONAL GALLERY OF DENMARK, V1 GALLERY AND ALL OVER TOWN
EXIT GHOST
photography LISA BARNARD TExt Max Houghton Lisa Barnard’s photographs are empty stages awaiting actors to enter through the myriad doors, emerge from behind spectral blue curtains, or even to appear hologram-like through a blank screen or a gaping rent in a wall. The theatre, located at 32 Smith Square, Westminster, is presently between productions. The final curtain for the last show came down in July 2004, though its glory days ended seven years earlier on 1 May 1997. Some would say the true date of its demise was 28 November 1990, when its leading lady, one Margaret Hilda Thatcher, announced she would no longer take the stage. By now it may be evident that this now-empty building was once the Conservative Party headquarters. A famously squalid building on the inside – a state encouraged by the party’s then treasurer Lord McAlpine to attract benevolent benefactors – it was the setting for 50 years of Tory election victories, as well as the site where party faithful learnt of the memorable loss of Michael Portillo’s Enfield seat to Labour’s Stephen Twigg that fateful May night. For many photographers, the chance to make a project in a building so redolent with recent political history would be a gift. But for one with a critical practice (anyone who saw Barnard’s Virtual Iraq at the Brighton Photo Biennial in 2008 will know that her work engages with the political), to perpetuate photography’s passionate affair with disused spaces would have been an opportunity wasted. Barnard has brought something else to the frame; an eye that doesn’t linger over the aesthetics of decay, but rather draws the observer’s attention to the poetics of space. With her cool blue interior shots, she creates the necessary distance for abstraction, moving through this new register of perception to a different spatio-temporal plane where the political and the performative, and the past and the future collapse into each other. It is as though Barnard is using documentary photography to take the observer beyond the real. On the one hand she is simply documenting the last vestiges of an old regime, yet in the same frame she is offering up the possibility that what she is documenting is not real, was never real, just a political chimera, all surface, no depth. To paraphrase Roth, the smallness of politics is crushing. So many doors offer the promise of a way out, yet all the time the observer feels claustrophobic, hemmed in by walls and industrial pipes, waiting for the low polystyrene ceiling to bear down at any moment. Thus trapped, we are invited to consider not just the space/the stage but its lost objects, its props, and the sense of disquiet they engender. A folk doll is photographed, along with other recovered oddments, almost as a fetish object, as though for a rather surreal catalogue. It – she? – is so pitifully abject, the smallest of capitalism’s useless commodities; a diplomatic gift, perhaps, from an eastern European country. Two disembodied arms hold what the police might term “Tory paraphernalia” – a flag and a scarf of the variety worn by the UK’s first female Prime Minister – literally at arm’s length. A string of weights tells a story of a curiously suburban security measure: to hold down net curtains in case of a bomb blast. The inclusion of a silver spoon carries with it the unpalatable taste of privilege. Barnard has photographed these objects in a style reminiscent of her earlier body of work Care Packages, a project devised by the Blue Star Moms of America, as a kind of grief kit for bereaved parents of dead soldiers. Removed
from their original context, these objects, like the Nestlé mini marshmallows or Hershey kisses, are rendered absurd, unfathomable, redundant. These are the props of Conservative politicians, who, after 13 years off Broadway, are now waiting fractiously in the wings to take centre, or should that be centre right, stage in May 2010. Barnard has been commissioned to photograph the building by Pringle Brandon, the architects working for the new owners, and these photographs will comprise part of the final exhibition, which will take place when it opens in its new guise. Though we see evidence of a – seemingly fraught – relationship with the US in the scratched out BUSH sign, or a tiny door tag that reads Washington, there is no sign of the infamous Vive Le Quid posters, or the Keep Britain Out of Europe slogans that characterised the Conservative Party’s loathing of the EU (formerly the EEC) at that time. Which makes it all the more ironic that these same rooms will soon house offices of the European Parliament and the European Commission. As Churchill said: “We shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us.” www.lisabarnard.co.uk
DESTROYING THE LABORATORY FOR THE SAKE OF THE EXPERIMENT PHOTOGRAPHY Mark Power Poetry Daniel Cockrill
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When my world was turned Upside down Everything fell out In the morning I fell out of bed My pens fell out my bag My money fell out my pocket My tears fell out my eyes My thoughts fell out my ears My anger fell out my mouth My hate fell out my fists My love fell out my heart My heart fell out my chest Luckily You walked behind me And picked them all up.
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fragile carbon cut waters eclipse ashen milk memories stacked bow to stern blackened by progress, promise and lie a deep flotsam bog veil conceals an apple sludge a blooded soil a drifting silt clogging arteries ventricles veins a hollow heart billows dust as a football floats and a swan swims between Picasso blue shadow tags tattoo every nook, cranny tug and barge dykes trickle traffic rolls the canal’s green grimace flickers, jitters and tickles a stony faced brick wall your warm brittle bones your blended voice tones your lost consonants your kind Brummie drone of breath currier glover saddler tanner thong and whip stripped dipped deep on bradawl shaped throat cut land apples rot ideas crumble stars vanish as they run out of light meanwhile they shoot down satellites even the seasons are changing as the current counts down the beats and the breath.
it is written
it is written
in the ‘too bright’ sky as giant snowballs evaporate between goalposts in the storm sodden fields of a schoolboy’s dream
in the long exposures on the flicker and fade of Union flags the ice in my dreams the thaw of my thoughts in the alcoholic laugh the flying fists the shattered glass the ammonium piss bus shelters the boarded up post boxes
it is written on the frost bitten toes and the blistered heels the gloveless numb fingers and the slush soaked bone it is written on our zipper pulled orange lined snorkel parkas hoods cupping a dripping blue ice pop nose it is written on the Cellophane wrapped couple the promises they make on the stairwells they climb and the bridges they cross it is written in the empty waiting rooms on the wall painted cotton fields the braille on the table cloth that blind men can’t read on the cobbled streets and polished floors
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it is written on the bricks and the mortar in the mad and the mean on the faces of the middle men on the policeman’s blooded baton on the politician’s conscience under the judges bitten nails in the carparks shopping centres train stations motorways churches mosques synagogues schools libraries and hospitals on the rooftops in the gutters on the benches where we sit on the paving stones of England it has been written.
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‘Destroying the Laboratory...’ is a collaborative project between photographer Mark Power (markpower.co.uk) and poet Daniel Cockrill as they travel around England. An exhibition of this work will be held in June at Atlas Gallery, London. 28
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BROOMBERG & CHANARIN OUT OF CONTEXT BY MAX HOUGHTON
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INTERVIEW
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Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin are not photojournalists, but sometimes they pretend to be. In the winter of 2007, the photographers were invited by the Ministry of Defence to make a series of portraits of British troops in Afghanistan. “We’d be delighted,” they responded, knowing that if they could get themselves embedded, whatever work they made during that time would not succumb to the “soldier as hero” narrative they knew the MOD would desire, the very narrative they associate with the practice of photojournalism, and one of their many reasons for challenging that discourse. At some point in the negotiations, Broomberg and Chanarin were told they would not have permission to go to Afghanistan after all. “We started thinking about what we’d like to do and by the time we worked it out, I think they’d seen our work and thought it wouldn’t be a good idea to send us there,” says Broomberg, the more forthcoming, more exuberant of the two, at least in this meeting, the most likely to illustrate his speech with exclamation or emotion. Chanarin, on this occasion, is more tightly sealed, more controlled. “We’ve always said our work has been 90 per cent about getting access and 10 per cent taking photographs but our ability to get access has been compromised by the work we’ve been doing,” says Chanarin, referring in part to Chicago, in which they photographed a fake Arab town, known as Chicago, built by the Israeli Defence Force for “combat training”. These fantasy landscapes, as Eyal Weizman notes in the book’s accompanying essay, reveal a ghost town where soldiers are trained to make ghost towns out of real cities. Unlikely to make comfortable viewing for the MOD, one imagines. “So, we got [the access] another way by pretending to be photojournalists coming to do a story,” says Broomberg. “It wasn’t as… what’s the word, when you lie?… deceitful as we’re making out,” continues Chanarin. “There was actually quite a transparency. We were working in the media, sleeping in the media tent, eating with all the other journalists. We were totally upfront about what we were doing: we had a cardboard box, it was full of paper, we were exposing it to the light. The level of deceit was that we had a camera, the kind of camera they would expect us to have, and we used it to take pictures as they would expect, but we would delete those pictures at the end of each day.” The photographic paper, rolled out in sections at strategic moments during their “tour” and exposed to the light for 20 seconds, resulted in the work The Day Nobody Died. It would become one of the most controversial series of images of the war, infuriating, among others, those concerned that in appropriating the main role of this artistic venture to the soldiers themselves – they were responsible for carrying around the rather absurd box, containing the roll of paper 50 metres long and 76.2 cm wide, weighing 13.5 kilograms – was potentially dangerous as well as disgraceful waste of soldiers’ time. “Doing what? They’re wasting my money…” says Broomberg. Yet, whatever this project is, it isn’t as flippant as this response looks on the page. Their intention in making the work, as is evident in the title, was to expose how images, or image-makers, are complicit in neutralising the horror of war. To quote from the text they distributed to accompany this work when it was presented at the Barbican: “We have found images that are constructed to evoke compassion or concern, pathos or sympathy – often the measure of a successful image – increasingly problematic. The act of looking becomes cathartic, a celebration of the sublime, but nothing else. It is a passive and quite worthless act.” 32
Broomberg and Chanaring’s latest project, an intervention into a photographic archive documenting The Troubles (opening spread and above, courtesy The Artists / The Belfast Exposed Archive) The oxymoronic practice of music torture (facing page): stills from ‘Saturday Comes Slow’, the video for Massive Attack
But even Broomberg and Chanarin didn’t count on the strange beauty of their own images; their Hockney blues, the flaming tongues that mingled with the very dirt and dust of Helmand. The images were accompanied by a film that documents the journey of the box of paper. When I saw it, at the Paradise Row Gallery in east London, the film seemed incidental. In subsequent exhibitions, it has received due prominence, serving as a filmic caption to the too-beautiful images, its purpose to show the theatre of war and to disrupt that narrative. Yet doesn’t the artists’ collaboration with the army make them complicit in the very machinery of war that grinds along with the flow of capitalism? “We were subversive in that machinery,” begins Chanarin. “We were interrupting it,” continues Broomberg. “It happened with every single person we encountered. They were like – what’s in the fucking box? What are we doing carrying a 15kg box around? We were having confrontation after confrontation. So it became this kind of foolish journey.” “I think our film about the box is actually the most authentic series of images of war,” says Chanarin, “War is that – war is mundane… War is logistical, war is waiting, war is hanging about. War is not really about the effects of ammunition on the human body because people are just eating and digging holes and flying aeroplanes and creating dust.” It’s a knowingly provocative statement and Broomberg doesn’t let it go: “No, sorry, war is tens of people dying…” And it’s this kind of jostling to find a moral position through their work that I sense happens all the time, is the reason for their continued collaboration, that began professionally at Colors magazine 10 years ago, and the reason it continues to thrive. Broomberg and Chanarin’s critique of how narrative is created has always been present in their work, for example, in Red House, where in choosing to photograph only the marks inscribed on the walls of Saddam’s former Ba’athist headquarters, and the site of torture for Kurds who were incarcerated there, they drew out an interplay between the fixity of photography and the unfinished nature of graffiti or drawing. Yet these images could simultaneously exist as part of a photojournalistic venture. The photographs in Mr Mkhize’s Portrait, such as those of the men in Pollsmoor Maximum Security Prison in Cape Town, are also photojournalistic. Both men grew up in South Africa – they first met on holiday in the Cape when they were 19 and are, in fact, distantly related – yet there is a sense in Mr Mkhize and in the various series that form Ghetto that they have turned their lens to the exotic, to the dispossessed, to the vulnerable. Though they don’t disown this work (they seem less sure of the validity of their first work Trust), Broomberg and Chanarin would not make pictures like that today. “Our photographs didn’t do anything. We took them, at that point, when we were operating within a belief that our photographs did something, that they functioned in some way,” says Chanarin. “There’s a contract between the photographer and the subject and… we’ve never lived up to that promise. We’ve gone into a psychiatric hospital and taken a picture of someone and no matter how dignified we want that picture to be, no matter how beautiful it is, or how ever well it communicates the situation, it never lives up to the promise – which is that in some way this will help that person.” Broomberg picks up the thread: “And every time we’ve photographed anyone, you can feel that promise happening, you can, and any photographer will tell you that. It’s part of the power and it’s part of the reason people give you access to themselves – 33
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‘ I think our film about the box is actually the most authentic series of images of war’: The Day Nobody Died on display at Paradise Row Gallery (top); stills from the film of soldiers transporting the box of paper (above); and a detail from one of the resulting images (left)
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especially if you are functioning within institutions where the history of photography is tied up so much with power or authority and categorisation, you’re seen as part of the power mechanism or as someone who can alleviate the suffering that power is causing. And you can’t. This is part of what led us away – quite violently away – from that.” And it’s this status as floor-crossers that can invoke wrath in those who believe in the need to document the lived life. This turning away has led increasingly towards a kind of abstraction in later work. Their series American Landscapes is described by Chanarin as “a road trip”, yet what the photographs depict are the very edges of sets used by commercial photographers across the US. Broomberg and Chanarin see the blank sets as offering a similar kind of projected fantasy as the landscapes they photographed in Chicago. Though admittedly, it is possible to make out tiny details of white flooring or terracotta paint, they seem to fall into that category of work that is utterly meaningless unless the artist tells you what to think; a charge I wouldn’t level at any of their other work, which is always freighted with a vivid politics that seems entirely absent here. I make this declaration as I read that John Berger has collaborated with them on this project, which will be shortly be released in book form. I look forward to being illuminated. Interestingly, even now, Chanarin and Broomberg call themselves “documentary photographers”. I say “interestingly” because their most recent work, Afterlife, and their work with the Belfast Exposed archive, could both be described as artistic interventions or “borrowing” – hardly the language of documentary photography. That they teach at the London College of Communication on the Documentary and Photojournalism MA makes their thoughts on where, if anywhere, such boundaries are drawn, even more relevant. Says Broomberg: “For me it’s quite clear. Photojournalism’s tropes and strategies have stayed the same for many, many years, and the way it functions; whereas documentary changes because it is constantly analysing the way it’s working. That’s the key distinction for me. It examines its own strategies constantly and that is a transgressive position and that’s to challenge power.” Chanarin: “For me photojournalism is practical, it’s pragmatic and it’s about news, about engaging with the machinery of newspapers. Documentary, I have in the camp of concerned photography – in my mind that’s where it sits… Documentary makes me think of documents. So it’s something separate from news. It‘s a photocopy of something. It’s a bit of data that’s been put into a file, and it’s been archived; it’s quite a passive thing. Photojournalism I see as much more aggressive and opinionated. “I see all these people out there with their cameras all the time and I marvel at it. Humans are fascinated with recording, in fact they are desperate to do it – to document. Whether you call it photojournalism, or you call it documentary, or whether you call it drawing, there is an obsession that humans have with creating representations of things and I’m much more interested in that than in fighting about whether something is documentary or not.” Again, Broomberg challenges his partner: “But then there is drawing which is making cartoons of Jews in 1934, that’s when the distinctions start becoming important. You start talking about its motivation, morality, ethics, strategies people use, at which point I think it is interesting. Put it this way photojournalism is more easily… it’s more dangerous because it can be used for different means whereas documentary is less… I don’t know… less easily manipulated because it’s thinking about its position.” 36
‘I see all these people out there with their cameras all the time and I marvel at it. Humans are fascinated with recording, in fact they are desperate to do it – to document’: from Afterlife (right); Mr Mkhize’s Portrait (top left); Ghetto (left)
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Rogue trip: challenging the discourse of photojournalism – or drifting into abstraction?American Landscapes (facing page); and Chicago (this page)
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These thoughts are interesting in relation to the work they have recently made that was sparked from a single image by Iranian photographer Jahangir Razmi. Their text offers the idea that “by reappropriating it, our relationship as spectators of distant suffering is interrupted”. While the opportunity to reconsider events that took place in 1979 is welcome, the phraseology seems glib. It’s as though by taking a photograph quite literally out of context – the background is removed and individual figures from the Pulitzer Prize-winning image and several frames from the contact sheet are featured as cut-outs – the context shifts to inhabit the words… but that’s all. What’s infinitely more interesting to me is the fact that Broomberg and Chanarin spent time with the Iranian photographer, whose anonymity was preserved for over 20 years, asking him to describe the events and people in the photographs as though they were blind and could not see his pictures. Their investigative technique revealed the ever-present gap between photography and memory, and further, challenged the primacy of the visual. Our interview is punctuated by telephone calls and discussions about their most recent work, which takes the form of a video they have made for the band Massive Attack. It’s a collaboration with Ruhal Ahmed, a former Guantanamo Bay detainee, and the human rights charity Reprieve. Ahmed was bombarded with incessant heavy metal music, played at the highest volume in a form of the oxymoronic-sounding practice of music torture. Broomberg and Chanarin’s technique here is to interview Ahmed in an anechoic chamber, used for sound experiments, so that it becomes a kind of performance. It’s absorbing to watch, yet, once again, beauty disrupts the artists’ own intention to disrupt the disposable vehicle of a pop video. The contours of Ahmed’s face are so physically perfect they briefly deafen the viewer to the disturbing content of the words he is speaking, deafened by sight, blinded by beauty. It’s in this way that with their whole body of work, Broomberg and Chanarin are creating the kind of audio-visual archive attributed to the great “seer” (“voyant”) Foucault by Gilles Deleuze. Throughout their practice, they are exploring the “infinite relation” between the seeable and sayable, between word and image, between history and memory. If sometimes their work falls short of the hyperbole, that is a necessary part of a practice that is constantly seeking to challenge the limits of representation. Their youthful arrogance gone – they’re both pushing 40, and Broomberg is a joyous new father – their desire to dissect contemporary history-making undiminished, they might even be content to follow Beckett’s dictum from time to time: fail again, fail better. As I’m about to leave, I ask a few predictable questions about their enduring relationship. “Listen to this,” says Broomberg, laughing at the thought he’s just had. “Olly’s mother comes round the other day to meet Leni [Broomberg’s baby daughter] and she starts telling this story about Olly as a little kid. Olly’s mum and dad moved from England when he, when you, were tiny… and they were invited to their first barbecue. This was a big thing, an introduction into the local community, and they are at the table and eventually everyone just leaves. Olly’s mum goes to Olly’s dad and asks where they’ve all gone. They were all huddled together, so she went up to them and asked if there was a problem. They said ‘Well, yes – your little baby has been mixing the peanuts with the crisps!’ – and they got kicked out of the party!” “That sounds like an exaggeration.” “No – that’s the way it was! And I said to her, ‘I’ve been separating the crisps from the peanuts for the last 15 years.’”
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AFTER THE CEASEFIRES
photography geert van kesteren TExt Max Houghton
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WORK IN PROGRESS
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It’s rare to find agreement in the photojournalistic community about the merits of a body of work. Geert van Kesteren’s work has been near universally lauded – twice – with his two books on Iraq, Why Mister, Why? and Baghdad Calling, offering a new and remarkably singular approach to photographic studies of contemporary conflict. He knows his decision to undertake his next long-term project in the country-with-two-names – Israel/ Palestine – is loaded in more ways than one. It’s hard to think of a more ambitious project than Why Mister, Why?, but with his new work, provisionally called After the Ceasefires, I’d guess van Kesteren has found it. He began in earnest after the February 2009 ceasefire, when he quickly came to understand the term “ceasefire” didn’t carry the expected meaning. Ehud Olmert’s promise of a “disproportionate response” to rocket attacks on Israel from Gaza – during the so-called ceasefire – was the first sign that words were thrown around as readily as stones. Van Kesteren’s photographic response to that grim realisation was to make a picture of a tree, a stark, broken silhouette of pale wood, reaching up bleakly from a ruined landscape. It’s still a tree, a sign of life; there may be sap rising if you scratch deep enough below the surface, but to all intents and purposes, it looks dead. Van Kesteren has set himself the task of making what he calls an objective reportage. “The project is about looking at two sides of the wall without being biased. I have high expectations, yes, but it’s 42
also limiting at the same time. It’s such a highly polarised conflict that this must be my approach – it’s even more important than looking in a psychological or philosophical way at the whole problem, though I would hope to be doing that as well,” he says. One of the many problems he will encounter on the road to making this project is negotiating his way through news events and “news events”. The latter are created, for propaganda purposes. Of course, the PR spectacle is not new, but when it’s staged on sites of death, it seems more galling. Van Kesteren witnessed a memorial service on the site where 29 Gaza residents were killed by the Israeli army, yet there was something missing: the families of the dead. The event had been organised by Hamas for the Arabic media, and the party leaders were swearing on the Koran and proclaiming their wish to die as martyrs. “It becomes public theatre. The mourning is real, but the event is not,” says van Kesteren. He was also present when Benjamin Netanyahu came to visit the Wailing Wall, the press image predefined as the personal moment of reflection amid the thronging crowds. “When is it news? When it’s fabricated? How do you receive that? I’m working with the media myself; what are the things I can never say? When you see the limitations as a wall, and see the media is part of that wall, it’s possible to find people who are keys that open doors in that wall.” Dividing his time between his home in Holland and an
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apartment in Jerusalem, van Kesteren will spend at least 18 months turning this project into something tangible, specifically a book, which he describes as “the perfect and complete format for me to show and tell; to show what matters”. He’s yet to decide whether all the photographs in the book will be his own, or whether he will utilise other imagery, as he did to devastating effect in Baghdad Calling, making the book a photo-album-in-exile. He has taken 6,000 images so far in Gaza, which sounds like a vast amount, until he reveals how many he made for Why Mister, Why?: over 40,000 pictures. Clearly, editing is as important a stage as the making of the photographs. “It’s my mission to show the thickness of reality,” he says. “Why Mister, Why? is so many images, not one iconic image.” Van Kesteren’s research methods are those of the traditional photojournalist: go to the place you want to document, look, and then look harder. “What research?” he asks, when questioned how he had prepared for this vast undertaking. “My research is always on the ground. My knowledge comes from other fields. I watch documentaries by Werner Herzog, I read my favourite Kapuscinski and listen to jazz. Then, with a certain vibe in my head, I can be extremely creative. It is possible to be an alien again, to go without knowing, and to wander around with an open eye. I have the same manic eye that any journalist has; I’m always looking for the story; for the real feelings and fears of the individuals. I do believe it is possible to report without bias. Kapuscinski was right in many of his thoughts; he is the bible for journalists.” It is interesting that he should cite Kapuscinski, whose factual reporting has been challenged recently in a new, critical biography
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by Artur Domoslawski. He is charged with crossing the boundaries between fiction and reportage, claiming to witness events at which he had not been present, altering facts to create a higher aesthetic truth. As a writer, he would have had two modes: the daily reports he filed for his newspaper, and then the longer form, which would not of course have been written contemporaneously. Facts are notoriously slippy, especially over time. Van Kesteren is aware of the changes that will occur as his journalism changes form as it turns into a book: “When I have finished my journalism, I add art to it, in the form of a creative design. Every time you look at art, it turns, and you discover new layers, new depths. A war is so complicated, this is why design and art are necessary. It gives the work meaning over the long term. The journalism is thrown away; the book lasts much longer. Art doesn’t explain, journalism raises questions and it is in this functional field of tension that I prefer to operate.” He is now entering the third phase of this project. The first stage was to visit the country in February 2009 after the ceasefire; the second to get a feel for the country and its divided people. Now, he is looking closely at what he calls the “dehumanisation of the area”, a concept he is still in the process of defining, desperate to be precise in employing such terms. The sight of children warming themselves around fires in freezing Jabaliya had almost an alien feel for van Kesteren, like it was the start of a civilisation, back to the very origins of life. He has spent time with trauma expert Muhammed Omar, whose own children are furious with him for not being able to protect them, hearing about such devastating concepts as “post-traumatic states”
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in which children step out of reality to simply survive. These words will be recorded; van Kesteren is employing the same interviewing method as in Baghdad Calling; transcriptions of conversations with the people of Gaza will form the core of this new work: “What is most important is that the individual explains their point of view,” he says. It is in on this simple wish that van Kesteren’s mode of humanitarian journalism turns. The aesthetic of his two published books is the antithesis of coffee table war porn. In an age where journalism, especially war journalism, follows the blood and the bombs with a slavish desperation, van Kesteren, through patience, persistence and a desire to understand, becomes a listening and seeing device, a kind of transmitter. While we might know that objectivity in reporting is only ever an unfullfillable wish, it can certainly be a very successful means through which to approach a story. And what a story this is. “I’m just back from the Old City in Jerusalem – destroyed 17 times, 23 different rulers, such a tiny city – it’s only 800 square metres! What can I say? People are not following the will of their god. It must be an enormous dilemma. Forgiveness, living humbly, living in peace; it must be difficult to be religious out here, in the Holy Land, when reality shows you something so different.” In his desire to document the thickness of reality, the 6,000 images are circling around in some imaginary sphere, one or two occasionally falling to earth and coming into focus. It may be a 48
photograph of an Egyptian watchtower, observing the comings and goings of computers, gas, schoolbooks and pens through the 1,500 tunnels that enable Gaza to function at all in the face of Israel’s blockades that keep goods – and people – out. A blown-out building, once someone’s home, makes an abstract silhouette against the blue sky, yet streets away, there are people buying new mobile phones, functioning normally, at least on the surface. A rather pitiful zebra lives to be stared at in Gaza zoo. But look harder. It’s not a zebra, it’s a donkey that has been painted with black Wella hair dye – transported through the tunnels – to look like a zebra. The old zebras died, and the blockades mean that livestock cannot be transported into Gaza. So, with a little ingenuity and a steady hand, Gaza’s children can take delight in seeing an exotic zebra, and for a while, they will believe it to be true. “I want you to feel the blur of conflict,” says van Kesteren. “A photograph gives us a feeling but it is always a lie.”
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RUSH HOUR PHOTOGRAPHY TExt Marco Vernaschi GUY LANE
Since 2007, GuineaBissau, a former Portuguese colony and one of the poorest nations in the world, has become the new hub for cocaine trafficking in Africa. Drug cartels from South America, terrorist organisations affiliated with Al-Qaeda and the voracious appetite for cocaine in Europe have transformed this tiny country – already striving to recover from decades of civil war – into a living hell
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On 2 March 2009at 5am, President Jo達o Bernardo Vieira was killed by order of a few generals trying to make new alliances with drug cartels. According to Interpol, Vieira was personally involved in drug trafficking and was trying to keep his generals at the edge of his business. The day before Vieira was killed, the chief of the army was assassinated by a bomb. They were competing for control of the drug trade
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Vieira was first questioned by a commando of soldiers loyal to the chief of the army, then shot to death and slaughtered with a machete. The assassination of Vieira, who ruled this small African nation for nearly a quarter of a century, finally attracted the attention of the international community and led to new elections. Two months after the murder, two presidential candidates were also killed in similar circumstances, upon order of drug cartels
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The team of soldiers who executed President Vieira at the military headquarters, seven hours after the assassination. The soldiers told in chilling detail how and why they killed him
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Drug traffickers have successfully organised a strong criminal network in the capital, Bissau. Over the last two years, abductions, murders and drug-related crimes have gradually increased, becoming normal practice. Here an account is settled between small drug dealers. The hostage was finally abandoned in the middle of nowhere, but was not killed
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Two Nigerians affiliated with a Guinean drug ring prepare capsules containing cocaine that will be swallowed and then smuggled into Europe
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Princesa, a 28-year-old prostitute, had five abortions from five different clients. Her body, consumed by the pregnancies and crack, reflects her suffering
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Prostitution in Bissau is not for locals, who can’t afford to pay. Most of the clients are foreigners, sometimes sailors in transit, UN or embassy employees. None of the girls I met used condoms; crack addiction is driving a new Aids epidemic in a region where even basic health care is beyond the reach of many
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Prostitutes dream of escaping the poverty and madness of Guinea-Bissau. The criminal network behind the drug trade also controls human trafficking from West Africa to Europe. Most of the girls who manage to leave their country will end up selling themselves on the streets of Europe. In West Africa, drug and human trafficking is seriously putting at risk a delicate peace process and is financing terrorist organisations
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More than most, the fortunes of the West African Republic of Guinea-Bissau appear damned by geography. The country abuts the Atlantic, squeezed between Senegal to the north and Guinea below, and its 350 kilometres of coastline, as well as the deserted reaches of the Bijagos Archipelago, have ensured its function as a conduit for those with business affairs that span the Ocean. The Portuguese slave traders are of course long gone; but in recent years overseas traffic returned with a vengeance as Latin American drug cartels sought out new routes into Europe. Such was the fragility of the country’s infrastructure and economy – it is the fifth poorest in the world, average income is $720 per year, and life expectancy peaks at 45 – that little was done to counter the new flows of money and cocaine. Largely without electricity, in hock to the World Bank and the IMF, deprived of the rule of law, no one was inclined to ask too many questions of the Colombians who started renting houses in 2004, posing as exporters of cashew nuts and fish. Since then, the relentless demand for cocaine within Europe has ensured the pivotal importance of Guinea-Bissau – and Liberia, Sierra Leone, Ghana – to the traffickers. Interpol now estimates that up to 300,000 kg of drugs per year reach Europe via West Africa. And while the cartels can transport bulk quantities across the Atlantic with relative ease, once shipped they need to be able to store and break down the hauls in order to penetrate European coastal patrols and airport security. Impoverished Guinea-Bissau offers a secure environment: the authorities lack the most basic equipment for law-enforcement – cars, petrol, phones and even handcuffs are in short supply. Corruption is endemic. When police seized 674 kg of cocaine in a raid in 2006, the military swiftly confiscated the haul, only for it to “disappear” shortly afterwards. As one of the country’s judges, André Lima, once explained to Time magazine: “The military has impunity and we have no protection. What is sad is that we are forever prosecuting people who steal one chicken or a cow, but drugs will never get to court.” Marco Vernaschi is one of the few photojournalists to have described events in the republic as it slides, apparently inexorably, towards despair. In his pictures, soldiers pose after a political assassination; drug gangs stage a mock execution; cocaine is packed into capsules to be swallowed by “mules”; crack addiction is rife in the Reno slum; and prostitutes await their foreign clients, while dreaming of following the drugs to lucrative Europe soil. Late last year a torched Boeing 727 was discovered in Mali, indication that quaint twin-props were no longer sufficient for the cartels’ escalating designs on the region. And full-blown laboratories, equipped for the processing of cocaine, have now been found in Guinea-Bissau. Not for the first time it seems that it is the country’s miserable fate to play host to the iniquitous trade of commodities bound elsewhere.
‘João’ is a cocaine dealer. Drug traffickers settled easily in Guinea-Bissau – the high degree of corruption among politicians and the army, the lack of resources and 90 unpatrolled islands offshore, make for a traffickers’ dream
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ON THE EDGE PHOTOGRAPHY ROBERTO BOCCACCINO TExt GUY LANE
The good news is: Latvia’s plummeting economic fortunes may soon hit bottom, bringing to a halt the recessionary freefall that began in 2008. Since then, the number of unemployed has increased threefold and more, with a further 10 per cent of the workforce predicted to lose their jobs in 2011. GDP has, quite simply, fallen off a cliff, declining over 25 per cent in two years. Retail sales have dropped by a third; wages have been slashed; and the government has introduced a programme of swingeing austerity measures. Alarmed protesters attended a rally in Riga last year which culminated in the country’s worst rioting since achieving independence. The severity of the crisis has provoked unfavourable comparisons with the Great Depression. ’Twas not ever thus. While under Soviet control, Latvians were immune to the lure of fickle property markets, capricious investment opportunities and cheap, cheerful credit. However, following independence the country enjoyed a period of extraordinary, unsustainable, bubble-driven economic growth. Now is the morning after. To an extent, Latvian youth are pivotal to hopes of recovery. For the exodus of the country’s young workforce – in search of more accommodating European labour markets – has been a determining factor in the crisis. As has the declining fertility rate: increasing numbers of young people have been deciding against raising a Latvian family. Photographer Roberto Boccaccino has recently undertaken to gauge the mood and, in his own words, “to try to understand what has changed recently apart from the economic data. This is why my project doesn’t focus so much on the crisis, but more on moods and feelings. The economy is just the context in which I attempted to know and represent people. “During my time in Latvia in November last year I talked with a lot of students, workers, and young parents, people from villages and from the big cities – I wasn’t after stories about the troubles; I was looking instead for typical youngsters with regular daily lives. So I spent most of my time hanging around with young people, talking and getting to know them a bit more deeply. Of course they knew clearly what I was doing, but I seldom felt a distance – that distance which can occur when someone is getting into your life with a camera – between us. In the main they were really friendly, and at ease sharing their daily life with me, and I became easily, although temporarily, part of their private life. “The final outcome is a work which tries to describe the sensations of that generation. They’re living very confusedly, without being the reason for the crisis nor feeling they have the solution to it. Most of them – not all, I have to say – are just waiting. It is as if they are in a bubble, a kind of limbo which is very difficult to escape from, not least because of their patriotism and their attachment to their country. The pictures want to tell the story of this waiting.” 64
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DEAD EAGLE TRAIL PHOTOGRAPHY JANE HILTON TExt Max Houghton 73
Pate Meinzer (above), cowboy, Benjamin, Texas, 2009 Ron Redford (right), cowboy, Benjamin, Texas, 2009 Jason Pelham (previous pages), cowboy and surfer, Spade Ranch, Canadian, Texas, 2009
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Kim McElroy, horse whisperer, and Dave Powell, rancher, Broken Horn D Ranch, Arizona, 2008 (above) Kenny Goode, powder monkey [explosives expert], and Joanne Goode, school teacher (right), Cortez, Colorado, 2007 Laramie, Wyoming (previous pages)
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Freedom. If cowboy wisdom could be summed up in one word, that’s it. The freedom to ride the prairie, the freedom to make a homestead, and to defend that sanctuary from transgressors. To the death if necessary. The cowboy is the American dream personified, encompassing a particular strain of taciturn spirituality gleaned from the land, from hours and days spent with just a horse for company between the man and the horizon. It’s a romantic image; as a myth it’s a heady mix of heritage and Hollywood, with the latter informing the former most likely more than plain facts would allow. As a crosscurrent to contemporary American culture, the cowboy aesthetic enters a confluence with country and western music and with rodeo and, from an outsider’s perspective anyway, it’s come to stand for a ballsy Texan Republicanism espoused by a president who borrowed its mores and its lexicon to justify his crusade against evil. Yet, in simple terms, a cowboy is a man who works with livestock, herding cattle, trading horses. In Jane Hilton’s intimate portraits, these 21st century cowboys are removed from these competing narratives, and from their beloved outdoors, and we encounter them in that most surprising location: the bedroom. Ever since she was first invited to supper by Johnny Green, a veteran cowboy who sold horses to John Wayne (every cowboy worth his spurs has a John Wayne story), Hilton was captivated by the interior life of men who spend their life outside. Her eye was drawn to the stuffed elk heads, the belt buckle collections, the stirrups strung above the bed that brought the spirit of the land into their domestic space.
Chris Lawrence (right), rancher, Seymour, Texas, 2009 Cowboy funeral (following page), Ute Mountain, Colorado
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Since 2006, Hilton has collected this series of portraits from the buckaroos of Nevada to the cowpunchers of Arizona and Texas. On one of these trips in March 2006, she was diverted to Cortez, Colorado, on a commission for The Times of London, to photograph a young cowboy called Jeremiah Karsten who had taken two years to travel from Alaska to the Mexican border on horseback: the cowboy’s cowboy, still living the dream. She chose the title for this body of work and her forthcoming book, Dead Eagle Trail, from an experience in southern Nevada, when she happened upon a golden eagle, a huge creature, the size of an Alsatian dog, lying dead by the side of the road. Hilton tried to photograph its noble beauty-indeath, but remained dissatisfied with her images. When she returned to the site of its roadside deathbed the following day, it had disappeared. While cowboy mythology is resolutely embedded in American culture, real and imagined, it is harder to sustain these days as a way of life, with average wages of just a few dollars an hour. Some have chosen to diversify, offering dude-ranch holidays and leasing out land to hunters. The bigger ranches are succumbing to the lure of developers; many have already been sub-divided and sold off because there is more money in land than in beef. Yet as long as America’s immense appetite for home-grown beef continues, there will be a cowboy to tend those cows. Don’t fence him in. Dead Eagle Trail will be exhibited at HOST Gallery from 21 April – 15 May 2010. Jane Hilton’s limited edition prints are available from Foto8
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REIMAGINING DETROIT
Dealerships have been hammered by sinking car sales. At Dalgleish Cadillac, the city’s only remaining Cadillac dealership (although facing a September 2010 closing date), employee Mike Spencer is having lunch
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reIMAGINING DetroIt
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PHOTOGRAPHY CHrIStIAN BUrKert TEXT GUY LANe
LIFE
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Cutting metal fixtures in an old industrial plant to sell as scrap
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Was ever a death so presciently and exhaustively foretold as that of Detroit? As long ago as 1961, Time magazine warned that “blight is creeping like a fungus”, that the middle-classes were fleeing to the suburbs, and that automation, consolidation and competition within the auto industry were laying waste to the city’s manufacturing base. Fast forward to the 1990s, and photographer Camilo José Vergara proposed that 12 derelict downtown blocks, dotted with decaying pre-Depression high-rises, be preserved as a “skyscraper ruins park”. Visitors to this American Acropolis could, he suggested, “escape capitalism and experience silence”. Jump to 2010, and Julien Temple’s BBC documentary Requiem for Detroit issued a stark warning: the trashed city manifested a “postindustrial future which awaits us all.” Oh dear. Against this discourse of terminal decline, Christian Burkert’s series of photographs holds out the promise that there may yet be flickers of life amid the photogenic decay. His camera remains at street – or more accurately, resident – level. Life goes on going on. Jay’s Fades barber shop serves another customer, for instance, a reminder that the city gave birth not just to the car and assembly line production, but to the annual touring Hair Wars. Detroit may no longer be the Motor City, but it is the country’s Hair Capital. “When I was in Detroit, I noticed that a sense of engagement and a will for improvement was outbalancing despair,” explains Burkert, “but it is a fine line and the city has a lot of issues. There have been several impressive photographic works about the city already, and before I started I looked at many of them and was certainly greatly inspired; they gave me a feeling for the scale of the decay. But my photography and my position is rooted in photojournalism. I wanted to tell a story about the people in Detroit and their social reality, rather than to factually document the decline.” He photographs a resident turning the soil on one of the growing number of inner-city community gardens. The burnt-out windows of a neighbouring apartment block are only the backdrop to a scene of productivity and cultivation. In a similar vein he shows the Motor City Blight Busters – a volunteer non-profit organisation active since the 1990s – clearing rubble from a demolition. And inside one of the city’s abandoned industrial plants (many of which are now too costly to demolish) a man armed with a welding torch scours for scrap. A sense of initiative or resilience prevails. Kids in a poor neighbourhood dress to the nines for prom night. Lads lean from a passing car on a Friday night downtown. The casinos pull in the punters. Even the 1920s landmark hotel, the Book Cadillac, has reopened, offering luxury suites, restaurants and a spa. It feels as if we are a long way, or a couple of blocks at least, from those ravishing, unpeopled scenes of apocalyptic destitution, as photographed by Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre, to name just one example. A long way too from “the glazed eyes of the street zombies… stumbling in front of the car,” as witnessed by Julien Temple. But we remain in Detroit and its history; and maybe Burkert has stumbled through the smoking ruins on the same truth that Henry Ford II uttered nearly 50 years ago as he contemplated a city already in decline: “As I see it, the vital need now is for the people themselves to become interested in the community and government, and to take an active part in their affairs.” Christian Burkert is represented by Panos Pictures www.panos.co.uk 87
A student outside the Heidelberg Project (top), an art project in a Detroit neighbourhood that has been running for more than 20 years. The artist, Tyree Guyton, uses salvaged items for his art pieces Cruising downtown Detroit on a Friday night (middle)
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Motor City Blight Busters (bottom) help demolish old buildings, in their fight against decay in the city Teenagers on their prom night (right) in the Brightmore district of Detroit
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Detroit is known as the ‘hair capital’ of the US. Jay’s Fades salon – ‘where barbers get their haircuts’ – is a meeting point for teenagers who are active in the Better Detroit Youth Movement, a group that engages young people through art and hip-hop
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Motor City Casino (top). Detroit’s casinos have the second highest earnings in the US, behind only Las Vegas
Amid the destitution (bottom), the city is tainted by poverty, unemployment, drug use and prostitution
Volunteer Xavier works in the Birdtown Community Garden (middle). Gardens are sprouting up in the city, as a way to reclaim nature against the backdrop of decay
Funeral of Levi Stubbs (right), singer with the classic Tamla Motown group, The Four Tops. Duke Fakir, the last surviving member of the original quartet, tips soil into the grave
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FARMERS OF MOTOWN
Detroit is the only ancient city in the world whose residents are embarrassed by their ruins. To be sure, abandoned mile-long factories, dilapidated train stations and collapsing, rat-infested half-burned once-baronial houses take some getting used to, but in their own peculiar way they are appealing, in the right light some are even beautiful. Detroit’s ruins have in fact become a canvas for the inventive art forms of a small but growing settlement of young creatives who paint and festoon them with urban effluvia. Not without reason the city’s decaying industrial remnants, soon to be joined by some shiny brand new factories, are far more popular subjects for visiting photographers than Renaissance Center, the sparkling phallic obelisk of corporate bravado which on a clear day can be seen from Ontario farms 100 miles away. Ren-Center is one of a dozen or more fruitless attempts cooked up by Detroit’s sadly unimaginative political and business leadership to celebrate “the capital of the 20th century,” and restore the apotheosis of industrial production to its former glory. Almost perversely, Detroit’s spectacular architectural corpses seem to presage the world’s forthcoming post-industrial era. Detroit gets a bad rap in the media, the worst of it from its own press which seems self-conscious, at times mortified by the city it serves. Motown (some now call it “Hotown”) does have its dystopic aspects – higher than average crime rates, decaying roads and bridges, 10 demolition permits for every building permit, bleak neighbourhoods, bad health, collapsing stadiums, wild dog 94
packs, depressing casinos and a city government in which the fire department and the arson squad are the two most active agencies. Most nights are pierced with sirens, often following gunshots. Or it could just be another fire truck rushing to extinguish another attempt to incinerate another neighbourhood crack house. The common response from friends and family of people who move to or stay in Detroit is “Why?” Some days that’s a hard question to answer, and there is a cloud of despair and apathy that hangs persistently over a city with a 22 per cent unemployment rate where a third of the population is on food stamps. But there is also, among longtime residents and new settlers I met, an indomitable vitality, a sweet hometown infatuation and a hopeful determination to somehow reverse the long decline their community has experienced since the million soul march to the suburbs began in the mid 1950s. Legendary sports writer Mitch Albom describes his fellow Detroiters as “the most downtrodden optimists you will ever meet.” One arrivista I met spoke of “moving back to the country without leaving the city,” another had just moved from New York “in search of open spaces.” There is plenty of open space in Detroit with the population less than half what it was 50 years ago. And the flight continues, about a thousand every month, mostly white folk leaving a city that is now about 90 per cent people of colour, two thirds of them living beneath the poverty line. Historian
Niall Ferguson calls Detroit “a developing country within the United States.” And he has renamed it “Subprima”. In a week I heard at least a dozen stories, some of them surely urban legends, about people moving into houses bought with credit cards (the median price of a house sold in Detroit is $5,737), and having the city throw in the rest of the block for a few hundred dollars. And I heard almost as many visionary master plans of restoration for their city, if not to its former glory, to a livable place that the world will notice and respect for more than its cars. The most intriguing schemes for economic salvation involved farming, not in the lush bucolic fields of nearby rural Michigan, but right there among the ruins of Motor City. And if I were an aspiring farmer, in search of fertile land to buy and plow, I would seriously consider moving to Detroit. As much as the city needs visionaries, creatives and industrial entrepreneurs, this one needs food. There are more visionaries in Detroit than in most rust belt cities, and thus more visions of a community rising from the ashes of a moribund industry to become, if not an urban paradise, something close to it. The most intriguing visionaries in Detroit, at least the ones who drew me to the city, were those who imagine growing food among the ruins – chard and tomatoes on vacant lots (there are over 103,000 in the city, 60,000 owned by the city), orchards on former school grounds, mushrooms in open basements, fish in abandoned factories, hydroponics in bankrupt
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Chard and tomatoes on vacant lots, orchards on school grounds, fish in abandoned factories, livestock on golf courses and waving wheat where cars were once test driven
department stores, livestock grazing on former golf courses, high rise farms in old hotels, vermiculture, permaculture, hydroponics, aquaponics, waving wheat where cars were once test driven, and winter greens sprouting inside the frames of single-storey bungalows stripped of their skin and re-sided with Plexiglas – a homemade greenhouse. Those are just a few of the agricultural technologies envisioned for the urban prairie Detroit has become. There are also proposals on the Mayor’s desk to rezone vast sections A-something, “A” for agriculture, and a proposed master plan that would move the few people residing in lonely, besotted neighbourhoods into Detroit’s nine loosely defined villages and turn the rest of the city into open farmland. An American Institute of Architects panel concludes that all of Detroit’s residents could fit comfortably in 50 square miles of land. Much of the remaining 90 square miles could be farmed. Were that to happen, and a substantial investment was made in greenhouses, vertical farms and aquaponic systems, Detroit could be producing protein and fibre 365 days a year and soon become the first and only city in the world to produce close to 100 per cent of its food supply within its city limits. No semis hauling groceries, no out-of-town truck farmers, no food dealers. Everything eaten in the city could be grown in the city and distributed through locally owned and operated stores and co-ops. I met no one in Detroit who believed that was impossible. Contemporary Detroit gives new
meaning to the word “wasteland.” It still stands as a monument to a form of land abuse that became endemic to industrial America – once productive farmland, teaming with wildlife, paved and poisoned for corporate imperatives. Now the city offers itself as an opportunity to restore some of its agrarian tradition, not 50 miles from the Renaissance Center in the countryside where most of us believe that tradition was originally established, but a short bicycle ride away. American cities once grew much of their food within walking distance of most of their residents. In fact in the 18th and early 19th centuries most early American cities, Detroit included, looked more like English countryside with a cluster of small villages interspersed with green open space. Eventually farmers of the open space sold their land to developers and either retired or moved their farms out of the city which were cut up into grids and plastered with factories, shopping malls and identical row houses. Detroit now offers America a perfect place to redefine urban design and economics, moving away from the totally paved, heavy-industrial factory-town model to a holistic, economically diverse, self-sufficient, intensely green, rural/ urban community – and in doing so become the first modern American city where agriculture, while perhaps not the largest, is the most vital industry in the city. Mark Dowie is an investigative historian living in Point Reyes Station, California
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REIMAGINING DETROIT
PHOTOGRAPHY JAMIE MCGREGOR SMITH TEXT MAX HOUGHTON
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Motor City Casino Hotel (right), open 24 hours The Ford Rouge Center (previous pages) was the nation’s largest industrial redevelopment project (at $2 billion), featuring a sustainable manufacturing process to compete with the global car market. The Center also houses one of the world’s largest living roofs and has been designated an official wildlife habitat
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A city’s monuments fall and rise like mini-empires. The story of contemporary Detroit is usually told in terms of decay, decline and deserted buildings. Yet city planners’ investment in sport, leisure and conference facilities, as well as a spanking new casino, shows a different face. A few ghosts of the motor industry still shimmer in the setting sun: the General Motors building and the rather less spectacular Ford plant. The latter looks to be losing the battle against nature; its grey concrete walls gradually being overgrown by persistent foliage. Yet in reality this is part of an intentional programme of redevelopment. At this particular moment in history, Detroit, thus pictured by Jamie Mcgregor Smith, looks like a city on the brink‌ not of disaster, but of a kind of revolution. An urban space that embraces nature as opposed to obliterating it in the name of progress, a conurbation where people can breathe not just traffic fumes but the scent of roses pushing up through fertile soil.
Downtown Detroit
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Main entrance of the Cobo Exhibition Center (above), home of the North American International Motor Show
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General Motors headquarters, in front of which runs Detroit’s monorail (barely used for practical transport purposes) and one of Detroit’s Skywalks. The Skywalks were built in the 1980s, designed to encourage seamless movement between freeway, carpark and office, without having to step outside
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A derelict Victorian house in Brush Park, once one of the wealthiest areas of the city, now considered the ghetto
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LIFE IS ELSEWHERE Sohrab hura
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UNDER GODS 120
PHOTOGRAPHY LIZ HINGLEY TExt GUY LANE
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Mrs Little’s home communion (opening spread, left). Mrs Little is a member of St Andrew’s Church on Soho Road, Birmingham and is too elderly to attend the services, so the priest comes to her house every week to give communion The Council of Faiths dinner (opening spread, right). The leaders of
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different faith communities in Birmingham meet in the town hall each year to show they are working together. The meal included Vegan, Halal and Kosher food Polish carol singers (above). Polish immigrants move to the Soho Road area when they first arrive in the UK because of cheap
rent, but soon move out because of the high crime rate Reverend Greg visiting the twins (right). They have been members of St Michael’s Anglican Church on Soho Road since an early age. They have lived together all their life in this house. Reverend Greg visits regularly to give home communion
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A Sikh wedding
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Once a year, representatives of Birmingham’s Buddhists and Baha’is, Christians and Confucians, Jews and Jains all gather for dinner, joined by some of the city’s prominent Muslims and Sikhs. This culinarily challenging feast is hosted by the Council of Faiths to foster harmonious and mutual understanding between the city’s myriad religions. As part of her project, Under Gods, Liz Hingley photographed the guests co-mingling and chatting, readying themselves to break bread – if we can use that phrase – with one another. As its title suggests, Hingley’s work is a study of faiths, in the plural. More specifically, it is a sustained examination, carried out intermittently over the course of 18 months, of the varying forms of belief and worship she found on just one street in Birmingham. “I was interested in the changing religious landscape of the urban environment, and communities where people were living closely together, places with as many religions as possible,” she explains. “So I found the Soho Road. Many people who emigrate to England – and the West Midlands – go there first because it is the cheapest area in the city to buy a house. Over the last 30 years there has been an amazing influx of immigrants from different countries. And, of course, each new community brings a different religion, or – if not a different religion – new cultural elements. Take, for example, the Buddhists: there were Sri Lankan Buddhists, Thai Buddhists, Indian Buddhists and Vietnamese Buddhists. As you can imagine, they all saw their religion very differently, and each had their own ways of practising it. It was really hard to finish the project because I kept finding new subjects; even when I was leaving Soho Road, after a year and a half, I would still stumble across new communities.” The daughter of Anglican priests, Hingley herself grew up in multi-faith, multi-cultural Birmingham; she was the only white child in her nursery class. Perhaps that experience, and her own abstention from religious faith, helped prepare her for some of the difficulties encountered while making Under Gods. “I learned how to integrate myself with the communities only very slowly, because each required a different way of relating to them, and often people didn’t speak English. I was seen as quite a neutral person, and because there were hardly any English people on the Soho Road, they thought I had to be Polish or something else. Also, I wasn’t part of any particular group – so I wasn’t from an opposite community or a defined category.” Ironically, Hingley’s pictures gain much of their singularity from their distinctly secular, homespun settings – hers is an intimate, suburban portrayal of Soho Road’s faithful. “I wanted to know how people were living their religion in their everyday lives… because for me that is what religion is. I didn’t read what the holy books said it was – I wanted to know what the people on the street thought it was. Why their children go to the mosque to read the Koran for two hours after school; why the black ladies have a section of their wardrobe reserved for their church hats. I wanted to know what religion really was for them, because the faiths are interpreted differently depending on time, place and person. “I was not trying to depict people’s spirituality, which I don’t feel you can really reveal, as it is something so personal. For me – and for a lot of these people – religion is just such a practical thing. They come from different countries, and religion is what is holding their communities together, it is their social life, their history, and it is what they really cling on to. It gives them a great deal of strength in their daily life.” ‘Under Gods’ will be published by Dewi Lewis this November to coincide with a four-month exhibition of the work at Wolverhampton Art Galley. The show will continue to HOST Gallery in 2011
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Dressing for Mosque (above) Mrs Adina’s church hats (right). Mrs Adina Clarke was born in Jamaica and moved to Birmingham when she was a teenager. She has a separate part of her wardrobe for her Sunday clothes. She would never wear them for any occasion other than church
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Jain and Christian neighbours (above). These girls live on the same street. The young Jain girl has sitar lessons at school. The Catholic girl is wearing her first holy communion dress Alka Jain’s personal prayer room (right)
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Sikh yoga (above) Polish Catholic chef (right)
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AFTER: LIFE photography louis quail TExt Max Houghton As well as the apocalyptic narrative, the scenes of devastation, the unforgettable images of bodies, of families ripped apart, that mushroomed out of Haiti after the earthquake in January 2010, there are other stories. They are not tales of hope, still less of joy, but they tell at least of life continuing. These lives will be reshaped as they take into account the loss of family members, the loss of limbs, the loss of homes. The concept of “luck� in this new order has been redefined to apply to those who have lost a loved one and possess the dead body in order to bury it. It also applies to those who survived and can leave their beloved city behind to start a new life, with family in the provinces, overseas or anywhere, out of the ruins.
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A woman preaches in downtown Port-auPrince: “You have to believe in God, this is God trying to send us a message.� 133
Mario Viau is the owner, director and broadcaster at Signal FM, a small radio station in Pétionville, Port-au-Prince. As soon as the earthquake struck he made his way to his studio at the station The way I cope is to not stop working. I know I have to be there for the people. In the beginning, I stayed on air for 36 hours without sleep. Now I am getting about four hours sleep a day. On my way here [that day], I knew we had been hit really badly. The biggest supermarket, the Caribbean, was down and I saw people running. There was blood and smoke in the air, it was terrible. I knew the country was in trouble. It’s a poor country already, we have lots of problems, political and social. To get hit like this was tough. The Internet and the international lines were working, so we had people from all over the world calling and we would put them on the air saying: “If you can hear us, come to the radio station and let us know so we can get in touch with you.” Other people were saying, “We have family under the debris. Could you help dig our families out?” We were like a phone with two people but broadcasting to the whole city. We had a minimum of 5000 people outside all the time for four days. We just gave them a microphone and then broadcasted messages all day. There are some beautiful stories. There were people crying on the phone from the States saying, “I am looking for my family”. Then the family would come here and broadcast a message saying “I am alive!” We were saving lives. Somebody would say, “my husband is still alive but has been trapped under the debris for four days.” Then the international search and rescue teams would listen to the radio and respond to the message. Eight days after the earthquake, one lady came and told us, “I know my husband is alive under a bank.” We managed to free him. When he came to say thank you he gave me a hug that almost put me in the hospital! We had some sad stories as well, people discovering their family members had died. Now we have talk shows with psychologists discussing how to deal with the future Personally, I have been lucky so I know I have to share and to serve.
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Marie Geralda Auguste, 17, and her mother, Marie Yolene Bois De Fer, 44, in a camp opposite the Palace, Cham de Mars I was sitting at the house when it started to rock and blocks and wood started falling. Romario broke his leg, Mum grabbed us all and we got out all except my oldest brother Emanual. He was trapped in a cramped space, knocked unconscious. We weren’t sure if he was alive or dead but we kept looking for him. Then my mother and Emanuel heard each other. He called out, “Mamma I’m alive”. Mum told everyone she could find that he was alive: journalists, aid workers, rescue workers. After 11 days, rescuers (an Israeli SAR) pulled him out and my mother collapsed from joy. He had survived by drinking his own pee and was so thin that he had to use rope to keep his pants up. But he was OK, he is recovering in the provinces. Now, though, we have very little food and water apart from what we can beg or borrow. Emanual is a tailor and was the chief wage earner. Now that he is out in the countryside it’s hard to get by – our living conditions are terrible. We shelter under a sheet, sleep on the hard floor. We have to go to the toilet in a bag and wash and bathe in the street, but at least we are all alive.
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Anne Marie, street seller, Main Street, Port-au-Prince My home is destroyed. I lost my brother and sister in the earthquake. I went three days without water. I was working on the street when the earthquake happened which is why I am OK but now I have to look after my sister’s kids as she is dead. They are weak and not used to coping on the streets, in order to feed them I must work. I have no time to grieve.
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Janne Orelis, 26, sales woman and mother of two, Central Hospital, Port-au-Prince The house collapsed on top of me, crushing my right arm. I was rescued by my family. If it were not for my husband I would be dead, but it was two days before I saw a doctor. The pain was terrible, by the time I got to see a doctor there was no choice but to amputate. I can’t stop thinking about my arm. But now I am worried sick about my six-month-old baby. My family have him with them in the provinces, but he has only ever had breast milk and now he is away from his mother. He could be very hungry. As soon as I am able, I will go to him. 139
Nadine Pleato, opposite a collapsed building in downtown Port-au-Prince. Nadine lives in a garage at Latimer 54, near Paloma I have just purchased this bag so I can pack a few things and leave Port-au-Prince for the provinces. My house was completely destroyed and I lost all of my clothes. All I have left is four pieces of clothing: a skirt and what I am wearing. I have to live and bathe in the street even if there are men watching, but I want to dress well and be clean. Everything was destroyed in the earthquake and I lost a three-year-old cousin. When it happened, I was in the street. I didn’t know it was an earthquake, but then everybody started running so I did too. There was mass panic. I saw some horrible things: buildings falling, people being crushed and buried alive and so much screaming. Afterwards, there were bodies left in the streets for days – dogs were eating humans. In this building behind me, there are bodies. If you look, you can see an arm. I didn’t know if my mother was alive for six days until she arrived from the provinces with supplies. I was so relieved but I still haven’t seen my boyfriend since the morning of the quake. We were with each other for a year. He must be dead but I will never know for sure as all the bodies were cleared into mass graves or burnt on the streets. It’s hard to carry on. How can we be normal now?
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Daphene Louis, an accountant, and her boyfriend Steve Babtiste, who works in customer care at Digicel, at the Catrine-Flon Camp, Puit-Blain St, Delmar 75, Port-au-Prince It was 24 hours after the quake before I saw my boyfriend. There were no communication networks and I had no way of knowing if he was dead or alive. When I saw him, I was so relieved I just jumped on him! Now we live in this camp under sheets held up with timber. It is very hard to get shelter from the sun, and when the rains come there will be no protection at all. We need proper tents, but even one month on we have been unable to get help. We have no privacy here, it’s always noisy. We don’t even have a chance for a cuddle. It would be great to get a proper mattress, but we don’t even have rice so that’s not high up in our priorities. There is not much to do but hang out, or pray. There is no electricity. We still go to our house to use the toilet even though there is no running water. The others in the camp use the field which, as you can imagine, creates a massive health risk. We don’t have anything to eat but yams and potatoes. If someone has something we share it, but there is never enough. There are 400 to 500 families – 3000 people or more. Only 50 per cent had jobs before the earthquake but now there are no jobs and no one has been paid since the quake, yet we still have to provide for the basics, even buying our own drinking water.
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Francy, morgue attendant, Central Hospital, Port-au-Prince. Francy has worked at the morgue all his life The bodies don’t bother me, not even when there were thousands here. Why should they? They are all my brothers and sisters.
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TWO UMBRELLAS
It was the umbrella that struck me, first. Not one but two. Identical, they seemed, but found an ocean apart, in locations sharing something horrible in common. The first I came across in Port-au-Prince’s grand marché, a few weeks after Haiti’s devastating earthquake struck. Beneath the crooked, iron gothic market centre, a cathedral-like structure of metal that seemed poised to skid off the rubble, a couple of women were setting up the umbrella to shade themselves as they sold vegetables. The women were not alone in their endeavours. Amid buildings that were leaning or collapsed – in a place where desperate Haitians were still digging through the rubble for what they could retrieve – others were trying to do the same. Attempting to re-impose a semblance of order. In a place where interior space had suddenly become too dangerous to be trusted – or simply swept away – what once happened inside, needed now to be conducted on the streets. Outside one building a hairdresser had set up her shop, two broken mirrors framing the street into her salon. It was not only those engaged in setting up their trades again. In another neighbourhood I came across a family who had managed to find an electricity hook-up, camped on a concrete space next to their broken home. While the mother cooked in the open, and other women hung washing on an erected line, the men and boys had set up a television in the open to watch an Italian football game. The second time I saw the umbrella 146
was in the midst of a different kind of disaster – the slow, toxic and devastating impact of long war. In a refugee camp on mount Tongo in North Kivu in the far east of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a pair of boys were using it to shelter from a sudden downpour in the midst of a field of crude shelters made out of wood and plaited banana leaves. There were no barbers chairs or televisions here. No mattresses to sleep in the open rescued from ruined homes. Instead, in the houses there might be a single pot, a tiny wooden bench, a cloth laid on some hay to make a mattress. What struck me then – as now – is how what we think of as home, in our more fortunate lives, is defined by things: houses, sofas, gardens perhaps. Bedrooms, chairs, washers and shower units. By smells. The cleaning products that we use, the scents of cooking, pets – our accumulated, boxed in and private perfumes. Defined by what we buy and what we consume. But home is more than that. It is us. When everything is lost, we make home where we are by being there with those closest to us, with a pan and a fire, with somewhere to sit. By asserting our individuality, among people we trust. It does not mean that we let go of what has gone before, the burned village or the collapsed valley home whose memory is tainted with the loss of family. But we begin again. And it is not simply about survival, or carrying on. Rather it encompasses that difficult-to-define concept that we
call dignity. In Haiti I noticed it in the first camp for the displaced that I went to – a football stadium in Pétionville. Walking through the lanes of the tents I came across two young women, one standing above the other and cutting her hair. Later the meaning of what I saw became more clear. Even those among the hundreds of thousands living on the streets – including my own fixer whose home for now was a car – would turn out each morning clean and groomed. Defying their circumstances. It reminded me powerfully of something I had once read, an account by a British officer, Colonel Mervin Willett Gonin, who had been among the soldiers who had liberated Bergen-Belsen refugee camp in 1945. “It was shortly after the British Red Cross arrived, though it may have no connection, that a very large quantity of lipstick arrived. This was not at all what we men wanted, we were screaming for hundreds and thousands of other things and I don’t know who asked for lipstick. I wish so much that I could discover who did it, it was the action of genius, sheer unadulterated brilliance. I believe nothing did more for these internees than the lipstick. Women lay in bed with no sheets and no nightie but with scarlet red lips, you saw them wandering about with nothing but a blanket over their shoulders, but with scarlet red lips. I saw a woman dead on the postmortem table and clutched in her hand was a piece of lipstick. At last someone had done something to make them individuals again, they were someone, no longer
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Even those among the hundreds of thousands living on the streets would turn out each morning clean and groomed. Defying their circumstances
merely the number tattooed on the arm. At last they could take an interest in their appearance. That lipstick started to give them back their humanity.” Visiting a barbershop in Port-auPrince, where the owner was sleeping in a corner, where customers were living on the street, I recalled the lipstick consignment of Bergen-Belsen. And remembered what it was to be human. Peter Beaumont is Foreign Affairs Editor of the Observer
Port-au-Prince’s grand marché, above, and refugee camp in Kivu, Democratic Republic of Congo, bottom. Photos: Peter Beaumont
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win win africa?
With Africa’s first football World Cup less than a hundred days away a Messianic email dropped in the inboxes of sports writers. Fifa, the game’s world governing body, wanted it to be known that their president, Sepp Blatter, had joined the 1GOAL campaign “on behalf of all those children who are unable to write their own names.” The puff went on: “At the heart of the campaign is the aim of securing school places for 72 million children still denied access to global education.” This ambitious press announcement from Fifa’s headquarters in Switzerland evoked the World Cup draw in December, when Blatter, in excitable mood, interrupted the glitzy global broadcast to promise “education for all”. The star guest on stage that night was the South Africa-born Hollywood actress, Charlize Theron, whose own Africa Outreach charity donates football pitches. On the eve of a momentous breakthrough for a continent that has provided European football with Didier Drogba, Michael Essien and Samuel Eto’o – Champions League royalty, all three – Africa is teeming with charities and educational organisations offering kits, balls, midnight leagues, artificial pitches and Aids awareness programmes as agents for social change. With much in between in the last hundred years, the Scramble for Africa that characterised European foreign policy in the 19th century has evolved into a dash to dispense care and attention, with football as the reason, or the excuse. After the great land-grab 148
comes mass land donation with goals at either end. When South Africa was chosen in May 2004 to host this summer’s tournament Fifa found themselves “sensing a duty to assist the African continent above and beyond the realm of sport,” and set up another programme called Win in Africa with Africa, with extraordinarily highminded aims. Their task, they announced, was “to ensure the entire African continent will benefit from the long-term effects of the 2010 World Cup in South Africa,” and “to send the whole world a positive message from Africa.” With a $70m budget, the aim was to give the landmass “the tools to progress.” Students of football politics will not be shocked to see humanity’s favourite pastime mistaking itself for the United Nations. But never has a sporting carnival that seeks to determine which country can force a ball into a net most frequently and at the most opportune moments assumed so many parallel political and economic functions. The crosscurrents are post-imperial guilt, opportunism, Blatter’s desire to be remembered as the history-maker who handed the World Cup down to Africa from a Swiss mountain top, market-hunger on the part of the football industry and a vast amount of philanthropy and compassion from people working in charitable organisations. The game’s anxiety is that the World Cup will be portrayed as a vast spaceship that blows dust across the townships as it descends for four weeks
and then returns to more wealthy lands, leaving an onerous legacy of construction debt for the poorest South Africans, who will be close but still far away from the action in the 10 stadiums. Fearing a boycott by the masses, Fifa raised the proportion of low-priced tickets reserved for South Africans from 11 per cent to 29 per cent of the total. This meant a new flood of match-watching opportunities at £12 a go, yet local people will point out that it costs £2 to see a game in the country’s premier league. Other African spectators fall outside Fifa’s conscience. They will be asked to pay £54 per match. There was no disguising the organising committee’s panic when a new sales drive began in January. The last published figures claimed 2.3 million of the 2.9 million tickets had been sold. Yet many European fans have been discouraged by South Africa’s high crime rates and by price-hiking. One Cape Town hotel was quoting £700-plus per night for England’s game there against Algeria. The five World Cups prior to this welcome sharing-out of arguably sport’s biggest fiesta (the Olympics are bigger, technically, but less passionately devoured) were stop-offs at major global power centres: Italy (1990), USA (1994), France (1998), Japan and South Korea (2002) and Germany four years ago. These were tournaments connected by high-speed rail with chain hotels and all the familiar comforts of consumer societies. They were football rewarding its most influential constituents, with a proselytising agenda thrown in, in Japan
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Students of football politics will not be shocked to see humanity’s favourite pastime mistaking itself for the United Nations
and America, where Football Inc seeks to colonise. To award a World Cup to South Africa required the football “family” to gamble on security and preparedness. Or, rather, it asks supporters to take those risks, because the 32 participating teams and administrators will take the best hotels and receive the greatest protection from the 41,000 extra police hired and trained to protect visitors in a country with a murder rate second only to that of Colombia. So, why is this World Cup heading to Durban, Polokwane and Johannesburg, when there are so many security and infrastructure complications? Blatter’s own urge to reward African federations for their support in his election as president is a murky topic, 12 years on from his appointment. In 2002, the vice-president of the African Football Confederation, Farah Addo, alleged that 19 African football associations had been offered $100,000 each to vote for Blatter by persons unspecified (the Fifa president denies any wrongdoing). On the ground in South Africa, though, those who see a chance to improve the host country’s standing and challenge preconceptions about the continent of Africa are entitled to look beyond whatever political machinations lay behind Fifa’s patronage, and past the rhetoric of altruism, which, realistically, is unlikely to change the economic realities of life in the Khayelitsha township visited by David Beckham during the World Cup draw. There, 80 per cent are unemployed and one in three is HIV-positive (the national
infection rate is 11 per cent, with 1.4 million Aids orphans). The World Cup will come, then go, and there will almost certainly not be a first African winner from the six teams who have qualified. But there is substance to the hope that football programmes and facilities will help a proportion of deprived South Africans to add structure and purpose to their lives (clubs to join, rules to follow, places to go etc) and that seeing the world’s greatest players performing in their country, if only on outmoded TV sets in township bars, will encourage and inspire. When the trophy arrived in Cape Town in December, Danny Jordaan, the main architect of this World Cup, announced the “death of doubt”. Blatter called it “a love story” and Nelson Mandela told the world in a recorded message that South Africa felt “privileged and humbled”. A master of deploying for sport for social effect, Mandela said: “The people of Africa learned the lessons of patience in their long struggles for freedom.” Part of Mandela’s genius was to see through politics and economics to emotion, to spirit, to the way it feels. He learned this art, in sport, when closing the gulf between black South Africans and the white Afrikaaner tradition during the country’s 1995 Rugby World Cup triumph. This was sport as political engineering, as unifying tool, but it was not only a calculation. It was a quick road out of apartheid, certainly, but Mandela’s conviction was that nations are not shaped solely by their politics. The width of the smile counts, too: the life inside.
Paul Hayward is chief sports writer for the Observer 149
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SieGE MENTALITY
For the first time in his presidency Barack Obama in March visited Afghanistan. He flew into Kabul by helicopter and stayed about three hours. Plenty of time to go down the rabbit-hole for tea and cakes at the Palace, with the Queen of Hearts (the increasingly isolated President Karzai). Obama said he had, “seen progress from the air, with much more electricity available than on [his] first visit”. Way to see a city Mr President… maybe he should write a travel book! For those of us who actually live in this tempestuous city things are a little more complicated than how twinkly it looks for from the windows of a Blackhawk. The judder thump thump of “Americans working overhead” is a regular occurrence. Windows rattle, doors bang, earth shudders. What was that? Sometimes it’s the US Navy, from time to time it’s a seismic shift in the Hindu Kush, but every now and then it’s the Taliban letting us know they are still here. Despite how much people who live here dine out on the war-zone kudos, this isn’t Saigon. However, the incident at the end of February was a wellexecuted attack in the heart of the capital. The Safi Landmark Kabul City Centre Hotel & Shopping Plaza, a symbol of Kabul’s most upwardly mobile district, was directly opposite the blast and took the main force of the explosion. Nearly every window was shattered. The hotel sign hangs limply from the entrance guarded by AK-47 wielding troops. Once again the horse has bolted and locking the door seems to be the only response, a scenario repeated ad nauseam from the 150
“Ring of Steel” of the City of London after IRA attacks to the Green Zone in Baghdad. So the road is swept and reopened, the scaffolding goes up, more check points are put in place and no doubt the “blast-proof window-maker” is currently making an appointment to see the proprietor of the Safi Hotel. In these uncertain times the only certainty is that the security industry is making a killing. Making hay while the bombs fly. The Taliban should pull their financial portfolios out of Dubai real estate and get into security stock. War is a profitable business and all the smart money is pouring into protection – from the concrete of the blast walls to the two-inch thick bulletproof glass in the thousands of armoured SUVs that barge and bully their way around the city. Daily, weekly, yearly this city, architecturally speaking, becomes more and more oppressive. While Obama’s military surge continues apace in the south of the country, the civilian surge is palpable in the nation’s capital. Most of the mercenaries have all left “I-rak” having paid off their mortgages back home, and are now working on that new boat or second home by hoovering up as much money as they can from the billions washing around the septic wound of this failing state. The Military Industrial/Private Security Complex are now in Afghanistan in full effect. They are at the trough and it’s feeding-time all over again. It’s a sight to behold and most visible at the few western bars and
restaurants in the city. The average neck width of the international visitor has doubled in the last two years. The soft North European accents of aid workers running women’s empowerment projects has been drowned out by the Midwestern drawl of Blackwater types. Acronym lingo is no longer NGOdominated. It’s all about CP teams and EOF. Fights or intimidating macho face-offs are by no means commonplace, but they are increasing. The previous token search by long suffering and oh-so-polite Afghan doormen, asking, “any weapons guns knives or explosives?” are now more thorough. The prediction among my peers is that this will escalate into something fatal within the year. I can bear witness that steroids in conjunction with a £100k-plus pay cheque are not personalityenhancing ingredients. The cash-waving hordes have also had an effect on the rising price of booze. Bars are now charging a minimum of $6 for small can of beer and some $12 for a glass of skanky cornershop wine. For the underpaid/ overworked journalist, whose creative lifeblood is alcohol, this is a seismic shift. Meanwhile the city of Kabul and its four million inhabitants collectively shrugs its shoulders and soldiers on with its crappy erratic electricity, its fucked-up roads and infrastructure, no sewerage system, kids begging in the streets or hunting though rubbish tips in the most expensive parts of the city awash with gaudy narco-palaces and $200,000 Landcruisers. I interviewed an armouredcar salesman last week and we were
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War’s good business and all the smart money is pouring into protection – from concrete blast walls to bulletproof glass in the thousands of armoured SUVs that barge and bully their way around the city discussing the state of the city. Without any irony he asked me, “where has all the money gone?” Reports last month stated that £6 million cash was leaving the country every day. The Afghan people know that corrupt politicians, drug barons, warlords, mercenaries and war profiteers are rinsing their city dry. The only thing that surprises me is that the Kabulis take it so well. They might have an exaggerated sense of why we are “really” here and have a propensity for conspiracy theories about Great Game strategies, NATO forces supplying the Taliban, mythical oil reserves and the natural resources we are trying to plunder – but overall they tolerate us and in most cases are hospitable to a fault. But despite the en masse arrival of the Iraq War junkies and the increasing media spotlight, this is not a city at war. It’s mostly peaceful and secure. There are no massive truck bombs killing hundreds of innocent civilians on a weekly basis. Kidnapping remains a low-level threat not a near certainty like Baghdad in the mid-2000s. There is no uprising, jihad, civil war or insurgency here. The Taliban (whoever they are) attacks are minimal, specific and usually aimed at progovernment, ISAF forces or, pitifully, the Indian workers. However, what these random attacks clearly do is shift everything away from development. The siege mentality has arrived now and it’s gaining ground in the form of bunkers, compounds and green zones. The UN closed down nearly 80 guesthouses last month and stuck its staff in a hideous holiday concentration
camp called Green City. The European Commission is forcing all its staff to relocate to a purpose-built, heavily guarded housing complex. It seems like the Taliban have subcontracted their terror tactics to “us” and we are doing a bloody good job. Be afraid. Listen to the threat levels. Protect yourself. Stay in your homes. Be off the streets by nightfall. Many westerners previously at liberty to wander Kabul and sample all its sights and smells are under strict curfew. This is a dangerous development and we have to be very careful that we don’t replicate and recreate conditions in Iraq circa 2003 in which the civilian population are left to rot while a few warped maniacs ferment death cult ideals onto the abandoned minds of a disaffected populous. While the war may be shifting in favour of allied forces in the south, something is changing here and it doesn’t feel good. The folks back home maybe seeing “our brave boys” tearing down white Taliban flags (rhetorical question: how do they surrender if their flag is white?) and hoisting up Afghan National Flags in East Bumfuck Marja, Helmandshire. But it isn’t impressing anyone in Kabulistan. Afghan Hound is a freelance journalist living in Kabul who, in tune with the times, prefers to remain anonymous
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is anyONE listening?
I remember the email like it was yesterday. I had come home from the market and had been singing along to show tunes on Radio 2 in the car. It was sunny, warm and Sunday. I was going to check my emails before I started cooking and an email addressed to me, in a long line of other recipients, told of the arrest of my co-editor and Newsweek correspondent Maziar Bahari in Tehran. It was the beginning of nearly four months in, not exactly hell, but its close neighbour. An incredible network of professional colleagues, friends and friends of friends around the world worked their way through thousands of contacts that furthered the Free Maziar Bahari campaign. In the midst of activity, there was always the fear. Maybe nobody was listening and, what if the worst was allowed to happen? When I saw Maziar for the first time after his release, to my relief, he was fully himself. As he described his arrest, 118 days in solitary confinement and blindfolded interrogations, he was brilliant and incisive. He was funny. My friend had been vulnerable and now he was safe. If anything, Maziar’s experiences have made him more determined. By December he had begun another campaign, which takes its inspiration from a famous 1978 quote by Ayatollah Khomeini, embodying the promise of the Islamic Revolution one year later: “Our future society will be a free society, and all the elements of oppression, cruelty, and force will be destroyed.” The campaign, supported by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), Index on 152
Censorship, Reporters without Borders, Canadian Journalists for Free Expression and PEN International – the same organisations that protested Maziar’s own arrest and incarceration – sent a petition to Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei, calling for the release of jailed journalists, photojournalists, citizen reporters and bloggers in Iran. More than 3,500 people from around the world, including Martin Amis, Tom Stoppard, Hanif Kureishi, Margaret Atwood, Jonathan Frazen, Jon Stewart, Ahmed Rashid and Mario Vargas Llosa, have signed the petition. Malu Halasa: In Evin prison, did you think that you would be campaigning for fellow Iranian journalists if and when you were released? Maziar Bahari: Because the authorities threatened me and told me to be quiet and not talk about my experiences, I thought that campaigning and telling the world what’s happening inside Iranian prisons was a responsibility. I don’t know if it’s survivor’s guilt but when I came out what was really a surprise was the amount of campaigning that was going on for me. That motivated me to campaign for other people as well. Not all people are as lucky to be working for Newsweek, part of the Washington Post group, and have the support and resources of those companies. So because people answer my calls and listen to what I say, I have to use that momentum to campaign for other journalists.
MH: What is the situation of photojournalists and journalists in Iran? MB: Even before the Revolution, journalists and the government had an uneasy relationship. Everybody was critical of the government’s inefficiency and authoritarian rule. But since the disputed presidential elections last June, the government has been targeting journalists because they want to blame them for the disturbances and chaos. Also, in the absence of any clear vision for the future of the country, the authorities need to have scapegoats. The journalists are the easiest targets. The government puts a lot of pressure on Iranian journalists inside the country mainly out of frustration of their lack of control – over citizen journalism and the international media attention being paid to Iran. The government is basically fighting against the tide of history. MH: I remember you returned to Iran after living and working outside the country in the late 1990s at the time of the reformist press boom. MB: When the reformist newspapers were published they had a very specific readership – not all people had access to newspapers, not all people cared to read newspapers. The ideas and opinions expressed in those papers were from people who were educated, pro-human rights, pro-democracy, pro-foreign. The majority of people [in the country] did not connect with this elite group. However, since the early 2000s and the advent of digital technology – satellite television and internet – more people are exposed to these ideas.
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They ask you to reveal all the information you have – both information about yourself and about others. My interrogator said ‘Put five people in this room and I’ll release you the next day’
MH: Are these ideas gaining currency within the wider population? MB: Because satellite television is being beamed into every house in Iran, the gap that used to exist between the educated elite and the masses is narrowing. And as more people are becoming educated that gap is almost disappearing. People who are in power in Iran – the Revolutionary Guards and the people around Khamenei, the supreme leader – are really scared of this new phenomenon. They don’t know what to do. Again, out of frustration, they resort to what they know – suppressing dissent through violence. MH: But the level of intimidation appears to be new. MB: This is a new era of crackdown on journalists and it’s exercised by a new group of people. In the past, journalists in Iran had to deal with the Ministry of Intelligence, the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance but now it is the Revolutionary Guards who are in control of culture, information and intelligence in Iran. So they are dealing with journalists, but also they are putting pressure on the Ministry of Culture and the Ministry of Intelligence to be more aggressive. They resort to any sort of intimidation they can against journalists – some can be accused of espionage for taking a picture of a demonstration. The government are going to draft a law against the Persian satellite channels BBC Persian and VOA Persian to incriminate anyone who works for them, or any Persian media outside of Iran, as a spy. Inside prison, the interrogators put
a different kind of pressure on journalists and photojournalists. MH: Is it the pressure of collaborating, to give names? MB: They ask you to reveal all the information you have – both information about yourself and about others. What my interrogator told me was, “If you put five people in this room I’m going to release you the next day.” MH: Do you think the Our Society Will Be a Free Society campaign will be effective at all? Your campaign was. MB: The reason I’m here is because of the campaign [for me]. The [current] campaign can have an effect if it’s consistent, vigorous and if all journalists around the world find it their duty to support their colleagues and friends who are under pressure in Iran. Unfortunately, I see that certain news organisations tend to forget about journalistic and ethical values in order to have a Tehran by-line for their correspondents, which is shameful. If an organisation’s transmission is jammed by the Iranian government, if an organisation’s journalist is persecuted by the Iranian government, they really have to name and shame the Iranian government.
revenue because of the internet and the free flow of information everywhere. So they are cutting down on foreign bureaus and reporters. On the other hand, we are watching news organisations in competition with each other, especially the 24-hour channels and various websites. They are seeking more news, while cutting budgets for their bureaus and foreign correspondents. We are also witnessing authoritarian governments becoming more paranoid about technology and, at the same time, citizens are realising the power they have as simple users of tools such as Twitter, Facebook and YouSendIt. Everybody is facing this unknown monster that might turn out to be an angel – we don’t know yet. Malu Halasa is an editor and journalist specialising in the culture and politics of the Middle East. Sign the petition for the Our Society Will Be a Free Society campaign at www.cpj.org
MH: With increasing levels of danger for reporters, surely the corporate news organisations realise the ramifications of pandering to authoritarian governments and violent men? MB: We are living in a very volatile era for journalism right now. On one hand, the news organisations are losing their 153
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PROTEST PHOTOGRAPHS Chauncey Hare Published by Steidl www.steidlville.com ÂŁ39 (224pp Hardback)
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In a recent radio interview, a Detroit schoolteacher spoke of her wonder at seeing a return to prairie for many acres of former urban space in her city. Whole communities, originally formed after a mass migration from the South towards the car plants and associated industries in the north of America, had lived through the Motor City era and found themselves surplus and disoriented after years of economic attrition. As one, they had to rethink how they might continue their lives and had eventually turned towards each other in co-operation, to grow orchards and farmland within the crumbling industrial landscape that had once been dominated by their provider and master. Such a rethinking of roles always seems to come at points of crisis, when the dominance of figure industries no longer seem adequate, correct or viable. It brings a necessary departure towards a more uncertain but hopeful and fulfilling way to live. I am mindful of such a crisis (albeit a very singular one) and the shadow of the industry that encouraged it, as I move through the considerable volume of photographs that fittingly returns Chauncey Hare’s work to its place among the most important American photographic projects of the last century. Over nearly 400 pages, Protest Photographs draws on a small number of photographs from Hare’s 1978 Aperture book Interior America and its 1984 follow-up This Was Corporate America and contextualises them among many previously unpublished pictures now held as an archive that the photographer offered the University of Berkeley, California in 1999. If Berkeley had rejected the photographer’s approach, it seems very possible that the work would have been destroyed at the photographer’s own instruction, closing a career that in reality had drawn to a halt in the 1980s, when Hare stopped photographing to retrain and begin working as an adviser, counsellor and therapist to workers and their families. The source of the ultimate dislocation that took Hare away from the world of photography is an undercurrent in the narratives that open this book. Instead of another polite appraisal, the kind that primes so many photography books, the photographer again deploys the strategy that so distinguished Interior America – using the early pages to unpack his life in open, earnest paragraphs. These personal 156
statements are articulate, intimate and moving, building a foundation for pictures that – despite such an unguarded commentary – flow singularly across each right hand page in a structure as regular and predictable as a working life. Looking at each picture, it becomes impossible to dismiss the emotional crises that shaped, implored and ultimately stopped Hare’s progress as a photographer. Whether hereditary (Hare’s father gained a promotion that took him away from his Irish Appalachian roots, towards later years of depression and disaffection) or learned, across the 29 years Hare worked as an engineer, the act of photography is, before everything, a channel for personal and political application – for a protest that is as emotionally open as any I have understood in the medium. Working as an employee of Standard Oil and later Chevron, Hare had begun his project in 1968 – a year after a works assignment had briefly taken him to a Mississippi region animated by inequality and Civil Rights protests. After what was perhaps a shocking and formative experience he returned to a normal routine, using his lunch-breaks to move out of the workplace and escape the tensions and monotonies of a working life that was increasingly shaping his own physical and mental well being. The act of photography, it seemed, could temporarily assuage the nausea that Hare experienced each evening after returning from his job, a condition that even his doctors could not account for. Walking around the periphery of the factory in 1968, Hare had been stopped by a local man, Orville England, who was keen to sell the photographer a plastic camera. He had been invited inside England’s home – a home that, years later, Hare himself would move into – to act as carer, as the old man’s life, blighted by work-related asbestos poisoning, eventually reached its difficult and inevitable end. After that early meeting, Hare had returned with a plate camera and photographed England again, a move that spurred him on to consciously photograph the rooms and residents of the modest houses within the proximity of his workplace. He would recognise lives lived out uncomfortably close to the pollution that hung in the air. He would note how security, prospects and plans were hindered by the economic fluctuations that shrank and expanded industries like lungs, causing uncertainty and for youthful ambitions to
wane. The photographer, who would wake up scared at 5 am each morning, eventually left his job and – with his new partner, the psychotherapist Judy Wyatt – progressed a relationship based on a shared and deep pain, felt about what was wrong with the treatment of working people in the society they both were part of. It’s not hard to imagine the challenge of gaining access into these homes – a process built upon trust and a nervous but determined momentum that Hare explains thoroughly in his own words – before setting up the camera to photograph. Hare’s photographic technique seems in part refined and in part abrupt or technically erratic, yet it’s always compelling. While some photographs are gently lit, with diffused light perfectly balancing interiors with the views of industrial plants that can be seen through windows, others are illuminated with the intrusion of a harsh and undisguised light. Flash plasters deep black shadows of inhabitants onto walls, creating rooms that are tight and discomforting. Elsewhere black, loosely pinned electric cables chase across walls, rendering power supplies as unstable and vulnerable. Men and women are often alone, held down underneath low grey ceilings. Family members are often sat back within the photograph, among the iconography of the wider family, the Kennedy government or religious devotion. Sometimes people are framed in doorways or wedged at the edges of a frame – occasionally they are asleep fully clothed and curled around exhausted children on still-made beds. The extreme coverage of a wide-angle lens shows complete rooms, as residents sit or stand, passively looking into their homes, surely unaware of their inclusion in the photographer’s frame. For the first time, this new book reproduces a number of group portraits made between 1968 and 1972 – loosely structured, inclusive pictures of extended families who fill rooms by sitting on temporary chairs, which have been gathered – along with their children – and carried from other parts of the home. Working externally, Hare often photographed the sprawl of housing in the industrial belts of Pennsylvania and Ohio, and there are echoes of a wider history of the American economic landscape – and of the history of photography, as the cemetery Hare photographs in 1972 in Bethlehem borders the same housing that Walker
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Evans had photographed for Roy Stryker in 1935, as part of the FSA programme to document struggling workers who merited the country’s support, after the 1929 Stock Market Crash. Hare recounts how, over his years of production, he felt obliged to “honour the reality of each person and their home” and speaks of a need to relate “the truth of people’s lives”. Yet this is not a measured, dispassionate process. In the book’s afterword, curator Jack von Euw suggests that Hare did not want the book to be about himself – but this somehow seems unavoidable, with the photographer struggling to escape from his own working conditions and inevitably affected by the lives he finds inside the America he concerns himself with. As he moved further
from photography into counselling and support work, it’s clear that perhaps photography had its own conditions that the photographer wrestled with. A set of Hare’s photographs were bought by the Museum of Modern Art, yet he grew to hold a mistrust of such institutions, noting how their organisational structures closely resembled those he had been at odds with throughout his life as an engineer. Hare would later picket a San Francisco MoMA showing of Szarkowski’s Mirrors and Windows exhibition that included examples of his work, in a one-man protest over the show’s corporate sponsor. Chauncey Hare’s work deserves to be understood alongside Walker Evans’ American Photographs or Nan Goldin’s first book, as a singular and articulate voice
speaking of the condition of a real America – the same America that the poet Fred Voss, himself a factory machinist, would later describe as a people “as real as a Marshall’s eviction notice, or a pink termination slip”. This new book offers a serious, passionate and exhaustive statement about the nature of working peoples’ lives to a contemporary audience witnessing the largest economic downturn since the 1930s. While Hare has created an important and singular response to such conditions, and found a life beyond the circumstances that once constrained him, in doing so he has foregrounded questions around the role of the photographer and the possibility for photography to say something of worth about something we can no longer ignore. Ken Grant
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GAZA PHOTO ALBUM Kent Klich Published by Umbrage Editions www.umbragegallery.com £26 (88pp Hardback)
Mohammed Shuhada’Ali Ahmed died when a shell fired from an Israeli tank struck his home in al-Tuffah, northern Gaza. Unemployed, 39 years old, he had earlier fled with his family – only to return, fatally, to collect clothes for his children. Around the same time the home of Ziad Mahmoud al-Absi, also unemployed, was hit. Of 11 family members, three were killed and four injured. Seven of their neighbours in southern Gaza’s Yibna refugee camp were wounded too. About a week later 28 members of the Samouni family were killed in eastern Gaza when Israelis bombed their house during an F-16 strike. They had been ordered by the military to remain indoors. You get the picture… The attacks, the killings and the woundings and the devastation, are the subject of Swedish photographer Kent Klich’s Gaza Photo Album, though his work shuns the region’s standard photojournalistic fare. So there are no pictures of funerals, artillery, grieving relatives, drones, phosphorous shells, aggressors, or indeed victims. Instead 164
Klich, working with the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, has assembled a series of sober and restrained photographs of ravaged domestic interiors. “Domestic” is perhaps the wrong word – these are no longer homes, merely the carcasses of houses. We can see where tank shells have torn through walls and blasted through ceilings; we can observe how military bulldozers can turn a room inside out; we can note the kitchen wall bullet holes in the house where Saleh Abdel Kareem Abu Haja’s mother and sister were shot and killed. The Israeli attack lasted from 28 December 2008 until 20 January 2009, and by the time they called a halt to Operation Cast Lead more than 1,400 Palestinians had been killed and 5,300 wounded. The dead included 900 civilians, 300 of them children. Some 13 Israelis lost their lives, four of them in friendly fire incidents. Destruction cannot help but dominate Klich’s pictures, yet searing traces of occupants’ and families’ lives remain. More than one television has survived intact; here and there framed portraits still hang in place; an ironing board stands ready for use against a wall of pock-marked plaster. Trashed furniture lies abandoned in defunct bedrooms and redundant sitting rooms. Through these scenes and fragments of eviscerated domesticity, Klich’s work functions to elicit from his audience a degree of recognition and awareness. As he put it, “I was sure that if we would see people’s apartments, their kitchens, their bedrooms and their living rooms, you know, they would look different... but
there would also be a lot of similarities – to your home or my home. And I thought the identification with the fate of the Palestinians would be stronger that way.” His work bears comparison, then, with other projects in which the room, or the interior, is used as a politically charged site of meaning. Ashley Gilbertson’s Bedrooms of the Fallen, for example, is a series (ongoing since 2007) of photographs commemorating American soldiers and marines who have died in Iraq and Afghanistan. The empty rooms “remind us,” writes Gilbertson of the troops, “that before they fought, they lived, and they slept, just like us, at home.” And Peter Bialobrzeski’s Informal Arrangements collates a series of photographs taken inside a Soweto slum, in order to comment on post-apartheid South African history, and preparations for the spectacle of the World Cup. All three projects operate on, and thereby modify, the terrain once securely occupied by photojournalism; but the photography in the Album is informed by a desire to move beyond some of the genre’s more familiar subjects and techniques – Klich has expressed disillusionment with an earlier body of black and white, reportage Gazan work in which he photographed funerals and demonstrations. Gaza meanwhile remains wounded. And despite the numerous allegations that their forces violated international humanitarian law, only one soldier has been convicted of an offence committed during the Operation – his crime, theft of a credit card. Guy Lane
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The JAZZ LOFT PROJECT W Eugene Smith and Sam Stephenson Published by Knopf www.aaknoppf.com £26 (288pp Hardback)
In 1957 W Eugene Smith was broke, in debt and depressed, with a professional reputation for being difficult. At his home in Croton-on-Hudson, in Westchester County, he and two assistants were printing the Pittsburgh project that he had shot in 1955-56. Rigorously editing what he saw as his greatest body of work, Smith subleased a workspace on the fourth floor of 821 Sixth Avenue in New York’s flower district, occasionally returning home to direct his assistants but increasingly staying in the city. The loft spaces in the building were used by many of the jazz musicians who were drawn to New York at the time. 821 became known as a place where musicians could meet to jam or rehearse to the early hours of the morning. Composer Hall Overton worked there with Thelonius Monk, Zoot Sims, Bill Evans and Charles
Mingus and countless other musicians passed through 821 to meet and play. The book The Jazz Loft Project is an outgrowth of the larger project at The Center for Documentary Studies to organise and present the 4,000 hours of tape recordings and some 40,000 pictures that Smith made at 821 from 1957 to 1965 (although Smith occupied the loft on and off until 1971). The book contains many images that Smith made from his window not seen in the 1958 Life essay “Drama Beneath a City Window”, pictures of the many jazz musicians and other visitors who frequented the building, and transcripts of reel-to-reel recordings that Smith made of conversations, jam sessions, street sounds and television and radio broadcasts, often plays or readings. These materials are supplemented by interviews conducted by Sam Stephenson and Stephenson’s contextual writing. Many of the recordings transcribed in the book can be heard on The Jazz Loft Project website (www. jazzloftproject.org). “The image of Smith maintained by the loft musicians,” notes Stephenson, “contrasts with the one that still prevails today in many photography circles, where his compulsions are judged to have been driven by megalomania and lunacy.” Through the transcripts and interviews and in his study of the street, Smith comes across with a humour and ease that belie his difficult reputation. Smith once asked a visitor: “Do you mind if I turn on my recorder in case something brilliant happens?” There are conversations between Smith and
musicians and recordings of jam sessions in the loft upstairs – he drilled holes and snaked microphones throughout the building, controlling them from his studio where his multiple recorders sat. Smith’s compulsion to record speaks not only to his documentary instincts but also to an ongoing exploration of the possibilities of documentary practice. Just as his ambition for the Pittsburgh project was to create an allegorical photo essay on a scale never before seen with a single subject, his photographs and recordings at 821 demonstrate his interest in documenting his own surroundings, making a record in real time of, apparently, everything. Was the urge to document an effort to define his own identity? He was also trying in this period to publish a retrospective of his work. Was it a way of steadying himself even as he was staying awake for days at a time printing and editing, fuelled by amphetamines? While the material in the book is by Smith, the narrative is Stephenson’s. Jazz Loft Project aspires to be a layering of multiple voices speaking to and across each other, quoting, echoing, and exploring ideas, like a jazz improvisation or a Smith photo essay. The book’s strength is the rich dimensionality that it brings to a portrait of a time and a place. However, Smith’s material is deployed for its effectiveness in evoking a past milieu, and not according to any archival rigor. That’s fine – but we come away in the end with the story that Stephenson wants to tell and we are not much closer to Smith’s intentions for this record. Leo Hsu 165
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Room 103 Jeroen Kramer Published by Noorderlicht www.noorderlicht.com Eur27.50 (72pp Hardback)
103 is just a number. It also happened to be the number of Jeroen Kramer’s hotel room where he lived while working as a photojournalist in Baghdad during the war – and became his subsequent nickname (the hotel staff had trouble pronouncing his Dutch name). In the naming of this book Kramer perhaps also sees himself as “just a number” and the work he was creating as perpetuating that notion – by being just another photojournalist in a war zone, shooting photographs of just another soldier or civilian senselessly killed. What Room 103 isn’t, is a book claiming to be about war and conflict – one that neither shows nor tells you anything new. While most books created under the guise of “worthy photojournalism” intentionally separate the author from the work – and end up creating the opposite effect – Kramer’s is the reverse in the blatant use of the personal. This book is about what it really means to be present in conflict, what it means to have to run, against all natural impulses, towards gunfire. The photographs contained in Room 103 mark Kramer’s time living in 166
Beirut, Baghdad and Damascus. The collage of written stories – accounts of personal friendships and hardships – are fragmentary and disjointed, perhaps a reflection on the reality of war. Kramer is not trying to make sense of war, an entirely impossible feat anyway, and the photographs reflect this. The series of 12 images that bookend the work, presented as a strip inside the front and back covers, tell the story of a convoy attacked en route to Mosul in which four soldiers were killed. Graphic and tense, these are the most predictable images in the book – or rather outside it – while those within are the more lyrical and quietly suggestive. The images here are secondary to the text yet not illustrative. After reading the story of Khaled, a close acquaintance from Damascus, you find yourself searching for a photograph of him – along with the others mentioned in the stories – but there aren’t any. And, perhaps they don’t exist – the images or the people in Kramer’s stories. The ones that do feature are those of daily life – weddings, children playing, street scenes at night – with images of horror thrown in – mass graves, bloodied faces and dead bodies. Although at first glance appearing to be devoid of context, a list of captions does appear at the back, telling us simply, where, when and what. There is an overriding sense that Kramer spent time with the people pictured and actually got to know them before taking their photograph. In one story, “Ammar is Sick” he explains how, during drinking sessions with his group of Iraqi friends – something, now that the country is “democratic” and “free”,
they have to go to Jordan to indulge in – there is a predictable chain of events: first singing and merriment and then the inevitable sobbing: for family, for country, for the present situation. The scene becomes one that no photograph could communicate. Kramer’s real intentions with this book become apparent at the end, when he writes of the email sent to his editor, talking of his self-loathing – the only reason he can come up with as to why he does what he does. Being a photojournalist is, to him, a suitable punishment for compassion fatigue and compliance in a media machine that simplifies and desensitises. He likens the experience of photographing one man, shot through his windscreen and nearly dead, as useless for him because there is no caption information to include with the image. The man becomes for him, along with countless others, a Dorian Gray, suspended in this stasis of being. Room 103 may be overcomplicated by its fussy design and odd coloured pages. And its awkward format, perhaps trying to emulate a scrapbook, could have benefited from being either larger or smaller. But its strength as an incongruous mix of word, image and emotion emerges after being immersed in the personal stories of love and death. While Kramer may only see himself as perpetuating a cycle of exploitation, this book represents his obligation to reverse the trend, to make sure that the people with whom he is interacting and whose stories he is telling, do not become just another number. Lauren Heinz
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Explosions, fires and public order Sarah Pickering
Published by Aperture www.aperture.org £25 (120pp Hardback)
Of the four photographic studies of human preparedness that comprise this collection by Sarah Pickering, the most wounding by a distance is Public Order. It is not that these photographs hint at a post-apocalyptic future, nor that they depict an uncanny simulacrum of Anytown (although they do both these things), but that the pain, the acute discomfort, we feel in looking at them arises from the fact that these pictures look like now. Denton is a fake suburban town used by the British police for specialist training purposes; everything from football riots to terrorist attacks happens there first. It is immediately obvious that it is a set, not even a very convincing one, yet every hollow façade, every door to nowhere, every grey concrete street looks like the
collective failure of public architecture, town planning and human spirit that has ransacked and homogenised every high street in Britain. Anyone who has grown up in suburbia has been sick outside Flicks nightclub, bought nylon underwear from Dickens department store, and has failed to be offered a job other than “account executive” at the Job Centre. Photographically, this work comes from the same stable as Broomberg and Chanarin’s chilling Chicago, or An-My Lê’s 29 Palms, and is shot in the same straight-on, deadpan style. The idea of the simulacrum is uncanny, a window to another world, in this case one where disasters become their polar opposite: controlled events. This idea is explored in three further bodies of work included here. The images from Fire Scene are compellingly narrative-driven. Pickering gained access to the Fire Service College and the domestic interiors carefully constructed for forensics officers’ training sessions. Fascinating stories of lives never lived unfold in these spaces. Chaotic lifestyles, where plates are ashtrays, chairs are tables and one-bar electric heaters are makeshift ovens invite a class-based reading of these scenes, as though fecklessness of the underclass in particular causes fires. It’s interesting to consider why a candle in the library of a mansion was not imagined by the creators of these spaces. Would their emergency procedure be different if the furniture’s provenance were antique French instead of the Red Cross charity shop on the High Street? The Explosions series holds fewer possibilities. Taken at a site used for combat training, the images themselves are only
superficially beautiful. It looks like more of a technical achievement, which in addition exposes the theatre of war, but once that conceit is undone (by the text), the photographs have the same effect as fireworks: to be admired only briefly. The abstraction engendered by the background landscapes renders each explosion less poignant to the human eye. The thought of someone being maimed or killed by them seems more remote than Raphael Dallaporta’s landmines photographed as gleaming product shots, less menacing than Simon Norfolk’s Full Spectrum Dominance. An exhibition of Incident happened to be my introduction to Pickering’s work, and it loses none of its power in book form. Also shot at the Fire Service College, these burnt out spaces have had the colour and the very life sucked out of them. Pickering has played with this, and her matt black and white prints take on the quality of drawing, allowing the full ghostliness of the spectacle to take over. The overstuffed dummy-bodies that draw the work to a close seem to have stumbled blindly from Eliot’s “The Hollow Men”, a dread-filled poem with the thrice repeated refrain: “This is the way the world ends.” Truly, contemplating these pictures, I could believe it had. What all these photographs lack is people. I say this not as a criticism of the absence-of-presence photographic style, but as an observation on the very reason why no amount of planning or preparation for disaster can be properly successful, Pickering’s people-free photographs are as tightly controlled as the security strategies she is documenting. Enter the human and watch all hell break loose. Max Houghton 167
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SILENCE Brad Rimmer Published by T&G Publishing www.tgpublishing.com.au Eur 35 (96pp Hardback)
With Silence comes the light. In Brad Rimmer’s new book on the wheatbelt communities of Western Australia, the deafening roar of silence echoes against the warm glow of the evening sun. Rimmer’s subjects are bathed in a light resplendent of the last drawn breath of the day. There is a clear felt ambiguity to the scenes he photographs – lone Australians, the last of the great wheatbelt dwellers, seem to be triumphant and hopeful but also melancholic, looking off into the distance. The only sounds to disturb them are the quiet sighs of communities who have lived and triumphed, whose better days are behind them. It is through the eyes of our very own local guide, Rimmer, that we see the great illuminated grain silos in Merredin rise majestically out of the night sky. In Dowerin, the drive-in movie screen looks 168
out across its parking lot, overgrown and now home to a solitary abandoned car. The blank white of the screen is set against the blue and purple hues of the sky at dusk. It stands almost as a monument to an age, not so long ago, when people would congregate here and, in coming together, signal the strength and vibrancy of their community. In the images of the interiors of the Farmers Club in Goomalling, the ubiquitous framed portrait of Queen Elizabeth II adorns the wall but the rooms are empty of people. They remain suspended in time, either awaiting better days or resigned to new roles as museum pieces of a bygone era. Even the modernlooking, well-kept swimming pool in Dowerin, its inviting water still like glass, is devoid of people. But these and other images sit comfortably alongside the solitary portraits of young people and views from the photographer’s car window of the unimaginably large landscape. It matters not for a moment that there are so few people but rather that any have survived and not been swallowed up by the scale of the place and the harshness of its climate. In the pages of Silence, Rimmer revisits these towns of his adolescence: Kellerberrin, Wyalkatchem, Tammin, Dowerin, Yelbeni and Goomalling. Having in common wheat crop and weather patterns, they also share similar tyre marks scuffed into the asphalt by bored youths on a Saturday night. These communities were once distinct, but due to their dwindling populations – each has now fewer than 1000 inhabitants – they face the threat of bureaucratic
amalgamation by the national census and planning department. Rimmer’s hometown of Wyalkatchem – or Wylie, as it is known – was once considered the regional centre. It was a busy hub of rail and local government, serving the outlying farming communities. Wylie is now home to just 300. In the photographs of Silence, there is unsurprisingly no noise, nor crowds, just the memories of growing up and the penetrating gaze on the faces of his subjects. It’s a look I read as muted pride mixed with love and loathing. There is an undeniable connection to the land but there is also a simmering loathing for the inevitable decline that the communities face and the pressure to move away for good to bigger things in bigger towns. Silence is a beautiful book, that does what all good books should – it tells a very personal story, almost in a way that is not meant to be read by anyone other than the author. Rimmer’s story moves as his car travels across the country, from loss and guilt to admiration and acceptance. With the passing of his grandmother and the time he has spent away, the connection Rimmer had to this land, he confides, is now gone. Silence feels like a question to and homage for the next generation of wheatbelt dwellers, as the mantle falls on their shoulders to eke out a living or move away. Rimmer ponders their futures and tips his hat at their presence – even as autumn fires rage across the wheat fields, bringing promise of new shoots which will rise from the ashes as reliably as the seasons change. Jon Levy
Reviews
War A °South Collection #1
Published by T&G Publishing www.tgpublishing.com.au Eur 60 (132pp Hardback)
War: A Degree South Collection #1 is a compilation of work by eight Australian photographers: Tim Page, David Dare Parker, Ben Bohane, Stephen Dupont, Jack Picone, Michael Coyne, Ashley Gilbertson and Sean Flynn. In the foreword Tim Page states that the book serves as “an antipodean anecdote to the tall poppies on the other side of the cultural world”. By this I assume he refers to the over-achieving likes of Don McCullin, Jim Nachtwey, et al – celebrated war photographers from the UK and USA. In truth, War is a book borne out of passion and made by photographers who wish to pool their talents and stand firm against the sad state of “infotainmentorientated” coverage gracing the pages of magazines and newspapers which once would run their stories. That Australia has produced some of the greatest war photographers of our time should not be forgotten and while the eight photographers have certainly shot
stories outside the combat zone, they agreed that war should be the “binding thread” to begin this, their first group project in publishing. As well as the book itself I am lucky to have seen the exhibition of photographs that accompanies its publication, on display at the FotoFreo festival in Fremantle and Perth. At a previous year’s FotoFreo the photographers gathered conceived of the Degree South concept. It’s therefore apt that War should be launched at the same festival. The printing in both the exhibition and the book reproduction, is exquisite. For someone like myself – brought up on this genre of hardcore news photography – there can be little better than seeing Tim Page’s photograph of a boy crying over the body of a wounded girl in the back of a red pick-up truck, displayed next to David Dare Parker’s image of East Timorese returning to the remains of their homes. The former, an iconic colour photograph from 1968, the latter the encapsulation of an agonising and profound moment from a more recent conflict in 1999. The exhibition also included images taken from the National Archive by army photographers during the First and Second World Wars. Their photographs provided a stepping stone with which to launch oneself across the years of Australian combat photography – for want of a better term – from 1918 to 1943 to 1968 to 1985 to 1996, and so to the present day. It was noticeable how the style of photography has changed, obviously influenced by the availability of cameras and lenses but also by a
desire to get ever closer to the action. There is something almost hyperreal to me about a scene of war and devastation photographed from a distance, strangely not the same when a photographer shoots right in the face of their subject. The wider view is disarmingly matter-of-fact, until you take it all in and become immersed in the detail. Only then can the viewer begin to extract the despair of the situation, or appreciate with trepidation the moment of impending doom that is suggested, but not yet exploding into the frame. War is a veritable history lesson and a thorough compendium of conflict in our world over the past 45 years, from Tim Page and Sean Flynn’s “Nam”; to Ben Bohane’s coverages in Burma, Papua, Kenya and the Solomon islands; Stephen Dupont’s Afghanistan, Palestine and Rwanda; Jack Picone’s Angola, Bosnia, and Sierra Leone; Michael Coyne’s Iran; Ashley Gilbertson’s Iraq; and David Dare Parker’s East Timor. The styles may differ and the angle of interest each photographer brings to their subject is unique, but there is no getting away from the over-arching fact that, for these photographers, the story is paramount and the events they witness are always more profound or important to others than their own experience of it. Amidst the images of death and destruction, and the protests and reprisals that necessarily make up a book on war, these eight photographers remain quiet, humble and focused on the job at hand. They are the personification of commitment. Jon Levy 169
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JANE HILTON DEAD EAGLE TRAIL
21 April – 15 May 2010
School of the
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171
call for submissions
deadline: 31st May 2010 Hereford Photography Festival Submissions are now being accepted for Open Here, Hereford PhotographyFestivalâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s open exhibition, to take place at The Courtyard Centre for theArts from 29th October to 27th November 2010. Open Here welcomes submissions from all photographers - both nationally and internationally - and are keen to support all disciplines of photographic practice. Photographers may submit up to 5 images, made since January 2009. Images may be individual works or from a larger series.One prize, of a socially-engaged commission (ÂŁ2,000) will be awarded, to be realised in Herefordshire prior to August 2011. An additional prize of ÂŁ250 will be awarded to the audienceâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s favourite,voted for by visitors to the exhibition. The Selection Panel &DLWOLQ *ULIĂ&#x20AC;WKV 0HOLVVD 'H:LWW Nina Gustavsson Paul Seawright 6WXDUW :KLSSV
$UWLVWLF 'LUHFWRU +HUHIRUG 3KRWRJUDSK\ )HVWLYDO (GLWRU +RW6KRH - Photography Lecturer, Hereford College of Arts. - Photographer and co-curator Hereford Photography Festivalâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Retrospective 2010. 3KRWRJUDSKHU DQG ZLQQHU RI WKH (DVW ,QWHUQDWLRQDO $ZDUG
www.photofest.org/openhere
" /&8 1&341&$5*7& DOCUMENTARY PHOTOGRAPHY UNIVERSITY OF WALES, NEWPORT 27 Exhibition opens 29 TH June 2010, 7 PM –9.30 PM & continues 30 TH June–3 rd July, 10 AM –6 PM At the Candid Arts Trust, 3 Torrens Street London EC1V 1NQ, nearest tube Angel. Admission free. www.twentysevenexhibition.com
Photograph © David Damoison
On my Shelf
sources of inspiration Simon Njami The exercise reminds me of torture – the Desert Island question! When I start to think about what my answer could be, I get overwhelmed by the possibilities – the sum of books which, since my childhood, have been accompanying me. The Bible was for me an interesting novel. Up until now, I am still fascinated by the way it was produced and the impact it generated. One Thousand and One Nights was another major discovery – the kind of piece that can never be exhausted, such as The Divine Comedy or Don Quixote. Only authors who have equally mastered style and content would be allowed a special place on my bookshelves. That’s why Deleuze, Sartre, Barthes or Nietzsche, to name a few, are very dear to my heart and sit on the same level as my favourite novelists. That’s probably why I always conceive my exhibitions as I would write a novel – I think stories are more important than concepts. If one looks at the work of Borges, this becomes obvious. The first book that comes to my mind – my memory is not necessarily chronological – is The Palm-Wine Drunkard, by Amos Tutuola. This novel, the most surrealist and unexpected narrative written by an African, had a strange story from the beginning. I have read the French, translated by Raymond Queneau, who was known for his literary impostures. When the book came
out, critics thought that Tutuola existed only in Queneau’s mind. The story is quite simple: a man inherits his father’s palm plantation and has the best palm wine maker in the village. His house is always full of friends with whom he would get drunk from dawn to sunset. But one day, the palm wine maker falls from a tree and dies. The hero hires another wine maker, but he was not as talented as the deceased and the friends of the drunkard start to desert him. His solution is to go to “the bush of ghosts” and bring back his old specialist. From that moment, we witness an incredible journey through the world of the dead, full of impossible anecdotes. Tutuola was not a professional writer but an obscure civil servant who would write in his spare time. The mastery with which he embarked on his quest is simply amazing. It reminded me of the best Latin American writers, in his ability to create believable worlds. This novel taught me that there are no limits to human imagination and that, when one pretends to be a writer, you should not bother with reality, for reality is only what is created. French author Boris Vian wrote the second book I shall comment on, a novel called L’Écume des Jours (Froth on the Daydream). It tells the story of a young couple facing a tragedy: the girl is sick and slowly dying. Vian warns us from the beginning: “This story is true for I invented it from the first line to the last... this novel is poetry.” The author plays with words and situation with the talent of a virtuoso. In this story, which could have been seen as pure science fiction, he questions French grammar and the very meaning of everyday words. Chloé, the young heroine, has a flower in her chest that grows everyday as the room where she is lying gets smaller. She dies at the end of course. Vian wrote the book right after the Second World War, when Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialism was at its peak. The author fills his narration with a great amount of references that he turns into satires, for the readers’ delight. The third book also leads us into a world that no human being has ever explored. It is The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by William Blake. Here again, the author describes demons as if he were familiar with them; as if he were an anthropologist exploring the Kingdom of Hades. It is poetry of course but it is,
above all, a reflection on human nature that contains a critical distance that one could not feel in Dante’s Divine Comedy. Here again, a lesson about writing, words and worlds. Frantz Fanon’s Les Damnés de la Terre (The Wretched of the Earth) was critical to my political awakening. At that age – I was about 17 – I had no interest in colonial history, the power game between East and West. I only dealt with matters linked with aesthetics and the existential quest. I had read Sartre and philosophers engaged in political fights but it was only with Fanon that I fully realised the weight of the past, and how it determined the present and future. Fanon reminded me of the simple fact that I was a “postcolonial” subject, which forced me to question, and then deconstruct this very notion. I believe that up until now my work is driven by the will to create a world where everyone is represented equally, influenced by statements like: “Each generation must, in a relative opacity discover its mission, achieve it or betray it.” Anything written after, under the label “postcolonial”, cannot stand the comparison with the seminal reflection raised by this book. Last but not least, comes Fragments d’un Discours Amoureux (A Lover’s Discourse), by Roland Barthes. Barthes, an accomplished entomologist, dissects the essence of love and its vocabulary. I never thought we could apply our minds to such a vain endeavour. I then believed that all thinking should have been dedicated to crucial matters: God, death, and existence – it was my first encounter with semiotics, and I was fascinated by the fact that the mind could apply its talents to such an intangible thing as love, and transform it into a scientific case study. Moreover, I was confronted with the meaning of words, their hidden logic and their unconscious charge. Barthes worked as an investigator, carefully looking at the expression “love” and analysing it in all its dimensions. There is no such thing as an innocent word. Simon Njami is an independent lecturer, art critic and novelist and has been Art Director of the Bamako photography biennial since 2001
THE FOTO8 SUMMERSHOW 2010 A PHOTOGRAPHIC EXHIBITION, AWARD AND
LONDON 26 JULY – 5 SEPTEMBER
PRINT FAIR OPEN TO ALL PHOTOGRAPHERS
Duratrans Printing ‘Approach, vertical flyer’ by Steve Macleod is printed on Kodak Duratrans, a backlit display print designed for lightboxes. With our new Superwide Lightjet we can make Duratrans images up to 10’ x 6’. For Steve’s exhibition, Blackwater - each print will be colour balanced and tested according to the specifications of the lightbox.
Lambda & Lightjet Prints Hand Prints Retouching Processing Scanning Finishing /Mounting
Metro 32 Great Sutton Street London EC1V 0NB +44 (0)20 7865 0000 contact@metroimaging.co.uk www.metroimaging.co.uk
HAVE YOUR PHOTOGRAPHS EXHIBITED IN LONDON’S PRESTIGIOUS HOST GALLERY, SEEN AND JUDGED BY RESPECTED INDUSTRY PROFESSIONALS FROM THE PHOTOGRAPHY, ARTS AND MEDIA WORLDS, WITH A CHANCE TO WIN £1500 IN THE THIRD ANNUAL FOTO8 AWARD FOR BEST IN SHOW.
OVER 150 PRINTS SELECTED FROM ALL ENTRIES WILL BE CURATED BY THE FOTO8 TEAM. THE WORK WILL BE EXHIBITED FOR PUBLIC VIEWING, VOTING AND PURCHASING. FOR MORE INFORMATION ON THE SUMMERSHOW AND FOR GUIDELINES ON HOW TO ENTER YOUR WORK, PLEASE GO TO WWW.FOTO8.COM/SUMMERSHOW
2
POYi awards Panos photographers Tomas van Houtryve, Carolyn Drake, William Daniels and Erin Trieb have been recognised with six awards at the 67th annual Pictures of the Year International competition.
THE PHOTOGRAPHY BIANNUAL
THE PHOTOGRAPHY BIANNUAL
panos pictures
telephone +44 20 7253 1424 email pics@panos.co.uk web www.panos.co.uk multimedia www.vimeo.com/panospictures updates www.twitter.com/panospictures
ISSUE 27 - SPRING/SUMMER 2010
Preserved fish on display in the History Museum of Aralsk, a formerly bustling fishing port on the Aral Sea. Kazakhstan. Š CAROLYN DRAKE
ISSUE 27 - SPRING/SUMMER 2010
CROSSCURRENT