Volume 5 Number 1 by Foto8

EI8HT PHOTOJOURNALISM

4TH BIRTHDAY EDITION

CALUMET SUPPORTS PHOTOJOURNALISM

ENGLAND FEATURES GRIME SURVIVAL PROGRAMMES BAGHDAD GARAGE THE LAST WITCH ALLOTMENTS WORLD FEATURES NIGERIA 103RD STREET ACID ATTACKS PIPELINE GENERALS COLUMNISTS TIM MINOGUE JOHN O’FARRELL DAVID PRATT JOHN VIDAL INTERVIEW SUSAN MEISELAS BOOK REVIEWS RESOURCES VOL.5 NO.1 JUNE 2006 £8 WWW.FOTO8.COM

CALUMET IS PROUD TO SUPPORT A PATCH OF ENGLAND A PHOTO STORY BY ANDREW BUURMAN

May – June Yann Mingard Spirits and Shamanism Landscapes of the East CANON, NIKON, KODAK, FUJI, POLAROID, EPSON, OLYMPUS, MANFROTTO, LEXAR 08000 964396 WWW.CALUMETPHOTO.COM

Telephone: 020 7253 2770 Email: info@ hostgallery.co.uk Website: hostgallery.co.uk

Free admission. Opening times: Monday – Friday 10am – 6pm or by appointment at other times including Saturday

EI8HT PHOTOJOURNALISM V5N1 JUNE 06

HO ST.

1 Honduras Street London EC1Y 0TH

EI8HT PHOTOJOURNALISM

4TH BIRTHDAY EDITION

CALUMET SUPPORTS PHOTOJOURNALISM

CALUMET IS PROUD TO SUPPORT A PATCH OF ENGLAND A PHOTO STORY BY ANDREW BUURMAN

May – June Yann Mingard Spirits and Shamanism Landscapes of the East CANON, NIKON, KODAK, FUJI, POLAROID, EPSON, OLYMPUS, MANFROTTO, LEXAR 08000 964396 WWW.CALUMETPHOTO.COM

Telephone: 020 7253 2770 Email: info@ hostgallery.co.uk Website: hostgallery.co.uk

Free admission. Opening times: Monday – Friday 10am – 6pm or by appointment at other times including Saturday

EI8HT PHOTOJOURNALISM V5N1 JUNE 06

HO ST.

1 Honduras Street London EC1Y 0TH

Mid-battle at the “Choong Workshop”, Romford, Essex, which opens its doors three times a week to MCs from surrounding areas to come and battle out their lyrical wits in Open Mic sessions

A C Nnadi, A G Middleton, A J Rhodes, A.D.H Taylor, A.J.J.A. v.d. Heijden, A Zemlianichenko, Aaron Oxley, Aarti Shah, Abbie Trayler-Smith, Adam Hinton, Adam M White, Adam Shannon, Adrian Bratby, Adrian McGivern, Adrian Pancucci, Aelred Burlton, Agatha Rack, Ailistair Paul, AJ Greaves, Alain Kaiser, Alan Lane, Alan Miller, Alan O’Connor, Albert Bertran Cipres, Albert Corbi, Alberto Bernasconi, Alberto Minio Paluello, Alex Ekins, Alex Milne, Alex Pointer, Alex Proud, Alexander Christensen, Alexander Franck, Alexander von Spreti, Alexandra Read, Alexandre Guirkinger , Alexis Maryon, Alfonso de Castro, Alice Levy, Alice Myers, Alice Wynn-Willson, Alistair Kille, Alistair Shaw, Allan Melzack, Amagerbro Kiosk, Amanda Day, Amy Pereira-Frears, Amy Timbrell, Amy Yenkin, An Nelissen, Andi Schreiber, Andre Collet, Andre Silva, Andrea Dapueto, Andrea Kunzig, Andrea Stern, Andrea Whittaker, Andreas Schmid, Andreas Thelan, Andrew Aleksiejczuk, Andrew Butterton, Andrew Cornish, Andrew D Buurman, Andrew E Lindblade, Andrew Fairbrother, Andrew Hinton, Andrew Jackson, Andrew Lee, Andrew McConnell, Andrew Moxon, Andrew Moye, Andrew Mullins, Andrew Peppard, Andrew Smith, Andrew Testa, Andy Aitchison, Andy Clingempeel, Andy Hauschild, Andy Stocking, Angel Sanchez, Angela Edwards, Angela Frost, Angela Glienicke, Angela Horsfall, Angus MacQueen, Anjali Lockett, Anjana Parmar, Ann Doherty, Ann Jenkins, Ann Johansson, Anna Branthwaite, Anna Lukala, Annabel and Alan Strutt, Anne and Ian Anstice, Anne Lucas, Annibale Ferrini, Annie Dare, Ann-Kathrin Kampmeyer, Anthony Levy, Anthony Alderson, Anthony C Benn, Anthony Jahn, Anthony Johnson, Antonio Babbo, Antonio Lucas Soares, Antonio Viera, Ara Oshagan, Arabella Schwarzkopf, Arjo S Ghosh, Arlene Collins, Ashley Edworthy, Astrid Schulz, Aubrey Wade, Avril Evitts, B Moldenhauer, Babiche Martens, Badgers Holt, Baier Julia, Barabra Schick, Barberis, Basil Hyman, Begonia Belmonte, Bella Bathurst, Ben Blair, Ben Borg Cardona, Ben Ellis, Ben Gancsos, Ben Gritten, Ben Ingham, Ben Lewis, Ben Smith, Ben Tajima-Simpson, Benjamin Ealovega, Bergljot Gunnlaugsdottir, Bert Rothkugel, Bianca Di Lauro, Bill Bradshaw, Birrer Martin, Bob Entwistle, Bob Kelly, Bob Strong c/o Reuters, Bohdan Warchomij, Bora Ulutas, Bradford Daly, Branko Franceschi, Brendan Dobson, Brendan Harrington, Brent Jones, Brian Edwards, Brian Harris, Brian Hodgson, Brian Kelly, Brian Krawlec, Brian Metcalf, Brian Storm, Bridget Coaker, Bridget Symonds, Brijesh Patel, Bruno Arnold, Bruno Decock, Bryan Dooley, Bryan Meade, Bryan O’Brien, Bryn Campbell, C H Steele-Perkins, C Y Dervish, C. van Alten, Cara Forbes, Carl Bower, Carl Reynolds, Carlos Cazalis, Carlos Labrador, Carol Allen Storey, Carol Parsons, Caroline Irby, Caroline Strange, Caroline Yang, Carsten Snejbjerg, Catherine I Dean, Catherine Kibble, Cathy Remy, Cecilia Rappe, Cedomir Igaly, Cem Cuneyt Ugur, Cemal Yamalioglu, Chad Wollen, Charles Cooper, Charles E Albertson, Charles H Whitaker, Charles Hotham, Charles Inglefield, Charles Watson, Charlotte Wiig, Charmian Skinner, Chloe Sherman, Chris de Bode, Chris Jepson, Chris Murchison, Chris Murphy, Chris Niedenthal, Christan Jungeblodt, Christer Jaereslaett, Christian Bragg, Christian Payne, Christian Piche, Christina Daniels, Christina Soar, Christine A Ebdy, Christine Kapteijn, Christine Vanden Beukel, Christopher Grover, Christopher Lane, Christopher McKane, Christopher Ng, Ciaran McCrickard, Cillian Kelly, Clare Keogh, Claudia Giat, Claudine Patterson, Colin Cavers, Colin McCormack, Colin Woodward, Combier Antoine, Conor Higgins, Cosatto Duilio, Cotton Coulson, Craig Maclean, Craig Mason-Jones, Crinan Dunbar, Crispin Rodwell, Cristina Borrero Bonilla, Curtis Appel, D Barker, D Brown, D Downes, D M Tyler, D Roberts, D.A.McLachlan, Daffyd Owen, Dagmar Seeland, Dagmar Seeland, Daniel Desborough, Daniel Duart, Daniel Ellison, Daniel Gellis, Daniel Julien, Daniel Ross, Daniela Perez, Dario Mitidieri, Darren Hepburn, Darren Newbury, Darren R. Brown, Darren Wisdom, Darrin Zammit Lupi, Darryl Styres, Dave Lander, David A Wilson, David and Jane Lightfoot, David Armstrong, David Bellot, David Broom, David Campbell, David Chancelor, David Constantine, David Eckersley, David Furst, David Gillanders, David Goroff, David Graham, David Hall, David Hatfull, David Hoffman, David John Bentley, David Knowles, David Lurie, David Oates, David Palmer, David Palmer, David Parker, David Roberts, David Rutter, David Ryder, David Smithson, David Thomas, David Walter, David Wilmot, Davin Ellicson, Debby Besford, Debby Besford, Declan ONeill, Declan Shanahan, DEMARET Raphael, Demetrius Ioannides, Denis Kenny, Deniz Saylan, Dennis Luckett, Derek Brown, Didier Lefevre, DJ Plant, Domenico Ceffa, Dominic Casciani, Dominic Vallely, Donald Ng, Douglas H Menuez, Dr Adam C Cooper, Dr Christopher May, Dr John D Perivolaris, Dr Michael Groves, Dr P G Marshall, Dr Peter Williamson, Dr Roger Till, Dr. David Boeckler, Dr. Sameer Khan, Duncan Clark, Duncan Heather, Dylan Lloyd, E Reddaway, E Williamson, E.M.F. Kok, Ed Reeve, Edd Turner, Edie Peters, Edith Lynford, Edmond L Soldz, Eduardo Bombarelli, Eduardo Citrinblum, Eduardo Martino, Edward Cowling, Edward Serotta, Edward Webb, Einat Bar, Eivind H Natvig, EJ Rappaport, Elaine Sutton, Eliezer Yolande, Elisabeth Ouwehand, Elisheva Shaked, Elizabeth Stella Chucker, Ellena Aldo, Elmar Pinkhardt, Emily Bishop, Emily Rogers, Emma Hardy, Emma Hobson, Emma Lynch, Emma Shaw, Ender Salih, Enrique E Shore Kohan, Enrique Garcia, Eric Engstorm, Eric Knepper, Eric Trometer, Erika Hanson, Espen Hoen, Euan Denholm, Eve Coulon, Evelyne Chevallier, Evelyne Eveno , Ewan Smith, Fabien Penso, Fabio Ancora, Fabiola Salle-Ang, Fabrizio Ferrero, Fanie Jason, Fanny Lugrin, Federico Sanchez-Bedoya, Felicia M Webb, Fiona Bourne, Fiona Mersh, Fiona ODell, Florencia Saluzzo, Florian Bloemer, Fotoavd ved Rune Saevig, Fran¡ois Eschapasse, Francesca De Bartolomeis, Francis Medina, Frank de Ruiter, Frank Wallner, Franky Verdickt, Frederic Duuez, Frederic Noy, Frederick Scott, Frk Arnesen, G A Jackson, G McAulay, G P Gill , G. Aza Selinger, Gabriele Stabile, Gail Ward, Gareth Phillips, Garikoitz Garaialde Etxaburu, Gary Calton, Gary Fabiano, Gary Francis, Gary Parkinson, Gary Wilson, Gaspar Garcia, Gautam Narang, Gavin Hammond, Geert Goiris, Gemma Booth, Geo Bildredation, Geoffrey Stevens, George Eastman House, Gerik E. Parmele, Gerlo Beernink, Gerrien Achterop, Giacinto Cosenza, Giacomo Mergoni, Gianfranco Bussalai, Gianluca Gera, Gianluca Gera, Gianluigi Guercia, Gianni Accasto, Gilles Mingasson, Gillian Barnes, Giorgio Baravalle, Giovanna Corti, Giovanne Fazzone, Giovanni Del Brenna, Glenn Campbell, GMJ Penfound, Gordon Ashridge, Gordon S Croft, Grace Yokem (1), Grace Yokem (2), Graham Barratt, Graham Brandon, Graham Jefferies, Greg Cummins, Gregory Shaver, Gregory Wolf, Guilio Zanni at Fam. Prole, Gurpreet Mundy, Gustavo Baratta, Guy D Williams, Guy Powell, Guy Ryecart, Guy Tillim, Guy Walder, H R Stepanian, H.C.Mulder, Hanah Brenchley, Hanna J Bergsten, Hannah Carey, Hannah Mathew, Hansgert Lambers, Harald Henden, Haris Coussidis, Harri Luoma, Harry Jost, Hasan Senyuksel, Hazel Thompson, Heathcliff OMalley, Hector Proud, Heger Boris, Helen Margaret Giovanello, Helen Shepard, Helen Solomon, Helen Van Pernis, Helen Ward, Helen Wishart, Henrietta Butler, Herman Hoeneveld, Herman Kolender, Hermann Bredehorst, Hideko Kataoka, Hijma J, Hilary Leftick, Hillary Dempster, Holly Benham, Homer Sykes, Horst A Friedrich, Horst Faas, Howard Davies, Howard Sharman, Hugh Lester, Hugh Manor, Huis Marseille / E. Barents, I H Maxwell, I J Bruno, Ian Bray, Ian Brodie, Ian Clifford, Ian Fish, Ian Hughes, Ian M Smith, Ian Oliver, Ian Pollen, Ian Rossin, Igor Ponti, ilkka m uimonen, Illtud Llyr Dunsford, Ingrid Davin, Inigo Bujedo Aguirre, Irina Werning, Isabella Guiditta del Vecchio, Isabelle Merminod, Isona Shibata, Ivan Keeman, Ivan Zupic, Ivor Watkins, Izzet Hakanoglu, J Banting, J Cabon, J G Sayers, J G W Holmes, J H FOGG, J L Smith, J Maclennan, J N Davidson, J Wearing, J.B. Russell, J.D. Geertsema, Jacek Spiewak, Jack Hill, Jack Hobhouse, Jack Picone, Jackie Cumming, Jackie Dewe Mathews, Jagdish Patel, Jakob Feigl, James Ashmore, James Ball, James Crayton, James Darling, James Dow, James Down, James Gifford-Mead, James Hazelwood, James Hill, James Homer, James Ralph, Jamie Jason, Jamie Strong, Jamse McGrady, Jan Brouckaert, Jan Grarup, Jan H. Thijs, Jane Moore, Janet Bowstead, Janet Pearch, Janne Kari, Jason D Teal, Jason Evans, Jason Florio, Jason Larkin, Jason Senior, Jax Murray, Jayne West, Jean Paul Guadagnin, JeanFrancois Hamelin, Jean-Jacques Viau, Jean-Marc Giboux, Jean-Pierre Perpigani, Jeff Ascough, Jeff Chouw, Jeff D Christensen, Jeff Wilson, Jemma Cox, Jennifer Hurstfield, Jennifer Lea, Jennifer Poggi, Jeremy Huck, Jeremy Jeffs, Jeremy Rose, Jethro Soudant, Jim Lunnon, Jim Stuart, Jim Winslet, JL Fasciolo, Jo Knight, Jo Tyler, Joachim Ladefoged Karge, Joan Tomas Corominas, Joanna Metson Scott, Joanna Oldman, Joao Carvalho Pina, Joao Mariano Silva, Joe Murphy, Joe Startin, Joe Wood, Johannes Haanraadts, Johannes Klaas, John Batten, John Castell, John Clarke, John Dane, John Fleetwood, John Forde, John Gilbride, John Kemp, John Lovesey, John Norsworthy, John Perkins, John Phipps, John Rush, John W Bennetts, John W Peterson, Johnathon Carmichael, Jon Barandica Arrigorriaga, Jon Blair, Jon Higgins, Jon Luebke, Jonatahn Hyams, Jonathan Casciani, Jonathan Elderfield, Jonathan H Reid, Jonathan Malachi, Jonathan Torgovnik, Joonas Brandt, Jorge Lago, Jos Grool, Jose Manuel Bacelar, Joseph Gaspar, Joseph Matthews, Juan Carlos Flores, Juan Ramon Morales, Jude Fowler Smith, Judith Overell, Judy Shapter, Julia Fullerton-Batten, Julian Curnuck, Julian Dunn, Juliette Atkinson, Justin Ide, Justin Leahy, Justin Partyka , Justine Walker, Kadir Van Lohuizen, Kalpesh Lathigra, Karen Norton, Karl Aston, Karoki Lewis, Katarzyna Kardasz, Kate Baverstock, Kate Eshelby, Kate Friend, Kate Gaustad, Kate Geraghty, Kate Newton, IRIS, Katherine Demopoulos, Kathi Ficek, Kathleen E Warne, Kathrin Vowinckel, Katie Grogan, Katie Hyams, Katy Niker, Keavy O’Shea, Keith G Jones, Kellie French, Ken Ponzio, Ken Wilson-Max, Kenneth M Pollard, Kerstin Elam, Kerstin Leesch , Kevin A Bjorke, Kevin Dwyer, Kevin R. Adlard, Kevin Saidler, Kevin Wyn Oates, Kieren McCarthy, Kim Minke, Kirsty Anderson, Kristain Skeie, Kristian Buus, Kumiko Uete, Kurt F Mutchler, Kurt Wintersteiner, L J Stewart, Lady Peat, Lalia Pozzo, Lambert McLaurin, Laurence Watts-Action Aid, Le

Doare Alix, Leah Gordon, Leca Raynal Christel& JJ, Lee Anthony Mitchell, Lee Brown, Lefteris Pitarakis, Leigh Marling, Len Grant, Leprince David, Lesley Smith, Leslie Grice, Leslie Jones - Ouside the Square, Leslie Ryan, Leslie Shannon, Levi Hamilton, Liberman Yoray, Lihee Avidan, Lim Joo Gek, Lindsay Welch, Lionel Peugeot, Lisa Cutler, Lisa Neidich, Liston P Siregar, Liz Cotter , Lizzie Everard, Lorraine Allister, Lorraine Grupe, Louise Bellaers, Louise Cohen, Lourdes Segade, Luc Novovitch, Luca Zanetti, Lucinda Marland, Lucy Carolan, Lucy Kelaart, Luis Mendes, Luqman Lee, Lyle Owerko, Lynda Howells, Lynn Brooks, Lynn Robertson, Lynn Robinson, Lynsey Pope, M E Tod, M Fisher, M H L Shenley, M Harvey, M N Schlossman, M Remi Ochlik, Magali Delporte, Maika Keuben, Maja Segedi, Malcolm Atwill, Malcolm Dickson, Malin Sjoberg, Manon Droz, Marc Barrera Diez, Marc Gibaud, Marc Lewell, Marc Meyerbroeker, Marc Rohrbach, Marcel Zyskind, Marcin Gajewski, Marco Casale, Marco Manfredini, Marcos Otero, Marcus Baron, Marcus Bleasdale, Marcus N Rose, Marek Burmeister, Margaret Clark, Maria Marro-Perera, Maria Mann, Marie Frechon, Marie Helene Robert, Marissa Keating, Marita Kankowski, Mark A Houlder, Mark Baynes, Mark Braun, Mark Eckersley, Mark Henley, Mark Lynford, Mark McEvoy, Mark Pringle, Mark Taylor, Mark Whyte, Mark Windsor, Marta Navarro Sanchez, martin beddall, Martin Burton, Martin Colyer, Martin Godwin, Martin Wierma, Mary E Carson, Mary Farbrother, Mary Jane Maybury, Mary Kelly, Massimo Mastrorillo, Massimo Pizzocaro, Massimo Plaino, Mathew Pontin, Mathias Barthel, Mathias Graf, Matt Foney, Matt Shonfeld, Matt Wreford, Matt Writtle, Matteo Mazzoni, Matthew E Lea, Matthew William Walker, Matthew Wood, Mauricio Epelbaum, Maxime Grosclaude, Melanie Friend, Melissa B Lyttle, Menno Meijer, Mic Warmington, Michael Briggs, Michael Calvert, Michael Cockerham Photography, Michael Folkman, Michael Fuery, Michael Greenwood, Michael H Hayes, Michael Hauri , Michael J Hands, Michael Kuzmak, Michael McWilliam, Michael Robinson, Michael Rose, Michael Slowe, Michael TL PaceSigge, Michael van der Graaf, Michael Warshaw, Michaela Valkova, Michele Nevard, Michele Schaal, Michelle Dubois, Mick Maslen, Mie Scharfe, Mignon Ling, Miguel Forde, Miguel Gonzalez, Mikael Sandager Funch, Mikael Sjoberg, Mike Abrahams, Mike Crockett, Mike Frohling, Mike James, Mikhail Evstafiev, Mimi Chakarova, Mimi Winter, Minmyo Kim, Minoru Inoue, Miro Kazmanovic, Miss A E Blackman, Miss Alixandra Fenton, Miss Charlotte C Thomas, Miss E J Neville, Miss EC Parrack, Miss Elaine Livingstone, Miss N Cutts, Miss P G Page, MM Huq, Mona Reeder, Morgan C. Hagar, Mr Adam Shawyer, Mr Andrew Cohen, MR Brian D R Jones, Mr Brian McCarthy, Mr C Bates, Mr C J Hodgson, Mr D Simmons, Mr Dilip B Harris, Mr Eric Harrison, Mr G Harrison, Mr Gareth Lowe, Mr Garry J Ure, Mr Henry E Iddon, MR I W J Kisselbach, Mr J A Peskett, Mr J G Wilson, Mr J Graham, Mr J P Spiller, Mr J Tydeman, Mr J.B.D Mitchell, Mr Jesse Alexander, Mr Leslie Talbot, Mr Lesllie Smith, Mr M A Pinches, Mr Matt Hassell, Mr Michael Usiskin, Mr N Burgess, Mr P A Martin, Mr P Carroll, Mr Pramod Sharma, Mr Richard M A Bailey, Mr Robert F.E. Jones, Mr Robert G Chippendale, Mr S J Younger, Mr S Lane, Mr Stephen Culshaw, Mr Steven Jenkins, Mr T W Morley, Mr Toby S A Adamson, Mr Tony Nandi, Mr W.E. Savage, Mr. A Zazueta, Mrs A Paine, Mrs Brown, Mrs DMS Campbell, Mrs Mary Muller, Mrs Vicky Good, Mrs. K.E. Lowes, Ms Imogen Kelly , Ms. Cecilia Rappe, Murray Keeler, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Mykel Nicolaou, N A Hardcastle, N Goulder, Nadine Gudimard, Najiba Abdellaoui, Natalia Asheshov, Neal Holland, Neff Urs, Neil Bennett, Neil C Gardiner, Neil Hodge, Neil Holliday, Neil Latner, Neil Weekes, Nicholas E Rogers, Nicholas Lane, Nicholas P David, Nick Cunard, Nick Jardine, Nick King, Nick Lowton, Nick May, Nick Parsons, Nick W Ozich, Nicki Sobecki, Nicky Catley, Nicola Evans, Nicola Frioli, Nicola Gee, Nicole Aeby , Nigel Atkinson, Nigel Tanburn, Nikolai Carlsen, Nilo Rebecchi, Nina Chohda, Nina Gustavsson, Nuno Tiago Valente, Nuria Paladio, Ola Samzelius, Oliver Dienst, Oliver Martin, Olivier Elie Noel, Olivier Faye, Olivier Hanigan, Olivier Picard, Ollie Solman, Olubunmi Okolosi, Otman Meriche, Ottilie Miller, Otto Karl Werckmeister, P Durrant, P Hayes-Watkins, P Heasman, P R Nettleton, P.Pfrunder, Pablo Blazquez, Paddy Walker, Pamela Marlow, Panagiotis Moschandreou, Panagiotis Voudouris, Paolo Messeca, Paolo Pellegrin, Pascal Couffin, Pascal Thomann, Pat McColl, Patrick Alonso, Patrick Barth, Patrick Baudelaire, Patrick Brown, Patrick Dunne, Patrick Guerin, Patrik Budenz, Patrycja Trawinska, Paul Alexander Knox, Paul Allen, Paul Bellsham, Paul Bullivant, Paul Conway, Paul Dixon, Paul Doyle, Paul Hatcher, Paul Martin, Paul O’Connor, Paul Treacy, Paul Verschueren, Paula Glassman, Paula Leite, Paull Littler, Paulo Alexandre Conceicao, Paulo Alexandrino, Paulo DBM Carvalho, Paval Yeats, Peggy Knotz, Peggy Sue Amison, Per Folkver, Pere Selva Masoliver, Peter Besson, Peter Black, Peter Dazeley, Peter Haig, Peter Kemp, Peter Klaunzer, Peter Metelerkamp, Peter Ross, Peter Schultz, Peter Scott, Peter Slade, Peter Smythe, Peter Thompson Photography, Petr Antonov, Petr Nagy, Pfeiffer, Phil Berczuk, Phil Hodgson, Philip David Coomes, Philip Jones, Philippe Achache, Phillip Mortimer, Phoebe Ling, Picture House Centre for Photography, Poppy Szaybo, Porter Gifford, Procovio Viola, Prof. C E Polkey, Quentin Newark, Quintin Finlay, R A Houchin, R J Walkden, R Williams, R Wilson, R.Olivier, Rachel Hartley, Rachel Palmer, Rachel Vere, Raja Iqbal. c/o Brent Mencap, Ralf Bittner, Ramona Farrelly, Raymond Depardon, Raymond Henshaw, Reagan Pannell, Rebeca Rodriguez, Rebecca Beynon, Red Bradley, REG Conant, Regina Maria Anzenberger , Regina Monfort, Reimar Juul, Reinaldo Luis Lombardi, Renata Ferri, Reza Moradi, Rhyner Beat, Rhys James, RI Pathmanaba Iyer, Richard Chamberlain, Richard Chambury, Richard Fenner, Richard H Phillips, Richard Holland, Richard Human, Richard Jeffries, Richard Marazzi, Richard Mills, Richard Pohle, Richard Searle, Richard Smith, Richard Tatham, Richard Thompson, Richard Turnbull, Richard W Fountain, Rita Leistner, Rob Becker, Robert Ashby, Robert Brady, Robert Burton, Robert C Howes, Robert Clark, Robert Coley, Robert John Darch, Robert Johnson, Robert Kelly, Robert Kimball , Robert Knight, Robert Knoth, Robert Lutyens, Robin Griffin, Robin Halls, Robin Hammond, Rocco Rorandelli, Rod Shone, Rogan Macdonald, Roger Chapman, Roger Gaess, Roger Hewins, Roger Popplestone, Ron Jacques, Ron Pearson, Rosalind Miller, Rowan Beckworth, Rowan Lange, Roy Appleyard, Roy CampbellMoore, Roy M Epps, Ruef Didier, Rui Soares, Rumi Kidwai, Ryan Neal Noble, Ryan Scott, S T Frost, Sabine Schmidt, Sam A Harrel, Sam Faulkner, Sam Robinson, Sam Wass, Sam Wheadon, Samuel Hauenstein-Swan, Sandra Scheltema, Sandra Vitaljic, Sandro Iovine, Sara Burigo, Sara Ghorashian, Sara Hannant, Sara Rumens, Sara Trechman, Sarah Basley, Sarah Gilbert, Sarah L. Hoskins, Sarah Lawson, Sarah Lucy Brown, Sarah Treuer, Sarah Van Den Elsken, Satyaki Ghosh, Savvas Lazaridis, Schuermann Ruth, Scott Anger, Scott Mc Kiernan, Scumeck Sabottka, Seamus Geoghegah, Sean Connelley, Sean Fishpool, Sean Gallagher, Sean Hemmerle, Sean Sutton, Sebastian Widmann, Serena Noorani, Serge Eyskens, Serge Porcher, Serge Pouzet, Shane Korpisto, Sharon Randall, Shaun Curry, Shaun Curry, Silvia Radan, Simon Beaufoy, Simon Brown, Simon Evans, Simon G Bannister, Simon Heaven , Simon N Childs, Simon Norfolk, Simon P Kindlen, Simon Rawles, Simon Young, Simone Donati, Slyvain Gaudan, Sonja Schaeffeler, Sonnlietner Michael, Sophie Gerrard, Splashlight Photographic LLC, Stefan Boness, Stefan Pollman, Stephane Enten, Stephanie Sinclair, Stephen Boakes, Stephen E Voss, Stephen Jackson, Stephen Romilly, Stephen Swain, Steve Cox, Steve Every, Steve Harries, Steve Mansfield, Steve Pennells, Steve Welburn, Steven Langdon, Stuart Bingham, Stuart Freedman, Stuart Hollis, Sue Fuller, Sue Lloyd, Sue Osmond, Sue Richards-Gray, Sueess Stefan, Susan Bearder, Susan Gotensparre, Susan Lane, Susan Manuel , Susan Olney, Susana Raab, Susie Medley, Suzanne E R Watts, Suzanne Hodgart, Sybil Taylor, Sylvie Goy, T Chandler, T H Brown, T Kaare Smith, Tadej Znidarcic, Tania Field, Tanju Ozelgin, Ted Giffords, Ted Ostrowski, Teresa Jackson, Teri Pengilley, Terry Mcparlene, Tessa Bunney, Theo Stroomer, Theresa Ambrose / The Age, Thierry Buignet, Thomas A Nicholson, Thomas Danvers, Thomas Dworzak, Thomas Moraitis, Thomas Nordam Andersen, Thomas Royal, Thorsten J Winterer, Thorston Geiger, Tiffany Fairey, Tim Dirven, Tim Hodgson, Tim Hunt, Tim Lowell, Tim Mercer, Tim Smith, Tim Wickens, Timothy D Sofranko, Timothy Hetherington, Tina Clay, Tina Norris, Tina Stallard, Tom Broadbent, Tom Astbury, Tom Kidd, Tom Millard, Tom Stoddart, Tom Swain, Tony Reddrop, Toril Brancher, Torkil Christensen, Tracey Fahy, Tracey Hayes, Tracey Mayer, Travis Hodges, Trish Anderson, Ulf Kress, Ulrich Eigner, Venetia Dearden, Veronique Besnard, Vicki Jane Couchman, Victoria Upton, Vilam Vuong, Vincent Bevan, Vincent Mundy, Vivienne Austin, W J Petrusewicz, Warren Clarke, Wayne Jennings, Wilhelm Kruger, William A Swersey, William Brierley, William McGrory, William Miller, William P. Barton Jr, William Robinson, William RobsonScott, Willi-Halter Barbara, Xavier Fernandes Guell, Zac Walker, Zak Waters. Thank you to all our loyal subscribers 8

Mid-battle at the “Choong Workshop”, Romford, Essex, which opens its doors three times a week to MCs from surrounding areas to come and battle out their lyrical wits in Open Mic sessions

Photographing the nationâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s youth led Ewen Spencer to East London, where he turned his focus to Grime and its creators, who, like the Kings Road Punks of the 1970s, are putting the capitalâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s innovative music scene back on the map

Lady Sovereign on her way

Members of Roll Deep (left) take time out between making a promo video for their latest release, â&#x20AC;&#x153;Limehouseâ&#x20AC;? At Romford Youth Centre (right and above)

Recording an MC “battle” (above) for a DVD, Lord of the Decks. Many of these battles take place by last minute invitation – the MCs have no rehearsal or multiple takes in front of the camera. If a rhyme sounds familiar or preconceived the MC will be ridiculed by those present – these moments inevitably make their way to the final cut. The DVDs hold a cult status and sell in their thousands, worldwide MC Fumin (right) in Walthamstow

Grime Ewen Spencer

There is a certain threshold photographers rarely cross, probably because it requires a kind of collapse into something. It creates an intimacy that’s difficult to sustain and only won by patience and return. It’s a condition of agreed privilege, changing the way we see our subjects and influencing what they are willing to reveal to us. It is hard earned. It’s sometimes suggested that our youth is without politics, as less young people than ever before choose to vote. Ewen Spencer acknowledges dynamic, aware and pressured lives, played out against what is unmistakably urban London. High walls and fenced courts, whitewashed brick window frames. Monotony. Youths exchange drugs and smoke. Drug-smoke threads through this series – even the youngest subjects exhale clouds of weed or pinch damp spliffs. Fingers roll skins, update mobiles or grip beer bottles. Yet, for all such drama, the photographs do not seem sensational, opportunist or accusing. Rather they appear accurate and exhilarating. There is little despair, none of the sense of implosion found, for example, in the juvenile gang work of Joseph Rodriguez. Spencer’s depiction of the Grime/Garage music scene in London is unsettling in its energy. It relates something of the richness that comes to photographers willing to negotiate such an involvement. His are revealing images – detailed, tough and agile, emphasising the kinship of young groups as they record, perform and hang out. Spencer employs colour and strategic repetition, and purposefully so. Waves of youths recur, communing, sharing microphones and dope, listening, watching. It’s an insular community, and he couldn’t be closer, mapping routines as bodies flow to the edge of busy frames. Ewen Spencer’s work is built around a vital moment of self-expression. Its very simple, occasionally solemn, a moment that’s been echoed in many forms through recent decades. It was there in doo-wop. It’s still found in the best examples of bluegrass, when musicians build their sound, guiding the mood of the room as they lean with reverence towards a microphone; a sound like a single voice expanding, exorcising, before a diminished returning to the shadows. And Spencer holds many shadows, each part of a chiaroscuro technique achieved by his off-camera flash. This is not a narration towards collapse. Nothing is threatened or in crisis. These young people are dignified, entirely immersed in their music, in each other, and in life 8 Ken Grant This work will form part of the exhibition 10 Years of British Youth Culture at Lazarides Gallery, 8 Greek Street, London, from 18 June

Pheasant shooting is popular in Walkern in season, and the pheasants are enticed into the fields by supplementary food. These morsels tempt other birds as the earth starts to harden with the onset of winter. The gamekeeper hangs a solitary crow by its neck – let that be a warning 8

The talk in the three small pubs – the Yew Tree, the White Lion and the Robin Hood – was of rabbits, snares, ferrets, hedging, ditching, and of the witch. There are still pegs on the wall of the White Lion where the legal wigs were hung in the days when it was the local assizes.

When Rod Shone moved to Walkern, everyone wanted to fill him in on the local history. He felt sure he had already met the medieval executioner, repairing a flint wall one crisp morning, as he walked Blackjack, his collie, through the fields. He watched as octogenarian Billy Green chopped firewood and stacked it neatly in Church End, where the witch once lived. A lone child appeared, gathered some wood and ran off, pleased with his wares. Were they ghosts or was it a trick of the November light?

On failing to recite the Lord’s Prayer, she was convicted by a jury, though Judge Sir John Powell later reprieved her death sentence. So she did not die in flames, a witch’s death, nor did she hang from the gallows. In fact, four centuries later, she has a street named after her in the pretty Hertfordshire village.

The name of the witch was on everyone’s lips. Jane Wenham, the last witch to be tried in England in 1712, bore a sullied reputation for swearing, cursing, idleness, thievery and whoredom. She was taken one day from her home in the village of Walkern, arraigned and charged with conversing with the devil in the form of a cat; a diabolic pact indeed.

>Moments Witch Way Rod Shone

Survival Programme Nicholas Battye, Chris Steele-Perkins and Paul Trevor

When three young photographers set out to document the growing crisis in Britain’s inner cities in the 1970s, they achieved a body of work so insightful that its relevance is undiminished in the new millennium. To mark the 25th anniversary of the publication of Survival Programmes, the British Library is preparing to launch the Survival Programmes Archive next year as a resource for a new generation. At the project’s inception in 1974, Chris Steele-Perkins was squatting in Belfast and Paul Trevor in Liverpool while Nick Battye was sleeping on friends’ floors. Over the next five years they collaborated under the name Exit, seeking out the country’s most impoverished neighbourhoods, meeting the residents and listening as they grappled with issues of race, religion, class and justice. Many of the stories of grinding unemployment, of wifebeating, and of the desperation that led to prostitution were harrowing. Yet the abiding mood of the resulting body of work was not one of pity but of outrage. In linking the causes of poverty to their crippling effects through image and text, Survival Programmes presented a unique achievement as a brutally honest document of the times. In looking at it again, its potency will resonate in every housing estate, every tower block, and every failing school that has not become a relic of a bygone age but stands as sorry testament to how little things have changed 8 Chris Steele-Perkins joined Magnum in 1982 and lives in London. Paul Trevor taught photography at the John Cass Institute and now lives in Malaga. Nicholas Battye became a Jungian mystic and seeker of spiritual truth. He died in 2004

Previous page and facing page, bottom: Chris Steele-Perkins. Below left; facing page, top: Paul Trevor. Below right: Nicholas Battye

Middlesbrough IN AMONG IT ALL Mrs Stenson (a resident of St Hilda’s estate, she is in her twenties and lives with her husband, who works on the buses, and their young son): I mean, I’m not a snob or anything but I like to think I’m a bit better than some of the folks around here. And I really don’t want to bring him up round here. You see, we applied for a transfer last summer. We were told, “Oh no, you’ve got to wait till you’ve lived in a council property two years.” Well, that two years was up on the 1st of January. The first thing that got me when we lived round here was the little three-and-four-year-old kids cursing and swearing. “You effin’ this, you effin’ that.” I said, “Hey, watch it!” He says, “Eff off missis, who d’you think you are?” I thought, “Blimey, we’re here! We’re in among it all, aren’t we?” (…) Exit: So what do you do most of the time? Mrs Stenson: Nothing. I get up in the morning. Do the housework. Go to town. Come back. Get his lunch. Sit and watch television all day and night … That’s it, my week. Every day’s the same. Do the washing, do the ironing, clean the windows, it’s just all housework. We never go out. Never. The only time I go out is when we’re on holiday, when we go down home. My husband sometimes calls in for a drink on his way home, but he won’t go for a drink on this estate, he calls at a pub in town. As for bringing anybody home, he wouldn’t. Exit: And your husband’s working seven days a week? Mrs Stenson: Yeah. You see he pays maintenance to his two children from his first marriage as well. So … he works seven days a week. I say on average he works about thirteen to fourteen hours a day, apart from when he should be having a day off. And if he’s working that day, which he always does, he only works eight hours.

Facing page, top; right: Paul Trevor. Facing, bottom: Chris Steele-Perkins

Middlesbrough WRITTEN OFF Teacher (from St Hilda’s Primary School, Middlesbrough): The future for most of these kids is the future of all the kids in this area – they’re written off. They’re written off from the time they were born … Our educational aim is to achieve a basic standard of literacy, that’s the bloody great goal out there. And if you’re getting a reading-age approaching ten when they leave [secondary school], you think, ‘Well, I’m getting somewhere.’ But these kids, in terms of traditional achievement at school, will get nothing at all – they will regress. By the end of the fourth year their reading age will have gone back to eight and a half. They can actually leave secondary school as remedial cases. They go backwards, so really the future’s nothing for them, not socially or politically or any other way. Brixton A TALE Exit: Can you say something about the attitudes of the white people to you when you first came over to this country? Blossom Gonzales: (42, born in Jamaica. She is separated from her husband and lives with her three children in a council flat on the Edmundsbury Estate, Brixton) Well, I think they were rather disgusting. (Laughs) I was working at Brixton Hill, Display Craft, and usually they don’t take coloured workers but I think the law came in then; they had to take on coloureds, so they took my friend and myself on. And they gave us a really hard time, you know. They wanted to know if we lived in tree-tops, if we were living in mud huts and so on. So this woman asked me one day, you know, where’s my tail? What do I do with it? I was so mad with her by this time I said to her, “If you’re coming to the toilet with me I’ll show you?” (Laughs) And she was so stupid that she actually followed me in, and so I made to put trousers down as to say, “You!” you know, “Really!” And then she realised I didn’t really have a tail and I was mad. So she apologised. So that’s one of my experiences. Exit: Mmm. What do you think causes it all? Blossom: Ah, the whites think they’re a superior race. (Laughs)

This page; facing page; top; bottom right: Paul Trevor. Facing, bottom left: Nicholas Battye

Facing page, top; bottom left: Paul

Birmingham Trevor. Facing, bottom; bottom right: Chris Steele-Perkins THE FINEST COUNTRY IN THE WORLD Mrs Sephton (Mr and Mrs Sephton and her husband have been married for thirty eight years and are now pensioners living in a new tower block in Lozells. Mrs Sephton works as a volunteer in the local Community Transport charity shop): I get on with them all right, you know, all of them. It’s just the odd ones, lately … since all this mugging and all this snatching of bags. But it’s mainly Jamaicans that are doing that. It’s very rare you find the Indian people into trouble. Once or twice I think they’ve caught a couple of white people but it’s very rare. Mr Sephton: I think that’s arisen because they’ve become unemployed and they must think it’s an easy way of getting some money. Immigrants come in this country … Mrs Sephton: They get everything, don’t they really? Everything they can have. Mr Sephton: Go to the Social Security and get their supplementary benefit, can’t they? Mrs Sephton: Well, this is it, you see. They haven’t even to be here twelve months, they haven’t to be here twelve hours, and they’ll give ’em some money to carry on with. I mean we couldn’t get it in another country, could we? This is a really silly country. It is really a silly country for giving out money … (…) Mind, I think whatever happens here, this is the best country in the world. England, definitely, I really do. I think it’s the finest country in the world. I haven’t been anywhere else, but the way things are, they let everybody come in and welcome people in, don’t they? I mean, we can’t go to other countries and be accepted the same, can we? They are all accepted here, aren’t they, more or less?

Stuart Griffiths arrived in Baghdad during the run up to the 2005 general election, travelling with other contractors in a heavily armoured American Rhino transport carrier. He was there to meet a group of British ex-servicemen with a background in security, who had set up a garage supplying PSD teams â&#x20AC;&#x201C; personal security detailsâ&#x20AC;&#x201C; in the deathly dangerous International Zone

Baghdad Garage Stuart Griffiths

The journey from the airport took half an hour. From the armoured glass window, I could see silhouettes of palm trees reflecting in a mass of water. When I arrived in the International Zone (IZ), I was told it had been purposely flooded due to insurgency attacks. Over a few beers later that evening, I got to know the guys in the “Amoeba Group”, mostly ex-servicemen with a history in Personal Security Detail (PSD). I met Swiss Dave, Mac and Brown, a civilian mechanic, who told me how he got the job at the garage from the “International section” at his local job centre back in England. Haji was the most senior in the garage and had over 23 years British Army experience. He explained that the garage was the mother hen of all PSD teams, the pumping engine room of Baghdad. “Mobile transport is the most important tool for these PSD companies. We are here to provide mechanical support for these guys. There is no bullshit here. It’s all about groundwork and they get our guarantee, which is our word. When the vehicle is ready, it’s ready.” The guys rent the garage compound from local Iraqis, with most of the mechanical parts bought from downtown Baghdad. The garage has an apprentice policy and employs 11 local Iraqis, who will be fully trained up in mechanical work, resprays, servicing, alterations, and armour plating. Without them it would be very difficult to function at the garage, yet the locals face intimidation if they are found to be working in the IZ. Only a few weeks earlier, a cousin of a worker was murdered. Haji was off on Christmas leave, so I watched while everyone prepared the necessary equipment in the garage workshop to take him to the airport: AK-47 assault rifles, “Trauma Kits” (field dressings and morphine), as well as a “Grab Bag” (with additional ammunition). They wore baggy shirts over their armoured vests and chest webbing. Haji carried his “lucky” golden gun, which had two rounds in the clip: “One for the victim, the other for my head, should it get that ugly,” he said. Haji also carried his own AK-47 assault rifle. I could feel the adrenaline pumping while the guys got ready. I guess they had done this journey many times before, but the anxiety was undiminished. “Iraq is heart attack cholesterol country,” said Haji. Mac added: “Put it this way, make sure you have a good shit, before you go on these journeys.” I watched Haji say his farewells and then they all drove off into the blistering afternoon sun. All was quiet in the garage. Mucka Gee the garage dog, left abandoned on a checkpoint and taken in by the garage, chewed my ankles playfully, while a radio blared a UK Forces radio show, airing messages from loved ones back home: “Miss you daddy.” “Hope you’re building huge sandcastles.” Suddenly I felt very homesick 8

Clients range from NGOs to government bodies, to most of the PSD companies operating in Iraq. The garage organises its own runs to Baghdad International Airport in low-profile armoured cars to avoid suspicion. The armoured proofing ranges from B12 (which is the highest ballistic rating) to the most common, B6. The cars are rarely cleaned and are caked with dust. Vehicles that turn up at the garage are â&#x20AC;&#x153;overtâ&#x20AC;? Mercedes, BMWs and Suburban Excursions

The International Zone is most dangerous at night. Mac provides a list of clear and present threats: a) Road traffic accident b) Friendly fire c) Enemy contact (insurgent attack) d) Kidnapping e) A mortar landing on your head. f) Garage food (the cook can only make omelettes)

Andrew Buurmanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s fascination with all things English led him to Handsworth, Birmingham, where behind the rows of terraced houses, the UKâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s largest allotment plot thrives

Lovely View Andrew Buurman

Miles grows chrysanthemums, and sells them down the cemetery for a couple of quid a bunch. Mr Baag grows methi, coriander and spring onions, preparing the ground meticulously beforehand with a rotivator. “You can tell who the allotments belong to,” says Andrew Buurman, who spent two years getting acquainted with the multicultural upkeepers of this most English of pursuits. “The English will grow flowers, or rows of carrots, the Irish like their potatoes, Asian families tend to use it like a little farm and the Caribbeans treat it more like a backyard, with a pumpkin here, a bunch of thyme there.” The 422 plots at the Uplands Allotments are less than a mile from the Lozells Road, which was known in bleaker times as Handsworth’s frontline, where homes and shops burned in the race riots of 1985. In contrast, the peaceful scenes presented here seem like an idealised, romantic vision of England’s green and pleasant land. Buurman sees allotments as a metaphor for Englishness today. “It’s still about warm beer and cricket on the village green, but it’s a constantly shifting idea. “Although allotments don’t provide 10 per cent of national produce anymore – which they used to – that cosy, post-war feeling has remained. It’s like having a cup of tea with your Grandad or your Uncle Joe, and we all love a cup of tea.” 8 Uplands Allotments by Andrew Buurman will be exhibited at Soho House, Handsworth, Birmingham from 22 June 2006

8 extra: More images from Andrew Buurmanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Allotments project can be seen online foto8.com/8xtra

PHOTOESPAÑA2006 IX International Festival of Photography and Visual Arts. Madrid, 1 June - 23 July www.phedigital.com

Jesús Abad Colorado, Región Colombiana de Choco, 2002

Naturaleza:

Welcome to our celebratory birthday edition marking our fourth anniversary and the start of a new volume, 5. We decided with this issue to set aside some space for ourselves, for England, hence the special design to our layout and pagination this time around. It’s good to celebrate our roots in England and in so doing, showcase the new talents in photography, writing and design that inspire our editorial decisions as well as pay tribute to established names already recognised in photography and journalism. The issue contains more than just the theme of England. As usual, we have chosen stories from around the world that we hope will surprise and work their way into your psyche by etching images full of feeling and resonance in your mind’s eye. In many cases the stories you see here are about revisiting – going back – to see things through the prism of time. Survival Programmes does this by holding a mirror up to modern times so we can see the faces and hear the words from an era which uncannily is not as long ago as it seems. Rod Shone follows the footpaths of rural history as he traces the landscapes which provided the backdrop to the last witch trial in Hertfordshire some 300 years ago, and Susan Meiselas talks about the need to revisit places familiar to her and the purpose in looking again at the events of her photographic past. Indeed it seems that looking back is an essential part of knowing where we are today and the great variety of stories published here all contain a vital reflection on past experiences in one way or another. In the case of Somalia, amid lost opportunities and a still-deteriorating situation, looking back is not a particularly heartening thing to do as David Pratt reminds us. But across the globe, where the residents of 103rd Street, looked like they had passed the point of no return, the way ahead for many appears positive. It is fitting therefore for EI8HT also to look back over its brief but productive early years, and in the process feel that its much stronger for: a) still being here against the odds and best advice at the time, and b) for knowing where we are today and having fresh ideas with each new edition. It’s the central role of a magazine to take stock of the present and portray it in the future so I hope you will find this a compelling issue of EI8HT today as well as for years to come. JL Editor’s Letter

8 Index Stuart Griffiths stuartgriffiths2@aol.com www.stuartgriffiths.net

Claude Baechtold Baechtold’s Best Afghanistan is published by Harry N. Abrams, Inc www.hnabooks.com www.baechtoldsbest.com

Chris Steele-Perkins Represented by Magnum Photos www.magnumphotos.com Paul Trevor p.trevor@virgin.net

Nicholas Battye, Chris SteelePerkins & Paul Trevor Survival Programmes in Britain’s Inner Cities was published by the Open University in 1982

Andrew Buurman www.buurman.co.uk

Tim Hetherington Represented by Panos Pictures www.panos.co.uk www.mentalpicture.org

François Daburon www.francoisdaburon.com

Andriana Lopez Sanfeliu www.adrianalopezsanfeliu.com

Editor Jon Levy

Contributing Editors Sophie Batterbury, Colin Jacobson, Ludivine Morel

Print Stones the Printers

Deputy Editor Lauren Heinz Features Editor Max Houghton Picture Editor Flora Bathurst Editorial Assistant Lally Pearson Columnists Tim Minogue John O’Farrell David Pratt John Vidal

Reviewers Bill Kouwenhoven, Sophie Wright Design Phil Evans & Rob Kester Special Thanks Maurice Geller, Leo Hsu, Sharon Raizada Reprographics John Doran & Adam Harvey at Wyndeham Graphics Advertising adverts@foto8.com

Paper Galerie Art Silk from M-real: cover 250gsm, text 130gsm Distribution Specialist bookshops & galleries – Central Books 020 8986 4854, Newstrade – Comag 01895 433800 ISSN 1476-6817 Publisher Jon Levy Subscription/Back Issues 8 issues, 2 yrs: £53-uk, £61- eu, £75-row 4 issues, 1 yr: £29-uk, £33-eu, £40-row Back issues from £9 (incl. p+p) subscribe@foto8.com

Rod Shone An exhibition of this work will take place at Photoworks, 26 Muswell Hill, London N10, from 15 – 17 May www.rodshone.com Ewen Spencer Open Mic is published by ES Books www.ewenspencer.com Andrew Testa Represented by Panos Pictures www.panos.co.uk

More Information W: www.foto8.com T: +44 (0)20 7253 8801 F: +44 (0)20 7253 2752 E: info@foto8.com Advertising Rates www.foto8.com/media Disclaimer The views expressed in this magazine are not necessarily the views of EI8HT or foto8 Ltd. Copyright © 2006 foto8 Ltd. All rights reserved. No part of this magazine may be copied or reproduced without the prior written consent of foto8 ltd EI8HT is published by foto8 Ltd 1– 5 Honduras Street London EC1Y 0TH United Kingdom

Contents Vol.5 No.1 June 2006

>Moments >08 Witch Way Rod Shone moved to the country and found a landscape haunted by the ghost of Jane Walkern >42 General Travel Claude Baechtold’s pictorial travel guide to Afghanistan >50 Picnic Protest Georgian residents picket a pipeline by François Daburon >Features – England >03 Grime Ewen Spencer’s intimate portrayal of the East London Grime scene >10 Survival Programmes Exit photographers undertook a mass observation of Britain’s working classes in the late 1970s, today their images and recordings are as relevant as ever >20 Baghdad Garage Stuart Griffiths discovers British ex-servicemen under the bonnet in the International Zone >24 A Patch of England Green-fingered allotment enthusiasts define our changing nation, finds Andrew Buurman >Features – Worldwide >34 Embarrassment of Oil Tim Hetherington treads the murky trail through Nigeria in search of oil >52 103rd Street Adriana Lopez Sanfeliu’s study of women and family life in Spanish Harlem >60 Look Away Unflinching photographs of survivors of acid attacks in Bangladesh by Andrew Testa

>Social Affairs Columns >44 Rage Without End John O’Farrell >Foreign Affairs Columns >46 Tuning In David Pratt >Environment Column >48 The Oil Curse John Vidal

>Inside >66 Susan Meiselas Reflects on her need to revisit the people and place that shaped her work in Nicaragua >Reviews >69 Drama and Shadows, The Granta Book of Reportage, Human Rights Watch Film Festival, European Fields, Stefan Lorant: The Godfather of Photojournalism, Snap Judgments, The Travelers, The Other Slovakia, Unseen UK, Life, Deutschlandbilder, Missions: Medicins du Monde, My Life in Politics >On My Shelf >79 Chris Steele-Perkins A new feature in which we ask: Which five books shaped you? Chris Steele-Perkins reveals his choices and a surprising amount of hair >Diary >80 Degree show diary and summer events >Listings >81 Picture agencies, special notices and professional resources >Scene >90 Crap Photographers Tim Minogue on the charms of the visually-challenged >Cover © Ewen Spencer 33

As the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta steps up its campaign for control of the regionâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s oil and the vast profits that flow from it, Tim Hetherington met the hostages, politicians and vigilantes, as well as local people, embroiled in the scramble

In the seven years since Nigeria ceased to be a military dictatorship, the country’s attitude to journalists has proved unyielding. Visa conditions are stringent, with freelance journalists not permitted entry. “Nigeria does not want journalists,” says Tim Hetherington, whose recent trip to the Niger Delta for the Mail on Sunday’s Night and Day magazine proved one of the most difficult of his career. “Nigerians use the word ‘embarrassed’ a lot, which can have a few different meanings. It is used to mean ‘not wanting to appear foolish’, yet it can also be used as a euphemism for having the shit beaten out of you. The government does not want to be ‘embarrassed’ by journalists, but in that sense, it means it doesn’t want the corruption to be revealed. “This fear of the press, and at the same time the intimidation of the press, has been built by the state apparatus and it pervades even now in that the press is self-controlled. It has become complicit in the same way the liberal media in the West has become complicit in its acceptance of war in Iraq. “This manifests itself in people in the Delta not wanting to be photographed at all. No one wants to have the light shone on them, because it benefits everyone to maintain the status quo. I felt I needed to keep a low profile, which, as a white man with a camera, was difficult.” Press interest in the area can be largely summed up in one word: oil. The billions of dollars of revenue reaped by Africa’s largest oil producer have not found their way to improving the lives of those who live in the far-flung communities of the Delta region; 70 per cent live on less than a dollar a day. As the region’s most famous activist Ken Saro-Wiwa knew, the politics of oil are both complex and deadly. All the oil giants are present from Shell to ExxonMobil, and are heavily criticised by human rights groups and environmentalists for the devastation caused by spills and the relentless gas flares like beacons of greed on the horizon. The most vehement opposition is voiced by Mend, the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta, which has kidnapped 14 expatriates since December 2005 as part of its campaign to put local people in control of the region’s riches. But, as Hetherington points out, there are many more players involved in the shape of militant groups, state actors and anti-state actors. “I’ve heard that up to a third of Nigerian oil is stolen,” he says. “The profits are used to fund weaponry and political campaigns, and it appears everyone is involved in an endless cycle. The balance is so fragile. To take the picture of the red flare, I had to pay the vigilante protection money – to protect me from him! Unlike in some countries, such as Burma, I knew I wasn’t in danger with regard to the police. They don’t know who you know, so they leave you alone. They wouldn’t want to be ‘embarrassed’.” Hetherington, who is based in Liberia, west Africa, was keen to document the Delta oil story because of its huge political significance, but was wary of playing to Western stereotypes of black men in balaclavas with guns. “Context is everything. Being based in Africa I hope provides a cultural and political context for what I do and why I’m there. It was great that the Mail commissioned the story, but the edit cut out some of the Nigerian characters, while leaving in the black aggressor in a ski mask, which lessened the story. The Delta was referred to in the story as a ‘white man’s grave’. If we are always trying to connect with our audience through race then we must stand accused of perpetuating racism. “I spent time in New York recently and I was once again struck by the ‘mediated’ world we in the West create; it’s so sophisticated. I think it’s healthy for me to have a base outside there. It’s a completely different reality” 8 Max Houghton Embarrassment of Oil Tim Hetherington

Gas flares at an Agip installation, (previous page). Oil and gas flares cause air pollution and acid rain affecting surrounding communities

A flare (far right) resulting from unused gas produced alongside crude oil pumped from a field in the Niger Delta

The Mend militants (top) had taken nine foreign oil workers hostage as part of their campaign to secure a greater share of the regionâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s oil wealth for local Ijaw people. The white flag signifies the Ijaw god of War, Egbesu

In the Niger Delta village of Okplema (above left). Despite the regionâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s oil wealth, the poverty and underdevelopment is stark Women sort the catch (above right) of fish in the Niger Delta village of Okplema

A farmer prepares palm nuts (top) to produce palm oil , against the backdrop of the Agip oil and gas terminal at Ebocha. In the 19th century, Nigerian palm oil was used as a lubricant for the machines of Britain’s industrial revolution – much as the region’s oil fuels the industrialised world today

Men collect water (above left) from a tap in the pipelines ferrying oil and gas from the federal refinery to the port through the residential district of Okreeka.

In the Niger Delta village of Pepe-ama (above right), a woman’s feet are covered by the oil that washes up on the banks of the Delta. The surrounding water and ecosystem has been polluted by spilled oil

Gas flares illuminate a local vigilante (following page) patrolling at night around the Agip installation at Ebocha

It being Afghanistan, we are also treated to 17 photographs of the best customised AK-47s, the 17 best pylons (you’ll find the ultimate on the road between Samagan and Kholm, saying as you asked) and the 17 best marijuana fields (the trippiest 19 miles west of Mazar-e Sharif). In the 17 best broken things, however, amid the cars and tanks and roads, there is no sign of a heart 8

Rather than bothering with the usual travel tips – where to eat, where to sleep, where to visit for deep cultural resonance – Baechtold has bypassed such pedestrian concerns and focused on the really fascinating. Each idiosyncratic category features a grid of 16 thumbnail prints, a map, and a larger picture of the best of the best. The General, listed under G for General, pictured here presumably achieved his ‘best in class’ award for his sartorial elegance. If you want to meet him, you’ll find him at the checkpoint between Gereshk and Kandahar.

As a holiday destination, not even the most enthusiastic tour operator would herald Afghanistan as the new Costa del Sol. Such definitions have not troubled the intrepid posse behind Baechtold’s Best in choosing the country as its inaugural destination for its new visual travel guide series.

>Moment General Travel Claude Baechtold

>Social Affairs Column Rage Without End John O’Farrell In February 2006, the centre of Dublin was walloped by the most serious riots in 25 years. Like the last time there was such an “interface” between the Garda Siochana and the Dublin mob, the catalyst was Northern Ireland. The spark that set off the riot on O’Connell Street was a parade by Ulster protestant loyalists who wished to highlight two things; the “forgotten” victims of the IRA, and the myopia in the Republic of Ireland towards the North, where the few who think at all about the conflict tend to side with nationalists.

Events proved the second point. The first was suspended, as the march never got off its starting block. The main opposition to the march were dissident Irish Republicans who oppose the Belfast Agreement, but could not have ordinarily drawn large numbers onto the streets. The rioters divided into three types and despite the particulars of the setting, they reflected the general types of rioters anywhere. The first type is the instigating group, usually populist and sectarian, but filled with “good” intentions, in this case, dissident IRA fans, in another case Islamists angered at Danish cartoons depicting their Prophet, or antiracism campaigners protesting at official indifference and police violence in the banlieues. The second type is the globally pissed-off. Under the rubric of anti-globalisation they vent their spleen at symbols of the new world order, from the starry circle of the EU flag to the golden arches of McDonald’s. They wish it was the ’60s, they wish they could be happy, they wish that something would happen. The difference between these two groups and the rioters of the New Left in the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s is that the Johhny-come-latelys can start a scrap, but can’t direct it. That is because of the third group. In a sense, the mob is as old as the city, but the mob that rioted in Dublin and Lozells in Birmingham last year, and the suburbs of France and the slums of many Latin American cities in recent years are driven by a motive that is impossible to rationalise: revenge. Reflecting on the French riots with his usual brio, sarcasm, snap judgment and accidental insight, Jean Baudrillard linked the nihilism of the car-torching with the rejection of the EU constitution, asserting that this was a refusal that was neither grand nor planned. They feel rejected, and reject back. “They are disaffiliated… But it is a short step from disaffiliation to desafio – defiance. All the excluded, the disaffiliated, whether from the banlieues, immigrants or ‘nativeborn’, at one point or another turn their disaffiliation into defiance and go on the defensive. It is their

only way to stop being humiliated, discarded or taken in hand.” Another veteran of ’68, the German feminist Alice Schwarzer, pointed up the twists that mark many a crucial turn from then to now in the dynamics of social unrest, in particular patriarchal Islamist attitudes among “the third generation (of European Muslims) who are often less well integrated that their grandparents”. This generation are bearing the brunt of the disappointment of their forebears who moved to Europe in search of dignity and prosperity, and are taking out their rage upon easy targets – schools and cars and cops during riot-time, their sisters on an everyday basis. Schwarzer notes the content and character of the change: “Stones were thrown in 1968, too. But the barricades were occupied by men and women, even if the leaders were all men. The revolt targeted authoritarian structures, but not the state as such. It was luxury shops that burned, not schools. And the war cry against the ‘pigs’ was ‘CRS SS!’ An inappropriate comparison, but at least a political one. Today’s equivalent is purely sexist: son of a bitch.” In another suburb, Lozells in Birmingham, atavism of an ethnic sort controlled days of violence and months of continued sullen rage. These riots were sparked by a rumour, that a black girl had been gang-raped by an Asian shopkeeper and his mates. Further investigation found little evidence, but unearthed a wave of economic resentment among blacks towards the perceived dominance of Asians over their “shared” community. This reflects a wider trend, identified by Amy Chua, whose book World on Fire highlighted the social impact of the simultaneous global spread of free markets and democracy. What tends to happen, she argues, is that local resentments towards “market dominant minorities” explode into violence. She starts by citing the murder in the Philippines of her aunt, a wealthy Chinese businesswoman, by her Filipino driver. The local police, who did not exactly exert themselves in catching the killer, wrote in their report that the motive for the

murder was “revenge”. As Chua points out, most of the millionaires in the Philippines are Chinese, as is also the case in Malaysia and Indonesia. Lebanese traders dominate commerce in west Africa and Japanese immigrants are key players along the west coast of Latin America, the best known being Alberto Fujimori, the former President of Peru. All of these communities have been targets of violent crime and riots in the past decade. They have also been the whipping boys of a new breed of populism expressed in demonstrations and elections. The nativist populism of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela and Evo Morales in Bolivia has updated the resentment of the indigenous poor towards minority mestizo dominance and updated it to include the gringo economics of the “Washington consensus” and market-dominant minorities such as the Japanese. This is rage without end. There is no programme, except winding back the clock to a freedom that no one remembers, because it never existed. When the suburbs of Bogata or Birmingham burned a generation or two ago, there were specific concerns, or a belief in a wider programme. The cute slogan that “another world is possible” is appealing, but in the absence of knowing what that world is and how it can be built, one is possessed by the dilemma faced by Albert Camus half a century ago over Algeria: the alternative future may be even more monstrous than the grim present. The other “actually existing” alternative withered and died at the end of the 1980s. And the more we know about its daily reality provides the answer to Camus’ dilemma, and quarantines against taking risks on hope. Thus we reach for cudgels instead of ploughs, for rocks to throw instead of bricks to build, for Molotov cocktails instead of Cuba libres (which someday, it may be). Until that ship comes in, all we have is our small flotillas 8

Policemen protect the Sorbonne University from demonstrating students, 10 March 2006, Paris ÂŠ Philippe Brault/Oeil Public

John Oâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Farrell is Communications Officer of the International Conflict Research Centre at the University of Ulster www.incore.ulster.ac.uk

>Foreign Affairs Column Tuning In David Pratt As hell-holes go, Mogadishu is in a class of its own. For years the no-man’s land that divides the north and south of the city has been the lair of looters and shooters. It’s a tense and eerie place, where the frequent flat pop of Kalashnikov fire epitomises Somalia’s lawlessness. In its canyons of bomb-blasted ruins, old Cinzano signs remain pinned to Swiss cheese walls and telephone poles lean at ominous angles, the stubs of their severed tops long since stripped of wires for sale on the black market.

Through the once languid boulevards now awash with garbage and sand, the humid wind off the Indian Ocean has left a wavering sea of blue plastic bags hanging from every scrap of withered vegetation. According to one recent Foreign Office report, “Somalia has completely collapsed as a functioning state.’’ From the moment you arrive there’s no mistaking it. For starters, nobody asks for your passport when you fly in. In Mogadishu, the only “official welcome’’ – if you are lucky enough not be kidnapped – is from henchmen of whatever warlord controls that particular dirt airstrip demanding a $20 “customs fee’’. Ever since strongman Mohammed Siad Barre was ousted by these clan-based warlords in 1991, the country has been without a government. During the past 15 years of anarchy, life in Somalia has at times provided a glimpse into a near post-apocalypse society where only the vicious survive. This is a place where people live on less than a dollar a day, and even rubbish is a commercial commodity to be fought over. A place where someone worth abducting or with anything worth stealing, would need an escort of at least six armed men for a journey of a few hundred yards. Famine stalks here too. Over the past few months, an intensifying civil war combined with the effects of the drought that has swept much of east Africa has left the country hovering once again on the brink of a humanitarian catastrophe. “Angry, hungry men with Kalashnikovs in search of food somewhere will lead to more conflict,” warned Jan Egeland, the UN’s most senior aid official, recently. Not that many people seem to have been listening. For the fact is that Somalia dropped off the global political radar some time ago. Strange really, given all the attention the country drew from the Bush administration in the wake of 9/11, when it was perceived by Washington as a future Afghanistan, complete with

emerging terrorist cells keen to launch apocalyptic attacks on the West. That the lure of radical Islam could reconcile disparate Somali clans and offer security and unity to a ruined nation (just as the Taliban did in Afghanistan) was Washington’s worst nightmare. Indeed by early 2002, George Bush was insisting that Somalia was full of terrorism. He was right, it was full of terrorism, but not the al-Qa’ida variety to which he was referring. Just the familiar African type, that dangerous marriage of guns and hunger. Combating that axis of evil would have been a battle worth fighting, I remember thinking, during a visit to the country. But it was not to be, and Somalia instead was left to flounder. Not surprisingly that political and economic neglect has today fostered the very Islamic militancy and chaos that Washington and others were keen to avoid in the first place. “The problem is that much of the international community has lost touch with Somalia, and doesn’t know who to deal with inside the country. So it’s easy for the US to scaremonger or embrace warlords only too keen to play up the terrorist fear for their own ends,’’ says Abdul Khadir Yahya Ali, of the Centre for Research and Dialogue, a think-tank, part of the War Torn Societies Project funded by European cash and run by Somali intellectuals. As I write, Islamic fighters have taken to the streets in an effort to boost the power of a group of fundamentalist clerics, who have been trying to assert themselves as a military and political force in the lawlessness that prevails. Their campaign comes just as an interim government made up of many of the warlords who toppled Somalia into chaos tries to assert control. Seeking to curb the clerics’ growing power, some warlords-turned ministers and businessman have in turn formed an armed coalition, called the Alliance for Restoration of Peace and Counter Terrorism. This “alliance”, many Africa-watchers say, is now getting weapons and logistical backing from the US.

Caught in the middle meanwhile are Somalia’s long suffering civilian population. In a country ravaged by drought and where as Oxfam recently reported, people have been forced to drink their own urine, Mogadishu’s “sky shooters” arms market is awash with brand new imported assault rifles and rocket propelled grenade launchers. How much better it would have been for countless innocent Somalis now caught up in the bloodletting, that if instead of playing power politics, and arming “friendly” warlords, Washington and other African nations, had concentrated their efforts on alleviating the poverty that subsequently thrust Somalia towards the embrace of Islamic militancy a few years ago. As in other parts of Africa there are individuals and movements inside Somalia itself, that constitute a civil society who with the right support could have become powerful lobbyists against these warlords, dictators and other militants abusing the interests of the people at large. Whenever I have visited Somalia, time and again I have listened to and been impressed by the people who constitute this clarion voice of sanity in the midst of the madness that once again is gripping the country. People like Miriam Ghassem, a businesswoman who needs to employ her own gunmen to survive. Somalia’s recent history she says is in great part the tale of grave miscalculations made by foreigners in a very foreign land. “The Americans have to know that we too are sick and tired of terrorism – the terrorism of the warlords and hunger that we’ve lived with for so long now,” Miriam told me the last time I visited. Because of the dangers in reporting from the country, Somalia’s agony has stayed off our television screens and goes largely unnoticed. But in Mogadishu’s dusty streets and in the parched countryside the suffering is there for all to see. The time has come for the world to do something about it of which it can be proud 8

Somalis tune in and listen intently to news from the BBC World Service, as the declaration of independence of the Republic of Somaliland is announced. Somaliland, 1991 ÂŠ Hamish Wilson / Panos Pictures

David Pratt is Foreign Editor of the Sunday Herald.

FOTO8

FOTO8.COM HOSTGALLERY.CO.UK +44 20 7253 8801 48

photo by jacob aue sobol

AWARD WINNING QUARTERLY MAGAZINE EI8HT BOOKSHOP SOURCE FOR ESSENTIAL PHOTOGRAPHY FOTO8 LONDON’S PREMIERE PHOTOJOURNALISM EXHIBITION VENUE HOST

>Environment Column The Oil Curse John Vidal If the first rule of the environment is that pollution always follows the poor, the second is that where there’s an oil or gas pipeline there’s always trouble. From the wilderness of Alaska, last month polluted by millions of litres of crude when a BP line burst, to the Niger Delta where villagers tap into the world’s densest network of pipes, they are becoming the front line of the 21st century oil wars – the targets of separatists, saboteurs, terrorists, crooks, armed gangs and environmentalists.

They have become the stuff of dreams and nightmares. For some people, like Hugo Chavez, the left wing president of Venezuela, pipelines are the way to link Latin America from north to south and create a new economic and political block to rival the US or Europe; for the remote U’wa tribe of northern Colombia who believe oil is the blood of the earth and through whose ancestral territory a major line passes, they are literally sucking the world dry. For oil companies they are hell to negotiate and construct and for financial institutions like the World Bank they are the best way to keep the global economy going. But for the majority of people who see them, they are the only glimpse they will ever have of the wealth that governments promise them but seldom deliver. The Cano Limon line in Columbia is probably the most defiled piece of property in the world. In the past 15 years it has been bombed at least 1,000 times by Marxist guerillas, spilling more than 2.9 million barrels of crude oil – more than 10 times the amount spilled by the Exxon Valdez tanker in 1989. Last year alone, the pipeline was bombed on average every two days. Those of the Niger Delta may be even more vulnerable. Every year up to 15 per cent of all the oil produced in Nigeria is believed to be stolen from pipelines and wellheads. Villagers may take a chisel and try to break into the metal arteries that crisscross their land, but their search for oil to cook with or to keep the lights on is small beer. Breaking into pipelines has become big business for armed gangs who are now taking ocean-going barges deep into the maze of creeks in the delta, tapping straight into pipelines and well heads and transferring thousands of gallons at a time directly into tankers anchored off shore. It’s known as “bunkering” and last year Shell said that it believed 100,000 barrels a day of oil was being stolen from its lines alone. If you wonder why oil is much more expensive these days, it’s partly because oil pipelines are being attacked in Nigeria. The problem is that demand for oil

has never been so great and fields must be opened as fast as possible to keep up with the unquenchable oil thirst of the West, and the new demand of countries like China and India. Academics have now realised that when oil is discovered in a developing country, it invariably leads, over several years, to what has become known as “oil curse” – the phenomenon that oil brings more trouble than it is worth, like a rise in civic disorder and large scale corruption, increased chances of terrorism and political destabilisation, and environmental destruction. Take the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline now pumping up to 1 million barrels of oil a day from Azerbaijan on the Caspian sea to Turkey on the Mediterranean – 1,100 miles of political dynamite passing through three unstable countries, skirting the heart of the Kurdish region in south-east Turkey and passing within 60 miles of Georgia’s lawless Pankisi Gorge. The oil companies and banks involved in this $4bn project say that 30,000 landowners, 450 communities and 750,000 people along its route have been consulted and in many cases compensated, but human rights groups and environmentalists believe they are sleepwalking into what could become a security disaster, with the pipeline becoming a focus of attacks by separatists and others. There are good grounds for fearing the worst. A pipeline linking the old oilfields of Kirkuk in northern Iraq with the Turkish Mediterranean port of Ceyhan, has been out of action for months because of frequent attacks by insurgents and criminal gangs. Iraq’s northern export route to Turkey has been effectively closed. And it is only a matter of time, say analysts, before the BTC pipeline attracts separatist trouble. Meanwhile, the $3bn, 665-mile pipeline from the Doba oilfields in Chad, Africa’s newest oil state, to the Atlantic terminal at Kribi in Cameroon, may have directly led to last month’s coup attempt. Chad is one of the world’s most corrupt countries and ever since

oil was found, it has been predicted that the oil wealth would be taken by the elite, distort the economy and strengthen repression even though oil giant ExxonMobil and the World Bank said that it would bring wealth and development to the poorest. It has only been open two years, but poor farmers say that they have been displaced and refused compensation, while other villagers claim they have been denied access to water. The oil companies know that their pipelines have become the targets, and are trying ever more elaborate ways to defend them. In Latin America, some are paying directly for governments to employ the army to protect them and in the Middle East and Africa, they are demanding that the land several miles on either side of the pipes is effectively ceded to the company and governments face heavy financial penalties if the pipeline for any reason fails to work. Amnesty international has called this “a worrying precedent”. Back in Latin America, Hugo Chavez has come up with the most ambitious and visionary pipeline of the lot – a $20-50bn plan to carry natural gas 10,000km through forests, across rivers and over mountains and plains around the continent. The fact that it would need thousands of miles of road and would inevitably hasten the destruction of ecosystems in almost every country through which it would pass has not been considered. Nor, indeed, has the fact that it is cheaper to transport the gas by ship and would cost a fortune to pump so far, or indeed that it would be impossible to defend. History suggests that just as people took leave of their senses in the 19th century when they hunted for gold, so today the promise of oil and gas may be enough to make people mad 8 John Vidal is the Environment Editor for The Guardian

>Moments Picnic Protest François Daburon This elegantly composed picture, echoing Cartier-Bresson’s genteel family picnic on the banks of the River Marne, belies the uncertain future of the village of Dgvari. Located in the heart of a landslide zone, the small Georgian village was scheduled for evacuation in 1989. After 15 years of waiting, the villagers then heard the news that the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline would be laid just a few metres from their homes. Somehow, project managers from the BP consortium financing the pipeline had forgotten to take Dgvari into consideration during the study of the social and environmental implications of the pipeline.

Today, some are using the construction of the pipeline to migrate to safer places. “We are rebuilding our houses every five years, and at night time we can hear the earth cracking,” says one villager. “We have to move out of here as soon as possible.” The pipeline is expected to pump one million barrels of oil a day by 2010, a fact which is appealing to a man whose family made its fortune through oil. “Greater energy security through a more diverse supply of oil for global energy markets, these are the engines of global growth, and with this pipeline, those engines can now run at a high speed,” said George Bush 1, on the eve of the pipeline’s construction 8 1

Energybulletin.net

Amy and Cope; “I first got pregnant at the age of 15. When our son Joshua was 3 months old Cope got arrested and went to jail for a year. I met Cope in High School in 1995 and this Valentines we are heading nine years together”

Welcome to Spanish Harlem, where the women walk sexy and the guys talk tough. New York City’s most affluent district, the Upper East Side is just seven blocks — and as many worlds – away. Adriana Lopez Sanfeliu began to document this tightly knit Puerto Rican community four years ago, and over time has sought to appreciate why it is better to be somebody on the block than nobody in the wide world 52

The women hire a stripper of their taste for a birthday party

Jesus and Cope hang out inside their building

“Right now [three years earlier] Cope is not working. He goes to the street to make easy money. He sells dope [heroin]. He’s been doing this since he was 12. If, God forbid, he gets locked up again he’s gonna do time … What’s gonna happen to me and the kids?” Amy

“The kind of life I would like to have ... I would like to have my own house with a backyard, three cars and a house for us to go on vacation. But this is the life I have now and this is the one I’m gonna get. I’m just waiting to see what the future holds for me after this baby is born” Amy

It wasn’t easy to gain to access to this world at first. Even though I am Spanish, to them I was still a white woman. They thought I was an undercover cop and it took months to let them get to know me. I gained the trust of the men first. Jesus introduced me to the rest of the group; he was recovering from being shot at the time, and was hanging out on the street with the other guys. As I’ve got to know everyone, I have become aware of the loop that repeats itself in their lives. When I first met them, all the guys were dealing drugs. Most of them would use cocaine but they sold heroin for profit. Often they hadn’t had a father figure in their lives and had grown up in poverty with so little education. Drug dealing is the fastest way to get cash. Everybody’s hero is Al Pacino in Scarface; they’ve got the poster on their walls. When their grandmothers arrived in America, there was work, but this generation, these guys, haven’t had the excitement of achieving something. They got caught in a loop of disappointment and passivity. This is why there is the attitude that it’s better to be somebody on your block than nobody in a new horizon. They know a new place might lead to a better life, but they’re reluctant to leave the block. They believe it’s their fate. Things have improved in the time I’ve been around. Not one of them sells drugs now. Cope, who is father to Amy’s three boys, used to sell heroin, but now he works for a courier service. He’s so happy he doesn’t sell drugs anymore. All he wants is to be a good father to his kids. The eldest is 10 now, and very conscious of what his daddy gets up to. Gradually, I gained the trust of the women too. Sheila, Amy, Mercy and Midget have all let me into their lives. I was there when Midget gave birth to Gabriel and I was there when Amy gave birth to her third child. She hates the picture I took of her pregnant, looking in the mirror, and she’s mad at me for using it … but in a good way! She’s such a coquette; she always wants to be the star. Amy and Cope and their three sons live in a tworoom apartment with Amy’s brother, his wife, their child and the grandmother. That’s normal. It’s why the staircase and the street become extensions of the apartment. I’ve even seen a blow-up swimming pool on the sidewalk. No one 103rd Street Adriana Lopez Sanfeliu

Midget and Mickey while expecting their first child â&#x20AC;&#x201C; a boy they named Gabriel. They both live with their families. They hope to be able to have their own home soon Amy and Cope playing with a fire hydrant in the street. Summertime can be one long party. Sometimes thereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s even a blow-up swimming pool put out on the sidewalk

After Amy gives birth, Marcy and Sheila visit her at The Mount Sinai Hospital in northern Manhattan A young girl from the block, asleep on the back of a car, as she waits for her parents to go back home Mickey shows the scar from an argument with a neighbour on the block

has the money to go out, but everyone likes to party, so they do it on the block. The guys are so territorial anyway, they prefer to stay home. There’s a strong division between the male and female worlds in this community. The women get together a lot to share problems about babies or families, but also just to party. I went to a party with Mercy that was just for women. The only man there was a stripper. The hip-hop culture is strong, and most of the women are interested in being very sexy, into being desired, being on show. The female icon is Jennifer Lopez, without a doubt. Midget is not like this at all. She doesn’t like to be on the street or to go partying. Even though she goes out with Mickey and they have a baby together, Gabriel, she still lives with her family, who are very strict Catholics. She’s a very private woman and she brings a sense of structure to Mickey’s life. He’s in a rehabilitation programme at the moment because he just got out of jail – for drug dealing. The two of them are working hard on being together and it looks like they’re going to make it. I feel quite excited about their future. Things have definitely improved; I’ve seen it. The wasteland by the block is finally starting to look like a park. The crowd have always partied there, even when it was grim and full of abandoned cars. I took the picture of the girl on the bench next to the huge bear at a barbeque there. Everyone was cooking chicken and steak and drinking beer. I looked over and saw her and it made me stop and think about what it is to come of age in this neighbourhood. The risk is that if anything goes wrong, if times become difficult unexpectedly, then the old patterns resurface. But no one’s heading in that direction at the moment. I’m hopeful” 8 Adriana Lopez Sanfeliu was talking to Max Houghton

“We were having a BBQ in the summer of 2003 in this empty space on the block. It was pretty grim then – it was where people used to go to sit and drink alcohol or dump cars. The bear had been on the bench all day, but I hadn’t paid much attention to it until the girl sat next to it. It made me think what it is to come of age in this neighbourhood. It looks better round there now – more like a park”

Nobisa Begam is 15 years old. In one act of devastating yet casual cruelty, her face and thus her future were irrevocably altered. Her skin was excoriated in an acid attack by a man whose marriage proposal she had refused. She did not flinch when photographer Andrew Testa asked to take her picture on a visit to the Acid Survivorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Foundation hospital in Dhaka, Bangladesh, where she was receiving counselling and medical attention for her injuries Look Away

Nobisa Begam (previous page and far right) photographed three days after acid was thrown in her face for refusing a marriage proposal. She is being treated at the hospital run by the Acid Survivors Foundation in Dhaka, which offers medical care and counselling to victims of acid attacks Lilima, 26, (top left) also had acid thrown in her face for refusing a marriage proposal Angura, 30, (bottom left) lies with her son and mother. Her husband and another man threw acid on her and then burnt her eyes with a blowtorch after she refused her husband permission to take another woman into their home This woman (bottom right), who chose to remain nameless, is a victim of the same crime as many of the others: revenge for refusing a marriage proposal

More than 2,000 women have been disfigured and mentally and physically scarred for life in Bangladesh since 1999, according to ASF, the Acid Survivors Foundation. Many more cases are thought to go unreported in the remote villages where these vicious crimes often occur. Rejecting a marriage proposal, refusing to let a husband bring another woman into the marital home, and disputes over dowry are cited as “reasons” for the attacks. The perpetrators use the cloak of night to target their victim, whom they leave destined to walk in the shadows, to hide from the outsider’s gaze. Monira Rahman, who runs ASF, has looked after women who have been forced to drink acid by their husbands for perceived acts of disobedience. She has seen babies of seven months whose eyes hang from their heads after being drenched in acid. She will never forget three-year-old Popoy who lived in the refuge with her blind mother, of whom she was terrified and would only spend time with her in the dark. As well as caring for the victims of acid attacks, the foundation is working to eliminate acid violence in a region in which nine per cent of burns injuries are acid related. Awareness is increasing and men and women marched together against acid attacks on International Women’s Day in Dhaka earlier this year. The crime is now punishable by the death penalty, though to date no such sentence has been carried out. Nobisa will return to her village with her mother when her treatment comes to an end. She says she feels like rotten fruit; no hand will want to touch her skin again 8 Look Away Andrew Testa

Monira Rahman, Director of the ASF

Nobisa lies on her bed at the ASF

The triage room of the ASF

>Inside As Susan Meiselas, the documentarian, prepares to take her latest work, Nicaragua: Reframing History to Arles, Max Houghton talks to her about revisiting past projects and about her abiding interest in looking at people looking EI8HT: Why did you want to revisit Nicaragua? Susan Meiselas: Sometimes I worry I go back more than I go forward. I’m constantly thinking about time and the impact of time on the work that I’ve done, and that began very early for me. I was involved in Central America over a number of years as history was shaped and significantly changed, beginning at the popular insurrection in ’78/ ’79, continuing through the triumph of the Sandinistas and the building of the revolution, the contra war. I was working a lot in El Salvador, then Guatemala, crossing boundaries and borders back and forth, and I still kept thinking about those places shifting. So at the 10 year mark – this was the first more formalised project – I did a film called Pictures from a Revolution, in which I went to find the people in the photographs 10 years later. And then I’ve gone back at other points in time. On the first anniversary, I organised a show of foreign photographers’ work, because one of the great tragedies for Nicaragua was that Somoza bombed the opposition newspaper La Prensa during the last offensive in June 1979. It was very important for me to bring it back because there was nothing of their own that survived … or very, very little. There was an archive but it existed outside of the country. This was seminal for me, even leaping 10 years later when I would do the work in Kurdistan. People document and then take who probably it is the most meaningful.

I also went back for the 20th anniversary, and at certain other junctures for other kinds of reasons just to keep track. Reframing History was very tied to the notion of the 25th anniversary and what it meant for people. Partly that number is interesting to me – 25 – because half the country is probably under 25, so that means they hadn’t lived the history that I’d recorded. We also revisited the people I had filmed at the ten year mark so it was kind of like a relationship in time. 8: A recent Sunday Times article on Don McCullin’s return to Cambodia cited ‘emotional reasons’ for revisiting. Would you say the same was true for you? SM: There are always emotional dimensions to it. A very special kind of bonding happened there, but I was desperately curious mostly. I wanted to maintain some kind of a connection to this place. For me it’s difficult separating from places I become involved with. I try to find that point at which it is OK to leave or move on in some way. There’s a line close to the end of the film Pictures from a Revolution where I know I have to move on and I’m not sure what it means to do that. It’s because we have all these threads of relationships within us, that we continue to weave the future. Added to that, I’ve always been interested in the relationship of the photographs to the community from which they have come. So Reframing History is really in that

continuum. I wanted to create sites of memory – 18 murals were placed in the country, in four different towns and one was placed in the university. The number 19 was to symbolise July 19, which was the day that Somoza was overturned. In some cases buildings didn’t exist anymore or there were different problems like someone who owned a house that had been the site of an original picture and we found they weren’t sympathetic to the Sandinistas even today. That one ended up being hung as a banner above the street. There were so many different and interesting encounters with people about what the photographs meant … though they were lodged in the past, they’re still very present. 8: I can imagine a documentary about people’s reactions to you taking the murals back … where does it end? SM: Well, exactly. Interestingly, when we did Pictures from a Revolution, we carried the book around, and page by page, that was the way we found people. We filmed the process of each encounter but we decided not to make a film about that because it was a kind of repeat feeling. I feel with ideas of looking and the process of looking, there’s not always an immediate response in language … of what it is that is being experienced or could be shared. Ultimately that’s what the video piece of this installation that will be at Arles is about: looking at people looking. 8: How do you feel about a purely aesthetic response to people looking at your work? SM: I did a show in England, at Camera Works, very early on in the Nicaragua work, 1981 or ‘82, about trafficking images. This was after I had done the book, I was looking at both how I came to figure out which 70 or so images would make the narrative … that could possibly encompass this year that I’d experienced, and then looking at what the media had chosen to publish. It also looked at the images that had come back to Nicaragua and been claimed by Nicaraguans, and used for stamps and rugs. There was a whole tracking

of those images coming back and finding new lives within a Nicaraguan context within those first years. In the same show, I framed the images that had been bought by museums at that time thereby identifying certain images as art or of historical value – the gruesome picture I made of a severed torso in the middle of a lush landscape was an image that immediately people were interested in. I have mixed views about it because in that early period I felt that photographs belonged in books and magazines and exhibitions, I never really thought of them as principally for one audience. I knew very early on that I was making a book, partly because of pictures that couldn’t be published or weren’t being published. The body in the landscape being the central one; no one would go anywhere near it but it was so central to me for understanding what the whole struggle was about. The book had to be the only means through which I could contextualise my own work – that made sense. An exhibition at that time wasn’t about making art it was about creating an environment for a different kind of reflection. There were a lot of different kinds of shows that I did. The first one was colour Xeroxes all around a room and that felt coherent at that time, somewhere in ’78, ’79, and had a very immediate effect. I co-curated a show of 30 photographers’ work from El Salvador at ICP in the fall 2005, and an image I made of the Mano Blanco, a sign of the death squad on the door of a peasant that had been killed, was bought by three people. Who are they? Why do they want that image? What is it part of for them? Are they hanging it in their living room or is it part of a collection that they’ll some day give to a museum? The hard thing is very often you’re separated from that collector, very often there is an intermediary and you can’t know who’s collecting what for whatever purpose. So trying to track all these different meanings, let’s say, is very difficult … 8: We were toying with an idea of collaboration in which dealers and gallery owners pay some sort of levy when they sell ‘concerned’

Mural project in Cova da Moura (top left), a Cape Verde immigrant neighbourhood on the outskirts of Lisbon, Portugal, June 2005 Masaya, Nicaragua, (left) and Esteli, Nicaragua, (above), July 2004. Nicaragua mural project installation based on original photographs taken in 1978 of the popular insurrection against Somoza Essex Junction, Vermont, USA, 1973 (next page). From Carnival Strippers, Lena on the Bally Box

photography, for want of a better term. SM: It’s interesting that social documentary photography or photojournalism bears this responsibility of an ethical concern whereas the world of the new documentarians in the art mode doesn’t inhabit that space at all – they don’t feel the burden of it in any sense. I think it is the responsibility of the image maker – if you’re serious about what you do, and you take on what these

relationships mean – it involves this question of going back to going back. You can’t go back to every photograph and to every relationship in every image but somewhere you have to explore that process for yourself. 8: Can you describe what it is about the photograph’s unique properties as a time capsule or cultural artefact? SM: The photograph is a point of juncture; the complexity

comes in when you try to work out how people might feel about it. People then shift themselves about how they feel about being in a particular photograph. In Carnival Strippers, the most enjoyable thing for me about reprinting it, was finding the people in those photos 30 years later … I could only find a few of them. To figure out how it felt for them to see themselves back then as young woman loose on the streets, running away

from home and then to reflect on that experience and the fact that they had been exposed to some degree. I mean there was, I felt, a very collaborative process in the making of the book in the interviews and that whole exchange. I had no idea about how they felt about themselves over time – but I wanted to. The book was reprinted but I haven’t done anything with the new interviews – I didn’t incorporate those into the reprint

… I didn’t feel I found enough to work with, but maybe that’s my personal experience comparable to Don’s, bringing the book back to three or four of the women, was in and of itself the important part of it. I didn’t photograph them. 8: Did you want to? SM: No. I just really wanted to spend some time with them. So we talked, I asked them if I could record the conversation. Part of that was also the timeframe. I was also really interested in what had happened to the girls’ shows and why they had been closed and I was trying to find out more information than I knew. That history seemed to be important, but many of the central players, the managers, were no longer alive, so I felt like I had too much of a fragmentary trace, not enough to substantiate. 8: Has any project since Strippers or Nicaragua had same impact on you personally? SM: Yes, but very different. The evolution to the Kurdistan project, not that anyone else sees the logic, began with the La Prensa bombing: what does it mean as a Western photographer to have a history of a people who no longer have what they had? Who am I to have this? Who does it belong to? That’s the basic question. And, further, how do you deal with

this culture of reclaiming images as theirs with or without my permission? All this informed the work I chose to do in Kurdistan which brought together bits and pieces of a history that was made for many different purposes by many kinds of photographers and people using a camera – missionaries, anthropologists, colonialists – which together give a shape of something in the past but which was inaccessible to the community itself. So I think those experiences lead me. 8: Is Kurdistan ‘finished’? SM: No, because Kurdistan for me now is about when is it going to be right, safe enough, to bring that archive back. It should live there. There’s a part of it that should be digitised and available to the community. I’d like to have the show there, which travelled for eight years in Europe and was important for the exile Kurdish community but I’d love it to be back in Iraqi Kurdistan today. It was deeply disturbing to read about museum of Halabja [the photographic memorial to the 1988 gas attack on the town by Saddam] being attacked in mid-March, which made me wonder whether or not things are stable enough emotionally, psychologically and culturally to bring an archive back.

8: Do we always need to go back in order to go forward? SM: It’s not necessarily the right thing for everyone to do but you have to be who you are. Certainly that’s been true for me in some ways. Some people don’t perceive going back as going forward, which is the other aspect. For me frankly Reframing History was the perfect circle; it had a very deep resonance. I could not have known that when I first got on the plane to go to Nicaragua in June 1978 where my life would lead me but it felt in such harmony and it’s hard to achieve that or feel that even for moments 8 Les Rencontres D’Arles will be running from 4 July – 17 September www.rencontres-arles.com

>Reviews

Drama & Shadows: Photographs 1945-1950 Stanley Kubrick Published by Phaidon www.phaidon.com £39.95 (240pp Hardback) Stanley Kubrick’s importance as a film director is widely recognised; his career as a Look magazine photographer is not nearly as well-known. In 1945, at the age of 17 and still in high school, Kubrick sold his first picture to Look. He was soon hired onto the pictorial magazine’s staff where he produced numerous photo essays over five years. In the 1990s, curator Rainer Crone, with Kubrick’s encouragement, tracked down the negatives that Kubrick had made for Look, the whereabouts of which were unknown to Kubrick and for which Kubrick no longer held the copyright. The rediscovered negatives resulted in a travelling exhibition in 1999, and in this book, Drama & Shadows: Photographs 1945-1950. The pictures collected in Drama & Shadows reveal Kubrick’s enthusiasm both for exploring his

environment with photography (as seen in pictures taken on the New York subway using a concealed cable-release pulled up his sleeve), and for exploring photography through manipulation of his environment (as evidenced in the numerous staged and lit pictures, often using his friends as actors). Kubrick clearly loved making pictures; he loved watching people’s faces, watching people move through their surroundings, and watching people perform for his camera. The same visual curiosity informs both a series of images of a young Leonard Bernstein clowning on a dock and the brief sequence of pictures, “Kids fighting in the street”. The pictures in the book read overwhelmingly as a love letter to New York (though the book also includes work from Chicago, Florida and Portugal). As a view onto the city and its surroundings in the late 1940s, or as a monograph of the work of a very good press photographer, the book is fine; the pictures are compelling and the reproductions are first-rate. Unfortunately, the organisation of Dramas & Shadows and the written commentary accompanying the photographs conspire to divorce these pictures from the meaningful contexts that might have drawn a reader to the book in the first place. These pictures were recovered because they were produced by Stanley Kubrick. Under what circumstances would an unknown Look photographer’s work be published so handsomely? Crone justifies the photographs by arguing that Kubrick was a sort of savant who was autonomously redefining photography while laying the groundwork for the allegorical

films that he would make. But while the photographs are very good, they are not groundbreaking; Kubrick is not recognised as either an influential photojournalist or an outsider artist. And while Kubrick’s pictures do exemplify his dramaturgical impulses, they are not unique in the photography of that time in doing so. Crone is mistaken to see the Kubrick who surreptitiously photographed subway riders or zoo-goers in 1946 as the same photographer who created the contrived photo essay on debutante and would-be actress Betsy von Furstenberg in 1950. Had the book been organised chronologically rather than thematically (Metropolitan Life, Entertainment, Celebrities, Human Behavior), we would have been able to witness the development of a photographic sensibility that shifted from a street photography with a focus on hardship and alienation to a conventional and increasingly heavily lit and staged magazine story form emphasising glamour,

even in backstage settings. The pictures become increasingly efficient over time as Kubrick masters his allegorical language. A second missed opportunity is to see these pictures in the context in which they were published. What did these pictures look like in the magazine layout? Putting aside Kubrick’s film-making legacy, this archive of a post-war picture press photographer’s work over five years offers a rare window into the publishing conventions of that moment. In the book’s presentation, it is not clear whether some or all of the images were published in Look or whether pictures identified with a story were actually published in that story. There is no sense as to which pictures were selected because they served the magazine’s needs, and which ones were selected – either for Look or for Drama & Shadows – because Kubrick himself found them successful or satisfying. As a result we have a book of beautiful, untethered photographs. Leo Hsu

like this one, it is sobering to think it is rarely available in its natural habitat. That newspapers have all but abandoned the longer report, even reportage itself, is a travesty. Because all the writing presented here is essentially journalism, the first draft of history, even, the omission of a date on each piece is at odds with its factual content. It is a treat to read Germaine Greer on passionate form, writing on women and power in Cuba, drawing out a fascinating comparison on cervical smear tests in Thatcher’s Britain (the NHS unable to cope with demand) and Cuba, where every sexually active woman is given one every two years. This, she says, is real power. Wendell Steavenson’s very contemporary take on the meaning of terrorism is a welcome inclusion in this book predominantly concerned with classics of reportage. Whether ‘Osama’s War’ will have the same longevity is by no means certain, but it provides a refreshing contrast as well as a useful definition from Osama, a 24-yearold Iraqi who had been fighting the Americans in a mujahideen cell in Baghdad: “Terrorism as I see it is when a person with money and power goes into a neighbourhood and starts shooting randomly.” The Granta Book of Reportage Published by Granta www.granta.com £9.99 (438pp Softback) In his introduction to this third edition, Granta editor Ian Jack discusses the adoption of the French “reportage” over the plainer, English word “reporting”. The clue to the preference for the French version, he feels, can be found in the very British distaste for ‘people poking their noses in’. Reportage, he says, “has that nice sense of things being seen, the event observed (which may be because its original use in English was confined to documentary photography, a French specialism.)” Jack is right to dwell on the significance and origins of the term. What each of these writers achieves, in vastly varying styles,

is to conjure up a mental picture of the bar at the Royale in French Saigon, where the “coffee at breakfast tastes like diarrhoea” as James Fenton so evocatively describes it, or of the utter confusion that descended on Tiananmen Square and how John Simpson dodged the Molotov cocktails and rolling tanks to tell the story. The modus operandi and ultimate intention of the writer and the photographer are surely the same. In each epic piece, the writer (whether a journalist by profession or an author such as John le Carré or Marilyn Robinson) has gone way beyond the essentials of the who what where when and why to produce something that transcends what we would usually call journalism. While it is indeed pleasurable for the reader to access such wellcrafted writing in an anthology

Of the ‘old school’ writers revisited here, Jack draws a comparison between Fenton, who he says became “tiresome in his worldweary omniscience” with age, and Martha Gellhorn, who in Jack’s eyes continued to be a beacon of all that is exemplary in reporting. As Jack acknowledges, Fenton’s “The Fall of Saigon” in this anthology is far from tiresome. Indeed it’s crackling writing, alive with an unexpected detail here, an illuminating insight there, no less vivid now than 30 years ago. Working only with this evidence, Fenton outshines Gellhorn; the latter’s “The Invasion of Panama” has aged less gracefully, even though it must have been remarkable in its time. Personal preferences aside, this is a book of riches. “Are they to be described as ‘writing’ in the sense of literature, or as ‘journalism’? I have never quite known where

one begins and the other ends …” says Jack, epitomising Granta’s raison d’être in a simple, graceful phrase. MH

Human Rights Watch Film Festival, London 15 – 25 March 2006 www.hrw.org.iff Last March, Human Rights Watch held their 10th film festival in London, cramming 22 films into 10 days of screenings within five different cinemas. It was not possible, or advisable for that matter, to try and see all 22 films – not only because of the logistics of what was showing where but also in anticipation of the constant barrage of harrowing subject matter. In an attempt to create some sort of cross-section of what was on offer from different parts of the globe, I managed to see Iraq in Fragments, Conversations on a Sunday Afternoon (South Africa), La Dignidad de los Nadies (Argentina), and Source/Zdroj (Azerbaijan). Human Rights Watch have defined their selection criteria for the festival as “fiction, documentary and animated films and videos with a distinctive human rights theme”. Iraq in Fragments was carefully constructed over two years by American filmmaker James Longley who brought the situation in Iraq and the lives of the average Iraqi to a new level of empathy. He concentrated on three distinct areas and individuals, focusing on the divisions within Iraqi society, now exacerbated by the looming civil war. Also bringing issues such as education, during and post wartime, in which a country’s deterioration of literacy is embodied in 11-yearold Mohammed, who speaks eloquently of security and beauty, yet cannot write his name. The following day I saw Conversations on a Sunday Afternoon, which it turns out is not really about South Africa but set there. The obscure beginning introduced elements of dramatic prose which somehow led the main character on a journey through Johannesburg in search of a Somali woman. The main character stops people along the way and begins interviewing them on their stories of immigration. Although with some entertaining accounts, not much is taken from

this movie apart from the obvious: that each person has his or her own history and story to tell. This was definitely a divergence in documentary style, which was refreshing to see but not all that interesting to watch. La Dignidad de los Nadies and Source/Zdroj both fell somewhere in between these two. While they were not as aesthetic as Iraq in Fragments, their subject matter spoke for itself in upholding the merits of their inclusion. La Dignidad de los Nadies, or the Dignity of the Nobodies, was an overall look at the state of affairs in Argentina as a result of the economic crisis in December 2001. The numerous stories of poverty, corruption and deaths were compelling not only in their severity but also in the over-riding sense of community and positivism displayed by those in need. One of the most uplifting and positive points from the films I saw came from this documentary, about a group of women who regularly attend public government auctions of land whose owners have failed to meet the absurd loan payments. Their relentless singing of the Argentine national anthem results in each auction being negated due to disruption.

undertaking and London is definitely a good place to do so. It was difficult not to leave the screenings without a tinge of guilt – considering even the cost of the Tube journey home in relation to the earnings of those just witnessed on screen. Of the festival’s success, I am unsure about box office sales and if the proceeds were going to any cause other than the cinemas themselves. As succinctly put by James Longley in his answer to the question from the audience, “will any of the money you make from this film be sent back to the families you met in Iraq?” To which his only response could be, “Money? What money?” LH

The group of singing women (top) and others from La Dignidad de los Nadies A scene from Source, and one of the filmmakers (bottom) in Azerbaijan

Source/Zdroj was another more amateur production undertaken by three Czech friends who were curious about Azerbaijan, the 125th, out of 133, most corrupt nation in the world. Their tactics for fooling the authorities with concealed cameras and fake agendas was all the more entertaining. The way they innocently interviewed a head honcho at BP was an ingenious way of exposing the reality in which the shady deals that allowed the creation of the BTC (Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan) crude oil pipeline were buried. Along with the screenings additional events were organised, with some directors present after the film to field questions, short plays preceding the viewings and world music nights at the Ritzy Cinema, making this into a well thought-out production. Human Rights Watch is certainly on the right track in promoting and raising awareness of their

This year marks 35 years since the opening of The Photographers’ Gallery in London. Housed in idiosyncratic premises at 5 & 8 Great Newport Street near Leicester Square, it continues to host exhibitions of national and international content, with the Deutsche Börse Prize a perennial draw for the capital’s photography enthusiasts. Its bookshop, print room and café are popular with students, tourists and professional photographers alike. As the UK’s first independent photography venue, it is also the closest we have to a national gallery of photography in London and with this semi-official role comes constant critical attention from all quarters on its activities. Its anniversary comes at a time when there appears to be a re-evaluation of the history of British photography within the establishment. Last year’s Creative Camera conferences traced the developments in the medium since the late 1960s as did Val Williams’ one day conference on 1970s photography at the University of Sussex . The latter highlighted the role of the photography exhibition Spectrum at the Institute of Contemporary Arts as a catalyst for development in that decade. Its popularity galvanised then-ICA employee Sue Davies into setting up The Photographers’ Gallery. She garnered wide-spread support and, critically, the backing of the Arts Council, which was at that time slowly coming round to the idea of photography as a separate funding category. The intention was to provide a place for professional photographers to show their own work and to balance shows by the celebrated with exhibitions by new young photographers.

become New York’s ICP in 1974. The early days of The Photographers’ Gallery have often been associated with this type of photography. There was a preference for social documentary as well as a politicisation of photography throughout the 1970s, but although this was acknowledged in the gallery’s programme it was never exclusive to one genre. It was the first gallery in the country to show key names in international photography such as André Kertesz, Jaques-Henri Lartigue and Irving Penn. In 1980 the building at 5 Great Newport Street was added to the existing gallery at no 8 and more staff were taken on in the shape of exhibition curators, education officers as well as bookshop and print room managers. In 1991, Davies retired as Director. Later this year, we will witness a reappraisal of its role to date with the publication of a history by writer and lecturer on photography Helen James in collaboration with the gallery. In addition, there will be a round table discussion on The Concerned Photographer in association with Magnum, which is holding the opening event to mark its AGM there in June. After a long period of looking for new premises, it can now also look forward to a move to Soho in 2008 under the supervision of Brett Rogers, its newly appointed Director. Many will be sad to see the gallery move from its current location, however, bigger and better equipped exhibition spaces will ensure it continues to represent an increasingly diverse medium both at a national and international level. SW

The gallery’s first exhibition in 1971, The Concerned Photographer by Cornell Capa, was a last minute substitution, but with its launch coinciding with a Magnum meeting in London, it ensured a high-profile event for the gallery. Capa went on to set up the fund for “concerned photography” which was to

Images Courtesy of Sue Davies / The Photographers’ Gallery, London

35 Years of the Photographers’ Gallery www.photonet.org.uk

the magazine publishing world, where teamwork is a key element, Lorant used every element of his background as a photographer, silent film director and “pictureson-a-page” pioneer to survive and prosper against the odds, time and again.

Stefan Lorant: Godfather of Photojournalism Michael Hallett Published by Scarecrow Press www.scarecrowpress.com $49.95 (240pp Softback) While his name might not resonate widely today, there are few photojournalists whose work has not been affected – even indirectly – by the late Stefan Lorant, who made his mark with his restless genius and massive ego.

In 1938, the hard-nosed henchmen of quintessentially British publisher and daydreamer, Edward Hulton, achieved the impossible. They persuaded the brilliant Hungarianborn editor, Stefan Lorant, author of I was Hitler’s Prisoner, to reconsider his rejection of a lucrative editorial contract, after their paymaster had expressed admiration for fascism. Close to bankruptcy at the time, Lorant was placated by the prospect of money and power. He sold Hulton his monthly magazine, Lilliput, for a cool £20,000 and paid off his considerable debts. At the time, the young Hulton believed he had given Lorant a free hand to create a Conservative

weekly in the Spectator mould. Instead, Lorant set about reinventing the picture magazine format he had perfected amid the political turmoil of Germany after the First World War. The result was to become, for almost two decades, the UK’s most cherished weekly picture magazine. In Lorant’s time at the helm (1938-1940), as creator and editor of Picture Post, he was the ultimate “godfather”, often irritated by the fact that he could not publish the magazine without the interference of an editorial staff. The layout of the pictures, the style of the captions and the grudgingly conceded space for words, were based on the numerous German and French magazine layouts that he had created in the 1920s. For those who believe that photojournalism began with the class of ’62, Lorant’s life story will come as something of a shock. Those photographers, with whom Lorant would trust the early Picture Post assignments, were fellow refugees from Hitler’s Germany and it was their

Unruffled by his mercurial image, author Michael Hallett first met Lorant when, approaching 90, he was invited to England by the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television.

professionalism which was to rub off on young innocents – like myself – in the final decade of the magazine’s existence. This neatly presented book expands on the life and foibles of a man to whom publishers, editors, photographers and the public at large owe much, because he stepped on to the photographic stage at the very time when photographers had been liberated by the advent of the 35mm camera. It was this, and moving pictures that implanted an appreciation of the classic picture sequence, which enabled Lorant to create his high-impact layouts on the printed page. Michael Hallett’s biography of the godfather of photojournalism is both detailed and honest. The text is presented in short, crisp, readable chunks, which unfold Lorant’s tumultuous life story in a very personal way. The layout of the 22 pages of pictures is clearly influenced by the Lorant “formula”. Predictable and, in part, somewhat selfindulgent, they provide a window on the world of the man whose stamp of personality did much to influence the evolution of European narrative photography. Now, its secret power rests only in the minds and memories of “the last of the few”. Charmed by his temperamental genius, I exchanged friendly postcards with him from time to time and when we met on one occasion, he growled some good advice: “Get rid of that beard Chillingworth, it makes you look old!” John Chillingworth

The result of that brief encounter and the content of Hallett’s subsequent article for the British Journal of Photography started a literary relationship.

It has taken until now for the result of his in-depth exploration of Lorant’s inner workings to reach publication. His discoveries blossomed into a revealing biographical account of the life of the professional loner who, almost single-handedly, changed the face of European magazine publishing, long before Henry Luce dreamed up the highly successful Life picture magazine concept in the US. Based upon hours of conversation during visits to Lorant’s home in Lenox, Massachusetts, Hallett has done much to demystify the legend. As a virtual hermit in

Equally, imagery from Africa was once also only the purview of Westerners jetting in for the latest coup, episode of cholera or Aids, starvation, or natural disaster – if they were photojournalists; or for the scenic savannahs, photogenic megafauna, and comely, scantily clad Africans – if they were tourists or art photographers. Perhaps only Peter Beard has done all of the above at the same time, but that’s another story. What was missing from the whole picture, of course, were images by Africans themselves about whatever interested them, be it art or politics. There have been a few exceptions: Malick Sidibé, Seydou Keita and Zwelethu Mthethwa are among the continent’s best known photographers in the international art world. Yet despite several shows of African photographers, among the earliest major work, In/Sight African Photographers, 1940 to the Present, which debuted at New York’s Guggenheim Museum in 1996, and Africa Remix at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Hayward Gallery in London, last year – and despite the long established photography festival in Bamako, Mali, there have been few major efforts to bring African photography to the world stage. With this in mind, the latest effort to bring African photography to the West, Snap Judgments: New

Several bodies of work stand out as documents of a new African vision of photography. The Nigerian collective, Depth of Field, six Lagosbased photographers, portrayed contemporary Lagos and Nigerian neighbourhoods in Africa and the UK. Their work was greatly stimulated by their participation in the photo festival in Bamako, then curated by Njami, several years ago when they noticed the complete absence of African photography documenting contemporary African cities. Andrew Dosunmu covered the street and fashion side of contemporary African photography as did Nontsikelelo “Lolo” Veleko, whose photograph from Johannesburg, “Cindy & Nkuli, 2004”, graced the cover of the Snap Judgments catalogue. Yto Barrada, Omar D, and Luis Basto explored the spell of desire, for work,

Although Snap Judgments presents more than 200 works by 35 photographers from more than 12 countries, it is necessarily a snapshot of contemporary photography from Africa, a continent of more than 70 countries and more than 800 million people. Still, Enwezor has done a remarkable job by bringing a wide range of perspectives, “platforms” or “positions” in art-speak, on photography ranging from concept art to political journalism and documentary photography while exploring issues of race, nationalism, globalisation, and daily life. Enwezor emphasises presenting a photography against conventional Western images of wars and famines and a prevailing image of “Afro-pessimism”. While they do exist in the imagery here, they take place mostly off camera.

If only all the politicians and pop stars who jumped on the Africa bandwagon, and all the sound bites, ballyhooing and photoops had any real effect. Whether on the day to day struggles throughout the continent or, much less any serious impact on the on-going conflicts in Darfur, around the Great Lakes, terrorism in Egypt, or strife and drought in Nigeria, there is little evidence of success.

Positions in Contemporary African Photography, at the ICP in New York is a great leap forward. Not surprisingly, it is also curated by Okwui Enwezor (Calabar, Nigeria, 1963), who was responsible for the Guggenheim show and for the African platforms of the 11th Dokumenta in Kassel, Germany, 2002. With Simon Njami (Cameroon, 1962), curator of Africa Remix, Enwezor has been instrumental in raising the profile of African photography at home and abroad.

romance, and for a different culture, that affects millions of Africans longing to reach Europe. Otobong Nkanga examined the interface between rural Africa and the ever-encroaching cities at the point where country shacks give way to housing developments. Guy Tillim’s images from Johannesburg represented a hard look at the new, post-Apartheid urbanisation. Zwelethu Mthethwa’s oversize portraits depicted industrial workers and farmers. Mikhael Subotzky photographed the crowded prisons of South Africa and stitched them into digital panoramas. Mamadou Gomis’s newspaper articles and images for Le Journal covered daily life in Dakar, Senegal. Randa Shaath took a bird’s eye view of the rooftops of Cairo and discovered a world both private and public that is completely unseen by those walking the streets. Boubacar Touré Mandémory, also from Dakar, covered a series of African capitals in vibrant colour while Sada Tangara presented

a darker face of urban poverty in night time black and white images of people sleeping rough in the big cities. Sohra Bensemra documented women police and families in post-conflict Algeria. Obviously, Snap Judgments has a major “art photography”

Snap Judgments: New Positions in Contemporary African Photography 10 March – 28 May 2006 International Centre of Photography, New York www.icp.org

make each person look their best and proud, and this is touching. French Perry, born 1924, North Carolina, holds the American flag, and Heyert comments later that he would have been in the segregated army. One young man is only 22 and has his white tracksuit pockets stuffed with dollars.

component, and African art photography has been established at international levels for some years. What was rewarding from Enwezor’s Snap Judgments selection was its diversity and the relative youth of the photographers. Most were under 35 years old, and only a few were in his 1996 Guggenheim show. The effort this show represents to demonstrate that there other points of view out there than which we in the West seldom see should be respectfully acknowledged and the photographers celebrated. To come back to the Year of Africa and other images of Africa, the winner of this year’s World Press Photo of the Year [Simon Njami was also on the jury and several other Africans were represented among this year’s prize winners]: Finbar O’Reilly, a Canadian living in West Africa for several years, said of his winning entry, “Here are some pictures from a continent that cannot be represented by a single picture.” It is to curator Okwui Enwezor’s credit that Snap Judgments presents the widest diversity of images from the most diverse continent on earth, Africa. When looking at Africa, we, everybody from East to West, from North to South, and from Africa itself should look at Africa differently and avoid the clichés his title provokes. Okwui Enwezor all but demands that everybody, Africans and non-Africans, learn to look at images and image makers from Africa as full participants in the global game of image making and representation on the world stage. BK

gloves, sit quietly upon her body; an elaborate bow on the hat finishes the outfit with a flourish. Rosie is one of the 31 people, captured by Elizabeth Heyert in her year-long study, to pass through Isaiah Owens’ funeral parlour in Harlem, characterised by its soothing motif: Where Beauty Softens Your Grief. The book is very simple. Each page has a full portrait – exquisitely detailed, immaculately lit, highcolour – of a deceased member of Harlem’s black community. The pictures are taken after the last goodbyes, and just before the person “goes to the party”. They float solidly, calmly and in full party gear on a deep, black background. All that accompanies them is their name, date and place of birth (if known) and of death.

The Travelers Elizabeth Heyert Published by Scalo www.scalo.com £40 (80pp Hardback)

Their story is over, and from such brief information we are inspired to imagine some of the journey. It is partly this narrative that concerns Heyert. Many of her unknown subjects come from the Carolinas, lived through the civil rights movement, and died in Harlem just before Starbucks got in. It is not only the end of each individual’s life, but, as Heyert sees it, the end of an era in American social history.

Her eyes are closed, her red, painted lips curve slightly downwards, and a flicker of worry rests in the crease between her eyebrows. Rosie Inez Miller – born: unknown; died: October 2003, Harlem, New York – lies awaiting burial in all her finery. Pink, puffy layers of satin and chiffon encase her body, while her hands, covered in white lace

Turning the glossy pages of the book, the figures look at first like waxworks, or models in a Duane Hanson installation: there is a Six Feet Under frankness and kitsch present here. They look strange, lying in white suits, or lacy dresses, buttoned right up to the neck – most smiling, beatifically. The youthful colours and frills are at odds with death, but affect to

It is altogether a remarkable project, if not for the faint-hearted. There is something inherently queasy-making in staring for too long at dead people, especially when so carefully dressed for their eternal shindig in the sky. Ruth Hedges

The Other Slovakia Andrej Bán Published by Slovart www.slovart.sk $39.95 (133pp Hardback) Established photojournalist and native Slovak Andrej Bán seeks to capture the essence of his homeland in The Other Slovakia, a poetic and beautifully reproduced series of photographs. Of his approach, he explains: “What interests me most is authentic life, the rituals and customs of ordinary people who seem to be living ‘against the flow of time’.” A relatively young country in an area of Europe synonymous with instability, Slovakia was once part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, then Czechoslovakia. It was overrun by the Nazis during the Second World War and Russia during the 1960s. Emerging from Soviet rule in the Velvet Revolution of 1989 it then separated from the Czech Republic in 1993.

Less-known than its neighbour it has the appearance of a country on the margins of Europe. A recent addition to the EU, but still essentially poor and rural, the way of life reflected in Bán’s pictures is comparable to that in the Irish Republic, pre-Celtic Tiger. There is more than a nod towards Josef Koudelka in these punchy black and white photographs, however, Bán’s dynamic compositions have an integrity all of their own. His best images play with ways of seeing through off-kilter framing, multiple viewpoints and graphic quirks as well as visual humour and a fondness for the surreal. A man watches TV: the rumples in his shirt and trousers reflected in the undulating interference on the TV screen. At a circus a boy looks intently upwards out of the photo frame at a merry-go-round. Behind him a window or mirror reflects an image of the multiple windows of a Soviet housing block that must be behind the photographer: a simple yet interesting visual puzzle that engages our imagination. Bán celebrates the many faces of his countrymen, seeking them out at gatherings of one kind or another: anniversaries, celebrations, ceremonies, festivals, the circus or a camp for young conservationists. He delights in a group of craggy former partisans at a gathering to commemorate their resistance against fascism during the War. Witnesses to so much change, these old men, upstanding in their suits and trilbys, wear expressions alert yet world weary. In contrast, in the only formal portrait in the book, Slovak returnees, the Krnac family, wear the hopeful smiles of a family embracing their future. Religion and the rural pervade Bán’s publication, reflecting a people still swathed in the past. A repetition of images of pilgrimage serves as a metaphor of sorts for Slovakia’s journey towards recognition and modernity. These photographs are more atmospheric than descriptive but through their accumulation, provide an empathetic record of this slow transformation. SW

Life Lennart Nilsson Published by Jonathan Cape www.randomhouse.co.uk £35 (304pp Hardback) Life is a fascinating book by Swedish photographer Lennart Nilsson which, simply, documents the miracle of life. Although Nilsson has a background in photojournalism and has won many awards for his photo-essays, he is best known for his scientific imagery.

Unseen UK Published by Royal Mail Group www.royalmail.com £20 (232pp Hardback) Unseen UK opens with hastily snapped photographs of an alarm clock reading 4am, bleary-eyed postmen sorting mail, a fry up and a sleepy looking family gathered in a double bed. The viewer is launched, with an early morning jolt, into life as a British postie. The 240 photographs that make up Unseen UK are the final edit of 20,000 photographs submitted to photographer Stephen Gill for an experimental project, undertaken by the workforce of the Royal Mail, in aid of the charity Help the Hospices. Employees were given disposable cameras with which they had free reign to take pictures of their daily experiences.

that make the collection attractive. Gill has been wise to keep his edit diverse in location, allowing observers to feel like they are scanning all corners of Britain as they flick through the book. From typically suburban areas to the rural isolation of Inverie, in the Scottish Highlands, where postman Tommy McManmon, complete with Wellington boots and a postbag slung over his shoulder, climbs up a pebble shore away from an engulfing loch. He and his van are taken to Knoydart by landing craft, a village on the UK mainland unconnected to the road network. In a light-hearted and entertaining way and with the ubiquitous British postie as an excellent guide, Gill allows us to glimpse a different perspective of the sights, scenes, places and people that form the fabric of daily life throughout the UK. LP

With no specific brief to work from, the photographs are varied and at times random in content. An image of neighbours gathering to watch firemen attending to a house fire is followed by a blurry, action shot taken through the handlebars of a post bike. Among the unique and eccentric sights that posties encounter on their daily rounds, such as a miniature village set up within a front garden, certain subjects like scary dogs, staircases, front doors, landscapes, fellow workers and mail recipients appear regularly. The majority of the images obviously lack photographic expertise, several are out of focus, too dark and flash-exposed, but it is the instantaneous and impulsive feel to the photographs

In 1965 his work on prenatal life was published in Life magazine which used on its cover Nilsson’s most famous picture; a living embryo. The magazine sold eight million copies in the space of a few days. This was a real landmark for Life magazine and this cover has since remained an icon in science photography as well as photo-documentary. Life tells us the ultimate story, documenting the evolution of our body, from embryo to newborn, to growth organs and tissues development. Nilsson’s imagery is spectacular, his challenging technique uses a powerful scanning electron microscope which allows him to photograph in the most detailed way the inside of our complex body. The embryo

and foetus development is the strongest and most moving part of the book with its revelation of foetus faces, facial hair, and eyes. I found it is simply beautiful. The next section documents the intricate interior of our body as well as all development from heart to senses, and the viruses that can threaten it: from HIV, to cancer, SARS, and herpes. Life also includes a few of Nilsson’s thermal photographs, such as a couple mating and kissing. Such an image serves as the cover of the book; a couple holding hands. The book is very well designed, printed on a black paper, it emphasises the colours (note: the colours are translated from the original grey scale into full colour). As well as this exceptional imagery, there is an essay by distinguished scientist Hans Wigzell and a portrait of Nilsson by Irving Penn. Lennart Nilsson’s mission seems to make the invisible visible. He unfolds the miracle of life exquisitely. LM

Deutschlandbilder: 17 Photographic Positions Ostkreuz Photography Agency Published by Edition Braus www.editionbraus.de f35 (176pp Hardback) Germany is in flux. After 15 years of re-unification, globalisation, EU expansion, zero growth, near record unemployment, and a deeply divided electorate, the Federal Republic finds itself for the first time in more than 30 years governed by a Grand Coalition of the centre-right Christian Democratic Union and the centreleft Social Democratic Party. That Angela Merkel of the CDU and Matthias Platzeck of the SPD, both academics from greater Brandenburg and politicians from the former German Democratic Republic, IE, East Germany, are trying to get the country moving again after defeating their Western party bosses in the run-up to the election has made for much soul-searching on a national level. Not surprisingly, “Heimat,” or homeland, is a staple theme of talk shows, movies, and any number of editorials and has become part of the national Zeitgeist. This introspection is addressed in timely fashion by a small, niche photo agency, the Berlin-based Ostkreuz. Founded in 1990 by seven of East Germany’s most prominent photojournalists and modelled on the structure of Magnum, Ostkreuz proudly takes its name from a major traffic crossing in the east part of Berlin. The agency has put together a book and travelling exhibition

that addresses Germany and its self-image. Deutschlandbilder or “Pictures of Germany” presents very different portfolios by the 17 current members of the agency in the context of its own 15-year anniversary. It is a remarkable take on contemporary Germany. On one hand, it represents a portrait of Germany, albeit deliberately not an all-encompassing one. On the other hand, it is a portrait of the agency and its photographers. With a grant from the Goethe Institute, the cultural arm of the Foreign Ministry, the portfolios were massaged into the frame of “Germany”. The exhibition will travel through Italy, France, India, and further afield over the next several years granting the show an extraordinary importance. With 17 subjective positions, it would be logical to expect a rather broad range of images. Yet such is the mood of Germany today that the look is largely dour and introspective. Ostkreuz, as an agency, occupies a particular niche in the spectrum of photography agencies both in Germany proper and in the international scene. Famous, of course, for its archive of photographs of the former GDR, Ostkreuz photographers have addressed many themes

of re-unification and changes in the east, especially the hollowing out of industry and the erasure of visual remnants of the country’s socialist past. Harald Hauswald put together a series from the 1980s and 90s depicting the massive changes effecting Berlin. Jordis Antonia Schlösser documents the human and environmental costs of the now collapsed soft-coal industry around Halle. Famed GDR fashion photographer Sibylle Bergemann’s “Fading Memories” details the ephemeral little things of everyday life in the GDR, wallpaper, bridges, commemorative toys and so on. Ute Mahler’s “New Oldies” is an ironic take on being elderly in Germany, a country with a rapidly aging population. Other works, by Wolfgang Müller, chronicle the uneasy situation of ethnic Germans moving from Russia to Germany. Dawin Meckel looks at the paradoxes of Germans still living in Namibia, the former colony of German South-West Africa. There are pictures of politicos politicking by Michael Tippel, children at play by Anne Schönharting, views of the North Sea by Thomas Meyer, and little bits of weirdness in Lynn Schröder’s “A Play.” One of the youngest photographers, Julian Röder, age 24, documented youth culture in a rather more

optimistic light with his ironically titled portfolio, “81% were in love at least once.” Yet it is in the pictures of Heinrich Völkel, “Germany’s Best,” and Wolfgang Bellwinkel, “Heimat II,” that the theme of Germany, per se, is most directly addressed. Völkel took up the topic of the national winners in a wide range of off-beat competitions – Best Belly Dancer, Best Soap-Box Car Builder, Best Cow Roper, Best Barbeque Griller, and Best Rescue Dog, won by Trümmer, naturally a German shepherd shown perched on a pile of Trümmel, or rubble, against a beautiful blue sky. This side of Germany presets a happy weirdness. Bellwinkel’s take is much more melancholy. His images of Sunday outings in the provinces, castles, suburbia, woods, and lakes are neither here nor there – which is his point exactly. As a journalist who has spent much of his time in Asia, Bellwinkel seems to be attempting to ground himself. His look at classic German themes such as Nature, so beloved by Caspar David Friedrich and the other Romantic painters and writers, seems very flat, distant even. It is a very cool look, if not exactly cold. The people in his pictures are strangely apart as though lost in their own thoughts.

It is also not unlike the work of another contemporary German photographer, Peter Bialobrzeski, whose own book is also entitled “Heimat.” Clearly, the Zeitgeist is stalking the photolabs of Berlin, Hamburg, and elsewhere in Germany. It also presents a picture of Ostkreuz itself. Unlike larger agencies like Laif or Focus, Ostkreuz specialises far more in reportage and long-term picture stories in Germany and the new EU countries to the east. They are the go-to agency for things germane to German politics and supply content to a wide range of international magazines. The pictures seem remarkably lonely almost like lifestyle stock imagery without the life part. The country seems to be awaiting the next big thing, the landscapes of suburbia for the next Ikea or Aldi to fill the emptiness with happy loving couples in gemütlich little pink houses. With zero growth and a marginal birth rate those days seem remote. What’s odder is that imagery from other low growth, low birth countries like Italy, for example, seems to be livelier. The German Zeitgeist is not optimistic, and the pictures demonstrate this. Ostkreuz director Betty Fink, herself a veteran of other German photo agencies, says of the book and exhibition that “it is rather sad” and shows a “distanced Romanticism … That there are so many sad pictures is a reflection through photography of what is there. We didn’t plan it that way, but that is what happened.” Deutschlandbilder is not a work of wildly optimistic vistas. The question is: is this look representative of Germany today as a whole or is it too pessimistic to be realistic? Deutschlandbilder represents 17 perspectives on 15 years of frustration, divided politics, and the failure to produce the “Blooming Landscapes” promised by Chancellor Helmut Kohl at the time of the reunification in 1990. It is fair to say that it is hard to describe it with pretty pictures. Yet the last image in the book, Julian Röder’s swirl of students near Alexanderplatz in Berlin-Mitte, somehow gives the viewer the hope that things will pick up in the future. BK

rigorous in terms of the historical and political context of the stories. Only available in French at the moment it merits translation and publication in English. One Médecins du Monde motto is: “Making Health a Human Right”. This book celebrates that aim. LM

Missions: Médecins du Monde Gerard Rondeau Published by Editions du Seuil www.seuil.com f37 (256pp Hardback) Missions: Médecins (jusqu’au bout) du Monde is a book that celebrates the 25th anniversary of the Médecins du Monde through the eye of photographer Gerard Rondeau, On 22 December 1989, VU photographer Gerard Rondeau was accompanying the humanitarian organisation Médecins du Monde to Bucharest, where they were the first to access the city, freshly liberated from the Ceausescu regime. Since this experience, Rondeau has been following the French doctors to document their extensive work, from Niger to St. Petersburg, from Iraqi Kurdistan to Sarajevo, New York and even Paris by night. Rondeau has not only concentrated his work on the everyday struggles of Médecins du Monde staff but also has documented the communities affected and their surrounding landscapes. In a classic black and white reportage style, Rondeau has sensitively shown the pain, the horror, the liberation, the hope as well as the unrelenting dedication of Médecins du Monde. The design of the book follows a purist approach with the photos printed on a black paper, either full page or many smaller pictures on a few spreads. The texts accompanying the photos are a personal insight to the adventures that Rondeau experienced with Médecins du Monde. The book is

My Life in Politics Tim Davis Published by Aperture www.aperture.org £22 (112pp Hardback) The title My Life in Politics makes the latest monograph by photographer Tim Davis sound rather like a biographical tribute to an elder grandee of contemporary Weltpolitik. But anyone familiar with Davis’s 2004 exhibition of the same name, at New York’s Bohen Foundation, will realise instinctively it is anything but. Far from presenting a glossy career portrait of Bill Clinton or Colin Powell, Davis offers us a scabrous visual critique of all that is most hollow about 21st century political discourse – from a row of television screens showing repeated images of a sloganeering George W Bush through bored-looking telephone canvassers tapping lazily on their keyboards to empty-eyed protesters queuing at an HSBC cash-point. Indeed, emptiness is the overriding quality shared by these photos. The plastic smile of Madonna of the Right, captured in profile to show off the stars and stripes threaded through her hair, shares the same shallow reverence for style over substance as the “trust me” portraits of right-wing talk show host Rush Limbaugh on remaindered copies of his books. In places, the theme is explored more literally – with

empty shots of the Oval Office and bland anterooms of provincial meeting halls. In One People One Nation One Taco One Destiny, this unbelievable “motto” spans the length of a cheap-looking mural in an empty diner, depicting highlights of the life of Martin Luther King. Elsewhere, Davis’s equation of politics with cheap advertising is turned on its head. In Marvin Prattt for Mayor, an airbrushed poster promoting the eponymous Mr Pratt is juxtaposed with an ungrammatical sign proclaiming, “Grannys Burgers 89c”. Politics as celebrity, meanwhile, is explored in Seven Entertainers, in which cardboard cutouts of the Clintons and JFK line up alongside Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Dr Evil. In the accompanying note, Davis observes dryly that Xena: Warrior Princess, who stands, sword in hand, to the left of the former president, “looks like Bill Clinton’s mom”. No one is safe from Davis’s savage iconoclasm. While there are plentiful references in both the pictures themselves and the accompanying essays to the misdemeanours of the present White House incumbent – and his recent military misadventures – ordinary people are held equally culpable for the debasement of political principle and serious debate. Nowhere is this more starkly illustrated than in FlagWavers, in which bronzed twentysomethings who could be hitchhikers or protesters enthusiastically swing the US flag beneath two roadside billboards bearing the shredded remnants of previous political campaigns. Empty rhetoric indeed. Jim Morrison

>On My Shelf Chris SteelePerkins The World of Henri CartierBresson Henri Cartier-Bresson House of Bondage Ernest Cole Evidence Larry Sultan, Mike Mandel Self Portrait Lee Friedlander Shadow of Light Bill Brandt I was in university at Newcastle in the late ’60s, doing a psychology degree which I quite enjoyed … it was very easy; not exactly quantum physics. The best thing that happened was working on the student newspaper, the Courier, where I did everything from photographing The Who to sport, teaching myself as I went along from Creative Camera and Longford. When I graduated, I was either going to be working as a consumer psychologist for local company Proctor and Gamble, finding out whether people preferred blue washing powder or green, or giving it a go as a freelance photographer. It was the best decision of my life. In terms of influence, Creative Camera was where it was at, and then these five books. Although I started my career as very much a domestic photographer, I was intrigued by the sheer elegance of the pictures of Henri Cartier-Bresson, a founder member of Magnum and well known for his travels to India. In the very finest of his pictures, there’s almost nothing going on at all, just a couple of people maybe and things lying about that you can’t get rid of. His images create an internal dialogue. You can’t get out of a Cartier-Bresson frame; you can bounce in and around them, but that’s it. Wanting to be like Bresson was more directive for me than wanting to be like Brandt ... in those days when I wanted to be someone else! When I met him, years later, at Magnum meetings, and then at his home with his wife Martine, I

found he was dismissive of that title, The World of Henri CartierBresson. He said it was like a collection of short stories, but he could be quite an acerbic kind of guy because his standards were so high. In the ’70s and ’80s, you couldn’t read about photography without a reference to HCB. That kind of status or influence couldn’t happen now; there’s so many people publishing. The thing about Ernest Cole – he wasn’t a big name – was that he was an extraordinarily courageous man. What he did – documenting black life in apartheid South Africa as a ‘coloured’ photographer – took a lot more courage than jumping around in a war zone. I remember one image in particular from House of Bondage, which was taken at night in a shopping area, of a black kid begging and being smacked round the head by an Afrikaner. I’d never seen a picture like it at the time, that captured the daily cruelty and arrogance. My own photography was reportage, so I felt close to HCB and to Cole, but I was also fascinated by what else photography could do … and this is where Evidence came in. I was aware of the use of photographs as evidence by the police and other agencies, of course, but what kind of evidence

depended on the caption. And this was the brilliance of Evidence: it had no captions. Their selection of pictures was extraordinary. It led the viewer through a very strange theatre via the narrative of the book … monkeys with covered faces, men in strange suits … all waiting to be reinvested with new meaning. I’d never seen the subject of captioning treated with such style. There was a lot of nonsense at the time in the Victor Burgin school of thought where awful images were used with pretentious captions. What Sultan and Mandel did in Evidence was to use bloody interesting photographs and no captions! It was so innovative at the time; all my contemporaries had a copy. It came back to life recently at the Photographers Gallery, and while it was interesting to see it as prints, the book is the thing. Friedlander’s book, Self Portraits, was making a statement about how it was possible to report the world with photography. He photographed shit in the street and made it look good. Anything could be a subject and could be transformed through your vision. I remember a comment he made about Ansel Adams, whose work he liked, but look at what he was working with: Yosemite is always going to be a bit more gorgeous than a New York street corner.

Like Friedlander, Bill Brandt made anything look good. He changed all the time – and it’s all there in Shadow of Light: portraits, news, reportage, landscape and he handled it all brilliantly. He had a mind that wandered and ranged over things’ that wasn’t always knocking on the same door. That he wasn’t more widely known at the time in the UK was a sign of how backward we can be. His first serious show at the Hayward was curated by MoMa; before then people couldn’t give a shit about him. It was typical then that homegrown talent could be ignored in this way. I still buy photography books, although not as much as I did. I bought Loretta Lux’s portfolio recently, which is interesting digital work, not crude and in fact rather surreal. I also bought Ed Burtynsky’s very rigorous book on China. And, yes, I still look at the books I’ve chosen here from time to time although Bresson in particular I don’t feel I need to look at all the time; it’s like a piece of music you know by heart 8 Chris Steele-Perkins’ latest book Echoes is published by Trolley

>Diary >UK College Degree Shows and Exhibitions

Free Range 2006 The Old Truman Brewery Brick Lane, London E1 www.free-range.org.uk A summer season of graduate art and design exhibitions, including the following photography shows:

The Well www.cwc.ac.uk

Leicester College Edexcel HND Photography Final Exhibition, The Last Supper 5 June – 9 June 2006 Leicester Creative Business Depot 31 Rutland Street Leicester LE1 1RE Free Admission Open Hours 1000 – 1800 For more information ring 0116 2242001 ext 3060 Or visit www.leicestercollege.ac.uk

Week 3: 16 – 19 June Salisbury College Access All Areas BA (Hons) Photomedia Dray Walk Gallery www.salisbury.ac.uk/create

Swansea Institute of Art & Design BA (Hons) Photography in the Arts BA (Hons) Photojournalism MA Photography Dray Walk Gallery www.sihe.ac.uk

Arts Institute at Bournemouth Graduate Show, Mine 20 – 21 July The Candid Arts Trust 3 Torrens Street London EC1V 1NQ For further information please contact Kristina on 07904028828 www.mine2006.com

University of Brighton BA (Hons) Editorial Photography Atlantis 1st Floor www.brighton.ac.uk University College Falmouth BA (Hons) Photography Studio 95 www.falmouth.ac.uk Thames Valley University Digital Soup – New & Improved Faculty of the Arts Atlantis Ground Floor www.digital-soup.co.uk www.tvu.ac.uk Havering College HNC Photography, HND Photography BA (Hons) Communication Arts Music/ Photography/ Graphic Design The Well www.havering-college.ac.uk Week 4: 23 – 26 June University of Westminster BA (Hons) Photographic Arts, BA (Hons) Photography (parttime) Atlantis 2nd Floor www.wmin.ac.uk University College for the Creative Arts Farnham BA (Hons) Photography Studio 95 www.ucreative.ac.uk City of Westminster College Foundation Degree in Professional Photography, BTEC Higher National Certificate Photography, BTEC National Diploma Photography, BTEC National Certificate Photography

West Kent College Untitled 15 HND Photography Atlantis 1st Floor www.wkc.ac.uk

Thames Valley University Digital Soup – New & Improved Faculty of the Arts Atlantis Ground Floor www.digital-soup.co.uk www.tvu.ac.uk Week 5: 30 June – 3 July Nottingham Trent University 10 BA (Hons) Photography BA (Hons) Photography in Europe BA (Hons) Photography as Art Practice BA (Hons) Photography as Documentary BA (Hons) Photography for Fashion F-Block T2 www.ntu.ac.uk Week 6: 7 – 10 July Staffordshire University Creating the Difference BA (Hons) Fine Art BA (Hons) Photography The Well www.staffs.ac.uk Week 7: 14 – 17 July University of Portsmouth Eye Candy BA (Hons) Photography F Block T3 www.pompey-eyecandy. co.uk www.port.ac.uk Week 8: 22 – 25 July Arts Institute at Bournemouth My Heart is Trembled BA (Hons) Photography Studio 95 www.myheartistrembled. co.uk and www.aib.ac.uk

Exhibitions and Events HOST Gallery, 1 Honduras Street London EC1Y 0TH 16 May – 30 June Spirits and Shamanism by Swiss photographer Yann Mingard, with landscape photography from the Far East. www.hostgallery.co.uk PhotoEspaña 2006 1 June – 23 July The international festival of photography and visual arts held in Madrid since 1998, this year focuses on representations of nature. The exhibitions will showcase new tendencies in the world of photography and visual arts, complimented by workshops, professional seminars, public screenings of audio-visuals and portfolio reviews. www.phedigital.com Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie D’Arles 4 – 8 July The theme of this year’s annual festival in southern France, is to investigate different fields of representation that consider reality and reflect on how we, as people, link in with it. Photographers, as well as artists using photography, communities, schools and organisations are invited to show their work. The main selective criterion remains the expression of an original artistic vision. www.rencontres-arles.com Rhubarb-Rhubarb Festival 27 – 30 July This annual 4 day festival held in Birmingham aims to bring photographers and people within the industry together. The theme of this year’s festival is ‘Photography and International Trade’. See website for more details on bookings for portfolio reviews. www.rhubarb-rhubarb.net Competition and Scholarship Bulletin Ian Parry Award 2006 Entries deadline 23 June www.ianparry.org Travel Photographer of the Year Entries deadline 09 September www.tpoty.com The Photographic Portrait Prize 2006 Entries deadline 21 July www.npg.org.uk/live/photoprize.asp

WWW. FOTO8.COM/ BOOKSHOP >LIMITED EDITIONS >SIGNED COPIES >EXCLUSIVE PRE-RELEASES >SMALL IMPRINTS >EI8HT MAGAZINE GREAT SAVINGS ON PHOTOGRAPHY BOOKS FROM THE SPECIALISTS

Picture Agencies

PHOTOGRAPHERS FOR EDITORIAL AND COMMERCIAL ASSIGNMENTS

Giorgio Barrera / Grazia Neri

ALESSANDRO ALBERT, MARCO ANELLI, PABLO BALBONTIN, ALBERTO BEVILACQUA, LORENZO CASTORE, GIANCARLO CERAUDO, RENATO CERISOLA, GIOVANNI DEL BRENNA, GUGLIELMO DE MICHELI, MARCO GAROFALO, ALBERTO GIULIANI, ZIJAH GAFIC, PAUL LOWE, EMILIANO MANCUSO, MAX & DOUGLAS, SEBA PAVIA, GIADA RIPA DI MEANA, ALESSANDRO RIZZI, MASSIMO SESTINI, MASSIMO BERRUTI

Agenzia Grazia Neri Via Maroncelli, 14 - 20154 Milano- Italy Tel. 3902-625271 www.grazianeri.com photoagency@grazianeri.com desk@grazianeri.com

Picture Agencies

+49 40 4328440 +49 40 4328440 www.bilderberg.com www.bilderberg.com Photo ÂŠ Walter Schmitz

Picture Agencies

www.fairfaxphotos.com

+612 9282 2442

fairfaxphotos@fairfax.com.au

Bushﬁre at Anakie. Simon O’Dwyer.

Australia’s best photojournalism

Picture Agencies

Pro Resources

The pictures in this magazine have something obvious in common. They are taken by “good” photographers. Whatever their subjects, they share a desire to capture unique, telling images. They know what they’re doing, they think about it, they care

But elsewhere there’s a lot of touchiness about what makes a “good” photographer. For some – usually male readers of camera mags – it’s a matter of getting to grips with the jargon. As a man who barely knows his aperture from his elbow, I’m glad the pages of EI8HT aren’t cluttered with all that. Then there’s the insecurity of the “pro” who sees the advent of affordable digital cameras and the Net as a threat to his – again, it’s usually “his” – special status. The discussions on the website of the British Journal of Photography hum with anxiety: “Can we have some legislation to stop people picking up cameras and calling themselves photographers? ... since the invention of the ‘digital’ camera [love those quote marks!] … dreadful photography … bore us with terrible websites … collapse into mediocrity … internet … equivalent of a shoe box under the bed … too egalitarian and unmediated… menace to photography.” What these harrumphers need to keep their pride intact, one feels, is for Mr Eastman never to have invented his beastly Brownie, so photography remained the preserve of chaps in top hats with a ton of equipment aboard a mule. If “good” photographers are hard to find, it follows that crap ones abound. But I’m not sure that happy snapping members of the public, or earnest amateurs whose posts of fuzzy landscapes on the web infuriate the readers of the BJP, really deserve to be called crap photographers. At least they are trying. The title properly belongs to those who get paid for taking photographs, but don’t much care how they turn out. One habitat where this species can be found is the great British local newspaper. One photographer I knew – call him Ron – was notorious for his out-of-focus pictures of football matches, amateur dramatics, Boy Scout presentations and the like. Local papers print as many faces as possible in the hope that everyone pictured, or at least their mums, will buy a copy. This doesn’t apply if the pic of the WI cake competition looks as if it was taken underwater. Ron was very fond of Scotch, which can’t have

helped, but we didn’t feel it was the sole explanation. The breakthrough came when we discovered Ron was too tight – in the financial sense – to visit the optician. He wore ancient specs, purchased from a jumble sale. He could see well enough to cross the road in reasonable safety, but not to take an in-focus shot of the ladies bowls team. The editor paid for a trip to Dollonds, which helped a lot, although the new specs didn’t cure the shaky hands. When I worked as a junior reporter on a local paper in Devon in 1977 a senior colleague had a tip from a police contact that we should head for a remote farm on Dartmoor, where we’d find something very interesting. This turned out to be a rented house where a former Miss Wyoming, Joyce McKinney, had for three days, with the aid of a male accomplice, held prisoner a handsome young Mormon missionary with whom she was sexually obsessed. At a subsequent court hearing it was revealed that, after kidnapping Mr Anderson, she had kept him manacled to a bed and forced him to have sex against his will. “I loved Kirk so much that I would have skied down Mount Everest in the nude with a carnation up my nose,” she said later. This, as you may imagine, was a sensational

tabloid story, and we had beaten the world’s press to it. We arrived shortly after Ms McKinney and the exhausted Mormon had been taken away, but police had not had time to seal off the site. Breakfast things were still on the kitchen table, though no manacles were in evidence. “Quick! Get some pictures before we get kicked out,” we told “Bert” the local wedding snapper who worked part-time for the paper. Pause. “Come on. What’s up?” “Erm, there doesn’t seem to be any film in my camera.” By the time Bert returned from the 15-mile round trip back to town, we’d been booted off the farm, the police had set up a cordon about half-a-mile away, so the only picture anyone could get of the place was a distant one of the roof, and the tabloid pack had arrived in force. So good-bye to our Inside-Sex-in-Chains-LoveNest photo scoop. And thanks a bunch, Bert 8

>Scene Crap Photographers Tim Minogue

Mid-battle at the “Choong Workshop”, Romford, Essex, which opens its doors three times a week to MCs from surrounding areas to come and battle out their lyrical wits in Open Mic sessions

EI8HT PHOTOJOURNALISM

4TH BIRTHDAY EDITION

CALUMET SUPPORTS PHOTOJOURNALISM

CALUMET IS PROUD TO SUPPORT A PATCH OF ENGLAND A PHOTO STORY BY ANDREW BUURMAN

May – June Yann Mingard Spirits and Shamanism Landscapes of the East CANON, NIKON, KODAK, FUJI, POLAROID, EPSON, OLYMPUS, MANFROTTO, LEXAR 08000 964396 WWW.CALUMETPHOTO.COM

Telephone: 020 7253 2770 Email: info@ hostgallery.co.uk Website: hostgallery.co.uk

Free admission. Opening times: Monday – Friday 10am – 6pm or by appointment at other times including Saturday

EI8HT PHOTOJOURNALISM V5N1 JUNE 06

HO ST.

1 Honduras Street London EC1Y 0TH

EI8HT PHOTOJOURNALISM

4TH BIRTHDAY EDITION

CALUMET SUPPORTS PHOTOJOURNALISM

CALUMET IS PROUD TO SUPPORT A PATCH OF ENGLAND A PHOTO STORY BY ANDREW BUURMAN

May – June Yann Mingard Spirits and Shamanism Landscapes of the East CANON, NIKON, KODAK, FUJI, POLAROID, EPSON, OLYMPUS, MANFROTTO, LEXAR 08000 964396 WWW.CALUMETPHOTO.COM

Telephone: 020 7253 2770 Email: info@ hostgallery.co.uk Website: hostgallery.co.uk

Free admission. Opening times: Monday – Friday 10am – 6pm or by appointment at other times including Saturday

EI8HT PHOTOJOURNALISM V5N1 JUNE 06

HO ST.

1 Honduras Street London EC1Y 0TH