Volume 5 Number 2

VOL.5 NO.2 SEPT 2006 £10 WWW.FOTO8.COM

industry

EI8HT PHOTOJOURNALISM

EI8HT PHOTOJOURNALISM V5N2 SEPT 06

CALUMET SUPPORTS PHOTOJOURNALISM

CALUMET IS PROUD TO SUPPORT THEM & US A PHOTO STORY BY JAN VAN IJKEN

CANON, NIKON, KODAK, FUJI, POLAROID, EPSON, OLYMPUS, MANFROTTO, LEXAR 08000 964396 WWW.CALUMETPHOTO.COM

© Reuters 2006

Covering the Quake A Reuters Exhibition

Visa pour l’Image Festival, Perpignan 2 – 17 September 16 Reuters photographers of 13 nationalities covered the violent earthquake in Kashmir, working from day one in rotation for over 6 months. Each documenting a reality where time does not necessarily bring relief, and where their presence is a way not to forget.

reuters.com/pictures

REUTERS/Goran Tomasevic

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Welcome to this, the 18th issue of EI8HT. As you will notice on the cover, we have labelled it “Industry” in order to pull together, under a unifying title, a number of stories that have been submitted to us . Our Industry subjects are varied and include stories about workers in a factory in the Czech Republic, a rubber plantation in Liberia, a failed industrial project deep in the Brazilian Amazon rainforest, salt collecting in the high mountains of Bolivia and man’s use of animals, both industrially and domestically, in Holland. Elsewhere in this issue other stories touch on industry in part, such as in the story of the disappearing men of a Mexican village who leave their families and homes in order to find work in the great industrial north, America.

There is much more besides industry in this issue, even some light relief in the form of Tim Minogue’s humorous column in which he looks at an exhibition depicting animals employed for wartime causes.

I certainly welcome some light relief from the otherwise serious stories we publish. At the same time I also applaud the independent photographers and writers who continue to seek out and report on stories that are “difficult” to publish these days. Our contributors have a firm belief in the process of making people aware of the issues they feel are important. In this copy of EI8HT you will also learn about the plight of the destitute in Bogota’s El Cartucho neighbourhood, as well as Lena Engel’s personal battle against her inner demons in Surfacing.

With each edition EI8HT aims to present stories that are real, sometimes brutally so.

Freud once wrote that people can have too much reality and that they necessarily must switch off from it to preserve their sense of well-being. Do the real stories in EI8HT change the world? Or even opinions of the world? Recently my bank manager told me cheerfully that he enjoyed receiving the magazine each time I send him the new issue, but he hurriedly looks away whenever he catches a glimpse of a story he deems too depressing. I respect his right to switch off from EI8HT’s take on the world but I also take solace in knowing that our magazine has momentarily upset the balance of his day. However small and niche EI8HT’s impact is, it doesn’t shy away. EI8HT gives a voice to the unheard and hopefully makes us think of lives outside our own, even if it is just for a fraction of a second.

JL Editor’s Letter

Contributors

Editor Jon Levy

Alain Buu www.orizon-photo.com

Deputy Editor Lauren Heinz

Victor Cobo www.victorcobo.com

Features Editor Max Houghton

Sibylle Fendt www.sibyllefendt.de

Picture Editor Flora Bathurst

George Georgiou www.georgegeorgiou.net

Editorial Assistant Lally Pearson

Stan Guigui sgphoto26@yahoo.com

Interns Rosie French Vincent Mundy Antony Riley

Jan van IJken Dierbarr ... (Precious Animals) is published by Voetnoot www.voetnoot-publishers.nl www.photo-projects.com Vaclav Jirasek www.jirasek.com Colin McPherson www.colinmcpherson.co.uk Caroll Taveras www.carolltaveras.com Stephan Zaubitzer Represented by Picture Tank www.picturetank.com www.stephanzaubitzer.com

Columnists James Meek Tim Minogue John O’Farrell John Vidal Contributing Editors Sophie Batterbury, Ludivine Morel Reviewers Ken Grant, Bill Kouwenhoven Design Phil Evans & Rob Kester

Special Thanks Maurice Geller, Leo Hsu, Sharon Raizada Reprographics John Doran at Wyndeham Graphics Advertising adverts@foto8.com Print Stones the Printers 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: £60-UK, £68- EU, £82-ROW 4 issues, 1 yr: £35-UK, £39-EU, £46-ROW Back issues available www.foto8.com subscribe@foto8.com

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WE WANT TO KNOW WHAT YOU THINK Take part in our reader survey and you could win a copy of the book Photography Past Forward, Aperture at 50 www.foto8.com/survey

Michaël Zumstein Represented by Oeil Public www.oeilpublic.com

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Contents Vol.5 No.2 Sept 2006 16

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>Moments >24 Hard Labour Michaël Zumstein finds the workers of the Firestone rubber plantation in Liberia are anything but free >36 Green Siesta The sleeping park-goers of Paris showed Stephan Zaubitzer that some like it hot >58 The Legend of Yabougo Alain Buu witnesses the miracle of the fish in a Mali Village >Features – Industry >08 Velvet Underground A factory in the Czech Republic stands as a relic from a bygone age for Vaclav Jirasek >16 Them & Us How humans treat animals, from treasured pets to factory products by Jan van IJken >26 Fordlandia Colin McPherson happens upon a monument to folly in Amazonia >60 Salt Flat The surreal landscape that is home to Bolivia’s salt industry, by Caroll Taveras >Features – Worldwide >30 El Cartucho The last months of Bogota’s most notorious slum, observed firsthand by Stan Guigui, before its destruction by government forces >38 Sueños Victor Cobo explores the dreams of a better life that are driving the inhabitants of a Mexican village to leave their homes and families >48 In Transit George Georgiou takes a ride through Kiev in search of the Orange Revolution >52 Surfacing Sibylle Fendt’s insight into a young woman called Lena

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>Environment Column >29 Fordlandia John Vidal >Social Affairs Column >47 Tied Hands John O’Farrell >Fiction >48 Simferopol James Meek >Media Column >57 Assumptions Max Houghton >Inside >64 Jonathan Kaplan talks to EI8HT about writing, photography and surviving as a surgeon in war zones >Reviews >69 Between Dogs and Wolves, Shadowland, Ghosts in the Landscape, Eyewitnessing, Raymond Depardon, Harry Benson exhibition, The Glass Between Us, Knock Three Times, Flandrien, After Katrina, Aftermath >On My Shelf >77 Simon Norfolk reveals the key texts that influenced his work >Listings >78 Picture agencies, special notices and professional resources >Scene >90 Man’s Best Friend? Tim Minogue muses on a one-sided relationship >Cover © Vaclav Jirasek 7

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The world of heavy physical labour rarely shatters the highly polished surface of our post-industrial society. Under Vaclav Jirasek’s admiring eye, these factory workers from the Czech Republic become mighty heroes, icons of an age of steely resolve, inner strength and unadorned beauty.

Jirasek’s desire to document these great bastions of socialism – the steelworks, the mines, the engineering works – began with a series of black and white pictures that portrayed the Wannieck factory in Brno with a sense of reverie and awe. These hallowed images were the genesis for this striking series of portraits, in which Jirasek switched to colour and used ringflash to create a neo-naturalistic effect.

Says Jirasek: “I wanted to depict the forgotten people, those tested by harsh reality. There is an element of fashion in the portraits. Tattered overalls become an object of beauty; protective gear becomes the bearer of strange mystery” 8 Velvet Underground Vaclav Jirasek

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“There are 16 million pigs in Holland, the same number as there are people … but you never see them.” Jan van IJken’s assignment for the Rijksmuseum and NRC Handelsblad in Holland, was to go and find them, and other animals.

Van IJken looked to intensive farming operations, animal-testing laboratories, pet shows, people’s homes and even the great outdoors. Access was obviously more of an issue in some place than others, yet in the end van IJken found his direct approach elicited positive responses.

One of the first locations he visited was a huge pig-breeding farm, where the newborn pig, featured here, was about to be vaccinated, before having his tail cropped.

“The people were understandably anxious about their image, but the most important thing is that they were willing to be open. I was there for two weeks, building relationships, gaining trust. After a while, they forget you are there. It’s not the happiest place to be – the smell, the screaming – but I was determined not to prejudge what was happening there.”

The pig’s stay at its place of birth was but brief; soon it would be transported to another vast intensive farming operation to be fed up before being slaughtered.

On another farm, turkey chicks, just hours old, were thrown into crates, then, two by two, put into a machine to laser their beaks, resulting in them dropping off 10 days later.

Like the pigs’ tails, the reason for this procedure is to stop them fighting in overcrowded conditions.

The tiny chicken captured on film at the very end of a conveyor belt, is not necessarily falling to his death. Just hatched, thousands of chickens will be removed from the giant incubators to a machine that sucks shell-remnants from their feathers. But only the strong will survive; the listless are picked out and disposed of. The survivors will be counted, sorted and dispatched to various farms. Those destined to be egg-layers will have a longer life than those destined for consumption – just six weeks in their case.

While he gained extraordinary access to the agribusiness of the Netherlands, van IJken expected a negative response when he approached animal-testing laboratories.

“In fact, they were keen to show they were not all bad,” he says. “They stressed that this work [injecting the monkey] was essential medical research, and not for cosmetics. They assured me repeatedly that the animals have a decent and proper life. They also said they were continually looking for alternatives.”

Van IJken was equally keen to document the incredible love and affection bestowed on pets or even livestock, from the naked cat and the hen having its “hair” blow-dried to the perfectly rounded rumps of the best-in-show cattle. A particularly touching moment took place at the Wilhelmina children’s hospital in Utrecht, as a young patient took comfort in stroking a guinea pig.

The Dutch also have a fleet of ambulances dedicated to animals, and van IJken accompanied one such team on an emergency call. One ambulance, one fire engine, five people, some in diving suits, attended a small lake where a duck had been reported as having a broken leg. At the crucial moment, as the diver cast his net to rescue the injured bird… it flew away 8 Max Houghton Them & Us Jan van IJken

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A bull’s sperm is collected for use in artificial insemination

Previous page: A piglet is inoculated against infection

National Beef Cattle Championships prize-giving ceremony for the winning double-muscled cows at the Utrecht Horse Show

At this turkey farm the tip of the beak is removed with an infrared beam. This new method is more humane than singeing

Artificial insemination of a rabbit at a breeding farm. The farmworker has become allergic to the dust in the shed

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Brahma chicken, washed and blow-dried for inspection A guinea pig from a children’s farm visiting a sick child at Wilhelmina children’s hospital, Utrecht

Firemen in Amersfoor were called by the animal ambulance service to catch a duck reportedly with a broken leg on the ice. The duck flew away

Inspection of a sphinx cat

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Drawing blood from a Macaque monkey to develop a new vaccine.

After this he is returned to his troop A chick on a conveyor belt. The chicks are sorted by hand for defects and counted automatically

8 extra: More images from Jan van IJken’s animals project can be seen online foto8.com/8xtra

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>Moments Hard Labour Michaël Zumstein Photographer Michaël Zumstein and journalist Ariane Chemin went to Liberia, a country whose very foundations were built on the abolition of slavery, to make a report on the world’s largest rubber plantation for Le Monde in January 2006. The working conditions they encountered and the stories they heard seemed like a throwback to another age.

The worker pictured here rises at dawn and before dusk he will have “tapped” as many as 800 trees, as stipulated by his employer, Firestone, the American owner of this vast plantation. The tapping process, achieved by scoring a groove into the tree trunk, releases latex sap, which will ultimately be transported to the US for rubber production.

Human rights abuses at the plant have become the subject of scrutiny. Yet strike action by the workers this year, an ongoing court case, and a damning report by the UN, have not yet made much impact on the lives of the workers, who endure a seven-day week, earning about $3 a day, and whose ascribed workload is so unfeasible that they must enlist the help of their families, including children, to help them meet their targets.

Living conditions are no better: effluents from the processing plant flow directly into the river that runs through the plantation. Locals report seeing “white stuff” floating on the river and local cases of blindness are thought to be related. Workers often live in extremely cramped conditions, with no running water or electricity. Rice is the staple food, provided by Firestone and deducted from the workers’ pay.

According to the plantation’s night watchman, William Togbah, complaints are met with the following response: “There are 200 people waiting for your job.” The only discernible difference between working for Firestone and being a slave 200 years ago is that technically, the tappers are free to leave. In a country with 80 per cent unemployment, “freedom” has rarely sounded so hollow 8

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In October 2005, photographer Colin McPherson set off from Santarem in the Amazon in search of ways to document the brutal destruction of the rainforest. He was commissioned by an ethically minded Welsh surfwear manufacturer, Howies, which uses 1 per cent of its annual turnover to fund environmental projects.

It was the tarmacing of the dirt track otherwise known as the Amazon’s famous highway BR163 that first caught McPherson’s eye. Once in situ, and with the help of a genius Austrian fixer, Tommy, McPherson found himself in Fordlandia, the earliest and most ambitious example of the industrialisation of the Amazon 8

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Environment Column Fordlandia John Vidal Who knows exactly whose bright idea it was, but in 1927, with America recovering from the great depression and the Second World War still years away, the car magnate Henry Ford took possession of a great swathe of 25,000 sq km of the Amazon. Of all the many great attempts to tame the forest and to make the Amazon productive and modern, this was one of the most expensive and crazed ever conceived.

As always, it seemed a good idea at the time. Mr Ford urgently needed rubber for the tyres of his cars. Brazil had the perfect climate for growing wild rubber and it had enough space for anything. The country desperately needed investment, and Mr Ford believed that he could break the British Dutch rubber monopoly in Malaysia and what is now Indonesia.

The plan was to create the greatest rubber plantation the world had ever known. A deal was negotiated which gave him the land for nothing, police protection, duty free entry and exit of his goods, and all that Mr Ford had to do was plant 12 million rubber plants and return 9 per cent of the profits to the government after 12 years.

Fat chance. The place chosen to build a modern industrial city was on the banks of the Tapajos river, a major tributary of the Amazon, and in August 1928 the steamer Lake Ormoc, pulling a great ocean-going barge, arrived from Michigan with steam shovels, pile drivers, prefab buildings, a saw mill, tractors, a railway engine, water tower, ice-making equipment, and even a mini power station. The American managers set to work and employed 350 people.

It promised so much. Within a year, Fordlandia, as it was named, had turned from the forest into American suburbia, with processing works, paved streets, a swimming pool, a hospital, schools, rows of shops and a church. The trees came down and more than 1.4 million rubber trees were planted. At the height of the great experiment in the forest, almost 10,000 people are thought to have depended on Fordlandia.

But what nobody told the Americans was that the river rose and fell here up to 40 feet a year, making it impossible to get goods in and out for much of the time.

Nobody had warned Mr Ford, either, about the seringueiros – the rubber tappers. Rather than see progress, American-style, they found Fordlandia weird. They hated the mid-western food, and the way they had to serve

themselves. They hated the housing which they found ugly; they did not want to work from 6am to 3pm; they did not understand the no drinking rules or why they should learn to square dance; and they preferred water from the river than from a tap. They protested over the company bringing in West Indian labour and four managers came and went in just two years. It was a social and financial disaster.

But the failure was ecological as much as social. The land was hilly and difficult to use tractors and modern equipment on; the soil was sandy and unsuitable for rubber plantations; the rains were not regular. Moreover, large ships could only reach Fordlandia for a few months of the year and it proved far harder than expected to clear the forest.

Even more fundamentally, rubber plantations are just not suited for Amazonia. Although it grows wild there, it has evolved to grow in clumps – and not in Mr Ford’s dead straight rows which it is believed attracted fungi and diseases. As clouds of malarial mosquitoes bred voraciously in the stagnant waters created by the tractors and attacked the men, so ants, moths, mites and leaf diseases attacked the trees. It was a disaster.

Henry Ford spent upwards of $20m on Fordlandia and never saw a harvest. Instead, the company swapped part of the huge concession for 700,000 acres further north near Santarem at Belterra. It was altogether more suitable for growing rubber. Some 3.5 million trees – mainly new variety, high-yielding ones brought back from Asia – were planted there and in 1942 Belterra produced 750 tonnes of latex.

But it, too, never paid its way and Henry Ford gradually lost interest in both plantations. In 1945 he sold them back to the Brazilian government for $250,000. He had never even been to Brazil.

“Our experience has taught us that synthetic rubber is superior to natural rubber for certain of our products”, the car company said at the time.

These days, Fordlandia is a ghost

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town, surrounded by forest. The government tried to exploit its tourist appeal 20 years ago but that largely failed. However, you no longer have to take a boat to get there but can drive, in the dry season, from the nearby Transamazonian Highway.

Today about 1,000 people live in Fordlandia and, as it was in the 1930s, it is divided between Vila Americana, where the managers live, and the workers’ town. Just one house is still the way it was in the 1930s when Ford’s managers were in residence. Kept as a museum, it has running water, electric fans and all mod cons.

In the dry season Fordlandia is another slow, dusty Brazilian town. In the wet, it is hard to move around. But the old iron watertower that was brought in 1928 still stands and still supplies water, the prison is still there, and so is the cinema and the remains of the rubber factory.

Everyone lives in the workers’ town, scratching a living, dreaming of gold and perhaps hoping that, just as they did in the 1920s, someone will arrive with work 8 John Vidal is the Environment Editor for The Guardian

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Just a few blocks from Bogota’s presidential palace festered El Cartucho, a sprawling, reeking, urban slum, home to the destitute, the lawless and the desperate, its narrow streets conduits for the city’s vast drug-trafficking network. While the government’s successive attempts to destroy and then redevelop its nemesis finally succeeded, accusations of social cleansing and unexplained disappearances have never been answered.

The stench of death had always clung to El Cartucho, where the drugs, knives and guns that were its currency were also the ghetto’s euthanasia. Kids as young as eight smoked Bazuko (freebase), like Chinche (previous page), who smoked with his mother, for whom he also went out robbing. The 13-year-old pictured opposite carried this machete ever since two men tried to rape him a few years ago. Only the toughest survived.

Large colonial buildings housed filthy crack dens, the airless rooms thick with the vapours of cocaine and ammonia being burnt. Of the $3bn given to Colombia’s right wing government by the Bush administration for the war on drugs, not a cent seems to have been spent here. At the very bottom of a society that gave them nothing, the people of El Cartucho gave nothing back.

The story of El Cartucho started at the beginning of the last century. In Bogota’s Santa Inés neighbourhood, between the martyrs’ church and Bolivar Square, students, artists, homosexuals and left-wing intellectuals created a zone of tolerance and free expression. A kingdom devoted to pleasure and debauchery grew, originally called Patio de las Brujas (the witches’ courtyard).

Then, in 1948, the assassination of Jorge Gaitàn, a popular candidate in the presidential elections, sparked fierce rioting. From that day, chaos reigned in Bogota and the city’s thieves, beggars and assassins made their homes in what came to be known as El Cartucho.

In Spanish, cartucho has several meanings: a flower, a coin-purse worn by peasant women, a bullet cartridge and a small street. But whatever its name meant, its physical incarnation has disappeared to make way for the government’s cherished Park of the Third Millennium. The legacy of the searing poverty, the crippling drug addiction, the scant regard for life, of course, lives on. Some former inhabitants have made a new life for themselves, in derelict abattoirs across town 8

El Cartucho Stan Guigui

French photographer Stan Guigui moved to Colombia to work in advertising.

What he saw in Bogota inspired him to work with people, not products, and he has been a photographer and documentary maker ever since. His film on El Cartucho has been entered in next year’s Cannes festival 32

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>Moments Green Siesta Stephan Zaubitzer

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Sue単os

Beyond the cornfields of home, the mighty dollar tempts the men of Cheran to leave their village to provide for their families.

At the annual Easter parade villagers remember the sacrifice made by their distant loved ones and pray for their safe return 38

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The Easter procession (previous page) honours an effigy of Christ ‘No fence too high to scale, no inner tube too small to cross the great Texan river’: Purepecha men from Cheran Michoacan, clamber over a fence near the US border, while the village waits to hear if the crossing is successful A cantina mariachi musician sings of lost love, heartache – and men who smuggle themselves over the border into Texas The girl in the picture (right) has gone to the US to find work. Nobody has heard from her in five years

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Dollars earned in America finance a traditional wedding for Pancho, who returned home after four years of landscape work in Little Rock, Arkansas, to marry his amor. Two months later he will leave again for as much as four more years An elderly villager plays with children whose parents are all in the US working

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In a small village called Cheran, in the central Mexican state of Michoacan, the inhabitants have a dream, a heady romantic vision of a new life beyond the cornfields of home.

Their deep attachment to their birthplace (most are indigenous Mexican indians) means that although 70 per cent head to their prosperous neighbour, the United States, in pursuit of the dollar, many will eventually return to their families with the fruits of their labour.

As Victor Cobo’s intimate gaze suggests, the journey is not an easy one, yet its hardship and loneliness is underpinned with hope. No longer able to earn an income from traditional industries, timber and corn, on which they can survive and uphold their native traditions, the migrant would-be workers leave their homeland and head north.

The men (for it is usually the men) negotiate hundreds of miles of desert, carrying a single bag with a change of clothes, a gallon of water and some dried meat. Cobo accompanied a small group of men on such a trip. They ran out of water on the first day, and would drink from cattle troughs. Although the photographer did not make the final crossing with the Mexicans, he found their methods ingenious. No fence was too high to scale; no inner tube too small in which to stow away across a great Texan river.

Documenting the effects of the migration on the villagers who stayed behind over a five-year period, Cobo saw how the traditional Easter parade, bedecked with the flowers, now also acts as a welcoming back celebration for returning family members as well as a time to send prayers to those far from home.

Norteño, the local folk music, thrives on the tragedy of women waiting long years for their men to return home, of lonely tales of travellers lost in the desert. Yet its plaintive ballads soar with pride at the strength both of those who stay behind and those who have gone to make their fortune 8 Max Houghton Sueños Victor Cobo

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Left behind: a procession of nuns, some locals harvesting corn from communal lands that cannot support them, an empty house – to which a family may one day return

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Foreign Affairs Column Tied Hands John O’Farrell Once upon a time there was something called the Dignity of Labour. It referred to that midpoint between being a producer of useful materials and a cog in the machine. It formed a core of that evaporated species, the organised working class. It implied that the work that you performed was part of a larger picture, one that you personally profited from as part of the collective. Sharing your independence increased your autonomy. Your very sanity was improved because the things that you made were understandable to you, not only in their function, but in their relation to the wider process of production.

John O’Farrell is Communications Officer of the International Conflict Research Centre at the University of Ulster www.incore.ulster.ac.uk

That satisfaction is strictly rationed now. The prospect of a unified refusal, let alone a global revolution, is as quaint and startling as the language commonly used by Jack London a century ago, when he wrote The Iron Heel, his fantasy of a proletarian revolt crushed by the capitalist oligarchy. His hero, Ernest Everhard tells a gathering of aghast exploiters that their time at the trough was running out: “You are fat with power and possession, drunken with success; and you have no more hope against us than have the drones, clustered about the honey-vats, when the workerbees spring upon them to end their rotund existence. You have failed in your management of society, and your management is to be taken away from you. A million and a half of the men of the working class say that they are going to get the rest of the working class to join with them and take the management away from you. This is the revolution, my masters. Stop it if you can.”

At the start of the 21st century, job satisfaction is at a premium and therefore limited to the very few.

We stuff parts of our lives into a series of bubbles; work, family, leisure, solitude, friends, hobbies, secrets, learning and dreams are separated and competing. The public sphere has become a series of these bubbles, where there is no room for such a luxury as the big picture. Any sense of dignity is lost as the bubbles randomly collide, or crash into the biggest blob of all: personal fear.

The new regime in Bolivia under Evo Morales has been busy renationalising its gas and other natural resources in the name of the people. Morales wants “the people” to profit from Bolivia’s gas, and has picked a fight with his neighbours in Chile as well as the multinationals, which is unfortunate as Bolivia has no coastline and depends upon a pipeline to the Pacific that crosses Chile. Meanwhile, the big gringo junta in Washington was proposing the abolition of estate tax on the fortunes of dead millionaires. Both stunts received large degrees of support from their respective populace.

The problem with economic populism is that it tends to last as long as the electoral cycle, and it also tends to be rammed through by governments whose attitude towards democracy is ambivalent, to put it mildly. The governments mentioned above have engaged in other populist stunts that have masked shadier deeds. Morales came to power in late 2005 after three years of riots by his supporters that made governance impossible. The Bush White House has shamelessly exploited the image of “wartime commander-in-chief” to deflect criticism of its domestic policy of tax cuts and handouts for the rich, ‘faith-based initiatives’ for the poor and illegal surveillance for the entire population.

In the US, over 60 per cent of those polled support the abolition of an inheritance tax that presently only affects estates of over $3m.

This follows years of propaganda about the “death tax” squeezing the widows of small farmers and trusty salesmen. Such tactics are at the core of the vote-grabbing strategy of the Republican Party.

During the 2004 presidential and congressional elections, things seemed a bit tight in around a dozen swing states, so a series of “propositions” (state referendums) were pushed by right-wing Christians. Nine were calling for a state ban on “gay marriage”, despite the complete absence of a campaign for such unions. Civil unions, protecting inheritance and next-of-kin rights had been allowed in San Francisco and Boston, and that was enough for a clamour to get to the ballot station. One such state that had this proposition passed was Ohio, regarded for months as the swing state of the election. Instead of spending millions on TV adverts making John Kerry look less like a Brahmin and more like Lurch from The Addams Family, the Democrats should have read Thomas Frank’s book of that year, What’s The Matter With Kansas, which examined how rural US populism had mutated from backing progressive causes such as the minimum wage to cheerleading Wal-Mart: “The trick never ages; the illusion never wears off. Vote to stop abortion; receive a rollback in

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capital gains taxes. Vote to make our country strong again; receive deindustrialization. Vote to screw those politically correct college professors; receive electricity deregulation. Vote to get government off our backs; receive conglomeration and monopoly everywhere from media to meatpacking. Vote to stand tall against terrorists; receive Social Security privatization. Vote to strike a blow against elitism; receive a social order in which wealth is more concentrated than ever before in our lifetimes, in which workers have been stripped of power and CEOs are rewarded in a manner beyond imagining.”

And still the anger boils, among the fag-ends of the process, mostly invisible to the rich world: the children of peasants stitching your jeans; the sans papiers flogging fake Rolexes for the real Mafia among the promenades of southern Europe; the free movement of capital that includes criminal assets and jihadi contributions and the free movement of labour that includes happy Polish plumbers as well as Moldovan girls trapped in the sex industry.

What is all too present is process, with interpretation and meaning sidelined. The issue for understanding global industry is not understanding what it makes, but getting what it does, and then accepting or rejecting that.

The Italian poet Cesare Pavese describes in The Paper Smokers an encounter with a veteran of vanquished struggle, who grew up with hunger and learnt to work unsmiling in a factory. The poem ends with a description of failure and poverty, then is interrupted by a yell of defiance that can terrify or inspire, or even both: Suddenly he shouted that it wasn’t destiny if the world suffered, if the light of the sun wrung a curse from you: it was men who were to blame.

At least we could get out, be free to choose hunger, and say no to a life that makes use of love and pity the family, the little plot of earth, to tie our hands 8

Fiction Simferopol James Meek Photographs In Transit George Georgiou

As Ukrainians negotiate the uneasy transition from state rule to democracy heralded by the Orange Revolution in 2004, so George Georgiou has been documenting their daily lives. Playing on the notion of transit, he boarded buses,

trams, trolleybuses and trains with his camera, watching people move from home to work, from the suburbs to the cities and back, as the optimism of the new dawn recedes like a halfremembered dream

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Masha, Callum’s interpreter, watched the TV news on the first night of their trip, and heard about a small new war for the first time. The TV put up a yellow map with the jagged symbol of an explosion near a place she knew. In summer, she’d been on holiday there, in the Caucasus, with her Kiev university friends. They’d stayed in a guesthouse, skipped over the hot beach stones to the Black Sea, played old student games in each other’s rooms and been flirted with at supper, girls and boys both, by local men who looked like Argonauts, with all their gold, their smiles, black hair, firm terracotta flesh and heroic posturing. Now they were at war, these two sets of men with different languages, who’d eaten and drunk in summer at neighbouring tables. They were killing each other with rifles and tanks.

Callum said sympathetic things to Masha about it, while what he wanted was to sleep with her. After her holiday, he’d picked her up from the airport, and she told him hours of stories. He felt excluded and jealous. He ended up believing that Masha and her friends had experienced two weeks of unrepeatable joy, a time which had passed into history after they finished with it, the last fortnight of Soviet innocence for the privileged children of Kiev, forbidden to him not only because he hadn’t been there, but because he hadn’t lived a favoured Soviet childhood, and didn’t know the same jokes and TV shows.

Masha understood this. She tried to help him by telling him everything that had happened; the more stories she told, the worse he felt.

In autumn, when they made the trip to Crimea, the fighting started in the Caucasus, a few hundred miles to the east, and Masha had to audit her holidays out loud again, breaking off to ask Callum how it was that the beautiful young men who’d told her how well they got on together, how they married each other’s sisters, could be killing each other now. She became so insistent that Callum tried to give her an answer. He told her that the two nations had allowed their myths about themselves to move so far away from reality that the thread connecting them had snapped. The truth was that he had no idea.

He did want her to be happy. He wondered what he would do if he was offered the choice between sleeping with her and making her unhappy, and not sleeping with her and her staying as she was, merry and contented. Someone would make her unhappy eventually; why not him? He’d kissed her once, and put his hand on her breast. She’d smiled and twisted gently away till there was air between them.

By the end of their trip, on the trolleybus carrying them from Yalta to Simferopol to catch the evening flight back to Kiev, Callum understood that Masha was going to leave him. His Russian was good enough now for him to do most of the reporting he needed without an interpreter, and Masha, who was about to graduate, had found out that she could earn more working for someone else. It occurred to Callum with a new clarity, as if a doctor was reminding him of the actual sickness beneath his symptoms, that Masha travelled around Ukraine with him and came to his flat not because she was in love with him, but because he paid her. She did like him. But she wouldn’t have to come.

Callum’s expat friends thought of them as a couple. Some of the men, especially those who found her skinniness reminiscent of boy crushes, were jealous. But while Masha and Callum had shared hotel rooms and sleeping compartments on trains, they’d never slept in the same bed, and Callum had never claimed he and Masha were lovers. Now, when it was coming to an end, his heart’s fires had been stoked by the sight of Masha in her room, when she’d come straight from her bed to the door in just a teeshirt. He felt most constrained and poor then, though he’d often sat with her on the beach, talking and playing cards, when both of them were nearly naked. Nor did it make sense that sometimes, when you were leaving a country you’d stayed in for a time, the sight of the fur of treetops and the intricate grain of mountains through the window of the ascending aircraft made you long for it as if you’d never been there.

It was cold in the trolleybus, which was roughly-made and indestructible. It was a metal box on wheels with a whiny electric motor and two heavily sprung prongs which bounced and sparked off the electric cables slung down the highway from the Crimean Riviera to Simferopol. The heaters breathed faint warmth. Most of the passengers were wearing coats and scarves.

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Masha turned round and explained to Callum that the big man was offended

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In the dusk outside, as they descended from the coast, they saw orchards, tidy small Russian and Ukrainian cottages in gardens which would be obscured by blossom in spring, and bare fields dotted with tents and piles of bricks where the Tatars, not long returned from exile, were getting ready to build new houses.

Callum and Masha were travelling with Paola, an ArgentinianAmerican woman who was trying the freelance journalist thing for a while, and her interpreter, Lina, Masha’s friend, a lanky tennis-obsessed girl with long black hair who, if it wasn’t for a stoop, would have stood a head taller than Callum. They didn’t talk much during the journey. Yalta, out of season, had turned out to be a dismal place. A freezing wind blew across the esplanade and chopped the sea into ugly, jagged portions.

Most of the restaurants were closed. Day and night the streets were deserted and although they managed to pull together bits of chicken and a bottle of sweet wine for supper there was a mood of scarcity and bitterness. Neither Callum nor Paola could find anything to write about.

When Lina asked why they’d come, Callum and Paola blamed each other. It’d been Masha who lifted them. Her anxiety about the war in the Caucasus had never been of the weeping kind, more a desperate sort of curiosity, as if she was surprised at not having seen the faintest bridge connecting her loving summer with the bloodshed now reported. Between the talk of that, she was doing footnotes and gags in her fast slightly accented English, with her grin and her chancer’s eyes. “In Crimea they call autumn ‘the velvet season’. Those kids are playing Afghans and Pakistanis. How come you can’t speak Russian?

It’s so easy. Brezhnev is making the opening speech at the Olympic Games. He says ‘O...O...O...’ and one of his guys taps him on the shoulder and says ‘Leonid Ilyich, you’re reading the Olympic symbol.’”

It was dark when they saw the first untended lights of Simferopol, harsh little bulbs in arbitrary places from which it was easier to imagine an infinite wilderness of back yards, lock-ups and allotments than a city. The trolleybus stopped at a shelter and rocked slightly with the weight of the man who got on. Everyone could sense, from the scrape of his soles on the floor and from the effort of his silence, that he was very drunk. Callum, who was with the others in two seats near the front, turned round for a second, and saw the man, broad, heavy, big-stomached and almost as tall as the bus, making his way to the back. The bus pulled away.

“I’m freezing,” said Masha, who was sitting next to Paola in front of Callum and Lina. She hunched her shoulders and rubbed her hands together between her thighs. She was tough but not stoic.

“Oh God,” said Paola, to no-one in particular, unless it was to God. “It’s so fucking slow.”

Callum sensed a disturbance behind him. He glanced round and saw two people, a man and a woman in their twenties, come down the aisle. They sat down in the seats closest to the middle doors of the trolleybus. She was a stern, handsome woman with dyed blonde hair in a ponytail laid across the shoulder of her white fur jacket. She looked as if she lived ugly months for every hour of happiness, and knew it, and reckoned it wasn’t a bad deal. Her arm was linked tight to her companion, a thin, dark, neat man with a gentle face. He could have been a Tatar or a Slav. He had the eyes and cheekbones of a filmed face and his raincoat, shined black shoes, closely shaved chin and newly cut hair suggested ambition beyond the Simferopol busways.

From the back of the bus, the big drunk passenger was shouting.

Masha turned round and explained to Callum that the big man was offended. When he’d sat down next to the couple, they’d got up and moved.

Callum heard breathing and ragged words as the big man came back down the bus. His black felt jacket gave off a warm vapour of sweat and alcohol fumes. The next time Callum looked, the big man was standing by the doors of the bus, facing the couple, gazing down on the young man like a father. The big man’s moustache was stretched wide across his face by a grin. It was not a natural or a generous grin. From the colour of his face he had been drinking outside for days. The young man was looking back into the big man’s face and talking pleasantly and quickly. It was hard to tell if he was pleading, or apologising, or soothing. The woman

watched him as if he was speaking well and bravely, and he didn’t flinch or stop talking when the big man reached out his hand and started stroking his head with firm, even strokes like those by which a farmer comforts a beast before slaughter. Callum could see the well-dressed man was in trouble, without defence, and when the big man punched him in the face what was remarkable was not the blow but how quickly the big man struck, as if his fighting motor was separate from the drunk part of him. However, the big man didn’t strike twice, giving the young one enough time to jump up and get into a position where he was standing facing his opponent. His raincoat was buttoned up to all but the last button and his hand darted into that small space and pulled out a nunchuk. He held the two wooden handles in either hand with the chain stretched taut between them.

The big man and the young one stood opposite each other in the aisle of the bus. Boozed up as he was the big man swayed marvellously with each swerve and bump of the bus on the unsmooth Crimean road, countering the motion with his weight. When he saw the nunchuk, his smile became real and wider. He beckoned to the young one. The two of them were alongside the seats where Callum and the others were sitting. Paola and Masha were hunched down in front and Lina had her head bent down and her body pressed against the window. Callum put his arm around her shoulder and looked up at the fighting men.

The neat young man hit the big man across the face with one end of the nunchuk. The sound as it struck the big man’s forehead and cheek made Callum think of the way old guys in pubs strike tables with their dominoes. Blood appeared on the big man’s face.

The trolleybus halted at the next bus stop and the doors clattered open. For a couple of seconds, the big man and the young one stood poised, the big man murmuring and beckoning and laughing, the young one tensed, being nowhere but in the fight. Then he sprinted out of the door, down the road in the darkness, with the big man running after him. Just before the door closed the young man’s girlfriend shouted after him to call her when he got home.

Afterwards Callum realised he had been squeezing Lina’s shoulder tightly. He saw that a spot of blood had fallen on the back of her white coat. They looked at each other and he took his arm away. None of them talked about what they had seen. Later, at the airport waiting for the plane, Callum offered to clean Lina’s coat. He took it to the washroom and borrowed a cloth from the attendant and cleaned the blood off as best he could. On the plane, when they were told to sit where they liked, Callum sat next to Lina. He invited her to dinner and she agreed but she said, then and often in the following months, when they were going out, that she’d been surprised by his invitation. Callum said he was surprised himself.

“Why?” asked Lina.

“I don’t know,” said Callum. This was a lie. He did know.

He was surprised when he remembered how, when the bus was coming down from the Crimean plateau and the sun was setting, he hadn’t been thinking about the woman sitting next to him, and how he’d been straining his neck, trying to see Masha’s reflection in the window. He often remembered it, and he never understood 8 James Meek was a correspondent for The Guardian in Kiev and Moscow for most of the 1990s. His most recent novel, The People’s Act Of Love, won the 2006 Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize. He lives and works in London, where he is writing his sixth book, a novel set in Afghanistan, Britain and America in 2002

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In 2003, Sibylle Fendt was working on a story about anorexia, and sought permission to photograph patients in a psychiatric clinic in her native Germany, dealing with eating disorders. All the patients, bar one, gave their permission.

But when Lena Engel saw everyone else being photographed she suddenly said “Yes, take a picture of me.”

The first picture was of Lena wearing white, lying in grass, which encircled her like a womb. Fendt made the second photograph as Lena floated freely in water.

During Lena’s stay in the clinic the reason behind her compulsive eating surfaced. She told the therapist she had been sexually abused as a child. She had known it and not known it at the same time, and the layers of flesh she amassed became an armour with which she could protect herself from the truth.

Fendt, who had herself suffered from anorexia, wanted the opportunity to look into somebody, to look further than the flesh, and in so doing learnt something about herself too. She developed a strong bond with Lena, even moving from Berlin to Lena’s hometown of Frankfurt for a time to continue the story. When Lena married Pascal, her childhood sweetheart, this July, Fendt took their wedding pictures 8 Surfacing Sibylle Fendt

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Media Column Assumptions Max Houghton As a society, we are obsessed with fat women, yet they are often invisible. They are not present in the dizzying catwalk of footballers’ wives, actresses and models who populate the pages of the I-spy press.

Drop a dress size in a week, leer the women’s mags. Eat cereal (cereal?) for two meals a day to lose an inch from your waist.

Never eat carbohydrates after dark or the bogeyman will come.

Only in an absurdly affluent culture could such edicts ever reign.

A recent edition of Grazia devoted a double page spread to the abject thinness of Victoria Beckham. The waist of a sevenyear-old, they reprimanded, printing an actual size illustration of her waistband across the page (or a small part of it). Their covergirl that week? Come on down, Victoria Beckham.

When an attractive woman appears in the public eye, whose physique is larger than that of a child, she is compelled to discuss why she is not skinny, and to prove in some way how ecstatically happy she is to be “curvy”, the favourite euphemism for size 12 and above. When fat, or even simply “curvy” women meet thin women, they feel obliged to comment on the thinness of the other, often feeling in some way inferior and surely less attractive.

Then there is the so-called obesity epidemic, which is used as a stick with which to beat excess flesh.

You’ll get heart disease if you’re fat. You’ll be infertile if you’re fat.

But the real disease you’ll get, if you’re a woman, anyway, is a profound sense of shame and self-disgust for taking up so much space. A spin-off syndrome is the dead certainty that you’ll never get a man. The tyranny of thinness pervades.

Lena Engel, the subject of Sibylle Fendt’s sumptuous photo essay, married the love of her life, in July.

Has her husband had to explain why he is in love with a fat woman? Probably. And if the question has never been asked, it has been framed in the minds of most people who have seen them together.

Last time a fat person sat next to you on a plane or train, did you honestly think nothing at all? Did you pay extra attention to what they ate? Did you judge them? If a thin person had sat next to you and eaten a couple of chocolate bars in succession, would you have felt the same? The truth is that we live in a society where it is more acceptable to have a cocaine habit than it is to be fat.

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We think that fat people are greedy, lazy, have no self control, eat junk food all day, that they should eat less and exercise more. We think that fat people must be stupid.

Lena Engel was sexually abused as a child and she eats so that she doesn’t remember. Her physicality becomes a cushion between her conscious mind and its memory. If she regulates her eating, becoming thinner, she starts to remember what happened to her and then she can’t bear to live with herself.

We think about fatness all the time, but not like Lena does. We should change our minds 8

>Moments The Legend of Yabougo Alain Buu

Everybody knows that here, in the first hours of humanity, a very young girl of Bamba, Yabougo Sourgo, discovered the Pond of Antogo, in the heart of Mali, when she was walking to Yanda, a neighbouring village. Arriving at the village, the child told her sister about this oasis among the stones and sand, about the coolness of the water, the way it mirrored the sky. The sister’s husband

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hurried to the spot. The scenery didn’t matter to him but the profusion of fish made him dizzy. He soon declared himself owner of the place.

Yabougo’s father became angry: his daughter had discovered the pond, therefore it belonged to him and no one else. Spears and assegai would decide the dispute. War broke out. Bamba

rallied its Peul tribesmen. The ground turned red, as blood was shed between the two communities.

The father and his followers were victorious. Even today, the men of Yanda cannot take part in the sacred fishing. Only the men of Bamba take part in the fishing. The others – Dogon, Peul and Tuaregs – remain spectators.

At nightfall, after the fishing ceremony, the women make a meal of fish and rice to be shared by all the following morning; a feast in a region where millet is the staple food. Yabougo disappears once more into the night, with her legend. She will be born again next year, for a new miracle of the fish  8 Laeticia Brunet

Buu and Brunet were told the Legend of Yabougo by three elders of Bamba.

The story is complex and not committed to paper

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Bolivia’s dazzling Salar de Uyuni is the brightest spot on earth visible from space. The Surrealist painters were captivated by the hallucinatory quality of the light on the great salt desert, where all that is solid melts into the thin Andean air.

This vertiginous landscape, its ecology unchanged for centuries, offers work to the inhabitants of the Altiplano and holiday memories to moneyed tourists from across the globe. Against the blinding backdrop of azure sky, workers painstakingly scrape salt from vast lakes that evaporated thousands of years ago, most of which is consumed in Bolivia. Holidaymakers stay the night in the hotel built entirely from salt blocks  8 Salt Flat Caroll Taveras

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Inside Max Houghton talks to Jonathan Kaplan about medicine, photography, keeping journals – and keeping sane

EI8HT: You’re a doctor by profession, a surgeon, currently based in London, but you’ve also spent the past 15 years in conflict environments, from Kurdistan to Eritrea, and notably written on and photographed your experiences.

Your most recent book Contact Wounds was borne out of the journals you keep when you are on your missions to conflict zones. You say in the book “My only sanctuary was my journal” – amid such intensity, do you feel the need to remove yourself from the company of others?

Jonathan Kaplan: When one goes to these places there is a disentangling from the links and bonds one has at home, but in their place the intensity of a new place, of new people and relationships. So you can’t really describe that as going off to be alone. Once there, amid the relentless demands on one to be available as a doctor, it’s very difficult to claim any time for yourself. Even if I hadn’t slept or eaten for a couple of days, and I’m finally managing to grab some sleep or eat a meal, that doesn’t mean you couldn’t be disturbed if somebody was hurt or wanted an opinion on the health of a member of their family or just wanted some tablets.

The only opportunity I had to draw back from that was if I was writing – it was assumed to be something important. So writing the journals became a time I could claim for myself, when I’d be able to sit in a corner with my head down; it gave me an opportunity for analysis. Part of the experience of being in those places is that

they are so intense that one can be overwhelmed by emotions, by concern about one’s patients, by fear and by the realisation that crucial insights would be overlaid in the next few seconds by something else that would come in the door. And the only chance one has to hang on to any part of it is to note them down. What actually got written down was – is – often incoherent and of no real value as a record, because later it’s impossible to work out what the hell I was trying to say! But it’s vital, it’s life-saving at the time.

8: If writing was a time for reflection or analysis, did the sketches you created in your journals serve a different purpose? Were they more of a meditation, perhaps?

JK: Drawing is therapeutic on all sorts of levels, because it disengages parts of the brain, especially those involved in the intense kind of problems the practice of surgery seem to entail. Sketching is an escape from those rigid ways of thinking; more meditative, an opportunity perhaps to get a little repose, as well as encouraging alpha waves in the brain – which one can also get by sleeping – when sleep isn’t an option.

8: In reading Contact Wounds there seemed to be an expectation early on that your parents expected you to do something in the arts. So was sketching always something you did?

JK: I never drew with any particular discipline. I would

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sketch in the pages between my medical lecture notes but I’d say that I was never particularly attentive to creating in that way.

It’s only really since I started travelling, and particularly doing this rigorous work in war zones and places of conflict, that I used sketching as a means of retaining a collection of impressions in shorthand. There is a level on which sketches work far better than words in encompassing some experiences.

8: Indeed, as can photography.

You say little about your photography in your book, although you do mention your friend Guy Tillim in the Angola chapter and I know you have an enduring friendship with Susan Meiselas. Tell me how photography fits in?

JK: I started taking pictures as a means of documentation.

But the truth of the matter is that I have always done these medical assignments as voluntary missions and they’ve been unpaid. So I’ve come back from wherever it is I’ve been away, sometimes months without an income, and the only way I’ve been able to cover the rent on my flat has been by managing to place the odd story with a foreign editor of a broadsheet newspaper.

The factor that interested those editors is that I’ve been working in a place and under circumstances that perhaps journalists hadn’t seen, and the only photographs that exist might be those that I’ve taken. So I started photographing in order to document what I was doing and also as means

of extending the level on which I could communicate the experience.

I’ve generally photographed in black and white and continue to do so because it has a modifying effect on the sort of images that I often find myself photographing.

It’s very seldom I will have the chance to pick up a camera if someone comes in wounded or if they are having surgery.

Occasionally I have been moving between cases and used that moment to record what was going on – not technically, but to achieve an impression of the work involved, the sensations one feels after.

8: You have even worked for Agence France Presse. I find it fairly amazing that you can work as a photographer and also work as a surgeon …

JK: Well I’ve never had any training in making pictures. It was somewhat of a process of observing what worked, what resonated with me when I looked at a picture, that made me decide how I imagined the components of photographs should come together.

I met Susan Meiselas when she was looking for source material for her book Kurdistan: In the Shadow of History. She used the journal I had kept when I was working as a surgeon in Kurdistan during the 1991 Kurdish uprising.

I knew of her work prior to that but through knowing her learnt much more about the way in which she recorded images. Guy Tillim and I have known each other for many years, travelled together

Watercolour sketch, and photograph of Kuito General Hospital, Kuito, Angola

There’s no contact more intimate than having your hands in someone’s belly and if they die then that relationship is suddenly bereft and it’s not something you can ever put together again.

Those amputated existences stay with you

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Watercolour sketch of ruined cathedral, Kuito, Angola Photograph of Kuito Cathedral during Portuguese colonial period, from the Angolan National Archive

extensively, and he’s been a very strong influence in the way I’ve learnt to look at and interpret images and he has some very personal and quite revolutionary ideas about how pictures should be made and what their purpose is, and those are ideas I respect very highly.

Working as a jobbing photographer for AFP was a strange experience. I was a stringer and I was paid $50 an image. I would be given two rolls of film at the beginning of the day and sent out on my assignment and when I came back, the editor would only look at those two rolls, so I learnt a certain discipline about the use of the shutter.

The same lack of formal training applies to writing. I’ve written on the basis of the impressions I’ve had of the way other people’s writing has affected

me rather than ever really feeling I was adhering to a particular style. The results are completely mysterious to me; I have no idea how my endeavours have ended up creating books.

8: Are you more conscious now that your journals are documents other people will be looking at?

JK: I can’t say that I’m capable, in the situations where I’m working, of too much forward thinking.

A combination of fatigue and emotional intensity means that I seem to use the journals – as well as being a sanctuary, a place of escape – as a place of setting down very raw experiences which often degenerate into almost incomprehensible stuff. These are intermixed with lists of patients being admitted and reminders to myself to take my anti-malarial medication, and notes on things

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I’ve got to do when I get back to London!

8: You describe your journals as “a repository of my fear and guilt that each next crisis would be the one I failed” – what kind of failure are you scared of?

JK: If you elect to study surgery and to work under these situations you don’t any longer have the right to step back and say ‘Well, I’m not going to be involved here; I’m renouncing responsibility; somebody else can do it’. You commit yourself to some – I don’t know what it is – a compunction to serve.

There, you have to acknowledge that working in desperate circumstances – sometimes with severely limited resources with people who are very badly wounded – you are going to meet situations, clinical situations, that

Children playing in front of ruined cathedral, some wearing disccarded surgical gloves from the hospital; toys were scarce in Kuito

are outside your ability. You have to nonetheless carry on and do the best you can.

Of course, one learns to function with a certain clinical detachment and maintain one’s ability to make decisions with a reasonable degree of deductive and rational thinking. But at the same time you are aware that you are judging yourself very hard.

And that means that you do feel failure and you have to be aware of the limitations of what you can do. All that is associated with guilt because you spend your training and your professional career feeling that your role is to combat death and suffering and in these situations that’s sometimes something you can’t do.

8: You wrote a chapter about your friend Andrew, who died on a trip on which you didn’t accompany

I knew that by the water engineer bringing clean water to the refugee camp he’d saved 10,000 lives and the whole time I’d been there, over a couple of months, I knew that I’d saved a handful, an absolute handful him. At the end of chapter you say “I could find no expiation”.

The next chapter – by accident or design is Angola – was it your expiation in some way? Was it because you lost something – someone – that you went somewhere so brutal?

JK: It coloured my perception of what I was doing in Angola, it was the next war I went to after Andrew’s death. But I’d worked as a doctor in four conflict environments prior to his death – Kurdistan in 1991, Mozambique in ’91 and again in ’92, and Burma in around ’94.

8: You describe Angola as having many ghosts – do they still haunt you, so to speak ?

JK: I feel that I remember every person who has died under my hand, or that I have treated and who hasn’t survived. In some cases they will be people with whom I have had long associations as patients. In other situations it was short and very intense and I never even knew their names. But I do remember those encounters.

It’s inevitable that you carry around those memories and that feeling of a sundered relationship – because there’s no contact more intimate than having your hands in someone’s belly! And if they die then that relationship is suddenly bereft and it’s not something you can ever put together again. Those amputated existences stay with you.

It’s one of the reasons why I’ve written my books The Dressing Station and Contact Wounds – an attempt to give an account of myself, to myself, to work out what it is that I have done and what I failed to do and, realistically, whether I have failed those people.

It’s a very difficult thing to do, because on one level of course

I’ve failed them completely. But on another perhaps being there and trying to help was in itself all that could be required. But I think one always carries those spectres around.

8: You grew up in South Africa.

As far as I can tell, your family background was stable, happy.

But you say in the book “perhaps none of us was intact in the first place”. What effect did growing up in South Africa under apartheid have on this sense of intactness – or lack of it?

JK: No doubt growing up in a skewed society has a number of effects. It can warp one’s sense of human values and the value of interrelationships. It can sensitise one to inequalities; it can leave one with a sense of being the recipient of inappropriate privilege and that’s something that I never felt comfortable with. No doubt that was an enormous formative factor in my growing up. I can’t say that I have been turned into an avid political activist as a result, though my thinking is strongly politicised. I’m very aware of the fact that the decisions I make have political consequences and I’m aware enough of it to be in most cases fairly clear about having consciously tried to assist victims of unjust forces.

8: You talk a lot about the importance of a hereditary line, indeed your father was a surgeon.

You must have thought about the lack of hereditary line and its psychological impact on children who are born into war?

JK: The psychological disfiguring caused by wars is immeasurable.

Children who grow up in wars, where their basic state of existence is fear and hunger, crying or muteness: we can’t understand just how destructive, how irreparable that damage is.

Young children who lose their parents will be affected forever. In wars they often lose everything, every semblance of structure in their lives. Working in places like that you become aware of how limitless human suffering is, while at a certain level, desensitised to it.

In Angola, around the hospital were these giant canvas barracks, critical feeding centres for children, and these kids would come in, starved, diseased, malnourished, wounded, having been wandering in the bush, trying to flee the fighting, separated from their families, and we’d try and keep them alive.

Even with the most intensive intervention, intravenous fluids, antibiotics and protein supplements, milk formula, about a quarter of them died.

And of those who survived, some of them might be reunited with members of their family, be reabsorbed into a community or a village group, but some of them just became ghosts, you’d see them wandering around the hospital and they didn’t speak and they had this permanent expression of incomprehension.

Human touch, conversation, were things they no longer related to.

After a while you became aware of them as sort of sidling ghosts on the edge of your vision. One can’t imagine what their future could be. That’s the legacy of so many wars and it’s difficult to think of a way one could intervene effectively. What do you do?

Adopt 1000 of them and try and love them all? It’s not practical or possible and yet something has to be done for those people.

8: But at least you’re there trying to. You’re not just being an observer – or a photographer!

JK: I intervene for such a short period, I’m seldom able to pass

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Sketch of World Food Programme poster showing aerial food drop

on my skills to anyone else.

Surgery is considered to be terribly dramatic, but I’ve become very aware of its limitations.

The most significant realisation I had was coming out of Kurdistan in 1991, where I sat on a helicopter flying out of northern Iraq next to a water engineer who brought clean water to a refugee camp. I knew that by doing so he had undoubtedly saved 10,000 lives, while the whole time I’d been there I knew that I’d saved a handful, an absolute handful.

Whereas the water engineer’s action would have an imprint for generations.

So I do ask myself, who’s the real beneficiary of the experience?

Some people are blessed with a degree of inner harmony and a great degree of personal fulfilment in all they do, and it is in their nature to identify with happiness and accept it. There are others who are troubled with the idea that there may be some essence of experience, some discovery just out of sight, that may be found in the next place, the next book, or the next moment. Perhaps I tend to think I’m more likely to find important realisations in places where the demands on me are intense, where I’m forced to adapt, to learn, and that’s quite a selfish reason for going off to intense situations, to war zones.

8: You call your prologue a “prodrome”, a word I’ve never seen.

JK: A prodrome is the period before the explicit symptoms of an illness begin, a sense of inner unease, when you know that something is going wrong but you’re not sure what. The prodrome comes before the syndrome!

8: In the book, you talk about “a dream of the possibility of homecoming”. Your parents now live in New York. Where physically would a homecoming take place for you?

JK: I visualise that as finding a place of psychological repose.

That is something many people are very lucky to have – they’re fulfilled on many levels and manage to live ordered lives in structured societies where they can measure their productivity and where they

can retire having known they contributed materially to peace, human progress, the sum total of happiness in the world. And they will have left behind progeny that will meet and exceed their parents’ expectations.

I somehow forgot to make those early steps on the right road. And so I tend to hang out in places where there is less certainty of the value of human endeavour, and where the rewards are less measurable and you certainly lose as much as you gain. So for me, homecoming is more of an emotional and psychological condition than a physical one.

8: Do you go anywhere in your head to find levity or does it coexist?

JK: Many of the questions you have asked me and the questions people expect me to answer are terribly sombre and there is an

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Construction of artificial limbs for landmine victims, Red Cross Orthopaedic Centre, Kuito, Angola

Casualty during surgery for war wounds requiring amputaion of right arm and abdominal surgery, Kuito General Hospital, Kuito, Angola

impression that the world is dark and full of pain – which it often is! But one would have to have a heart of stone not to laugh out loud at the absurdity of the human condition. I hope that my writing is actually quite funny, because there is a lot to laugh about.

You see idiocies and you see situations that are incomparably funny, and I’m aware of laughing at myself a lot of the time as I find myself adopting equally ridiculous postures.

I suppose I see the human condition as basically absurd and piquant and hilarious.

And that affects the way I look at everything, even the most dire manifestations of human malevolence. I see existence as a fairly elaborate joke and when the circumstances I’m enduring are particularly relentless, I always think of the line, “If you can’t take a joke, you shouldn’t have joined” 8

Contact Wounds: A War Surgeon’s Education is published

by Picador/PanMacmillan Press www.panmacmillan.com

Reviews

Between Dogs and Wolves: Growing Up in South Africa Jodi Bieber Published by Dewi Lewis www.dewilewispublishing.com £15.99 (144pp Hardback) Squatting near the earth, and pulling at handcuffs locked to one wrist, a white South African man is hugged fraternally by a black friend. Children curiously look on, somewhat charmed by this animated storyteller, briefly passing through their world.

His skin is rough and worn – his life has aged him early, and his hair is shaved close. He has entered the squatter camp to escape the police, to seek help, and disappear. It’s a pattern deeply marked in the lives of those like David Jakobie, the young man whose presence paces Jodi Bieber’s intense and affecting photographs of troubled Johannesburg neighbourhoods.

Something about the size of Bieber’s Between Dogs and Wolves surprises at first. It is almost slight, diary-like, its modesty a tonic, perhaps, after

the heavily paged surveys and monographs of recent years.

Yet in a sense this book is also a survey, and a self-reflection, drawing together the concerns of a photographer at the dawn of democracy in South Africa.

Bieber’s book is a complicated, atmospheric work. Complicated, because the work dwells on the periphery, neighbourhoods at the edge of any civic interest, and at the edge of any consideration. In this work we are far from the key moments of change or the news events that surface to alert crisis or success.

The book has no concise narrative telling a simple story, because nothing here is in these districts is simple. More appropriately, it works as a series of vignettes, intimacies that work in clusters, pictures lapping against each other, yet remaining strong enough to be complete in themselves. Learning her photography on the streets of Johannesburg, one can sense the guidance of the Market Theatre workshop, where Bieber worked with David Goldblatt. Her work shares many of his strengths – the ability to work long-term with dedication, sensitivity and a formal dexterity that moves from delicate portraiture to the most animated scenes of nervous, unfolding drama.

As a thread to hold onto, children run through Jodi Bieber’s pictures, and her work plots the tender passage from innocence to obligation, as roles are adopted, gangs are joined, and relationships are formed. They are searching studies of what childhood has become here: a child prostitute, held in shadows,

nestles into an iron-gated doorway; children somersault on a washing-line trapeze as their elders redundantly squat against a housing block’s fire-smudged wall. There is little sense of regular industry or metropolis in these photographs. Instead, Bieber works closely, relating the conversations and consequences of neighbourhood life, as groups drink and housekeep their fraying, functional homes. Like the young twins who stare with uncertainty from the book’s cover, children are never far from tension. The calm shade of domestic interiors rub against the stark happenings that punctuate these lives –whether the tragedy of a child’s funeral or the fall into blissful inebriation, such exertions marks the lives of those who can expect, to borrow from Eugene Richards, few comforts or surprises.

In such environments, it would be easy for a photographer to be seduced by the superficial, but these pictures travel further, and reward scrutiny as they relate the briefest of lives. In Westbury, home of the Fast Gun gang, the slightest tilt of a young boy’s head is enough to reclaim him for childhood, despite the armour of hoods, masks and guns.

Elsewhere, a worker cradles his child in a stark, unadorned home.

He appears infirm and awkward – the copper mines perhaps having already taken his health.

Looking at Bieber’s portraits, I return to Milton Rogovin, whose photographs succeed because of a willingness to work with persistence and empathy, and without judgment. Among these children meanwhile, there is an expectancy that at any moment a change will come, a threat will

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be realised. A gun rests close to hand as card players kill time; an unclothed child, hardly reaching table height, is bare and vulnerable in a fruitless kitchen.

Rough edges in life, it seems, are always close.

A family sleeps on the bare foundation block of a potential home, and two young girls dance themselves into a perfect world at a birthday celebration in an unfurnished local hall.

Adolescence paces this work in all its tender stages. Jodi Bieber eloquently relates the decisions of her subjects as they grow, flourish or fall. Yet nothing quite prepares us, among the unravelling of all these lives, for the sight of a new-born baby. It had been abandoned, left in a bucket, on a bed of black plastic sheeting in the Turffontein veld. It is the imperfect dawning of a vulnerable new life in an imperfect society – foetal, formally beautiful, and almost heartbreaking.

In a commentary that anchors the book at its close, Jodi Bieber talks of her own childhood. Her family photographs appear too, warm in colour and contentment.

Her work in some part might be about this distance, about coming to understand a world in which, without photography, she would have played no part. Moreover, it is about a selfless immersion into communities that a photographer is unable to dismiss. Anders Petersen once suggested ‘I need to be at touching distance to know that I exist’, setting his work apart from a kind of photography that remains comfortable and remote. Bieber, it seems, shares that aspiration.

Ken Grant

Shadowland Jan Grarup Published by Politikens Forlag www.polforlag.dk £27 (227pp Softback) Denmark, a small country with some 5.3 million inhabitants, has probably produced more successful photojournalists per capita than any other country in the world. Three of the most recent winners of World Press Photo’s Picture of the Year award have been Danish. Virtually all of them have been students of the now legendary Danish School of Journalism in Aarhus. The school works closely with Danish newspapers and magazines in a thoroughgoing internship programme that encourages young talent and supports their development. One of the stars in the Danish firmament is Jan Grarup who seems to have won every photojournalistic prize short of World Press’s Picture of the Year. He has worked for several years with Per Folkver, Picture Editor in Chief of the Copenhagen daily Politiken, and is the author of a new book, Shadowland, a compendium of much of his reportage from crises around the world. Known for its stunning black and white imagery and indepth reportage, Grarup’s work is intensely personal, deeply felt,

and immaculately composed.

Shadowland sets a standard for concerned photography that touches the reader as much as anything by Salgado, Nachtwey, or Kratochvil. It is a stunning tour de force from the front lines of human existence at its most extreme.

Per Folkver describes the relationship between the school and the paper as the secret to Danish success and to Grarup’s in particular. ”When photography was brought into the programme 15 years ago, it was as part of journalistic training.

For the first part of their studies, photographers will not touch a camera. At that time I thought it was stupid, but now I think it is great. I see the trainees come out, and they are fantastic. What I do with the interns at Politiken is that I tell them they have a big responsibility and a lot of freedom.

I ask them their ideas and suggest that they perhaps do it this way rather than that way, and they listen. I will actually change the schedule to accommodate their ideas if it takes a day or a week to do a job.” Among other things, the students learn to critique each other’s work and to network on a collective basis. In the old days, he notes, “The photographers were not allowed to debate the merits of their own pictures. We

changed that. Now you have to criticise a colleague’s work. You have to remember that it is never personal. It all revolves around the idea of how can we be better.”

Obviously, the system works.

When Grarup joined Poltiken, he had been working for the Ekstra Bladet, a tabloid, and doing some long-term stories as well. Under Folkver’s tutelage, he morphed into a reportage photographer.

“What happened to Jan was that he had started as a hit and run photographer, but now he has developed a kind of humanistic touch, a human sense. He seems to work even harder each year to understand what he’s looking at.

Instead of just taking the picture, he is trying to get behind the scenes. He is concerned about what he is seeing and doing longer stories and returning to the same places.“ Shadowland contains 11 essays on Chechnya, Rwanda, Rammallah, Kashmir, the earthquake in Bam, Iran, the tsunami, the Balkans, Roma in Eastern Europe, Darfur, and other stories.

For Grarup, reportage must be about more than single, stunning pictures. The imagery must tell stories. “One of the things in the book is to make us question the fast-forward media world in which we live now,” he notes. “We talk

about ‘sexy conflicts’. A conflict is ‘sexy’ for maybe six months, if not only three months. At some point everybody goes to Afghanistan and then three months later, they move on to Iraq.” In the years that he has worked with Folkver, Grarup’s shooting style has changed to a more nuanced approach to his subject matter.

“I find myself seeing things more simply now. Previously, I was looking for many layers before I was really satisfied with a picture.

I am now stepping a few steps back before I take the picture. I try not to think too much about it.

The simplicity brings a lot more to the picture.” This affects the way stories are composed as well.

“The thing is that by simplifying some of the images, you make room for the much more complicated ones. You cannot do a story with 12 really complicated, many-layered images. They have to complement each other. That is what I was looking for. One of the things I needed to think about was how to tell a story, like the one about the Roma. The image of child in a pram in Trebisov, Slovakia, is just a documentation of how Roma are living in 2004.”

Other stories, for example from Darfur, present other problems because of the stunning colours involved in this “fashion conflict”.

He notes, “You see it in the picture of the mother and her child. This takes away from what should be going on in your mind – that this is a real conflict. Some pictures are so beautiful they are distracting.”

The Shadowland project will also expand into new media. A website (www.shadowland-book. com) will include all possible information with the entire book available as a flash production with a podcast for more in-depth commentary. Grarup notes, “This is no one time thing. This is an on-going project. It is not necessarily to promote my work.

It is about telling people about these stories and what is going on in these stories. We are planning to present it and keep it out there to keep these stories alive. That is why we have the website. It doesn’t matter that I have done these stories, they could easily keep going, unfortunately: Kashmir, Afghanistan, Iraq, Darfur ... The thing is stories seem to drop away, but in reality they keep

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his memories, the sights and sounds and smells of which have haunted him for almost 40 years.

His images are intensely personal and in no way “objective”, yet his “subjective” camera depicts only what is in front of it, no more, no less.

on going. I think that the thing is to do these stories when they are not hot in the media world, because they get lost in the next crisis. People must remember, they must know, that they are on going even after they drop out of attention.

“We have an obligation from my point of view to get involved in these issues. Whether it is war-related or some natural catastrophe like the earthquake in Bam or the tsunami, it doesn’t really matter. I truly believe that we cannot just sit back and not get involved.“Such is the strength of Jan Grarup’s work that it is all but impossible to look at Shadowland and remain unmoved.

BK Ghosts in the Landscape: Vietnam Revisited Craig Barber Published by Umbrage Editions www.umbragebooks.com $45 (112pp Hardback) Craig Barber was a young soldier of 19 when he was sent with the Marines to Vietnam in 1967-68.

There, at the period of peak violence of America’s war, he endured the horrors of combat in a strange country as far from his birthplace in rural upstate New York as it is possible to imagine.

He survived where friends of his didn’t in the randomness of warfare. Some years after the war he picked up a camera, began making pictures, and ultimately developed his signature style of pinhole panoramics printed on platinum paper.

In the mid-1990s, Barber embarked on a series of three long visits to the re-unified, now peaceful country, revisiting areas he patrolled and fought in, across the Mekong Delta, further north

by Hue, Hoi An, Da Nang, Phu Bai, and Chu Lai, as well as the borderlands near Laos and

by Hanoi. This time, however, instead of carrying a machine gun he carried his handmade cameras and tripod. The results of his trips are astounding and possess a hallucinatory beauty, like no other photographs of Vietnam.

In her accompanying essay, Alison Nordstrom, Curator of

Photography at George Eastman House, Rochester, New York, describes the effects rendered

by Barber’s technique as both a means of expressing the uncontrollable and of reproducing the uncertainties of representing memory. Because of the several minutes it takes to produce an image using a pinhole camera, movement is effectively seen as a blur, not unlike that of a soldier or civilian slipping past seen out of the corner of an eye. “Their softly darkened corners and rudimentary out-of-focus forms lend these photographs a sense of the archaic and the mysterious.

The long exposure time blurs any elements of the image that move, turning branches into feathery gestures and people into wraith-like traces in an eternal landscape.” These minutes-long moments reflect the eternity before a firefight, when upon entering a village or crossing a bridge something just moves in an otherwise seemingly abandoned landscape.

The blur in the images, here seen in diptychs or triptychs as when the soldier Barber was looking to left and right – for a movement, a muzzle flash – now takes on a new meaning in the civilian Barber’s eyes. A dog passes along a path in plate seven between a rice paddy and a house, its motion lost to time. The scenes of villagers, barely seen in plates two and four, questioning the photographer’s purpose while he may be wondering if any of them had shot at him years before, completely capture the haunting power of wartime memory and trauma.

This work is completely unlike documentary imagery by the likes of Alfredo Jaar, Simon Norfolk or David Farrell whose “innocent” landscapes depict scenes where acts of war and violence took place in the recent past.

Barber’s landscapes document

Craig Barber can never forget the pain of his experience in Vietnam, and still cries for all that was lost, yet “coming here was not only the right thing, it was one of the smartest things I’ve ever done. Before it was about death and dying, kill or be killed. It was totally crazy. Now it is about learning, caring and forgiving. Now it is about seeing.”

Barber’s voyages to Vietnam were a form of catharsis through confrontation with the past and an acknowledgment of Vietnam’s new present: “It is time to put our ghosts to rest.”

BK Eyewitnessing: The Uses of Images as Historical Evidence Peter Burke Published by Reaktion Books www.reaktionbooks.co.uk £14.95 (224pp Softback) As its subtitle suggests – the use of images as historical evidence – Eyewitnessing by Peter Burke, just published in paperback, was written for historians researching the visual and not about documentary photographic practice. So if you’re looking for consolation as you cross the ideological minefields of politics and the media in your pursuit of “documentary photographic truth”, prepare to be disappointed.

Burke investigates a wide range of visual images across the ages, enumerating different theories and approaches that may help unearth the evidence they may contain. The methodology may indeed be helpful to historians looking for formulae in the interpretation of visual sources.

In an effort to retain healthy scepticism and some sort of academic impartiality, Burke encourages a cautious awareness of the rhetorical devices of historical/cultural interpretation and of those implicit

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in the construction of images at the time of their making. He investigates visual sources from the Bayeaux Tapestry to paintings, etchings, architectural drawings, coins, ceramics, photographs and film.

His approach is equivocal in its accommodation of traditional historiography and contemporary cultural theory.

He suggests establishing a “third way”– one that marries conventional historiography (where images have traditionally been subordinate and used as illustration for fact-based text) with the more credible interpretative offerings that can be drawn from image based critical theory such as semiology.

In contemporary culture, where visual imagery has greater dominance than in the past, images and words are still clearly interdependent at the point of conscious recognition.

There are no words in the unconscious, which is why visual imagery is psychologically pervasive. The proverbial saying that “a picture says more than a thousand words”, which Burke quotes at the beginning of his introduction to Eyewitnessing, has I would suggest been misinterpreted. Brought to conscious recognition, a picture may conjure up a thousand words of explanation or more, but the image and interpretation are not substitutes for each other.

Photographs of “facts” and words of “fact’”exist in symbiosis over time. Material facts are opaque,

their deeper human meaning has to be revealed in discussion.

Images are seen and then explained.

Burke’s highest regard for the visual image as historical source is reserved for its less self-conscious dimension – the apparent innocent ability or tendency of a visual source to disclose, unadulterated factual detail to “those who know how to read it”. This is a theme he returns to throughout the book.

Eyewitnessing positions the historian rather than the imagemaker, as the authoritative interpreter of reality through visual references. For Burke, God, not the devil, is in the detail.

Presumably the historian is the conduit to God. Burke surmises that the un-selfconscious detail of an image may be more revealing of material or social circumstances than the “effect” an image maker may wish to create in “dressing” or “arranging” an image and its occupants (although he admits this may be useful in the investigation of “mentalities”).

In this respect he implies that the intentions of documentary photographers are as susceptible to artifice as any other imagemaker, citing as examples: the much-debated veracity of Robert Capa’s “Death of a Soldier” from the Spanish Civil War; and Margaret Bourke-White’s interventionism in photographing rural poverty for Life and Fortune magazines in the 1930s.

Due to his continued focus on the isolated photographic image, his take on documentary photography is consequently reductive. He avoids in depth discussion of its moral and political imperatives as these amount to intention and context – the very things that could cloud the historian’s judgment. So, no analysis is made of photographic narrative – the mechanisms of captioned and essay-supported picture sequences in photoessays, exhibitions, and books.

Yet, it’s the association of words and photographs in the picture essay form, which best exemplify documentary’s raison d’être – the humanitarian advocacy in its story telling.

The germ of documentary practice is thus swept under the academic carpet. It doesn’t fit in with the non-partisan “detached” historicism which questions photography’s pretence to objectivity. But Burke has surely been hooked by an old red herring. The science of propaganda and the propaganda of science are two different things. Somehow the scientific pretensions of 19th century anthropological and forensic photography have been conflated with “documentary”, the visual expression of what in the 1930s was a movement towards social democracy.

At its apogee in the 1930s the documentary movement had a political agenda. Its practitioners (across the arts and not just among photographers) were broadly humanist, humanitarian and socially democratic in their intentions. Their photography was far from impartial or neutral, but predicated on notions of political and social democracy.

It should be remembered that Robert Capa’s reasoning when establishing Magnum Photos as an autonomous photographers’ agency was political.

When John Grierson the “founding father” of the British Documentary film movement spoke of “documentary” it was with the clear intention of elevating the everyday to the dramatic level – educating the masses by drawing attention to the “drama on the doorstep”. He had no hesitation in employing the montage techniques of Soviet filmmakers to make “reality” more vivid and therefore the experience of “seeing how other people lived” more “real” in the memory of cinemagoers.

Documentary photographers have different ways of storytelling.

Many do not stand back from “real life” drama’ and will position themselves and their cameras to exploit this. Others may stand further back, adopting a more detached style. The virtue in documentary photography is in the variety.

Maybe we need to be reminded that the eyewitnesses of documentary photography tell us

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stories not as if the photographic eye were God but because they are human. “Objective truth” can only ever be the servant of humanitarian intention as an ideal.”Documentary truths” are about the integrity of humanitarian intention. But that’s a larger story, one that is unlikely to be revealed in the detail of a single image.

Mark Windsor The Glass Between Us Rebecca Norris Webb Published by Channel Photographics www.channelphotographics. com $39.95 (104pp Hardback) In Rebecca Norris Webb’s whimsical collection of photographs and writings, we are invited to muse on Rodin’s advice to an uninspired Rilke (to stare at an animal until you can really see it; it could take months, he warns) and Roethke writing about Rilke gazing at a panther. Originally from the Black Hills of South Dakota, her poet’s soul is moved by what she calls “urban animals”; that is, animals kept in zoos for human delectation.

The book’s first image presents a beluga whale, apparently soaring Concorde-like through a blue sky, casting a shadow on a huddled crowd below.

Norris Webb’s pictures are all predicated on this one idea: that when you photograph an animal through glass, the resulting image depicts not only the animal but also shadowy figures in a sort of double exposure. We are

watching the watchers. The results, if somewhat predictable, are also disquieting.

The multi-layered quality of the photographs gives them a dreamlike, almost hallucinatory feel. The child’s face in the gorilla’s chest, the ethereal-looking woman in a shalwar kameez seemingly swallowed by a bear, the back of a man in repose overshadowed by an eagle. All could feasibly pose questions about where man ends and animal begins, or they could just be vignettes from a surrealist tableau; the chance encounter of a pair of knickers and a giraffe’s tail on a roll of film.

There’s certainly a sense of grace emanating from the work. However slight the idea, however fragile the fragments of her own writing might seem to a brutal critic, there is an integrity in the work that goes beyond the obvious ethical point about keeping animals in zoos. Photographically, it is the antithesis of the photoessay about human treatment of animals by Jan van IJken elsewhere in this magazine, yet its capacity to engage the reader in less than comfortable thoughts is almost as powerful.

At Norris Webb’s hand, the difference between the animals and the people sometimes disappears. It seems as though she has taken to heart Rodin’s advice. It seems entirely possible in these gossamer light photographs, that we can see the spirit of the object of her gaze.

There is something of the shaman about her.

MH

Raymond Depardon: Photographer and Filmmaker Published by Episode www.episode-publishers.nl f25 (144pp Softback) “At the end of the 1970s,” writes Frits Gierstberg, “[photojournalism] was attacked at a level of theory and content due to the posture of being an ‘authority’ adopted by the postwar ‘author-photographers’ with their dominant style of ‘the decisive moment’. Depardon’s break with this approach – he turned his back on the notions both of current news and of the decisive moment – and his choice for a more subjective approach was his response to this crisis.”

Gierstberg’s is one of two essays introducing Raymond Depardon, Photographer and Filmmaker, an excellent catalogue celebrating the work to date of the prolific French documentarian. The catalogue, which along with two essays includes quotes from Depardon, examples of his work, a biography, and a bibliography, accompanied exhibitions by the Nederlands Filmmuseum, and Nederlands Fotomuseum in 2005.

In 1958, 16-year-old Raymond Depardon left his family farm for Paris after taking a photography correspondence course. By the time he was 20, he was covering the war in Algeria for the Dalmas photo agency; five years later he co-founded the legendary Gamma agency. When he joined Magnum in 1979 he had already

begun his prolific output of films and photography books. He is better known in recent years for films such as the feature La Captive du désert (1990) and documentaries Délits Flagrants (1994) and 10e Chambre – Instants d’audiences (2004).

He has published more than 20 books, often on subjects on which he also made films but which are nonetheless autonomous works.

His most recent film project, Profils Paysans: le quotidien (2005) returns to the situation of French farmers, as did his autobiographical book La Ferme de Garet (1995), which resulted from a commission by the French landscape development agency.

If Depardon turned away from the authority of the photojournalistauteur and the decisive moment, what then did he turn towards? Nico de Klerk’s essay in the catalogue addresses the influence of American direct cinema on Depardon. In the 1960s, documentary filmmakers Robert Drew, DA Pennebaker, and the Maysles brothers developed techniques that allowed unobtrusive, continuous observation, from which truth – about politics, institutions, social life – would be revealed.

Depardon shared this interest in the time between moments, the “temps faibles” or “uneventful moments” that, Gierstberg notes, lead to “banal, calm images that are yet full of emotion”.

Depardon turned towards everyday subjects rather than news, examining the relationship between citizens and civic institutions, methodically photographing urban landscapes, and exploring ordinary moments on the street not as revelations of authorial insight, but as a saturation of temps faibles.

This method contrasts with the decisive moment approach favoured by photojournalism, in which the photographer simultaneously recognises the significance of an event and realises that significance in the act of photography, satisfying, in an energetic moment, the eye, the heart and the mind. Depardon’s images are no less authored, but in their style, the author recedes; the moment is no less decisive, and the frame no less deliberate,

but the photographer becomes less an auteur and more a point of intersection between himself, the subject, and the audience.

Where most photojournalists create a body of work over their lifetime that looks at the world, and which may, in its sum, be revealing of the author, Depardon creates a body of work that looks over his earlier projects. His films are in conversation with his books, his photographs with his films.

The books are not collections of photographs so much as arguments in which photographs present evidence not of the world, but of Depardon’s ongoing effort to understand the documentary process.

Where documentary photographs are valourised for indexing events in the world in history, Depardon is equally interested in how the photograph indexes the photographer’s role and presence at the time of its making. He explores this role by drawing attention to the process of making, whether by creating a series of images in which every photograph must be vertical, with the horizon line dividing the image at the centre (Errance (2000)), or by combining commissioned images with personal souvenirs from his youth in La Ferme de Garet.

De Klerk discusses the impact of American direct cinema on Depardon’s career, but Depardon is clearly influenced by French cinema verité as well, in which the act of making a film can create a

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situation that reveals something interesting or true. Depardon’s later work is often systematic, shaped by conditions that he imposes in order to produce an unexpected and otherwise unrealisable provocation. But this is not a scientific experiment; it is a philosophical contemplation, orderly but also nostalgic, sometimes regretful, lonely, yet powerful in that it is the audience’s eye, heart, and mind that are invited to converge upon the photographer’s report, and in this sense it is a kind of collaboration, and a test of the aesthetic, intellectual, and emotional limits and possibilities of documentary practice.

Leo Hsu

Mia Farrow and Frank Sinatra, Plaza Hotel, New York City, 1966 © Harry Benson

Acomb club, Coekin implies, in the published conversation with David Campany that appears at the front of the book, is much like others of its kind; a place for social gathering. It has a bar, a games room, a lounge and a concert room. These are the fixtures, but what makes it much more than simply a building is the people who use it.

As we are introduced to them visually, although it is in no way a formal greeting, we meet ordinary people. Probably some of them are “characters” but Coekin does not seek them out as performers, gurners for the camera. Instead he affords them the dignity of being themselves; people who are revealed simply talking, sitting, drinking, laughing, holding hands, or lost in thought.

Being There: Harry Benson’s Fifty Years of Photojournalism 4 August 2006 – 7 January 2007 Scottish National Portrait Gallery www.nationalgalleries.org In a hotel room in Paris 42 years ago, a little-known photographer from Glasgow captured four young lads from Liverpool having a pillow fight. It was the start of a relationship that would change the photographer’s life forever.

Those four lads were The Beatles, and the picture became an iconic image of the Swinging Sixties.

The photographer also went on to become a legend, and now Harry Benson’s extraordinary life and work is celebrated in a retrospective exhibition at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery.

In that Paris hotel room, The Beatles song “I Want to Hold Your Hand” had just reached number one in the American charts. After the other photographers had gone to bed, Benson carried on photographing the pillow fight.

He processed the film in the toilet of his hotel room, printed it in the bathroom and stayed up till dawn wiring pictures to his newspaper.

It was these photographs that would seal the reputation of this young news photographer for the Daily Express. The sense of magic in this, the first of many

Interposed between meeting the club’s members we are introduced to its furnishings: functional tables, strip lighting, coat hooks, a condom machine in the gents’ toilet – shot from a child’s viewpoint (Coekin reveals why in the aforementioned interview) – and the club’s performers, whose dressing room walls we see bedecked with the artists’ “z” cards, often crudely defaced, presumably by fellow performers.

era-defining images that Benson captured of the Fab Four, endures.

Benson has carved his career out of conflict and celebrity. He shoots stars, big stars – Greta Garbo, Elizabeth Taylor, Winston Churchill – from the time when stardom meant mystery and elegance. From rock idols to riots, Benson has been there – the first emergence of a brash young boxer called Cassius Clay, the funeral of Martin Luther King, Richard Nixon’s farewell to the White House, the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, the Gulf War, 9/11.

Perhaps his greatest talent is his ability to switch between news photography and portraiture, as in his moving study of the Alzheimer’s-stricken Ronald Reagan with the devoted Nancy alongside. One of his most famous photographs is of the moment Ethel Kennedy looked out in terror and disbelief from beside the prone body of her dying husband, Senator Robert Kennedy.

This retrospective, appropriately named Being There, covers many events that have shaped the past 50 years, and shows that Harry Benson, now 76 and still going strong, really was there.

Frances Anderson

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Knock Three Times Chris Coekin Published by Dewi Lewis www.dewilewispublishing.com £16.99 (96pp Hardback) There is no longer, social commentators would have us believe, a working class. We are all of us, they claim, middle class or else lumped into one general mass, described as an “underclass”. Chris Coekin’s Knock Three Times refutes the supposition.

Primarily a document of Acomb working men’s club in York, photographed over a decade from 1996, Coekin’s opus reveals itself as a personal exploration of his own background, upbringing and social identity within a family in which such clubs have played a significant role.

The third layer to Knock Three Times is the Coekin family’s relationship with the working men’s clubs. The book is dovetailed with black and white family snapshots: firstly the Coekin clan in a Blackpool club in 1963; lastly, his grandfather posing for a photographer, standing with seven fellow men, incongruously drinking pints through straws, at the family’s local club, Latimer Road, Leicester, circa 1935.

Elsewhere, in a picture from the early 1980s, Coekin’s Dad, a champion darts player, is seen holding a trophy. Later, his one line redundancy letter is presented to us: “Dear Barry Coekin,” it reads, “Please be advised that as from today’s date we have made you redundant. Yours etc.” This one-sentence dismissal, comes after 46 years working for the company. On the opposite page is Coekin’s paternal grandfather’s

the cyclist’s routes – 24 separate images spliced into a frieze.

Scored and worn by years of use, each with great individuality and character, surely these cobbles are mute but emotive metaphors for the Flandriens themselves.

leaving certificate that tells of his 49 years’ service with British Railways London Midland Region. Coekin corrects this casual carelessness: he worked for them for 52 years. The three missing years matter in a lifetime of labour.

The documents’ inclusion, and Coekin’s telling of the stories that lie behind them, as well as his family’s connection with clubs, make the book an altogether more vital work.

Similarly, the historical family snapshots juxtaposed with the contemporary portraits of Acomb club members highlight how far and yet how not at all far we have moved over the intervening decades.

Some people may view Knock Three Times as a “moment in time and place” piece. They would be wrong to do so. The time and place of Coekin’s book – whatever demographic “experts” may have us believe – says as much about the way many of us in Britain live today as it does about yesteryear.

Gordon Miller Flandrien Stephan Vanfleteren Published by Medium www.lucderycke.be f19.50 (117pp Hardback) Flandrien is the new book by globetrotting Belgian photographer Stephan Vanfleteren, whose diverse projects have included covering the Aids crisis in Kenya, porn in California and Elvis-worship in the US. His radical black and white documentary-style images capture the essence of these events and micro-cultures, portraits of artists, writers, actors and musicians, in fact anyone who expresses themselves through their métier.

For seven years Vanfleteren followed the Flandriens, the racing cyclists of Flanders, the northern region of Belgium, and the stories behind their supporters and families. But the Flandriens are more than “mere” cyclists. It’s a word that encapsulates an entire ethos, a whole attitude to life;

it’s “the spirit of being Flemish”.

And that unique spirit is just what Vanfleteren has captured in this beautifully crafted reportage of the Flandriens and their society.

The journey begins with a stunning cover shot of Albéric (“Brieck”) Schotte, to whom the book is dedicated, a hero among the other cyclists, who died shortly after this portrait was taken. Brieck stares back at us, like a wise old guru, his face halfhidden amongst velvet shadows, his features and tenacity formed by years of racing over the flat Flanders landscape, the icy winds blowing in off the North Sea.

The book ends as it began, with an exquisitely composed shot, this time in profile, of Albéric Schotte, observed with a Brandtlike intensity, his proud, weatherbeaten features emerging out of the light and shade. A warm smile creases his wrinkled skin, his dark eyes set against a relentless wind blowing in from the sea, long miles of road lying ahead of him. Brieck was a true Flandrien, each one urging forward with the determination of Sisyphus.

Clive Joinson

An image of one-time champion Nico Verhoeven, exhausted and mud-caked after the grueling Paris-Roubaix race, brings to mind Robert Frank’s photographs of coal-grimed miners walking home to a tin bath before the range. But, unlike Frank, Vanfleteren is no fly on the wall and it is here, knowing that Vanfleteren was once a Flandrien himself, that in taking such images he’s somehow making sense of his own life.

In the Wake of Katrina Larry Towell Published by Chris Boot & Archive of Modern Conflict www.chrisboot.com £15 (96pp Hardback)

God is Terig (God is Back) shows a message painted in white lettering onto a road, a famous cycle-route, in adulation of another racing cyclist hero, Van de Brucke, who made a celebrated comeback after years of drug abuse. Van de Brucke’s struggles, mental and physical, and return as a champion made him a hero among the Flemings.

Vanfleteren, again like Frank, sometimes shoots images in sequence, as with Kapel Muur Geraardsbergen, a shot of racers en-route, the fervent crowd cheering them on, or the double page spread of a series of cobblestones, that cover so many of

The abiding images of Hurricane Katrina are of violent devastation: cataclysmic floods levelling ranks of tottering timber dwellings; trees twisting and folding like so much tumbleweed; anguished faces wailing as they sink beneath an unforgiving tide. Yet what is remarkable about Larry Towell’s stirring photographic record of the havoc wrought by this singularly turbulent event is a lingering quality of stillness.

The opening picture – Highway 90, Waveland, Mississippi – is like an establishing shot from a Wim Wenders film overlaid with irony and surrealism. On the left

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a discarded door straddles the road’s central reservation, while on the right lies a sign bearing the legend “shallow water”. Above both, the line of the river seems becalmed – but almost certainly somewhat higher than it was before the tempest struck.

This preternatural sense of calm in the aftermath of such ferocity typifies Towell’s approach for the first and last thirds of the book. In Debris from Destroyed Homes and Wal-Mart, Pass Christian, Mississippi, a landscape of displaced sandbags frames what amounts to a “graveyard” of furniture. Here and there wicker armchairs stand stolidly, describing the interiors of homes whose walls have simply evaporated. Where figures do appear in these pictures they are statues: among them the ghostly, blank-faced Madonna of Catholic Church, Waveland, Mississippi and the open-shirted everyman flanking a sinking mausoleum in Metairie Cemetery, New Orleans, Louisiana.

The middle section takes a different tack. Suddenly, as if from out of the woodwork, real people start to appear – their expressions a medley of placid incomprehension and angry defiance. In Residents Returning Home to Assess Damage, Biloxi, Mississippi, two quizzical teenage girls survey a flattened suburb redolent of Dorothy’s Kansas City after the twister hit.

Meanwhile, in Service Outside the Lighthouse Apostolic Church, Biloxi, Mississippi, an impromptu gospel chorus spills out into a street stuttering back into life with cars and trucks.

These are exceptions, though.

Most of the photos featuring people are blurred and elusive: half-glimpsed, like phantoms of the old New Orleans. Such haunting images are apt companions to Towell’s bitter afterword. Revisiting the Katrina trail six months after his initial odyssey, he was struck by the lack of reconstruction taking place – by the rusting shells of abandoned gas stations, and the sad small town carnival that had replaced the once spectacular Mardi Gras. Devastation indeed.

James Morrison

Aftermath Joel Meyerowitz Published By Phaidon www.phaidon.com £45 (304pp Hardback) Five years ago, Joel Meyerowitz took on the self-appointed task of creating a historical document of the site of rubble in New York that was the result of 11 September 2001. Aftermath, the prodigious tome taken on by Phaidon, stands as a memorial to both the process of excavating and all whose lives were taken or affected by the events. The physical and emotional weight of Meyerowitz’s World Trade Center Archive is intimidating to say the least.

Meyerowitz took it upon himself to gain access to Ground Zero, the site where the World Trade Center once stood, by whatever means necessary. His determination was borne out of his initial expulsion from the site on the basis that no members of the press were permitted. Outraged by such a decree, and its implication that any historical record would be nonexistent, Meyerowitz, day in and day out, fought his way into the site until his presence became part of the scenery. His record of events began on 28 September 2001 and lasted until 30 May 2002. All 300 pages of Aftermath are dominated with large format, intensely detailed images of the site as it is slowly cleared – rubble transported out, artefacts uncovered and human remains discovered.

In Aftermath, Meyerowitz repeatedly describes the sheer

emotional pull of the “pile”, as Ground Zero was referred to by those responsible for its excavation. The daily transport between the “real world” and the “pile”, for everyone – volunteers, iron welders, fire men and police – was not an easy task. For many, as the clean-up came to an end, leaving the “pile” was as difficult as beginning the task.

Throughout Meyerowitz’s encounters and musings, and symbolic of the fragility of stereotypes, is the burden of sorrow that the construction workers endured each day, often bringing these rough, tattooed men to tears. As one lone man, raking through the dirt eloquently put it in the last day before the site was finished “We are gardeners on the garden of the dead.”

Ten million tonnes of corrugated steel was melted down into movable pieces only to uncover more of the same for months upon end. The distant images of the site allow for little variation when viewed chronologically. Yet, interspersed are the more intimate images – portraits of the people he met on the site and relied on; the discovery of human remains, of which there were over 9,000, that always, without fail, was followed by a ceremony; an abandoned but not completely destroyed, daycare centre coated in a thick film of grey dust resembling, as Meyerowitz suggests, the remains of Pompeii.

“The insignificant objects that describe a passing moment in culture”.

His detailed yet sometimes poetic descriptions of the slow and arduous task ahead are scattered throughout the pages like those jotted down in a personal journal.

“As I watched sunlight and shadow pass in waves over the site, I thought about nature’s indifference to our passage on earth. Throughout history, great tragedies have happened on days like today. And yet it is often nature and time that eventually help us move away from grief and grant us perspective and hope. I decided to set up my camera”.

Tragedies often afford insights like these.

What is refreshing about Meyerowitz’s approach is the

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complete absence of the political how and why. Aftermath does not pretend to be more than it is, an archive to an historical event. The intentional publication date of, September 2006, marks five years since the terrorist attacks.

For New Yorkers, this body of work will resonate deeper than for those of us who were not in New York during September 2001, witnessing the sudden transformation of their city under tragic circumstances. Now, they too will be able to peer behind the POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS tape that so stringently cordoned off the area. Credit must be given to Meyerowitz for his determination and wilfulness to bring this home to his fellow New Yorkers. In memory of Lesley Thomas-O’Keefe.

LH

Photography Events 18th International Festival of Photojournalism 2 – 17 September The annual event in Perpignan specialising in press photography.

Although there are many events centred around industry professionals, the festival is open to the public with nine venues. www.visapourlimage.com 13th Noorderlicht Phototfestival 10 September – 29 October Held in and around Leeuwarden, the event is structured so as to devote attention to non-Western photography, this year focusing on South and Southeast Asia. www.noorderlicht.com Hereford Photography Festival 30 September – 28 October In it’s 16th year, the festival continues to host numerous exhibitions throughout Hereford, including the So Now Then Conference on contemporary documentary photography. www.photofest.org Brighton Photo Biennial 6 – 29 October Contemporary and newlycommissioned photographic and moving image works by a range of artists who explore the thin line between past and present, fact and fiction, illusion and reality. www.bpb.org.uk Helsinki Photography Festival 7 October – 6 November The main event of the 11th year of this festival is the exhibition of approximately 18 artists works from Finland and the UK. The festival runs in three locations in the city. www.helsinkiphotographyfestival. net Photo Month in Krakow November 2006 The theme of the 2004 festival was to promote photography and to present exhibitions of both Polish and international artists. www.photomonth.com Paris Photo 16 – 19 November An overview of the finest photography the market has to offer, Paris Photo has selected 109 exhibitors to present the art of photography, from the early masters of the 19th century right through to contemporary discoveries.

The Statement section at this year’s fair is focused on Nordic artists. www.parisphoto.fr

THE NEXT ISSUE OF EI8HT “RELATIONSHIPS” We welcome your written and photographic contributions on this idea.

See www.foto8.com/drr for full details on how to submit your stories to us

On My Shelf Simon Norfolk My inspirations come from so many places: from walks, conversations, off-the-cuff remarks, music … I think all those things are equal and I don’t really elevate books, and definitely not photography books. I’m amazed people pay the money they do for photography books, mine included.

The book in which I find something new every time is Capital by Karl Marx. The sophistication of the book is that it’s four or five books in one. I read it when I was at Bristol University studying philosophy. While I would have called myself a socialist before I went to college, I was a socialist in a liberal kind of way, a kind of teenage emotional response to the world. I’m also a socialist because of The Jam’s “Setting Suns” and because of Margaret Thatcher, but reading Capital gave me an understanding of why society works the way it does. To this day, I would say I am not a liberal and I think that’s the difference between me and most of the people I know.

So many people my age are not socialists any more, which is very depressing, especially when these people are principals of photography colleges or on the boards of arts council grant-giving groups. The reason why their politics has failed is because it was rather flaky in the first place.

What Capital taught me was something more rigorous.

I read Ordinary Men by Christopher R Browning when I was doing the gencoide book (For Most of It I Have No Words) in the mid 90s, amongst a great shed load of books I read at this time.

It’s brilliant piece of research.

When I started researching the genocide work it was all a question about how. Who are these people and how do you get yourself into the mindset in which such atrocities become possible?

How do I know that I wouldn’t have persuaded myself – if I was a young man growing up in Germany in the 1930s? These people don’t just wake up one day and they’re working in the gas chambers, they do it by a million little compromises that act like the salami-slicer in your ethical stance. Browning found all the correspondence between the policemen who were dragged into the army and their families.

They rounded up people from villages in the middle of nowhere, put them in ditches and shot them; they made the SS look like pussies. How do you get inside their minds? You look at the letter one wrote to his wife. He tells her what he did that day and how he felt about it. It makes you ask yourself: am I made of stronger stuff?

The other big inspiration for the genocide book was a conversation with Holocaust survivor, Leon Greenman. I found him in Ilford, in a little flat full of boxes and we spent all day talking. His wife and son were gassed at Auschwitz and they probably shouldn’t have been sent there because he was a British citizen, which gave them different rights. His wife was Dutch, but if he’d been able to prove he was English, they would have been treated differently. A bureaucrat denied him the documentation and the boxes in his flat were testament to his lifelong pursuit to uncover the identity of the bureaucrat. He never found out. I asked Leon what he would do if he found him.

He said he would break the bureaucrat’s neck. Although Leon was a frail old man, he still had this white heat of fury.

One of the few photojournalism books that I own is Crimes and Splendors: The Desert Cantos

of Richard Misrach. He is the granddaddy of American colour landscape photography. It was streng verboten at college! It was all Cartier Bresson and Eugene Smith, but fortunately we managed to get illegal copies of contemporary American colour photography, like Winogrand and Friedlander. Then I came across this guy Misrach and I was completely astonished by his work. It’s all about the American desert and the way America has dealt with it and destroyed it in so many ways. The work is aesthetically absolutely beautiful and that’s why it’s so powerful.

The guy really gives a shit about the subject matter. It’s not just some flighty thing that he just picks up and plays with for a while because he thinks it’s interesting.

For the last 22 years Misrach has been producing work about the American desert but he’s not just taking the same picture again and again, so the format of the work is in cantos. One section is a series of pits where they destroy animals that die, many from radiation poisoning from nuclear plants.

Some pictures are of copies of Playboy magazine that Misrach found in the desert, which had been tied on a post and used as target practice. There are also beautiful pictures of clouds and sunsets but – and there is a but – he explains to us why they look the way they do. It’s because of the way agriculture works in the desert; it’s been completely overused and drained of any kind of nutrients by being aggressively farmed, and that’s lead to a massive amount of soil erosion, which then blows into the air creating those beautiful red shifts.

I just love the man’s commitment.

What I like about poetry, especially the work of Simon Armitage, is it has something of the photographic essence.

Seventeen syllables to get across an idea – it’s exactly the same as having a fraction of a second in photography. As John Cooper Clarke said, “To write a poem in seventeen syllables is very diffic”.

To go back to Marx, Engels wrote a letter to Marx and at the end of it he wrote “I’m sorry to have written you such a long letter; if I’d have had more time I would have written you a much shorter one”. If I had less time, I would make a

77

video. I love that acuity that poetry has; that ability to conjure up an entire mood. Armitage lives in Yorkshire and he writes about the things around him. He lives in the countryside, but he doesn’t write about the majesty of a great river falling from the mountains, he writes about burying a horse out the back, the difference in class between a gamekeeper and a lord of the manor, or the regrets he has on leaving a lover, which can make you cry.

I’m also extremely inspired by things I think are awful. It can be so instructive in how not to do things, which is why I was tremendously inspired by James Nachtwey’s Deeds of War. It’s a book which is brilliantly photographed, technically superb, journalistically brilliant and utterly ineffective in talking about the things I think it wants to talk about; not how does this look but rather: why does this happen?

Having a thing described to me again and again – well, we call it pornography, don’t we? If you can’t engage me emotionally and make me want to do something – whether it’s having boycotts, standing outside an embassy or shooting your prime minister – whatever the action is that you do as a consequence, that’s the difference between pornography and not pornography. Someone like Nachtwey is very brave, with all the qualifications and all the rest of it, I don’t want to knock that. He’s a great picture maker but you will not learn a single thing from that book about what you should do now. I want to be challenged by a book in terms of how can I alter my behaviour. A lot of photojounalism tells you the photojounalist is a a handsome hero, a swashbuckler who jumps in and out of landrovers in his flakjacket, but it doesn’t tell you anything about being a human being. That’s why the work’s so easy to consume – because it asks nothing of you. And that’s why it can sit on your coffee table.

I’m very inspired by Marcus Bleasdale 8 Simon Norfolk was talking to Max Houghton

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Scene Man’s Best Friend?

Tim Minogue There’s an exhibition on at the Imperial War Museum, until April 2007, called “The Animals’ War”. It’s about the ways horses, dogs, camels, pigs, elephants, mules and other creatures were pressed into military service during the 20th century. There are photographs of parachuting dogs, carrier pigeons emerging from tanks, labradors with gas masks, pigs sniffing out explosives, dolphins detecting mines. Ever since some Stone Age person turned the tables on our furry rivals by inventing the spear, and Hom. Sap. became the hunter rather than the hunted, we have been coercing animals for our own purposes. If they can amuse us, guard us, pull our carts and feed us, they may as well take part in our wars.

The IWM exhibition was the cue, in the Daily Mail, for a stunted photograph of a Churchillian bulldog wearing a Tommy’s helmet under the headline: “The Dogs of War!” In the real world few dogs affect any enthusiasm for patriotism, or any other ism. No hounds of my acquaintance have an opinion on globalisation, the rise of China or conflict in the Middle East; if they do they are keeping it to themselves. Some white South Africans still keep guard dogs which are trained to attack unfamiliar black people: nasty, certainly, but the dumb mutts are just doing what they’ve been taught; it’s unlikely that they share the prejudices of their masters. So, is the bulldog in the tin hat a peculiarly British piece of sentimental anthropomorphism?

Or is there, on some remote ranch in Paraguay, an aged former SS death camp guard cradling a photo of a long-dead Rottweiler whose fangs gave staunch service in the cause of Nazism?

Perhaps there is. Humans like to project their own values and beliefs on to the animals they control; no more so than when making images of them.

The earliest photographs of animals were in the tradition of 18th century oil paintings commissioned by aristocrats to show off the trappings of wealth – the mansion, the landscaped park, the thoroughbreds, the elegant wife. The new medium of photography enabled the rich to show off their prize bulls and racehorses in the same way. The photographs weren’t about the horses or the gun dogs in them at all, but about the wealth and status of their owners.

My nine-year-old daughter’s weekly magazine, in between pinups of boy bands and tips on how to make yourself look like a preteen trollop, features cutesy photographs of kittens and bunnies. The animals are there not for their own sake but to reassure parents, and no doubt the magazine’s readers, that they are still, at heart, little girls.

Tim Minogue writes for Private Eye Photograph © Imperial War Museum

In the 1970s the Daily Mirror published many pictures by a skilled and patient photographer called Arthur Sidey. Arthur specialised in animals in bizarre

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poses: cigar-smoking chimps, bicycling dogs, seagulls sitting on policemen’s heads, that sort of thing. It was an offshoot of the circus tradition which saw animals as spectacle, subjects for human amusement and ridicule: elephants standing on their heads, lions roaring at the flick of a whip.

The talking chimps of the PG Tips TV ads and the skateboarding ducks of Esther Rantzen’s That’s Life show, contemporaries of Sidey’s Mirror pix, were among the last gasps of this way of treating animals as vehicles for a sort of cheeky chappie humour. In the 1970s and 1980s many people started to question our relationship with other species and to stand back aghast at the destruction already wreaked upon our fellow creatures. Save the Whale posters went up on a million bedsit walls, opposite Fateh Singh Rathore’s iconic photograph of a Bengal tiger, eyes aglow, stalking through the jungle towards the camera. Alas not one tiger’s life was saved by well-meaning posters; today the species stands on the brink of extinction in the wild. All those photographs on all those walls weren’t telling us much about, or doing much for, whales or tigers.

They were shorthand for the ways the inhabitants of those student flats wanted to be seen as in touch with the earth and its creatures; how they cared. And then they went to work for Barclays Bank and Tesco.

I hope Jan van IJken will forgive me if I say that some of his arresting photographs of animals in the current edition of EI8HT put me in mind, ever so slightly, of the bulldog in the tin hat or one of Arthur Sidey’s tightrope-walking guinea-pigs. Not because van IJken has set out to exploit or ridicule these animals – quite the reverse – but because we cannot help projecting our own feelings and prejudices on to the animals we see in photographs. A monkey is held down by a masked, rubber-gloved figure while it receives an injection. It stares into the camera, looking sad and wise.

But, then, most apes look “sad” and “wise” in repose. If there is any reproach here it comes not from the monkey, but from the

viewer’s imagination; our own unease – guilt, perhaps – about whatever is happening. There’s another striking photograph of a hairless cat being held up for judging at a show. You may consider that breeding hairless cats for shows is a stupid thing to do, but what makes the photograph unforgettable is the look of malevolence on the cat’s face as it stares straight at the camera. This is one very pissedoff moggie. But it isn’t furious because of 50,000 years of humiliation and exploitation of animals by people – which is perhaps what we are being invited to see in those piercing eyes – it’s just irritated because, like most cats, it doesn’t much like being manhandled.

I admire Jan van IJken’s work, especially his photographs of factory farming, which document the way much of our food is produced. They show things which most people would prefer not to think about. But we should beware speculating too much about whatever is behind the eyes of these animals. We don’t know, and they aren’t telling 8

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