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The weather is unseasonably balmy in England and frosty in Chicago; Mother Nature showing her wrath for all we have wrought on her planet. Into this tumultuous climate, a new issue of EI8HT is born, on not quite such an epic scale, yet the stories chosen to convey our Relationships theme are imbued with an unshakeable strength; a remarkably feminine strength, it seems to me. This power is evident in both the women who are the photographic subjects and the photographers of these stories. Like the Great Mother herself they too have immense fortitude. In the pages of EI8HT this issue, we meet women who are building bridges and defying the odds. Take for example, Promise, Sylvia and Sipathi in South Africa. Or women who are fierce and unforgiving like an Albanian wife with a vengeance to uphold. Or indeed Emma Hunter, photographed by her sister, who is now winning her personal battles against self-harm and anorexia. Take the proud women on the Norwegian island of Givær who are instrumental in maintaining family ties and the tradition of farming, or the less conventional spirit of Amanda Jo Williams as she makes a claim for her own identity as well as being mum to twins Ginger and Hominy. Mothers, it is apparent, bear the brunt but they also restore our will to go on. Tim Minogue’s loving memories of his late mother are a touching and evocative tribute to that matchless maternal power, as well as to the enduring profundity of photography. Elsewhere in the magazine we can see the footprints of mothers, their sons, daughters, brothers, sisters. A train ride through the heart of the Congo acts as a microcosm for life itself, travelling towards a distant destination with you friends, family or strangers as companions. And still in Congo we witness the beginning of another trail, the diamond trail. It begins in the open cast mines of Africa and ends in the high class boutiques of western jewellery shops. “All life is here” would be a fitting title to this issue since the photographs grant us a ringside seat from which to observe the continual cycle of births, deaths, marriages and a lot of hard work. These are the essential elements to all our lives and this is why we have chosen Relationships for this issue to illustrate the point. EI8HT does not offer a solution to life’s hardships and injustices but I believe that this issue shows that harnessing the power of the mother could teach us all to tread more gently on the Earth. JL Editor’s Letter

Contributors Alfredo Cáliz Represented by Panos Pictures. Inshallah is published by Tres Culturas. www.panos.co.uk Guillaume Herbaut Represented by Oeil Public. www.oeilpublic.com Laura Hunter laura_e_hunter@hotmail.co.uk Mehrnoosh Khadivi mehrnoosh.k@mac.com Bénédicte Kurzen www.evephotographers.com René Limbourg www.nomanzland.com Kadir van Lohuizen Represented by VU. www.agencevu.com www.lohuizen.net Marcelo del Pozo Represented by Reuters. www.reuters.com

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Contents Vol.5 No.3 Dec 2006 28

>Moments >38 The Clever Shepherd Alfredo Cáliz happens upon this unusual sight in Morocco >46 Beirut Corniche Mehrnoosh Khadivi witnesses a scene of shortlived peace >48 State of the World Marcelo del Pozo takes a peek at the annual festivities surrounding Corpus Christi in Spain >64 Lhasa Train René Limbourg charts the engineering feat and politically explosive development that is the train from China to Tibet >Features >06 Best Served Cold A tale of revenge and murder in Albania by Guillaume Herbaut >14 Mirror Image Laura Hunter helps her twin sister Emma to face up to the bruising reality of her illness >18 Next of Kin Part of a wider project on motherhood, by the collective Eve Photographers, Bénédicte Kurzen recounts the painful stories of three HIV-positive women and their families in South Africa >28 American Day Psychosis Muzi Quawson is mesmerised by a young woman, Amanda, in Woodstock, New York and documents her disaffected life >40 Diamond Matters On the diamond trail, from mines to boutique, by Kadir van Lohuizen >50 Givær Knut Egil Wang documents the community spirit created by two families on a tiny island in Northern Norway >58 Life on the Line Michaël Zumstein hops aboard the Kambelembele express and travels through the heart of the Congo >Columnists >26 This Brief Flight Tim Minogue’s tribute to his mother inspired by the pictures he discovers from the time before he was born >35 Indigo Jon Ronson muses on the phenomenon of “indigo” >Listings >66 Picture agencies, special notices and media associations >Inside >75 Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark talk to EI8HT about their fascinating life of investigative reporting, as well as their professional and personal partnership

>Reviews >78 Satellites, Niagara, The Photobook II, Reuters: State of the World, Another Asia, Coney Island, Apropos Rodin, My America, Revolution in Hungary, Life in Death, Rough Beauty, Tidy Street, Ecotopia >On My Shelf >91 Kathy Ryan, Photo Editor of the New York Times Magazine, talks about the books that influence and enrich her life 8 Christmas Appeal: For every subscription made over the course of this issue, 8 will donate 10% to a charity in South Africa working to prevent mother-to-child transmission of the HIV virus. For more info visit www.foto8.com. >Cover © Guillaume Herbaut 5

BEST SERVED COLD

A TALE OF MURDER AND REVENGE IN ALBANIA

Aslan Cufi and Mustapha Daij – Peacemakers (previous page, left) Aslan Cufi is called the Uncle of Shkodra. He has three sons: the first is in prison for murder, the second just got out (legitimate defense), the third drives around in a big car. Aslan Cufi replaces Emin, the old peacemaker, who was assassinated. His was ‘the most beautiful murder in Shkodra’, according to a local journalist: five bullets in the back with a silencer in the stairwell of a building one night Mustapha Daija is also a peacemaker. He agrees to set up meetings with the families in hiding … at a cost. A donation for his organisation: 200 euros. And help for the families: 15 euros for the rich ones; 30 euros for the poorest. The average monthly salary in Shkodra is 150 euros

Eliolha Dibra (previous page, right) On 29 April 2000 at 10.30pm, Guezim Dibra was on his way home from the restaurant where he worked washing dishes. He was walking up the path from his vegetable garden when two men suddenly appeared and shot him down. His wife Bukurie, heard the gunshots and rushed outside. Guezim was lying in the path covered in blood. Bukurie ran towards him calling for help. The men came back and beat the man and wife. Bukurie regained consciousness in hospital; her husband’s body had been torn apart Eliolha was Guezim’s favourite child. He took her everywhere; even teaching her how to drive and plough the land. She is a real tomboy. Guezim used to say: “Eliolha is her father’s son! Her father’s son!”

In the north of Albania,10,000 people are being pursued under vendettas, living shut away for fear of reprisals from hostile families. Since the fall of the communist dictatorship in 1991, old practices from the past have returned. The Kanun, a set of civil laws laid down by Lek Dukagjini, a feudal lord from the north country in the 15th century, has a strict code of revenge: if a person is murdered, his family must avenge the killing Best Served Cold Guillaume Herbaut

â&#x20AC;&#x153;BLOOD SPILT WILL BE WIPED AWAY BY BLOOD TAKEN BACKâ&#x20AC;? CODE 848 OF THE KANUN 9

Christian and Alexander Vukai (top) On 15 May 2000 at 5.30 am, Pietr Vukai left the small house where he lived with his wife and three children. He was a farm worker and would leave the house at dawn every morning. In his bag was the lunch he would eat later in the fields. His wife was pregnant. Their three children, Christian, Alexander and Albana, would soon leave for school. Pietr had been worried ever since the murder of his brother six months earlier. He noticed his fellow workers leaning against a truck up ahead. Then, three men emerged from a nearby lane, carrying pistols. They took aim and shot him down in front of everyone. Pietr was hit in the chest by several bullets and started convulsing. A figure came over and finished him off with a bullet to his head

Anton Hili (with family, top right) On 10 August 2003 at 11 am, my father decided to put an end to his life and threw himself into the well. My sister told us three hours later. She had gone out to get water. Holding her buckets, she noticed my father’s body lying at the bottom. It had rained a lot and the well was full. I’m 14 years old and I now live with my four sisters and my mother. Before we lived in the mountains in a small village called Dukagjin. Ten years ago, my uncle got into a fight with a neighbour. He killed him with a stone. He smashed his skull. We had to leave our home. The dead man’s family wanted to kill us. We came to Shkodra. Since then, we have lived closed in, for fear of being killed. My father was called Voxan. He had had enough of living shut away. He threw himself down the well because he couldn’t stand it any longer. Sometimes at night I wake up thinking I can hear noises in the garden Fran Shulani (above) Fran Shulani is a historian and legislator of the Kanun. “According to the Kanun, when men find themselves surrounded, they can hold their wives in front of them and no one is allowed to kill the women. Today, even the wives are killed”

Anonymous (above) This man protects one family in hiding. He cannot be named for his own safety. The family he protects had to leave their home because an uncle of the family killed two people and wounded another

8 extra: More images from Guillaume Herbautâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Vendettas project can be seen online at foto8.com/8xtra

I’ve always taken pictures of Emma. Even though we’re twins, she looks much better in photographs. She’s never felt that, though. It’s always been in her that she’s ugly, or fat, and it’s nothing to do with how we were brought up – we were spoilt rotten! We were born by Caesarean section, so even though was I grabbed first, it was just an accident – but she’s always felt I’m the big sister. I was doing a degree in photography when Emma became really ill. She’s had problems since she was 14, and she’d been addicted to cocaine for years before mum and dad knew about it. I lied to them all the time about her, so in a way I helped her get into the state she was. As she became anorexic, she asked me to take pictures of her so she could see how thin she was looking, and she’d want them taken from the front and the side to make sure. She didn’t like looking in the mirror, and she usually covered the glass, apart from the one behind the bathroom door. She’d have a look in that one just to torture herself. When she started smashing herself in the face, when she was first in the Cardinal Clinic in Windsor, she really couldn’t see what she was doing to herself. So I gave her a hard copy of what she really looked like. I started to make a photo-diary to help her, and I’d take pictures everyday, if she let me, and she usually did. She let me use the pictures of her for my final project at college. My tutor had seen one and liked it a lot – it’s a good job because it was the only work I had! I never thought there would be any more to it than that, but then I was commended in the Ian Parry awards. Emma was on holiday in Dubai, so I phoned her and she helped me pick the final 12. She was shocked at the interest in her. She’s not so touchy about the way she looks in them anymore; now she’s in recovery she thinks it’s not her anymore. Emma is an amazing person, especially in front of other people. Before she became really ill, she worked six days a week as a nail technician. Everybody loves her; we’ve got so many friends! Sometimes I get annoyed about how she’s imposed on my life – birthdays, exam results – but then all twins are competitive. At the same time she’s helped me a lot, letting me do this project. She’s paid me back.

Mirror Image Laura Hunter

I remember the first time I was really bad with anorexia, I asked Laura to take pictures of me. In the mirror, I looked really fat, but in photos I could see what I really looked like. It was the same with my face, when I was self-abusing, I didn’t register it as damage. It didn’t even hurt; I was just trying to get rid of my face. I was constantly self-abusing when I was first in the rehab clinic. When Laura took pictures and showed them to me, I wasn’t even upset, but I did realise I was doing myself damage. My right eye wasn’t shutting properly; it was open even when I was asleep – that’s when it became worrying for me. The pictures are the main reason I stopped self-abusing and that’s the only way I could ever recover from the alcohol and drug addictions – the self-abuse was just an excuse to concentrate on damaging myself instead of recovering. I’ve seen the pictures exhibited, and I’m proud of Laura, she’s a very good photographer. At the same time, I feel quite disconnected and a bit sorry for the girl in the pictures and I think “she looks a bit sad” and I have to remind myself that it was me. Since I’ve been in the clinic, I believe there’s a reason for everything and, if it doesn’t sound too strange, if I hadn’t done what I’ve done these pictures wouldn’t have happened. So I’m really happy that I’ve been able to help Laura, in a small way, because she’s spent a lot of years helping me. She’s always been the big sister, even though we’re twins, looking after me and making sure no one upset me. It was Laura who told mum and dad about the drugs, after years of keeping it a secret for me. It was incredibly difficult for her to break the twin-bond, and I was furious at first. When I was first in the clinic, she kept apologising for telling mum and dad. But I know she had to do it: she did it to save my life. I’ve been clean for eight and a half months now, and I still use my butterfly book [Laura made a photo album for Emma with motifs of a butterfly to represent her recovery] if I’m having a bad day; I look at how much progress I’ve made. Laura used me a lot as a model before I got really bad, and I can even look at some of the pictures and think “I’m not that bad!” I think it will help me for years to come. And if it helps even one other person to be open about their problems, and to get help, then that’s a reason for the work to be shown 8

Emma Hunter

Next of Kin

Sylvia holds her daughter, Badalo, in her arms. The baby is six months old and is sick; she tested HIV-positive when she was six weeks old. She is taking medication but the family still live in denial of the virus

Sylvia sits in her shanty house right after Badalo, seven months, has been buried. She is surrounded by the women of her family

Badalo died of the consequences of Aids despite the treatment. The body lays in a coffin at the private funeral company after the gran-aunties have washed her

Sylvia, Promise and Sipathi. All three women live in the Tembisa township in South Africa. And all three found out they were HIV-positive when they were pregnant

Sylvia

Zimbabwean-born Promise, 28, walks every day from the squatter camp where she lives, to the association where she works. Here, she is nine months pregnant and HIV-positive

Promise had a friend who died under anti-retroviral treatment so now she is afraid to take the drugs

In June, she gave birth to a daughter, Sissi: she has not yet been tested

Promise

Sipathi, 23, has three children â&#x20AC;&#x201C; the eldest of them, Tsato (far left), only five years old

Sipathi is too week to get out of bed on her own. She is helped by her aunt

Surrounded by family, Tsato, in blue jacket and hat, buries his mother in Tembisa cemetery

Tsato pours soil onto a shovel. The soil will be used to cover the coffin of Sipathi

Sipathi

Children’s graves in Tembisa township. During 2006, the children’s section of the cemetery has almost trebled. It is a South African tradition to bury the children and put on the top of the grave objects that they used, played with, or even medicine bottles

This is the story of three young women: Sylvia, Promise and Sipathi. It is also a story of ambivalence and denial on a national scale in the wake of a crippling Aids epidemic. All three women live in the Tembisa township in South Africa and all three found out they were HIV-positive when they were pregnant. President Mbeki’s notorious remarks questioning the link between the HIV virus and Aids may not have shaped the country’s health policy over the past six years, but it haunts it. In May 2006, the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/Aids (UNAids) identified South Africa as the country with the highest number of women infected with HIV/Aids in the world, almost double the number in India and over triple that in neighbouring Zimbabwe. The drug nevirapine, which prevents transmission of the virus from mother to unborn infant, was only received by 14.6 per cent of women, according to the UNAids report. Yet the government estimates 78.7 per cent of pregnant women who were HIV-positive received the drug in 2004. This discrepancy has not been addressed. Informed by such unedifying statistics, French photojournalist Bénédicte Kurzen decided to focus on the issue of mother-to-child transmission; a decision that has not been welcomed by the health authority in charge of Tembisa township. Since last winter, Bénédicte has witnessed what she describes as a “tripling in size” of the children’s area of the cemetery (pictured). In the words of Bénédicte, the deeply affecting pictures we see on these pages represent just half a story. Although we are privileged to share these intensely private moments in the lives of Sylvia, Promise and Sipathi, these three women, and their families were prepared to share much more. Promise wanted the birth of her daughter to be documented. Sipathi was dying when Bénédicte met her, but her family wanted Bénédicte to photograph her son’s last visit. Bénédicte herself wanted to photograph the neglect she witnessed; patients left lying sleeping in their own vomit for two hours at a time. All official permission was refused. The CEO of the hospital asked Bénédicte to stand in front of the University of Johannesburg’s Ethics Committee, and to take two objective witnesses to prove her story was ethical. Instead, Bénédicte approached the Ethics Institute in Pretoria and it was agreed she should provide “informed consent” letters for her photographic subjects. Still the hospital said no. Of the mothers and children Bénédicte decided to photograph, Sipathi died aged 23, leaving behind three children under six. Sylvia’s daughter Badalo died at seven months. Zimbabwean-born Promise and her daughter Sissi, who was born on 25 June 2006, live in a squatter-camp for illegal immigrants in Tembisa. Her partner left when he found out she was HIV-positive. Sissi (the name means “lady”) has not yet been tested for HIV. According to UNAids, there are already 1.1 million Aids orphans in South Africa. This number is expected to increase to approximately 3 million by 2010. Reports in late October of a significant change – a “dramatic reversal” even – in the government’s approach to the country’s Aids crisis may yet turn the tide 8 Max Houghton Next of Kin Bénédicte Kurzen

This Brief Flight Tim Minogue A few days after my mother’s death I am looking through some photographs, some in albums, many more in an old biscuit tin. Most are familiar. There is the studio portrait of the 18-year-old nurse in starched uniform, all stiff collars and flaps, managing to look slightly haughty and at the same time if she is about to burst out laughing. I halfremember a story she told me as a child, about working at Sheffield Infirmary during an air raid and – with a hint of wistfulness – caring for injured airmen, British and German. Sheffield’s only major air raids took place on the nights of 12, 13 and 15 December 1940. Six hundred and sixty people died and 80,000 buildings were destroyed or damaged. My mother was still 16.

There is a tiny, dog-eared snapshot of Joan and her longdead younger brother Eric, probably taken around 1930, when she was seven, heads together, laughing. A small, sepia “Camera Study by Rembrandt Cinema Studios” of Queen’s Arcade, Leeds, shows a twoyear-old carefully posed on a couch in front of a foggy background of drapes. I’ve seen this picture before; now I realise how much my mother as a child looked like my youngest daughter, now five. There’s another, dated April 1940. I’ve never seen it before. On the reverse it says it was taken at “Novelty Studio (Madame Beryl Ltd)”, of Spurriergate, York. It shows a 16-year-old girl in a plain blouse and a hand-knitted cardigan, dark hair tied back, wisps trying to escape. She wears an expression of trust and innocence. One eyelid is slightly droopy (I had never noticed that before) and her teeth are a bit crooked (when did she get them fixed?). What is really startling about the picture to me is that it is of a child – a 16-year-old child. There’s not a hint of sexuality, of the knowingness affected by modern teenagers. Teenagers hadn’t been invented in 1940. Yet a few months later this child was helping care for the broken bodies of airmen only a little older than herself. I sift on, backwards and forwards through the years. There’s the strong and gentle mother who in her 30s kissed away our tears and towelled my sister and I down on the beach; there’s a confident, shapely woman of 23 posing on a jetty at Morecambe in 1946 – there are no shadows and she’s wearing an overcoat with wide lapels, nipped in at the waist. I can almost feel the chilly wind off the Irish Sea. There’s a photograph I took at Rievaulx Abbey a few years ago. Mum looks happy, as if we were sharing a joke. The arthritis which virtually imprisoned her in the house for her last few years must have kicked in by then, but she could still enjoy a walk. Then I realise that “a few years ago” was 1981 or 1982, a quarter of a century past, and that my mother was not very much older then than I am now.

I end up with about 20 pictures and from these select a dozen, mostly old, small, black and white snapshots. Back in London I take them to Colorama in Wardour Street, where they are scanned and enlarged to a little under A3 size, then mounted on 3mm board. Thanks to digital technology no definition is lost. “Hidden” details emerge: yachts and fishing boats in the distance in the Morecambe picture, scuffs on the two-year-old’s shoes. In a park in Torquay, a picture taken by a roving photographer employed by Happy Snaps (“Fleet Street – four doors from GPO”) reveals that my mother is carrying a ball of knitting. She’s wearing the same coat as in Morecambe, but on the balmier shore of the English Riviera it’s unbuttoned and casually worn over the shoulders. These quotidian details become exciting: pieces of forgotten days revealed and restored. One of the set – of my mother in her 60s, at my sister’s wedding, relatively recent but still happy and vital – is propped up on the coffin; the others are displayed on the walls at the reception afterwards, where they stimulate a lot of conversation. When I told Max, EI8HT’s features editor, that I wanted to write about this, she asked if I had read Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida. I hadn’t, but I have now. It’s a book of reflections on the nature of photography, published in 1980, in which, as he regards photographs of his dead mother, a Proustian process of memory is unlocked: “Contemplating a photograph in which she is hugging me, a child, against her, I can waken in myself the rumpled softness of her crêpe de Chine and the perfume of her rice powder.” But Barthes is troubled by the barriers of time and history – the “kind of stupefaction in seeing a familiar being dressed differently” – the distraction of long out-of-fashion clothes and objects and, most of all, a feeling of “exclusion” from “the time when my mother was alive before me”. After looking at dozens of photographs of his mother in which he feels he recognises “parts” of her Barthes eventually finds one, of her as a child, where he eventually finds the “truth of the face I had loved”.

I was not seeking an essential, defining photograph of my mother, although I think I know which I would keep if told I could only save one. But looking through her photographs brought me an unexpected feeling of peace. When my mother died aged 83 in September – in an instant, of a pulmonary embolism – she had been racked by arthritis for many years. She could no longer enjoy the great pleasures of her life – dancing, walking in the Yorkshire Dales, scrambling over ruins in Greece, maintaining her beautiful garden. She was nearly blind, so even television and reading were almost denied her. But now, to me, she is no longer only the tired, ill, sometimes tetchy old woman of her later years. She is, equally, the laughing child, the sweet 16-year-old with all before her, the mother of young children, in her prime. I am seeing her life now as a whole, not just its end. Someone once wrote that a human life is like a bird flying out of the darkness through an open window into a brightly lit hall, then out of the window at the other side of the room and into the darkness once more. Thanks in part to my grandmother’s Brownie, Rembrandt Cinema Studios and Madame Beryl, I can at least contemplate all of that brief flight equally, and not merely the disappearance into the night 8 Tim Minogue writes for Private Eye

american day psychosis

A chance meeting in Manhattan in 2002 was the beginning of a friendship between Muzi Quawson, a London photographer, and Amanda Jo Williams, a young mother from Georgia who was creating a home and an identity in Woodstock, upstate New York 28

Swimming with Diamonds, Phoenicia, New York, 2002

Amanda Jo Williams invited Muzi Quawson to Woodstock in 2002, to stay with her extended family. At that time, they included her partner Paul, 30 years her senior, her twin children Ginger and Hominy and her close friend Hollis (the flame-haired woman in the pictures) who lived nearby. Over the next couple of years, Amanda, true to the fabled ’60s values of peace and love that still permeated the new Woodstock generation four decades on, fell in love with different people, wrote songs and yearned for total freedom. She allowed her new friend to document her moods, her changes of mind, her increasing sense of alienation, with total candour. Although she left Georgia to find her “own world”, Amanda has always known that an important part of her identity springs from her roots. Of her decision to spend three months in Florida in the winter of 2001 with her partner during that period, Gerard, leaving the twins with Paul, she says: “I missed the babies so much but I chose Gerard. This small town decided it would judge and it’s never been the same. They don’t understand me completely and won’t until they take a visit with me down to Georgia. I don’t care (half true). I like being a loner. I’m young” Amanda’s acute sensitivity perhaps in part stems from her belief that she is Indigo, a term which encompasses ideas of deep empathy with the earth, a dislike of systems – and telepathic ability. The once longed-for metropolis of New York City quickly stopped making sense; it felt like a sprawling intangible swamp: “I don’t want anyone to be here. I feel schizophrenic walking the streets of NYC. There’s a haze everywhere; I want to run from it. I want new friends to run around with. I feel like there are chains on me or something. I gotta go.” Amanda married Matthew in a ceremony in rural Big Indian in October last year. Ginger and Hominy were flower girls. Quawson attended, standing among the rose petals, and filmed the ceremony on Super8. Amanda has since moved with Matthew to a similarly freespirited community in Pennsylvania. The twins are schooled in Woodstock during the week and spend weekends with their mother. Like most of us, Amanda is still trying to make sense of life, still searching for meaning, still trying to find her way 8 American Day Psychosis Muzi Quawson

When Quawson began, she used a Nikon 35mm which provided the snapshot aesthetic she wanted in the earlier pictures. In the latest phase she switched to Contax 645: she found the medium format allowed her to step back and allow the landscape in

Milkweed, Big Indian, New York, 2006 (main picture) Hot Tub, Phoenicia, New York, 2002 (from far left) Collecting the Scooter, Phoenicia, New York, 2002 Talking with Mama, Hogansville, Georgia, 2006 Union City Blues, Brooklyn, New York, 2004

Where did the little people go, they said they’d be here at three and now it’s four and I’m old and time is only running farther from me, farther from me

eyes aren’t the prettiest sight if they haven’t looked in the mirror tonight and seen the cold dark damp spaces where light once filled those empty places

now take back what you didn’t give, man with a cause, ’cause you ain’t no rebel to me, even I can rebel against the American day psychosis to be, and if the truth must be told, it won’t be sewed in the hems (hymns) of what you’re reading or wearing, just in your eyes

hey hey hey hey there’s a hole in my chest cavity, could you fill it with fire, could you fill it with wind, i just want to feel something good within

hey hey hey hey i’ve lost my way way way can you help me out? can you give me a hand? or have you lost it in the war, along with your land? a long long time ago, i fought a man and left his bones piled in my kitchen circle, and i said, i can’t do this again i buried my mind in a southern state, and when i wake, i hope i’m home to what i long for, and what i have a song for

he’s a mean mean man and we all know it we go to the polls but it doesn’t show it. i know they got a place in the north pole, we don’t know where it is because we haven’t been told and we haven’t been warned that there’s a to be born epidemic i once had a friend who said he could sin only when he looked away when the president spoke about pain, like it was a joke on his name, cause he likes to get down on dirty deeds, and plant his seeds where the rain doesn’t come, and the sun doesn’t shine, we’ll all be

dead while he wines and dines on Mars, in a capsule, where the sex is good, and the beer far exceeds the stars we just got to rise above we can’t let them stop us with their hateful love, that they learned from misinterpretations, which is now reflected in their hatred for instability and greenish nature they want everything brown, they want to sell stuff in towns, to get people’s minds off the simple stuff, and give back simple minds that the truth won’t touch hey hey hey hey i’ve lost my way way way can you help me out can you give me a hand or have you lost it in the war along with your land hey hey hey hey i’ve lost my way way way can you help me out can you give me a hand or have you lost it in the war along with your land Hey Hey Hey Hey Amanda Jo Williams

Reflection, Phoenicia, New York, 2002 (above) Quicksilver, Woodstock, New York, 2004 (below, from left) Paul, Woodstock, New York, 2004 Inside the Bluehouse, Woodstock, New York, 2004 At Lisa Smallwoodâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s House, Hogansville, Georgia, 2004

Birthday Party, Woodstock, New York, 2006 (left) Corona Queen, North Carolina, 2004 (below, from left) The Wedding Dress, Big Indian, New York, 2006 The Hideaway, West Point, Georgia, 2006 Afternoon Stroll, Woodstock, New York, 2004

Outside Sidewalk, Lower East Side NYC, New York, 2004

Indigo Jon Ronson Amanda – the dark-haired woman in Muzi Quawson’s photographs – believes she’s an Indigo adult. To be Indigo is to think of oneself as part of a highly evolved species that has been sent to Earth by angels, specifically an angel called Kryon, to heal the planet. The Indigos see themselves as kind of benign Midwich Cuckoos: telepathic and super-intuitive. Hundreds of thousands of Americans think they are Indigo.

This has been causing some trouble at high schools. There have been reports of Indigo parents barging up to teachers and saying, “You can’t discipline my child, she’s an Indigo.” There have been other reports of Indigos trying to commit suicide. “They’re so ultra-sensitive to feelings,” an Indigo called Nikki Harwood once told me. “Imagine having the thoughts and feelings of everyone around you in your head. In an ideal world, Indigo children would be schooled separately.” There are websites dedicated to the Indigo community. In fact, you can do a questionnaire to determine if you or your child is Indigo. I decide to give it a go, on behalf of my eight-year-old son, Joel. “Does your child have difficulty with discipline and authority?” Yes. “Does your child refuse to do certain things they are told to do?” Yes, he bloody well does. “Does your child get frustrated with systems that don’t require creative thought [such as spelling and times tables]?” Yes. This is getting eerie. “Does your child display symptoms of Attention Deficit Disorder?” No. “Is your child very talented (may be identified as gifted)?” Of course! “Does your child have very old, deep, wise looking eyes?” No. “If you have more than 15 yes answers,” it says at the bottom, “your child is almost definitely Indigo.” Joel has 16 yes answers. “Realise that if you are the parent of one of these spirits you have

been given a wonderful, marvellous gift! Feel honoured that they have chosen you and help them develop to their fullest Indigo potential.” I decide not to tell Joel that I’m honoured he’s chosen me. It might turn him into a nightmare. Indigo meetings have sprung up in small towns and big cities across America – in Grapeville, Texas, in Puyallup, Washington, in Chandler, Arizona, and so on. At these meetings Indigos talk about their feelings – the stresses of being chosen ones, the joys and burdens of being telepathic. They learn tarot skills. I once attended an Indigo meeting, in Kent, in which 10 children were blindfolded and asked to walk from one end of the room to the other using telepathy. Unfortunately they all immediately started walking into tables and chairs and pillars. According to photographer Muzi Quawson, though, Amanda doesn’t attend Indigo meetings, even though she considers herself Indigo. The man in the photograph on page 32, by the way, is Paul, the father of her children. He is 30 years her senior. Amanda left the deep south for New York City , and ended up living in Woodstock, upstate NY, hanging out with musicians and bringing up her twin daughters. The USA is, by and large, a good place to have crazy religious beliefs, as long as you remain harmless in the eyes of the authorities. If you remain harmless, other people respect your differences. The atheist author Richard Dawkins quotes the atheist author Douglas Adams in his book, The God Delusion: “Religion has certain ideas at the heart of it which we call sacred …What it means is, ‘Here is an idea that you’re not allowed to say anything bad about; you’re just not. Why not? – Because you’re not!’ If somebody thinks taxes should go up and down you are free to have an argument about it. But if somebody says, ‘I mustn’t move a light switch on a Saturday,’ you say, ‘I respect that.’”

This respect for alternative religions is pervasive in the USA. Talk shows like Larry King Live and Montel routinely welcome nationally acclaimed mediums like Sylvia Brown. The most popular game show on television is Deal Or No Deal, a programme based on the belief that you can somehow divine with your mind the contents of 22 sealed boxes. Even the US Military employed, for two decades, a crack team of secret psychic spies. They put them in a condemned clapboard building in Fort Meade, Maryland, and told them to be psychic. So I imagine that Amanda suffers little prejudice, living in a country so prone to believing in nutty things. The problems come when people like her are deemed to have crossed the line. Recent American history is littered with occasions when US Federal authorities have suddenly decided that a particular alternative community is no longer harmless. Take the Weavers in Idaho, a family of White Separatists who believed all sorts of nutty things. The local FBI and US Marshals – for no good reason – began to see the Weavers as a potential threat. They staked out the family’s cabin, were spotted, panicked, and killed the mother, Vicky, and her 14-year-old son, Sam. US Federal authorities believe that American freedom needs to be protected at any cost, and that includes scaring the cattle back into the pen when they start behaving too freely. But Amanda looks like she’s going to be fine, there in Woodstock NY, raising her children, believing in harmless things. She’s going to be OK 8 Jon Ronson is a writer and broadcaster based in London

>Moments The Clever Shepherd Alfredo Cáliz Imagine driving along the road from Marrakech to Essaouira. All is well with the world when suddenly you see 14 goats up a tree. One goat: unusual. Two goats: think it might be time for a pitstop. But 14? A mirage, perhaps? On stepping out of the car, as if by magic, a shepherd appears. He says you can take a photograph of the goats up a tree. For a price. As you dig deep into your pockets, you notice his big stick and realise that the chances of 14 goats climbing a tree of their own accord are about as slim as bumping into Jimi Hendrix in Essaouira, where he wrote “Castles in the Sand”. That is more or less what happened to El Pais photographer Alfredo Caliz, who has been documenting Morocco since 1996. He hesitated over whether to include it in Inshallah, the culmination of his project, as it is hardly qualifies as an “authentic” Morocco scene. Yet, at the same time, it is exactly that! 8

Ahead of the London opening of an exhibition as well as a blockbuster movie on the subject of diamonds, EI8HT presents the photographs of Kadir van Lohuizen who has covered the global diamond business from mine to boutique. And Alex Yearsley comments on Global Witness’ role in reporting on the darker side of the glittering trade

Carrying gravel out of the mine at Bakwa Bowa, DR Congo (below) Ishmael Nyaka, 34, Sierra Leone (right): “I am born in Koidu. When the war started I fled to Bo. I came back in 2003. I am a miner, it is not OK here the work; there are no social programmes. I don’t get any money, just food. If a diamond is found we share, but the prices are low”

Mary Kangbo, 35, Sierra Leone: (far right): “I was born in Bo and came to Koidu in 1973. During the war I fled back to Bo. I am a licence holder, but it is not going well. I need an investor to buy equipment. I have about 50 boys digging for me. I give them food”

In the 1990s, I did a number of photo stories during the fighting in Zaire (now DR Congo), Sierra Leone and Angola, conflicts which were often dismissed as tribal wars. By degrees, however, they increasingly became conflicts over raw materials. The diamond deposists were, for the most part, controlled by the Angolan and Sierra Leonese rebels who used the gems as a means to buy weapons. Governments got in on the act too and the terms “blood diamond” and “conflict diamond” were born. Worried by any threat to their image, the industry bowed to public opinion and entered into negotiation with the relevant authorities and campaign groups. This led to the Kimberley agreement being signed at the end of 2002 by a large number of the exporting and importing countries. Nowadays these African countries are, on the whole, at peace and rebel movements no longer officially play much of a role in diamond expoloitation. Yet working conditions remain appalling, profits are enormous, but very little flows back to the people. “Fair trade” in diamonds would be the ideal next step with profits being shared by all in the industry and diamond workers’ rights being respected. Two years ago, I decided to return to the same African countries and follow the diamond trail worldwide, from the mines to the ultimate consumers. Diamond Matters Kadir van Lohuizen

Lunch break at the Surat diamond factories (main). Surat in India is the main polishing centre for diamonds in the world. Some 70-80 per cent of the world diamond production passes through here Pastor Mbaya Kafui, 42 years old, DR Congo (right): “I am a diamond dealer in Mbuji Mayi. Since 11 years I am also a pastor. I started my own church. About 10,000 people visit three times a week. They sell their diamonds to me after or before service” Yogesh,13, Surat, India (far right): “I come from a village very far from here, I live with my uncle in Surat. I cut diamonds, I start at 8 AM and finish at 8 PM. I earn 50 euros per month. Once a year I go home to my parents”

An estimated 120,000 men and children work as diamond diggers in Sierra Leone. Up to 400,000 worked as diamond diggers in Angola, but in 2004 the government forcibly expelled many of them, beating people and forcing them out of diamond mining areas. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, approximately 800,000 work as artisanal diamond diggers, in often dangerous and dirty conditions. It’s a casino economy but the diggers rarely get rich – the profits go to the diamond buyers, exporters, manufacturers and retailers. In 2005 the diamond jewellery industry was worth over US$50 billion. Meanwhile, in diamond rich towns like Koidu, in eastern Sierra Leone, there is no electricity, roads are in disrepair, and homes are riddled with bullet holes from the war that ended in 2002. In the DRC, the town of Mbuji Mayi has seen billions of dollars of diamonds mined but little of that money has stayed in the town. We at Global Witness met Kadir in the DRC in 2004 and visited mines with him. Van Lohuizen had worked in Angola, the DRC and Sierra Leone during the wars, and returned to the same African countries to follow the diamond pipeline from mine to consumer, funded by the Netherlands Institute for Southern Africa, Fatal Transactions, and West Africa Witness. His photographs have toured the African countries in which they were taken, enabling diamond diggers for the first time to see the path of the diamonds they dig, and for New York’s diamond dealers to see where the diamonds they benefit from originate. Global Witness is a non-governmental organisation that exists to expose the corrupt exploitation of natural resources and international trade systems to drive campaigns that end impunity, resourcelinked conflict, and human rights and environmental abuses 8 Alex Yearsley is campaign coordinator for Global Witness. Alex Yearsley

The exchange for rough diamonds in Antwerp (main) Moshe Feder, 54, New York (right): “I have been a diamond polisher for 35 years. A couple of years there were many polishers. Now all the work has moved to Asia. We only polish very valuable stones, bigger then 10 carat. For this company I work since five years. It is one of the prestigious diamond houses” Philippe Schaeffer, Paris (far right): “I am the vice president of Harry Winston, one of the exclusive diamond houses in the world. All our jewellery is designed by ourselves. Customers usually come by appointment, but they can also just walk in. They rarely buy at once, they think for a while and come back” The exhibition of van Lohuizen’s work will be on show, 28 November – 28 January 2007, at HOST in London

>Moments Beirut Corniche 9 July 2006 Mehrnoosh Khadivi

The following (including an excerpt of a poem by Nizar Qabbani) is quoted from the online community www.cafearabica.com Author: casbah In Reply To: Nizar Qabbani (posted by yasamine) Subject: RE: Nizar Qabbani Posted: July 2006 You know, may be its a coincidence but I have been reading more of Nizar’s poetry in the last weeks too. When this new war on Lebanon started, the first thing that came to my mind was “what would Nizar have written had he been alive today?”. And I went back to read his poems, in particular the ones he wrote about Beirut during the civil war. You most probably have read this one but I thought I’d share it with you and everyone else. Its interesting to read it in the context in which Beirut finds itself today.

BEIRUT IS YOUR PLEASURE WOMAN, BEIRUT IS MY LOVE A poem by Nizar Qabbani (1923 – 1998) Forgive us if we left you to die alone if we slipped out like runaway soldiers, pardon us if we watched you bleed carnelians rivers and saw adultery performed but remained silent. Tell me you’re well, Beirut in your sadness. Has the sea too been killed by a sniper’s bullet? And love? Is it now a refugee ... among the thousands? And poetry? After you Beirut can there still be poetry? The futility of war has left us butchered, emptied us of our substance, scattered our people to the four corners – pariahs, wasting. It has left us, against all prophecy, as lost Jews

>Moments State of the World Marcelo del Pozo The people of Zahara de la Sierra, Cadiz, celebrate the festival of Corpus Christi by decorating streets and houses with grasses, flowers and branches. This moment, of a woman entering her home, was captured on camera by Marcelo del Pozo, one of the 230 Reuters photographers whose work has been published in an ambitious project Reuters: The State of the World. The book, documenting the first six turbulent years of the new millenium, is dedicated to the 240-plus journalists who were killed in the course of reporting the news during that periodâ&#x20AC;&#x201A; 8

2+14+5=1

Two families, 14 people, five cows and an island. On GivĂŚr, a speck off the coast of Norway, just one kilometre in rocky circumference, a warmth emanates from the remarkable sense of community spirit 50

Givær sits off the coast of northern Norway. On the south of the island lives the Nilsen family. The Sivertsens live in a cluster of houses on the north. It has been so for generations. Martin Nilsen’s grandfather was on a freighter from Ålesund, when a storm forced the ship to shore in Givær. Here, the seaman met Martin’s grandmother. He never left. Martin’s mother came here as a maid. She was so disappointed when she arrived, but the Nilsen brothers persuaded her to stay until they mowed the hay. She, too, stayed for the rest of her life, marrying the brother who played the organ and the violin so beautifully. Martin’s wife, Marit, came from Drammen. She was working in Bodø, 16 miles west of Givær, as a kindergarten teacher, when Martin invited her out on a date. She says she knew immediately the path her life had to take. She would either have to follow him to the island – where there was no running water even – or she would have to forget him. Their five children think she made the right decision. Sølvi Sivertsen from Stavanger, a town on the west coast of Norway, chose her cousin Jostein on Givær. She had known him since childhood. Sølvi and Jostein went on to have three children of their own, and then, in 1990, they adopted three more. The Kvarsnes brothers – two-year-old Chris, five-year-old Glenn, and Kim, the eldest at eight – came ashore. They were busy years. Now Kim has his own plot of land on the island, and wants to build his own house. After years of living on the mainland, Olaug, the Nilsens’ second-youngest daughter returned to the island with her husband to tend the family farm. Sigrun Sivertsen says if Olaug hadn’t returned, there wouldn’t be any farming on Givær. Just across the sound is Burøy, where the five cows graze in the summer. The older generation say that when the animals move to the top of the island, the weather will be good. When the east wind is coming, you can catch the smell of leaves and jet fuel. When the moon is on the wane, the halibut grow lazy, and become an easy catch. These things, you learn. The sense of kinship and community, you embrace 8 Hilde Sandvik Givær Knut Egil Wang

Bodil Sivertsen married Stein Skirbekk one summerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s day in 2004 Every piece of straw on GivĂŚr is collected in preparation for wintertime. When the grass has been cut, the field becomes a football pitch. Regardless of how long he has been working, Chris puts on his Ronaldo jersey and shorts to play. With the hay cut, stacked and brought indoors there is no shortage of space to hang out the washing

Heading home at dusk (main picture) The little speck in the sea, Givær, has had three kings.They are hung on the wall at the Sivertsen’s. Jesus hangs in the guestroom On a dock, a ball of yarn and 10 water bottles make a game of skittles This club is strictly for women only. There is knitting, talking, singing, reading and praying. And of course coffee and cakes too Olaug Nilsen is getting married and coming home to run the family farm. Her mother puts on ‘false teeth’ and sings To make an eiderdown: vibrations in the strings shake dust loose from the eider and the breeze carries it away. It takes a few years to collect enough common eider to make a duvet

Summer visitors leaving the island.

The Kambelembele transports its passengers through the heart of DR Congo, from Kindu to Lubumbashi. The journey takes a month. A lot can happen in a month

Life on the 58

Line

It takes one month to cover 1400 km of railroad in the heart of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Departure point: the city of Kindu, in the province of Maniema, in the centre of the country. Final destination: the country’s second largest city, Lubumbashi, in the southern province of Katanga. You sleep in the train, you live in it, you do business in it. You fight in the train, your money gets extorted from you in it, you die in it. Without the train, Lubumbashi, wouldn’t receive any agricultural products, nor would it dispatch Bic pens, pots, and other manufactured goods that arrive from China to the otherwise isolated enclave of Maniema. There are no roads, and planes are expensive. The only way to get there is to take the “Kambelembele”. The only hitch is that today nobody is really responsible for the Kambelembele, which is technically owned by the Congo railroad company, the Société Nationale des Chemins de Fer du Congo, a “public” company. Ten years of internal Congolese conflicts, spurred on by armed interventions, has left the country’s utilities in disarray. The army and local businessmen control the train, taking a “tribute” from each passenger. So you pay your money and take your place alongside off-duty but armed military, on-duty military extorting passengers, women giving birth, pastors preaching, and illegal voyagers dangerously installed in train car roofs. When the train derails – a fairly frequent occurrence – passengers will leap off to restrain the persistent creeping vegetation, which has overgrown the track. Somehow the Kambelembele keeps chugging on in spite of it all 8 Life on the Line Michaël Zumstein

Train de Vie: (previous page) Passengers without tickets travel on the roof of the train Numbi Kasomadingé (this spread, clockwise from top), 68 years old, is in charge of coordinating the conductors at the Luena station. He was hired by the Société Nationale des Chemins de Fer du Congo company in 1960. The railroad’s employees haven’t been paid in months While the train is stopped at the Kitanda train station, worshippers gather around the pastor to pray

The DR Congo economic situation leaves people to their own devices. Musicians have made instruments out of local materials During a train stop, a young girl gets her hair done The Lubumbashi station, last stop of the train’s journey. ‘Anxiety gives way to euphoria at having arrived. Most of the “racketeers” are from this city and the long journey has eaten up their capital’

Mystery train: (facing page, clockwise from top). Leaping off the train before it pulls into the station Isabelle N (left) is on her way back from Kindu where she just got married in her hometown of Lubumbashi. She had to buy a ticket from the military who took over the compartment A man who has been doing business during the whole train ride counts his money

Hats pulled down (this page, top right) members of the Presidential Guard, who are travelling on the train pose anonymously When the train derails, passengers clear the creeping vegetation which has overgrown the track At dusk on the roof of the train, at the Kitanda station. After four days of stranded with no fuel, help arrives

This woman died on the train. Now her family watches over the body A man drinks â&#x20AC;&#x153;cinq centsâ&#x20AC;?, a small bottle of palm alcohol named after its price. Passengers drink a lot of it during the endless hours of waiting when the train runs out of fuel

>Moments Lhasa Train Rene Limbourg

The multi-billion dollar Qinghai-Tibet Railway, which opened in July 2006, is indisputably an amazing feat of engineering. At 1,956km, it is the longest railroad built on a plateau in the world. Writing in 1988 Paul Theroux remarked about the mountainous region, “The Kunlun Range is a guarantee that the railway will never get to Lhasa. That is probably a good thing. I thought I liked railways until I saw Tibet, and then I realised that I liked wilderness much more.” Previously inaccessible, Lhasa can now be reached in just 48 hours from Beijing. It was, of course, the Tibetan capital’s remoteness that in part helped to shape its unique cultural identity as the seat of Tibetan Buddhism.

The Buddhist approach to the environment – to live in absolute harmony with nature – is at odds with the Chinese desire for progress and there are fears that the railroad is part of a future strategy to relocate thousands of ethnic Han Chinese in Tibet. It would seem that a migration of sorts has already begun with 1800 passengers now arriving in Lhasa each day. This figure is expected to rise to 3000 next year 8

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In Rwanda, as in much of Sub-Saharan Africa, HIV/AIDS is stealing a generation. This tender image of a mother and her child, playing within a few feet of her husband’s grave, was one of a series by Stuart Freedman which won the Photojournalism category in the 2006 Amnesty international Media Awards.

MEDIA AWARDS For more information about Amnesty International’s annual awards go to amnesty.org.uk/awards If you have any queries or wish to be added to our mailing list contact media.awards@amnesty.org.uk

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Inside Investigative journalists Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark talk to EI8HT about Burmese generals, jade, Gestapo archives and the boundaries between work and home EI8HT: You have reported from Burmese jade mines, from Russian archives, from Calcutta’s busiest railway station. What would you say unites the stories you choose to work on? Adrian Levy: Getting beneath the surface of a story is the aim – it’s something we always return to in our work. It’s like when you arrive in a country, the hardest things to do are things like shopping, because nothing is arranged according to the culture you understand. You can’t actually find the things you need to sustain you; you just see a bazaar that you’re passing through. It’s a similar thing with writing. When you land in the middle of a culture for the first time, you inevitably create crass stereotypes. So that’s something we consciously decided to work against. Kashmir is a good example of where we tried to be with people rather than reporting on the situation. We went back to the same group of people year in year out, following them, then their stories inspired a whole load of other stories that came from that. But it came from their perspective. 8: Is the desire to report from this perspective the reason why you stay freelance? AL: We have lots of freedom but it’s been hard won! Cathy Scott-Clark: I could never go back to working in an office; haven’t done that since the Sunday Times. 8: Which is where you met?

CSC: Yeah, I was in education and Adrian was an investigative reporter and we both ended up being foreign correspondents. 8: Working together isn’t that common among journalists – why did you decide to? CSC: We weren’t going to. We left the Sunday Times and we were going to have a year off travelling, in 1996, but we got bored! We didn’t have plans – or at least I didn’t – to work together at all. 8: But you were, you are, a “couple”? AL: Yeah. We just wanted a break from the institutionalisation of everything. We thought we’d try set up our own projects to work in tandem but independently. But actually we chose subjects that were either difficult, remote, or that required lots of help. 8: What was your first job together? CSC: Child sacrifice in India. We had a vague plan to do something about it. AL: It was an awful story CSC: It wasn’t an awful story. AL: We didn’t do it very well! CSC: I don’t think we did it very badly at all, actually! It’s come back again as a big issue. AL: Yeah, we hit on some very big issues, you’re right. But it was work in progress, wasn’t it? CSC: It was our first magazine piece, for the Sunday Times. It took about nine months to convince them that we were going to write something sensible.

The road home: track leading to Levy and Scott-Clark’s home in rural France

The attitude was very much “You’re newsroom people – we couldn’t possibly let you loose on a 5000 word piece”. They did eventually commission us. AL: There was a period of transition. We’d gone from news into reportage, and there’s such a different culture in the commissioning environment, that they tend to deter news journalists from moving into reportage. They think they’ve got the wrong goals, and they’re not looking at narrative or character. CSC: It’s seen as the wrong kind of writing, not able to construct something so all-consuming as a 5000-word major feature. AL: And anyway, our goal was 100,000 words. We were saying: “Well, what we really want to do is write books!” CSC: Which is what we’ve done. 8: How do you actually physically write together? AL: We’ve got it down to an art, now … CSC: If we’re in a hurry, then one of us will write the piece, and hand it over, and the other will have another go at it. If we’ve got a bit more time, one person will sit at the computer, usually Adrian, I’d sit next to him and talk it through sentence by sentence, but that’s very long-winded. Takes forever. AL: With the books, everything is really structured and planned and we develop this homogenous idea of where we’re looking for and where going with it, we’ll just split them in half and then the reedit becomes really important. If

we went off on our own, we’d probably come back with the same information each other was looking for … CSC: Er … AL: I think we would. 8: Do you go off on your own? CSC: We have to now because we’ve got a little two-year-old boy. I think we have different interests within the stories we choose. Adrian has a much more global perspective and is much more aware of the politics, whereas I’ll be much more interested in the human side, which is probably inevitable. So if one person writes and one person edits, that combines the medium, if you like, and I think it works very well. 8: You always have a joint byline? AL: Yes, it’s all shared, whoever is writing or editing. Especially on long projects – and nearly all our projects are, they take months because we have several balls in the air. CSC: A major feature for Guardian Weekend can take two or three weeks to research and 10 days or two weeks to write. 8: They do back you, then, which is unusual in these days of nobudget journalism? AL: They’re very good. CSC: They do talk more and more of “a quick in and out”… but they’re good employers. The Sunday Times used to be very good, but their environment changed. We haven’t worked for them since 1999.

8: As this is our Relationships issue: I’m interested in where work stops and the relationship starts? Or is it all one thing? AL: It’s a thorny subject. We used to be much worse at it than we are now. CSC: Did we? AL: We had this phase where I felt we were always on a chase, pursuing these ideas, which were invariably protracted and difficult. So we’d go off doing that and … CSC: It was all work. AL: … and other things fade into the background and it’s very hard to keep a life/work balance. We still haven’t managed to work out what you do in your downtime. A holiday for us is not travelling. So when we do, we’re always looking for things to do. 8: You live in France. Was that part of the solution? AL: Yeah – we live in the middle of nowhere. CSC: It was partly to do with having a baby as well, and Adrian’s mum was ill. We’d been living in Asia for eight years, so we thought we should be back closer to the UK, but not in it. I couldn’t cope with living in London full-time again. It’s very difficult to write here [in London] – we had a small flat and it was incredibly noisy. We decided to rent somewhere in France and we loved it, so we bought the farmhouse. Very cheap, very lovely, very quiet. We go off on trips and then go back there to write. AL: It makes the whole thing less stressful for is. It’s an exhausting process as well, mentally emotionally and physically and you need time to be able to recharge. We did a whole series of stories back to back, for a long period of time … We went through Kashmir, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, where we were with the Tamil Tigers, we were going from story to story to story … CSC: And we were writing a book. AL: Yes, our first book, the jade book, Stone of Heaven, and we got to the end of that and we had to do this horrendous journey to get to the jade mines, which turned into an ordeal in itself. I felt like I was suffering from posttraumatic stress …I know that sounds like a grand thing to say … CSC: No, it doesn’t – you ran out of steam

If you go into someone’s house and have tea with them, they inevitably will end up talking. Doesn’t matter where in the world you are. If you listen, then you succeed AL: I had – I’d run out of juice and so had you. CSC: You are the one that runs out of steam, especially when you’re doing a lot of writing as well. I find when I get to a certain stage, I’ve got nothing left to say. I don’t want to write for a while. 8: How has having a baby affected your work? CSC: We lump work together a lot; we were in Asia for four months this year so we based ourselves in Thailand, where we lived before, found a house, found a nanny, and once it’s all set up, we went off on some separate trips, some together … AL: It’s the only way to make it work, so we each get a fair share. When we were in Washington we hired a flat, went on to mums.net, found the right person, then we could get on. We have to work a lot harder to make it work now, but it’s worth it. CSC: We’d much rather take him with us. AL: We get to see loads of him – it’s lovely! And also, in the preschool years we have the luxury of being able to dip in and out. He knows a bit of Thai, in France he’s picked up a bit of French – he’s getting good, got a little accent … 8: You don’t normally put yourselves at the centre of stories – but there was a story about family heritage, about homelands and timelines, which illustrated so well how, if you spend time talking you can find things out … AL: That was a whole weird thing. Usually we don’t write about ourselves – ever … CSC: It’s not very interesting AL: … but that story was interesting – the balance of the story changed, and out of it came something more interesting. It was my grandmother talking about being forced to leave her home in Nove Zamky [near

Budapest] in 1939 with such haste that all she could take with her was a diamond, sewn into the lining of her dress. She should have sailed for Bombay but the ship was diverted to England, where Anna, her husband Miklos, and their new baby (my Aunt Veronica) were ushered down the gangplank at Tilbury Docks… CSC: Your family is interesting because they’ve come further, they’ve travelled. My mum’s side of the family have always been in the UK, whereas yours was part of the diaspora. AL: We sit with both our families, we’ll listen to stories all afternoon, they’re fascinating.

interview the dustman, the caretaker, the neighbour, so you get a whole picture … AL: I’m very interested in Arab writers who are transplanted into the European environment, because culturally they’re storytellers, but also there’s displacement, and it means that there’s a very interesting tension within the stories, as well as the folk element. Russian writers are the only others who come close to that. What all these guys, and Naguib Mahfouz [the Egyptian novelist and Nobel laureate], have in common is the magicalness of mundanity and I think mundanity is great.

8: I wanted to ask you about another great storyteller Richard Ryszard Kapuscinski a joint favourite author, I gather? AL: He’s the greatest reportage writer ever. My favourites are Shah of Shahs, The Soccer War, Imperium, that’s probably one of the greatest – a train journey through the Soviet Union as it’s collapsing. His trick is that he’s Polish through and through and was part of the Polish state news agency that had zero zlotys to spend on anything, so he would always be the last to every major breaking news story. When CNN chartered a plane, he’d be hitching or on the bus. He never went with the pack, so he was in the slums, because that’s where he could get a room. So his book is a combination of this fantastic writerly view coupled with the Polish sensibility of the underdog. CSC: Sorry to interrupt you but he does what I like best which is he doesn’t parachute into situations, he waits ’til everyone has gone, but then he stays for ages – because he hasn’t got the money to go back – and he’ll interview everyone in great detail and get to know everyone properly. He’s there for six weeks and he’ll

8: Would you like to work on UK stories, to reacquire that tension yourselves? AL: We did Binge Britain this year and we approached the UK like foreign correspondents; because we haven’t lived here for so long. It was really weird being back in Britain. It worked well being strangers … we have the tension of the displaced. We talked about it, to avoid the Third Worldness, to apply those values to western stories. After we did the Calcutta station, we wanted to do Kings Cross station – we will do it one day. My idea is to apply that critical faculty to the UK CSC: We’ve tried to do that with a normal housing estate but the magazines come back with “what’s the story?” – because there’s no foreigness. AL: But now we’re away more than we’re here, I actually classify it as a foreign assignment – it’s something I’m desperate to do. CSC: Nick Davies does it brilliantly … AL: There are very few people like him, who do what he’s doing, he’s extraordinary. We are always juggling ideas trying to find new ways in. You get locked out and then you find another way in.

Photographs taken in the Tiwi Islands (left) and blessing at full moon in a nunnery in Doi Saket, Northern Thailand (right), all by Cathy Scott-Clark

8: Who is the persuader? CSC: [laughs] Who do you think? He is! AL: I’m a used car salesman. CSC: He’s brilliant at talking people round … AL: I think both of us are … 8: Is it to do with having the backing of a big paper? AL: No – not at all. I think it’s about going into a situation being certain of several key things. One thing is that most people want to talk. Any person, any race, any religion. First you have to get over the potential embarrassments. They are always things like language, money, how we sit, how we eat. So if you go into someone’s house and have tea with them, they inevitably will end up talking. Doesn’t matter where in the world you are. If you listen, then you succeed. 8: With people in a station, say, I can imagine that. With generals in Rangoon, though … AL: They’re all the same. Doesn’t matter. They all need something; they all want something. 8: Do you ever pay people off? AL: Never pay anybody anything. Ever. We’d pay for government permits, for transport, we pay our fixers as generously as we possibly can all the time. We are often in situations where people become fascinated by the process. We are working on a big project at the moment … CSC: It’s on Nuclear Pakistan and you’d be amazed at how keen people are to talk, people in the public domain. It’s just a matter of knocking on the doors. People tend to say – come in. Ask us if we’re going to write the same as everyone else – we say no. You tell us what the truth is, we’ll write it. AL: Also, people who are slightly out of the limelight but in major events in their country or culture –

they tend to want to biographise all of that. If you go slowly, and you don’t approach it as one hour, you approach it as days, or many different meetings – it doesn’t matter if the first day you get nothing. We spend a lot of time. CSC: Sometimes I don’t even get my notebook out. We can always go back to a situation in order to document it. We only need to do that if people are really twitchy. AL: We were in a situation in Burma where they were going to deport us, even though we’d been invited to go there to hear their perspective. And that situation was transformed – we were literally under hotel arrest – into them sending a car and taking us to meet members of the government who sat in chairs and talked at us, they produced a microphone and one by one, delivered a lecture … CSC:… and then we got invited to a party! AL: And that’s because we listened. We were with some UN people, typical paid-up people who have no insight into the culture they’re dealing with. They said we should give in. We just ignored them. Right up until the end, we didn’t know if it would work. And it did work: we got one of the first big interviews with the cabinet of the Burmese government. 8: Do you think you keep each other going in such situations? That maybe alone, you’d get a rising sense of failure … or is that just not in you? AL: Cathy bounces back from things very quickly. CSC: I can’t stand failure! AL: Your natural response when you hit a cul de sac is to find another way round. The thing is with two people, there is that ability to share failure, by converting it to a positive. We’ve only ever failed once, on

something we were forced to do … it was a glib thing on stunt women for a women’s magazine, but they’d all resigned in a mass industrial action, so the stunts were being done by men in drag! AL: What we did discover though is that the combination of history and reportage works really well. It’s about bringing out timelines. We’ve done a lot of archival work, all round the work. CSC: It’s great going from the document to the person. AL: We happened upon this amazing story in Prague, these amazing archives in the Strahov monastery, where papers had been abandoned by the Gestapo and they’d been frozen – our idea, the theme we came back to – was to take the documents and find the people from the documents, to get a collision between the history and the now. It’s an idea we came back to in Israel/ Palestine. CSC I went on a fantastic journey with one of the Israeli women, who had never been back – didn’t even really know the name of the village her father had come from. She didn’t know whether it was in Ukraine, or in Poland or in Russia … She gave us this name which turned out to mean “small village” and she had a photograph of her ancestor outside this wooden house in their frilly clothes and we actually found the house! She’d never been. We worked out it was actually on the border of eastern Poland, and Belarus. We found the right town, we found a translator, found out half the town had been burnt down in 1945, and we thought “Oh no, we’ve brought her all the way here…” We were literally walking around the town looking at the window panes, looking for the ones in the photograph … 8: Do you ever actively try to work with photographers?

AL: We both like to – because everything we do is integrated into the images. Cathy shoots really well herself, although she wouldn’t say so. CSC: It’s more difficult these days to take a photographer with us, magazines often tend to say they’ll send you the photographer later, so we end up taking pictures ourselves. We have worked with the lovely Stephen Gill, though, and we really want to do a project with Jonathan Torgovnik. AL: Often the places we go to are quite remote so we’ll end up writing and shooting. We just came back from the Tiwi Islands, Australia, and it was all about getting access to the place, so we couldn’t pick up where we left off or even get there again, probably, so Cathy took the pictures. 8: Was it a similar access problem in the jade mines? AL: Yes. I shot that myself, on a broken APS. I had to hold the shutter open with my finger. That was an example of downscaling because of the kind of story we were doing. Normally, we’d use a Leica! 8: So where are you off to next? AL: To the States for the last part of our book on Nuclear Pakistan. It’s really America Arms the Axis of Evil. It’s told through the prism of this Superspy who was working for every side. 8: And how on earth did you get hold of him? AL: Oh, you know the CIA, they’re all desperate to talk! 8 Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark were talking to Max Houghton

Reviews Satellites: Photographs from the Fringes of the Former Soviet Union Jonas Bendiksen Published by Aperture www.aperture.org £19.50 (152pp Hardback) A ghost from the future haunts Jonas Bendiksen’s eerily lucid Satellites: Photographs from the Fringes of the Former Soviet Union. Cleverly evoked by Bendiksen in shadowy black and white, spectral images of space rockets are used as the opener to each chapter of his insightful book, a metaphor for the lost greatness of the empire that put the first man on the moon. Bendiksen began his voyage around what he describes as “half-forgotten enclaves and restless territories” after a ‘bureaucratic incident’ in the mother country left him destined to roam its more obscure outposts. Perhaps he acquired a taste for trouble … the first chapter, Transdniester, begins with a tale of being unceremoniously booted out of that self-proclaimed independent

state into neighbouring Moldova on a “dirt-coloured winter’s day” in 2004. The subsequent photographs depict such days, as well as significantly more exoticlooking nights. Bendiksen’s eye is unashamedly “outsider”, but the sharper for it. Our travel guide mesmerises us with images of stark family homes, of the heavy industry that the region is known for, of old socialist realism, the latter a nod to another fact mined by Bendiksen: that Transdniester sits on one of Europe’s largest stockpiles of weapons and ammunition that the Russians neglected to take home. Next, to Abkhazia, struggling to maintain its hallowed image as a premier Soviet beach resort, since a bloody war with Georgia, which left ten thousand dead. Although the war ended in 1993, two-thirds of the population fled, and many buildings in the capital Sukhum remain derelict, bombed out. Bendiksen depicts the desolation with solitary figures imprisoned by their very freedom. Yet when he offers us a glimpse into the “Riviera of the Caucasus” – bathers enjoying the waters of the Black Sea, lovers at twilight seen through a haze of disco lights, or a peek at a lone tourist, resting on a rock, oblivious to the charms of an incongruous stuffed bear behind him, his gaze becomes ironic, though never inappropriately so. As we enter the third section, depicting another little known region, Nagorno-Karabakh, it is abundantly evident that this is exemplary photojournalism; that is, the text and the pictures work together to create a rich map of meaning. In order to frame one of the bleakest images in the collection, Bendiksen defies the

deputy Foreign Minister (more trouble-making!) by travelling to Aghdam, a town once home to some 50,000 Azeris. He describes what he saw – the skeletal remains of a town that had been systematically pillaged, brick by brick, tile by tile, in order to reconstruct the capital Stepanakert – as “the starkest war memorial I had ever seen”. In the Ferghana Valley, the most fertile and densely populated part of Central Asia, Bendiksen’s lens turns to religious intolerance and drug abuse. As with elsewhere in this impeccably researched book, he aims, through pictures and words, to provide a context for these societal problems. His gaze is intimate, and his access, especially to the underground mosque in Margilan, privileged. Photographically, many of the unforgettable images inhabit the section on Birobidzhan, the Jewish Autonomous Region established by Stalin in 1928. A red Star of David is scrawled on a shattered window pane, still framed by yellowing lace, which in turn frames a bleak snowscape: a communist apartment block across the way. A moment stolen from a snowy night as three locals wend their way home glows with a filmic timelessness. Poignantly, the final scene – and each image could be a film-still – sees yet another charter jet carrying a new generation to the new promised land, Israel, one of six such jets that took off during Bendiksen’s month long stay. Empires fall. The last section in this extraordinary book is called Spaceship Crash Zones. As Bendiksen says: “What goes up must come down.” He travelled

to isolated villages north-east of the Baikonur space centre in Kazakhstan to witness the consequences of living in a cosmic flight path: first and second stages of rocket booster coming crashing down to earth. Space debris provides rich pickings for what Bendiksen calls “roaming bands of men” who seek to profit from the precious metals, while at the same time slowly poisoning themselves with remnants of toxic rocket fuel. Bendiksen’s acute eye for the uncanny allows us to witness these strange ghosts from the future becoming relics here on earth. MH

Niagara Alec Soth Published by Steidl www.steidl.de £35 (144pp Hardback) Raymond Carver once wrote of the realisation that his writing needed to become strong enough to dismiss the wild distractions so dominant in the literature he had grown up with. Rejecting the famous events, the heroic characters and the overthrowing of kingdoms, he approached a more intimate subject, tracing the climaxes, collapses and stalemates that shape ordinary blue-collar American lives. The short story, Kindling, published after his death and drawn from gathered transcripts, half-finished papers and notebooks, tells of

the estranged Myers, awkward in another couple’s rented spare room. Treading lightly, and withdrawn from the world, he slowly drafts a letter. A personal letter – spontaneous, desperate and unguarded – something like those that lie at the heart of Alec Soth’s second book, made among the modest motels and private relationships that border the Canadian and American banks of the Niagara. While his 2004 work Sleeping by the Mississippi drew upon a journey along the river – and ultimately through a contemporary America – Niagara is a more concise project. It seems to be a place for ultimatum, for catharsis or

confirmation. Though the Falls hum and flow in the distance, they are remote, almost out of sight and unreachable. When they do appear in the book, they are sublime scenes, timeless, beautiful and bleeding with colour. These impressions become natural borders, containing the tensions that build in the small, anonymous rooms that occupy the wonder’s hinterland. Niagara has several voices. It layers handwritten narratives (with all their imperfections), with the precise reserve of controlled large format photography. By way of attrition, each in their own way elaborates the details and blemishes of intimacy. Once a student of Joel Sternfeld, Soth has mastered the technique and pacing of his former teacher. The roots of his work are found in photographers that came to prominence in the 1980s, exploring the surfaces and particulars of the American land and people. Soth has extended this practice. His work becomes collaborative, with the photographer moving beyond the bright, exotic or pleasantly formal to make subtle and evocative portraiture. Sitters show composure and trust, working with Soth to relate an entwined and imperfect devotion. A couple are portrayed unclothed and preoccupied on a motel floor as cocaine is snorted on television; a young mother, holding a new-

born baby, teeters on awkward platform shoes as she stands in a vacant lot. As a photographer, Soth relates a gentle engagement with his subjects. A young couple lie on a bed of moss. She nestles against her partner’s pale stomach, their hands meeting at the edges of the frame. In what is a beautiful and mature photograph, both subjects return Soth’s attention with a still and trusting gaze. It’s almost unfashionable, perhaps, among the reserve of these knowing times, but this is a work imbued with both humility and a precise craft. In a previous project, made in a factory, so noisy as to negate any meaningful communication, Soth asked workers to write down the concerns they dwelt upon through the isolation of their working days. Elsewhere, on a Mississippi highway, sitters were asked to write down their dreams as Soth prepared to photograph them. It is a useful strategy, and in this latest work these fragile phrases acknowledge lives at a turning point. In exhibition at the Gagosian Gallery in New York earlier this year, these notes achieved a status and scale equal to the portraits and architectural studies. A critic once wrote of watching Sonny Rollins perform, noticing that “even his feet looked sad”.

When happening upon Soth’s architecture, it is embroidered with snow and crazed concrete. Yellow basket seats, coupled like caged birds, extend skywards, with cherry blossom softening rigid concrete shells, and the critic’s phrase returned to me. When photographing interiors, two hand towels are shaped as swans, touching over a flowered bed, a wedding dress hangs from wire in a bare, timberpanelled room, and an invite is extended – to anyone – to ‘Joy’s divorce party night’. There is a considerable twilight in Niagara. As night draws in to leave neon and the last pastels of colour, there is a sense that we are at the end of something, and Soth emphases this by employing Nabakov to introduce his series “… both doomed were we”. The pleasure in this book comes from its ambition. It follows no singular strategy, it doesn’t deal with the current crises of terror and threat. There is no war here – this is not late photography, dealing with the malevolence of another time. It is an involved work, a committed observation of relationships and their consequences. By inviting Richard Ford to write the essay at the start of the book, Soth nods to a canon of writing that foregrounds such detailed considerations of private, unremarkable lives.

To return to Raymond Carver, (with whom Ford was close friends) the letter Myers begins to write, like some of those that interrupt Soth’s photographs, is asking for the forgiveness of a wife and family he hopes to return to, in a hometown far from his emotional exile. The title of the collection it is drawn from, echoing the moving words in this book, is “call if you need me”. KG

The Photobook: A History: Volume II Martin Parr and Gerry Badger Published by Phaidon www.phaidon.com £45 (326pp Hardback) One of the arduous pleasures of visiting the Arles Photography Festival is to amble up and down the massed entries for the annual Book Prize. Located in a huge disused railway repair shed, seemingly endless rows of trestle tables groan with around 400 books of all shapes, sizes, provenances and production qualities. Their subject matter is

beyond eclectic; an incredibly weighty and authoritative study of, say, 19th century developments in photographic printing techniques can nestle next to a self-published bookzine such as Geert van Kesteren’s innovative Why Mister, Why. Two things quickly become apparent: contemporary photographic book publishing is in a healthy state, editorially at least, and many mid-to latecareer photographers now look on the book as being their chosen mode of expression. Photographers love books because they tend to get a lot more input into and control over

the editing. The production process usually happens over a period of time, with much coming and going and gnashing of teeth, allowing the opportunity for the theme or vision to be developed in a quasi-satisfactory way (have you ever met a photographer who was entirely happy with the way his work was presented?). By contrast, in a magazine context, photographers seldom get invited to participate in the editorial business of editing and design. What leaps out of Martin Parr and Gerry Badger’s Photobook II is the integral relationship between picture editing and design that contributes to the overall success House of Bondage, Ernest Cole

Raised by Wolves, Jim Goldberg

or failure of a publication. Many a magazine feature has got by solely on the strength of its images, isolated from matters of design, sequencing and editorial coherence (Ed: not in this magazine). Few sloppily constructed books will stand the test of sustained scrutiny and repeated analysis over time. Indeed, this is both the strength and the inherent vulnerability of the photo book; magazines seldom get more than a onceover and do not often lie around to be critically examined well after the event. Badger and Parr – does it have the ring of a comedy duo? – function well as a team. Parr does the leg-work, buzzing around the world and storing his vast collection of photo books in his house. Badger the critic and historian writes it all up, providing the history and the context and neatly underlining the role of photography festivals, galleries and critics in the making or breaking of the reputation of photography books (and indeed of photographers) – nothing new there then. Parr makes the reasonable, if rather self-serving, claim that the first volume of Photobook added significantly to the status of photography book collecting and raised the monetary value of many of the volumes featured. It would be churlish to point out that as probably the world’s most avid collector of visual books, Parr himself is the principal benefactor of this trend. I am reminded of those horse trainers who place enormous bets on their brilliant unknown young racers confident that they are unlikely to lose. Parr’s reputation as a collector may well overtake the value of his photographic work in the eyes of posterity. Who knows, the Parr Museum of the Book is not such a far-fetched idea. His international perspective is a major contribution to cultural history providing a kick up the arse for those of us stuck in narrowly defined national or continental mind-sets. He speculates that more than a thousand photography books are produced annually around the world. It shows beyond reasonable doubt

that photography outside the gallery circuit is alive and well and living worldwide in the realm of the book. Indeed, the authors intimate that we ain’t seen nothing yet. Within the next decade, numerous photo books will start rolling in from China and India. Heavens, how long will it take to do the Arles Book walk then? Photobook II proffers many of the usual suspects in chapters on American and European books but there are surprises in “Point of Sale”, a section devoted to “The Company Photobook”. “Home and Away” covering “Modern Life and the Photobook” looks at contemporary attempts to redefine documentary work in the face of the decline of reportage and the cross-over into the gallery. By far the most interesting chapter was “Other Territories: The Worldwide Photobook”, including an impressive excerpt from The Death of a Lake by Peter Merom (1961), a prescient study of the conflict between Israel’s need for water and the environmental effects this caused. There is some stunning work from Central and South America, including two city books, La Ciudad de Mexico III by Nacho Lopez (1960) and Buenos Aires Buenos Aires I by Alicia D’Amico and Sara Facio (1968). I was left in awe, wondering where are these excellent photographers now? The book also contains a neat little epilogue that, like the film critic, I will not reveal for fear of spoiling your enjoyment – but suffice to say, it’s very postmodern. Colin Jacobson

suggests. There is a breathtaking array of dramatic images, not all of mankind’s inhumanity to man.

Reuters: The State of the World Published by Thames and Hudson www.thamesandhudson.com £24.95 (384pp Hardback) And they say you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover … In March 2005 a young Lebanese girl is photographed, her hands held palms up; her face half-pressed to the glass of a bus window that drips with condensation; her gaze is distant, eyes peeking out obliquely, almost forlornly out of the picture. The bus is taking Shi’ite women to pay their respects at the grave of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Al-Hariri, who was assassinated the month before, allegedly by agents of the Syrian government. In October 2006, following an arduous selection process, the photograph forms the front cover image for Reuters: The State of the World one of 537 colour photographs in a weighty near400 page book – encyclopedia, even – that attempts in images and words to chart the issues and themes that have marked the first five years of this already tumultuous century. The cover image is apt, given our current political preoccupations. At once touching in its capture of the girl’s sweet innocence, it is thought-provoking in its cross-cultural references. For the pink head-scarf of this young Muslim girl is branded with the Barbie doll logo - a picture of the blonde haired puppet/doll, mass produced and exported from the USA in the last thirty years of America’s global cultural expansion. The Barbie doll image provides an arguably more benign indication of the influence of the USA in the Middle East, than the Americans’ more frightening militaristic incursions into Islamic countries following the atrocity of the twin towers on 9/11, 2001. The “state of the world” is massively complex and so one suspects, are the real ulterior strategic and territorial imperatives that underpin the

United States and its allies’ “fight against terrorism”. Reuters’ role in the representation of such issues is a pivotal one but, unlike myself, the organisation is hidebound by rules of impartiality and political neutrality. To that extent, some of the essays, which introduce each section of the book, seem anodyne in the writers’ analysis of the first five years of this century. They may be politically neutral but they inevitably reflect a Western world view, necessarily sanitised for the market the book reaches out to. Despite all the visual signs in the book of the world’s violent complexity, it says less about the state of the world than it tells us of a world view rendered safe for commercial consumption, by people of Western sensibility. Some people, not all of them outside the United States, consider the country and its allies to be taking a high-risk route into the future, one that is in danger of spiralling out of control because of its apparent misreading and alienation of the people the young girl in the photograph appears to represent. That is not a line that a book such as this can openly opine. Reuters: The State of the World appears to be designed for the coffee tables of the general public and the traders and money men who are the core consumers of its services as one of the world’s largest companies in the information business. Money makes the world go around and Reuters provides the financial men the information essential to the conduct of their dealings. Reading the pictures between the words it is possible to make many more readings than my own surely limited interpretation

Given the incredibly narrow strictures incumbent upon photojournalists working for the commercial media, it is good to see their humanity, bravery, intelligence, wit and, dare I say it, political acumen still shining through these images. Many journalists and photographers, for Reuters and others, have been killed in their attempts to relay the facts as they see them: indeed, the book is dedicated to them. Too much attention is paid in the book to the over hyped antagonism of religion and cultural difference. What part the media have played in whipping up the “clash” of cultures is moot. It is hard to deny that differences exist but they surely provide a smokescreen for issues more troubling to the world’s only superpower; its increasing weakness in the face of potential future world fuel crisis, the meteoric advance of a rampantly expanding Asia; and the USA’s massive failure as ‘world leader’ to meet its responsibilities in challenging global climatic change. Climate gets too little attention in this book. It should have a section of its own. Perhaps this is a reflection of our misguided leaders’ different priorities. Hmm, that might explain the “state of the world”. Mark Windsor

Another Asia: Photographs from South and Southeast Asia Published by Aurora Borealis www.noorderlicht.com e39.50 (264pp Hardback) Asia. In the “West” when one first thinks of Asia, one thinks of the “mysterious ‘East”, with all its romance and exoticism, or a newspaper scan of the day’s crop of Conradian horrors: bus plunges, coups, terrorists, earthquakes, tsunamis, teaming masses, outsourcing, and the “tiger” economies. Beyond the clichés, however, lies another Asia or many Asias different and distinct from each other. This year the Dutch photography festival, Noorderlicht, took on those many Asias and their representation, both by Westerners and Asians.

uneven, yet the material is fascinating. This review looks at the documentary component of the festival at the expense of the equally valid artistic side. Works by Wahyudi Rahardjo (Indonesia), Anay Mann (India), Sudharak

Olwe (India), and Farhana Syeda (Bangladesh), examine the radical changes in societies affected by economic and social change that is radically reshaping the landscape. Images by Tri Huu Luu (Vietnam) and Alex Supartono,

Paul Kadarisman, Muhammed Revaldi and Arief Kamaruddin Rahman (Indonesia) address issues of religion, whether in the case of the former, the position of Buddhism in modern Vietnam or, in the case of the latter, the

For those who couldn’t make it to Leeuwarden where this year’s incarnation of the festival was held, there is a vastly informative catalogue with texts in English and Dutch, produced by festival director Wim Melis and the Jakarta, Indonesia, based independent curator Alex Supartono. The geographic range of the work moves from India through Indonesia and SouthEast Asia to The Philippines. (It does not include China, Korea and Japan).The exhibitions and catalogue are grouped into three themes: Through Western Eyes, featuring Western photographers with long experience in the region; A Look to the Past, including work from local and international archives; Through Asian Eyes, with portfolios by photographers from the 21 countries included in the show.

Naturally, such an omniumgatherum with some 60 photographers is somewhat

roles Islam plays in contemporary Indonesian society. Swan Ti Ng (Indonesia) documents Christian worshippers in the world’s most populous Muslim land, Indonesia. Other works touch on the situation of widows in India and examine female stereotypes in Bollywood cinema.

Not surprisingly, imagery from the colonial and recent past plays a major role in the ways by which Westerners identified and controlled Asians and the ways by which Asians have learned to represent themselves to each other and to the West. For example, a portfolio by Edward Fitzgerald Charlesworth (Great Britain), a soldier sent to India during the First World War, documents aspects of North India, its cities, landscapes and peoples. Identification images of workers from the Sinkep Tin Company of what later became Indonesia were collected in 1919 by the then Colonial Museum in Amsterdam (now known as the Tropen Museum) are dignified studio portraits that resemble work by Martin Chambi, for example. They honour their

subject’s humanity yet do not include reference to name and position. A more aggressive stance to ethnographic photography is taken by Pushpamala N (India) who recreates classic anthropometric photographs using herself and various “measuring devices” such as rulers and calipers for measuring and classifying racial characteristics of “natives”. Other works are culled from photography studios old and new across the region. Work by the famous Philippine photographer Eduardo Masferré depicts tribal cultures of remote parts of the Philippine Archipelago in the period before the Second World War in a wholly humanist documentary style. Imagery from the North Vietnamese Army press photographer Mai Nam covered everyday life behind the front lines and sometimes rare battle scenes during the America war in Vietnam. It is a body of work only recently coming to light in the West and all but unknown outside of Vietnam that tells a different version of the story better known through the images of Capa, Burrows, et al. This brief reprise is only a sample of the range of imagery coming out of Asia. Now with more and more people taking pictures with everything from cell phones to Leicas, the nature of representation will be constantly in flux. As societies change so too do the means used to depict them. Now, at least, the power of the image and the control over the distribution of images finally allows non-Western actors to represent themselves on a more equal footing and so present views of another Asia than the standard view. BK

Coney Island Peter Granser Published by Hatje Cantz www.hatjecantz.com e35 (100pp Hardback) The words in neon, “Wonder Wheel and Thrills” on an arrow pointed sideways grace the front cover of photographer Peter Granser’s new book paying homage to that time-worn American dream, Coney Island. Many a photographer, from Weegee to Diane Arbus, has been drawn to the “democratic paradise” to document the mechanical treats, beach freaks and hordes escaping the New York cram. At the beginning of the 21st century the Coney Island that Granser frames, however, is one washed and faded by the ebb and flow of almost one hundred years of pleasure seekers. A few of the classic rides remain, hanging on by their mechanical teeth, whirring round, and hotdogs (invented here) are still offering their juicy rewards. But what is most prevalent in Granser’s pictures is the wire mesh and corrugated fencing that surrounds the beach and attractions. Notices are tacked up which seem to hail from a bygone era: “Keep Off Jetty”, “Police Lines Do Not Cross”, and some more humorous, hand-painted in orange and white: “Don’t Piss Here!”. This is the melancholic backdrop to the human life that Granser finds making the most of the treasures; some day-trippers are here in a modern ironic way, to take their own pictures of the lost playground, while others, children still find genuine delight in running through sand, and an old man enjoys the feel of the sun on his bare shoulders. On the strips of hot concrete floor, bejewelled exhibitionists can be spotted posing for pictures. Young women dressed in 1950s swimsuits look the part, with a streak of scarlet lipstick and high pony tails. We meet throwbacks from the1970s New York gay scene, moustachioed and attired in tight shorts and baseball caps, also taking in the sea air. These are all allusions to times past.

It is no surprise to learn that Granser was strongly influenced by Martin Parr, and indeed switched from black and white to colour after meeting him in 1997. The colours are quite different though, with Granser’s taking a more bleached finish, compared with Parr’s penchant for garish glory. In the square format, the book has a solid quality that resists easy judgment. There is space for a page of seagulls in flight, and a grainy ocean where two small swimmers struggle away from the horizon; there is space for a close-up of two young boys grinning in shark masks and for an empty corner advertising “Shoot Sadam [sic] Paint Ball Mania”. Coney Island’s anachronistic, yet enduring appeal, is given a subtle rendering in Granser’s portrait and sits well with its history of photographic devotees. Ruth Hedges

My America Christopher Morris Published by Steidl www.steidl.de £24 (180pp Hardback)

Apropos Rodin Jennifer Gough-Cooper Published by Thames and Hudson www.thamesandhudson.com £16.95 (128pp Hardback) There’s an image somewhere in this glossy photographic tribute of a solemn terracotta statue called The Crouching Woman. Its depiction of a squatting female figure, her head twisted to one side, right hand clasping her left ankle, has a haunting, deathly quality redolent of the petrified, blistered corpses subsumed by the lava of ancient Vesuvius. In this picture, and a handful of others, Jennifer Gough-Cooper comes close to capturing the fragile humanity which typifies Rodin’s most accomplished work. Elsewhere, this handsome volume, for all its merits, has the feel of a posh coffee table book with grander pretensions. The works that come off worst here are the most familiar ones. Perhaps because it’s been depicted so many times before, in Gough-Cooper’s hands The Kiss just looks like a rather battered, truncated version of an over-exposed icon. Does this photographer have anything new to say about it? From this workmanlike portrait, it appears not. Curiously, Rodin’s other most celebrated sculpture, The Thinker, is absent. This is no bad thing, as a large version of the statue takes centre-stage at the Royal Academy’s current Rodin retrospective (with which the release of this book coincides) – ensuring it is bound to be a ubiquitous feature of the accompanying media coverage.

shrouding the background in a sepulchral, crypt-like darkness. Equally impressive is the dreamlike Hotel Biron, Reflected Interior, in which shafts of ghostly sunlight pierce an ornate room cluttered with statuary, yet fail to describe the detail of the fractured forms. And Madame Fenaille on a Column offers a playful conceit, as the eponymous lady gazes down imperiously on a slighter, turbaned figure in the display case below. In his introduction, Geoff Dyer praises Gough-Cooper for bringing out the “colour” in Rodin’s famously “whiter than white” work. He has a point: at times, her photographs imbue it with a creepy flesh-like quality. In the final analysis, though, Apropos Rodin is little more than a polished souvenir for those eager to return home from the RA with a faithful reminder of the master’s genius. James Morrison

Christopher Morris is an accomplished photographer who has covered many conflicts during his 18 year career. Following the birth of his daughters he became more interested in his homeland and turned his camera on the administration of the nation. This, his first book, is the result of his work as a contract photographer for Time magazine covering the inner circle of George W Bush. The pictures are quite impersonal. The photographer found himself more detached as the assignment continued, capturing the President very rarely. Instead we see the fervour of the people around him. We see the secret service agents, who come across as almost robotic, like something from science fiction. Their suits are immaculate, faces inscrutable and small strange wires disappearing into their suits. Throughout the book they are lurking in dark car parks, carefully sweeping deserted rural fields or in one particular picture peering from behind an enormous letter “w” on a rooftop. I suspect that there were agents behind every letter of the sign, but the “w” is a perfect compliment to the picture. I find myself wondering what the sign read. Wal-Mart perhaps The cover image sets the tone for the whole book, which shows the Stars and Stripes in many guises. From ‘headless’ T-shirts to large drapes across the huge hall. One of the most striking is an elaborately iced cake, each slice to be served with its own tiny flag. Morris has chosen to shoot the cake alone in a dark corner, which has turned an ordinary piece of confectionery into a poignant symbol of a nation.

Of the stronger photographs, a handful deserve special mention. The image of Rodin’s 1895 bronze, Iris, Messenger of the Gods, seems startlingly modern, pornographic even – legs splayed wide, headless neck apparently thrown back in ecstasy (or agony). Monument to Victor Hugo, in contrast, is an eloquent exercise in light and shade, illuminating Rodin’s sage-like depiction of the great French writer while

The thing that really stands out is that the people he has photographed, are often unseen – a bejewelled cleavage gets out of a Mercedes and we have no need to identify the owner. There are several portraits showing glamorous women from their

perfect lipstick down, which are then followed by one of the rare appearances by the President, again from the chest down with his hands as the only human detail. Where Morris has chosen to photograph a face it is that and that alone that we see. Awestruck youths open mouthed at the spectacle, experienced soldiers looking grave and proud and of course the omnipresent secret service agents. The book has no captions other than a location and date for each image, which encourages the reader to come to their own conclusion of what is being portrayed, although Morris firmly directs the reader with his precise composition and fantastic use of colour. The overall impression is of a fantastic body of work taking a very sideways look at the current administration and giving a very different view from the usual images we see from the White House through the wire services. SB

Life in Death Eva Persson Published by Musta Taide www.evapersson.com e20 (80pp Hardback)

Revolution in Hungary Erich Lessing Published by Thames and Hudson www.thamesandhudson.com £35 (252pp Hardback) Through independence and strange fortune, photographers are sometimes at the heart of world events as they emerge. In Telex Iran, a troubled and disoriented Gilles Perres, makes one of the most honest and dynamic visual diaries as a reaction to civil unrest. Conveying his position as an outsider in an Iran becoming increasingly unstable by the hour, his work complements the native, the Czech Josef Koudelka who moved through the Prague streets in 1968 as Russian tanks swept forward to quell unrest with terrible force. Twelve years earlier, a mass rally in Budapest was the spark that created the Hungarian Revolution. After nearly a fortnight of protest, Hungarian police and Soviet tanks managed to regain control, though casualties by then were heavy on both sides, and an estimated quarter of a million people had consequently fled the country. Erich Lessing arrived in Budapest a day after the uprising began, negotiated his way past the blockades and began to photograph, witnessing the summary executions and surreal happenings that pace the streets of revolution. In scenes consistent with times of such polarity, women stepped around chalk-dusted Soviet bodies and shoppers queued for food as tanks lay idle or destroyed. For the photographer, it was to be the most affecting of a number of trips to the region. After working on a photo-essay for Life magazine about four European communist countries, his account of the early days of conflict is set against photographs that draw together some of the more regular aspects of Hungarian life and customs. A factory series contextualises the faces of labour with the daunting scale of the work spaces; generations mix with different preoccupations at a Danube tea dance. Amid evocative and beautifully made photographs of families at rest,

devotional services and cultural processions, other photographs allude to the contested nature of territory and politics within the region, and a sense of what might come. Lessing relates a sense of the landscape with exceptional reserve, and such quiet observations at the edges of sovereignty have a resonance that is less marked in the later street pictures. He photographs a railway-track, crossed by modest wires that mark the edge of the Iron Curtain, and on All Souls Day, a solemn line of visitors weaves around the Schattendorf graveyard, which sits across the border of Austria and Hungary. These are gentle and precise pictures. While Lessing’s street pictures are in some ways less lyrical than the earlier work he made in the service of Life, their significance, as a historical document, lies in how they relate the uncertainty, suspicion and animation of a people under duress – and in that, they are compelling. KG

Life in Death – an evocative title, and with a meaning more literal than you might at first expect. Eva Persson came across, on one of her jaunts around Finland, a small town named Koulema, meaning “death” when translated from the Finnish. As small towns go, Death is quietly peculiar to the outsiders’ eye and no doubt entirely ordinary to those who live there. Instantly attracted by the prospect of producing a photographic body of work entitled Life in Death, Persson decided to return to Death, although not entirely sure of her plan of action when she arrived. Little did she know that behind the façade of Death, and its single, solitary store, K-Extra Pitkänen, there was a charming story waiting to be told. K-Extra Pitkänen is run by twin sisters Arja and Airi Pitkänen. The twins work in the shop and also live together in the house behind with their husbands, who are themselves brothers. Each couple has one child, born just seven weeks apart. The quirkiness of the arrangement would excite any contemporary documentary photographer into action, so Persson set about making friends with the twins to persuade them to let her use their families as a subject. This turned out to be easier than expected: by using the magic word, coffee. The resulting book from her many visits to Death holds few surprises. We are offered glimpses from the Pitkänen sisters’ lives and also the cultural peculiarities and rituals from this area of Finland. Persson’s camera takes in the garish colours of kitsch decorations scattered about their house and she follows the sisters on their daily routines which revolve around working, preparing meals, drinking coffee and watching their favourite soap, The Bold and The Beautiful. The images are as static as one can imagine life is in Death. Still lives

reveal boots lined up after an elk hunt, a dartboard on a wall (demonstrating a tendency for bad aim, with more tiny punctures on the wall then the board) and a shelf full of trophies and medals for some unidentifiable sport. It is the more curious images, that have a sense of a story only half-told, that are the more intriguing: the two separate master bedrooms practically identical, complete with plush red carpet wall hangings, Joni, Airi’s son, aiming a riffle at nothing in particular in K-Extra, and Kalevi, Arja’s husband, at the stove making dinner, sitting down as he does so. Persson does not convincingly unearth the emotional makeup of the relationships shared by the family. Most portraits are of a singular person. Indeed, the only sign of affection, albeit one-sided, is in an image of Arja looking up and smiling at her husband, Kalevi. Perhaps this was Persson’s intention – only skimming the surface of her characters and relying mainly on idiosyncrasies of the unusual family arrangement. The result is somewhat mundane … lifeless, even. Who knows, maybe life in Death is as much fun as a party in a graveyard. LH

Rough Beauty Dave Anderson Published by Dewi Lewis www.dewilewispublishing.com £25 (120pp Hardback) “It’s a nice cute little town, but life sucks when you’re living hand to mouth.” Dave Anderson’s threeyear photographic project of Vidor, east Texas is a look into the lives of residents of a backyard town in the middle of nowhere. It’s a place renowned for its KKK membership and for a grinding poverty that the oil industry never alleviated. Ninety-four per cent of the population of Vidor are white – the classic demographic of a sundown town. Anderson went to Vidor to document a side of American life that effectively bypassed the civil rights movement and survives today in a permanent economic depression. He’s a romantic, able to capture the formal beauty in the ordinary detritus of everyday life – white Americans, living in a modern kind of poverty, struggling to keep alive the dream that is always elsewhere. The quotes dotted throughout the book are as telling as the images themselves (“Come to find out that my wife been married to another man the whole time. Our whole marriage don’t amount to nothing”). They give us an insight into the mindset behind the sometimes impassive faces captured in Anderson’s natural yet forensic photographs. They also suggest how open the inhabitants were to his presence and his genuine interest in them. Shooting in black and white, his references may be Diane Arbus and Keith Carter, but to me Anderson’s vision of the beauty of his subjects is uniquely his own. His occasionally subtle print vignetting serves to draw the focus towards what he believes is most important in the image – and removes any distraction that may bring into question his version of the story.

Anderson’s eye is genuinely compassionate and curious, and there is enough distance between him and the subject for us to believe he’s no Schrödinger – it’s not his opening the box that makes things happen. We see a few of what you might call middle-class Christian folk, but in the main photographs find those living on the poverty line with little hope of alleviation. Anderson picks up on the ephemera of town life – the swamps, rusted redneck signs, the dirt backyards, garages of hub caps and dumps full of busted cars that tell of time passing, families moving on and loves that lived and died … and these are as important to the book as the people for the sense of place. He sees the elegance of the continual circle of birth and decay both in place and person: the free joy, imagination and hope of the children of Vidor in the dirt yards with their numerous pets, running in the eerie woods; the blue collar workers still believing the land of the free is unsullied and hard work will always overcome; the destitute, with sorrow and distrust scarring everything, and then the old, with their history drawn hard on their faces. Anderson is affectionate and while one can see the references to the FSA photographers of the depression, his images portray a softer humanity and, yes, a definite beauty that has the depth of the human condition at it’s heart. Rough beauty, indeed. Mike Trow

Vidor may be seen as an outpost of disappointment, rather than a reflection of a nation in crisis, but the urge of the children to play and the desire of the adults to keep striving is clearly evident.

Tidy Street Brighton Photo Fringe 2006 www.photofringe.org 6 – 29 October 2006

So, we walk up one side and down the other, a hundred unanswerable questions forming in our heads:

Who isn’t fascinated by a peek into their neighbours’ lives? An exhibition in Tidy Street, in Brighton’s North Laine, provides us with a legitimate opportunity to do just that. Working with photographer Lisa Creagh, the residents have chosen an image to display illuminated in their windows each evening, for the duration of the Brighton Photo Biennale and its more inspiring Fringe events (like this one).

Who is the little boy in the blue Adidas T-shirt, holding a stillboxed gift of a car? Six other children are watching with glee as their friend has his picture taken. Is it in Africa? Are the family who live in this house immigrants? Did they adopt this child?

There is something curiously exciting about an exhibition that only happens at night. Indeed spotting the first image – we approached from the eastern end of the city – felt like finding a Christmas present with your name on it under the tree. A little boy is staring out, not at his new audience, but beyond, down a playground slide, it seems. He is gripping two yellow bars, his blueeyed gaze holding the wonderful combination of apprehension and delight that frames childhood. The second image is of a woman I recognise from a writing group I nervously attended 10 years ago when I first moved to Brighton. She has chosen an intimate picture of herself and her two young children. And it’s at this moment I start to fuel my imagination. Why did she choose this picture? Was this when she was happiest? Who bought the pendant that serves as the picture’s punctum? Who took the photograph? It is at this point that this very simply executed exhibition starts to work its magic. Very few, maybe one, of the photographs are what we might confidently term ‘good pictures’. At least two are noticeably blurred, completely out of focus, but that’s not the point. Trying to guess at the relationships suggested in the pictures, the set of circumstances that led to a particular picture being taken, the reasons behind choosing that particular picture over and above any other for all the city to see: here the fascination lies.

Isn’t that the first man in space, Yuri Gagarin? This is a world class portrait, drawing the eye from the other side of the street. Did he move to Brighton (unlikely, though many do!)? Is he related to the people who live here? What is his significance in their lives? Just as intriguing: a small girl, wearing bunches and a blue coat hides in a fireplace. But the fireplace is detached from the wall and there are boxes or crates stacked around it. Is this the day this family moved into the house? Does she have children of her own, now? A group shot, somewhere in the Himalayas? In Tibet? They seem united by a sense of communal achievement. Have they climbed a mountain? A sign in the centre of the picture says “In Memory of Rob Hall” … is this illuminated image a further memorial to him? And as we walk slowly from door to door, many more treasured snapshots of fathers, daughters, mothers, sons, light our way. All too briefly, we saw what matters most in people’s lives: other people. We have a sense of knowing them and yet not knowing but still wanting to know. It’s like the relationships we have with our neighbours. Like the ones we have with our families. Like the one we have with ourselves. MH

Ristelhüeber’s images of burned and dead palms from Iraq, Simon Norfolk’s painterly photographs of abandoned military hardware in Edenic settings from around Baghdad, and Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin’s portfolio of forests planted on the ruins of Palestinian villages in the occupied territories. Futuristic videos by Mary Mattingly and Marine Hugonnier project an uncertain, perhaps apocalyptic future with the implicit message that if mankind stays his present course, we’ll all go over the cliff into some ecological dystopia. Yet works by Dodo specialist Harri Kallio and art-world shooting star Wang Quingsong, with his pastiche mockumentaries of Chinese epics of consumerism, belittle any political impact the ICP’s curators may intend.

Ecotopia: The Second ICP Triennial of Photography and Video International Center of Photography www.icp.org 14 September – 7 January 2007 It is said, disparagingly, that the camel is a horse designed by a committee. This overlooks the fact that the camel is supremely suited for its environment and to the people who depend on a camel-based economy for their own survival. Indeed, if the camel were designed by a committee, it must have been a pretty good committee. Unfortunately, the group show of vaguely environmentally themed art, Ecotopia: the Second ICP Triennial of Photography and Video, proves the rule. The four curators who put this exhibition together, Brian Wallis, Christopher Phillips, Edward Earle, and Carol Squiers, and assistant curator Joanna Lehan, have done a disservice to art, per se, and politically engaged art.

At a time when Al Gore’s movie, An Inconvenient Truth, as well as Photo España’s “Naturaleza” and FotoFest’s “Earth and Artists Responding to Violence” have addressed issues of nature,the environment, globalisation, pollution, politics and power in a coherent fashion, the ICP’s attempt to explore these varied but interlocked issues is especially poor, all the more so because as a triennial show, the curators had more time available. Of some 40 artists from 14 countries represented by approximately 100 bodies of work, more than 23 are resident in the US. Of the rest, the bulk are British and European. There are lone residents of Canada, Australia, Argentina, and China. There are valid pieces of concerned photography, notably Robert Adams’s images of clearcut forests and Mitch Epstein’s images from a post-Katrina landscape. Engaging the political with the artistic are series by AnMy Le of soldiers training at 29 Palms, California, Sophie

To be sure, there are other redeeming features in this extravaganza. Perhaps most amusing is work by Sam Easterson, whose “critter cams” present the between the ears view of a variety of creatures ranging from falcons and sheep to scorpions and armadillos. It is eerie how similar the armadillo is to James Nachtwey as depicted in “War Photographer” as they both go about their business of looking for interesting subjects to consume. In its attempt to straddle the fence between “art” and “politics”, the exhibition is more a catalogue of well-known names with relatively new work that is lost in the “pod-like” installations by Brooklyn-based Matter Architecture Practice of repurposed nonbiodegradable petroleum-based polyethylene foam tubing. “Ecotopia”, itself, is a word of 1970s vintage combining feel-good notions of “Ecology” and “Utopia” which hopes for an harmonious future, the present lack of which has led to anxiety, unease, and despair, as well as some political action. Intended to “introduce striking new perspectives on humanity’s increasingly fraught relation to the natural world” and “as a critical survey of current artistic trends,” Ecotopia fails both and lands alternatively in a realm of an “ambient fear” of environmental apocalypse and in well-intended, politically motivated kitsch. BK

Photography Exhibitions and Events Lianzhou International Photo Festival, Lianzhou City, Guangdong Province, China 20 – 26 November 2006 More than 80 exhibitions compiled by top ranking Chinese and overseas photographers. The programme will also include academic slide shows and seminars. Twilight: Photography in the Magic Hour at the V&A 10 October – December 17th This collection focuses on eight contemporary artists whose photography and installations are made at, or suggest the fleeting state of the world at dusk. Including the work of Robert Adams, Philip-Lorca diCorcia and Boris Mikhailov. www.vam.ac.uk Michael Hoppen Gallery 3 Jubilee Place, London SW3 30 November – 25 January An exhibition of the photographs and collages of Peter Beard, showcasing his new work from his return to Kenya in 2006. www.michaelhoppengallery.com HOST Gallery 1 Honduras Street, London EC1Y 28 November – 28 January Diamond Matters by Kadir van Lohuizen explores the diamond trade, from the mines of the Congo and Sierra Leone to boutiques around the world. www.hostgallery.co.uk Sundsvall’s 7th International Photo Festival, Dokument07 February 2007 Based in Sundsvall, Sweden, Dokument07 is the only festival in northern Europe dedicated to photojournalistic film and photography. Highlights include former Magnum photographer Kent Klich speaking about his exhibition, The Children of Ceausescu’s, a project based upon the blood transfusion scandal which took place in the 1980’s in Romania. www.fotomuseet.se

THE NEXT ISSUE OF EI8HT “HOME” We welcome your written and photographic contributions on this idea. See www.foto8.com/drr for full details on how to submit your work

real is it, or how soulful is it. Is it really there, do these pictures really go below the surface, are they genuine documents of feeling, and his work does. It brings me back to a sense of what really matters in photography: somehow looking at the world like it’s your first time.

On My Shelf

Kathy Ryan I’ve been looking a lot at the book that came out in connection with Lee Friedlander’s big retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art about a year or so ago (Lee Friedlander 2005, MoMA). It’s extraordinary because it’s got everything: classic reportage, incredible documents across the country, unbelievably beautiful landscape photography with the work on the trees. It’s got incredibly beautiful still life photography that he did on all the stems and glass jars, it’s got beautiful, emotional, powerful family pictures, from all of his family work, it has nudes – and yet it’s all connected by this kind of fabric that he weaves in his pictures. There’s always a density, the pictures are always about complexity. Other photographers might go in and try to narrow down what’s happening in front of their lens to try and put together an image. What I find unbelievable with Lee is that he embraces it all. It’s something about his gusto for life and his ability to just head out in the world as a witness, and he just goes at it in this sort of fearless way, with a hungry appetite. I love it, love it, love it. He’s really got soul. With photography you often contemplate, how true is it, how

There has to be a cohesiveness to a book from beginning to end. That’s what often separates the great photo books from the ones that aren’t so great. They cannot just be compendiums or anthologies that pull together disparate elements; those are never as satisfying. His work is so connected that even in a book of this size, and it’s huge, it’s all of a whole. If you could take any two pictures from this book and put them side by side, you could feel the poet behind them, they’re his. And I just love how somehow when his eyes are looking at trees, you can see his eyes looking at a worker sitting behind a computer. I’ve had Tropism by Ralph Gibson (1987, Aperture) on my shelf for about 15 years. Whenever I refer to it I still get goosebumps. The black and white grain in his work, it’s so tactile, so beautiful. I connect with this work in the way I usually connect with painting, meaning in a plastic, tactile way. If I’m having a very distracting day where there’s too many thoughts coming, somehow when I go to Tropism and I start flipping through it, it’s pure pleasure, it puts me in an altered state. I imagine that for people who read poetry really well and who understand poetry, which I wish I did more, that poetry lifts them out of their ordinary existence, takes them to a place, that’s what Tropism does for me. Mitch Epstein’s Family Business (2005, Steidl) is astounding in the way in which he took the deeply personal story of his father losing his family furniture store business after 50 years. He took that deeply personal story and just kind of started to make some documents because this turning point was happening within his own family. And he realised that there was this larger story to tell, that others would appreciate the narrative of family

struggle, of times changing, of loss. The book is amazing because it’s filled with single iconic images. He has one picture of his father’s briefcase – lying on a flowered mattress in the store, when they had a closing out sale – that he’d carried for decades. It’s an exquisite photograph. He’s got a picture of an American flag hanging in a dry cleaning bag. This book has all of these singular iconic images that act as metaphors for some larger thing happening in the culture and at the same time it’s a family album, an unbelievable family album. It’s often hard, I think, to hold a photo book to a discipline where it’s not just about some great pictures that are between these two covers, but that the book in itself is a narrative. It’s literally like a great novelist sat down to write an incredible novel about one family history and all of the anguish of losing the store and at the same time it is filled with these incredible photographs that transcend even that immediate story. I can’t think of any other book that’s so finely tuned to both being this narrative about this one family, his family, and at the same time has a lot of classic photographs. I have a particularly close relationship to The Innocents by Taryn Simon (2003, Umbrage). We commissioned Taryn to do the photographs for a story on people who were wrongfully convicted of crimes and who’d been released since, and they were very powerful. When the assignment ended the story had just begun for her. She was so taken with it as a subject, that she decided to make it her big project, put everything else in her life aside, and just focused on figuring out how she would put together the funding and the research to do a book of these people. One part of her is extremely visual, her pictures have an extremely distinct light, colour, presence, and another part of her is deeply politicised and concerned with real issues of our time. I like so much that she takes this issue that’s usually handled in a more documentary 35mm fashion and comes to it with this very modern approach to picture making. There’s a very disciplined quality

to her work, it takes a lot of effort to bring in the big camera and the lights, particularly when you’re dealing with people who are fragile and emotionally vulnerable. She somehow gets past that and makes a riveting image that you look at twice because you can’t turn away from it. I’ll mention one other book; one that’s wonderful to go back to time and again: Reflex: A Vik Muniz Primer (2005, Aperture). I love that one, again because it gets the imagination going. It’s such a helpful book in terms of how to think, and come up with ideas. He’s so generous in his spirit, sharing his ideas with his readers, how he gets his ideas, how they come to be. That one’s a total inspiration 8 Kathy Ryan is the photo editor of the New York Times Magazine. She was taking to Leo Hsu

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