bas vroege
multivocal histories
In 1990 Julian Germain graduated from the Royal College of Art in London with a book called Steelworks. The book describes the effects of the radical economic changes in and around Consett, in the north of England, as a result of the ruthless Thatcherite politics of the time. The title of Kevin Smith’s 2004 book on that period, Civil War Without Guns, describes the nature of the brutal social confrontation that took place in the UK between 1980 and 1985. What was ground-breaking about Steelworks was the fact that Germain mixed his own work with photographs made by Tommy Harris, a photographer who had worked for decades for the local newspaper, and with vernacular photographs from workers’ family-albums, and a reportage made by star reporter Don McCullin for the Sunday Times Magazine. Without the intention of doing so, Germain thus gave birth to a photographic practice that could be labelled ‘postmodern visual history writing’. Its essence resides in the fact that no one voice can be authoritative: history is by its nature the product of multiple voices and of recombining records from different moments in time. Or, as Frits Gierstberg recognized in Perspektief No. 41 in 1991: “By juxtaposing different types of photography Germain brings up for discussion their separate claims to authenticity and historical reality within the presentation itself”.1 Making use of vernacular photography became increasingly popular during the 1990s. Still, most of the time the material was used for its ability to reveal common culture from a non-intentional point of view, as circumstantial evidence, part of a personal archive or simply as a fashionable way of suggesting authenticity. Despite photographers’ growing (and not always voluntary) independence from the press, few chose to combine vernacular photographs with other image material to tell stories or write visual history. Among the exceptions was Magnum photographer Susan Meiselas, with her 1997 project Kurdistan: In the Shadow of History, with which she established the non-existent Kurdish national visual history archive in the form of an exhibition, a book and a website. Germain’s own pictures represent some 20% of the images in Steelworks. In the case of Kurdistan, however, Meiselas’s own work only appears sporadically and her role can therefore better be described as editor and visual researcher than as photographer alone. The traditional division of roles between curators, editors, photographers and researchers have become blurred here. The result is a visually rich and challenging book and project. To this day Kurds, living somewhere in diaspora, can make contributions to the project, in the form of the website (www.akakurdistan.com), adding their memories, their documents and their stories to the ever-larger picture.
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