Category: Issue

Bryan Schutmaat

Good Goddamn

Book review by Gerry Badger

I think I am beginning to see a trend amongst a certain group of American photographers, not exactly a runaway trend but at least a tendency. I thought this when I saw Tim Carpenter’s book, Local Objects, which was deservedly praised by John Gossage and also Ron Jude, who is himself part of this tendency, while Gossage is one of its big inspirations. Carpenter’s book was small, shot in black-and-white, restrained in design, and concentrated upon the photography. And crucially, it dealt with non-metropolitan America, the huge heartlands of the country that are so different, and almost diametrically opposed to the coastal conurbations.

Photographers like Ron Jude, Christian Patterson, Gregory Halpern, Raymond Meeks and others, most of them originally from the heartlands themselves, have been examining America’s interior myths and realities for a number of years, and can be said to constitute the latest generation of photographers, beginning with of course Walker Evans, who have gone in search of – as the French might put it – America profond.

Bryan Schutmaat first came to the photo-world’s attention with a classic of the genre. His Grays the Mountain Sends (2014) was a superb book, a series of portraits and landscapes of small, almost forgotten communities in the Rocky Mountains. It was a lavish, superbly produced book, shot in sumptuous colour, which demonstrated that Schutmaat was not simply a photographer of rare ability – especially in his haunting portraits – but someone who could use photography effectively to build a narrative.

That is the point about Schutmmat and what someone has called – whether kindly or unkindly I’m not sure – the ‘lumberjack’ school of photography. John Gossage recently said that he took up photography because it “allowed me to understand things that were not spoken.” Looking around a lot of today’s photography, it would seem that its makers are suspicious of this dictum, and are distrustful of photography without the crutch of words – or overelaborate design, which can amount to the same thing.

Not so Ron Jude, or Tim Carpenter, or Bryan Schutmaat. Grays the Mountain Sends did not suffer from a surfeit of words, and neither does Good Goddamn, which is modest in size but displays both an assuredness and a quiet ambition. Interestingly, Schutmaat has switched to black and white for this project, which seems to be making a claim for the work’s seriousness. Similarly, the restrained, classical design, like that of many American photobooks, states a certain respect for the integrity of the photographs themselves.

Good Goddamn, published by Trespasser, tells a nominally simple story. Shot over a period of a few days in February 2017, in Leon County, Texas, Good Goddamn documents, in only twenty-seven photographs, the last few days of freedom of Schutmaat’s friend Kris before he went into prison. As this is a book of hints and half-lights, the spaces between the pictures being as important, so to speak, as the pictures themselves, we are not informed of the crime that led to Kris’s incarceration, nor the duration of the sentence. But the fact he was not in custody possibly suggests that the misdemeanour was not serious, although the psychological weight of the book perhaps points to the opposite.

The cast of characters, besides Kris himself and the bleak mid-winter Texan landscape, are an old pickup truck and a hunting rifle with a very business-like telescopic sight. And there is an enigmatic blurred figure in two images at the end who might be Bryan Schutmaat, or a deputy sheriff come to escort Kris to his fate. Kris’ final days of freedom seem to be spent drinking Coors Lite or shooting his gun. So far this is a typically male Texan as we imagine them, tough guys who never cry, but the macho surface image is thoroughly undercut by the book’s elegiac tone and complex emotional mood. There is a general aura of wistfulness, not to say sadness, but also encompassing moments of reflection, uncertainty, loneliness, and bitter reflection, making for a concerto of shifting emotions in which the bare, gloomy landscape pulls the strings. The constant background is the expectation that what will follow will be a life changing experience for Kris, and not, at least in the short term, a good one.

All this is suggested by Schutmaat’s exceedingly well judged photographs – the somewhat indeterminate portraits of Kris drinking, smoking, or cradling his rifle, in nagging juxtaposition with the bleak but beautiful February landscape. One can almost feel the damp. Yet even a bleak, damp landscape will be a great loss when you are behind bars. I call the portraits indeterminate, not because they are soft in focus, but because they have an unsettling quality, which may come from nothing more than the sight of Kris in a short-sleeved tee shirt in a winter landscape – even though we are told that the weather was unseasonably warm during the shoot. Of course, it is more than that, Schutmaat has conveyed the psychology of this moment in Kris’ life unerringly, and makes us feel it too. Little wonder we are disturbed and unsettled.

In the end, Good Goddamn is about the photographs, which is not always the case with photobooks. As he demonstrated in Grays the Mountain Sends, Bryan Schutammt is a photographer with a rare sensibility, the pictures in Good Goddamn are so finely calculated and balanced. I can only compare his talent to that of a superior musician. There are many calling themselves ‘musicians’, but the difference between an ordinary musician and a great one is vast, and yet tiny – a matter of subtlety, the right emphasis, and nuance. It is like this with Schutmaat’s photographs. His images sing, like a well-played piece of music. They are a pleasure to contemplate, and contemplate over and over again for their felicities. They lend the book its visual delights, but also its emotional depths and bitter-sweet tone.

As always in photography, they are pictures of things we have seen before, many times. Ordinary but important things. Yet in themselves they are new, pictures we have not seen before. ♦

All images courtesy of the artist and Trespasser. © Bryan Schutmaat

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Gerry Badger is a photographer, architect and photography critic of more than 40 years. His published books include Collecting Photography (2003) and monographs on John Gossage and Stephen Shore, as well as Phaidon’s 55s on Chris Killip (2001) and Eugene Atget (2001). In 2007 he published The Genius of Photography, the book of the BBC television series of the same name, and in 2010 The Pleasures of Good Photographs, an anthology of essays that was awarded the 2011 Infinity Writers’ Award from the International Center of Photography, New York. He also co-authored The Photobook: A History, Vol I, II and III with Martin Parr.

Luke Willis Thompson

Autoportrait

Essay by Duncan Wooldridge

The philosopher Byung-Chul Han writes that, ‘The demand for transparency grows loud precisely when trust no longer prevails. In a society based on trust, no intrusive need for transparency would surface. The society of transparency is a society of mistrust and suspicion; it relies on control because of vanishing confidence.’

The live-streamed video of Philando Castile’s murder by Minnesota Policeman Jeronimo Yanez, filmed by his partner Diamond Reynolds, was viewed over 6 million times across Facebook Live – where it was originally broadcast – and YouTube, where it has been shared. In the video, Reynolds, with remarkable poise, narrates Yanez’s shooting of her partner four times in front of their young daughter. Pulled over for a missing brake light, Reynolds recalls how Castile had calmly and voluntarily told the police of his legal possession of a firearm in the vehicle. Reaching for his licence, he was shot and killed. Reynolds speaks to camera in the absence of a reliable system of justice: indeed, Yanez was acquitted, despite video footage from both Reynolds and from the dashboard and sound mounted camera on the police car. Castile can be heard informing the police officer of his weapon: his honesty exists in stark contrast to the accountability of the juridical system.

The video’s large viewership now circulates with the story. Often used as a banal statistic, such information considered more closely opens up to thought the complex and challenging conditions of visibility which structure relations of power. It is not uncommon for social media videos to be valued by their quantitive measure, but this is not a simple or innocent act of accounting. We are encouraged to share images of ourselves – this, as Han points out is a form of control that we ourselves maintain – but at the very same time, there is a need to broadcast, because power acts often without consequence: despite it’s claims to transparency, the law and governance remain hidden. The viewing figures that have been grafted to Diamond Reynolds’ video tells us something valuable, but it needs to be unpacked, for it risks being a spectacular but meaningless statistic. First, there is Reynolds’ instinctual decision to broadcast: she shares the event, like protestors and others before her, as the only recourse to the unaccountable relationship that the police have to (especially black) subjects, who are routinely pulled over, questioned, and – more frequently than allows for the term ‘accidentally’ to be used other than disingenuously – murdered by an overzealous trigger finger. Second, there is the diffusion of the event as a collective protest or call to action: the dissemination, copying, and diffusion of the original video, preventing its shutting down or blocking on networks. Viral multiplication of imagery has become a frequently adopted strategy to counteract the censorship, which results from the digital contest of broadcasting and the logics of post-truth politics, where the event must be accessible for its actuality to remain known. Finally, there is the video as an object of the news, and its disconcerting proximity to becoming entertainment: viewers watch the video as it goes viral, as much for fear of missing out as for social and political concern. Such an image participates in a quest for spectacle: the continuity of violence is witnessed and quickly passed over by the click-driven attention economy.

Luke Willis Thompson’s silent video Autoportrait, commissioned by the Chisenhale Gallery and subsequently shortlisted for the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize 2018, was conceived as a sister-image or corrective to the widely viewed video of Reynolds. In the first of two long takes, Reynolds is set against a clear middle-grey background – perhaps the sky – whilst she holds her position, moving only slightly to raise or lower her head. In the second take, with a subtly different image, she is also calm and static, and speaks, though the sound is not captured. Her voice is withdrawn, just as the image’s colour is withheld. Autoportrait comments then on the long consequence, memory and implications of images and the events they represent, and how Reynolds became enveloped in this image. As Willis Thompson has done so in his Cemetery of Uniforms and Liveries (2016), he positions the image in relation to the language of film and media, and their relationship to our consciousness.

Autoportrait contains a strong reference to Warhol’s screen tests, with the cameras prolonged gaze and lack of narrative. Willis Thompson adopts this format to complicate our presumed understanding of Reynolds: silent and dignified, she maintains her calm balance, but here her demeanour resists the divulging of herself to the camera, which she is seen by but looks away from. Warhol’s videos gathered people from the circle of his studio, and participated in their fleeting celebrity: Reynolds too has been subject to a sudden thrusting into the spotlight, though her experience is a thoroughly contemporary manifestation, born of images from our networked reality. She encounters the camera, but it is with a contrast to that intuitive calling to record of her urgent live broadcast: she does not speak to the camera, so much as understand that it both presents and captures her simultaneously. It is for this reason that Willis Thompson has suggested that his collaboration with Reynolds proposed the taking back of her own representation. She is lit from acute angles on both the left and the right. It is a light that brings out detail on Reynolds skin, producing an intense detail that suggests an encounter where Reynolds retains some agency. Doubled highlights effect a sense of her as someone who has quickly become public at the same time as being unknown: she has been made, for the time being, double by her mediation. Autoportrait partakes in a critique of the visible, presenting it as both necessary and constraining at the same time.

Collaboration is an important facet of Willis Thompson’s practice, and his work with Reynolds constructs a representation that places the viewer in a position whereby it is not the producer so much as the recipient who must think and become involved. Willis Thompson’s practice is important for how it adds a complexity to the process of seeing and therefore witnessing. In many of his works, he has actively collaborated with performers to take viewers to locations to develop a personal experience which is detailed in not only narrative or historical, but also visceral and sensory information. For the New Museum Triennial in 2015, visitors were instructed to follow a black guide with a backpack and hoodie who wordlessly took them to poorer areas of New York, occasionally looking over their shoulder to ensure that visitors followed, at the same time turning them into pursuers (the work references the histories of stop and frisk in New York, and takes participants on paths that reference the histories of inequality and black culture). Upon arriving at the other end of the subway, the guide would end the piece without explanation, leaving the viewer to unpick the history of the walk and its resonances. The viewer’s embeddedness in a neighbourhood, at its remove from the safe parameters of the gallery in the gentrified Bowery, seeks a human encounter which places the body of the spectator into a site that most accurately relates to an experience which is told through the work. Autoportrait, though bound within the gallery space, affects an interesting inversion, taking a media representation, and making it static. There is something in its arrestedness – in the long take, and the slowed down gaze of both viewer and subject alike, that construct a space of different reflection.

If our culture seems to insist upon transparency and a logic of visibility, it is noteworthy that we regain control of our images by producing more complex, even secretive depictions. Willis Thompson and Reynolds recognise the necessary resistance that must be presented to us. If the culture of visibility is ultimately one where trust has been displaced in favour of total surveillance, the construction of new representations must account for the demands placed upon us to be visible, and the uneven representations of power, which hide in spite of its calls for openness. We might foster trust by not always being rendered subjects of an ideological visibility, but by retaining a private space that might allow for us to distinguish between where trust is deserved and unwarranted. The gallery must exist as a site that is made not for readily digestible imagery: it might become a space of difficult or counter narratives, as Willis Thompson proposes in his gesture to Reynolds to work with her to retrieve her image. ♦

All images courtesy of the artist and The Photographers’ Gallery. © Andy Keate

Autoportrait was commissioned by Chisenhale Gallery and produced in partnership with Create. The Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize 2018 opens on 23 February 2018 at The Photographers’ Gallery, London.

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Duncan Wooldridge is an artist, writer and curator. He is also Course Director of the BA(Hons) Photography at Camberwell College of Arts, University of the Arts London.

Simon Roberts

Merrie Albion: Landscape Studies of a Small Island

Essay by David Chandler

Imagine walking along a crowded street in any British city. It is morning, and the people around you are in a hurry. Most will be on their way to work and have a purposeful stride and an air of thinking ahead about them, and most are looking at their mobile phones. Some are smiling as they work their fingers across the handsets; others are talking loudly into the morning air, spoken names, places, and events conjuring that fleeting sense we all know so well of multiple lives – instantly recognisable but remote – colliding briefly with our own. Now imagine being in a shopping mall. It is later, maybe the weekend, and the pace here is less frenetic. People are ambling with their bags, looking in shop windows, lingering, waiting around and relaxing (retail having long since been resold to us as a space of recreation, as a kind of therapy). Many of the shoppers are also using phones, involving those elsewhere in their leisurely acts of looking and choosing. And all around, the amblers hold long, remote conversations as they move slowly through the mall, waving their arms in exclamation, making open demonstrations of their connectedness, as if being connected was an expression of their well-being and their relevance.

We have become accustomed to this distractedness, and it is a central paradox of our public experience that those drawing most attention to their physical presence on the street or in the mall are often openly declaring an absence of mind. Being there but not there, being explicitly detached, would seem to be a common sign not only of an increasingly affectless public realm, but also of fundamental shifts in the way we understand and value communal experience. It would be tempting to assert, as many have done, that new technology has begun to radically alter our behaviour, diverting us away from physical contact with others towards immobile screen-based forms of communication in a digital space where constant competition for our attention undermines our ability to concentrate, and dissolves or complicates the distinctions we make between what is public and private, social and intimate. Whether or not this is true, it is becoming clear that we now inhabit a plurality of publics and communities, manifest in overlapping physical and digital spaces that have reconditioned our senses of belonging as well as changed our patterns of social interaction.

The nature of public, communal experience has been an implicit theme of Simon Roberts’ photographic work of the last ten years or so. Since he embarked on his project We English in 2007, he has documented events and places across Britain that have drawn people together, all the while compiling evidence that the desire for common presence and participation, for sharing a sense of being ‘in place’, not only endures but might also harbour something distinctive about our national character and identity. That these gatherings are also set in specific landscapes and are embedded in unfolding social histories of place has been a distinguishing feature of Roberts’ investigation, one that has enabled him to critically conflate elements of a British landscape tradition – in which the land is seen as central to the idea of a national culture and identity – and those of social documentary photography in this country, drawn at particular moments in its history to exploratory national surveys. Roberts’ work presents the viewer with complex relationships between people and places, and incongruous juxtapositions of history and contemporary culture that create gentle ironies and underlying tensions across the images. Played out through particular local and regional contexts, it is these tensions that ultimately deny any consistency of mood and resist the coherent, and possibly seductive sense of binding national characteristics.

This decade of work has reflected debates in art and cultural geography that understand landscape not simply as territory or a mode of representation but as an active process, shaped over time by politics and economics as well as by geological and environmental forces. This process is largely one of incremental change, manifest in different ways and at different speeds across diverse spaces, and, in Britain, Roberts interests have gravitated towards evolving patterns of leisure, the consumption and commodification of history, militarisation, and to lines of demarcation and exclusion in the landscape. But in parallel to this, he has also chosen to photograph events and places that have a more immediate, topical significance in the turning of Britain’s recent history, and which – again summoning the sense of a national survey – might collectively offer a form of pictorial chronicle of these times. It is these particular photographs that provide the structural focus and thematic substance of this book. 

Merrie Albion ranges across various projects, both commissioned and independently produced over the last ten years, from single photographs made around the time of We English, to Roberts’ subsequent photographs of the General Election of 2010, his series The Social: Landscapes of Leisure (2013) and National Property: The Picturesque Imperfect (2013–15), and his photographs from the 2012 Olympics in London. The book also registers a distinct shift in approach, and tone, from We English. In Merrie Albion, Roberts has exchanged the element of discovery and revelation that came from his prior speculative journeying around England to many new and, for him, unknown sites, for a form of ‘reporting’, where he has responded to subjects and places that have already entered the public consciousness and can be seen as defining locations in the recent national story.

Roberts’ work on the 2010 General Election can be seen as representative of this change of emphasis, and its photographs assume a pivotal role in Merrie Albion. Importantly, they distinguish Roberts’ particular manner of recording events from that of the photojournalists and reporters who often appear in his pictures, as one not primarily concerned with capturing newsworthy aspects of the election but with observing what might be called the broad and multifaceted choreography of the electoral process as it unfolded in British social space. One abiding effect of this approach is that the photographs undercut the sense of politics constructed for us by the media, both by revealing that process of construction taking place and by giving equal status to scenes that would be deemed un-newsworthy, affording a monumental quality to the prosaic drama of the election embedded in the everyday fabric of British life. As Roberts steps back with a large-format, five-by-four-inch camera to take up his customary elevated, detached viewing position, the activities and incidents of the election, the jostling, walking, waiting groups of people, are not simply diminished in scale by the expansive space surveyed by the camera lens, they appear now as figures set against a much broader arc of social time, that slower course of history within which the towns and villages they live in – the housing estates, the communities, the streets, pathways and networks of communication – have developed into the familiar landscape of this country. This is the dialectical space/time of Merrie Albion’s social panorama.

Roberts’ apparently quiet, detached chronicling of the events and public atmospheres of Britain’s recent past – charting the mood swings of a diverse national culture – is also a discreet opening up of a set of complex ideas about places and their histories, and about the abiding influence of the country’s past on its present. In his comparative observations and contextual annotations Roberts provides his own form of narration here, and invites us to look with him, to think again, and maybe to think differently about Britain at a time when ideas of our national identity, our national culture and our international relations have never been more fiercely contested.

The world of Merrie Albion is a subdued, anti-theatrical space, with its slower time and sometimes daydreaming sense of duration, and its social panoramas displaying the consciously style-less, apparently detached and indifferent attitude that declares the photographer’s sociological interest as he journeys through the landscape of Britain over the course of its recent history. Yet, as this book so quietly suggests, this history is one of dramatic change and extreme social contrasts, and it is precisely that drama, the drama of difference and upheaval, matched against Roberts’ dispassionate recording of its representative events, places, and social gatherings, which gives his photographs their distinctiveness and unique value.

In many ways these marked shifts of place, culture, and atmosphere create, in themselves, an overriding sense of uncertainty and anxiety in Roberts’ national chronicle as it moves slowly towards the referendum and Brexit, and then culminates in the terrible iconic image of social inequality, injustice, and trauma formed by the blackened high-rise tomb of Grenfell Tower. At its heart Roberts’ work seeks to quell the visceral drama of events. He does not thrust his camera into the action, but steps back to see the wider picture, to create photographs that embody a kind of weighing up of complex tableaux of comparative information – whether that be a political rally winding away down a city street or a family on a beach, pausing for a moment to stare out to sea. Merrie Albion is a partial account; it is selective and subjective; but Roberts’ pictures draw us into the slow unfolding of social time and provide points of connection that encourage us, from one image to another, to think not only about the varied scenes as part of a unified historical process but ultimately to reflect on our own place in that history. ♦

All images courtesy of the artist. © Simon Roberts

This essay is adapted from one of the accompanying texts for Merrie Albion: Landscape Studies of a Small Island, published by Dewi Lewis and has been reproduced with kind permission. An exhibition of the works runs until 10 March 2018 at Flowers Gallery, London.

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David Chandler is a Professor of Photography at University of Plymouth. Since 1982 he has held various curatorial roles in museums and galleries, including the National Portrait Gallery, London (1982-88) and The Photographers’ Gallery, London (1988-95). Now he works principally as a writer, editor and curator, in the fields of contemporary photography, photographic history and the visual arts. He was also Director of Photoworks, Brighton (1997-2010).

Peter Fraser

Mathematics

Book review by Jeremy Millar

If one wants to take the measure of something, then it is often best to do so from more than one point. More usually these multiple positions occur in space – the same object viewed simultaneously from different places, for example – but they can also occur in time. Let’s consider, for example, something that Peter Fraser noted some years ago: ‘With each series of photographs I choose a different strategy to approach the same underlying preoccupation, which is, essentially, trying to understand what the world around me is made of through the act of photographing it.’ Actually, this was fifteen years ago, and – full disclosure – written to me in preparation for a retrospective exhibition of his work that I was curating for The Photographers’ Gallery, London, yet it could quite easily describe the process that Fraser has undertaken for this most recent book published by Skinnerboox. The title Mathematics might also bring to mind that of an earlier series, Towards an Absolute Zero, but whereas that was metaphorical and referred to ‘a “still” universe’ where a ‘minute shift carries importance’, here the title is to be taken quite literally; as he notes in the afterword, Fraser has made these photographs with the belief ‘that mathematics can explain the world, or at least describe it in a way that approaches an explanation’.

Such a claim, and perhaps the misgivings one might have towards it, is apparent in the first photograph. Here a triangular rack of pool balls recedes upon the cobalt blue felt of the table, the white sitting atop them. While all sports depend to some extent upon numbers – points scored, time taken, distance covered – pool seems amongst the most ‘mathematical’, a table-top exercise of Platonic forms and Euclidean geometry. Even the balls themselves have numbers upon them, yet while these might help us to describe their relative positions within the rack as wrong, could they explain it? Here, one might feel that mathematics is less a structure underlying the world – and the work – than one placed upon it.

The work becomes far more compelling when such an organising structure seems less apparent and given the diversity of pictures here contained, this is often. Indeed, the universalism that mathematics seems to hold for Fraser allows him to photograph far more widely than he has for some time. (I didn’t then mean geographically, although this is also true: whereas many earlier projects were bound by a form of geographic constraint – a particular journey, or city – here the photographs are clearly made in many different countries.) I am reminded often of pictures found within Two Blue Buckets, Fraser’s seminal book, which, through its recent republication as a director’s cut, might itself become another point, or two, from which to view this more recent work. One might also come to think it almost inevitable that there should be two books called Two Blue Buckets, both similar, each different. The irregular curves along the back of a bay horse; the weathered paint of a corrugated building; the arrangement of domestic objects; the interiors of sacred spaces: all can be found in both books, and if the democratic vision he borrowed early from William Eggleston insisted that yes, even this – the merely familiar – was worthy of our consideration, then Fraser now allows that ‘this’ might also include that which is extraordinarily familiar, such as the Matterhorn, or great works of architecture, or of art (or their copies, at least).

To this list we might also include people, who here return to his work. Before making each portrait, Fraser asked each person ‘to imagine that they had just discovered that something they had always believed to be true had just been found to be a lie.’ Whether, in the terms established by this work, such a discovery might be considered an addition to or a subtraction from their sense of the world, or themselves, is left uncertain, as uncertain as their expressions, yet the premise is far less so: ‘had just discovered’ suggests that the knowledge had been accepted in a manner that ‘had just been told’ surely wouldn’t. What we know to be true depends largely upon what we believe to be true, and here we return to the subject that has been at the very heart of Fraser’s practice for three decades or more: the notion of faith. In the mid-Eighties he wrote that, ‘The sacred is everywhere and resides in the most unlikely places’, finding it then in the knotted net hanging in a stable, or the Marian embrace of an Avery weighing scale (although whether this was a Nativity, or a Pièta, one would never know). Now, Fraser’s faith might have shifted, but it is made manifest in similar things. One does not have to hold such a belief to believe that others do, nor that that belief might create things of great beauty and intelligence, whether that is the strange scintillation of what seems to be a flooded quarry, or the calligraphic splendour of the main dome of Blue Mosque.

To consider one last picture: here we are invited to look down, obliquely, across the rooftops – polygons of terracotta and slate – of what one presumes to be a European city. The bright sunlit planes of the stuccoed façades throw into relief the shadow thrown across – and up from – the foreground, spiking flatly across the complex of shapes below. And yet where might we situate ourselves in such a view? Given our downward glance one can assume that we are somewhere high upon the building casting the shadow, yet our position is unclear. We are both elevated and umbral, never knowing how far from that threshold to lucidity we are. ♦

All images courtesy of the artist. © Peter Fraser

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Jeremy Millar is an artist, and Senior Tutor at the Royal College of Art, London.

Alexandra Lethbridge

Other Ways of Knowing

Essay by Lisa Stein

In his introduction to Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought, Martin Jay observes that ‘we are often fooled by visual experience that turns out to be illusory, an inclination generated perhaps by our overwhelming, habitual belief in its apparent reliability’. Distinguishing between ‘the “natural” and the “cultural” component in what we call vision’, Jay maintains that it is not only our scientific understanding of the function of the eye – its superior capacity to process external data, and the rate at which this information is transferred to the brain via the optic nerve – that led to the privileging of vision over the other four senses. His opening paragraph testifies to what Jay refers to as the ‘ocular permeation of language’; containing numerous visual metaphors, it reveals that our ability to interpret, negotiate and make meaning from what we see is likely to have played an equally important role in locating vision at the top of the sensual hierarchy. However, Jay proceeds to demonstrate that the ‘permeability of the boundary between the “natural” and the “cultural”’ – take the word “image”, which can ‘signify graphic, optical, perceptual, mental, or verbal phenomena’ – would ultimately lead to the very premises of “ocularcentrism” being called into question. Still, it is not only the ambiguities inherent in any one language, but the ‘wealth of visually imbued cultural and social practices, which vary from culture to culture’ that Jay believes further complicate the idea that ‘knowledge is the state of having seen’.

Other Ways of Knowing, Alexandra Lethbridge’s ‘exploration into the illusion of magic and misdirection in comparison to ideas of hoax, deceit and trickery’, draws on the discrepancy between visual and cognitive perception, and examines the role of photography within that binary. The type of magic represented in the series, which combines found photographs, archival imagery and the artist’s own, ‘constructed’ photographs, is often referred to as “stage” or “street” magic to distinguish it from the paranormal or ritual kind, which aims to control supernatural forces. Using items such as playing cards, coins, cups or balls, the stage or street magician entertains an audience by performing tricks, effects or illusions; everyday objects are made to disappear, to defy gravity or to pass through other, solid objects. The magic performance disrupts and alters the relationship between our sensory and cognitive processes; by exploiting our belief in the infallibility of vision, the magician is able to perform seemingly supernatural feats that challenge the way we think. For instance, while we cannot actually “see” a coin passing through the wall of a glass because we know it is an illusion, we think we see it happening because we expect to, or indeed, because we want to. In that moment, our desire to believe that what we are seeing is possible leads to a reversal of visual literacy; we are no longer decoding, but encoding. In other words, our pre-existing knowledge influences what we see and how we choose to interpret this information or, in the case of the magic trick, to disregard it. For a brief moment, we do not want to know.

Like a magic performance, the photographs in Other Ways of Knowing ‘are designed to promote uncertainty in the viewer’s understanding in what they see’. Indeed, Lethbridge’s still-lifes, abstract compositions, portraits and sequenced photographs do not allow for a straightforward “reading”. By layering images, using multiple exposures and strategically placing graphic elements throughout her photographs, the artist controls our gaze; like the magician, Lethbridge instructs us where to look, what to see. Black arrows and bright colours direct our eyes and initially, consumed with wonder, we give into the performance. However, wonder at even the most thoroughly crafted magic trick soon gives way to scepticism, and as our eyes begin to move through her photographs more naturally we grow suspicious of Lethbridge’s visual interventions. Particularly upon revisiting a sequence of images depicting hands performing a magic trick, or a set of photographs revealing the construction of an impossible object, we ask ourselves whether these visual “clues” and “solutions” are being offered up too readily. Even Lethbridge’s censorship of elements one might consider fundamental to reading a photograph, like a face or a hand, seem like a deliberate distraction. However, if this is misdirection, which ‘deceives not only the eye of the spectator, but his mind as well’, it begs the question what exactly Lethbridge is trying to distract us from. What are we missing? Considering that the success of a magic trick lies in the extent to which it can challenge our cognitive processes, perhaps the question is not what we know about these photographs, but what we do not know.

Looking at the images in Other Ways of Knowing we might ask ourselves whether what is “true” about a magic trick resides in the performance of the magician or in the mind of the audience. We might ask ourselves where the “magic” happens. One could argue that what makes a trick “real”, what defines it as magic, is our wonder at what we (think we) can see, not what we know about how it is executed. By focusing on ‘aesthetic judgment rather than abstract reasoning’, Lethbridge forces us to reconsider our understanding of “truth” in relation to the photograph, which registers numerous ways of “seeing”. Indeed, while Jay’s notion that vision is informed by culture might not mean that a photograph cannot depict reality, it suggests that what is considered “real” might differ in the mind of the photographer versus that of (a) viewer(s), say. This leaves the question of what we can gain from what we do not know about a photograph. In Photography is Magic, a survey of artists that engage ‘with experimental approaches to photographic ideas’, Charlotte Cotton observes that a magic trick, like all performative art forms played well, creates the conditions for us to explore imaginative possibilities’. In other words it is the experience of not knowing that forces us to reflect upon ourselves and how we “see” the world. If a photograph that we do not understand is more likely to make us reconsider our (visual) culture, there is more truth to the manipulated images in Other Ways of Knowing than the most visually accurate of photographs. ♦

All images courtesy of the artist. © Alexandra Lethbridge

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Lisa Stein is a London-based writer and researcher specialising in photography. Managing Editor of the photo-literary platform Photocaptionist and Editorial Assistant at The Burlington Magazine, her writing has also appeared in The Philosophy of Photography.

Mathieu Pernot

Les Gorgan 1995-2015

Essay by Natasha Christia

A highlight of this year’s Les Rencontres d’Arles, Mathieu Pernot’s Les Gorgan 1995-2015 welcomed visitors with respectful silence. Hosted under the high ceilings of la maison des peintres, a new venue located near the calm premises of the village cemetery, the exhibition is presented as a multi-layered narrative comprising ten murals each dedicated to members of the Gorgan, a small Roma family from Arles living along the shores of Rhône. Spanning over two decades, it told the story of their individual destinies, and through it, the journey of photographic imagery that has accompanied them.

Importantly, Pernot’s gorgansiene universe created a precise and honest statement beyond visual and conceptual effects. In comparison to the noisy theatricality of Roger Bailen’s installation in the adjacent space wherein photography was unceasingly striving to find its place in the misty waters of contemporaneity, there was nothing redundant or unnecessary in it. Stretching exclusively across photography’s genres and practices – black and white portraiture, mug shots, Polaroids, iPhone and vernacular images – it was in many ways a slap in the face. A straightforward confrontation with photography and its evolution over the last twenty years, a prosaic testing of its normative modes, and, above all, an involuntary and yet consistently ruthless reminder of what straight images can do.

It was back in 1995, while still a student at L’École supérieure de la photographie d’Arles, when Mathieu Pernot first came across a group of gypsy kids in the area surrounding the village’s railway station. Pretty much everything has happened since his introduction to the whole family and the debut show of The Tsiganes (1995-1997) at Les Rencontres d’Arles in 1997. Seasons have alternated, kids have become teenagers, teenagers parents and former adults grandparents. Life has bestowed upon the Gorgan joys, farewells and irretrievable losses. Likewise, he ‘who once met those people as a photographer’ has found himself involved in a long-lasting relationship with them. By 2001, when Pernot left Arles for Paris, he had become godfather to their children, had inquired into the family history that extends over one century, and had funded Yuk, an association committed to the education and integration of gypsy children in the local community.

In the years that followed up until to the present, Les Gorgan has been continually revisited and naturally reflects how Pernot’s conceptual approach and strategies has evolved. The development of the project incorporated various chapters, distinct ideological and symbolic layers and diverse points of view. Over the course of two decades, the artist published different bodies of work in the form of seemingly disconnected series, yet all parts of the same puzzle. Unconsciously he was building a cartography, a universe, a whole.

The current assemblage, as displayed in Arles, is a remixed version after Pernot’s reunion with the family in 2012, a programmatic dismantling of the preexistent bodies of work that have been reedited and shaped anew. Many different projects and years have been spliced together in a new formulation. From the early children portraits in Tsiganes (1995-1997) – fusing a documentary approach at the crossroads with humanist photography and the detached observational documentalism akin to Walker Evans – to correspondent mug shots in Photo booths (1995-1997) in the tradition of anthropometric portraits; from their penitentiary choir, as teenagers, outside the prison of Avignon in The Shouters (2001-2004), to the whole family watching the deceased Rocco’s caravan burning in Fire (2013), photography here appears closely attached to a changing liquid reality.

Similarly, from the early Gorgan posing timidly before the camera to determining their self-representation in snapshots photographs of births, family gatherings, lazy afternoons that have been extracted out of their own albums and mobile phones into the sacred realm of the gallery space to Pernot’s fine art photography being re-appropriated by the Gorgan and serving as post-mortems on their family graves, these images reveal an infinity of uses, practices and dynamic relations between the subject and the photographer.

This sustained demystification of the photographic image, which both recovers its status as an extinct amulet and quotidian object bestows on the work an unforeseen authenticity. It is a level of authenticity achieved not out of fascination nor by means of attempting to build a bridge with the ethnographic ‘other’, but naturally, in an unhindered way. Here photography is actually about and for something.

As noted by both Clément Chéroux and Johanne Lindskog in essays from the accompanying publication by Xavier Barral, Les Gorgan project transgresses with wit the boundaries of the ethnographic, the cultural and the anthropologic. For those who wish to detect in the project folkloric clichés and ethnographic archetypes, gypsy matriarchy and palm reading, it is indeed all there. And yet crucially and suddenly the Gorgan turn from characters to people. Expanding idly on the surface of the image, their bodies are humanised under the weight of time and human destiny. At the same time, they are infused with an awareness of the confined territory they occupy between the lens and the world.

Beyond the personal, the familiar and various trappings of the photo community or art world, Les Gorgan resonates with history. While accessing the Camargue local archives as a historian for an exhibition in 1998, by chance he came across hundreds of police identification files of former Saliers gypsy camp inmates under the Vichy regime. He also discovered that Bietschika Gorgan, the patriarch of the family, was deported to Buchenwald in 1944. In this knowledge, the formidable face and side portraits of the children in Photo booths can inevitably be seen under a novel, dark perspective. They involuntarily awake memories of seclusion, deportation and extermination of these minorities during World War II. Likewise, they speak eloquently of the implementation of photography as an authority and means of control. In fact, they still do given the recent evictions of Roma migrants from France in 2009, turning the whole work into a cumulus of embedded history, memory and trauma.

Silence in Les Gorgan is suggestive. For the story remains untold and is crude and partial. The gaze is distance, and the ‘other’ a fabricated construct to accommodate it. Visually exuberant at first glance, Pernot’s narrative gradually reveals itself as a complex object of relations among subjects, gazes and modes of representation. By abolishing hierarchies between the artistic, the quotidian and the banal, and by dissolving the status of narration and voices, ‘it recreates’, in Pernot’s words, ‘the circumstances of each member of the family, and recounts the story that he and the Gorgans wrote together; face to face, then side by side’. As such, it daringly takes a stance to reconstruct the dialogical structure of history from the viewpoint of the ones who have not written it, recovering and ultimately surpassing the proper experience of photography. ♦

All images courtesy of the artist and Xavier Barral. © Mathieu Pernot

—
Natasha Christia is a writer, curator and educator based in Barcelona. 

Salvatore Vitale

How To Secure A Country

Essay by Max Houghton

Switzerland has long enjoyed its reputation as ‘the safest country in the world’, not least for anyone wishing to keep financial affairs private. Since the Treaty of Paris in 1815, self-imposed political neutrality has been central to Switzerland’s security. This decision saved thousands of Swiss – though few Jewish – lives during WWII, when the country was encircled by Axis powers. Neutrality, however, does not equal pacifism. With every male citizen aged 18-34 mandated to military service, Switzerland is a gun-nation, the third most heavily armed country in the world, after the United States, and Yemen, and where it is common-place to see a ten year-old loading SIG SG 550 or FAS 90 (similar to the AK47, but also customised for sport). In case of invasion, hyper-vigilant Switzerland is ready to defend its territory.

Making citizens feel safe comes at a price, of course, as Josef K. found out, to his detriment and eventual voluntary suicide, in Kafka’s The Trial. Kafka was matchless in describing what happens to a person, when everything and everyone is perceived in terms of a threat; a kind of disintegration at the level of the soul. Spiritual bankruptcy.

A question hovers, and remains ever-present: when does a threat become a risk? Looking for the answer has preoccupied photographer Salvatore Vitale, a Sicilian, who has been living in Switzerland for the past twelve years. One imagines the initial shock of experiencing the smoothness and visibility of a Swiss road at night. His adopted home, surrounded by mountains, enfolded into the very centre of Europe, offers unique social, political and financial protection to its citizens; it is palpable. Vitale could feel it in the air. Over time, his observations of differences in efficiency and state protocols inspired a desire to create an extensive visual research into How To Secure A Country. He began to collaborate with the prestigious ETH university in Zurich, a relationship which has proved essential in both trying to assess one of the most complex security systems in the world and in gaining permission to access places otherwise sequestered. The collaboration functions at many levels and is used by Vitale specifically to be responsive to interests outside the art world. By being guided by specialists within various institutions, he aims to show how the system works from the inside. This approach to research is as refreshing as it is rigorous.

Looking at Vitale’s meticulous, clinically clean Switzerland, we might begin to comprehend that the landscape we more stereotypically associate with skiing or yodeling or Heidi is in fact weaponised, to use a popular term, or we could say ‘securitised’. Mountains are hollowed out to house entire army divisions. Fake stonework conceals artillery; domestic residences in chocolate-box pretty villages harbor canons; bridges are stuffed with dynamite, ensuring all roads become dead-ends in the event of an attack.

‘Pre-emption.’ Brian Massumi writes, ‘is the generative logic of our time.’ He is writing, in Ontopower, about post 9/11 USA, but the Swiss approach might operate as a kind of antecedent. The experience of looking at Vitale’s chilling imagery reminds us how ‘[t] his incipience of an event as yet to be determined, overfull with really felt potential, carries an untenable tension.’ Vitale has striven to find an aesthetic approach that bears witness to this tension. He has restaged the contents of instruction manuals, spent time in border control rooms, weather stations, and airport watch-towers, and been present at simulation exercises in order to understand the production of security. Vitale’s eye also takes in the environment in the shape of mountain valleys, nocturnal foliage, a lake inhabited by a police diver. To further the connection with Massumi’s thinking, Vitale’s enterprise reveals how state power is a significant factor in shaping the very environments in which we live. Eventually, it all becomes entirely natural.

Vitale is also spending time – the project is ongoing – at MeteoSwiss, which supplies vital meteorological analysis via its super computer in Lugano. There is a productive connection between the weather and state security, which Vitale is exposing, in terms of air traffic, both civil and military, or chemical or nuclear accident, for example, as well as providing forecasts for climbers or hikers, who would be at risk from extreme weather. In wealthy Switzerland, the profitable insurance industry relies on such risk analysis.

Piecing together the many links in this unwieldy network, via Vitale’s imagery, we begin to see how a politics of knowledge is created through power relations. He brings us a sonar image, used on a rescue mission undertaken by Swiss lake police, who provided the image. Sound wavelengths in water are approximately 2000 times longer than those of visible light, which makes it possible to ‘see’, when light can’t penetrate far enough. The resulting image can only be interpreted by a highly-trained expert, leaving the layperson to consider it purely as visual spectacle: a narrow, symmetrical chasm between two masses, with an unidentifiable circular ring to the top right. Scientists have employed sonar imaging techniques in Lake Neuchatel to find evidence of tectonically active zones that might trigger earthquakes, for example. Seek and you shall find.

As might be expected, technology is at the forefront of security production. While older methods of detection are still utilised – as we see in the image of the sniffer dog – the most advanced robotics technology is playing its role too. Vitale introduces us to ANYmal, which (it is tempting to say ‘who’) is being developed for rescue missions, and is designed for autonomous operation in challenging environments. Robotics research has been focused predominantly in this area since Fukushima. The inclusion of ANYmal in this series seems ominous. The human body begins to feel superfluous.

Perhaps the most revealing glimpse into the production of security is the series of still images, the title of which translates as The six errors with regard to security threats. Classic stock imagery of elegant ballets dancers, or three generations of a healthy Swiss family, is juxtaposed with more sinister pictures – a hooded person at a keyboard, a raging fire. The original video is a Swiss Army production, at once bane and antidote: one the one hand, it educates the public on possible dangers to their culture or economy, while at the same time, presents the army as the necessary solution; guarantor of peace and prosperity.

A couple of images offer brief respite from the tightly-calibrated visual regime. Vitale’s research began with border control, where, outside the inspection rooms and the extraterritorial space of the airport, he observed traces in the landscape, left by refugees. The viewer is affected by this fleeting human touch. A hand-written note in Tigrinya, the Eritrean language, offers reassurance for those that might follow in their footsteps: ‘We are here. You are in Switzerland.’ Elsewhere, a vivid red map acts as a warning to fellow refugees, to make clear that Switzerland is in fact a country in its own right.

A final image in this illuminating series shows a white cross on a red square, one of the most-recognised flags in the world, or the looking-glass version of a never-ending state of emergency. The disaster-to-come is always already present. ♦

All images courtesy of the artist. © Salvatore Vitale

—
Max Houghton writes about photographs for the international arts press, including FOAM, Photoworks and The Telegraph. She edited the photography biannual 8 Magazine for six years and is also Senior Lecturer in Photography at London College of Communication – University of the Arts, London.

Krakow Photomonth 2017

The War From Here

Exhibition review by Duncan Wooldridge

We are encouraged to perceive of it as a striking, spectacular occurrence, but war is not one eventful instance of violence: it is the layering of multiple small violations that accrue and erupt. Thus conflict is sustained until one side is so dominant that any attack it makes is no longer legitimated by the promise of a reciprocal threat. It is a longer proposition than the spectacle of conflict: it begins before a gun is fired, and is felt long after. The political theorist Carl Von Clausewitz infamously stated that war is the continuation of politics by other means: not just a means of getting your way through violence, and the sign of a political project that goes beyond typical coercion. It emblematises an antagonistic, immovable politics, getting its way.

If war is the continuation of politics by other means, then the reverse must also be true: in our everyday politics and interactions, instances of war are also played out. There is war in forms of nationalism and patriotic fervour that posit the supremacy of a nation amongst more than 200 others; and there is war in the gains we seek over each other in the neo-liberal workspace. Violence can be tracked back from the site of armed conflict, to our sofas, and our devices, and our material wealth. That we do not draw connections between our material wealth and the conflict or exploitation it requires is one of the great achievements of capitalism.

The War From Here, curated by Gordon Macdonald as one of the keynote exhibitions of Krakow Photomonth 2017, is an exhibition of five artists who approach war from a different set of proximities, setting it much closer to us. They choose to be distant from the ‘theatre’ of war: they seek not theatricality, but origins, traces, and consequence. As such, it is one of the most striking exhibitions of war in recent times, because it resists the ‘over there’ condition of photojournalistic tradition, stressing tangible experiences, scars, and roots of violence.

At its entrance, Sophie Ristelhueber’s Eleven Blowups teases and undermines the reportage photograph, and acts an initial disruption of our expectations for the image. Installed as large-scale prints directly mounted to the surface of a phalanx of walls, they problematise photography’s rhetoric of de-authored transparency. This is the image not as a window, but as blockade: montaged from multiple images of bomb craters, some of which are Ristelhueber’s own and others that are drawn from media outlets, a composite real is made that brings together the image’s connection to the place it depicts, with its place of reception and encounter.

Nina Berman works within a recognisable documentary tradition, but uses it to show the domestic manifestations of America’s war on terror, challenging the way that that country’s militarisation is figured in daily life as elsewhere. Her project Homeland captures the full extent to which life is laced with military simulation and rhetorics of American power. One image shows B2 Stealth Bombers passing over beaches of Atlantic City. They participate in a celebratory display of military might that is triumphalist but exposing of the silent, lingering threat of a secretive military industry. Berman also depicts the militarisation of labour, as ordinary Americans are employed to act as Iraqi ‘terrorists’ in emergency drills. The war’s relationship to home is revealed by Berman as a series of constructs that produce the image of state power at the same time as constructing personal-imaginary images of terrorists and otherness. Here, war is a fantasy that displays little concern for that which exists outside of an American sense of might: documentary is suddenly a form that has courage to show a view beyond the generic humanism of the eyewitness.

At the centre of the exhibition is Martha Rosler’s Bringing The War Home. Rosler’s montages directly equate the purpose and trauma of conflict with the luxury of the western home. Rosler makes clear that it is a largely exploited international labour force that extracts and forms the products of domestic luxury, which conflict maintains through its expansive project of installing democratic capitalist nation states. Rosler’s montages use the technical surfaces of the home (phones, televisions, pictures, and glass windowpanes) as openings to this conflict, as scenes that are mistaken as distant apparitions, but which are closely interlaced in a luxury that we have come to see as a desirable and freeing. Her later montages draw upon our various bodily postures with our mobile devices: laying upside down on a sofa, checking our pictures in our phone screens.

In a convincing and clear-sighted diversion from the usual obsession with war as a space of heroic individualism, Macdonald’s exhibition is unrepentantly social: it understands that war impacts upon a people, a multitude. As Ristelhueber, Berman and Rosler reveal how representations of war have been used to frame and limit our understanding, Lisa Barnard and Monica Haller evaluate the impacts of war through research upon the short and long-term experiences of conflict, whatever its ‘physical’ distance. Haller’s Veteran’s Book Project is structured around the first-hand encounter. 50 books present individual accounts from war, reclaiming the notion of the war veteran to include not just soldiers and military personnel, but also Iraqi and Afghan survivors. Each presents their own experience, an account that is always moving between the past and its impact upon the present. Some accounts are harrowing in places of course, but they are human and relatable first and foremost. Haller’s collection of a plethora of voices has a distinctive effect that repels the conventional desire to defer the war to some other place: it takes place between humans, as Judith Butler reminds us when she recalls the precarity of each human being as underwriting the necessity of the social. Haller posits that an array of voices can displace the dominant narratives of conflict and their contest the drive towards individual gain, and the illusions of a consequence-less accumulation.

As Haller also suggests that we need to place the human back into the field of conflict, Lisa Barnard explores the military strategy of drones (or Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, UAV) operation, one manifestation of a technological war without the human (at least, this is what is claimed by its manufacturers and agents). The industry of war’s technological development – what Manuel De Landa calls the ‘machinic phylum’, feeding technological development that makes it to the consumer thereafter – seeks to displace the human in the place of machines, with a simplistic comparison between machinic efficiency and bodily fatigue. Barnard shows that the human effect remains.

As Adam Greenfield argues in his book Radical Technologies: The Design of Everday Life, the adoption of machinic and technological systems produces human effects in each of its manifestations. In Barnard’s work Whiplash Transition, an opening is found in the 40 minute drive between the military base and a drone pilot’s home. Whiplash transition is a term used by UAV pilots to describe the rupture between the locked-down enclosure of the drone mission, and the all-too-nearby comforts of the American city. In her installation, Barnard draws potent connections between the machinic vision of military devices, or the flying patterns of drones in strategic formations, and the fantasy-world of Las Vegas. In another part of the installation, a shipping crate displays a map of an arms fair on its top side: the uncomfortable meeting of armaments and basic human needs (food service counters, restrooms and cafes) is starkly revealed by the diagram.

Photography, with its concern for a slice of the action, is a common agent in the compression of war as something distant and unthinkable. The War From Here is an extraordinary call to see how it occurs right in front of us. Photography is capable of something more contextual, more critical, more enduring and penetrating. In this, one of the most convincing exhibitions about conflict and its reaches, we are called to see how war is something that surrounds us.

—
Duncan Wooldridge is an artist, writer and curator. He is also Course Director of the BA(Hons) Photography at Camberwell College of Arts, University of the Arts London.

Image credits:

I-Opening of The War From Here at Bunkier Sztuki/Krakow Photomonth 2017, curated by Gordon Macdonald featuring Lisa Barnard, Nina Berman, Monica Haller and Sophie Ristelhueber.

II-Lisa Barnard, Lawnmower, from the Mapping the Territory series © Lisa Barnard.

III-Lisa Barnard, Object #3, from the Primitive Pieces series © Lisa Barnard.

IV-Lisa Barnard, American Flag, from the Not Learning from Anything series © Lisa Barnard.

V-Nina Berman, Bomb Iraq, Times Square, New York City, from the Homeland series, 2003 © Nina Berman | NOOR

VI-Nina Berman, Stealth bomber, Atlantic City, New Jersey, from the Homeland series, 2007 © Nina Berman | NOOR

VII-Monica Haller, The Veterans Book Project (VBP), library of 50 books, print on demand, page length varies, 2009–2014.

VIII-Monica Haller,Page spread from book by Ehren W. Tool, 2010.

IX-Martha Rosler, Cleaning the Drapes, from the series House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home, 1967–1972 © Martha Rosler.

X-Martha Rosler, Gladiators, from the series House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home, New Series, 2008 © Martha Rosler.

XI-Martha Rosler, The Gray Drape, from the series House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home, New Series, 2008 © Martha Rosler.

All images courtesy of Krakow Photomonth.

STOP + FIX Publishing

The Shackleton Collector’s Edition Box Set

Book review by Gerry Badger

It’s not often I begin a book review with a physical description of it, but this is a package rather than a single volume. The Shackleton Collector’s Edition Box Set must be the most complex book object since the Chinese photographer Peng Yangjun and Chen Jiaojiao’s Box – Pass It On (2012). Like that memorable achievement, it’s another ‘book in a box’, or rather two books in a box. The first publication of STOP + FIX, led by photographer and Mumford & Sons bassist Ted Dwane, graphic designer and artist Ross Stirling, and photographer and director Marcus Haney, is a collaboration between Dwane, Stirling, and musician and composer Paul Frith.

As the subject is Sir Ernest Shackleton’s fabled Antarctic expedition of 1914-17, this box is a replica of a Venessa case, a reinforced plywood box that served as the original cargo boxes packed aboard Shackleton’s ship, the Endurance. Inside are the two volumes comprising the book, and a folding gramophone sleeve containing four 10 inch vinyl records plus an MP3 download. This is a photobook with attitude, combined with a newly composed symphony by Paul Frith, written to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Endurance expedition, a powerful piece by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. Then, just as a piece of icing on the cake, the first two hundred and fifty copies of the publication include a replica glass positive plate similar to those used on the expedition.

There are two principle names in this story. Firstly, there is Shackleton himself, Britain’s greatest Antarctic explorer, and the photographer who took these excellent photographs, including many in colour, under the most adverse circumstances. The photographer was an Australian, Frank Hurley, but he has an important place in British photographic history, as following his exploits on Shackleton’s Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition of 1914 to 1917, he served as an army photographer at the end of the First World War and made some memorable images of the conflict.

The story of Shackleton’s great trip of 1914-17 is one of the great tales of heroism, pluck, and endurance and being typically British is one of triumph snatched from the jaws of disaster. After the race to reach the South Pole – a race Britain was desperate to win – ended in December 1911 with the Norwegian Ronald Amundsen gaining the prize, Shackleton, who had come within 97 geographical miles from the Pole in 1909, turned his attention to crossing Antarctica from sea to sea, via the Pole. But the expedition ran into early problems when the Endurance became trapped in pack ice, and was slowly crushed before the shore parties could be properly landed. The expedition escaped by camping on the sea ice until it broke up, and Shackleton ordered everyone to the lifeboats in a bid to reach Elephant Island and ultimately the inhabited island of South Georgia. This involved a hazardous ocean voyage of 720 nautical miles, accomplished successfully and regarded as one of the most notable exploits in Antarctic exploration.

The two part photobook features never-seen-before images from Hurley’s archive, and follows the chronology of the expedition and Frith’s original symphony. It’s worth considering for a moment the effort required to get these great images. Hurley was using large wooden view cameras taking glass plates and lugging these around in sub-zero temperatures, up to the top of Endurance’s masts or the tops of mountain peaks on South Georgia. If photography is about persistence, the Australian exemplifies this to perfection. If that weren’t enough, he also shot cine film and made a renowned movie of the expedition.

In all, Hurley shot over 550 plates. When the Endurance was lost and the expedition was camping on the ice prior to taking to the lifeboats, a episode that produced some of the most iconic images, the photographer sat with Shackleton on the ice and they decided between them which plates should be taken and which should be left in order to preserve weight. Apparently the rejected plates were immediately broken to avoid any prevarication. Hurley had rescued many of them by returning to the half submerged wreck, diving bare chested into three feet of icy water to retrieve lead-lined cases of negatives. In all, 150 of the best plates were saved and form the basis for the two books while some 400 were lost or destroyed.

Of course that the photographs took a lot of effort to make is irrelevant, it’s the quality that counts. Fortunately, Hurley was an above average photographer, that is, he had an eye. Stylistically, he hovered between an art photographer and a reportage photographer – albeit at a time when such distinctions were largely meaningless – but the whole body of work is much more than a basic record of the expedition. There are stunning landscapes, moving portraits of the expedition members, and fascinating glimpses of daily life on the pack ice. But the most iconic and best-known images are of the Endurance stuck in the ice and gradually breaking apart, including one extraordinary nocturnal shot of a spectral boat in the Antarctic dark. As a footnote, it is worth noting that the odd image from the First World War is included, just to remind us what was happening thousands of miles away at the time.

In all this is a splendid and complex package. I have been critical of late about overly complicated photobooks, but here it is fully justified. It seems only appropriate to end with the inspirational words of Sir Ernest Shackleton himself, which apply to bookmaking as well as Antarctic exploration: ‘I believe it is in our nature to explore, to reach out into the unknown, the only true failure would be not to explore at all.’ ♦

All images courtesy of Ted Dwane. © Frank Hurley Archive/STOP + FIX

—
Gerry Badger is a photographer, architect and photography critic of more than 40 years. His published books include Collecting Photography (2003) and monographs on John Gossage and Stephen Shore, as well as Phaidon’s 55s on Chris Killip (2001) and Eugene Atget (2001). In 2007 he published The Genius of Photography, the book of the BBC television series of the same name, and in 2010 The Pleasures of Good Photographs, an anthology of essays that was awarded the 2011 Infinity Writers’ Award from the International Center of Photography, New York. He also co-authored The Photobook: A History, Vol I, II and III with Martin Parr.

Arwed Messmer

Zelle/Cell

Book review by Gerry Badger

In 1977, Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel produced their famed book entitled Evidence, in which a collection of anonymous photographs from government and corporate archives – presented without commentary – looked liked an exhibition of images by the latest young art photographers. It demonstrated that, with most photographs, it is usage rather than aesthetics that matters. Sultan and Mandel introduced archive imagery into the aesthetic discourse, and thereby aestheticised it – made it art.

This is the area in which German photographer Arwed Messmer also operates. For a number of years, he has had privileged access to various German state archives, including those of the former DDR. He has produced various projects mining this rich material, including one made with Annett Gröschner, Taking Stock of Power. An Other View of the Berlin Wall. Here, Messmer created panoramas from negatives made of the Berlin Wall in the 1960s, made from the DDR side, and combined this with other archive material, including a series of watch towers that out-Bechered the Bechers. Now he is particularly interested in the left-wing terrorism of the 1970s and 80s as evinced by his latest publication Zelle/Cell, as well as an exhibition this June at Museum Folkwang, Essen, entitled RAF: No Evidence / Kein Beweis.

As with Sultan and Mandel, the aesthetic element is there, but Messmer’s artistic intentions are more complex. He is clearly asking questions about the archive, about all this photographic material held by the state, not necessarily for nefarious purposes, but largely because, like the vast new Internet archive, it is simply there. Nefarious – maybe not, but as Sultan and Mandel say – it is evidence. It is also, to one extent or another – surveillance.

On February 27, 1975, a prominent West German politician, mayoral candidate Peter Lorenz, was kidnapped by one of those revolutionary groups that so haunted that decade, the Movement 2 June group. Next day, the gang sent a Polaroid picture of a shocked and battered looking politician, holding up a sign to prove its legitimacy. The picture, like a similar one of the kidnapped Italian politician, Aldo Moro from the following year, became one of those symbols of the 70s – iconic, to use this overused and now devalued word. But unlike Moro, who was left to rot by his own party and eventually murdered, Lorenz was freed after a deal was made to release the prisoners demanded by the kidnappers. It is this image around which Messmer constructs his narrative. But, while well-known, it is one of many, taken from an extensive archive of 3,000 police negatives, and yet many of the written files and object evidence had been destroyed, so these hitherto unexamined photographs bear the burden of the story – a story which, as Messner says is “non-linear.” He is not attempting to reconstruct the history but play creatively, as it were, with this fascinating, but enigmatic material. His concern, as Ines Linder puts it in the book’s accompanying essay, is ultimately with “the language of the photographs.”

Messmer begins with a suite of photographs depicting the incident which gave the Movement June 2 its name. During a student demonstration on June 2, 1967, against a proposed visit to West Germany by the Shah of Iran, a student named Benno Ohnesorg was shot in the head by a police officer who later was revealed as an East German Stasi agent – in “self defence” of course. The photographs show the aftermath of what was nothing less than murder – but instigated by whom? The images show shocked bystanders, police officers not knowing what to do, a woman tenderly cradling the dying man. Using direct flash, the aesthetic reminds one of Garry Winogrand, but this isn’t art, it’s reality.

This is followed by similar, press-photo style pictures of two of the people released in accordance with the Lorenz kidnappers’ demands, taken to Tegel Airport to be flown to Yemen. And then the fun begins. Firstly, Messmer photographed a model made of the ‘cell’ under a bric-a-brac store in Kreuzberg where Lorenz was detained, followed by a variant of the famous Polaroid. Thereafter, there is an almost bewildering sequence of images – of getaway cars, the location where Lorenz was released, and his basement cell. One particularly intriguing sequence – again out-Bechering the Bechers, shows a series of sheet materials used to soundproof the Lorenz cell. There are images of weapons, mug shots, fingerprints lots of interiors with piled up detritus – terrorists are a squalid lot, as the Daily Mail would say – and one intriguing shot of a broom left at the scene of the kidnapping. One of them, it seems disguised himself as a street cleaner. Squalid, not him.

Messmer deliberately alters the chronology of events, and you need to look at the captions in the rear to make sense of things. But that is not the point. Messmer is questioning photography’s role, both as witness, and ultimately, as art. As Ines Linder again points out: “The super cool style of crime scene, medical, or military photographs communicates with our imaginations in a very idiosyncratic manner when these images are not contextualised in a narrative.”

Even when contextualised into a narrative, the photograph communicates in ways that are not only idiosyncratic but sometimes downright baffling. The more I get into photography – and that journey represents more than four decades of my life – the less I am interested in arty-farty photography, in a word, pictorialism, and the more I am fascinated by how photography intersects with history. That necessarily means documentary photography, but not necessarily ‘documentary’ photography in its strictest definition. It might mean photocollage, or constructed photography, or art utilising photographs. As long as it intersects with history it becomes interesting. For photography in general does not intersect with history in a straightforward manner since all photography eventually becomes history, but again, not necessarily history as we know it. Some photography clearly portrays history directly. However, not as much as we might think so one could say photography excels most at providing history’s footnotes. In the main, the historical connection is oblique, confusing, slippery, inconclusive, often unreliable, but always highly intriguing. As this superbly conceived and executed book amply demonstrates. It shows art clashing with history – with art just winning out on points. ♦

All images courtesy of the artist. © Arwed Messmer, using negatives from the Police Historical Collection Berlin (Lorenz files).

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Gerry Badger is a photographer, architect and photography critic of more than 40 years. His published books include Collecting Photography (2003) and monographs on John Gossage and Stephen Shore, as well as Phaidon’s 55s on Chris Killip (2001) and Eugene Atget (2001). In 2007 he published The Genius of Photography, the book of the BBC television series of the same name, and in 2010 The Pleasures of Good Photographs, an anthology of essays that was awarded the 2011 Infinity Writers’ Award from the International Center of Photography, New York. He also co-authored The Photobook: A History, Vol I, II and III with Martin Parr.