Category: Issue

J Carrier

Elementary Calculus

Special book review by Bridget Coaker

There is nothing more enjoyable than spending time in a bookshop, leafing through books and dipping into the first few pages to discover what lies within and what new adventure will present itself.

I like the structure of the novel; the beginning, middle and end, travelling down the narrative road and becoming friends with the characters and anticipating the plot ending. Along the journey, I create landscapes, portraits and interiors in my mind’s eye – glimpses of what the characters look like and where they live. These images, like dream sequences garnered from my memory are fleeting, a jumble of places and people. It is a collaborative process where the author brings the words, and I provide the visuals. It is a linear process, starting on page one and finishing with the final full stop.

Photobooks work for me in a very different way; I dip into the pages and submerge myself in the possibilities of new ideas and new stories. I like the process of getting to know the photographs, reading them as single images and also as sequences that are part of a greater whole. It is a multi-layered visual experience, which once completed offers as much as the novel does but is an entirely different experience. The photobook responds best to an investment of time and an almost osmotic absorption of the photography and the story the photographs collectively tell. I rarely start on page one and follow the logic of turning page after page until I reach the final full stop. I approach photobooks in stages; picking them up, putting them down, starting in the middle, at the end, flicking through the pages. I go backwards and forwards, slowly discovering more on each visit. As with the novel this is a collaborative process. I provide the words while the photographer provides the imagery.

Book in hand, I began perusing Elementary Calculus by J Carrier by flicking the pages backward and forward, randomly letting a page fall open, hovering over a photograph, looking to see if the images were interesting and worth further investigation.

On first opening Elementary Calculus I saw bright sunlight, lemons, streets. I thought this was a book of random images, conventional snapshots of memory. Nice photographs but familiar and then I spotted a pair of images. It was the conversation between these two photographs across the book’s spine that intrigued me. A photograph of birds perched on telegraph wires sat opposite a photograph of a man’s arm with a tattoo made up of words. I was curious about the dialogue between these two images. Could the wires be the staves of a musical score and the birds, notes on the stave, music for the lyrics imprinted on the man’s arm? Was this the implied connection?

I continued to flick and found another pair of photographs, a mass of wires and phone parts laid out on a cloth facing a photograph of pigeons scattered on the pavement, picking at bread. The visual similarity, in pattern and tone was clear to see, even if the meaning of this relationship still needed eking out.

I was hooked. Here was a photobook that, whatever else it would turn out to be, was led by a visual impulse. More than the show and tell tactics of the documentary genre, this was photography that was using the poetry of visual language to tell its story.

Narrative photography is fixed within the real world. We recognise what it shows us. But simply knowing that a pigeon is a pigeon and a telegraph wire is a telegraph wire, does not help us necessarily understand what lies behind Elementary Calculus. So I opened the book again and started once more to look at what J Carrier had photographed and in particular how the photographs were sequenced.

If we do not read the signs properly we can be misdirected. It is easy for our brain to make assumptions about important parts of a scene. The title of the book and the bleached sunlit photographs came together to suggest that this was America, maybe the Texas border or even California. Actually the exact location was not of much concern to me. I was more interested in working out the story. A number of motifs were running through the pages: stray cats walking along sunlit walls were repeatedly interspersed with phone boxes; some in use, others empty with the handset left dangling. I began to fill in the conversations that the characters were having and imagined who was left on the end of the line and why their telephone call had ended.

I noticed for the first time the book ends. The photographs at the beginning and end of the book were of a repeated stone wall with a white bird nesting in the crevice. I liked the way the birds were positioned so they looked into the body of the book, suggesting everything I needed to know lay between these two photographs.

The cats and the phone boxes proposed a transitory life lived on the streets, without a fixed location. In a world where everyone is connected via mobile phones, the use of phone boxes took on a significance, begging the question – why were people using them and who were they calling?

And so I had begun to build up a picture of a warm place, where people were living a transitory life. Maybe they were refugees or migrants? It seemed clear that there was a sense of disconnect, of somehow not belonging.

But there was one image that jarred. It did not seem to belong to the warm streets of America that I thought I recognised. The photograph was of a young man leaning against a wall, hat on his head. The proximity of his body to the wall suggested a mournful posture, perhaps even crying and suddenly I realised that this was not America but Israel and that this must be the Wailing Wall – a site for Jewish prayer and pilgrimage for centuries. I felt simultaneously stupid and elated. I had cracked the code and could go back into the story and look with fresh eyes. And yes all the clues were there. Where I had casually assumed the phone boxes were American, closer inspection revealed Hebrew script on the keypad. Company skyscrapers, letters on the money notes, graffiti on the wall, details in the wrought iron gates, posters on the bus shelter all revealed their location, probably Jerusalem or maybe Tel Aviv, but certainly Israel.

And so the story of Elementary Calculus took on a political edge. The characters, seemingly not Israeli and not obviously Palestinian did not fit in the location they found themselves. Unlikely to be refugees, they would appear to be migrant workers, living on the edge of the society they found themselves in, calling home to their wives, girlfriends, mothers. Snatched conversations that could only last as long as the money would allow. This Israel is different from the one with which we are so familiar through its representation in the mass media and forms of visual culture. Here we have the story of the migrant worker, scratching about for work, always on the move, looking for ways to exist in a world where they do not belong.

Photobooks offer us a challenging experience and we need to take care and time when we read them. Elementary Calculus is a quiet, understated book. It does not shout its message out to us but it rewards those who take time out getting to know its plot and characters as its visual narrative slowly unfolds and reveals itself. ♦

J Carrier was born in 1974 in Biloxi, Mississippi, USA. He spent most of the past decade living and working in Africa and the Middle East and now currently resides in Brooklyn, New York. Carrier has an MFA in Photography from the Hartford Art School. He was nominated for the 2012 John Gutmann Photography Fellowship and the 2011 Santa Fe Prize for Photography. In 2010 he was a ‘Director’s Choice’ in the CENTER awards, won first place in the Fine Art series, for the NYPH Photo Awards; and received an honourable mention in the Duke Center for Documentary Studies Photo Awards. His commissioned work has been featured in a variety of publications and media outlets including, The NY Times Magazine, TIME, Newsweek, Men’s Journal, National Geographic and CNN.

All images courtesy of MACK and the artist. © J Carrier

Daisuke Yokota

Back Yard

Essay by Peggy Sue Amison

There is a revolution going on in the works of emerging photographer, Daisuke Yokota, a revolution that links the past with the future of Japanese photography and reflects the artist’s desire to capture ideas of how memory is affected by the passage of time. His images appear at first to be the remains of a science fiction film set, illuminated by a silvery light that blasts everything like an atomic explosion to the point of removing all detail and origin. A futuristic vision, yet within its foundation is an ongoing thread continuing a tradition that emerged in the 1960’s – twenty years before the photographer was born.

This new way of seeing began with the emergence of Provoke, published by Takuma Nakahira and Koki Taki in 1968. The artists and publishers of this seminal magazine presented new visual ideas and explored more intimate realities, ripping the medium of Japanese photography from its past, more controlled origins of strict reportage and social documentary. The artists published in Provoke freed image making in Japan, pushing photography into an exciting new territory.

Daisuke Yokota takes an active part in this ongoing visual conversation. His use of experimentation as a vehicle to eliminate information and narrative, continues what Daido Moriyama et al began when they responded to life in post-war Japan with an aesthetic known as ‘are-bure-boke’ (literally ‘grainy, blurry, out-of focus’), which allowed photography to be considered strictly for its material nature and removed any sense of a record of reality. They reached out, as Taki wrote in the Provoke manifesto, “…to grasp fragments of reality far beyond the reach of pre-existing language, presenting materials that actively oppose words and ideas … materials to provoke thought.”

Similarly, Yokota says multiple processing and experimentation are also integral to his practice. “There are no stories in my work. There is only what the viewers find within it for themselves. I am more interested in exploring time and multiple possibilities that exist in reality.”

Yet Yokota also uses multiple layers of re-photographing to obtain happy accidents and thereby assimilate his ideas of how memory is shaped and evolved over time. He explains: “We recollect a single experience from the past again and again, but never in the same way twice. Memories are experienced in relation to the present. As we go through the act of repeatedly recalling our memories, I believe these memories change in relation to what is happening to us now. Although physical experience of time is singular, time at a conscious level can multiply with each recollection of memory and the different experiences of time generated by these actions pass in parallel to a physical time. By recreating those multiplying memories via a series of recollecting actions, I use them as important data that tell me about my current self and my surrounding world.”

The photographs that make up his series Back Yard illustrate this exploration. They are gracefully messy in their appearance. “During the development of my film,” Yokota says, “I stick rubbish to it and experiment with uneven development. I purposely add natural phenomenon to digital data.”

His endless re-photographing from colour to black and white, along with the use of traditional darkroom techniques, such as over processing and solarisation, break down each image to capture the passage of time in a physical way. Although barely recognisable on the one hand, there is a striking feeling of familiarity, which invites openness. “I try to keep away from figuring out the exact place, or person in my images. In this way the viewers can easy to put themselves into them,” he adds.

In terms of presentation, Yokota has utilised zines as a way of disseminating works such as Site and Back Yard; “The difference between zines, photo books and exhibitions lies in how the viewer participates with the work,” he says. “With a book, both the viewer and I must step back and think about photography in an active and intimate way. Publishing also allows the possibility for more viewers to experience the work through the mass production of zines.”

In these self-published zines, he makes his works accessible for a wider audience, but he also uses them to further experiment with his imagery and add another layer through his choice of paper and publishing methods. He has also created publications in dialogue with other artists, as evidenced in Nocturnes, six slim volumes by the photographic collective AM Projects of which Yokota is a member. Again, zines, flyers and photobooks also have a long lineage in Japanese photography dating back to the 1960’s. When the photo market was virtually non-existent in Japan, these outlets were the only means of accessing the medium. Japanese photographers included these methods of mass distribution to their practice out of a sheer necessity to communicate and exchange ideas within their artistic community. Ink, paper, methods of construction etc were all hugely important, making intense study and understanding of the details of publishing paramount to photographers.

The subjects in Yokota’s work balance earthy elements with looming banal architectural shapes and room interiors, sometimes featuring twisted, faceless silhouettes. In this way the artist takes his audience into a realm of surrealist expression, which balances urban materiality against nature’s organic forms, while striving toward a similar notion of ‘pure’ imagery as evinced by Daido Moriyama, Yatuka Takanashi and Taki.

Yokota compares his working methods to those of an electronic musician; he says he employs his own version of static, noise, reverb and multiple recording processes in a visual way to create a wordless ambience. Mimicking sound layers with visual noise and interference and purposefully blurring all traces of the original draws from his cultural past and explores new ground. Ansel Adams had a theory that each negative is comparable to a composer’s score and the print its performance. With Diasuke Yokota’s own brand of back yard magic he stretches this theory and again pulls it from a classical association, to something decidedly closer to punk rock. ♦

Daisuke Yokota was born in Saitama, Japan in 1983. A graduate of the Nippon Photography Institute, he was selected for the New Cosmos of Photography exhibition at the Tokyo Metropolitan Musuem of Photography in 2008. Yokota is included in the group exhibition with the members of AM projects in their first gallery show, All Colours Will Agree in the Dark at Noorderlicht from 6 April – 18 May, 2013.

All images courtesy of the artist. © Daisuke Yokota

Thomas Sauvin

Silvermine

Essay by Gordon Macdonald

Beijing Silvermine, naturally and without artistic pretention, documents the experience of ‘ordinary’ people stepping out from the shadow of The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, as China accelerated towards becoming the world’s second largest economy and its people began to experience all of the consumer pleasures that go along with such wealth. The subjects of the photographs are pictured posing with refrigerators, telephones and TV sets; they are lying on the beach in Speedo trunks and visiting theme parks.

This is a vast and complex project by French archivist/artist Thomas Sauvin, though definitions become tricky and maybe moot here. In order to understand Sauvin’s truly monumental undertaking, it is useful to look at the process through which he has managed to collate and catalogue the discarded snapshots of China’s capital city. Silvermine is the result of more than four years work collecting, digitising and ordering what now amounts to over half a million negatives and transparencies retrieved from a Beijing recycling dump. The material has been recovered from the rubbish bags of Beijing citizens in several stages, and while it involves various different people, it is clear that it would no longer exist as photography were it not for Sauvin’s intervention and orchestration. The photography – presumably thrown out because the original owners have moved to digital photography, have died or moreover no longer see the value in keeping negatives – is recovered from the tip by an ‘illegal recycler’ and taken back to a small lock up where the necessary equipment for silver nitrate recovery is sited. It is kept in large rice bags waiting to be submerged in acid baths, which strip out the silver nitrate, leaving the film clear and the images lost. This is where Sauvin intervenes by buying the film at a Renminbi per kilo price. The recycler, one would imagine, has no time to follow an interest in the images, their content or their history. By the look of his dingy workshop and description of his working day, he cannot afford such pursuits – it looks a bleak day-to-day existence, and Sauvin must be an oddity to him, paying to save him the work of extracting the precious commodity that is his livelihood. Sauvin’s idea of the value of the material is, of course, more culturally-based, and he takes them from the ramshackle workshop to the more salubrious surroundings of his studio for initial interrogation on a gigantic light-table.

Sauvin chooses only snapshots and separates out those images that could have had commercial use, before taking them to the small home of his scanning technician, whose job it is to scan the pile of negatives and transparencies. Having completed the scanning, he then delivers them to Sauvin on a hard disc some weeks later. This is where Sauvin’s intervention, and the work of viewing, ordering and cataloguing starts in earnest. It is evidently a task of truly overwhelming proportions considering the sheer scale of the archive and the rigour he brings to it, but one which would be hard to stop short of completion. Indeed, Sauvin has envisioned the end of his pursuits, saying “I’ll stop collecting negatives when there are no more to collect. I get less and less of them every month and it is quite likely to be over soon. Eventually this project will witness the death of analog photography in China.”

Surprisingly, the real shock of Sauvin’s Silvermine is the familiarity, not the exoticism. The poses, leisure activities, clothes, home appliances, relationships, landscape, expressions, vehicles, theme parks or food do not differ all that much from the photographs found in a typical British family album from the 70’s and 80’s. It is sometimes the case that collections and studies such as these can slip unnervingly towards a cut-priced anthropology, where western eyes are cast over foreign cultures, at worst resulting in a bizarre form of neocolonialism. But, thankfully, there is everydayness in this project.

Sauvin also makes the archive accessible to Chinese artists to view, reassess and use with the aim of producing their own interpretations of the material. Notable Chinese artist LeiLei, in collaboration with Sauvin, is one such example. An animation, the images flit unremittingly from one to another, sometimes pointing out the happenstance, which occurs so regularly when this many photographs are collected from one place, or sometimes the oddity within individual photographs. It is all set to the soundtrack of the collected white noise of the city – electric hum, helicopters, road traffic, dripping, screeching, overwhelming sound – which, with the pace and intensity of the images filling your peripheral vision, leaves you spinning. Every so often in the film, titled Recycled, a print of one of the images appears, held at arm’s length by LeiLei, up to the landscape in which it was shot, leaving you in no doubt that you are looking at photographic constructs, and the edited extracts of peoples’ lives. Having watched the film a few times now, I have had to limit myself to one viewing a day for fear that my brain might combust as a result of its greed for the visual information the film is feeding it with – I feel like a compulsive eater at an all you can eat buffet. It is a completely enveloping sensory experience.

This archival project is not without context – comparisons could be made to Evidence by Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel; the epic Pictures from the Street (Bilder von der Straße) by Joachim Schmid, In Almost Every Picture by Eric Kessels (et al) or the magnificent Sputnik by Joan Fontcuberta – but Silvermine seems markedly different and unlike any archival project to have come before. There is a certain generosity to Sauvin’s non-curatorial approach and commitment to collecting and cataloging every image he possibly can. And, though some images necessarily creep to the top of the pile and become emblematic of the archive, Sauvin seems to treat every picture as equally important to the overall project. Silvermine, funded by the London-based Archive of Modern Conflict, seems genuinely to be about saving an important history that is in danger of being consigned to oblivion. If only the discarded images of every city could benefit from this process, but it is certainly well past the point of no return for analogue photography and far too late to start somewhere else. Maybe the next Silvermine will be made up of hard drives recovered from discarded computers, as digital files will surely soon be made redundant by the relentless march of technological change. ♦

Thomas Sauvin is a French photography collector and editor who currently lives in Beijing. Since 2006 he works exclusively as a consultant for the UK-based Archive of Modern Conflict, an independent archive and publisher, for whom he collects Chinese works, from contemporary photography to period publications to anonymous photography. A glimpse into this collection is presented in the photobook, Happy Tonite (2010). Sauvin has exhibited at Dali International Photography Festival, China; Open City Museum, Brixen, Austria; Singapore International Photography Festival, Singapore; and FORMAT International Photography Festival, Derby.

All images courtesy of the artist. © Thomas Sauvin

Mårten Lange

Another Language

Special book review by Debra Klomp Ching

To say that the self-publishing of photo books is a practice that is popular, is quite an understatement – and is a practice that shows no sign of abating. Never mind the mantra “everyone’s a photographer now”, we can justifiably say “everyone’s a publisher now”. The phenomenon has gone mass-market, to the degree that there are organisations, such as Self Publish, Be Happy and the Indie Photobook Library, positively celebrating and encouraging it. We are awash, needing to wade through the flotsam and jetsam of titles, in order to uncover the minority jewel that glistens. That jewel can take the form of a specific book, and on rare occasions, it can also present itself in the form of a self-publisher.

Mårten Lange is a Swedish photographer who founded Farewell Books in Gothenburg, Sweden in 2007. Of the eleven titles published during its three short years – the project ran until 2010 – four were vehicles for the photography of Mårten Lange himself. Later, he published a book with the publishing collective JSBJ, which itself metamorphosed into Études Books.

In October 2012, Lange was published by MACK, the highly-regarded independent publisher that works ‘with artists, writers and curators to realise intellectually challenging projects in book form’. This transition, from publishing a wholly self-directed and self-published photo book, to one that is invested in by a third party of such note, is an important step for Lange. Although, the creative partnership between MACK and Lange can hardly be seen as surprising – the collaborative ‘fit’ seems like a perfect match – it goes some way to endorsing Lange’s self-publishing history and certainly attracts a good level of consideration by consumers and critics alike. It was only in 2009, that Mårten Lange was included in Humble Arts Foundation’s The Collectors Guide To Emerging Art Photography. With all of his previous books now listed as out of print, this new endeavour has great promise.

The book, published by MACK, is Another Language. Described by the publisher as Lange’s “first major publication”, it closely resembles Lange’s previous books, in that it is a collection of photographs that are sparsely presented. Across the 96 pages, are 59 tritone plates of rectangular photographs. The photographs are sequenced so that some appear as single images on a spread, whilst others are presented in pairs. Positioned centrally on the vertical line, but positioned higher up on the horizontal line, the visual design appears formal and restrained. Despite the use of blank pages, the edit does not project an overt rhythm. On the contrary, the edit is quiet and understated, drawing attention to a straightforward scopic relationship between images – the use of shape and positive/negative space is used to good effect. As you turn the pages, the transition from one image to the next is smooth and without any significant drama.

The images themselves continue Lange’s interest with the broad spectrum of nature. The various subjects contained in the photographs are positioned centrally, making for a highly deliberate use of the photographic frame. We see flora and fauna – isolated in the frame and easily studied. In one image a fish swims alone, a fossilised talon sits silently, a puff of smoke hovers upward, the eye of an elephant stares back, a sheep grazes and so they continue. Each subject equally revered. Lange is somehow successful in presenting banality in a most curious way. The highlight in this collection of oddities is the book’s most stunning photograph – that of a whirlpool. It’s an important one for Lange too, as it also appears on the book’s frontispiece, reworked as a blind-stamped image sitting centrally on the highly textured cloth that encases the book. None of the images carry titles. The absence of text is contradicted at the end of the book, with the inclusion of a quote from the nineteenth century Prussian, Alexander von Humboldt. The quote is drawn from Kosmos. Published in 1845, it solicited the idea of using universal laws to unify the sciences of the natural world. The inclusion of this text, potentially points to an attempt by Lange to propose a universality in his photographs – partly suggested through his use of the repetition of photographic tropes.

Universality in anything is a challenging thesis to propose. The title of the book – Another Language – suggests that Lange does not actually suggest this, but instead is suggesting that photography itself is a language, hence the absence of text and his reliance on the image itself to convey meaning. Indeed, the inclusion of the Humboldt quote becomes quite curious. Wherever it is that Lange is taking the reader on his journey of expression, we can acknowledge that photography is visual and the closest expression of language to it, is another form of visual language – that which is written. In this context, one might turn to literary theory to explore the tensions evident in Lange’s book – the tension between specificity and ambiguity.

The Russian philosopher, Mikhail Bakhtin, wrote extensively on the philosophy of language in the early twentieth century. An important element of his writings was the concept of heteroglossia, which referred to qualities of language that are common to all languages. If photography is another language, as Lange suggests, and heteroglossia is universal, then a fixed meaning becomes impossible – because heteroglossia is extralinguistic – it is subject to the influence of context, ideology and perspective.

Mårten Lange’s Another Language is a fascinating and wonderful photo book project. It is full of contradictions, purposefully constructed by its author and publisher, and a challenging collaboration which leaves the reader in a cycle of unresolved questions. The lasting impression is that of being a highly covetable object, so it is good news to learn that a special edition will be published including a small selection of loose prints. It’s unresolved cycle of messages keeps it from being static, returning us to the abyss of the whirlpool. ♦

Mårten Lange was born in 1984 in Mölndal, Sweden. He studied photography at University of Gothenburg in Sweden and the University for the Creative Arts in Farnham, United Kingdom. He has previously self-published four books, including Machina (2007) and Anomalies (2009).

All images courtesy of MACK. © Mårten Lange

Tom Wood

Men and Women

Essay by Francis Hodgson

There is something hard to grasp about the lifetime of powerful photography produced by the Liverpool photographer Tom Wood. His pictures overlap with other things that we know. They overlap with other pictures, for a start. Wood does the ‘peculiarity of the British’ like a Homer Sykes or a David Levenson (recently published by Café Royal Books and The Sunday Times). He can do schoolgirls like a Markéta Luska?ová. He can do men at work like an Ian Beesley or an Ian Macdonald. Nightclubs, of course, he has done for years, and some of the pictures look like Billy Monk or PYMCA.

Wood is a sociologist, ethnographer, local historian, political campaigner, novelist, autobiographer. He has made long studies of the football culture, and hilarious one-liners which you just have to see to get. It gets worse: Wood uses medium format, panoramic, little cameras, big ones. He uses all sorts of lighting arrangements.

Here he is, in the transcribed interview he gave to annotate a file of brilliant pictures of the Cammell Laird shipyard he made in 1996 on a commission for the Documentary Photographic Archive, now deposited at Greater Manchester County Record Office: “I used different types of film for the sake of economy. When I started I tended to use what film I had in stock. So I had some date-expired Konica, but I also had free film from Jessops including Fuji Reala, so I used that. The negative film doesn’t make much difference at this size as long as you expose correctly. The colour balance is being altered all the time due to long exposures and different lighting sources – tungsten or welding or fluorescent. At the same time I would use fill-in flash. This messes up the colour, but that’s O.K.”

If we define a photographer by his technique, we get nowhere much with Wood. But that is OK; a photographer like Wolfgang Tillmans has much of the same elusive refusal to stay in one conveniently marketable box. If we begin to define him by his subject material, we get a little closer: as far as I know, Wood has not done much in the way of would-be Zen black pebbles, or shiny modernist architectural details. I rather doubt he has done many product shots of perfume bottles, either. Even so, it would be a mistake to prejudge the question. Martin Parr (who himself made great work at New Brighton, the garish beach resort at the end of the Wirral, north of Birkenhead, in the very heart of Wood’s hunting grounds) makes a lot of commercial pictures for fashion magazines, and so have people like Nick Waplington. There is no a priori reason why Wood should not do the same, although, again, I do not know that he has. So you cannot easily define Wood by what he does, and you need to be careful defining him by what he has not yet done.

Many years ago, when I worked at The Photographers’ Gallery, we represented Matthew Dalziel (who was not then yet Dalziel + Scullion) and held a particular set of pictures of his called Images for Hugh. They commemorated a friend who had died in an industrial accident. They were close large format views of a workplace, in colour, and there was something about the In Memoriam status they held that demanded the most exceptional care in the scrutiny. The photographer had done his looking harder than normal, and somehow as viewers it was only fair to do the same. I saw lots of people over a period of months look quite casually at those pictures, and then with a double-take, look harder, feeling the seriousness before they knew why. I pretty much consistently find that same experience when looking at Tom Wood.

He is one of those photographers who often publish with not much in the way of explanation. His recent show at The Photographers’ Gallery was strict and austere in the presentation – to the point, I may say, of letting him down a little. Two minutes in his company on the opening night provided me with five or ten little details about pictures which nobody who had not the chance of meeting him could have known. Indeed, Wood is one of the photographers I would like to sit down and listen to at length – I think it is fair to say he has not had the chance properly to put the back story yet. But one can see without knowing the details, if one looks hard enough. The details which matter will somehow spring to the eye. Wood demands that.

He includes, for example, a number of pictures of his family and of those around him in his work with no hint that they are closer than any other sitter. He might use their names in a caption, but since he photographs intensely in a relatively restricted area, he knows the names of a lot of people. He also is quite happy to shelter pictures by other people under his own umbrella without necessarily feeling obliged to use terms like ‘appropriation’ or ‘repurposing’. So he told Sean O’Hagan of The Guardian about his terrific picture of a woman lying collapsed by a road: “That’s not even my photograph. She’s my Auntie, but a friend of hers took the picture. I love it so I put it in there.” He is informal like that, irregular in his photographic habits and hard to pin down.

He is known for taking many hundreds of pictures on each project, and that has done him harm. I have heard him disparaged with remarks along the lines of the ten thousand hours principle (that Malcolm Gladwell discussed in his book Outliers) – that anybody can become good at anything if they put that time into it. My take on it is that I could not care less whether it is the hours or the most instinctive natural talent, but he must be the most remarkable editor, to take only what he wants from that volume and not be bogged down by it. Certainly, by whatever magic it is achieved, he does not often release pictures that are less than interesting. He is varied and non-formulaic, and his curiosity is piqued by different kinds of things in different scenes, but he is unerring.

Here is a picture of a man in a pub. It is suitably blurred, but the man is looking just near the camera, tie beginning to come adrift. His face is pleasant but his eyes are at the extreme edge of their orbits, as he turns towards the camera. The skin tones are too red – or just red enough for the cruddy lighting on licensed premises. A few golden flickers off gaudy joinery in the background provide the kind of twinkle that used to come from candlelight. A flare of light occupies about ninety degrees of a circle below the man’s chest, like a little reminder of what it’s like to look through the bottom of a glass. All in all, it is only a little study of a man in the pub, with bonhomie and potential threat in an easy balance. It is a subtle and fine picture, although like so many of Wood’s you could miss it if you are not concentrating. It is only called Untitled, 2010. Does it make any difference that this man Wood photographed is in fact Graham Smith, one of the subtlest photographers ever to have raised a camera (or a glass!) in a pub, the Hermann Melville of the drinking culture? You would not expect to know that, but it is another layer in the picture when you do.

Wood has been a connoisseur’s photographer. His publisher’s website quotes a nice compliment to him from Lee Friedlander. Chris Killip is known to admire some of what he has done. At long last he is now receiving his first ever UK retrospective at the National Media Museum in Bradford. It is well overdue, and I shall tell you why.

Over many years Tom Wood has deliberately put aside all that makes it too easy to latch onto this or that set of pictures. He has destroyed the familiar, often crude, pegs upon which we hang our approval. So many photographers grub about until they have a formula, and then force all their pictures into the same mould. Not Wood. Forever unsatisfied, never content to make a series when a single picture will do, his curiosity and his intellectual powers always fully engaged, he has roamed around making pictures of the world he lives in. Then he has roamed about in the pictures until he has found the telling details, the arrangements that add up to more than the sum of their parts. He is a brilliant but uncomfortable communicator: he reminds me often of Ian Dury, as it happens. He is brilliant at things like composition and sequencing and lighting and framing; but where most photographers end their pictures with those things, he starts with them. Enjoy those things, and then, if you look hard enough, you can get irony and wit and humanity in spades. But it is the looking that Wood demands.

I think of Tom Wood as quite a Dickensian photographer. His real subject matter is not this or that group or subculture, and the way they carry on. What he is really about is the pressure that morals and ethics and manners find themselves under from circumstance. People are often kind or gentle in Tom Wood’s pictures, even in the meanest-looking of circumstances. It is not a style, and it is not a technique, and it is not even really a subject. It is a mistake to think of what Wood does as reportage or street photography or this or that benighted project. He is just a man who has found the means to say important things to those who take the trouble to care. ♦

Tom Wood was born in 1951 in County Mayo in the west of Ireland. He lived and worked on Merseyside between 1978 and 2003 before he moved to his current home in North Wales. Wood has published numerous books, including Bus Odyssey, People, All Zones Off Peak and Looking for Love. His latest book, Men and Women, will be published by Steidl in 2013. He has had solo and group exhibitions worldwide and his work is represented in the collections of major international museums. Tom Wood: Photographs 1973-2013 is a collaboration between the National Media Museum and The Photographers’ Gallery London.

All images courtesy of the artist. © Tom Wood

Alexandra Catiere

Here, Beyond the Mists

Essay by Natasha Christia

In the photography of Alexandra Catiere there is a subtle light burning, something akin to a frail but persistent memory that cannot be fully restored. Through these pictures, shot mainly in Chalon-sur-Saône, France, we encounter the remains of an agonising perception – unfinished and rapidly consumed. Something intrigues us to return to her work again and again, relentlessly trying to recover now what it felt like before, and yet also strangely as if felt for the first time. Like a speech running after the lights are dimmed, Catiere’s photographs trigger within us a sense of something irremediably lost but still somehow present. An abrupt flash-bolt, they mark a primal moment of photographic genesis, in which everything surges forth from the depths.

Catiere’s photographs carry the audacious transparency of a glance that announces its own partiality. Far from being instantaneous shots capturing merely the mundane aura of a city and its people, they are loaded with a timeless, dignifying gentleness that successfully bridges the space between wonder and understanding. In the image that introduces her only book to date, a truck abandons the scene, rendering as its sole protagonist a slender male figure. Ethereal and almost reduced to a black spot, the man counterbalances the emptiness of the composition while reinforcing, in his staunch immobility, the impression that the meaning infused in the picture – essentially metaphysical at heart – is in fact encountered elsewhere, outside the frame.

By the same token, doors and windows are frequently left half-open in Catiere’s photographs. There is always a way-out drawn by a photogenic light, a vanishing point that marks the path to a spiritual after-world beyond apparitions. In a good many portraits, the subjects appear as if they are on the verge of turning into somebody else. Or moreover their awkward poses suggest the possibility of an inner transformation. In the scenes of natural surroundings, the light mixes with the particles of the atmosphere, diluted amid the falling snowflakes that draw a profile of trees, humans and cityscapes. It is precisely this very moment, when the picture seems completely devoid of content, when its surface becomes an indefinable blank surface, that intrigues Catiere. Paradoxically, this moment of indecisiveness bestows upon us a reminiscence, only to take it away afterwards. It offers us the past as a coherent and plausible whole, but then dissolves it abruptly in the midst of the image, consumes it like a flame, leaving it incomplete, vague, mute.

The famous fog that lies like a blanket over the Saône river couldn’t be a better backdrop for the dreamful but contained imagery of Alexandra Catiere. Here, Beyond the Mists, the title chosen for the work, serves as an apt statement of purpose. Far from being mirrors of the world, her images are sparkles, fugitive apparitions. They are blank reflections of missing idols – of what we long for from the past but are unable to recover in the present; of something that, in its painstaking departure and absence, becomes properly ours. Loss is not the question here, nor is there space for drama or free melancholy. It is rather all about a sort of decaying vital information we carry in our genes and about what we can make of it.

Light burns everything in these pictures. Light as evoked in the darkrooms of the first pioneers, light as the mystic force of the first heliographic experiments and their alchemical processes; glass negatives, plates and contact sheets. Even so, this young artist does not stick to the rules for her prints do not seek perfection. On the contrary, as if by a series of deliberate accidents, they push the limits in terms of contrasts, tonality and nuances, fostering a manner of expression that is distinctly contemporary.

While informed by the subtle and intimate lexicon of black and white imagery, her pictures conjure a space devoid of solid statement. Eschewing creative ties and affinities with her generation, her works go further to integrating the old and the new into an unvarnished map of personal sensibility. Catiere approaches her subjects, but also maintains an honest distance from them. The encounter between the photographer and the world around her is an ephemeral celebration steeped in empathy and honest exchange.

As a result, Catiere recollects, through her imagery, diverse emotions and moods, constantly evoking the circles of life, birth, childhood and ageing. The way she chooses to conclude her book – from Burgundy, France she goes back referencing her hometown Minsk, Belarus – reinforces this feeling of integration to the chain of an ever-changing historical reality. On the last page her book we encounter a tiny image that shows the statue of Nicéphore Niépce at a distance. Lost in the mist, could this represent a last homage to one of the fathers of photography ahead of a future that will be distinct photographically? Or is it, perhaps, the tangible record of a reminiscence diluting in the passage of time?

By turns gentle and haunting, Catiere’s photography raises awareness of the fact that memories do decay and that they lose their original shape and coherence. All that is left is to look at and discover the beauty beyond the mists – a beauty, proper to the living, pure and immaculate at heart, that will stand over the patina of time. ♦

Born in 1978 in Minsk, Belarus, Alexandra Cartiere initially began experimenting with photography at Minsk State Linguistic university. As encouraged by her mentor Youi Kuper, Cartiere moved to New York in 2003 to complete a certificate programme at the International Centre of Photography. She then worked as an assistant to internationally renowned photographer Irving Penn.

In 2005, Cartiere was listed as one of the twenty most promising emerging photographers in New York, and as a result participated in the Art & Commerce Festival, a travelling exhibition that began its tour in D.U.M.B.O, NYC. Since then, Cartiere has been named as an emerging star of International Photography in American Photo magazine, 2005, and exhibited at photography festivals in France, Japan, Italy and Spain. In 2006 she received a Silver Camera award from the Moscow House of Photography.

In 2009, Pobeda Gallery, Moscow, presented the work of Cartiere at Paris Photo and went on to showcase her new series at VOLTA6 in Basel in 2010. Cartiere was the artist chosen for the first BMW residency, a liaison established between BMW Art & Culture and the Museum Nicéphore Niépce in France. The work produced here, with the support of the museum, alongside a publication published by Trocadéro Editions, was featured most recently at Les Rencontres d’Arles 2012. In addition to her art practice, Cartiere works as a fashion photographer, and has had her photography featured in Dazed & Confused, Liberty Magazine, The New Yorker and T Magazine (The New York Times).

All images courtesy of the artist. © Alexandra Catiere

Paul Graham

The Present

Special book review by Gerry Badger

How do you follow a shimmer of possibility, rightly voted the best photobook of the last twenty-five years at Paris Photo 2011. The truth is, you cannot, but Paul Graham is obliged to, or give up making books. It is unfair to bring the question up, but life is unfair. However, I shall try not to compare The Present with shimmer. I shall try to review the new book as if the last one never happened, although the odd reference might be necessary, particularly as they form part of Graham’s American book ‘trilogy.’

What have you got with The Present, a much anticipated volume? We have an exploration of certain questions that have occupied Paul Graham before, both photography’s relationship with time, that is, the ‘present’, and the nature of photographic narrative, or in this case, with non-narrative, as Graham would have it.

The premise behind The Present is nominally simple enough. The book consists of pairs, sometimes trios of pictures taken on the streets of New York, the images in each group taken more or less simultaneously, one a few seconds after another. None of the photographs could be described as ‘decisive moments’ in the street photography sense, where every element of the image is in perfect synchronisation, thereby creating a formal, if not an actual drama. Of course, his pictures are moments, and certainly decisive because the photographer has captured them, and more importantly selected them, but in imagistic terms Graham is aiming at a kind of divine ordinariness.

And in so doing, he is implicitly critiquing the decisive moment mode. Not for him the fake theatricality of the perfect street shot, which, as Lincoln Kirstein (back in 1938) believed “sensationalises movement, distorts gesture, and caricatures emotion.”

The Present is not about how traditional street photography freezes life and creates drama where in essence there is none, but is about the experience of the street, in particular how the process of seeing and comprehending things on the street can be represented more faithfully in photographs.

For example, take the book’s opening diptych. We are about to cross Delancy Street, in downtown Manhattan. We cannot see the other side of the street because a large truck delivering Heineken beer has paused, straddling the pedestrian crossing and obscuring the view. A moment later, the truck has cleared, but smaller vehicles have taken its place. The crossing is still physically blocked, but the view uptown to a distant Empire State Building has been opened up.

That is the picture’s substance – a view uptown is blocked and then cleared. Actually this is probably the most ‘dramatic’ image pair in the book. Most feature one or two figures who come into focus or disappear in the next picture, to be replaced by another – or not as the case may be. The groups are taken at the same location, but each time the viewpoint shifts subtly, as if we are walking along, and the various figures move in and out of our notice, just as they do as we encounter them in actuality.

But why not make a short movie sequence to recreate this kind of city experience? Asked this by Liz Jobey in The Financial Times, Graham replied that “a lot of film, I find, is neutered by the tyranny of narrative”, the necessity to have ‘a storyline.’

Here, Graham is perhaps being a little disingenuous. I know what he means, but if you put two photographs together, you inevitably create, or at least hint at a narrative. I have written above that we were about to cross Delancy Street in Graham’s diptych. We weren’t. There is nothing, beyond the hint of the pedestrian crossing, to suggest that. I have projected my own narrative on to the two pictures.

A photographer cannot stop that, nor should he. But what Paul Graham is exploring here, is a fragmentary, illusory, highly elliptical kind of narrative, almost a non-narrative. He always has. His photobooks, from New Europe onwards, could be said to be about the poetics of narrative rather than narrative itself. He certainly is no straightforward ‘story-teller.’

The overwhelming intent in The Present is to describe experience and its photographic description in a fresh way – undramatic, but true to how we comprehend the street. I am actually standing at a London bus-stop as I write this. People are walking past me. I look up briefly from my notebook and I catch a glimpse of them, or I look down again and they pass by in a blur of peripheral vision. Graham has caught that feeling. It might not be spectacular, or even pretty, but it is true.

However, I suspect that in a gallery, it is a different matter. In an interview posted on his website, Graham talked about the nature of photography versus photographic ‘art.’ And, whilst not denying the “big bang for your bucks” impact of the large single picture – the Gursky syndrome – he pleaded for the more modest art of Robert Adams, the sequence, and the photobook.

But Graham has done both – the book and the wall, so to speak. And this, I feel, is the real difference between shimmer and The Present. I have seen shimmer in both its manifestations, and while those sequences work on a wall, for me shimmer is first and foremost a bookwork. I did not see The Present exhibition, but my New York spies tell me that the prints were large and spectacular, confirming what I suspected from the book. With large printed diptychs, one would have a better chance to get ‘inside’ these pictures and ‘inhabit’ their spaces, thereby obtaining a fuller sense of the visual and psychological experiences they are conveying.

That conjuring up of lived experience is what the best photography aspires to do, to be about both how we exist in the world and about picture making. The second is as important as the first. When asked once why he took photographs, Garry Winogrand replied, “to get my rocks off.” Paul Graham tries to do this in every project he tackles, the ratio of the first impulse to the second differing each time.

Ok – to come back to being unfair. The Present might not be another shimmer of possibility, but it is still better than at least 95% of the photobooks published this year.♦

Paul Graham, born in 1956, was among the first photographers to unite contemporary colour photography with the documentary genre in the 1980’s. His early works, including A1 – The Great North Road, Beyond Caring, and Troubled Land were pivotal in reinvigorating and expanding this area of photographic practice, by both broadening it’s visual language, and questioning how such photography might operate.

In 2002 Graham completed a shimmer of possibility, which went on to be voted the best photobook of the last 25 years at Paris Photo 2011, and is the second instalment of Graham’s American trilogy which also includes American Night and The Present.

Graham’s work has been published, exhibited and collected internationally and he has received numerous awards including the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize in 2009 and the Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography in 2012. He is represented by Pace MacGill (USA), Anthony Reynolds Gallery (UK), Les Filles du Calvaire (France), Carlier | Gebauer (Germany) and La Fábrica Galería (Spain). Graham lives and works in New York City.

All images courtesy of MACK. © Paul Graham

Esther Teichmann

Drinking Air, and Mythologies

Interview by Brad Feuerhelm

Brad Feuerhelm: Could you explain to us your process as it revolves around the ephemeral additions to the work. Do you reference images from eighteenth and nineteenth century French schools of paining? I see a beautiful symmetry between you, Gustave Courbet and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. Yet, I also have a feeling of loss when I turn from your work. Is this a projected issue of mine, or does the fictional/non-representative slough of images best sum up these aspects of the viewer’s projection? Are you my remote viewer when you make these images?

Esther Teichmann: Usually I do not refer directly to reference material and I have not really worked directly from specific works. In the recent artist book I worked on, Drinking Air, I included material that I am influenced by, pairing images afterwards and playing with juxtapositions.

All my work is set within a fictional space, which is closer to how I see the world with closed eyes. Whether within the studio, in sets or in bedrooms, or even jungles – all the spaces have the magical feeling of the tents children build, light filtering through coloured blankets transforming reality. The spaces inhabited within the films and images are womb-like liquid spaces of night, moving from beds to swamps and caves, from the mother to the lover in search of a primordial return. In some way, all the images are more about myself than the subjects depicted – they are always bodies I desire, bodies close to me, whether family, lovers or friends. The lover and the artist turn their beloved, their subject, into an object, and within this shift a kind of violence occurs, complicating this meeting further, drawing the other, now object, into an auto-erotic, fetishistic relationship. The condition of artist and lover is one of projection, of idealised and imaginary, narcissistic image; this representation is now one’s ‘truth’, the imagined and real no longer separable.

I am drawn to works, which explore human relationships and look at desire and loss as bound to one another. I am fascinated by what we can never know about the bodies and subjects we desire, about the mother and lovers’ lives before we knew them, and the people they are when not with us – it is within this context that I am interested in the fantasy of the other. Throughout my practice there is the slippage and confusion between loving an image, a fantasy in place of it’s subject. It is the violence, the shame and the necessity of momentarily putting the work, the image, before the person, that haunts me repeatedly. For an instance I love and need the image so much more than this other standing before me – it is their image I am grasped by, their image I am transfixed and engulfed by as they themselves recede, becoming invisible. This very gentle undoing of the other, of transforming them into image and object, is a demand for them to give themselves up to me and to the image.

BF: Can you elaborate whether your interest in photography is specific to the medium? And why? I know you also make video, which in some way, I believe relates directly to the still image in your work. The film is very still, and has these lucid and dark moments in twilight or dusk culled from the edge of sleep or the liminal spaces between. The videos certainly have the sense of static from a still, yet underneath is this continual pulse. It is a quiet pulse, but it lives differently. Can you explain the shift to film works? It suggests a certain sort of narrative development perhaps more obtuse in the still works from Drinking Air.

ET: My relationship to the photographic image, whether still or moving, is less connected to the idea of delivering transparency or of a copy, rather, the camera and image function here as metaphors for subjectivity, memory and desire. The real is transformed from one thing into another in a magical totemistic process, fracturing any claims of the photograph as evidence. Momentarily photography delivers the perhaps universal and timeless desire to become one with another, sought within the lovers’ embrace. I fall into the image, into the projected, miniature crystalline glow of the body I will lose.

The apparatus makes this possible, makes loving pictures and picturing love a vertiginous extended moment of absolute proximity and distance at once. Image has replaced the actual loved body, flesh fallen away in place of this more exhilarating fiction. Photography here is an apparatus of fan­tasy driven by desire; the desire of the artist, the subject and the viewer. Within this story (within the film) and these images of love, the work of art remains within a perpetual process of becoming, the bodies of desire never quite imaged or captured, forever eluding the present, always already lost.

In my sketchbooks I have always written fictional texts alongside the image making, and drew on top of and extensions of the photographs to plan further set constructions and new images, then realized this was as much the work as the ‘final image’, so began including reference material, collages, etchings and painting into photographs and film pieces with voice-over narratives in my process. This crossover between the photographic and other media is something I have always worked with and perhaps is a reflection of the works I am drawn to and look at within my research.

BF: A sense of femininity also pervades the work. Would it be possible to draw a line between the themes of ageing, mothers, and environment? The matriachical figures seem to be the most comforting, the least ominous, the least directed of your sitters. Is this interpretation of clarity within the mother figure something you intended on?

ET: The maternal body as lover, as home and origin echoes throughout the work, at times almost invisibly, yet is always there. The mother’s and lover’s bodies evoke the illusion, that to survive without the existence of the other would be an impossibility. Both bodies remind us precisely of our own separateness; exactly at the point of contact with the other, we become most acutely aware of our own skin, our own boundaries. These ideas of an impossible return, of grief and a sense of inherited homesickness, return us to the womb, to the original home of mother and beyond. This image of otherness hails the maternal as an image of escape, a place to travel to: backwards and towards.

BF: Speaking of origins and the idea of all things returnal, could you give us some insight into your own family and beginnings?

ET: I grew up in Weingarten, a village in southern Germany in the Rhine valley near the French border. My mother is American, my father German – they still live in the same house we were born and grew up in. Both were academics although not within the arts (literature and engineering), so our house is filled with books and we didn’t have a TV (quite tragic for a child when everyone else does). Reading was one of my escapes from the world, as was cinema which I went to often from an early age with family or friends, (as well as swimming, saunas, spending days and evenings at the lake with my best friend floating on lilos and talking for hours, dancing, driving through the night with my high school lover).

Our house is a big renovated farmhouse in southern Germany with lots of open space and a barn and workshop with endless material to work with. My mother loves restoring furniture and saves everything, so all sorts of broken things were rescued and dragged into the house, making for great props for building structures. I used to make things from the remnants on the floor in my father’s workshop. I still love looking through the cloth trunks and cellar to find props for shoots. You can endlessly rediscover forgotten things. My sisters and I are really close and we always slept in one bed in my little sister’s room (even though we each had our own room). They now have children of their own and are incredibly open and generous with making me a part of their experiences of motherhood, which has been an incredible part of the last few years, an intensity of love which is so unexpected and overwhelming. The physical relationship to them and to my mother, and the slippage between being mother, lover and sister is present within all my work. I go back to my hometown regularly and make part of my work there, using the swamp and cave landscape as a backdrop to stage narratives within.♦

Esther Teichmann was born in Germany in 1980. She was listed in Art Review’s top 25 artists in 2005, the same year that she received a MA in Fine Art from the Royal College of Art where she later completed a PhD project. She currently lives and works in London as a senior lecturer at the London College of Communication/University of the Arts London.

Teichmann’s work has been exhibited and published both within the UK and internationally. She has had group exhibitions in London, Los Angeles, Berlin, Mannheim and Modena, as well as solo shows in the UK, Australia, Germany and Switzerland. Her photographs have appeared in ArtReview, Bedeutung, Dazed & Confused, The Guardian, Wallpaper*, Time Out, Source, O32C amongst many others. Her work has also been featured in Francesca Gavin’s book, 100 New Artists, published in English by Laurence King and in Germna by Prestl Verlag and she has just published her first monograph, a limited edition book titled Drinking Air.

All images courtesy of the artist. © Esther Teichmann

Regine Petersen

Stars Fell on Alabama

Essay by Lucy Davies

Stars Fell on Alabama is the first chapter in Regine Petersen’s series on meteorites, titled Find a Falling Star. It is a configuration of archive press cuttings, eye witness reports, interview transcripts, genealogy and found images, fleshed out with quiet, contemplative photographs taken in the field.

She began the project in 2009, having chanced on the story of the Hodges meteorite. What began as an investigation into a single stone, though, has branched into a lightning rod touching memory, history, magic and mortality; human relationships and religion; race, slavery and colonialism. It also considers the practice of storytelling itself – whether an author/photographer can tell a story without casting their own shadow over its content.

Meteorites are pieces of asteroid, leftovers from the formation of the solar system 4.5 billion years ago. They are highly prized by scientists, who find in their solid, iron and stone mass clues to the infant universe. Of the several thousand that make the fiery plunge to earth each year, most are lost in the sea. Others become cosmic dust and disperse, but each year a great number make contact with the ground. Most fall without consequence. Most that is, not all.

On 30 September 1954, an eight pound meteorite fell on a house in Sylacauga, Alabama. It crashed through the roof, bounced off a console radio and hit 31 year old Ann Elizabeth Hodges on the hip while she was napping on her sofa. A photograph from the time included in Petersen’s anthology shows the woman with two policemen. Her brow is furrowed, her hands nervous, and no wonder. As well as extensive bruising, the incident brought a Special Forces investigation to her door, a flurry of media attention, a bidding war, a lawsuit, divorce, betrayal and a breakdown. This is the event on which Petersen’s project pivots, although as we shall see, its remit is much wider.

The rock, still boasting the tar it picked up en route through the roof, now resides in the Alabama Museum of Natural History, where Petersen travelled as part of her research. The curator removed it from the glass case. “He said ‘you can touch it, you can take it in your hands’ and I knew he was looking at me and I thought, I have to feel something now, I have to connect to the history of things, and it was just impossible. Later though, when I photographed it, it was quite different,” Petersen explains.

Petersen has compiled eyewitness accounts from the time, detailing bright flashes and fireballs smoke, television interference and bicycle accidents. In Phoenix City a woman thought it was a flying saucer: she “saw a man get out of it.” The disparity that exists between these reports is something that came to fascinate her. “People misremember. It all starts with an idealised story that sounds a little bit like a fairy-tale and then you go below the surface and it gets more and more complicated.”

She also includes the transcript of an interview with Ann Elizabeth’s husband, conducted in 2005. Eugene Hulitt Hodges was out when the rock hit his white-frame house, and returned to find some 200 reporters on the scene. He spent months fighting his landlady in court after she sued for possession. Collectors lost interest, so he used it as a doorstop for a while, then Ann Elizabeth donated it to the museum, against his wishes. They divorced a few years later, both citing the meteorite as primary cause.

In the transcript, Eugene is questioned about the events. The interlocutor, ‘Bill’, is visibly massaging his subject’s answers, disagreeing with him: “The way I remember you telling me is…Here’s what I remember…Here’s what I know and you tell me…”

‘Bill’, though, had a motive. He wanted to make a film, but the catchy plot he wanted wasn’t what Eugene remembered. “I had the feeling he wanted to direct the events,” says Petersen. “But I’m not critical. I’m in the same position: I want to make a story, to find out what happened, but I learned it’s absolutely impossible. People forget a lot and they idealise a lot.”

To compensate, Petersen decided she needed to find truths of her own first hand, with her camera. She photographed the muddy earth of the impact site. She rented a car and drove to Talladega forest, the local junkyard, defunct marble quarries. Sylacauga is known as ‘Marble City’ and huge chunks lie everywhere in the dust. “I liked the idea of the two coming together; the thing from space and the marble from the earth,” she says.

Strange things began to happen. On the day she visited the cemetery to find Eugene’s grave (he had died two weeks before she came to Alabama) men were assembling his gravestone. Ghostly patterns appeared in the depths of the forest. When she visited an old slave plantation a dog with one blue eye and one brown came out of nowhere and sat in front of her. “The photographs I took are like apparitions. It felt like everything just came towards me of its own accord.”

The day following the Hodges incident, a 60 year old farm hand named Julius McKinney discovered a second fragment of the meteorite in the middle of a dirt road. His mule shied away from it, and in the dark he thought it was a snake and left it alone. It wasn’t until he heard about Ann Elizabeth Hodges that he retrieved it, but because he was black, and this was Alabama, and the Civil Rights Act was still a decade away, he hid the rock under his bed, frightened he wouldn’t be allowed to keep it.

Several months later he told his postman, the only ‘official’ person he knew. He arranged for McKinney to meet a geologist, who in turn helped arrange a sale to the Smithsonian. The money furnished McKinney with enough to buy a farm and a car outright.

Petersen includes cuttings from the Ironwood Daily Globe, and Avondale Sun, the last including a photograph of the McKinney family, with the “black-colored pearl”. She also includes a photograph of the original negative, retouched crudely by the newspaper with white paint to cover the extreme poverty the McKinney’s lived in. In 1954 Alabama, people liked their reality watered down.

Also included are accounts from an 1833 fall large enough to be visible all over America, including Alabama. “I like these layers of history,” says Petersen. Prophet Joseph Smith recalls “the long trains of light… like serpents writhing…it seemed as if the artillery and fireworks of eternity were set in motion to enchant and entertain the Saints, and terrify and awe the sinners of the earth.” A slave recalls her “tellin’ some of the slaves who their mothers and fathers was, and who they’d been sold to and where…they thought it was Judgement Day.”

It is the way in which Petersen’s work swings gently between religion, science and superstition that provides the golden thread binding it together. Her own magical thinking for example, or Julius McKinney believing “the Lord gave [the meteorite] to me” and a postcard sent to Ann Elizabeth Hodges from a church in Bellevue, Kentucky pleading for the rock. Inserted between Petersen’s photographs of anthills and cotton plants and discarded snapshots in the dirt are scientific images of planetary bodies far away in the night sky, as she switches ably back and forth between microcosm and macrocosm. The fragility of human life in the face of the cosmos lurches into view.

Next, Petersen will travel to Calcutta, where a collection of meteorites has been kept hidden for years after locals tired of seeing their space loot packed off to the Natural History Museum during the years of the Raj. She has already been to a town in Westphalia, Germany where three children witnessed a fall in the 1950s.

Petersen has no idea how far the project will take her. One thing is certain, she has rich pickings ahead. It’s impossible not to be fascinated by these stories, which contain as much rich detail about human fallibility as the rocks contain about the beginning of the universe. “I don’t think my friends feel the same,” says Petersen. After all these years, they say ‘Ah, the meteorites again.’”♦

Born in 1976, Hamburg, Regine Petersen received a Diploma in Communication Design & Photography at the University of Applied Sciences Hamburg in 2006, and went on to graduate from the MA Photography course at the Royal College of Art in 2009. Petersen has had her work exhibited internationally including at the House of Photography, Hamburg; Museum Folkwang, Essen; James Hyman Gallery, London; and Aperture Gallery, New York.

Her most recent and ongoing project Find a Falling Star, has been nominated for the National Media Museum First Book Award this year. It was exhibited in 2011 at the Lunar Planetary Lab in Arizona, complimenting the Southwest Meteorite Collection; at Galerie Jo van de Loo, Munich; and most recently at the B2 Institute, Oracle, USA with Geoff Notkin.

Petersen’s work has been featured in publications such as Photographies, Material and Camera Austria, and she one the National Media Museum Bursary. She was a finalist of the Saatchi New Sensations Prize 2009, and has most recently received funding from the Arts Council Hamburg, as well as been shortlisted for The Discovery Award as part as Les Rencontres d’Arles 2012.

All images courtesy of the artist. © Regine Petersen

Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin

Stirring Around in a Discordant Cabinet of Curiosities

(Inte)review by Anouk Kruithof

Anouk Kruithof: On a high wooden table something small and cute attracted me and drove me towards it. It was a little book wrapped in semi-transparent pink paper, inviting to be unpacked. The high table was part of the furniture at TEMPORARY OFFICE in Arles, France, which was a gathering space organised by Self Publish, Be Happy, The British Journal of Photography Journal and Hard Copy. This temporary office functioned as a venue for presenting new publications and organising lectures around photobook-making and publishing. I started unwrapping and what appeared was a small mint-green cardboard booklet bound with black tape with an actual polaroid placed on the cover.

Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin: This mint-green colour has followed us around. It’s a particularly South African colour. Many of the homes in the countryside were painted partly in this colour. It’s also the colour of prisons and psychiatric hospitals. Both places we’ve spent time in for professional and non-professional reasons.

AK: The Polaroid contained an image of two hands making some gesture. With both hands I was holding the book, touching it, turning it around. It felt like an object; the physicality became stronger by taking out the Polaroid, which was a queer experience. My hands mingled with the two hands on the image. It was almost like making contact with a book in a human way. Wonderful. Underneath the Polaroid you find a hidden phrase of Fernando Pessoa “If the heart could think it would stop beating?”

AB & OC: This is something like when you have those tiny moments of lucidity and everything feels like a foolish and pointless charade. Those moments freeze you up in horror. Luckily they pass and you’re able to carry on.

AK: The nicely printed and perfectly bounded little Polaroid book made in collaboration with Bruno Ceschel is the first edition of the SPBH bookclub, which offers a series of three photobooks per year, made exclusively for its members. Each volume contains a series of never-seen-before photographs. In this case, excluding the Polaroid on the cover there are 59 of those hidden treasures. I thought about Polaroids naturally often being untitled. Can you describe them in one word?

AB & OC:

1. Whiteness
2. Rose
3. Bambi
4. Aunty Ethny
5. Dead
6. Drawing
7. Child
8. Army studio
9. Mother
10. Jewish transvestite
11. Image of a nation

AK: Nelson Mandela laughing. Nelson Mandela’s image is always very powerful. In this image you observe the lack of proper construction in glaring contrast with the laughter, which makes it so excitatory, for that I need more than one word please….

AB & OC: Mandela’s wax limbs were being cleaned when we came into the Museum to Apartheid, which is a scrappy little place in the corner of the largest casino in South Africa. The image of Mandela is sacred property, and also closely controlled by the country’s copyright laws. So this image really disturbed South Africans, perhaps because it alludes to the faltering mechanics that have emerged in post-apartheid society. Mandela’s legacy is not entirely secure in a country reeling from waves of violent xenophobia and electrical outages. In the UK the Observer Magazine were planning to run it on their cover, but it was pulled at the last minute. Perhaps it just felt too transgressive.

12. A meter
13. Lights
14. Flowers
15. Immigrants
16. Bones
17. Her bones
18. Singer
19. Gabriel Orozco’s head
20. First Aid
21. White dog
22. Blue bomb
23. Yellow bomb

AK: The spread with Polaroid number 22 and 23 is extremely alarming because of the shuffle in seductive aesthetics and Thespian content. I set my eyes on two sculptural bread-houses. I am thinking of rocks, bunkers, German-healthy-but-too-heavy-to-carry-bread. While I am aware it’s a suicide bomb from the Chicago series.

AB & OC: We were feeling like counter insurgents in a wasp’s nest.

24. Bad idea
25. Another bad idea
26. Ceiling
27. A moral dilemma
28. An actor
29. Women
30. Boy
31. Painter
32. Still life
33. Prisoner
34. Girl
35. Dark girl
36. Heroin
37. Heroin
38. Vertigo
39. No. 10
40. Anthropology
41. Claustrophobia
42. Fig
43. Guardians against evil
44. Jaguar
45. Inventor of mobile phones
46. Cul de Sac
47. Lilies
48. Lights
49. A pact with the devil
50. Cul de sac
51. Kevin
52. Man
53. Portrait
54. Reproductive organs
55. Home
56. Face
57. Mask
58. Neck
59. Prison studio

AK: As well as the images inside, there’s also the actual unique Polaroid on the cover. The edition is 250, which means in the case of this book there are 250 different Polaroid’s of ‘situations’ with those two hands. Within the context of your work I immediately started thinking about what these gestures of the hands would mean? Maybe there is a secret message behind them in some sort of sign language which would only reveal itself, when you place all 250 books next to each other in a long line through the picturesque streets of Arles? It’ll stay as a shiver of possibilities, because the distribution of the publication by the bookclub scatters the answer behind the secret ‘hands’ Polaroid collection in the universe of the different owners i.e bookclub members.

AB & OC: Together all the books would make a zoo or impossible creatures. Something like a Borgesian nod.

AK: The idea of Bruno Ceschel, founder of SPBH, is that the books flowing out of its book club must be very intimate, experimental and off-beat. Something like a little secret. I know you both agreed on this idea and therefore this book is prosperous. To me this is a memoire of loose fragments of your close collaboration, the travels you made, the interaction with the encounters you had. It’s lovely and, at the same time, an obscure cabinet of curiosities. Because of it’s mystery it makes your brain expand and tickles your emotions. But on the other hand, it is also just another book with images in it, which is contradictory with the project-based conceptual works from recent years. It feels less anonymous, less objective. Even self-portraits and your own body parts play a role in this book…

AB & OC: It’s true that this is our least conceptual book. And we also allow some of our personal experience in – there is a Polaroid of Adam’s mother included. And we appear too. In the past we have resisted this. In part because there’s two of us and we’ve prized the anonymity. There is never any sense of who took which picture, and it’s never mattered much to us. That’s still the case. But with the Polaroids it was different because they contain traces of us; we used each other to test lighting and trial ideas. So this part couldn’t be surgically removed. The green portraits were taken in a hotel room in Madrid after smoking a gram of heroine.

AK: If you consider writing an (Inte)review as akin to preparing a dish, here are three ingredients: Book+Polaroid+SPBH. I just need some assistance with stirring.

BOOK?

AB & OC: For a long time, the book was the goal. In our minds images lived on pages.

POLAROID?

AB & OC: For over ten years the Polaroid functioned in exactly this way for us: As an exchange, a physical exchange, we quite literally left a trail of Polaroids behind us wherever we went (actually not always because we’d often get attached to them). But the function of the Polaroid was more than this, more than a gift. It offered the possibility of Feedback – a phrase developed by Jean Rouch, the French ethnographer and film-maker. Rouch made his ethnographic films in collaboration with his subjects. He refused to uphold the traditional hierarchy of power between the observer and the observed. Once he had produced a first edit of a film, it would be screened on location and comments would be incorporated into subsequent edits. It was not a token gesture towards collaboration. His films evolved out of this process of feedback and discussion. Likewise we have used Polaroids in this way, to break down the one-way flow of power between us and our subjects. But there is a flip side to the story, because the Polaroid also robs us of something precious, which is blindness and the possibility of accident. In May we visited a remote part of the rainforest in Gabon, central Africa, in order to observe a pygmy village perform a traditional ‘eboga’ initiation. Perform is probably the wrong word, because despite the use of masks and costumes, these initiations bear little relation to the notion of theatre. We didn’t have Polaroid, or even a digital camera, and therefore couldn’t share our pictures at the time. And this made the whole process much more opaque. There was no hope for feedback. But that blindness was also refreshing. The process and the results are somehow more threatening and more mysterious.

SPBH?

AB & OC: If anything the self publishing phenomenon suffers from an acute case of nostalgia; many of these projects could quite easily be websites, or something else that we haven’t discovered yet instead. Their bookness feels arbitrary.

AK: I have some difficulties with the side effects of the Polaroid. Let’s call it ‘romantic blemish’, because it’s too easy and too beautiful. I think you do too.

AB & OC: Polaroids do produce their own category of errors and it’s certainly possible to fetishise this, which is less interesting.

AK: But let’s end this interview with the urge of this book and dank je wel for your collaboration.

AB & OC: This book is a simple goodbye to a material, a process, a smell we used to live with every day and no longer have. It’s a small selection of a much larger archive of our Polaroids, many of which were made as tests rather than finished images. This archive of unfinished images is now complete, because we no longer use this technology. There is an emphasis right now on the photograph as object – and Polaroids – being Things – resonate. But that’s not where we are coming from exactly with this book. It also co-incides with our interest in ‘process’, which is in partly the theme of our next show. The unfinished, damaged, poorly exposed, poorly composed poorer sister to the final product just feels a hundred percent more engaging; this unfinished quality gets so much closer to an authentic experience, and the messiness of our ideas.♦

Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin are South-African born, London-based artists who together produce photographic work that explores the documentary and ethnographic traditions of photography. They regularly teach workshops and give master classes, as well as lecturing on the MA in Documentary Photography at LCC in London.They are the recipients of numerous awards, including the Vic Odden Award from the Royal Photographic Society and continue to works for a number of magazines including The Guardian Weekend and The Telegraph Magazine.

Broomberg and Chanarin have produced nine monographs to date, their most recent being War Primer 2 (2011), published by MACK Books. The pair have exhibited within numerous group shows, including at Saatchi Gallery, London; FOAM, Amsterdam; and at the Les Rencontres d’Arles, France. They have also had solo exhibitions at Paradise Row, Dusseldorf and London (2012, 2011); Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg (2011); and at Photomonth, Krakow (2007). A forthcoming exhibition of their work, ‘To photograph the details of a dark horse in low light’ will be on display at Paradise Row, London from 12 September to 25 October, 2012.

Their work is represented in major public and private collections internationally, including at The National Portrait Gallery, London; Victoria & Albert Museum, London, International Center of Photography, New York, Musee de l’Elysee, Switzerland, the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam and Saatchi Gallery, London. Between them, they also sit on the Board of Trustees at Photoworks and The Photographers’ Gallery, London.

All images courtesy of Self Publish, Be Happy. © Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin