1000 Words archive

15 Years, 15 Picks

Selected by Lucy Soutter

Marking 15 years of 1000 Words, Lucy Soutter takes us on a journey through our archive, offering a selection of features based on her own affinities across the magazine’s history. Capturing the richness of an archive and its ability to generate multiple routes through the material contained within, Soutter’s eclectic picks, as she writes, ‘celebrate the sweep of 1000 Words in embracing a range of 21st century photographic practices.’


Lucy Soutter | Archive highlights | 26 Sept 2024 | In association with MPB

I once spent a week time travelling to the 1960s. I was half-way through a PhD on photography in first-generation Conceptual Art when my supervisor sent me to the library to immerse myself in period art magazines – including Artforum for the avant-garde side of things, and Art in America for a mainstream view. She told me not to worry about reading every article (though I made some useful discoveries) but to skim every single page in chronological order, to immerse myself in the general culture of the time through the pictures, letters pages, ads, layout, etc. My week-long flashback to the decade of my birth gave me untold insights into the aesthetics, politics and general mood of the period. Magazines are traditionally classed as “ephemera,” cultural forms with fleeting significance, important primarily in the moment they are produced. That very topicality makes them an ideal form for studying the conscious and unconscious preoccupations of the time, whether the past or the near-present.

This assignment, to look back over 15 years of 1000 Words (particularly the last 12, as archived on the website) has taken me on a journey through my own past: exhibitions visited, books read, and articles shared in the classroom with students, as well as many important things I missed. At the same time, the exercise clarified trends that have emerged from the flow of visual and written materials. My selections are eclectic to celebrate the sweep of 1000 Words in embracing a range of 21st century photographic practices. I also want to draw attention to the ambition of the editorial teams over the years, led by Tim Clark, in extending the discussion of contemporary photography into new terrain. Although the pieces in this online magazine are short, they are bold in mobilising concepts from an array of academic and pop cultural contexts. The magazine has often been the first to publish emerging artists and writers, many of whom are now familiar names. Tracing the expansion of the field through evolving configurations of genres and presentation formats, it has also played a key role in promoting a broader range of practitioners.

Part of the richness of an archive is its capacity to generate multiple different routes through the material. This set of selections, loosely chronological, are based on my own affinities. I hope that they will invite you to dip in, whether to revisit familiar selections or make fresh discoveries.

1. Esther Teichmann, Drinking Air, and Mythologies
Interview by Brad Feuerhelm
Issue 14, 2012

When I started teaching at art schools in the early 2000s, the UK photography scene was dominated by documentary approaches. Contemporary photography is now so much more eclectic that it is hard to believe that a practice such as Esther Teichmann’s needed to take a stand against this orthodoxy to embrace symbolist themes, painterly gestures and mixed media installation. The images in this portfolio combine with the text to offer a rich field of possibility. Teichmann’s distinctive voice, her embrace of poetics, and the generosity of her approach are all evident in this interview. 1000 Words has provided a platform for a number of artists emerging in parallel expressive modes, including Tereza Zelenkova (28) and Joanna Piotrowska (30).

2. Daisuke Yokota, Back Yard
Essay by Peggy Sue Amison
Issue 15, 2012

‘There is a revolution going on in the work of emerging photographer Daisuke Yokota, a revolution that links the past with the future of Japanese photography.’ In a few deft paragraphs, Peggy Sue Amison provides several different points of entry for viewers seduced by Yokata’s evocative, mysterious images. She sketches in Yokata’s context in relation to the grainy, blurry aesthetic of the Provoke movement and describes how the photographer updates Japanese zine culture with collaborations and a participatory approach. Amison illuminates how his use of experimental processes such as solarisation and rephotographing combine with banal architecture, natural forms and faceless figures to create work that is distinctly Japanese and distinctly contemporary. As with Gordon Macdonald’s essay on Thomas Sauvin’s Beijing Silvermine project (15) or Sergio Valenzuela-Escobedo’s framing of Nadège Mazars’ Mama Coca (38) this concise piece provides essential context for interested readers to pursue further research into an important international practice.

3. Sara-Lena Maierhofer, Dear Clark, A Portrait of a Con Man
Interview by Natasha Christia
Issue 16, 2013

I confess that I was late to the photobook scene. It had been heating up for the first decade of the 2000s before I realised that this was not just a fad or nerdy subculture (though it has its fads and nerdy aspects) and that I needed to pay attention to it. 1000 Words was one of my go-to destinations for reading about new releases. I was so impressed by Natasha Christia’s interview with the author/artist/maker of Dear Clark that I ordered the book and looked with new eyes at its skilful combination of obsessive research, idiosyncratic reenactment and seductive, self-referential layout. As I have learned more about this aspect of contemporary photography culture, I have come to appreciate the extent to which the book reviewers for 1000 Words (variously photographers, writers, book-makers, curators and editors themselves) have contributed both to defining the photobook as a form with its own unique concerns, and to creating a canon-in-progress of its plural possibilities.

4. Julian Stallabrass, Memory of Fire: Images of War and the War of Images
Book Review by James McArdle
Issue 16, 2013

In 2008 – five years into a war that had seen the US, UK and allies invade and occupy Iraq – Julian Stallabrass curated the Brighton Photo Biennial as a searing critique of the uses of photography as a tool of pro-war propaganda, exploring the ways photographers past and present can work against the conventions of the genre to provoke other forms of understanding. How can war photography serve as a lesson or a warning rather than just pulling us into its quasi-pornographic thrall? James McArdle draws some of the key issues out of Stallabrass’ 2013 anthology of projects, essays, and interviews related to the festival, pointing to artists including Trevor Paglen, Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin, and Coco Fusco, and writers including Sarah James and Stefaan Decostere.

5. Duane Michals, Storyteller: The Photographs of Duane Michals
Essay by Aaron Schuman
Issue 18, 2014

In this feature on Duane Michals, Aaron Schuman traces the historical roots of staged, narrative photography far beyond Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills to Victorian tableau photography. Schuman argues convincingly that in Michals’ hands the genre does not merely advance photography as an art form, but also grapples with aspects of experience that transcend ordinary vision. Although it may be difficult to identify the direct impact of Michals on contemporary photographers whose work, like his, is filmic (like Jeff Wall), fictive (like Gregory Crewdson) or constructed (like Matt Lipps), Schuman points out that the sophisticated use of series and sequence by photographers such as Paul Graham and Alec Soth owes a debt to Michals’ storytelling capabilities. (The final image in this portfolio, Michals’ This photograph is my proof is my all-time favourite image + text work).

6. Laura El-Tantawy, In the Shadow of the Pyramids
Book Review by Gerry Badger Issue 19, 2015
Matthew Connors, Fire in Cairo
Book Review by Max Houghton
Issue 20, 2015

It is difficult for a magazine, which in its previous format, only came out a couple of times a year to respond to current events or political crises like the Arab Spring, especially when photographic projects, like novels, sometimes take years to come to fruition*. Gerry Badger’s 2015 review of Laura El-Tantawy’s book In the Shadow of the Pyramids describes the artist’s response to the events in Tahir Square in 2011 in the context of her own life inside and outside Egypt. In response to this blend of document and personal archive, Badger provides a personal meditation on how we create photographic narratives out of the messy flow of life. Max Houghton’s review of Matthew Connors’ Fire in Cairo in the following issue is a more wrought, imagistic essay, a perfect fit for Connor’s disorienting, back-to-front combination of surreal images and fragmented fiction. Together, these two reviews open a space to consider how we see, remember and understand protest and its aftermath.

7. Saul Leiter Retrospective
Essay by Francis Hodgson
Issue 21, 2016

One of the important tasks of the critic is to return to older works and read them afresh in light of current developments. Events may be fixed in the past, but their importance for us shifts in significant ways that need to be acknowledged and articulated. This review illuminates one of the things we take for granted about contemporary photography – that most of it is in colour – and reminds us that it was not always so. Roving across Leiter’s street photography, fashion work and painterly ambitions, Hodgson’s essay and selection of images offer a celebration of Leiter’s glowing Kodachrome aesthetic and illuminate its contemporary appeal. 

8. Richard Mosse, Incoming
Essay by Duncan Wooldridge
Issue 25, 2017

1000 Words has provided a constructive platform for encountering 21st century social documentary photographers who use strategies from contemporary art. Photographers like Lisa Barnard (25), Salvatore Vitale (26) and Gideon Mendel (36) offer projects that are rigorously researched, visually and technically innovative, and presented in layered, imaginative forms designed to jolt us out of familiar understandings of social situations. Such work can be highly controversial. This essay by Duncan Wooldridge provides a response to a flurry of topical online debates (by writers including Daniel C. Blight, Lewis Bush and JM Colberg) around Richard Mosse’s exhibition at the Barbican Centre, London and book Incoming from 2017, and its controversial use of military-grade thermal imaging technology to create eerie, spectacular video and still imagery of migrants from the Middle East and Global South. Fiercely analytical and ethically engaged, Woodridge frames the project in the philosophy of Judith Butler and Giorgio Agamben, while keeping an eye on the economic and institutional dilemmas of being a (materially successful) political artist.

9. Lebohang Kganye, Dipina tsa Kganya
Interview with Sarah Allen
Issue 34, 2021

For centuries, self-portraiture has provided artists with a way to explore their own identity and self-presentation. A new generation of artist photographers including Arpita Shah (27) Kalen Na’il Roach (32) and Sheida Soleimani (38) are turning to archival imagery, family albums and strategies of montage to counter dominant colonial (and frequently racist) histories with imaginative autonarratives. In this interview with Sarah Allen, Lebohang Kganye (Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize 2024 winner) explores the complexities of figuring her own identity within post-apartheid South Africa, and how the interweaving of family photography and performance gives her scope to recuperate personal, familial and tribal memory within the context of an exhibition in a Bristol slave owner’s 18th century home.

10. Curator Conversations #11: Alona Pardo Features, 2020

At their best, exhibitions can define practices and the ways they are understood, bringing new ideas into focus. To make this work happen, curators must embody various qualities: administrative, collaborative, critical and visionary. In her contribution to the Curator Conversations feature series, subsequently drawn together into a book, Alona Pardo discusses the layers of consideration that went into the exhibitions she curated at the Barbican before leaving to be Head of the Arts Council Collection. Her drive to facilitate spaces for creative discussion rather than promote her own point of view have led to a series of highly influential exhibitions including Masculinities: Liberation through Photography of 2020 and RE/SISTERS of 2023.

11. Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa, One Wall a Web
Book Review by Taous R. Dahmani
Issue 30, 2019

Photographers are more likely than other kinds of artmakers to also be writers of non-fiction, fiction and/or criticism. This can sharpen the edges of the language they use in their work. In this review, Taous R. Dahmani looks at artist/writer/editor Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa’s award-winning book One Wall a Web and describes the associative force of his filmic juxtapositions of text and image. Dahmani seeks precedents for his pointed appropriations in the scrapbooks of historical African Americans seeking to reclaim their own representation. On a related note, Dahmani’s response to questions provided by the 1000 Words feature series and book Writer Conversations (edited by myself and Duncan Wooldridge) convey a vivid sense that research and writing around photography are urgent and thrilling. She includes an inspiring list of classic and recent texts related to photography that made me want to run away on an extended reading retreat.

12. Cao Fei, Blueprints
Essay by Sergio Valenzuela-Escobedo Issue 34, 2021

While the cultures of contemporary art and photography share certain structures, there are ongoing disparities in their economic and cultural currency (one reason why many lens-based practitioners insist on being called “artists” rather than “photographers”). It is sometimes difficult for outsiders to decipher the coded language used to place a practice in one camp or the other, especially when some move fluidly between contexts. Sergio Valenzuela-Escobedo’s account of Cao Fei’s 2021 Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize win provides a window into the world of a high-flying international artist, represented by mega-gallery Sprüth Magers and whose astonishingly polished, high-tech, multimedia work is more likely to be seen at Serpentine Gallery or the Venice Biennale than in a dedicated photography gallery. Escobedo’s essay explores the work’s push and pull between ironic simulation and fantastical techno-utopianism. The Chinese State’s role as a geopolitical and industrial superpower is never far out of the frame, but Fei’s relationship to it remains strategically ambiguous. As a productive counterpoint, this issue also features Fergus Heron’s exhibition review of Noémie Goudal’s Post Atlantica (34), a body of photographic and moving image installation work that sits firmly within a contemporary art sphere while also asking rich and probing questions about how photographs operate as documents, images and phantasms. For those interested in the representational politics of The Deusche Börse Photography Foundation Prize, the most prominent international art photography award, see Tim Clark’s impassioned 2020 editorial, ‘False signals and white regimes: an award in need of decolonisation.’

13. Laia Abril, On Rape: And Institutional Failure
Book Review by Jilke Golbach
Issue 36, 2022

1000 Words has devoted a significant number of its features to female experience and points of view, including the delirious layered portrait constructions of Dragana Jurišić (22), the intimate portraits of Yukuza women by Chloé Jafé (29) and Carmen Winant’s powerful lexicon of found images around abortion (43). Laia Abril’s On Rape is the middle piece of her trilogy of books On Misogyny, following On Abortion (2016) and leading towards On Mass Hysteria. Bodily harm, trauma, silence, guilt and victim-shaming weave through Jilke Golbach’s review, framing Abril’s investigative project with its evocative, visceral images in relation to the persistence of rape and its impacts in the contemporary world.

14. After the End of History: British Working Class Photography 1989–2024 Exhibition Review by Lillian Wilkie Issue 42, 2024

In photography, as in the rest of society, one of the anxieties about globalisation is that it will erode local cultures. At the same time, we live with the paradox that it is often in relation to each other’s intersectional differences that our own distinctive cultures come into focus. An important strand of 1000 Words essays and reviews has explored work by photographers from the UK and Ireland, well-known ones (like Brian Griffin, 20) and those deserving greater attention (Vanessa Winship, 16), those exploring private relationships (Matthew Finn, 25), those who record distinctive local places and material culture (Café Royal Books, 41), and those who explore the performance of Britishness (Simon Roberts, 27). In this review, Lillian Wilkie dives into Johnny Pitts’ unruly travelling exhibition of British photography since the fall of the Berlin Wall, her vivid language looping around the rich mix of photography to ask, as the exhibition does, how we might reimagine the cultural and creative force of the British working class after Thatcherism.

15. London City Guide
Tim Clark with Thomas King
Features, 2024

When I ask photography students to read magazines, it is to improve their knowledge of recent practices and debates, and to introduce them to the key figures, communities, activities, institutions and markets that make up the contemporary network. The intermittent city guides, festival highlights, annual photobook roundups and even obituaries provided by 1000 Words provide different angles on a scene that is growing, multifaceted and increasingly interconnected. The London City Guide sets the stage by providing an instructive analysis of the current crisis in UK arts and education funding before introducing a handful of the leading institutions, including the V&A, The Photographers’ Gallery and Autograph, as well as Flowers Gallery as a sample of a large commercial gallery, and Large Glass as an example of a smaller gallery making interesting propositions about photography within contemporary art. These features provide a vital way to trace flows of influence in the UK and internationally. They also fulfil one of the original key functions of art criticism: providing a pleasurable vicarious experience of things we may not be able to see in person. ♦

 

 

 

 


An artist, critic and art historian, Lucy Soutter is Reader in Photography at the University of Westminster where she is Course Leader of the Expanded Photography MA. She is author of
Why Art Photography? (2018) and co-editor with Duncan Wooldridge of Writer Conversations (2023) and The Routledge Companion to Global Photographies (2024).


1000 Words favourites

• Renée Mussai on exhibitions as sites of dialogue, critique, and activism.

• Roxana Marcoci navigates curatorial practice in the digital age.

• Tanvi Mishra reviews Felipe Romero Beltrán’s Dialect.

• Discover London’s top five photography galleries.

• Tim Clark in conversation with Hayward Gallery’s Ralph Rugoff on Hiroshi Sugimoto.

• Academic rigour and essayistic freedom as told by Taous R. Dahmani.

Top 10

Photobooks of 2019

Selected by Tim Clark

An annual tribute to some of the exceptional photobook releases from 2019 – selected by Editor in Chief, Tim Clark.

1. Long story short
Fraenkel Gallery

Long story short sees San Francisco-based Fraenkel Gallery return to publishing. Coinciding with the current exhibition marking the gallery’s 40th anniversary, this book is an endlessly rich slice of 180 years of photographic history. It aims to convey “that visceral sense of experiencing a work of art for the first time, in ways that defy words.” With a taste for the eclectic, it certainly delivers. Enigmatic photographs, such as the anonymous Untitled [Dinosaur Balloon], November 25, 1969 cover image, ricochet against immediately recognisable images from some of the medium’s stalwarts – Berenice Abbott, Man Ray, Katy Grannan or Eadweard Muybridge to name but a few – all continuing to entrance, all brought together in a celebration; not only of Fraenkel’s anniversary year, but to also retune our attention on the pleasures and rewards of sustained looking. With its sumptuous printing and lavish production values, Long story short is a joy to behold. A door to the heart of a gallery that has done so much to contribute to the culture, study and appreciation of photography as an art form in the United States and beyond.

2. Salvatore Vitale, How To Secure A Country
Lars Müller Publishers

As a case study to consider critical global issues, such as borders and immigration, Salvatore Vitale’s How To Secure A Country promulgates a timely and deeply-layered look at 21st century statehood. Edited with Lars Willumeit, this long-term visual research project – as opposed to an investigation of a ‘closed’ topic – deals with the machinations and protocol of security systems in Switzerland, a country widely regarded as one of the world’s safest. The work is organised into visual clusters to reflect the collaborations with individuals from different disciplines and via access granted by various institutions, both public and private, including those relating to borders and customs, cybersecurity, data centres, armed forces and even weather forecast and supercomputering. How To Secure A Country offers a privileged perspective and multi-vantaged point of view on the fraught relationship between individuals, power and state control, yet never through images that are self-explanatory, nor without pronouncing judgement. In Vitale’s work there is always space for the viewer.

3. Lisa Barnard, The Canary and The Hammer
MACK

Another book of first-rate intelligence is Lisa Barnard’s Canary & The Hammer, spanning four years of photographic work shot across four continents. The artist’s third monograph takes gold as a subject – its complex history, relationship to wealth accumulation and symbolic representation – to demonstrate its myriad of uses and ubiquity in modern life. Deftly combining image, text and archival material within a structure of seven chapters, Barnard’s project embraces a fragmented narrative as a metaphor for our dissonant and uncertain times. Overlapping disparate yet related stories, ranging from the 1849 Gold Rush or activities by Peruvian mining organisations to jewellery manufacturing and high-tech industry, hers is a larger vision comprised of systems, contradictions and affects, ultimately cognisant of capitalism’s proclivity to both exploit and self-destruct. Throughout her career, Barnard has rigorously tested and questioned parameters within contemporary documentary practice, all the while reflecting on photography’s ability to render visible such vast and seemingly unimaginable themes.

4. Masahisa Fukase, Family
MACK

It’s a swell time for reprints of photobook masterpieces. And MACK has been leading the way in recent years. Amongst its latest have been Larry Sultan’s Pictures From Home and Alec Soth’s Niagara, and now comes Family by giant of Japanese photography, Masahisa Fukase. First released in 1991, and the artist’s final book, the project centres on a series of group portraits showing Fukase and his relatives in the family’s professional studio that were shot over nearly two decades. Family utilises the ritual of the family portrait but subverts it by featuring various nude or partially dressed women, many of whom are young performers or student actors bearing no relation to the family. Melancholy is piled on melancholy in these photographic gestures of commemoration. Touching on issues of memory, empathy and dispersal, it reflects what Geoffrey Batchen has referred to as “the desire to remember, and to be remembered”. And as Tomo Kosuga notes chillingly in his parting words to one of the book’s essays, Archiving Death: The Family Portrait as a Site of Mourning: “As we meet their staring eyes, we may feel that the process of the mourning vigil, conducted around the Fukase family, is taking place within ourselves.” File under: ‘essential titles’.

5. Hassan Hajjaj, Hassan Hajjaj
RVB

As the eponymous title suggests, this is a book about the vibrant Anglo-Moroccan artist Hassan Hajjaj – his creative universe, unique visual language and cultural remixing – that provides a noteworthy contribution to this year’s offerings. Remarkably this is Hajjaj’s first major monograph, produced to accompany the recent retrospective at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris. It draws upon his signature colour work that so effortlessly and promiscuously straddles modes of documentary and fashion photography. It also reunites this with hitherto unseen black and white work. His is an approach to studio and street portraiture that harks back to the traditions of Malick Sidibé, but which is given a contemporary twist through the bricolage of high and low cultural references in order to shine a light on the louche of global consumerism. The book’s design perfectly augments the content of the imagery by drawing out the repeated motifs and all-over compositions in an explosion of patterns and visual textures. Pluralism and new signs of recognition are the order of the day.

6. Anastasia Samoylova, FloodZone
Steidl

Necessary images from the frontiers of climate emergency in the southern United States make up this brooding exploration of the people, spaces and surfaces existing in preparation of its onslaught. Rising sea levels and hurricanes threaten but it’s the absence of any drama or action that defines Anastasia Samoylova’s FloodZone. Instead, as individuals wait and look on, conjured is an atmosphere akin to a mood piece laden with suspense and foreboding. Through a skilful blend of luscious imagery, encompassing lyrical documentary photographs and black and white studies – by turns staged and spontaneous – along with epic aerial views, and touching upon issues of paradise, tourism, decay and renewal, FloodZone constitutes an inventive addition to the slew of recent approximate visions of the Anthropocene. As David Campany notes in the monograph’s essay, “Paradise is as photogenic as catastrophe.” And while “the seductive contradictions of a place drowning in its own mythical image” is indeed embodied, Samoylova’s is a fantastic double vision, proffering depictions that oscillate somewhere between the already seen and never seen.

7. Karla Hiraldo Voleau, Hola Mi Amol
Self Publish, Be Happy Editions and ECAL/University of Art and Design, Lausanne

Readers of 1000 Words will recall the recent magazine feature on this highly-original monograph. Within it, French-Dominican artist Karla Hiraldo Voleau has made it her business to take us on a journey through her personal history in Hola Mi Amol, one that burrows into her dual heritage, its influences and prejudices. As a child Voleau was often warned to treat Dominican men with suspicion, ergo the slightly leery title of this book project, and here she returns to the island of her youth to actively seek out those very individuals she was warned about. A cast of nude or partially-dressed men populate the photographs – seen at the beach, in homes and motels or riding on the back of motorbikes via selfies with the artist – in images that both resist the admonishments of her family and, by natural extension, play us as viewers on a meta-level. Combined with text extracts, Voleau’s intersections call into question ideas of authenticity and ambiguity in the narration of the artist’s various encounters. Hola Mi Amol speaks through the most personal and private experiences relating to eroticism, prowess and racial identities. Ultimately the male gaze has in effect been turned on itself to powerful, and at times beguiling, effect.

8. Sohrab Hura, The Coast
Ugly Dog

Blood splatters, smoke bellows, tattoos sore, rats cower, tears fall – the visual experience of leafing through Magnum photographer Sohrab Hura’s fourth monograph The Coast is akin to a feverish dream. Chosen by the jury of Paris Photo-Aperture Foundation Book Awards as Photobook of the Year, there is something clearly so captivating about The Coast. And what’s interesting eventually winds up beautiful too. Opening with an absurd short story of a woman named Madhu, who has quite literally lost her head, the tone is set for an intense and unrelenting narrative that Sohrab relays in twelve varying iterations. It features photographs taken up and down the Indian coastline that work in service of what the artist refers to as “a metaphor for a ruptured piece of skin barely holding together a volatile state of being ready to explode.” Images are printed full bleed with only a narrow white gap creating a continuous visual flow – or assault – while their shifting contexts furnish our gaze onto a disorientating post-truth world, particularly in a country where disinformation and acts of violence are on the rise. Reality teeters between fact and construction in this fable for the times.

9. Amak Mahmoodian, Zanjir
RRB Books/IC Visual Lab

“This book is a conversation imagined between the artist Amak Mahmoodian (1980-present) and the Persian princess and memorist Taj Saltaneh (1883-1936).” So reads the preface to Zanjir, a riveting book hot off the press by Bristol-based, Iranian-born Amak Mahmoodian. What unfolds through sequences of quiet photographs – both authored and appropriated from the Golestan archives in Tehran – is a moving meditation on the actuality of having one’s family based there but no here and the hybrid experience of living between cultures, lands and languages, all bound up in sensations of love, loss and longing. From the subtle gaps between recording and not forgetting emerges this deeply poetic look at the vestiges of the past as they move into the present only then to become the past again. Time, memory, dreams and their inevitable decay approach something so powerful as it relates to the homeland. Mahmoodian, by her own admission, has created “a life of memories” swaying between presence and absence. With a stellar team of editors including Aaron Schuman and Alejandro Acin, Zanjir is a personal and rich foray into the imagination of an understated and poetic artist.

10. George Georgiou, Americans Parade
Self-published

This is the kind of photography that renews a feeling of wonder every time we gaze upon its imagery. Here, we are witnessing the theatre of life as seen through the parade of Americans during 2016, the year Donald Trump came into office and when the country had revealed its profound fractures. George Georgiou’s black and white photographs show one community after the next in a project spanning 24 cities across 14 states. Crowds of various sizes are captured via a simple but effective approach of photographing wide and from a distance to form tableaux-style images, their constancy bestowing a feeling of detachment but also one of acute observation. Revelling in the abundance and complexities of individuals who make up group identities, it is almost as if Georgiou is invisible – such is the candour. In these instances, people never stare down the camera, but instead focus on something beyond the frame. And they resonate with us, so pressingly that we look for ourselves in them. As we scrutinise the minutiae in such detail, images within images emerge, resolving into a kaleidoscope of mini portraits that are full of contemporary trappings. It thus offers up a valid document; in the same way the various locales reflect the socio-economic disparities of the United States to speak volumes of the environments in which the photographs were taken. Something must be said of the book’s quad-tone printing and its importance in revealing the sumptuous detail of the scenes, which, combined with lay-flat binding, allows viewers to really enter the imagery: exquisite.


Tim Clark is a curator, writer and since 2008 he has been Editor in Chief and Director at 1000 Words. 

Captions:

1-Eadweard Muybridge, Contortions on the Ground1887. (Long story short, Fraenkel Gallery)

2-Salvatore Vitale, A customised assault rifle transformed for sport purposes, from the series How To Secure a Country, 2014-18.

3-Lisa Barnard, Gold-miner Kimberly, at the Las Vegas Gold & Treasure Show, 2017, from the series The Canary and The Hammer.

4-Masahisa Fukase, from the series Family, 1971–89. Courtesy Michael Hoppen Gallery, London, and Éditions Xavier Barral, Paris.

5-Hassan Hajjaj, Keziah Jones, 2011. Courtesy Vigo Gallery, London, and Taymour Grahne Gallery, New York.

6-Anastasia Samoylova, Park Avenue, 2018, from the series FloodZone. Courtesy Galerie Caroline O’Breen, Amsterdam.

7-Karla Hiraldo Voleau, from the series Hola Mi Amol.

8-Sohrab Hura, India, 2014, from the series The Coast. Courtesy Magnum Photos.

9-Amak Mahmoodian, from the series Where Time Stood Still.

10-George Georgiou, 4 July Parade, Ripley, West Virginia, 04/07/2016, from the series Americans Parade.

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.

Lisa Barnard

The Canary & The Hammer

Essay by Lisa Stein

In Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2014), which traces the evolution of inequality since the beginning of the industrial revolution, the French economist Thomas Piketty observes that before the gold standard was abandoned in Britain, France and finally, the United States, the power of central banks to create money was severely limited due to the existing stock of gold and silver. Commenting on the role financial institutions have assumed during economic crises, he goes on to explain that ‘once currency ceases to be convertible into precious metals, the power of central banks to create money is potentially unlimited’. Indeed, following the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008, governments and central banks would create ‘the liquidity necessary’ to avoid a crash as serious as the Great Depression. In other words, currency was created out of thin air, currency with no intrinsic value. In fact, once the gold standard was abandoned in the early 1970s the value of currency became intangible, virtual; banknotes were no longer backed by a physical commodity, but by abstract concepts and speculative relationships. Particularly after the 2008 financial crisis the gap between what currency was and what it represented appeared wider than ever before.

Lisa Barnard’s highly-ambitious body of work The Canary & The Hammer is a response to both the events that followed the crash as well as gold’s status as a ‘barometer for the state of the economy, and is, most fundamentally, a potent symbol of ultimate value, beauty, purity, greed and political power.’ In so doing it raises a very interesting question about the medium it utilises: how can photography, which has eluded stable definition since its inception, a medium that inhabits both the tangible, real, and the virtual, respond to an event as abstract as the global financial crisis?

The evidentiary power of photography has always been a point of contention; the image, in simultaneously revealing and concealing what it depicts, only ever provides partial information. Still, early methods of manipulating images in the darkroom did little to destabilise photography’s claim to ‘truth’; the image, dodged or burned, was evidence of what had been. It was the digital-born image that would present a stronger challenge to what photography was in itself, and how it was consumed. In their introduction to On the Verge of Photography: Imaging Beyond Representation (2013), Daniel Rubinstein, Johnny Golding and Andy Fisher claim that the networked digital image has moved us beyond visual representation, but it has done so in important respects. For Rubinstein and Fisher, the digital image ‘has become a hinge between […] physical and digital modes of existence, combining as it does elements of familiar ocularcentric culture – with its trust and reliance on the true-to-life photograph – and algorithmic processes that problematise the presumption of an ontological connection between images and objects’.

In The Canary & The Hammer, a website that is now presented as a complex, interactive projection in the headline exhibition, Ahead lies our future as part of FORMAT International Photography Festival in Derby, the digital image assumes precisely the role outlined in On The Verge of Photography: Barnard’s documentary approach to the various narratives of gold’s discovery and multivalent uses and the western world’s desire to accumulate wealth utilises the photographic image in ‘all its hybridised digital forms, that encapsulates the interlacing of physical and algorithmic attributes, aesthetic and political forms, which characterise the age of information capitalism’. Incorporating images, videos and sound the website, which is divided into six thematic sections, allows the ‘user’ to navigate their way through the history of gold; its discovery, extraction and various applications. The way in which Barnard has chosen to present her research invokes the manner in which we have come to consume information in the digital age. As we scroll, an activity naturalised by the mobile device, images and animated GIFs enter the screen from every direction; we can click on embedded videos and access additional information by hovering over colour-coded icons. The soundtracks that accompany each page recall early social networking websites, which allowed users to encode personal music into their profiles. Finally, the website incorporates a broad range of photographic styles and techniques. Barnard’s combination of traditional landscapes, portraits and still life with images that are less formal, unconventionally lit or otherwise highly-stylised foregrounds the many uses of photography. Since its popularisation in the 1850s the medium has influenced various fields, infiltrated various spheres such as the scientific, the commercial and, most notably, the social.

It might seem counterintuitive to explore a concept as abstract as the global financial crisis with a medium that has not only assumed various ‘identities’ throughout history, but one whose very materiality and consequently its ability to represent the real world, has been called into question. However, this is precisely what makes The Canary & The Hammer so relevant. According to Rubinstein, Golding and Fisher the technical qualities of the digital image have altered the temporal condition of photography: no longer merely a record of past events the digital image, due to its instantaneity and simultaneity, ‘is active, it has an agency that relates to and has an effect on embodied existence. It comes before and has effects on the real’. In other words, photography’s ability to shape an event has become equally, if not more important than its ability to record it. Indeed, that the digital image, used in conjunction with social media, has played a fundamental role in the unfolding of political events such as the Arab Spring, the rising civil unrest in the United States following numerous cases of police violence against African American citizens and, most recently, the 2016 presidential elections, is undeniable.

Equally, while The Canary & The Hammer is Barnard’s response to past events, the decision to include the work in FORMAT, which explored the impact of human civilisation on planet earth, signalled a belief in the force and agency of photography. The images that illustrate Barnard’s investigation into a natural, non-renewable resource are not merely reactive; part of a vast digital network, they are being circulated, shared. They are active, drawing attention to the human desire to consume, not only large quantities of images but also our natural world, itself on the verge of disappearing.

All images courtesy of the artist. © Lisa Barnard


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.