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.

Salvatore Vitale

How To Secure A Country

Essay by Max Houghton

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All images courtesy of the artist. © Salvatore Vitale


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