William Eggleston's Guide

https://vimeo.com/34595129

Bought this book a while back as part of the colour documentary section, but it was a FB post from another student that reminded me that I'd not recorded any reaction to it.

This is partly because at first sight the contents are rather underwhelming. Photos of ordinary stuff in the rather muted colour palette that film of the time produced. I know that it was the first time colour photography was taken seriously as art, but that's not sufficient reason all this time later to enjoy it. So why has it been growing on me ever since I got it.

I think it's because the photos are capable of being read in so many ways. Many can be read as simple exercises in colour composition.  A classic example is the rather prim woman in the blue dress eating her lunch...but wait...what's that chain doing wrapped around the post next to her. Is it deliberately symbolic of the fairly limited life that many women like her must have faced at the time?

The famous tricycle is another case. For me it has come to represent the dominant role that our kids play/ed in our domestic life although it could equally represent the start of a journey out of the image frame and away from home.

The lightbulb and red ceiling...simply an exercise in colour? A study in loneliness? An icon for a sunset missed?

Eggleston appeared to have the knack of making everday stuff interesting, and by isolating moments turn them into opportunities to reflect on our lives. This is a book that continues to repay thought and time spent.

Xavier Ribas

http://www.xavierribas.com/

Possessed

One feature of having a real block is that all sorts of things you should have done get skipped. I’ve got my work cut out now to put that right, but that’s my own fault. The beginning of November saw the 3rd Carlisle photo festival (which I’ll write up elsewhere), but one of the exhibits which really grabbed me – and has grown on me ever since was Possessed by Sarah Faraday and Yujiang Wang.

The Possessed project – which can be found at www.possessed.org.uk – “operates by participants giving up objects of personal importance…” In return the artists take two photos – one for the exhibition and one for the participating donor. According to their statement the process of documenting the objects serves a dual purpose – it is part of the act of letting go and it serves as a reflection on the role of the image as an archival document.

On the face of it I think it also asks questions about how we see photos of objects - do we see them as photos or do we see them as the objects themselves? I seem to recall Barthes (or was it Sontag?) expounding on something similar with pictures of deceased relatives standing in for the person themselves in family conversations. Few of the participants feelings on this issue are actually recorded – Leila’s jeans is an exception, where it is clear that the image hovers on the boundary of actually replacing the jeans in terms of the emotional attachment felt. Travel memories falls into a similar category.

A more tricky question – asked by the artists – is “Can the camera capture anything of the emotion invested in an object?” On the face of these images I feel the answer is probably not. This is not a failing of the artist – simply a reflection that deadpan photography is not ideally suited to this task. yes – we can wonder what caused all the dents and dings in the spanner, why and how a pair of climbing shoes got so battered, and we can surmise some things about the owners life on the basis – but I think it’s stretching it to say that they can illustrate the emotional links in isolation without some supporting contextual material – as in this example where there is a hint of something more personal. Berger makes much the same point in “Another way of telling”.

Other material

Sarah Faraday’s website: http://www.sarahfaraday.co.uk/

Yujiang Wang’s website:http://www.xaphire.de/

Hasan and Hussain Essop

This is a truly fascinating video. The Essop’s are brothers who wish to show the realities of their life as Muslims, and the conflicts they feel  between their religion and their desire to participate in aspects of western culture. A key challenge was squaring their religions view of the inclusion of people in images with the need to include people – their answer being to act out all the roles themselves - producing a result through multiple exposures.

Again I come back to – the integrity of the image as a document depends on the integrity of the artist. All the scenes they produce are totally fabricated, because they are the only people in them, and yet they work as documents (for me anyway) because I have faith that they are truly reflecting the world as they see it. It’s an interesting kind of subjectivity that they produce as well, because there working method appears to involve both of them talking through ideas about how to convey a concept until they achieve a single solution – in other words the subjectivity of both of them is incorporated into the final image.

A final point – their images are not so different in overall concept to my 4 seasons landscape shot from the previous course.

Reference

Figures and Fictions: Hasan and Husain Essop; V&A Channel, Victoria and Albert Museum: http://www.vam.ac.uk/channel/people/photography/figures_and_fictions_hasan_and_husain_essop/

Tom Hunter

This exercise asks us to read and consider the following articles:

• Think Global, Act Local’ by Diane Smyth (BJP Aug 2010, p.55) now available on Hunters website http://www.tomhunter.org/think-global-act-local/,
• Tom Hunter: Under the Influence BBC Radio 3 – available here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00zt7ky

Hunter’s early backgound is as different from mine as it seems easy to imagine within the boundaries of the UK and yet what he says makes a lot of sense to me. I’m particularly sympathetic to his thought that “You can slightly alter the scene, you can bring in a fiction in a way, but underlying it the core foundations are reality.” I have struggled throughout this course – which has a very historical turn to it - with the hard to kill belief that truth and subjectivity are mutually exclusive. They aren’t and, as Woman Reading an Eviction Order shows us, straight photography is not the only way to provide a document. As I’ve said before – documentary relies on the integrity of the photographer – a point which Hunter delightfully illustrates.

We English

Link: http://simoncroberts.com/work/we-english/#PHOTO_0

I have more than a sneaking admiration for this work, and in particular the way it thumbs it’s nose at the idea that documentary should have some social purpose. This latter point seems to have irritated the editorial panel of Foto8 who said: “We need more than dramatic vistas or seductive tableaux, we want to know rather to know if the photographer takes a position on their mother country’s devastating record on inequality or the criminal recklessness exhibited by financial institutions for which the country will pay for decades to come.”

Well that’s their prerogative but I, on the other hand, think that some reflective view on English-ness at a time when claims to the flag are being made by the far right is no bad thing. Roberts does what documentary says on the tin..it documents. It documents the people of England and they way they interact with the countryside, which if the introductory essay to the book is anything to go by has a long history. It is a powerful example of the use of landscape photography as a documentary practice and yet many of the works remind me of more traditional painted arts e.g. Claude Lorrain if somewhat less romantic.

Little else to say really – this is documentary photography that i can identify with – it’s not shoving a message I may or may not sympathise with in my face.

Paul Close – A Snakebox Odyssey

An absolutely fascinating set of travel portraits. Close isolates his subjects against a white backdrop set up in there environment, which simultaneously contextualises the individuals and displays their common humanity. Each photo is presented with their answer to the question “Is there one thing that could make your life better?” As Close notes in the well hidden supporting statement this simply emphasises the commonalities of widely differing people and cultures.

By odd coincidence I came across this site shortly before discovering it in one of the exercises, which asks me to consider whether the same work displayed on a different site is documentary. I have tried to understand why this is more than a trivial question and am struggling a little. For sure it is not what Walker Evans described as “documentary style” but that’s where the difficulty ends for me. It appears to be documentary on a number of levels:

1. A record of various cultural types across Africa – in this context I think the white backdrop device prevents the series from dropping into the same rut as earlier “colonial” photography. Somewhat counter-intuitively I feel the backdrop removes some of the feeling of looking at “other” perhaps because it isolates their humanity.
2. A record of a motorcycle trip across Africa – in this sense it is clearly a record of places and peoples visited and has the potential to act as a visual diary
3. A record of the desires of a mixed sample of humanity at a given moment in time. It would be interesting to be able to compare the wishes expressed in the caption with a similar experiment 50 years ago, and perhaps 50 years from now. How would those desires have changed? Would they be closer to or further from typical western desires (assuming ours is still the dominant culture in 50 years time)
4. Finally, I think it documents the fundamental desires of people everywhere, pinpointing that the differences are by and large superficial.

For me the whole series is refreshingly free of victim imagery. In spite of the completely different approach to portraying a culture I feel it shares with the work of RAX a basic desire to show people as what they are – people like us, with their own desires and problems.

2004-08, Drop in the Ocean | photographic still life studies by nick sinclair | plastic bottles discarded on the suffolk coast

2004-08, Drop in the Ocean | photographic still life studies by nick sinclair | plastic bottles discarded on the suffolk coast | + 44 (0)7774 714275:

A brief portfolio by photographer Nick Sinclair featuring plastic bottle which have been washed up after long immersion in the sea. The title of the work gives a clue to the origin of the material, and the simple, almost abstract forms reveal themselves as plastic bottle on closer inspection. In the process of identification we are invited to speculate on the accidents and forces that led from the familiar plastic bottle to these alien shapes, and further, to speculate on the eventual fate of these items in the environment.

Stephen Dupont: Portraits of tribal life in Papua New Guinea

http://m.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-27350410 Not much to say about this really. It reflects my view that "true" documentary requires genuine time and engagement with the subject.

On the back of this I can't help questioning if "street photography" as currently defined/practised is documentary at all. What is it documenting? As far as I can see it is, often as not, simply collecting random stuff, with no programme or purpose other than to photograph on the street - which  captures a thought Szarkowski attributed to Eggleston in the preface to the latter's Guide, "...that the nominal subjects of his pictures were no more than a pretext for making colour photographs." Szarkowski notes that he did not believe him and proceeds to explain why - in a nutshell "...it is a matter of intelligence, imagination, intensity, precision and coherence." If Szarkowski's insight is valid - how does much modern street photography, or alleged documentary in general, measure up? 

Ragnar Axelsson (Rax)

I was pointed to the work of Ragnar by a student on one of the Facebook fora I frequent during a discussion about the pros and cons of the most recent work of Salgado. For the record I see mainly cons - which is certainly not so with Ragnar.

He is a working photojournalist with Iceland’s leading newspaper Morgunblaðið and although he has carried out assignments in areas as far afield as Thailand and Africa he is most well known for his images of Iceland, Greenland and the Faroe Islands. His images have a certain spontaneity to them – horizons are not always level, there is motion blur, and sometimes out of focus elements “intrude” on the subject. I say “intrude” although in reality the intrusion is only formal – these are clearly the deliberate acts of someone who has full control of his medium.

He also likes to make use of the edges of the frame such as shots 1,11 and 14 accompanying this short interview. It’s an interesting technique which serves in my mind to encourage us to think about what is going on around the subject, and perhaps serves to remind us just how tenuous man’s hold on these landscapes actually is.

What I like about his images most however is the sense that the photographer is of that world and part of what he is photographing. Unlike the feelings I get from Salgado’s Genesis I do not feel he is some kind of evangelist parachuted in for a few days determined to tell us what we should think. He has a genuine relationship with both the landscape and the people and he shows them as they are. Some of his images, such as those covering polar bear hunting, are hard to look at, but there is no sense of judgement. Others such as some of his iceberg shots, are undoubtedly beautiful, but they are not idealised. He seems more interested in helping us understand a way of life on the verge of extinction than reminding us that it is. This feels to me like documentary photography at its very best.

Sadly his website is currently off-line but I bought a small book - Ragnar Axelsson - with a selection of his work, which I can highly recommend – although be aware that all the text is in French. There are also a couple of videos I can recommend: Last Days of the Arctic which is a slide show with atmospheric music, and a documentary featuring Ragnar which is worth a look – but again, be aware, the commentary by the photographer is in English with Danish subtitles but the conversations in the films are in Icelandic and Danish.

Axelsson, R. (2014). Ragnar Axeslson. Arles: Actes Sud Editions.

Photobards. (2009, June 22). Ragnar Axelsson. Retrieved October 25, 2014, from Photobards.com: http://www.photobards.com/interview/ragnar-axelsson-10.html

Inventing Vivien Maier

While completing the research point on Vivien Maier I was struck by the similarity of her position and that of Atget. Both produced huge quantities of work and both have had their work interpreted/reinterpreted later by people with agendas of their own – in Atget’s case the surrealists and subsequently the institutions trying to actively develop a photographic canon, and in Maier’s case a small group of people trying to capitalise on the value of a previously unknown hoard of street photos.

I’m not saying that this reflects on the quality of the individual photographs – there are some real gems on the Vivien Maier website – but it is an inescapable fact that we have very little knowledge of how Maier would have displayed these images. On the basis of even the small selection available on the site she seems, like Atget, to have been quite promiscuous in her choice of subject and this in itself means that we are not judging her work alone – we are judging the work of the curators as well. What is it they are trying to achieve? How do we fit her in to the canon on this basis – until recently she can hardly have been influential – modern street photography developed in her absence, so what are we to make of claims such as “..one of the greatest street photographers of the 20th century.”? Even the idea that it is “the Official website of Vivien Maier” website is slightly ridiculous – it is, if course, the Maloof Collection website. It is none the worse for that, but surely it must impact on our reading of greatness.

A bit of web research reveals that all this, and much more is discussed much more eloquently and in much greater detail by Abigail Solomon-Godeau here and Malcolm Jones here. For the meantime I think it is always wise to be aware of hype. A couple of hundred images carefully selected from an archive in excess of 100,000 is a pretty small sample from which to rush to judgement – one way or the other.

Heinz Vontin’s Ibiza and more

What happens in Ibiza stays in Ibiza – according to the T-shirt slogan – but I’m making an exception to write up a visit to the  Museu Puget, and more briefly the Museu d’Art Contemporanie D’Eivissa.

The Museu Puget was hosting a display of 1950’s monochrome  photos of life in Ibiza by a German photographer Heinz Vontin. Taken in a style reminiscent of Cartier-Bresson, and at their best certainly catching the decisive moment, they provide a small insight into what Ibiza was like prior to the package holiday explosion. A particular favourite was the picture top right on this page with the five young women walking away down the street line abreast. Sadly there did not appear to be a catalog available.

The museum is named for two local oil painters who also tried to capture local life in all its variety. It struck me as I wandered around that their work was also documentary in a very real sense – this image of two women/girls in festival dress is a good example, although there were plenty more utilitarian scenes on view as well.

Earlier in the day we also paid a short visit to the Museu d’Art Contemporanie D’Eivissa as prior experience suggested they would have something worth seeing. As it turned out they had some new acquisitions on display – by Christina de Middel, perhaps best known for her series “The Afronauts”. The work on display here consisted of four images produced for a 2009 exhibition which all featured large images with a blurred or sharp foreground partially obscuring a correspondingly sharp/blurred background. Most contained some religious iconography – pendants, churches etc - and I could see how the juxtaposition of the items affected the reading of the images. Whether they formed a “…reredos on the temporary condensation of semantic content…” expounded by the International Art English of the labelling is something I’ll have to decide when I work out what it means. Another recent acquisition on display was a series by Felix Waske of presumably well known artists – which struck me as rather unremarkable, although potentially of some historic value.

Perfect Documents – Walker Evans

An interesting and somewhat unexpected discovery – a collection of still life photos of African art taken by Walker Evans prior to his more famous traditional documentary work. The introductory essays make a number of claims about this work laying the basis for his subsequent “documentary style work. Although they are clearly very formally taken and composed I would have to admit to struggling to see too many overlaps. On the other hand I have no vested interest in establishing the set as a key part of the Evans canon – but perhaps I am being too cynical. What seems clearer is that completing the portfolio provided Evans with a number of important contacts who were to have an important role in his subsequent career.

How should we read them? A tricky question. From the text it seems that this was one of the first major exhibits of African art put on the American audiences, iseand that the objects were displayed in very simple “white cube” type surroundings. This is presumably intended to relate them to each other – and the formal compositions of the photos tend to support this. The absence of other context also seems to aestheticise the objects, so that they are seen as works of art rather than as religious icons or other more prosaic artefacts. This would also appear to fit the tone of the exhibition which was an early acknowledgement of the artistic traditions of the African continent.

A pdf catalogue is available on the MoMA website here: http://www.metmuseum.org/research/metpublications/Perfect_Documents_Walker_Evans_and_African_Art_1935. A more formal reference is given below.

Webb, V.-L. (2000). Perfect documents : Walker Evans and African art, 1935 / Virginia-Lee Webb. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art.

ERA Exhibition–University of Cumbria 2014

The ERA Exhibition was part of the University of Cumbria degree show and features the work of 33 Photography graduates.

My thoughts in no particular order of importance:

• It’s a shame the show couldn’t have been held somewhere more prominent than the depths of the University Campus – which isn’t large, but is relatively distant from the city itself. I say this because there was a stimulating variety of work on display and it deserved to be seen by a wider audience.
• As you might expect, there was a range of approaches on show, from very formal (Amy Trantum for example) to near abstraction (Julie Dennis). The were quite a few typologies/ typology based displays – perhaps the most poignant of which was Natalie Cheetham’s “Life before loss”.
• Much of the material would not have looked out of place in BJP. There was a small selection of what I might consider “straight” documentary including Karl Ballantyne’s Boom and Bust and Marc Johnston’s Rampworx and a wider selection of material which I think broadly fits the documentary category.
• There were several interesting takes on using photography to explore mental states – of which The Life within my mind (Eleanor Armour) and Halfway up and halfway down the mountain (Penelope Peel) had the most immediate impact on me.
• Other sets which stick in my mind are Pot-bound (Lauren McGuiness) – a slightly humorous exploration of pot plants given as gifts – and Paolo Luccardi’s Deserted Land – a well observed study of abandoned buildings slowly falling into decay, but still bearing the traces of the occupants and their various activities.

Overall I found the show really enjoyable – there was plenty to provoke thought and inspire, some reassurance that the kind of work I like is not far off the beaten track and similarly some reassurance that the sort of work I think I produce best seems to be of a suitable standard.

Henri Cartier-Bresson: The man, the image & the world

This is a truly wonderful book – which I’ve borrowed from my local library. It contains just shy of 500 of HC-Bs photographic images, a selection of his drawings and images related to his film-making and his family history. It is split into several sections interspersed with short, but insightful essays from the “curators” of this retrospective.

I’m not going to attempt an explanation of why Cartier-Bresson was important – there are plenty far better informed than I who can do that – just to capture my reactions to some of the images in this book. Inevitably a stepping off point is the idea of the “decisive moment” and there are plenty of the more famous examples on display here, including the gentleman jumping off the plank in Paris and the bicycle whizzing past the foot of the stairs. However there are plenty of others that in many ways I found more interesting.

For example “Seville Spain 1933” shows a group of kids playing. The one nearest the camera is heading away from the other group and it isn’t really possible to tell if he is running away because the others are taunting him, or if he is part of their game. As far as I can tell it’s the moment that he pressed the shutter which has created this ambiguity – and in the process he asks far more interesting questions about the human condition than the more famous images mentioned above. Thirty-four years later he captures a monkey in an experiment in a lab in Berkeley (Berkeley California 1967 – two images near the bottom of the page). In the book version the hapless creature appears to be reaching and trying to turn off the equipment – again the timing and subsequent ambiguity of the photo creates this effect. It’s telling that the other image on the linked page shows the monkey looking almost nonchalant – the narrative is created by the size and timing of the quote from the continuum.

Some of his images are almost pure comedy – the dog sleeping in the mouth of the dragon in “Tehuantepec, Mexico, 1934” and the “Baris Dance, Bali, 1949” would be simply funny if they weren’t leavened by his ability to get everything in just the right place at just the right moment. At the other extreme, his images of Gandhi’s funeral catch human emotion at its most raw. He was also a master at capturing the interaction of people with their surroundings in ways that make almost breath-taking virtuosity from otherwise ordinary pictures.He seems to have taken some inspiration from Escher for Matera, Basilicata, 1951, L’Aquila, Abruzzo Italy, 1951 and Istanbul, Turkey, 1964.

The course notes suggest that Cartier-Bresson was influenced by the ideas of the Surrealists – that every so often in dreams or our waking subconscious - order revealed itself by emerging from the chaos that surrounds us. I’m more inclined to go with the suggestion from Jean Clair of the Musee Picasso in his discussion at p47 et seq, that Cartier-Bresson never left anything to chance, that he was so skilful that he could see, anticipate and act on events going on around him to extract the order himself – HC-B was the vital ingredient that makes the moment decisive.

The variety of images on display is astounding – the book rivals Family of Man for it’s variety and is not tainted with the rather naive idealism of that collection. Cartier-Bresson seems to have photographed virtually the whole of the 20th century – in Europe, America, Africa, and Asia – near and far. I recommend this book – buy it, borrow it – but whatever you do see it.

Cartier-Bresson, H., 2003. The man, the image & the world. London: Thames and Hudson. Ed: R. Delpire et al

Here comes everybody – Chris Killip

From what I have seen of Chris Killip’s images on a Google search this book was a bit of a surprise. Instead of gritty real-life shots of child coal pickers and the bleaker side of life in the 80s NE of England we get page after page of engaging – sometimes slightly whimsical – shots of small villages on the west coast of Ireland, and a record of people making pilgrimages to places of unknown (to me anyway) religious significance.

One thing immediately strikes me – and that is the variety of shots and the diversity of the layout – sometimes 4 to a page – sometimes just 1, colour and black and white on facing spreads, mists and sun , landscape and people up close. Overall the sensation is of someone who has fallen in love with somewhere – and it’s inhabitants - and wants to explain why. This is a place where things change slowly, farmhouses appear to decay – only to be revived, walls are repaired with whalebone, religion is a central theme and hayricks are built by hand. And yet - presumably once a year – all is frenetic activity as modern waterproofs are donned and people labour uphill in dodgy weather for a moment of calm contemplation with an ancient saint.

These are among the first colour photos Killip ever published – and the book would have been very different in black and white only. I think it would have lost some of the sense of contrast – an ancient ceremony happening now - if produced solely in black and white. But at the same time, and perhaps counter intuitively, the black and white photos act as an accent – separating the ancient and customary from the current time.

Intriguing – given the standard advice not to mix colour and monochrome in a single presentation. It clearly works if you have a reason for it.

Killip, C., 2009. Here Comes Everybody. 1st ed. London: Thames and Hudson.

Taryn Simon

Contraband – Taryn Simon
This post is a slight revision of a post from my People and Place blog and is included here because Simon's approach and presentation are of interest to me.

This exhibition – in the Centre  d’Art Contemporain – was the first solo exhibition by Taryn Simon in Switzerland. It featured 546 photos from a set of 1,075 photos of items detained or seized from passengers and overseas mail over a 5-day period at JFK Airport Terminal 4. All the items were classified as prohibited, undeclared, etc.

The press release makes an issue of Simon’s scientific methodology – which veers towards ‘trying too hard’, in my mind, although I can see that such an approach elevates the concept from simple snap-shotting and places it on the footing of a formal study.. Each photo was captured, we are told, using ‘a labour-intensive forensic photographic procedure - large format camera and the same neutral backdrop for all items.’ This is ‘reinforced’ by presenting the series alphabetically from ‘alcohol’ to ‘wood carvings’.

As it happens they were hung in batches which could be viewed in several different orders and they were reproduced at about A5 which talks to my point about trying a bit too hard. However they certainly benefited from being grouped under headings, because many of the items were not easily identifiable.



This was/is a fascinating set of images. I doubt a much smaller group would have had the same impact, but the sheer number and variety of items was memorable in itself. There are some samples on Taryn Simon’s website. People smuggle or carry odd things. In between the obvious – Viagra, heroin, gold-dust, counterfeit handbags etc. – there was dried deer penis, dried guinea pigs, cow dung toothpaste and horse-meat sausages. It was difficult to decide whether to be appalled or amused.
The work itself fits with some of Simon’s previous work which seeks to document unknown parts of daily life in America. Should you ever wonder what customs officials are handling every day this exhibition would be a good place to start.
In the press release Simon is quoted as saying that she was interested not just in the cataloguing, but also the ability of the photos to transcend boundaries –the goods were denied entry but have made it across the border as images. An interesting idea – especially as they have now been re-exported to Switzerland! I can see her point though – without the photos the objects would float in international limbo until they were destroyed and most of us would be none the wiser.

Klaus Pichler

There’s a limit to how much 1970’s black and white social documentary I can handle – so here’s something completely different. Austrian photographer Klaus Pilcher brings a humorous eye to a number of subjects – some serious, some less so but all providing insights into little known aspects of the everyday lives of some of the people around us.
For example – One Third – looks at the environmental impact of the huge quantities of food we throw away every year. His approach is to juxtapose studied commercial-style studio shots of beautifully arranged rooting food into contact with short technical captions detailing the environmental impact of their production and transport. the message is quite clear although there is, I guess, an argument that the aesthetics of the approach over-rides the message. On the other side of that argument is the idea that the double-take produced as we realise the food is rotting attracts our attention in a way that simple shots of waste might not.
Middle Class Utopia is a study of the inhabitants of some of Austria’s allotment gardens and Just the Two of Us is a study of people who like dressing up as fantasy characters in their spare time. Remember – these people could easily be your neighbour – I have no idea what my kids would make of it if I started dressing as the Cookie Monster to relax.
My favourite of the series on his website is Dust. In his project statement Pilcher says it is about:

Dust as a by product of civilisation, the enemy of a sterile society, a constant presence hidden in corners, nooks and crannies. Also, a microcosm made up of multiple components, a combination of different colours, textures and structures, a construct reproducing itself. Every bit of dust is different, each space produces it’s unique type of dust, depending on its nature and its individual use.

The captions indicate the source of the dust and in many if the cases it is then possible to imagine the sequence of actions that resulted in these small piles of debris – the khaki colours of the army surplus shop, the fabric fragments from the tailors the staples and elastic bands from the police offices – the tell tale traces of everyday life, collected and displayed for us to inspect.
While we might expect flies in the dust from a Natural History museum (why?) the presence of a dead cricket in the art gallery is vaguely surreal, and it’s obvious – but only with the knowledge presented here, that the dust in the fan-club stores of different football teams would reflect team colours.
There is quite a lot of related material around the web which i shall have to track down – complicated somewhat by another photographer of the same name operating out of Vienna, but at this stage I feel there is a clear link between all these series, which is our interrelationship with our environment, on a range of scales.
Pichler, K., n.d. Klaus Pichler Fotografie. [Online], Available at: http://www.kpic.at/
[Accessed 09 February 2014].

Survival Programmes (II)

I’ll be upfront – this is not generally my kind of book, but it is undoubtedly interesting on a whole number of levels.
Initial reactions

• The layout is very sombre – alternate pages of nearly solid text and gritty, dark black and white photos on white background with simple captions. The production basically says – take me seriously, there’s nothing frivolous here.
• There is much more text than I expected.
• It’s presented as a collective work – no individual picture credits – but the styles are pretty consistent.
• Where are the middle classes?

Content

• As noted above the pictures are quite dark – essentially the traditional documentary approach.
• The pictures can stand on their own. It is not necessary to read all the text to get a message about powerful people making distant decisions while on the ground life is pretty grim.
• The book tells a story which starts with the situation getting difficult , moves through the powerful trying to impose decisions, the inevitable consequences of poorly managed welfare provision and finishing with riots.
• I grew up in the period covered by the book – yet nothing in  it touches on my experience of the period. It is clear from the text that the middle classes are deliberately excluded. In a book which is concerned with indicating process not just symptoms this seems a significant omission since it is probably the middle classes that put people into positions of power, rather than the disenfranchised.

This is clearly a book in the classic documentary idiom, but I think it asks some fairly searching questions of that idiom. It is clearly highly tendentious – the authors have a story they wish to tell and they get on with telling it. The images they use are too disturbing to make up, and are presented in a manner which brooks little argument with their premise. Yet they have so obviously been selective in their material that I feel it potentially undermines the authority of the piece as a document of the period. Perhaps their intent in seeking to concentrate on process, is to move documentary from a simple portrayal of facts (with or without an agenda) to a position of analysis or assertion.  If so then they succeeded – if not I’m not sure what to make of it.