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“When the child was a child,
it didn’t know that it was a child,
everything was soulful,
and all souls were one.”
Peter Handke’s Song of Childhood, from Wim Wenders’s film Wings of Desire (Der Himmel über Berlin), came to my mind when writing an earlier post here -few days ago- about the Eternal Children.
“When the child was a child,
it had no opinion about anything,
had no habits,
it often sat cross-legged,
took off running,
had a cowlick in its hair,
and made no faces when photographed.”
This is a film that still haunts me, since the first unsuspected time, with its magic, its little surprises and original questions - which slowly reveal themselves, the poetic motion and engulfment.
I vividly remember the first time that I discovered the pleasure of photography by simply changing the vantage point of my view. So much, I also remember the experience and awe felt by the monochromatic cinematography, when first viewed the Wings of Desire.
Parallel to what is portrayed on the film, the longing for physicality and the emphasis on human relations, there has been since then a personal desire to retouch the mystical, non-straightforward, but critically real world that I once saw.
Henri Alekan, at the age of 77, was the director of photography. Interestingly, I found out now, that he used a unique, very old and fragile silk stocking that belonged to his grandmother as a filter for the monochromatic sequences.
There is a wonderful interview of Henri Alekan here, under the title ‘If there such a thing as real angels.’ It is intriguing to read his explanations about many scenes of the film. Even more, his personal views on artistic expression and lens-based image making. I picked up, for example, two points. One where he says, ‘I just don’t believe that electronic effects can make the public experience the same communication you can achieve with a trick that is manually executed.” And another one where he emphasises his approach by pointing out that “a certain level of illumination for the image to be recorded on film [is necessary] but it must correspond intimately with what will happen, with the action.”
All the photographs in this article are film-frames from Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire.
Late night party in downtown Leeds
Photographs by Christos Stavrou © 2007. All rights reserved.
‘The Eternal Children‘ is a documentary directed by David Kleijwegt (2006). Shown in 6 parts below, it’s about a group of musicians, including Devendra Banhart, Anthony & The Johnsons, CocoRosie and others, who share a common spirituality and lyrical understanding of the world.
Young and colourful musicians, ‘with their eyes wde-open’, but not naive, but with hope; a young generation that shifts away from the rage and depression of early 90s, as Anthony Hegarty remarks.
“From the beginning of the [20th] century the perceptual field in Europe was invaded by certain signs, representations and logotypes that were to proliferate over the next twenty, thirty, sixty years, outside any immediate explanatory context, like beak-nosed carp in the polluted ponds they depopulate. Geometric brand images, initials, Hitler’s swastika, Charlie Chaplin’s silhouette, Magritte’s blue bird or the red lips of Marilyn Monroe: parasitic persistence cannot be explained merely in terms of the power of technical reproducibility, so often discussed since nineteenth century. We are in effect looking at the logical outcome of a system of message-intensification which has, for several centuries, assigned a primordial role to the techniques of visual and oral communication.
On a more practical note, Ray Bradbury recently remarked: ‘Film-makers bombard with images instead of words and accentuate the details using special effects. … You can get people to swallow anything by intensifying the details.’
The phatic image - a targeted image that forces you to look and holds your attention - is not only a pure product of photographic and cinematic focusing. More importantly it is the result of an ever-brighter illumination, of the intensity of its definition, singling out only specific areas, the context mostly disappearing into a blur.
During the first half of the twentieth century this kind of image immediately spread like wildfire in the service of political or financial totalitarian powers in acculturated countries, like North America, as well as in destructured countries like the Soviet Union and Germany, which were carved up after revolution and military defeat. In other words, in nations morally and intellectually in a state of least resistance. There the key words of poster ads and other kind of posters would often be printed on a background in just as strong a colour. The difference between what was in focus and its context, or between image and text, was nevertheless stressed here as well, since the viewer had to spend more time trying to decipher the written message or simply give up and just take in the image.”
Excerpt from the book ‘The Vision Machine‘ by Paul Virilio (p.14, 1994, Indiana University Press).
Dinu Li is a UK based artist born in Hong Kong and now living in Manchester. Today at 5pm he will be giving a talk at 42 New Briggate Gallery in Leeds, looking at the work he is currently showing, ‘The Mother of All Journeys‘.
It’s free to attend and will include a session of questions and answers, as well as plenty of Chinese beer and green tea. I know because I was there and enjoyed them few weeks ago during the exhibition’s opening!
[Dinu Li's exhibition in Leeds © 2007 Christos Stavrou]
Dinu Li’s work has been described as one that addresses the construction of individual and collective identity in an increasingly connected, but at the same time fragmented global village. The Mother of all Journeys is an exploration into the memories of the artist’s 80-year-old mother. Through a series of colour photographs Li charts her journey from China to England.
[photograph from 'The Mother of All Journeys' © Dinu Li]
The exhibition consists of some impressive, high quality colour prints of large and smaller sizes depicting places where the artist’s mother and family have been. They are accompanied by few personal belongings and several pieces of text on paper, written by an old type-writer (another referent to the interplay of old and new, now and then). For example, near the photograph shown above it is written: “By coincidence, your dad and I both had jobs making underwear. He worked in a factory stitching English words into the waistbands on men’s pants. I would bring work home, cutting loose treads from bras. Chun Yu was the one being breast-fed at the time. Sometimes his legs would kick out, causing me to cut the bra straps.”
A warm and deeply human story unfolds in the exhibition room. The viewer is called to connect the pieces, as in a puzzle. Through traces of time and space, through someone’s experiences and feelings. Photographs, texts and sound, (a music theme keeps playing in the background), are elements which never reveal a straightforward reality but rather in co-operation with the viewer’s imagination succeed in reconstructing, or rather reinterpreting, time and personality within the individual trajectory of a loved person.
Through the images we revisit unique spaces in the mother’s journey. We can view them as they are now. A mental transformation of those spaces takes place. It’s a trip backwards in time. Ultimately a trip depending on us. The texts help us to connect with those visual representations of present and past, what we see and what we imagine, but what they evoke has an independent existence in itself. We interact and learn, both personal and collective, stories of diaspora, ethnicity and family. We become active readers and listeners, not just distant viewers, almost like the family’s far relatives. We become participants because, after all, our experiences may partially overlap with what is revealed in front of us. One piece of text reads in a familiar to me tone: “Nobody dared try their English out at the cornerstore. Eventually you ran over and came back with a pack of salted peanuts.“
[Dinu Li's exhibition in Leeds © 2007 Christos Stavrou]
At the background there is a small TV set and a song is playing repetitively. The same song can be heard through a CD player mounted on the wall. At first, it appears as a pop soundtrack from the 60s. It adds to the dreaming quality of the exhibition. But also it invites the visitors to construct the identity of Dinu Li’s mother. Was that her favourite song? Maybe it was his mother’s and father’s special song?… Somewhere there is another text that could be relevant, the careful viewer would have noticed, one where Dinu Li’s mother describes her engagement and refers to her new house as socially distinct, being the only one which had a record-player…
The exhibition reveals social divisions and cultural rituals intertwined with individual experience and personal memory. Humans do not appear over-determined by social processes. Little moments become humorous and lyrical. The interaction and eventful meeting of multiple signs of ethnicity, culture, and migration, but always under a framework of personal perspective -including the viewer, becomes one of the main characteristics. The exhibition song, for example, clearly reminds an old and famous western musical but after few seconds or minutes someone realises that it’s sang in Chinese. Issues of the relational, both inclusionary and exclusionary nature of culture are raised. The visitor becomes a consious part of this of course. There is a photo of the entrance of a cinema theatre. It makes you think whether this is Hong-Kong, or Britain, or somewhere else. And the nearby caption, that “Your brothers were taking you to see movies of Tony Curtis” points out to the global village we increasingly inhabit. But keep reading the same text and it offers a personal and emotional dimension too: “I would always take you to see love stories. Whenever the stars kissed I had to cover your eyes.”
This kind of ‘familiarity’ of the visual and textual material, the interactive quality of the presentation, and the feelings of love, care and endurance that the whole work brought into surface, were for me what I found as so successful and rewarding in this exhibition. The intercrossing of time feels life and the intercrossed spaces sense culture.
[Dinu Li in his exhibition in Leeds © 2007 Christos Stavrou]
At some point, I managed to find the artist alone and ask few questions, a conversation that I’ll try to recreate here:
First, I wondered how important was the thinking about the compositions to his project. He said, not that much, more important was for him to be in the right place, which was not always easy. “I usually had to ask my mother: was that the right tree mom?.. Or the other one over there, etc..”
“Yet, what did you particularly try to include or exclude”, I asked again. He replied that he mainly tried to exclude any people from his frames, the viewers could read different things, if there were people in the scenes. Another question regarded what equipment did he use and why. He pointed out that the whole project started by finding one very small and old square photograph of his mother, a picture that himself did not know about. In order to reproduce that square format he used a Hasselblad.
[photograph from 'The Mother of All Journeys' © Dinu Li]
“I found a photo of my mother in her things” Dinu Li said. ‘There she was, a young woman holding my brother as a baby. It was the first time I saw that picture.. I hadn’t seen my mother looking this way before…”
So, I continued, your idea for this project started by you realising that your mother had not many physical evidence of her past but memories… and then you travelled with her to so many different places, recreating reality in a way…
Yes, it was all in her mind.. Dinu explained. Many stories of her past, our past.. I knew much of it already from stories that she had told me.. In one level, this project is about the journey of her life, in another level we may question if what is shown here is reality…
I made a final thought that didn’t express that day. Dinu Li’s work, as Roland Barthes did in Camera Lucida, asserts the referential power of photography. And as another Barthes insists of his mother’s knowable presence in the world based on a photograph he found of her as a child. But he develops and builds upon it by revisiting the traces of the past and the places she has been. It is rather another accomplishment of what Barthes describes as achieving “utopically, the impossible science of the unique being” (Barthes, 1981, p.71).
[from Dinu Li's exhibition in Leeds © 2007 Christos Stavrou]
The Mother of All Journeys (which accompanies Opera North’s production of Madam Butterfly) will run until 10 November 2007, at 42 New Briggate Gallery, Leeds.
Sousveillance is the recording or monitoring of real or apparent authority figures by others, particularly those who are generally the subject of surveillance. Steve Mann, who coined the term, describes it as watchful vigilance from underneath.
When I was recently covering a music gig following a local friendly political protest, I decided to photograph those who were photographing all of us all the time (see above).
Later I discovered that there is even a FlickR group called Surveillance Mirror from which I have borrowed the explanations of the terms. It is worth the visit, both for the the
written posts -concerned with democracy and freedom, as well as for the photos. They often do elevate it to art, as the photo at the left demonstrates (photo by Dr John2005)
The term sousveillance stems from the contrasting French words sur; meaning above; and sous; meaning below, surveillance denotes the eye-in-the-sky watching from above, where as sousveillance denotes bringing the camera or other means of observation down to human level, either physically (mounting cameras on people rather than on buildings), or hierarchically (ordinary people doing the watching, rather than higher authorities or architectures doing the watching).
In Britain we are officially the most watched people on earth. If you live in London, the chances are you are caught on CCTV about 300 times a day.
In a recent competition called ‘new ways of looking’ I sent that photo above from Bradford’s train station, in which I had photographed a massive police poster depicting an officer photographing the public. At the moment of shooting the photo, I smiled thinking that I was returning the favour.. And I was wondering if the poster’s self-controlling message had ever reached the man with the suitcase sitting on the bench away, appearing with his back and shoulders down as having a long and tiring trip ahead of him…
The idea of an inherent resistance to the top-down application of this type of power, and its disciplinary and normalising effects (with tools, such as ‘the gaze’ which target the mind and not the body any more) can be found in Foucault’s work. Especially in his classic Discipline and Punish and the selected writings and interviews titled Power/Knowledge.
This is a photograph (above) of staff members of WBAI (an anti-war, non-commercial New York radio station of the 60s) including Bob Fass, Larry Josephson and Steve Post. It is a photograph made by Richard Avedon in 1969.
And this is a photograph (below) by Brian Griffith from a massive corporate photography project he has just completed for his client London and Continental Railways. He has produced a wide and impressive range of portraits of the people who built the Channel Tunnel’s high speed rail link.
The final work, a collaboration with art director Greg Thorton called Teamphoto, is exhibited right now at the German Gymnasium, 26 St Pancras Road, London until 19 November. You can view more of these photos here.
In a recent interview in BJP (3 October 2007, p.28) Griffin points out his influences, which were Avedon’s classic ‘In the American West’, Russian constructivism, Edward Hopper, David Lynch, 17th century painting and 1960s fashion photography.
Griffin, as seen in the photo above, depicts the men in suits in a rather humorous way, emphasising something of the egocentricity or conceitedness of the management. It is in fact a contrasting approach compared with the glorifying images of workers and labourers as seen in his other work.
Avedon’s influence nevertheless is stark: Both, in the formal arrangements (use of frame lines to crop figures and faces, merged bodies, lack of three dimensional space by removing foreground and background elements), and in the emotional impact of the photo, capturing something of isolation and egocentrism, nonetheless creating a sense of rather irritating but interesting, intense context.
Through a bizzare series of mental associations and following the viewing of these ‘workplace’ photos, I went seeking in my room for an old jazz record by John Coltrane, The Africa/Brass sessions. I played the second track, ‘The Song of Underground Railroad’ based on folk tunes from the past of African people in America. The songs of the underground railroad refer to the slavery period and had coded meanings to bring the slaves to freedom.
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Photographs by Christos Stavrou © 2007 All rights reserved.
Photograph by Gary Winogrand, World’s fair, New York City, 1964.
“The crystalline clarity of Garry Winogrand’s awareness of a photograph cutting through motion and time makes this image of people interacting on a bench absolutely riveting. The quality and intensity of a photographer’s attention leave their imprint on the mental level of the photograph. This does not happen by magic.”
This is what Stephen Shore writes in his book ‘The Nature of Photographs‘ (2007 Phaidon) about Winogrand’s celebrated picture above. And these comments, with their simplicity and power, have captured my attention. More than any debate whether this was a posed or unposed photograph, especially given the artist’s preference for a casual and rather poorly executed pictures.
A catalogue of the Museum of Modern Art stated about this photograph, according to this review, that “in addition to the physical description the work provides - the pattern of legs, the leans and whispers - it also alludes to broader human relationships and suggest the coexistence of two parallel worlds: the specific and intimate reality of the women clustered on the park bench and the anonymous presence of the crowds visible in the distance.”
Besides all and any meanings found in this image, those first words about perception keep coming back… ‘the awareness of a photograph cutting through motion and time’…
After a train trip of about 20 minutes toward the North of England, Leeds’s neighbor and very far cousin city emerges: York. Such different are their social histories of past and present that the return ticket price of £9.10 (an obvious rip off) feels almost justified…
Click here or at the picture above for a link to my photographs from a recent trip to York. It is part, unrefined yet, of a wider photographic project which is currently in progress, about the changing faces of the English North cities and the diverse spirit of experience within them.
All photographs by Christos Stavrou © 2007. All rights reserved.
Bill Callahan or Smog in a recent photo by Joanna Newsom (left).
Lee Friedlander’s ‘Shadow Play’ from 1966 (below).
![Friedlander [Shadow Play] 1966.jpg](http://thinkinpictures.files.wordpress.com/2007/10/friedlander-shadow-play-1966_445px.jpg)
Who is the main subject? In both cases, as the photographer’s shadow is projected upon the depicted person, a new analogy and relationship emerges. Lee Friedlander’s shadow head acquires hair by carefully ‘falling’ upon the woman’s hair. Her coat button becomes his mouth. Ultimately he is the main subject there. Bill Callahan, in the first photo, is embraced by the stretched arm of a shadow-figure in a warm and sensitive gesture of co-existence.
Watch a video of ‘Rock Bottom Riser’ below with Smog and Joanna Newsom at the Parish (Sept. 2006)
I know we have almost a whole month until we are to officially celebrate Halloween, on the night of 31st of October, but the shops around us have a different idea. From little tempting chocolates which look like curved pumpkins to headless ’scary’ plastic men, a day’s shopping in downtown Leeds can hardly miss the Halloween commercial frenzy…
Not that the ubiquitous advertising has ever been desperate just for public holidays in order to grab people’s attention. Every case, such as a new club night, seems to demand and justify something impressive.. As far as I know, no the photo below does not show a military coup in Leeds…
But yes, you have probably guessed well, those little Santas and his deers are already out there…
[All images by Christos Stavrou © 2007 All rights reserved]
Today’s photo comes from a lonely page left behind in the train. (It has become a habit of mine lately to base my interaction with the happenings of this world upon the poetic and ironic powers of chance).
Photograph by Pawan Kumar / Reuters
It is the ‘image of the day’ published in The Times yesterday, October 2 2007. Children dressed as Mahatma Gandhi during celebrations in Lucknow, northern India, marking the 138th anniversary of his birth.
There is something ambivalent and strange that I feel looking at this photo. Maybe it’s about the way that we teach the young generations history and identity, in a ritualistic way that appears too limited, that suddenly reminds for me those words from Genesis, that ‘God created man to his own image’. Or maybe of course we created God in our own image… and now, all the same, we socially reproduce the future too. Amid childish innocence and loughs, we are moulding our own cultural image upon the placid unwritten space of the new generations.
Where all these thoughts lead me… do they mean and imply that culture -despite all the recent celebrations- is (also) a limitation? In particular when culture actually means enforcing a restricted national ‘We’?
Maybe the photo becomes ambivalent and strange for me after all, because it awakens memories of my childhood, being dressed to resemble the national heroes of my own country. It reminds me the absolute faith and pride of those years, although so tarnished and contrasted by the later critical ideas of growing up. And there is still a national ‘we’ that keeps struggling with the critical ‘I’.
Those social rituals, nevertheless, are not fixed-end processes, neither are reduced to a mere self-centered enforcement. They depend on the meanings invested upon them. The Times accompany the photo with Gandhi’s words in bold letters about how to achieve peace: “If we are to teach real peace in this world, and if we are to carry on a real war against war, we shall have to begin with the children.
As much as I aspire in the paper’s universalised approach on general peace and the world’s general youths, a quite idealised and harmless approach, so much I think that it misses one further point, maybe a stronger one; and probably it misses it because of its own national bias. Gandhi, as well as my own national heroes who I was dressing up to resemble when I was kid, apart for peace and tolerance, they fought for independence and what this means is mainly freedom.
Exploring the random pockets of green around my new neighborhood. An old and abandoned quarry has stolen one of my days. Horsforth has a long history of stone quarrying - its stone was even used in the building of Kirkstall Abbey in the 12th century.
It was almost night when found my way out.
(All images by Christos Stavrou © 2007 All rights reserved. View them larger here)
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