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A news photograph of F.D. Roosevelt, circulated in 1928, four years before he was first elected as a president, shows a well-dressed man in a confident posture. It is visually demonstrating his ‘good standing’ to the electorate. But otherwise, it could easily pass as an unremarkable photograph among many other official photos of politicians. ‘Candidate with a cane’ could be the generic title as Sally Stein remarks in a recent article (2006).

But on closer inspection, the viewer might discover a well hidden second cane which provides support to Roosevelt’s impaired body. Since 1922, he was not able to stand or walk without external form of help.

Images are very important in electoral campaigns. The ways that leaders and politicians stand in their representations are heavily invested by visual indications, which aim to convince the viewers that they are appropriate to govern. So, this visual manipulation with the hidden support can be understood within the context of U.S. democracy, which has shown little deviation from the theatrical norm of leader: a male, WASP, heterosexual individual with a very sound mind - though religious persuasions are accepted - and very sound body (Sally Stein, 2006).

Such political manipulation of the ‘inappropriate’ body continued long through his political career and involved a series of tactical decisions. For example, he consistently avoided any photographs together with the fellow patients of the polio clinic which he was regularly visiting… His bright steel leg braces, particularly seen when he was seated, were painted black to avoid reflecting in flash photography… He used others to hold him when walking in public, especially his sons, in order to avoid using canes and wanting to appear as walking by himself… He deliberately gave all his public speeches from a standing position, though the podium was appropriately reinforced so that the necessary support was provided…

An endless effort of appearing active and strong, according to the dominant norms, and against the stigma of disability… was met by a cooperative press and a desperate nation wanting to believe in ’strong’ leaders.

Nevertheless, Roosevelt had a successful political career; although many have argued that this was precisely because his impairment and disability was masked. A convenient collaboration between the politician, the media and a nation wishing to believe to fictions of ’strong’ leaders.

As we enter another election period in U.S. with probably another candidate who deviates from the traditional rigid norm, I’m wondering how Barack Obama will deal with this situation and way of his representation. Will he, for example, play down blackness in his images, and if yes, how? And in the end, how obssessed will the electorate be with maintaining the dominant forms of representation, the appearances…

There is one video - linked in my last post - that keeps coming back in my mind. I am talking about that tv clip showing how the sculptor Cosimo Cavallaro got attacked by a representative of a religious group, who in the name of their version of Catholicism and rigid moral order, launched a series of bullying tactics and threatening acts against everyone associated with Cavallaro’s work: a statue of Jesus made by chocolate.

The scandalous point for that religious group was not its chocolate nature of course. It was its anatomically correct representation.

I’m glad that Cosimo Cavallaro has eloquently exposed the morally and conceptually empty stance of his attacker during the TV interview. Yet, if the latter believes that this is “one of the worst assaults against Christian sensibilities ever”, as reported in the news, which he then conveniently uses to justify a wave of violent reactions, should we overlook him with disdain for manipulating reality and ends, or start worrying about the state of our political thought and the undermined role of art?

I am wondering how to perceive this whole incidence. For example, as evidence of some remaining parochial figures which keep providing a source of identification for easily-led authoritarian personalities? Or, given their apparent capacity to terrorise, to threaten with violence or enforce economic boycotts, is this evidence of the continuing political power and effectiveness of extreme right-wing groups and their discourses?

For many, this represents a kind of anachronism within modern society. Certainly, an example of its current contradictions. Many sociologists, such as Giddens, have viewed these groups in terms of modern fundamentalisms. They try to defend tradition but in a way which refuses public dialogue and examination of their ‘truths’. But, as it is asserted, we live in times and places where truths have to be decided. Consequently, these fundamentalist movements of religious, or national and other traditional discourses, can lead to violence.

Violence is in the air, no doubt about it. Although, I would say that this violence arises, not only from the non-dialogic position of such traditional groups (of religion, nation, sexuality, gender, etc), but also from the emotion-based and non-rationally understood reactions of the threatened individuals which comprise them. (In other words, their intolerance might not be responsive to rational approaches).

Now, whether these individuals of fundamentalist groups face real or imaginary threats to their beliefs and identities, could be the next big question. I leave it to everyone to think about it, whether being one of those individuals or not.

I’ll just continue with three relevant visual traces of thought.

a

The religious representative above was trying at some point to explain what finds offensive by evoking a comparative image, which would show the artist’s mother to the public, being naked with her genitals exposed.

What would be offensive or threatening about that?

A photograph entitled Flesh by Japanese artist Manabu Yamanaka (© 1995) comes to my mind.

Yamanaka, who practiced as a nurse among the elderly for years, shows us a photograph of a naked old woman against a white and empty background. Nothing to soften the image, no beautifying techniques or other trycks. Neither the subject makes any attempt to hide her naked bodily existence.

If the viewers feel, however, an emerging emotion of disturbance or embarrassment, contrasting in fact the subject’s comfortable approach, this owes much more to their own problematic attitudes and fears, rather than the photograph itself. Fears of mortality, or chaos, or secret fascination, or whatever else, can and have to be resolved by the viewers themselves, not the subject or the artist. And if for many the photograph comes as a shock, they should probably question our wider culture which makes images of old age rare and invisible, which is obsessed with health and youth, and which associates nude with young female bodies.

b

Let’s go to Vertigo, one of Alfred Hitchcock’s most fascinating movies. I remembered a point made by the well known scholar Slavoj Zizek.

In the plot of the movie, Scottie (James Stewart) saves Madeleine (Kim Novak) when she fell into the waters of San Francisco Bay. Later we are back to Scottie’s flat where she has been recovering sleeping in his bed and he is waiting for her to wake up.

In the meantime, the camera zooms around Scottie’s flat and shows us Madeleine’s clothes hanging in the little kitchen room. So it makes clear that Scottie has undressed Madeleine off her wet clothes before placing her to bed. (After all she later wakes up and questions what happened).

But just a moment! If we focus carefully into the picture of those clothes we realise that there is no underwear shown. There is a chance that they are further away, behind the wall, and so not shown in the image, but we can also observe a bizarre piece of clothing hanging there.

Zizek has argued that there was a censorship issue there with a particular ideological twist. It was imperative that no underwear should be shown, (thus they were replaced by some irrelevant old cloth), because the regulators were concerned that the viewers would otherwise assume that Scottie had seen Madeleine naked. The image of underwear hung to dry was seen, in other words, as the signifier of a scandalous act. Its omission was rendered as the appropriate way to avoid evoking such a conclusion into viewers’ mind.

But, of course, someone would simply ask: Since we, the viewers, know that Scottie has undressed Madeleine and thus we know that he has seen her naked why do we need this kind of symbolic protection?

In the same way, if people know that their god was at some point an ‘anatomically correct’ man, in terms of genitalia, then why are the regulators of their public morals go to such effort to make sure that an artifact which shows that must not be produced? What, in the end, are we protected from?

c

The absurdity of modern life often hits us in the face fully-clothed and fully-regulated. Whether it is found in its limits or consists its integral core, and whether it is an issue of collective lies, are not a matter of the image alone.

“And there appeared a great wonder in heaven - a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars. Revelation:12″

This was the introductory quote by Diane Arbus in her unpublished article ‘Bishop’s Charisma’ (1964). It included 3 photographs and text written by her. Here’s part of it.

“On a cliff overlooking the Pacific, in a cemetery in the sun, a small lady in damask robes with hair of a phosphorescent pink holds aloft a styrofoam cross encrusted with smaller crosses and raises her eyes till they pale at the vision of Jesus Christ. She is called Bishop Ethel Predonzan of The Cathedral Of The Creator, Omnipresence, Inc. Christ, she declares, has summoned her there to Santa Barbara, California, all the way from Astoria, Queens, to await His Second Coming on December 4th of this year.

I followed the Bishop across the country to hear her story and to listen to God’s voice on a 45 rpm record, as he says to her: “I appeal to you for the future of this earth to lead the people, my dear. You are their Guiding Star. Do not fail Me now that I stand before you. . .” etc. [...]

“He has a gorgeous voice,” she says. “What a diction. There is no one on this earth that can speak the diction of The Father and Christ.” Sometimes while the Bishop is talking, a strange sound interrupts her speech. This is how Jesus kisses her in the throat, she explains, blissfully, “like a butterfly.” Occasionally, she relates, He tells her: “I am going to fly with you tonight. You must be pure like a glass of water.” And then He comes, she says, His wings like a hurricane, and takes her to the Heavens (”Ooooooh, what a feeling”), to the different planets. “My Lord, my Lord,” she cries out to Him, “I’m going to fall,” but He touches something in the back of her neck and she is no longer afraid.”

Now, I have begun to wonder about something else… Why was this article by Diane Arbus not published?

The Rolling Exhibition began as a simple photograph taken while Kevin Connolly was skating down a backstreet in Vienna some time ago. Kevin kept travelling balancing his torso on a skateboard, and now, after rolling through the streets of 31 cities in 15 countries, he exhibits what he collected: the stare.

The stare, or ‘the gaze’, the expression of social power, which normalises and disciplines populations of our times, according to Foucault and other scholars, has captivated and excited - with its conceptual potency - our understanding of society and self.

What is the power relationship here? It is between able-bodied and non able-bodied people as social actors. What does this mean in actual terms? In brief, that the different power these groups have, and had in recent centuries, has heavily influenced and crystallised, or ‘naturalised as they say in sociology, the way that we see or know things. Social norms are constructed, and made to appear as natural, pre-existing our societies; which then used to discipline those who deviate, assumed to breach the ‘natural order’, but also used to regulate all of us.

And any kind of natural and normal able-bodiedness is of course just and only an assumption. That people must have a particular bodily and mental structure, that there is something called ‘normal humanity’ or ‘normal human body’, let’s say something which requires to have two legs, is just the effect of theological, social, political and economical discourses which forcefully and violently have achieved this to be seen as ‘truth’. In brief, any idea of what is a ‘natural human body’ is a result of social processes, not of any natural norms. And to claim the opposite, that yes there is a natural biological body does not stand well to criticism. Not historically (because it changes meaning through time and space), or logically (the metaphysics of western reason), or empirically (the social normalisation of any difference involves, for example, even such practices as those by doctors who surgically shape new-born babies’ genitalia to ‘appropriate’ form, if these do not conform to the dualist social norm male/female).

So, Kevin Connolly has turned the gaze back, he is taking the photos of his viewers. From an object of the gaze - and devaluation - he becomes the active subject. He seems to want to record but also to make people think and narrate the content of their thoughts. Constructing the narratives, approaching the origins of their stories, the viewers -those who were photographed or us who view the photos- may become able to encounter and question one of the deepest and most hidden socially constructed identities, one which people who are entitled to they never even use it to identify with: being ‘able-bodied’.

You might remember an earlier post here presenting a text by Susan Sontag: “Photography is, first of all, a way of seeing. It is not seeing itself.” Kevin Connolly’s photographs is an attempt to introduce a new and different way of seeing.

So, how is this all responded to? I can speak for one source found through Kevin’s website, an article in the ABC News website (1/1/2007): ‘Man without legs harnesses public gaze‘

Pardon? Something is deeply wrong in this article and can be sensed even from the title! Although, it tries hard to leave behind the traditional melodramatic ‘tragic but brave’ attitude to disabled people (oh, how heroic that he can take a photograph!), in the end it sinks deep in the same boring and stereotypical presentation of disability.

Instead of going through an analysis of the photographs and the involved meanings, it focus on the photographer. Certainly, the low viewpoint that characterises Connolly’s photos does not provide much to analyse in terms of originality in abstract, it is all of course in the context that which matters.

But the article fails to talk about this context. It fails to talk about the subjects of the photographs and their projections… or any challenging implications… or the meanings we have analysed above… or how the writer/viewer feels having to identify with the gazers (is this guilt and anxiety coming through?)… or even how ‘lucky’ Kevin is to be able to have access to a photographic project because he actually can use a tool (skateboard) made for able-bodied people… Instead, it talks only and about the photographer, his medical record, his upbringing, his customs, how he deals and manages with his condition etc.

In other words, despite what Kevin Connolly tries to show with his work, the stereotypical response of the media is to refuse the re-arrangement of the stare, and politically return the gaze back!

In all its naivety the article just briefly talks about the viewers’ stares as an example of ‘human nature’ (a concept often used in order to disguise the lack of social analysis), whilst describing how cultures approach him differently, from beggar to holy man. This is something not surprising at all! Actually it confirms how tied is any, changing understanding of ability and disability with its particular society of making (not the human nature).

One final note. I felt very happy to see Kevin Connolly rejecting prosthetic legs and any other forms of normalisation. It speaks something loud and emotive. to me personally and I hope all those currently removing disabling physical barriers from all areas of social life. It’s about how agency and personal ideas, and of course difference, must be accounted and accommodated, for the potential of any new adaptations to ever become effectively enabling.

Here, at left, maybe relevant in its assumptions of a standard uniform body, Le Corbusier’s modular man. It was used as a measuring device for his architectural work and reflects his understanding that ‘man is a geometrical animal’ based upon the conception of a normal biological body. Physiological difference and diversity were simply absorbed into a system of fixed and universal standards of function and performance (Rob Imrie, 2006).

the kiss

How does it feel to know that one of the most romantic images ever made was staged? The famous ‘Kiss by the Hôtel de Ville’ by Robert Doisneau, captured in Paris in 1950, was no other but a manufactured image. Alas, this was revealed by its creator himself in a court trial in the 1990s when, in mid of controversy, Françoise Bornet, a former actress and the woman who was featured with her boyfriend in the photo, sued Doisneau for $18,000 and a share of the royalty in the image.

Her case was dismissed. Doisneau died the next year in 1994. But in the end, few years later, Ms. Bornet sold her original print of the photograph for over $200,000 at an auction (BBC News 25/4/2005) while the rights still remain with Doisneau’s agency.

So does it still feel an iconic image to you, a quintessential Parisian image of passion, a symbol of romantic spontaneity and  desire?

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“In the early fall, I drank coffee with several generations of the Conner family, the close air of their kitchen settling across my shoulders like a shawl. I explained what I was doing and, as so often happened, their initial suspicion gave way gradually to caution and then to curiosity and a guarded acceptance. They agreed that I could photograph Kelly.

At dawn at the first day of hunting season they called where the deer were beheaded and hung. As I set up the camera, Kelly appeared, buttoned up, accompanied by her mother, her aunt and uncle, her grandparents, cousins, and a few other family members. Arrayed behind me, they remained watchful and intent.

As I pulled her jacket back, to separate her white-shirted figure from the darkness of the shed, I thought I might have heard a murmur. After few minutes I relaxed enough to identify the prevalence of the V shapes in the scene and without thinking I asked Kelly to spread her legs. This time the murmur was audible, but I could see that the picture was complete.”

Text and photograph (above) by Sally Man; from her book ‘At Twelve. Portraits of young women’ (© 1988, Aperture Foundation).

A major photographic exhibition is coming to the North. Representing the first half of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s career (which spans from 1932 to 1946), a photographic material which was carefully selected, printed and mounted to a scrapbook by himself after the World War II, will be shown in the National Media Museum in Bradford from 7th of March to 1st of June 2008.

As the museum’s website reports, “these photographs documented both his extensive travels and his encounters with Surrealism and modern art. They were conceived as an initial selection for a major exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, a show that would catapult Cartier-Bresson onto the world stage and bring him international recognition. All the original photographs have now been brought together for a new exhibition, showing for the first time in the UK.” (photo left: Henri Cartier-Bresson, Mexico, 1934)

The story about the scrapbook’s making entails few very interesting twists. During World War II, and following Cartier-Bresson’s capture by the Nazis, the curators of the Museum of Modern Art were making arrangements for a posthumous exhibition of his work. But Henri, after three years in prison camps and two unsuccessful attempts, he managed to escape in 1943 and then survived in hiding. Few years later, he found out with pleasure about the MoMA plans and decided to collaborate and curate the exhibition himself, bringing 300 self-made prints glued in a scrapbook to New York!

Cartier-Bresson began photographing the world in 1930, first with a brownie box camera and then, two years later, with his trademark Leica. His photos from expeditions in several countries were published in major journals and he had his first exhibition in Madrid in 1933.

Henri Cartier-Bresson, Madrid 1933

Cartier-Bresson was also drawn to the cinema and worked as an assistant director in Jean Renoir’s film ‘The Rules of the Game’ (1939). He also became interested in documenting the Spanish Civil War. At the outbreak of World War II, he was drafted into the French army where he was a corporal in a film and photo unit captured in the Vosges Mountains in June 1940.

The MoMA exhibition, celebrating his survival, opened on February 4, 1947. (Note that the same year he also joined Robert Capa and David Seymour in founding Magnum).The collection includes portraits, such as of Matisse, Picasso and others, as well as street photography, assigned photo essays and reportage of France’s war years.

Henri Cartier-Bresson, Gestapo Informer, Dessau, Germany, 1945.

The ‘Scrapbook’ has been published in its entirety for first time last year by Thames & Hudson. Cartier-Bresson turned his attention to it in the 1990s again, realising its great importance - especially since the selection of the photos was his own choice. In fact, he rediscovered it in a suitcase in his parents’ house after his mother died. But he was not really ‘a man living in the past’ - as described in the interview below - and left it in the bookshelf. Following his death in 2004, the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, the present owner of the prints, finished the job of restoring the photographs, and made their wider publication available.

Llisten here to Martine Franck and Agnès Sire of Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson talking about the history of the Scrapbook. This is an interview hosted in the website of the International Centre of Photography, New York, where the Scrapbook was exhibited last year.

Leeds under construction. The city deconstructed.

Photograph by Christos Stavrou © 2007. All rights reserved

I opened a classic book tonight, The Americans by Robert Frank (1958). A friend left it here with couple other books before Christmas. I went downstairs to search for it. I was left with Robert Frank’s spectators.

In page 37 a young girl working in a cafe or a similar place, is staring towards an unseen space at the left. It could be anywhere in America in the 1950s, when Frank went on the roads with his camera - in fact, the book does not provide any caption for this photo.

Above her head we can see the advertising signs for the shop products. They speak almost louder than her. ‘Steak sandwich’ reads one sign at the far left, and another one just straight in front of us offers ‘jumbo size hot dog’ with big letters - bigger and better than ever, it adds.

And between the signs a seasonal plaque with Santa Claus and Merry Christmas wishes. He is smiling, he seems to know what he is doing, she is not. But their faces echo each other.

I remembered that we just had all those semi-religious western holidays at the turn of the year, accompanied with the usual consumerist noise and emptiness. I think I was a child, about after ten, when first got disappointed by the empty promise of those holidays. A repetitive hedonistic apotheosis, and far too much myth over the capitalist dream of hapiness, the invented needs, which inevitably faded away any personal meaning and importance over the years. Yet, someone always would come these days trying to offer me descriptions of all their wonderful recent shopping. Why, I don’t know. But I stare at their excitement trying to guess, is it real?

Robert Frank captured the commodified transformation of the banal into spectacle. And as Derrick Price argues in his essay Surveyors and Surveyed (2004) , “the people in these photographs are not constituted as ‘poor’ or ‘workers’ or, indeed, as any particular kind of social being. They exist as spectators, gazing out at some invisible scene: other people, the road ahead, a movie screen, a parade going by. In these closed, watchful faces we can read no significant facts, and if we have a sense of ‘being there’, it is as a witness to nothing of any great importance.”

In page 53, a photograph of a Cafe in Beaufort, South Carolina (above). Jack Kerouac writes in the introduction of The Americans that “after seeing these pictures you end up finally not knowing any more whether a jukebox is sadder than a coffin.”

Robert Frank’s approach paved the way and moved along new understandings of documentary photography, away from its traditional ties with major social events and facts, following political situations or causes (see for example our previous post about Margaret Bourke-White). Its subject-matter could now be what interests or fascinates the photographer. The new and expanded field of exploration could now penetrate the commonplace life and deal with subjectivities, identities and personal meanings. A jukebox could equally be sad or sadder than a coffin.

Untitled photograph by Christos Stavrou © 2007 All rights reserved

“In the modern way of seeing, reality is first of all appearance - which is always changing. A photograph records appearance. The record of photography is the record of change, of the destruction of the past. Being modern (and if we have the habit of looking at photographs, we are by definition modern), we understand all identities to be constructions. The only irrefutable reality - and our best clue to identity - is how people appear.”

“Photography is, first of all, a way of seeing. It is not seeing itself.

It is the ineluctably ‘modern’ way of seeing - prejudiced in favor of projects of discovery and innovation.

This way of seeing which now has a long history, shapes what we look for and used to noticing in photographs.”

“The modern way of seeing is to see in fragments. It is felt that reality is essentially unlimited, and knowledge is open-ended. It follows that all boundaries, all unifying ideas have to be misleading, demagogic; at best, provisional; almost always in the long run, untrue. To see reality in the light of certain unifying ideas has the undeniable advantage of giving shape and form to our experience. But it also - so the modern way of seeing instructs us - denies the infinite variety and complexity of the real. Thereby it represses our energy, indeed our right, to remake what we wish to remake - our society, our selves. What is liberating, we are told, is to notice more and more.”

[Excerpts from Susan Sontag's essay 'Photography: A Little Summa' found in her recently published book At the Same Time (2007), New York, Farrar Straus Giroux]

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The British soldiers first saw the lights along German trenches on that Christmas Eve in 1914. Then they heard the music and the songs. Although they might not have known the German language, they recognised the “Silent Night” and responded by singing carols in English that crossed the few hundred feet of No-Man’s Land dividing the two enemies.

And on Christmas Day the British troops learned the flickering lights they’d seen the previous night were burning candles on fir trees. Before long, the two groups of soldiers were exchanging holiday greetings, cigarettes, food and gifts. They collected and burried the dead, they were introduced to each other, took photographs and in one place they even played a football match.

A Christmas truce had broken out.

The term ‘Christmas Truce‘ refers not to a single event but rather to a number of spontaneous expressions of comradeship between the front line soldiers of both sides in December 1914.

This spontaneous truce, which was initiated and apparently confined to the more friendly German units made up by Saxons; which occurred in several and not a sigle place; and was arguably influenced by the proximity of the fighting forces and the uncomfortableness of the trenches; was definitely frowned upon by the higher authorities. Horrified by the news of fraternisation , the leadership on both sides issued orders of condemning and forbidding such tendencies, threatening direct penalties. Such acts were not repeated in subsequent Christmases.

[Sources: i) Christmas Truce: The Western Front December 1914 by Malcolm Brown & Shirley Seaton, Macmillan, London, 1994. ii) Freepress.com iii) H.B. Lee Library of Brigham Young University ]

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The caption of the above photograph, from The Illustrated War News, January 20th 1915, reads:

“A SCENE OF FRATERNISATION : BY ONE OF OUR TRENCHES

Much publicity has been given to the fraternising, at Christmas-time of British officers and men and German officers and men facing one another in the trenches: the German authorities are said to have issued strong orders against such friendliness between enemies. In a letter accompanying our photographs, a private of the London Rifle Brigade writes, from the Ypres-Armentieres neighborhood : “No. … Company went into the breastworks (which have, in most places, round here superseded the flooded reserve trenches) on Wednesday night. Soon after dusk on the 24th the Germans put up lanterns on the top of their trenches and started singing; and their shooting practically ceased. Firing ceased on both sides, and both Germans and English ventured out on the top of their trenches. After daybreak on Christmas Day small parties on both sides ventured out in front of their trenches, all unarmed, and we heard that a German officer came over and promised that they would not fire if we did not.

Apparently during the morning small parties of Germans and English fraternised between the trenches, and when … and I and some of our pals strolled up from the reserve trenches after dinner, we found a crowd of some hundred Tommies of each nationality holding a regular mother’s meeting between the trenches. We found our enemies to be Saxons.

One of the Germans had been a waiter at the Savoy; and another a West-End barber’s assistant. Talk and souvenirs were exchanged. There are those who did not appreciate this cessation of hostilities, even on Christmas Day !”

(source: ‘The Great War in a different light’ website)

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— — — — — —

The Imperial War Museum London will commemorate the 90th anniversary of the Armistice (11 November 1918) with a major exhibition during the next year (September 2008 to March 2009).

According to the museum’s website, In Memoriam: Remembering the Great War will focus on the individual experiences of men, women and children: the front line soldier, sailor and airman; the munitions worker and the nurse; the prisoner-of-war and the internee; the artist and the writer; the disabled and the shell shocked; the widow and the orphan. Their stories will be told through personal objects ranging from a bierstein which was presented to the British captain of a winning football team in the Christmas Truce of 1914 to a rosebud from a wreath which lay on the tomb of the Unknown Warrior in 1920.

Photo by Christos Stavrou © 2007 All rights reserved

Photograph from a degree ceremony in Leeds University.

So, we are removing the barriers. We build special ramps by the side for all those who can’t walk the stairs. We reserve special spaces for those who were traditionally deemed as the unworthy surplus of educational systems… We publish books in braille and use complicated devices to communicate with all those who were thought incommunicable for us…

We publish even more useful, and colourful, prospectus and reports and photographs that proudly demonstrate our achievements… And now that all these newcomers are arriving to receive their diplomas and awards, still very few but they are coming, and still our awards indeed, we count their faces as the face of our own new progress…

But I wonder, did anybody tell them, those in the safe and proud side, that they should count instead all those who could not come, those who couldn’t make it… all those who actually are not here to be counted?…

Photo by Christos Stavrou © 2007 All rights reserved

People write poems while walking between bus stops. I take photographs. While waiting, the air becomes cold or a soft breeze, the light is changing, the day is passing. While waiting, you notice things. People’s faces, their tireness or anticipation. Maybe they come from work, probably they go home. And the camera behaves the same sober or drunk, playful or insular like its owner. Photography is a performance while waitng.

All photographs by Christos Stavrou © 2007. All rights reserved.

Influential photographer Martin Parr has presented a list of inspiring photography books, published in 2007 (The Sunday Times, 2 Dec 2007). His focus on monographs, artistic creativity, originality and small independent photography publishers distinguishes by far his list from other similar ones appearing these days (such as The Guardian’s poor fixation with fashion and ‘national geographic’ aesthetic, no link provided!).

So here’s what Martin Parr has singled out:

• Hackney Flowers by Stephen Gill, is Martin’s favourite book of the year and Gill’s fourth book on his neighborhood area. He has collected various discarded photos found in the local flea market and combined these with some of his own images interspersed with ones of pressed flowers and berries, also derived from Hackney. View one of these photos at the left or the whole fascinating work in the artist’s website here.

• The Genius of Photography by Gerry Badger, a book written to accompany the BBC series, presents a comprehensive account of the complexities and history of photography. It examines the wider, social, political, economic, technological and artistic context of its evolution.
• I’m a Real Photographer by Keith Arnatt, a highly respected conceptual artist of the 60s and 70s, who changed direction and the following decades concentrated on working in obscurity as a photographer. This book tells the story of this journey in 19 series of photographs. Each series features prosaic subject matter - his dogs, the local rubbish tip, everyday objects photographed in his studio, notes that his wife Jo left for him - exploring the conventional with a distinct edge and humor. Seen together, for the first time, the threads and themes of Arnatt’s work connect to make a coherent statement about the act of photography and its relationship to the history of art, as well as produce a moving and profound documentary of everyday life.
• The Mother of All Journeys by Dinu Lee, maps the journey of the photographer’s mother from Hong-Kong to Manchester and reconstructs her memories after several intervening decades. A sensitive and emotional work about personal experience, diaspora, and the gap between memory and reality. Read more and see photos in my review of the exhibition in Leeds here.
• Welcome to Pyongyang by Charlie Crane, is a collection of formal looking portraits of a huge range of people from North Corea, after the photographer managed to get the blessing of the authorities with the help of a tour guide and local guides. But as Martin Parr points out, that these guides were later invited to write the captions and they have composed them in true propaganda style, is what gives this book its edge.

• A China Chronicle by Zeng Li, is a documentation of contemporary China. Zeng Li comes from Liuzhou, Guangxi, and is a well known stage designer working for theatre and film productions. The photographs deal with a country being transformed in one of the most dramatic building booms in history. Documenting change and visually preserving a quickly disappearing urban fabric is the main theme of the book. “My wish is to become an author of ‘images’ and to construct an image ‘museum’ archiving and presenting our history of today and yesterday writes Zeng Li in the book’s introduction. (For a similar historical approach see Sze Tsung Leong’s work in this blog here). Hutong lanes, standardized blocks of flats, factories and polluted rivers resist the ideals of the country’s tourist board, or give way to soaring residential towers and glittering shopping malls. This book shows “what China really looks like now” according to Martin Parr.

• A Shimmer of Possibility by Paul Graham, a British documentary photographer now living in America. The images “depict a slightly downbeat view of America, and tantalisingly, very little appears to be happening” writes Martin Parr. He goes on that this is a bold and successful attempt to rewrite the rules of documentary and the ways that photographs are presented, by a very innovative photographer.

• In England by Don McCullin, a photojournalist who began as a dyslexic child with talent in drawing -growing in London’s poor areas, and established a career scattered with amazing stories, such as having his life saved by his Nikon camera stopping a bullet intended for him. He became well-known recording war-zones and humanitarian catastrophes, such as the Vietnam War, the conflict in Ireland and the AIDS epidemic. In 1982, his work was considered so powerful and evocative that the British Government refused to grant him a press pass to cover the Falklands War. In an interview given in 1987 he announced his change of direction: “I have been manipulated, and I have in turn manipulated others, by recording their response to suffering and misery. So there is guilt in every direction: guilt because I don’t practice religion, guilt because I was able to walk away, while this man was dying of starvation or being murdered by another man with a gun. And I am tired of guilt, tired of saying to myself: ‘I didn’t kill that man on that photograph, I didn’t starve that child.’ That’s why I want to photograph landscapes and flowers. I am sentencing myself to peace.” The book combines forty years of shooting, iconic early images with shooting from 2006, which highlight his thematic return to the cities and landscape he knew as a young photographer. In the introduction McCullin points out his fading away “tolerance or stamina to continue much longer… I am not at the end of my work, but I’m close to the limits of what I can accomplish.” And he continues ‘This is not the England of 1955 … there are new phenomena sweeping the land: obesity, selfishness and the hand gestures and postures of the young that I cannot understand.” It is interesting, however, how many of these new images could have been taken thirty years ago and that McCullin’s lens shows us, with humor and lyricism, a perpetuating and clearly defined social division between the affluent and the impoverished. Martin Parr remarks, “black and white, grainy images of people at either end of the wealth spectrum offer an almost cartoon like rendition of the English”.
• An American Index of The Hidden and Unfamiliar by Taryn Simon, presents photographs from strange places, such as the missile-control centre on the USS Nevada and the death-row cage at Mansfield correction institution. These are places which normally we would never see in person unless we are in some big trouble, writes Martin Parr.
  
• Nein, Onkel (Snapshots from Another Front 1938-1945) edited by Timothy Prus and Ed Jones, is an archive of war imagery and specialises in snapshots taken by soldiers. This compilation shows Nazis having parties, dressing up and generally entertaining themselves in ways that we have not customarily associated with Nazis, thus questioning our assumptions of evil.
• Fashion Magazine by Alec Soth, who is the third Magnum photographer (after Martin Parr and Bruce Gilden) to produce the agency’s annual ‘Fashion Magazine’, with this one entitled Paris Minnesota. Here Soth explores the world of French high fashion and photographs ‘high-style’ Parisians as well as the ‘gentle folk’ of Minessota in the latest creations. (Notably, similar space is devoted to photos of winter snow across a JC Penney parking lot). The juxtaposition and contrast is what makes this compilation irresistible. “What is interesting is the space between us” writes Alec Soth about his work Paris Minnesota. A wider view of this portfolio can be found here, accompanied by two interviews. In one of those, Alec Soth talks about his out of desparation, but hugely successful, approach in creating advertisements. He acquired various top brand items which he planted in the landscape inviting the viewer to engage in a Where’s Wally game. For Martin Parr, these are the most ‘oblique’ advertisements you’ll ever encounter, differentiating themselves from the pretence world of fashion industry, which would never hold your attention for so long.
• Magnum, Magnum, is a huge tom celebrating the 60th anniversary of the famous co-operative photo agency, in which Martin Parr is a member. Interestingly, the photographers have chosen to select not their own but other members’ photos for presentation, writing also the commentary. As Martin Parr points out, the book weighs 6.5 kilos and costs £95 which works out at £14.62 per kilo: about the same price as cod.

Part One

‘Beware of trains’ by Christos Stavrou © 2007

I have received a comment about this picture: “It’s very interesting how you make all these pretty colours seem strange and threatening. Combined with a cryptic message like this the effect is even more striking.”

Sometimes, I wonder loudly about the meanings of a photograph. Here, I recognise the muted primary colours which enhance uncomfortable feelings and a vantage point that sets the viewer in a precarious position. But was it really that, the psychological state described in the comment above, what I have tried to communicate? Maybe, but yet, is it only or exactly that which lies beneath and above the making of this image, before and after its showing? It seems futile this effort to pinpoint a unique and accurate meaning. It’s unnecessary. After all, and so often, people come with comments about my photos which surprise me, which without being foreign to what I have already sensed, they do express a reality even richer than my own initial comprehension.

So, if all is about various interpretations in the minds of the viewers, I need to ask: Is what really matters - in the end - to find the right people to show your pictures.. those who can, and would, read and decode your images, and even invest new meanings upon them?

And something else, what kind of consequences do we face now, all of us making what is called documentary photography? What about those old debates and struggles between self-expression and objectivity?

Part Two

“Fish Story” Koreatown, Los Angeles by Allan Sekula © 1992

“I should not have to argue” writes Allan Sekula in his essay Dismantling Modernism, Reinventing Documentary (1976/78) “that photographic meaning is relatively indeterminate; the same picture can convey a variety of messages under different presentational circumstances. Consider the evidence offered by bank holdup cameras. Taken automatically, these pictures could be said to be unpolluted by sensibility, an extreme form of documentary. If the surveillance engineers who developed these cameras have an esthetic, it is one of raw, technological instrumentality. ‘Just the facts ma’am.’ But a courtroom is a battleground of fictions. What is it that a photograph points to?

A young white woman holds a submachine gun. The gun is handled confidently, aggressively. The gun is almost dropped out of fear. A fugitive heiress. A kidnap victim. An urban guerrilla. A willing participant. A case of brainwashing. A case of rebellion. A case of schizophrenia. The outcome, based on the ‘true’ reading of the evidence, is a function less of ‘objectivity’ than of political maneuvering. Reproduced in the mass media, the picture might attest to the omniscience of the state within a glamorized and mystifying spectacle of revolution and counter-revolution. But any police photography that is publicly displayed is both a specific attempt at identification and a reminder of police power over ‘criminal elements’. The only ‘objective’ truth that photographs offer is the assertion that somebody or something -in this case, an automated camera - was somewhere and took a picture. Everything else, everything beyond the imprinting of a trace, is up for grabs.”

Part three

“The Magnum and Newsweek photographer Luc Delahaye recently declared publicly that he was no longer a photojournalist. He was an artist.” (fromThe Guardian, 31 January 2004)

Who is Luc Delahaye? As implied in this interview, a photographer influenced by the financial and artistic crisis that photojournalism is currently going through. And he searched for control and his own answers, through a range of experiments, tests and self-made questions (which even brought him in opposition with the grand Cartier-Bresson tradition).

“History” Jenin Refugee Camp by Luc Delahaye © 2002

Luc Delahaye first became known for covering wars. However, in 2001 he began the series History, which deals with issues of documentary photography. The latter is all about context; the place it is shown, the way of presentation, the surrounding information. The transmitted message is heavily influenced by such factors. In History, Delahaye intentionally presents traditional themes of documentary photography out of its normal context, thereby questioning their meaning as documents and generally the meaning of photography.

His photographs are enormously enlarged panoramic images of various war zones (see above) and staged historical events -such as conferences and events organised by the communication industries, which are hung in art galleries. Representation and truth become a constant question, although the viewer recognises these photographs as having a historical nature.

Delahaye’s work points out the artifice of photography -even news photography, which is as fictional as painting. It allows us even to think that contemporary historical events may be constructed and run not only for profit but for the media as well. War itself can be seen as such an event in a massive and immoral scale.

Late night party in downtown Leeds

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Photographs by Christos Stavrou © 2007. All rights reserved.

Photos by Lee Friedlander (At Work, Boston Massachusetts, 1985-86)

Work shapes who we become.

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.

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.

Yes, I just came back from our own Carnival here in Leeds, tired and smiling… As a friend says, it’s like Notting Hill just better!.. And of course I came back with few photographs to show you as well (please ask written permission for any use)

The history of Leeds West Indian Carnival goes quite back, first initiated in 1967 by a Leeds University student from St Kitts. It was the first Carnival of its kind in Britain.

The Carnival takes places in Chapeltown, a Leeds suburb and centre of the British Afro-Caribbean community, which during the years has experienced a range of social problems and stigma.

It’s probably worth noting here, that until the end of the 60’s racial discrimination in England was institutional and non-white immigrant populations were not allowed to freely participate in the house market.

This was the second time that I visited the Carnival. My pictures and comments from the first time, back in 2001, can be found here in this photo-essay. Back then, I had found it the Carnival of no fun, of hardly anyone smiling… such an ironic contradiction. I was really sceptical, after all, if all this was anything more than a consumerist one-day firework without any real effect in understanding difference and emphasise commonality. I’m not sure how much things have changed. I did feel though that things were more relaxed this time, but maybe for real change we need more time and more work from all of us.

But there was one more reason for my good mood. I found out that ‘Honeydrum’ the music band of some old friends were playing their samba there. Well.. I honestly think that it was one of their best performances including some great dance improvisations!… I do recommend to catch up with them in another festival, you can find more details in their website here.

All images by Christos Stavrou © 2007 All rights reserved (written permission is required before any use)