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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).

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.

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.

I was in town. I had just read in a paper found in the train about this exhibition in a downtown Leeds church and decided to pay my respects.

Schizopolis consists of paintings, photographs and sculptures exploring the concept of the ideal and imagined modern city, comparing it to the reality of today’s urban environments. It was launched last week with an evening of art and music (see poster, left) and will go on until the 7th of October.

Entering the church I couldn’t fail to join the mood of spiritual awe and silent excitement, which follows the visual impact of falling ambient light in the wide-open and engulfing, as much as ordered, church space. The minimalist music in the background enhanced the experience. Whereas the tripods with their painted canvasses standing on top of the sitting benches, and the framed black & white photos with ominous and bleak captures of Leeds life, hanging off the huge round columns, added their peculiar and challenging element to the show.

I feel the marriage of art and churches is really promising; even if, as in this case, the installation may suffer from structural inconveniences which hinder viewing and the coherent flowing of meanings. The way the space and light was used often didn’t help and unfortunately, any ideas and subtleties sometimes appeared as stacked in chance. The lack of any detailed information about the artists and their concepts didn’t help my viewing either [edit: see full details in comments below, as provided by the organisers, thank you].

But overall, the exhibition was very interesting and how much liberty can be exercised in a church is debatable. I really don’t know.. but I could imagine a bolder similar exhibition in the future. If anything, I welcome the idea of a church transforming itself to a cultural refuge. A cultural space that is springing by, but in the end disassociates itself from its past dominant connotations.

It is a particular phenomenon I have found here in Leeds (and probably it’s happening elsewhere in England as well) that churches are used for other than their original intentions and religious meanings. For years I used to live near to a church that sells.. carpets and people keep inviting me to the trendy old-church night-club just by the Leeds University…

So, it was not so surprising, yet not less amazing, that this church was used for art and as I discovered it operates its own daily cafe as well (see photo above). It was busy, mostly with older people, it served no fancy coffee or food at all, and the strong yellow lights reflected on the shiny walls transfer someone into another era. But the smiles and the immediacy of the people there are not easily found in the main city streets and shops. This is for me real England.

Finally, I had the pleasure to meet one of the exhibiting painters, Rachel Savage (see above), and her ominous landscapes with tall and dark, leafless tree-trunks under a cold winter sun. We had a chat. Her metaphoric work was dealing with places so far and still so near to urban alienation. I discovered that she takes photographs of her themes as well, which intrigued me. I wanted to know what a different medium of expression offers to others: “Why do you need to paint them, then?” I asked, adding extra seriousness in my voice. She wasn’t sure, and so I insisted: “Is it painting just for the sake of painting?”

She shook her head, which blurred my photo… and simply replied “No, it’s not, but if I couldn’t paint I would have probably become insane.”

Photographs by Christos Stavrou © 2007 All rights reserved.

After few weeks of a blogging fast and lack of any writing… I’d like to return back to the exhibition “Do not Refreeze. Photography behind the Berlin Wall.” It will be touring the UK during the next months and it showcases the -unknown so far to West- work of a group of innovative and subversive photographers working in East Germany for more than 40 years after the War.

Crop (above) from the relevant article published in Black & White Photography (Issue 72, May 2007) . At top a photograph by Gundula Schulze Eldowy. She photographed a neighborhood of Berlin documenting a community’s permanent melancholia; as she put it “they had lost their ability to dream.” The photography of the era offers a dynamic, critical and democratic documentery of the human and social condition during the socialist regime and through political change. Although, these photographers are coming from different backgrounds, they have created a superb photographic reality which highlighted an ideological and emotional conflict.

As shown in our previous post, the GDR authorities were aware of the power of the image and were highly tuned to pass their messages, for example censoring and manipulating a public photo in order to reinforce their normative image of happy people and social consensus.

However, the curator Matthew Shaul (who was fundamental in the conception and materialisation of this exhibition) has posed this intriguing question: How did such an extraordinary visual work, with its obviously subversive and critical character, came into being in a society that was not going to allow any opposition? In other words, how did the authorities fail to see that photography could be constructed to turn against them?

And he answers this question: “Because photography wasn’t considered to be art.”

crop from an exhibited photograph by Sybille Bergemann, Hoppenrade, 1975

The general perception of photography at that time was vague with no written definitions of what should be or should do, escaping any perception of dangerous or critical potential. Notably, photographers after graduation were to become general members of the Artists Union, but without being in a separate section no official supervision and control was excerted. So unlike, let’s say, painting, literature, theatre and other arts, photography enjoyed a comparative freedom and even a public promotion or at least without official interference, despite its dynamic critical stance (B&W Photography 72/2007).

More information about the touring days and venues here