I’ll be late tonight is a pleasant object to hold. It has an unobtrusive weight and its physical presence is inoffensive, polite in the hand, and the signatures are contained with pastel pink endpapers that are equally charming. At first.
A casual browse of the pages reveals, for the most part of the edit, domestic settings and their details. There is very little warmth to this first impression: stark white painted walls transmuted through photographs to cool off-white canvases contain minimal, icy compositions. Bourgeois interiors and decorations, all in impeccable, uncomfortable order.
This is a depiction of Roxana Savin’s, and her neighbours’, domestic realities from 2012-2020 living in a gated community on the outskirts of Moscow. Typically, residents here comprise families supported by a husband who commutes into the city, and expatriate wives tending to the apartments, ensuring everything within is maintained to immaculate standards.
We see something of the apparatus that make all this possible in the complex: the pool, spa, gym… and these are complemented with details from within the home, such as soiled cottonwool pads and eyelash curling tongs… There is a potent, exhausting sense of the effort that the wives and mothers in these families devote. In Savin’s portraits of these women, they all appear commanding, in both attractiveness and in their authority.
Roxana Savin: I’ll be late tonight (Courtesy of the artist)
Savin’s exterior images of the architecture and the surrounding topography are equally measured, and the land is used effectively to support Savin’s narrative. It is an austere environment, captured exclusively in winter months, figureless and bleached in snow. In one photograph, an impossibly well-formed disc of an island with a tasteful sprinkling of birch trees in the middle of a lake speaks directly of a willing, yet compromised, seclusion. Another reveals a razor-wire topped perimeter fence gilded with snow, and a CCTV camera disguised amidst trees in the background. Is it keeping a vigilant eye out for intruders, or monitoring residents? Although rich in detail, the whiteness of the picture mirrors the light tones within Savin’s interiors. We are overwhelmed and trapped, suffocating in the oncoming horizontal avalanche.
The relative absence of children in the book (limited to just two frames) adds to a sense of sterility and dystopia: Savin observes a girl playing on the floor in one image, and in another; twin boys face the camera obediently. (The text on their school blazers gives us the only clue in all the photographs as to where this place is.) The photograph of a spotless child’s bedroom is perhaps the most distressing image of the whole book: the Lego kits, all constructed to the exact specifications of their instructions, spaced evenly and lined up neatly on shelves – not like toys but like museum exhibits.
Aided with interspersed texts that might have been lifted from a novelty stocking-filler handbook for being a model wife, we are aware that all of this is for Him who is, figuratively, only ever alluded to. A clothes horse stands-in to fill-out a husband’s suit jacket in his absence… In another photograph metal shoe-stretchers substitute a husband’s actual feet in his diligently laced Brogues. (Or are they Oxfords? I’m not sure but I’m positive his wife knows the difference.) Even in a picture of a what is apparently a hotel room (somewhat incongruous to the series in that it is not set in the gated community or its environs) the husband is absent, this time his jacket supported by the extended handle of his trolley case.
Roxana Savin: I’ll be late tonight (Courtesy of the artist)
Whilst this book is a narrative that is concerned, foremost, in a female experience and a reflection upon ongoing traditional patriarchal family structures, it is also about a more universal sense of the toil of sustaining relationships and manging the family. I’ll be late tonight resonates with the sense of loneliness, isolation, and monotony that has been, unfortunately, the reality for all of us in the period that Savin was drawing this work to its concise, coherent and affecting conclusion.
Roxana Savin I’ll be late tonight Essay: Clare Bottomley Book design and layout: Alla Mirovskaya and Roxana Savin First edition of 300 copies Format: 19×23 cm, Hardcover, 67 pages Published in Italy, January 2021 ISBN: 978-2-8399-3191-5 Price: 35 EUR + shipping: www.roxanasavin.com
As noted in Robert Macfarlane’s accompanying text to this book, the peripheries of towns and cities, or the interstitial spaces between the rural and urban, continue to be fertile subjects for photographers as well creative practitioners working in other disciplines. These spaces have been defined in various ways but Robin Friend has adopted Victor Hugo’s provocative phrase ‘bastard countryside’[1] to position this series, that he has developed over the course of the last 15 years. For a viewer sympathetic of Friend’s fascination with these kinds of themes, or critical of the casual way that these spaces are routinely abused, the photographs are compelling; rich in their visual clarity, and attest to what is possible to create through an obsessive commitment to a concern.
Rubbish and waste dominate the project, from the pruned boughs of a conifer on a giant bonfire through to the rusting hull of the RMS Mulheim wrecked near Lands End. In other projects Friend has mastered working in subterranean environments and the underground appears here frequently; most dramatically in the penultimate image of a pile of scrap cars dumped somehow in a cave or disused mine. This is an enviable, photogenic find and it is a little frustrating that Friend denies us any captions or index of any sort so that the reader might examine further the narratives behind these places that are deeply intriguing. This decision, we might assume (coupled with the exaggeration of certain colours in some pictures), could be an attempt to shift the series from the documentary, or from the topographic, to a much more subjective stance, forcing the viewer perhaps towards a more profound questioning of our emotional relationship with non-urban spaces.
In addition to ponds, pools and streams of one sort or another, coastal views and structures are a conspicuous feature of book. This is worth considering as, despite literally being on the edge of land, coastal sites tend not to be associated with the geographical concept of the ‘edgelands’.[2] Indeed, the expanse of the ocean seems contrary to the claustrophobia of the spaces sandwiched between town and country. It is also worth noting that Bastard Countryside, and many of these images, came out of a much more lyrically contextualised body of work titled Belly of the Whale[3] that embraced ideas around mythology and literature. The re-contextualization of these images should not necessarily be read negatively: time, critical distance, and continuous analysis inevitably reveals deeper insight into creative intentions and the true nature of one’s motivations.
It is possible that the earlier title was made redundant with Friend’s discovery and the ensuing graphic depiction of a stranded sperm whale; its blood leaching into the sea and encircling the rotting ribs of the wreck of the Sheraton steam trawler. Like the proverbial siren, this Norfolk beach has drawn these divergent beasts to the same fate. It is difficult to imagine a more poignant image of the collision of man and nature that Friend is so keen to articulate. This image is one of only two in the book containing people – excepting the multiple portraits of scarecrows, à la Peter Mitchell[4] – that punctuate the landscapes. The absence of human figures coupled with the rusting detritus in all forms, as well as archaeological relics like the concave monoliths that were early warning devices for enemy aircraft during the First World War, alludes to an abandoned, post-apocalyptic[5] landscape.
The surreal is another common thread, a nice example of which is the photograph of somebody’s half-finished boat project wedged under a road bridge at Chudleigh near Dartmoor, that would be impossible to navigate along the narrow brook that it is perched next to – assuming its owner might ever get around to finishing the job. Hugo’s ‘bastard countryside’ refers primarily to the land encircling Paris, which has a certain relationship to surrealism, including Man Ray and his picture titled ‘Terrain Vague’ (c. 1932) which is believed to have been made in homage to Eugène Atget’s photographs of the same area.[6] If an alignment with surrealism is deliberate, then a more critical justification of the decision to manipulate the colours of some of these pictures, in this superficially surreal way, is warranted.
Whether or not the catchy title is quite right for this work, Friend very directly reveals the ‘illegitimate’ British countryside: it has not been sanctioned or protected by law like its nobler cousins, the ‘Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty’ or the ‘National Park’. Should we celebrate the weirdness of the bastard countryside, or should we feel profoundly ashamed by our misuse of it? These spaces are of equal importance in terms of their biodiversity as well as our duty of their stewardship. Whilst the edgeland may be something of a cliché of contemporary photography, it is here that some of the worst of our abuses of the land can be witnessed and Bastard Countryside invites us to give it the attention it demands.
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Hardcover, 104 pages
ISBN 978-1-912719-04-4
Published by Loose Joints
£40.00 retail
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[1] Hugo, Victor [1862] (1982) Les Misérables (London: Penguin Classics p.498)
[2] The phrase was coined by Marion Shoard in the essay ‘Edgelands’, in Jenkins, Jennifer (2002) Remaking the Landscape (London: Profile Books)
[5] At least one image from the series has been posted on Friend’s Instagram account tagged with #extinctionrebellion (https://www.instagram.com/p/Bwj2ryhgLs-/ 23.04.2019)
Autobiographical approaches in contemporary photography have proliferated in recent years, and the domestic and the everyday have proved to offer rich source material for diverse practices from the documentary to the conceptual. The experience of motherhood, or the maternal perspective of childhood, is prominent and was celebrated in Susan Bright’s survey exhibition and catalogue Home Truths: Photography and Motherhood in 2013. In an era when men choose to have a greater presence and responsibility in the day-to-day care of their children than previous generations, the father’s voice, however, is distinctly absent in contemporary photography. There are notable exceptions of course, such as Phillip Toledano’s The Reluctant Father, which is a candid and at times uncomfortable visual diary of the photographer’s emotional journey as a new father. But if, as many would insist, it remains the case that the world of contemporary photography and its publishing outlets remain dominated by men, then it is reasonable to conclude that the overwhelming majority of male photographers who are fathers choose not to engage seriously or critically with such a fundamental aspect of their lives, and society more broadly.
Colin Pantall’s All Quiet on the Home Front is a further exception to this rule, and is a very personal account of his relationship with his daughter Isabel, and the role of place and how it shaped her as a young woman and Colin as a father. The book is composed of photographs of Isabel from a girl into adolescence, her mother, the home and their landscape, as well as pictures made on holiday. In addition to the photographs of course, Colin’s voice appears very directly in the form of short personal anecdotes and recounted memories of Isabel’s childhood. The materiality of the book warrants delicate handling: the accompanying texts are printed on highly textured, almost handmade, paper. The photographs are also printed on matt paper, and, with the conspicuous stitching of the book’s signatures, the overall production heightens the sense of both intimacy, and also the domestic.
As the title suggests, the ‘fronts’ that are at odds in this work are the interior, domestic environment and the outdoors. These spaces converge in the pictures of the Pantall’s allotment, as well as tourist spots such as Rhosilli Bay on the Gower in South Wales. But it is the more unkempt, less picturesque environments closer to the family home in Bath which allude to the shaping of Isabel and Colin. Some of these spaces in fact have quite interesting histories, but their appearance is more that of suburban wasteland or woodlands on the outskirts of a recent housing development: there is a sense that the pair will stumble upon the empty cans and broken bottles of a bunch of ‘hoodies’ from the night before, or that a mob of teenagers on BMXs and scramblers will rudely interrupt their jollity.
The familiarity, and perhaps banality, of these spaces will perhaps resonate with many parents, in particular in the need to break out of the domestic environment, which can be stifling for bored children and highly stressful for those attempting to look after them. That is, it is not so much the exceptional nature of these outdoor spaces, but simply that they are anywhere but the claustrophobic walls of the home. In a more specific relation to fatherhood, however (and I should disclose, as a reader of the book from that perspective), there is a sense in the work of the desire to break free of – not only the enclosed nature of the domestic environment – the space where parental authority tends to default to the mother. There is also a sense of a father’s urgency to acquaint the child with the risks of the outside world by exposing them to it: where a branch might give way; or a bank might slip away under your feet; or whether a flimsy rope swing might snap… all of which are captured in these images.
Whether other readers will unanimously identify or accept these points in relation to All Quiet on the Home Front, or these assertions more broadly, is unlikely. But the presence of such a work will prompt such discussions and hopefully help lead us to a more sophisticated, and inclusive, understanding of parenting.
The full title of Stefano Carnelli’s monograph, Transumanza: Italian Pastoral invites an analysis of the project alongside an inspection of the term ‘pastoral’ – a pillar within the discourse of landscape representation, yet multifaceted and poorly understood. Whilst the word is frequently used pejoratively, alluding to a sentimental and idealised representation of rural life, this does the pastoral a disservice. In one of its earliest forms, such as Virgil’s satirical sketches to be found in his Eclogues (c. 40 BC), the pastoral mode reveals its potential for, as William Empson described, the ‘process of putting the complex into the simple’[1]. Often using the voice of the humble shepherd, the pastoral uses such rustic figures, or nature itself, to speak of social concerns of the period, within narratives around confrontations between a virtuous rural existence and the wretched ways of the city and its politics.
A simpler definition of a pastoral however is provided within Leo Marx’s remark, ‘No shepherd, no pastoral’[2]. In Transumanza Carnelli’s followed a number of shepherds in Lombardy, northern Italy, who continue ancient pastoralist practices of herding their sheep from higher altitudes to more temperate climates in the winter, and then retrace their journey into the mountains in the spring. It is estimated that only 60 shepherds in this region continue this practice today, the majority of whom transport their flocks in trucks rather than by foot. These journeys intersect towns and villages, and also distinctly less rural scenery such as supermarket carparks, industrial estates and abandoned factory compounds. The final few images in the book show the sheep within the more typical agrarian landscape of Alpine foothills, but the narrative starts with pristine stock bathed in morning light striding through a thoroughfare in an indistinct business district.
Carnelli’s straightforward documentary approach, occasionally capitalizing on more luxurious lighting situations, distances the work from the widespread understanding of the pastoral as the creation of an idealised image of rural life. The constant juxtaposition of the agricultural with the urban throughout the book provides an abundance of incongruent, amusing, and almost anachronistic imagery that subverts pastoral stereotypes. Carnelli’s photographs tend to be taken closely amongst the sheep and the shepherds, but he often steps back a little further, and consciously references traditional, pictorial landscape composition, updating the scenery. In addition to the topography there is close observation of the realities of the shepherds’ lifestyles during these periods of herding, such as their stiff socks and underwear drying on a makeshift washing-line attached to a dilapidated caravan – a far cry from the kind of ‘shepherd’s hut’ one might find as a garden office or studio, or listed at an extortionate price on Airbnb.
The antagonism we see in the constant invasion of the urban by these shepherds and their flocks underscores literary definitions of a pastoral work, as something which expresses a contrast between urban and rural life. If the project attempts to be considered as a pastoral narrative beyond this more superficial definition, and perhaps place itself within the political satire of the Virgilian sense of a pastoral narrative, then it is appropriate to ask what social and political complexities Carnelli might be attempting to articulate through his series: We are perhaps invited to consider for how much longer this ancient agricultural practice will continue in this region, with knowledge of specific routes exchanged from generation to generation likely to soon be lost to bureaucracy and agricultural regulation. But Carnelli’s photographs are very much rooted to here and now – vehicles, billboards and architecture in his pictures connect us to the present climate. And as such, it is difficult not to be reminded of current uncertainties around the movement of people in Europe, and the much more desperate migration crises globally.
[1] Empson, William. 1935. Some Versions of Pastoral. London: Chatto & Windus [23]
[2] Marx, Leo. 1986. ‘Pastoralism in America.’ In Ideology and Classic American Literature. Ed. Sacvan Bercovitch and Myra Jehlen. Cambridge University Press. 36-69 [45]
Published by Peperoni Books, £36.00, ISBN 978-3-941249-06-6
The central theme of James Morris’s book Time and Remains of Palestine is the word ‘Nakba’ or ‘catastrophe’, which has become synonymous with the displacement of Palestinians following the 1948 war. Morris’s photographs and narrative captions examine, in great detail, the violence and trauma witnessed by the land whereby thousands of homes were destroyed and, in many cases, entire villages wiped off the map.
The first half of the book surveys sites of destroyed villages, settlements and, where possible, architectural relics of these former places, which mostly consist of mosques and graveyards. Morris’s approach of researching and photographing the sites, and the impact, of violence in the landscape bring the phrase ‘landmarks’ to mind: a word that encapsulates the concerns of a number of practitioners working with the land and its histories, such as Susan Meiselas, Paul Seawright and Marc Wilson.
The irony of this word is of course the binary connotation of the celebrated touristic ‘landmark’ as a space for enjoyment and relaxation – places that are clearly defined on the map and guided towards by road signs. (With that said, it would be remiss to neglect to acknowledge the phenomenon of ‘dark tourism’, which has, for example, been explored in recent years extensively by photographer Ambroise Tezenas.)
In Morris’s images however, this phrase is equally fitting: many of the decimated villages have since been transformed into leisure spaces, such as recreational spaces and nature reserves filled with fast growing pine trees. Picnic benches can be found where houses once stood; mosques have even been turned into restaurants… pain is glossed over with playtime.
The in-depth and authoritative captions that accompany each image, with detailed narratives drawn from numerous sources, re-iterate the various methods of colonization and oppression – topics that the book does not shy away from. This is extended in other ways, such as the book’s dust jacket, which reproduces an extract of an 1880 Ordnance Survey map that was, Morris suggests, commissioned speculatively, in case an opportunity should present itself for British Imperialism, which turned out to be the case following the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in 1918, leading to Britain’s mandate over Palestine.
The straightforward, almost album-like, layout of each of Morris’s pictures resonates with certain celebrated nineteenth-century topographic projects conducted through a colonial gaze, which would have been made with a not entirely different technical approach, such as Auguste Salzmann’s studies of Jerusalem published in 1856 and Maxime du Camp’s photographs from Palestine, Egypt and Syria (1852). One of Morris’s images in particular, Towards the Jordan Valley, from the JudeanHills, which flirts outrageously with its much more traditional evocation of sublime landscape depiction, recalls something of the melodrama of one of John Martin’s Biblical scenes. The photograph could even be taken as an exaggeration of a plate from Francis Frith’s photographically illustrated Holy Bible, published in 1860.
This image is very different to the majority of Morris’s photographs, which are typically much more visually modest, finely balanced between forensic documentation and pensive contemplation: the sublime that is evoked through the suggestion of hidden dangers, and unspoken atrocities. Very few figures are present, and when they are their forms are obscured due to the longer exposure times required of the large format camera lens. Figures are therefore rendered apparition-like, re-enacting the lost and displaced.
The images in the second half of the book, which focuses on settlements in the West Bank, are inevitably a lot more populated in contrast to the first section. But again it is the architecture, including dwellings and extensive defensive structures that dominate the narrative. It is a contrasting visual story to the quietness of the first half of the book: dense urban housing chokes the frame while to the suburbs, odd little terraces seem isolated amidst open dry land. And throughout; wire, fences and cages of all description convey a sense of constant containment and unease.
Examining the subject of the conflict in the Middle East in any medium is a demanding task, not least because of the globally polarised perspectives on Palestinian and Israeli claims to the land, but because of the sheer complexities of the historical narratives and the ongoing disputes and their broader ramifications. James Morris makes a sincere, robust and venerable attempt at this in Time and Remains of Palestine – a substantial photobook and narrative of the conflict from the humble perspective of the land, which is so bitterly and bloodily contested.
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James Morris, Time and Remains of Palestine, with an introduction by Raja Shehadeh, was published by Kehrer Verlag 2016, £35.95, ISBN 978-3-86828-651-9
I was thrilled to be in Sheffield earlier this week hanging my work at Bank Street Arts in Sheffield. I have been working on Elementary Husbandry for several years, beginning shortly after I relocated to the rural Mendip Hills in Somerset from living in the city.
Popular myths of the countryside, and narratives of the spaces beyond our towns and cities as places of sanctuary, retreat and escape are sources of great personal intrigue and underpin the motivations behind the images I’m presenting. They encompass both my personal reflections on my immediate surroundings and my preoccupation with the representations of the British landscape more broadly, which I have spoken about previously.
The title, Elementary Husbandry, draws upon two founding pieces of Western literature: Hesiod’s Works and Days (c. 700BC) and Virgil’s Georgics (c. 40BC). These ancient poems conflated practical advice for farmers alongside guidance on how to lead a modest and virtuous existence. They are widely accepted as the prototypes for the pastoral motifs that have since become ubiquitous within artistic expressions of rural life and depictions of the agricultural landscape. They intrigue me in their use of the land, and in particular its stewardship, as metaphor and allegory.
This exhibition coincides with my current residency at Bank Street Arts, where I’m creating a piece of work called The Nymph and the Shepherd. This involves making a new image for the gallery each week. Through nuances within the photographs, and the correspondence of material between the gallery and myself, I aim to consider the amorous romance that is often a feature of pastoral tales.
The Open College of the Arts is generously sponsoring a symposium that is aligned with some of these themes, which will be held on Saturday 23rd July called New Pastoral Paradigms: Explorations in Landscape and the Self. This will be an opportunity to hear from some great practitioners who use photography and the land to explore personal and historical narratives. Speakers include: Michal Iwanowski (whose great new book Clear of People is currently under production), Hanna-Katrina Jędrosz, Christina Stohn and John Umney. It would be great to see you there.
There will be a reception at Bank Street Arts on Friday 22nd July from 18:00 – 20:00 to view the exhibition and, for those who are able to come to Sheffield ahead of the symposium, to catch up before hand.
‘This is How it Is’, was the name given to Don McCullin’s photoessay that covered the advance on Hué in 1968 during the Vietnam War [i], and comes from a succession of similarly succinct and matter of fact titles and headlines that, throughout the history of photojournalism from conflict zones, have bluntly and unsentimentally introduced images of the worst evidence of human behaviour. Many of us are familiar with Don McCullin’s images from his long career which, justifiably, endure for not just their content, but for his ability to relate to such horror with formal sensibility. Such images are firmly planted in the canon of ‘great’ photographs of the twentieth century, but within the scope of McCullin’s broader body of work, they are perhaps exceptional: many of McCullin’s photographs are actually compositionally quite ‘straight’ and visually unembellished. Like other great reportage photographers, McCullin’s work tends to simply allow the stark reality of the subject matter to provide narrative, often keeping stylization to a minimum. His greatest asset as a practitioner has been his ability to survive, to negotiate his way into and then out of situations with potentially lethal consequences, and to quite simply tell people back home ‘how it is.’
The siting of McCullin’s war photography throughout his career has mirrored, to some extent, the changing relationship that the documentary image has experienced with institutions and audiences since the Second World War. McCullin enjoyed a long succession of assignments for British broadsheet’s weekend supplements that sustained him, and published his work in generous proportions and within elegant layouts for several decades. His most recent photoessay ‘My Last War’ published in 2012, that reported on the plight of the people of Aleppo in Syria [ii], is contrasting in terms of its blandness of scale and layout compared to spreads and stories from a couple of decades ago.
Photoessays in supplements were the primary contexts for McCullin’s work, samples of which are generally displayed at his various retrospectives. In 1980 however, his reportage work stepped outside of these spaces, and was exhibited at the V&A in London [iii]. Since then McCullin has been honoured with a succession of publications and exhibitions, most extensively Shaped by War at the Imperial War Museum (2010); an institution that has a long history of supporting artists through collaborations, commissions and acquisitions and was perhaps the most least ethically challenging placing of his work to date. Last year McCullin turned eighty-years-old and as part of the celebrations an exhibition of some of his best know images were re-printed and displayed at Hamilton’s Gallery in Mayfair (under the title Eighty), and also a more extensive show at Hauser & Wirth in Bruton, Somerset (Conflict – People – Landscape), near where he has lived for many years.
McCullin has been documented many times candidly disclosing his compulsion to work in lethal environments between the 1960s and ‘80s, as well as discussing the trauma that his experiences have left him with – the torment of his ‘ghosts’[iv]. He has also discussed his landscape photography from Britain in relation to his experiences further afield, and the role this has had in rebuilding his emotional life [v]. The Hauser & Wirth exhibition concludes with six such images, made in Somerset and representative of the transparent emotional intensity of his work. The skies of this usually temperate county are ferocious and black; sunlight scorches the land with equal menace; and bleak metaphors abound, such as the stumps of harshly pruned willow trees that thrive on the marshy Somerset Levels – like feeble white knuckled fists determined to punch through McCullin’s Stygian prints.
Installation view, ‘Qwaypurlake’. Hauser & Wirth Somerset, 2015. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Ken Adlard
While his exhibition is steeped in historical narratives, the exhibition that McCullin’s is paired with at Hauser & Wirth looks towards an imagined ‘future’. In the accompanying galleries, Simon Morrissey has curated Qwaypurlake, a collection of works that proposes a dystopian future where the county of Somerset is (once more) dominated by water and human beings live a marginalised existence. Combining practitioners with connections to the area working in multiple disciplines, Morrrissey juxtaposes figurative and familiar forms in photographs and sculpture with more abstract pieces and artefacts – playfully inviting open interpretations of a disquieting narrative. The representation of people is restricted to Ben Rivers’s three-quarter length monochrome portraits of sack-hooded figures, disturbingly fixed on the viewer through rough eyeholes. More forensic pieces complement Morrissey’s narrative; such as Marie Toseland’s (actual) wisdom teeth, and Aaron Schuman’s photographs of smouldering ashes that perhaps hint most explicitly towards some kind of imagined Armageddon event. The perpetrators of this fictional catastrophe are also described in Elizabeth Fink’s bronzes from the 1950s and ‘60s. In this context Fink’s abstracted ‘heads’ read as the fossilized remains of our extra-terrestrial successors and her ‘birds’, with their elongated legs; a life form well adapted to traversing a wetland environment.
Installation view ‘Qwaypurlake’. Hauser & Wirth Somerset, 2015. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Ken Adlard
The spirit of fantasy that Qwaypurlake embraces is a pertinent extension of the mythology and narratives of the locality. The Somerset Levels in particular, measuring only a few metres above sea level, were indeed once under water. Neolithic settlers constructed series of wooden walkways and buildings, exploiting the natural biodiversity of the wetlands. This heritage is perhaps referenced in Sebastian Jefford’s Wattle and Daub – a giant piece of netting that hangs in one corner of the gallery, although all it has managed to catch are unappetizing clumps of clay. David Wojtowycz’s looped video The Lake, which is projected at one end of the installation and depicts a subtly strange view looking down a pier or jetty with oddly turbulent water to one side and still water to the other, makes a further connection to the region’s archaeological legacy.
Installation view ‘Qwaypurlak’. Hauser & Wirth Somerset, 2015. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Ken Adlard
Glastonbury, which overlooks the Levels and is arguably the most historic and culturally significant part of the county, is associated with Joseph of Arimathea who is said to have brought Christianity to Britain and whose staff supposedly sprouted into the Glastonbury Thorn where the town’s abbey was later erected. In the twelfth century the monks at Glastonbury Abbey claimed to discover the remains of King Arthur, and the area became associated with the mythical ‘Isle of Avalon’ where Excalibur was purported to have been forged. In 2014 of course, the Somerset Levels were severely flooded, causing extensive damage and disruption – an event that will no doubt endure in the collective memory of the county’s people.
As well as the frivolity of Morrissey’s concept, Qwaypurlake has a dark and macabre side, notably the works in the gallery that adjoins McCullin’s photographs. These include Heather & Ivan Morison’s wax candles in the shape of bones, and Daphne Wright’s life-sized cast marble Rabbit and her partially dissected Stallion – laid out on its back on the gallery floor as if it had been carefully examined by the inquisitive conquerors from outer space.
Installation view ‘Qwaypurlake’. Hauser & Wirth Somerset, 2015. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Ken Adlard
Wright’s marble Rabbit, however, additionally has a much more grounded presence: hanging neatly on the gallery wall by its feet it acts as a pastoral motif – the morning’s toil of a farmer or poacher, or part of a rustic themed still life by the likes of Chardin. Devoid of photographs in this gallery (such as contributions elsewhere by James Ravillious, famous for his images of rural life in Devon, and Jem Southam’s dew ponds) the installation builds upon a preoccupation with topography and place to more of an exploration of what the relationship with our natural resources and neighbouring species (and how that existence could be characterised) might be like for inhabitants for this parallel universe or potential future.
The scheduling – and thus pairing – of McCullin’s work, explicitly preoccupied with the destructive realities of human beings, with Morrissey’s escapist vision was a provocative decision. McCullin’s photographs certainly support the malevolent and dystopian presence that Morrissey constructs, and McCullin’s landscapes provide a pertinent and powerful bridge between the two exhibitions. The work in McCullin’s gallery, however, is experienced as prologue to or an extension of the Qwaypurlake project, and marks yet another contextualization of McCullin’s photography by another kind of institution.
Don McCullin. Conflict – People – Landscape and Qwaypurlake were at Hauser & Wirth Somerset 15.11.15 – 31.01.16. Documentation can be found here.
This essay was commissioned by Photomonitor and can be viewed here.
NOTES:
[i] The Sunday Times Magazine 24.3.1968. (Also reproduced in Robert Lebeck, Kiosk: A History of Photojournalism. Gottingen: Steidl, 2001)
[ii] The Times Magazine, 29.12.2012
[iii] In his memoirs, McCullin expressed his concern of having imagery of war, horror and suffering on display in an in a space to be admired. Don McCullin. Unreasonable Behaviour: An Autobiography (London: Jonathan Cape, 1990, p.226)
See also Mark Hayworth-Booth’s article ‘Personal notes on dismantling the McCullin exhibition at the V&A’ in Creative Camera (April/May 1981), in David Brittain. Creative Camera: Thirty Years of Writing(Manchester University Press, 2000)
[iv] The title of McCullin’s early retrospective monograph was titled, Sleeping with Ghosts: A Life’s Work in Photography (London: Jonathan Cape, 1994). In the documentary film McCullin (Dir. Jacqui & David Morris, Artificial Eye, 2012), he also described the ghosts haunting him from his negative filing cabinets.
[v] McCullin interviewed by John Wilson on Front Row, BBC Radio 4: 11.9.2015
Scarecrows aren’t as abundant as they used to be. A somewhat tokenistic effort in crop defence, scarecrows now tend to be limited to more ceremonial duties, such as decorating trendy suburban allotment plots. We are still likely to encounter the scarecrow’s cousin – the guy – particularly on fund raising trails and competitive villages’ fêtes, cobbled together with bits of redundant clothing and other surplus household objects.
The fifty-odd scarecrows within the pages of Peter Mitchell’s monograph have been photographed over the past four decades and accompany an eclectic array of objects from the photographer’s past on the adjacent pages. He describes the book as ‘my autobiography told through inanimate objects silently observed by scarecrows’. The miscellaneous quality of Mitchell’s collection is similar to the makeshift fabrication of the scarecrows themselves. His belongings are not, however, ephemeral objects, but neither are they (for the most part) of high value. They comprise a range of items that could be representative of collective boyhood and adolescent memories (such as model aeroplane kits, comics, pin-ups, LPs) to far more personal effects, including family photographs and memorabilia from Mitchell’s past exhibitions, as well as an Egyptian winged cobra brooch – a motif that appears repeatedly throughout the book.
These objects reflect Mitchell’s diverse personal interests and the inventive, and at times eccentric, ways that he has framed his practice. His passion for cosmology, for instance, is present in his choice of many of these things. This theme was also reflected in his seminal exhibition A New Refutation of the Viking 4 Space Mission at Impressions gallery in 1979, in which he contextualized his environmental portraits of shopkeepers and workers around Leeds by speculating what the city might look like to visitors from another planet. Such an irreverent contextualization of his work in fact had truer resonances than we might imagine; that exhibition being the first exhibition of colour photographs in the UK by a British practitioner – colour film being a material that was considered the reserve of commercial imagery and family snaps alone.
Although Mitchell’s possessions might appear to be a little random, he describes them in his introductory note as the things that ‘made’ him a photographer, and reveals much of their personal significance within captions at the end of the book. The relevance of the scarecrows is, however, not articulated at all. Their uncanny qualities perhaps propose ideas around ‘the other’ – perhaps picking up on earlier themes in his work. Maybe we are supposed to read their blobby limbs as cumbersome spacesuits? Are the scarecrows just something that, as per his Leeds shopkeepers, he has enjoyed collecting during his career? It would seem actually that the scarecrows’ link with mythology connects them to many of Mitchell’s possessions.
Scarecrows are firmly planted within our popular culture and our imaginations, and as with the other objects in the book, they ignite myriad other emotions and narratives. While they are often presented as sinister or malevolent, scarecrows are represented in equal measure with more charming qualities, particularly in young children’s literature: they do not tend to be anthropomorphised by a single archetype. This open, malleable quality of the scarecrow is reflected in Mitchell’s strategy, whereby he purposefully selected for the book, those that had been constructed without facial features, allowing the viewer to interpret the character of each scarecrow themselves. Mitchell’s photographic approach, however, is far from typological or clinical: he allows brooding skies and fields veiled in mist to contribute to their meaning. He has also shot most of these pictures from a low perspective, giving us a child’s-eye-view of the scarecrow – as if we were tentatively stalking it, not entirely confident that the figures are harmless. Although there is humour throughout the series, many of the scarecrows are unsettling, and despite their unsophisticated construction, it is difficult to avoid reading them as figures.
Scarecrows and other human effigies are associated with seasonal rituals and in some children’s stories they can be used to represent the passing of time – offering a point of continuity within narratives around the annual cycles of arable farming, as well as the life cycles of the small mammals who bed down within them and the birds who pick out stuffing for their nests. These endearing personal qualities are owed to their diligence – their willingness to loyally preside over the crop come rain or shine until there is little more to them than rags: their stoicism makes them noble narrators of Mitchell’s biography.
But there is also a melancholy in the scarecrow which, accompanied by the nostalgia within many of Mitchell’s reproduced possessions, can feel elegiac. (These are, after all, his personal effects and sifting though them feels a little invasive.) It is, however, by no means a morbid piece of work. Some Thing means Everything to Somebody is an exciting concept, amusingly and thoughtfully contextualized, and beautifully presented in this enchanting book.
Some This mean Everything to Somebody is published by RRB Publishing and is available in an edition of 950 including a print for £45.00, and can be purchased from RRB Photobooks.
Coinciding with the centenary this year of the death of London social reformer and industrialist Charles Booth, Keith Greenough exhibits and publishes Lifting the Curtain, a series that juxtaposes extracts from Booth’s accounts of the hardships of the Victorian East End with contemporary images of the spaces Booth surveyed.
Taken late at night and within the early hours, Greenough’s long exposures have a tonal and aesthetic coolness to them. The technically refined and pensive images invite the viewer to study the disquieting scenes with the same patience that the photographer exercised with the long exposure method, and perhaps with a scrutiny similar to Booth’s observations.
Although Greenough’s photographs depict streets that might seem at best uninviting, or at worst malevolent, they perhaps offer more a sense of exhaustion than fear: of worrying whether you are on the best side of the street to catch a cab to save yourself from a very long walk home after a hard night partying, rather than anxiety about being on the same side of the street as some unsavoury characters.
The absence of people in Greenough’s photographs is balanced by the appropriation of Charles Booth’s very detailed accounts of individuals he encountered and wrote about in his Life and Labour of the People (1889), who existed, he wrote, “… hidden from view behind a curtain on which were painted terrible pictures.”
Avoiding an illustrative approach to the juxtaposition of image and text, there is enough narrative within the images that speaks of the economy and social ecologies of contemporary East London, while leaving enough ambiguity within the images to interplay with the texts, and for viewers to contemplate the myriad changes and progress (or not) to the streets and populations of East London over the past century.
In the spirit of Charles Booth, Greenough is donating the proceeds of Lifting the Curtain to Toynbee Hall, whose vision is to eradicate all forms of poverty, and where Charles Booth conducted his survey from. Lifting the Curtain is part of Photomonth, East London Festival of Photography 2015:
Town House, 5 Fournier Street, London E1 6QE, from 15th – 25th October
Rail travel invites parallels to the construction and consumption of landscape pictures. Like the stagecoach, which the railway succeeded, the train carriage provided the traveller with a novel, elevated view from which to survey the land, protected behind glass from the elements and whatever unpleasantries might lurk within it.
Rebecca Solnit begins her narrative of Eadweard Muybridge’s invention of the moving photographic image by describing the historical and technological contexts around which his high speed photography was explored. Solnit elaborates how the first railways shattered perceptions of distance through their ability to move across the land at speeds greater than anyone had travel before. So alien was such a capability that apparently, moving at the balmy rate of 30 miles per hour, passengers found the rapid succession of views from the windows incomprehensible.[i] Interestingly, when we dissect a sequence of moving image, which when allowed to run at their 30 or so frames-per-second seem to look sharp enough, it often turns out to be a series of single blurry pictures. Turner’s impressionistic Rain, Steam and Speed – The Great Western Railway, painted in 1844 captures something of the chaotic image that passengers – as well as onlookers of this new spectacle – must have experienced from their carriage windows.
JMW Turner, ‘Rain, Steam and Speed – The Great Western Railway’, 1844 (The National Gallery)
Like the moving image – which, even at its most banal or tedious can be highly distracting – the views from the train window can be deeply mesmeric. Rail travellers entertain themselves in all manner of ways, but many chose the train purely to immerse themselves in thought, daydreams, or to simply stare for a time and take in the views of the land and the play of light across it. Trains get you to places, but they also offer their passengers tableaux vivants within the price of the ticket.
Railways often take us through kinds of terrain that we wouldn’t normally visit: their lines transect the land, often drawing longer connections between conurbations than roads by traversing around steep gradients and topographic features rather than taking the shortest route. (This isn’t always the case of course, and many railways have involved dramatic and brutal interventions to level flatter routes.) As a result of this, long distance railways tend to take travellers through relatively unpopulated parts of the land. In a British context this tends to be fairly unspectacular agricultural land that the majority of us are only likely to experience from the distanced viewpoint that some form of transport or another can offer. New railways are not always welcomed of course, particularly by those upon whom it will have a direct impact in terms of their lifestyles or property. The proposed ‘High Speed Two’ line to connect London to the North East has attracted controversy, not least around the cost of the project but how it might impact the appearance of parts of the land and the environments of its inhabitants.
Carleton Watkins ‘The Calloway Canal, Kern County’, c. 1884 (Library of Congress)
The polarization between – typically – environmentalists and industrialists is of course one that dates back to the birth of the railways. Developers have been all too aware of the need to promote not just the economic arguments in favour of their railways, but the aesthetic ones. It is uncanny that one of the most important aesthetic discoveries of modernity (photography) coincided with the development of commercial steam travel – arguably the most significant technological advances.[ii] And it is fitting that this new medium was employed within some of the earliest, and still highly regarded, topographic surveys that were commissioned by railway companies and industrialists, who employed photographers including Muybridge, AJ Russell, WH Jackson, and Carleton Watkins. Joel Snyder notes how Watkins had an ability to represent the industrialization of the American West in sympathy to the land:
“Watkins’s photographs reinforce the commitment of his audience to a belief in a Western Eden, but it represents the Garden in a way that encourages the audience to see it as a scene of potential exploration and development. This representative scheme, then, presents the possibility of a double salvation – a return to unspoiled innocence and opportunity to profit from the violation of innocence. It offers, furthermore, a reassurance that this untouched West can withstand endless mass immigration and industrial exploitation.[iii]
AJ Russell, ‘Deep Cut, No. 1. West of Wilhelmina Pass, Weber Canon’, c.1869 (Library of Congress)
Railway companies have made use of much more conspicuously picturesque imagery to promote the services and routes they offer the paying public, generally championing view of their destinations or the surrounding scenery, rather than the locomotives or their rails cutting through them. The neo-realist posters of the 1920s to the 1940s that tapped in to increasingly mobile populations still retain a mass appeal. In 1942, one such favourite of the railway companies, Frank Newbould was commissioned by the War Office to paint a series of picturesque images of Southern England, featuring the South Downs and Salisbury Cathedral, in his familiar style yet under the rousing strapline ‘Your Britain. Fight for it now!’ [iv]
The recent advertising campaign by the railway company First Great Western continues the picturesque traditions that are present in historical and contemporary railway promotional material. Moreover however, it vividly echoes Newbould’s nationalistic imperative, with the command to ‘Be a Great Westerner.’ Like the majority of Newbould’s railway posters, the machines and infrastructure of the railway haven’t featured on FGW’s billboards. Instead, glitzy panoramic photographs of destinations and landmarks throughout Oxfordshire, Wiltshire, the Western counties and South Wales have been put to use to entice weekenders and tourists to venture to the provinces. In cities like Bristol and Cardiff, similarly stock-looking images of the capital sprouted up to suggest the possibility of a reciprocal economic and cultural exchange. These images, such as the glistening sand at Weston-Super-Mare at sunset (actually, even ‘silt’ would be an over generous description of the surface of its beaches) are a fabulous illustration of landscape photography at its worst: generic and devoid of feeling or realism.
FGW billboard at London Paddington station, June 2015
FGW’s campaign, however, designed by the Leith Agency received an industry award for what was celebrated by the Chartered Institute of Marketing for being “a truly exceptional campaign” [v] and was awarded the campaign of the year in May. The scale of the campaign is certainly impressive – installation shots are available on Leith’s website, and they include the domination of certain urban spaces.[vi] Given the extent of the damage and disruption to the network during the flooding and storms in 2014 and the isolation that this caused for many in Somerset,[vii] Devon and Cornwall, the necessity of a major effort to restore public confidence is evident.
Perhaps there is something exceptional about FGW’s financial commitment to the campaign that may justifiably be labelled “truly exceptional” (the campaign consisted of a range of different contexts including a video, which is also available on Leith’s website), however, the creativity of the photography, and the jingoistic strapline that accompanied them surely cannot be held to such high acclaim. The campaign also falls foul to the commonly misplaced emphasis on the importance of the location as integral to the success of the landscape image. The checklist of landmarks that are depicted on FGW’s billboard reads like a landscape photographer’s ‘bucket list’ of locations and monuments to collect in his portfolio, and overall, promotes a deeply cynical approach to the purpose of travel or recreation.[viii]
Rather than continuing with an outdated obsession with the destinations that railways lead to, if some thought was given to the potential of the uniqueness of the journey that FGW might be able to offer its passengers – as a means of experiencing and consuming the landscape – or celebrating the remarkable feat of civil engineering the Great Western Railway remains, then a more original, exciting and, above all, faithful campaign might have a chance to emerge.
[i] Rebecca Solnit (2004) Motion Studies: Time, Space and Eadweard Muybridge. London: Bloomsbury, p.9
[ii] IK Brunel’s Great Western Railway ran its first passenger trains in 1838, which runs a few miles past Lacock Abbey near Chippenham where Fox Talbot developed his photographic process, which he announced the following year.
[iii] Joel Snyder, ‘Territorial Photography’ in WJT Mitchell (ed.) (2002) Landscape and Power (2nd edn.) Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
[viii] In fairness, the accompanying video does not dwell on clichéd views or landmarks in the same manner as the billboards, however, this piece demands a separate critique.
Perspectives on Place 