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
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
‘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
2015 marks four decades since William Jenkins’s curated the hugely influential exhibition New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape at George Eastman House in New York. Not only was the show revolutionary in terms of challenging traditional values and aesthetics within landscape photography, but it was also highly significant within the broader narrative of the documentary image and art photography [1]. The exhibition’s genesis is largely credited to the artist’s books of Ed Ruscha, in particular Twenty-Six Gasoline Stations (1963), which documented a drive of over a thousand miles from Los Angeles to Oaklahoma City [2]. Ruscha’s typology conveyed not only the monotony of this kind of journey, but it remarked upon the corporatization of the American landscape and drew attention to the significance of the relationship between it and the automobile.
The New Topographics exhibition was also contextualized through the images made by the photographers who were part of nineteenth century geological surveys, as well as the documentation of major engineering projects of the time. The exact job description of the photographers such as Carleton Watkins, Timothy O’Sullivan and William Henry Jackson – what their exact purpose within the expeditions was and what they were expected to supply – is unclear, and this uncertainty has perhaps contributed to the allusiveness of their pictures as expressive artefacts. However, their photography has been broadly interpreted, at least in part, as supporting an entrepreneurial attitude towards the uncharted North American landscape – speculating upon how it might be populated and inhabited and commercially exploited.
The photographs within the New Topographics exhibition revealed some of what became of these once ‘wild’ landscapes, approximately one hundred years on. Robert Adams for instance, within his project What We Bought, revealed the suburbanization of the landscape around Denver – soulless commercial buildings and out-of-town shopping precincts marching ever deeper into the Colorado desert [3]. The subjects, themes, and deadpan aesthetics of the works that comprised the New Topographics show continue to inspire and influence contemporary photographic practice: Robert Harding Pittman’s photobook Anonymization exemplifies its influence, notably, the secure place that architecture now has within landscape photography and discourse.
Where Adams and his peers were concerned with presenting studies of specific parts of the American landscape, Pittman has survey urban sprawl on a more global scale, the images in his book having been compiled over a decade and encompass his broader research and professional activities around environmentalism. Included in his survey are images from America, Europe, the Middle East and Asia. The architecture depicted however is markedly generic: carbon hungry cement rendering and re-enforced concrete create overbearing forms throughout the series and contrast against the mostly arid desert conditions they have been uncompromisingly inserted into.
A stubborn refusal to build and develop in sympathy to the topography and climate is also very apparent throughout the series: extensively irrigated and fertilized lush green lawns and boarders are conspicuously incongruous amongst the sand and dirt in Pittman’s vibrant colour photographs, so saturated and iridescent that they are at times difficult to view – disparaging the utopian ideals that these developments proclaim. As Alison Nordström observes in one of the book’s essays, Pittman’s images are certainly not derivative of the cool, objective, deadpan gaze that typified the visual characteristics of the New Topgraphics: Pittman’s are scalding hot and have a polemic visual quality in contrast to the stoic monochrome images from the 1970s.
Lewis Baltz showed us that there is of course tremendous visual potential in these kinds of subjects. His images of tract houses in the New Topographics exhibition comprised minimal blocks of grey tones rendered from the buildings’ architectural features. What these kinds of structures lack in nuanced design and individuality they make up for somehow with a distinctly photogenic quality. The visual celebration of mundane forms, geometry and repetition, is a common trend in contemporary photography inherited from the New Topographics [4].
Pittman presents these structures from a variety of distances; sometimes displaying them within the context of the landscapes in which they uncomfortably cohabit, but elsewhere; cropping much closer in and meditating on a landscaping or architectural feature. Perhaps here he is meditating on their vulgarity, or perhaps he is entertaining, for a brief moment, the possibility that they might have virtues.
Although it might have been tempting for Pittman to underscore his narrative around the increasingly homogenised nature of our suburban architecture by concealing the geographic identification of these locations, he instead (within the Index) provides not only details of where in the world they actually are, but offers extensive information about each development and the specific social and ecological problems associated with them, as well as a host of other points of reference. Similarly – and refreshingly – the monograph essays are chiefly concerned with expanding upon the topics of Pittman’s enquiries rather than the aesthetics of his work. This positions the work on an authoritative footing as activist documentary, articulating a persuasive argument about the urgency of these social, economic, and most importantly, environmental issues.
[1] For an expansive discussion of the exhibition, see Foster-Rice, G. & Rohrbach, J. (2013) Reframing the New Topographics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).
[4] Bernd and Hilla Becher, who contributed typologies of industrial architecture and infrastructure to the exhibition, taught at the celebrated Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, and whose students included Thomas Ruff and Andreas Gursky – noted for their deadpan style and systematic visual methodologies.
This review was commissioned by Photomonitor and can be viewed here.High-rise chronicles Peter Bobby’s long-term photographic examination of corporate spaces and the suite of installations of his work that have framed the project over the last eighteenth months or so. (Bobby was interviewed by Photomonitor during the project’s development, which can be read here.) Unpacking the politics and ideology of interior spaces has preoccupied Bobby’s practice, such as his Showhome project (2001-2002) which documented interior displays of new build luxury developments, fabricated to entice buyers to purchase property off-plan. His exploration of exclusive high-rise architecture began in 2007, on the eve of the global financial crisis. Since then, his body of research has acquired a greater socio-political resonance, as the economic gulf between the world’s ‘top 1%’ and the rest of us has increased dramatically. In almost the same period that Bobby has completed this project, the combined wealth of the richest one thousand people in Britain has risen from two hundred billion to five hundred billion pounds [1].
High-rise architecture conjures up contrasting images – one of extravagance and one of necessity: firstly, the slick skyscrapers that Bobby surveys, designed exclusively for the economic and social elite and secondly; (within a British context at least) post war modernist tower blocks built to house as many people as efficiently as possible. The latter are of course considered socially problematic by today’s planners and many have been systematically demolished, although some (the Trellick Tower in Kensington and The Lawn in Harlow for example) have acquired listed building status. Although Bobby’s work does not address the social issues that relate to this second category of high-rise, it illustrates their highly divisive and controversial nature, and more subtly alludes to ideas around division and inequality – not just in an economic sense, but in the relationship between vision and power. Critics of the corporate high-rise structure identify an inherent dislocation from the reality of life at ‘pedestrian level’, and the symbolic power that the gaze of their users exert over the city and its inhabitants below. Consistent throughout Bobby’s interiors are the giant ‘panoramic’ windows that dominate the architecture and interior design of the spaces. While Bobby’s work is not overtly political from a social perspective, it deals with the politics of these kinds of spaces. In particular, suggesting how the omnipresent view from the high-rise is indistinguishable from the egotistical ideology of this type of structure, and how views might be used strategically to impress or intimidate those who temporarily visit them.
The connection between the performances of power that take place within these spaces and theatre is referenced across Bobby’s project; notably the recurring curtain motif, and his decision to install the work at the National Theatre in London in 2013. The vulnerable corporate façade of the high-rise is further explored in Bobby’s contrasting exterior images of the buildings. As per their layout in the installations, in the book they are dispersed throughout the sequence of images, punctuating the series and disarming the prowess of the interiors. These graphically economic images resemble etchings onto a black plate and reduce their subject’s form to a concise expression. The pictures are dramatic, and the upward looking point-of-view and expanse of black night sky allude to the sublime. However, resigned to the bottom edge of the frame the subjects themselves are denied their usual resplendence.
The competitive nature of the high-rise is elaborated upon in the book’s first essay by Kim Dovey, concluding with a discussion of their fundamentally phallic nature. (Serendipitously, whilst the Tramshed in Cardiff – one of the venues for Bobby’s installation – was in the process of being decommissioned for its use as a temporary exhibition space for the Diffusion festival, a worker spray painted a yellow penis on one of the walls. This can be seen in one of the installation views in the final section of the book.) Much like the views that these spaces and their windows frame, this ostensibly patriarchal architectural underpinning is aligned with the all-encompassing, commanding force of the traditional landscape picture – which, historically, tended to be commissioned by those with a limited personal connection to the views they consume.
The notion that the high-rise user is immune from the eyes of others through vertical distance is illustrated in 85th, Ladies Toilets. What could be more luxurious than going to the lavatory surrounded by clear views and secure in the knowledge that no one can see you? The one-way glass that such buildings are often cladded with facilitates the high-rise’s voyeuristic, objectifying ‘gaze’. However, this material actually has more complex implications: notably, a self-affirming quality for its users. Perhaps ironically, high-rises tend to be erected in geographical clusters, offering their occupiers views onto similar constructions and microcosms, or even constant, narcissistic mirror images of themselves in their neighboring buildings. The photograph 17th, Residential Pool invites us to consider implications of reflection, and 27th, Property Sales Office, a peculiar mise-en-abyme self-portrait – where an architect’s model of a high-rise is echoed by a similar construction visible through the room’s window – provides a more vivid illustration of this.
Bobby subverts the privileged views offered by the high-rise through his resistance to conform to norms of architectural photography, such as carefully balancing the exposure of the view outside the window with that of the space within. This is just one of several methods that Bobby employs to critique photography’s traditional role as servant to the ideology of architectural concepts and strategies, a problem outlined by David Drake in the book’s introduction. To the casual glance, Bobby’s photographs – as with his earlier works – might easily be mistaken for commercial- rather than art photography. One obvious distinction however is that Bobby’s High-risepictures are ‘un-dressed’ from a stylistic perspective, and are free of figures to animate the space or offer scale. Instead, however, Bobby allows certain objects to gain slightly more prominence within the frame than a more conventional picture of the space would allow, often with surreal consequences: for instance, the olive tree sprouting up from the horizon in 18th, Health Club. Absence is most acutely felt in the one image from the project which is anchored to a specific moment in history, 23rd, Executive Lounge, where a news story about the Gulf of Mexico oilrig disaster unfolds on a television. The juxtaposition of the screen and the neat, empty bar stools and tables has a distinctly abandoned atmosphere, as though – like the workers on the rig – the high-rise occupiers have responded to a similarly urgent mayday alarm. Rather than lending the spaces and their images a sense of clean minimalism in keeping with their design, Bobby literally strips them bare, leaving them a little naked and vulnerable to our scrutiny.
As their titles suggest, Bobby’s three video pieces, Curtain, Divide and Blind, explore the idea of a physical barrier or shield between these exclusive spaces, and those on the ‘other’ side. In these works, the artist makes further references to the medium of photography, notably; the camera shutter, exposure reciprocity, and the photographic surface. In his essay, Liam Devlin notes Bobby’s deliberate use of the video camera on auto-exposure mode, whereby the camera constantly compensates for exposure as the screens in Curtain and Blind are slowly drawn across their respective windows. In Curtain this results in the steady emergence of a blood red curtain, much like at a theatre or cinema, that emerges from its dark shadow like a latent image materializing in the developer tray. In Blind, we see the electronic aluminium venetian blinds steadily descending across a window, to be suddenly flipped 180 degrees, momentarily overpowering the camera sensor and overexposing the sequence. Both of these videos offer the whole project two pseudo decisive moments that are the product of camera algorithms rather than an organic author. Devlin likens this auto exposure mode to the complex maintenance mechanisms that allow these highly artificial spaces to operate, constantly regulating temperature, humidity and air circulation.
The High-rise publication effectively documents and handsomely presents a substantial project, which acquired a slightly new narrative of its own in each of the four venues in which it was installed. The scope – in terms of related subjects and disciplines – and critical depth of the publication’s essays do justice to the complexities of Bobby’s work and the issues that he addresses. While the work is not directly concerned with the socio-economic implications of the high-rise – and Bobby delves much further than this conceptually – it would have been interesting to explore the architectural polarity (and similarities) of the high-rise and the divergent images that they arouse. This view is obviously coloured by the economic climate in which we presently find ourselves looking at Bobby’s project, and is a reminder of how the specific moment of experiencing a work influences our reading of it as significantly as all of the other contextual dimensions. [1] According to Jacques Peretti’s documentary The Super-Rich and Us(BBC2: 08.01.15 & 15.01.15)
Softback, 112 pages ISBN 978-1-872771-97-7 Published by Ffotogallery £20.00 Designed by Victoria Forrest designbyvictoria.com
On initial inspection, readers can certainly be forgiven for questioning the logic or wisdom of discussing Bob Mazzer’s recent monograph Underground within this blog. Since his days as a projectionist in a King’s Cross cinema, Mazzer has photographed people travelling on and around the London Underground, and his book is a celebration of the diversity of the capital’s commuters and visitors and the – at some times wonderful, and other times terrifying – atmosphere of the place. The use of a small format camera, the emphasis on human subjects and of course, the urban location might most immediately site Mazzer’s series within the documentary sub-genre of street photography – save for the fact that these are all, almost exclusively, not taken on the streets but beneath them [1]. Definitions of ‘landscape’ often tend to emphasise examples of the topographical things within an area of land [2]. But what happens when the photographer dwells on such things rather than taking in a more all-encompassing composition? [3] Does this matter particularly? Isn’t the relationship between those elements, or how they are juxtaposed, define the the real ‘landscaping’ [4] – rather than the detail of what those things might happen to be?
Mazzer’s interest isn’t in the transport infrastructure per se, but the people who use it and the collective identity that they bring to it. The great time period that the project covers, from the 1970s to today, gives a sense of the shifts in styles, tastes and socio-political attitudes over the decades. We might therefore consider the work as a ‘survey’ in a scientific sense: through the almost obsessive nature of Mazzer’s picture taking (if, I am led to believe, his Leica is not around his neck it’s being held up to his eye), his keen observations, and importantly; the relatively confined geographic nature of this study, we are presented with as much a record of place as a record of its users, which, unlike the people who have made use of it over the years to commute, socialise and holiday, has remained relatively constant.
Using journeys to make photographic projects is a staple of documentary practice. From Walker Evans and Robert Frank’s road trips across America to Paul Graham’s seminal work of British colour documentary, A1 – The Great North Road, and more recent projects such as Chris Coekin’s The Hitcher and Paul Gaffney’s We Make the Path by Walking, the methodology (and act) of moving through the landscape is often just as important as how it is framed within the viewfinder. Another body of work that makes and interesting counterpoint to Mazzer’s are Paul Fusco’s blurry shots from the open window of Bobby Kennedy’s funeral train that record – literally – a cross section of society on one particular day, as the train cut its transect through a sample of the American landscape.
I don’t believe Mazzer’s Underground does really belong in the field of landscape, but it gives us an opportunity to consider the porous – and perhaps pointless – nature of neatly defined genres. It also reminds me that the most interesting photographic subjects we are ever most likely to capture will not be found in exotic locations, but right under our noses. Moreover, it’s the interaction between people and place, rather than just the arrangement of the ‘stuff’ within the frame, which is what’s most interesting to focus our lenses on.
[1] It was an interest in the discrepancy between the values we place on the terrain above the surface compared to below it that led me to explore the underground landscape during my postgraduate studies. See Threshold Zone and Turnstile on my personal website.
[2] See for instance, the definition of landscape for the ‘100 Mile Radius’ Photography Prize.
[3] Robert Adam’s tree stumps in Turning Back and Atta Kim’s rocks in In-der-Welt-sein come to mind.
[4] WJT Mitchell asserts in Landscape and Power (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994) that the verb ‘to landscape’ has more relevance than the noun ‘landscape’, in terms of defining the nature of the genre.
Perspectives on Place 