Cheaper, Deeper Budget Burials: Fibro by Glenn Sloggett

'Cheaper and Deeper'

Fibro Dreams  is an Australian neighbourhood watch for Australian neighbourhood oddness; a can man who says G'Day is the start of the book and he's the  highpoint. It's all downhill from here on, as suburban Melbourne goes to seed; it's Porpoise Spit without the class. A broken picket fence, a pond full of stumps of trees and an empty barrel point the way. Midway through the book, past the 'mattress for a homeless man', the sad cemetery plot and the shopping trolley in whatever the Australian version of the canal is, and we're into a picture captioned 'Life on the piss'; a ripped red bar stool set against red wallpaper rubbed raw by the clients' chair,

The captions are vital here. It's kind of Goldberg meets Eggleston with a bit of black humour thrown in for good measure. It's a tour of the poverty and the quite relentless shabbiness of things that are pretty much dead. All the objects in Fibro are on their way out, if not out already. So that's the visual story and it's echoed by another story that,  thanks to the captions ( which are short and sweet) does have a strong narrative thread that really is a narrative thread (when people use the word narrative in photobook world, it usually means the narrative in their head that they think you should see on the page. But it's in their head and it's never been on the page and never will be). There is a story in Fibro Dreams here that has some strange bitter-sweet substance.


'Life on the piss'

The 'Old man's home' comes next. That looks like an old man's home with its  folded blankets and worn out curtains. And then it's a grim diner, 'you are alone' and 'amputee op-shop bride.' Op-shop is the Australian term for charity shop and forgive me if I don't go and throw myself into the patch of water where the shopping trolley is.

That's Fibro for you. It's a book about the lives that old men lead (maybe?) and the lonely death they are going to end their lives with. But told in a kind of funny way. There's a text in there saying how Sloggett used to work in a shop selling meths to the old men who came in from the boarding hours across the road.

And there's some hope in there too (and there's a picture of as street calle 'Hope Street'!)  because in the text we hear about an old man whose eyes lit up when he talked about getting seconds of dessert at his Christmas lunch.



Simon (Red Cross)

But overall it's about wasted lives on wasted streets. It's partly handmade with little snippets (like the page of text and a 'junkie love poem') dropped in. And the captions are everything, driving us down and down into this slow meander towards the cheaper, deeper death (as advertised on the side of a pink hearse for 'Budget Burials') that awaits us all.

Fibro Dreams is launching tonight at Photobook Melbourne

Hear Glenn Sloggett talk about Fibro Dreams here

Buy Fibro Dreams here. 

Marco Citron and The Photograph Guessing Game

I have a postcard on my shelf at home. It's a picture from Goa, India. It shows the beachfront at Miramar.In the middle of the picture is a Standard Herald MKIII, driving across sand-streaked tarmac. The colours reds are desaturated and the picture bounces with 1970s Indian Modernism.

Strangely enough it's not that dissimilar to the pictures in Marco Citron's Ubanism 1.01. But where my postcard is of a veritable tropical backwater shot in picture postcard style, Citron's book consists of a series of pictures of the brutalist architecture of the former Soviet Union.

Urbanism 1.01 is a small book. It doesn't have fold-outs or tip-ins or pop-ups. It's simple, functional and fits perfectly into the hand. Which is fitting considering the subject matter; functional architecture and functional cars, all processed with a saturation-heavy, reds-down (or something like that) processed palette that makes the pictures look like they come from the 1970s rather than the last few years.

The pictures do look like they are postcards from lands that time forgot, and they are great. They are like those corporate real estate ads you see around new developments; but come to life and then died again. Brutalist architecture, roads and retro cars all on post-millennium streets. It's hard to believe they aren't from a different age these streets are so empty and devoid of anything but the most ancient-looking of automobile - it must have taken a lot of patience to get the streets populated just so.

The book opens with a picture of a hotel (I think) rising above parkland sits in a cyan-blue sky then continues to an apartment block with concrete pods tagged on the side. There's a Lenin, a glass-fronted corporate or government HQ and a railway station hall. Well, those might be all those things, I don't know, I'm just guessing. The annoying thing is that though there is an informative essay by Gerry Badger at the back of the book that focusses on brutalist architecture, there are no captions to give the pictures a sense of place.




That's a shame because I'd quite like to know where these buildings are and what they are. Is the picture of the low-rise building with the mural and three flagpoles out front a school, a police station, a clinic, a laboratory or what. And when was it built. Some of the buildings look old, some look new, some are built in the service of the state, some are corporate headquarters and some are built purely for profit and gain. I'd like to know which, but then again, why bother knowing when you can guess.

And that is what the book ends up being - a guessing game. Where are these buildings (former Soviet Union - where's that? Belarus?), what are they for and what do they represent. So the purity of the pictures comes to the fore and you end up using them as a kind of evidence; pictures of buildings, roads and cars as evidence of a culture, an economy and a means of control.

Buy the book here. 

It's your fault you don't get it!

picture: Colin Pantall

I posted on the eyegazing research that was used to determine what held people's attention when viewing a photograph. The research was commissioned by an organisation of professional photographers and used 58 subjects attending university. So in some respects it's not a really representative sample, but then again it's representative enough if you want to say that a certain demographic are more likely to look at professional pictures than amateur pictures.

Ultimately though it's a nice little yarn that gets picked up by petapixel and can get us mumbling into our cornflakes for half a day.

A fair few people did question the findings though. And with good reason because the methodology may very well be questionable.

But what of the methodology of anything that is connected to photography. Some of the time, I teach history, research and theory of photography across a number of programmes and most of the time, I'm pointing my students in the direction of  Linfield, Sontag, Barthes, Baudrillard, Clarke, Craik, Cotton, Linkman, Mulvey, Struk, Stallabrass, Fontcuberta as well as a bunch of other subjects depending on what studetns are interested writing about.

But I'm not sure if any of these have a particular methodology in mind when they write their work. Writers such as Linkman, Batchen and Struk base their work on particular archives ( Linkman includes references to Mass Observation) and refer to social history so that's different, but the majority? Don't tell me they just chimp their ideas out and it might just all be made-up - in the nicest possible way! Don't tell me that some of the rather sweeping claims aren't backed up with some kind of scientific, methodological rigour.

But even if it is (and it is), does it really matter? We live in a world ruled by mass psychosis so what harm does it do? We mostly read these these writers because they have a particular agenda and they wrap their particular yarn around that agenda so it fits. And they do it in quite an entertaining and tidy manner. The ideas are neat. It's nonsense but it's neat nonsense. That's important.

Sample sizes and demographic don't come into it. You might as well talk about the sample size used to determine the efficacy of reading chicken entrails or the science of alchemy. It doesn't apply. These thoughts are plucked from the ether and made to fit, no matter what. It's all part of the fun.

Tell me, when we (you, me, anyone) yabber on about exploitation, collaboration, the body or the power of the gaze, does it connect to any field research? I'm sure there is research out there somewhere (and especially with regards to surveillance, weapons and algorithms) but in the theoretical field?

Nearly all the time I am guessing the answer is no. People are just pissing their ideas into the wind. Some do it in a dynamic, engaging manner. Some obfuscate and couch their thoughts in the densest of possible prose. They are literally unreadable.

On Monday I posted on Marc Wilson's beautiful pictures of Second World War defences, The Last Stand, Perhaps the best-known of sea defence work is Paul Virilio's Bunker Archaeology. It's a great book too but with a brutal photography which suits the subject. And the text is rather brutal too. Virilio was one of the author's cited by Sokal and Bricmont in Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science.

This is a book (I haven't read it yet) where the authors debunk the pretensions of well-known theorists (Lacan, Baudrillard, Deleuze, Kristeva) and the manner in which they conflate theory and dubious readings of science.

I don't know. It's science heavy and has an anti-intellectural undercurrent to it -  I kind of like the flaky made-up language some of the time (simulacra is practically my favourite word. I have it on the cornflakes I mumble into in the morning. It sets the day up nicely) - but at the same time, if you have ever had anybody fire off a few key buzzwords at you in the hope of intimidating you, then the debunking is kind of welcome and necessary. Anything that makes language less ugly and laden with incestuous powermongering should be welcomed.

There was a feature in the Guardian today celebrating the 10-year anniversary of Nathan Barley. This is a programme which satirises the idiocy of start-up culture and mass-audience internet content. It's about the Idiots of the Internet in other words. And the Idiots are winning.

But it had a little line in it... "the massive self-regard, the daft fashion statements and the low-level passive-aggressive insinuation that if you don’t get what they’re doing then somehow it’s your fault … these are the hallmarks of the modern creative layabout from Dalston to Williamsburg to Kreuzberg to Nørrebro."

 I wonder if that line isn't something that applies to all our worlds, including the photography world, the photobook world and the academic worlds, if sometimes we feel guilty if we don't embrace the ugly ideas, the ugly language and the ugly pictures and design in all its glory.

So anything that can make photography less ugly (in a metaphorical sense) should be welcomed. There is a parallel in photography (at least our little niche that we deal with here) with Sokal and Bricmont. There is so much bad and ugly photography out there that has lame statement justifications, that ultimately is fraudulent and empty. But we still fall for it, because that is the nature of things. If we don't get it, it's our fault! And it is - sometimes.

Landscape is Not Dead: The Last Stand

all pictures by Marc Wilson

There is something quite compelling about finding old war defences on the British coastline. Without even looking for them, you stumble on bunkers, radar stations and old radio bases, curious constructions that were never quite put to their fullest possible use and have been left to decay in the face of the sea and the salt and the wind.

These sea defences are the subject of Marc Wilson's book, The Last Stand: Northern Europe, in which he travels around Europe photographing the sea defences of Britain, Belgium, Denmark, Norway and France.

It's large format work and it's quite beautiful (Paul Virilio's Bunker Archaeology may be the most recognised photography of sea defences but that's a different kind of book) . Everything is shot in subdued diffused light, the pre-dawn it looks like much of the time, and the way in which the different defences merge and crumble into the landscape of which they are now part.



At Sainte-Margtuerite-sur-Mer in Normandy, the grey brutalism of bunkers meets with the brutalism of crumbling cliffs, the plates of concrete mirroriing the tectonic plates of a shifting earth. On the pebble beaches, the shards of blackened concrete look like the remains of ancient megaliths, while on the grey sand stretches the slabs look almost soft and malleable.



The Scandanavian defences take on a pagan look. At Vorupor in Denmark, a radar receiver is buried into what looks like peat bog, while on the beach the batteries (which could fire 495 kilogramme projectiles) look like the remains of particularly malevolent beetles.

At Haugesund in Norway, the batteries are folded into the basalt rock formations. The top of one bunker peeks out from a pile of shattered rock like the top of some strange helmet, the opening a visor from which some mysterious being looks out upon the world.




The most attractive patterns are made by tank walls, the one-kilometre wall at Newburgh, Scotland being a particularly fine example, while the anti-submarine barrier in the Firth of Forth is known as 'the dragons' teeth' for good reason.

The English sea defences are curious and range from old gun placements on the white cliffs between Dover and Folkestone and the defences at Studland Bay in Dorset, the bay where the full-scale rehearsal for D-Day took place.

The Last Stand is as multi-layered as the landscapes which it features; there's historical detail wrapped folded over into a chronotopia of functional brutalism, mixed with local touches that feeds into the geological, panoramic and tactical.

All the boxes are ticked in Robert Adams traditional landscape list: there's geography, autobiography,  and metaphor. But on top of that, Wilson gives us a politicised view of landscape and power that ties back to survey photography of Timothy O'Sullivan and the work of Mitch Epstein.

Layered into that is an Arcadian vision. With its focus on Northern Europe it's a dystopian Arcadia; there is a pagan feel to Wilson's pictures, a syncretic vision where geology, flora, climate and war find a single expression. And it's beautiful. .

Buy the book here

It's Jihadi John, not Jihadi Giovanni.

picture from Makeshift Sacred Spaces by Christopher Holt

I know there are loads of people who have photographed dust in different forms, and there are those who have well-known dust pictures/projects. And then there are those who don't. I bet there are a fair few people around the world cursing Klaus Pichler for his Dust book (see yesterday's post), saying things like, "but I did that 10 years ago."

Yes, but you didn't make a book of it. And if you did, nobody knows about it. If a tree falls in the woods and nobody hears did it really fall? If a book is made and... er, finish that one yourself.



picture from Hidden Islam by Nicolo Degiorgis

It's the same with other projects. Nicolo Degiorgis's superb book, Hidden Islam was a hot book because it had great design and concept that combined maps, interiors and exteriors in almost seamless form, with an outside-inside, open-up-the-gatefold to expose the interior design ( the interiors and exteriors don't always match however. That still niggles some).

The fact that it came out at the right time, in the right form, with social media, photobook festivals and small but connected circles of book afficionados to power it into people's consciousness did no harm either. Nor did the fact that Degiorgis is smart, committed and hard-working.

But what can you do? You either know how to work these things or you don't. And if you don't know how to work them, or you don't even try to work them, you're not going to do that well out it, no matter how good the pictures.



gatefold sleeve from Hidden Islam

And of course, there have been numerous others who have done similar projects. It's all been done before remember. Which is not a problem. Just do it again, but do it different and do it better. Nobody has a copyright on the basic idea of repurposing space because it is a staple of photography.  It always has been.

For example, in London, David Spero did a beautifully photographed project on spaces adapted to christian chapels and churches, of an evangelical bent. You can think of this as similar to the exterior part of the Degiorgis project.

Also in London, Christopher Holt spent 3 years working on a project showing makeshift places turned into places for muslim worship (this is similar to the interior part of the Degiorgis project). He got into Photoworks and the BJP, but it didn't go too far beyond that despite the struggle to gain access and make a project that had value in its own right.

It's a great project, but Degiorgis didn't just combine the interiors and the exteriors of his Hidden Prayer Halls. He also added something new. And in that respect, Degiorgis got there first. That's why he's the go-to-guy for  repurposed places of muslim worship.



picture from Makeshift Sacred Spaces by Christopher Holt

It's a fine line between that relative success and the acclaim that Degiorgis received for his work and anonymity. But the truth is Degiorgis had the right subject in the right place. Islam isn't 'hidden' in much of London. It is in Italy. It's Jihadi John, not Jihadi Giovanni. The subject is far more charged in Italy and that comes across in the killer statistic that there are only 8 recognised mosques in Italy. And 2 million muslims! The title sells the story which sells the pictures.

Add to that the design, the support and the obsession with which the project has been pursued and you see why Degiorgis' book came good.

The obsession is still there. Following the first two volumes, Degiorgis also released a book of comments that were made about the project when it appeared on the Guardian website. It's called 479 Comments. 

There are more maps in here (they parallel the original Hidden Islam) and there are considerations on what it is to read these comments on the printed page compated to on a website. But still, I think it might be taking the obsession too far. Interesting as it is, it's still 479 comments on a website with all the inaccuracy, neurosis, denial and prejudice that you would expect.. But who am I to say. No way would I have traipsed around Northern Italy for 5 years photographing hidden prayer rooms. Not in a million years. So maybe, Degiorgis has got it right.

There are some humdingers in there. My favourite is:

142: I have found that it is dangerous to have Muslims as neighbours, all those sweet cakes that get passed over the fence play merry hell with your arteries and waistline.

More on 479 Comments.

Buy the book here.

Dust gets in my Eyes

It's a difficult game photography, but at the same time it's not so difficult. It's like everything; you have to keep on moving. All you really need to do is:

have some ideas
take some pictures
find a market
make some money
meet some people
show your work

have some new  ideas
take some more pictures
find another market
make some more money
meet some more people
show your work to more people

have some new  ideas
take some more pictures
find yet another market
make even more money (food and stuff. It costs!)
meet some more people, are there any left?
show your work to more people
etc

And Bob's your Uncle!

You need to be pretty high-energy and self-starting to do this, with caffeinated blood to keep up with all this multi-tasking. And you have to do it year on year on year on year.


Klaus Pichler seems to have the ability to do all the above. He comes up with consistently high-quality projects, and consistently uses the best tools possible to show them, books mostly

His latest book Dust is a case in point . A lot of people, inspired by famous dust pictures and the fact that they don't get out much (or was that just me?), photograph dust. Most of the time it looks pretty nondescript.

Even Pichler's pictures look pretty non-descript on a screen. They're small and flat and lifeless. They're too tidy. No woodlice, fingernails, or flakes of skin, on the screen you skip over them too fast to get into the scabs and flies!

But in book form they come to life. It really is quite a surprise. It's a surprise that starts with the cover. It's a felt cover that looks like a big ball of felty flush mashed into flatness. You just want to stroke it to death. It's like a bunny rabbit in book form. A dusty bunny rabbit.

Then you open it and there are those glassine sleeves with DUST spelt out on them, a letter a page. Flick over and you're into the first picture. And this is what everyone does when they get to it - they stroke it. To see if it's real, Because it pops out of the page, it looks like a dust-your-enemy attack in book form.

The piles of dust were originally about 1 inch square so are blown up to about 5 times life size, so they don't look that dust like; it's all giant hairs and threads of fabric at first, but then it starts to become fun to look into the detail. There are flies and bugs from the natural history museum, a plethora of white hairs from the art gallery, and flour and crumbs from the bakery. All gathered together into surprisingly ordered (that's the blow up effect) balls of fluff.



Dust has been sitting on Pichler's virtual shelf for a few years now. I guess he's been waiting for the right time to publish it, with the money available to publish it. The latter's important because it doesn't look like it was a cheap book to make. And if it had been a cheap book, then it would not be nearly as striking as it is.

 And it comes with a poster. Of piles of dust.

Buy the book here. 

Faces, Father Ted and Krass Clement

picture by Larry Sultan

I chose a couple of favourite books for Paper Journal yesterday. One was Pictures from Home, the Larry Sultan epic that combines text and images to tell a complex story. It's a book that has fantastic photographs but uses the text to tell a far greater tale than images alone would convey. This is part of what I wrote.
,
The text comes via Sultan, his mother and his father so there are three voices; they’re not the same voice. They argue and quibble and dispute over who and what this family is. Words are had about fidelity, career, photography and love, all against a background of images that are repeatedly brought into question. Where do these pictures come from, why do we make them, what does it mean – this family, this photography, this love?

The other was Krass Clement's Drum. This doesn't have words but it does have fantastic pictures. The face tells the story, the face of one man. This is from the post.

picture by Krass Clement

This man sits alone, his eyes cast into the middle distance; to the floor, the ceiling, to anywhere they won’t be met. His back turns this way and that, always away and he stares rheumy-eyed into places where his gaze won’t be found. It’s the most cinematic of books and it has a leading man who is a study of loneliness. It’s heartbreaking.

So two books where Sultan and Clement are telling stories where people, the face and different forms of narrative structure power the viewer through their books. They are both single-minded in what they do and whenever anyone looks at the pictures in these books, they cannot take their eyes off them.

They are superb pictures. And Sultan and Clement knew it when they made them. They were/are the real deal. They know what works and they don't pfaff about with meaningless fluff. Their pictures get straight to the heart of things.

That's not always the case with photobooks. You can hear somebody tell stories about the people and places in their photographs and then show their pictures and there's nothing there. Somehow the story (which is so central to the talking about the photographs) gets lost in the showing. As though somehow including some text or other context will detract from the power of the pictures... "I let my pictures do the talking" must be one of the most heartbreaking sentences every heard. Not because this isn't possible, but because most of the time it should be "I let my pictures do the mumbling." I'm a bit of a mumbler so I know exactly where I'm coming from with this one.

But sometimes the power's not in the pictures. It's in the story that's the thing, the text and the captions and the overall yarn. That might not be the case with Krass Clement but it is with Larry Sultan, Sultan has his amazing large format photographs in pictures from home but it's the words of his mother and father, it's the mix of images and the welding of them into a geographical, social and family history that makes it so great.

Anyway, by sheer coincidence, just as the Paper Journal piece came out, this popped up via Petapixel. It was a story about an  Eyetracking device that shows what people look at in pictures.

The general idea is that professional photographers take better pictures than amateurs. These are some of the findings.

— People look first at faces. (This echoes other eyetracking studies I have directed for The Poynter Institute for Media Studies.) And they are interested in the relationships between people in the frame, often looking back and forth, between faces and interactions.

— The importance of “storytelling” to photography was mentioned by nearly every subject in the exit interviews.


 “A photo needs to tell me a story, versus just capturing a scene,” said a 44-year-old female participant.

“If (a photo) draws you in, it’s connected to a story and it makes you want to learn more, that’s important,” said a 41-year-old male participant.


So it's basic stuff and the key idea here is that if you hire a proper photographer, more people will look at your magazine, your brochure, your website, the photographs will hook viewers into the story, the product, the sale. So the aim is very much at selling photojournalism and commercial photography.

I know that when we talk about high-end photography, about prints, exhibitions and books, we're supposed to pretend that somehow our aesthetic capabilities rise way above this level.

But I wonder. The Larry Sultan and Krass Clement books hit all those spots; the people, the faces, the stories. And they hit them square on without flinching.

Drum works so well because of the face of that lonely man (is he lonely? I don't know, he might not be in real life, but he is in the pages of Drum). Clement is picking a face on which there is a life written, a face that is going to pierce through our cynical eyes. It's a rare skill that ability both to read faces and read how they are going to touch the viewer because these faces are not random, they are not just any old faces, they are faces that have been cast, that are one in a hundred or one in a thousand. There aren't that many of them. And reading these faces, finding these faces, is a skill that the real greats of art and photography have. It's the reason why we remember an Arbus or an Avedon or a Sander or a Klein.

That ability to read faces and understand how they work might be a bit more sophisticated than what the Eyetracking Device records, but it is still something quite hard-wired and basic. I wonder if sometimes we try to look away from the absolutely bleeding obvious and try to complicate things through wilful indirection and vagueness.

Or pretension. Because yesterday Federica Chiocchetti's fine interview with Sean O'Hagan was up on the brand spanking new 1000 Words website, where he repeated Nan Goldin's great quote.


“Fucking postmodern and gender theory. I mean, who gives a shit? People made all that crap up to get jobs in universities.” I think it kills the work for people who are not from that academic background. That kind of writing is exclusive by its nature. It often makes things less clear.

I know that it's brutal and that we should embrace all ideas and even give Judith Butler a go or two before losing the will to live, but at the same time, yes exactly. We shouldn't shut anything out, but things that 'makes things less clear', or things that have an excellent and complex point to make but take 500 words and the densest of prose to make to make that point. In the visual arts. Which is full of visual people. Isn't it sometimes designed just to intimidate and scare. And doesn't it still intimidate and scare.

And valuing all that theory above more interesting, entertaining and accessible ideas that attach to art, TV, film and literature - the powerhouses of creativity, education and information exchange, which is where we want to be? Is that the hierarchy we should have? In a visual art where people go into the visual for a reason.

I'm not saying that we should value the complete series of Father Ted above the works of Merleau-Ponty and Lacan, but... oh no, wait a minute. I am saying that. Oh dear, there's no way out. Better end it here.