"The Myth of the Airborne Warrior" by Stuart Griffiths

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This book brings together two developing strands of thought, the importance of vernacular photography as a record and how the design of a book influences the way that we read photographs.  At a secondary level this book also illustrates very well how context drives meaning, how a photograph can be lifted from snapshot to art work, simply by being taken from a plastic container and being printed in a book.

Stuart Griffiths is an ex-Paratrooper who served in Northern Ireland during the troubles and this book, "The Myth of the Airborne Warrior", presents photographs he took during the late 80's and early 90's.  The photos were taken on a cheap Canon Sureshot, the film precursor of today's bargain basement digital compacts.  They are poorly framed, poorly exposed, poorly, pretty much everything.  But, they are a record of a difficult time presented from a unique perspective.  Collectively they rise and present a frightening picture of boredom, fear and ultimately abuse.  The Para's are revealed as a bunch of vulnerable young men trapped in a nightmare from which they cannot escape.  The enemy is everyone, trained to engage a uniformed military they do not even know who the enemy is until they are shot at.

Stuart left the army and in 1997 was enrolled on a Photography degree alongside Gordon MacDonald, now Head of Publications at Photoworks and Editor of Photoworks magazine. Stuart did not speak much about his experiences and it was not until 2009 that he shared the images.  The subsequent book had to do more than simply present the photographs or make a political point about the troubles, it needed to convey the experience he had beyond the merely visual.  The book design has to carry this weight and it does it well.  Most photographs are faced on the opposite page by a block of text telling his story, the size of the block exactly mirroring the photograph.  The text is, however, mostly blacked out, the censors black marker redacting his story.  It can still be read with difficulty.  What remains almost reads as fragments of poetry.  This conveys the sense that not only was their life miserable and boring it was also something that the government of the time did not want to be seen.  The book is further augmented by the inclusion of bits of paper containing "rules of engagement", small leaflets warning against fraternization and a really welcome touch a single print signed by the author, 1 of an "edition" of 500, but nice all the same.

A small, but very interesting photobook, yielding new ideas for design and use of imagery.  I wonder how many other stories sit inside the albums of amateur photographers  never to be told, but containing important visual history.  "Serious" photographers seem to spend so much time looking for the remarkable, when it is so often to be found a few feet away in our everyday lives.  We may not know it now, but one day these records might be a priceless artifact of a time passed.  Photography has an important archival role, that occasionally can be transformed into art.

"Think of England" by Martin Parr

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Most photo books I look at as a photographer; trying to understand the art and thinking that went into the creation of both the images and the volume.  With this book I am taken to a completely different place, a nostalgic retreat into a sense of England that I have dearly missed during my 18 years in Germany.  It see it as an impressive photographic tour de force, but also works in so many other ways.  There is biting satire, juxtapositions of the wealthy with the working class, a group of horsemen contrast with the a picture on the lid of a jigsaw puzzle, a handbag with a builders lunch bag, an ear-ringed bald head with a jeweled watch, it goes on and on.  As Gerry Badger states in the brief introduction to the book, this is the creation of the England we hold in our minds, it only exists fleetingly, but is what many expats hang onto as their dream of home.

Apart from the construct of the England of tea parties, seaside resorts, huntsmen, floral dresses, and jumble sales, the book is a homage to the qualities of highly saturated colour film.  It explodes with garish colours, Parr's England lives in an eternal summer, the greys of winter are forever banished.  This is further enhanced by the design of the book.  There are few white borders, pages are full bleed, punctuated with single photo two page spreads and double photo one page composites. The book seems to break every rule of art publishing, it has more of the quality of someones holiday snaps crammed together into a cheap print on demand volume.  However, this structure is very effective, it takes the emphasis away from the single photo and places it firmly on looking at the book as a whole.  I found myself paging backwards and forwards finding new details, new threads of thought, simply marveling at the power of observation.

Looking deeper into the book there are a number of elements that I can take away and apply to my own work, in particular my current study of the Oktoberfest.  Colour; lots and lots of colour, I need to be less afraid of over-saturating my images, but at the same time must remember that the overall set must hang together visually. In Parr's book, the very last image of a Gatso camera warning sign has far greater impact because it is almost monochrome, it almost says funs over back to the real England of grinding work and bureaucracy.   This can be done once, but not many more times.  Detail; many of the photos in the book bring the camera in very close, picking out small details.  From an assignment perspective this is not easy to include as human interactions become obscured, but for my book, it is a necessary element that can be used to break the flow and add context.  Irony and Metaphor.  I put these two together as they are the hidden message, the former created by how the images are ordered, the latter by the content of individual images.  This is a skill I am trying to develop, however, it really does require a practiced eye and a very agile mind to create images containing these attributes.

The more I look at Martin Parr and his view on the world around him, the more I feel I can learn.  He presents the world we live in, he does not need to highlight poverty or disadvantage in the world.  His world is my world, full of the absurdities of middle class living.  This is documentary of the life we lead and something I find I want to capture here in Germany.  My long term project, Die Muenchener, has a goal not dissimilar to "Think of England", but I do need to be careful, my treatment is supposed to be Robert Frank, not Martin Parr.  But! Perhaps they have more in common that we think?

"Tulsa" - by Larry Clark

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If there is one area in which I am failing on this course it is clearly a lack of consideration of other photographers work.  This is my 41st post in my Social Documentary Blog and yet only the 2nd that actually addresses the subject of other photographers.  I think there are a couple of reasons for this, the main one simply being time, not only do I have precious little of it, but looking at a writing about photography is very time consuming.  This is rather sad because one of the aspects of studying photography has been a realization that I love the medium and get a real thrill out of seeing original work by the greats of the medium.  I am an avid collector of photobooks, a week never goes by without something arriving from Amazon.  My goal has always been to consider one artist each week and write about my feelings about their work, it is just not happening - so here goes!

Larry Clark's Tulsa is not an easy book to look at.  I first came across images from the book in the recent exhibit of American photography at the modern art museum in Munich.  The exhibit was largely reminiscent of photographs featured in the New Topology exhibit of the early 70's, however, with the inclusion of additional artists such as Eggleston, Winogrand, Friedlander and in particular Larry Clark.  Clark was represented by a short row of 8x10 photographs, original prints taken from Tulsa.  These were hung on their own against a vast white wall.  There was a visible shock reaction as people studied these images.  They were very different from the other material in the exhibit, primarily different plays on the landscape; these presented a visceral study of a descent into hell.  Two photographs reached out and attacked the viewer, a pregnant woman shooting drugs, adjacent to an open coffin containing a newly born.  This neatly summarized Tulsa, fascinating voyeuristic photographs possessing a terrifying narrative.

In a sense it is in a similar vein to Nan Goldin's work, an intensely involved study of a severely dysfunctional group of people, however, where Nan clearly loves many of the subjects of  her narrative this cannot be said of Larry Clark. In his photographs teenagers mix guns with speed and sex, the outcome inevitable.  The images are starkly black and white, there could be no colour here, the world he portrays is black and white, life and death, heaven and hell.  He is involved, after all he is there, but the photos are not made with love of the subject, he simply seems to be chronicling them, the edit intended to shock rather than invoke empathy.

This is, however, Social Documentary at its best, the images expose late 60's small town teenage culture, kids driven by boredom into the excitement of living on the edge, and then falling off.  It is not a study of "The Other", Clark is part of this, he was one of the speed freaks, injecting drugs as he took these photographs.  When Robert Frank made The Americans in the late 50's he was exposing the American dream for what it was, Clark turns that dream into a nightmare.

"The Ballad of Sexual Dependency" by Nan Goldin

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As I continue this journey with the OCA, periodically I come across a milestone that reminds me of how far I have come.  One of those arrived through the post a couple of weeks ago, the 25th Anniversary reprint of Nan Goldin's "The Ballad of Sexual Dependency".  In early reading tackling the history of photography and how it relates to contemporary art, Nan Goldin's work appeared again and again, however, I simply did not get it.  Why were these badly lit, oddly coloured, often grotesque images seen as art and why as an exemplary piece of work?

Today, I look at Nan's work and see the immense courage and strength it must have taken to create this story.  I see a work that is both a personal record, but at the same time a damning comment on the sexual mores of late 20th century America.  I enjoy the narrative and find myself visually exploring the lives of the people she portrays. In other words my own experience of art has changed, my visual education has progressed and most importantly I have shed many preconceptions and biases that got between me and a personal reading of the image.

In assignment 1 I turned the camera on myself, exploring who I am and how I feel at this point in my life.  I only looked at a single facet of my world and opened the door for a very short period of time.  In the Ballad Nan spent 15 years chronicling the often abusive and dysfunctional relationships that she and her friends experienced.  Drug and Alcohol dependency suffuse the photographs, violence is used as a metaphor for love.  And yet Nan treats her subjects with great tenderness and respect.  Even very private moments seem to say something about the individual that is deeper than a first reading permits.

There is a very clear thesis at work within the photographs, that men and women although very different need each other, often to the extent that two people might despise one another and still be bound by the sexual dependency of the title.  The images are very carefully sequenced starting with almost saccharine images of couples, through sets that address the nature of men and women, back to relationships without the sugar coating.  It ends in photographs of death.  In the afterword, she reveals her loss, many of the people photographed, although young, have gone, AIDs and drugs took their toll on her friends.

There is much to learn as a documentary photographer from this work.  The sequencing of the images is exquisite, it builds the narrative she wants to portray.  The photographs are not all that technically good, if they were the sense of being there would be lost.  The snapshot aesthetic she employs holds the set together across the many years of creation, maintaining continuity.  Possible with film, I this could be done with ever changing Digital technology.  The key takeaway here is that a narrative sequence of images will hold together better if shot in similar style with similar equipment.  Whilst the photographs make the book, the foreword and afterword bookend the images and provide context within which the photographs can be read.  This is a personal weakness in my work and an area that deserves greater attention of the book is to be the primary creation of my photography.

Before closing this review of the Ballad, I was struck by what Nan wrote in the afterword to accompany this 25th anniversary edition.  It was about the reality of photographs.  The "trueness" of a photograph has been called into question so much that it is now conventional wisdom that photographs contain no evidential value, in other words a photograph is not a true recording of reality.  Nan utterly rejects this idea for her own work.  She sees the Ballad as a record of real events and people that occurred through her life.  She mentions that she started taking photographs when she was so hopped up on drugs and alcohol that she no longer remembered what she did the night before, the photograph became a surrogate memory.  For her these photographs are real.

I find this book inspirational, it shows the power of the camera as a documentary tool, but also the ability to build a narrative from a disparate set of photographs that carries a true societal meaning.  It reveals that an in depth study of society is not done over a weekend or the length of an assignment, but over a life time.  As a student I merely scratch the surface of the possible, understanding my limits is key, however, Nan shows that there really are no limits.