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26 JULY 5 SEPTEMBER
A PHOTOGRAPHIC EXHIBITION, AWARD AND
PRINT FAIR OPEN TO ALL PHOTOGRAPHERS
RIP Motor City, farewell then, Motown. Detroits
illustrious past is lost to history and this rust
belt city is now on the map for 50 per cent
unemployment, its status as a murder capital
and is infamous to photographers in particular
for the faded grandeur of its abandoned
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industrial cities? Or if the parking lots were torn
up and paradise unpaved? Theres a real chance
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potential into homegrown food. Our special
report with photographs by Christian Burkert and
Jamie Mcgregor Smith and words by Mark Dowie
sees how the land lies.
By the time this issue is out, its odds on that a
new political leader will be installed in Downing
Street. Crosscurrents from the Tory regime that
ended so memorably in 1997, as explored through
Lisa Barnards work on the former Conservative
Party Headquarters, have informed Labour policy
and will pervade the new regime with equal force.
Elsewhere we look at different perspectives
within mainstream news stories Peter Beaumont
and Louis Quail on Haiti, Paul Hayward on the
frst African World Cup, Geert van Kesterens new
project on Gaza along with those that are more
or less ignored in the press Guinea-Bissaus
collapse into lawlessness, Latvias youth as they
try to fnd their footing, as well as a personal
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making. It is in or between these social, political
and cultural crosscurrents that the potential for
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faced by people across the globe, exists. If a
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power relations that are ceaselessly at play, and
navigating a path towards responding personally
or politically without basing that response
on diametrically opposed choices that in their
narrowness remove space for contemplation.
Were glad you could join us for our ongoing
swim upstream.
The Editors
Cover:
Sohrab Hura
ISSUE 27
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08
50
72
FRONT
08 EXITGHOST
Lisa Barnard
20 DESTROyINGTHELabORaTORyFOR
THESakEOFTHEEXpERImENT
Mark Power and Daniel Cockrill
30 INTERVIEW
Adam Broomberg and
Oliver Chanarin
40 WORkINpROGRESS
After the Ceasefres
Geert van Kesteren
INpICTURES
50 RUSHHOUR
Marco Vernaschi
64 ONTHEEDGE
Roberto Boccaccino
72 DEaDEaGLETRaIL
Jane Hilton
107LIFEISELSEWHERE
Sohrab Hura
120UNDERGODS
Liz Hingley
132aFTER:LIFE
Louis Quail
REpORT
83 DETROITREImaGINED:
LIFE
Christian Burkert
94 FaRmERSOFmOTOWN
Mark Dowie
96 DETROITREImaGINED:
LaND
Jamie Mcgregor Smith
INWORDS
146TWOUmbRELLaS
Peter Beaumont
148WINWINaFRICa?
Paul Hayward
150SIEGEmENTaLITy
Afghan Hound
152ISaNyONELISTENING?
Malu Halasa
154bOOkREVIEWS
Protest Photographs
Gaza Photo Album
The Jazz Loft Project
Room 103
Explosions, Fires and Public Order
Silence
War
178ONmySHELF
Simon Njami
3
40
CONTENTS
5
Lisa Barnard
Lisa Barnard completed a BA in
Editorial Photography in 2005 at
Brighton University, where she now
teaches. Her work Virtual Iraq
premiered at the Brighton Photo
Biennial 2008, to much acclaim. She
has recently concluded a year-long
residency at the Unicorn Theatre for
Children and continues to work on
her own artistic practice, in both fne
art and editorial photography.

Jane Hilton
Photographer and flmmaker Jane
Hilton started out as a classical
musician but her love of photography
brought her to London to work as an
assistant, before going it alone in
1988. Her series of 10 documentaries
on brothels in Nevada for the BBC has
been aired 250 times. Her early work
in American in the 1990s looked at
the kitsch wedding culture in Las
Vegas, a region of the world that
continues to enthral her.
Sohrab Hura
Sohrab Hura, born in 1981 in India,
grew up changing his life ambition
from one thing to another. He frst
wanted to grow up to become a dog,
which later turned into becoming a
superhero, followed by veterinarian
and herpetologist to a wildlife
flmmaker. After completing a Masters
in Economics, he is today a
documentary photographer living in
New Delhi.
Marco Vernaschi
Marco Vernaschi is an Italian
photojournalist and writer currently
living in Buenos Aires. His long-term
project, West Africas New Achilles
Heel, completed in association with
the Pulitzer Center, documents the
illegal activities, such as drug
traffcking, that are fueling terrorism.
His work has been published
internationally in publications such as
Newsweek, National Geographic and
The Sunday Times Magazine.
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COPENHAGEN PHOTO FESTIVAL
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EXHIBITIONS:
DANISH ARCHITECTURE CENTRE , THE NATIONAL MUSEUM OF PHOTOGRAPHY, FOTOGRAFISK CENTER,
GALERIE MIKAEL ANDERSEN, GALLERI BO BJERGGAARD, HANS ALF GALLERY, MARTIN ASBK GALLERY,
PETER LAV GALLERY, ROHDE CONTEMPORARY, NATIONAL GALLERY OF DENMARK, V1 GALLERY AND ALL OVER TOWN
12 - 20 May 2010
COPENHAGEN PHOTO FESTIVAL
DAY AND NIGHT ALL OVER TOWN
WWW.COPENHAGENPHOTOFESTIVAL.COM
FACEBOOK: COPENHAGEN PHOTO FESTIVAL
Lisa Barnards photographs are empty stages awaiting actors to
enter through the myriad doors, emerge from behind spectral blue
curtains, or even to appear hologram-like through a blank screen
or a gaping rent in a wall.
The theatre, located at 32 Smith Square, Westminster, is
presently between productions. The fnal curtain for the last show
came down in July 2004, though its glory days ended seven years
earlier on 1 May 1997. Some would say the true date of its demise
was 28 November 1990, when its leading lady, one Margaret Hilda
Thatcher, announced she would no longer take the stage.
By now it may be evident that this now-empty building was
once the Conservative Party headquarters. A famously squalid
building on the inside a state encouraged by the partys then
treasurer Lord McAlpine to attract benevolent benefactors it was
the setting for 50 years of Tory election victories, as well as the site
where party faithful learnt of the memorable loss of Michael
Portillos Enfeld seat to Labours Stephen Twigg that fateful
May night.
For many photographers, the chance to make a project in a
building so redolent with recent political history would be a gift.
But for one with a critical practice (anyone who saw Barnards
Virtual Iraq at the Brighton Photo Biennial in 2008 will know that
her work engages with the political), to perpetuate photographys
passionate affair with disused spaces would have been an
opportunity wasted. Barnard has brought something else to the
frame; an eye that doesnt linger over the aesthetics of decay, but
rather draws the observers attention to the poetics of space. With
her cool blue interior shots, she creates the necessary distance for
abstraction, moving through this new register of perception to a
different spatio-temporal plane where the political and the
performative, and the past and the future collapse into each other.
It is as though Barnard is using documentary photography to
take the observer beyond the real. On the one hand she is simply
documenting the last vestiges of an old regime, yet in the same
frame she is offering up the possibility that what she is
documenting is not real, was never real, just a political chimera, all
surface, no depth. To paraphrase Roth, the smallness of politics is
crushing. So many doors offer the promise of a way out, yet all the
time the observer feels claustrophobic, hemmed in by walls and
industrial pipes, waiting for the low polystyrene ceiling to bear
down at any moment. Thus trapped, we are invited to consider not
just the space/the stage but its lost objects, its props, and the sense
of disquiet they engender.
A folk doll is photographed, along with other recovered
oddments, almost as a fetish object, as though for a rather surreal
catalogue. It she? is so pitifully abject, the smallest of
capitalisms useless commodities; a diplomatic gift, perhaps, from
an eastern European country. Two disembodied arms hold what
the police might term Tory paraphernalia a fag and a scarf of
the variety worn by the UKs frst female Prime Minister literally
at arms length. A string of weights tells a story of a curiously
suburban security measure: to hold down net curtains in case of a
bomb blast. The inclusion of a silver spoon carries with it the
unpalatable taste of privilege. Barnard has photographed these
objects in a style reminiscent of her earlier body of work Care
Packages, a project devised by the Blue Star Moms of America, as a
kind of grief kit for bereaved parents of dead soldiers. Removed
photography LISA BARNARD
tExt MAx HougHtoN
from their original context, these objects, like the Nestl mini
marshmallows or Hershey kisses, are rendered absurd,
unfathomable, redundant. These are the props of Conservative
politicians, who, after 13 years off Broadway, are now waiting
fractiously in the wings to take centre, or should that be centre
right, stage in May 2010.
Barnard has been commissioned to photograph the building by
Pringle Brandon, the architects working for the new owners, and
these photographs will comprise part of the fnal exhibition, which
will take place when it opens in its new guise. Though we see
evidence of a seemingly fraught relationship with the US in the
scratched out BUSH sign, or a tiny door tag that reads Washington,
there is no sign of the infamous Vive Le Quid posters, or the Keep
Britain Out of Europe slogans that characterised the Conservative
Partys loathing of the EU (formerly the EEC) at that time. Which
makes it all the more ironic that these same rooms will soon house
offces of the European Parliament and the European Commission.
As Churchill said: We shape our buildings and afterwards our
buildings shape us.

www.lisabarnard.co.uk
DESTROYING
THE LABORATORY
FOR THE SAKE
OF THE
EXPERIMENT
PHOTOGRAPHY Mark Power
POeTRY Daniel CoCkrill
21
22
23
When my world was turned
Upside down
Everything fell out
In the morning
I fell out of bed
My pens fell out my bag
My money fell out my pocket
My tears fell out my eyes
My thoughts fell out my ears
My anger fell out my mouth
My hate fell out my fsts
My love fell out my heart
My heart fell out my chest
Luckily
You walked behind me
And picked them all up.
fragile carbon cut waters
eclipse ashen milk memories
stacked bow to stern
blackened by progress, promise and lie
a deep fotsam bog veil
conceals
an apple sludge
a blooded soil
a drifting silt
clogging
arteries
ventricles
veins
a hollow heart billows dust
as a football foats
and a swan swims
between Picasso blue shadow
tags tattoo
every nook, cranny
tug and barge
dykes trickle
traffc rolls
the canals green grimace
fickers, jitters and tickles
a stony faced brick wall
your warm brittle bones
your blended voice tones
your lost consonants
your kind Brummie drone of breath
currier
glover
saddler
tanner
thong and whip
stripped
dipped deep
on bradawl shaped
throat cut land
apples rot
ideas crumble
stars vanish as they run out of light
meanwhile they shoot down satellites
even the seasons are changing
as the current counts down
the beats
and the breath.
26
it is written
in the too bright sky
as giant snowballs evaporate
between goalposts
in the storm sodden felds
of a schoolboys dream
it is written
on the frost bitten toes
and the blistered heels
the gloveless numb fngers
and the slush soaked bone
it is written
on our zipper pulled
orange lined snorkel parkas
hoods cupping
a dripping blue ice pop nose
it is written
on the Cellophane wrapped
couple
the promises they make
on the stairwells they climb
and the bridges they cross
it is written
in the empty waiting rooms
on the wall painted cotton felds
the braille on the table cloth
that blind men cant read
on the cobbled streets
and polished foors
it is written
in the long exposures
on the ficker and fade of Union
fags
the ice in my dreams
the thaw of my thoughts
in the alcoholic laugh
the fying fsts
the shattered glass
the ammonium piss bus shelters
the boarded up post boxes
it is written
on the bricks and the mortar
in the mad and the mean
on the faces of the middle men
on the policemans blooded
baton
on the politicians conscience
under the judges bitten nails
in the carparks
shopping centres
train stations
motorways
churches
mosques
synagogues
schools
libraries
and hospitals
on the rooftops
in the gutters
on the benches where we sit
on the paving stones of England
it has been written.
27
28
Destroying the Laboratory... is a collaborative project between photographer Mark Power (markpower.co.uk) and poet Daniel Cockrill
as they travel around England. An exhibition of this work will be held in June at Atlas Gallery, London.
29
30
BROOMBERG & CHANARIN
OUT OF CONTEXT
BY MAX HOUGHTON
31
I NTERVI EW
32
Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin are not photojournalists,
but sometimes they pretend to be. In the winter of 2007, the
photographers were invited by the Ministry of Defence to make a
series of portraits of British troops in Afghanistan. Wed be
delighted, they responded, knowing that if they could get
themselves embedded, whatever work they made during that time
would not succumb to the soldier as hero narrative they knew the
MOD would desire, the very narrative they associate with the
practice of photojournalism, and one of their many reasons for
challenging that discourse.
At some point in the negotiations, Broomberg and Chanarin
were told they would not have permission to go to Afghanistan
after all. We started thinking about what wed like to do and by
the time we worked it out, I think theyd seen our work and
thought it wouldnt be a good idea to send us there, says
Broomberg, the more forthcoming, more exuberant of the two, at
least in this meeting, the most likely to illustrate his speech with
exclamation or emotion. Chanarin, on this occasion, is more tightly
sealed, more controlled.
Weve always said our work has been 90 per cent about getting
access and 10 per cent taking photographs but our ability to get
access has been compromised by the work weve been doing, says
Chanarin, referring in part to Chicago, in which they photographed
a fake Arab town, known as Chicago, built by the Israeli Defence
Force for combat training. These fantasy landscapes, as Eyal
Weizman notes in the books accompanying essay, reveal a ghost
town where soldiers are trained to make ghost towns out of real
cities. Unlikely to make comfortable viewing for the MOD, one
imagines.
So, we got [the access] another way by pretending to be
photojournalists coming to do a story, says Broomberg.
It wasnt as whats the word, when you lie? deceitful as
were making out, continues Chanarin. There was actually quite
a transparency. We were working in the media, sleeping in the
media tent, eating with all the other journalists. We were totally
upfront about what we were doing: we had a cardboard box, it was
full of paper, we were exposing it to the light. The level of deceit
was that we had a camera, the kind of camera they would expect us
to have, and we used it to take pictures as they would expect, but
we would delete those pictures at the end of each day.
The photographic paper, rolled out in sections at strategic
moments during their tour and exposed to the light for 20
seconds, resulted in the work The Day Nobody Died. It would
become one of the most controversial series of images of the war,
infuriating, among others, those concerned that in appropriating
the main role of this artistic venture to the soldiers themselves
they were responsible for carrying around the rather absurd box,
containing the roll of paper 50 metres long and 76.2 cm wide,
weighing 13.5 kilograms was potentially dangerous as well as
disgraceful waste of soldiers time.
Doing what? Theyre wasting my money says Broomberg.
Yet, whatever this project is, it isnt as fippant as this response
looks on the page. Their intention in making the work, as is evident
in the title, was to expose how images, or image-makers, are
complicit in neutralising the horror of war. To quote from the text
they distributed to accompany this work when it was presented at
the Barbican: We have found images that are constructed to evoke
compassion or concern, pathos or sympathy often the measure of
a successful image increasingly problematic. The act of looking
becomes cathartic, a celebration of the sublime, but nothing else. It
is a passive and quite worthless act.
Broomberg and
Chanarings latest
project, an intervention
into a photographic
archive documenting
The Troubles (opening
spread and above,
courtesy The Artists /
The Belfast Exposed
Archive)
The oxymoronic
practice of music
torture (facing page):
stills from Saturday
Comes Slow, the video
for Massive Attack
33
But even Broomberg and Chanarin didnt count on the strange
beauty of their own images; their Hockney blues, the faming
tongues that mingled with the very dirt and dust of Helmand. The
images were accompanied by a flm that documents the journey of
the box of paper. When I saw it, at the Paradise Row Gallery in east
London, the flm seemed incidental. In subsequent exhibitions, it
has received due prominence, serving as a flmic caption to the
too-beautiful images, its purpose to show the theatre of war and to
disrupt that narrative. Yet doesnt the artists collaboration with the
army make them complicit in the very machinery of war that grinds
along with the fow of capitalism?
We were subversive in that machinery, begins Chanarin.
We were interrupting it, continues Broomberg. It happened
with every single person we encountered. They were like whats
in the fucking box? What are we doing carrying a 15kg box around?
We were having confrontation after confrontation. So it became
this kind of foolish journey.
I think our flm about the box is actually the most authentic
series of images of war, says Chanarin, War is that war is
mundane War is logistical, war is waiting, war is hanging about.
War is not really about the effects of ammunition on the human
body because people are just eating and digging holes and fying
aeroplanes and creating dust.
Its a knowingly provocative statement and Broomberg doesnt
let it go: No, sorry, war is tens of people dying And its this kind
of jostling to fnd a moral position through their work that I sense
happens all the time, is the reason for their continued
collaboration, that began professionally at Colors magazine 10
years ago, and the reason it continues to thrive.
Broomberg and Chanarins critique of how narrative is created
has always been present in their work, for example, in Red House,
where in choosing to photograph only the marks inscribed on the
walls of Saddams former Baathist headquarters, and the site of
torture for Kurds who were incarcerated there, they drew out an
interplay between the fxity of photography and the unfnished
nature of graffti or drawing. Yet these images could
simultaneously exist as part of a photojournalistic venture. The
photographs in Mr Mkhizes Portrait, such as those of the men in
Pollsmoor Maximum Security Prison in Cape Town, are also
photojournalistic. Both men grew up in South Africa they frst
met on holiday in the Cape when they were 19 and are, in fact,
distantly related yet there is a sense in Mr Mkhize and in the
various series that form Ghetto that they have turned their lens to
the exotic, to the dispossessed, to the vulnerable. Though they
dont disown this work (they seem less sure of the validity of their
frst work Trust), Broomberg and Chanarin would not make
pictures like that today.
Our photographs didnt do anything. We took them, at that
point, when we were operating within a belief that our
photographs did something, that they functioned in some way,
says Chanarin. Theres a contract between the photographer and
the subject and weve never lived up to that promise. Weve gone
into a psychiatric hospital and taken a picture of someone and no
matter how dignifed we want that picture to be, no matter how
beautiful it is, or how ever well it communicates the situation, it
never lives up to the promise which is that in some way this will
help that person.
Broomberg picks up the thread: And every time weve
photographed anyone, you can feel that promise happening, you
can, and any photographer will tell you that. Its part of the power
and its part of the reason people give you access to themselves
34
35
I think our flm about
the box is actually the
most authentic series
of images of war:The
Day Nobody Died on
display at Paradise Row
Gallery (top);stills from
the flm of soldiers
transporting the box of
paper (above);and a
detail from one of the
resulting images (left)
36
especially if you are functioning within institutions where the
history of photography is tied up so much with power or authority
and categorisation, youre seen as part of the power mechanism or
as someone who can alleviate the suffering that power is causing.
And you cant. This is part of what led us away quite violently
away from that.
And its this status as foor-crossers that can invoke wrath in
those who believe in the need to document the lived life. This
turning away has led increasingly towards a kind of abstraction in
later work. Their series American Landscapes is described by
Chanarin as a road trip, yet what the photographs depict are the
very edges of sets used by commercial photographers across the
US. Broomberg and Chanarin see the blank sets as offering a
similar kind of projected fantasy as the landscapes they
photographed in Chicago. Though admittedly, it is possible to
make out tiny details of white fooring or terracotta paint, they
seem to fall into that category of work that is utterly meaningless
unless the artist tells you what to think; a charge I wouldnt level at
any of their other work, which is always freighted with a vivid
politics that seems entirely absent here. I make this declaration as I
read that John Berger has collaborated with them on this project,
which will be shortly be released in book form. I look forward to
being illuminated.
Interestingly, even now, Chanarin and Broomberg call
themselves documentary photographers. I say interestingly
because their most recent work, Afterlife, and their work with the
Belfast Exposed archive, could both be described as artistic
interventions or borrowing hardly the language of
documentary photography. That they teach at the London College
of Communication on the Documentary and Photojournalism MA
makes their thoughts on where, if anywhere, such boundaries are
drawn, even more relevant.
Says Broomberg: For me its quite clear. Photojournalisms
tropes and strategies have stayed the same for many, many years,
and the way it functions; whereas documentary changes because it
is constantly analysing the way its working. Thats the key
distinction for me. It examines its own strategies constantly and
that is a transgressive position and thats to challenge power.
Chanarin: For me photojournalism is practical, its pragmatic
and its about news, about engaging with the machinery of
newspapers. Documentary, I have in the camp of concerned
photography in my mind thats where it sits Documentary
makes me think of documents. So its something separate from
news. Its a photocopy of something. Its a bit of data thats been put
into a fle, and its been archived; its quite a passive thing.
Photojournalism I see as much more aggressive and opinionated.
I see all these people out there with their cameras all the time
and I marvel at it. Humans are fascinated with recording, in fact
they are desperate to do it to document. Whether you call it
photojournalism, or you call it documentary, or whether you call it
drawing, there is an obsession that humans have with creating
representations of things and Im much more interested in that
than in fghting about whether something is documentary or not.
Again, Broomberg challenges his partner: But then there is
drawing which is making cartoons of Jews in 1934, thats when the
distinctions start becoming important. You start talking about its
motivation, morality, ethics, strategies people use, at which point I
think it is interesting. Put it this way photojournalism is more
easily its more dangerous because it can be used for different
means whereas documentary is less I dont know less easily
manipulated because its thinking about its position.
37
I see all these people
out there with their
cameras all the time
and I marvel at it.
Humans are fascinated
with recording, in fact
they are desperate to
do it to document:
from Afterlife (right);
Mr Mkhizes Portrait
(top left);Ghetto (left)
38
Rogue trip:challenging
the discourse of
photojournalism or
drifting into
abstraction?American
Landscapes (facing
page);and Chicago
(this page)
39
These thoughts are interesting in relation to the work they have
recently made that was sparked from a single image by Iranian
photographer Jahangir Razmi. Their text offers the idea that by
reappropriating it, our relationship as spectators of distant
suffering is interrupted. While the opportunity to reconsider
events that took place in 1979 is welcome, the phraseology seems
glib. Its as though by taking a photograph quite literally out of
context the background is removed and individual fgures from
the Pulitzer Prize-winning image and several frames from the
contact sheet are featured as cut-outs the context shifts to inhabit
the words but thats all. Whats infnitely more interesting to me
is the fact that Broomberg and Chanarin spent time with the
Iranian photographer, whose anonymity was preserved for over 20
years, asking him to describe the events and people in the
photographs as though they were blind and could not see his
pictures. Their investigative technique revealed the ever-present
gap between photography and memory, and further, challenged
the primacy of the visual.
Our interview is punctuated by telephone calls and discussions
about their most recent work, which takes the form of a video they
have made for the band Massive Attack. Its a collaboration with
Ruhal Ahmed, a former Guantanamo Bay detainee, and the human
rights charity Reprieve. Ahmed was bombarded with incessant
heavy metal music, played at the highest volume in a form of the
oxymoronic-sounding practice of music torture. Broomberg and
Chanarins technique here is to interview Ahmed in an anechoic
chamber, used for sound experiments, so that it becomes a kind of
performance. Its absorbing to watch, yet, once again, beauty
disrupts the artists own intention to disrupt the disposable vehicle
of a pop video. The contours of Ahmeds face are so physically
perfect they briefy deafen the viewer to the disturbing content of
the words he is speaking, deafened by sight, blinded by beauty.
Its in this way that with their whole body of work, Broomberg
and Chanarin are creating the kind of audio-visual archive
attributed to the great seer (voyant) Foucault by Gilles Deleuze.
Throughout their practice, they are exploring the infnite relation
between the seeable and sayable, between word and image,
between history and memory. If sometimes their work falls short of
the hyperbole, that is a necessary part of a practice that is
constantly seeking to challenge the limits of representation. Their
youthful arrogance gone theyre both pushing 40, and Broomberg
is a joyous new father their desire to dissect contemporary
history-making undiminished, they might even be content to
follow Becketts dictum from time to time: fail again, fail better.
As Im about to leave, I ask a few predictable questions about
their enduring relationship. Listen to this, says Broomberg,
laughing at the thought hes just had. Ollys mother comes round
the other day to meet Leni [Broombergs baby daughter] and she
starts telling this story about Olly as a little kid. Ollys mum and dad
moved from England when he, when you, were tiny and they
were invited to their frst barbecue. This was a big thing, an
introduction into the local community, and they are at the table
and eventually everyone just leaves. Ollys mum goes to Ollys dad
and asks where theyve all gone. They were all huddled together,
so she went up to them and asked if there was a problem. They said
Well, yes your little baby has been mixing the peanuts with the
crisps! and they got kicked out of the party!
That sounds like an exaggeration.
No thats the way it was! And I said to her, Ive been
separating the crisps from the peanuts for the last 15 years.
40
AFTER THE
CEASEFIRES
photography geert van kesteren
tExt Max HougHton
41
Work I n Progress
42
Its rare to fnd agreement in the photojournalistic community
about the merits of a body of work. Geert van Kesterens work has
been near universally lauded twice with his two books on Iraq,
Why Mister, Why? and Baghdad Calling, offering a new and
remarkably singular approach to photographic studies of
contemporary confict. He knows his decision to undertake his next
long-term project in the country-with-two-names Israel/
Palestine is loaded in more ways than one.
Its hard to think of a more ambitious project than Why Mister,
Why?, but with his new work, provisionally called After the
Ceasefres, Id guess van Kesteren has found it. He began in earnest
after the February 2009 ceasefre, when he quickly came to
understand the term ceasefre didnt carry the expected meaning.
Ehud Olmerts promise of a disproportionate response to rocket
attacks on Israel from Gaza during the so-called ceasefre was
the frst sign that words were thrown around as readily as stones.
Van Kesterens photographic response to that grim realisation was
to make a picture of a tree, a stark, broken silhouette of pale wood,
reaching up bleakly from a ruined landscape. Its still a tree, a sign
of life; there may be sap rising if you scratch deep enough below
the surface, but to all intents and purposes, it looks dead.
Van Kesteren has set himself the task of making what he calls an
objective reportage. The project is about looking at two sides of
the wall without being biased. I have high expectations, yes, but its
also limiting at the same time. Its such a highly polarised confict
that this must be my approach its even more important than
looking in a psychological or philosophical way at the whole
problem, though I would hope to be doing that as well, he says.
One of the many problems he will encounter on the road to
making this project is negotiating his way through news events and
news events. The latter are created, for propaganda purposes. Of
course, the PR spectacle is not new, but when its staged on sites of
death, it seems more galling. Van Kesteren witnessed a memorial
service on the site where 29 Gaza residents were killed by the
Israeli army, yet there was something missing: the families of the
dead. The event had been organised by Hamas for the Arabic
media, and the party leaders were swearing on the Koran and
proclaiming their wish to die as martyrs. It becomes public
theatre. The mourning is real, but the event is not, says van
Kesteren. He was also present when Benjamin Netanyahu came to
visit the Wailing Wall, the press image predefned as the personal
moment of refection amid the thronging crowds. When is it
news? When its fabricated? How do you receive that? Im working
with the media myself; what are the things I can never say? When
you see the limitations as a wall, and see the media is part of that
wall, its possible to fnd people who are keys that open doors in
that wall.
Dividing his time between his home in Holland and an
43
46
apartment in Jerusalem, van Kesteren will spend at least 18 months
turning this project into something tangible, specifcally a book,
which he describes as the perfect and complete format for me to
show and tell; to show what matters. Hes yet to decide whether
all the photographs in the book will be his own, or whether he will
utilise other imagery, as he did to devastating effect in Baghdad
Calling, making the book a photo-album-in-exile. He has taken
6,000 images so far in Gaza, which sounds like a vast amount, until
he reveals how many he made for Why Mister, Why?: over 40,000
pictures. Clearly, editing is as important a stage as the making of
the photographs.
Its my mission to show the thickness of reality, he says. Why
Mister, Why? is so many images, not one iconic image.
Van Kesterens research methods are those of the traditional
photojournalist: go to the place you want to document, look, and
then look harder. What research? he asks, when questioned how
he had prepared for this vast undertaking. My research is always
on the ground. My knowledge comes from other felds. I watch
documentaries by Werner Herzog, I read my favourite Kapuscinski
and listen to jazz. Then, with a certain vibe in my head, I can be
extremely creative. It is possible to be an alien again, to go without
knowing, and to wander around with an open eye. I have the same
manic eye that any journalist has; Im always looking for the story;
for the real feelings and fears of the individuals. I do believe it is
possible to report without bias. Kapuscinski was right in many of
his thoughts; he is the bible for journalists.
It is interesting that he should cite Kapuscinski, whose factual
reporting has been challenged recently in a new, critical biography
by Artur Domoslawski. He is charged with crossing the boundaries
between fction and reportage, claiming to witness events at which
he had not been present, altering facts to create a higher aesthetic
truth. As a writer, he would have had two modes: the daily reports
he fled for his newspaper, and then the longer form, which would
not of course have been written contemporaneously. Facts are
notoriously slippy, especially over time. Van Kesteren is aware of
the changes that will occur as his journalism changes form as it
turns into a book:
When I have fnished my journalism, I add art to it, in the form
of a creative design. Every time you look at art, it turns, and you
discover new layers, new depths. A war is so complicated, this is
why design and art are necessary. It gives the work meaning over
the long term. The journalism is thrown away; the book lasts much
longer. Art doesnt explain, journalism raises questions and it is in
this functional feld of tension that I prefer to operate.
He is now entering the third phase of this project. The frst stage
was to visit the country in February 2009 after the ceasefre; the
second to get a feel for the country and its divided people. Now, he
is looking closely at what he calls the dehumanisation of the area,
a concept he is still in the process of defning, desperate to be
precise in employing such terms.
The sight of children warming themselves around fres in
freezing Jabaliya had almost an alien feel for van Kesteren, like it
was the start of a civilisation, back to the very origins of life. He has
spent time with trauma expert Muhammed Omar, whose own
children are furious with him for not being able to protect them,
hearing about such devastating concepts as post-traumatic states
47
48
in which children step out of reality to simply survive. These words
will be recorded; van Kesteren is employing the same interviewing
method as in Baghdad Calling; transcriptions of conversations with
the people of Gaza will form the core of this new work: What is
most important is that the individual explains their point of view,
he says. It is in on this simple wish that van Kesterens mode of
humanitarian journalism turns. The aesthetic of his two published
books is the antithesis of coffee table war porn. In an age where
journalism, especially war journalism, follows the blood and the
bombs with a slavish desperation, van Kesteren, through patience,
persistence and a desire to understand, becomes a listening and
seeing device, a kind of transmitter. While we might know that
objectivity in reporting is only ever an unfullfllable wish, it can
certainly be a very successful means through which to approach a
story. And what a story this is.
Im just back from the Old City in Jerusalem destroyed 17
times, 23 different rulers, such a tiny city its only 800 square
metres! What can I say? People are not following the will of their
god. It must be an enormous dilemma. Forgiveness, living humbly,
living in peace; it must be diffcult to be religious out here, in the
Holy Land, when reality shows you something so different.
In his desire to document the thickness of reality, the 6,000
images are circling around in some imaginary sphere, one or two
occasionally falling to earth and coming into focus. It may be a
photograph of an Egyptian watchtower, observing the comings
and goings of computers, gas, schoolbooks and pens through the
1,500 tunnels that enable Gaza to function at all in the face of
Israels blockades that keep goods and people out. A blown-out
building, once someones home, makes an abstract silhouette
against the blue sky, yet streets away, there are people buying new
mobile phones, functioning normally, at least on the surface.
A rather pitiful zebra lives to be stared at in Gaza zoo. But look
harder. Its not a zebra, its a donkey that has been painted with
black Wella hair dye transported through the tunnels to look
like a zebra. The old zebras died, and the blockades mean that
livestock cannot be transported into Gaza. So, with a little
ingenuity and a steady hand, Gazas children can take delight
in seeing an exotic zebra, and for a while, they will believe it to
be true.
I want you to feel the blur of confict, says van Kesteren. A
photograph gives us a feeling but it is always a lie.
49
50
R
U
S
H

H
O
U
R
Since 2007, Guinea-
Bissau, a former
Portuguese colony and
one of the poorest
nations in the world,
has become the new
hub for cocaine
traffcking in Africa.
Drug cartels from South
America, terrorist
organisations affliated
with Al-Qaeda and the
voracious appetite for
cocaine in Europe have
transformed this tiny
country already
striving to recover from
decades of civil war
into a living hell
PHOTOGRAPHY
Marco Vernaschi
TExT
GUY Lane
52
On 2 March 2009at 5am,
President Joo
Bernardo Vieira was
killed by order of a few
generals trying to make
new alliances with drug
cartels. According to
Interpol, Vieira was
personally involved in
drug traffcking and
was trying to keep his
generals at the edge of
his business. The day
before Vieira was killed,
the chief of the army
was assassinated by a
bomb. They were
competing for control
of the drug trade
53
Vieira was frst
questioned by a
commando of soldiers
loyal to the chief of the
army, then shot to death
and slaughtered with a
machete. The
assassination of Vieira,
who ruled this small
African nation for nearly
a quarter of a century,
fnally attracted the
attention of the
international community
and led to new elections.
Two months after the
murder, two presidential
candidates were also
killed in similar
circumstances, upon
order of drug cartels
55
The team of soldiers
who executed
President Vieira at the
military headquarters,
seven hours after the
assassination. The
soldiers told in chilling
detail how and why they
killed him
56
Drug traffckers have
successfully organised
a strong criminal
network in the capital,
Bissau. Over the last
two years, abductions,
murders and
drug-related crimes
have gradually
increased, becoming
normal practice. Here
an account is settled
between small drug
dealers. The hostage
was fnally abandoned
in the middle of
nowhere, but was not
killed
57
Two Nigerians affliated
with a Guinean drug ring
prepare capsules
containing cocaine that
will be swallowed and then
smuggled into Europe
58
Princesa, a 28-year-old
prostitute, had fve
abortions from fve
different clients. Her
body, consumed by the
pregnancies and crack,
refects her suffering
59
Prostitution in Bissau is
not for locals, who cant
afford to pay. Most of
the clients are
foreigners, sometimes
sailors in transit, UN or
embassy employees.
None of the girls I met
used condoms;crack
addiction is driving a
new Aids epidemic in a
region where even basic
health care is beyond
the reach of many
61
Prostitutes dream of
escaping the poverty
and madness of
Guinea-Bissau. The
criminal network
behind the drug trade
also controls human
traffcking from West
Africa to Europe. Most
of the girls who manage
to leave their country
will end up selling
themselves on the
streets of Europe. In
West Africa, drug and
human traffcking is
seriously putting at risk
a delicate peace
process and is
fnancing terrorist
organisations
63
More than most, the fortunes of the West African Republic of
Guinea-Bissau appear damned by geography. The country abuts
the Atlantic, squeezed between Senegal to the north and Guinea
below, and its 350 kilometres of coastline, as well as the deserted
reaches of the Bijagos Archipelago, have ensured its function as a
conduit for those with business affairs that span the Ocean. The
Portuguese slave traders are of course long gone; but in recent
years overseas traffc returned with a vengeance as Latin American
drug cartels sought out new routes into Europe.
Such was the fragility of the countrys infrastructure and
economy it is the ffth poorest in the world, average income is
$720 per year, and life expectancy peaks at 45 that little was done
to counter the new fows of money and cocaine. Largely without
electricity, in hock to the World Bank and the IMF, deprived of the
rule of law, no one was inclined to ask too many questions of the
Colombians who started renting houses in 2004, posing as
exporters of cashew nuts and fsh.
Since then, the relentless demand for cocaine within Europe has
ensured the pivotal importance of Guinea-Bissau and Liberia,
Sierra Leone, Ghana to the traffckers.
Interpol now estimates that up to 300,000 kg of drugs per year
reach Europe via West Africa. And while the cartels can transport
bulk quantities across the Atlantic with relative ease, once shipped
they need to be able to store and break down the hauls in order to
penetrate European coastal patrols and airport security.
Impoverished Guinea-Bissau offers a secure environment: the
authorities lack the most basic equipment for law-enforcement
cars, petrol, phones and even handcuffs are in short supply.
Corruption is endemic. When police seized 674 kg of cocaine in a
raid in 2006, the military swiftly confscated the haul, only for it to
disappear shortly afterwards. As one of the countrys judges,
Andr Lima, once explained to Time magazine: The military has
impunity and we have no protection. What is sad is that we are
forever prosecuting people who steal one chicken or a cow, but
drugs will never get to court.
Marco Vernaschi is one of the few photojournalists to have
described events in the republic as it slides, apparently inexorably,
towards despair. In his pictures, soldiers pose after a political
assassination; drug gangs stage a mock execution; cocaine is
packed into capsules to be swallowed by mules; crack addiction
is rife in the Reno slum; and prostitutes await their foreign clients,
while dreaming of following the drugs to lucrative Europe soil.
Late last year a torched Boeing 727 was discovered in Mali,
indication that quaint twin-props were no longer suffcient for the
cartels escalating designs on the region. And full-blown
laboratories, equipped for the processing of cocaine, have now
been found in Guinea-Bissau. Not for the frst time it seems that it is
the countrys miserable fate to play host to the iniquitous trade of
commodities bound elsewhere.
Joo is a cocaine
dealer. Drug traffckers
settled easily in
Guinea-Bissau the
high degree of
corruption among
politicians and the
army, the lack of
resources and 90
unpatrolled islands
offshore, make for a
traffckers dream
64
PHOTOGRAPHY ROBERTO BOCCACCINO
TExT GUY LANE
The good news is: Latvias plummeting economic fortunes may
soon hit bottom, bringing to a halt the recessionary freefall that
began in 2008. Since then, the number of unemployed has
increased threefold and more, with a further 10 per cent of the
workforce predicted to lose their jobs in 2011. GDP has, quite
simply, fallen off a cliff, declining over 25 per cent in two years.
Retail sales have dropped by a third; wages have been slashed; and
the government has introduced a programme of swingeing
austerity measures. Alarmed protesters attended a rally in Riga last
year which culminated in the countrys worst rioting since
achieving independence. The severity of the crisis has provoked
unfavourable comparisons with the Great Depression.
Twas not ever thus. While under Soviet control, Latvians were
immune to the lure of fckle property markets, capricious
investment opportunities and cheap, cheerful credit. However,
following independence the country enjoyed a period of
extraordinary, unsustainable, bubble-driven economic growth.
Now is the morning after.
To an extent, Latvian youth are pivotal to hopes of recovery. For
the exodus of the countrys young workforce in search of more
accommodating European labour markets has been a
determining factor in the crisis. As has the declining fertility rate:
increasing numbers of young people have been deciding against
raising a Latvian family.
Photographer Roberto Boccaccino has recently undertaken to
gauge the mood and, in his own words, to try to understand what
has changed recently apart from the economic data. This is why my
project doesnt focus so much on the crisis, but more on moods and
feelings. The economy is just the context in which I attempted to
know and represent people.
During my time in Latvia in November last year I talked with a
lot of students, workers, and young parents, people from villages
and from the big cities I wasnt after stories about the troubles; I
was looking instead for typical youngsters with regular daily lives.
So I spent most of my time hanging around with young people,
talking and getting to know them a bit more deeply. Of course they
knew clearly what I was doing, but I seldom felt a distance that
distance which can occur when someone is getting into your life
with a camera between us. In the main they were really friendly,
and at ease sharing their daily life with me, and I became easily,
although temporarily, part of their private life.
The fnal outcome is a work which tries to describe the
sensations of that generation. Theyre living very confusedly,
without being the reason for the crisis nor feeling they have the
solution to it. Most of them not all, I have to say are just waiting.
It is as if they are in a bubble, a kind of limbo which is very diffcult
to escape from, not least because of their patriotism and their
attachment to their country. The pictures want to tell the story of
this waiting.
ON THE EDGE
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
DEAD
EAGLE
TRAIL
PHOTOGRAPHY JANE HILTON
TExT MAx HOuGHTON
74
Pate Meinzer (above),
cowboy, Benjamin,
Texas, 2009
Ron Redford (right),
cowboy, Benjamin,
Texas, 2009
Jason Pelham (previous
pages), cowboy and
surfer, Spade Ranch,
Canadian, Texas, 2009
75
78
Kim McElroy, horse
whisperer, and Dave
Powell, rancher, Broken
Horn D Ranch, Arizona,
2008 (above)
Kenny Goode, powder
monkey [explosives
expert], and Joanne
Goode, school teacher
(right), Cortez,
Colorado, 2007
Laramie, Wyoming
(previous pages)
79
80
Freedom. If cowboy wisdom could be summed up in one word,
thats it. The freedom to ride the prairie, the freedom to make a
homestead, and to defend that sanctuary from transgressors. To
the death if necessary. The cowboy is the American dream
personifed, encompassing a particular strain of taciturn
spirituality gleaned from the land, from hours and days spent with
just a horse for company between the man and the horizon.
Its a romantic image; as a myth its a heady mix of heritage and
Hollywood, with the latter informing the former most likely more
than plain facts would allow. As a crosscurrent to contemporary
American culture, the cowboy aesthetic enters a confuence with
country and western music and with rodeo and, from an outsiders
perspective anyway, its come to stand for a ballsy Texan
Republicanism espoused by a president who borrowed its mores
and its lexicon to justify his crusade against evil. Yet, in simple
terms, a cowboy is a man who works with livestock, herding cattle,
trading horses.
In Jane Hiltons intimate portraits, these 21st century cowboys
are removed from these competing narratives, and from their
beloved outdoors, and we encounter them in that most surprising
location: the bedroom. Ever since she was frst invited to supper by
Johnny Green, a veteran cowboy who sold horses to John Wayne
(every cowboy worth his spurs has a John Wayne story), Hilton
was captivated by the interior life of men who spend their life
outside. Her eye was drawn to the stuffed elk heads, the belt buckle
collections, the stirrups strung above the bed that brought the spirit
of the land into their domestic space.
Since 2006, Hilton has collected this series of portraits from the
buckaroos of Nevada to the cowpunchers of Arizona and Texas. On
one of these trips in March 2006, she was diverted to Cortez,
Colorado, on a commission for The Times of London, to photograph
a young cowboy called Jeremiah Karsten who had taken two years
to travel from Alaska to the Mexican border on horseback: the
cowboys cowboy, still living the dream. She chose the title for this
body of work and her forthcoming book, Dead Eagle Trail, from an
experience in southern Nevada, when she happened upon a golden
eagle, a huge creature, the size of an Alsatian dog, lying dead by
the side of the road. Hilton tried to photograph its noble beauty-in-
death, but remained dissatisfed with her images. When she
returned to the site of its roadside deathbed the following day, it
had disappeared.
While cowboy mythology is resolutely embedded in American
culture, real and imagined, it is harder to sustain these days as a
way of life, with average wages of just a few dollars an hour. Some
have chosen to diversify, offering dude-ranch holidays and leasing
out land to hunters. The bigger ranches are succumbing to the lure
of developers; many have already been sub-divided and sold off
because there is more money in land than in beef. Yet as long as
Americas immense appetite for home-grown beef continues, there
will be a cowboy to tend those cows. Dont fence him in.

Dead Eagle Trail will be exhibited at HOST Gallery from
21 April 15 May 2010. Jane Hiltons limited edition prints are
available from Foto8
Chris Lawrence (right),
rancher, Seymour,
Texas, 2009
Cowboy funeral
(following page), Ute
Mountain, Colorado
81
82
REIMAGINING
DETROIT
report
84
Dealerships have been
hammered by sinking
car sales. At Dalgleish
Cadillac, the citys only
remaining Cadillac
dealership (although
facing a September
2010 closing date),
employee Mike
Spencer is having lunch
85
LIFE
PHOTOGRAPHY CHrIStIAN BUrKert
TEXT GUY LANe
reIMAGINING
DetroIt
report
86
Cutting metal fxtures
in an old industrial
plant to sell as scrap
87
Was ever a death so presciently and exhaustively foretold as that
of Detroit? As long ago as 1961, Time magazine warned that blight
is creeping like a fungus, that the middle-classes were feeing to
the suburbs, and that automation, consolidation and competition
within the auto industry were laying waste to the citys
manufacturing base. Fast forward to the 1990s, and photographer
Camilo Jos Vergara proposed that 12 derelict downtown blocks,
dotted with decaying pre-Depression high-rises, be preserved as a
skyscraper ruins park. Visitors to this American Acropolis could,
he suggested, escape capitalism and experience silence. Jump to
2010, and Julien Temples BBC documentary Requiem for Detroit
issued a stark warning: the trashed city manifested a post-
industrial future which awaits us all. Oh dear.
Against this discourse of terminal decline, Christian Burkerts
series of photographs holds out the promise that there may yet be
fickers of life amid the photogenic decay. His camera remains at
street or more accurately, resident level. Life goes on going on.
Jays Fades barber shop serves another customer, for instance, a
reminder that the city gave birth not just to the car and assembly
line production, but to the annual touring Hair Wars. Detroit may
no longer be the Motor City, but it is the countrys Hair Capital.
When I was in Detroit, I noticed that a sense of engagement
and a will for improvement was outbalancing despair, explains
Burkert, but it is a fne line and the city has a lot of issues. There
have been several impressive photographic works about the city
already, and before I started I looked at many of them and was
certainly greatly inspired; they gave me a feeling for the scale of the
decay. But my photography and my position is rooted in
photojournalism. I wanted to tell a story about the people in
Detroit and their social reality, rather than to factually document
the decline.
He photographs a resident turning the soil on one of the
growing number of inner-city community gardens. The burnt-out
windows of a neighbouring apartment block are only the backdrop
to a scene of productivity and cultivation. In a similar vein he
shows the Motor City Blight Busters a volunteer non-proft
organisation active since the 1990s clearing rubble from a
demolition. And inside one of the citys abandoned industrial
plants (many of which are now too costly to demolish) a man
armed with a welding torch scours for scrap. A sense of initiative or
resilience prevails.
Kids in a poor neighbourhood dress to the nines for prom night.
Lads lean from a passing car on a Friday night downtown. The
casinos pull in the punters. Even the 1920s landmark hotel, the
Book Cadillac, has reopened, offering luxury suites, restaurants
and a spa.
It feels as if we are a long way, or a couple of blocks at least, from
those ravishing, unpeopled scenes of apocalyptic destitution, as
photographed by Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre, to name just
one example. A long way too from the glazed eyes of the street
zombies stumbling in front of the car, as witnessed by Julien
Temple. But we remain in Detroit and its history; and maybe
Burkert has stumbled through the smoking ruins on the same truth
that Henry Ford II uttered nearly 50 years ago as he contemplated a
city already in decline: As I see it, the vital need now is for the
people themselves to become interested in the community and
government, and to take an active part in their affairs.

Christian Burkert is represented by Panos Pictures www.panos.co.uk
88
A student outside the
Heidelberg Project
(top), an art project in a
Detroit neighbourhood
that has been running
for more than 20 years.
The artist, Tyree
Guyton, uses salvaged
items for his art pieces
Cruising downtown
Detroit on a Friday night
(middle)
Motor City Blight
Busters (bottom) help
demolish old buildings,
in their fght against
decay in the city
Teenagers on their
prom night (right) in
the Brightmore district
of Detroit
89
90
Detroit is known as the hair
capital of the US. Jays
Fades salon where
barbers get their haircuts
is a meeting point for
teenagers who are active in
the Better Detroit Youth
Movement, a group that
engages young people
through art and hip-hop
91
92
Motor City Casino (top).
Detroits casinos have
the second highest
earnings in the US,
behind only Las Vegas
Volunteer Xavier works
in the Birdtown
Community Garden
(middle). Gardens are
sprouting up in the city,
as a way to reclaim
nature against the
backdrop of decay
Amid the destitution
(bottom), the city is
tainted by poverty,
unemployment, drug
use and prostitution
Funeral of Levi Stubbs
(right), singer with the
classic Tamla Motown
group, The Four Tops.
Duke Fakir, the last
surviving member of
the original quartet,
tips soil into the grave
93
94
Detroit is the only ancient city in the
world whose residents are embarrassed
by their ruins. To be sure, abandoned
mile-long factories, dilapidated train
stations and collapsing, rat-infested
half-burned once-baronial houses take
some getting used to, but in their own
peculiar way they are appealing, in the
right light some are even beautiful.
Detroits ruins have in fact become a
canvas for the inventive art forms of a
small but growing settlement of young
creatives who paint and festoon them
with urban effuvia. Not without reason
the citys decaying industrial remnants,
soon to be joined by some shiny brand
new factories, are far more popular
subjects for visiting photographers than
Renaissance Center, the sparkling phallic
obelisk of corporate bravado which on a
clear day can be seen from Ontario farms
100 miles away. Ren-Center is one of a
dozen or more fruitless attempts cooked
up by Detroits sadly unimaginative
political and business leadership to
celebrate the capital of the 20th
century, and restore the apotheosis of
industrial production to its former glory.
Almost perversely, Detroits spectacular
architectural corpses seem to presage the
worlds forthcoming post-industrial era.
Detroit gets a bad rap in the media,
the worst of it from its own press which
seems self-conscious, at times mortifed
by the city it serves. Motown (some now
call it Hotown) does have its dystopic
aspects higher than average crime
rates, decaying roads and bridges, 10
demolition permits for every building
permit, bleak neighbourhoods, bad
health, collapsing stadiums, wild dog
packs, depressing casinos and a city
government in which the fre
department and the arson squad are
the two most active agencies. Most
nights are pierced with sirens, often
following gunshots. Or it could just be
another fre truck rushing to extinguish
another attempt to incinerate another
neighbourhood crack house.
The common response from friends
and family of people who move to or
stay in Detroit is Why? Some days
thats a hard question to answer, and
there is a cloud of despair and apathy
that hangs persistently over a city with
a 22 per cent unemployment rate where
a third of the population is on food
stamps. But there is also, among
longtime residents and new settlers I
met, an indomitable vitality, a sweet
hometown infatuation and a hopeful
determination to somehow reverse the
long decline their community has
experienced since the million soul
march to the suburbs began in the mid
1950s. Legendary sports writer Mitch
Albom describes his fellow Detroiters as
the most downtrodden optimists you
will ever meet.
One arrivista I met spoke of moving
back to the country without leaving the
city, another had just moved from New
York in search of open spaces. There
is plenty of open space in Detroit with
the population less than half what it
was 50 years ago. And the fight
continues, about a thousand every
month, mostly white folk leaving a city
that is now about 90 per cent people of
colour, two thirds of them living
beneath the poverty line. Historian
Niall Ferguson calls Detroit a developing
country within the United States. And
he has renamed it Subprima.
In a week I heard at least a dozen
stories, some of them surely urban
legends, about people moving into
houses bought with credit cards (the
median price of a house sold in Detroit is
$5,737), and having the city throw in the
rest of the block for a few hundred
dollars. And I heard almost as many
visionary master plans of restoration for
their city, if not to its former glory, to a
livable place that the world will notice
and respect for more than its cars. The
most intriguing schemes for economic
salvation involved farming, not in the
lush bucolic felds of nearby rural
Michigan, but right there among the
ruins of Motor City. And if I were an
aspiring farmer, in search of fertile
land to buy and plow, I would seriously
consider moving to Detroit. As much
as the city needs visionaries, creatives
and industrial entrepreneurs, this one
needs food.
There are more visionaries in Detroit
than in most rust belt cities, and thus
more visions of a community rising from
the ashes of a moribund industry to
become, if not an urban paradise,
something close to it. The most
intriguing visionaries in Detroit, at least
the ones who drew me to the city, were
those who imagine growing food among
the ruins chard and tomatoes on
vacant lots (there are over 103,000 in the
city, 60,000 owned by the city), orchards
on former school grounds, mushrooms in
open basements, fsh in abandoned
factories, hydroponics in bankrupt
REPORT
FARMERS OF MOTOWN
95
REPORT
department stores, livestock grazing on
former golf courses, high rise farms in
old hotels, vermiculture, permaculture,
hydroponics, aquaponics, waving wheat
where cars were once test driven, and
winter greens sprouting inside the
frames of single-storey bungalows
stripped of their skin and re-sided with
Plexiglas a homemade greenhouse.
Those are just a few of the agricultural
technologies envisioned for the urban
prairie Detroit has become.
There are also proposals on the
Mayors desk to rezone vast sections
A-something, A for agriculture, and a
proposed master plan that would move
the few people residing in lonely,
besotted neighbourhoods into Detroits
nine loosely defned villages and turn the
rest of the city into open farmland. An
American Institute of Architects panel
concludes that all of Detroits residents
could ft comfortably in 50 square miles
of land. Much of the remaining 90
square miles could be farmed. Were that
to happen, and a substantial investment
was made in greenhouses, vertical farms
and aquaponic systems, Detroit could be
producing protein and fbre 365 days a
year and soon become the frst and only
city in the world to produce close to 100
per cent of its food supply within its city
limits. No semis hauling groceries, no
out-of-town truck farmers, no food
dealers. Everything eaten in the city
could be grown in the city and
distributed through locally owned and
operated stores and co-ops. I met no one
in Detroit who believed that was
impossible.
Contemporary Detroit gives new
meaning to the word wasteland. It still
stands as a monument to a form of land
abuse that became endemic to industrial
America once productive farmland,
teaming with wildlife, paved and
poisoned for corporate imperatives. Now
the city offers itself as an opportunity to
restore some of its agrarian tradition, not
50 miles from the Renaissance Center in
the countryside where most of us believe
that tradition was originally established,
but a short bicycle ride away. American
cities once grew much of their food
within walking distance of most of their
residents. In fact in the 18th and early
19th centuries most early American
cities, Detroit included, looked more like
English countryside with a cluster of
small villages interspersed with green
open space. Eventually farmers of the
open space sold their land to developers
and either retired or moved their farms
out of the city which were cut up into
grids and plastered with factories,
shopping malls and identical row houses.
Detroit now offers America a perfect
place to redefne urban design and
economics, moving away from the totally
paved, heavy-industrial factory-town
model to a holistic, economically diverse,
self-suffcient, intensely green, rural/
urban community and in doing so
become the frst modern American city
where agriculture, while perhaps not
the largest, is the most vital industry in
the city.

Mark Dowie is an investigative historian
living in Point Reyes Station, California
Chard and tomatoes on vacant lots, orchards on
school grounds, fsh in abandoned factories,
livestock on golf courses and waving wheat where
cars were once test driven
96
REIMAGINING
DETROIT
PHOTOGRAPHY JAMIE MCGREGOR SMITH
TEXT MAX HOUGHTON
LAND
REPORT
97
98
Motor City Casino Hotel
(right), open 24 hours
The Ford Rouge Center
(previous pages) was
the nations largest
industrial
redevelopment project
(at $2 billion), featuring
a sustainable
manufacturing process
to compete with the
global car market. The
Center also houses one
of the worlds largest
living roofs and has
been designated an
offcial wildlife habitat
99
100
101
A citys monuments fall and rise like mini-empires. The story of
contemporary Detroit is usually told in terms of decay, decline and
deserted buildings. Yet city planners investment in sport, leisure
and conference facilities, as well as a spanking new casino, shows a
different face.
A few ghosts of the motor industry still shimmer in the setting
sun: the General Motors building and the rather less spectacular
Ford plant. The latter looks to be losing the battle against nature; its
grey concrete walls gradually being overgrown by persistent
foliage. Yet in reality this is part of an intentional programme of
redevelopment.
At this particular moment in history, Detroit, thus pictured by
Jamie Mcgregor Smith, looks like a city on the brink not of
disaster, but of a kind of revolution. An urban space that embraces
nature as opposed to obliterating it in the name of progress, a
conurbation where people can breathe not just traffc fumes but the
scent of roses pushing up through fertile soil.

Downtown Detroit
102
Main entrance of the
Cobo Exhibition Center
(above), home of the
North American
International Motor Show
103
104
105
General Motors
headquarters, in front
of which runs Detroits
monorail (barely used
for practical transport
purposes) and one of
Detroits Skywalks. The
Skywalks were built in
the 1980s, designed to
encourage seamless
movement between
freeway, carpark and
offce, without having
to step outside
106
A derelict Victorian
house in Brush Park,
once one of the
wealthiest areas of the
city, now considered
the ghetto
107
Sohrab hura
LIFE IS E LSEWHERE
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
UNDER GODS
121
PHOTOGRAPHY LIZ HINGLEY
TExT GUY LANE
122
rent, but soon move out
because of the high
crime rate
Reverend Greg visiting
the twins (right). They
have been members of
St Michaels Anglican
Church on Soho Road
since an early age. They
have lived together all
their life in this house.
Reverend Greg visits
regularly to give home
communion
Mrs Littles home
communion (opening
spread, left). Mrs Little
is a member of St
Andrews Church on
Soho Road, Birmingham
and is too elderly to
attend the services, so
the priest comes to her
house every week to
give communion
The Council of Faiths
dinner (opening spread,
right). The leaders of
different faith
communities in
Birmingham meet in
the town hall each year
to show they are
working together. The
meal included Vegan,
Halal and Kosher food
Polish carol singers
(above). Polish
immigrants move to the
Soho Road area when
they frst arrive in the
UK because of cheap
123
124
A Sikh wedding
125
Once a year, representatives of Birminghams Buddhists and Bahais, Christians and Confucians, Jews
and Jains all gather for dinner, joined by some of the citys prominent Muslims and Sikhs. This
culinarily challenging feast is hosted by the Council of Faiths to foster harmonious and mutual
understanding between the citys myriad religions. As part of her project, Under Gods, Liz Hingley
photographed the guests co-mingling and chatting, readying themselves to break bread if we can use
that phrase with one another.
As its title suggests, Hingleys work is a study of faiths, in the plural. More specifcally, it is a
sustained examination, carried out intermittently over the course of 18 months, of the varying forms of
belief and worship she found on just one street in Birmingham. I was interested in the changing
religious landscape of the urban environment, and communities where people were living closely
together, places with as many religions as possible, she explains. So I found the Soho Road. Many
people who emigrate to England and the West Midlands go there frst because it is the cheapest
area in the city to buy a house. Over the last 30 years there has been an amazing infux of immigrants
from different countries. And, of course, each new community brings a different religion, or if not a
different religion new cultural elements. Take, for example, the Buddhists: there were Sri Lankan
Buddhists, Thai Buddhists, Indian Buddhists and Vietnamese Buddhists. As you can imagine, they all
saw their religion very differently, and each had their own ways of practising it. It was really hard to
fnish the project because I kept fnding new subjects; even when I was leaving Soho Road, after a year
and a half, I would still stumble across new communities.
The daughter of Anglican priests, Hingley herself grew up in multi-faith, multi-cultural
Birmingham; she was the only white child in her nursery class. Perhaps that experience, and her own
abstention from religious faith, helped prepare her for some of the diffculties encountered while
making Under Gods. I learned how to integrate myself with the communities only very slowly,
because each required a different way of relating to them, and often people didnt speak English. I was
seen as quite a neutral person, and because there were hardly any English people on the Soho Road,
they thought I had to be Polish or something else. Also, I wasnt part of any particular group so I
wasnt from an opposite community or a defned category.
Ironically, Hingleys pictures gain much of their singularity from their distinctly secular, homespun
settings hers is an intimate, suburban portrayal of Soho Roads faithful. I wanted to know how
people were living their religion in their everyday lives because for me that is what religion is. I
didnt read what the holy books said it was I wanted to know what the people on the street thought it
was. Why their children go to the mosque to read the Koran for two hours after school; why the black
ladies have a section of their wardrobe reserved for their church hats. I wanted to know what religion
really was for them, because the faiths are interpreted differently depending on time, place and
person.
I was not trying to depict peoples spirituality, which I dont feel you can really reveal, as it is
something so personal. For me and for a lot of these people religion is just such a practical thing.
They come from different countries, and religion is what is holding their communities together, it is
their social life, their history, and it is what they really cling on to. It gives them a great deal of strength
in their daily life.

Under Gods will be published by Dewi Lewis this November to coincide with a four-month exhibition of the
work at Wolverhampton Art Galley. The show will continue to HOST Gallery in 2011
126
Dressing for Mosque
(above)
Mrs Adinas church hats
(right). Mrs Adina
Clarke was born in
Jamaica and moved to
Birmingham when she
was a teenager. She has
a separate part of her
wardrobe for her
Sunday clothes. She
would never wear them
for any occasion other
than church
127
128
Jain and Christian
neighbours (above).
These girls live on the
same street. The young
Jain girl has sitar
lessons at school.
The Catholic girl is
wearing her frst holy
communion dress
Alka Jains personal
prayer room (right)
129
130
Sikh yoga (above)
Polish Catholic
chef (right)
131
132
AFTER: LIFE
photography louis quail
tExt Max HougHton
As well as the apocalyptic narrative, the scenes of devastation, the unforgettable images
of bodies, of families ripped apart, that mushroomed out of Haiti after the earthquake in
January 2010, there are other stories. They are not tales of hope, still less of joy, but they tell
at least of life continuing. These lives will be reshaped as they take into account the loss of
family members, the loss of limbs, the loss of homes. The concept of luck in this new order
has been redefned to apply to those who have lost a loved one and possess the dead body in
order to bury it. It also applies to those who survived and can leave their beloved city behind
to start a new life, with family in the provinces, overseas or anywhere, out of the ruins.
133
A woman preaches in downtown Port-au-
Prince: You have to believe in God, this is
God trying to send us a message.
134
Mario Viau is the owner, director and broadcaster at Signal FM, a small radio station
in Ptionville, Port-au-Prince. As soon as the earthquake struck he made his way to
his studio at the station
The way I cope is to not stop working. I know I have to be there for the people. In the
beginning, I stayed on air for 36 hours without sleep. Now I am getting about four hours
sleep a day.
On my way here [that day], I knew we had been hit really badly. The biggest
supermarket, the Caribbean, was down and I saw people running. There was blood and
smoke in the air, it was terrible. I knew the country was in trouble. Its a poor country
already, we have lots of problems, political and social. To get hit like this was tough.
The Internet and the international lines were working, so we had people from all over
the world calling and we would put them on the air saying: If you can hear us, come to the
radio station and let us know so we can get in touch with you.
Other people were saying, We have family under the debris. Could you help dig our
families out? We were like a phone with two people but broadcasting to the whole city.
We had a minimum of 5000 people outside all the time for four days. We just gave them
a microphone and then broadcasted messages all day. There are some beautiful stories.
There were people crying on the phone from the States saying, I am looking for my
family. Then the family would come here and broadcast a message saying I am alive!
We were saving lives. Somebody would say, my husband is still alive but has been
trapped under the debris for four days. Then the international search and rescue teams
would listen to the radio and respond to the message. Eight days after the earthquake, one
lady came and told us, I know my husband is alive under a bank. We managed to free
him. When he came to say thank you he gave me a hug that almost put me in the hospital!
We had some sad stories as well, people discovering their family members had died.
Now we have talk shows with psychologists discussing how to deal with the future
Personally, I have been lucky so I know I have to share and to serve.
135
136
Marie Geralda Auguste, 17, and her mother, Marie Yolene Bois De Fer, 44, in a camp
opposite the Palace, Cham de Mars
I was sitting at the house when it started to rock and blocks and wood started falling.
Romario broke his leg, Mum grabbed us all and we got out all except my oldest brother
Emanual. He was trapped in a cramped space, knocked unconscious. We werent sure if he
was alive or dead but we kept looking for him. Then my mother and Emanuel heard each
other. He called out, Mamma Im alive. Mum told everyone she could fnd that he was
alive: journalists, aid workers, rescue workers.
After 11 days, rescuers (an Israeli SAR) pulled him out and my mother collapsed from
joy. He had survived by drinking his own pee and was so thin that he had to use rope to
keep his pants up. But he was OK, he is recovering in the provinces.
Now, though, we have very little food and water apart from what we can beg or borrow.
Emanual is a tailor and was the chief wage earner. Now that he is out in the countryside its
hard to get by our living conditions are terrible. We shelter under a sheet, sleep on the
hard foor. We have to go to the toilet in a bag and wash and bathe in the street, but at least
we are all alive.
137
138
Anne Marie, street seller, Main Street, Port-au-Prince
My home is destroyed. I lost my brother and sister in the earthquake. I went three days
without water. I was working on the street when the earthquake happened which is why I
am OK but now I have to look after my sisters kids as she is dead. They are weak and not
used to coping on the streets, in order to feed them I must work. I have no time to grieve.
139
Janne Orelis, 26, sales woman and mother of two, Central Hospital, Port-au-Prince
The house collapsed on top of me, crushing my right arm. I was rescued by my family. If it
were not for my husband I would be dead, but it was two days before I saw a doctor. The
pain was terrible, by the time I got to see a doctor there was no choice but to amputate. I
cant stop thinking about my arm. But now I am worried sick about my six-month-old baby.
My family have him with them in the provinces, but he has only ever had breast milk and
now he is away from his mother. He could be very hungry. As soon as I am able, I will go
to him.
140
Nadine Pleato, opposite a collapsed building in downtown Port-au-Prince. Nadine
lives in a garage at Latimer 54, near Paloma
I have just purchased this bag so I can pack a few things and leave Port-au-Prince for the
provinces. My house was completely destroyed and I lost all of my clothes. All I have left is
four pieces of clothing: a skirt and what I am wearing. I have to live and bathe in the street
even if there are men watching, but I want to dress well and be clean.
Everything was destroyed in the earthquake and I lost a three-year-old cousin. When it
happened, I was in the street. I didnt know it was an earthquake, but then everybody
started running so I did too. There was mass panic. I saw some horrible things: buildings
falling, people being crushed and buried alive and so much screaming. Afterwards, there
were bodies left in the streets for days dogs were eating humans. In this building behind
me, there are bodies. If you look, you can see an arm.
I didnt know if my mother was alive for six days until she arrived from the provinces
with supplies. I was so relieved but I still havent seen my boyfriend since the morning of
the quake. We were with each other for a year. He must be dead but I will never know for
sure as all the bodies were cleared into mass graves or burnt on the streets. Its hard to carry
on. How can we be normal now?
141
142
Daphene Louis, an accountant, and her boyfriend Steve Babtiste, who works in
customer care at Digicel, at the Catrine-Flon Camp, Puit-Blain St, Delmar 75,
Port-au-Prince
It was 24 hours after the quake before I saw my boyfriend. There were no communication
networks and I had no way of knowing if he was dead or alive. When I saw him, I was so
relieved I just jumped on him!
Now we live in this camp under sheets held up with timber. It is very hard to get shelter
from the sun, and when the rains come there will be no protection at all. We need proper
tents, but even one month on we have been unable to get help. We have no privacy here,
its always noisy. We dont even have a chance for a cuddle. It would be great to get a proper
mattress, but we dont even have rice so thats not high up in our priorities.
There is not much to do but hang out, or pray. There is no electricity. We still go to our
house to use the toilet even though there is no running water. The others in the camp use
the feld which, as you can imagine, creates a massive health risk. We dont have anything
to eat but yams and potatoes. If someone has something we share it, but there is never
enough.
There are 400 to 500 families 3000 people or more. Only 50 per cent had jobs before
the earthquake but now there are no jobs and no one has been paid since the quake, yet we
still have to provide for the basics, even buying our own drinking water.
143
144
Francy, morgue attendant, Central Hospital, Port-au-Prince. Francy has worked at the
morgue all his life

The bodies dont bother me, not even when there were thousands here.
Why should they? They are all my brothers and sisters.
145
146
It was the umbrella that struck me, frst.
Not one but two. Identical, they seemed,
but found an ocean apart, in locations
sharing something horrible in common.
The frst I came across in Port-au-Princes
grand march, a few weeks after Haitis
devastating earthquake struck. Beneath
the crooked, iron gothic market centre, a
cathedral-like structure of metal that
seemed poised to skid off the rubble, a
couple of women were setting up the
umbrella to shade themselves as they
sold vegetables.
The women were not alone in their
endeavours. Amid buildings that were
leaning or collapsed in a place where
desperate Haitians were still digging
through the rubble for what they could
retrieve others were trying to do the
same. Attempting to re-impose a
semblance of order. In a place where
interior space had suddenly become too
dangerous to be trusted or simply
swept away what once happened
inside, needed now to be conducted on
the streets.
Outside one building a hairdresser had
set up her shop, two broken mirrors
framing the street into her salon. It was
not only those engaged in setting up
their trades again. In another
neighbourhood I came across a family
who had managed to fnd an electricity
hook-up, camped on a concrete space
next to their broken home. While the
mother cooked in the open, and other
women hung washing on an erected
line, the men and boys had set up a
television in the open to watch an Italian
football game.
The second time I saw the umbrella
was in the midst of a different kind of
disaster the slow, toxic and
devastating impact of long war. In a
refugee camp on mount Tongo in North
Kivu in the far east of the Democratic
Republic of the Congo, a pair of boys
were using it to shelter from a sudden
downpour in the midst of a feld of
crude shelters made out of wood and
plaited banana leaves.
There were no barbers chairs or
televisions here. No mattresses to sleep
in the open rescued from ruined homes.
Instead, in the houses there might be a
single pot, a tiny wooden bench, a
cloth laid on some hay to make a
mattress.
What struck me then as now is
how what we think of as home, in our
more fortunate lives, is defned by
things: houses, sofas, gardens perhaps.
Bedrooms, chairs, washers and shower
units. By smells. The cleaning products
that we use, the scents of cooking, pets
our accumulated, boxed in and
private perfumes. Defned by what we
buy and what we consume.
But home is more than that. It is us.
When everything is lost, we make
home where we are by being there with
those closest to us, with a pan and a
fre, with somewhere to sit. By asserting
our individuality, among people we
trust. It does not mean that we let go of
what has gone before, the burned
village or the collapsed valley home
whose memory is tainted with the loss
of family. But we begin again.
And it is not simply about survival,
or carrying on. Rather it encompasses
that diffcult-to-defne concept that we
call dignity.
In Haiti I noticed it in the frst camp
for the displaced that I went to a
football stadium in Ptionville. Walking
through the lanes of the tents I came
across two young women, one standing
above the other and cutting her hair.
Later the meaning of what I saw became
more clear. Even those among the
hundreds of thousands living on the
streets including my own fxer whose
home for now was a car would turn
out each morning clean and groomed.
Defying their circumstances.
It reminded me powerfully of
something I had once read, an account
by a British offcer, Colonel Mervin
Willett Gonin, who had been among the
soldiers who had liberated Bergen-Belsen
refugee camp in 1945.
It was shortly after the British Red
Cross arrived, though it may have no
connection, that a very large quantity of
lipstick arrived. This was not at all what
we men wanted, we were screaming for
hundreds and thousands of other things
and I dont know who asked for lipstick.
I wish so much that I could discover who
did it, it was the action of genius, sheer
unadulterated brilliance. I believe
nothing did more for these internees
than the lipstick. Women lay in bed with
no sheets and no nightie but with scarlet
red lips, you saw them wandering about
with nothing but a blanket over their
shoulders, but with scarlet red lips. I saw
a woman dead on the postmortem table
and clutched in her hand was a piece of
lipstick. At last someone had done
something to make them individuals
again, they were someone, no longer
Column
TWO UMBRELLAS
147
Column
merely the number tattooed on the arm.
At last they could take an interest in
their appearance. That lipstick started to
give them back their humanity.
Visiting a barbershop in Port-au-
Prince, where the owner was sleeping in
a corner, where customers were living on
the street, I recalled the lipstick
consignment of Bergen-Belsen.
And remembered what it was to be
human.

Peter Beaumont is Foreign Affairs Editor of
the Observer
Even those among the hundreds of thousands living
on the streets would turn out each morning clean
and groomed. Defying their circumstances
Port-au-Princes grand
march, above, and
refugee camp in Kivu,
Democratic Republic of
Congo, bottom. Photos:
Peter Beaumont
148
PAUL HAYWARD
With Africas frst football World Cup less
than a hundred days away a Messianic
email dropped in the inboxes of sports
writers. Fifa, the games world
governing body, wanted it to be known
that their president, Sepp Blatter, had
joined the 1GOAL campaign on behalf
of all those children who are unable to
write their own names. The puff went
on: At the heart of the campaign is the
aim of securing school places for 72
million children still denied access to
global education.
This ambitious press announcement
from Fifas headquarters in Switzerland
evoked the World Cup draw in
December, when Blatter, in excitable
mood, interrupted the glitzy global
broadcast to promise education for all.
The star guest on stage that night was
the South Africa-born Hollywood
actress, Charlize Theron, whose own
Africa Outreach charity donates
football pitches.
On the eve of a momentous
breakthrough for a continent that has
provided European football with Didier
Drogba, Michael Essien and Samuel
Etoo Champions League royalty, all
three Africa is teeming with charities
and educational organisations offering
kits, balls, midnight leagues, artifcial
pitches and Aids awareness programmes
as agents for social change.
With much in between in the last
hundred years, the Scramble for Africa
that characterised European foreign
policy in the 19th century has evolved
into a dash to dispense care and
attention, with football as the reason, or
the excuse. After the great land-grab
comes mass land donation with goals
at either end. When South Africa was
chosen in May 2004 to host this
summers tournament Fifa found
themselves sensing a duty to assist the
African continent above and beyond
the realm of sport, and set up another
programme called Win in Africa with
Africa, with extraordinarily high-
minded aims. Their task, they
announced, was to ensure the entire
African continent will beneft from the
long-term effects of the 2010 World
Cup in South Africa, and to send the
whole world a positive message from
Africa. With a $70m budget, the aim
was to give the landmass the tools
to progress.
Students of football politics will not
be shocked to see humanitys favourite
pastime mistaking itself for the United
Nations. But never has a sporting
carnival that seeks to determine which
country can force a ball into a net most
frequently and at the most opportune
moments assumed so many parallel
political and economic functions. The
crosscurrents are post-imperial guilt,
opportunism, Blatters desire to be
remembered as the history-maker
who handed the World Cup down to
Africa from a Swiss mountain top,
market-hunger on the part of the
football industry and a vast amount
of philanthropy and compassion from
people working in charitable
organisations.
The games anxiety is that the World
Cup will be portrayed as a vast
spaceship that blows dust across the
townships as it descends for four weeks
and then returns to more wealthy lands,
leaving an onerous legacy of
construction debt for the poorest South
Africans, who will be close but still far
away from the action in the 10
stadiums. Fearing a boycott by the
masses, Fifa raised the proportion of
low-priced tickets reserved for South
Africans from 11 per cent to 29 per cent
of the total. This meant a new food of
match-watching opportunities at 12 a
go, yet local people will point out that it
costs 2 to see a game in the countrys
premier league.
Other African spectators fall outside
Fifas conscience. They will be asked to
pay 54 per match. There was no
disguising the organising committees
panic when a new sales drive began in
January. The last published fgures
claimed 2.3 million of the 2.9 million
tickets had been sold. Yet many
European fans have been discouraged by
South Africas high crime rates and by
price-hiking. One Cape Town hotel was
quoting 700-plus per night for
Englands game there against Algeria.
The fve World Cups prior to this
welcome sharing-out of arguably sports
biggest festa (the Olympics are bigger,
technically, but less passionately
devoured) were stop-offs at major global
power centres: Italy (1990), USA (1994),
France (1998), Japan and South Korea
(2002) and Germany four years ago.
These were tournaments connected by
high-speed rail with chain hotels and all
the familiar comforts of consumer
societies. They were football rewarding
its most infuential constituents, with a
proselytising agenda thrown in, in Japan
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win win africa?
149
Column
and America, where Football Inc seeks
to colonise.
To award a World Cup to South Africa
required the football family to gamble
on security and preparedness. Or, rather,
it asks supporters to take those risks,
because the 32 participating teams and
administrators will take the best hotels
and receive the greatest protection from
the 41,000 extra police hired and
trained to protect visitors in a country
with a murder rate second only to that
of Colombia.
So, why is this World Cup heading to
Durban, Polokwane and Johannesburg,
when there are so many security and
infrastructure complications? Blatters
own urge to reward African federations
for their support in his election as
president is a murky topic, 12 years on
from his appointment. In 2002, the
vice-president of the African Football
Confederation, Farah Addo, alleged that
19 African football associations had been
offered $100,000 each to vote for Blatter
by persons unspecifed (the Fifa
president denies any wrongdoing).
On the ground in South Africa,
though, those who see a chance to
improve the host countrys standing and
challenge preconceptions about the
continent of Africa are entitled to look
beyond whatever political machinations
lay behind Fifas patronage, and past the
rhetoric of altruism, which, realistically,
is unlikely to change the economic
realities of life in the Khayelitsha
township visited by David Beckham
during the World Cup draw. There, 80
per cent are unemployed and one in
three is HIV-positive (the national
infection rate is 11 per cent, with 1.4
million Aids orphans).
The World Cup will come, then go,
and there will almost certainly not be a
frst African winner from the six teams
who have qualifed. But there is
substance to the hope that football
programmes and facilities will help a
proportion of deprived South Africans to
add structure and purpose to their lives
(clubs to join, rules to follow, places to go
etc) and that seeing the worlds greatest
players performing in their country, if
only on outmoded TV sets in township
bars, will encourage and inspire. When
the trophy arrived in Cape Town in
December, Danny Jordaan, the main
architect of this World Cup, announced
the death of doubt. Blatter called it a
love story and Nelson Mandela told the
world in a recorded message that South
Africa felt privileged and humbled. A
master of deploying for sport for social
effect, Mandela said: The people of
Africa learned the lessons of patience in
their long struggles for freedom.
Part of Mandelas genius was to see
through politics and economics to
emotion, to spirit, to the way it feels. He
learned this art, in sport, when closing
the gulf between black South Africans
and the white Afrikaaner tradition
during the countrys 1995 Rugby World
Cup triumph. This was sport as political
engineering, as unifying tool, but it was
not only a calculation. It was a quick
road out of apartheid, certainly, but
Mandelas conviction was that nations
are not shaped solely by their politics.
The width of the smile counts, too: the
life inside.
Students of football politics will not be shocked to
see humanitys favourite pastime mistaking itself
for the United Nations
Paul Hayward is chief sports writer for
the Observer
150
For the frst time in his presidency
Barack Obama in March visited
Afghanistan. He few into Kabul by
helicopter and stayed about three hours.
Plenty of time to go down the rabbit-hole
for tea and cakes at the Palace, with the
Queen of Hearts (the increasingly
isolated President Karzai). Obama said
he had, seen progress from the air, with
much more electricity available than on
[his] frst visit. Way to see a city Mr
President maybe he should write a
travel book!
For those of us who actually live in
this tempestuous city things are a little
more complicated than how twinkly it
looks for from the windows of a
Blackhawk. The judder thump thump of
Americans working overhead is a
regular occurrence. Windows rattle,
doors bang, earth shudders. What was
that? Sometimes its the US Navy, from
time to time its a seismic shift in the
Hindu Kush, but every now and then its
the Taliban letting us know they are still
here. Despite how much people who live
here dine out on the war-zone kudos,
this isnt Saigon. However, the incident
at the end of February was a well-
executed attack in the heart of the
capital. The Saf Landmark Kabul City
Centre Hotel & Shopping Plaza, a symbol
of Kabuls most upwardly mobile district,
was directly opposite the blast and took
the main force of the explosion. Nearly
every window was shattered. The hotel
sign hangs limply from the entrance
guarded by AK-47 wielding troops. Once
again the horse has bolted and locking
the door seems to be the only response, a
scenario repeated ad nauseam from the
Ring of Steel of the City of London
after IRA attacks to the Green Zone
in Baghdad.
So the road is swept and reopened,
the scaffolding goes up, more check
points are put in place and no doubt
the blast-proof window-maker is
currently making an appointment to
see the proprietor of the Saf Hotel. In
these uncertain times the only certainty
is that the security industry is making a
killing. Making hay while the bombs fy.
The Taliban should pull their fnancial
portfolios out of Dubai real estate and
get into security stock.
War is a proftable business and all
the smart money is pouring into
protection from the concrete of the
blast walls to the two-inch thick
bulletproof glass in the thousands of
armoured SUVs that barge and bully
their way around the city. Daily, weekly,
yearly this city, architecturally
speaking, becomes more and more
oppressive. While Obamas military
surge continues apace in the south of
the country, the civilian surge is
palpable in the nations capital. Most of
the mercenaries have all left I-rak
having paid off their mortgages back
home, and are now working on that
new boat or second home by hoovering
up as much money as they can from the
billions washing around the septic
wound of this failing state.
The Military Industrial/Private
Security Complex are now in
Afghanistan in full effect. They are at
the trough and its feeding-time all over
again. Its a sight to behold and most
visible at the few western bars and
restaurants in the city. The average neck
width of the international visitor has
doubled in the last two years. The soft
North European accents of aid workers
running womens empowerment projects
has been drowned out by the
Midwestern drawl of Blackwater types.
Acronym lingo is no longer NGO-
dominated. Its all about CP teams and
EOF. Fights or intimidating macho
face-offs are by no means commonplace,
but they are increasing. The previous
token search by long suffering and
oh-so-polite Afghan doormen, asking,
any weapons guns knives or
explosives? are now more thorough.
The prediction among my peers is that
this will escalate into something fatal
within the year. I can bear witness that
steroids in conjunction with a 100k-plus
pay cheque are not personality-
enhancing ingredients.
The cash-waving hordes have also
had an effect on the rising price of
booze. Bars are now charging a
minimum of $6 for small can of beer and
some $12 for a glass of skanky corner-
shop wine. For the underpaid/
overworked journalist, whose creative
lifeblood is alcohol, this is a seismic shift.
Meanwhile the city of Kabul and its
four million inhabitants collectively
shrugs its shoulders and soldiers on with
its crappy erratic electricity, its fucked-up
roads and infrastructure, no sewerage
system, kids begging in the streets or
hunting though rubbish tips in the most
expensive parts of the city awash with
gaudy narco-palaces and $200,000
Landcruisers. I interviewed an armoured-
car salesman last week and we were
Column
SieGe MeNTALiTY
151
Column
discussing the state of the city. Without
any irony he asked me, where has all
the money gone? Reports last month
stated that 6 million cash was leaving
the country every day. The Afghan
people know that corrupt politicians,
drug barons, warlords, mercenaries and
war profteers are rinsing their city dry.
The only thing that surprises me is that
the Kabulis take it so well. They might
have an exaggerated sense of why we
are really here and have a propensity
for conspiracy theories about Great
Game strategies, NATO forces supplying
the Taliban, mythical oil reserves and
the natural resources we are trying to
plunder but overall they tolerate us
and in most cases are hospitable to
a fault.
But despite the en masse arrival of the
Iraq War junkies and the increasing
media spotlight, this is not a city at war.
Its mostly peaceful and secure. There are
no massive truck bombs killing hundreds
of innocent civilians on a weekly basis.
Kidnapping remains a low-level threat
not a near certainty like Baghdad in the
mid-2000s. There is no uprising, jihad,
civil war or insurgency here. The Taliban
(whoever they are) attacks are minimal,
specifc and usually aimed at pro-
government, ISAF forces or, pitifully, the
Indian workers.
However, what these random attacks
clearly do is shift everything away from
development. The siege mentality has
arrived now and its gaining ground in
the form of bunkers, compounds and
green zones. The UN closed down nearly
80 guesthouses last month and stuck its
staff in a hideous holiday concentration
camp called Green City. The European
Commission is forcing all its staff to
relocate to a purpose-built, heavily
guarded housing complex. It seems
like the Taliban have subcontracted
their terror tactics to us and we are
doing a bloody good job. Be afraid.
Listen to the threat levels. Protect
yourself. Stay in your homes. Be off the
streets by nightfall. Many westerners
previously at liberty to wander Kabul
and sample all its sights and smells are
under strict curfew.
This is a dangerous development and
we have to be very careful that we dont
replicate and recreate conditions in Iraq
circa 2003 in which the civilian
population are left to rot while a few
warped maniacs ferment death cult
ideals onto the abandoned minds of a
disaffected populous. While the war may
be shifting in favour of allied forces in
the south, something is changing here
and it doesnt feel good. The folks back
home maybe seeing our brave boys
tearing down white Taliban fags
(rhetorical question: how do they
surrender if their fag is white?) and
hoisting up Afghan National Flags in
East Bumfuck Marja, Helmandshire. But
it isnt impressing anyone in Kabulistan.

Afghan Hound is a freelance journalist
living in Kabul who, in tune with the
times, prefers to remain anonymous
Wars good business and all the smart money is
pouring into protection from concrete blast walls
to bulletproof glass in the thousands of armoured
SUVs that barge and bully their way around the city
152
I remember the email like it was
yesterday. I had come home from the
market and had been singing along to
show tunes on Radio 2 in the car. It was
sunny, warm and Sunday. I was going to
check my emails before I started cooking
and an email addressed to me, in a long
line of other recipients, told of the arrest
of my co-editor and Newsweek
correspondent Maziar Bahari in Tehran.
It was the beginning of nearly four
months in, not exactly hell, but its close
neighbour. An incredible network of
professional colleagues, friends and
friends of friends around the world
worked their way through thousands of
contacts that furthered the Free Maziar
Bahari campaign. In the midst of activity,
there was always the fear. Maybe nobody
was listening and, what if the worst was
allowed to happen?
When I saw Maziar for the frst time
after his release, to my relief, he was
fully himself. As he described his arrest,
118 days in solitary confnement and
blindfolded interrogations, he was
brilliant and incisive. He was funny. My
friend had been vulnerable and now he
was safe.
If anything, Maziars experiences have
made him more determined. By
December he had begun another
campaign, which takes its inspiration
from a famous 1978 quote by Ayatollah
Khomeini, embodying the promise of the
Islamic Revolution one year later: Our
future society will be a free society, and
all the elements of oppression, cruelty,
and force will be destroyed. The
campaign, supported by the Committee
to Protect Journalists (CPJ), Index on
Censorship, Reporters without Borders,
Canadian Journalists for Free
Expression and PEN International the
same organisations that protested
Maziars own arrest and incarceration
sent a petition to Irans supreme
leader Ayatollah Khamenei, calling for
the release of jailed journalists,
photojournalists, citizen reporters and
bloggers in Iran. More than 3,500
people from around the world,
including Martin Amis, Tom Stoppard,
Hanif Kureishi, Margaret Atwood,
Jonathan Frazen, Jon Stewart, Ahmed
Rashid and Mario Vargas Llosa, have
signed the petition.

Malu Halasa: In Evin prison, did you
think that you would be campaigning
for fellow Iranian journalists if and
when you were released?
Maziar Bahari: Because the authorities
threatened me and told me to be quiet
and not talk about my experiences, I
thought that campaigning and telling
the world whats happening inside
Iranian prisons was a responsibility. I
dont know if its survivors guilt but
when I came out what was really a
surprise was the amount of
campaigning that was going on for me.
That motivated me to campaign for
other people as well.
Not all people are as lucky to be
working for Newsweek, part of the
Washington Post group, and have the
support and resources of those
companies. So because people answer
my calls and listen to what I say, I have
to use that momentum to campaign for
other journalists.
MH: What is the situation of
photojournalists and journalists in Iran?
MB: Even before the Revolution,
journalists and the government had an
uneasy relationship. Everybody was
critical of the governments ineffciency
and authoritarian rule. But since the
disputed presidential elections last June,
the government has been targeting
journalists because they want to blame
them for the disturbances and chaos.
Also, in the absence of any clear vision
for the future of the country, the
authorities need to have scapegoats. The
journalists are the easiest targets.
The government puts a lot of pressure
on Iranian journalists inside the country
mainly out of frustration of their lack of
control over citizen journalism and the
international media attention being paid
to Iran. The government is basically
fghting against the tide of history.
MH: I remember you returned to Iran
after living and working outside the
country in the late 1990s at the time of
the reformist press boom.
MB: When the reformist newspapers
were published they had a very specifc
readership not all people had access to
newspapers, not all people cared to read
newspapers. The ideas and opinions
expressed in those papers were from
people who were educated, pro-human
rights, pro-democracy, pro-foreign. The
majority of people [in the country] did
not connect with this elite group.
However, since the early 2000s and the
advent of digital technology satellite
television and internet more people are
exposed to these ideas.
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153
Column
MH: Are these ideas gaining currency
within the wider population?
MB: Because satellite television is being
beamed into every house in Iran, the gap
that used to exist between the educated
elite and the masses is narrowing. And
as more people are becoming educated
that gap is almost disappearing. People
who are in power in Iran the
Revolutionary Guards and the people
around Khamenei, the supreme leader
are really scared of this new
phenomenon. They dont know what to
do. Again, out of frustration, they resort
to what they know suppressing dissent
through violence.
MH: But the level of intimidation
appears to be new.
MB: This is a new era of crackdown on
journalists and its exercised by a new
group of people. In the past, journalists
in Iran had to deal with the Ministry of
Intelligence, the Ministry of Culture and
Islamic Guidance but now it is the
Revolutionary Guards who are in control
of culture, information and intelligence
in Iran. So they are dealing with
journalists, but also they are putting
pressure on the Ministry of Culture and
the Ministry of Intelligence to be more
aggressive. They resort to any sort of
intimidation they can against journalists
some can be accused of espionage for
taking a picture of a demonstration.
The government are going to draft a
law against the Persian satellite channels
BBC Persian and VOA Persian to
incriminate anyone who works for them,
or any Persian media outside of Iran, as
a spy. Inside prison, the interrogators put
a different kind of pressure on journalists
and photojournalists.
MH: Is it the pressure of collaborating, to
give names?
MB: They ask you to reveal all the
information you have both information
about yourself and about others. What
my interrogator told me was, If you put
fve people in this room Im going to
release you the next day.
MH: Do you think the Our Society Will
Be a Free Society campaign will be
effective at all? Your campaign was.
MB: The reason Im here is because of
the campaign [for me]. The [current]
campaign can have an effect if its
consistent, vigorous and if all journalists
around the world fnd it their duty to
support their colleagues and friends who
are under pressure in Iran. Unfortunately,
I see that certain news organisations
tend to forget about journalistic and
ethical values in order to have a Tehran
by-line for their correspondents, which is
shameful. If an organisations
transmission is jammed by the Iranian
government, if an organisations
journalist is persecuted by the Iranian
government, they really have to name
and shame the Iranian government.
MH: With increasing levels of danger for
reporters, surely the corporate news
organisations realise the ramifcations of
pandering to authoritarian governments
and violent men?
MB: We are living in a very volatile era
for journalism right now. On one hand,
the news organisations are losing their
revenue because of the internet and
the free fow of information everywhere.
So they are cutting down on foreign
bureaus and reporters. On the other
hand, we are watching news
organisations in competition with each
other, especially the 24-hour channels
and various websites. They are seeking
more news, while cutting budgets for
their bureaus and foreign
correspondents. We are also witnessing
authoritarian governments becoming
more paranoid about technology and, at
the same time, citizens are realising the
power they have as simple users of tools
such as Twitter, Facebook and YouSendIt.
Everybody is facing this unknown
monster that might turn out to be an
angel we dont know yet.
Malu Halasa is an editor and journalist
specialising in the culture and politics of
the Middle East. Sign the petition for the
Our Society Will Be a Free Society
campaign at www.cpj.org
They ask you to reveal all the information you have
both information about yourself and about
others. My interrogator said Put fve people in this
room and Ill release you the next day
154
PROTEST
PHOTOGRAPHS
Chauncey Hare
Published by Steidl
www.steidlville.com
39
(224pp Hardback)

Revi ews
155
Revi ews
156
Revi ews
In a recent radio interview, a Detroit
schoolteacher spoke of her wonder at
seeing a return to prairie for many acres of
former urban space in her city. Whole
communities, originally formed after a
mass migration from the South towards the
car plants and associated industries in the
north of America, had lived through the
Motor City era and found themselves
surplus and disoriented after years of
economic attrition. As one, they had to
rethink how they might continue their lives
and had eventually turned towards each
other in co-operation, to grow orchards and
farmland within the crumbling industrial
landscape that had once been dominated
by their provider and master.
Such a rethinking of roles always seems
to come at points of crisis, when the
dominance of fgure industries no longer
seem adequate, correct or viable. It brings a
necessary departure towards a more
uncertain but hopeful and fulflling way to
live. I am mindful of such a crisis (albeit a
very singular one) and the shadow of the
industry that encouraged it, as I move
through the considerable volume of
photographs that fttingly returns
Chauncey Hares work to its place among
the most important American photographic
projects of the last century.
Over nearly 400 pages, Protest
Photographs draws on a small number of
photographs from Hares 1978 Aperture
book Interior America and its 1984
follow-up This Was Corporate America and
contextualises them among many
previously unpublished pictures now held
as an archive that the photographer offered
the University of Berkeley, California in
1999. If Berkeley had rejected the
photographers approach, it seems very
possible that the work would have been
destroyed at the photographers own
instruction, closing a career that in reality
had drawn to a halt in the 1980s, when
Hare stopped photographing to retrain and
begin working as an adviser, counsellor and
therapist to workers and their families.
The source of the ultimate dislocation
that took Hare away from the world of
photography is an undercurrent in the
narratives that open this book. Instead of
another polite appraisal, the kind that
primes so many photography books, the
photographer again deploys the strategy
that so distinguished Interior America
using the early pages to unpack his life in
open, earnest paragraphs. These personal
statements are articulate, intimate and
moving, building a foundation for pictures
that despite such an unguarded
commentary fow singularly across each
right hand page in a structure as regular
and predictable as a working life. Looking
at each picture, it becomes impossible to
dismiss the emotional crises that shaped,
implored and ultimately stopped Hares
progress as a photographer. Whether
hereditary (Hares father gained a
promotion that took him away from his
Irish Appalachian roots, towards later years
of depression and disaffection) or learned,
across the 29 years Hare worked as an
engineer, the act of photography is, before
everything, a channel for personal and
political application for a protest that is as
emotionally open as any I have understood
in the medium.
Working as an employee of Standard Oil
and later Chevron, Hare had begun his
project in 1968 a year after a works
assignment had briefy taken him to a
Mississippi region animated by inequality
and Civil Rights protests. After what was
perhaps a shocking and formative
experience he returned to a normal routine,
using his lunch-breaks to move out of the
workplace and escape the tensions and
monotonies of a working life that was
increasingly shaping his own physical and
mental well being. The act of photography,
it seemed, could temporarily assuage the
nausea that Hare experienced each evening
after returning from his job, a condition
that even his doctors could not account for.
Walking around the periphery of the
factory in 1968, Hare had been stopped by a
local man, Orville England, who was keen
to sell the photographer a plastic camera.
He had been invited inside Englands home
a home that, years later, Hare himself
would move into to act as carer, as the old
mans life, blighted by work-related
asbestos poisoning, eventually reached its
diffcult and inevitable end. After that early
meeting, Hare had returned with a plate
camera and photographed England again,
a move that spurred him on to consciously
photograph the rooms and residents of the
modest houses within the proximity of his
workplace. He would recognise lives lived
out uncomfortably close to the pollution
that hung in the air. He would note how
security, prospects and plans were hindered
by the economic fuctuations that shrank
and expanded industries like lungs, causing
uncertainty and for youthful ambitions to
wane. The photographer, who would wake
up scared at 5 am each morning, eventually
left his job and with his new partner, the
psychotherapist Judy Wyatt progressed a
relationship based on a shared and deep
pain, felt about what was wrong with the
treatment of working people in the society
they both were part of.
Its not hard to imagine the challenge of
gaining access into these homes a process
built upon trust and a nervous but
determined momentum that Hare explains
thoroughly in his own words before
setting up the camera to photograph.
Hares photographic technique seems in
part refned and in part abrupt or
technically erratic, yet its always
compelling. While some photographs are
gently lit, with diffused light perfectly
balancing interiors with the views of
industrial plants that can be seen through
windows, others are illuminated with the
intrusion of a harsh and undisguised light.
Flash plasters deep black shadows of
inhabitants onto walls, creating rooms that
are tight and discomforting. Elsewhere
black, loosely pinned electric cables chase
across walls, rendering power supplies as
unstable and vulnerable. Men and women
are often alone, held down underneath low
grey ceilings. Family members are often sat
back within the photograph, among the
iconography of the wider family, the
Kennedy government or religious devotion.
Sometimes people are framed in doorways
or wedged at the edges of a frame
occasionally they are asleep fully clothed
and curled around exhausted children on
still-made beds. The extreme coverage of a
wide-angle lens shows complete rooms, as
residents sit or stand, passively looking into
their homes, surely unaware of their
inclusion in the photographers frame.
For the frst time, this new book
reproduces a number of group portraits
made between 1968 and 1972 loosely
structured, inclusive pictures of extended
families who fll rooms by sitting on
temporary chairs, which have been
gathered along with their children and
carried from other parts of the home.
Working externally, Hare often
photographed the sprawl of housing in the
industrial belts of Pennsylvania and Ohio,
and there are echoes of a wider history of
the American economic landscape and of
the history of photography, as the cemetery
Hare photographs in 1972 in Bethlehem
borders the same housing that Walker
157
Revi ews
Evans had photographed for Roy Stryker in
1935, as part of the FSA programme to
document struggling workers who merited
the countrys support, after the 1929 Stock
Market Crash.
Hare recounts how, over his years of
production, he felt obliged to honour the
reality of each person and their home and
speaks of a need to relate the truth of
peoples lives. Yet this is not a measured,
dispassionate process. In the books
afterword, curator Jack von Euw suggests
that Hare did not want the book to be about
himself but this somehow seems
unavoidable, with the photographer
struggling to escape from his own working
conditions and inevitably affected by the
lives he fnds inside the America he
concerns himself with. As he moved further
from photography into counselling and
support work, its clear that perhaps
photography had its own conditions that
the photographer wrestled with. A set of
Hares photographs were bought by the
Museum of Modern Art, yet he grew to hold
a mistrust of such institutions, noting how
their organisational structures closely
resembled those he had been at odds with
throughout his life as an engineer. Hare
would later picket a San Francisco MoMA
showing of Szarkowskis Mirrors and
Windows exhibition that included
examples of his work, in a one-man protest
over the shows corporate sponsor.
Chauncey Hares work deserves to be
understood alongside Walker Evans
American Photographs or Nan Goldins frst
book, as a singular and articulate voice
speaking of the condition of a real America
the same America that the poet Fred Voss,
himself a factory machinist, would later
describe as a people as real as a Marshalls
eviction notice, or a pink termination slip.
This new book offers a serious, passionate
and exhaustive statement about the nature
of working peoples lives to a contemporary
audience witnessing the largest economic
downturn since the 1930s. While Hare has
created an important and singular response
to such conditions, and found a life beyond
the circumstances that once constrained
him, in doing so he has foregrounded
questions around the role of the
photographer and the possibility for
photography to say something of worth
about something we can no longer ignore.
Ken Grant
158
Revi ews
Protest Photographs
Chauncey Hare
159
Revi ews
160
Revi ews
Protest Photographs
Chauncey Hare
161
Revi ews
162
Revi ews
Protest Photographs
Chauncey Hare
163
Revi ews
164
Revi ews
GAZA PHOTO ALBUM
Kent Klich
Published by Umbrage Editions
www.umbragegallery.com
26
(88pp Hardback)

Mohammed ShuhadaAli Ahmed died
when a shell fred from an Israeli tank
struck his home in al-Tuffah, northern
Gaza. Unemployed, 39 years old, he
had earlier fed with his family only
to return, fatally, to collect clothes for
his children. Around the same time
the home of Ziad Mahmoud al-Absi,
also unemployed, was hit. Of 11 family
members, three were killed and four
injured. Seven of their neighbours in
southern Gazas Yibna refugee camp
were wounded too. About a week later
28 members of the Samouni family were
killed in eastern Gaza when Israelis
bombed their house during an F-16
strike. They had been ordered by the
military to remain indoors. You get the
picture
The attacks, the killings and the
woundings and the devastation, are
the subject of Swedish photographer
Kent Klichs Gaza Photo Album, though
his work shuns the regions standard
photojournalistic fare. So there are no
pictures of funerals, artillery, grieving
relatives, drones, phosphorous shells,
aggressors, or indeed victims. Instead
Klich, working with the Palestinian
Centre for Human Rights, has assembled
a series of sober and restrained
photographs of ravaged domestic
interiors. Domestic is perhaps the
wrong word these are no longer homes,
merely the carcasses of houses. We can
see where tank shells have torn through
walls and blasted through ceilings; we
can observe how military bulldozers can
turn a room inside out; we can note the
kitchen wall bullet holes in the house
where Saleh Abdel Kareem Abu Hajas
mother and sister were shot and killed.
The Israeli attack lasted from 28
December 2008 until 20 January 2009,
and by the time they called a halt to
Operation Cast Lead more than 1,400
Palestinians had been killed and 5,300
wounded. The dead included 900
civilians, 300 of them children. Some 13
Israelis lost their lives, four of them in
friendly fre incidents.
Destruction cannot help but dominate
Klichs pictures, yet searing traces of
occupants and families lives remain.
More than one television has survived
intact; here and there framed portraits
still hang in place; an ironing board
stands ready for use against a wall of
pock-marked plaster. Trashed furniture
lies abandoned in defunct bedrooms and
redundant sitting rooms. Through these
scenes and fragments of eviscerated
domesticity, Klichs work functions to
elicit from his audience a degree of
recognition and awareness. As he put
it, I was sure that if we would see
peoples apartments, their kitchens, their
bedrooms and their living rooms, you
know, they would look different... but
there would also be a lot of similarities
to your home or my home. And I thought
the identifcation with the fate of the
Palestinians would be stronger that way.
His work bears comparison, then, with
other projects in which the room, or the
interior, is used as a politically charged
site of meaning. Ashley Gilbertsons
Bedrooms of the Fallen, for example,
is a series (ongoing since 2007) of
photographs commemorating American
soldiers and marines who have died
in Iraq and Afghanistan. The empty
rooms remind us, writes Gilbertson
of the troops, that before they fought,
they lived, and they slept, just like us,
at home. And Peter Bialobrzeskis
Informal Arrangements collates a series of
photographs taken inside a Soweto slum,
in order to comment on post-apartheid
South African history, and preparations
for the spectacle of the World Cup.
All three projects operate on, and
thereby modify, the terrain once securely
occupied by photojournalism; but the
photography in the Album is informed
by a desire to move beyond some of
the genres more familiar subjects
and techniques Klich has expressed
disillusionment with an earlier body of
black and white, reportage Gazan work
in which he photographed funerals and
demonstrations.
Gaza meanwhile remains wounded.
And despite the numerous allegations
that their forces violated international
humanitarian law, only one soldier has
been convicted of an offence committed
during the Operation his crime, theft of
a credit card.
Guy Lane
165
Revi ews
In 1957 W Eugene Smith was broke, in
debt and depressed, with a professional
reputation for being diffcult. At
his home in Croton-on-Hudson, in
Westchester County, he and two
assistants were printing the Pittsburgh
project that he had shot in 1955-56.
Rigorously editing what he saw as his
greatest body of work, Smith subleased
a workspace on the fourth foor of 821
Sixth Avenue in New Yorks fower
district, occasionally returning home
to direct his assistants but increasingly
staying in the city.
The loft spaces in the building were
used by many of the jazz musicians who
were drawn to New York at the time. 821
became known as a place where musicians
could meet to jam or rehearse to the early
hours of the morning. Composer Hall
Overton worked there with Thelonius
Monk, Zoot Sims, Bill Evans and Charles
THE JAZZ LOFT PROJECT
W Eugene Smith and Sam Stephenson
Published by Knopf
www.aaknoppf.com
26
(288pp Hardback)

Mingus and countless other musicians
passed through 821 to meet and play.
The book The Jazz Loft Project is an
outgrowth of the larger project at The
Center for Documentary Studies to
organise and present the 4,000 hours
of tape recordings and some 40,000
pictures that Smith made at 821 from
1957 to 1965 (although Smith occupied
the loft on and off until 1971). The
book contains many images that Smith
made from his window not seen in
the 1958 Life essay Drama Beneath a
City Window, pictures of the many
jazz musicians and other visitors who
frequented the building, and transcripts
of reel-to-reel recordings that Smith
made of conversations, jam sessions,
street sounds and television and radio
broadcasts, often plays or readings.
These materials are supplemented
by interviews conducted by Sam
Stephenson and Stephensons contextual
writing. Many of the recordings
transcribed in the book can be heard
on The Jazz Loft Project website (www.
jazzloftproject.org).
The image of Smith maintained by
the loft musicians, notes Stephenson,
contrasts with the one that still prevails
today in many photography circles,
where his compulsions are judged to
have been driven by megalomania and
lunacy. Through the transcripts and
interviews and in his study of the street,
Smith comes across with a humour and
ease that belie his diffcult reputation.
Smith once asked a visitor: Do you
mind if I turn on my recorder in case
something brilliant happens? There
are conversations between Smith and
musicians and recordings of jam sessions
in the loft upstairs he drilled holes
and snaked microphones throughout
the building, controlling them from his
studio where his multiple recorders sat.
Smiths compulsion to record speaks
not only to his documentary instincts
but also to an ongoing exploration of the
possibilities of documentary practice.
Just as his ambition for the Pittsburgh
project was to create an allegorical
photo essay on a scale never before seen
with a single subject, his photographs
and recordings at 821 demonstrate
his interest in documenting his own
surroundings, making a record in real
time of, apparently, everything. Was the
urge to document an effort to defne his
own identity? He was also trying in this
period to publish a retrospective of his
work. Was it a way of steadying himself
even as he was staying awake for days
at a time printing and editing, fuelled by
amphetamines?
While the material in the book is by
Smith, the narrative is Stephensons.
Jazz Loft Project aspires to be a layering
of multiple voices speaking to and
across each other, quoting, echoing, and
exploring ideas, like a jazz improvisation
or a Smith photo essay. The books
strength is the rich dimensionality that it
brings to a portrait of a time and a place.
However, Smiths material is deployed
for its effectiveness in evoking a past
milieu, and not according to any archival
rigor. Thats fne but we come away in
the end with the story that Stephenson
wants to tell and we are not much closer
to Smiths intentions for this record.
Leo Hsu
166
ROOM 103
Jeroen Kramer
Published by Noorderlicht
www.noorderlicht.com
Eur27.50
(72pp Hardback)

103 is just a number. It also happened to
be the number of Jeroen Kramers hotel
room where he lived while working as
a photojournalist in Baghdad during
the war and became his subsequent
nickname (the hotel staff had trouble
pronouncing his Dutch name). In the
naming of this book Kramer perhaps also
sees himself as just a number and the
work he was creating as perpetuating
that notion by being just another
photojournalist in a war zone, shooting
photographs of just another soldier or
civilian senselessly killed.
What Room 103 isnt, is a book
claiming to be about war and confict
one that neither shows nor tells
you anything new. While most books
created under the guise of worthy
photojournalism intentionally separate
the author from the work and end up
creating the opposite effect Kramers
is the reverse in the blatant use of the
personal. This book is about what it
really means to be present in confict,
what it means to have to run, against all
natural impulses, towards gunfre.
The photographs contained in
Room 103 mark Kramers time living in
Beirut, Baghdad and Damascus. The
collage of written stories accounts of
personal friendships and hardships are
fragmentary and disjointed, perhaps a
refection on the reality of war. Kramer
is not trying to make sense of war, an
entirely impossible feat anyway, and
the photographs refect this. The series
of 12 images that bookend the work,
presented as a strip inside the front and
back covers, tell the story of a convoy
attacked en route to Mosul in which four
soldiers were killed. Graphic and tense,
these are the most predictable images in
the book or rather outside it while
those within are the more lyrical and
quietly suggestive. The images here are
secondary to the text yet not illustrative.
After reading the story of Khaled, a close
acquaintance from Damascus, you fnd
yourself searching for a photograph of
him along with the others mentioned
in the stories but there arent any. And,
perhaps they dont exist the images or
the people in Kramers stories.
The ones that do feature are those of
daily life weddings, children playing,
street scenes at night with images of
horror thrown in mass graves, bloodied
faces and dead bodies. Although at
frst glance appearing to be devoid of
context, a list of captions does appear at
the back, telling us simply, where, when
and what. There is an overriding sense
that Kramer spent time with the people
pictured and actually got to know them
before taking their photograph. In one
story, Ammar is Sick he explains how,
during drinking sessions with his group
of Iraqi friends something, now that
the country is democratic and free,
they have to go to Jordan to indulge in
there is a predictable chain of events:
frst singing and merriment and then
the inevitable sobbing: for family, for
country, for the present situation. The
scene becomes one that no photograph
could communicate.
Kramers real intentions with this
book become apparent at the end,
when he writes of the email sent to his
editor, talking of his self-loathing the
only reason he can come up with as
to why he does what he does. Being a
photojournalist is, to him, a suitable
punishment for compassion fatigue and
compliance in a media machine that
simplifes and desensitises. He likens the
experience of photographing one man,
shot through his windscreen and nearly
dead, as useless for him because there is
no caption information to include with
the image. The man becomes for him,
along with countless others, a Dorian
Gray, suspended in this stasis of being.
Room 103 may be overcomplicated
by its fussy design and odd coloured
pages. And its awkward format, perhaps
trying to emulate a scrapbook, could
have benefted from being either
larger or smaller. But its strength as an
incongruous mix of word, image and
emotion emerges after being immersed
in the personal stories of love and death.
While Kramer may only see himself as
perpetuating a cycle of exploitation, this
book represents his obligation to reverse
the trend, to make sure that the people
with whom he is interacting and whose
stories he is telling, do not become just
another number.
Lauren Heinz
Revi ews
167
Revi ews
ExPLOSiOnS, FiRES And PUBLiC ORdER
Sarah Pickering
Published by Aperture
www.aperture.org
25
(120pp Hardback)

Of the four photographic studies of
human preparedness that comprise this
collection by Sarah Pickering, the most
wounding by a distance is Public Order.
It is not that these photographs hint at
a post-apocalyptic future, nor that they
depict an uncanny simulacrum of Anytown
(although they do both these things), but
that the pain, the acute discomfort, we feel
in looking at them arises from the fact that
these pictures look like now.
Denton is a fake suburban town used
by the British police for specialist training
purposes; everything from football riots
to terrorist attacks happens there frst.
It is immediately obvious that it is a set,
not even a very convincing one, yet every
hollow faade, every door to nowhere,
every grey concrete street looks like the
superfcially beautiful. It looks like more
of a technical achievement, which in
addition exposes the theatre of war, but
once that conceit is undone (by the text),
the photographs have the same effect as
freworks: to be admired only briefy. The
abstraction engendered by the background
landscapes renders each explosion less
poignant to the human eye. The thought
of someone being maimed or killed by
them seems more remote than Raphael
Dallaportas landmines photographed as
gleaming product shots, less menacing than
Simon Norfolks Full Spectrum Dominance.
An exhibition of Incident happened to
be my introduction to Pickerings work,
and it loses none of its power in book form.
Also shot at the Fire Service College, these
burnt out spaces have had the colour and
the very life sucked out of them. Pickering
has played with this, and her matt black and
white prints take on the quality of drawing,
allowing the full ghostliness of the spectacle
to take over. The overstuffed dummy-bodies
that draw the work to a close seem to have
stumbled blindly from Eliots The Hollow
Men, a dread-flled poem with the thrice
repeated refrain: This is the way the world
ends. Truly, contemplating these pictures, I
could believe it had.
What all these photographs lack is
people. I say this not as a criticism of the
absence-of-presence photographic style,
but as an observation on the very reason
why no amount of planning or preparation
for disaster can be properly successful,
Pickerings people-free photographs are as
tightly controlled as the security strategies
she is documenting. Enter the human and
watch all hell break loose.
Max Houghton
collective failure of public architecture,
town planning and human spirit that has
ransacked and homogenised every high
street in Britain. Anyone who has grown
up in suburbia has been sick outside Flicks
nightclub, bought nylon underwear from
Dickens department store, and has failed
to be offered a job other than account
executive at the Job Centre.
Photographically, this work comes
from the same stable as Broomberg and
Chanarins chilling Chicago, or An-My
Ls 29 Palms, and is shot in the same
straight-on, deadpan style. The idea of
the simulacrum is uncanny, a window
to another world, in this case one where
disasters become their polar opposite:
controlled events. This idea is explored
in three further bodies of work included
here. The images from Fire Scene are
compellingly narrative-driven. Pickering
gained access to the Fire Service College
and the domestic interiors carefully
constructed for forensics offcers training
sessions. Fascinating stories of lives never
lived unfold in these spaces. Chaotic
lifestyles, where plates are ashtrays, chairs
are tables and one-bar electric heaters
are makeshift ovens invite a class-based
reading of these scenes, as though
fecklessness of the underclass in particular
causes fres. Its interesting to consider why
a candle in the library of a mansion was not
imagined by the creators of these spaces.
Would their emergency procedure be
different if the furnitures provenance were
antique French instead of the Red Cross
charity shop on the High Street?
The Explosions series holds fewer
possibilities. Taken at a site used for combat
training, the images themselves are only
168
Revi ews
SiLEnCE
Brad Rimmer
Published by T&G Publishing
www.tgpublishing.com.au
Eur 35
(96pp Hardback)

With Silence comes the light. In Brad
Rimmers new book on the wheatbelt
communities of Western Australia,
the deafening roar of silence echoes
against the warm glow of the evening
sun. Rimmers subjects are bathed
in a light resplendent of the last
drawn breath of the day. There is a
clear felt ambiguity to the scenes he
photographs lone Australians, the
last of the great wheatbelt dwellers,
seem to be triumphant and hopeful but
also melancholic, looking off into the
distance. The only sounds to disturb
them are the quiet sighs of communities
who have lived and triumphed, whose
better days are behind them.
It is through the eyes of our very own
local guide, Rimmer, that we see the
great illuminated grain silos in Merredin
rise majestically out of the night sky. In
Dowerin, the drive-in movie screen looks
out across its parking lot, overgrown
and now home to a solitary abandoned
car. The blank white of the screen is
set against the blue and purple hues of
the sky at dusk. It stands almost as a
monument to an age, not so long ago,
when people would congregate here and,
in coming together, signal the strength
and vibrancy of their community.
In the images of the interiors of
the Farmers Club in Goomalling, the
ubiquitous framed portrait of Queen
Elizabeth II adorns the wall but the
rooms are empty of people. They remain
suspended in time, either awaiting better
days or resigned to new roles as museum
pieces of a bygone era. Even the modern-
looking, well-kept swimming pool in
Dowerin, its inviting water still like
glass, is devoid of people. But these and
other images sit comfortably alongside
the solitary portraits of young people
and views from the photographers
car window of the unimaginably large
landscape. It matters not for a moment
that there are so few people but rather
that any have survived and not been
swallowed up by the scale of the place
and the harshness of its climate.
In the pages of Silence, Rimmer
revisits these towns of his adolescence:
Kellerberrin, Wyalkatchem, Tammin,
Dowerin, Yelbeni and Goomalling.
Having in common wheat crop and
weather patterns, they also share similar
tyre marks scuffed into the asphalt by
bored youths on a Saturday night. These
communities were once distinct, but due
to their dwindling populations each
has now fewer than 1000 inhabitants
they face the threat of bureaucratic
amalgamation by the national census
and planning department. Rimmers
hometown of Wyalkatchem or Wylie,
as it is known was once considered
the regional centre. It was a busy hub of
rail and local government, serving the
outlying farming communities. Wylie is
now home to just 300.
In the photographs of Silence, there
is unsurprisingly no noise, nor crowds,
just the memories of growing up and
the penetrating gaze on the faces of his
subjects. Its a look I read as muted pride
mixed with love and loathing. There is
an undeniable connection to the land but
there is also a simmering loathing for the
inevitable decline that the communities
face and the pressure to move away for
good to bigger things in bigger towns.
Silence is a beautiful book, that does
what all good books should it tells a
very personal story, almost in a way that
is not meant to be read by anyone other
than the author. Rimmers story moves
as his car travels across the country,
from loss and guilt to admiration and
acceptance. With the passing of his
grandmother and the time he has spent
away, the connection Rimmer had to this
land, he confdes, is now gone. Silence
feels like a question to and homage
for the next generation of wheatbelt
dwellers, as the mantle falls on their
shoulders to eke out a living or move
away. Rimmer ponders their futures
and tips his hat at their presence even
as autumn fres rage across the wheat
felds, bringing promise of new shoots
which will rise from the ashes as reliably
as the seasons change.
Jon Levy
169
Revi ews
WAR
A South Collection #1
Published by T&G Publishing
www.tgpublishing.com.au
Eur 60
(132pp Hardback)

War: A Degree South Collection #1 is a
compilation of work by eight Australian
photographers: Tim Page, David Dare
Parker, Ben Bohane, Stephen Dupont,
Jack Picone, Michael Coyne, Ashley
Gilbertson and Sean Flynn. In the
foreword Tim Page states that the book
serves as an antipodean anecdote to
the tall poppies on the other side of
the cultural world. By this I assume
he refers to the over-achieving likes of
Don McCullin, Jim Nachtwey, et al
celebrated war photographers from the
UK and USA.
In truth, War is a book borne out of
passion and made by photographers who
wish to pool their talents and stand frm
against the sad state of infotainment-
orientated coverage gracing the pages
of magazines and newspapers which
once would run their stories. That
Australia has produced some of the
greatest war photographers of our time
should not be forgotten and while the
eight photographers have certainly shot
desire to get ever closer to the action.
There is something almost hyperreal
to me about a scene of war and
devastation photographed from a
distance, strangely not the same when
a photographer shoots right in the
face of their subject. The wider view is
disarmingly matter-of-fact, until you take
it all in and become immersed in the
detail. Only then can the viewer begin
to extract the despair of the situation, or
appreciate with trepidation the moment
of impending doom that is suggested,
but not yet exploding into the frame.
War is a veritable history lesson and a
thorough compendium of confict in our
world over the past 45 years, from Tim
Page and Sean Flynns Nam; to Ben
Bohanes coverages in Burma, Papua,
Kenya and the Solomon islands; Stephen
Duponts Afghanistan, Palestine and
Rwanda; Jack Picones Angola, Bosnia,
and Sierra Leone; Michael Coynes Iran;
Ashley Gilbertsons Iraq; and David Dare
Parkers East Timor.
The styles may differ and the angle of
interest each photographer brings to
their subject is unique, but there is no
getting away from the over-arching fact
that, for these photographers, the story
is paramount and the events they
witness are always more profound or
important to others than their own
experience of it. Amidst the images of
death and destruction, and the protests
and reprisals that necessarily make up a
book on war, these eight photographers
remain quiet, humble and focused on the
job at hand. They are the personifcation
of commitment.
Jon Levy
stories outside the combat zone, they
agreed that war should be the binding
thread to begin this, their frst group
project in publishing.
As well as the book itself I am lucky to
have seen the exhibition of photographs
that accompanies its publication, on
display at the FotoFreo festival in
Fremantle and Perth. At a previous years
FotoFreo the photographers gathered
conceived of the Degree South concept.
Its therefore apt that War should be
launched at the same festival. The
printing in both the exhibition and the
book reproduction, is exquisite. For
someone like myself brought up on
this genre of hardcore news photography
there can be little better than seeing
Tim Pages photograph of a boy crying
over the body of a wounded girl in the
back of a red pick-up truck, displayed
next to David Dare Parkers image of
East Timorese returning to the remains
of their homes. The former, an iconic
colour photograph from 1968, the latter
the encapsulation of an agonising and
profound moment from a more recent
confict in 1999.
The exhibition also included images
taken from the National Archive by army
photographers during the First and
Second World Wars. Their photographs
provided a stepping stone with which
to launch oneself across the years of
Australian combat photography for
want of a better term from 1918 to
1943 to 1968 to 1985 to 1996, and so to
the present day. It was noticeable how
the style of photography has changed,
obviously infuenced by the availability
of cameras and lenses but also by a
Promoting the best
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Issue 8 | Afghanistan | Available Now!
Daylight
multimedia
magazine
blog
Submit online by May 15, 2010 | For more information go to www.daylightmagazine.org
Announcing the rst annual

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DEAD EAGLE TRAIL
21 April 15 May 2010
171
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call for submissions
deadline: 31st May 2010
Hereford Photography Festival
www.photofest.org/openhere
Submissions are now being accepted for Open Here, Hereford PhotographyFestivals open exhibition, to take
place at The Courtyard Centre for theArts from 29th October to 27th November 2010.
Open Here welcomes submissions from all photographers - both nationally and internationally - and are keen to
support all disciplines of photographic practice.
Photographers may submit up to 5 images, made since January 2009. Images may be individual works or from a
larger series.One prize, of a socially-engaged commission (2,000) will be awarded, to be realised in Herefordshire
prior to August 2011. An additional prize of 250 will be awarded to the audiences favourite,voted for by visitors to
the exhibition.
The Selection Panel
Caitlin Griffths - Artistic Director, Hereford Photography Festival.
Melissa DeWitt - Editor, HotShoe.
Nina Gustavsson - Photography Lecturer, Hereford College of Arts.
Paul Seawright - Photographer and co-curator Hereford Photography Festivals Retrospective 2010.
Stuart Whipps - Photographer and winner of the East International Award 2009.
call for submissions
deadline: 31st May 2010
Hereford Photography Festival
www.photofest.org/openhere
Submissions are now being accepted for Open Here, Hereford PhotographyFestivals open exhibition, to take
place at The Courtyard Centre for theArts from 29th October to 27th November 2010.
Open Here welcomes submissions from all photographers - both nationally and internationally - and are keen to
support all disciplines of photographic practice.
Photographers may submit up to 5 images, made since January 2009. Images may be individual works or from a
larger series.One prize, of a socially-engaged commission (2,000) will be awarded, to be realised in Herefordshire
prior to August 2011. An additional prize of 250 will be awarded to the audiences favourite,voted for by visitors to
the exhibition.
The Selection Panel
Caitlin Griffths - Artistic Director, Hereford Photography Festival.
Melissa DeWitt - Editor, HotShoe.
Nina Gustavsson - Photography Lecturer, Hereford College of Arts.
Paul Seawright - Photographer and co-curator Hereford Photography Festivals Retrospective 2010.
Stuart Whipps - Photographer and winner of the East International Award 2009.
" /&8 1&341&$5*7&
DOCUMENTARY PHOTOGRAPHY
UNIVERSITY OF WALES, NEWPORT
27 Exhibition opens 29
TH
June 2010, 7PM9.30PM
& continues 30
TH
June3
rd
July, 10AM6PM
At the Candid Arts Trust, 3 Torrens Street London
EC1V 1NQ, nearest tube Angel. Admission free.
www.twentysevenexhibition.com
The exercise reminds me of torture the
Desert Island question! When I start to
think about what my answer could be,
I get overwhelmed by the possibilities
the sum of books which, since my
childhood, have been accompanying
me. The Bible was for me an interesting
novel. Up until now, I am still fascinated
by the way it was produced and the
impact it generated. One Thousand and
One Nights was another major discovery
the kind of piece that can never be
exhausted, such as The Divine Comedy
or Don Quixote. Only authors who have
equally mastered style and content
would be allowed a special place on
my bookshelves. Thats why Deleuze,
Sartre, Barthes or Nietzsche, to name a
few, are very dear to my heart and sit on
the same level as my favourite novelists.
Thats probably why I always conceive
my exhibitions as I would write a novel
I think stories are more important than
concepts. If one looks at the work of
Borges, this becomes obvious.
The frst book that comes to my
mind my memory is not necessarily
chronological is The Palm-Wine
Drunkard, by Amos Tutuola. This novel,
the most surrealist and unexpected
narrative written by an African, had a
strange story from the beginning. I have
read the French, translated by Raymond
Queneau, who was known for his
literary impostures. When the book came
out, critics thought that Tutuola existed
only in Queneaus mind. The story is
quite simple: a man inherits his fathers
palm plantation and has the best palm
wine maker in the village. His house
is always full of friends with whom he
would get drunk from dawn to sunset.
But one day, the palm wine maker falls
from a tree and dies. The hero hires
another wine maker, but he was not as
talented as the deceased and the friends
of the drunkard start to desert him. His
solution is to go to the bush of ghosts
and bring back his old specialist. From
that moment, we witness an incredible
journey through the world of the dead,
full of impossible anecdotes. Tutuola
was not a professional writer but an
obscure civil servant who would write in
his spare time. The mastery with which
he embarked on his quest is simply
amazing. It reminded me of the best
Latin American writers, in his ability
to create believable worlds. This novel
taught me that there are no limits to
human imagination and that, when one
pretends to be a writer, you should not
bother with reality, for reality is only
what is created.
French author Boris Vian wrote the
second book I shall comment on, a novel
called Lcume des Jours (Froth on the
Daydream). It tells the story of a young
couple facing a tragedy: the girl is sick
and slowly dying. Vian warns us from
the beginning: This story is true for I
invented it from the frst line to the last...
this novel is poetry. The author plays
with words and situation with the talent
of a virtuoso. In this story, which could
have been seen as pure science fction,
he questions French grammar and the
very meaning of everyday words. Chlo,
the young heroine, has a fower in her
chest that grows everyday as the room
where she is lying gets smaller. She dies
at the end of course. Vian wrote the book
right after the Second World War, when
Jean-Paul Sartres existentialism was at
its peak. The author flls his narration
with a great amount of references that he
turns into satires, for the readers delight.
The third book also leads us into a
world that no human being has ever
explored. It is The Marriage of Heaven
and Hell by William Blake. Here again,
the author describes demons as if he
were familiar with them; as if he were
an anthropologist exploring the Kingdom
of Hades. It is poetry of course but it is,
On my Shelf
above all, a refection on human nature
that contains a critical distance that one
could not feel in Dantes Divine Comedy.
Here again, a lesson about writing,
words and worlds.
Frantz Fanons Les Damns de la
Terre (The Wretched of the Earth) was
critical to my political awakening. At that
age I was about 17 I had no interest
in colonial history, the power game
between East and West. I only dealt
with matters linked with aesthetics and
the existential quest. I had read Sartre
and philosophers engaged in political
fghts but it was only with Fanon that
I fully realised the weight of the past,
and how it determined the present
and future. Fanon reminded me of the
simple fact that I was a postcolonial
subject, which forced me to question,
and then deconstruct this very notion.
I believe that up until now my work
is driven by the will to create a world
where everyone is represented equally,
infuenced by statements like: Each
generation must, in a relative opacity
discover its mission, achieve it or betray
it. Anything written after, under the
label postcolonial, cannot stand the
comparison with the seminal refection
raised by this book.
Last but not least, comes Fragments
dun Discours Amoureux (A Lovers
Discourse), by Roland Barthes. Barthes,
an accomplished entomologist, dissects
the essence of love and its vocabulary. I
never thought we could apply our minds
to such a vain endeavour. I then believed
that all thinking should have been
dedicated to crucial matters: God, death,
and existence it was my frst encounter
with semiotics, and I was fascinated by
the fact that the mind could apply its
talents to such an intangible thing as
love, and transform it into a scientifc
case study. Moreover, I was confronted
with the meaning of words, their hidden
logic and their unconscious charge.
Barthes worked as an investigator,
carefully looking at the expression love
and analysing it in all its dimensions.
There is no such thing as an innocent
word.

Simon Njami is an independent lecturer,
art critic and novelist and has been Art
Director of the Bamako photography
biennial since 2001

sources of
inspiration
simon njami
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Approach, vertical yer by Steve Macleod is printed on Kodak
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new Superwide Lightjet we can make Duratrans images up to 10
x 6. For Steves exhibition, Blackwater - each print will be colour
balanced and tested according to the specications of the lightbox.
HAVE YOUR PHOTOGRAPHS EXHIBITED IN
LONDONS PRESTIGIOUS HOST GALLERY,
SEEN AND JUDGED BY RESPECTED INDUSTRY
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LONDON
26 JULY 5 SEPTEMBER
A PHOTOGRAPHIC EXHIBITION, AWARD AND
PRINT FAIR OPEN TO ALL PHOTOGRAPHERS
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CROSSCURRENT
panos pictures
POYi awards
Panos photographers Tomas van Houtryve,
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of the Year International competition.
Preserved sh on display in
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a formerly bustling shing
port on the Aral Sea. Kazakhstan.
CAROLYN DRAKE
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