Top 10

Photobooks of 2022

Selected by Alex Merola

As the year draws to a close, an annual tribute to some of the exceptional photobook releases that caught our eye during 2022 – selected by Assistant Editor, Alex Merola.

1. Carmen Winant, Arrangements
Self Publish, Be Happy / Images Vevey

The book – as both medium and as subject – is probed to its expansive potential in Carmen Winant’s latest. Large, elegant but always “DIY” in feel, with its rough, naked spine, Arrangements is one of those books that is both specific and sweeping at the same time. For the once discrete and disparate tearsheets that bound it together – depicting Bikram yoga classes, beauty pageants, moonwalks, childbirth, tantric sex and the young Malcolm X – have been decontextualised to conjure wonderfully capacious constellations which, as a whole, wrestle with, and trouble, the notion of “theme”. Most admirable is Winant’s insistence on labour; inherent not only in the (ever-visible) tears of each page, but also in the collaborative networks that enable the making and sharing of a book, foregrounded through the detailing of the designer, printer, distributor and, of course, publishers Self Publish, Be Happy and Images Vevey on the graceful front-cover. Whilst this is a book that could have been subject to an infinite number of rearrangements still, the strength of the “arrangement” Winant lies in its courage: the courage to put something out into the world; something confounding and generous in equal measure.

2. Collier Schorr, August
MACK

As strong as the taboos it touches, Collier Schorr’s third chapter in the Forests and Fields series is over a decade in the making and well worth the wait. Her many revisions have resulted in an unnerving book, extending Schorr’s investigations into ancestral responsibility through the mythos of the small town of Schwäbisch Gmünd, a synecdoche for German history. A finely-calibrated blend of history and fiction, the sequencing moves through Polaroids picturing crucifixes, flora and androgynous boys, at their moment of ripening, in and out of Nazi uniform. Invoking the performative history of fetishism and uniform – with references to Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter (1974) as well as August Sander’s portrait of Hitler’s guard – Schorr is clearly working with the reactions the young men portray when they are confronted with artifacts of the Third Reich. Her anachronisms are provocative and transgressive, but also intimate and cathartic, resonating further given that Schorr is of Jewish descent, while most of her subjects are not. It is commendable how Schorr has sought to uncover the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of traumatic history, inherited and imagined. Ultimately, this book does not lose itself to nostalgia, even if it is hinged to it. For the fleeting Polaroid frames land on the now, shedding light a war whose ripple effects persist.

3. Zoe Leonard, Al río / To the River
Hatje Cantz

Intended as a companion, rather than a catalogue, to its coinciding exhibitions at Mudam Luxembourg and the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, Zoe Leonard’s Al río / To the River is a real tour de force and totally befitting of this most ambitious body of work. Comprised of 2,000 kilometres worth of photographs, the first volume follows the Rio Grande / Río Bravo along the US-Mexico border through a nuanced weave of abstractions of whirling water, iPhone shots of digital surveillance imagery and documents of Leonard’s own path. Countering the mass media’s sensationalist portrayals of a natural river that is made to perform a political task, all the while exposing the topographical indistinguishability of its demarcations, Leonard’s “half-pictures” inconspicuously shift through different ground-level vantage points, geographical times, tempos and tones. The arrangements of photographs – alternating between standalones to groups of two, four or more – invoke a multiplicity that is perfectly reverberated in the second volume, wherein writers, artists and other thinkers ruminate on the fraught history of the river from their respective fields. The book is an anti-monument, developed through its repetitions and refractions: its emphasis instead is on subjectivity and embodiment; on the notion that taking a photograph is taking a position. After all, Leonard’s preserved black frames do not carry the weight of the world, but the weight of her vision, which in turn becomes ours.

4. Kikuji Kawada, Vortex
Akaaka

Evidence of Kikuji Kawada’s ability to make a masterful book has increased spectacularly with his aptly-titled tome. There are clearly elements of his great opus The Map (1965) contained within the DNA of Vortex, not least for the cover’s chilling allusions to the scars of war left on urban environs. Yet, Kawada’s extractions of the zeitgeist carved into the depths of Tokyo have taken on a fundamentally twisted form here, resulting in surely one of the most bewildering books in some time. Spending time in its company is an intense experience; with extraordinary energy and stamina, the claustrophobic, seemingly never-ending full-bleeds, packed with immense colours, contrasts and textures, plunge us into a strange catastrophe. Pulled predominantly from his vast Instagram archive – which, as curator Pauline Vermare notes in her accompanying essay “Everything was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt”, feels like a “timeless conversation with a man of outstanding depth, soul and modernity” – Kawada’s visions have been augmented on matte paper, thereby summoning the impression of coming into contact with another’s memories – or indeed nightmares. The book feels like, in many ways, a culmination of Kawada’s lifelong mental-mapping, through which he has strived to find the “clues to the future and the whereabouts of my spirit.” Yet, one also feels his quest into the darkness of a sky from which the sun has fallen is but over yet.

5. Nan Goldin, This Will Not End Well
Steidl / Moderna Museet

There are few experiences as ecstatic as encountering a Nan Goldin slideshow in its intended form. With that said, since her breakthrough The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1985), Goldin has produced several books-on-films which have both eschewed and embraced the artist’s original vision for her slideshows. This Will Not End Well is a stunning culmination of all of them, and the first time we can truly appreciate, in one place, the breadth and depth of her work as a filmmaker. The book’s exquisitely-paced sequences are true to their sources; flickering glimpses of light, sinking deeper into the night. Whilst its filmic debt is obviously strong, the black spaces of the pages also remind us that Goldin’s slideshows are, too, films made out of stills. The statis of each frame is heightened here on the page, the result being a reinforcement of the artist’s use of photography as memoir, as preservation, as a talisman against loss. And now, in place of the soundtracks, one hears whirring, whistling and voices. They are different voices, all telling the same story: of passages in and out of addiction; of families lost and found; of romantic obsession until death. There is much pain and heartache to be found here – but also, when it is most needed, love, tenderness and strength.

6. Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen, Byker
Dewi Lewis

Dewi Lewis’ republishing of Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen’s Byker (1983), a very distinct and authentic snapshot of British cultural life during the 1970s, feels timely in this moment of heightened social inequality and reflection. It is of course a testament to the incredible depth and power of this body of work, which documents the Finish photographer’s deeply-lived encounters with the terraced, working-class suburb of Newcastle; it was amongst the steep cobbled streets and smoking chimney pots that Konttinen found home. Whilst Byker was destined for redevelopment and eventually bulldozed (along with Konttinen’s own house) to make way for the Byker Wall estate, the photographs do not actively court the reader’s sentimental responses. Instead, they bear an intensity of living and loving, of struggle, resilience and, above all, community. The photographs have been handled with tremendous respect, exemplarily reproduced in tritones and re-sequenced alongside local anecdotes, many of which are published for the first time. Although Konttinen’s introductory text yields wonderful insightfulness, sensitivity and wit, it is her eye that exhibits the greatest empathy. It is perhaps an empathy that only photography, with its ability to, even decades later, relay and multiply a human consciousness, could elicit.

7. Sayuri Ichida, Absentee
the(M) éditions / IBASHO

Looking for the ties that connect the photographs contained within Sayuri Ichida’s Absentee is like groping for Ariadne’s mythical thread, until one realises that the seeking is essentially its point. Though oftentimes elaborate, the book does not feel overproduced or too precious; it is a consummate piece of bookmaking, ranking amongst the finest and most memorable of the collaborations between the(M) éditions and IBASHO. Ichida has reworked the traditional category of elegy (in this case, in honour of her mother) to impressive effect, inviting a variety of viewpoints which can only be gained through act – or process – of feeling. Feather-light in one’s palm, the book is comprised of multiple Japanese bound gatefolds that house four-image sequences. They reveal urban structures, scenes from nature and Ichida’s own body, inverted in silver inks on black matte paper, eliciting an elemental, even ritualistic, experience. For all of Ichida’s emphasis on touch and surface, the book’s dualities – between positive and negative, exteriority and interiority – seem to constantly point, in a very visceral way, to something much deeper. In the strange, tense symmetries of worlds Ichida has sketched, what really comes through is the power of their being in a book: frail but immovable.

8. Samuel Fosso, African Spirits
Sébastien Girard

The latest gem to emerge from the printing workshop of Sébastien Girard is African Spirits by Samuel Fosso, a most enigmatic artist who, since his early experimentations in performative self-portraiture in his Bangui studio in the 1970s, has never stood still. Although it is, in design terms, a comparatively restrained follow-up to the dashing Studio Photo Nationale (2021), Girard’s decision to print Fosso’s legendary series as a newspaper-format risograph publication is characteristically wise, for here is a work concerned with the media, celebrity and the history of representation. Fosso references and restages (or moreover parodies) famous photographs – including mugshots, press images and studio portraits – of prominent personalities of 20th century Black liberation movements, the most iconic of which is Carl Fischer’s 1968 Esquire cover showing Muhammad Ali impaled by arrows, martyred as St. Sebastian. We also find Fosso self-styled as Aimé Césaire and Léopold Sédar Senghor, two principal thinkers of Négritude. Indeed, the posture of revolt – a voice of raising up, a voice of freedom, a voice for the retrieved spirit – propels these performances. What’s more, through his extension of photography’s role in the construction of myths – this book only the latest chapter – Fosso reminds us that what’s past is always prologue.

9. JH Engström, The Frame
Pierre von Kleist

Believing in man today is complicated; what is left to admire, desire or envy? There has been no shortage of meditations on masculinity in recent years, but JH Engström’s, which is entitled The Frame, stands out for its scope and sincerity. The daunting exterior of this black, almost bible-like, book belies what lies inside: three-decades-worth of portraits of the men in Engström’s life; trans and cis, naked and bruised, desperate and vulnerable, sometimes violent but never fantasy (someone else’s, theirs, his). Divided into roughly-edged chapters, which either begin or end with a portrait of the artist himself, the rhythmic sequencing is, whilst skilfully sustained and indeed thematised, totally unconcerned with the language or logic of a single, sovereign gender. On the contrary, these broken faces find themselves mirrored by the frost-shattered, ice-aged rocks of Engström’s native region of Värmland in Sweden, which bracket – or frame – this book, which is really more like a refracted self-portrait. The effect is startlingly existential. What Engström invites us to find is the anima within. This is, after all, what makes us human.

10. Meghann Riepenhoff, Ice
Radius Books / Yossi Milo

Volatility, tactility, mercurial, the sublime: these are the words that come to mind when perusing Meghann Riepenhoff’s exquisite Ice. Although it is delivered with an immaculate blind debossed cover bearing frosted imprints, the imagery within is anything but. By producing cyanotypes through an unpredictable process of physically tracing ice – in varied temperature degrees, water types and crystalline structures – onto photographic paper, Riepenhoff has clearly conducted herself with great integrity, putting herself at the mercy of natural forces in an era when human urges to contain the environment have caused unprecedented destruction to our planet. Because her prints are left unfixed – in a state of flux from the point of their conception – their being reproduced on the page naturally limits their inherent drama. Nevertheless, it is by way of the book’s cumulative effect that Riepenhoff successfully evokes the fluidity in the frozen. These are the words which title the beautiful text by Rebecca Solnit, who writes: ‘… there was the yearning of blue, which is itself the colour of yearning because it is the colour of distant things…’ Riepenhoff reminds us that they are also the blues that kicked off the photobook in 1843: the blues of Anna Atkins. How wonderful it is to see her legacy live on in such spellbinding ways.♦


Alex Merola is Assistant Editor at 1000 Words. 

Images:

1-Cover of Carmen Winant, Arrangements (Self Publish, Be Happy/Images Vevey, 2022). Courtesy the artist, Self Publish, Be Happy and Images Vevey.

2-Tearsheet from Carmen Winant, Arrangements (Self Publish, Be Happy/Images Vevey, 2022). Courtesy the artist, Self Publish, Be Happy and Images Vevey.

3-‘Mattias. Study for The Night Porter (1974)’ from Collier Schorr, August (MACK, 2022). Courtesy the artist and MACK.

4-Detail from Zoe Leonard, Al río / To the River (Hatje Cantz, 2022). Courtesy the artist, Galerie Gisela Capitain and Hauser & Wirth.

5-From Kikuji Kawada, Vortex (Akaaka, 2022). Courtesy the artist and Akaaka.

6-From ‘The Other Side’ (1992–2021) in Nan Goldin, This Will Not End Well (Steidl/Moderna Museet, 2022). Courtesy the artist, Steidl and Moderna Museet.

7-‘Kids with Collected Junk Near Byker Bridge, Byker’ (1971) from Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen, Byker (Dewi Lewis, 2022). Courtesy the artist and Dewi Lewis.

8-‘#207’ (2021) from Sayuri Ichida, Absentee (the(M) éditions/IBASHO, 2022). Courtesy the artist, the(M) éditions and IBASHO.

9-‘Self-Portrait (Muhammad Ali)’ (2008) from Samuel Fosso, African Spirits (Sébastien Girard, 2022). Courtesy the artist and Sébastien Girard.

10-From JH Engström, The Frame (Pierre von Kleist, 2022). Courtesy the artist and Galerie Jean-Kenta Gauthier.

11-From Meghann Riepenhoff, Ice (Radius Books/Yossi Milo, 2022). Courtesy the artist, Radius Books and Yossi Milo.

1000 Words

Writer Conversations

#6 Daniel C. Blight

Daniel C. Blight is a writer based in London and Lecturer in Photography (Historical & Critical Studies) at University of Brighton. Recent work includes “Ways of Seeing Whiteness” in George Yancy: A Critical Introduction, eds. Kimberley Ducey, Joe R. Feagin and Clevis Headley (Rowman & Littlefield, 2021) and The Image of Whiteness: Contemporary Photography and Racialization (SPBH Editions/Art on the Underground 2019). He is currently working on a monograph, Photography’s White Racial Frame (Bloomsbury 2024), and slowly completing a PhD in the faculty of Social Science and Public Policy at King’s College London. In April 2022, he will be Visiting Scholar, Department of Art and Art History, University of Utah, Salt Lake City.

At what point did you start to write about photographs? 

I developed an interest in photography via post-rock and “electronica” album covers. The cityscape on the front of Fugazi’s End Hits (1998), the obliquely angled road sign on Hoover’s The Lurid Traversal of Route 7 (1994), or the pixelated “terrain” on the cover of Autechre’s Incunabula (1993) LP, which I took to be extra-terrestrial Swindon as I walked its streets, mashed at night, strangely under-stimulated. 20 years ago in that place, I made digital photographs and electronic music as part of a photography foundation course at Swindon College because, having quit my A Levels to become a pizza chef, it was the only route to university, an overdraft and a student loan.

My work then involved software editing digital photographs into CD artwork for the glitchy music I was making. I recorded the mechanical sounds of analogue camera shutters, cutting them up and sequencing them into drumbeats, and then manipulating tonally-inverted photographs of lightning to visually represent the glitches. It was as bad as it sounds. One of the compositions I completed then was titled Just take the fucking photo. This was the first time I wrote about photographs – or should that be “photography”? – eventually repeating the phrase into a microphone and layering the recorded voice track over camera shutter rhythms constructed in Fruity Loops, an audio sequencer of sorts.

My first experience of writing about photography is a species of repetitive song lyric: “Just take the fucking photo”, I wrote aggressively, over and over, on a piece of note paper in my teenage bedroom. In a sense, all my writing about photography since then has been born from the frustration captured in that phrase. Although I like to think I’m able to work with more “complex” forms of writing nowadays, there is a large part of me that appreciates teenage quotidian writing, an adolescent poetic writing, a writing apart from the perceived maturity of scholarly aptitude and normative citation practices.

On reflection, I feel there is something to learn from my frustration. What if my writing is frustration? What if I was supposed to be a writer not because I had anything interesting to say, but so that I could enjoy all the other things I do because my frustrations were absorbed by and confined to my writing? I count myself lucky that I have figured out how to confine frustration. I’ve sealed it into a sort of literary defeat.

What is your writing process?

‘Process’ sounds like such a clinical and serious word to describe how I write, although I like the sound of one of the word’s synonyms — ‘unfolding’. A procrastinatory unfolding. I enjoy reducing myself to a state of under-stimulation over a period of two or three days. Eventually, boredom compels me to write. At that point the smallest thing feels new, wakes me up and gets me excited again. Often cooking, or fixating on a particular image in a book.  

I spend most of my time not writing. I find this a necessary part of the process leading up to the act itself (which is both a struggle and a performance to myself – can I do it? Should I do it? Will it work?). Things don’t unfold this way deliberately. Most of the time, I just can’t write. It seems too hard, too difficult. I think coming to terms with this is the most important part of my writing in a philosophical sense. I like the idea, more and more, of slow writing, and of selective writing.

The rest is practical: reading, mostly on a screen, apart from poetry which I tend to read on paper. Looking at pictures in printed books. Making mental notes. Forgetting things. Then eventually I write something when I feel I can. I collect quotations when I’m reading. When I’m writing essays, I often use these to structure text. I write before them, after them, in the middle of them to disrupt them, and to see what happens. I largely write in incoherent, broken fragments which I call paragraphs. I can’t always be clear because I don’t really know what I mean. I call this writerly honesty. I’m trying to describe a feeling using words that are always wrong.

Since 2013, I’ve been making visual cues to aid my writing. I call these Image Reconstructions and they are collages comprised of visual symbols that summarise the subjects of texts I am working on. I collect images in folders as I research and read: the QAnon “logo”, a photograph of some weed, a Creative Commons image of oil burning on the surface of the sea, a .png of a pizza held up by a white hand. I then group them together into meaningful compositions (see the image nug, 2021). The rest is a weird form of visualisation in which images come to life through speculation, appropriation, trying things out to visually represent meaning. Sometimes I can’t finish the essay, or the poem, and it instead becomes an image reconstructed from the practice of writing. Sometimes I can’t finish the image. Most of the time nothing is finished, and nothing gets made, and that’s OK too.  

It sounds a cliché – and I hate the empty verbosity of the conceptual framing – but I prefer to write with photographs rather than about or, in the oft-repeated phrase, on them. I produce an essay plan using images and quotations in close and strange juxtapositions. I look for resonances, contradictions, parallels. My habits have been reformed by The Virus and by family life, particularly children. I no longer feel a need to write all the time. Most of the time I just don’t want to. I’d rather read or listen. I write towards happiness and in the direction of freedom. I’m much more comfortable with that cliché.

Can you expand on what draws you to slow writing? Is there an act of refusal, a determination to take time, in this? You’ve begun to focus much more on longer form writing over the short form.

In a sense, this isn’t true because I write many more short poems than I do long essays. Perhaps a poem a month, and two or three essays a year? I politely decline most invitations to write short form for magazines and newspapers nowadays. There are other people much better placed to comment on new projects and exhibitions than I am. There are certain spaces I don’t wish to occupy any longer. I am also disillusioned with the way badly paid short form essay writing for magazines and newspapers forces me to focus on some specious idea of right now, responding to “current practice”. Slow writing is something that the world of photography magazines can’t contend with, but they need it badly. Slow writing is a needed practice in academia too, in which scholars are forced to produce at pace to satisfy the various “excellence frameworks” they are compelled to adhere to. How many journal articles do I need to get a promotion? Are we talking 10 mediocre articles, or one bad boy one? Who gets to decide whether I’m any good or not?

If “right now” is both a fashionable position culturally speaking, and a global catastrophe unfolding in strikingly visual terms (images of the sea on fire, shamanic QAnon fascists storming the Capitol, Boris Johnson talking shit on the BBC), I’m looking to respond more slowly certainly. Part of what capitalism’s recently rejuvenated intersection with fascism requires of us is that we keep up. Move fast and stay relevant! I’m not the first person to say we should refuse that. I want to go back to a time when I could walk the streets stoned at night slowly with nowhere to be. I want to make pizzas for minimum wage again. But this time they’re texts, and I get to bake them for longer than four minutes. Unfortunately weed makes me puke now, so I can’t smoke, and I earned more money working as a waiter at Pizza Express than I do as an academic.

Slow writing is a form of epistemic protest. It says to me: stop producing knowledge habitually until you understand your own epistemic standpoint. Or: work to produce a kind of counter-knowledge that supports other people. Slowing down is me trying to be less selfish. Perhaps the “knowledge” I possess is a form of what Charles W. Mills called ‘white ignorance’ before he recently passed. I have thought about this in more detail in a chapter for a new book on the philosopher George Yancy. In that essay, I consider his work, his excellence, and myself, as I am.

What are the questions or problems that motivate your writing? 

I write to edge away from the disappointment of my social self. To be white, and to be a man, is in two interlinked ways to be a problem. Therefore, the superficial problem of my work is me, and by extension the fundamental problems are white supremacy and the elite white male dominance system. I write in the hope that I can become someone else, someone better. I am in my own way, tripping over my own feet. This is a process of discovery in which my social self is cracked open; breached to form a sort of aperture. I want to write despite myself. I have come to understand this more recently as a willingness on my part to become vulnerable, to fail publicly, to not care about the consequences of doing so. It’s only through a kind of risk that anything meaningful can come of my writing. The trouble is risk is predominantly about failure. My process is just that, then: attempt to escape myself; fail. A strangely productive failure.

Isn’t it true that writers can’t name themselves? My writing began with frustration, and its continuation now involves wondering whether what I write next will result in another “race traitor!” death threat via email. Yet, with this violence in mind, how can I not name myself? I am a white writer coming to terms with what it’s like to unravel in words. I think all white writers should try this. This is not a melancholy unfolding though, and it is not one that requires any emotional sympathy, nor undue attention. I am deeply happy. I am filled with love for other people’s writing, other people’s poetry, other people – for the first time in a long time.

What kind of reader are you? 

I read long essays quickly and short poems slowly. Then I read the same essays slowly and have no time left to read poems. I read with admiration, curiosity, frustration. I read searching for something I never find.

What do you go looking for in your reading?

I look for a mix of deep exegesis and personal reflection. Often one leads to the other. It’s sort of like asking what I go looking for in food. How much time do I have? Am I in the mood to cook? Do I have a Tesco lasagne I can put in the microwave, squirt extra ketchup on top of, and dip chunks of garlic bread into? Or am I in a Michelin Star pub for my birthday rinsing it hard on my credit card? When I read, I gorge uncertainly, and its often done in such a way that makes me feel I’m avoiding rather than looking for things. I’m avoiding writers like me. I do think “What do I want to read?” before I read sometimes, but it’s not like I always have much choice when one article takes me via a hyperlink to another, over and over again. I’ve read so much, partially. I keep trying to read in print again, and then I start missing all the hyperlinks, the distractions on Wikipedia, the stopping and searching for things I don’t understand in journal articles on the University of Brighton’s online library.

I enjoy reading my student’s essays. They teach me how to read and they teach me how to write. It’s a wonderful thing, teaching. I used to conceptualise it as something I did to feed myself so I could concentrate on my writing, but now it’s a thing I do to actively learn. I read with pleasure in a community of student-scholars. This year, I will work with students to encounter racial whiteness in reading photographs. This is a process in which we “let go” of the white logic and white racist visual foundations that underpin the western colonial history of photography and instead turn our attention to forms of white uncertainty. Irrespective of our individual racial identifications, we all work together in a white university. In a white space. In white complicity pedagogy, this involves de-centring forms of “knowing” and instead centres notions of white humility (“I do not know”/”I am not sure”) and white listening – learning to listen while giving up on needing to feel like a “good” white scholar. I take my lead here from educators such as Barbara Applebaum, Stephen Brookefield and Zeus Leonardo.

Reading should always be paired with writing. This doesn’t necessarily mean essay writing, but perhaps a simpler form of writing notes, questions or incomplete fragments. I encourage students to read in such a way that excites them to produce fragments of text, as roughly as they like. We then work through those texts together and make sense of them in critical relation to scholarly conventions. What results is a form of photo-textual essay practice; a manner of writing with photographs in order to produce literary essays that respond both to a history of the essay form in photographic cultures, and importantly, embodied, reflexive and phenomenological approaches to images derived from methods in visual sociology. It sounds technical, but it’s exciting, in practice, in the classroom.

How significant are theories and histories of photography now that curation is so prominent? 

The sort of canonical history of photography taught in British Higher Education is undergirded by the white logic of European settler colonialism. This isn’t discussed nearly enough, and it has a huge impact on what is often falsely named the history of photography and how we theorise its structures and meanings (in this way history and theory go hand in hand). We desperately need new historical and theoretical frameworks because the European invention of photography from the 1830s – which is not the first invention of photography, but rather the most convenient white inauguration – is founded upon the same intellectual traditions that justify the genocide of Indigenous, Black and Brown people the world over. After Gerald Horne, let’s call this tradition the apocalypse of settler colonialism, and, after Charles W. Mills, let’s call it the white ignorance of epistemological individualism in the historical project of racial liberalism. In short, white supremacy continues to govern the world at large, and all cultural phenomena including photography falls within its scope and power.

More precisely, the European invention of photography, which is to say the “fixing” of images by such figures as William Henry Fox Talbot in the middle of the 19th century (some 200 years after the invention of racial whiteness), is a visual project that inherits the social dynamics of what Joe R. Feagin calls the white racial frame and extends this into particular types of “image-schema”. This image-schema, which I am theorising in a new book, Photography’s White Racial Frame, can be described in several ways. It is first and foremost a mental frame, or what has been described differently as the colonial gaze by Frantz Fanon and Edward Said. More precisely, this mental frame is named white scopophilia by George Yancy, and a regime of seeing by Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks. These concepts share a common truth: that with the invention of racial whiteness came what might be called a psychology of colonial picturing. This is a form of white imaginary, which is of course etymologically to say white imagery. We white people look at the world through what Stuart Hall called a white eye, and we do so full of an often-unconscious desire for power, wealth and knowledge. Photography is the great inheritor of this perceptual frame, this image-schema and its false narrative of white violence then and white innocence now. Thus, I theorise the European history of photography as a white racist visual dynamic full of emancipatory potential in the hands of those artists that choose to work against it. Like racial whiteness, photography can be abolished.

Understanding the significant violence of this visual framework should result in nothing less than seeing the world in an entirely new way, and as I have contended, seeing one’s white self in an entirely new way. If curation is the care and organisation of cultural phenomena, then in a white supremacist world it either stands within or without the white racial frame. The practice of curating is an historical and theoretical positioning which takes place in relation to the history of the western museum defined as (what Dan Hicks calls) ‘white infrastructure’. So, the question becomes, why is curating now so prominent? And for me, the answer has to do with the false choices racial whiteness continues to offer curators (remember, everyone is a curator, but it is most often white people that declare themselves so or who are awarded the title institutionally). To curate is first to possess knowledge, and then to make choices based on that knowledge resulting in some objects getting attention and others not. Possession is privilege. Knowledge is racialised, gendered, made bodily. Which curatorial bodies are most prominent? Ones like mine. Like racial whiteness, white curators can be abolished too.

Your book The Image of Whiteness, examining photography’s construction and perpetuation of racialised hierarchy, felt like it could have been an exhibition, but existed in book form. Was that a choice you made, or does it reveal something about the spaces of writing and display?

The Image of Whiteness is visually intrusive and conceptually shocking for lots of white people – certainly if encountered as an exhibition, in a public museum space (white infrastructure). I owe this to the artists featured. They have done the work and I have brought it together. I think it would be interesting if there was an accompanying events programme in which people could thrash out some of the ideas in the project. George Yancy might deliver the keynote on the question of symbolic white death – he’s an excellent public speaker – and I could be available as white visitors feel more and more uncomfortable, just like I do every day as I try to learn about my white self. I would be there to care for them (the curator’s role), not to make them feel good but to make them understand that it’s OK to feel uncomfortable and confused by something we are only just coming to understand: that being white is to embody a violent lie; that the exhibition is teaching us that we have been lied to, and that we are upholding that lie and that what we need do is look, and then see differently, and listen attentively. That’s what I hope The Image of Whiteness is about: rendering white people uncomfortable so that we can be challenged and then learn. We white people need to learn to feel – to racially empathise – and then to self-disclose. I’m not interested in books or exhibitions that revive whiteness or make it “good”. That is an impossibility. A paradoxical space of both white projection and display.

White self-disclosure starts from the position that there is ‘no contradiction in whites working as anti-racists and their being racist,’ as Stephen Brookefield writes. So, I start from that position in my own work, and when I encounter white denialists – those individuals socialised white that have unfortunately still not realised their racial whiteness has very little to do with their skin colour – I seek to help them through a form of creative care. Imagine if that could be communicated to an exhibition audience? This is not to say white viewers should be told they are racist upon entry to the museum, but that they will surely come to realise to be white is to be racist by the time they leave. The exhibition becomes a form of white abolitionist narrative disclosure in which white people are prompted to learn through a process of looking and seeing differently.

Whatever The Image of Whiteness is, I hope it is not a mere anti-racist declaration. I am interested in avoiding spaces of epistemic comfort for myself and other white people. I want to create thankful spaces in which abolitionist practice is uncomfortable and ongoing. An anti-white social ontology requires a complex theory of practice that understands the space between white agency and white social structure as a fissure in which a series of epistemic possibilities might be revealed. My writing, and any exhibition making that follows it, is about revealing in this way. I reject error avoidance as I will make errors as I go. In a sense to be white is to be a human error, so what would it be like to accept that glitch in the social matrix from the get-go? What if instead of conceptualising my work as “good” I call it an error – which is different from a mistake – and brings me all the way back to where I started: frustration, erratum, not writing until I have something to say, or rather, something to do.

What qualities do you admire in other writers?

I admire anyone who has the courage to write against themselves.    

What texts have influenced you the most?

Here’s what is influencing me this week: Simple Men (2019) by Rachael Allen; To Revive a Person is No Slight Thing (2016) by Diane Williams; White Self-Criticality Beyond Anti-Racism: How Does it Feel to Be a White Problem? (2014), edited by George Yancy; Weird Fucks (1980) by Lynne Tillman; Black Bodies, White Gold (2021) by Anna Arabindan-Kesson.

What is the place of criticality in photography writing now?

Criticism gets me in trouble. Always with white people in positions of power, which is reason enough to keep getting in trouble.♦

Further interviews in the Writer Conversations series can be read here.


Writer Conversations is edited by Lucy Soutter (University of Westminster) and Duncan Wooldridge (Camberwell College of Arts, University of the Arts London), upon the invitation of Tim Clark (1000 Words and The Institute of Photography, Falmouth University). 

Images:

1-Portrait of Daniel C. Blight. © Idris Khan OBE

2-Book cover of Daniel C. Blight, The Image of Whiteness (SPBH Editions and Art on the Underground, 2019)

3-Daniel C. Blight, 010 (After Julia Margaret Cameron, The Echo, 1868 (2021), from A selection of white people’s expressions from the great period of realism organised into a grid and positioned in such a way that they can smell a lemon. Photographs on archival paper, walnut frame © Daniel C. Blight

4-Daniel C. Blight, nug (2021), from Image Reconstructions. Photographs on archival paper, walnut frame © Daniel C. Blight

5-LP cover of Autechre, Incunabula (1993) © Warp Records

Top 10 (+1)

Photobooks of 2021

Selected by Alessandro Merola and Tim Clark

As the year draws to a close, an annual tribute to some of the exceptional photobook releases from 2021 – selected by Editor in Chief, Tim Clark, with words from Assistant Editor, Alessandro Merola.

1. Gilles Peress, Whatever You Say, Say Nothing
Steidl

What Gilles Peress has achieved with Whatever You Say, Say Nothing – unsurprisingly shortlisted for the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize 2022 – is astonishing, and surely must rank amongst the highest feats in photobook history. In some 2,000 pages, sprawled across two volumes as well as an almanac entitled Annals of the North, the esteemed French photographer embarks on a visual and philosophical exploration of the ethno-nationalist conflict that engulfed Northern Ireland from the late 1960s to 1998. With no beginning, middle or end, Peress’ tale defies the orthodoxies of linear narrative by orchestrating 22 semi-fictional “days”: days that recycle, over and over, the rituals of violence, protest and grieving; days in which the carnage becomes inseparable from the quotidian. That said, whilst Peress exploits photography’s “reality effect” to register the material specifics of the Troubles, it’s in the work’s accumulation that the strife operates synecdochically. For it expresses – like a photographic Finnegans Wake (1939) – what is elsewhere – or, rather, everywhere: the simultaneity of good and evil; the push and pull of power; the helicoidal unravelling of time. That this work speaks to such profound, ineffable ideas is a testament to the potential of the photobook when it finds its upper limits. And, indeed, few could have executed this unison between content, structure and form so flawlessly as Gerhard Steidl has: a book of all books, unlike anything that has come before.

2. Gregory Eddi Jones, Promise Land
Self Publish, Be Happy Editions

With the mounting complexities which define our times requiring increasingly sophisticated modes of storytelling, it is exciting to witness an artist invent something so utterly imaginative that it makes us see the world anew. Promise Land, by Gregory Eddi Jones, is one such example. In this whirling, poetic mashup, Jones riffs off T. S. Eliot’s apocalyptic epic, The Waste Land (1922), of course penned in the wake of the First World War and influenza pandemic. Aligned with Eliotean tactics of appropriation, Jones’ sequences are comprised of stock photographs: consumerist fantasies which, for the artist, not only bespeak the excesses of contemporary culture, but represent photography in its most hollow, debased and regurgitative state. Through a profusion of détournements – cropping, compositing, inverting, inkjet hacking and digital retouching – Jones makes implicit values explicit, inviting readers to re-evaluate the relationship between photography and truth, or sever their ties altogether. Here is a work that is bold, irreverent and oftentimes chilling, not least for the bookending displays of a composer waving his wand before a spell-bound audience; suggestions that there may be as much method as madness in this heap of broken images.

3. Hoda Afshar, Speak The Wind
MACK

From start to close – and vice versa – Hoda Afshar’s Speak The Wind entrances with its eloquent rendition of zār: the wind spirits which, for millennia, have shaped the topography and traditions of the islanders of the Strait of Hormuz, an oil passageway joining the Arabian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman. They are said to inflict disease, placated only through ritual dialogues conducted with the gusts themselves. Situated somewhere between the sacred and the baleful, Afshar’s incantatory, cinematically-paced photographs do not so much conjure a people but channel their psychic entanglement with place. Punctuating the book are bound pages depicting wind-sculpted mountains; they form pockets that conceal islanders’ drawings and writings describing their experiences of being possessed by zār. Afshar’s dimensional switches cleverly rupture photography’s predispositions for certainties; those which can be clutched, seen. It’s easy to get swept up by these pages, to concede to forces greater than us, yet Afshar also empowers readers like she does her subjects. Setting foot on twinkling black sands, or setting sail through seas as red as blood, we are ultimately met by a crossroads: between reality and fiction; between this world and another.

4. Tarrah Krajnak, El Jardín de Senderos Que Se Bifurcan
Dais Books

The breakthrough of Tarrah Krajnak has been one of the most significant of the year, and the artist’s nuanced handling of archival material is on full view in this precious book. Borrowing the title and parable blueprint of Jorge Luis Borges’ short story, The Garden of Forking Paths (1941), it plays a deep concern with the circumstances surrounding her birth: amidst the terror of Peru’s military dictatorship in the 1970s, Krajnak’s biological mother travelled to Lima to work as a maid; she was raped, and gave birth to Krajnak in 1979, ‘the year of the orphans’. Instead of attempting to resolve these personal and political narratives, Krajnak invents mothers, imagines lineages and initiates what she calls ‘misremembrance’. The asymmetrical sequences pull our attention in fractured ways, moving through re-photographed images from political magazines, oral testimonies of women born in 1979 and the artist’s interactions with projections in which temporalities enmesh like palimpsests. Krajnak’s sharp prose and deliberate mistranslations bestow an added intensity to this book’s reckoning with subjectivity as much as history, all the while collapsing the boundaries between them. With El Jardín de Senderos Que Se Bifurcan, Krajnak shows that affinity can be innate, even historical, persisting in the psyches of those separated by space and time yet linked by collective knowledge, memory and trauma. Theirs is a storied history, seen through a glass, darkly.

5. Catherine Opie
Phaidon

Boasting lavish printing and impeccable production values, Phaidon’s survey of Catherine Opie’s prodigious output is of the highest order and entirely befitting of one of the great chroniclers of this century. There is much to be praised for the ways in which over 300 photographs, spanning 40 years, have been mapped, not chronologically, but thematically across three chapters: People, Place and Politics. Yet, the lines which delineate them are almost non-existent. One spread pairs a headshot of Pig Pen (Opie’s long-time friend and subject) donning a fake moustache with a photograph of a lesbian couple seated in their backyard with arms interlocked; another the iconic ‘Self-Portrait/Cutting’ (1993) with a literal manifestation of the domestic scene carved-out on Opie’s back. They are juxtapositions that steer us towards the central paradox of Opie’s oeuvre: for all its supposed extremity in staging the queer body as a site of self-actualisation, there is, at its heart, a yearning for the fundamental. Because, whether documenting human, ecological or architectural subjects, she never strays far from home, hence the tome’s modest, perfectly-judged cover, which displays the young artist photographing herself in the mirror alongside potted plants and a wood burning stove. Opie’s work feels vital; it always did.

6. Raymond Meeks, Somersault
MACK

Raymond Meeks’ very beautiful and affecting ode to ­his daughter, Abigail, is a charged companion piece to his much admired aubade, ciprian honey cathedral (2020). Through imperceptible yet tenderly convicted narrative shifts, Meeks unveils the inner-world of a young woman on the cusp of adulthood and leaving home. He coaxes out Abigail’s emotional subtleties in a way perhaps only a parent could; she is alternately timid, whimsical, inquisitive and fearless. However, Meeks honours the guarded mysteries of adolescence, too. Abigail becomes, for her father, a horizon where intimacy and loneliness converge, as mirrored by Meeks’ sublime evocation of the wilderness that envelops their home, delicately tethered by train tracks, telephone wires and wilting daisies. His impossibly lucid visions crackle with longing throughout until we reach the parting words of Abigail herself, who recalls the innocent daydream of her younger self: ‘She wants to climb on a train and go where it takes her.’ The grace of Somersault is to measure distance whilst recognising that few distances are ever fixed.

7. Zora J Murff, True Colors (or, Affirmations in a Crisis)
Aperture

Where Zora J Murff ’s previous book, At No Point in Between (2019), takes as its subject the historically Black neighbourhood of North Omaha, Nebraska, his new book is nation-wide in scope. Beneath the swirling surface of True Colors (or, Affirmations in a Crisis) – currently displayed in exhibition form at Webber Gallery, London – lies a provocative meditation on America: its fragile bonds, elective affinities and colonial legacies. From police brutality and lynching to redlining and economic oppression, violence – fast and slow – runs through the veins of this book, so arresting in its dense web of image types: vernacular photography, newspaper clippings, Internet screenshots, video stills, landscapes, portraiture and more. Murff’s dexterous use of juxtaposition – often contextualising his own photographs alongside found and appropriated material – brings into focus the medium’s complicity in creating and maintaining racial hierarchies through the spectacle, commodification or erasure of Black bodies. This book serves as not only a complicated, oft-impenetrable ‘manual’ for coming to terms with the country’s past and navigating its present, but – true to its title – an autobiographical retelling of the epiphanies of a young Black artist finding his voice. And it’s emphatic.

8. Massao Mascaro, Sub Sole
Chose Commune

Sub Sole ­– a classical, richly-layered piece of narrative work which was recently exhibited in an elegant show curated by Fannie Escoulen at Fondation A Stichting, Brussels – follows after Homer’s The Odyssey (c.750 BC), traversing the coasts of the Mediterranean Sea. Its waters have, since time immemorial, been a crucible for voyages: some mythical and heroic; some real and tragic. Against the backdrop of such tense, intersecting contexts, Massao Mascaro furnishes our gaze across relics, architecture and the gestural relations between those who have sought refuge in Europe. These passing impressions are loosely arranged through nine visual poems, each introduced by a literary fragment which rolls along the bottom edges. The clarity of Mascaro’s frames; the lyricism of his sequences; the mesmerising gradations of Mediterranean light: all of them are a function of the casual grandeur of the world he has crafted. Yet, there is also a deeply disturbing cycle to this book, which ultimately feels suspended in time – timeless even – as intimated by the dialless clock that decorates its front cover, or the line from which its title derives: ‘There is nothing new under the sun’ (Ecclesiastes, 1:10).

9. Frida Orupabo
Sternberg Press and Kunsthall Trondheim

Although the subversive strategies of Frida Orupabo are best experienced via her Instagram feed, @nemiepeba, and on the gallery wall, this debut monograph affords a persuasive translation of her work in book form. The opening black pages (preceding incisive essays by Stefanie Hessler, Lola Olufemi and Legacy Russell) showcase Orupabo’s social media images, offering flashes of the artist’s extraordinary online archive – a ‘voluptuous trail of black continuity’, as Arthur Jafa called it – which she uses as a laboratory to make her paper collages. Whilst the inclusion of installation views here attests to the uneasy transitions these physical pieces undergo when they enter the gallery’s white space, it also evinces the manifold ways of seeing Black bodies that Orupabo compels. W. E. B. Du Bois’ notion of ‘double consciousness’ – that is, viewing oneself through the coloniser’s eyes – is undeniable, but so too is bell hooks’ ‘oppositional gaze’. Orupabo’s greatest triumph might be in the transmission of a wholly new consciousness, found in the unforgettable, searing stares of her feminine protagonists. Their pasts are fraught, but, in Orupabo’s curative hands, they embody the spirit of resistance that literally underpins them.

10. Alexis Cordesse, Talashi
Atelier EXB

The catalytic inquiry of Alexis Cordesse’s subtle entry into the vernacular genre is this: how does one evoke a tragedy that is paradoxically made invisible through too many images? The tragedy in question is the Syrian civil war, an ongoing conflict that has displaced over half the country’s population since 2011. Seeking an alternative to the sentimental dramatisations of war all too often circulated by mainstream media, Cordesse performs an act of collective remembrance by collating personal photographs belonging to those living in exile in Turkey, Germany and France; those who entrusted him enough to share the memories they hold dear. These artefacts have, like their owners, survived perilous journeys, for, if they had been seized as pieces of evidence at the borders, they might not have made it – and, indeed, many didn’t. Such is the precarity of Talashi, whose title translates from Arabic to Fragmentation, Erosion or Disappearance. Slowly weaving what ultimately becomes an ever-vanishing tapestry of home, this book quakes with a quiet, mournful energy: a reminder that though all photographs are silent, some are more silent than others.

+1. What They Saw: Historical Photobooks by Women, 1843–1999
10×10 Photobooks

The advent of photobook history – a still relatively new field of study – set in motion the books-on-photobooks. Although doing much to further our understanding of the medium, they have failed to redress the canon’s long-standing male biases. Enter What They Saw: Historical Photobooks by Women, 1843–1999. In the foreword to this important anthology, editors Russet Lederman and Olga Yatskevich stress the issues of access and funding or lack thereof; ergo their necessary expansion of what constitutes a “photobook” via the inclusion of albums, scrapbooks and maquettes. Indeed, marginalised histories are not just a question of gender, but of class and race too, hence the scarcity of, for example, African photobooks as opposed to books-on-Africa. The anthology countervails these factors through its signature turn: an interwoven, parallel timeline that charts publishing, magazine and small press events which might not have realised “photobooks” in the narrow, Western sense, but certainly influenced history. Many of these notations are incomplete, acting more like leads. Of course, one wishes that such a sole dedication to female authors did not have to exist. However, until it doesn’t, it prevails as a critical resource for discovering forgotten parts of photobook history: a history that is longstanding, forever rich yet still being written.♦


Alessandro Merola is Assistant Editor at 1000 Words.

Tim Clark is Editor in Chief at 1000 Words, and a writer, curator and lecturer at The Institute of Photography, Falmouth University. He lives and works in London.

Images:

1-Gilles Peress, Whatever You Say, Say Nothing (Steidl, 2021). Courtesy the artist and Steidl.

2-From the chapter ‘The Last Night’ in Gilles Peress, Whatever You Say, Say Nothing (Steidl, 2021). Courtesy the artist and Gilles Peress Studio.

3-‘Betterland’ (2019) from Gregory Eddi Jones, Promise Land (Self Publish, Be Happy Editions, 2021). Courtesy the artist and Self Publish, Be Happy Editions.

4-‘Untitled’ from Hoda Afshar, Speak The Wind (MACK, 2021). Courtesy the artist and MACK.

­5-‘Dead Ringer/Self-Portrait as Found Photograph (1979 Lima, Peru)’ (2018) from Tarrah Krajnak, El Jardín de Senderos Que Se Bifurcan (Dais Books, 2021). Courtesy the artist and Dais Books.

6-‘Joanne, Betsy & Olivia, Bayside, New York’ (1998) from Catherine Opie (Phaidon, 2021). Courtesy the artist and Regen Projects, Los Angeles; Lehmann Maupin, New York/Hong Kong/Seoul/London; Thomas Dane Gallery, London and Naples and Peder Lund, Oslo.

7-‘Untitled’ from Raymond Meeks, Somersault (MACK, 2021). Courtesy the artist and MACK.

8-‘Stole-On (or, I wanna be a world star)’ (2021) from Zora J. Murff, True Colors (or, Affirmations in a Crisis) (Aperture, 2021). Courtesy the artist and Webber Gallery, London.

9-‘Untitled’ from Massao Mascaro, Sub Sole (Chose Commune, 2021). Courtesy the artist and Chose Commune.

10-‘Untitled’ (2017) from Frida Orupabo (Sternberg Press and Kunsthall Trondheim, 2021). Courtesy the artist, Sternberg Press and Kunsthall Trondheim.

11-‘Untitled’ from Alexis Cordesse, Talashi (Atelier EXB, 2021). Courtesy the artist and Atelier EXB.

12-Spread from Christina Broom and Isabel Marion Seymour, Women’s Social and Political Union Postcards Album (self-published, 1908–14). Courtesy Museum of London.

Karla Hiraldo Voleau

Hola Mi Amol

Book review by Alice Zoo

In Karla Hiraldo Voleau’s new book Hola Mi Amol, the narrator – Karla herself, or a version of her – is often travelling on the back of a motorbike. She snaps pictures with her phone of the shadow cast by the bike, and the two people on it: herself, and the Dominican man she’s holding onto as they ride. The motorbike recurs again and again, despite the book being made up of her different experiences and acquaintance with seven different men. It is as good a metaphor as any for the freedom and spontaneity and dangerous thrill that runs through the project like shining thread – the trust required in allowing a stranger to transport you like this, on the back of a bike, away from home, without a helmet, your body pressed close against them.

On its surface, Hola Mi Amol, co-published by SPBH Editions and ECAL, is a relatively straightforward re-approaching of a personal history. Voleau grew up under the influences of her dual heritage: French on her mother’s side, Dominican on her father’s. When visiting Santo Domingo as a child, she was warned against straying outside her house, advised to treat Dominican men with suspicion: ‘I think sometimes my parents were just terrified I’d get pregnant with a “tigre” passing by.’ As an adult, Voleau returns to the island alone, without the admonishments of her family, and seeks out the people and places she was warned about. Her images illustrate encounters with these men, meeting them on the beach, or accompanying them back to their homes or motels, riding on their bikes, shooting portraits of them surrounded by greenery. Often the men are nude. She turns the lens on herself, too, most frequently in selfies with her subjects, but at times alone. The images are accompanied by a simple text, describing a very limited account of their encounters. We skate along it, accepting it as easily as the heat from the Caribbean sun.

When Voleau meets a witch, however, the narrative starts to feel more uncertain. A friend needs to visit to remove a curse; Voleau accompanies them, and finds herself asking for a love potion. Her childhood suspicion of the men hasn’t quite gone away. ‘I want to desire back,’ she says, ‘I want to believe them.’ The inclusion of this supernatural element unsteadies us, and other uncertainties from earlier on, hardly noticed at the time, start to rankle. The project has become a hall of mirrors that distorts the narrator, her subjects, and the viewer, too. In the book’s final pages, Voleau asks: ‘Do you still believe me? Have I been transformed into the character I was pretending to be?’ Voleau lies across a bed, eyes towards us, a challenge in them. So, then, what is the performance? What were we expected to believe, and what judgments have we formed? The images and text must be re-approached and, as we do so, they splinter.

Voleau’s visual approach appears to mimic the foundational principles of her project, one intended to be ‘more personal, more tender, more spontaneous’ than the connections her family allowed her to make in her youth. Much of the work is shot on a phone, and is rough and grainy as a result. The low resolution feels contemporary, like the way that images degrade the more they are reproduced and passed around online. This aesthetic is relaxed, undemanding, an ad hoc approach that only foments the project’s intense intimacy. Introducing a professional camera into a circumstance formalises it, or induces subjects to perform, no matter how much the photographer works to palliate this effect; but every contemporary subject is more at ease around a phone. There’s no need to be quite so guarded. The cover of the book shows a man’s back, covered in sand which sticks to the skin; inside, this motif is repeated, where sand clings to a torso, and later, to the palm of a hand, its coarse grain mimicking the grain of the images’ own rough resolution. However, as long as we are taken in by the effect of informality, we are blind to the highly formalised meta-techniques peppering the work. At one stage, we see an image of Julio’s back, and spliced below it is a photograph of the phone as it takes that same image. Yet if we can see the phone taking the picture, that means another one must have taken the second frame which we are now looking at. In this way, Voleau is calling attention to the presence of the camera, to the making of the image, even where she appears to have adopted the very apparatus that would allow itself to go unnoticed. In another image, we see her and Julio together from a distance, appearing to meet one another on the beach. If the phone is on a self-timer, then the meeting is staged. Not all is as it seems.

When Voleau goes looking for Julio in town, shortly after they meet, she is conscious of the assumptions of those watching her. ‘I could feel people assumed I was looking for sex.’ She makes photographs of the time they spend time together; he tells her his friends ‘advised him to fuck [her].’ Overleaf is a gloriously sensual portrait of him reclining, naked, his eyes closed, his penis semi-erect. Across the page, his trousers rest on a stone wall, discarded in dappling light. What does the viewer assume? What do we read in images taken at such close quarters, and especially when sex has been explicitly discussed? Later on, however, Voleau again uses the text to remind us that nudity does not have to be code for anything in particular. She asks Dimas, another subject, if he minds being naked, and he replies in Spanish that perhaps she should get naked with him. The photograph occurred while she was clothed, then, and his question suggests he is yet to see her naked. The transaction is photographic, not sexual, even if the content of the photograph hints at the latter. Everywhere the photographs and text misdirect us, only to reveal themselves in a different direction later on.

The book explores the potency of the female gaze, or the potency of turning the male gaze back against itself. She takes these Dominican men, in this place where ‘clichés of toxic masculinity’ abound, and makes beautiful, voluptuous images of them. Beyond these facts, her relationship to them is unclear. Throughout the book, whenever she directly quotes her subjects, it is in Spanish. As such, their presence within the work is set at that slight distance from the reader (presumed to be English-speaking, given that the bulk of the narrative is written in English). We can see Voleau’s subjects better than we can understand them, and we can see them close enough to count the individual drops of seawater that still cling to their chests on the beach. Towards the end of the book, when she seems to establish perhaps the book’s only genuine romantic or sexual relationship, with Denichel, she quotes him in English when he tells her, ‘I want to hold you.’ It is as though the truthfulness of their connection has brought him into the main language of the work: he is given words the reader is sure to understand. The genuine connection is given the clearest portrayal, until their short relationship ends, too.

Though Voleau has said that she wants to ‘put on display the brutal loneliness of our times,’ the book does not read as evidence of loneliness. It reads rather as evidence of the ease with which a transactional relationship can be established, and how frequently the surface of a thing can be misread as its totality. The narrative construction experiments with the expectations of the men it portrays, as well as the expectations of the viewer. It asks: what do we look for when we see a selfie taken by an attractive young woman in the ocean, her arms around a man? Yet the work doesn’t seek to answer the questions it raises about the performance of desire, or the suggestiveness of its images, nor does it judge the viewer for perhaps making judgments of their own; it merely holds a mirror up, the glass distorted, the reflection warping. The actual substance of her relationships, throughout Hola Mi Amol, is barely relevant. Voleau is a bold narrator flicking towards us jewel-like images, as though they were bait, and waiting to reel us in.

All images courtesy of the artist and Self Publish, Be Happy Editions. © Karla Heraldo Voleau / ECAL, University of Art and Design Lausanne


Alice Zoo is a photographer and writer based in London, working with national and international publications such as BBC News, the British Journal of Photography, and the Washington Post. She is also a freelance photo editor at the FT Weekend Magazine, and co-founder of Interloper magazine.

The Image of Whiteness:

Contemporary Photography and Racialization

Book review by Paul Halliday

We live in strange times. Recently, a senior British politician thought it acceptable to describe Muslim women wearing burkas as looking “like letterboxes”; this, after having previously described Black people as “Piccaninnies” with “watermelon smiles”, and gay men as “tank-topped bumboys”. It is quite possible that such overtly, Islamophobic, racist and homophobic utterances would have been considered unremarkable, had it not been that the speaker eventually became the British Prime Minister. All this, at a time of national crisis, the likes of which has not been seen during the post-war period. As Boris Johnson moved closer to seizing the reigns of parliamentary power, the more horrified the British Left became, as if watching a slow-motion car crash unfolding on a dimly lit CCTV screen, without any possibility of switching to pause or rewind.

On reading The Image of Whiteness: Contemporary Photography and Racialization, edited by Daniel C. Blight, one is immediately struck by the complexities around some of the contemporary uncertainties associated with the inexorable rise of alt-right identity politics and the sociological space of an imagined future. This book invites us to reconsider the normalcy of the now, set against a future that may materialise through the Baldwin-esque fire of engaged memory, truth-making, agency and utopianism. Many of the writers are concerned with the historical optics of concealment and revelation, and this has particular resonances for those artists and cultural thinkers working in the difficult and shape-shifting area of ‘race studies’.

The book is effectively a series of conversations about the crisis of being; of making sense of being, and of being made sense of. On the cover, we see a photograph of what appears to be a white middle-class family surrounded by the accoutrements of a consistent, effortlessly maintained comfort. In this group portrait, there are no apparent signs of austerity impacting on the sitters as we so often see within the lives of families living at the edge; the so-called ‘left behind’. The book starts with an engaging and insightful introductory essay by Blight outlining some of the core thematic and theoretical concerns of a wide range of interdisciplinary writers and cultural commentators approaching ‘race’ from a variety of critical perspectives.

In Blight’s chapter, he outlines his central thesis that the very discussion (or the absence of discussion) of ‘whiteness’ is predicated on two primary responses; the first being White Denial ‘in which certain white people won’t acknowledge whiteness at all, it being more conspiracy than concept to them, a mere apparition.’ He contrasts this with a second response, which he intriguingly terms Relative White Silence. Having worked in British Higher Education for well over two decades, this resonates with me, both in terms of my actual experiences of just how difficult it can be to have conversations with some academic colleagues utterly convinced of the rightness (moral or other) of their ideological positions around institutional cultures that promote structural inequality ‘because’, as Blight puts it, ‘white people can never be truly silent, finding it necessary to recapitulate their subjectivity at every turn – a form of taciturn behavior in which they simply won’t engage either positively or negatively, preferring to be silent so as to remain “moderate”.’

Therein lies one of the central questions all of the contributors respond to, namely, how does ‘society’ make sense of difference and acknowledge the relationships that exist in real concrete terms for people of colour? Relatedly, how might ‘whiteness’ itself be seen beyond the epidermal surface? This book doesn’t attempt to answer what whiteness is exactly; how could it and why should it? Instead, it focuses on the implicit tensions of denial and silence; of hidden power relations not spoken of, or indeed spoken to. Through a well-considered image edit and thoughtfully designed layout, an extended conversational encounter is played out. There are portraits by Buck Ellison of young white people in a variety of natural settings; an interior-designed sitting room, a verdant meadow, a gymnast balanced atop an American Civil War-era light field artillery piece. Elsewhere, Ken Gonzales-Day offers images of a lynching of an absent African American in the Deep South. Absent, because the artist has removed the mutilated and twisted body of the victim; but what still remains is the delighted, carnivalesque faces of those witnessing and contributing to the ritualised murder that underpinned the true relationship between Jim Crow and a post-slavery society based on the racial terror that William DuBois, Alice Walker, Ralph Ellison, Bell Hooks and Paul Gilroy have so eloquently written about.

There is a power and relevance in this, particularly for those researching and teaching photography and urbanism informed by social anthropology, socio-legal studies, cultural archaeology and art history. What excites me about this book is that it speaks to the conceptual foundation of interdisciplinarity, namely, that meaningful philosophical and epistemological insights may be found through practices working through ideas, pushing boundaries and being prepared to take risks. And there’s the rub. Interdisciplinarity, by it’s very nature is risky. It flies in the face of Bourdieusian Habitus in terms of its lack of ontological centeredness. As one works through this book, there is a strong sense of an indefatigable de-centering; of narratives around ‘race’ folding back, of then recapitulating within a written component, an interview, a visual element.

So we see in Nancy Burson’s images of Donald Trump, an all-seeing, all-powerful, assured white man comfortable within his own skin, transitioning through a series of colour shades and putative ‘races’, not entirely dissimilar to the colour classification system used to distinguish ‘true whites’ from ‘mulattos’ through to the outer edges of dark-skinned ‘negritude’. Suddenly Trump inhabits a different space, there, but not fully there. And of course, suffice to say, this continuum is arbitrary, relative, constructed, contested and imposed. Even now, decades after the big battles in social, cognitive and evolutionary anthropology have moved on from the conceptual prevarications and self-indulgences of experimentally and methodologically-challenged ‘race science’, there are the rumblings of a new awakening in eugenics research that promotes itself as dispassionate, objective, impartial, truthful and above all, ‘good for us.’

The white woman stands in front of a group of squatting Africans as seen in Michelle Dizon & Viet Le’s White Gaze. Education; it’s good for them. A Black man stands against a dark background draped with a Union flag in Abdul Abdullah’s, Self-portrait as an Ultra-nationalist, from the series Homeland. On his shirt is the legend “Fuck Off We’re Full”. Abdullah’s photograph confronts the white viewer with an image of difference that functions less as an experience of looking at or looking into a void; but rather challenges the viewer to think about the Black man as a projected mirror image drawing on a paradoxical innermost terror.

The conversations with David Roediger (The Advent of Whiteness), Yasmin Gunaratnam (The Borders of Whiteness), Claudia Rankine (On Blondness and Whiteness), Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa (Picturing the Invisible) and George Yancy (Symbolic White Death), are focused, philosophically rich and well-crafted explorations of what ‘race’ today means within academia, literature, art-making and curatorial practices. As such, this book will be highly relevant to those readers engaging with some of the core issues surrounding such a complex, controversial and, at times, incendiary field. On reading the texts, one senses a real and present urgency, and the conversations, whilst not offering any easy ‘answers’ to some of the most pressing cultural, historical and geo-political issues of the day; often point to the possibility of mediation, conciliation and engagement, contrasting with stark warnings about the sharp shift to the outer edges of nationalist extremism.

There is a telling moment where Blight, in his final conversation with George Yancy, recalls a question he had previously asked the philosopher, “what should white people do?”, to which Yancy responded: “Lay down and die. White people should die a symbolic death.” There is so much confusion, invective and entrenchment around how best to approach the issues of ‘white privilege’, ‘white fragility’, institutional denial, silence and complicity; and it does feel that this timely book will make a contribution towards engaging and bringing into sharper focus a much-needed paradigm shift around addressing ‘whiteness’, ‘otherness’ and ‘difference’ as constituent parts of our mundane, and often unremarkable lives. On reflection, I would suggest that rather than “lay down and die”, white people might consider doing something altogether more radical; they could engage differently with the history and cultural politics; they could reject denial, silence and complicity; they could stand up and live.

All images courtesy Self Publish, Be Happy Editions and Art on the Underground.


Paul Halliday is a photographer, filmmaker and urbanist based at Goldsmiths, University of London, where he convenes the MA Photography and Urban Cultures. After training in photojournalism and Fine Art film at LCC and Central St Martins, he studied social anthropology, art history and archaeology at Goldsmiths, and the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. A member of UPA – the Urban Photographers’ Association, a former Channel 4 film director and British Refugee Council Media Advisor, he now researches urban spaces, identities and material cultures through visual and written forms.

I-Broomberg & Chanarin, Shirley 1, from the series How to Photograph the Details of a Dark Horse in Low Light, 2012. Courtesy the artists and Lisson Gallery, London and New York.

II-Nate Lewis, Focused Heads, from the series Social Patterns, 2017. Courtesy the artist.

III-Ken Gonzales-Day, East First Street #2 (St. James Park), from the series Erased Lynchings, 2013. Courtesy the artist and Luis De Jesus Los Angeles.

IV-Nancy Burson, What If He Were: Asian, 2018. Courtesy the artist.

V-Nancy Burson, What If He Were: Black, 2018. Courtesy the artist.

VI-John Lucas & Claudia Rankine, Stamped, 2018. Courtesy the artists.

VII-Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Mirror Study (2140278), 2018. Courtesy the artist and team (gallery, inc.), New York; DOCUMENT, Chicago; and Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, Los Angeles.

VIII-Michelle Dizon & Viet Le, White Gaze (book spread), 2018. Courtesy the artists and Sming Sming Books.

IX-David Birkin, Detail (Death Row Gate), from the series Midnight Blue, 2018. Courtesy the artist.

X-Richard Misrach, Wall, east of Nogales, Arizona, from the series Border Cantos, 2015. Courtesy the artist and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco; Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Los Angeles.

XI-Libita Clayton, Untitled, from the series Quantum Ghost, 2019. Courtesy the artist.

XII-Libita Clayton, Untitled, from the series Quantum Ghost, 2019. Courtesy the artist.

XIII-Sutupa Biswas, Birdsong, 2004. Production still. 16mm lm transferred onto 2 DVDs. Dual-screen projection. Colour. No sound. Duration: 7’7”. Dimensions: variable. Commissioned by Iniva (London, UK) in collaboration with FVU (London, UK). Realised with the generous support of the AHRC (UK) and Chelsea College of Art and Design (UAL). Courtesy the artist.

Buck Ellison

Perfect White Family

Essay by Daniel C. Blight

Picture this if you can. The obsequious glow of white skin, in your house, at your work, in your mirror. If you “don’t see race”, see it now. See the thing you were taught to ignore. This signifier — this sallow epidermis — is what renders you invisible. Without your conscious permission, it places you at the unseen centre of what it is to be human. The ‘unmarked nature of whiteness derives from it being the centre point from which everything else can be viewed’, writes Steve Garner in his Whiteness as a kind of absence.[i]

White people are ghosts, invisible to themselves.

Photography is the social and technological history of “seeing white”. It finds its origins in the long 19th century and is often framed as a miraculous invention pioneered by the polymathic glow of elite European men. Sir William Henry Fox Talbot, the imperious Knight of the British Empire. Nicéphore Niépce, the son of a wealthy French lawyer. Photography then rapidly becomes the visual tool of European Imperialism — power, war, continued colonisation. At first, wealthy white men set out to photograph the world around them; “dark” things they find outside the centre of whiteness. White skin commands the signification of purity at home and black and brown “natives” form the subjugated portrait of the Grand Tour abroad.

Google Image search “family portrait”. The algorithm offers us a picture of white familial normativity. Perfect teeth, rose-tinted skin, wavy locks of hair. Race is also a question of class, of course. The same algorithm delivers us a picture of wealth: three of the first ten images in the search return a photograph of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge with their two young children. Immaculate teeth, snow white skin — human “perfection”. Where does this image come from, why does it appear so avaricious and white, and what happens if we turn it against itself?

Buck Ellison flips the antipathy of such an image on its side. His “perfect” family is an image of acknowledgement; one that references a history of art bound to white, upper-class familial representations, from Dutch Golden Age painting to contemporary photographs of monied elites. But it is also an image of critique; one which captures the currency of financial aspiration and success in the present-day West. The psychology of wealth-making underpins our consumerist drives to accrue money and the sense of power and independence that often comes with it. As a recent research paper, The Psychology of Wealth[ii] notes, ‘Individuals endorsing the beliefs that self-worth and net worth are intertwined, that success is defined by how much money they earn, and that money helps give their life meaning were more likely to have attained a high-income level.’ In short, if you believe you are a high-value person in social terms — if you are able to perform that kind of vanity — you stand more chance of earning highly, so the story goes. One might pose the question here: what is the relation between narcissism, wealth and cultural traits associated with the social construction of whiteness?

In a period of ludicrous economic inequality, the photographic representation of this type of domestic space provides a seldom-granted look in to a 1% culture which owns 90% of American dollars. Ellison visually documents this space, and at the same time renders it artifice, fiction. As Gillian Rose writes, domestic space is ‘connected to the public space of political, economic and cultural relations’[iii] and we might therefore interpret it as a space that is constructed. While reflecting a social class that is very real indeed, the subjects of Ellison’s photographs nonetheless perform their identities, assembling the meaning of the space around them. How might this function, as an image?

One of Ellison’s visual references is 17th century Dutch painting. As Martha Hollander notes in her An Entrance for the Eyes[iv], Dutch painters designed a complex and thoughtful series of signifiers into their images which in equal parts documented and allegorised the lives of the subjects featured. Ellison has made a series of photographs that work similarly to reveal various tropes and details. An American war of Independence drill manual, a First World War cannon, a diamond engagement ring, a phone call made or taken in the Ritz-Carlton.

The Prince Children, Holland, Michigan, is a semi-formal group portrait. The photograph gives us a number of venerably posh signifiers: flowery upholstered furniture (good taste); a large, welcoming fireplace lined with parquet woodwork (a warm and wholesome environment); plenty of pictures and books (knowledge is power); the boy wears his polo-neck tucked-in (smart, well bred) and the girls sit or stand in plaid skirts and knee-high hosiery (European cultural heritage, check). This type of family photography, as French writer Jean Sagne notes,

puts in place a system of signs, which translate
into the image of a class…. The conformity to
the model, the constraint imposed on the individual
to bend to [certain] rules can but translate into
a voluntary assimilation, a recognition of a social code.[v]

I cannot claim to know these people, but I am socialised to recognise the image they project for I have come to unconsciously desire it myself. As Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks shows in her Desiring Whiteness,[vi] whiteness is the ‘master signifier’ to which all other racial categories must be submitted. White people are thus lured towards it; our lives lived in a state of flux between ignorance of what we are and a certain crisis of knowing, somehow, that we are living in a state of denial; a refusal to give up that chimerical promise that was offered to us, for nothing, at birth. It is not our skin that makes us white, but rather the way we act upon the world. As Cheryl Harris has shown[vii], whiteness was in part devised as a system of property ownership, and it is with the notions of property, assets and profit that white people continue to be obsessed. In this respect, whiteness is capitalism, and we barely know it.

Photography complicates questions of race and class considerably. As a medium shifting between documentary and fiction, it both reaffirms the dynamics of social, political and economic power and at the same time places them out of reach. Ellison’s pictures are enigmatic in the way that they both “image” and “imagine” a certain kind of reality. To look at the family group is, as Philip Stokes writes, ‘to add the assumption of a whole thicket of connections between the sitters; most viewers allow themselves the pleasure of extravagant supposition.’[viii] We, as viewers, do not know who these people are, but we can suppose who they remind us of, if not directly ourselves.

All images courtesy of the artist and The Sunday Painter, London. © Buck Ellison


Daniel C. Blight is a writer based in London. He is Lecturer in Historical & Critical Studies in Photography, School of Media, University of Brighton and Visiting Tutor, Critical & Historical Studies, School of Arts & Humanities, Royal College of Art. His first book, The Image of Whiteness: Contemporary Photography and Racialization is forthcoming from SPBH Editions co-published with Art on the Underground.

References:

[i] Garner, S. (2007), “Whiteness as a kind of absence” in Whiteness: An Introduction. London: Routledge.

[ii] Klontz, B.T., Seay, M.C., Sullivan, P. and Canale, A. (2014), The Psychology of Wealth: Psychological Factors Associated with High Income. Journal of Financial Planning, 27:12. Denver: Financial Planning Association.

[iii] Rose, G. (2003), Family photographs and domestic spacings: a case study. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. London: Royal Geographical Society.

[iv] Hollander, M. (2002). An Entrance for the Eyes: Space and Meaning in 17th Century Dutch Art. Los Angeles: University of California Press.

[v] Sagne, J. (1984), L’atelier du photographe. Paris: Presses de la Renaissance.

[vi] Seshadri-Crooks, K. (2000). Desiring Whiteness: A Lacanian Analysis of Race. London: Routledge.

[vii] Harris, C. (1993). Whiteness as Property. Harvard Law Review, 106:8. Cambridge: The Harvard Law Review Association.

[viii] Stokes, P. (1992), “The Family Photograph Album: So Great a Cloud of Witnesses” in Clarke, C. The Portrait in Photography. London: Reaktion.

Lorenzo Vitturi

Money Must Be Made

Self Publish, Be Happy Editions

Taking its title from the front of a T-Shirt, spotted by Vitturi in the Balogun Market, Money Must Be Made is in fact it a Lagos motto. The phrase aptly sums up the content of the book, an exploration of the delicate balance between commerce, commodities, people and urban space.

Centered in and around the Balogun Market in Lagos, Nigeria, one of the largest street markets in West Africa, Money Must Be Made is at first glance similar in style to Lorenzo Vitturi’s earlier work Dalston Anatomy in the way that he transforms everyday items of little value into unique, sculptural forms. Here, in an attempt to capture the essence of the sprawling market, Vitturi uses several different approaches, layering and sequencing them side by side to create a surreal narrative. We see documentary images of the market, collaborative portraits with street vendors taken in a make shift studio and still life compositions constructed by Vitturi into sculptural forms. All interwoven through the treatment of collage, which, used here, is as much about the absence and the removal of content as it is about presence and accumulation.

However, the intrigue of this book lies in the contrast both physically and metaphorically between the two rival characters, the market and the Financial Trust House. The mostly abandoned eighteen story monolithic brutalist structure disrupts the sequence and demands to be the main protagonist, offering a central vantage point in which the surrounding market spirals outwards. Occupying the centre of the book the dull, almost monochrome approach to documenting the building perhaps reflects the mundane nature of corporate business as something formal and structured. This removal of colour, or rather the distraction of colour is a technique also used by Nigerian photographer Logo Oluwamuyiwa who photographs Lagos in monochrome in order to ask ‘what will I find’ if I strip Lagos of colour and noise? Vitturi, by resisting the temptation to rely of colour alone, presents a different side of the city, highlighting the contrast between the two overlapping worlds, the official and unofficial, local and global. The tower, with its high vantage point, offers a view down onto the market, a physical distance which again speaks of division and raises questions about class, power and the ownership of public space. Should we feel empathy for the owner of the abandoned tower? Or do we celebrate the masses for occupying the streets?

Shoair Mavlian

Images courtesy of the artist and Self Publish, Be Happy. © Lorenzo Vitturi

Nicholas Muellner

In Most Tides An Island

Self Publish, Be Happy

Nicholas Muellner’s most recent publication, In Most Tides An Island, is a rich blend of overlapping narratives, both real and imagined, played out through image and text. Divided into twelve chapters, the work shifts between the personal realities of closeted gay men suffocated by the violently homophobic climate of contemporary Russia, Muellner’s reflections on love and isolation in the digital age, and the fictional tale of a solitary female island dweller. Seemingly disparate, these narratives are unified by an underlying theme of loneliness.

From the coastal paths and beaches of provincial Russian towns and villages, to the steamy depths of a public men’s bath, Muellner offers us a glimpse into the isolation of gay men in Russia. One acquaintance introduces Muellner to his supposed best friend, who later asserts: “If homosexuals arrived in our town, we would kill them”. Isabel, the fictional character, on the remote Caribbean is also alone: “Only the ocean can sea her face”. She exists as an anonymous entity, masked by the island’s scenery in the ethereal black and white photographs that accompany the text. And Muellner himself is detached; divorced from the digital generation, his mediations on photography now feel like “dust” on his lips.

The digital realm as a place to fulfil forbidden desires is touched on. For the same man whose best friend regards homosexuality as punishable by death, the Internet provides a momentary respite from his isolation. But like the stories of these men, the digital sphere too is shrouded in solitude; “We are alone together. Or was it: together, we are alone,” Muellner writes. This sentiment is both echoed and alluded to in the faceless profile pictures interspersed throughout the book; their profiles masked, our eyes are drawn instead to the seductive and expressive poses of these anonymous individuals.

In Most Tides An Island is a worthy addition to Muellner’s critically acclaimed image-text books The Amnesia Pavilions (2011) and The Photograph Commands Indifference (2009). Visually and intellectually engaging, it overturns traditional photographic and literary narratives, existing as an experimental hybrid that encourages new perspectives on the state of the modern world and the individual’s place in it.

Hannah Abel-Hirsch

All images courtesy of Self Publish, Be Happy. © Nicholas Muellner

Matthew Connors

Fire in Cairo

Book review by Max Houghton

The end is where we start from. This oft-quoted line from T.S. Eliot’s Little Giddings was an expression of philosophical, spiritual and, perhaps, aesthetic renewal after the horrors of the two world wars. It is also a deliberate conceptual strategy in the making of Fire in Cairo by Matthew Connors, a book which reads back-to-front. When many of us encounter a photo-book, this is how we flip through it, anyway. It’s a curious but pervasive quirk. Books in Arabic are ‘read backwards’ or, more accurately, they are read in the reverse direction to books in, for example, Germanic or Romance scripts. It is important, however, to note that language itself doesn’t have a direction.

Among Connors’ achievements with this work is that he has harnessed the energy of fire and revolution and used it as a charge for his own creativity, with this vivid green, cloth-covered book. It opens, at the ‘back’, with a short story which oscillates between sexual intimacy, the history of torture and the impossibility of knowledge, only to end in silence. This is our territory. He lands the reader in Midan Simon Bolivar, Cairo, a location which, like its eponymous hero, symbolises the people’s struggle and the possibility for change and freedom. During the heady days of 2011, when nearby Tahrir Square was the epicentre of the uprising to oust Mubarak, a bandage was placed over the eye of the Bolivar statue, after police had employed tear gas. As Pablo Neruda writes of Bolivar, “I wake every hundred years when the people are awake.” The story closes with its narrator detained, while the “bureaucracy of retribution” is adjudicated. As a description of what follows the fever and ferment of revolution, this chilling phrase conjures tedium, injustice and quiet threat of violence still to come.

We turn the page to a different kind of not-knowing: a portrait in black and white of an older man, in what I will lazily call traditional Arab dress. I cannot say if there is further significance to his attire – it may be clerical. Like the narrator, I am reminded constantly of my lack of knowledge. An extensive series of paired portraits follow this single image and, with a couple of disruptions, we are still seeing in black and white. Connors took two images of each person, seconds apart, and the editing process led to this effective juxtaposition, in which we can perceive subtle changes in light or expression. One pairing is of two different men – police not protestors – and is the exception that proves the rule. With this series, Connors invites the reader to question the nature of a photographic portrait, shown here to be always in flux. His doublings create a kind of binocular vision, without the illusion of depth.

These portraits begin a sustained meditation on sight and sightlessness, and speech and silence that courses through the work. The right eye of the first young man pictured is occluded. A few pages on, another young man sports a plaster on the delicate tissue just below his eye. Another man wears a scarf, creeping up to obscure his sight. A veiled woman has only a narrow aperture through which to see, curtailing her peripheral vision, as do the hoods of sportswear worn by others. A masked man’s eyes are open to the elements, his mouth a covered orifice. Then, on subsequent pages, fire ablaze in orange. Fire that seems to hang like a mushroom cloud in the sky, though the flames flare from tyres burning on the ground.

Next, another pairing is of a boy with an oversized sweatband concealing most of his eyes, as well as his nose and mouth. This seems to be the last doubling, as overleaf a vivid image of bright green laser lines engulfs the reader’s vision. This is the image on which the work turns. Now: riot police and tear gas trails. Then one final portrait pair (for now); this time in a full skull mask with upturned eye-socket slits, rendering the face underneath bug-like. Metamorphosis can indeed be a reasonable response to oppression. Questions of freedom of speech; the right to say what has been seen (another impossible task); the right to remain silent, hover over these faces, wary, vulnerable, fearless, hidden, exposed, altered.

During the uprisings – and since – thousands of people used laser pointers as an act of protest, shining their light at military helicopters in an attempt to knock them off course. In Fire in Cairo, the images they created in the night sky becomes a leitmotif, the most important in the book. They are images of protest, a union of technology and direct action, even, if we take the etymological light-writing definition, a new and potent photography.

Other images depict a city heading towards ruin — torn down posters, remnants of things destroyed by fire, shadows through trees, a young man clutching something that might detonate if thrown, a man bent double in apparent despair, military helicopters, birds in flight or fright. On seeing a found photograph of a bride, I am struck by the thought that it is in fact a lost photograph, unsutured from its family album. A graphic poster of a teenage girl has her face, especially her eyes, repeatedly and violently struck out. As the book draws to a close, a sinister portrait pairing reminds us of our compulsion to repeat. The figure is fully covered by a black garment, with a mirrored mask over the face, reflecting back a view of the contested landscape of the street. The revolution through masked and unseeing eyes. It is a mannequin, but such distinctions between real and unreal no longer make sense. The view thereafter is upwards. A sky redesigned by smoke and fire. Is that encroaching blood? Gathering darkness? New constellations have been created with green light, though we cannot be sure how long their luminescence will endure. They have, like pinned butterflies, been captured here.

All images courtesy of the artist and Self Publish, Be Happy. © Matthew Connors


Max Houghton writes about photographs for the international arts press, including FOAM, Photoworks and The Telegraph. She edited the photography biannual 8 Magazine for six years and is also Senior Lecturer in Photography at London College of Communication – University of the Arts, London.