I grew up in a large town, (though when I say ‘in’ I really should say 'just outside of’) a fifteen minute drive would leave me in its then tumbling-down centre. On that short journey I’d pass through four other districts, (the town being made up of twenty) each one having its own idiosyncrasies. I know the town I grew up in well; I’d journey to its centre once a week, taking the same bus, visiting the same places, meeting the same people, as if gripped by a ritualistic fervour. During the long school holidays I’d roam through the different boroughs with my friends, eagerly looking for new surroundings and new memories. I moved away in my late teenage years and haven’t moved back since. When I revisit, to catch up with my family and friends, I always notice slight changes, not just in the centre, but throughout the many sprawling districts too. A shop that has closed, a new one that has opened, more poverty and destitution, more wealth and prosperity - a new road, a field that has transformed into an unaffordable housing estate. On these visits I often think of all the stories I’ve missed out on in my time away, of all the narratives that are lost to me. The town’s constantly changing identity often overwhelms me - I fixate on its history and what I remember of it, then I compare it to its present and its near future - what will become of this shifting place that I call my home? It is only the people who offer a welcome concreteness, not just those that I personally know, but the strangers I pass in the streets, or the hazily familiar faces I do or don’t quite recognise. I know that we share something in common, being from the same place, and that is something I can hold onto. - Seven Hills, Chris Hoare’s latest and most substantial publication to date, weaves an emblematic tapestry of his home city of Bristol, located in the south west of England. The book interweaves images from the cities’s outer reaches to its built up centre. Sun-drenched moments of rebellious adolescence make way for adulthood, mythmaking, historicity, and politics. We see young teenage boys clad in balaclavas, seemingly two abreast on a motorbike - their prescient blue eyes gaze outward, seemingly both trusting and uneasy in their unshielded stares. The slack embrace of a pensive young couple, the woman, perched on the lap of her partner, whose eyes are narrowed downward in contemplation, stares off to the right - their pallid emotions are painted on their faces, but so is the care and comfort they bring to each other in this quiet poetic moment. Seven Hills is filled with such scenes, interwoven between urban landscapes, (a collapsable garden armchair sat on a grassy mound, vacant - the long golden blades of grass around the chair trodden flat - behind, the long sprawl of the M5, running to the heart of the city) and the minutiae of the everyday (polka dotted spray-paint hops up a paving slabbed pavement, blue, white, green, pink.) An eroded stone relief clutches an orb and a sceptre as it looks to preside over all who pass below it, this is either Brennus or Bellinus, one of the two mythic knights-cum-kings who, it is said, founded Bristol. The leitmotif of myth, of a traditional story, is echoed throughout the book: the velvety red crown of fancy dress, the scrawled graffiti of names on a cold brick wall, a memorial at a booze-soaked grave. How do myths and stories shape places and their people? And how do these fictions intertwine with what we know to be fact? Seven Hills plays on this complex structure, this endless back and forth between what we believe to be true, what we may hold onto, and what we should let go of. There is a sense that the narrative structure of the book plays an important role as we journey from the city’s outer limits inward, into its concrete centre, and then outwards again to its spacious leafy suburbs. Yet in no way is this narrative a simplification - the extraordinary fictional foreword, ‘Throw Stones at God’ based on Hoare’s photographs, by Bristol based writer Moses McKenzie, builds on the many layers that are woven into the work. It tells the story of Zachary Miller, his friends and his family, his love for racing, (quads, scramblers, peds) the loss of life to ‘stabbings, shootings, [and] cancer’, and his subdued promise of moving away from the ‘council-owned crescents and estates of Hartcliffe’ to somewhere sunny with his mum. There is still a certain ambiguity to Seven Hills, a desire to know who the people are, the faces and places and moments that Hoare has so adeptly captured. If you had never been to Bristol, there is a feeling that Seven Hills could be about any city in England, with its recurrent themes of racial issues, poverty, gentrification and the widening gap in social stratification found throughout the country. But within the book there is the indelible mark of the toppling of the Colston statue, which took place in June 2020 in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, as part of the global Black Lives Matter movement. There are two moments in the book that allude to this momentous occasion: one is marked by the statue's empty plinth lying on a flagstone pavement, cast in bright sunlight, toppled on its side. It is the absence within the image which gives it such a weight, as if, in its emptiness, it is negating the very thing it once upheld. The other is a photograph of another statue, (of King William III, another profiteer of the slave trade) captured against an eggshell blue sky. The bronze figure on horseback is fully enwrapped with plastic tape which reads ‘FRAGILE’ in a muted red, over and over. - Each time my own home town comes to my mind, I first think of how I know it, and then, ambivalently, think about how it is now and its future. There is a part of me that will always hold on to the way I knew this place, and how I want it to remain the same, as it is in my memories. And the ambivalence I feel is most likely due to the fact that I won’t be part of the changes that will inevitably happen, whatever they may be... With Seven Hills, Hoare has managed to produce a book which looks to the past, within the present, and towards the future of the city that he is from, not with any nostalgia, but with a considered sensibility of an ever changing world.
As I sit in my parent’s kitchen, I begin to form a pattern of seeing. I look ahead of me to be met with a reflected glare coming from the glass door of the oven. The reflected scene is slightly distorted and, at first glance, hard to make out. After a minute of looking, I begin to see clearly the black and grey tiles of the kitchen floor, leading to the tapering legs of some darker grey stools - one of which I am sat on. My sight drifts upwards and to the left and stops on the door of the microwave. I similarly see a reflected scene, though this time it is strangely warped. The scene is from slightly higher than waist level, and instead of being able to make out any distinct elements of the room, (the counter tops with scattered kitchen utensils, the radio, the lower edges of the cupboards) I can only make out the outlines of random distorted forms. I finally look downwards and to my left where my gaze stops at the two white, side by side, fridge and freezer units. Stuck to their faces are a variety of colourful geometric shapes, (magnets my young nephew has arranged into a constellation of seemingly random design) which mimic the reflected distorted forms from the microwave’s door. Metre/Metre, the recent self-published book by Daniel Dale, lends itself to this practice of quietly observing the everyday. At first, Metre/Metre seems to be a book focused on the photographing of the literal - objects or scenes seeming to be a metre in length: a collection of retired street name signs, a sequence of bird shaped reliefs stuck to the side of a house, a rectangle-shaped hole made by some torn wallpaper, a vinyl sticker of some mountains and trees on the side of a van. Quickly, this method of observation falls away into the semi-absurd. In one image an empty egg box sits in the centre of the frame. By my calculation it can fit a dozen eggs. As the box lies in the image, splayed open, I begin to question how this could possibly equate to a metre in length? Perhaps if I tore the box apart and lay each piece side by side, I could just about make it a metre? Or, perhaps the missing eggs, all twelve of them, would equal a metre when lined up, head-to-head; or, in fact, that the photograph is taken from a metre away? Finally, I wonder, is it instead that as we view these images, one by one, the rhythmic beat of a poetic metre is slowly made apparent? This ebb and flow of observation continues - a black square outlined by a white edge painted onto a temporary shelter - each edge I would deem to be, give, or take, a metre long. A white table, the flat plane of its surface splitting the top and bottom of the image in half; all four of its white legs seem to be stuck firmly into the dark ground below - each leg, I think, could again be a metre. In one image, fourteen and a half small square grids dominate the concrete floor, their sprawling uniform designs weave diagonally across the image plane - how could any of these possibly measure a metre, I ask myself? Perhaps four of them side by side are roughly a metre, or perhaps the excavated hole beneath each one travels a metre downwards? For this writer, the real strength of this work begins to make itself apparent over multiple readings. Slowly, the playful refrain of the metre length falls away, and you begin to notice how shapes, forms, objects and moments, can all begin to somehow relate, no matter the disparity we place upon them. At the corner of a road there is a white gleaming wall which pans to the rightward edge of the frame, to the left is a low wire fence, which again journeys to the edge of the frame. At the meeting point of the two, the wall and the fence, there is a triangular pointed gap created by the absence of the white bricks. On the following page there is a close-up image of the front end of a car. What strikes you as you look at the image is the headlight indicator. In place of its usual plastic protective cover is what looks like some clear plastic sheet secured by hatch-patterned tape. The slapdash design of this makeshift cover imitates the triangular gap from the preceding page. Metre/Metre is a book that is full of these curious and playful considerations. It moves between the literal and the lateral to reveal Dale’s astute method of observation and seeing and offers the viewer a moment of reflection on the mundane and the everyday. When I sat in my parent’s kitchen and spent a longer time looking, I began to realise the plethora of connecting images that make up the small room. No matter where I looked there was one image linking to the next. As I moved my eyes across the room, I would always return to the lefthand corner - here, there is a door leading out of the kitchen into the hallway, and to its right is another door, which leads through into the dining room. The two doors are set at a right angle, each entranceway leading a different direction, and are separated by a length of bright orange wall. Perhaps, I kept wondering, that wall could be a metre in length, just about.
I had wanted to write about Folly, the debut book by Jamie Murray, since I first quickly flipped through its pages. Jamie showed me one of his advance copies as he was hand printing the special edition prints in the darkroom. I had many questions. Some I asked – what were the motives behind the work? why the animals? – but most I kept to myself, hoping the book would answer them for me. The work arose as a progression of sorts from a previous project, Albatross, made in the confines of a navy warship returning from a nine month deployment. Folly came into being through a series of conversations Murray had with individuals who have been incarcerated; the animals relate, in part, to Murray’s continued fascination with the human condition and the fact that we are, in essence, animals ourselves. Folly opens with an image of its namesake, an ornamental structure looming from the shadows of a garden setting. Seemingly, this extravagant building serves little purpose, its castle-like facade acting as mere decoration, laden with the pomp and pageantry that follies so often display. In Murray’s photograph, however, the opposite is true. As the tower emerges from the thick silhouettes of the surrounding trees, so does the metaphor of the panopticon, an 18th century prison design. The French philosopher Michel Foucault linked the prison’s design – jail cells built around a central tower allowing the prison’s wardens to observe the inmates without being seen – to the sense of constant observation that characterises modern structures of power. In his 1975 book, Discipline and Punish, Foucault argues that the panopticon is an example of how modern prison systems and modern governments enforce power through discipline, via the concept of the ‘un-equal gaze’. Metaphor is an integral aspect of this book, and is what makes it so pertinent and intelligent. Each image is seemingly laden with a multitude of meanings, as if the ebb and flow of the conversations were embedded in every one of them. Each time you return to the book you can choose a new strand of detail to follow, a new conversation to have between yourself and the images: second chances, sorrow, wasted time, fragility, masculinity, rebirth, zoomorphism… The sequencing of the images is open and free flowing – no one image presides over the others – allowing the metaphorical connections entwined within and between the pages to spill outwards. We see the sculpture of a minotaur, the imprisoned mythical creature who has an insatiable hunger for human life, gazing outward towards the viewer. To its right are the jutting horns of a rhino, to its left, the watchful eyes of a young stag. Beyond, high on a pedestal watching over these beasts is a towering sculpture of a man. How are we any different, Murray seems to be asking, than these taxidermy puppets? Are we not more like the beastly minotaur than this model picture of man? Are we being asked to question the monster that is lurking in the labyrinth of the human psyche, and the reason we have a penal system at all? There are photographs of windswept coastal plants surviving in extreme conditions. They have a hardened quality to them as they take centre stage in the image, as if nothing can disturb their obstinate existence. I wonder about the inured ideal of masculinity that we have in society, the toughness and the virility, and its inherent connection to the carceral system. Another image – of some vibrant what-look-like red crab apples precariously sat beneath an excavators’ imposing metal weight – has a similar effect. The umbra of the metal and dirt overwhelms and obtrudes, suggesting power and force. For this writer though, both of these images also have a delicate reverse side; one where beneath and between these tough veneers sits a fragile beauty and tenderness. The reward of looking at Murrays’ work is a wealth of such apparent contradictions. Throughout the book are several portraits of men, all of whom are avoiding the camera’s lens. Each one of them carries a deep sense of sorrow and regret. These must be the individuals who Murray talked with, and the reason that this project came to be. As they are slowly introduced one by one, between crowns of barbed wire, rain sodden roads that lead to nowhere, and vacant pool tables, we begin to sense the effects of the system they’ve been through. The metaphors multiply, and the images encourage reflection on the harsh realities of a system we hear and see so little of – a sequestered, almost remote concept of society that lingers in its background. As I am writing this, I look at the many different statistics relating to the British penal system. I look at the reoffending rates of previously incarcerated individuals; according to Statista, 24.3 percent of those who have committed offences released from custody, between January-March 2021 in England and Wales, went on to reoffend within one year. As of January 2023, England and Wales had the highest incarceration rate per capita in Western Europe. Almost a quarter of individuals who are pushed through our penal system end up back there in no time at all. Coupled with this burgeoning incarcerated population are countless reports of the deaths of inmates, of self harm, assaults, drug use and understaffing. If prisons are meant to encourage reform, why do we have such a high reoffending rate so soon after the prisoner’s release? And why are prisoners living in conditions that lead to physical harm and even death? Folly doesn’t ask these questions directly, but with the help of the deeply rooted metaphorical images, they still come to the fore. Folly is a book that makes you think. The final image before the books’ epilogue is of a man holding a Lightwriter, a text-to-speech device for individuals with communication difficulties. On the glowing blue digital screen which faces the camera, a short sentence reads “it speaks as well”. This poignant metaphoric conclusion leaves us with much to contemplate and question – who are the people who go through our penal institutions, and why do they end up there? What can be done for those who are pushed back out into the world so they don’t end up jailed again? Why does society cast away people who are in need of help and care? My resounding thought is that Folly does speak; it speaks of many important issues, it speaks of society, individuals, spirituality, philosophy… But most of all it speaks for the people who put their trust in Murray to tell an honest story about incarceration and life.
Samuel Beckett never stopped his translations, writing in his foreign French to translate back to his native English. His urge to be apart form his mother tongue was a choice, a creative tool used to construct his surreal dramas or tragicomedy’s. Works by Beckett, and other writers like him, highlight the myriad possibilities of translation, the benefits of manipulating they way we communicate, searching for the perfect cadence to inform and inspire. But what are the limits to translation? What are the problems of foregoing your mother tongue to communicate in a way that is secondary? Omid Asadi’s Scuffle Tussle Struggle (2022), made as part of the Peer to Peer: UK/HK exchange programme, begins to unpack these very limitations. As the title suggests, the video performance of Asadi, filmed by Jules Lister, starts by showing the artist grappling with an indistinct object, blurred by bright blocks of light which morph as the artist shapes and moulds and prises. As the artists hands grip and shape the material in front of him, the bright blocks of light form into characters of their own, English, Persian, Cantonese. They whirl and billow in a kaleidoscopic stream, at times being legible to read, at others, forming a cosmetic skin which coats the performance in a psychedelic plane. The artist himself then becomes visible, rising behind the moulding block, coating himself in the swirl of language as he still scuffles, tussles, and struggles - hands always moving, trying to both mould and break apart the matter that sits before him. English is the shared language of the two artists in this collaboration, (Karen Yu being the collaborator) Persian being the mother tongue of Asadi, and Cantonese belonging to Yu. In Asadi’s performance, what both unites and separates them is merged into a frantic dance of symbols. These layered languages highlight the problematic nature of translation, the difficulty of breaking down and reforming structure, of making visible the intended meaning. The object Asadi moulds reminds me of the rosetta stone, the two thousand year old decree inscribed into rock, translated into three languages. As Asadi moulds this semi-malleable clay, you begin to understand that translation isn’t so straightforward. It has twists and turns, and needs to be broken apart and reformed; Asadi shows a struggle, one of restructuring your mother tongue for foreign verse. Asadi’s plight continues until the object is fully deconstructed. What was once a towering block of material that concealed the artist is now broken into smaller fragments. Asadi is the one bathed in the triology of languages, yet still his hands desperately try to shape and pull apart. You are left wondering if his labour will ever end, or if what he has set out to do a Sisyphean task, destined to continue forever? As the bright light of the language fades, we are left looking at a deep blue silhouette, head bowed, exhausted, silent. The silhouette sinks and the video fades to black, and we are left contemplating the struggle we have just seen. To speak in a foreign tongue, I think, takes more than I have ever known.
When I hid as a child in a game of ‘hide-and-seek’, I often hid my eyes, thinking this act would cloak me from the vision of others. As I’ve gone through my life, I’ve revisited this moment on countless occasions, wondering if anything is lost when you stop looking. Does everything around you cease to be? Or does it continue in the absence of your seeing? Elliott Erwitt’s Fontainebleau Hotel has an inkling of what may be lost. It almost feels like staring into an optical illusion – knowing that what you see is a trick of geometrical design, but being enticed to look again and again by its alluring unusuality. During a moment of hesitation I blink my eyes, and begin to see the illusion again, afresh, at its beginning. In the apparent infiniteness of the hotel’s towering walls, and seemingly endless swirling patterns, I am drawn into the Fontainebleau Hotel, exploring the many possibilities before my eyes. These walls must have a ceiling, I argue to myself, but there is something here, within the image, which makes that impossible. I am constantly pivoting my gaze toward the far corner of the room, that cluttered corner. It’s as if all the patterns point here, toward the familiar objects so oddly arranged. As I fix my focus on this trio, the rest of the room melts away, and in so doing, I lose sight of all else that sits before them. I am drawn into a place which has a never ending infinity pointing out in all directions. Much like the Red Room in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, Fontainebleau Hotel invokes in me an endless feeling of waiting: a waiting for the door to be closed, the seat to be filled, the marble to be tread on, the tree to grow; each element that makes up the photograph seemingly residing in a liminal state. In my waiting, the numerous possibilities within the frame multiply: the door to open wider, the seat to remain vacant, the tree to wilt and die (“This is the waiting room. Would you like some coffee?”). This waiting room acts as my space for exploration in the extension of the image; the events which have taken place beyond the outer reaches of the frame slowly become visible to my mind’s eye. For this writer, viewing this photograph demands time – time spent unknotting the intricacies in its seemingly endless avenues. It demands time spent sitting, looking, questioning, seeing – closing my eyes and imagining, replicating, searching. I will never truly know why the chair is vacant, or the view on which it faces, much like I will never truly know why the door is ajar, but in the moment of looking, the need for this truth diminishes, and all that comes to matter is my own empirical understanding. Optical illusions are meant to teach us how our eyes and brain work together to see. The brain processes the information the eyes gather, forming a perception of light, patterns and colour based in unreality, creating a false image of the one in front of us. When Szarkowski situates Erwitt’s photograph as, “… a window, through which one might better know the world” what is being touched on, for me, is this visual function of teaching to see. When I look at Fontainebleau Hotel, I know that I am seeing the hotel itself, though granted only a small section of it, but part of me wonders if what I am actually seeing is some form of optical illusion. Am I really seeing an unreality which Erwitt has created for his viewers with careful selection? The swirling patterns, the cluttered corner, the infinite walls, the cascading light, all culminating into a false image of the Fontainebleau Hotel on Miami Beach? As a child, when I hid desperately behind my hand, I was hiding from the knowing look of others. In my solipsistic act, I became invisible until otherwise proven visible. Perhaps, when we stop looking, it is a similar sort of knowing which is lost – the knowing of anything beyond ourselves.
Throughout history, the nude has transitioned from a figure of anatomical intrigue to a token of beauty, and even a political tool. From Weston to Mapplethorpe and into the present day, Joseph Glover unravels the then and now of the photographic nude The photographic nude has been a driving force in shaping the relationship we have between ourselves and our corporeal understanding. From anatomical photographs of the pre-modernist era, to modern day explorations of sexuality and identity, the nude has consistently enabled artists to challenge preconceptions of what the human body is, and how we view it. Edward Weston’s Nudes, made between 1920 and 1945, is a collection of photographs illustrating the strive of modernist photographers. It is a radical shift from pictorial or academic representation (common to photography before the First World War) towards an approach concerned with aestheticised form. Often singular and impersonal, Weston’s photographs are evidence of the beauty of the human figure. Weston’s nudes sit apart from those of his contemporaries’. His unique interpretation of form and his masterful recognition of light and shadow render images that are unmistakably his own. In looking, we are often left no room for the comprehension of anything other than the rhythmic shapes which dance together to fill the photographic frame. It is an oeuvre of a dedicated photographer, one who saw “life as a coherent whole,” as he once wrote, in his Daybook of 1930. “And myself as a part, with rocks, trees, bones, cabbages, smokestacks, torsos, all interrelated, interdependent.” In the same decade that Nudes was published, there was another drastic shift in the representation of the body. Through the 1970s and 80s, Robert Mapplethorpe’s transgressive photographs lifted the veil on sexual taboos of the time – fetishism, homosexuality and sadomasochism, for example. Unlike modernist photographers before him, Mapplethorpe’s vision of nude photography was political. Yet, although his subject matter was different, the intent was similar to that of Weston’s. “I am looking for perfection in form. I do that with portraits. I do it with cocks. I do it with flowers,” he said, in the catalogue of a 1996 touring exhibition, Mapplethorpe. The radical picturing of the nude by modernist photographers like Weston heralded a shift in our perception of the body. No longer was it solely a piece of anatomical intrigue, but something more, something beautiful, something to celebrate. But how is the nude depicted in today’s culture? Identity politics are now at the forefront of our political discourse. How we see the nude has been undeniably influenced by visual culture; we are taught how and what to see, in turn, telling us who and what we are. This year, John Berger’s iconic Ways of Seeing turns 50, and an increasing number of contemporary artists are examining the potential of the nude – exemplified in Fotografiska’s recent exhibition in New York, for example. How have depictions of the nude throughout history shaped our contemporary perceptions of the body today? One way to better navigate the murky waters of our future comes from rereading the past. Considering the history of photography in a contemporary setting, we are able to learn about both the positive and negative impacts it has had on society. For instance, Weston’s depictions of the human form were from an inherently modernist perspective. But, in a contemporary analysis of the photographs, it is hard to dismiss the male gaze that punctuates each image. Has Weston’s framing of the model helped shape the current undertones of how we picture women and their bodies? And has his own personal romantic history – secret affairs with his sitters – contributed to the institutional maltreatment of photographic models? Similarly, Mapplethorpe challenged our preconceptions of sexuality, but when re-viewing his fetishisation of nude Black men, we are witnessing the white ideal – an imagination of what Mapplethorpe sees, or wants, a Black man to be. Mapplethorpe saw his own nudes of Black men as racist: “It has to be racist. I’m white and they are black,” he once said. Still, the photographer’s inability to understand the racially ingrained power dynamic, and how he benefits from it, is apparent. “There is a difference somehow, but it doesn’t have to be negative. Is there any difference to approaching a black man who doesn’t have any clothes on and a white man who doesn’t have clothes on? Not really.” Again, How have these processes of thought and practice transpired into our culture today? Weston and Mapplethorpe are only two small droplets in the wider notion of our photographic history, but they are examples that we must revisit in relation to society today. One hundred years since Weston marked a shift between pictorial and modernist nude photography, the evolution of the medium is ongoing. Tarrah Krajnak’s body of work, Master Rituals II: Weston’s Nudes, seeks to destabilise this canon of photographic history. In positioning herself alongside Weston’s nudes, Krajnak reenacts the negation of the model in the original image. The performance questions both the historic position of the female model while referencing and affirming Kajnak’s Latin American identity. The photographs become instilled with a considered, multi-layered structure, calling the viewer not just to comply with the images at hand, but to unweave the conceptual layers of thread which hold them together. They become, what Mark Sealy eloquently expresses in a recent interview with Caroline Molloy for 1000 Words “a thinking with images, rather than thinking for them”. Evolutions in the photographic medium, such as the nude, are full of essential discourses that demand our attention. Krajnak’s images are an example of how artists can question the implicit structures embedded in history, and how this opens new avenues of reference and conversation, engaging our present selves in the necessary task of continuing to see, think, and act differently. Tracing the then and now of this phenomenon illustrates how extensively our perceptions of the human body have progressed. Now, we can only revel in the anticipation of what may come next.
All Images Copyright © 2012 - 2020, Joseph Glover. All rights reserved.