Increasingly I have become interested in the inclusion of fictitious texts to accompany my photo works.  In my recent work ‘The Golden Road’ a fictitious and imagined narrative of the spaces outside of M’s interior world was introduced.  Nine blocks of text were sequenced in between the images of her interior spaces.  I will soon add the images and text to my website.

Below are an example:

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Somewhere above Walsall, above the greyness of its clouds, that hides their silver lining, the muffled sound of a jet engine fades in and out of the ears below. Yet, no-one looks up as they stand at a bus stop; waiting patiently for the 311 or the 313 or some other.  Further along Bradford Street, with their backs turned to an estate agent, another group wait for the 404 and 405.  People just stand and wait as they watch each other discretely. As in saccadic jumps of their eyes, a chain of observation leads from the back to the front of the queue, as only the brave look over their shoulders at those behind them. 

A car lazily rolls by and whilst others look at watches, and sigh, or check the time on their mobile phones, and then their messages, two elderly women share their contempt for a younger woman who has just pushed in and placed herself at the head of the queue.

Bradford Street is a world of bus stops, topped off with, a tattooist, a second-hand furniture shop and a Corals bookmaker, with late night closing. Corals Bookmakers is the Stock Exchange for the unwaged, who all day, gamble the present on the outcomes of unknown futures. Outside of this financial hub, with its bright posters that ask you to deduce the result of the Liverpool Vs Chelsea game, is a green metal bench that waits patiently for the entrepreneurs and soothsayers inside, who are in need of a ‘time out’ from watching over their portfolio of investments. 

A young tall and sinewy man walks slowly out of Corals, his white trainers tentatively tracing across the pavement.  As he walks, his body stretches upwards, his clothes lifting to reveal his lower torso, and as it does, one hand reaches instinctively to shield his skin from the coldness of the world before deciding to nestle itself under his white t-shirt instead, just above his belt, for its own protection.

He continues to walk, as his back arches backwards with each step. His frame elongating upwards as his free hand, in a soothing gesture, reaches to cradle his neck, his elbow in turn pointing out at a right angle to the world.  And in so doing, the bottom of his blue hooded jacket rides up high above his waist and into the realms of his back. 

The lower right corner of his jacket, with its large stitched pocket, dangles aimlessly as an open pressed studded flap reveals an empty interior.

It is almost like a semi-sign of surrender, and of defeat, as he continues to walk slowly, hand on neck. His coat falls, as his hands reach to warm in his pockets, and as he slumps down onto the bench his legs ripple out in front of him across the pavement.

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A young woman, with a pink top and bleached blonde hair, pushes a buggy past him, swerving slightly to avoid his legs; and momentarily turning her head as she flicks a glance up and down at him before turning away. But he sits there oblivious and motionless; just looking though the window from where he has come - into the world he has just left. She continues with a purposeful stride; her body bouncing slightly up and down with each step, and as she goes, her child below and in front of her, looks ahead at the road to come and drops an empty packet of Milk Chocolate Buttons on the floor.

There’s a queue in Greggs. A line of students, workers on breaks and the unwaged line up and peer contently at that which they will soon consume and soon lose. Weight is shifted from leg to leg as hands in pockets, hands checking change and the hands of others nervously tense and relax as they wait patiently to grasp that which they crave.

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At the end of the millennium’s first decade, it’s natural for us to want to pause, before entering a new era, and to look back to the recent past in order to reflect upon the events that have shaped our present.  I first saw the horrific legacy of Hurricane Katrina on television, late in August 2005, whilst sitting in the living room of my friend Fanie Jason’s home in Cape Town.  Personally, it was quite a surreal time in my life, made even more so by the vision of a broken people, lost and swirling within a city waiting for help that was slow to come.

Many moving images surfaced from that time.  Thomas Dworzak’s ‘Ghost Town’ images stand out for one, as does Spike Lee’s film ‘When the Levees Broke’.  But it is easy to forget that for many, for the survivors at least, that the legacy of August 2005 is still real and still present within lives slowly and belatedly being rebuilt.

I’m fighting the urge to enter into a polemic on race and injustice here but I write this post just to highlight the beautiful and much lauded work of the designer Dee Adams and her attempts to help those in need.  Whilst her work usually graces the pages of Vogue and Wallpaper, and homes across the world, she has for 2010, produced a series of posters to celebrate the city of New Orleans and its people.  The city that she says contains the ‘..most cherished memories of [her] life…”

All proceeds from the sale of her posters go to charity and will help those still living with what happened on that day in August 2005 when the Levees broke.  A number of the images below can also be seen on her excellent blog.  All images below are copyright Dee Adams - for more information on this series and her work contact her here.

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The Golden Road
The Atrium Gallery, London School of Economics and Political Science

11th January - 13th February, 2010
Reception: 18th January, 2010.  7pm - 9pm:

Exhibition introduced by Prof. Sarah Worthington
Exhibition opened by Peter Sutherland

The Old Building

Houghton Street

London

WC2A 2AE

Monday - Friday 10am - 8pm

(Click on photo to see a larger version).

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I’ve never been much of a Robert Burns fan, having only seen and heard caricatured performances of his work, perhaps hasn’t helped. But I recently saw the actor Robert Carlyle perform Burns’ 1791 poem on the The Culture Show on BBC2 and found it was quite haunting and beautiful. If the previous link doesn’t play in your country an audio version is available here. By the way ‘Ance mair, means ‘once more’.

Thou Gloomy December

Ance mair I hail thee, thou gloomy December!
Ance mair I hail thee wi’ sorrow and care;
Sad was the parting thou makes me remember-
Parting wi’ Nancy, oh, ne’er to meet mair!

Fond lovers’ parting is sweet, painful pleasure,
Hope beaming mild on the soft parting hour;
But the dire feeling, O farewell for ever!
Is anguish unmingled, and agony pure!

Wild as the winter now tearing the forest,
Till the last leaf o’ the summer is flown;
Such is the tempest has shaken my bosom,
Till my last hope and last comfort is gone.

Still as I hail thee, thou gloomy December,
Still shall I hail thee wi’ sorrow and care;
For sad was the parting thou makes me remember,
Parting wi’ Nancy, oh, ne’er to meet mair

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Life is like a manual that you leaf through at pace, as you look only for the immediate answers to satisfy the immediate concerns. You tell yourself, well, that you’ll return and inspect those passing pages in much closer detail at a later date, and learn from them, but of course once the pages are turned there is no going back to live that time again.

Those fleeting moments, that flicked by whilst in search of something else, are only made real – after the fact - by what we thought we saw or what we thought we knew from that time. As such, they are facts that are not to be trusted and yet as they are all that we have, from that past, they in turn become archived in a box called history; and they become all that we know of whom we were and who we are.

This morning I sat in the reception of an ‘old people’s home’ – where I’m currently working on a project. Looking at the fractal-like pattern of the carpet, the halo like rings of light in the ceiling and the crimson painted steps, with their yellow lining, that rose upwards with each step to disappear around a pink painted corner. You see symbolism everywhere here, in an empty seat, a discarded coffee cup and an open doorway.

Maybe it was just the opportunity to sit down in a quiet space, or perhaps it was the sight of the slow tentative footsteps of an old woman as she walked through reception, that brought one’s mind to how brief time is, as once, I thought, those feet were sure of step.

I’m not sure.

The day before I had given a lecture about how changing geographical space affects our psychological spaces and the next day here I am feeling blue in space where essentially people have come to die. Of course, the elderly people here don’t think that - only the melancholy figure sat in the chair in reception does. Everyone else just gets on with life here - as we all do.

Making do and putting off what they should be doing today, until tomorrow, in the hope that tomorrow will still be there.

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…so tenderly your story is….nothing more than what you see…or what you’ve done…or will become…

I love this song…and the film…

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Roy DeCarava the Jamaican born American photographer died just short of his 90th birthday last week. He once said for him race was not about black and white, but about the greys… as Peter Galassi, the chief curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, continues in the NY Times. “He was looking at everyday life in Harlem from the inside, not as a sociological or political vehicle…no photographer black or white before him had really shown ordinary domestic life so perceptively and tenderly, so persuasively”.

Mississippi freedom marcher, Washington, DC
1963

© Roy DeCarava

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Recently my rants - or posts - have meandered slightly out of the realms of all things photographic..so as a catch-all for other comments - and many related - I’ve set up a smaller blog to run alongside this (main) one. Writtenbylight (redux) is just a way to post other thoughts - importantly from out in the world. I travel a lot on public transport - just looking out of windows - finding myself detached both from the world outside as equally the world inside - and decided to use the time wisely. And so writtenbylight (redux) is just a way to stop my brain from liquidising and running out of my ears whilst on a long tedious journey. Ok, that last sentence was a little gory but it is Halloween after all. Drop in and check it out sometime.

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Recently Prison Photography published my ‘If’ homage as part of its developing debate on documentary practice and photojournalism. They are hoping to arrange a symposium on the subject next year.

Prison Photography is probably the best blog out there at the moment I recommend a look. My small part in it is here.

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I recently sat down to watch an episode of the Art Show entitled If - on the 4OD website. The episode asks a number of contemporary poets to produce modern (re)workings of Kipling’s famous poem ‘If’. I’ve always loved the sentiments of that poem. And in homage I’m offering my own albeit shorter version.

It perhaps speaks of my own misgivings of documentary photography.

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If

If you can meet strangers and develop relationships with them
If you can enter into their lives and ensnare them with trust
Then solicit from them their lives and record this with your camera
And if you can make them believe this to be a collaborative process
Only to end this when your photographs are taken - never to see them again
And if you can raise a profile upon these images
Whilst talking sympathetically of the plight of those you have discarded
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it
And - which is more - you’ll be a documentary photographer, my son!

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I’ve uploaded an audio clip - recorded off a laptop….from a video (so it’s a tad ropey) - of an interview that will form an element of a short film that I’m currently making. The film forms part of what will be a text and image work examining economic migration.

In the audio clip “M” discusses her journey to England, the world she has left behind and the world she still hopes to find.

I thank “M” for everything, her time, her hospitality and her honesty; and I truly hope you find what it is that you are looking for.

The clip can be found here.

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A man waits alone on the corner of a road that is adorned by an assorted collection of jaundiced looking polystyrene burger containers. Containers that only a few hours earlier, had held a greasy meal that topped off someone’s alcohol tinged night out with friends.

His shoulders droop, as his hands clasp behind his back, and I look at a faint burgundy pattern that runs through the grey acrylic fibres of a suit jacket that seems best fitted for someone, anyone, other than him.

People and cars pass by him as his hands unclasp and he reaches for a bush of a black beard that he smooths down repetitively with his right hand, and in so doing, reminds me of a Bond villain petting a supine feline.

He’s waiting; still waiting. As his left foot moves slowly from side to side, as he appears to draw a small imaginary pattern out onto the pavement. I look at his once white trainers and then up at his navy track suit bottoms.

You will often see people just waiting in Smethwick.

Just sitting on benches or standing on street corners looking off into the distance. All of them looking like lost items of property waiting patiently for someone to claim them and give them a purpose.

The credit crunch never happened here as this world was already broken…before the bust. The only thing that has changed here is that the ‘local’ prostitute has moved on in search of richer pickings. Or so I’ve been told.

I spoke to her once. Someone had shut a car door on her thumb and she asked me for a cigarette as our paths crossed in the street, but I don’t smoke, and then she walked off to the doctor’s surgery. She was tall and young and good looking below the chemical haze and broken exterior. The next time I saw her she was staggering out of a car parked up behind the Bella-Pizza Pizzeria. Staggering and drawing closed her obligatory sheep skin coat. And then she was gone.

But nothing changes really. People will still buy their bottles of Whiskey or tins of beer with their morning papers and the wind will still carry the shouting and screams that ring out occasionally, off into the night.

But the night is to be welcomed here - as the night is a shroud that covers the deceased frame of a town and its people. The man waiting on the street corner and the photographer who writes his blog; all of us who find themselves on a hiatus between the lives they have left behind and the lives they still hope to find.

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I like Todd Hido’s work.

OK, there’s more. The video below, at 10 minutes, is quite detailed in its examination of his working practice, and for anyone else who likes his work, it’s a detailed and informative ride as he is very candid and open about his methodology. It’s quite refreshing then to see someone doing quite well who hasn’t adopted the troubled genius persona….and actually seems ‘normal’.

Enjoy.

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During one day of our summer that never was, I spent eight hours in the company of an ex-British Cabinet Minister. During the course of our conversations they mentioned how they felt that President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan was ‘deeply corrupt’. Operation Panther’s Claw had just been launched and thousands of Coalition troops had begun to flood into the southern areas of the country - the heartland of the Taliban - to help secure a platform that would enable the free and ‘democratic’ elections that were soon due to take place.

The passing of the summer, and of course the operation, has revealed that these ‘democratic’ elections were so in name only. As villages, that only had handfuls of eligible voters, somehow voted in their thousands for the incumbent President Karzai. Karzai’s main rival during the election, Dr Abdullah Abdullah has blamed the Independent Election Commission for helping to rig the elections in favour of Karzai. It should be pointed out that incumbent President Karzai set up the IEC.

Dr. Abdullah, of course has not been without blame himself, as accusations of ‘buying’ votes has also been targeted at him. With all of this, Heroin production has hit high heights and experts have estimated that the Taliban has earned $100 million from it. Who said that war is bad for business? It of course wasn’t BEA System, General Dynamics, Boeing, Lockeed-Martin, etc..etc…etc…

According to figures published by the Telegraph, on August 26th, from early July to August 20th, (this does not include the earlier mid June pre-emptive phase of the operation), the British Army had 37 soldiers killed and an estimated 150 wounded in action. Yet, according to the BBC, despite British forces securing ground in the south that apparently freed up a potential of 80,000 voters - only 150 turned up to vote.

More British soldiers were killed or wounded than the number of those who actually voted within the region they liberated. As the American General Stanley McChrystal has said, time is running out in Afghanistan. For the 37 dead British soldiers time has sadly already stopped.

The Frontline documentary below examines the legacy of Operation Panther’s Claw which is seen as the opening salvo of what is now considered to be Obama’s War. Photojournalist Danfung Dennis spent three weeks following Echo Company from the start of the battle. His film contains scenes of a graphic nature.

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His mother remained silent as he spoke.  Her eyes fixed on the faded patterned plastic table cloth below her that her elbows ruffled as they rested upon.  In contrast, he with head upright and eyes fixed upon the camera; described how his son, and her grandson, had made his choice and had paid for it.  He was shot and killed: and left a teenager forever more.

I, like the reporter, perhaps had expected his pause to be followed by the gradual secretion of tears; but his eyes remained dry and still. The photograph below, is one taken by Vanley Burke in Handsworth, Birmingham in the early 1970’s; and is one of the photographs that etched itself upon my psyche.  This image, as well as a body of work entitled ‘Born to work’ by the photographer Nick Hedges made me want to take photographs seriously.

It would then, be a strange quirk of fate, that a few years ago now I would find myself in a room with Vanley and with the boy from that photograph, who now as a grown man, was being filmed for a news segment by Newsnight as he spoke of how his son had been shot and killed in a gang related murder.

The strange twists of life are not ours to control, which is why perhaps that the photograph affords us with such solace.  As of course, it is so much easier for us to look back at the preserved certainties of our past than at a future beyond the hands of our making.

Boy with flag. Copyright Vanley Burke. Circa 1970

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Life and all its wondrous subtlety, sometimes denies its true presence to me; blinded as I am by the over-riding fact that we are born…that we live….and that we die.

This journey, this life’s journey…as a New Yorker in London once said to me…” is what it is”.  Perhaps not Sartrean in its revelatory proportions - but her stoic sense of determinism - is of course true nonetheless.  It is what is.

Perhaps you’re career arc may not be as you wish…or indeed may have already peaked.  Or that your work may not be appreciated or even appear upon the radars of the glorious and the good….thee O’ gracious gatekeepers.

It is what it is. When publishers turn down your worthy tome of ‘social concern’  and then instead publish one where someone photographs portraits of people wearing photocopied cat masks.

It is what it is. That it is impossible not to judge ourselves against the success of others and that no matter how well things may have been or is going….it is never enough as the unquenched artistic thought that will elevate you…your practice and your esteem…is alas always unquenched.  It is what is.

When you trawl though Google-Analytics and peruse how many people came to your website on a given day.  This is it by the way;  www.writtenbylight.com    writtenby-shite…..(as a friend recently remarked)….and see that only two people… in the whole world wide web could be arsed to have a look at your work - and then only for 20 seconds each.

Perhaps…as another American once said…alas not to me…is that it’s” sons of bitches like me who are the problem”.  The never happy, ‘socially concerned’ melancholy half-empty glassers who look for failure before it’s calling card is presented…and who are never content with anything (or anyone) and who are always a day away from where they want to be.

This meandering journey of certainty of ours comes clothed, as it is, in the multi-coloured robes of loss and of love - and of all of the other chromatic inflections in between from brightness to darkness.

Yet, regardless of the route we take, upon our odyssey through light; within this journey…this certain journey;  it takes us all to the place where Leonard Freed remarked will be a place ultimately feared by us all…

….the place where there are no more photographs.

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Richard & Tumi © A.Jackson 2009

This is just a photograph of two friends I haven’t seen for a while.  Richard and Tumi, somewhere in Cape Town in 2006/7.  At the time I thought the image, for my work,  was too obvious.  Too obvious an image…too much of a cliché for a work that was exploring the subtle ambiguities found within the spaces of the city.

A white man and a black woman embracing in South Africa.  But in hindsight, why should an image of a couple in love be seen as obvious?  A couple unaware of the camera, or indeed the world at that moment?Maybe I didn’t choose it at the time because I didn’t consider it strong enough…and indeed what has made the image work for me has been the distance of time between myself, the image and people who I miss.

I shot 1,500 frames during my stay in the city and only selected 42 to be printed…it makes me wonder what other stories are in the remaining images.

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On Thursday I was asked to document the latest work by Alex Lockett and Ian England which took place at the Rea Gardens as part of the ongoing series of [insertspace] interventions.  [insertspace] was founded in 2005, by Cheryl Jones, Charlotte Smith and Matt Westbrook, with the initial concept of setting out to explore the relationship between art and audience.The following is taken from the [insertspace] website:

“Lockett and England’s practice is centred around collaboration with constituencies on the edge of society. This, coupled with their interests in nature’s relationship with culture, as well as traditional and contemporary modes of communication, makes pigeon keeping the perfect vehicle for their investigations.

After twelve months of research with local pigeon racing clubs, the artists have built a loft from reclaimed materials, in which to keep their own brood. The loft echoes those they have visited, with additional features borrowed from past traditions: the red and white perches and colourful exterior mimic the pigeon lofts from a time when it was thought pigeons were attracted home by the brightly coloured patterns.

Fifteen pigeons have been kindly donated to the artists by local pigeon breeders, which Lockett & England will train and enter into races with the Aston & District Flying Club. A GPS system will be used to track one of the pigeons, giving an insight into their fascinating ability to return home.

In addition to the public programme, the artists will run workshops for participants in the Birmingham Intensive Supervision and Surveillance Programme throughout May and June. The group will learn about all aspects of pigeon keeping, whilst helping train the birds to race fitness”

A publication will be launched in November as part of The Event, to document this multi-faceted project, with additional contributions by artists, workshop participants and pigeon fanciers.

On a side note…the pesky Pigeons made me ill.

Copyright A. Jackson 2009

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The last time I went to the countryside a nice police officer arrested me. On questioning, as to why I’d been detained, he limply offered, as his defence, that as they don’t get many ‘coloureds’ in Hereford he believed that my presence was slightly suspicious….and I was duly detained for questioning…until released without charge.

In hindsight, this does indeed all sound like a scene set in some small Mid-Western town as the lone drifter…that’s me in this analogy by the way…well, drifts into town …..and is harassed by the maniacal police chief content on keeping the good people of his Mid-Western town safe from ‘outsiders’.

So, as you can see, I have a lot in common with that famous drifter….no, silly not The Littlest Hobo….John Rambo of course.

Well, that cathartic release was offered up as the mise-en-scène for the fact that perhaps England for me is not symbolised by the countryside… that world, whenever I’ve been to it, has either stared rudely at me or arrested me.

So perhaps if I was say, going to photographically represent ‘England, I’d focus on the cities - where most of my life has been lived…the space where I’m not totally posited as ‘other’ and where there are other ‘swarthy’ looking types like my good self.

Photography of course is the taxonomy of our subjectivity…a series of subjective dialogues or personal discourses, if you will; the parameters of which we, as photographers, set and construct at will. So someone, if they so wished, could represent England of course, in any way, shape or fashion that fulfilled their own subjectivity.

Now people, I am well and truly down with this.

My England is not your England…and your England is not mine.

The flaw within this, alas, is that I seem to see more and more representations that are one’s I only ever see from my train window - on my journey to other cities….one’s that don’t ever include people who look like me or who share the same streets as me.

I seem to see an ever protracted vision of England that have removed my history in this country from the archives. Mono-cultured visions of country villages, fetes, festivals, rolling hills, green rolling hills, no, deep green joyous rolling hills that speak in hushed tones of the history of a glorious past that gave birth to a proud people who civilised the world….wait, did I mention the green rolling hills?

*You are accordingly invited to read that paragraph back again, but this time with Jerusalem being played in the background…*

Well any how, you get the message; I’m talking about the photographic equivalents of the BBC period costume drama…an image of England unsoiled by mass immigration…an image of England that never was and never will be.

The latest photographic work that attempts to represent a nation, We English by Simon Roberts, he uses as his leitmotif - to examine notions of Englishness - the English and their pastimes.

Now, when I first heard about this work I was interested to see how Mr. Roberts would depict the massed throng of drunks undertaking the nation’s favourite pastime of binge drinking as they gorge themselves on cheap booze and end up in the gutter.

I wanted to see him at that great English festival…the Notting Hill Carnival….and how he’d respond to all of the Red Stripe bottle holding ‘head, shoulders, knees and toes’ skankers dancing up an incoherent storm…and so I was saddened to hear that Roberts’ was only including ’pastimes’ taking part in the countryside….because that’s where the English live….right?

But why attempt to explain a people via their connections to the landscape when so few of us indeed have any connection to it? And why visit all of the tourist traps? With this in mind who is to say that – as the images are taken in tourist traps – that all of the people captured are indeed ‘English’?

Pedantic of me perhaps…but it’s an interesting question….what if some of the people who are being used to depict a nation aren’t actually English? Ok it’s not exactly a Ben Shahn moment, and anyway, of course, the people are inconsequential figures in relation to the land…the great imposing wild land of the countryside.

Now, OK there’s no need for me to declare an interest here…you’re right…I’ve got ‘beef’ with the countryside…but I decided to put this aside and look afresh at We English.

I really wanted to like this series. Especially as Roberts’ on his We English blog had previously ‘dissed’ Martin Parr’s own vision of England in his British cities work.

But I didn’t.

There are a number of stand out images…Roberts is a good photographer - there are bound to be. But at times I felt that I was looking at images of England from my train seat. A series of images that flashed by, without resonating; that attempted to reach out to me but couldn’t hold on.

It was if I sat dislocated and hermetically sealed away from them. I felt posited as that very same passenger behind glass…the dispassionate viewer to scenes that I was familiar with…but ambivalent to.

The more that I looked at the images the more they seemed to be one’s captured by a stranger…or outsider…to England (conversely, his images of ‘foreigners’ in Motherland are more intimate).

They seemed to be made by someone who felt separated and distanced from what he saw – someone at odds with and unable to approach those within the ‘country’ rather than someone who was celebrating it….or its people. Someone, who let’s just say, had been run out of town a few times by a despotic Sheriff….not someone who was in love with it.

Maybe I’m not Roberts’ target audience…and maybe as Roberts himself cites it’s unfair to judge his images as 72dpi jpegs. Regardless of this, I just didn’t make a connection to them…I didn’t ‘feel’ them or see myself within them…and once more I didn’t see my England.

But of course it isn’t up to Roberts to afford me this vision…or indeed pretend that he can….he can only afford me of his own image of the English. His search for what has made him.

Personally, I feel that the concept of Englishness is such an amorphous, subtle and nuanced…and let’s just say a damn right intangible concept to be discussed within photographs of ‘pastimes’.

But this is Roberts’ self-made discourse. Robert’s own vision…and you can’t kick a man for wanting to share this….but maybe he isn’t trying to convince ‘Us English’…but those further a field.

What the hell, they’ll do well amongst the Anglophiles of the world who love a romanticised image of an England made real by a green and pleasant imagination.

Beyond my cynicism though…I must add that I love this country. It is the country of my birth a world that has made me all that I am and all that I know….and I can understand someone wanting to examine what it is that has fashioned them.

Perhaps though, Roberts should have called his book ‘My English’.

As ultimately, of course, these images are only Roberts’ vision of his England…and it was misguided of me to ever expect to see mine within them.

Mine can only be made by me…

….and yours only ever by you.

To see Simon Robert’s images click here.

Good night, and good luck.

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“In the transitioning from one geographical place to another, participants related moving into a psychological in-between space. In this space, they questioned, re-examined, and reflected on the meaning of who they had been…..as they moved towards repositioning themselves in new contexts. Thus, migrating was articulated as a process involving a departure from geographical and psychological places….towards finding and creating psychological places which incorporated who they were in [the] multiple locations [of their host and home countries”.

Michele Callahan Wolfson

Beyond an open door, within flat 39; a rusting bicycle sits on a balcony suspended six floors in the air. It is adorned by a makeshift washing line and a pair of white socks that gently wafts too and fro in a wind that carries upwards the shouts below of a mother for her child. As inside, and behind me, a mobile phone rings twice and then stops; and without realising it, another, albeit coded and distanced message, has been sent by a mother to her daughter from a village in Europe to a tower block in the West Midlands.

This is a work about migration. About the psychological affects engendered by those who leave all that they know behind in search of things that perhaps they will never find. Whether the reasons for migration are labelled as ‘economic’ or ‘Impelled’, or whether they are seen as ‘traditional’ or ‘new migrants’, the universal affects upon the transitional self, caught as it is between their changing geographical and psychological space are the same.

In 2004, the European Union enlarged its membership to include the so-called A8 Eastern European Countries: the Czech Republic, Estonia, Latvia, Hungary, Poland, Lithuania, Slovakia and Slovenia. This led to Britain’s largest ever wave of immigration into the country as an estimated 1 million people left their home countries and came to Britain. This work is about one of those who made that journey.

Marcela left her village of 2000 people, just outside Bratislava in 2005 and travelled for 26 hours by coach to come to England. She did not know a word of English. She worked as an au pair for a family in Wolverhampton, whilst slowly learning English, before later finding work in factories and currently a supermarket chain in Walsall. Whilst in Wolverhampton she met her partner, an Iraqi Kurd refugee, and they moved into their first home together in Walsall. They married in January 2009.

The images in this series are taken inside that home: the symbolic space that stands in for, as Wolson cites, ‘their psychological in-between space’. They live in England and yet they are not really here as their hearts are elsewhere. They seek solace in those who are the same and seemingly wait for the day until they can go back home once more.

Marcela, and perhaps others in her position, are here and yet they are not. As for those who long for return find their minds and their hearts are elsewhere; and so no roots are laid here in this makeshift and transitory world of England. Here within what has become this in-between life.

There is an absence that marks and makes real the spaces that temporarily define them. As at times this space appears to symbolise the hollowness of this makeshift life. Perhaps, as indeed for all migrants, length of stay decreases chances of return, and in turn soon this hollowness will fade as roots are finally laid.

But alas, in one sense, they will always find themselves posited between what they have left and what they have found, here in this world, at the end of the Golden Road.

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For awhile now I’ve been producing a work that explores the impact of changing geographical space on one’s psychological spaces. This work has been commissioned by the London School of Economics and Political Science and principally investigates the experiences of an economic migrant from Slovakia who moved in search of work from her village outside of Bratislava to Walsall in the West Midlands.

Caught between the identities of their home and host countries, migrants, at least psychologically, exist within a third space. No longer truly a member of their motherland, and not a member of their host country, they are in a limbo like state of identity. An insecure and inauthentic state that pushes the migrant further into themselves and in turn in search of those who they feel share their own experiences, rather than the indigenous population of their host country.

In this work, symbolically the interior spaces are used to examine the concept of their, or in the case of this work, the psychological spaces of one woman who traveled twenty-six hours on a coach to come to a country where she could not speak a single word of it’s language.

What pressures could possibly cause someone to do this? I’m not sure, but the Slovakian phrase ‘bez práce nie sú koláče’ may answer that question. Incidentally, it translates as….’no work, no cake.’

This work, provisionally entitled The Golden Road, will be a photography and video based work and is currently in the development and editing stage (as the photocopied image below evidences) and is to be exhibited at the LSE in January 2010.

‘Untitled’. Copyright A.Jackson 2009

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I originally wrote this posting (below) on December 30th 2006. At the time, my housemates had all left to see their families for Christmas. Tumi had flown to London and her partner Richard had taken his son Jaime to the Eastern Cape to spend the holidays with his father. I found myself alone in a house that would come alive at night, and as the draw of the moon cooled it’s heated frame, that the days summer Cape Town sun had warmed…it would moan and creak as I tried to sleep with a large kitchen Knife under my pillow. The next week someone would tear off the metal burglar bars and smash their way into my room - fortunately I was not there.

Well that’s the premise…and this is what I wrote back then in another time. More South African posts are available here…click it and scroll back in time.

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Just as I was about to drift off to sleep last night I thought I heard someone calling my name and I slowly fought my way out of the haze to sit upright in bed and listen. But nothing came, outside there was only the wind that blew through the trees and beyond it a steady hum of a city that had closed it’s eyes.

During the day I returned to Khayelitsha CFC for my third and final visit. I wasn’t sure what to expect as last Friday was quite bloody and unlike my first visit this time there were tears and cries of pain. A pregnant woman had come into trauma, she had begun to bleed quite excessively. She cried both out of anguish and pain and I remember her leaning down towards her unborn child to whisper some words of comfort, if not to her child, then to herself - the doctor came over and told her that her baby might die or it might live and she was wheeled away leaving her bloody sheets.

I walked over and photographed the sheets and a woman behind me whispered “..how can he take such a terrible photograph?” I’m not sure why but I sarcastically replied “it’s art”….she laughed and then I laughed and the world carried on.

In another room a large hulking man sat upright on a bench in only a pair royal blue briefs. He had been asleep in bed when his partner poured boiling water over his torso and groin. Flaps of skin hung off him. Later his partner would come in and be treated for cuts and bruises. Apparently in the night he had assaulted her and she waited for him to fall asleep before enacting her revenge.

Later a man with his hand in a bag full of blood would walk in and collapse. The bag burst its contents onto the floor and blood cascaded down the corridor. He had been shot in the wrist but luckily for him he was high and for now couldn’t feel the pain - although later he would. This could be any trauma unit in the West but here the difference is is that there is only one doctor on call. I cannot imagine the pressure that he is under.

Yesterday I returned.

At times in my life I’ve wished that I had a faith, that I belonged to some orgainised religion that could promise me that there was more to life than what I could see or feel but alas even as a child I could never find any omnipotent being to believe in and so I guess that I’m left with only the random and arbitrary happenings of life.

Perhaps thirty-six years ago the man who lay on the bed before me never knew that ultimately our paths would cross and that on the day of his death I would be there to photograph his hand resting on a red blanket. I didn’t find out his name; perhaps that was intentional.

I looked at him; his face partially covered by a thin white blankt: and looked at his open eyes and waited for them to blink as I loaded film into my camera. But of course they wouldn’t. I thought momentarily about what he had seen last and then I extended the legs of my tripod. I didn’t really feel anything - I know how that sounds. I was alone in the two bed morgue and all I thought about was the quality of light coming in through the door. Not even later when I stood next to his mother did I feel anything - everything was so matter of fact. There was no sad music in the background, no-one cried for him and in the corridor outside people joked and laughed. His was just another wasted life that went nowhere, a life made and destroyed in Khayelitsha, the invisible world that grows on the edges of the city. I know that I sound cold but it’s the one’s still left alive we should cry for.

His death was suspicious and so the police promised that his body would be taken to the government mortuary for a post mortem. The last time they promised this the body rotted for three days before being taken away.

Later a daughter brought in her father; he was slumped in a wheelchair. After tests it was deduced that he had suffered a severe stroke and that his chances of survival were low. When the daughter was told this of course in the fraction of a second her world changed and she cried uncontrollably.

The doctor left the room and left me alone with her. She looked at me and I looked towards the floor…I waited for a while then looked up again to see her crying and still looking at me. I fiddled with my camera and tried not to cry as I remebered when the doctors had told me that my father also was going to die. He lived and I wanted to tell her to have hope but; she couldn’t speak English and anyway I knew that I didn’t really want to leave my seated silence. Later she rang her pastor for comfort.

A mother brought her young child in. He had dragged a pan full of soup off the stove and over his head: his face was burnt. The doctor stopped as her read the case file, this was the third time that this had happened. He had burns on top of burns. Whether it was direct abuse or neglect the result was the same and the child went back home again.

My last day ended and I too went home. I shook Timmo’s hand and felt like thanking him for the work that he does as I know it takes a toll on him- but I didn’t. I was glad to have met him and seen a part of his life. We wished each other goodbye and I closed the door. I’ve been lucky to have met so many good people. Perhaps the only faith we need is the faith in the knowledge that here on earth there are still good people with good hearts.

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If there is a pride of lions, well surely there must be a ‘brag’ of photographers…right? Well, anyway, if not a brag, I wonder what else you would call a group of photographers? Perhaps someone else, infinitely more wise than I, has suggested a ‘pack’ of photographers. Anyway, regardless of what you may call an assemblage of camera users, I always feel distinctly out of place amongst them, at least one’s whom I’m not acquainted with.

There is a tangible air, an almost electrical charge of hubris that, like the calm before a thunder storm, is felt all around me. As the hierarchical jostling occurs, as photographers piss all around them to mark and claim their turf….but of course then the free booze and food at these things kick in and then it’s all ‘gravy baby’…to coin a phrase.

I once went to a VII seminar in London and sat amongst the crowd of photographers who were all decked out in a wardrobe styled by central casting. All ’suited and booted’ in customary and almost ceremonial like chains of identity….Leica M8’s and Canon 5D’s…worn visibly around their necks - although never used - as they reinforced their identities with their completed uniforms of black or red checked Arabic scarves and photo vests. Add to this the mutterings of having been or about to become embedded with some infantry division or the other in Iraq cemented the occasion….and my exclusion - self imposed or otherwise - from it.

Perhaps I just don’t like the idea of belonging to anything….which is why indeed the solitary pursuit of photography appeals.

Or perhaps again, photographers are more suited to being the ‘only photographer in the village’? We always like to think of ourselves as somehow being unique and separate from the crowd. The only one’s in the room who can truly ’see’ the world around them that others ignore. Commentators enabled by some unknown force to capture, summerise and explain the world via our frozen visions…for the good of mankind…OK, that’s bollocks but it sounded good.

Ultimately, maybe the reason why I don’t like ‘chillin’ with other photographers is as Groucho put it, perhaps “I just don’t want to belong to any club that will accept people like me as a member”.

OK, I’m heading back now to my small corner of the village…

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Taliban is a word that has dominated our lives since the Autumn of 2001, as such, it was interesting to watch this Magnum in Motion presentation.

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Join me if you can for my talk at the Open Eye Gallery in Liverpool, on Tuesday 28th July. The talk, organised by Redeye, will be an excellent environment for photographers to meet and network. Entry is free.

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I love film soundtracks. Letters from Iwo Jima is wonderful; and sitting on the night bus with Bernard Hermann’s Taxi Driver on the ipod, surrounded by the flotsum and jetsum of the night, seems a tad fitting at times. So for no other reason that Hermannn, Eastwood and Ennio Morricone have ‘mad skills’ and that they’ve all produced beautiful pieces of music…enjoy.

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There is something about the series Mad Men that grasped me immediately. It is a show set in the wake of the American dream of the early 1960’s, within the world of advertising. Perhaps it is the subtle under current of melancholy that flows beneath the great script and wonderful acting; or perhaps it is just the honesty of a programme that doesn’t need to continually hold your hand and whisper to you that things will be OK?

It is an adult show that doesn’t pander to happy endings, a show that takes you on a journey and leaves you wondering where the hell those forty-odd minutes have gone? The third series airs in the States on AMC next month and a part of me hopes that it’s the last season.

In this segment, from the last episode in season one, Don pitches to Kodak his agency’s idea on how to sell their new gadget, the slide Carousel - it’s a great clip. To see it please follow this link here.

Enjoy.

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Here’s a small excerpt from my first short documentary film, it’s entitled ‘Fire’. The film follows the experiences of eighteen year old ‘Fire’ who lives in an area of England called Handsworth, which is in Birmingham. In the film Fire (he does not use his ‘government name’ only his street name), reflects on his life, his world, and ponders the future.

The film was made in conjunction with Beyond Bricks. The programme was facilitated by Multistory and funded by Urban Living and the Arts Council.

This is my first film and the practicalities of filming, sound recording and editing have at times proven frustrating, and well, still do. But it’s a learning curve - and the film is still a work in progress; but video is definitely an area that I would like to continue with in the future.

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Apparently if aliens are out there, in the vacuum of space, this map below shows what TV broadcasts are viewable to them.  When the news that Margaret Thatcher has won the 1979 General Election finally reaches HD 217107 we’re screwed guys….expect the UFO’s on their way to save us from her tyranny with their own brand of liberation / occupation.  For a bigger version of the map (Copyright Gizmodo 2009), go to the Gizmodo site that I appropriated from…..or just click on the map.

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Over the years I’ve always enjoyed coming back to Dziga Vertov’s ‘Man with a movie camera’. 80 years after its production, it remains a remarkable film, and a repository of visual stimuli that I continue to return to. But apart from the obvious visual artistry of the film, are the candid moments of life in the then Soviet Union of 1929.

There are moments within his film when I ‘wonder what happened to you’…you that young man sleeping rough who has been unexpectedly woken by the camera? Did you survive the coming purges or indeed the ‘Great Patriotic War‘? What happened next for you? Indeed I often think about what happened next for the people I have fleetingly come into contact with, photographed, and never seen again.

I do often think about the woman in Khayelitsha who I stood next to as she bled out over the white sheets that covered the bed beneath her as she miscarried her child. She asked me to fetch the doctor and on our return the doctor told her that her baby might live or it might die. And that was it. She has placed on a wheelchair and pushed away. I’ve written about this here before but I always remember her leaning down and whispering to her unborn child as she cried and she was pushed away I photographed the blood left behind by her on the white sheets on which she had sat.

“Yuh, yuh…how can you photograph something so terrible”, one woman asked. I wasn’t really sure.

I often think about what happened to her child and if it indeed lived or died.

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Yesterday I went down to my parents home, with a digital and video camera in hand, with the expressed intention of starting what I hoped would be a multimedia presentation about their life as migrants who came from a land far away and who had to re-evaluate their identities in the face of the one’s they had left behind and the new one’s they had constructed in its wake.  I’ll discuss this in a later post as it’s an issue that I’m exploring within another work.

Anyway, when I got there I was surprised to see numerous workmen busily hammering, sawing and singing their hearts away as they  merrily decorated the house.

Gone were any thoughts of filming the first of what I’d envisaged would be a slow, and sensitive interview that shaped their experiences.  And in a child-like huff, with my parents for not telling me they had the decorators in, I put my cameras away and instead sat arms folded watching the tennis.

But of course I was wrong.  I should have continued and filmed something - anything - and made sense of it afterwards.  Perhaps in time the symbolism of the decorators removing the old identity of the space in which they lived and constructing a new one, would have been an apt and fulfilling one. Or the backdrop of sawing and hammering and indeed singing, could have been a valuable soundtrack to my parents words.  Well, perhaps I’ll never know now.

As observers we have to be flexible, be able to roll with the punches and make it work - beyond that which we had preconceived.

Anyway I’ll go back on Monday and start afresh.

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