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Highlights and Trends: Paris Photo 2016

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Archive Pierre Molinier, Maison Européenne de la Photographie

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Like all contemporary art fairs, Paris Photo is a photography business and be in no doubt about the proper order of those two words. It was notable that even outside the event one had to run a gauntlet of ticket touts offering illict entrance to the fair. It wasn’t vastly different inside, where there are certainly some touts active only wearing suits and displaying more discrimination about their clientele. It was interesting to arrive in Paris just a few days after a session with my MA students discussing the transition of documentary to the gallery. One of the questions we discussed was that old sticking point of what makes something art, something we failed to reach a conclusion to but which led to some interesting observations, including that something (perhaps anything) can be art if someone says it is, but whether it’s good or bad art is another matter entirely.

Paris Photo evidences the truth of this, with an enormous amount of photography desperate to assert its artistic value in the most obvious of ways, through process, size and other ostentatious displays. As I noted last week art is often encouraged to exist in the artificial vacuum of the white cube gallery, but the reality is that it’s meaning is often defined in the most interesting ways by what surrounds it. Amongst the ocular and aural noise of the huge Grand Palais, the photographs that were content to sit on the wall quietly, sometimes neglected in the dingiest corner of a gallery’s booth (I saw a print by surrealist Maurice Tabard hung on a cupboard door) were often the most pleasurable discoveries when you stumbled across them. The typology, the calling card of art photography, appears alive and well, with a staggering variety from Ursula Schultz-Dornburg’s Becher-esque photographs of bus stops to Luis Molina-Pantin’s series of Mexican door intercoms. Often it’s the ones that feel more casual, the latter in this case, that work. Ditto photographic abstraction which is abundant and almost to a man dull. For the most part contemporary journalism and documentary are absent which perhaps says much about it’s percieved worth. One encounters weird anomalies of course, for example James Hill’s photographs of Afghanistan circa 2001. In one image an elderly man prays against the backdrop of a sky filled with the white loops of contrails left by American bombers. Then there was Daniel Blau selling the purest documentary in the form of vintage NASA prints of stars and military shots of atom bomb detonations, showing that anything can be repurposed as art if the price is right.

Prints exhibiting texture and sculpture were less in evidence than at Unseen Photo Fair earlier in the summer but still represented especially amongst younger artists. Some of these managed to make something unique without appearing to try too hard. Tom Lovelace’s cinema pinboard (transformed by the sun into a natural photogram suggestive of a Mark Rothko) is a neat example, although displayed without explanation I expect the idea is lost on most. Another nice twist on this came in Timm Rautert’s framed boxes of darkroom paper, each box containing an unseeable photographic print. The boxes are themselves rather beautiful objects carrying a timely commentary on analog fetishism, and almost don’t need the added conceptual twist of containing the photographic equivalent of Schrodinger’s cat. A few artists even riff on what you might call the textural turn, for example Ben Cauchi’s photographs, which from a distance appear to be crumpled prints representing exactly this type of sculptural photography, until you get close and realize they are just normal photographs cleverly lit. As I said in my write up of Unseen, the sculptural trend isn’t inherently interesting but it definitely serves a purpose in the context of the photographic art market’s inherently contradictory need to limit a medium which in reproductive terms is entirely unlimited. And how glaring that contradiction is in the Grand Palais. You might feel that a vintage Edward Weston for €230,000 is sort of understandable, it’s all about the history I guess and for institutions and perhaps some collectors owning an object with lineage is worth that sort of price. But I feel that prices even a small fraction of this hard to rationalize when you come to contemporary works, irrespective of who the photographer is. It makes you realize how much art can be like trading currency or junk bonds, a game which perhaps will get most interesting when the wheels finally start to fall off and someone with some influence abandons the ridiculous game of treating photographs like paintings.

Perhaps hedging their bets because of the pressure to recoup their costs (I heard speak of around €20,000 for a booth) many of galleries opted to show a little of everything, with clusters of old and new, photojournalism and art, but this approach usually felt dysfunctional and rather as if they were showing nothing very much at all. In contrast to this tendency the ones that made something of a stand by offering a coherent display really stood out. East Wing Dubai got a tip of the hat for this at Unseen, and they did the same again although perhaps not quite as compellingly. In a similar way the Paris-Beijing booth was turned over to a display of Thomas Sauvin’s Beijing Silvermine, a wonderful collection of Chinese vernacular photography rescued from the city’s municipal dumps. These degraded and distorted the images are a fitting metaphor for historical adjustment and technological change. A nice touch was a light box table in the middle of the booth piled high with the original negatives which visitors were encouraged to inspect with a loup, in contrast to the hands-in-pockets-and-don’t-get-too-close-to-the-merchandise vibe in some of the other parts of the fair. For me the highlight of the more ‘curated’ displays was the whole of James Danzinger’s booth turned over to Paul Fusco’s RFK Funeral Train. A series shot from the locomotive that carried the younger Kennedy’s coffin to burial in 1968, Fuso captures Americans coming out to pay their final respects, holding signs, smiling, saluting and shedding tears. In each image the subject is isolated in a bubble of sharpness, their surroundings blurred out by the movement of the speeding train. Both as an important moment in time and for its resonance with the current divisions in the United States the series is beyond moving. I’ve got to admit I was almost tempted to ask for the price, but the old truism that ‘if you need to ask then you can’t afford it’ came to mind.

Predictably many of the memorable bits were away from the main event. Le Bal’s Provoke exhibition was one, and while part of me would have preferred something I’d not seen so many times before the curation of the show was so excellent that it made this familiar material feel fresh and exciting anew. A particularly nice touch were deconstructed facsimiles of the original issues of the radical photography magazine pinned to the walls, allowing visitors to study them in detail. ‘Unlike today we thought of the camera as a weapon’ Nobuyoshi Araki says in one of the wall texts, and it is the political agenda of the work that is partly what excites along with the iconoclastic attitude towards photography. The abandonment of the idea of the camera as a weapon (however flawed an idea it is) explains much about why so much in the Grand Palais is dull beyond belief. Provoke and it’s contributors had an ethos, and that made them dangerous, but were it around today it would also probably make it deeply unfashionable. At the Maison Européenne de la Photographie the Andres Serrano show was worth a look, particularly for America his series of vast portraits made in the wake of the 9/11 attacks which echo August Sander’s similar documentation of Weimar Germans. A photograph of president elect Donald Trump is one of the first you see, aptly flanked by a child beauty queen on one side and a crack cocaine addict and model on the other. Serrano’s massive prints are partly engaging for the way they reveal the small imperfections in even the most superficially perfect people, but doing so without suggesting these imperfections are shortcomings, more part of what makes us who we are. The really uncanny thing about Trump is noticing the way he lacks even the smallest blemish or scar, even the child beauty queen showing more sign of this very human imperfection.

My highlight of the entire trip however was the exhibition upstairs Archive Pierre Molinier. A house painter turned artist, cross dresser, and hedonist loosely aligned with surrealism, Molinier produced a series of erotic self-portraits blending photography, drawing, and collage to bizarrely brilliant effect. It’s hard to know what to compare his images to, the thought that came to my mind was that had Otto Dix employed photography and had a penchant for transvestitism, sodomy and mixing colour pigments with his sperm (as Molinier did) he might have produced a series of images a little like these. Mollinier’s photographs and photomontages vary between the funny, the smutty and the downright creepy, but the overall effect of the exhibition is powerfully moving. Despite André Bréton championing his art, Mollinier lived a marginalized life and killed himself in 1976, which in the context of Paris Photo would seem to make it worth quoting the critic Frédéric Beigbeder. Writing an essay to accompany an auction sale of Molinier’s work last year, a text which might normally be a congratulatory piece aimed at the soon to be owners of the artist’s work, Beigbeder instead offers this apt truth: ‘true artists die in suffering, poverty and anonymity, while decades later the high classes pay tribute to them as they eat their truffle risottos’.

My visit to Paris was brief and so I didn’t look at as many books as I might have normally, skipping Offprint entirely to save on time (and also because such large book fairs also often have a strangely depressive effect one me). The Aperture Photo Book prize had a few interesting titles in the long list but there was also quite a bit that was bland and the knowledge that is a paying prize is hard to escape when noticing this. As I wrote recently of the prize, when you charge entrants for a competition you can’t expect it to reflect the best, only the best of what can afford to pay. The winner, Gregory Halpern’s ZZYZX is a competent book, beautifully photographed and printed. I appreciate what Halpern is doing but at the same time in its intellectual abstractness it’s a league away from the photographic terrain that I like to spend my time traversing. I found the offerings at the boat-borne book fair at Polycopies more rewarding. Some highlights included Marco Tiberio and Maria Ghetti‘s Immo Refugee Camp, a typology of the Calais jungle’s informal structures which in it’s published form masquerades as an estate agent’s brochure and Dear Clark, Sara-Lena Maierhofer’s compelling investigation into identity via a non-receptive con man (the book also appears in Aperture’s shortlist). For the photo history buffs Javier Viver’s Révélations. Iconographie de La Salpêtrière is a wonderful catalogue of the hospital’s pioneering medical photography including the profound and troublesome work of Freud’s mentor Jean-Martin Charcot and his collaboration with pioneering chrono-photographer Albert Londe. At all these places there was such lavish overdesign on show (inserts, French folds, etc), which rather like the gallery penchant for cleverly manipulated and distorted prints really needs to be taken to be analysed, and taken to task.

So there were of course some wonderful gems to be found at Paris Photo, but rather like Sauvin’s trawling of rubbish dumps it took time and a strong stomach to find them. I calculated that I found one image actually worth spending time over for every thirty minutes I spent exploring the main fair, whether that is a good ratio and how it compares to previous years of Paris Photo, I dare not determine.

The Market: An Interview with Mark Curran

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Financial Surrrealism (World Trade Center II)
Zuidas Financial District, Amsterdam, Netherlands, 2015, from THE MARKET

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It’s a paradox that one of the great strengths of photojournalism and documentary photography can also be one of its great handicaps. That is the tendency to employ a laser like focus, conducting photographic micro-studies which encompass a very small field in great detail. It’s the approach many of us learn from the start, being advised (with good reason) as students not to overextend ourselves and to restrict our focus. But it’s also an approach many of us continue to use even as we mature as photographers and become capable of so much more. This micro approach certainly has advantages, and in certain contexts, particularly in exploring very human topics, it can work very well. But in exploring some of the bigger themes and forces that shape all of our lives it often falls short, unable to expose the importance of abstract relationships, networks, and flows that take place between the disparate elements which often make up the greater whole of an issue.

How for example can one speak about environmental decay without also discussing capitalism, and how can one discuss capitalism without discussing the cultures and societies that participate in and tolerate it? A few, very few, photographers and photographic artists are ambitious enough to set aside the micro for the macro in this way. One of them I think is Mark Curran, an artist researcher and educator who lives and works in Berlin and Dublin. His long term research projects combine photography, multimedia and installation to highlight the flows of global capital and predatory acts and contexts that result from them. They have been shown at galleries, festivals and universities globally and future exhibitions are planned for the UK in France in 2017 alongside a full publication of THE MARKET. Mark holds a practice-led PhD, lectures on the BA (Hons) Photography programme, Institute of Art, Design & Technology (IADT), Dublin and is Visiting Professor on the MA in Visual & Media Anthropology, Freie Universität Berlin. (Full biography on Mark’s website). Recently we discussed his work and some of the wider questions that it raises.

Mark, perhaps you could start by telling me a little about how you first became interested in making work about the financial system?

Although now living and working between Berlin and Dublin, with hindsight, centrally all began with my experience first as a migrant from, and then as a returning migrant to, Ireland in 1992 (from western Canada, where my family emigrated in 1984 when I was 19). Having studied in Calgary, I was then working as a Social Worker and while away, one holds romantic notions of where one is from and ideas of ‘Home’. On my return, I was faced with the contradictions and hypocrisies of both the country of my birth and my own position. This was exemplified how on the second day of my return, a very close friend brought me to see Ireland’s first shopping mall and having seemingly left the landscape of suburbia and such spaces in Calgary, this was, a significant defining and revelatory moment. Then in 1995, I decided to take a career break (became a career change), bought a camera and went on an extended trip to SE Asia. This transformed everything. On my return, I lived in an area of Dublin that, as we would now understand, was experiencing the initial stages of gentrification, and what was the beginning and evolution of the so called ‘Celtic Tiger’ economy where the Republic of Ireland basically underwent it’s Industrial Revolution.

I had a conversation with my elderly neighbour, Kathleen, and she described how, her daughter, the first in five generations could not afford to live in the area. So, I began then to photograph in this area, named Stoneybatter. It is one of the oldest parts (and Irish speaking parts) of Dublin. When the Vikings arrived and came up the river Liffey, to make way, the locals moved from one side of the river to the other and this site was Stoneybatter. In 1998, having applied and been accepted to art college to study photography (IADT where I now lecture), over the month of August, I began photographing young children at dusk and always with cranes in the background. A somewhat naïve, impulsive way of using photographs, in light of that conversation with Kathleen, to ask questions of economic futures and for whom. Of course, I didn’t realise then that this was really the beginning of a cycle of projects, thematically, that continues to the present.

Since that time, I have undertaken four long-term research projects, completed over the last 18 years, addressing the predatory impact resulting from the flows and migrations of global capital. Two have been completed in Ireland, one in the former East Germany and my current ongoing transnational project titled, THE MARKET*, which focuses on the functioning and condition of the global markets with increasing focus on the rogue, Financial Capital.

The first of these SOUTHERN CROSS (1999-2001) (recipient of the first Artist Award from the Gallery of Photography in Dublin) critically surveyed the so-called, ‘Celtic Tiger’ economy of the Irish republic, through portraits and landscape, mapping the spaces of Development and Global Finance. The title alludes to being sited in the south of Ireland and the new religion of capital. At the time of the first exhibition, we also published a catalogue (Gallery of Photography/Cornerhouse, 2002). This included and essay by Dr. Justin Carville and the poet and writer, Philip Casey. More recently, the writer, Colin Graham observed:

‘evidence of the rasping, clawing deformation of the landscape, the visceral human individual in the midst of burgeoning idea of progress-as- building, propped up by finance-as-economics…it stands as an extraordinary warning of the future that was then yet to come (2012: 15)’

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Stephen from Dublin
(IFSC, Phase I, Dublin, 2001) from the series prospect (SOUTHERN CROSS)

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This was followed by, The Breathing Factory (Belfast Exposed/Edition Braus 2006), completed between 2003-2005 and was the central research of my practice-led PhD, one of the first of its kind in the Republic of Ireland. Sited at the Hewlett-Packard Industrial & Research Complex outside Dublin, which followed over 9 months of negotiation regarding access, the project critically addressed the role and representation of globalised labour and industrial space and global labour practices. Completed over a sustained two year period, central is an understanding of the condition of precarity and vulnerability as core to the functioning of those practices and seeing the factory complex as an allegory for the nation-state itself, in terms of responding to the needs and demands of the global market (the title references such an economic model, as defined by former Volkswagen CEO, Peter Hartz, who, on invitation of Francois Hollande, is presently reforming the state social welfare system in France). This was exhibited at FORMAT Festival in 2013 and a video of this installation can be seen here.

Extracts from EDEN/Ausschnitte aus EDEN (Arts Council 2011) was undertaken between 2003-2008 in a declining industrial and mining region of the former East Germany. A central premise of the project was seeking a future of capital, at time in Ireland were citizens were being told the ‘Celtic Tiger’ would last forever, The prophetic experiences of this region, and East Germany as whole, contradicted this narrative and evidenced the devastating unevenness inherent in globalisation. The intention, similar to the HP complex, was to also see the Opencast mine (‘Tagebau’) at the heart of the Lausitz as an allegory again for globalisation, being both unsustainable and finite. The project also alludes to how capital has no national identity. The installation is all projection-based underlining the precarity of this community and limitations of audio-visual practice to describe.

The intention was always to enter the site/sphere that has framed and defined all these other projects. Hence, in 2010, I began working with the curator and very much collaborator, Helen Carey (now Director of Fire Station Artists’ Studios, Dublin) on THE MARKET. Helen has been instrumental in securing project funding and in the evolution of the project, which now incorporates five sites, Dublin, London, Frankfurt, Addis Abeba and Amsterdam. All were selected for specific reasons – Dublin, where the project started, London as the global centre for financial capital, Frankfurt, at the heart of Europe, the Euro, however, for the project became about the mediatised version of this structure and inaccessibility, Addis Abeba as site of the youngest exchange in the world (opening in 2008) and Amsterdam, although site of the oldest exchange in the world, the focus for me was the Netherlands central role in the global Shadow-Banking system and High-Frequency Trading (HFT). Ultimately, each site offers description regarding this globalised sphere.

Your work on this topic has been long term to say the least. Is that the way you naturally work or do you think that sort of long term involvement is simply demanded by a subject of this complexity?

Having started working directly with this theme in 1998 through what would be defined as documentary photography, my practice evolved to an expanded multi-media practice, in response to and informed by ethnography and the then burgeoning field of Visual & Media Anthropology. This is for a number of reasons. First, in the context of ethics and representation and photography’s historical role in the construction of identity. As someone who centrally incorporates the portrait and representing people, this was and remains a central consideration. Ethnography puts the human subject at the centre and in a way that demands time, is immersive and thereby brings understanding and insight – a critically reflexive approach. This evolved into formulating an expanded practice and ‘montage/multivocality’ as critical representational strategy in the context of the politics of representation. Therefore, in addition to photography, the projects incorporate, audio-digital video, artefactual and archival material and sound and centrally, text/verbal testimony – the person/citizen as witness.

In addition, time is significant in the role of securing access, as I understand these projects as a study of power. THE MARKET, in particular, has been informed by the anthropologist, Laura Nader and her advocacy in 1973 for Studying Up – to study the structures of power and the culture that substantiates them:

What if, in reinventing anthropology, anthropologists were to study the colonizers rather than the colonized, the culture of power rather than the culture of the powerless, the culture of affluence rather than the culture of poverty? Principally studying the most powerful strata of urban society…and instead of asking why some people are poor, we would ask why other peope are so affluent

(Nader, L. (1972: 289) from ‘Up the Anthropologist – Perspectives Gained from Studying Up’ in Hynes, D. (ed.) Reinventing Anthropology, Pantheon, New York, 284–311).

This requires time explicitly as she states, ‘how the powerful do not want to be studied’. So perseverance becomes critical to provide cultural description to theses spheres, these structures that centrally define us. So for example, with this project, it has taken on average, 1.5 – 2 years to access sites and/or individuals. So perseverance becomes critical to enable cultural description of theses spheres and structures that centrally define us, and how we are expected to live as citizens. In addition, where access was not given as with the Deutsche Börse in Frankfurt, the project documents that process in terms of what that lack of access describes, the paper trail and indeed the mediatised version of the market as evidenced by the ‘TV studio’ as the Börse itself describes the actual exchange in Frankfurt. So the projects are inherently political in terms of a study of power, and therefore this frames a positioning of artist researcher and activism. This has also been informed by Nicholas Mirzoeff’s idea of #VisualActivism, which he describes as the ‘interaction of pixels and action to make change’.

I would just like to acknowledge that there is much discussion of ‘post-representation’. However, in the context of contemporary financial capital whose key function is abstraction (this is witnessed in the impact of algorithmic technology/machinery, which financial capital has been, and is, the central innovator), and evolving how Marx stated, Capitalism seeks everything to be recreated in its image, I would observe that Financial Capital seeks everything to be recreated in its image – therefore, to embrace such a position opens the possibility of practices which, intentionally or not, align themselves, ideologically with the functioning of financial capital.

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Bethlehem, Trader (negotiation 1.5 years) Ethiopian Commodity Exchange (ECX)
Addis Abeba, Ethiopia, September 2012, from THE MARKET

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I’m glad you raise the spectre of technology, it’s relationship to capitalism and the question of its abstraction. I’ve often written here about the issue of representation in a time when more and more of the key machinery of our world is becoming impossible to directly visualise in the ways that journalists, artists and particularly photographers would traditionally have done, the increasing use of algorithms being a very clear example of that. I think the work of Beate Geissler and Oliver Sann makes an interesting example of this in that they apply these traditional approaches rooted in the axiom of proximity to a topic which cannot really be revealed by such closeness. By contrast, I think you find very interesting ways around this problem and I wonder if you could talk a little about how you think about visualising topics, which are essentially avisual?

A central function of capital is abstraction. This is so critically important to understand as through my research and speaking with those working in this sphere, I became aware of the central role of technology, specifically what we may define as algorithmic machinery, which has been innovated and pioneered by financial capital. At present almost 85% of trading is undertaken through such technology. Indeed, a 2012 UK government Office of Science (Foresight) report forecasts that within a decade there will be no human traders having been largely replaced by these systems. It is again important to understand and stress that the application of algorithmic technology was innovated by the markets beginning in the 1980s. Too often this relationship is overlooked and indeed under-represented in discussion around such themes as ‘Big Data’. And this is where it can become rather dystopian.

Focusing on the thesis of how the markets, and more specifically, financial capital, seeks everything to be recreated in its image. In such a scenerio, where, in addition to the role of tax avoidance systems/Havens and Shadow Banking systems with as much as half the money circulating the planet flowing through these networks daily remaining largely unregulated, creates a large degree of Stateless-ness, there is an argument of a future about significant peopleless-ness. So, as an artist researcher, how to represent such structures, to give these processes cultural description.

Therefore, a critical element of the project and the installation of THE MARKET is the soundscape, which is immersive in scale. Algorithms emit pulses as they travel through fibre-optic cables (although presently shifting to light) and function 24 hours a day so they are ever present beyond the visual and aural realm of human beings so how to represent something we, as citizens, cannot see or hear. My brother, Ken (Curran), is a programmer and composer. So, through the application of an algorithm, which Ken coded, to identify the words “market” and/or “markets” in public speeches given by relevant national Ministers of Finance, the data was then transformed to create the installation soundscape. To date, ‘localised’ algorithmic translations of speeches by Michael Noonan (Ireland), George Osborne (United Kingdom), Pierre Moscovici (France) and Jeroen Dijsselbloem (Netherlands & Eurozone Group President) have been included in exhibitions in those countries. The intention conceptually is to represent the functioning of contemporary financial capital through the conduit of the financialised nation-state. In turn, to create a tension between the material objects of the installation – photographs, artefacts, transcripts – and the possibility of their abstraction through the processes that the soundscape represents.

Another strategy I have employed is drawing on research by Eric Scott Hunsader (Owner of Nanex, online platform which documents daily global trading), who looked at one stock for one second in 2012. He noted that in one second, 14,000 positions were taken globally on that one stock. He stated how if you were to print out that amount of data, it would equate to a 6 feet high stack of A4 paper. So, I have recreated this (titled Normalising Deviance II) as part of several installations further in the context of the soundscape. It is figurative in scale and in addition on each page is a quote from a telephone conversation I had with a senior trader working in London, who stated:

…what people don’t understand… is that what happens in the market is pivotal to their lives… not on the periphery…but slap, bang, in the middle…

More recently, a further elaboration on the soundscape and critique of the popular graphic representation of the markets, I worked with a friend and colleague, Damien Byrne, who designed a 3D visualization/virtualisation of the algorithmically-generated soundscape. So again as a key contemporary operating strategy is the virtualisation of structures including the nation-state (as outlined by Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi), I would argue through this appropriation, it further represents contemporary financial capital functioning through the conduit of the financialised nation state. It is important to note that in the installation is that a one point the 3D graph disappears, evaporates so alluding to how we, as an audience, as citizens can reject the narrative that supporting/saving such structures is the only possibility available. Remembering that presently, it is the actions of global central and state banks that is maintaining the appearance of globalised economic well-being through quantitative-easing resulting in austerity and a scale of inequality, which according to the World Economic Forum, the world has ever experienced. And again, this has occurred since, the crash in 2007/2008.

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Empty Workstation (Steilmann Textile Factory (one week before closure) – last textile factory in East Germany relocating to Romania and 6 months later Moldova)
Cottbus, Lausitz, Eastern Germany, April 2006
(Glass slides, multiple, looped projection) from Auschnitte aus EDEN/Extracts from EDEN

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You neatly pre-empt my final question. The economic turmoil of the last decade seems to have revealed even to people not that interested in economics how shaky and impermanent these systems can be. This is naturally frightening in some respects but also exciting, a hint that edifices which have come to be regarded as normal, permanent and indispensable could disappear and be replaced by something different. The turmoil of the recession offers glimpses of alternatives to the current financial system, and has helped perhaps more than anything to dispel the once prevalent sense that there is no alternative. At the risk of asking for an impossible forecast where do you see The Market and the wider market which it explores going next in the coming years?

In terms of the project, the intention is to make a complete publication, critically, as a document, but also as an artefact of a sphere that may ultimately abstract itself through the means of its own innovation. The aspiration would be, in parallel, to create an e-book and/or App version, which, ideally, will be freely available. The intention is to distribute the cultural understanding regarding this sphere, as widely as possible. So at present, I am seeking a publisher and Nicholas Mirzoeff has already kindly agreed to contribute an essay to the publication. Beyond this, there are forthcoming conferences/symposia in the US and UK. Some of the work will form part of a major group exhibition organised in the Autumn, by the Blackwood Gallery in Toronto titled ‘I Stood Before The Source’, which sounds really dynamic. The complete projects will encompass several locations extending to off-site and/or public spaces and there is a full programme of events planned under a theme with a large focus on representing contemporary financial capital. In November, I will also give a public talk in Newcastle, organised by NEPN (the research centre at the University of Sunderland, who in cooperation with Noorderlicht Festival (Netherlands) commissioned project work undertaken in Amsterdam last summer), who are also planning an installation for next year. In addition in 2017, there will be an exhibition at Galerie Bleu du Ciel in Lyon working with Gilles Verneret ho also previously showed both Southern Cross and The Breathing Factory. The intention then would be to begin the next project of the cycle, which would be to engage with, and map those central to the technology & innovation of globalised finance and more closely, the shadow structures.

In answer to the second part of your question, it is understood how structurally and regarding the culture of that structure, nothing has fundamentally changed since 2007/2008 and that the system is being artificially maintained by debt undertaken by the world’s central and state banks through Quantitative Easing (QE). For example, since 2015, the European Central Bank has been buying debt to the total of 80 Billion Euros per month (both bank and corporate) and this is set to continue (and watch what the Bank of England is planning later in August and this year). To subvent and subsidise this system, policies of austerity are imposed, resulting in the harrowing conditions of inequality, that we witness, globally. I am reminded of the words of one senior trader:

‘You have no money in your education system, that’s us (‘the markets’), you have no money in your health system, that’s us…you have no money for culture, that’s us…it’s everything’

(recorded notes with Senior Trader, Cafe, The City, London, March 2013)

Combine this with the technological evolution of algorithmic machinery innovated by financial capital and the process of abstraction, while always remembering that this sphere creates crisis and simultaneously, the means for its survival. Therefore, it truly seems unsustainable.

There is consensus and awareness that the previously understood cyclical nature has evolved into something structural. In addition, the apparent disconnect between this sphere and the real economy – hence in the project, titles directly reference ‘the Economy of Appearances’, ‘Systemic Risk’ and ‘Financial Surrealism’. Many observers, including bankers, traders, analysts, economists and CEOs I have encountered, are alert to how a massive globalised bubble has been constructed through the intervention of QE and the functioning of this system that could make the aforementioned financial crash seem minor in comparison unless, a radical overhaul occurs… But critically, this all points to the end of a system of capital as we understand and simultaneously opportunities as it is clear that resources are there to re-enable inclusive citizenship, the social contract and to invoke Martin Luther King, Socialist Democracy. Unless this is addressed and I would further argue that from Trump to Brexit, not to mention climate change, terrorism and war, all symptomatic of this dreadful malaise, that such conditions will only become more volatile and unstable. This is why it is urgent we understand the central role of this sphere, the culture it presently embodies of normalising deviance and its relationship to technology, as part of a process, which it is important to acknowledge, is happening, to avoid such calamity and towards the re-imagining and reclaiming of other futures.

* Supported by the Arts Council of Ireland, Department of Foreign Affairs, Government of Ireland and partnered by Belfast Exposed Photography, Gallery of Photography, Dublin, CCA Derry-Londonderry, NEPN, Noorderlicht and curated by Helen Carey, Director, Firestation Artists’ Studios (Dublin), the transnational multi-sited project, THE MARKET, was also part of a series of visual art events marking the centenary of the 1913 Dublin Lockout, a pivotal moment in Irish labour history.

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Installation (Limerick City Gallery of Art, 2015) includes The Economy of Appearances 2015
3D Data Visualisation of the algorithmically-generated soundscape identifying the application of the words market and/or markets in the public speeches by Irish Minister of Finance, Micheal Noonan.(Single channel projection, sound) Algorithm Design & Sound Composition by Ken Curran, Data Visualisation by Damien Byrne

After Europe: A Cultural Post-Mortem

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Statue by Hugo Hagen from life mask of Ludwig van Beethoven.
Photograph by W.J. Baker, (Source: Library of Congress)

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Last week the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union after nearly half a century of membership. In London, and in the arts and photography circles I orbit around, the mood is one of unremitting gloom. Talking politics is typically something the English only do with people they know well, such is the potential for disagreement, but over the last few days it has been the first topic of conversation in almost every encounter I have had, discussed with people I am meeting for the first time, embedded in the sign-offs of work e-mails, and referred to over the till in the supermarket. This eagerness to discuss the referendum results even with complete strangers I think reflects the great uncertainty over what happens next. While it’s certainly too early to fully anticipate the consequences for the European Union, or even for domestic politics in the UK, I have been thinking about the implications for my particular sector, attempting a tentative post-mortem of the events of the last week, and wondering in what ways photography and the arts more generally stand to be affected by this decision.

Exchange, it has been said, is the oxygen of capital. The same might well be said of art, where disparate influences, ideas, opinions all contribute to a vibrant cultural community, and where introspection and narrow horizons invariably leads to dullness, conservatism and a sort of artistic inbreeding. For me the most direct and frightening change is the prospect that so many European friends and colleagues face an uncertain future in this country, and while the Leave Campaign have made promises that EU citizens already in the UK will not be treated differently post-referendum, there are no guarantees that they will stick to this pledge (others made in the campaign quickly feel by the wayside). These people are talented artists, educators, writers, curators and more. Many have lived in this country longer than I have been alive, they have worked and paid taxes here, have married Britons, have British children, have embraced British culture (sometimes indeed to an annoying degree, a European friend who is an ardent fan of dire rural soap opera The Archers being a case in point). We stand to lose immeasurably not only from the possibility that they might be legally unable to remain, but even just from the uncertainty in the interim which might see some of them decide that it is better not to wait for a government decision on their status.

As a university lecturer many of my students are European citizens studying abroad and again I am keenly aware that my classes benefit immeasurably from the different perspectives, ideas, and references they bring to them, and the different photographic ideas and journalistic stories they choose to explore at home and abroad. They often widen my horizons about the world as much as I widen their knowledge of photography. It is yet unclear how the referendum will affect EU students, who previously paid rates comparable to UK students, and again that is a scary and depressing thought. Adding to that many friends and colleagues from Europe and further overseas have remarked to me that for the first time in Britain they have really been made to feel foreign, that they don’t belong, and that they are not welcome here, something which might well dissuade foreign nationals thinking about studying here in the future. The feeling of alienation is shared by many Britons as well, who woke up on Friday morning feeling unsure if the United Kingdom was still really our country, or whether it had been turned completely over to the right. The post-referendum atmosphere, composed of uncertainty and lingering xenophobia, is in many ways as sad and poisonous as an outright government decision to refuse European citizens the right to remain. To that end the feeling among many young photographers and artists I have spoken to is that it might perhaps be worth getting out while they can, seeking residency in other European countries before the United Kingdom’s exit enters into motion.

Beyond this, artists and photographers certainly face losing access to many European cultural programs and art funds that were available as part of our membership of the European Union. In general artists in the UK haven’t been the best at making use of these resources, well provisioned as we are with funding from domestic organisations like the Arts Council, but the fact these Europe wide funds existed was useful and I know many who have benefited from them particularly in making work and exhibiting overseas. On a more prosaic level, the European Union has supported arts events and exhibitions throughout the continent in a far more direct way, hosting them in their offices and representations and providing support with galleries. The European Union’s permanent representation in London gave me what was effectively my first solo show in 2014, that in spite of the fact the work I asked to show was in many respects very critical of the European Union’s conception of history. It takes a brave organisation to do that, and the team at the Representation was enormously international, supportive and critically minded. I had absorbing conversations about the work and about the future of the European Union with everyone I met there, from the receptionists and security staff to the Head of the Representation.

Estimating the consequences of this referendum vote for the arts is also complicated by the potential changes in UK politics as a result of a vote to leave. Hard to admit though it is, I was actually  sorry to see David Cameron resign in the immediate aftermath of the result. There are many, many things I disliked about Cameron as a politician, but one significant thing I would say in his favour is that even as he divided the country with many of his policies I think he actually believed he was doing them for the right reasons. This is significant in light of what comes next. We face the very real prospect of a future with Boris Johnson as Prime minister, a sleazy opportunist and proven liar, someone who like Trump will say whatever he believes people need to hear in order for him to get the approval he needs (Andrew Gimson, one of his biographers, recently defended Johnson’s lengthy record of dishonesty by arguing that what the public really want is to be lied to be their politicians). As a result a brief moment of optimism provoked by the recent election of a left wing London mayor after eight years of Johnson at the capital’s helm has subsided further into gloom.

What Johnson did for London could be next for the country as a whole, and if you think that’s not entirely a bad thing then think again, the benefits will likely be as unevenly distributed as they have been in this city, where a quarter of the population live in poverty while next door developers construct multi-million pound flats that will be bought and left empty by foreign investors. That has clear consequences for the arts also, which did not bear well under his mayorship, with developers given a free hand to buy up and demolish numerous spaces used by artists and cultural groups while Johnson attempted to assert his cultural credentials with naff prestige projects by artists like Anish Kapoor and his inverted trumpet monstrosity of a corporate advert at London’s Olympic Park. Based on his track record it’s hard to imagine that Johnson will prioritise the arts any more than Cameron did, and easier to imagine that he will do so even less, and perhaps only when it is politically useful for him. Weighing this up alongside the other victors of the leave campaign, for example Michael Gove (promoter of a reductive, imperial British history), Chris Grayling (who banned the sending of books to people in prison), and Nigel Farage (the less said here the better), we face the likelihood of a future of cultural neglect and intellectualism vandalism.

This referendum is a reminder that the United Kingdom is a land divided, not just in terms of Euro-politics but also much more broadly terms of it’s economics, culture, and demographics. There are undoubtedly a great many people in this country who feel their voices have been ignored and marginalised over the past few decades by politicians in London and in Brussels, they took their moment to speak last week and they have been more than heard. It’s really hard though to see these divisions getting smaller in the wake of this referendum, with the strong likelihood of a second referendum on Scottish independence in near future if anything they look like opening up into ever more unbridgeable chasms. Another possibility as remain campaigners and politicians scramble for a procedural get-out of last week’s result, is that the European membership referendum might be rerun, annulled or ignored. Even for an ardent remainer like myself this is a profoundly frightening prospect. A political system choosing to ignore the will of seventeen million people will do little to heal the United Kingdom’s divisions, rather it will wrench them still wider open and provide still more fertile ground for far right movements who view democracy only as a means to the end of gaining power. This country is today is stuck in an impossible no man’s land, unable to go back to the country it was a week ago, but terrified of the consequences of going forwards.

As photographers, artists, and cultural creators in general we have to break free from the sense of shock and inertia that this decision has created and ask ourselves what we can and should do next. As I wrote a year ago in the bleak moment following the re-election of the Conservative party on a platform of austerity, there are two ways to anwser such crushing defeats. One is to withdraw, to consider exit plans of our own. The other option is of course to stay, whether to simply document these momentous changes, or to try fight to influence them. Culture can entrench divides, and arguably it has played it’s part in the divisions the United Kingdom now suffers under. However it can also work to bridge them, and that was always a fundamental part of its role in the European project. If the United Kingdom is going to overcome the fractious politics of the last few months, and work through what feels like an incredibly divided present, photographers, artists, and creators in general need to start seriously thinking about the roles they are going to play.

Towards A New Europe

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Totenkopf und Leiche in Uniform in einem Luftschutzkeller,
Dresden nach der Bombardierung vom 13./14. Februar 1945, Richard Peter (source)

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I apologise in advance that this short post has little directly to do with photography, and knowing what I do of the audience of this site I also suspect it will mostly be a case of preaching to the converted. Even so, I feel compelled to write something brief about the referendum on British membership of the European Union to be held this Thursday.

The debate on the British membership is invariably cadged in terms of the future, in terms of what might happen if Britain stays or goes. But underneath that debate Europe’s history stirs restlessly. The Second World War, the Holocaust, have been repeatedly and often problematically invoked in the course of both referendum campaigns, but they are just the rawest of many wounds that Europeans have left on each other. The European Union undoubtedly has its problems, not least with it’s own past, but the value of our relationship with it need to be measured as much in terms of the question of what it has prevented as well as what it costs, what it imposes, and what it has or hasn’t achieved. This continent has experienced seven decades of unprecedented peace and prosperity. Economic union, cultural exchange, free travel, all have played no small part in our coming closer together and learning to look beyond the arbitrary national boundaries and petty differences which had Europeans killing each other in scores for most of the preceding thousand years.

The great number of people risking what little they have in order to settle here because their own homelands are ravaged by war, oppression or poverty are not a symbol of this continent’s failure, they are on the contrary a testament to its success, evidence of the fact that it remains a beacon for so many in a dark world. Whatever our misgivings about the structures of the European Union, the ideal remains strong and the institutions remain something worth fighting to improve. The European Union maybe isn’t yet the new Europe that many of its people dream of, but the only way it will realise these aspirations is if it’s members remain committed to fighting for it.

Not All’s Fair: Photo London 2016

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Trotters Independent Trading co. van,
from Only Fools and Horses (Flickr)

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At the risk of being outspoken (hah) it’s my belief that the only useful purpose that the commercial art trade has is as something which inadvertently creates spaces where normal people can look at artworks, effectively subsidised by those few who are rich enough to actually buy and own them. I have absolutely no problem with artists selling and living by their work, my problem rather lies with the speculation, inflation, obfuscation, hype, exclusivity and all those other things which invariably seem to come with the professionalisation of this activity. These are things which art doesn’t need, and which in some cases actively harm art, but which by dint of this trade have come to be seen by the majority of normal people as being at the core of it is about. Even so, while I might not like galleries, fairs and their ilk, I can tolerate them as long as they provide at least the shadow of a socially useful function. When on the other hand these places restrict the audiences who can view the work they tout, I completely run out of interest in them. Photo London which launched last night plays host to eighty photography galleries who presumably pay a fee to exhibit, and is sponsored by the Swiss private bank Pictet. But it also asks punters to cough up £27 for a day ticket, which as photographer Jim Mortram pointed out on Twitter is roughly half the weekly allowance for a carer like him.

Historically fairs were places where a relatively broad swathe of society mixed in the pursuit of trade, entertainment, and more. Matthew of Paris recounts that in 1248 Henry III banned all traffic in London ‘in order that by these means the Westminster fair might be more attended by people’. Such human heterogeneity seems unwelcome at the art fairs of today, where one imagines ticket price plays as much of an important function in defining and filtering the type of visitors who attend as it does actually fulfill any need to generate additional income. Whether this bothers you or not probably depends very much on your view of who art is actually for, and what purpose you believe it ought to serve. If you view it merely as chintz for the ultra-wealthy to pad out their obnoxious homes, then get yourself to Photo London and enjoy yourself. If it’s anything like last year you’ll see some enjoyable if usually rather predictable photography, often unfortunately handicapped by its display in forms better suited to sales than to contemplative viewing or contextualisation. You’ll also likely get to snap a selfie with the row of Bentleys parked up outside and if you’re feeling cruel then do ask some of gallerists to tell you the prices of the pieces they are showing, that question usually seems to make them a little nervous in a city where more than a quarter of the population live in poverty.

If on the other hand you see art as something which ought to be economically accessible to as wide an audience as possible then I suggest you give the main events at Somerset House a wide berth. There are some great fringe events going on over the next few days which are completely free. For example you might cross the river to Tate Modern (freshly liberated from its long corporate sponsorship by BP) for Offprint where you can see some of the best that photobook publishing has to offer. Could it be that the explosion in interest in the photo book has come partly from the realisation amongst so many young artists and photographers that the type of galleries participating in Photo London actually have very little to offer them? Nearby to Tate is Fix Photo with some great work including images from Ed Thompson’s The Unseen Project (in interests of critical transparency, Ed is a friend of mine) and Robert Clayton’s Estate series. Alternatively jump on a 171 bus from outside Somerset House and get yourself down to Peckham 24, where a range of interesting photographers including Ciaran og Arnold, Ryan Moule, and Tom Lovelace are showing work, along with three promising young Irish artists exhibiting as part of the Belfast Exposed Futures program. There will be a series of talks running on Saturday, including a panel chaired by Rodrigo Orranta with Jo Dennis and Carlos Alba and one by yours truly (advertorial alert). I’ll be in conversation with Mark Duffy and Peter Mann to discuss humour and appropriation in a world of images. It’s free and open to all, you can sample the delights of Peckham, and if watching too many episodes of Only Fools and Horses has left you worried about a visit down south then take it from someone who grew up nearby that the area isn’t what it used to be. For one weekend at least the wheelers and dealers will be in another part of town.

History in the Making: Palmyra’s World Tour

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The reconstruction of the arch nears completion in Trafalgar Square.
Photograph: Stefan Rousseau/PA

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A replica of Palymra’s Arch of Triumph has just been unveiled in London. The original was constructed by the Roman Empire and was believed to be over two millennia old by the time it was dynamited by Islamic State in late 2015. The group were later driven out of the site by Syrian government forces. The replica arch which now stands in London’s Trafalgar Square was engineered by the Institute of Digital Archaeology who created a digital model from photographs of the original, before having a replica made in Italy, where it was machine tooled from Egyptian marble by a robotic cutting arm. This new arch will soon go on to tour to other cities including Dubai and New York. “Antiquities like this belong to all mankind and it is imperative that we all strive to safeguard our common heritage,” said London Mayor Boris Johnson as he unveiled the recreation, apparently oblivious to the distinction between a genuine relic and its copy.

Photography is evidently mixed up in this recreation in very practical ways, as the means by which the arch has been so meticulously reconstructed. But photography also offers a model for the way we think about the relationship between original things and their copies. A photograph is not a window on another world, as some people like to think, nor increasingly even is it a trace of the thing it depicts. Photography is a pattern of tones and colours, and whether it be an analog print or a digital upload to Instagram the image lives far less in the medium itself than in our minds. The same one might say is true of history and it’s traces. In Phillip K Dick’s alternative history novel The Man in the High Castle, the plot revolves in part around an inflated market for icons of Americana, driven by the rapacious collecting of the Japanese soldiers who have occupied the country. In response an industry of fakes has arisen, with artisans producing items like wild west style pistols, carefully aged, but completely inauthentic. Everyone knows that these items are fake, including the collectors who pay huge sums for them, but no one has the will to speak this truth out loud. I feel something similar here.

The reconstruction of the arch has been questioned by some as a rather hollow act, a Disneyland attempt at history, and certainly for me the recreation of the arch calls to mind the underwhelming Stonehenge used as a stageset by the fictional rockband Spinal Tap. Others have criticised it as downright unethical. Martin Makinson from the Association for the Protection of Syria Archaeology rightly highlights the politically contested nature of these sites and points to the way that the reoccupation of sites like Palmyra has become a way for the Assad government to reclaim a degree of legitimacy in the eyes of some in the west, even as it continues to torture and kill its own citizens. Any attempt to willfully recreate history says as much as an attempt to willfully destroy it and so the recreation is undeniably political, and attempt to pretend otherwise is disindigenous. The understated photograph above by Stefan Rousseau hints at this in the way it uses a section of the arch to frame Nelson’s Column, a victory monument in it’s own right, and in the distance the looming clock tower of the Palace of Westminster. One might say the same of attempts to occupy or colonise certain sections of the past, whether that occupation is undertaken by the descendants of the people who built what is being colonised, or it is done by foreigners acting in the name of humanity at large.

In this sense one might say that we are doing something not entirely dissimilar to what the Assad regime has done in making the rescue of Palmyra from Islamic State a military objective. In erecting and celebrating this arch in London, we are asserting our cultural credentials in an attempt to show that we are doing something tangible in response to this terrible and protracted war. The destruction of cultural artifacts is something most in the west can comfortably express outrage over, even if doing so just rather awkwardly reveals the gulf between our horror at the destruction of these irreplaceable ancient monuments, and an enduring indifference to the suffering of the Syrian people, every one of those people is just as irreplaceable. A particularly memorable chapter in Vassily Grossman’s Second World War epic Life and Fate consists of Grossman describing at length the absolute impossibility of constructing a computer which could think and feel as even the most average human being is able to. He then imagines the excitement that such a machine would engender among the techno-fetishistic German armies then ploughing their way across the Soviet Union. The chapter concludes by reflecting on the unbearable irony these people who would hail as miraculous a machine which could muster even a poor imitation of a human mind were actively exterminating millions of people.

Raising this arch of triumph also reflects a certain inability to remember recent history of our own, for example when our tanks rolled over ancient archaeological sites during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and the American military set up a base on the site of what had been the ancient city of Bablylon damaging it enormously in the process. For me this amnesia rather poses the question of whether either of the two are worse; people who willfully destroy ancient monuments and culture because of an overdeveloped sense of what those objects represent, or those who destroy them because of the opposite, out of a sheer ignorance of their importance. There is needless to say also a certain irony in erecting this arch in London, one of the prime marketplaces for looted antiquities smuggled out of conflict zones like Syria, and a city with so many museums containing artifacts that are much more directly the spoils of state aggression and imperialism. Touring the arch to the art superpowers of Dubai and New York would seem to only underline this.

In contrast to the rhetoric of ‘great men’, true history isn’t something which can be made. History is something which accretes, congeals, weathers, falls apart and gets blown up, and which almost always has on it the traces of those who lived it, a deficit all the more apparent in the case of this copy because it has not been even been sculpted by contemporary human hands but by a machine. History is also a finite and naturally accruing resource, not something which can be synthesized or manufactured, and imagining that one can simply replace the past when it can no longer be put back together represents a terrible misunderstanding of what history is and how it relates to the present. It’s a misunderstanding not so unrelated to the conception of the present that imagines that things like drone bombing campaigns can recorrect our past foreign police mistakes, and which refuses to consider that these new innovations are in Marx’s famous words an example of history repeating itself (as tragedy in the case of the drone campaigns, perhaps as farce in the case of London’s paltry Arch of Triumph).

One wonders what future arcs of triumph will mark the War on Terror and the wider misadventures of the past two decades. In pondering this, I can’t help but be reminded of the words of the Roman historian Tacitus. In writing his epic Agricola around the same time that Palmyra’s original arch was constructed Tacitus referenced the Scottish chieftain Calgacus and attributed to him one of the most remarkable speeches against Rome or any empire, one made all the astonishing because these bitter words were in fact almost certainly not those of the soon to be defeated Celt, but rather those of Tacitus himself, a Roman citizen. ‘Robbers of the world, having by their universal plunder exhausted the land, they rifle the deep. If the enemy be rich, they are rapacious; if he be poor, they lust for dominion; neither the east nor the west has been able to satisfy them. Alone among men they covet with equal eagerness poverty and riches. To robbery, slaughter, plunder, they give the lying name of empire; they create a desolation and call it peace.’

The Bailiff and the Bodycam

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Detail from Can’t Pay? We’ll Take it Away

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A particularly memorable episode from the British comedy series Peep Show includes a scene where two characters discuss their conflicting visions of the ideal public house, rather in the manner of a schizophrenic version of George Orwell’s essay The Moon Under the Water. After some discussion and debate about the name one of the pair suggests The Swan and Paedo as a compromise between their competing priorities that the establishment’s title be both traditional and contemporary. That episode was made in 2005 at the height of the Blair government. Today, one year in to the second term of David Cameron’s premiership, the same conversation might propose The Bailiff and the Bodycam as a pub name which similarly encapsulates the history and traditions of Britain with a darkly contemporary slant. The bailiff is a medieval figure in British society experiencing a contemporary resurgence in a landscape of growing underemployment, personal debt and economic precarity, where even a search for the term results in a flurry of desperate websites advising you of your meager rights should they come calling in pursuit of an outstanding debt.

Recently I turned on the television to find myself confronted by a program called Can’t Pay? We’ll Take it Away! This is austerity entertainment at its worst, where repossessions and evictions are turned into amusement under the guise of a fly on the wall documentary following the professional activities of bailiffs and high court enforcement officers, some of them working for a company called Direct Collection Bailiffs Limited (who unabashedly feature the series on their website). The childish rhyme and exclamation mark in the program’s title reflects the barely concealed glee that one senses on the part of the program makers each time they find a particularly tragic or awkward story to exploit. Normally I would have immediately switched off, but a combination of having just returned from teaching at the School of Punktum, where the theme was austerity, and the strange nature of the program’s production kept me watching for longer than I otherwise might.

What I found particularly fascinating about Can’t Pay? We’ll Take it Away! was that almost all the footage used had been filmed using body cameras or ‘bodycams’, with the exception of short post-factum studio interviews with some of the bailiffs recounting the events which had just been shown. As austerity television goes this is a stroke of genius, a case of not only turning the camera on the grim landscape of twenty-first century Britain but relating event the method of the program’s production a part of that same landscape of reduction by eliminates the need for actual cameramen, directors and other expensive professionals. In this sort of television the medium very much equals the message. At the same time the nature of the filming still gives the grainy, shaky and generally compromised aesthetics that most of us think we can recognise as a shorthand for documentary veracity. The sense that these body cameras provide some sort of unmediated witnessing of these events, much like the camera of a citizen journalist, is also underlined by the fact that these cameras are primarily employed by bailiffs to gather evidence of repossession proceedings for later use in court. The television program is an unintended spin off.

And yet the nature of their use and even the very name of these cameras implies a form of witnessing which is deeply one sided, presenting one view of events filmed very much from the perspective of the wearer or bearer or the camera. That horrible neologism, bodycam, implies a closeness of the camera to the operator almost to the degree of inseparability and it is apt perhaps that word bailiff, traced beyond its origins in old French, appropriately roots itself in the latin word bajulus meaning ‘carrier’. Body cameras potentially have a vital part to play in offering citizens accountability and redress over the misapplication of power, but as the employment of body cameras in law enforcement has shown, the body camera often remains a hand-servant to arbitrary state or private power rather than a check and balance on it. As attempts to use body camera footage in court cases has sometimes shown, what is often as important as what is shown, is how it is shown, and from what perspective. As I argued here recently in discussing the perspective that many of the World Press Photo winners gave on the refugee crisis in Europe, the visual angles employed in reporting, whether conscious journalism or dumb technologies like bodycameras are not simply questions of aesthetics. They define in very real ways the political readings of the people and things which we are trying to represent.

The Deutsche Börse 2016 Shortlist

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Trevor Paglen, They Watch the Moon, C-print, 36 x 48 inches.
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The shortlist for the 2016 Deutsche Börse Photography Prize has just been announced, and while there are no major upsets as there were in the 2012 Deutsche Börse shortlist when the likes of Mishka Henner and Cristina de Middel featured, it’s still one of the more interesting shortlists of recent years. As I recently did with the Taylor Wessing prize, I thought I’d offer some short reflections on the shortlist now, and a more in-depth consideration when the exhibition opens to the public next year.

Since 2012’s shortlisting of Cristina de Middel’s Afronauts it seems to be increasingly a given that each year’s shortlist will include some form of photo book, whether grandiose and conventionally published (like last year’s Ponte City by Mikhael Subotzky and Patrick Waterhouse) or more modest and self-published like de Middel’s book. Laura el Tantawy’s The Shadow of the Pyramids is a worthy inclusion, an intriguing and intelligent volume which explores the build up to the recent revolution in Egypt by blending family archive photographs with events in Cairo’s streets, drawing parallels between the micro and macro units of family and nation. The Shadow of the Pyramids is a fantastic book, but its inclusion is also (perhaps accidentally) symbolic at the present moment, as Egyptian revolutionary enthusiasm and turmoil subsides back towards a new status quo, and governments (including the British government) sidle up to military leader, turned president, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi hoping for a rapid continuation of business as usual.

To some Erik Kessels will come as a surprising and perhaps slightly controversial inclusion since he dosen’t take his own photographs but works largely with archives of found vernacular imagery. Again though I doubt the controversy will be anything like that which has surrounded the past inclusion of these post-photographic photographers (if one can call them that). Kessel’s has more than demonstrated his visual credentials, showing a humour and intelligence about the way he works and arranges imagery which is much more sophisticated than that of most ‘real’ photographers. The surprise is maybe more in the particular choice of project to include, his dramatic installation Unfinished Father, a rumination on loss and memory explored through photographs and the remains of an old Fiat 500 left half restored after Kessel’s father suffered a debilitating stroke. It’s a powerful piece although I’m not convinced it’s sculpturally or photographically innovative enough to warrant the prize, that may of course change to see it first hand.

The real surprise inclusion for me was Tobias Zielony for his exhibition The Citizen, although when I say surprise I mostly mean in the sense that I hadn’t seen this work before and I was surprised by that because because of it’s quality, relevance and apparent subtlety. Zielony explores the lives of African refugee activists in Berlin in Hamburg, combining photography with first person accounts of their experiences. The Citizen raises significant issues of integration and identity at a time when more and more European countries are closing their borders to migrants and refugees, and even those like Sweden which up until have had a virtual open door policy are thinking twice. This work I particularly look forward to spending more time with when the exhibition opens next year.

Last is Trevor Paglen, shortlisted for his exhibition The Octopus at Frankfurter Kunstverein. The smart and cynical money is on Paglen to take the prize. His work is undeniably relevant beyond the ghetto of photography, interesting in both conception and execution, and lacks the deeply uncritical self-indulgence of Richard Mosse’s Enclave which won in 2013. But as I’ve written before I don’t really think the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize is particularly about any of those things. It’s about rewarding work which lends Deutsche Börse and its attendants some cultural credibility and relevance, while at the same time being work which is ultimately toothless and unthreatening, and perhaps just a little bit bankable (I wonder how many of the prize’s winners ultimately end up in the company’s extensive art collection). It seems to me that there is a sort of apt resonance in Paglen being shortlisted for an exhibition in Deutsche Börse’s home city of Frankfurt.

In his brief write up of the shortlist, the Guardian’s photography writer Sean O’Hagan proposed a couple of names he would have liked to see on the list, and while I think O’Hagan’s suggestions aren’t really relevant to the prize’s remit of rewarding artists pushing the medium’s boundaries I think the act of highlighting what was missed is a worthwhile one. In vain I have wondered before, and I continue to wonder, what it would take for a body work to be shortlisted which asks difficult questions about the system and problems that this prize’s sponsor is very clearly part of. Work which focuses on capital, exchange and austerity like that by Mark Curran for example, photography which attempts to get inside and reveal the insidious innards of global finance in much the same way that Paglen has done with global surveillance. How badly we need this, and what a gesture the inclusion of work like that would make. But I doubt it would be a welcome inclusion on the wall of a plush Frankfurt boardroom, and lest we forget, ladies and gentlemen, that is probably what really counts.

Magna Errata at The Alternative Magna Carta Festival

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GCHQ Bude listening post, Cornwall

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At the start of last month I made a call for submissions of work dealing with human rights and civil liberties in the United Kingdom. The response has been really interesting and as a result of it work by seven photographers including will be on display next weekend at the Alternative Magna Carta Festival in Clerkenwell. The concept of the exhibition was to curate something which ran counter to the conventional celebrations of Magna Carta as a source of modern liberties, and which instead would draw attention to the ways that those liberties have been eroded or sidetracked, particularly in the wake of the War on Terror, and the start of what has been termed the ‘Age of Austerity’.

Magna Errata (or ‘Great Errors’) features projects dealing with a diverse array of rights and civil liberties in contemporary Britain. From detention without trial, to mass surveillance. From food insecurity to curtailments of the right to protest. For my contribution I’ve produced a small project which is a direct follow on from my current work about covert intelligence radio stations. This new work uses satellite imaging to map the physical infrastructure of the British surveillance state. From the golf ball-like domes of Menwith Hill’s massive eavesdropping base to the underground bunker where submarine data cables are tapped for data, these sites are the frontline of the erosion of privacy in the UK.

More information about the festival can be found through it’s website.

Five More Years to Fight

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‘Mother Frackers’ (2015)
Digital photomontage

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A few months ago I posted a piece asking why there is so little photography of austerity? The last five years have seen the widespread closure of public services, the scapegoating of the weak, and the wholesale promotion of a degenerate, hypocritical set of values that have spread beyond individual parties and which seem to permeate almost the entire political establishment. And yet beyond a few heavily repeated topics, photographers have done relatively little to document (let alone protest) the current direction of British politics.

When I first wrote that piece I have to admit that in the back of my mind was the thought that it was hopelessly overdue. I knew that a general election was in the offing and like many I suspected (or perhaps just hoped) it would result in a victory that would reverse many of the regressions we have seen taking place over the last five years. Now that election has been and gone, and we know now that the longed for reversal will not materialise. Indeed depressingly the champions of an ‘age of austerity’ are now in an even more powerful position from which to pursue their destructive agenda.

Little good can be said about this state of affairs. The only thing that I can draw from it at the moment is the knowledge that there will be plenty of new regressions coming in the next few years that will need to be highlighted, challenged and resisted. Different people will do this in different ways, but for me this remains in large part the purpose of what I do with photography, writing and other media. Loathe as I am to admit it, my sense of what art is and how it should be used has been in great part a product of spending almost all my formative years under a succession of governments I profoundly disagreed with, from the neo-Thatcherism of Blair to the austerity of Cameron. Once again I think we need to call for an ‘art of austerity’ to counter this ‘age of austerity’.

I know as well as anyone that it can sound deeply naïve to talk about photography and art as a force for change, and in and of themselves they very rarely are. With odd exceptions the only thing the arts can be said to really change are people’s thoughts, but this cognitive change is the essential first step which leads to those affected by it to agitate for real change. To be a dour realist again, I also know that most arts and photography projects reach only small audiences and preach largely to the converted, this is partly the result of complacency on the part of those in the arts, and we need to look for ways to change this.

Whatever else happens over the next five years I hope other photographers and artists will recognise and embrace the power they possess, however slight it might be, to draw attention to injustices and challenge official narratives. Drop all this artistic self-referentialism, this pathetic pandering to ingrowing cliques of curators and critics. This stuff is beyond irrelevant. Speak to the people who have a power to shape more than just your career. Art is a voice, sometimes quiet, sometimes loud, but it should always be raging.