My first OCA study visit in a long time, to see a very strong field at The Photographers Gallery. As usual there were four finalists for the prize:
Anastasia Samoylova for Floodzone
Samoylova also featured in the America in Crisis exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery (https://photo515050level3.wordpress.com/2022/06/02/america-in-crisis/) although she was nominated for her photobook. The series is a response to climate change in American coastal cities, particularly in Florida, and started when Samoylova moved to Miami in 2016 and took her camera out to explore her new territory and try and make sense of it. Hence she is in that sweet spot I have described before of both outsider and insider.
Samoylova uses a pastel palette which for me strongly associate the images with the place; essentially the colour has meaning beyond the factual. The angles and light she chooses to shoot the buildings in tend to subvert the property advertising genre. So we get a dissonance in the frame – aspiration vs reality, seduction vs destruction. Samoylova describes her own emotional reaction as anxiety.
This was an excellent entry although what made it particularly engaging was the exhibition layout. The photographer studied environmental design and the curation was very strong, creating an immersive space with a progressive colour palette from swamp green to pastel pink, which I tried to capture with an iphone panoramic shot:
The book itself, however, obviously contained more images which did not hang together quite as well as the show for me. We were uncertain as a group as to how much postproduction had been applied to the photographs, some of which seemed somewhat unreal on close study.
Jo Ractliffe for Photographs 1980s – now
Ractliffe’s monochrome monograph covers several projects about the legacy of apartheid in South Africa. She “explores questions of violence, conflict and memory through landscape as they manifest in the place” (The Photographers Gallery, 2022), an approach that seemed full of promise to me. It was unfortunate, however, that this room was visited via the Floodzone exhibition, whose strong use of colour left Ractliffe’s lyrical b&w imagery of a complex situation looking rather washed out.
There were several interesting ideas here – such as a concertina book with a mirror behind so the viewer could see both sides at once, and a montaging effect between photographs hung from the ceiling that juxtaposed in the visitor’s vision with those on the walls. Since the 80s Ractliffe has experimented with such strategies, as well as plastic and toy cameras. Taking the viewer away from the chronological sequencing of her photobooks, the idea is to look at how relationships change between images and to ask the viewer to consider representation. It’s an interesting approach, but somehow seemed to try too hard, clashing with the classic documentary look of the images. It might have worked better for me with images that had a lot of “pop”, to borrow the name of an iphone filter.
Often with such work a certain image can strike the viewer (Barthes’ punctum at work) – for example the overall’s hanging in a tree in Angola reminded me of a lynching, although for Ractliffe herself “they are hollow men” (Frizzel, 2016) referring to the generation that had died in the war. It is interesting that in Angola, away from the familiar ground of South Africa, Ractliffe abandoned the montage techniques – “It felt very important that I shoot straight” (The Photographer’s Gallery, 2022).
Deana Lawson for Centropy
“Centropy offered a precisely choreographed constellation of works (spanning 2013-2020) including large scale photographs, holograms, 16mm projections, video works and smaller images printed on mirrors or decorated with rock crystals.” (The Photographers Gallery, 2022).
This exhibition was definitely different – in fact there was not much on the walls and what was there was confusing. Interestingly, however, when we sat down as a group to discuss the work we found a lot to talk about. Perhaps this explains why Lawson won the prize. Her overall theme of representing the black experience is also a key concern for the politics of the moment.
There does not appear to be much information provided by Lawson, although a lot of interpretation by critics – reminding me of Cindy Sherman. In Lawson’s image of herself from 2012, she operates a large format camera that is not pointed at the viewer in the traditional way these self-portraits are coded. She seems to be implying a fiction, or perhaps as Sherman does underlying that these images are not pictures about her – although that makes an interesting twist for a self-portrait.
Lawson’s back story could not stack up better for this work – her grandmother was George Eastman’s cleaner. She draws on various tropes (vernacular, documentary and art history) to assemble her compositions, which feature amateur actors often cast off the street that she dresses and directs. A key skill must be persuasion, given that sometimes they agree to be unclothed. For example an image of a couple having sex on an uncomfortable chair while their baby sleeps nearby.
But something does not feel right in these images. The man’s arm is strangely relaxed in the encounter, for example. Perhaps the idea is to represent the confusion of the black experience, of not necessarily belonging?
Why is there an elliptical exercise machine in what appears to be the corner of a wake? Is the woman really dead in this image or is she one of the actors scouted by Lawson? Why is an image of Niagara Falls on its side. It seemed that there must be a code to decipher these image, but not one I was familiar with. Again, this maybe speaks of the experience Lawson is representing.
Gilles Peres for Whatever You Say, Say Nothing
The title of the book refers to an IRA slogan, designed to act as advice/warning to informers whether inadvertent or not. It is also a poem by Seamus Heaney. Peres describes writing out pages and pages of potential titles – “the title is very important”.
One section of the book and exhibition deals with the death of Denis Donaldson, Peres’ republican friend who was later revealed (according to some, by the British as a political act) to be an informer and shot. Some of these images on the walls were upside down, perhaps conveying the dual nature of the target?
Peres’ work is very significant, representing 14kg of photographs from decades of work in Northern Ireland in two large books accompanied by an almanac in a tote bag. The sheer weight of the work, in both senses of the word, would appear to make it a strong contender for the prize, although it is not without issues. Nevertheless, at a workshop in Sicily, Martin Parr told me this was to be the photobook of the decade.
The retail cost of £450 makes the book inaccessible to most of the people it represents (although copies can be found on amazon for £268).
In an interview with Steidl (the book’s maker) Peres is acutely aware of this. He feels that too much design kills everything: “the best books have no design … this is the hardest work”. Hence the two books come with two stencilled roman numerals on the front, apparently complex designs difficult to produce but actually looking rather home-made. Peres says “I try to remove as much preciousness from the object as possible”. The prints on the walls of the gallery are unframed, for example, simply stuck on even just resting against the sides.
Most critics, while lauding the accomplishment, also comment on the need for a tighter edit. Here we come up against a key conflict for the book and its photographer – indeed for all photographers working in series. In making an edit the images work differently for different people, depending on what the viewer brings to the story. For example I was very struck by one of the quieter images in the book, which may have been almost ignored by others:
On his Magnum page Peres has a different take on the issue: “I don’t care so much anymore about ‘good photography’; I am gathering evidence for history” (Magnum). A weight of evidence, then, an extended witnessing if you will.
Sean O’Hagan describes it as an “almost Joycean attempt to ‘describe everything'” (O’Hagan, 2021). Steidl and Peres describe it as a “paper movie” (Steidl interview).
Similarly the point of the book is to examine the helicoidal structure of history “where today is not only today but all the other days like today”. The point is that for Northern Ireland in particularly the calendar structure of events like marches precipitates repeating patterns of violence that create a narrative from which it is difficult to escape. Time itself is a subject here, and since it does not operate in a linear way Peres has reorganised it into 22 semi-fictional days. Each image taints the next, until all start to shimmer with a violent potential energy.
“The book is the place where I process … where everything happens.” “I am always involved in everything … every detail has meaning.” (Steildl interview)
In the Steidl interview Peres is asked if he is a war photographer. He feels all categories are problematic … it creates a predetermination of what you are going to do”. Hence “the interesting work is in the no man’s land” (Steidl interview) which happens to also be an appropriate way to describe a book on liminal tensions.
The exhibition itself is almost split in two by a wall of its own, with photographs of the partitions that divide the north from the south on another wall. I think they missed a trick here – the exhibition wall could have been made up of images of the Belfast barriers.
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
- Lamb, J. (2022) Floodzone installation view
- Lamb, J. (2022) Photographs 1980s – now installation view
- Ractliffe, J. (2002) Angola At: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/jun/30/jo-ractliffe-best-photograph-ghosts-angola-civil-war (Accessed 3.6.2022)
- Lamb, J. (2022) Centropy installation view
- Peres, G. (s.d.) from Whatever You Say, Say Nothing
- Lamb, J. (2022) Whatever You Say, Say Nothing installation view
BIBLIOGRAPHY
- https://thephotographersgallery.org.uk/whats-on/deutsche-borse-photography-foundation-prize-2022 (Accessed 2.6.2022)
- https://www.magnumphotos.com/photographer/gilles-peress/ (Accessed 4.6.2022)
- Frizzel, N. (2016) Jo Ractliffe’s best photograph: the ghosts of Angola’s civil war At: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/jun/30/jo-ractliffe-best-photograph-ghosts-angola-civil-war (Accessed 3.6.2022)
- Kazanjian, D. (2021) Photographer Deana Lawson Unveils Her First Self-Portrait in Almost a Decade At: https://www.vogue.com/article/deana-lawson (Accessed 3.6.2022)
- O’Hagan (2021) Firefights, foxhunts and flower shows: a staggering new view of the Troubles. At: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2021/aug/25/giles-peress-whatever-you-say-say-nothing-troubles-northern-ireland-gilles-peress-joycean (Accessed 4.6.2022)
- Smith, Z. (2018) Deana Lawson’s Kingdom of Restored Glory. At: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/05/07/deana-lawsons-kingdom-of-restored-glory (Accessed 3.6.2022)
- Peres, G. (2021) Whatever You Say, Say Nothing. Germany: Steidl
- “What we’re doing together is a paper movie” | Conversation between Gilles Peress and Gerhard Steidl (2020). Dir. Bircher, A. At: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RltgJWk6Iuc (Accessed 4.6.2022)
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