Aaah..those Poor Righteous Teachers. Where would we be without them?

Schools out. Enjoy:

Peter posted a fascinating article last year about Nic Dunlop’s book ‘The Lost Executioner’ and the photographs taken of those incarcerated by the Khmer Rouge prior to execution.

I came across a related, and insightful project, by Pete Pin featured on NPR recently -  ‘Cambodian Diaspora’:

“Pete Pin was born in , a refugee camp on the border of Cambodia and Thailand. Fleeing the infamous “killing fields” of Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge regime, his family eventually resettled in Stockton, Calif., in the mid-1980s. What started with a single portrait of his grandmother has evolved into a deeply personal project that aims to explore the Cambodian diaspora.

His grandmother survived and the , and after having her portrait taken in 2010, she unexpectedly felt compelled to share her story. “I felt that my camera created this safe place that enabled the conversation to happen,” says Pin. “The stories that my grandmother told me explained a lot about my family.”

Pin is hoping to reach older Cambodians, but also younger generations who may not be familiar with their family’s history and experiences under Khmer Rouge. His goal is to use photography to create an open dialogue within the Cambodian community.”

Pete’s website has a larger collection of his images from the project, which are gently revealing and beautifully observed. This is the kind of work that reminds me of how important photography can be in informing, educating, but more simply connecting people with people, and with their shared past.

Well worth your time having a look.

Some are, some aren’t. Either way, it’s about that time..

There were several mentions of dementia in the news yesterday, eerily coincidental, as I was in the middle of writing something about the disease.

First was a theatre production ‘Inside Out of Mind’, which sounds intriguing, described as:

And then shortly afterwards it was announced that Arnold Peters, one of the cast of The Archers had died. His Telegraph obituary noting:

There’s long been a place in the arts for issues around mental illness, for raising awareness, educating and informing, so it makes sense to do the same with dementia, so here’s a thought to consider: Tracey Emin should collaborate with the Alzheimer’s Society. Why Emin? Bear with me please……

I don’t care much for a lot of the conceptual art I’ve seen. Too much of it seems to crave exclusion, the shutting out of those of us who could care less about, or fail to understand, the wordy artist’s statements containing too many big words and too few commas that accompanies it. It’s often work which, shorn of its rigorous intellectual scaffold, gives me the impression it would collapse like a pile of baked beans on sale at the supermarket after one pernickity small child pulls out the wrong tin, too low down.

But I don’t dismiss all of it, there is some conceptual art that’s intrigued me, such as that produced by Tracey Emin. Unlike some of her artistic peers whose work is rooted in some place I am totally unfamiliar with, it always struck me that Emin’s work had some ‘connection’ to the real world where I spend most of my time, an echo of the familiar.

However it would be fair to say that Telegraph columnist Ruth Dudley Edwards isn’t quite so accommodating of Emin, as she proclaims in her piece “She may be a CBE, but Tracey Emin is still naked”:

“I wasn’t going to write about Tracey Emin being made a CBE, since having published a novel (Killing the Emperors) about crass, talentless conceptual art last year, I was taking a holiday from writing about people like her….”

“….(Have a look at this website, where for £300, you too can purchase one of 200 prints of a sketch that could have been created in a couple of minutes by tens of thousands of pencil-wielders. But they are not the Royal Academy’s Professor of Drawing – an appointment that has brought shame on an institution that these days prefers sensationalism to excellence.)”

No mincing your words there then.

However, in a world where its currently somewhat fashionable to dismiss photography and it’s significance I was heartened to read a very touching and insightful comment about photography by Tracey Emin in the Guardian recently, in an introduction to her new book ‘My Photo Album’, one that really struck a chord and made me think:

“I love the photo booth. Photo booth photos were how I marked time. From the age of 10 to my 30s, I have documented my mood and face alone in the photo booth. When I was 13, my purse went missing at school. Inside were maybe 50 strips of photo booth photos. I found my purse some time later. I then found all my photos in a pile in the corner of the playground, ripped into tiny pieces. I knew then how bad this was, not because they were my photos, but because it was all I had to prove to myself who I had been and how I appeared. They were my identity. The memory of my own existence. And someone had destroyed them.”

It struck me that Emin could have been talking about dementia, for it does this too. It takes your memory of who you have been, and how you appeared, and rips it into tiny pieces. It is like sitting in a photo booth and looking into the mirror only to see a stranger gazing back at you. Nothing left to prove to you who you actually are. Well, nothing except the image of you reflected in the memories of family. Memories that, in time, become priceless to them.

I’ve written several times about Alzheimer’s on duckrabbit and the articles have been well received, so last year I offered to share some of my writing with the Alzheimers Society. They were interested: “Please submit to our blog” they said. But I ran into a ‘rights’ problem in their T&C’s:

“3.12 By submitting information to the discussion boards, you grant Alzheimer’s Society a non-exclusive worldwide royalty-free perpetual non-revocable licence to use, distribute, adapt, modify, display, reproduce and transmit such information in any and all media in the manner in whole or in part without any duty to account to you.” (sic)

This surprised me, but I am aware that in order to manage a blog a certain degree of ‘control’ over content is required, and permission is needed in order to undertake the ‘digital duplication’ that of necessity occurs when moving data around, but I’ve not seen it written quite like this. So I queried their need to obtain all rights in submissions from (perhaps) vulnerable people, but in particular when this is undertaken “without any duty to account to you”.

They replied:

“This statement, 3.12, is fairly standard for an online forum and exists to a) protect us from requests for payment for forum content generated by the users and b) allows us to assert our rights over the content if any other party should reproduce the content for their own commercial benefit.”

I queried this justification, noting that:

“The bottom line is that the rights in the material are the property of the contributor and protected as such by The Copyright Act, as an act of their creation by the individual, even when posted on your site. It is therefore disingenuous of you to imply that by ‘stealing’ people’s IP rights that you are somehow offering them more protection from copyright misuse. That is quite simply a ridiculous proposition. I am astonished that you would even consider to offer that reason as justification.”

I continued to press them for an explanation of why they felt this degree of ‘acquisition’ was necessary, but got nowhere. The final comment from the Society’s representative regarding any likely response from their Legal Dept. was:

 ”I have been unable to get any further response myself so I would consider that the matter is now closed and no further statements will be made. If I do hear anything, then I will let you know but that is quite unlikely.”

I’m not sure why this particular issue upset me. But it did. My dad suffered increasingly from dementia before he died, and my mum currently lives with this dreadful condition. ‘Control’ over the memories of my parents are all I have left of them.  These memories are priceless, and if I was to share them with the Alzheimer’s Society I would not expect them to be traded “in whole or in part without any duty to account to you.” 

The Alzheimer’s Society do sterling work all over the UK supporting people with this dreadful illness, for which I am grateful, but they could do it just as well without apparently taking control of the only thing many people will have left of their loved ones – their memories. But I have to say,  from my considerable amount of previous experience of questioning this kind of rights acquisition, it most likely represents only the attitude of the A.S. Legal Dept and is not something reflected in the ethos and attitude of the individuals within the wider organization.

Statistics about dementia on the Alzheimer’s Society’s site are very sobering, and given the fact that they estimate there will be over a million people in the UK with dementia by 2021, and two thirds of dementia sufferers are women, Tracey Emin may be unfortunate enough to become a statistic.

Emin’s personal art work is challenging, no doubt to its creator too, and I always wondered, as I pondered her various pieces, where does this come from, what is this a response to?

A hint is revealed in Emin’s recollection:

“After the age of seven, moments captured on camera were few and far between. There was no responsible witness. The eye behind the camera just wasn’t there. So there are massive gaps in the documentation of my childhood. This would explain why so much of my work relates to memories of my early years. A need to clarify and confirm events. Not all palatable. I did not grow up with any images of the family that marked time.”

Conceptual art made as a response to the absence of photographs? That’s something to ponder at length.

Maybe Ms Dudley Edwards will now review Emins’ photography book, and be gracious enough to recognize in her photographs the fact that yes this work “….could have been created….. by tens of thousands of pencil-wielders…”  but crucially not “…in a couple of minutes….”  but requiring a lifetime of experience.

And she may also realize that in sharing this work Emin, perhaps for the first time, is truly naked, revealing her self in that peculiar and unique way that only photographs can achieve.

Never mind the other work she’s produced, Emin’s ‘photo album’ may turn out to be her most significant work yet precisely because her simple image collection is something we can all recognize ourselves in, identify with the line created by the living of our own lives, scrawled by we “tens of thousands of pencil-wielders”…..and drawing as Emin herself so eloquently describes it…“An invisible line held by the hand of a ghost, moving from one world to the next.”

The Alzheimer’s Society might benefit greatly from collaborating with an artist of the status of Emin to raise awareness of this awful condition. They should take note of the value Emin places on the memories of her younger self, and the fact she has been able to eloquently illustrate in a few sentences, albeit obliquely, the damage that dementia can do, and in a profoundly moving way that we can all understand. No ‘exclusivity’ nor conceptual posturing here:

“….I then found all my photos in a pile in the corner of the playground, ripped into tiny pieces. I knew then how bad this was, not because they were my photos, but because it was all I had to prove to myself who I had been and how I appeared. They were my identity. The memory of my own existence. And someone had destroyed them.”

And in the final line of her final paragraph provides a touching and heartfelt observation that should resonate with all of us, and to which I think we would all aspire:

“At 17, I even tried to emulate my mother’s exotic photo album, with floating cut-outs of myself and friends, suspended in time. Now, in my mind, both these albums collide into one. I feel my book is similar to those albums – a document of the passing of time. An invisible line held by the hand of a ghost, moving from one world to the next. I think when I’m old, I’m really, really going to like this book even more.”

I sincerely hope she does have the joyous experience of contemplating her younger self when she is old, sees the line she’s drawn from past to present, and is able to celebrate who she has become, but crucially recognizes who she once was.

Memory is a rare thing: it’s something we must hold close and personal, but also something which, if it is to have value, we must of necessity willingly share. But it is not something any of us should ever have taken from us.

 

( Tracey Emin, My Photo Album, is published by FUEL, price £19.95.)

In the last piece I posted here I argued that the technical evolution of photography has always been leading towards some form of ‘instant’ photograph. By this I meant a photographic technology which makes the elapsing time between photographer desiring an image, and it being shared with that photographer’s audience, effectively imperceptible. I wondered if achieving this might present a challenge to our understanding of photography in the same way photography has often challenged how we understand time, and felt this might be a topic to discuss a little more.

Part of the appeal of photography is its ability to abstract the way we see the passage of time. Photographs by their nature never show events in what we experience as ‘real time’ instead they visually compress or expand a moment, allowing us to see things that the limits of our physiology would normally make invisible, for example by freezing a speeding bullet or drawing out the slow arc of the sun across the sky.

By revealing the movement of the effectively invisible, photography can force us to reconsider how we understand these things, and can lead to a better understanding of time. An early example of this was Eadweard Muybridge’s pioneering motion sequence photography, reputedly commissioned to settle a bet over whether a galloping horse takes all of its feet off the ground, something imperceptible to the human eye. Photography allowed Muybridge to settle the question, to dismiss one of two conflicting narratives of the world.

Muybridge’s rather functional, scientific images proved to have huge public appeal, something some theorists have attributed to the pace of change in the late nineteenth century, and perhaps a growing public sense of temporal dislocation as once familiar ideas about space and time were exploded by incomprehensible new technologies. Motion sequence photography captured something of the zeitgeist of the era, perhaps because they offered an opportunity to understand time in a world where it was becoming ever more central and important, and at the same time speeding ever more wildly out of control.

Photographs can also challenge our notion of time and how it works, rather than support it, because of the privileged status of photographs as artefacts that exist inside and outside of the present. While a photograph physically exists as part of the on-going movement of time, subjected to all the physical processes that entails, it shows something irrevocably isolated in the past. This temporal incongruity often has no noticeable effect, but certain photographs can break the thin separation between past and present, projecting  an ‘illusion of the real’ directly into the now.

I first experienced this while still at school, skipping through a history textbook I came across a photography of the Russian monk and mystic Grigory Rasputin. I felt an overpowering sense that something was emerging out of the image, almost as if this long dead person was in fact right in front of me. As I became more aware of the effect I experienced it again, the contents of certain images refusing to remain where they belonged. The effect is subjective, the causes unknown, by way of explanation it has been suggested that certain photographs behave in a similar manner to traumatic memories.

Freud compared the functioning of memory to a camera; experiences are recorded, but then must be processed and assembled into the narrative of memory. Theorists including Ulrich Baer have argued that memories of traumatic events, and certain photographs that in some way also defy understanding or resist historical categorisation refuse to be simply stored as part of this narrative. Instead they remain unsorted, uncategorised, repeatedly and unexpectedly intruding into the present like a terrible memory.

Turning to photography’s own traumatic history, it’s only relatively recently that discourses have found voice that describe photography in ambivalent terms. Certainly at its inception and for maybe the first century or so of its existence, photography, a technical and conceptual child of the enlightenment, firmly represented ideas of rational scientific progress. These ideas were undoubtedly undermined by the rupture that followed in the wake of the Second World War.

The use of the products of rational progress to perpetrate brutal and irrational acts and advance profoundly anti-progressive ideologies demanded a reconsideration of the narrative of progress. It lead to the disturbing realisation that technologies like photography are not inherently progressive, but at best neutral, and can as easily be deployed for ‘good’ or ‘bad’ purposes. It can be used to guide a bomb more accurately onto it’s target, or it can be used to locate a bullet in a victim’s skull. Photography is no impartial observer, it takes the side of whoever pressed the button.

But despite this rupture the idea of progress as an end in itself still holds huge sway in the world. We retain a childish belief in things like the apparently endless possibilities of scientific ingenuity, the boundless productive capabilities of capitalism, the limitless resources of the natural world. But hitting some sort of technological glass ceiling, or reaching in some sense the terminal velocity of the medium would perhaps in a very small way challenge this still further by reminding us that progress is finite, that there is not always more, to discover, to produce, to consume, and of course, to photograph.

Lewis Bush / Disphotic