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100 Images of Migration – in pictures
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Migration to and from Britain over the last 100 years is the subject of a touching exhibition at Hackney Museum in partnership with the Migration Museum project. 100 donated images document the vast range of experience from those seeking work, refuge or education to those leaving for a new life overseas
via Art and design: Photography | guardian.co.uk http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/gallery/2013/jun/11/photography-immigration Sarah Gilbert Thanks for reading Jay
100 Images of Migration: journeys of the century
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Photographs charting 100 years of migration tell touching stories of identity, community, suffering and hope
While travelling along the US-Mexican border a few years back I met a man in New Mexico who called himself Quasimodo and patrolled the frontier in search of undocumented immigrants.
“I can tell an illegal just by looking at them,” he said.
“How?” I asked.
“Well, I can tell you’re black just by looking at you and you can tell I’m white.”
“But you can’t tell my immigration status just by looking at me.”
“Well, it’s like wild dog versus tame dog,” he said. “They just don’t have the same kind of look.”
You can’t, of course, tell where someone was born, let alone whether they have moved or under what circumstances they have arrived just by looking at them. That makes a new exhibition being held at Hackney Museum in east London particularly challenging. Titled 100 Images of Migration and part of the Migration Museum project, the aim of this collection of photographs is to chart the immigrant experience in Britain over the past 100 years.
Jean Mohr managed it in A Seventh Man, published in 1975, which chronicled the migration to and within Europe in the 1970s, with considerable assistance from John Berger’s text. “The photographs, taken over a period of years … say things which are beyond the reach of words.” True enough. And yet to speak with any authority they also had to narrate the journey in its entirety. The political, economic and historical forces that pushed the migrants from home are every bit as significant as those that pulled them abroad or the physical trip itself. “It is not men who immigrate but machine-minders, sweepers, diggers, cement mixers, cleaners, drillers, etc,” writes Berger beneath a picture of two officials looking out over hundreds of workers at a recruitment centre in Istanbul. “This is the significance of temporary migration. To re-become a man (husband, father, citizen, patriot) a migrant has to return home. The home he left because it held no future for him.”
In the absence of that sequence one is left with a litany of apparent incongruities and abstractions: an Oromo family from Ethiopia on Brighton beach, an Indian woman standing beneath an England flag, Vietnamese girls near the pier in Weston-Super-Mare. Individually they speak of community, identity and suffering; collectively of racial and ethnic difference and diversity. But it is only alongside the pictures of a passport stamped by the immigration department, a Jamaican family outside their Jamaican home preparing to leave for Britain and an Irish family on a boat to Canada, that one gets a sense of migration.
The distinction is important for two reasons. First, for much of the past century in Britain, the inability to distinguish between race (the colour of people) and place (the movement of people) presented a particular challenge for those who laboured under the delusion there was an intrinsic, essential “look” and cultural performance that underpinned what it meant to be British. So ingrained was the connection that pollsters often lumped the two themes together, inviting people to express their concerns about “race/immigration” as though the two were inextricably linked.
“We need to be reassured that strangers, especially those from other countries, have the same idea of reciprocity as we do,” argued David Goodhart, the director of Demos thinktank in a particularly noxious article in Prospect a decade ago. As I pointed out at the time, such framing raised the questions: “Who does he consider to be the strangers from our own country? How did they become strangers in their own land? And who does he mean by “we”?”
Second, without understanding where people came from and why – be it colonial occupation, war, poverty or career advancement – the potential for resentment of “strangers” who seem to have appeared from nowhere can be substantial. This was particularly significant for that period of mass migration during the middle of the last century from former colonies. In the words of Gilbert, a Jamaican immigrant in Andrea Levy’s award-winning novel Small Island. “But for me I had just one question – let me ask the Mother Country just this one simple question: how come England did not know me?” I still have the British passport my mother brought with her to Britain from Barbados in 1961, along with three A-levels in English literature, European history and British Constitution.
The photographs in this exhibition showing young Italians in north London or the Jewish woman holding the family pendant she hid in her shoe while in Auschwitz broaden our understanding of the migratory patterns that have energised Britain beyond that particular wave at a time when so much of the immigration is now from Europe. When Gillian Duffy approached Gordon Brown in Rochdale that fateful day three years ago, her specific concerns were about eastern Europeans – even though she lives in a town where one in five were Muslim and the Bangladeshi population had increased 58% in a decade. With portraits of women, asylum seekers and refugees the photographs also go beyond Berger and Mohr’s timely but time-limited portrayal of the archetypal migrant being a man seeking work.
Such images are useful because, with the impulse to retreat into the nostalgia of a monocultural, monoracial nation that never was, Britain needs a new image for itself. Migration is not only not new. It is not going away. As a small island that was once an empire in an increasingly interconnected world, migration is not only the product of a modern world, it is the reality that Britain itself has done a great deal to produce. You cannot tell if a person is an immigrant by looking at them; but you can tell a country that has been enriched and enlivened by immigration by looking at it.
via Art and design: Photography | guardian.co.uk http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2013/jun/11/100-images-of-migration Gary Younge Thanks for reading Jay
Seeing stars: Visions of the Universe exhibition – in pictures
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See the wonders of space as photographs of the cosmos go on display at London’s Royal Maritime Museum
via Art and design: Photography | guardian.co.uk http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/gallery/2013/jun/11/visions-universe-royal-maritime-in-pictures Thanks for reading Jay
Guardian Camera Club: Sean Gaule’s portfolio
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A review of Sean Gaule’s portfolio
via Art and design: Photography | guardian.co.uk http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/gallery/2013/jun/11/photography Thanks for reading Jay
Sport picture of the day: US soccer team’s supportive street vendor
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Sports photography isn’t just about what goes on inside the stadium, sometimes on the fringes there are a rich source of subjects to be captured
via Art and design: Photography | guardian.co.uk http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/picture/2013/jun/11/sport-picture-of-day-us-soccer-street-vendor Steven Bloor Thanks for reading Jay
Visions of the Universe exhibition reveals full wonder of space images
please note this post is not by Jay Clapp Photography but from the photography news at the guardian for your viewing pleasure please feel free to use the share buttons at the bottom.
Dazzling photographs of the cosmos at Royal Maritime Museum, Greenwich, skirt between spheres of science and art
A child has just stepped onto the Red Planet. While visitors to Visions of the Universe, an exhibition of astronomical photography that has just opened at the National Maritime Museum, gaze at hyper-lucid images of the rings of Saturn and moons of Jupiter, she stands in front of a panoramic projection of images from Mars that are so vast, so detailed, that to stand here feels like a real-life visit to the empty desert of this alien landscape.
Mount Sharp looms ahead, photographed by the Curiosity rover in 2012. Its orange strata lie exposed layer on layer beneath the pale Martian sky. Rocks in the foreground look solid enough to touch.
I drag myself away beyond the solar system to the very edge of the universe, to gaze on tiny shining cigar-shaped galaxies photographed by the Hubble space telescope at the very limit of human knowledge.
By the time they reach this image of the Hubble Ultra-Deep Field, one of the last glories in this enrapturing show, many visitors will feel, as I did, ecstatic and overwhelmed – not just by the beauty of the cosmos but the scales of time and space this exhibition encompasses. To put it bluntly, this is the most beautiful and significant exhibition I have seen in ages. It is a great moment, when a revolution in science and art explodes into the public eye like the proverbial champagne supernova in the sky.
The quality of photographs taken by the Hubble orbiting telescope, robot space explorers like Cassini and Galileo and most recently Curiosity has transfigured our perceptions of space. Tiny dots in the night sky are now known to be just a hint of astral magnificence. Beyond the naked eye rise stupendous veils of luminous smoke in a space that is not empty, but teeming with energy like a Turner painting.
It is one thing to look at these pictures in a book or on the Nasa website, but this exhibition shows them at the scale they deserve, in a brilliantly generous display that reveals the full daunting wonder of these eerily gorgeous pictures from beyond our atmosphere.
There are even some dazzling pictures taken by amateur astronomers, one of whom happens to be the Turner prize-winning artist Wolfgang Tillmanns. His photographs of Venus in transit across the pink disc of a filtered sun raise a question: is it art? This show proves astronomy is generating some of the most visually beguiling images of our time, but is their beauty that of art or science?
When the Hubble telescope photographed the Pillars of Creation, immense columns of star-forming dust in the Eagle nebula, the resulting image was given colours that symbolise different key elements identified in it. Ever since, photographs from space have been cherished, and processed, as aesthetic objects as well as factual records. Yet the colours and atmosphere enrich scientific knowledge. Among other things we sense the sheer sublime scale of phenomena that are light years across, and millions of light years away.
Science or art? The question fades before the power of a reality that dwarfs us. This exhibition proves that Keats was right. Beauty is truth.
• Visions of the Universe is at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, until 15 September.
via Art and design: Photography | guardian.co.uk http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2013/jun/11/visions-of-the-universe-greenwich-space-photography Jonathan Jones Thanks for reading Jay
Merry-go-round
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Gaston Paris’ playful image from the mid-30s embodies the influence of the surrealism on his photography
via Art and design: Photography | guardian.co.uk http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/picture/2013/jun/11/photography Ranjit Dhaliwal Thanks for reading Jay
Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin’s Holy Bible – in pictures
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This year’s Deutsche Börse prizewinners have published a new work, The Holy Bible, inspired by Berthold Brecht’s own annotated Bible. The work is illustrated with pictures from the Archive of Modern Conflict
via Art and design: Photography | guardian.co.uk http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/gallery/2013/jun/11/broomberg-chanarin-holy-bible-in-pictures Thanks for reading Jay
The Holy Bible: Broomberg and Chanarin’s religious experience
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The Deutsche Börse 2013 prizewinners have been experimenting with Bertolt Brecht, war and the scriptures for their provocative new work, the Holy Bible
At first glance, artists Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin‘s new work, The Holy Bible, looks just like an old-fashioned Bible: a black cover with a title embossed in gold. Inside, though, many of the pages of holy writ have been overlaid with photographs that refer obliquely to specific passages or words underlined in red.
A few thunderously violent lines from Exodus – “… lie for lie. Eye for eye, tooth for tooth … wound for wound, life for life” – are illustrated by an image of an atomic bomb’s mushroom cloud. A black-and-white photo of a couple kissing, meanwhile, refers to “My lips … My tongue … my delight” from Psalms. Each time the line “And it shall come to pass” appears (which is often), it is accompanied by shots of circus performers or magicians.
So far, so conceptual, and so in keeping with Broomberg and Chanarin’s previous book, War Primer 2, a reworking of Bertolt Brecht’s original War Primer, in which Brecht matched photographs of war and conflict to a series of his own short poems. War Primer 2, which puts Brecht’s original texts against images from the war on terror won the 2013 Deutsche Börse photography prize last night and was hailed by judges as a “bold and powerful” reimagining.
With The Holy Bible project, though, the choice of both text and images is altogether more problematic and may be seen by some as wilfully provocative, indeed blasphemous. The phrase “arrows drunk with blood” (Deuteronomy 34:32), for instance, is accompanied by a graphic photograph of the blood-soaked corpses of two young women. A shocking image of Holocaust concentration camp victims, their bodies piled in a heap, is linked to the words “princes of the congregation” (Joshua 9:15) . Then, there is Broomberg and Chanarin’s appropriation of the already infamous photograph of a Palestinian child dressed as a suicide bomber which, here, is linked to the lines “As is the mother, (so is) her daughter” (Ezekiel 16:44).
Elsewhere, there is a pornographic portrait of a naked young man with an erection and others of couples having sex, as well as photographs of suicide victims, Nazis in uniform, deformities and disfigurements. All of the photographs come from the Archive of Modern Conflict, a vast private collection of found photography housed in London. Broomberg and Chanarin’s bible will perhaps come as no surprise to those who have followed the trajectory of their politically-fuelled, often provocative, work thus far. Should it travel beyond the borders of contemporary art, though, where this kind of appropriation and re-contextualising is common practice, it will almost certainly offend Christians of every hue.
“The book includes some images that are undoubtedly violent and shocking,” says Chanarin, “We did debate whether or not to shy away from these images, but, after all, they exist within the archive and elsewhere, even if we don’t like to look at them. The artist, Thomas Hirschhorn, has argued that images of destroyed bodies need to be looked at. It is our duty to look at them. We also see the inclusion of these types of images in our bible as an antidote to the way in which mainstream media is horribly controlled and sanitised. In fact, our illustrated bible is broadly about photography and its preoccupation with catastrophe.”
Alongside Jeremy Deller, Broomberg and Chanarin are arguably the most politically engaged artists working in Britain today. “We are more interested in the world than the art world,” they told one interviewer recently. They first collaborated as photographers while working for the groundbreaking Colors magazine in the early 1990s, where post-modernism practice and reportage existed in an uneasy alliance, and have worked together ever since. Whereas War Primer 2 questioned the role of contemporary photography “in the images generated by both sides of the so-called war on terror”, the subtext of The Holy Bible is power. Broomberg describes the project as “drawing a parallel between a holy book that is so linked with power and photography, a medium that possesses this extraordinary, often unscrutinised, power.”
Once again, the starting point for the project was Brecht, whose own personal bible they came across in his archive while researching War Primer 2. It has a photograph of a racing car stuck to the cover. “The curator let us look more closely at this sparingly illustrated book,” says Chanarin, “and we realised that, when Brecht had run out of notebooks, he’d paste clippings from the popular press into it, and make small annotations. We can safely say this planted the seed of the project.”
The other perhaps more important touchstone for the project is the essay that provides the afterword: Divine Violence by the Israeli-born contemporary philosopher Adi Ophir, which draws a direct parallel between the violence of the bible and the violence of “the modern state … a multi-apparatus that strives to control everything it contains and to contain everything it can control.” Broomberg says: “We chose the bible because we were in communication with Adi and his text morally and politically shaped the project. The bible is his main concern and his reading of it – that the book is a parable for modern governance and its relation to catastrophe or punishment – rang true with our understating of the world but also of photography and its relation to power, to war, to catastrophe.”
Broomberg, who grew up in South Africa and attended what he calls “a right wing Zionist-based school” as a child, adds: “The Bible has informed my life, but when I read Adi’s essay, it blew my mind as a political reading of the book. Until then, I had never looked at it in that way. His contention is that the book is so linked with power that it is a parable for, and indeed a model of, modern governance.”
Are they worried that the book might, like the Bible itself, take on a life of its own? “Well, if you you actually read the Old Testament from cover to cover you notice very quickly that God reveals himself through acts of catastrophe, through violence, “says Chanarin, “Awful things keep happening, a flood that just about wipes out most of his creation, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorra. We constantly witness death on an epic scale and the victims hardly ever know what they have done to deserve such retribution.” He adds, “I do hope people make the connection between Adi Ophir’s reading of the Bible and our project and to the fact that the camera has always been drawn to these themes, to sites of human suffering. Since it’s inception it has been used to record but also participate in catastrophic events.”
Broomberg concurs: “The Bible itself could be considered highly offensive and provocative. All we’re doing is equating its violent project with the violent project of photography. We also hope this helps reactivate the text – we haven’t seen many people reading it of late.”
via Art and design: Photography | guardian.co.uk http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2013/jun/11/deutsche-prizewinners-new-work-holy-bible Sean O’Hagan Thanks for reading Jay
Tasmania’s Tarkine region: mining province or world heritage site?
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Photo gallery: Tasmania’s Tarkine region is facing more than 50 mining applications for exploration, including in the rainforest heartland
via Art and design: Photography | guardian.co.uk http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/gallery/2013/jun/11/tasmania-tarkine-mining Thanks for reading Jay
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