Sublevel Critical Journal

Seaside Day (1954)

2012-02-03T11:17:00.001Z

SEASIDE DAY

Fuji X Pro 1

2012-01-05T17:18:00.001Z

http://www.stevehuffphoto.com/2012/01/04/the-new-fuji-x-pro1-details-yep-fuji-is-in-this-to-win-it/

Introduction to 'Subway' by Bruce Davidson

2012-01-01T02:22:00.000Z

A Window into the World of the Photographer

2011-12-30T17:40:00.000Z

Ian Berry: Street Photography

2011-12-30T17:32:00.000Z

I wouldn't want to carry Ian Berry's bag...

Two Cute Dogs - A Documentary

2011-12-23T12:44:00.001Z

View Here: Leica Blog

Polaroid Z340

2011-12-21T16:28:00.002Z

Jonathan Day: Robert Frank's 'The Americans': The Art of Documentary Photography

2011-12-21T16:16:00.000Z

Vicki Goldberg: Light Matters

2011-12-21T16:12:00.000Z

Storytelling Series: Daniel Milnor

2011-12-20T22:12:00.000Z

Wedding at the Old Kent Barn Swingfield

2011-12-20T18:51:00.001Z

I travel not to go anywhere, but to go.

2011-12-14T22:26:00.000Z

Prototype: Return to Westwwod

2011-12-09T16:44:00.003Z

Uchujin: The Blog

2011-12-09T14:54:00.001Z

Tokyo Camera Style

2011-12-09T14:50:00.001Z

Film Photography Podcast

2011-12-09T14:49:00.001Z

Dear Santa...

2011-12-08T01:08:00.001Z

Cover of Life Magazine: December 29th 1972

2011-12-07T10:35:00.001Z

Final Show Notes

2011-12-06T23:20:00.000Z

Reply–all email for everyone to communicate
Publication? Show of hands 15 out of 21
last year £900 for 1000 booklets
kitty?
raising money?
appearance
Curating - discuss in March
Use people to their strengths
Rob & Miranda's MA Show - external designer for publication - minimalist
Maquettes - work with designer
Poster - link to designer
Postcards? Pros and cons? Jon to explore further
Website? Show of hands 2 out of 21
"Graduate Show"
name not to be one point something...previous!!
FOL10 | 1mag1ne | Vision 1.0 | Exhibit #1
Space
leaflets outside
magazine ads
discussion each week during MPP
costs of website - find out

Lecture Notes

2011-12-06T23:11:00.000Z

Staged Photography Lecture - Miranda Hutton
Susan bright - narrative
Charlotte Cotton - Once Upon A Time...
The opposite of the photo–essay
One tableau image
Cindy Sherman - Film Stills (Bordering staged according to Susan Bright)
Jeff Wall - absorbed in film
returning the gaze
lightboxes - echo movie screen/billboard
Sugimoto - Movie Screens
di Corcia - lighting, Hollywood. Dramatic. Twilight suggests change
Crewdson - parents were psychoanalysts
American suburbia
filmic/film crew
Bill Henson - 'Crewdson–like' teenage - inbetween stages
Tableau - picture on grand scale
for gallery/wall space
Michael Creed - talks about performance/posed
doing the everyday things
Painterly observation - direct link to novel
Holding something back - viewer interprets (back/no face)
Construct then removes things - works in reverse - incomplete

Koudelka's Theater of Exile

2011-12-04T20:48:00.001Z

Text from MaxKozloff, Lone Visions, Crowded Frames

Koudelka'sTheater of Exile

... It's shocking to thinkof how much in current Western experience is ruled out by Koudelka, andnullified as if it never existed. One could search practically in vain for thehistorical Europe or the tourist scene, the life of the middle classes,plastics, the consumer market, signs, cars, modern diversions, blue-collarexistence, productive systems of any kind, in short the characteristic Jamboreeof the late twentieth century. It takes a certain exclusionary genius to haverejected such a sights while still asserting one's ties to people. A great dealhas been made of the solitary spirit of Koudelka's work, but that spiritprotests too much. Because of his rhetorical estrangement, his world may be asinhospitable as It is unfamiliar, but it remains a world of minority cultures,whose religious and funerary rituals It intimately discloses. The question ofhow long these cultures will continue to exist in recognizable form is held insuspense by his imagery. Pre-industrial and mostly unrelated to any sizableeconomy, they seem to be holding on, in atrophied, ingrown states, a dwindlingthat has spurred him to make his late records. Europe had no place for theEastern Slovakian gypsies Koudelka photographed in the sixties, and the Spanishpeasantry of his more recent images would not seem to have the brightestprospects either. At first glance, it looks as if he's declared his theme to berural, Third World poverty, but the faces, though gnarled like those inundeveloped countries, are Caucasian. What happens in his pictures seems tohave taken place a long time ago, under archaic conditions, hard to remember .. . so that their actual contemporaneity appears misplaced.

The first plate ofKoudelka's most recent book, Exiles, which accompanied his show at theInternational Center of Photography this summer in New York (it had traveledthere from Paris), shows the photographer's left forearm stretched from abalcony over an empty Prague boulevard. The year is fateful, 1968, and thegesture is unmistakably that of someone who consults his watch. It's twelveo'clock, a noon hour here momentous because of its silence and emptiness, as ifto mark a large strike. The photographer engages us with a symbolic interval ofhis resistance as a fighter on behalf of the aborted Dubcek liberalization. Hissubsequent flight from the Brezhnev armed clampdown, along with numerous otherCzech intellectuals, artists, and filmmakers, was an escape to a freedom in theWest whose embryo promise they had lost at home. (In this era of glasnost, thepersistence of the Czech regime in its singularly reactionary unbending courseindicates all the more glaringly what they were up against.)

In the case of Koudelka,however, welcome into Western creative circles did not lead him to anendorsement of the materialism, much less the capitalist ethic, that surroundedhim there. The only pictures really impacted with things in his entire careerare of Soviet tanks in Czechoslovakia, swarmed over by defiant but impotentcrowds during the time of national humiliation and trauma. Events like thathave the capacity to mark an artist's vision. Though befriended in the West(particularly at the photo agency of Paris Magnum, which took him as a member),and clearly grateful for it, Koudelka was never consoled. It can be argued thatthis diffident man, who lives and travels as lightly as possible, is bytemperament an uprooted character. In the early sixties, as a young man, anaeronautical engineer and theater photographer, he had already been takingpictures of the outcast gypsies, a foretaste of his experience as oneexpatriated in his own turn. Still, there had once been a homeland for hisalienation, and now he was forced to reproduce and project it by the sheerstrength of his nomadic will. So, the pictorial introduction of his book isalso really a closing down, a climax from which there could only follow ananticlimax. But from that ensues his meaning, as it's realized that our WesternEurope has been suffused by Koudelka's downcast view of Eastern Europe.

...

One of his admirers, RomeoMartinez, observes that "Koudelka has recognized in the theater a form anda metaphor of life." This idea is seconded by Robert Delpire, who not onlyoriginally organized Koudelka's recent show, in France, but was the first topublish Frank's Americans in the fifties. Delpire says that Koudelka'swork is "marked by a sort of theatrical organization of reality." Insuch a view, the subjects of the photographs function as players on a stage,and it is true that some of them perform obvious roles, such as a little boywith angel wings and sneakers on a bicycle, or a young gypsy man cuffed andcondemned on the edge of a village. Interestingly, both these individuals areremoved from their nominal audiences but are close to the camera. Imaginativeor real as were their onetime scripts, they now perform unknowingly in dramasdevised on the spot by the spectator's eye of the itinerant photographer. He isan expert in showing us two or more scenarios adjacent to each other in theframe, not merely keeping track of them but welding them together freshly in anew production. A one-armed bather seems resentful of a squalling baby on aPortuguese beach-as far as Koudelka will go in depicting vacation. Some kidshorse around in a Spanish alley while just around the corner, in the foregroundand out of their sight, a baggily dressed fellow seems to play uninvitedhide-and-seek. Four Irishmen piss against the wall of a concrete trench, andthough they avoid noticing each other, as men typically do in such quarters,Koudelka, behind them, makes a dramatic synthesis of their isolation.

While the town or villageoffers Koudelka's theatrical flair such glints of reduced sociality (which arehumorous and a little sinister), what of the country? He almost seems to thrillto the depressing vacancy of open reaches and plains. He's a vagrant explorerof unpopulated places where every now and then he finds like-minded passersby, animalor human. He insists on the freedom to be without direction, to be derelict, tobe attracted to the unlovely and unploughed field or heath, where there is norefuge from the feeling of loss. Here is nature, spoiled not by industry-but bythe viewer's own malaise. Koudelka's pictures of this type never make it to thestatus of landscape. The weather is bad. Someone throws up a ball, in poeticennui, and a horse lounges in the distance. Later in his work, we realize thatthis desolate mode overmasters; the ecstatic one of the denser groupings. Theimpression grows that an admirable independence of spirit can have its morbidside: instead of going his own way, the photographer shuns people out ofreclusive need, weariness perhaps, or suspicion. If the smallest incident ormodest object-a glance, graceful debris-becomes an event, it may be because ofa disheartened vitality that has to disguise itself.

Czeslaw Milosz on Exiles

2011-12-04T20:40:00.001Z

Text from CzeslawMilosz, Exiles

Koudelka

ON EXILE

While writing thisessay I had before my eyes Josef Koudelka's photographs. Let my words serve asa tribute to his art of telling stories without words.

Rhythm is at the coreof human life. It is, first of all, the rhythm of the organism, ruled by theheartbeat and circulation of blood. As we live in a pulsating, vibrating world,we respond to it and in turn are bound to its rhythm. Without giving muchthought to our dependence on the systoles and distoles of flowing time we movethrough sunrises and sunsets, through the sequences of four seasons. Repetitionenables us to form habits and to accept the world as familiar Perhaps the needof a routine is deeply rooted in the very structure of our bodies.

In a city or avillage which we have known well since our childhood we move in a tamed space,our occupations finding everywhere expected landmarks that favor routine.Transplanted into alien surroundings we are oppressed by the anxiety ofindefiniteness, by insecurity There are too many new shapes and they remainfluid, because the principle of their order through routine cannot bediscovered. What I am saying is perhaps just a generalization of my ownexperience but I hope to be understood as that experience has been shared bymany especially in this century.

Among the misfortunesof exile, anxiety of the unfamiliar holds a prominent place. Whoever has foundhimself as an immigrant in a big foreign city had to cope with a kind of envyat the sight of its inhabitants engaged in purposeful occupations, confidentlygoing to definite, known to them, shops or offices, in a world weaving togethera huge fabric of everyday bustle. It is possible that such an observer from theoutside would have recourse to special strategies in order to diminish hisfeeling of alienation. Living in Paris, I was for a long time drawing a linearound a few streets in the Latin Quarter, so that I could call a certain areamine." A restaurant at the corner, a small bookstore, a laundry, a cafesucceeded each other when I was taking a walk and would give me some assurancethrough their presence at the points expected in advance.

To be lost in aforeign city. Perhaps something more is involved here than a mere inability tofind one's way It once happened to me, also in Paris, a city of my many joyousmoments and many misfortunes, when I stepped out of the Métro in a part of thetown with which I was acquainted but not too well. I started to walk andsuddenly I noticed that there was not even one spot to serve me as a guide markand I was seized by a sort of fear of height. The houses seemed to turn aroundand threaten to fall. I lost orientation. And I was quite aware that myindecision of which street to take reflected my loss of orientation in a deepersense. Exile deprives one of the points of reference that helped us to makeprojects, choose our goals, to organize our activities. In our native countrieswe maintained a peculiar relationship with our predecessors, with writers if wewere writers, with painters if we were painters, etc., and that was arelationship of both respect and opposition; our driving force was to better themin one or another manner and to add our name to the roster of names rememberedby our village, our city, or country Here, abroad, nothing of that is left, wehave been catapulted out of history, which is always the history of a specificarea on the map, and we have to cope with, to use an expression of an exilewriter, "the unbearable lightness of being."

The recovery is slowand never complete. There is a period when we refuse to recognize that ourdisplacement is irrevocable and no political or economic changes in the countryof our origin can bring about our return. Then slowly we come to therealization that exile is not just a physical phenomenon of crossing stateborders, for it grows on us, transforms us from within, and becomes our fate.The undifferentiated mass of human types, streets, monuments, fashions, trendsacquires some distinct features and gradually the strange transforms itselfinto the familiar At the same time, however, the memory preserves a topographyof our past, and this dual observance keeps us apart from our fellow citizens.

"Having leftyour native land, don't look back, the Erinyes are behind you." One of thePythagorean principles, the advice is good but difficult to follow. It is true,the Erinyes are there, behind your back, and their very sight may petrify amortal. Some say them to be daughters of Earth, others, daughters of Night, inany case they arrive from the depth of the underworld, are winged, and in theirhair carry twisting serpents. They are your punishment for your past offensesand you know well that you cannot claim purity whether you are aware of yourfailings or not. The best protection against the Erinyes would be, indeed,never to look back. And yet it is impossible not to look back, for there, inthe land of your ancestors, of your language, of your family, a treasure hasbeen left, more valuable than any riches measured by money, namely, colors,shapes, intonations, details of architecture, everything that shapes one'schildhood. By letting your memory speak you wake up the past and by the sametoken attract the Erinyes; yet man stripped of memory is hardly human or herepresents only a very impoverished humanity Thus a contradiction appears andyou have to learn how to live with it. There is another aspect of exileconsidered as a specific affliction of the twentieth century The most famous ofthe exile writers of the past, Dante, after leaving his native Florence,wandered all his life from one city to another but today those cities hardlycan mean "abroad" as they are all situated in Italy Dante died andwas buried in Ravenna which today doesn't seem at all a land distant from hisbirthplace. Could it happen that with the shrinkage of the planet Earthdistances but also differences between particular countries grow smaller andsmaller? Perhaps it would be possible to visualize a modern pilgrim'swanderings as his going from one place to another within one country, whetherthat country is called Europe, a continent, or the world? If this is not sonow, there is a certain latent dynamism inherent in the progress of technology,which pushes in that direction. The twentieth century also brings aquantitative change as befits an era of population explosion. In Dante's timethe number of people leaving the towns and villages where they were born wasvery small. Now hundreds of thousands, and even millions, migrate, chased fromtheir homes by war, by harsh economic necessities, or political persecution,and an expatriate, for instance a writer, an artist, an intellectual who lefthis country for his own, so to say, fastidious reasons, motivated as he was notonly by fear of starvation or of the police, cannot isolate his fate from thefate of those masses. Their nomadic existence, the slums they often inhabit,the deserts of dirty streets where their children play are, in a way, his own;he feels solidarity with them and he only wonders whether this is not an image,more and more generalized, of the human condition. For life in exile seems nomore limited to a transplantation from one country to another Industrialcenters attract people who leave their peaceful but impoverished ruraldistricts, new towns grow where a few decades ago only cattle were grazing,shacks and barracks of slums surround big capitals. When characterizing theindefiniteness and insecurity inherent in exile one notices that practicallyeverything that is said on the subject applies to the new inhabitants of theurban landscape, even if they have not arrived from foreign lands. Alienationbecomes a predicament of too many human beings to be considered an afflictionof a special category, and the self-pity of an emigre reflecting on thatphenomenon is undermined.

Perhaps a loss ofharmony with the surrounding space, the inability to feel at home in the world,so oppressing to an expatriate, a refugee, an immigrant, however we call him,paradoxically integrates him in contemporary society and makes him, if he is anartist, understood by all. Even more, to express the existential situation ofmodern man, one must live in exile of some sort. Are not Samuel Beckett's playsabout exile? Time in them is not perceived as a serene repetition favoring agladly accepted routine; on the contrary, it is empty and destructive, itrushes forward to an illusory goal and closes on itself in a display offutility Man in those plays cannot enter into a contact with space which isabstract, uniform, deprived of specific objects, in all probability a desert.

Writing this I amvisited by a tune of an old religious song in Polish which begins: "Exilesof Eve, we beseech Thy help." And indeed an archetypal exclusion from theGarden of Eden repeats itself in our lives, whether Eden be the womb of ourmother or the enchanting garden of our early childhood. Centuries of traditionare behind the image of the whole earth as a land of exile, usually presentedas a desertic, sterile landscape in which Adam and Eve march, their headsdespondently lowered. They were chased from their native realm, their true homewhere the same rhythm has ruled over their bodies and their surroundings, whereno separation and no nostalgia has been known. Looking back, they may see fieryswords guarding the Gates of Paradise. Their nostalgic thinking about a returnto the once happy existence is intensified by their awareness of prohibition.And yet they will never completely relinquish the thought of the day when theirexile will end. Later, much later on, perhaps that dream will take the shape ofa golden city lasting beyond time, of a heavenly Jerusalem.

The biblical imagefavors a cliche according to which exile means looking back towards the countryof one's origin. And, indeed, many poems and novels have been written in thiscentury by exiles who describe a region of the world from where they have comeas more beautiful than it had been in reality, simply because now it is lostforever Yet an objection imposes itself here. Displacement creates a distancemeasured by kilometers or miles, hundreds and thousands of miles. The biblicalimage is that of a movement in space from the Gates of Eden or, translatingthis into modern notions, from the borders of a state guarded by armedsoldiers. However, distance may be measured not only in miles, but also inmonths, years, or dozens of years. Assuming this, we may consider the life ofevery human being as an unrelenting movement from childhood on, through thephases of youth, maturity, and old age. The past of every individual undergoesconstant transformations in his or her memory and more often than not it acquiresthe features of an irretrievable land made more and more strange by the flow oftime. Thus the difference between a displacement in space and in time issomewhat blurred. We can well imagine an old expatriate who, meditating on thecountry of his youth, realizes that he is separated from it not only byexpanse, but also by the wrinkles on his face and grey hair, marks left by asevere border guard, time. What then is exile if, in this sense, everybodyshares that condition?

Nevertheless, thecondition of exile in a geographical sense is real enough and those whose fateis to experience it have been using various consolations to make it lessdepressing. An awareness of its universal character in this century may provideconsiderable relief and even induce a pride of belonging to an avant-garde. Inaddition, such an awareness draws encouragement from the fact that historyknows big countries founded by wanderers, among them, America. An artist and awriter in exile are, however, confronted with the insidious question of his orher creativity or paralysis. An argument has been advanced many times accordingto which there is a mysterious link between the land of our ancestors, itssoil, its light, sounds of its language on the one hand and the creative powersof the individual on the other It is said that our sources of inspiration riskto dry out abroad. And in fact a great number of people who were gifted,brilliant, promising poets, painters, musicians have been leaving theircountries only to suffer defeat and to plunge into anonymity that would covertheir names forever There is much truth in the assertion that the native soilpossesses a vivifying force, even if we put aside the obvious, namely themother tongue and its irreplaceable nuances. Fear of sterility is a companionof every expatriate artist and though it visits artists in general, itspresence in that particular case is felt more strongly. To calm it, the mostuseful is to invoke the names of all those who despite the odds have not lostthe game. Fundamental works of poetry in some languages, for instance, Polishand Armenian, have been written abroad, owing to the political persecutionpracticed by foreign occupying powers. Decades spent in Paris far from hisnative provincial town, Witebsk, didn't discourage Marc Chagall from followinghis original inspiration and he continued to fly in the sky together with theroofs of huts, with the goats and cows of his childhood and early youth. IsaacBashevis Singer recreated in America through memory and imagination the lifegone forever of the Polish Jews. It is doubtful whether James Joyce's Ulyssescould have been written in Dublin, it is more probable to assume that hisestrangement and his refusal to serve Irish patriotic goals were necessarypreconditions for his description of Ireland from afar And Igor Stravinsky, inspite of malicious rumors, according to which after the Rite of Spring histalent, not enlivened by Russia, was on the wane, remained productive and veryRussian during his long exile.

In every one of theseexamples, and they can be multiplied, a pattern is noticeable. A farewell toone's country, to its landscapes, customs and mores throws one into a no man'sland comparable perhaps to the desert chosen as a place of contemplation byearly Christian hermits. Then the only remedy against the loss of orientationis to create anew one's own North, East, West, and South and posit in that newspace a Witebsk or a Dublin elevated to the second power What has been lost isrecuperated on a higher level of vividness and presence.

Exile is a test ofinternal freedom and that freedom is terrifying. Everything depends upon ourown resources, of which we are mostly unaware and yet we make decisionsassuming our strength will be sufficient. The risk is total, not assuaged bythe warmth of a collectivity where the second rate is usually tolerated,regarded as useful and even honored. Now to win or to lose appears in a crudelight, for we are alone and loneliness is a permanent affliction of exile. OnceFriedrich Nietzsche exalted the freedom of height, of loneliness, of thedesert. Freedom of exile is of that lofty sort, though it is imposed bycircumstances and, therefore, deprived of bathos. A brief formula may encapsulethe outcome of that struggle with our own weakness: exile destroys, but if itfails to destroy you, it makes you stronger.

The exodus of peoplefrom their countries is a familiar feature in our century and it has beencategorized under various names. The Russian Revolution resulted in theappearance of Russian emigres in the big cities of the West. Soon they werejoined by refugees from Hitler's Germany and ex-soldiers from the SpanishRepublican Army. At the end of World War II a defeated Germany was full ofdisplaced persons called D.F.'s, former slave laborers and survivors ofconcentration camps, also of Germans expelled from the Eastern provinces. Inthe subsequent decades a wave of migrations from Central-Eastern Europe hasbeen due to political spasms (the crushed Hungarian uprising, the invasion ofCzechoslovakia, the martial law in Poland) or to the economic attractiveness ofthe capitalist West. Similar names and categories can be found in Africa andAsia, the exodus of the "Boat People" from Vietnam being the mostfamous case. Though officials, charged with granting or refusing to a newcomerthe right to stay, distinguish between ideological and economic motives,reality is more complex than that and a given person has usually been pushed tomigrate by a tangle of reasons. One thing is certain: people leave theirhomelands because life there is difficult to bear.

Can we imagine a world inwhich the phenomenon of exile disappears because it is unnecessary? To envisagesuch a possibility would mean to disregard the current that seems to carry usin the opposite direction. What is probable is the increase of awareness thatwhoever looks for happiness in distant lands must be prepared fordisillusionment or even for the doubtful reward of one who jumps from thetrying pan into the fire. That awareness, of course, would not discourageanybody, for the pain we feel at a given moment is more real than the pain wemay endure in the future. This earth with all its charms and beauty is afterall the earth of the "Exiles of Eve." An old anecdote about a refugeein a travel agency has not lost its bite: a refugee from war-torn Europe,undecided as to what continent and what state would be far off enough and safeenough, for a while was pensively turning a globe with his finger, then asked,"don't you have something else?"

Cliftonville Prototype

2011-12-03T23:49:00.001Z

Lecture Notes

2011-11-29T18:10:00.000Z

MPP
Feedback - formative evaluation and online from March
MA/PhD/PGCE
Sidney Cooper - series of work
Visit in March
Come together as a group
KS - evening event
Wednesday = street photography
Marketing
Publication
Ownership - investment
Next week - lecture on staged photography
Next week = tutorials
London Trip tomorrow
Framing - quality v price!
Turner
The ready made picture frame company
Series 3/4/5/6 Never see a series of 16 at Free range - why?

Lecture Notes

2011-11-28T18:01:00.000Z

Dissertation - Last Formal Meeting
Sense of urgency - not just do it - live it
You can not take a month out for xmas
Take 5/6 days off and graft for three weeks
Some get a degree thru their delivery not their progress
Opportunity for MA needs 2:1 or First
To Do Lists - colour pen!
get everything out of your head
certain things cannot be put aside
'what i have achieved'
do not start tomorrow...
Proforma due date guarantees feedback before xmas
Not marked but needs to be signed off
"This is what I intend to do..."
"This is why it is important..."
Relevance/significance
Who are the key people? Monographs
What are the key texts? Photo Books?
You sign to say you can get the resources
Coherent (not polished)
Next term is tutorials only - supervisor cannot chase us
1500 words sent prior to tutorial
Also next term = Outside talkers and portfolio review