Radio interview and Facebook page

I was interviewed by Luchi at Radio Phoenix at midday on 7 March 2013 about Postcards from Zambia having just made it back through the pre-holiday traffic jams in Lusaka after filming in the Big Concession near Mumbwa. You can listen to the recording here. Meanwhile, this picture from the book was taken in Mumbwa.

 The Facebook page for Postcards from Zambia is here.

Postcards from Zambia, book and exhibition

I had my first photo exhibition on Saturday, 23 February 2013 in support of my first photo book, Postcards from Zambia, in Lusaka. There were 43 photographs exhibited. A further 34 had not been printed by the exhibition deadline due to lack of desired printing materials, anywhere in southern Africa.

It was by invitation only and therefore potentially stratified by class, gender, race; except it wasn't. Attendees included Americans, Chinese, English, Zambians, and no 'others' at all, that are probably best described as senior middle class. There is a very big gap between saying and doing, as we all know, and there are real lessons from doing.

Publishing a book on its own, without an exhibition is undoubtedly somehow sterile, standoffish and elitist, and has no means of responding to feedback until the second edition, which may never happen. It presumes the photographer knows his audience and can select the photographs that his audience wants to see. Since the audience is self-selecting, presumably by the content, the second option simply does not exist. This was verified by the exhibition which demonstrated different people liked different photographs, actually unsurprisingly. I had fortunately planned to print all of the book's photographs after my sister had said she liked a (soft) picture that I had thought to exclude. (This does not change the fact that I selected the photographs for the book in the first place.)

The exhibition also showed up the weaknesses of Robert Frank's The Americans and John Szarkowski's The Photographer's Eye that Szarkowski subsequently but partially corrected in Looking at Photographs: the audience most definitely wants to know about the photographs, where, what they are about and the story behind them. Omitting such detail on the basis that the photograph can be interpreted by education, knowledge and experience is nonsense made worse by the absurdity of the concepts that are simply not understood by the viewing public, like the emotive post-colonial 'exotic' or 'other'. In the case of my exhibition, everyone knew nearly everything about the photographs: they had been there, knew the street. What they wanted was detail, not only about the photographs but also my personal views - my motivation and agenda if you like - and they really enjoyed receiving it, much more than I had expected. One line text on the page of the book is simply not enough and in future I will always include an explanatory paragraph.

The book is currently available at Planet Books in Arcades and from Amazon. The book signing is at Planet Books on 9th March 2013 from 1000 to 1200 hrs. Public exhibitions are planned at Alliance Francais and at the National Museum in Lusaka in the next month. The book's website is Postcards.

Jacky and April, and pupsy, with the Choma Milk Cooperative, 2008

One of the exhibition rooms

Another. 

24 February 2013

Ongoing Activity

The book Postcards from Zambia is available from Amazon and in bookshops and other outlets in Zambia. My website is www.peterlangmead.com. A private exhibition was on 23 February 2013.

It is anticipated that a public exhibition will be held at Alliance Français and, possibly, the Lusaka National Museum, which is all but moribund since colonial times and even has a few bullet holes in it: I was not impressed. I also plan to exhibit in Livingstone National Museum. There will be a press release for a book signing at Planet Books at Arcades on 9th March 2013.

Exhibition prints are being printed in Zambia and mounted on wood frames.

I wrote to Martin Parr

Response to comments

I have stripped out 11 photographs and replaced them with seven, to improve the quality. In nearly all cases, the captions are horizontal; there are a few instances where it is not possible. I have been able to do this because I delayed printing the book until I had received comments from a few of the top photographers…

I only received an answer from Martin Parr. Here are my resulting notes.

I wrote to Martin Parr, and all the top photographers as institutionalised by establishment BBC. I am sure that the British ones anyway half died, I would have done.

Our conversation enlightened me about my photography.

The Last Resort. The photographs are wide angle. This is close for most people, but it is not in the crowd. This means that the subjects know they are being photographed, which means they have been asked to ignore the camera. To a greater or lesser extent, then, the pictures are posed and fake. Sorry!

I use 24mm or 28mm wide angle lenses. The difference is I am very much in the melé and participating in the crowd, even intruding. Further I am white, and everyone knows I am there. Zambians, like other Africans, are impeccably polite: hello, how are you, I am fine thank you, before any business is done, so I have been very rude by my intrusion. Unlike Parr, I do not ask permission and rarely ask to photograph, or please carry on as you were, so, unsurprisingly, facial expressions are more surprised than posed, the half-smile is usually a reaction, and genuine. Besides this, generally I have found the answer is no if asked, but not for any particular reason.

A second observation about, probably all, Africans, is they have quick reactions and appear to be always aware of everything going on around them. They have noticed the camera, not to mention the white man, often before I can take a picture, so they are all likely to be looking at the camera and chorusing ‘Iwe’; using the very wide lens therefore does indeed unsettle the subjects. I contend that this is the camera by the way, and the same would happen with a Zambian photographer, but with more conversation after the event.

Parr’s work is famous for being in colour: in England, the sky is never blue, and the people never smile and are dour, so use blue sky, happy English people and colour, which is a good ironic combination. The children and demonstration of affection also show that the English are not as hung up about sex as legend would like to believe, well at least in the north!

My book is serial documentaries, both impartial and persuasive types. The People shows characters and is not posed, very much Cartier-Bresson’s fleeting moments. Often I am talking to the subjects as I bring out the camera and take the photograph. It is impossible to do this with the Nikons of the world, and I recognise the aperture effects of smaller sensors. The pictures are, in my view, impartial; they show the character and his/her environment. Rural life continues with characters. In all this, I am trying to show how normal people are, that they do normal jobs, just like August Sander’s subjects but less formally and with more information, and they are not war-mongering, starving, disease-ridden, poverty stricken and unwashed urchins with their hands out as being perpetuated by neo-imperialists.

On the one hand, westerners are frightened of Africans, particularly the Americans, who are frightened of everyone and want to shoot them; on the other, they expend time being neo-imperialist and trying to influence African governments.

For Westerners, charcoal is inherently emotional and very eligible to be a persuasive document; however, it is so easy that the real challenge is to present it in Zambia’s context, as a job of work. There is no doubt that the power of the persuasive document, therefore, is absolutely a function of associated text: the hot erroneous ‘global warming’ rather than the conservative ‘climate change’, for example.

Like defending charcoal production, no amount of argument can be successful against the tirade of neo-imperialist abuse and insult directed at Africa, embedded in the West’s simulacrum: those poor brown people are all dying of famine, disease and war. This is irrational, ignorant and absurd tosh!

Interestingly, Parr referred to South Africa as a source of good African photography. 

1.       South Africa is only geographically Africa, but it is not Africa.

a.       Nobody here thinks of South Africans as being African in any sense of the world. That is what you think. 

b. It made me realise that photographs in Africa are very local and cannot be aggregated on the basis that they are taken in Africa or of Africans

c.       There is no comparison between my representations of Zambians and South Africans

d. South Africa is moving on to something worse than apartheid, driven mostly by huge income disparity and real urban poverty. It is already a police state.

I have started to do Postcards for another country, and I very quickly recognised that I really do know Zambia better than I know other countries.

Parr didn’t like the smiling, but more interesting is he missed the gaze, straight to camera and to me, ostensibly the colonial (not actually). Needless to say, I had no responses; too bad, not even from my tutor.

Decoys and Disruptions

I cannot think of another book that is such a catalogue of the dullest articles ever written. I am always amused by how Americans talk up their talents - but Martha Rosler has none. The design of the book itself is appallingly uncomfortable, the margins are too big; the text is in the wrong proportions, and the notes are space fillers. In the writing there is no contrast and little interesting material, and I found it difficult to read much before falling asleep. There are more words than necessary, which is always an abuse of the English language and a feature of poor writing. If it was not for my marking the very few points made in the book, I would have gleaned nothing from this gnomic tome. There is little that is memorable: I do not rate her photographs and her artistic skills are limited, in my opinion, and if it was not for the support of photography students, it would not survive, and it still may not. That the book is rated in the US is an interesting statement about American inabilities. If there has been a sea change from the postmodern, it is the lack of tolerance for the inveterately boring; if you can’t say it briefly and succinctly, don’t waste my time, I don’t have any.

Exhibition Considerations

Exhibition Considerations

A useful site in on the web provided fine guidelines for exhibitions[1].

·         Logical groupings

o   Chronological

o   Like with like

§  Medium

§  Treatment

§  Scale

§  Colour-monochrome might be together

§  Genre

§  Theme

·         Use of space

o   Best spaces

o   Dark areas/dead zones

o   Areas better suited to display or a/work types

§  Small walls, small work

§  Large walls, large work

·         Lighting

o   Sources

o   Quality, warm/cold

o   Controllable or changeable

o   Sufficient?

·         Flow

o   Entry point

o   Movement usually clockwise

o   Exhibition information at entrance as people arrive

o   First wall is a feature, strong work

o   Images left to right

·         Layout

o   a/work placed in front of proposed position

§  visualise how exhibition will look

§  move a/work around, try different groupings, positions

o   May need to edit exhibition

§  If too much or fussy

§  Place in clusters or sets

·         Seen as a group

·         12 pix in a row looks bigger than 3 grids of 4 pix

·         Placement

o   Comfortable height, 150cm for adults, 120cm for children

o   If relatively close together, seen as a pair

o   Consider groups as one artwork

o   Measure wall

§  Sum widths of pix and subtract from wall measurement

·         Equals space measurement

·         Divide space measurement by n+1 spaces required

·         Stop and think!

o   Is it successful?

o   Can it be improved?

o   Is the wors level and equally spaced?

o   Is there good flow and rhythm?

o   Does one piece lead to the next?
Now the other stuff

Other stuff

Some other sensible information was found on the internet: do not mix black and white, duotone or colour. The implication is you could not do the job in one type, for whatever reason. There is no particular issue about size, other than probably consistency and price.

The one metre images I am planning to print are to fit Alliance Francais, or another 10 x 25 m location. This is large, but then so are the large colourful hoarding boards all over the country; it seems to me A3 would not be spectacular enough. If I use A3 prints, the room size would be 10.5 x 4.14 m, the smallest conference room at the Southern Sun.

The simplest printing option for one metre prints is Correx, which is corrugated plastic and very light, and designed for exhibitions. The advantages are the numbering and titling can all be done on printing, and there is no frame. The surface and price may challenges. A1, A2 and A3 can be photographic poster-type prints, and A3 can be quality printed from .pdf at a much reduced price.

The layout for the exhibition is easily designed on Google SketchUp and can be readily re-scaled, with only the scenes for the .avi being tiresome for the 420mm prints.

From my own experience of exhibitions, somewhere to sit is essential.

The other option is simply to have a slideshow and some chairs, because it achieves the same outcome and is significantly better use of resources.

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[1] http://www.coca.org.nz/media/files/Tips%20on%20exhibition%20layout.pdf

Photographic and printing considerations

Photographic and Printing Considerations

I discovered Silver Efex Pro 2 from the Leica M monochrome camera, which provides a free edition of the programme, but not by buying one! I found this programme gives considerable latitude to black and white digital processing and can substantially enhance black and white images.

Langmead & Baker Ltd has experience in magazine and book publishing, with InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop, Lightroom etc; however, this does not mean there was nothing to learn. The hint came from John Swarkowski ‘s The Photographic Eye… ‘172 duotone images’, back cover. I had already made the decision to do the book in black and white, which is not uncommon, but many photographic books are only printed in black. The difference using duotone is enhanced contrast: I have used mustard yellow as the second colour, which is also on the back cover. The method is simple enough in Photoshop, converting the 8 bit image to grayscale first and then to duotone, which gives a facility up to quadtone. The separations are produced by cancelling CYM and leaving process black and panatone 117c, in this case, which is now a two-colour lithographic printing process. Utility is not increased for me by using tri- or quadtone.

The first time I did this, I followed the consensus of advice on the web, using .eps files. Not only are these are very big files, .eps is an outdated file type and the general consensus is now tif or .psd; before I  used .jpg. Another c-change is I now use .dng exclusively. So my duotone sequence is

• .dng 
• silver efex to .tif 
• photoshop duotone, not rastered, because the photographs are also to be used large
• saved as .psd for Indesign

I have three books planned directly, four actually, because the first one has technical and production errors, which I will learn on reflection.