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.

---

[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.

Neo-imperialism, race, sex and power

Essay on Considerations

Analysing my Role...

I am 59-years-old: I am not going to become a war photojournalist; I am not even going to go where there is even the slightest hint of unrest. Linfield’s pornographic book revolts me. I live in Zambia, and in Zambia it is pretty difficult to find tension. Zambians are not aggressive and dissipate fast in the face of even the smallest sign of trouble, apart from the troublesome. 

I might chose to specialise in Aviation, for example, in which case I will not be doing much in Zambia, and I do not wish to travel extensively; I have done that already. In my second year, I studied social photography, so whatever my role is, it has to be within the set of social activities occurring in Zambia. There is plenty of game (wildlife) and exceptional landscape, these may not appropriate, and of course people, what humanity is made of. There are not many people, but broadly there is/are:

·        Rural

o   small-scale farming,

o   forestry

o   charcoal 

o   firewood

o   artisan mining, 

o   refugee camps from the warring countries that surround Zambia, 

o   livestock

o   large cattle herds 

·        transport

o   bus stations, ports

o   truck stops

o   customs

o   road transport, 

o   ferry boats

o   airports 

·        health:

o   orthopaedic centres, 

o   Red Cross, 

o   hospitals, 

o   clinics.

·        labour 

o   workers' housing, 

o   child labour

o   markets and small-scale trade 

o   graveyards,

o   and 'the street'.  

The simulacrum of the West asserts that Africa is at war, starving to death or dying of disease; well, Zambia is not. I do not believe the only subject matter for social photography is depravity and misery, so my role is to show the good things in Africa. These are the dual strengths of the family and community. To some extent the Western negativity pervades Zambia as well; something like 23,000 societies reporting that Zambians are starving to death, are oppressed et cetera. Actually, it is the misery and reek of the West that is seeping across the borders.

Is it possible to remove ‘neo-imperialism’ from photographs? Is it possible to remove race, sex, power, etc? 

Yes, but only if the subject is superior, or in some way more important than the photograph and/or the photographer. In the case of photojournalism, the emphasis is on the content of the image illustrating the text. If there is no text, superiority can be shown by the camera's low viewpoint of the subject, and/or the subject being emphasised by differential focus. (There are other ways this can be accomplished including form and colour.)

If photography is solely a part of the simulacra is there any chance of disruption? 

To be part of the simulacrum - I suggest this interpreted differently by each country, colour and creed - the media concerned, photographs, have to be incorporated in that simulacrum, as journalism or advertising, both of which provide entirely different interpretations and useage. Disruption of advertising is easy but likely to be self-censored by the industry, unless you are Benetton, who have used such a strategy on many occasions. Also, advertising photography tends to be directed at a target audience of willing believers: the best example of this is the iPhone, which is almost exclusively used as a two-dollar phone, and only half as powerful as the Android, by user and capacity. This however is more apparent in a communication hostile environment, like Zambia, where phones are fully utilised as access points for internet, wirelessly linked to LANs, file storage, music storage, et cetera, because of the paucity of infrastructure. The iPhone is disrupted by its own negative and abusive charisma; it doesn't need any help from anyone else.

Photojournalism is more or less discredited by nearly everyone, Susie Linfield, Martha Rosler, and every other woman, for some reason. In the press of the simulacrum, pictures are usually illustrative and rarely need to be interpreted; nobody has the time for interpretation. Photo essays have more room for disruption and the consumers are likely to do so, while the photographer is likely to be labelled an airheaded imperialist and patronising racist, and accused of being the perpetrator of the problem in the first place, since he is photographing it. 

I do not agree with this and I do not care either, sorry for the permission-seeking worm. The problem for all this postmodern negativity is there is a reaction, and that is the whole-scale rejection of it; and the credibility of those who advocate it is shot. For feminism I care even less, and I do not have any time for it: why do feminists always seek permission from their male competitor? Just take it, because men are not interested. Of course it has been possible to fake photographs right from the start of photography; and some amazing trickery has been employed, and the programmes today make it very easy.

I am not convinced art photography, or even art, is part of the simulacrum, even if it should be. Are the increasing numbers of unwashed proletariats really sensitive to the arts, apart from destroying them? The socialist not-at-all-democratic very rich bourgeoisie might be, because he has nothing else to do, and there are an awful lot of them in Britain.

I am afraid that I do not rate the trivial and pedantic using of cock-eyed, unnecessarily blurred and badly-framed photographs, since all this can be imposed in post-picture processing, and can be equally removed, so it would inevitably be fake, which, for me, does not say much for the photographer. By such deviance, the faked photograph detracts from the content of the image and means all future photographs cannot be trusted. Not at all impressed, and never have been.

Who is my audience? 

I would like my audience to the oh-so-generous, and rich, middle and working class in Europe and the West. The problem is that they all believe that they are saving poor little brown children; that the people of Africa are dying from wars, AIDS, typhoid and every other misery known to man. The fact is the West has no idea of what is going on and it is a most amazing demonstration of the power of an ill-informed simulacrum to sell newspapers and rivet eyes to TV screens, to reduce discontent, and of course to this can be added that it is an example of Guy Debord's non-stop spectacle, of which Africa is part. The argument that the Western target audience is fed-up with atrocity photographs is nonsense; they revel in it, their negativity and their guilt. Good, long may it continue! The question is how to overwhelm the patronising, racist and imperialist myth created by Geldoff that 'conjures up an almost neocolonial ideology of failure, inadequacy, passivity, fatalism, and inevitability' (Linfield, 2010, 40); no wonder the British decorated him.

Where would you like your photography to be shown?

I will publish it as a book, attached. The book is not a catalogue of negative opinion of what the West believes is happening in Africa, but a positive opinion about how Zambians really are. I will also print postcards. I am less sure about the value of an exhibition in Zambia, but I may do one in conjunction with the book launch in December 2012.  The overally objective is to try to make the people reject donor aid and belittle the patronising neo-imperialists of the West.

The Cruel Radiance

As a preface, this book sucks of professional journalism; you can always tell, too many words and verges on non-stop ranting, an extended newspaper article.

I am disappointed when the author seemingly has to justify this book, that relegates photojournalism to the bane of human kind, by claiming a link to Jewry, by ancestor, in the introduction, and I cannot say that I think it adds anything, especially in a world of six degrees of separation and the internet, not least because she was definitely not there. My qualifications for objecting to this claim of irrelevant experience is my grandfather came from East London - so what - and my belief that most of us are a concoction of much more than our own xenophobia.

I was also discouraged with American, desperately wrong, grammar of quotation marks from pp4, which clearly shows nobody in US has ever thought about the logic - how can a sentence refer to a quotation with the full-stop inside the end quote, before the sentence has finished? The quote is not finished if the quote mark is outside the full-stop, is it!

After these irrelevancies, I found this book is very much after my own mind, and I am relieved to find it so, not least because of my discomfort with some of the wilder assertions of post-moderns who actually are rather boring, haven't done very much except comment on everyone else in perfect rhetorical English and hopelessly demonstrate lack of worldly experience. It is hopeful that Linfield suggests that these malicious gnome-like spiteful critics come out from under their oaken desks and 'integrate emotion into the experience of looking' (30). I agree.

These people hate the work of Salgado, because it all looks too good, of Africa, perfect poverty, and some think this should not be so perfect, but they revel in their baseless superiority. Because they lack experience, these people do not know that it takes considerable discipline to work in remote African places, with most of the diseases, which he has not only suffered but also he took photographs at the same time. I know that is the case because I was doing just that in 1976 and later, with dysentery for several months at a time, with malaria every year. Second, a level-framed picture is not a function of the camera but of processing; the active decision for the print to be cock-eyed is fake. So the question is, are these commenting postmodernists actually more fake than the picture? When the pictures really is cock-eyed, out-of-focus and blurred, and the blood is still wet from the photographers ears from the gunshot shock-wave, then we know it is real, but if it has been faked, then you are a liar and screw you. Is lying justified as a photojournalist? Never. "Vacuous universality .... of misery" (43) - 'here's an American who has never got out of his [f*cking] Cadillac' and never experienced any misery. (I notice Linfield does not rate it a lot of this, either.) And Jim Lewis must be an inveterate liar, 'I really don't think that a picture of an atrocity should be a good picture' (44); anyone intelligent considered just how stupid this statement is? If this man is responsible for editing, then we can be sure that no photograph contains anything.

I am not going to give a rundown on what the book is about: it is necessary and, like the author wondering why she has to look at atrocity photographs, one has to wonder why it was necessary to publish. We all know it had to be, even if most prefer not to read it. I am also not sure that this represents independent, non-emotional, professional photojournalism; I suspect it has more to do with making statements about atrocities, and it is easy to see that such photographs will be adopted and shoved in the faces of the innocent to demand sympathy. Not all the people in the examples are like that. I have been in several countries where this type of history exists and there is something very distinctive about them that Linfield does not capture, which is much more ghastly than the photographs.

I do have a problem with this however: there are in this world professional victims, who like to suffer, not too much, and complain endlessly, even when the story was over many years ago: optimists always look forward and see no evil from their past, even if it was there; then there is the rest, and Zambians are professional victims at the drop of a hat, to some degree created by swimming-pooled donors. the faked grimace from a Zambian can only be fake because they do not know how to pull a face.

Photographs are definitely imperialist; an African's fear of having his soul stolen by a camera is very real, and you can never know who he is, so is the frown of a man being photographed without consent. This is not however exclusively African.

If photographs cannot show anything and deny the use of explanatory text, which is probably roughly right, then the answer for the photographer is to photograph subjects that really do have nothing to show, like refugees, people going to their deaths, people without rights. Unfortunately, one might say this is over-published, Nazis and the Jews, and the other subjects in this book. I agree with the discomfort of the author and with the need to publish the material, even if it is horrible. A drawback is there are not so many such activities and the press rarely wants to published them anymore, it is not nice for the simulacrum and serial spectacle; the real problem with this is such images also become unbelievable, and we have seen them too many times before. Anyway we seem to like watch people being killed and maimed, it makes really good reality television, and Syria is an example. It is almost as if the UN contributes to maintaining conflict so that there is something to watch on television; in effect, keeping people employed by war.

I certainly agree that photographs of the third world are 'patronising, imperialist, and racist', and with the concept of them somehow being 'pornographic' (40). It is interesting that, apparently, atrocity photographs are often taken by the perpetrators, who are of course patronising, imperialist and racist, not least because it  might be said that poverty is an atrocity and  is imposed by the West, which duly photographs it. And, anyway, as Linfield says, photographers are always obscene.

I do not agree with Sontag that atrocity photographs are normal, but think that nobody of sensitivity is prepared to look at them (45), but this may be West-centric. In the Iraq, Iran war, the television in Iraq routinely showed people in bits and nobody noticed, and this is also in newspapers around the world.

It is easy to write a book about something that is comfortable; it is not easy to write a book that is a documentary on atrocity, so this is a good contribution to the necessary but mostly unread books of the world.

Victoria Falls and South Luangwa National Park, Zambia

For those of you who believe Livingstone found Victoria Falls, it was called Mosi-O-Tunya before he arrived, probably named by an other, a Zambian, or Zimbabwean. For those of you who believe Victoria Falls was discovered by a photographer from the Sun, I guess you will have to continue to delude yourselves that nobody lives here.

www.langmead.com/photo/victoria falls

South Luangwa National Park has animals in it, and rather less discovered than Kenya. Important people sometimes go there, like the man who doesn't know the price of milk in the UK.

www.langmead.com/photo/luangwa zambia

The British Simulacrum

The British Simulacrum
Although I am English, I live in Zambia and I inevitably I take a Zambian view of the world as created by the media, the Zambian simulacrum. I view the West as neo-imperialist, a view that is held implicitly by the West, because of its simulacra, whether it is British, French or American. My differentiation of simulacra is illustrated by Guy Tillim’s documentaries on war-torn Africa, as if they somehow represent Africa: there are many wars in Africa, and none of them are here, and all of them are in the countries that specialise in war, like Eritrea, Somalia, Sudan, Congo, which have been at war forever …, but these do not represent life in Africa by any statistical measure, only according to Western media, which is essentially according to some minor pop star. Did a war in Kosovo mean Europe is at war?

Ferguson’s view favourably compares former colonial management with many of the tyrannical governments that exist in Africa, and there is no reason why he should not. Colonialism did provided a massive kick-start to development, but this is not praising colonialism so much as recognising that many governments in Africa continue to be murderously tyrannical, and are still emerging as so. Whether this is right or wrong is irrelevant in comparison with trying to rescue Africa from pre-modern times of witch doctors and religion. I am not sure that American globalisation and mercantile development has been any less colonialist or more effective than colonialism but both have been responsible for substantially developing the world in one way or another, whether or not the the uneducated in the world wants it.

There are no arguments for sustaining pre-modernist medieval cultures, especially from those cultures, but the management of development is the responsibility of the national governments concerned and not the business of neo-imperialists; however, many argue that countries have the right to lobby/influence the behaviour of others, whether religious, commercial, political or just downright imperialist. The views of the uneducated unwashed are dangerous at any democratic polling booth and voting to sustain pre-modernist poverty is will result in an underclass. But so what? At this level, their suffrage is not our business, it is theirs; however, I believe there is a limit, civilisation, badly represented by the UN et al, itself determines that interventions are necessary in cases of murder by government, but then does nothing.