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.
