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.