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All posts tagged Another Kind of Life: Photography on the Margins
Kader Attia: The Museum of Emotion @ Hayward Gallery
Kader Attia is 'one of today's leading international artists' and this exhibition is the first major survey of his work ever held in the UK.
Attia was born in 1970 France. His parents were of Algerian origin. He grew up in one of the banlieues or suburbs in north-east Paris, in a multicultural environment where Catholic, Jewish and Muslim religions mixed. Attia has dual nationality and has returned often to the family home in Algeria. In the mid-1990s he worked and travelled in the democratic republic of Congo where he held his first exhibition.
Since then he has gone on to forge a career as an exponent of deeply fashionable 'post-colonial art', working across a dazzling array of media to criticise western imperialism, western colonialism, western racism, western cultural appropriation of native lore and art, western control of its immigrant populations, and so on.
'I try to trigger a political feeling in the viewer. My job is like all of us confronted with reality. What interests me is when a work poses a political question not only from a linguistic point of view, formal, but more from an ethical point of view.'
Political feelings. Political questions. Well, the show as a whole struck me as a sustained attack on western values, history, art and culture. The assault is sustained across six rooms on the ground floor of the Hayward gallery, plus the Heni Project space entered from the gallery lobby.
Transgender sex workers
When I learned that one of his earliest successes was a project to photograph and 'document' the lives of a community of Algerian transgender sex workers, and that a slideshow of 160 of these images won him international recognition when displayed at the 50th Venice Biennale, my heart sank.
What could be more crushingly obvious, inevitable and clichéd? Is there any other subject as fashionably outré and yet as well trodden? I immediately thought of:
Modern Couples: Art, Intimacy and the Avant-Garde at the Barbican, which featured lesbian, gay and transgender artists and performers
diane arbus: in the beginning currently the sister exhibition to Attia, upstairs in the Hayward, which features a ton of male female impersonators and performers from the 1950s and 60s
Under Cover: A Secret History Of Cross-Dressers at the Photographers' Gallery, with hundreds of photos of transgender and cross-dressing people from the past century, notable:
the well documented life of Marie-Pierre Pruvot, born a male in Algeria, who became a famous French transsexual entertainer with the stage name of 'Bambi'
The photos taken by Olivia Arthur of the suppressed LGBT+ sexualities in India which featured in the Illuminating India exhibition at the Science Museum
Another Kind of Life: Photography on the Margins at the Barbican, which featured photos by half a dozen photographers of sex workers and transgender people, namely:
Daido Moriyama's photos of prostitutes and transvestites in Tokyo
Walter Pfeiffer's portfolio of photos of his young transsexual friend Carlo Joh, from the Zurich gay scene
Casa Susanna, a historic collection of around 400 prints taken during the mid-50s and 60s at a private retreat for transvestites in upstate New York
Paz Errázuriz's project depicting the community of transgender sex-workers working in an underground brothel in Chile
Teresa Margolles's series of enormous colour photos depicting transgender sex workers in Mexico
Queer British Art 1861-1967 at Tate Britain which was packed full of transsexuals, transgenders and same-sex desires
Identity and 'trangressive' sexuality are the fashionable subject of our age and yet curators and artists conspire to imagine they are still hugely taboo subjects which you have to whisper about and which an artist is oh-so brave to address.
Instead of a boringly predictable subject which has been comprehensively 'explored' by every art gallery in London.
This set the tone for my reception of Attia: he and his supporters think he is a grand rebel, an incisive critic of western historical narratives and norms – but all of his critiques seemed to me extremely old and over-familiar and passé.
When I went to the Sensation exhibition of young British Artists in 1997 I was genuinely bowled over by their dazzling new approaches to an amazing new range of subject matters. This guy is retreading ideas and approaches I got bored with decades ago.
Room 1 – modern architecture
Room one is dominated by an awesome projection which covers one entire wall of a camera very slowly moving up the facade of one of the shitty council housing blocks which make up the dreaded banlieues of Paris, the post-war sink estates where Paris sent all its working class and immigrant population to live and which, more or less every summer, erupt in rioting and car burning.
Post-war concrete high-rise council estates are crap. Not a new idea, is it?
Installation view of Shifting Borders by Kader Attia, part of The Museum of Emotion at Hayward Gallery. Copyright the artist. Photo by Linda Nylind
The wall label tells us Attia is drawing attention to the way these blocks were built around principles of surveillance and control similar to those used to subdue colonial populations.
As it happens a) I grew up on the edge of one of Britain's all-concrete post-war new towns and b) I've been reading a lot recently about post-war town planning and architecture in the social histories of David Kynaston:
Although the subject of post-war town planning was fraught with controversy and disagreement I've nowhere read anything suggesting that the new estates were designed in order to monitor and control their inhabitants.
Sounds like Attia has swallowed his Michel Foucault whole. (Michel Foucault was a French philosopher, historian of ideas, social theorist, and literary critic whose theories address the relationship between power and knowledge and how they are used as a form of social control through societal institutions. He died in 1984. Foucault was awesomely fashionable in the early 1980s when I went to university and read half a dozen of his books. It was when I found myself reading an interview from the mid-70s in which Foucault explained how 'we' [the radical student movement] could use Maoist concepts to battle against the fascist French police, that I began to realise that Foucault had little or nothing to offer me in the actual political and cultural situation of Thatcherite Britain that I found myself in.)
The mistakes the planners made had nothing whatever to do with surveillance and control. In knocking down the old slums and rehousing people, they decided that, instead of rehousing them on the same locations, they would move them out to clean new locations which had no historic restrictions on design. All the architects were fans of the fashionable Le Corbusier who promoted cities in the sky and also adopted high rise builds as solutions to shortages of space.
It was only as tenants moved into these gleaming and fashionable new blocks that the drawbacks became clear: very often the planners had forgotten to build in shops and facilities, pubs and churches and you centres and the miscellaneous kinds of places where people meet and hang out. Public transport into the city centres was poor and irregular, and they were too far way to walk to.
More importantly it turned out that various elements needed expensive maintenance, especially the lifts without which people couldn't get to their flats. Getting rubbish out of people's flats down to collective rubbish collection points didn't always work and anyway resulted in overflowing bins which bred rats.
Most subtly, it was discovered that traditional communities are self-policing. Where you had an old-fashioned street you had windows on the street and, in any kind of good weather, people sitting out on stoops and steps watching, generally congeries of mums watching their kids playing, or owners of the various small shops in a neighbourhood similarly watching what was going on.
These acted as an informal and highly informed police. If fights broke out, if kids did something dodgy or rude or bullying and so on, there were scores of eyes watching and people could intervene, often mums who knew the mother of the wrong-doer. Thus communities were able to police themselves with little or no intervention from the authorities. This is something I've seen described in Somerset Maugham's novel Lisa of Lambeth, have read about in 2,000 pages of David Kynaston's histories, and was really emphasised by a recent BBC 4 documentary about Janet Jacobs who wrote the classic book The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) describing how over-intellectual architects and planners, dazzled by the futuristic designs of le Corbusier and other fashionable European architects, were destroying the neighbourhoods of old Manhattan, replacing rundown but friendly and self-policing communities, with windswept high 'projects' – just like the French banlieues. Into the projects American planners decanted a lot of their cities' poorest which tended to include lots of blacks, just as Paris decanted its poorest, which included lots of Algerian immigrants, into its banlieues.
The result? Vast expanses of concrete high rise buildings where 'community' has been destroyed, and the public spaces belong to the worst kind of tearaway teenagers who patrol in gangs, peddle drugs, stab rivals and erupt in violence if the police try to intervene.
In everything I've read and watched on this subject, no-one has mentioned the idea these wretched estates were built to to monitor and control their inhabitants. A far simpler explanation is that they were the disastrous result of planners and architects falling under the spell of fashionable French and German theorists with sweeping intellectual attitudes: demolish the old, build the shiny gleaming new cities of the future.
This is what went through my mind as I stood in this first room looking at the awesome film of a camera slowly moving up the side of just such a concrete high rise building, next to a model of such a building.
My conclusion was that Attia is deliberately and wilfully ignoring the real motivations and the complex social history of these places, in order to turn them into a cheap and obvious jibe at the police and authorities. The claim that these places were built solely so the authorites could control their inhabitants is 1. factually incorrect 2. a deliberate distortion which allows Attia to quote Foucault and so sound wondrously intellectual and clever and 3. 40 years out of date.
Meanwhile, back in the real world, who is surveilling and controlling the inhabitants of these horrible slums if it isn't the owners of multinational American corporations, Microsoft, Google, Apple, Amazon, Instagram, Facebook and twitter to name but a few? But the internet is a bit too up to date for Attia. He is still lost in the 1970s when it was cool and path-breaking to take photos of transgender people (wow) and use new Left Bank ideas to deconstruct notions of power and control ("have you read Foucault, man, he's just soooo cool").
Away from the leather-jacketed student politics, I liked some of Attia's more allusive pieces, such as this piece of minimalism, although I still found it weird that he made it some forty years after minimalism had become well established as a style in America.
Narcissus (2012) by Kader Attia. Concrete block, mirror and wire
Room 2 – joy, fear and humiliation
This is a massive room devoted to scores of big prints of his photos of 1990s Algerian transgender sex workers, capturing 'moments of elation experienced in the course of an otherwise precarious and difficult existence'.
Attia is obviously yet another artist who subscribes to the view that prostitutes and sex workers are privy to a kind of special knowledge and insight concealed to the rest of us, that photographing hookers reveals a 'secret world', that the mere act of photographing them 'breaks taboos' and 'transgresses' conventional bourgeois values. Really?
La Piste d'Atterrissage (The Landing Strip) by Kader Attia (2000) © the artist
He says:
I wanted to present the whole picture of their lives, to show that even illegal immigrants working as transgender prostitutes have moments of joy, of happiness, of hope.
'Even illegal immigrants have moments of joy, of happiness, of hope'. How patronising. How patronising to his subjects to treat them like some kind of remote tribe in New Guinea, instead of people like you or me, and how patronising to us, the viewers, that he feels he has to explain that prostitutes are people who have feelings. Really?
As to the transgender thing, some of us have been totally comfortable with, not to say bored by, the whole idea of cross-dressing and transgender for nearly fifty years. ('But she never lost her head, even when she was giving head…')
Like the room criticising soulless concrete housing estates this took me right back to the 1970s.
The opposite wall displays a number of black-and-white press and publicity photos of world famous politicians and popular singers, entitled Field of Emotion. Apparently, this work
explores the ambivalent role that emotion plays in all areas of our lives… Attia asks us to consider how and whether powerful emotions might help heal rather than create conflict.
Emotions play a role in our lives. Hmm. Really. Do you see why I felt I was being patronised?
Anyway, what struck me about the display was how very dated all of the images were. Miles Davis, Fidel Castro, Idi Amin, Edith Piaf, Moshe Dayan, Lenin, Mussolini, Ella Fitzgerald. It looks like the wall of a radical student on the Left Bank circa 1974. "Right on, baby. Have you heard Lou Reed's new album? And what about Foucault's new book?" Dated dated dated.
Installation view of Kader Attia: The Museum of Emotion at Hayward Gallery. Copyright the artist, courtesy Hayward Gallery
Room 3 – Chaos + Repair
I liked this big ball made out of fragments of fabric, broken mirrors and wire. Apparently it is an attempt to capture the ambivalence most people feel about aspects of their cultural, political or personal identity. Is that how it makes you feel? Do you feel ambivalent about aspects of your cultural, political or personal identity?
I just liked it as another example of the minimalist thread in his thinking and creating.
Chaos + Repair = Universe, 2014 by Kader Attia. Photo by the author
Attia is, apparently, critical of
the museological impulse to classify and categorise [because it] is part of a much broader and more problematic system of control. In many of his sculptures and installations, he typically invokes the display methods and subject matter of a typical 19th-century natural history or ethnographic museum… in order to explore the ways in which colonialism continues to shape how western societies represent and engage with non-western cultures.
I profoundly disagree with this on all kinds of levels.
Abandoning all the achievements of science All western science is based on the collection and sorting of data. Medicine is based on a vast array of anatomical, chemical, biochemical and medical information which has been painstakingly collected, sorted and categorised over the last 200 years. Does Attia really think the inhabitants of Algeria would be better off without antibiotics, anaesthetics, innoculations and vaccinations which European scientists devised after years of collecting samples, experimenting and cataloguing? If so, he is an idiot.
Valorising voodoo His work, he says, is looking for a way we can escape from 'the obsession of the Western modern mind to organise the universe', which sounds very cool and Foucauldian. "Let's smash the system, man."
But just really, really think for a moment what it would be like to live in a world where there was no organising, classifying impulse, where knowledge was not recorded, and collated, in which each generation was born into the same old ignorance and fear. The world of the illiterate wode-painted heath-dwellers who the Romans found in ancient Britain, performing human sacrifices to placate the anger of the gods. Is that the kind of world you'd like to live in, ruled by shamans and witch doctors. Don't think the transgender prostitutes would last long in that world. Or any woman who defies tribal customs.
Luckily Attia with his irresponsible views and the entire class of dilettantish modern artists to which he belongs, has absolutely no effect whatsoever on politics, economics, medicine, science or technology.
Classifying and categorising A few years ago I went through every room in the British Museum and discovered that the five dark, dusty, wooden-cabinet-lined rooms on the east side of the central courtyard are devoted to showing how everything we know today had its origins in the impulse of all sorts of people, from the Holy Roman Emperor to English parish vicars, to collect all manner of weird and wonderful objects, and to sort and organise their collections.
These rooms look boring but turn out to be full of quirky and highly personal collections of everything from bones and fossils to Roman antiquities, types of rock to the shape of clouds.
All human knowledge is based on the impulse to collect and categorise. The impulse to collect is a fundamental human attribute. Everyone does it. I arrange my books into categories. My daughter puts her photos into different Instagram albums. My son organises his music into different spotify playlists. Who doesn't 'curate' their own content on social media and the web?
Well then, it turns out you are in the grip of the Western world's sick and dubious 'museological impulse to classify and categorise'. It turns out you employ 'problematic system of control'.
Of course some of this classifying and categorising can be used for evil purposes, as the Nazis categorised humans into different races, starting with the distinction between Jews and Aryans, and imperial authorities may well have categorised people into 'white' and 'native' for all kinds of bureaucratic reasons. And it is very much this tradition of classifying people and in particular the inhabitants of the colonised nations of Africa and Asia which Attia has in mind.
But to say that the impulse to collect and categorise is in itself evil and to devote your work to finding ways 'to escape this' impulse is like deciding to abolish language because Hitler used language in his speeches and imperialists used language in their racist laws.
Hypocrisy And, it barely seems worth pointing out that all these works which are devoted to critiquing the wicked Western habit of wanting to organise and classify and categorise are being displayed in an art gallery where… they are being organised and classified and categorised :).
The walls of this exhibition abound in labels precisely dating each piece, carefully explaining the materials they're made from, categorising them as photographs, sculptures, installations and soon.
The works are divided into rooms each of which has been organised around a central theme or concept.
And there is, of course, a big expensive catalogue of the works on sale in the gallery shop, 'a fully-illustrated catalogue with an extensive interview between Kader Attia and Ralph Rugoff', Director, Hayward Gallery, no less.
In other words, this exhibition itself demonstrates the very compulsion to categorise and organise which Attia claims to have devoted a career to trying to deconstruct.
When I was younger and experiencing the first heady rush of reading Foucault and Barthes and Adorno and Benjamin I might have interpreted this as sophisticated irony, or as 'a playful deconstruction of the normative values which underlie the western historical narrative', or some such.
Now I'm older and more impatient, I just see it as idiotic hypocrisy.
Technology Is Attia at any point using traditional tribal native-people's media to create his art with? No. He uses digital photography, digital video, film, light shows and minimalist sculpture. All the hallmarks and media of the most technically advanced, post-industrial, post-modern Western art.
Ethnography But of course Attia isn't really referring to the impulse to collect and categorise as a whole, whatever he might say. He is speaking much more personally about the West's history of collecting and categorising the artefacts (and indeed peoples) of the non-Western, 'developing' world which he has taken it upon himself to be a post-colonial mouthpiece for.
No prizes then, for guessing that there might well be a room devoted to showing how Western culture has ripped off and appropriated non-western art and artefacts.
As long ago as the 1920s left-wing critics were criticising Picasso for ripping off African tribal masks. This accusation became a standard part of Marxist art criticism in the 1960s and 70s. Now it is entirely accepted, it is the utterly conventional wisdom of our time, that early 20th century artistic Modernism wouldn't have existed if Picasso and Matisse hadn't been able to see African and Oceanic tribal masks in the Paris Ethnography Museum. Which exhibition of Picasso and Matisse does not point it out?
Thus the Royal Academy's exhibition on Matisse and his studio was at pains to prove how up to date and politically correct it was by 'calling out' Matisse for his 'cultural appropriation' of tribal artifacts, as well as his 'orientalism' for painting odalisques.
So – as with Attia's pieces of minimalism, or his insight that concrete high-rise estates are horrible, or his oh-so-risqué photos of transgender prozzies – what really struck me about his western-modern-art-ripped-off-African-art pieces was how very, very, very old, clichéd and totally acceptable this fact is.
How he presents this is so glaringly obvious I thought it was funny, Here is one of his 'artworks' where he has placed a book with a cover illustration of Munch's notorious painting The Scream next to a 'Pende sickness mask'. Yes, Kader, I do get it. Munch would never have painted like this if it he hadn't had sight of the African masks collected by wicked imperialists, and therefore his painting is a wicked wicked piece of cultural appropriation.
Installation view of Kader Attia: The Museum of Emotion at Hayward Gallery. Photo by the author
Naughty, naughty Western artists. Pablo and Henri and Edvard, you must all go and sit on the naughty step. Don't you know that art must never copy ideas from other cultures. Only Europeans are this wicked. The Chinese, the Japanese, the Indians never copied art, writing or religions from of other people's cultures. And even if they did, it's alright, because they aren't white.
What I found literally impossible to believe was the wall label for this work which explained that:
Several works in this room, including The Scream and Mirrors and Masks point to the still under-acknowledged influence of African art on the trajectory of Western art history.
Still under-acknowledged? By whom? This point of view has been knocking around for ages. I found it in full cry in an art history book from 25 years ago which I reviewed last year.
Primitivism and Modern Art by Colin Rhodes (1994)
Do you really think this is news to anyone who regularly attends art galleries or knows anything about modern art? It is one of the clichés, one of the absolute bedrock certainties, of modern art history. Anybody who studies modern art will hear about it.
Room 5 – The Repair from Occident to Extra-Occidental Cultures
The biggest room in the gallery is given over to this massive installation.
Installation view of The Repair from Occident to Extra-Occidental Cultures, part of Kader Attia: The Museum of Emotion at Hayward Gallery. Copyright the artist, courtesy Hayward Gallery 2019. Photo by Linda Nylind
The fundamental concept is 'repair'. As Attia, a self-declared expert on Western and non-Western societies, confidently proclaims:
While Western societies seek to erase marks left by injury or trauma, 'in traditional societies it's the opposite: they have ways to fix an injury that also keeps it visible.'
Hence this collection of twenty or so metal warehouse shelf units as well as three vitrines which display hundreds of objects including African masks, vintage photographs, books, newspapers and a series of decorative, functional or devotional objects constructed by soldiers during the First World War.
In among all these objects are mingled busts which Attia commissioned from craftsmen in Carrara, Italy and Senegal, which depict members of an African ethnic group known for body modification including facial scarring – juxtaposed with busts of First World War soldiers with severe facial injuries.
The whole thing, then, is an 'investigation' into contrasting Western and non-Western attitudes to scarring and healing, repairing and fixing.
Another part of the display is a slideshow juxtaposing photos of First World War soldiers undergoing early and rudimentary plastic surgery, with African masks showing obvious signs of repair –
an unsettling series of juxtapositions that challenges our conventional ideas about wholeness, injury, beauty and otherness.
Ah. 'Otherness'. Surprised it's taken this long to get round to that familiar old shibboleth of cultural studies and critical theory.
The premise is that Western cultures try to cover, repair and occlude physical scars and injuries, whereas non-Western cultures don't and often wear them with pride.
OK. I'll buy that.
Room 6 – Shifting Borders
The most recent work in the exhibition is a set of three videos being shown on three big monitors with benches in front of them, and headphones for you to put on so you can listen to the talking heads.
Each of the videos features Attia interviewing mental health professionals, academics and survivors of the 1980 Gwangju Uprising in South Korea in which more than 600 people, most of them students, were killed.
Installation view of Shifting Borders by Kader Attia, part of Kader Attia: The Museum of Emotion at Hayward Gallery. Copyright the artist, courtesy Hayward Gallery 2019. Photo by Linda Nylind
In one of the videos a Vietnamese spiritualist describes holding a ceremony for the spirit of an American soldier who had possessed her brother-in-law. In another a professional doctor declares 'I don't think a psychiatrist is the only one who can heal.' In other words:
Through the spoken testimonies that make up the video element of Shifting Borders, Attia addresses different forms of healing and in particular the therapeutic role played by shamanistic and spiritualist practices in non-Western societies.
West bad. Non-West good.
The first impact is the scale and variety of the work, sculptures, photos, installations, videos on display – Attia is covering the whole waterfront of contemporary media.
Next I was struck by how very out of date so much of it seemed – finding 70s housing estates crappy, oh-so-edgy photos of transgender prostitutes, the claim that European modern art ripped off African masks, the claim that traditional non-western 'healers' know things Western scientists don't understand, a wall of political and jazz icons from the 1950s – all of these struck me as old, old, old ideas and images. Non-western medicine might have alternative ways of healing? A new idea? Really?
He wanted a political response and so I have responded to the ideas on show and I find them thin, deliberately misleading, superficial and, although dressed up in fashionable curator-speak, in fact stunningly old and dated.
The one big theme which I did find thought-provoking or interesting was this idea of 'repair' which runs through many of the works. Thus in the room of African masks placed next to western books to prove how wicked wicked Europeans ripped off African culture, there was suddenly a big hole in the wall, apparently unconnected to the grim lecturing of the other pieces.
Untitled (2014) by Kader Attia, part of Kader Attia: The Museum of Emotion at Hayward Gallery. Copyright the artist. Photo by the author
I liked this. Like the ball made of fabric and broken mirror, I just found this an arresting artefact, object, thing. Not something you see every day.
I get so bored by hectoring, lecturing, dogmatic, ideological modern art. It's a refreshing change to come across something which just… is. Which connects with you at some inexplicable level… Which gives you a funny feeling about space, and secrets, and interiors and wrecks and rubble.
It reminded me of some of the works of Anish Kapoor which play with the integrity of the surface of the gallery i.e. disappear into the walls and ceilings.
Something similar could be said of this hypnotic jumble of sheep horns, that it creates an eerie and uncanny sensation in the viewer, a kind of discomforting sensation in your mind as you imagine running your hands over its sharp surfaces.
Schizophrenic Melancholia (2018) by Kader Attia, part of Kader Attia: The Museum of Emotion at Hayward Gallery. Copyright the artist. Photo by the author
Unfortunately the wall label then goes on to give a lengthy explanation which does its best to eliminate all of the mystery and surprise from the piece, and convert it into another part of the heavy-handed anti-western lecture.
In this sculptural work, Attia elaborates on the relationship between contemporary Western medicine and traditional healing practices, in particular those that deal with mental illness. Attia's research in this area – a key subject for the artist – took him to Dakar, Senegal, where he witnessed an ancient healing ceremony called 'Ndeup', in which the horns of sacrificial goats and sheep form the centrepiece of a ritual that involves the whole community. According to the Lebu people, by the ceremony's end these horns would hold all the 'bad energy' that had been forced out of the afflicted individual during the ritual.
"Yeah, man, western society has lost its way, it's like traditional peoples, man, they're like so much more in touch with nature and their true selves, man. I've seen stuff on my trips, man, things you people can't understand, stuff which defies western medicine, man." Neil the hippy.
It was only on leaving the gallery that I realised that the enormous poster / hanging / digital print opposite the main entrance is also by Attia.
Rochers Carrés (2008) by Kader Attia, part of Kader Attia: The Museum of Emotion at Hayward Gallery. Copyright the artist. Photo by the author
It's a striking composition although, like everything else in the exhibition, it cannot be allowed to simply be: it must immediately be stuffed full of Victorian moralising and curatorial meaning-making.
It has to be categorised and defined and described, to be titled and dated and explained and interpreted, in just the kind of way which Attia has made a career out of saying he is trying to run away from. So:
Kader Attia is interested in boundaries – 'geographical, cultural, sexual, religious' – and the way they function as in-between spaces. the son of Algerian immigrants, Attia grew up in Paris but spent his summer holidays in Algiers where he spent hours smoking, fishing and – like the teenagers in this photograph – watching the ships going back and forth between Algeria and Europe.
Rochers Carrés – in English 'square rocks' – is one of a series of images that Attia made of this breakwater 'beach' in the Algiers neighbourhood of Bab El Oued. In Attia's words, this beach is 'the ultimate boundary' that separates these young people from their dreams of a better life.
Really? Is it really that much of a boundary to youths like Attia who could take a cab to the airport, get on a plane and fly back to their homes in Paris, secure in the heart of the scientific, economic, technological and artistic bosom of the West?
The world is much more perforated and mixed up and heterogenous and immigrated than Attia's simplistic binary definitions (West bad, non-West good) allow.
And this big poster is a classic example of the way every single piece in the show has to be dated and defined, contextualised and interpreted, labelled and explained.
If Attia is sincerely trying to 'escape' from the European obsession with collecting and categorising, then this exhibition shows his efforts to have been a self-defeating failure.
Kader Attia: The Museum of Emotion continues at the Hayward Gallery until 6 May 2019
An interview with Kader Attia
Kader Attia's website
diane arbus: in the beginning (March 2019)
'Learn the Rules Like a Pro, So You Can Break Them Like an Artist!' (November 2018)
Space Shifters (October 2018)
Lee Bul: Crashing (May 2018)
Posted in Africa, Art, Exhibition
Tagged 1945–48, 1945–51, 1948–51, 1951-5, 1951–57, 1955-57, 1957–59, 1957–62, 1990s Algerian transgender sex workers, 50th Venice Biennale, A Thicker Cut, A World to Build, Anish Kapoor, Another Kind of Life: Photography on the Margins, art, Austerity Britain, Bab El Oued, banlieues, Barbican, Chaos + Repair = universe, cultural appropriation, David Kynaston, diane arbus: in the beginning, exhibition, Family Britain, Field of Emotion, France, Gwangju Uprising, Hayward Gallery, Heni Project, Illuminating India exhibition, installation, Intimacy and the Avant-Garde, Janet Jacobs, Jazz, Kader Attia, Kader Attia: The Museum of Emotion, Le Corbusier, LGBT, Linda Nylind, Matisse, Matisse and his studio, Michel Foucault, minimalism, Modern Couples: Art, Modernity Britain, Munch, Olivia Arthur, Opening the Box, Orientalism, otherness, Paris, Photographers' Gallery, photography, Picasso, Primitivism and Modern Art by Colin Rhodes, Ralph Rugoff, Rochers Carrés, Royal Academy, Schizophrenic Melancholia, sculpture, Smoke in the Valley, South Korea, The Certainties of Place, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Repair from Occident to Extra-Occidental Cultures, Transgender sex workers, Under Cover: A Secret History Of Cross-Dressers
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/03/16/kader-attia-the-museum-of-emotion-hayward-gallery/
Another Kind of Life: Photography on the Margins @ the Barbican
Scale and scope
This is a big exhibition. It showcases the work of 20 leading photographers from around the world and brings together an impressive, almost overwhelming range, of material, with over 300 works from the 1950s to the present day, including vintage and contemporary prints, archival material, specialist magazines, rare audio recordings, films and photo books.
The theme is 'outsiders and rebels'. As the press release explains:
By recording and documenting those on the edges, or outside of the mainstream, the images in Another Kind of Life bear witness to how social attitudes change across time and space, charting how visual representation has helped shape current discourse in relation to marginalised or alternative communities.
The rebels and outsiders come in roughly two forms, social and sexual. By 'social' I mean rockers, bikers, street gangs, criminal gang members, Teddy boys and so on. By 'sexual' I mean the pronounced thread of work which focuses exclusively on transvestite and transgender people, people of 'unorthodox' or outside sexuality, often prostitutes.
It struck me as I went round the show that you could categorise these as rebels-by-choice and rebels-by-sexuality.
Broadly speaking the pictures in the downstairs rooms are from the 1960s, by photographers born in the 1930s and 40s, who are American or European, and the pictures are in black and white. Up in the first floor galleries, the photographers are younger, the prints are in colour, a lot bigger and from a wider geographical reach (Russia, India, Chile, Mexico, Nigeria).
Each of the photographers has a room dedicated to their own work and for this purpose the normally fairly open gallery space of the Barbican has been converted into a warren of smallish rooms. The walls partitioning off the display areas are black and arranged in such a way that there are 'dummy' or empty spaces between them, converting the downstairs area into quite a maze. Indeed, they hand out a map with arrows to help the visitor find their way through it. If I'd had small children it would have been quite a good layout to play hide and seek in.
First a thumbnail sketch of the photographers and their work, then some thoughts.
The photographers – 1. Downstairs
Diane Arbus (1923 – 1971) American. Arbus became famous for taking photos of marginalized people – dwarfs, giants, transgender people, nudists, circus performers, and people stricken by what 'normal' standards might be called ugliness. Pictures of what we used to call 'freaks'. She is quoted as describing the way she tried to go from being an outsider to the strange worlds she recorded, to going 'inside'. The wall label explains that her work underwent a significant transformation when she started using a square format camera. Maybe she's here at the beginning because she introduces many of the themes the exhibition will pursue.
Diane Arbus circus photos
The next room contains works by legendary American photographer Bruce Davidson (b.1933), specifically from the series The Dwarf and Brooklyn Gang. These were taken in the late 1950s and feature skinny youths in jeans, white t-shirts with rockabilly hairstyles on the beach at the cheap seaside resort of Coney Island, or hanging out in the streets and stairwells of New York.
Japanese photographer Daido Moriyama (b.1938) is famous for his seminal work, Japan Photo Theatre (1968). This features shots of ordinary people captured in candid moments, in bars, restaurants, drinking heavily, smoking, as well as shots of prostitutes and transvestites in Tokyo, belying Japan's reputation for propiety and and conformity.
Japan Theatre from the series Japan Photo Theater by Daido Moriyama. Michael Hoppen Gallery, London, UK Courtesy of Daido Moriyama Photo Foundation
Danny Lyon (b.1942) is an American photographer and film maker who works on the immersive principle. The works here record him becoming accepted in the mid-60s by the 'hard-drinking' motorbike gang, The Outlaws. Lots of photos of these tough guys wearing sleeveless denim jackets to showcase their tattoos, riding their rigs, smoking tabs and kissing their women.
The second Japanese photogrpaher in the exhibition is Seiji Kurata (b.1945) represented by starkly lit images from Flash Up (1975–79), a work depicting the seedy, often violent underbelly of gang culture in the notorious Ikebukuro and Shinjuku districts of Tokyo, featuring 'leather-boys and bargirls'. The young toughs in Danny Lyon or Bruce Davidson are dead proud of their tattoos but they have nothing on these Japanese gang members who are covered from head to foot with intricately-drawn tattoos, often containing violent and threatening imagery.
Another American, Larry Clarke (b.1943) is a director, photographer, writer and film producer who is best known for his photography book Tulsa, in which he recorded in black and white photos (and in a rough and ready b&w film, on show here) the dead-end, semi-violent, drug-influenced world of his twenty-something schoolmates, shown smoking, drinking, snogging girls, driving cars, shooting up heroine.
Untitled (1963) from the series Tulsa, 1962 – 1971 by Larry Clark. Courtesy of the artist, Luhring Augustine, New York and Simon Lee Gallery, London
Igor Palmin was born in Russia in 1933. The commentary explains that during the 1960s and 70s going on an 'archaeological expedition' was a good way for dissident youths to get away from the stifling conventions and social spying of home. Through these trips Palmin discovered scattered communities of young people trying to copy the western ideal of becoming hippies and 'dropping out'. This resulted in the two works on show here, sequences of black and white photos set in the grungy post-industrial landscape of Southern Russia, The Enchanted Wanderer (1977) and The Disquiet (1977). The first one features numerous shots of the same long-haired, bell-bottomed hippy wandering round what looks like an abandoned gravel works; the second features a few more hippies, complete with flower power hair bands, playing guitars in abandoned buildings or smoking joints in a scruffy caravan.
Untitled XVI, Stavropol Krai, USSR, 1977 from the series The Enchanted Wanderer (1977) by Igor Palmin. Courtesy of the artist © Igor Palmin
The Swiss Walter Pfeiffer (b.1946) emerged on the peripheries of documentary photography in the 1970s and now flourishes in the mainstreams of contemporary fashion and style bibles. He's represented by his body of work about his young transsexual friend Carlo Joh, from the Zurich gay scene. Partly inspired by Lou Reed's recently released album Transformers (1972), Pfieffer took a whole series of black and white and colour photos and films of Joh over a few months in 1973, showing him in various states of undress, with or without wigs and make-up, playing with gender imagery.
Untitled from Carlo Joh, 1973 by Walter Pfeiffer. Courtesy Fotomuseum Winterthur © Walter Pfeiffer
Born in 1959, Frenchman Philippe Chancel is best known for his work documenting Paris street gangs in the 1980s, specifically the Panthers and the Vikings. The commentary describes the gangs as being 'in thrall to an idealised version of 1950s American youth culture', and explains that they treasured vintage U.S. Air Force jackets and listened to hot jazz. The Vikings were named after the Del-Vikings, the first American rock'n'roll group to include both blacks and whites; The Panthers are named after the Black Panthers. Note both the American-ness and the datedness of these influences.
To my eye it was just another set of young dudes, wearing jeans, with rockabilly quiffs, smoking tabs, showing off their tattoos, dancing in nightclubs and getting off with girls. Far from being 'outsiders' I was struck by how much they were just copying what, by the 1980s, had become the international conventional look of youth 'rebellion'. Some of them packed baseball bats and one had a gun. As sure as night follows day, we see all this revelry leading to street fights and then to some of les jeunes being carted off by les flics.
Untitled, 1982 from the series Rebel's Paris 1982 by Philippe Chancel. Courtesy of Melanie Rio Fluency, France
Casa Susanna is not a person but a collection of around 400 prints taken during the mid-50s and 60s at a private retreat for transvestites, a safe haven in upstate New York where they posed for the camera in glamorous dresses, playing cards, eating dinner and having drinks by the fire. This treasure trove of old prints was recently discovered at a Manhattan flea market and here it is, now a treasured part of gender-bending social history.
Susanna at Casa Susanna, 1964-1969 attributed to Andrea Susan, from the Casa Susanna Collection © Art Gallery of Ontario
The last room on the ground floor showcases black and white photos by Chris Steele-Perkins (b.1947) who was commissioned by the Times in 1976 to do a feature on contemporary Teddy boys. First time around in the 1950s, Teds were so named because they adopted the style of Edwardian dandies, with Brylcreemed quiffs, three-quarter length drape jackets and beetle crusher shoes. Steele-Perkins captured the lives, loves, music and fashion of the Ted revival of the mid-70s, with the usual cast of pimply youths hanging out in pubs and clubs, smoking tabs, showing off their hard man tattoos, dancing with stockinged girls, and showing respect to some of the wizened elders of the movement. I took a particular fancy to 'Tongue-Tied Danny's Wedding', partly because of the title alone.
Tongue-Tied Danny's Wedding
The photographers – 2. Upstairs
The exhibition continues upstairs in the nine rooms on the first floor, and the mood here feels distinctively different. The American photographers here come from a markedly younger generation than the ones downstairs, and there is a much wider range of nationalities.
You are immediately arrested by the work of Jim Goldberg (b.1953) and the selections from his harrowing work, Raised by Wolves (1987-93). This details the life of street kids Goldberg befriended in Los Angeles and San Francisco in the 1980s, including Tweeky Dave and Echo. There are plenty of photos but also physical objects including what appears to be the actual denim jacket covered in scrawls which one of the kids wears in the photos, FUCK OFF etched repeatedly in biro. And there are 'photo-texts' where a print of one of the street kids is accompanied by a white sheet with their scrawled, hand-written messages on them, such as:
I'm Dave who the fuck are you?
My mom was a junkie slut
My old man is a biker asshole from hell
the fucked-up asshole shot me in the gut when I was 10
These kids are really, really damaged. Another big print of a teenage boy with grazes on his face is accompanied by a text describing how sleazy old men pay to jerk off in front of him for money and how only taking drugs makes it bearable.
In some of the carefree biker photos of Lyon or Davidson, among the denim-clad young men lounging around smoking fags of shooting up or handling half-dressed women, there are babies. You can't help thinking that Goldberg's photos show what happened to those babies. Or what happened to the children of those babies. A couple of generations on from the original rebel chic of the late 50s to mid-60s, much of America is an urban wasteland of abandonment and dereliction and drugs.
This message is rammed home by the work in the next room of New York photographer Mary Ellen Mark (1940-2015). She worked on a long-term project, Streetwise (1983) recording her time spent with Erin Charles, a street kid known as 'Tiny', who she first met as a 13-year-old surviving on the streets of Seattle. In the last of these brutal photos teenage Tiny is crying, blurring her mascara.
Having consumed more than their fair share of American TV and movies through the magic of the internet, both of my teenage kids think America is the most fucked-up country in the world. Hard to disagree on this evidence.
Lillie with her rag doll. Seattle, Washington from the series Streetwise, 1983 by Mary Ellen Mark © Mary Ellen Mark. Courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery New York
Then again – Putin's Russia :).
Boris Mikhailov (b.1938) specialises in brutally realistic colour photos of the bedraggled, ugly, poor inhabitants of his native Kharkov. The homeless have a special name, the bomzhev, and the Mikhailov room is devoted to a particularly humiliating sequence of two ugly old bomzhev preparing for their marriage, the ugly dwarfish woman, often topless, showing her haggard body and flat breasts, the bearded husband playing around with a twelve-inch dildo. Here are the happy couple:
Untitled, 2005 – 2006, The Weddding © Boris Mikhailov courtesy Sprovieri Gallery
Some light relief came in the form of a room of photographs by Chilean photographer Paz Errázuriz (b.1944). General Augusto Pinochet headed a military dictatorship in Chile from 1973 and 1990. Any form of political, cultural or religious non-conformity was punished with arrest, torture and executions. Errázuriz created a series depicting the community of transgender sex-workers working in an underground brothel in Chile, which was gathered together in the book Adam's Apple (1982-87). The photos here focused on the transgender brothers Pilar and Evelyn, the latter a particularly handsome man, who makes a fine-looking woman. I needed cheering up so I was relieved that some of the photos show Evelyn, apparently with other, straight, members of his family, laughing and joking. One of them catches a moment of real love and affection. Phew.
Evelyn, Santiago from the series La Manzana de Adán (Adam's Apple), 1983 by Paz Errázuriz © Paz Errázuriz / Courtesy of the artist
By now the visitor might be forgiven for being overwhelmed, both by names and biographies of the photographers and the histories of their various projects, and by the rather exhausting emotional response some of the more harrowing photographs provoke. But there is still quite a lot more to see and process.
So it's perfect timing that the visitor is taken by surprise in the next room which is devoted to five or so giant colour prints taken by Pieter Hugo. Hugo, born in 1976, is South African, and the selections are from the series named The Hyena and Other Men (2005–2007). This records members of the Nigerian gang of 'debt collectors' who go around with tamed hyenas to collect their debts. Yes. Tamed hyenas. I'd pay up pretty quickly, wouldn't you?
Google images of The Hyena Men
Just as you'd begun to forget how wrecked America is, there's a room of photos by Katy Grannan (b.1969) depicting what the Yanks themselves describe as 'trailer trash'. There are some black people in there, too, but mostly it's poor whites, economically and socially downtrodden.
Anonymous, Modesto, CA, 2010 by Katy Grannan from the series The Ninety Nine © Katy Grannan, courtesy the artist and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
As sudden and unexpected as the hyena men is the next room which is devoted to a big screen showing of a film of Mona Ahmed, a eunuch from New Delhi. This is by Indian photographer Dayanita Singh (b.1961) who met Mona in the 1980s and formed a lifelong friendship with her. Mona was born a boy, castrated when young, and grew up to assert her identity as a member of a 'third sex'. Beside the film is a series of stills of Mona which include her own 'honest and frank words' as accompaniment.
Born in 1969, Alec Soth, another American, by chance came across a guy living in the wild, completely detached from modern life, the state and so on, and this led him to uncover the whole sub-culture of American men (it is mostly men) who live 'off the grid' as the modern saying has it. The result is not only enormous colour prints of these haunting, solitary monks, survivalists, hermits and runaways but a number of documents, including wills, letters and manuals on 'how to disappear from Amerika'. One photo was of a ruined wall in a derelict-looking house, peeling plaster etc, and scrawled on it:
I love my Dad – I wish he loved me
Which bathetically echoed the sentiments of the abandoned children in Jim Goldberg and Mary Ellen Mark. By this stage America really has been painted as the country of loss and abandonment.
The final room in the exhibition is devoted to the even bigger colour prints of Teresa Margolles (b.1963). These huge full colour works depict transgender Mexican sex workers, each one portrayed in a very styled and composed way standing amid the ruins of one-time nightclubs. Very very different from the rough and ready, snap and go, catching the moment black and white shots of Japanese bars and American bikers which we started the show with…
Dance floor of the club 'Arthur's', 2016 by Teresa Margolles. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich, Switzerland
Big It's big, a very big exhibition. Given that there's a hefty chunk of text introducing each photographer, and a lot of the pictures themselves tell stories, featuring individuals who themselves require a bit of introduction, plus the films and the survivalist books – it's a lot of information to take on board. And it gives rise to a tsunami of ideas and impressions.
Categories In trying to categorise or make sense of it all, I felt I could break the exhibition down into three very broad elements:
rebels by choice – the 50s, 60s and 70s bikers, hippies and Teds
rebels by gender i.e. people who don't feel at home in the gender roles assigned to them, transvestites, transgender people
abandoned kids, and abandoned adults
Whereas in the 1950s or 1960s teen rebellion was a choice made by kids and young men who had choices, it is quite obvious that the lives of the abused, sexually exploited, drug-addled street kids of Lyon and Goldberg and Mark contain no choices. Their parents abandoned them or were incapable of looking after them. They didn't choose to be selling sex on the streets at 13.
Transgender I couldn't help feeling uneasy about the way the show threw together the issues and life choices facing transvestite and transgender people with the lifestyles of Hell's Angels or Paris street gangs. The bikers and Japanese gang members and Teds seemed completely different to me. For a start those cultures are aggressively heterosexual and so in many ways confirm and entrench the social pressure which transgender people confront. And somehow it also felt as if those lifestyle choices – being a Russian hippy or an American biker – were in many ways superficial; after all, plenty of hippies ended up cutting their hair, going into business and now run big corporations. Somehow it felt to me as if the life choices the transgender people had to make – in Chile or Mexico or Japan – ran deeper, were more existential, went more to the heart of who they were.
Post-war American invents 'cool' Nine of the twenty photographers are American. That phrase about the Paris gangs being 'in thrall to an idealised version of 1950s American youth culture' is true of a lot of the other people shown here, too, from the Russian hippies to the London Teds.
After the Second World War America emerged as the most powerful and richest nation the world had ever seen. It pioneered a whole wave of consumer goods – phones, radios, televisions, fridges, washing machines, hoovers – which the whole world wanted. It pioneered and perfected aggressive new marketing techniques associated with thrillingly dynamic images of this new rich automobile lifestyle. And all of this was encapsulated and sold around the world via Hollywood movies featuring rugged-jawed men and the big bosoms of Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell.
And accompanying all the products and marketing of post-war industrial capitalism, America also pioneered all the ways a newly affluent generation of young people could rebel against it. The Wild Ones (1953), Rebel without a Cause (1955), On The Road (1957). From the Beat poets through Californian surfer chic on into flower power and Woodstock and then New York glam, American popular culture pioneered all the attitudes, fashions and looks which pissed-off young people around the world could adopt as symbols of their 'rebellion'. According to the wall label, The Outlaws, the gang Bruce Davidson hung out with, influenced the conception of Easy Rider (1969), which itself went on to inspire a whole new generation of young men.
Somewhere along the way, I don't know when exactly, this look – scruffy jeans, white t-shirt, fast motorbike – became completely commodified and commercialised. By when – was it sometime in the 1980s, or was it in the 1970s – every street market in the western world was selling 'rebellion' in the shape of studded leather jackets or pre-stressed jeans, and a whole universe of logo-ed t-shirts.
My point is that, although the actual people Danny Lyon and Bruce Davidson and Larry Clarke documented were real, and experienced their non-conformity as real, this look, this style, this approach, this feel, has for generations now been the stuff of international marketing and profitable merchandising. It has become the international stock language of youth 'rebellion'.
Post-Cold War America pioneers urban collapse This, I think, explains the difference in vibe between the ground floor and the first floor rooms. On the ground floor are loads of black and white photos which could still feature in an advert for Levi jeans today. That look is totally assimilated into the international style of 'cool'. It is amusing and thrilling and nostalgic to see all of them, American bikers, Paris gangs, English Teds. Aaaaah, sweet.
Nothing could be more different from the lost children of America on the first floor. This is the world of The Wire and Breaking Bad, depicting a nation which has become really dysfunctional, in which not just a few cool kids drop out to ride bikes or take acid, but scores of millions of families and abandoned individuals live lives of poverty and violence and drug addiction. This is a completely different kind of 'outsider', not cool and not by choice they are casualties of a society falling to pieces, a society ravaged by urban unemployment, astonishing levels of street violence, widespread opioid addiction and mass shootings.
Transgender issues I'm not equipped to say very much about transgender issues except that the exhibition provides striking evidence that it is a universal condition – America, Chile, Mexico and, most surprisingly of all, polite suppressed Japan, all have their transgender communities. It is, quite obviously, another way of being human which should be accepted along with all the other ways and means of being human. And at the end of the bombardment of nearly 300 images, one of my favourite images from the whole show was of Evelyn, the Chilean transvestite, smiling, looking genuinely happy.
Photography on the margins?
I couldn't quite make sense of the theme or message of the exhibition. Sure all these people are outsiders of sorts, but there is a world of difference between an American motorbike gang member and a Japanese transvestite club entertainer. Isn't there? And between both and a street kid who's selling sex aged 12?
Maybe they all are 'outsiders', but why stop there? If we're talking the 70s and 80s (which a lot of the exhibition does) what about Vietnam veterans or the Russian veterans of Afghanistan? Come to that what about the veterans of any war from the last 70 years or so, damaged, alienated, depressed, often institutionalised?
What about the inhabitants of mental institutions, outsiders if there ever were any?
What about immigrants who – so we read in the papers – often feel alienated and threatened and 'outside' the host culture? Or refugees, also strangers and outsiders?
What about the disabled, hospitals full of deaf or blind or paraplegic people, who have their own ways of communicating and affirming their identities? They're outside the 'conventional' cultural narratives.
What about old people with dementia, a growing tide of people who are really outside all conventional narratives? (My dad had dementia; it puts you way outside 'conventional social narratives'.)
And those are just Western groups. Thinking of India makes me think of the Untouchables, the excluded caste, which I'm sure have been the subject of photographic books. Why not them?
In short, as soon as you begin to think for yourself about groups living 'on the margins', 'outsiders' living beyond conventional narratives of society, you quickly realise there's no shortage of groups and tribes and sub-cultures in any modern society.
So it's an exhibition which manages to be both overwhelming in the number of images it presents – very high quality images by some brilliant photographers who have dedicated years and even decades to studying their subjects – but also seems to be oddly narrow, politically correct and 'cool', in its subject and themes – 60s bikers, street kids, transgender heroes (I appreciate the ugly Russian and the hyena men stand completely outside all these generalisations).
You should definitely go, though. It's full of brilliant photographs in a whole range of styles, and will (probably) introduce you to wonderful photographers you've never heard of before. I've told my daughter to go and take her friends. She's 16. She loves taking photos. She wants to get piercings and a tattoo in order to express her individuality. She's been taught that society oppresses women and alternative sexualities. She wants to change the world. She wants to be a rebel. She'll absolutely love this show.
Women in the art world
Barbican Senior Manager – Katrina Crookall
Barbican Director of Arts – Louise Jeffreys
Barbican Head of Visual Arts – Jane Alison
Exhibition Curator – Alona Pardo
Exhibition Assistant – Charlotte Flint
Another Kind of Life: Photography on the Margins continues at the Barbican until 27 May 2018
Interview with exhibition curator Alona Pardo
Reviews of previous exhibitions & concerts at the Barbican
Basquiat: Boom for Real (November 2017)
Purple by John Akomfrah (October 2017)
Into the Unknown (Science Fiction) (August 2017)
Strange and Familiar: Britain as Revealed by International Photographers (March 2016)
Where The Shadows are so Deep by Imran Qureshi (March 2016)
The World of Charles and Ray Eames (November 2015)
Magnificent Obsessions: The Artist as Collector (April 2015)
Pop Art Design (February 2014)
Toru Takemitsu (February 2013)
Everything Was Moving: Photography from the 60s and 70s (November 2012)
Bauhaus: Art as Life (July 2012)
Music by Jonny Greenwood and Krzysztof Penderecki (April 2012)
The Sinking of The Titanic (April 2012)
Tagged Alec Soth, Another Kind of Life: Photography on the Margins, Boris Mikhailov, Bruce Davidson, Casa Susanna, Chris Steele-Perkins, Daido Moriyama, Danny Lyon, Diane Arbus, Igor Palmin, Jim Goldberg, Katy Grannan, Larry Clark, Mary Ellen Mark, Paz Errázuriz, Philippe Chancel, photography, Pieter Hugo, Seiji Kurata, Teresa Margolles, the Barbican, Walter Pfeiffer
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2018/04/06/another-kind-of-life-photography-on-the-margins-barbican/


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Top 15 electric bike routes in Florida
We have been looking on forums and Facebook groups along with review platforms and come up with a top 15 bike route list in Florida!
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redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


I always enjoy getting a phone call asking for my availability for a shoot. Especially when it's in Barcelona and at the home of one of the worlds greatest football players Lionel Messi.
I was again working with my friends at Icons.com the home of worldwide authentic sports memorabilia.
The usual set up for me photographing the sporting star signing the items for their authenticity purposes and once they have been signed I take them to the studio to shoot the product images for the companies website and social media.
To view, some of ICONS' signed products click here.
I have been in the world of product photography now for the last 2 years mainly for A1 Sporting Memorabilia and Icons.com. They are both reputable sellers of authentic hand signed memorabilia and work with some of the biggest sporting name including Lionel Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo, Luis Surez and many many more. As well as attending their signings session with them to photograph the sporting stars I also shoot their signed products.
I love photographing products and making something look its best for a customer to then purchase from the companies website.
My professional corporate shoots start from as little as £200, and if you have your own buisness then this is ideal for you to showcase your products in a professional way.
Well what a weekend so far!
After working with Lionel Messi the previous day, he handed us tickets to watch the next Barcelona game.
This would be my first ever game at Camp Nou and yes I was a tad excited.
We met with Messi's brother, who greeted us at the entrance to the stadium. Arriving at our pitch-side seats, we definitely had one of the best views in the stadium!
The game was immense and nothing like I have ever seen before. The talent and class of Spanish football is on another level.
Below are a small selection of images that I took for myself and Icons Memorabilia.
And here is a link to their site where you can purchase signed memorabilia.
This was a big one and as I walked off the plane back in sunny Barcelona and headed to the taxi I began to realize what was going to happen in the short few hours to come. I have been so lucky to have met and worked with many sporting legends but this was a whole new level of wow.
Leo Messi is classed as the best footballer on this planet, a huge social following he is adored by fans all over the world and I had the chance to work and photograph him for a short time as you can imagine he is none stop manic.
4pm on the dot and he entered the room, I was greeted with a smile and handshake and it was soon down to business.
We only had limited time with Leo but had a good chat and a few personal photos with him before he departed.
I was collaborating with Icons Memorabilia on this occasion who also deal with many other sporting icons.
Only a small selection of photos that I am allowed to use I am afraid, But still theres a great shot of us and yes Im smiling in a photo!


Serdar Atayev has been appointed Deputy Minister of Economy and Development of Turkmenistan, the president's decree says on Tuesday.
The Ministry of Economy and Development was established in accordance with the decree dated Feb.2, 2008 on the basis of the reorganised Ministry of Economy and Finance of Turkmenistan.
The ministry is holding auctions for the sale of facilities of state property.


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Ossas-Suhare é uma comuna francesa na região administrativa da Nova Aquitânia, no departamento dos Pirenéus Atlânticos. Estende-se por uma área de 7,14 km².

Comunas dos Pirenéus Atlânticos

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


For many years my products have gone by the brand of Blue Turtle Botanicals, which reflected a little bit of me and was a name I could take anywhere, out of the desert, into the mountains or the forests of New England. But my life has been shifting a lot in the last year or two, and Shamana Flora became the umbrella which I work under. It encompasses more of who I am and what I'm doing with my work with the plants at this time.
So, I've decided, its time to retire the Blue Turtle Botanicals name- because my work with plants is more, different, and is growing in new directions. Starting on April 15th- all the products I make under the name Blue Turtle Botanicals will now be Shamana Flora Apothecary! And will be showcasing new products that reflect a bit more of my plant spirit magic as regular items, along with some old favorites!
This means the web address of my little Apothecary store will be changing as well. Starting today you will now go to – www.shamanaflora.bigcartel.com to purchase all of the same products. I will also be linking the store to my www.shamanaflora.com website! It will take a little while to transfer over all the old labels to the new name, so you may see some old Blue Turtle labels. You may already notice some changes underway if you visit the store!
In celebration of this shift to make it easier to find my products, and my educational offerings, from May 01- May 10, 2015, everything in the store will be on sale!! Use the code "shamanaflora" for 20% off all orders!!
I'll send a reminder as the sale and switch over gets close!
I love and appreciate all your loyalty over the years as I have made my journey with the plants. I hope this change helps you find my offerings even easier in the future!
You are the coolest! I live in phoenix and love your blog as well as blue turtle (did not know that was you) There aren't a whole lot of desert herb blogs (unless I'm missing something than please share?!!!) Thank you for the work you do!


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Authorised form of name Gray; Andrew (1847 - 1925)
Surname Gray
Forenames Andrew
Activity Education:
MA (Glasgow)
FRSE
Bulloch's Roll
Proc Roy Soc Series A 1926 vol 110 pp xvi-xix, plate, signed by A R
IM/Maull/001747 Gray, Andrew nd
EC/1896/07 Gray, Andrew: certificate of election to the Royal Society
MS/377/1/59 Letter from Andrew Gray, the University, Glasgow, to [William Fletcher] Barrett 31 March 1906
NLB/63/218 Copy letter from Francis Alexander Towle, Assistant Secretary of the Royal Society; to Professor [Andrew] Gray, FRS 18 July 1922
AP/74/14 Relation between the Electrical Resistances of Pure Metals and their Molecular Constants 1901
NLB/7/758 Copy letter from Herbert Rix, to Professor Andrew Gray, University College, Bangor 20 April 1893
NLB/7/767 Copy letter from Herbert Rix, to Thomas Gray, Rose Polytechnic Institute, Terre Haute, Indiana, United States of America 24 April 1893
NLB/19/648 Copy letter from an unknown correspondent, to Messrs Harrison & Sons 16 December 1899
NLB/23/1/113 Copy letter from R Chapman, to Professor Andrew Gray, Fellow of the Royal Society 24 September 1901
NLB/13/440 Copy letter from Theodore E James, to Professor Andrew Gray, Fellow of the Royal Society 10 September 1896
NLB/14/151 Copy letter from Arthur William Rucker, to Richard Tetley Glazebrook, [Fellow of the Royal Society] 13 January 1897
RR/15/141 Referee's report by Andrew Gray, on a paper 'The velocity of the ions produced in gases by rontgen rays' by John Zeleny April 1900
RR/15/149 Referee's report by Andrew Gray, on a paper 'The mechanism of the electric arc' by Phoebe Sarah Hertha Marks Ayrton December 1901
RR/15/179 Referee's report by Professor Andrew Gray, on a paper 'The resistive and electromotive forces of the electric arc' by William Duddell December 1901
RR/15/315 Referee's report by Andrew Gray, on a paper 'An experimental determination of the variation of the critical velocity of water with temperature' by Ernest George Coker and S B Clement October 1902
RR/16/197 Referee's report by Andrew Gray, on a paper 'The effects of changes of temperature on the modulus of torsional rigidity of metal wires' by Frank Horton 10 April 1904
NLB/52/341 Copy letter from Robert William Frederick Harrison, Assistant Secretary of the Royal Society; to Professor Andrew Gray, FRS 12 November 1915
NLB/20/257 Copy letter from Robert William Frederick Harrison, to Professor Andrew Gray, Fellow of the Royal Society, 11 University, Glasgow 7 March 1900
NLB/20/607 Copy letter from Robert William Frederick Harrison, to Professor George Carey Foster, Fellow of the Royal Society 30 May 1900
NLB/22/172 Copy letter from Robert William Frederick Harrison, to Professor [Andrew] Gray, Fellow of the Royal Society 18 March 1901
NLB/22/433 Copy letter from Robert William Frederick Harrison, to Professor Andrew Gray, Fellow of the Royal Society 14 May 1901
NLB/23/1/59 Copy letter from Theodore E James, to Professor Andrew Gray, Fellow of the Royal Society, 11 The University, Glasgow 3 September 1901
NLB/23/2/473 Copy letter from Joseph Larmor, to Professor Andrew Gray, Fellow of the Royal Society, and A Wood 5 May 1904
NLB/24/399 Copy letter from Robert William Frederick Harrison, to Professor Andrew Gray, Fellow of the Royal Society 5 May 1902
NLB/26/712 Copy letter from Robert William Frederick Harrison to, Professor Andrew Gray, Fellow of the Royal Society 18 May 1903
NLB/26/600 Copy letter from Robert William Frederick Harrison to, Professor Andrew Gray, Fellow of the Royal Society 28 April 1903
NLB/29/198 Copy letter from Theodore E James, to Professor Andrew Gray, Fellow of the Royal Society 28 July 1904
NLB/32/122 Copy letter from Robert William Frederick Harrison, to Professor Andrew Gray, Fellow of the Royal Society 9 January 1906
RR/13/138 Referee's report by Andrew Grey, on a paper 'Magnetization of liquids' by John Sealy Edward Townsend 2 July 1896
NLB/36/146 Copy letter from Robert William Frederick Harrison, to Professor Andrew Gray, Fellow of the Royal Society, Madras House, St Andrews, Scotland 22 August 1907
NLB/44/200 Copy letter from Joseph Larmor to [Andrew] Gray 24 May 1911
NLB/38/265 Copy letter from Robert William Frederick Harrison, to Professor Andrew Gray, Fellow of the Royal Society [July 1908]
NLB/35/682 Copy letter from Joseph Larmor, to Professor Andrew Gray, Fellow of the Royal Society 3 July 1907
NLB/37/31 Copy letter from Robert William Frederick Harrison to Professor A [Andrew] Gray FRS 13 January 1908
NLB/38/133 Copy letter from Robert William Frederick Harrison, to Professor Andrew Gray, Fellow of the Royal Society, Grand Hotel de L'Etablissement, Wittel, Vosges 18 June 1908
NLB/46/764 Copy letter from Robert William Frederick Harrison, to Professor [Andrew] Gray, Fellow of the Royal Society 30 October 1912
NLB/52/741 Copy letter from Robert William Frederick Harrison, Assistant Secretary of the Royal Society; to Professor Andrew Gray, FRS 21 February 1916
NLB/56/887 Copy letter from Robert William Frederick Harrison, Assistant Secretary of the Royal Society; to Professor [Andrew] Gray FRS 20 June 1919
RR/20/41 Referee's report by Andrew Gray on a paper 'An experimental method for the production of vibrations on strings, illustrating the properties of loaded or unloaded telephone cables' by J A Fleming 3 November 1913
RR/27/25 Referee's report by Andrew Gray, on a paper 'On the richardson gyro-magnetic effect' by Arthur Price Chattock and Leslie Fleetwood Bates July 1922
RR/28/14 Referee's report by Andrew Gray, on a paper 'On an electromagnetic method for the measurement of the horizontal intensity of the earth's magnetic field' by Frank Edward Smith 22 April 1922
NLB/55/142 Copy letter from Robert William Frederick Harrison, Assistant Secretary of the Royal Society; to Professor [Andrew] Gray, FRS 17 December 1917
RR/14/40 Referee's report by Andrew Gray, on a paper 'An extension of Maxwell's electro-magnetic theory of light to include dispersion, metallic reflection, and allied phenomena' by Edwin Edser 7 March 1898
NLB/68/766 Copy letter from Francis Alexander Towle, Assistant Secretary of the Royal Society; to Professor [Alexander] Russell, FRS 30 October 1925
NLB/68/682 Copy letter from Francis Alexander Towle, Assistant Secretary of the Royal Society; to Professor [James Gordon] Gray 13 October 1925
NLB/44/39 Copy letter from Robert William Frederick Harrison to Professor A [Andrew] Gray FRS 26 April 1911
RR/17/119 Referee's report by Andrew Gray, on a paper 'A new current weigher and a determination of the electromotive force of the normal Weston cadmium cell' by William Edward Ayrton, Thomas Mather and Frank Edward Smith 18 July 1907


The Jewel Series provides the protection you'd expect from Ballistic without the bulk on your Apple iPhone 5c. Engineered with Six-Sided Drop Protection Technology and 6 ft. high impact drop protection, the Jewel Series protects your Apple iPhone 5c for your next jet-setting escapade.
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Why non linear activation function is needed?
An activation function is a decision making function that determines the presence of particular neural feature. Non-linearity is needed in activation functions because its aim in a neural network is to produce a nonlinear decision boundary via non-linear combinations of the weight and inputs.
What is ReLU activation function?
In the context of artificial neural networks, the rectifier is an activation function defined as the positive part of its argument: , The rectifier is, as of 2018, the most popular activation function for deep neural networks. A unit employing the rectifier is also called a rectified linear unit (ReLU).
What does a neuron compute activation function?
Neuron Output, y: The artificial neuron computes its output according to the equation shown below. This is the result of applying the activation function to the weighted sum of the inputs, less the threshold. This value can be discrete or real depending on the activation function used.
What is leaky RELU?
Leaky ReLU. Leaky ReLUs are one attempt to fix the "dying ReLU" problem. Instead of the function being zero when x < 0, a leaky ReLU will instead have a small negative slope (of 0.01, or so). Some people report success with this form of activation function, but the results are not always consistent.
What is the hyperbolic tangent function?
Tanh is the hyperbolic tangent function, which is the hyperbolic analogue of the Tan circular function used throughout trigonometry. Tanh[α] is defined as the ratio of the corresponding hyperbolic sine and hyperbolic cosine functions via . Tanh may also be defined as , where is the base of the natural logarithm Log.
What is a hyperbolic function?
Just as the points (cos t, sin t) form a circle with a unit radius, the points (cosh t, sinh t) form the right half of the equilateral hyperbola. The hyperbolic functions take a real argument called a hyperbolic angle. In complex analysis, the hyperbolic functions arise as the imaginary parts of sine and cosine.
What do you mean by Sinh?
Sinh is the hyperbolic sine function, which is the hyperbolic analogue of the Sin circular function used throughout trigonometry. It is defined for real numbers by letting be twice the area between the axis and a ray through the origin intersecting the unit hyperbola .
What is tan to the negative 1?
The Value of the Inverse Tan of 1. As you can see below, the inverse tan-1 (1) is 45° or, in radian measure, Π/4. It is helpful to think of tangent as the ratio of sine over cosine, ie: . Therefore, tan(Θ) to equal 1, sin(Θ) and cos(Θ) must have the same value.
Is Sinh a periodic function?
As a reminder, the functions Cos(x), Sin(x), and Tan(x) are periodic, but the functions Cosh(x), Sinh(x), and Tanh(x) are not. The text box below gives a comparison of some standard trigonometric identities and hyperbolic trig identities. Go online and check out the other hyperbolic trig identities. You will be amazed.
What is sin to the negative 1?
The inverse sin of 1, ie sin-1 (1) is a very special value for the inverse sine function. Remember that sin-1(x) will give you the angle whose sine is x . Therefore, sin-1 (1) = the angle whose sine is 1.
Is Arctan and Tanh the same?
I don't believe there is any deeper reason why these look alike, since one is an inverse trigonometric function, while the other is a hyperbolic function (not an inverse). If you define f ( t ) = arctan ? ( arctanh ( t ) ) , you'll have f ( tanh ? ( x ) ) = arctan ? ( x ) .
What does Tanh mean in Excel?
The Microsoft Excel TANH function returns the hyperbolic tangent of a number. The TANH function is a built-in function in Excel that is categorized as a Math/Trig Function. It can be used as a worksheet function (WS) in Excel.
What is the Arcsinh?
ArcSinh is the inverse hyperbolic sine function. For a real number , ArcSinh[x] represents the hyperbolic angle measure such that . ArcSinh automatically threads over lists. For certain special arguments, ArcSinh automatically evaluates to exact values.
What is Atan in Excel?
The Excel ATAN function calculates the arctangent (i.e. the inverse tangent) of a given number, and returns an angle, in radians, between -π/2 and +π/2.
Is excel in radians or degrees?
When solving trigonometric expressions like sine, cosine and tangent, it is very important to realize that Excel uses radians, not degrees to perform these calculations! Therefore, if the angle is in degrees, multiply it by p/180° to convert it to radians. With Excel, this conversion can be written PI( )/180.
What does atan2 do in Excel?
The ATAN2 function in Microsoft® Excel calculates the arctangent (i.e. the inverse tangent) of a given set of X and Y coordinates, and returns an angle, in radians, between -π/2 and +π/2.
What is meant by atan2?
ATAN2(y,x) returns the arc tangent of the two numbers x and y. It is similar to calculating the arc tangent of y / x, except that the signs of both arguments are used to determine the quadrant of the result. The result is an angle expressed in radians.
What is Pi in Excel?
Open your Excel spreadsheet and type "=" into a blank cell to label its contents as a mathematical formula. Type "PI()", which is equivalent to "3.14159265358979" in an Excel formula.
What is the function of pi?
The Microsoft Excel PI function returns the mathematical constant called pi, which is 3.14159265358979. It can be used as a worksheet function (WS) in Excel. As a worksheet function, the PI function can be entered as part of a formula in a cell of a worksheet.
Is Excel sin in radians or degrees?
Excel SIN Function. The Excel SIN function returns the sine of angle given in radians. To supply an angle to SIN in degrees, multiply the angle by PI()/180 or use the RADIANS function to convert to radians. number - The angle in radians for which you want the sine.
Is Cos function in Excel in radians or degrees?
Excel COS Function. The Excel COS function returns the cosine of angle given in radians. To supply an angle to COS in degrees, multiply the angle by PI()/180 or use the RADIANS function to convert to radians. number - The angle in radians for which you want the cosine.
How do I convert degrees to radians in Excel?
2. Then press Enter button on the keyboard, and drag the fill hand of the B2 to the end of B5, see screenshot: On the contrary, if you have radians in Column A, you want to convert the values in Column A to degrees in Column B, you should type this formula =DEGREES(A2) in B2.
why-non-linear-activation-function-is-needed-79301193 / 5 based on 1 vote.
How is an ELT activated?
What is Akt activation?
How is PLC activated?
What is an activation function?
What is VMO activation?
How are cytokines activated?
How is primary active transport different from secondary active transport?
How do they make activated charcoal?


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Revisit the Late Ren Hang's Provocative Photographic Legacy
It was scarcely a decade ago that the Chinese photographer Ren Hang first captivated the art world with his unapologetically nude, sexual, and accordingly subversive photographs—a rare thing to come out of China, which Western art buyers promptly ate up. (Back at home, where Ren was often arrested and prevented from exhibiting his work, it was met with much less enthusiasm.) Ren's oeuvre has, however, gotten much more exposure as of late, though the reason for that renaissance is tragic: He died two years ago at age 29, prompting an outpouring of homages and remembrances of the late photographer that are still underway today. The latest, a retrospective titled "Love, Ren Hang," which is on view at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris, pairs excerpts of Ren's poetry, which frequently touched on his struggle with depression, with some of his lesser known photographs that are true as ever to his sculptural, yet never objectifying style—the best example of which might be an undated, untitled picture that, upon closer inspection, is actually made up of rows of butts shot to resemble undulating hills. Take a look inside the show, here.
Stephanie Eckardt
© Courtesy of Estate of Ren Hang and OstLicht Gallery
Ren Hang, Untitled, China, 2015. Featured in the exhibition "Love, Ren Hang," on view at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris through May 26, 2019.
Ren Hang, Untitled. Featured in the exhibition "Love, Ren Hang," on view at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris through May 26, 2019.
© Courtesy of Estate of Ren Hang and Blindspot Gallery
Ren Hang, Untitled, 2011. Featured in the exhibition "Love, Ren Hang," on view at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris through May 26, 2019.
© Courtesy of Estate of Ren Hang and stieglitz19
Ren HangEye CandyNSFW


Celebrate the years you've been in business with these shimmery hot pink Join Us business anniversary invitations. Change the wording or use ours to create invitations that are perfect for the opening of your business, business service awards invitations, corporate dinner party invitations, business banquets and more. Printed on shimmery hot pink paper and comes with coordinating shimmery white envelopes. Use for any year anniversary, just change the number.


What is "large format" photography? When we talk about large format we are usually referring to film photography*, and more specifically, any film photography work that uses a negative of 4×5 inches or larger.
In truth, large format photo work extends far into other imaging modalities beyond that of film… but that's for another article. Large format film photography is essentially those "old timey" looking cameras that appear a little bit like accordions and seem to be very complicated to use.
In reality, these accordion-esque large format cameras are quite simple to operate once you know a few basic concepts. And the images the produce still easily outclass even the most modern digital cameras in terms of tonal range and sharpness.
What does large format photography offer to us photographers? After all, we live in a brave new digital world of photography where sensor size wars rage even at this very moment. Why would anyone want to go through the trouble to work with large format photography instead of digital? We're going to look at exactly how and why the answer to that question is something that isn't well… answerable in the mainstream sort of way. It all comes down to your intentions(more on that at the end.) In the meantime we're going to talk about the basic parts of large format cameras and show you how they make photos. Get ready to go back to the future of photography.
*The manner in which the image is recorded also varies greatly but for the purpose of this lesson we will only look at large format film. There are other types and processes of large format photography such as wet plate and even digital that are also equally incredible.
The first thing to understand about large format photography is that the principles are exactly the same as any other form of photography; you have a lens mounted to a light-proof housing (except for pinhole photography), and an image receptor to record the focused image. A key difference between large format photography and conventional digital or even film photography is the amount of "movements" which are possible with may large format cameras. While there is a lot of variance between one large format camera to another there are some basic parts and components that can be found of the majority of these large format beauties.
The rear standard is the back portion of the camera. Movements made to the rear standard control the perspective of the final image. That is, the minimization and enlargement of the background and foreground. Here is where you will view your image on the ground glass. The ground glass is a translucent plate where the incoming light from the lens is focused and composed prior to inserting the film holder.
The film holder is inserted in front of the ground glass and held in place via friction or spring compression.
Depending on your camera, the rear standard is capable of a variety of movements. This includes, tilt, swing, and rise/fall. With some large format cameras the rear standard is also capable of shift movements as well as rise and fall. My particular camera, a Zone VI 4×5, does not have these movements in the rear standard. Don't worry, all of these movements will be covered a little later in the article.
As you've probably guessed, the front standard is the front portion of the camera. The front standard is where the lens is mounted to the camera and is responsible for the majority of the movements that affect the focus of your final photograph.
The accordion. The bellows are one of the hallmarks of large format cameras and what makes them so recognizable. Bellows function as a light-proof point of flex between the front and rear standards. They allow for complex movements and focusing between the lens and the ground glass.
We've all seen those photographs where everything looks as if it's miniaturized. This is accomplished by tilt/shift focus manipulation. This was born from large format photography. A tilt movement is when the front or rear standard is literally tilted either forward or backward.
Here we see front standard tilt.
Front tilt affects the focusing of the foreground or background in it's vertical relation to the film. Rear tilt controls how the light interacts with the film thusly vertically enlarging or shrinking the relative perspective of the foreground or background.
A swing movement is a close cousin to tilt. The difference is that swing affects the horizontal lines of the image instead of the vertical.
Remember, the rear standard of my Zone VI 4×5 is capable of swing movements but not all large format cameras have this option.
Unlike swing and tilt, shift movements do not affect focusing or perspective. Shifting either the front or rear standards essentially moves the image left or right in the frame. This is hand for adjusting the horizontal composition without repositioning of the entire camera.
Just as with the rear swings, not all cameras will be able to perform rear standard shifts. My camera coincidentally cannot. Rear shifts, however, operate in principle exactly as front shifts.
This is exactly the same as shift but this time we are moving the frame up and down instead of left to right. This is a great way to adjust the composition vertically without physically changing the elevation of the camera.
Just as with shift, my particular camera doesn't have rear standard rise/fall.
The way film is loaded into large format cameras is at once incredibly straightforward while at the same time incredibly nuanced. Photographic film of any type consists of a base layer and a photosensitive emulsion. The emulsion is what makes the film sensitive to light and therefor records the image. The film is loaded into this, a film holder with the emulsion side facing outward so that it will be positioned towards the lens when it's loaded into the camera.
Large format sheet film holders are generally identical in terms of design but vary in size respective to the film they hold. The film holder consists of a holder and one or two dark slides.
Then the film is loaded (emulsion out) into the holder. In this picture I've used a sheet of 4×5 film that was damaged during processing. Never load your holder in the light!
The dark slide is replaced and the holder is now ready to go out into the world and make photos. Oh, and did I mention this whole loading process usually must be done by feel in complete darkness? Honestly, with practice it becomes quite easy to do so don't let this intimidate you.
I know what you're thinking. Why would someone work with large format photography instead of digital or even smaller format film like 35mm? Well, to understand the answer to that, you might have to change your way of thinking about photography.
It goes back to what I said at the beginning of this article about how some questions don't have a definitive answer. Instead, it all depends on your specific direction of intent. What are you photographing and why? What are your goals? Large format imaging offers so many benefits such as ultimate resolution and eligibility, incredible camera manipulations, and an outlet to express your photographic craft.
On the other hand, working with large format means that there are multiple additional steps in the process that leads towards a final image to share with your viewer. First and foremost, each shot will cost you money. Whereas digital reshoots are essentially free, shooting film requires the expenditure of a finite medium. You will also have to develop the film you shoot and then finally, if digital output is your goal, scan those developed negatives to your computer. Is it worth it, in my opinion, absolutely. You of course might draw a different conclusion. Which is fine.
If you choose to delve into the world of large format you will find the true nature of what photography was and still is to this day: a way of expressing yourself through recordings of light. Now, you have to take the good with the bad. Large format camera work requires a certain diligence to technique, materials, and process. It can be costly in both terms of time and money but it also offers some weirdly incredible benefits both artistically and creatively.
Honestly, you can get started in large format photography for less that $500 if you're smart and patient. It's not a high price to pay when you look at some of today's digital camera systems. Unfortunately it's one of those strange leaps where the certainty only comes after the fact. For me, I still shoot digital (quite a lot) but once I got started with my 4×5 field camera it was the beginning of an unlikely love affair.
Hopefully this article will be helpful in deciding whether or not you want to take the same artistic leap as I did.


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package com.bytegriffin.get4j.annotation;

import java.lang.annotation.Documented;
import java.lang.annotation.ElementType;
import java.lang.annotation.Retention;
import java.lang.annotation.RetentionPolicy;
import java.lang.annotation.Target;

@Target(ElementType.TYPE)
@Retention(RetentionPolicy.RUNTIME)
@Documented
public @interface Config {

	String email() default "";

	String downloadFilenameRule() default "default";

}

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub