Sketchbook Prompt Nine

Prompt: After viewing the presented series by Edmund Clark, read the following commentary also by the artist. After digesting the work, go in depth on what you believe the meaning, connotation and significance of the work is.

If the Light Goes Out:
Home from Guantanamo
photographs and text by
Edmund Clark

“When you are suspended by a rope you can recover but every time I see a rope I remember. If the light goes out unexpectedly I am back in my cell.”

—Binyam Mohamed, Prisoner #1458

“I went down to the basement and turned on the light. I wanted to see my room which was exactly as I had left it...It was a strange feeling – seeing my black leather couch, my blue sofa bed, my glass fronted wardrobe, and my model shop again. I’d decorated my room when I was thirteen and had never changed a thing.”

—From “Five Years Of My Life: An Innocent Man in Guantanamo” by Murat Kurnaz, Prisoner #061

These images are from three places associated with the prison camps at Guantanamo Bay.

Rather than documents to monumentalize the historical fact of the camps, these images illustrate three experiences of home: the naval base at Guantanamo which is home to the American community and of which the prison camps are just a part; the complex of camps where the detainees have been held; and the homes, new and old, where the former detainees now find themselves trying to rebuild their lives.

The post-prison homes illustrate the contrast between the shared humanity of their domestic interiors and the spaces of the prison camps. Motifs of imprisonment and entrapment are present in both, resonating with the prisoners’ experiences — and coming to terms with them. Glimpsing the evening sun through a window is a simple thing but readjusting to having the freedom to do so may not be so simple. Like a net curtain, memories can obscure the view.

On the naval base an American community lives surrounded by razor wire in the last enclave of the Cold War. This is small-town America with a high school, golf course, a mall and familiar fast food chains. It is home to a community where I found echoes of a wider America traumatized after 9/11 by a new post-Cold War threat from a religion and cultures it does not understand.

The narrative is confused and unsettled as the viewer is asked to jump from prison camp detail to domestic still life to naval base and back again.

This disjointed edit is intended to evoke the disorientation of the process of incarceration and interrogation at Guantanamo and to explore the legacy of disturbance such an experience has in the minds and memories of these men.

Still life imagery of personal space and possessions follows a long tradition of symbolism and metaphor. My work draws on the ‘Vanitas’ style of 17th century Dutch painting in which objects like hourglasses, candles, skulls and flowers symbolized the passage of time and the transience of human existence.

— Edmund Clark took part in the 2009 Rhubarb-Rhubarb International Photographic Review.

Sketchbook Prompt Eight

Prompt: After viewing the presented series by Christian Houge, read the following commentary by Erling Bugge. After digesting the work, go in depth on what you believe the meaning, connotation and significance of the work is.

Okurimono
photographs by
Christian Houge
text by
Erling Bugge

Christian Houge guides us into a mystery. It resides between the ritualized shapes of the traditional and withdrawn Zen garden in Kyoto and the equally ritualized spaces of futuristic, urban Tokyo. For a westerner, Japan might look familiar, since what is held up for us looks like a futuristic spectacle somehow grounded in a western imagination. This judgment, however, is too easy. In Houge’s photographs, the sense of sameness withdraws and a very different feeling of strangeness creeps up on us. In fact, what this series registers is a remarkable place of alterity in today’s global order, a radical difference bang in the middle of the familiar.

This is pushed to the limit in the technological and virtual wonderland of Akihabara in Tokyo, where shop after shop trades in electronic products and computer games, while a weird costume play, “cosplay”, is being performed in the streets. A similar kind of simulation is being acted out in the district of Harajuku, where Houge found some of his motifs. There is no authenticity here, no western “essence” or “reality”; instead, the virtual conquers the carnal body in a purified play of surface, image and the hyperreal. This is exotic. All the while as we are conscious of these notions as pinnacle points in a western idea of the post-modern. But in this sense Japan has always been “post-modern”. It has always integrated the most refined culture and technology from the outside while somehow retained an identity for itself. So, what would this identity be? Houge takes the view of ritual and play. Indeed, Japanese culture seems to be grounded solely on ritual, in business and in sex, in its relation to nature and in religion.

This play transcends the notion of authenticity altogether, unlike the West which is haunted by the “ghost” of origin and beginnings. In Japan, “now” would mean just that; it is a “no looking back”, but rather a flow of intensities integrated in the play and ritual of the ever-present, okurimono. There is no threat of being eaten up by western culture and technology here, for, like in Zen practice, the ritual oversees everything and has no historical drag. Japan becomes weightless, shot into orbit outside the material of earth itself.

Is acting out the role as Lewis Caroll’s Victorian girl driven by a sense of nostalgia? I think not. It is a striving for a moment of perfected presence, in dialogue with Houge’s optical machine. It is the moment of Now. The girl, the Zen garden and the image shares in a perfection modified by small uncertainties, coincidental imperfections that become somewhat oblique points of entry for us - a discarded handkerchief or seemingly unremarkable shapes and reflections in the prismatic play of surfaces.

There is a ghostly, otherworldly quality in these images, even in the fleeting blossoming cherry tree and the play of shadows across a concrete minimalism. The doubly exposed or reflected light on the lens reminds us of the uncertain beginnings in photography’s history, with its widespread belief that the camera was able to perceive more than the naked eye, like spirits and ghosts. In Houge’s images there are different specters, skeletal, natural shapes on the one hand, the machine and the virtual on the other. Here, like some scene from the film Blade Runner, there is an uncanny confusion and mix between the human and non human.

Maybe the search for a perfect moment in the perpetual flow of things is a romantic or melancholic longing for transcendent wholeness, a drive that is harnessed in a rigorous attention to visual detail. This compulsive discipline might seem absurd to any western observer, while longing itself forms a common ground and will ultimately be the basis in our meeting.

— Erling Bugge

Sketchbook Prompt Seven

Prompt: What are your reactions to the work? Do you find the series interesting? Why or why not? What is going on in the imagery? Choose the image that you find most interesting to write about in more depth. Why is that particular image striking to you? Label your description so that others can refer to your chosen piece. The top image is one, the second is two, and so on.

Enchanted Spacesphotographs and text by Marrigje de Maar

I am a restless traveler, who keeps on leaving, but never arrives.

I have been taking pictures of interiors since 2002. In the beginning I worked in worn out, rejected buildings, later I concentrated on private homes.Interiors tell stories about people. In public space people follow the global trends and fashions. In their homes they tend to make other choices. The private space is the only place where we are ourselves.The personal story is told inside the privacy of our home.

I never travel along a pre-fixed route. My trips are guided by intuition and by experiences along the way. Roads that attract me, people I meet and stories I hear. The doors I choose to knock on rarely hold a clue about what I may find inside.I never visualize anything beforehand and my pictures reflect my first impressions.The image comes alive in the existing light.

Many of my interiors give evidence of a frugal life, of inhabitants who are able to make their personalities known with only a few means. In my work I concentrate on this authenticity and dignity.My pictures tell a story about these people, a story that reaches beyond material reality.
Everything visible in the picture was there. I never change anything. I only use the available light. I use colour negative film and print both analog and digital. During this process no drastic changes are made either.

— Maarigje de Maar took part in the 2009 Rhubarb-Rhubarb International Photographic Review.

Sketchbook Prompt Six

Prompt: After viewing the imagery and the written commentary, what are your reactions to the piece? Choose the image that you find most powerful and write a synopsis of what you think happened the day in which that particular image was shot. Label your description so that others can refer to your chosen piece. The top image is one, the second is two, and so on.

In Whose Name?
Photographs by Abbas

Abbas, a member of Magnum since 1981, takes us along with him on a journey among the believers. This journey started on September 11, 2001 when Abbas watched live on Siberian television the tragedy taking place thirteen time zones away. A year later, confronted with a giant cross erected on the ruins of the World Trade Center, he asked, "Does one form of religious intolerance lead to another?"This led him to embark on a seven year project completed in the book In Whose Name? and soon to be exhibited at the Magnum gallery in Paris.Driven by a desire to understand how the Ummah, the polity of Muslims throughout the world, let violent jihadism develop in its midst, he traveled through 16 countries. From New York to Jakarta, from Kabul to Zanzibar, through Baghdad, Teheran and Dubai his quest was the same:“My relationship with God has always been of a professional nature, I have never been on first name terms with Him. It’s not so much God who engrosses me as other people’s perception of Him and the unacceptable things they do in His name.“

Sketchbook Prompt Five

Prompt: After viewing the imagery by Leandro Piñeirore and reading the commentary by Kate Stanworth what are your reactions to the work? Can you relate to the work? Is the work significant to today's American society? Why or why not?

Fotografías Mínimasphotographs by Leandro Piñeirore
Review by Kate Stanworth

Fotografías Mínimas is a simple and understated, independently published book of black and white street photography by Argentine photographer Leandro Piñeiro. During two separate periods in 2002 and 2007, Piñeiro stalked the busy downtown avenues of Buenos Aires, snapping passers-by literally “from the hip” without looking through the viewfinder or arousing attention.

Giving value to small encounters and chance sightings, we view it in passing fragments; moments of intimacy seen through a café window, a confused figure in front of an internet café, feet traversing a worn crosswalk or people immersed in quiet contemplation.

Piñeiro avoids representing Buenos Aires through familiar iconography. Rather, subtle details such as French style facades, men in tailored tweed suits and well groomed ladies in an elegant street-side café tell of a South American city that draws from the European heritage of the majority of its population. Such elements also hark back to post-war Paris street photography from which Piñeiro finds inspiration.

This vision of Buenos Aires, however, is not the “Paris of the South” that tourist brochures might wish to portray. The images, mostly taken from below waist level, or “from the viewpoint of a dog” as the photographer calls it, seem far from conjuring a sense of grandeur.

The city appears at times on the brink of collapse, with architectural lines bearing down upon its inhabitants, and shop signs crammed haphazardly into the corner of frames. In other photos we come down to the level of a child kneeling, a street musician slumped against a store window, and even an eager canine.

Piñeiro’s style of photography may seem a little raw, but its unpolished, verité feel perfectly encapsulates a place that, even in its most peaceful moments, seethes with potential tumult. Many of these photos were taken just after the economic crisis of 2001/2, which marked a period of social and political turmoil.

However, this context is not made explicit. The photos are left free of any captions that might lead us to any one particular reading of them. “My photos don’t carry a narrative,” says the photographer. “There’s no beginning or end and no message that needs to be decoded.”
The manner in which Piñeiro has pictured his metropolis seems to dismiss the idea that the city can be reduced to any easily digestible whole. His images ultimately point us back to the unrefined immediacy of urban experience, and the chaotic, enigmatic processes of those who meander, crouch, embrace or dream within the city’s streets. His photos therefore talk not only of Buenos Aires, but of all cities.

— Kate Stanworth is a freelance journalist covering arts and culture in Buenos Aires and London.