David Southwood

For a while tension has existed in my apartment. This could be because I only recently regained full use of my right hand after a month of fumbling, or it could be that I, only recently, joined some very large dots.

Ed van der Elsken’s book Bagara has had a huge effect on Viviane Sassen. I am not going to regard this as a moot point, because it’s not.

I think particularly of VS’s book FLAMBOYA(white). On a very simple level FLAMBOYA’s book design mimics BAGARA’s(black) because the more contemporary photographer cuts her photographs up by employing short pages which allows an image from beneath to be seen simultaneously with the primary dps. One sees three pages at once at times(tps!). EVDE makes the bold move of sometimes having a mere sliver of a photograph on the right side of a double page spread(dps) which has the same effect as looking at some of VS’s spreads. Say something clever here about about temporality and compression. I think this formal plot enhances the plastic nature of each individual photograph.

Thinking in more complex terms it’s interesting to note how the two authors deal with the surface of the African body. They are both fairly unapologetically reducing it to a series of planes and perspiring panels. I have no issue with this as in both cases I feel it’s been done with striking transparency and directness unlike Jeff Walls ‘MILK’ which shares other phenomenological ties with the two series in question.

Both bodies have work have the same relationship with shadows: they are employed at most times and provide a very compelling, clandestine, voodoo counterpoint to the explicit formal plans on which they both are fully dependent. Call it ‘hard  chiaroscuro‘, maybe.

There is a lot more than I could say, but the sun is high and the phone does ring.

Last aside 1. When I look at Bagara’s night time shots I am put in mind of Larry Fink

Last aside 2. When I look at Bagara’s night time shots I am put in mind of Burnt Friedman’s new beats(bokoboko-Jap)

1958 1958 – VAN DER ELSKEN, Ed. Bagara. (Amsterdam): De Bezige Bij, [1958].

Quarto, original black cloth rebacked with original spine laid down, original photographic dust jacket & booklet. First edition of this incisive photo-essay on Equatorial Africa, illustrated with 138 rich photogravures (most double-page, eight in color).

“Out of stream-of-consciousness photography emerged several distinct genres, [among them] the photographic odyssey, the photographer’s quest to find himself, the photographic version of On the Road” (Parr & Badger, 255). In 1957 Van der Elsken made a three-month trip into the interior of Central Africa. Bagara gives an incisive picture of the native peoples and their culture, in which hunting, magic, death-dances and circumcision play an important role. In his own words, traveling the world “is enough to keep me in a delirium of delight, surprise, enthusiasm, despair-enough to keep me roaming, stumbling, faltering, cursing, adoring, hating the destruction, the violence in myself and others.” See Roth, 146; Icons of Photography, 141; Open Book, 168.

I made this shot last weekend at Muizenberg Beach. The spots in the sea are people and when my friend, Professor Michael Godby, saw it he said, ‘It’s a lesson in diminishing perspective’ with a smile on his dial. Before Andreas Gursky began to utilise photoshop he made a book called ‘Photographs’ which, in part, is an observation on how the human organism arranges itself. It’s beautiful.

From the preface to the Gursky book: ‘When I saw Andreas Gursky’s large-format print entitled ‘St. Moritz’(1991) for the first time, I immediately felt it was familiar. I couldn’t say exactly why. It was only much later that I recalled Alfred Hitchock’s film ‘North by North West’. The English director had a penchant for the subliminal and the concealed which really come into its own whenever his images suggested a sweeping view and a clear outlook’

BTW ‘North by North West’ has the best opening title sequence ever.

Tom on TV http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9F7qUlz1p6o