Fishing for eels

David Goldblatt, Robert Mugabe. Harare, 1986

Courtesy Michael Stevenson

Collection Michael Graham-Stewart

The word “subtle” does not appear in the Ambrose Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary, a satirical book of alphabetised entries conceived and ordered by a gun-totting journalist working out of San Francisco in the latter half of the 1800s. This is only fitting.

Subtlety, the art of pillow fighting in front of an audience of boxing fans, has no place in the world of politics. And politics, as Bierce writes in his self-styled “comic dictionary” – which grew from a series of infrequent newspaper columns – is both “a means of livelihood affected by the more degraded portion of our criminal classes” and “a strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles”.

Photography, which in Bierce’s time was an infant medium practiced by quixotic men who lumbered across the landscape with cumbersome equipment and hid under black clothes, fares little better. He describes it as a “picture painted by the sun without instruction in art”.

Politics and photography: it is a love affair that entertains no third parties.

In a week of abrupt burps (Julius Malema) and fatal sighs (Eugene Terreblanche), photo editors around the country have all been faced with a simple predicament: finding a decent picture of these eels. (Bierce on politicians: “an eel in the fundamental mud upon which the superstructure of organised society is reared.”) It is, of course, a perpetual dilemma: the more degraded portion of our criminal classes is always at work. The feedback loop this creates is endless. Photographers will always be asked to go fishing.

It’s time to reflect. In January 2005, I asked David Goldblatt a simple question in response to a 1986 photograph he took of Robert Mugabe for the magazine Leadership, of which he was photo editor at the time. What was it like photographing men of stature? I quote his response in full.

“I was quite ruthless, ruthless in the sense that my brief was to get a strong portrait of the subject, possibly for the cover and certainly for the inside pages of the magazine. In order to do this knew I had to have certain prerequisites met. I could, for example, not allow them to bully me into accepting the furniture that they regarded as their best from a public relations point of view – Gomma Gomma deep armchairs – unless I wanted to do a hatchet job. If I wanted to do a hatchet job that was the best thing they could offer me because you put someone into a deep armchair and they sink down. When you see them from the front you see their knees and a bit of their face.

David Goldblatt, Kenneth Kaunda, Lusaka, 1986
Courtesy Michael Stevenson

Collection Michael Graham-Stewart

“I would insist… sometimes it became quite tense because they had their public relations press people and their G-men and security people. All of them were absolutely outraged that I would want to photograph Kenneth Kaunda, for example, on a chair I found in the recesses of the kitchen. And the same with Mandela. Karl Niehaus was his press secretary at the time. We came there at five o’clock in the morning and I immediately rejected all the deep armchairs and couches and said I want to look around in the kitchen. I found one in the kitchen.

“I said, ‘This one will do very nicely thank you.’ Karl Niehaus was outraged. He said, ‘You can’t photograph Mr. Mandela in that.’ I replied, ‘But yes I can. I have to photograph him and not the furniture.’ This used to lead to quite strong confrontations. He eventually conceded to my wish and eventually apologised to me. But it took some convincing. I had the same trouble with Joaquin Chisano in Mozambique.

 David Goldblatt, Joachim Chissano, president of Mozambique, in his office in Maputo. 1987
Courtesy Michael Stevenson

Collection Michael Graham-Stewart

“I also had trouble with lighting because I never as a matter of principle but really to throw myself into the deep, I never took lights with me. At the most I would have a reflector or space blanket. And so I would come into, for example, Mugabe’s office or PW Botha, the same thing, and it was heavily curtained right round for security. I would tell the incumbents that I wanted to open some curtains and they would say, ‘No you can’t.’ I would say, ‘I am sorry but I am going to have to.’ [Laughs] Very reluctantly they would allow me to open one or two curtains, but that was all I needed.”

 Marc Shoul, Eugene Terreblanche, 2009

That was 1986. What about now? I emailed Marc Shoul. He is routinely asked to go fishing for eels. In the last year he has photographed Jacob Zuma for the Financial Times, Eugene Terreblanche and Julius Malema for Time, and so on. Given the news value of such portraits, timing is always crucial. The Terreblanche portrait, he says, was made “after he did his fire and brimstone thing to a crowd”. The photographer requested permission to shoot one picture. After the third click of his camera’s shutter, Terreblanche stated: “You said one photo, you bastard.”

“Zuma was cool,” he says “I was supposed to shoot him the next day and got a call from his PA on a Sunday afternoon, asking me to do it in an hours time.  I was in Brackpan at the time so moved out of there quickly. It was the day before he was let off for one of the crimes he allegedly did. He was cool and calm; he gave me about 20 minutes. I tried to get him to go outside and he tuned me something to the extent that he can’t have a white guy take him outside and photograph him in front of his guards. He also didn’t want to put on formal shoes so I had to shoot him without his feet in the frame.”

What is the hardest part of photographing especially politicians?

“Time is short, you can’t chew the fat with them and get to know what makes them tick. There is no time to mess around or for your camera mess with you. It’s a rush in and out, and always a little disappointing because you don’t have the time to craft the image much. And you can’t really go to a location that may be better. Some of them are better in front of a crowd. When its one on one, they are just people who don’t really have a clue on how important it is to work with the photographer.”

Sol Lewitt's system

Sol Lewitt died today three years ago. I only encountered his work twice, first at New York's Andrea Rosen Gallery in 2003, again at the 2007 Venice Biennale. Both times they were wall drawings, the first a spare grid, the latter a paired set of wall drawings made up of whorls of lines that gained/lessened in tonal intensity. The austerity mesmerised.

The drawings in Venice were made around two months after Lewitt's death. The drawings exist and function independent of Lewitt's hand. In fact, there existence is prescribed, or rather, are predicated on a determined set of rules, the implications of which the artist discussed with Saul Ostrow in a 2003 issue of Bomb magazine:

SO: Once you start working serially, a certain amount of decision-making is being deferred. Say in the case of your wall drawings, which existed as a set of instructions. Giving the script over to someone else is adding another variable to the formula and has been interpreted as an attempt either to de-aestheticize the work or at least to distance the artist from the results so that it wouldn’t be about the artist’s taste. I once did one of your wall drawings myself. You sent me a set of instructions that read, “Using pencil, draw 1,000 random straight lines 10 inches long each day for 10 days, in a 10-by-10-foot square.” The distribution of the lines in the square was totally up to me. I didn’t know what you wanted it to look like.

SL: What it looked like wasn’t important. It didn’t matter what you did as long as the lines were distributed randomly throughout the area. In many of the wall pieces there is very little latitude for the draftsman or draftswoman to make changes, but it is evident anyway, visually, that different people make different works. I have done other pieces that give the draftsperson a great liberty in interpreting an action. In this way the appearance of the work is secondary to the idea of the work, which makes the idea of primary importance. The system is the work of art; the visual work of art is the proof of the system. The visual aspect can’t be understood without understanding the system. It isn’t what it looks like but what it is that is of basic importance.

Two things strike me a germane, as possibilities for future exploration:

1. By working serially a certain amount of decision-making is deferred. Is it, though, possible to translate this statement into imaginative fiction?
2. To what extent is it possible to systematise the process of writing fiction? Perhaps, as an option, a modular set of characters that migrate from story to story? Or, as an alternative, a plot that remains constant but is populated by new characters? Even in writing this I realise that these are merely experimental probabilities, not viable solutions in and of themselves.

Kapuscinski and tape-recorded memory

Ryszard Kapuscinski and friends, date and photographer unknown

The Lede, the news blog for The New York Times, reports that recent press coverage on a new biography devoted to Ryszard Kapuscinski got it all wrong, especially when they said the book accused the masterful Polish journalist and essayist of lying. Responding to questions from the NYT, the book's author, Artur Domoslawski, dismissed these reports as "completely wrong". 

One statement in the ensuing interview intrigues: 

"He never recorded interviews, but he did write notes – though usually he wrote them at night after a whole day’s work. He often said: if you don’t remember a detail or a fact, it means that it is not really important, it doesn’t matter. 

So, all that relation between facts and fiction in his work is quite complicated. One of the reviewers of my book had an interesting observation: the picture of the forest that Kapuscinski shows us is generally correct and true, but in order to create that picture – true in its essence – Kapuscinski changed sometimes the position of some trees inside the forest. 

Maybe there should be a separate category: neither fiction, nor nonfiction, but just shelf called “Kapuscinski.” I hope he would like the idea."

This last point seems a bit fanciful, but I do like the fact that Kapuscinski never recorded anything. The statement reminds me of a fragment from a 1974 Paris Review interview with WH Auden: "I think if there's anything worth retaining, the reporter ought to be able to remember it."

I must be a lazy journalist, reporter, hack, since I record most of my interviews. What I like about this strategy is the way it demystifies an encounter. Last year I interviewed a prominent photographer and left awed. "He is so eloquent," I told friends. When I transcribed the interview a month or so later – I had a long lead on this one – I was surprised at how, well, halting and ordinary his speech was. Count the conjunctions and repeated "you know" in this small fragment from the interview: 

"You know, we all know what a refugee looks like: they cut the horizon at the waist and they’re bent over and they look hungry. You know, you can do that, and I’ve done that over the years and it’s repetitive, and I think photojournalism in general may suffer from that."

Perhaps this isn't germane to what Kapuscinski or Auden were talking about, but I like the fact that when you read verbatim transcripts of interviews with Miss Verb and Mister Person – a riff I have stolen from  Sudanese-Ugandan poet Taban Lo Liyong – there is still this residue of the oral. Writing from memory often papers over this very basic fact. 

On Takashi Miike

"I don't think about genre at all. My films are categorised as being in a certain type of genre. But myself, I don't make the movie thinking about which category the film belongs in." Takashi Miike, interview 2001

Deadpan, surreal, misogynist, funny, brutal, imaginative: Takashi Miike's films are anti-bourgeois excursions into hard-boiled fantasy. In less hyperbolic terms, they're offbeat gangster flics.

One is tempted to explain them by invoking the names of other filmmakers, Takeshi Kitano, the two Davids – Lynch and Cronenberg–- Jean-Pierre Melville. Also JG Ballard, and perhaps – and this is a big perhaps – Franz Kaka. Diffident characters, surreal normalcy, uncertain resolutions.