“Sweet Car” by Spanish photographer Óscar Monzón is a confrontation between photography and privacy, an agression on the values of self-affirmation and separation that are related with the car.
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People often ask me what I carry in my daily bag. So, now you know what’s in my daily bag on-the-go.
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I recently discovered at the Brooklyn Museum the work of photographer Cass Bird, giving us a insight into the the life of people she meets.
“These photographs show, through portraits, landscapes and documentary scenes, lives that resist and create alternatives to the structures of societal norms. They illustrate the convergence of alternative lifestyles with accepted conceptions of motherhood, nurturing and family. The subjects include people who manipulate gender roles, pushing perceived boundaries of gender specification. The photographs portray the beauty and the positive existence of these individuals, their male or female origins overridden by their own will to define their gender, sexuality, and place in society,” writes the Brooklyn Museum.
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Stephen Kelly‘s marvelous documentary about Qi Lihe, a district that sits on the outskirts of Lanzhou in Gansu Province, north western China, which is the most destitute area of this heavily polluted industrial city, makes me want to know more about this Province. Originally in the territory of the Western Qiang peoples, Lanzhou became part of the territory of Qin (state) in the 6th century BC. During the following centuries the Province was ruled–besides some others–by the Han, Sui and Ming Dynasty. During the Japan’s invasion of China in 1937, the Guominjun Generals Ma Hongkui and Ma Bufang of Muslim faith protected Lanzhou with their cavalry troops, and put up resistance, the Japanese never captured Lanzhou.
Kelly explains the problems of the Muslim people in detail, “It is home to thousands of Muslim migrant families who have left their homeland within the Linxia Hui autonomous prefecture and arrived into the city, searching for job opportunities and ultimately, a better life. For hundreds of years the Hui and Dongxiang Muslim minorities have farmed the arid land surrounding their ancestral villages. In recent years though, desertification has forced this once workable landscape to begin a dramatic change, impelling many modern day farmers and their families to migrate to the provincial capital in order to survive.
Life for these migrant families in Qi Lihe remains extremely difficult, as they live in abject poverty. Economic and educational marginalization has greatly impacted on the community, as its residents are unable to enjoy the same privileges as the majority Han residents of the city.
As poor rural farmers living on the edge of society, the majority struggle to gain official Lanzhou residency from the local government. This means they cannot visit hospitals for the most basic medical care and they have very little hope of job security and therefore, no regular income. Many of the children of the district are unable to attend local schools, as their parents cannot afford to send them.
As desertification continues to swallow up the countryside of Gansu Province and rural communities continue to disperse to the bigger cities for survival, this pattern of economic and environmental migration will continue. Existing ecological problems will be compounded and the desperate plight of these people will continue.”
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‘After Ascension and Descent’ by Charles Grogg is from a phrase by Pierre Joris in ‘A Nomad Poetics’ in which he calls for an approach to writing that accounts for what Gilles Deleuze refers to as ‘rhizomatic’, allowing for varieties of discourse, idioms, syntax, even languages.
Grogg says about this series, “I gave the work this title because I am at a loss when it comes to speaking of knowing one’s roots. My family, with its adopted members, silence about its past, reverence for the absolute at the expense of the profane, has taught me to speak one language only. To be monolingual is to be foreshortened, and like so many Americans I know I speak a provincial, not a global, language. The advent of ‘wireless’ living does nothing to allay this. If anything, we are almost hopelessly tethered—to each other, to the world. It’s when we forget this, when we think we are free beyond complicity, that we encounter trouble looking for meaning.
I watch as our attempt at domestic growth reaches for infinity and then think of growth in terms of what matters to me most, my ancestral family, the roots mostly hidden. I am aware of a subtle desperation in these pictures, as if I were trying to save something, to ground the dearest thing somehow to keep it.”
Thinking in these terms has resulted in these images, an expression of desire for growth at the moment of inhibition, when hesitation is the gap between desiring and having.
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“Tree, Line” is an ongoing series of constructed photographs by Zander Olsen rooted in the forest. Olsen explains, “These works, carried out in Surrey, Hampshire and Wales, involve site specific interventions in the landscape, ‘wrapping’ trees with white material to construct a visual relationship between tree, not-tree and the line of horizon according to the camera’s viewpoint.”
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