Tag: politics

Can you see me now?

Brunel Johnson’s four-part series provides a necessary platform for Black and minority ethnic groups

Many of Brunel Johnson’s ideas tend to formulate in the shower – it’s where he devises some of his best work. In the past, there’s been Dream, a project documenting the Pembury Estate in Hackney, photographing and videoing young women playing estate football. There’s also the countless sports, commercial, lifestyle and documentary photography projects, that each depict his notably candid style of image-making and, more importantly, his view of the world. It’s my Hair is another fine example, an ongoing project that aims to show the time, effort and skill that goes into maintaining Afro hair. 

Whether it’s a still or moving image, Brunel’s shower-formed concoctions are deeply powerful just as much as they are empathetic. And Brunel’s most recent endeavour is a fine paragon of his goals as a self-taught, documentary photographer-turned-filmmaker. Titled Can you see me now?, the project is a four-part series produced and directed by Brunel himself, that aims to provide a space for Black and minority ethnic groups to tell their stories. For him, creativity is an apt tool for telling these narratives and to ultimately steer change. So by working with a solid team – including Milo Van Giap as the DOP, plus charities Rise.365 and Re:Sole and United Borders – Brunel has cast an array of real-life people with lived experiences to share, heightened by his artful use of mixed-media and 1:1 format. The result of which is a compilation of four films, Young Black Man, The Beauty Of The Hijab, Black Girl Magic and CHiNK. Below, I chat to Brunel to hear more about his impactful series.

 

First, tell me about your ethos as a photographer.

I strive to capture the mundane moments of daily life in an authentic and raw way. If I’m working on a project, I’ll always try to draw out the moments that tell the story I want the audience to see best. My goal as a photographer is to change the narrative that surrounds Black and minority ethic communities. I want to change how we’re shown in the media and how our stories are told. So I strive to bring out the stories that I believe the world needs to hear and see without tainting it from a biased gaze. 

When did the idea arise for Can you see me now? Why tell this story?

It actually came about while I was in the shower (a lot of my ideas happen there). Being a Black creative in this industry can be frustrating, as not only do you have to deal with basic day-to-day struggles of life, you also have to deal with the stereotypes, your work being deemed irrelevant, being labelled unprofessional for stating your mind and making a stand for what you believe in, being randomly stopped and searched because of a vague police description as you walk out your front door. 

All these things and many more make you realise that you’re in a constant upward struggle to achieve a basic human right – to just live. And this can really take a toll on you mentally. Simply screaming, complaining and protesting gets you easily labelled and tossed aside. So how do you tell your pain, struggles and experiences while making those who wouldn’t normally listen, listen? It has to be done creatively. In my opinion, anyway. I believe these stories are important and need to be told, especially with how the world is right now. The mic isn’t being given to those who are truly affected and that needs to change. How will people understand what is happening in these communities if it’s always the white gaze of the media telling us what they think we feel? 

What are your reasons for incorporating mixed-media, and what does this add to the narrative?

While planning this project, I wanted the message to be delivered in a way that hits the viewer from multiple angles. I’ve seen this format done many times before, but I wanted to do it differently. Sometimes the visuals are dope but the poem is a bit meh, other times it’s the visuals that are meh but the poem is dope; I wanted to create something that was both visually and audibly dope yet still digestible. 

As a documentary photographer, I know the face and eyes tell a story and are probably the most captivating part of the human body. I saw the face as a blank canvas that I could use to tell the story with words, and would visually have the viewer spending more time staring at the photo. I didn’t want the viewer to come up with their own interruptions. The monochrome palette and 1:1 format were important for me. I acknowledged that, for some reason, whenever we talk about race, despite its complexities, it always somehow boils down to Black and White, so why not have visuals like that too. The 1:1 format was to create a box, symbolising the stereotypical box many of us have had to live our lives in, but now we were taking control of this box and using it to our benefit, to tell our stories. I made the subjects stare directly into the lens to prevent the viewer from looking elsewhere. The subject is in front of them and there’s no escape; it’s time to listen, read and see what they have to say. 

How did you land on the subject matter, and what do these topics mean to you? 

I decided that I wanted each piece to be direct and unapologetic of how these communities really feel. For the young Black man part of the series, I drew upon my personal experiences and had a friend who is a poet write it out as a spoken word. With the other parts of the series, I spent time speaking to people from those communities to educate me on their experiences, their feelings and what they’d like to say if given the platform to. 

I really enjoyed this process because, for example, with Black Girl Magic I was going down the lines of Maya Angelou and the strong Black woman narrative. However, after speaking with Black women, many said that the era of the strong Black woman had passed and that they wanted the world to know that they experience other feelings too; that they cried, laughed, felt anxious, scared, fatigue and more. So making this a reality was incredible. It was the same situation with CHiNK and The Beauty of The Hijab. One thing I made sure of was that each poem was written by someone from their respective community. This is why I decided to call the series Can You See Me Now? I do what I do so I can learn more about humanity. Each topic for me is an opportunity to learn, to find common ground and build bridges. 

What’s the main message with this powerful series, what can the audience learn? 

Can you see me now? Am I visible now? Can you feel and understand my pain, struggles and experiences? It’s to be visible. I hope the audience can relate to the series and feel a sense of relief that maybe how they’ve felt is finally being put across, and those who haven’t experienced the things said in the series become more understanding and accepting to the fact that they do exist and are happening. 

Film credits:

Producer, Script Writer, Director: @bruneljohnson
DP: @milovangiap
Sound & photographer: @bruneljohnson
AC: @notsergioh
Lighting: @flapjacksss & @milovangiap
Makeup: @ioanasimon_mua @madalina_petreanu
Editor: @jfroudy
Sound Engineer: @flynnwallen
Retouch: @alberto__maro @isahakeemphotography
Runner: @soyd1416

Models: @lenaelghamry @sadiqa.e @_shazfit @alex_fergz @da_bf9 @mrbonsu @proscoviauk @doggsza @jaychelle.1 @youngshahid @belliebooze @_purnimaraicreates @w.cui Gladys & Sandro.

Poems by: Yumna Hussen, @ashleybelalchin @thejasminesims @belliebooze

Brunel Johnson is represented by Studio PI, an award-winning agency with a diverse roster of talent from the most under-represented sections of society
 

 

 

 

 

 

Jo Ractliffe: Nadir

The South African photographer publishes her first comprehensive book of works made over 35 years

Photographs: 1980s to now by Jo Ractliffe published by Steidl. The Borderlands (2015)

From 1948 until the early 90s, apartheid took hold of South Africa and South West Africa (now known as Namibia). Politically dominated by the nation’s minority white population, the first apartheid law was the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act (1949); followed by the Immorality Amendment Act and the Population Registration Act of 1950. Between 1960 and 1983, over three million Black Africans were removed from their homes and into segregated neighbourhoods, while the government announced that those who had been relocated would lose their South African citizenship, and moved into ten designated territories known as ‘bantustans’.

Sparking outrage and backlash against the institutionalised racial segregation of apartheid, this resulted in resistance and the rise of social movements across the globe – some of the biggest of the 20th century. Notable documentary photographers of that time would pull their lens onto the uprising and division prevailing across the country, like David Goldblatt who documented South Africa’s people and landscapes, and Ernest Cole, one of the country’s first Black photojournalists. Jo Ractliffe, a South African photographer born in Cape Town, first raised her camera in the mid-80s during the midst of the anti-apartheid movement. But rather than documenting its brutality, she turned an unusual lens onto the metaphorical, shooting landscapes and somewhat allegorical placements of figures, things, animals and nature; capturing the borderlands of her home town; the aftermath of civil war in Angola; addressing themes of conflict and displacement in far from the typical documentary manner.

Jo’s earlier series include Crossroads (1986) and Vissershok (1988), both of which were crafted in her hometown, shortly followed by Nadir (1986-1988) that compiles a collection of photomontages in a land where seemingly aggressive stray dogs have replaced humankind. A move to Johannesburg in the 1990s led to reShooting Diana (1990-1995), which captures the moments of ordinary life. While in 2007, she documented the war in Angola and published three books on the after-effects of the war on the South African landscape: Terreno Ocupado (2008), As Terras do Fit do Mundo (2010) and The Borderlands (2015). These are all but a few examples of the 35 years spent as a photographer, and now her life’s creations have been formed into a comprehensive tome titled Photographs: 1980s to now, co-published with the Walther Collection and Steidl and featuring text by Emmanuel Iduma, Matthew Witkovsky and a conversation with Artur Walther. 

In this publication, you’ll find a mix of prose, impactful imagery and in-depth, personal cadences written by Jo that detail the reasoning behind her credited works. Like Nadir – a series shot in 1988 that, now more than ever, conveys a sense of dystopia in the formidable aftermath of the apartheid government. The stray dogs are luminescent and the backgrounds are dark and bare, alluding to the hostile control of the police as they roam the bleak, supernatural landscapes. And even the name, Nadir, denotes a feeling of despair, defined as the lowest or most unsuccessful point in a situation. It’s a powerful series to say the least, and one that echoes with history and politics.

Below, Jo shares an excerpt from the book that explains more about the series Nadir (1986 – 1988).

Photographs: 1980s to now by Jo Ractliffe published by Steidl. Nadir (1986-1988)

Come down with a thump on the out side of the fents and slyding down the slippy bank in to the ditch which I come up out of it soakit and sopping and there wer that black leader waiting for me with his yeller eyes. 

Jus stanning there in the rain and waiting for me. 

Dint see no other dogs jus only him. Looking at me and wagging his tail slow. Then he ternt and gone off easy looking back over his shoulder like he wantit me to foller so I follert. I ben waiting for it so long when the time come I jus done it. 

» Russell Hoban, Riddley Walker, 198à

 

Nadir began as an experiment in montage. I was disappointed with my photographs; they seemed somewhat apart, detached from the events that surrounded them. I wanted my work to register with what was happening in South Africa. Especially in that moment, in what felt like ‘a world gone mad’, I wanted to make work that, more than simply an image, conveyed an experience of the world. 

Initially, my intentions were quite straightforward: I needed to retain a degree of photographic mimesis, but I also wanted to destabilise the veracity of the photograph and insert something of the unreality of my own experience. I started to reconfigure my photographs, taking structures and objects from one set of images and incorporating them into another. My ‘empty’ landscapes became like stages as the various constituents found their place and the narrative developed. As I became more technically proficient, I began assembling entirely fictitious spaces made up of fragments of ground, texture, sky and clouds, all with conflicting light sources and distorted scale relationships – things impossible in ‘reality’ but plausible nonetheless. This also influenced how I approached things photographically, my seeing often directed more towards the needs of my montages than the photograph as an end in itself. 

Making these screen-printed photographic lithographs involved printing my negatives through an enlarger onto line film, using a sheet of sandblasted glass as a halftone screen. Various elements were cut and pasted to make up the composite image, which was exposed onto a lithographic plate and printed on cotton paper. Colour and tone were built up by screen- printing layers of transparent ink and finally the image was varnished to produce a surface quality similar to photographic paper. 

In the beginning I didn’t think about dogs, although funnily enough they were always around, getting themselves into my pictures. I then began to seek them out. I photographed domestic dogs at play, went to animal shelters and followed feral dogs roaming the streets. I attended police-dog training sessions, had the trainers set their dogs on me so I could photograph up close. One day in 1986, when photographing in Crossroads, my eyes met those of a white dog slinking around a pile of discarded boxes and rubbish. Soon after that encounter, I came across Ryszard Kapuściński’s book Another Day of Life (1976), about the events leading up to Angola’s independence and subsequent civil war. I was very struck by that book, the ways it resonated with what was happening in South Africa – in particular, a passage about the dogs in Luanda, abandoned when the Portuguese fled. And when I read Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker, the journey of the dogs in Nadir started unfolding. 

Jo Ractliffe’a Photographs: 1980s to now is available here.

Photographs: 1980s to now by Jo Ractliffe published by Steidl. Nadir (1986-1988)
Photographs: 1980s to now by Jo Ractliffe published by Steidl. Nadir (1986-1988)
Photographs: 1980s to now by Jo Ractliffe published by Steidl. As Terras do Fit do Mundo (2010)
Photographs: 1980s to now by Jo Ractliffe published by Steidl. As Terras do Fit do Mundo (2010)
Photographs: 1980s to now by Jo Ractliffe published by Steidl. The Borderlands (2015)
Photographs: 1980s to now by Jo Ractliffe published by Steidl. The Borderlands (2015)
Photographs: 1980s to now by Jo Ractliffe published by Steidl. Everything is Everything (2017)
Photographs: 1980s to now by Jo Ractliffe published by Steidl
Photographs: 1980s to now by Jo Ractliffe published by Steidl

The Picture Library

In celebration of The Photographers’ Gallery’s 50th year and the Guardian’s 200th anniversary, a new exhibition presents 200 images from the Guardian’s mammoth photojournalism archives

Greenham Common protester, Roger Tooth, 1982 Courtesy, Guardian News & Media Archive

In celebration of its 50th year, The Photographers’ Gallery has launched an exhibition titled The Picture Library, arriving in conjunction with the Guardian’s 200th anniversary. The show, conceived and co-curated by The Guardian Archive’s founder Luke Dodd, along with TPG’s senior curator Karen McQuaid, features more than 200 images pulled from the mammoth Guardian picture library – or better known as the home to around one million prints and negatives, not to mention a plethora of contact sheets, editing notes and newspaper ephemera. 

“In terms of actual numbers,” explains Luke, “the archive and library comprises about 100,000 individual files – it has been catalogued in such a way as to preserve the original categorisation.” This includes extensive photography collections from industry greats, like Guardian photographer Don McPhee, Cecil Beaton and Yousuf Karsh, as well as a close inspection into the inner workings of a traditional picture desk, revealing the role photojournalism has played throughout society. It also provides a visual timeline, spanning the entirety of the 20th century and divulging into major cultural and political subjects that have occurred in the UK over the years – such as race, gender, feminism, nationalism, immigration, post-colonialism, globalisation and the climate crisis.

National Front demonstration against Asian immigrants, 1970. Courtesy, Guardian News & Media Archive

To say that The Guardian has a lengthy history would be understating, what with the debut photograph published by The Manchester Guardian in 1905 – a half-tone of the Angel Stone in Manchester Cathedral. Three years down the line and Walter Doughty was appointed the first staff photographer, which arose in conjunction with the launch of the picture library. In the 60s, the desire for photography in newspaper format increased, equating to the arrival of feature spreads, colour pages and use of the 35mm camera.

So naturally, with such a hefty collection of records under its belt, the library required a strict categorisation of sorts. “Originally, everything was filed in terms of two catch-all categories: personalities and subjects,” says Luke. “So the library grew organically rather than systematically, and when non-staff photographs were added (licensed), they were integrated with the existing. No special treatment for photos from Magnum, or Madame Yevonde or Beaton, for example.” And when curating the works for The Picture Library exhibition, Luke manually made his way through the library in its totality – “I physically went through all the files; months of work”, he notes – whittling down the 500 images initially selected to the 200 seen in the final cut of the exhibition. 

Anti-Apartheid demonstrators being removed from the South African Airways office, Peter St, Manchester, Don McPhee 1972. Courtesy, Guardian News & Media Archive

Gay rights marches, riots, demonstrations, strikes, political rallies and social deprivation all make appearance throughout The Guardian’s liberal output with publishing and journalism. And this is indeed mirrored in the curation of The Picture Library. “Obviously, I had to keep in mind a number of different strategies when deciding what was to be included: historically important (Belsen trial); vintage classic (Annie Kenney, suffragette); representation of other cultures in a post-colonial Britain (Commonwealth Conference); Guardian liberal stance (male anorexic); routine sexism (Picasso photographed surrounded by young women); politics (Bernadette Devlin); the purely aesthetic (Water Board Salford, 1966); heavily annotated images (Harlem),” adds Luke. “But there was also much room for the esoteric, those images that have transcended the particulars of their context (fog from driver’s viewpoint).”

“In many ways, the show is a good illustration of the anxieties that have played out in England (as opposed to the United Kingdom) in the past few decades: immigration, relationship to Europe, post-colonialism and what that means any more, sexism, racism and capitalism.”

Domestic bliss for Alfie and Shirely, Don McPhee, 1976. Courtesy, Guardian News & Media Archive

To reflect the wide-spanning nature of photojournalism, the exhibition equally follows suit of this non-hierarchal structure and pairs the well-known alongside the more unfamiliar. The pictures involved are vast; take Medical Research (1968) as an example, detailing the “flu vaccine being grown in hens’ eggs”, says Luke. Another sees the arrival of the Quest at Plymouth in 1922, as part of the Shackleton Antarctic Expedition wherein venturers headed to Antarctica via the Falklands and South Georgia: “There is a definite and recurring narrative of conquest which flows from colonial expansion but which persists as the Empire vanished, related to the idea of British exceptionalism – much rehearsed in the Brexit debate.” 

Luke continues to highlight a few more significance images, like one of Mr M Hamdy of Manchester University and DR J Maslowski of Cracow University, attending the Selenodesy conference in Manchester, 1966, following the crash landing of a man-made missile of Russian origin on the surface of the moon in 1959. He describes the piece as “one of those difficult to define and ‘strange’ photos of two men attending a conference but there seems to be a supreme ease between the two parties.” Meanwhile, a photo of Irish civil rights leader Bernadette Devlin at an anti-internment rally in London, 1972, is one of his personal favourites, “because had Devlin been listened to in the early 1970s, three decades of needless voices in Northern Ireland could have been avoided.”

Chinese mission staff face off with police, Peter Johns, 1967. Courtesy, Guardian News & Media Archive

There’s so much history littered throughout these works, that to see it all picked apart and compiled into an exhibition is only going to have universal impact on all that visit. “The exhibition straddles the 20th century, so it’s hard to imagine a visitor that won’t find something that resonates,” says Luke. “I imagine the audience will leave knowing a little more about the workings of a picture desk, and how decisions are made on the use and context of images (and how this has changed over the decades). I would also like to think that people might leave the exhibition with a greater appreciation of the sometimes pernicious nature of representation – how images are never neutral. Even those images being used to campaign for a particular cause are in fact informed by retrogressive views, like the Biafran famine victim.”

This leaves us on a final thought about the role of photography itself, particularly in journalism and in the medium of newspapers. What was once a slower and perhaps more considered approach is now transformed with utmost immediacy, where all it takes is the snap of a finger on a thin piece of touch screen glass and, there you have it – a photograph. But does this waver our level of trust with photojournalism, or add a more personal and reliable sensibility? “It’s easy to take photography for granted nowadays given that nearly everybody has a serviceable camera on their phone,” says Luke. “But despite the ubiquity, the photographs ability to pull one up short, to shock, to amaze, and to change the course of history has not diminished – the football of the killing of George Floyd is the best recent example.”

The Picture Library is on view at The Photographers’ Gallery from 25 June – 26 September 2021

Families Need Fathers protest, London, E Hamilton-West 1979. Courtesy, Guardian News & Media Archive
Immigration – Gatwick. Courtesy, Guardian News & Media Archive
Arthur Scargill faces police line, Orgreave Coking Plant strike, Don McPhee, 1984. Courtesy, Guardian News & Media Archive
Adrian Churm and Rebecca Evans, winners of Juvenile modern trophy, Michael Stephens, 1983. Courtesy, Guardian News & Media Archive
Mr and Mrs Keith Wells with their adopted Vietnamese war orphans, Surrey, 1969. Courtesy, Guardian News & Media Archive

The city and all it holds

Hong Kong-based photographer Roni Ahn remedially lenses adolescence and uncertainty during a difficult year in the city

Cherry and Zac

It’s an undeniable fact that the youth of today have been hard hit by the pandemic. Mental health, education and job prospects have all waned, with repercussions heightened in isolation and from a lack of support throughout the year. Even returning back to schools and seemingly normal life has proven to be tricky for most – with 67% of UK youths who responded to a Young Minds survey believing that the pandemic will have a long-term negative effect on their mental health. Clearly, there’s much to be done in the way of bettering the lives and minds of the younger generation, and the effects are being felt worldwide.

To alleviate some of the year’s trembles, Roni Ahn, a photographer based between London and Hong Kong, turned towards her medium as a remedial outlet. Originally from Korea, Roni moved to Hong Kong at the age of nine before flying the nest to university in the UK. And just moments before the first waves of the pandemic were felt, she’d flown back to Hong Kong to reapply for her UK visa, which “happened to be when the pandemic blew up in Europe, in March 2020,” she tells me of the experience. “So I decided to stay here until things settled down, but ended up staying a lot longer than planned.” Filled with doubt about what may happen in the future, let alone the present, Roni found this point in time to be difficult – and rightfully so, particularly as she didn’t know how long she could extend her visa for. 

Although, it wasn’t just the pandemic that ensued anxieties; Roni felt like she didn’t have much of a creative place in Hong Kong as she did in the UK. “There are a lot of brand shootings and less room for creative freedom,” she explains. And with the recent political events unfolding – such as the protests led by the city’s youth – this naturally added to the political uncertainty in the area.

Kitman and Kuku

Roni’s camera is therefore her antidote, employed to build on her own personal project that turned out to be unambiguously close to home. Titled The city and all it holds, the documentary-in-style series has now reached completion and compiles various images shot between the months spent back at home in Hong Kong. The imagery, as a result, is both powerful and soft, capturing the moments of idleness and the unknown as her subjects roam the familiar landscape around them. “Working on my personal project gave me a sense of purpose and excitement in doing something that was solely for myself,” she adds. “Whilst I was taking photos of other people, the project reads like a journal of my time here.”

Indeed, it’s important to think of this work as a time capsule. When the lockdowns arose in Hong Kong, and meetings of more than two people in public were banned, Roni started to cogitate about the people she holds close. “When you’re forced to limit social interaction, you begin to narrow down on those that are more important to you – who is your support system?” Addressing this contemplation through imagery, Roni wanted to translate these thoughts into a series and thus formulated her findings into The city and all it holds; the title alluding to a shrunken world, and a place where she can look at things a little differently.

Fat, Kwan and Ruby

Most of her subjects, then, are those she’d met on set or through friends, but oftentimes they are cast on Instagram. A usual meeting would take place momentarily, getting acquainted with the her friends, lovers and family on the day of shooting, “which actually ended up being some of my favourite shoots,” she notes, specifically pointing to the ones with an “environment that feels authentic to them.” This has been achieved through the artful curation of clothes or location, meshed into a pictorial representation of the person in front of the camera, as well as the places that they are particularly font of, “whether it’s where they grew up, where they spent the most time in or has a special meaning to them.”

Setting the precedent is one of Roni’s favoured images of a group of friends – Sam, Blake, Ruby, Shui, Fat and Kwan – jumping across the waterway in the outskirts of the city. There’s an irradiating light flushing through the evening as the sun begins to fall behind the trees; the subjects appear joyous, as part of the group awaits as the others jump across the water. It denotes rebellion, freedom and strength – that nothing can come in the way of the younger generation fulfilling their youthful duties together. “I was shooting them from above a bridge and I was on my last two frames of a film roll,” says Roni. “I wasn’t expecting them to jump across, but they just started running and jumping back and forth, and I managed to catch the moment. I think the photo encapsulates the true spirit of the boys.”

Sam, Blake, Ruby, Shui, Fat and Kwan

Now that this series is out in the world, Roni has realised a shift in her role as a photographer. The city and all it holds has been the gateway for this recognition, where Roni now considers herself as a narrator who’s retelling the stories of her subjects. “I feel more accountable to tell these stories as accurately and authentically as possible,” she says, cementing the work as somewhat journalistic. But most of all, she’s telling the stories of adolescence – a universal experience felt by all. And once you observe the goings on within her pictures, it will most likely bring back a memory, feeling or relationship from your own past, too. “With all my work, I want to make people think. My favourite thing about photography is that it can be interpreted differently by everyone who views the work. What I am personally trying to tell with the pictures (often clouded by my personal experiences and memories) becomes irrelevant.”

Photography by Roni Ahn.

Kayla and Fa
Kayla and Fa
Kitman and Kuku
Lok and Enoch
Lok and Grandfather

The Ravine, the Virgin, & the Spring

Juan Brenner documents the oddities and geography of his hometown in Guatemala City

Guatemala is a mountainous country with vast and hilly valleys, where sand dunes and deserts make up all but a small fraction of its landscape. It’s also home to 30 volcanoes, three of which still remain active. But it’s not just the eruptions that have continued to cause concern. Alongside years of war and colonisation, Guatemala endured a catastrophic earthquake; one that shook the city and left the majority of its structures in ruin.  

Within Juan Brenner’s book The Ravine, the Virgin, & the Spring, he seeks to capture this voluptuous and shattered geography of his hometown, Guatemala City. An ode of some form, the book, published by Pomegranate Press, arrives as his latest instalment of work in the Central American country – following his debut publication Tonatiuh, and Genesis, a series lensing the highland’s younger generation.

Guatemala is a location that Juan could spend days talking about, let alone photographing. “But being pragmatic,” he says, “I could say Guatemala City is the result of bad planning and beautiful weather.” In the early 1700s, for example, the city was designed to house 100,000 people and its horses. Socio-political decline meant that the planners decided to insert the city into a small valley, surrounded by ravines and mountains. So instead of your typical stream or waterway, there was a growing population in its banks. “Now, there are almost three million people here, so it’s pretty hectic. Our internal conflict really made our urban development stagnated and if you add a massive earthquake that destroyed more than half of our infrastructure to that mix… ”

“… It’s beautiful though,” Juan continues. “The old part of the city has amazing neoclassic architecture (some of it is really run down), beautiful churches (Catholic presence is essential in our landscape) and probably the best weather in the world (Guatemala is called ‘the land of eternal spring’). It’s odd and dangerous; gorgeous and inspiring.”

Born and raised in the municipality, Juan is a photographer who hails from a “very typical middle-class Central American family,” he tells us. He began making images during his teenage years in the 90s, snapping his friends and those he’d be intrigued by on the street. Although, he had a strong inkling that his style wasn’t quite going to make the cut in the Guatemalan photography scene, which provoked him to pack his bags for New York to work as a fashion assistant. Almost 12 years later, Juan was a fully-fledged fashion photographer and, as events go, life got a little hectic: “the whole NY thing kind of got the best of me; I had to change my lifestyle and decided to come back to Guatemala for a while, then I decided to stay for the sake of my rehab process and also kind of abandoned the idea of photography. I took a seven year hiatus from shooting personal projects, and I started shooting again three years ago.”

Even though Juan came into his medium almost by accident, it’s something that he relies on wholeheartedly. Or, as he puts it, it’s given him a “second chance”. He adds: “I’m trying to stay away from whatever makes me feel comfortable and just exploring new ways of capturing images.” Plus, having been away from the city for some time, his comeback was almost like an awakening: “I intentionally kept away from my territory and my upbringing in order to blend in the international market, but it was about time to come back and experience my reality.”

As such, The Ravine, the Virgin, & the Spring is more than just your typical documentation of sorts. It’s characteristically sun-drenched, littered with unexpected and discrete occurrences – the type that the untrained eye would usually miss. And what at first might be perceived as a typical marriage of street photography paired with artful landscapes, is in fact Juan’s own personal meanderings through a place that he knows too well, and one that he documented for months with his large analogue camera at hand. The project was also created as a means of comfort; he’s made himself a “bubble”, or a safe space, in which he feels “numb” to the oddities and realities around him.

Shot between the seams of the hilltops and its architecture, you’ll notice the daily goings on with the city’s inhabitants. This includes a “dude” sporting a leopard coat, a man that regularly strolls this historical part of the city. “He is really mellow but evidently in trouble, both physically and mentally; I feel really connected with him, and I see myself in that portrait. He’s also so stylish!” 

A further shot presents a piece of fabric tied to a vehicle’s rearview mirror, which visually paints a narrative of how the photographer views the city. “We’re not super rich and we don’t shine, but somehow we improvise to make everything work. We might not be the prettiest but we function; it is an extremely fragile rhythm but we have it down.” Elsewhere, there’s a photo of the slum, featuring the virgin mural. “The small valley where the city is built is called ‘The Valley of the Virgin’, so it’s a magical and perfect metaphor for our reality.”

Since Juan returned to the city, it’s safe to say he’s experienced a fresh start. He’s also now represented by Rocket Science, and enlists a medley of projects in the pipeline. And let’s not forget an additional upcoming book set to release at the end of the year, a project that’s connected to Tonatiuh – looking at the conquest and invasion of his home country, plus “the terrible repercussions of the colonial process in the Americas.” 

Yet despite all of this, Juan’s reasons for leaving in the first place still remain closely in tact, and he’ll always be battling against the barriers laid in front of him in terms of artistic freedom and expression. “It’s complex,” he explains, “on the one hand I’m doing everything for me. I’m trying to execute ideas that make me a better person and ground me, but on the other hand I want people to see where I come from and my view; my work is not 100% welcomed in Guatemala, the topics and that ‘numbness’ I mentioned before keep most of the people away from my work, especially the ‘elite’. My work is definitely more appealing to American and European audiences and I’m aware of that. I feel comfortable with what I have to say and conscious of the responsibility it carries.”

Jules de Balincourt: Precision and Abstraction

Franco-American painter Jules de Balincourt ruminates on abstraction, utopia and the accessibility of art, at the opening of his latest exhibition

Another Divided Island, 2017 © Jules de Balincourt. Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro, London / Venice

If contemporary art is frequently found to be conceptually obscure, exasperatingly self-referential or weighed down with lofty ideals, then the vibrant works of Brooklyn-based artist Jules de Balincourt may be just the antidote. With nothing more new-age than oil on panel, he has produced paintings that project a powerful radiance from within an abstracted haze. Imposing landscapes inhabited by roaming communities, each work is arrestingly aestheticised in a way another artist might find beneath them, but De Balincourt owns it. “Art for me, it always was about beauty and seduction at a certain level, the first thing that draws you to art is to be pulled into it, seduced by it.” He hurriedly adds, “but it can’t just be sugar-coated sweetness, I need an edge or tension or… I like the idea of these paintings standing at a crossroad where it could go either way. I like to leave that suspense.”

If Queens Ruled 2017 © Jules de Balincourt. Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro, London / Venice

De Balincourt was born in Paris, although from the age of nine he was raised in Malibou Lake, California. He has stated in interviews that he doesn’t identify as either entirely French or American, although with France recently voting in Macron over the far-right, populist Le Pen, it is clear that his mind is very much focused on the troubled and divided times facing the United States. It is almost a year since Trump’s inauguration when I meet him at the installation of his new show, They Cast Long Shadows, at Victoria Miro in Mayfair. Perched on stools in the main gallery, we are surrounded by these new works, and he gesticulates energetically whenever he seeks a point of reference.

Troubled Eden 2017 © Jules de Balincourt. Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro, London / Venice

The show is an accumulation of activity from only the past few months, although this is in fact an arbitrary marker. “It’s just a continuation of what I’ve always done in some ways. There’s never a big drastic shift… I consider each show like another page in the same book.” De Balincourt is very precise about his process, if only to articulate its imprecision. Each painting is begun in abstract until, floating in the brushstrokes, “I find something to grasp onto and it eventually becomes figures.” These little populations in turn create a landscape from the floating impressionistic forms by transforming their surroundings into a coherent space. It is unplanned and instinctive, and de Balincourt eschews the use of photography or preliminary sketches. “I’m always working intuitively and unconsciously, I’m interested in my own self-discovery through making this work.”

This approach has informed the show’s installation process too, “I’m interested in the free-associative elements that come up when two completely different images are juxtaposed but I know they still somehow relate.” For all their chance origins, De Balincourt’s landscapes are highly expressive and their metaphorical power leaves them steeped in narrative potential.

Big Little Monsters 2017 © Jules de Balincourt. Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro, London / Venice

The island, a recurrent motif for the artist, who is also a keen surfer, has unfixed and shifting applications. In Island People the pastel pink island is an ‘Edenic comfort zone’ or a sanctuary where people freely congregate. In Divided Island, however, a gathering perches on one island and stares across a channel to another larger land mass that recedes into the distance. It speaks of islands that are insular and isolating with a resonance that is at once timeless and timely, as de Balincourt confirms – “it’s a subtle jab at Brexit”.

His work has long toyed with a tension between the utopian and dystopian, although he admits, “I think my work, when I was younger, was a little bit more direct. Now I push myself to delve more into the unconscious, the abstract, the intuitive and see what comes up.” This is inevitably influenced by real world events, which have recently loomed in the minds of many. “The real challenge under the Trump administration is how to confront the current situation at all… I don’t really know how to address it directly but I know that subconsciously I am concerned about what’s happening in America.”

Repeated Histories 2017 © Jules de Balincourt. Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro, London / Venice

In his recent move towards greater abstraction, de Balincourt has found avenues to address those issues. Even the most obvious work, Repeated Histories, in which a robust orange-faced man directs a small accusatory finger towards a row of black men, makes use of abstracting techniques such as repetition and distorted scale to reflect real power structures. Other works in the collection take a softer approach, and one that is distinctly undogmatic. The art is deliberately accessible, with de Balincourt entirely unconvinced by the social or political impact of art that he considers “convoluted and hyper-conceptual… completely wrapped up in a hermetically sealed corner of the art world. My work is in a weird way a resistance to that pretentiousness and elitism,” he stares intently at a canvas across the room before turning to me with a grin, “but then again, you know, I’m starting to sound like a Trump supporter.”

Cave Country, 2017 © Jules de Balincourt. Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro, London / Venice

De Balincourt’s work seems simple, yet strikes to the core of a complex conversation. In these dreamy worlds, at least, the utopian defeats the dystopian and de Balincourt announces, “I wanted to be optimistic. I wanted to still give hope.” At one point he gestures towards Cave Country, a large canvas in which a deep crevasse of hot oranges and warm pink cuts into a turquoise rock to house a crowd seeking refuge. He pauses carefully before declaring, “I like to think of it as a place away from the chaos of the rest of the world.”

They Cast Long Shadows is at the Victoria Miro Gallery until 24 March 2018.

Lifting the Lid on Trump

Author and staff writer at The New Yorker, Mark Singer, considers the reality of national life and death under President Trump

Illustration – Louise Pomeroy
Illustration – Louise Pomeroy

To try to understand how and why one of America’s two major political parties managed to nominate a presidential candidate so self-absorbed, defiantly ignorant, intellectually vapid, impulsively combative, compulsively mendacious and recklessly erratic as to jeopardise the United States’ strategic international alliances, national security and standing as a rational guardian of the world order, begin with the inanity of our electoral protocols. Our national anthem brightly declares us “the land of the free and the home of the brave.” Politically, though, we are the land of the easily amused and the home of the readily fooled.

The 2016 campaign got underway the afternoon of January 20, 2013. Earlier that day, President Barack Obama had taken the oath of office marking the inauguration of his second – and final – term. Officially, this meant four more years to command the armed forces, steer the world’s largest national economy through its recovery from the most dire crisis since the Great Depression, and fulfil the duties and responsibilities designated by the Constitution. The Republican Party leadership, however, was having none of it. Throughout Obama’s first term, the opposition had embraced a content-free agenda of resolute obstructionism, a strategy still in effect. Obama would be the lamest of lame ducks. Other than the ceremonial formalities, they vowed, his presidency was kaput. In this regard, they were enabled by a political punditocracy that had already turned its attention to the next election. Focus conscientiously upon the arduous work of governance? For the possibility of transcending partisan differences for the common good? For the redress of stark social and economic inequalities? Please! Only the horse race, it seemed, mattered.

When, in June 2015, Donald Trump formally declared his candidacy, he had already spent four decades clamouring for public attention. New Yorkers knew him as a rough-edged rich kid from the outer boroughs – son of a developer who amassed a fortune building rental housing in middle-class Queens – who had crossed the river into Manhattan and ingeniously succeeded, as no one previously had dared, at branding real estate. Depending upon one’s perspective, Donald was either a self-parodying parvenu or an aspirational figure. He developed residential high-rises plastered with the ‘TRUMP’ moniker, then diversified in Atlantic City, where he built casino hotels slathered with blinding ornamentation, the goal being to titillate suckers with the fantasy that a Trump-like life was a lifelike life – to distract from the fact that he had lured them inside to pick their pockets. The odds favouring the house notwithstanding, the casinos would in time fail, a saga of serial bankruptcies (six!) that would correlate with Trump’s nastiest habits, his cruel pleasure in stiffing creditors and his hair-trigger litigiousness.

His personal life was no tidier. During the first of his three marriages, he had committed blatant adultery (along the way snookering the New York Post, a tabloid, into publishing a headline with a putative quote from his mistress and future second-ex-wife: “BEST SEX I’VE EVER HAD”). Equally promiscuous had been the bankers credulous enough to lend Trump billions. No longer creditworthy, he possessed only one remaining exploitable resource – his brand. Going forward, moneyed partners would assume all the risks and, in exchange for having his name on their buildings, Trump would earn back-end equity when a project succeeded. Such details were hidden from a public for whom the Trump illusion survived. For more than a decade preceding his candidacy, Trump’s day job had been reality television star. No longer – and perhaps not ever – an actual billionaire, he now impersonated one on TV. Trump’s role on ‘The Apprentice’ and ‘The Celebrity Apprentice’ constituted his political capital, an asset he would leverage to seduce millions of voters suspended in their own collective fog of make-believe. 

America’s first-ever reality TV presidential campaign began infamously, of course, with Trump’s slander of Mexicans as rapists and drug smugglers. Islamophobia followed. The bigotry extended his four-year run as the nation’s birther-in-chief, promoter of the racist lie that Obama had been born not in Hawaii but in Kenya, rendering his presidency illegitimate. Birtherism – stirred with economic populism, fear and nativism – begat Trumpism, a brew concocted by a narcissist, drunk on his metamorphosis into demagogue. 

Eventually, 16 other horses joined the race, among them senators, governors, former senators and governors, one in-way-over-his-head retired neurosurgeon, and one erstwhile corporate chief executive. The latter two, in particular, hoped to trade upon their outsider status with an electorate disgusted by the political status quo and especially by Washington. Any of the contenders seemed as likely to prevail as Trump, whose candidacy for far too long was treated by the press, the public and the Republican establishment as a relatively harmless novelty. Trump win the nomination? Get outa here. The general election? – beyond ludicrous. 

Cable news doted upon Trump because, regardless of one’s politics, he provided entertainment, which meant bigger ratings, which meant bigger revenue. The digital and print media, while perhaps less cynical, knew that Trump delivered good copy. Still, subject him to labour-intensive investigation? We’re busy.

By the time the first primary votes were cast, in early February, his candidacy was seven-and-a-half months old. The monster had long since risen from the laboratory table and run amok. There had been 13 debates and ‘candidate forums’, and Trump had dominated virtually all of them – bullying, interrupting, taunting and lying about his opponents. One by one, short of votes, short of money, they gave up. Each retreat seemed inevitable and each seemed to embolden him. When challenged, he attacked the moderators. During campaign rallies, he incited his supporters to spew venom at the hapless journalists assigned to cover him.

Throughout, Trump’s sordid history – racial discrimination against would-be tenants; dealings with organised crime; employment of undocumented immigrants; deeply ingrained misogyny; unconscionable fleecing of desperate enrollees in his fraudulent get-rich-quick real-estate seminars; refusal to pay contractors whose businesses then failed – hid in plain sight, accessible with a few keystrokes, thanks to years of exertions by superb journalists (Wayne Barrett, David Cay Johnston, Timothy O’Brien, Tom Robbins et al.).

With laudable exceptions – Politifact.com (a project of the Tampa Bay Times), Fact Checker (ditto, Washington Post), Factcheck.org (Annenberg Public Policy Center) – not until Trump had clinched the nomination did most news organisations subject him to the scrutiny they could have and should have from the get-go.

By the time of the first debate (of three) with Hillary Clinton, the election was six weeks away and the race was perilously close. Arrogant as ever, Trump showed up unprepared. Clinton did decidedly the opposite. Not long into the proceedings, Trump was reduced to petulant defensiveness. At the end, both his feet were perforated with multiple bullet holes – a historically awful performance.

How awful? One of his most pugnacious partisans, Rudy Giuliani, a former mayor of New York City, showed up in the spin room to cry foul. The debate moderator, an equable, self-restrained network anchorman, had had the temerity to correct one of Trump’s more flagrant lies by citing widely documented data. “If I were Donald Trump,” Giuliani said, “I wouldn’t participate in another debate unless I was promised that the journalist would act like a journalist and not an incorrect, ignorant fact-checker.” Goddam facts!

Twenty years ago, while preparing a profile of Trump for the New Yorker, I spent a great deal of time with him across several months. Early on, I decided not to take personally the transparent distortions that constantly burbled from his lips – or, if you will, his reflexive lying – telling myself, ‘That’s just the way the man talks.’ Trump said many things that I found baffling, such as when he described the apartments he sold as belonging to three categories: “luxury, super luxury and super-super luxury.” This taxonomy led to my conclusion that he “had aspired to and achieved the ultimate luxury, an existence unmolested by the rumbling of a soul.”

Naturally, Trump hated what I wrote and my reward was his undying enmity. But I knew that my verdict was accurate, evidence of which the electorate has now been exposed to for more than a year. Still, I am resisting presumptuous optimism. This is a matter of national life or death. Trump, soulless or not, might yet be the next occupant of the White House. Should that come to pass, dear Lord, please save ours.

Mark Singer has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1974.  He is also the author of Trump & Me, published by Penguin Books.

This article is taken from PORT issue 19, out now.