Happy Christmas and New Year

Ha, December already!  So have a lovely Christmas, a Happy New Year and see you all in 2010!

Warleigh Weir Summer

Only about 6 more months and we might be able to swim here again.... Isabel at Warleigh Weir, August 2009.

The Progressive Women's Association of Pakistan

From Okinawa Soba's ( who is responsible for the fabulous T.Enami photostream) comes this picture from a series on Chinese footbinding, which makes for fascinating but horrendous viewing and reading.

Equally horrendous but a whole lot more contemporary  is this series on acid burn victims in Pakistan, pointed out by Stan at Reciprocity Failure. It's not a new photographic subject but it doesn't need to be, why should it be, it still happens, it still continues and it will do for a long time (though the article mentions that Bangladesh has curbed sales of acid which has helped). But then footbinding ended when it was banned by Mao, so there's no reason why this can't end, especially when there are people fighting it on the ground like The Progressive Women's Association of Pakistan. From the article

Acid attacks and wife burnings are common in parts of Asia because the victims are the most voiceless in these societies: They are poor and female. The first step is simply for the world to take note, to give voice to these women.” Since 1994, a Pakistani activist who founded the Progressive Women’s Association (www.pwaisbd.org) to help such women “has documented 7,800 cases of women who were deliberately burned, scalded or subjected to acid attacks, just in the Islamabad area. In only 2 percent of those cases was anyone convicted.”

Link to The Progressive Women's Association of Pakistan

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Assumptions I make about photography

I make a few assumptions about photography, some of them are good, some of them are bad, most are a bit in the middle, they're pretty much all wrong, many are opposing pairs and shouldn't be - this post fits somewhere in this picture, but I'm not sure where. Somewhere at the back perhaps?

Anyways, here are some assumptions.


Photography is an art
Photography is not an art

There is such a thing as documentary photography

There is a visual truth
There is not a visual truth

The bigger the better

The more the better

Repetition is good
Repetition is bad

Sequences of pictures tell stories

Individual pictures have a narrative

There is a right way sequence pictures to tell stories

Good photographers know things

Good photographers have to know things

You can learn from pictures



Photographs can change things
Photographs can't change things

Photographs  make things better


There is such a thing as a concerned photographer
There is no such thing as a concerned photographer

Photographers care

It's all been done
It hasn't all been done

Obvious is good/not obvious is bad
Not obvious is good/obvious is bad

New is good

People understand pictures

We see pictures the same
We see pictures differently

There is a right way to see pictures

Photographs are like paintings
Photographs are not like paintings

Having your picture in a gallery is good
Having your picture in a magazine is good
Selling your pictures is good
Having people see your picture is good

Pictures don't need text
Pictures do need text

Commercial/social/product photography is not real photography

The only real photograph is a print

Looking at photographs on computers, in books and in a gallery are different things

There is such a things as photographic criticism

Intention matters
Intention doesn't matter

Photographic education is a waste of time
Photographic education is not a waste of time

You need money to be a successful photographer
You don't need money to be a successful photographer

Things used to be more real in the old days

And on and on and on.... Any more?

Vintage Japanese Prints

These are all by T Enami.

Follow the link and find all kinds of beautiful pictures of a very Japanese looking Japan - Enami is to turn of the century Japan, what John Hinde is to 1960s Britain. Wonderful! (via Mrs Deane and Flickr)

The Seven Deadly Narratives of Women Criminals

In Media and Crime, Yvonne Jewkes identifies seven standard narratives to describe women who commit serious crimes

These are:

• Sexuality and sexual deviance
• (Absence of) physical attractiveness
• Bad wives
• Bad mothers
• Mythical monsters
• Mad cows
• Evil manipulators


 Which just about covers everything (with the exception of Bad Mother) Amanda Knox has been accused of in Italy - more on the Amanda Knox trial in Will Knox find Justice in Perugia? .

The above taken from Ashley Tya Austin's dissertation, The Denial of Agency.

Picturing Myra Hindley

From pictures of Amanda Knox and Hatice Can, we continue to a Beatrix Campbell blast from the past on the most iconic photograph of evil ever made - that of Myra Hindley. 

The other picture above is one taken by Ian Brady on the Moors where they murdered their child victims.

Lots of people have done versions of the picture above, but none come close to the original on any level. Whether the picture reflects 'fright', as Campbell suggests, or 'evil' as popular folklore would have it, I'm not so sure.  But here goes anyway.  

"What if it lied? That photograph of Myra Hindley, a bottle-blonde with stark, staring eyes, commandeering our gaze, became one of the ubiquitous images of our time.

The picture was put to work for almost four decades. Although there were contemporary photographs of Hindley, that image acquired iconic authority.

With Hindley safely behind bars and largely silent, that image serviced a collective fantasy invested in the icon itself ­ here was a moment of transgression caught in the artifice of tarty hair, the slack, sullen cheeks, the audacious, arresting eyes.

This "icon of evil" sponsored Hindley's reputation, together with the tape recording of little Lesley Ann Downey dying. Nothing Hindley herself would ever say could surpass the synergy of the words and the picture ­ it was as if the image was snapped in the moment of that atrocity, of Hindley hovering, pitiless, over a dying child.

The world brought bored indifference to her mentor, the sadistic, fascistic Ian Brady. He was just another bad bloke.

The icon delivered mystery and menace in the context of an assiduous campaign to make Hindley the commissar, the evil genius in that relationship. Indeed the Sun claimed yesterday that it had been responsible for the revelation that she and not he was the designer of their horror story.

There is an ambiguity in that image, however, that offers us an alternative narrative. It satisfies neither that tabloid discourse of enigmatic evil, nor the sloppy sentimentality of some of her champions, nor others' quest for evidence of heroic malevolence.

This picture was not taken as Hindley fussed around the little girl's desperate survival strategies. It is a police photograph taken in maximum light in a dungeon. That stark, sinister expression could also be one of fright, ­ the antithesis of the transgressive transcendence conceived by Brady."