Fans of the Humans of New York blog & books will need no encouragement, this is more of the same but from all around the world.
I have to say that theFans of the Humans of New York blog & books will need no encouragement, this is more of the same but from all around the world.
I have to say that the stories of these people are mostly sad or jarring or frankly horrendous – the longest entry is a ten page account of a woman’s experience of the Rwandan genocide. There are many victims here, many having bravely overcome their struggles, some who are overwhelmed pools of sorrow. I notice that we get many victims or ex-victims and almost zero perpetrators.
Authors should read all these Humans books and re-think all their novels – so many ghastly or remarkable circumstances explained by these interviewees leave most fiction looking timid and becalmed.
Most people get a dense couple of paragraphs but some of my favourite entries are the one-liners :
We’re eating cookies before lunch because Grandpa doesn’t have any rules.
We don’t have any hobbies. But we do try to get together a few times a month to judge people and complain about things.
I should have invested the money I stole.
The landlord doesn’t care how much furniture you’ve sold this month.
I photoshopped my head onto a healthy body to see what I would look like.
Apparently Eugene Atget strapped his forty pound camera to his back and put the rest of the gubbins in a cart and trundled round Paris for 40 years phApparently Eugene Atget strapped his forty pound camera to his back and put the rest of the gubbins in a cart and trundled round Paris for 40 years photographing everything he could that was a) really old, b) very melancholy and c) didn’t contain people. So this is Paris in 1880-1920 after the neutron bomb. Well, there are a few tramps and hawkers and peddlers and knife-sharpeners to be seen, but rarely. The lack of people is explained by the long exposure of film required in those days – the people who were there were not fixed on the film because they moved too fast. But also I think M Atget didn’t like people.
This is great : he took 10,000 photos of Paris and totally ignored the Eiffel Tower. It was way too modern for him.
I was wondering what made Humans of London less startling, less wrenching and less extraordinary than Humans of New York. And it's this -
Girl in New YI was wondering what made Humans of London less startling, less wrenching and less extraordinary than Humans of New York. And it's this -
Girl in New York : I think I may be a disappointment to my family.
Girl in London : I've just finished doing a variety performance at the Hackney Empire and it was amazing
Man in New York : My daughter lives in Pennsylvania. She's working at a nursing home and studying to be an accountant. I don't tell her I'm homeless. She's got enough to worry about. I just tell her that I'm retired.
Man in London : I've not long finished training as a clinical hypnotherapist. I'm now a level 2 Reiki practitioner and I've been volunteering at this hospice for youngsters with life-limiting conditions.
Older lady in New York talking about another older lady: This is my neighbor. She only speaks Mandarin, so we've never had a conversation. But she's brought me a handful of candy every day for twenty years.
Older lady in London : Our son's gay and our granddaughter is married to a Jamaican so it doesn't matter what sexual orientation or what colour you are we've got no problem with that at all.
Brandon Stanton who did the original New York book seems to have been able to capture an endless succession of poignant, horrible and funny stories about all the people he photographed. Cathy Teesdale who does this London spin-off book seems to have attracted a whole crowd of really positive, upful, achieving smilers who are just about to launch their new Thai streetfood stall or coming back from an Amnesty International visit to Tadjikistan. If she finds a guy with a prosthetic leg he will be raving about how it's the best prosthetic leg ever.
But life is sad, life is difficult a lot of the time, happiness is as fleeting as a rare butterfly. So I'm glad for those jolly Londoners but I didn't shed any tears for them. Whereas New York got me bawling....more
Let’s get this out of the way first – the photos & commentary in this book are a beautiful FIVE STARS.
And the presentation in this bricksized thing isLet’s get this out of the way first – the photos & commentary in this book are a beautiful FIVE STARS.
And the presentation in this bricksized thing is ONE STAR because at least a quarter of the photos are teeny tiny – what is the point of reproducing these great pix like that so you can’t see them??? Oh I see, this is part of a series called 1001 (Fill In The Blank) That You Must See Before You Die ( – I believe the next in the series will be 1001 Mountains You Must Climb before you Will Certainly Die, followed by 1001 Sexual positions You must Try before You will Probably Die of Something or Other and finally 1001 Wild Animals You Must Fight Before You Will Absolutely Die Horribly.) So the design of this book has to conform with all the others in the series. There is no such tiny-photo problem in 1001 Books You Have to Read or Films you Have to See but there sure is here because it’s ABOUT PHOTOS.
So, here you have the first photo of a human being in 1838
[image]
They had to expose the film for a long time at the beginning of photography, which meant that things that moved – like people – were not caught on the film, only static things – like buildings – except that down in the lower right corner there are two figures who were stationary for quite a long time & were thus caught in the photo quite by accident – it’s a guy getting his shoes shined.
And here you have the great and the not so good, Alice Liddell, Oscar Wilde, Stalin, Madonna (from 1979 – wow, she has been around for a long time), Frank Sinatra’s mugshot when he was arrested, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, Prince, the desk where The Little Prince was written, Jodie Foster, etc etc.
Emotional whiplash is always an issue in vast collections like this – an American slave displaying his back hideously deformed by scourging faces the beautiful Clementina Maude lounging in front of her boudoir mirror; Ham the Chimp (sent into space by NASA in 1961) on page 453 is immediately followed by Eichmann in prison on p454. U S Marine Sgt William Bee Under Fire From the Taliban on p880 faces some guy dressed in a stupid wolf costume on p881.
And for any of these big photo collections you have to be okay with the display of the hundreds of varieties of human pain and suffering – for example, one photo has the caption
My Lai : A Group Of South Vietnamese Women And Children, Cowering. Minutes Later They Were All Dead
SOME TIMES CAPTIONS ARE EVERYTHING
So, a beautiful study of a young woman looking at a paper she is holding is just a lovely woman looking at a paper she’s holding except the caption says Woman Reading Possession Order (so she was a squatter and now has to has to clear out of the house). And there’s also a photo of a woman at a writing desk looking at a human skull
[image]
Fairly innocuous, she might be a medical student, but the caption is
The Skull Of A Japanese Soldier Sent By An American Soldier To His Girlfriend
Yes, apparently this was a thing soldiers used to like to do – send their families and girlfriends human trophies. This photo was instrumental in getting that sort of thing stopped.
Some other favourite captions :
The Shirt Of The Emperor Worn During His Execution Man Selling Mummies Emperor Hirohito Inspects Giant Ear Trumpets We Are Animals In A World No One Knows Memphis Housewives Meet And Compare Recently Purchased Weapons
So, this is a wonderful exciting head-spinning collection of photos almost but not quite wrecked by stupid publisher-imposed design. 1001 fragments of this quite insane world we try to live upon....more
Everyone reading this has got one, unless you suspect you might be a brain in a vat being programmed with fake sensory inputs. It’s an intriguing theoEveryone reading this has got one, unless you suspect you might be a brain in a vat being programmed with fake sensory inputs. It’s an intriguing theory but it won’t help at all when you’re pulled over for speeding. “I’m just a brain in a vat, officer”.
So that thing you have there draped round your soul, yes, your very body – did you know that it’s like an explosive device waiting to go off at the slightest movement? It’s so offensive! Depending on the context.
For instance, on p155 we read:
Jock Sturges has been photographing the same nudist families in France year after year, watching the children grow into young adults. Sally Mann photographs her own children negotiating the turbulent waters of childhood.
This book was published in 1994 and in the last 24 years we have had such a tsunami of revelations about the prevalence of paedophilia that the very young nudes in these two photographers’ works are now alarming and very unsettling. (But still on sale at Amazon.)
How’s this for a story about the offensive qualities of the human form. A modest form of swimwear was created for Muslim women which got called the burkini – actually it’s nothing to do with the burka as it does not cover the face, but it covers everything else.
[image]
The burka had already been banned in France as you will know. But then the burkini was banned by various French resorts. What could possibly be the problem? The Independent newspaper explained:
The first city to announce the prohibition was Cannes, where mayor David Lisnard said he wanted to prohibit “beachwear ostentatiously showing a religious affiliation while France and places of religious significance are the target of terror attacks” to avoid “trouble to public order”.
So then you had the crazy sight of French policemen on the beach ordering Muslim women wearing the burkini to expose more of their bodies or face the judicial consequences. “You’re offending public decency by wearing too many clothes!”
This fits right into the chapter of this remarkable book called “Politic” – “the body as a site of contested meaning and value”. Boy, you can say that again.
*
So this book is stuffed full of 366 photos – “35 in colour, 331 in duotone” (yes, black & white) – of the human body in its many phases and attitudes, from the very gruesome
Felice Beato 1865 – Crucifixion of the Male Servant Sokichi who Killed the Son of his Boss and was Therefore Crucified. He Was 25 Years Old
to surrealistic fun in the 1930s and all the way to the pinnacle of straight and gay male and female beauty. It’s also stuffed with rather turgid and waffly prose consisting of statements of the obvious and statements of the indefinably abstruse with very little in between.
*
One of the most interesting chapters is called “Estrangement”, dealing with imperfect, disfigured, disabled, rejected, sick and dead human bodies. So here we have the bound Chinese foot, the Fijian cannibals with a fresh corpse, the hermaphrodite, elephantiasis due to scarlet fever, and a selecting of grossly deformed foetuses in big jars (always a crowd-pleaser). And let’s not forget
A Filipino Freak Of Seven Or Eight Years Old Having An Extra Pair Of Legs Protruding From The Pelvis, C 1900
We are then informed that
in the 19th century there was a brisk trade in such photographs of 'the other' : the circus freak, the bearded lady, Siamese twins, and so forth were popular subjects to be collected and traded
So all those sites on the internet specialising in the gross and the grotesque have a venerable pedigree.
A book like this demonstrates how our notions of what is decent and what is indecent mutate quite confusingly as the decades roll on by. I now think that the Victorian collectors of pornography would not be shocked by modern porn; instead they would be delighted at the quality of the images. We 21st century people, however, might well be shocked at some Victorian practices :
Dead babies were another popular subject. Although to our thinking there is something of the macabre in this practice, people in the 19th century seemed to find much solace in it, as they did also in the so-called spirit photograph, a portrait of the widow or widower with an image of the dearly departed (manufactured by double exposure) hovering reassuringly over the shoulder.
(If you’re interested, just google “Victorian babies in coffins”)
* In 2016 Lucy Martin became a weather presenter on the BBC – here she is
[image]
I’m used to her now but at first she kind of shocked me. Okay, not kind of, she did shock me! I’m still trying to work out why....more
This enormous beast of a book, 1,117 pages long, consists of photos of everything that happened between the years 1899 and 1999 – a slight exaggeratioThis enormous beast of a book, 1,117 pages long, consists of photos of everything that happened between the years 1899 and 1999 – a slight exaggeration, but it sure seems so. Each year is allotted between ten and twenty photos, and although I can’t claim total accuracy here, by my reckoning 78% of all these photos depict human misery in one form or another.
Leafing through this vast book, easily the heaviest out of the thousand or so I have in my possession, I tremble at the accumulation of the clear evidence that I, in my life, have been the recipient of great, undeserved, statistically unlikely, and almost unnoticed, good fortune. I’ve been so fantastically lucky. Why me? I was born well after all the great wars, in a country which had given up its empire and had no need to conscript its young men. My country had already created a cradle-to-grave welfare state – the great dreams of the socialists were everyday reality for me : free universal schooling (up to and including university – no student fees or loans for me), free (at the point of delivery) universal health care; a police force which is not allowed to arrest me arbitrarily, and one which is relatively free of corruption; a military which does not interfere with the democratic process; shops which refund goods! Insurance companies which pay up promptly! Streets paved! Electricity which never shuts off! Clean water! Almost no guns! Very few murders! Elections free and fair and no vote-rigging! Plentiful libraries! Even my job is (touch wood) secure (I think the clinical trial business is here to stay).
I have lived through all of this and taken it for granted – this is my country, this is my life, in other places things were different, I always knew that. But really, for 99.9% of all the human beings who have ever got themselves born on this spinning planet in this backwater of a minor galaxy out on the rim of what we consider to be the universe, it hasn’t been like that at all. No, not at all. These photos show what it has been like which is the opposite of the above list – revolution, massacre, assassination, drought, disease, and the four horsemen of the apocalypse clattering about the school playground.
I can’t say I recommend this extraordinary catalogue of how human beings can fuck up each other so brilliantly well there ought to be a medal for it, but if you want a visceral violent fast-acting no-punches-pulled photographic history of the psychopathic 20th century, this is it. You will be devastated.
Note : If you buy it from a shop you will need a strong friend with you....more
Photography is the crossroad where opposing ideas smash right into each other because all the lights are on green permaNICE PICS, SHAME ABOUT THE TEXT
Photography is the crossroad where opposing ideas smash right into each other because all the lights are on green permanently. It's realistic, it's artificial, it's revolutionary, it's reactionary, it's exploitative, it's celebratory, it's pornographic, it's erotic, it's banned, it's compulsory, it's banal, it's exciting, it's everywhere, and anyone can do it. And you do it don't you - come on, it's no use looking at me like that, I know you do. It's the democratic art. Looking through this book I was thrilled by the greatness of many of these photos, bemused by the ordinariness of others, and depressed by the pretentious codswollopy wankery in the explicatory comment. Taken at random:
one of his pictures seemed very much like another, but that was deliberate.
Prince's photograph is a copy of an image based upon illusion and myth, and meditates upon both the creation of images and their consumption within our society.
the artist sets up a continual dialogue with the viewer about the nature of water and how we might regard the surface of a river as a reflection of ourselves and our collective psyches.
Over and over, our author Gerry Badger presents such tired old cliches as if they were gems of insight, as if they were actually worth writing down in the first place. I think writing about photography must damage the brain, I don't know why.
This is a beautiful looking book, with great layout and a feel of generosity in its acceptance of so many genres of photos - and what an electric charge I got on seeing (page 14 and 15) the very first photograph of a person (in 1838 or 39, a guy in the Boulevard du Temple having his shoes shined) - and here it is:
[image] and how horrible is the photo by Lee Miller of a Nazi suicide on p 97 - and - and - well, I could list half of the book like that - but eventually I had to give up reading the text, the photos pulled me up and the writing pushed me down.
So this is the ideal book to look through carefully when you're next in a bookshop! Hide behind one of the taller shelves, they won't notice.
Actually, in my local Nottingham Waterstones, they have sofas for you to sit down and browse, howsabout that. There must be more books like this one then.
(Five stars for the photos, 1 star for the text, average - 3 I guess).
This was pretty good but the aesthetic and philosophical implications revealed were so complex that I had to lie down with a cool damp towel over my hThis was pretty good but the aesthetic and philosophical implications revealed were so complex that I had to lie down with a cool damp towel over my head after every paragraph. ...more
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