Venice is where my passion for photography first gripped me. I’d never taken my own photographs before that. I’d looked at plenty of photographs and had occasion to judge a few, and I’d even worked with photographers. However, the written word was definitely my medium. In 1951 I was travelling to Venice. I even had a camera with me, a gift from my mother. For the longest time it had been screwed onto the top of her microscope, but she now had a new one. I didn’t really know how to use it; it got lost, and yet somehow, I always managed to get it back. Even in Naples, where I’d left it in a taxi, the driver brought it back to my hotel.

It was raining in Venice. The light was incredibly beautiful, and suddenly I was convinced of the need to photograph it: someone had to photograph it. I called up a few photographers. No-one was interested. Bob (Robert) Capa in Paris simply said, “Why the hell don’t you take a picture yourself, you idiot?”.

I went to a photo shop and had them put a roll of film into my worn-out Contax. The assistant advised me to wait until the rain had stopped before taking photographs, which I thought was idiotic; after all, I’d been around photographers long enough to know that they worked even in the rain. What’s more, the leaflet inside the box said, “1/50th with aperture 5.6 in dull weather”. Naturally, I didn’t have a light meter, and this was well before automatic cameras.

I was all excited. I went and stood in the spot where I wanted to take my photographs, a street corner where people went past in a way I found interesting. I adjusted the camera and pressed the release as soon as everything was exactly the way I wanted it. It was like a revelation. To realize in an instant what had been simmering away inside you for so long, capturing it the moment it took on the shape I felt was right. After that, there was no stopping me. I went everywhere, standing on bridges, in church entrance, on corners that looked promising. And then there was no film left. I bought another and decided there and then to become a photographer. I kept the decision a secret because it seemed ridiculous, and everyone knew I never took photographs. I had to find my own way by whatever means, serve my apprenticeship by myself. It took roughly a year, and it was difficult, and good. In 1955, four years after I’d taken those first photographs, I was given an assignment by L’Oeil, an art magazine for which I’d started taking artists’ portraits. “Mary McCarthy is in Venice writing a book for us. We need a photographer who can find views of Venice that match the backdrops painted by the venetian artist that Mary is writing about. Are you interested?”

Soon I was on a train from Paris to Venice. I didn’t know anyone in the city, and I’d been told the writer Mary McCarthy could be difficult. I don’t recall how I got from the Stazione Santa Lucia to the small pensione I was booked into. The room was very small, with a greenish tint, and it smelled of mould. I would have to look for something else. But first I had to set off and explore the city, and so for hours I’d walk around aimlessly, just looking until I was obsessed by the sheer joy of seeing and discovering a place. I had of course devoured books about Venice, painting and history in preparation. My inner reservoir was filled.

At the appointed hour and with butterflies in my stomach I met the formidable Mary McCarthy at the Café Quadri, deep in conversation with the legendary Bernard Berenson. She was beautiful, with her hair brushed straight back, a very clear profile. It bothered me that I was interrupting their conversation, so escaping seemed like the best option. As quickly as I could, I said, “I’m Inge Morath, and perhaps it’s just best if you tell me what you want from my photos. Then we can meet again in a week or so and take a look at the work, OK?” I added that Georges Bernier from L’Oeil had told me more or less what it was about; also that I still didn’t know where I was staying, so perhaps she should give me her phone number. She did so, and then resumed her conversation with Berenson, seemingly relieved that I wouldn’t be detaining her any further.

So now what? Somewhat aimlessly I walked across the bridge to the rather empty Zattare Promenade on the other side of Grand Canal to calm myself by looking at the view across the wide canal to the Giudecca, where Leonardo is said to have painted Mona Lisa. Sitting on a landing stage jutting out into the canal was a painter in a blue-yellow straw boater, his legs dangling from the piece. I took his photograph, even thought he had nothing to do with my theme. He saw me, and I explained I was taking photograph for a book. Also, that I was interested in what he was painting. He packed up, came up onto the quayside, and introduced himself: ‘Bobo Ferruzzi’. The painting was nice, with bold colours and a lightness influence perhaps by Tintoretto. Bobo offered to accompany me on a few of my Venetian forays. He loved his city and knew of a thought and nooks and crannies no stranger could ever know. His father was a well-known antiques dealer, and his mother was descended from the ancient Venetian Balbi dynasty.

What a huge stroke of luck I had had. Bobo found me a better pensione; and he knew of palazzi along the grand canal with empty rooms, their windows opening up onto unusual views. He showed me secret gardens behind the Palazzi (one of the most beautiful belonged to his father), and he loved talking about painting. As each of us was in love with someone else, our mutual attraction was based on an unstrained friendship, with just enough appeal never to be dull. A little buzz in your blood is never a bad thing when taking in Venice.

A week later I met Mary McCarthy at her rented apartment.  The first thing that struck me was a goldfish bowl containing very pale and rather tired looking fish. According to Mary, the signora maintained that the fish lived best off coins tossed into the water. We say down in a large room with a very beautiful stucco ceiling. Several pieces of furniture were covered with antimacassars. Lots of things were lopsided – the casual negligence of nobility. I showed Mary my photographs, which in the meantime I’d had enlarged, and she was satisfied. We met up now and again in San Marco, talked about painting and architecture, and sometimes about America, of which I know so little; Mary was so very American.

The duena at my pensione knew a gondolier. I’d previously told her I wanted to take photographs from the water. He was willing to give me a good price for a whole morning or afternoon. It was delightful; we gondola-ed our way down countless canals, past gondola workshops, open windows with women mending mattresses, moorings with funeral gondolas, narrow streets, and fish markets. Of course, we also steered our way down the grand canal with its pesky motorboats. On one occasion I even visited his family. I can’t recall how many people were living in that small house near the Fondamente Nove. On the ground floor they were making glass beads, young girls hunched over Bunsen burners. Outside, women sat unravelling wool, knitting and knitting till the last of the evening light.

Walking down the alleyways in the Fondamente Nove and looking up, I could see laundry flapping on washing lines tethered from one chimney stack to another, each as if borrowed from a Carpaccio painting. The windows everywhere were proportioned with noble elegance, the low-set doorways marble-framed; statues all about brought street corners to life, like the turbaned moor seemingly squinting at a woman’s swirling skirt as she walks past. Cats everywhere, stretching, peering from recessed windows, huddling in mewing bundles around feeding bowls.

Inside the museums it was often quite dark, and your eyes took a while to adapt, which was good as it forced you to look closely. Titian, Tintoretto, Bellini. I enjoyed nothing more than sitting in the Scuola degli Schiavoni, immersing myself in Carpaccio. I was almost always on my own. Or spending time in the company of Tiepolo, and the end of the world.

By the evening my feet felt tired, and even in my sleep I found myself still walking across countless bridges, the waves of the canals now turned to stone.

There is no end to exploring Venice. Bobo showed me the old ghetto and the new; tall buildings; a synagogue; children on a merry-go-round. I found myself in all sorts of kitchens, with women seated outside. I scootered about on Bobo’s vespa to villas in the Brenta Valley. Marble statues rising from trimmed boxwood hedges, weeping willows framing the Villa de la Malcontenta. Who was she, I wonder, the malcontent behind the Palladian façade?

I walked alongside a gondola as it slowly rowed its way to the San Michele cemetery with a coffin and wreaths. I happened upon a vaporetto stop just as a boat was casting off for Burano, and hopped on board.

Burano was like a rustic Venice: small canals, low-built houses, all brightly coloured. It was fish-market day, with wares laid out on coarse wooded trestles: the trading and bartering and arguing. A young girl sat in a barque waiting for buyers for her roasted pumpkin seeds. Young lace-makers demanded I buy their lace before photographing them, and they were right, of course. Two men were playing cards beneath a canvas hanging above the alley like a giant sail. A restaurant served a wonderful unforgettable risotto con vongole. On the wat back I alighted at Torcello and spent a long time sitting in front of the incredible golden mosaics.

There was still plenty of work. Processions, the Festa del Redentore, for which they constructed a special pontoon bridge from Santa Maria della Salute across the Grand Canal to the Piazza San Marco. Then, late in the evening, firework displays that exploded into the bight in honour of the Redentore; families in boats and gondolas clustering along the Giudecca Canal, picnics on board.

My train left early in the morning. Of course I shall return, I am not finished, not by any means. How delighted I would be to have captured with my camera something that moved me, like the woman in front of the gate of the Furstenberg Palace, her elbows folded behind her back, or the shoes forgotten in front of a fountain, everyday life in all its precarious beauty.

Material taken from Magnum Photos website.

In other news, Rick Owens Fall 2021 Men's. “I’m always conscious of my own aggression. And the older that I get, I feel like I should have reached a level of serenity that I just haven’t; I get impatient, I get itchy, I snap at people sometimes… Aggression is something that I’m fascinated with because I’m constantly conscious of wrestling with it, personally. And I think that that’s true of every man.”

In this long-unpublished essay, the photographer reflects on the allure of the city, its hidden gardens and waterways, and the role it played in sparking her photographic career.

Cristina de Middel’s intimate portraits of men in low-lit rooms slowly draw us into a desire that drives them into the arms of prostitutes. It is here, in these dark corners hidden away from it all that men of all walks of life find themselves inextricably drawn to a fleeting encounter with a local sex worker.

For de Middel, the photographic reportage of prostitution had been reduced to a series of visual clichés revolving around women, sex, and capitalism. For all of the stories told time and again, the identity and lives of the clients was all but invisible. The Spanish-Belgian photographer, who now lives between Brazil and Mexico, has always enjoyed subverting the paradigms of the status quo to provide new sources of insight and understanding.

The ongoing project, Gentlemen’s Club, began in Rio de Janeiro with a simple advert placed two in free newspapers, Extra and O Dia. de Middel offered to pay clients for an hour of their time, during which she would photograph and interview them in a local hotel room. The response was overwhelming. With more than 100 people responding willing to participate, de Middel recognized a much larger story unfolding before her eyes.

Adopting a global perspective, de Middel decided to expand the project to cover eight major prostitution hubs on every continent around the world, bar Australasia. Since launching the project in June 2015, de Middel has completed the first leg of her journey: Rio, Havana, Paris, and Bangkok. Plans for Mumbai, Kiev or Moscow, Las Vegas, and Lagos are on deck, with de Middel focused on the key cities where photographers have traditionally gone to make stories about prostitution.

This August, de Middel returned from a three-week trip to Bangkok – a city where prostitution flourishes despite being de jureillegal. With revenues estimated to be worth US$6.4 billion in 2015, sex work is one of the leading contributors to the Thai GDP. For Gentlemen’s Club, de Middel focuses exclusively on cisheterosexual encounters, although she recognizes the industry is extremely diverse. The red light districts of Bangkok cater to any number of penchants and propensities inside the brothels, massage parlors, restaurants, and specialty bars.

Here, de Middel took a different approach to finding subjects. “I ask friends, or people I meet if they know ‘someone’ who uses a prostitute’s services – because I cannot ask them about themselves. They find people for me, because I am a woman,” she laughs. “These men all use prostitutes, but they have to find a friend who wants to pose instead of themselves.”

De Middel got her start on the project after meeting an art handler at Photo Bankgok known for discussing his dalliances. Together, they took a taxi to an area that services local men. Along the way, they struck up a conversation with their driver, who himself agreed to participate. “Then he called three more friends. It was like pulling a thread. Once there is one trusting you, then they all start popping up – but the first one is the hardest,” de Middel remembers.

Once at the hotel, de Middel assumes the position that the client traditionally occupies during the encounter: first booking the room for $10-$20 an hour, then paying the men the same amount they would spend on a prostitute.

“There were a few that realized what was going on. Right at the moment where I give the money, they go, ‘Ahhh, okay,’” de Middel observes knowingly.

“Most of the time, they take the money and they are happy about it because in the end, the motivation is the same as the woman’s: they do it because they need the money. They don’t do it because they want to do it. There are many clients who would never accept money to be in a picture, because they don’t need it.”

In Bangkok, de Middel worked with a translator to explain the idea of project to the men. Then, after signing a model release, she showed them examples from previous shoots so that they understand the concept of her work. Each session is broken up into two parts: first the portrait, then the interview.

For the portrait session, de Middel asked her subjects to pretend that they were in the hotel room at the very beginning of their encounter with a prostitute. “There are some who go to sex workers because they need affection and others who are really obsessed with sex. I tried to understand what kind of clients they are. It’s quite psychological,” de Middel observes.

Following the shoot, de Middel conducts a simple and straightforward interview that covers the client’s history, frequency, motivation, and cost for visiting prostitutes. She also asks them about their marital status, if they have children, and if their wives know about their visits to prostitutes.

“In Bangkok, half of the local men said they got drunk and their friends took them there. The others said they went out of curiosity. Prostitution is everywhere. There are different areas for Japanese clients, Arab clients, Western clients, and local clients. It is so accessible and cheap that I understand every man is like, ‘Why not try?’” de Middel notes.

“Then there were the Western tourists. All of them said that that they had their first prostitute encounter in Bangkok. Almost all of them said that they got tricked. They said they were drunk in a bar and thought that they had seduced a woman – just like that. They went to her house and then when they woke up in the morning they have to pay a huge amount of money, or she would call the police.”

Though the interviews were brief and direct, they provided many men with an unexpected opportunity to speak from the heart. “You never know what is going to happen. Sometimes they reply with one word and others are waiting for someone to ask them and the room becomes a confessional and they can say everything to a woman,” de Middel reveals.

“There are people you feel have the need to talk, so they project on me what they would say to their wife. I try not to project any judgment. I don’t want to blame them. I just want to understand. They have guilt in front a of a woman but when they are in front of a man, they don’t feel guilty. They show off. It’s really a gender-specific reaction.”

For de Middel, the portraits that make up Gentleman’s Clubare a form of visual justice, and an opportunity to go inside a very well known world and see what has largely been hidden from the public dialogue on the subject of prostitution. For as much as sex workers are studied at length, there appears to be a corresponding absence of attention paid to the clients.

“It’s quite exciting to break into that world and see it the other way around. It is a different approach to how things happen – and most of the time, it is forbidden to a woman,” de Middel says.

“Men can get this sort of information, they can go themselves, they can ask their fathers, brothers, whoever – but women, are you going to ask your husband, your brother, your father or just go in the streets and ask a prostitute how it is? Never going to happen. There is a part of the information, that is buried for women and that’s what I tried to find.”

Gentlemen’s Clubexposes a story that few have told about the “world’s oldest profession.” De Middel acknowledges, “These men want to stay invisible. The conversations were so deep. They could be anyone. It is two realities for two genders. If that information was available to wives, the idea of family might change. I understand why men are scared to talk openly about this.”

Cristina de Middel’s ongoing project, Gentlemen's Club, focuses on prostitution’s less well documented side: men. In the latest instalment of the global series the photographer travelled to Thailand, where prostitution and the associated industries constitute a sizeable share of the nation's GDP.

CRISTINA DE MIDDEL: GENTLEMEN’S CLUB BANGKOK

The Monaco Grand Prix is one of the most prestigious Formula 1 racing events in the world, drawing an extravagant crowd to the French Riviera year after year. On Sunday, bystanders watched the cars fly across the Circuit de Monaco, which runs through the streets of Monte Carlo. Martin Parr photographed the luxurious parties leading up to race day where champagne flowed on yachts packed with rich and famous spectators, as well as the hillside sidelines where mere mortals caught glimpses through binoculars.

“The first thing to say is that Monaco is mobbed by all classes, in all locations, from the expensive matches by the side of the track to the precarious hill overlooking it where thousands of people literally hang on to the hillside,” says Parr. “I love the way the track opens up after the races, and becomes one of the main social points.”

The Monaco Grand Prix (French: Grand Prix de Monaco) is a Formula One motor race held annually on the Circuit de Monaco on the last weekend in May. Run since 1929, it is widely considered to be one of the most important and prestigious automobile races in the world, and is one of the races—along with the Indianapolis 500 and the 24 Hours of Le Mans—that form the Triple Crown of Motorsport. The circuit has been called "an exceptional location of glamour and prestige".

The race is held on a narrow course laid out in the streets of Monaco, with many elevation changes and tight corners as well as a tunnel, making it one of the most demanding tracks in Formula One. In spite of the relatively low average speeds, the Monaco circuit is a dangerous place to race and often involves the intervention of a safety car. It is the only Grand Prix that does not adhere to the FIA's mandated 305-kilometre (190-mile) minimum race distance for F1 races.

The Monaco Grand Prix was part of the pre-Second World War European Championship and was included in the first World Championship of Drivers in 1950. It was designated the European Grand Prix two times, 1955 and 1963, when this title was an honorary designation given each year to one Grand Prix race in Europe. Graham Hill was known as "Mr. Monaco" due to his five Monaco wins in the 1960s. Ayrton Senna won the race more times than any other driver, with six victories, winning five races consecutively between 1989 and 1993.

Martin Parr captures the wealthy spectators at the prestigious Formula 1 event on the French Riviera.

CHAMPAGNE ON THE SIDELINES: MARTIN PARR AT THE MONACO GRAND PRIX

On May 28th, 2013, a small group of environmentalists occupying Gezi Park, in Istanbul’s Taksim Square, were challenged by police who teargassed activists and set fire to their tents. The protests, which had been ongoing since April, had originated in opposition to plans for razing the park in order to build a shopping mall. As the police moved in the protestors held their ground and over the following days their numbers grew. A standoff developed around Taksim Square and the police crackdown continued, with the coming weeks seeing the repeated and liberal use of tear gas, water cannons, and plastic bullets. What had begun as an environmental protest to save a small park coalesced, in the face of what was seen as unwarranted state violence, into a national anti-government uprising.

Magnum nominee Emin Özmen was in Gezi Park to witness the violent opening phases of what was to become a country-wide expression of dissatisfaction with the status quo. His photos and documentary from Gezi capture the hope, confusion, unity and violence of the weeks that changed modern Turkey.

How important were those few days in shaping the recent history of Turkey?

The Gezi protests were, in my point of view, a major turning point and a challenge for Turkish democracy. From the first day in Taksim, I felt that these would not just be simple demonstrations. There was a revolutionary breath in the air. The protests grew very rapidly. The unbelievable violence of the police response – the massive use of water cannons and tear gas – only increased anger and fanned protests in the heart of Istanbul.

It was about more than protecting a park from destruction, these events quickly became anti-government demonstrations, all around Turkey. Gezi became the catalyst for a wider sense of awareness. It was a revolt against the increased authoritarianism of the system and the allegations of mass corruption inside the government.

How did you come to be in the park on the day in question?

When the Gezi protests began, I was working for one of the biggest newspapers in Turkey as a staff photographer. I was usually pretty free to do the jobs I wanted to, but the newspaper – like most Turkish media at that time – refused to send me to Gezi to document what was going on.

That opened my eyes to many things and it was in general a defining moment for the press in Turkey. Many in the mainstream media did not relay information, or they did so in a biased and partisan way. Even worse, as police brutality in Istanbul spiralled out of control on one night, CNN Turkey chose to air a documentary on penguins…

I decided to cover the events anyway, to follow and document everything for myself to keep as historical evidence, even though I was sure it would not be published by my employers.

From the first day, in order to follow the events as closely as possible, I pitched my tent in the middle of the park, just as the demonstrators did. It was not a militant act, I was doing my job as a photojournalist. I covered the events from the side of the demonstrators as well as the police. It was important to me to show that the police were fatigued and under extreme pressure, and that there was disagreement among them over the way demonstrators were being treated. I spent my days with a mask on, drowned in a cloud of tear gas. I didn’t fall asleep until my strength abandoned me.

One month after the events, having seen that the newspaper for which I was working had not published anything about these demonstrations, I decided to resign and start my freelance career by founding my own photographic agency.

Clearly, what happened at Gezi Park is hard to isolate from the last five years of events in Turkey. How central were those early days in creating the dynamic we see today in the country?

From these early events emerged a new opposition based on humanist values. Suddenly, hundreds of thousands of people, who did not see their views reflected by any of the traditional political parties, felt heard and represented by this new movement.

This new breath, however, was quickly suffocated by the violence of the government’s response. The government has never given in or conceded anything to the protestors in any way.

Events at Gezi marked a turning point in the way Erdoğan ruled the country. He felt extremely threatened by this new movement. He sees any form of dissent as treason. During the protest, at a party rally outside Ankara, he said “Nobody can intimidate us. We don’t take orders from anybody except God.”

It was the beginning of something, but the events that have taken place in Turkey since then have killed that movement. After Gezi came the rebirth of the Kurdish conflict, the elections of 2015, bloody and repeated terror attacks, the attempted coup, violent repression, purges, the state of emergency decreed, the change of constitution following the referendum, the snap presidential elections… A spiral of brutal and stressful events has struck Turkey since the  protests. The zeal of 2013 has faded, and the hope too.

I remember very well that people were chanting, ‘This is only the beginning, the struggle continues’, from the first day of the protests until the last. Now, when I think about it, they weren’t wrong. That was just the beginning, the beginning of a new era. But certainly not the one they had in mind at the time.

What is there, on looking back, that you still find to be inspiring from those days?

What impressed me during Gezi was discovering the power of social media. The demonstrators organized themselves very quickly and showed solidarity. Even though there were many different groups among the protestors, any sign of political affiliation was forbidden. They communicated in an effective way thanks to twitter in particular. There were for example about ten barricades near Besiktas’ stadium, near Taksim square: if the police arrived on the spot and began to destroy the first barricades then the demonstrators were warned on twitter and immediately began to erect new barricades. This is just one example among many. I have never witnessed scenes of violence or tension between protestors – on the contrary, I only witnessed it when I was documenting the police.

There were also many people who volunteered to provide medical support. One of the largest and most prestigious hotels, located directly opposite Gezi Park in Taksim, even became a shelter for the protesters who were escaping from the fierce police intervention. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan had repeatedly criticized this hotel for opening its doors to protesters.

These last five years and the exceptional and unfortunate events that have taken place in my country have made me nostalgic for a time when everything was still possible, when all hope was still allowed. Today, to many people, protest seems unthinkable. Fear and resignation are paralysing. I remember back in 2013, during the protests, people were saying of Erdoğan : “How can a whole society become a prisoner of the will of one person, of one person’s mood?” – We are now in 2018 and that sentiment may make even more sense today.

"Today, to many people, protest seems unthinkable. Fear and resignation are paralysing."

Magnum nominee Emin Özmen on the hope embodied by the 2013 popular uprising, and the repression that followed.

EMIN ÖZMEN: TURKEY’S GEZI PARK PROTESTS, FIVE YEARS ON

Lu Nan is a contemporary photographer who was born in Beijing, China in 1962. After working for National Pictorial for 5 years, he decided to become an independent photographer. From 1989 to 1990, he shot a series of images of the living conditions of patients in Chinese mental hospitals. From 1992 to 1996, he shot a series of images about Catholicism in China. From 1996 to 2004, he shot a series images of the daily life of Tibetan farmers. Lu Nan is known as "the most legendary photographer in China". He is also the only Chinese contemporary photographer chosen by Aperture magazine as a topic colon.

Lu is constantly invited to participate in numerous exhibitions; however, he is extremely selective about the exhibitions he is involved with. Lu also refused to have his portrait taken by others, so it’s very rare to see any photo documentations of him. For fifteen years, Lu has been leading a life that is almost like a monk, spending his time working and studying, as he believes that “good stuff comes out of reticence.”

Since 1989, Lu Nan has spent 15 years completing his trilogy of photographic series: The Forgotten People, China's Catholicism and Four Seasons in Tibet. These images have allowed Nan to place himself in the international spotlight. But perhaps more importantly, he became one of the first people who exposed another side of Chinese society; people often considered outcasts. “I just respect them and care about them… They are the same as us,” said Lu as a reminder that all human beings are equal and deserve dignity. His black and white photographs depict people within their own environment by using a rather straight glance, which is yet associated with delicate contrasts and elegant compositions.

From 1989 to 1990, Lu Nan has closely contacted 14,000 people who had different kinds of mental conditions in 38 hospitals of 10 provinces and cities in China as part of the series Forgotten People. He also visited hundreds of patients’ families to complete it. Lu Nan showed the living conditions of a group of people who are forgotten by society in a powerful and real way by photography.

From 1992 to 1996, Lu Nan shot the second part of his trilogy, called On the Road in 10 Provinces and Cities. During this time period, Lu Nan visited more than 100 churches, but he tried to focus on the daily life of people in the church to show how they practice love and faith, because he believes that "is the real church in their heart". Although It is a hard learning process to accept the happiness and misfortune in life, people finally found themselves in the process of establishing their own value.

From 1996 to 2004, Lu Nan shot one of his most important photography works, titled Four Seasons in Tibet in Tibet. During these 8 years, he spent at least half of his time living in Tibet with local people. He also worked more than 4000 meters high above sea level. Although the working condition is very harsh, he still returned so he could capture every touching moment in Tibet.

Lu Nan makes a heart-breaking study of the neglected psychiatric patients in China.

LU NAN: THE FORGOTTEN PEOPLE, THE STATE OF CHINESE PSYCHIATRIC WARDS

The invention of the ‘teenager’ in the 1950s was a global, almost simultaneous phenomenon. Defined by groups of youths rebelling against the expectations of their parents and wider society in their behaviour, attitudes and clothing, movements sprang up in America, Australia, Japan and beyond. Identifiable by their clothes and the music they’d play, these youths revelled in a post-war freedom not enjoyed by the previous generation.

In the United Kingdom, one facet of this newly emerging youth culture was working class youngsters adopting the formal and flamboyant tailoring of Edwardian dress. Known as the ‘Teds’ (nodding to the Edwardian era their look was borrowed from) their jackets – often sumptuous velvets – had wide notched lapels accessorized with a skinny tie or bootlace, and they wore brothel creeper shoes on their feet. “The Ted swaggered with it all out front, male sexuality overt,” wrote journalist Richard Smith. As well as a way of dress and a style of music, owing to several high-profile incidents, the Teds were also associated with wayward and yobbish behaviour and public fights that led them to being banned from some venues.

Trends die, music moves on and teenagers become adults. More youth culture movements would follow, but with them would come a surprising phenomenon of recycling. In a move that on the surface would seem somewhat at odds with the maverick trailblazer idea of youth in revolt, many youth movements have had subsequent second waves. For example, Brit Pop in the 90s borrowed many of its fashion cues from the music and social movement of Northern Soul in the 70s. Some twenty years after the arrival of the Teds, a second wave of young people, who were often not yet born when the original wave hit, began aping the style, music culture and attitudes of their Ted forebears.

Chris Steele-Perkins, along with writer Richard Smith, were commissioned by the now-long defunct New Society magazine to cover the second wave of the Teds for a story, which grew into a self-motivated study of the British youth movement over several years. Steele-Perkins, who at the time was donning a more relaxed style and long hair, remembers the first wave of Teds when he was a child in the 1950s: “Each town had its own Teds who hung around on street corners smoking and sort of grunting at people. My father would rail against them and threaten to turn me over to them if I didn’t behave myself. Maybe that helped to drive my curiosity when I was older.”

“The gear: it’s smart; it’s great stuff; it’s much smarter than flared gear. The hair: it’s tidy; it’s not long and straggly. You walk down the street and you get all the old people – the original people who was there in the fifties – looking at you and saying, ‘Ah, look there’s Teddy Boys’.

You get great screws from people. You get people looking at you as if you were really brilliant like, as if you were really great,” said a Ted who spoke to Richard Smith.

Since the Teds put so much effort into crafting their look, they were expectedly keen to be photographed – “Well, they weren’t there to be ignored; that wasn’t their vision of themselves in life,” says Chris Steele-Perkins. However, this presented its own challenges as the photographer had to work around their propensity to peacock in order to capture genuinely candid shots. “You had to then get to the point where they didn’t just pose for you,” he adds.

What Steele-Perkins’s photography shows, corroborated by Richard Smith’s writing from the time, is that the Teds second wave was more than just a way of dressing but a lifestyle. We see evidence of the characteristic Teds attitude filtering through to the way youths behave, socialize, interact with and even romance each other in his photographs. Chris Steele-Perkins muses on what separates a subcultural youth movement from a fashion trend:

“It’s the roundedness of it, it has a slang, a code, a dress code, a sort of knowledge of certain areas, esoteric areas that might be rockabilly music, for example. With (1970s UK music and culture movement) Northern Soul, it was obscure songwriters, for example. It could include a dance style, or a way to dress – all those little cultural tick boxes. It becomes part of their identity. You’re a somebody as opposed to the bricklayer or the butcher’s boy; you’re this guy that people think look fancy and they might be frightened of you just because of the clothing you’re wearing.”

One critique often lobbed at the study of fashion and teen culture is that it is frivolous, but, as Steele-Perkins explains, it, like an anthropological study of the teen species, reveals a significant amount about the society from which it emerges. “What I tried to do was to document a subculture, and quite a major one in British society,” says Steele-Perkins. “I went into their homes and documented them in all kinds of contexts, and the clothes, in the end, become relatively peripheral to the whole thing. I’m not interested in them per se, they’re part of the package. And it’s like most things, leather jackets, you know, it all fades away. It’s much more about identity and who we are.”

This attitude is emblematic of Steele-Perkin’s lifelong photographic approach; it’s what draws him to photograph the subjects he does: families, sports, cultural gatherings, microcosms. “That’s why I photograph England, in particular,” he says. “All my working life I’ve been drawn to these small worlds which have the whole world in them. It could be the Teds, it could be Holkham estate (a private aristocratic estate in North Norfolk); it’s pretty similar in terms of it being a world within a world with its own rules and its own codes.”

Chris Steele-Perkins on why photographing teen subcultures is so much more than style over substance.

Yael Martínez, a former Magnum Foundation fellow and recipient of The World Press Photo Award for long-term projects – as well as nominations for the Prix Pictet and the ICP Infinity Awards – has, since 2013 been exploring the tangible and spiritual impact of violence on families in Mexico, including his own. The photographer’s loss of three family members to organized crime set him on a path of exploring the deleterious effects of the drug trade upon his native state of Guerro, and Mexico at large. Here Martínez discusses rendering dreamscapes in photographs, the benefits of a multi-media approach to a long-term project and transforming the destruction caused by bereavement into something generative.

Could you tell us about your path into photography, and at what point an interest became a profession, and how that profession then became what appears now to be more of a mission with your work? 

I discovered that I wanted to become a photographer when I saw the work of Josef Koudelka and W. Eugene Smith. At the time I was just a boy and I had never held a camera. I took my first photographs when I was 17 years old, with a plastic camera that belonged to my sister, which was the only camera that we had in our family. With those photos I tried to make a story and applied to study Visual Arts at a university in Mexico, but I was rejected because I did not have the knowledge or skills to become an artist.

I realized that we are not born with these skills, but we can learn them. Art can be taught.

After taking up classes on commercial photography in a technical college in Mexico, I started working as an assistant to an architectural photographer – and did that for two years. In 2006 started working alone, trying to make a living. With the money that I earned I was able to buy my first digital equipment: a camera, a lens, and a computer.

After a year in the States I returned to Mexico and started working on several personal projects; these projects helped me enter into different photography programs that helped shape and develop my work as a photographer. Two of these programs took place at Centro de la Imagen in Mexico City, and La fototeca nacional de Pachuca. But the ones that really defined me as a photographer were at the Manuel Alvarez Bravo´s Center and The Center for the Arts of San Agustin. Both created by Francisco Toledo in Oaxaca, Mexico. Considered one of the most important artists in the country, he is also known for his work as a social activist. He is responsible for opening up opportunities to Mexicans to study arts, regardless of their social status.

Thanks to these spaces in Oaxaca I have had the opportunity and privilege of being mentored by great names in photography such as Mary Ellen Mark, Antoine d’Agata, Charles Harbutt, Maya Goded, Joan Liftin, Gerardo Montiel Klint, Eniac Martinez, Pablo Ortiz Monasterio and – in 2019 – I was fortunate enough to be selected as one of the nine fellows from around the world to be part of the Magnum Foundation Photography and Social Justice Fellowship with Fred Ritchin and Susan Meiselas as my mentors.

"My work focuses on communities fractured by organized crime, in a physical and psychological sense. I am trying to create work that represents the connection between absence and presence"

Your best-known project – for which you have won numerous international awards – is La Casa Que Sangra (The House That Bleeds) – could you explain the project’s origins, and its history to date? 

In 2013 I lost three members of my family, they 18, 19, and 23 years old. After that happened I began photographing my own family and others who had also had loved ones either killed or disappeared. I am exploring a path that will help me generate a historical memoir of our lifetime: a testimony through which I can discuss all these layers of reality that shape my country. My work focuses on communities fractured by organized crime, in a physical and psychological sense. I am trying to create work that represents the connection between absence and presence, and this state of invisibility in a symbolic manner, working with the concepts of pain, emptiness, absence, and forgetting. I’m interested in exploring the symbolic construction of the territory where violence penetrates all and this violence crosses the physical and spiritual space of those who inhabit it. The territory as an analogy to a body or space that could be a house, a person, a family, a community or a country.

I intend to create work that reflects the time we live in and responds not only to the Mexican identity, but also to the Latin American identity. I believe that when photography engages with education, culture, and politics we can create a better world with different voices and perspectives in life.

"I started working with the concept of resilience and how we as human beings can transform a black energy into a positive energy. A light in the darkness. That’s when Firefly came about"

Firefly – another project – sees you illustrating your photographs with pinpricks, allowing delicate threads of light to emerge from the images. Is that part of The House The Bleeds, or distinct from it. How much do your projects intertwine in your mind?

After six years of working with the families of missing people I was trying to explore a different perspective on the concept of resilience in these families and individuals that have been fighting  against violence in their communities for several years; and last year  I got  an invitation from a curator – his name is Claudi Carreras – to participate in an exhibition about the concept of night in Latin-America. I proposed the idea that I had in mind to him and started working with the concept of resilience and how we as human beings can transform a black energy into a positive energy. A light in the darkness. That’s when Firefly came about.

I would describe it as the next chapter of The House That Bleeds.

"I chose different approaches in order to develop an image for the audience that is as close as possible to my experience"

You used the idea the other day – when speaking with Magnum staff – of having different types of photography come together ‘like a choir’ – how important was it for you that your exploration of your own loss and Mexico’s situation wasn’t a ‘straightforward’ photo reportage project – that I included self-portraiture and illustration?

Photography has for me been a life experience; and I always try to develop an image can be close to that experience; that is way I chose different approaches in order to develop an image for the audience that is as close as possible to my experience.

Restrictions on what can be photographed can also help you to redefine an idea. What is important is to preserve the core of the idea and to follow our perception of reality. There is not one-reality, but there are many different ones existing in the same time. 

What specifically, can a non-literal approach help you capture that more descriptive one can’t?

I think as photographers we can work with both approaches, but what is more important is to create a specific experience when telling the story; this is the key to engaging the audience. 

"For me it was really important to transfer those images from the nightmares into photos"

There’s a surreal or dreamlike or surreal aspect to some of the images from THTB – is that intentional?

Yes, at the time I made the work my family and I were having nightmares and –  again – for me it was really important to transfer those images from the nightmares into photos.

I wanted to create a sense that reality and dreams are as one.

The disappearances of your brothers-in-law happened in the same vicinity as the – now – famous abduction and disappearing of students from Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College… How did that later event impact your own thoughts about documenting your family’s loss – if at all? Did it go from a personal project to a project about all of Mexico – or was it for you that big from the outset? 

In the beginning, I was trying to find a path to understand this tragedy in my own family, but after I began working with the other families the project expanded from a personal one to dealing with social issues all over Mexico.

The process of the project was slow. I have put all of my personal life into it and takes time to understand the situation you are going through.

How have the rest of your family responded to your work on this? Were there fears about your safety, objections to your publicizing this loss?

In the beginning we all had fears about our security, but after a year we decided to continue working with the project because for us was important to talk about these issues in our community and in the country at large; I always try to be honest and clear with all those I work with on the project because I see my family and the families who are opening the doors of their lives to me as my main collaborators.

The fears don’t disappear but the greater urgency is the need to confront these issues to give closure to grief, to transform the energy.

"Now, more than ever, we need to create an extensive narrative of our history to re-construct our past, present and future."

Speaking about the House that Bleeds – you have said that the project explores just one aspect of life in Mexico today that is fraying at the fabric of society. What are the other pressures you see on Mexican society, and how can photography – and art in general – be used to counter these negative pressures? 

We are living a complex time in Mexico and in different latitudes of the globe; there is so much poverty and social injustice, and there has been for so many years, that we are still dealing with all the bad decisions of the people that came before us. But I have learned all over these years that art and photography can be a vehicle for social transformation.

Mexico is a country that is photographed a lot, but often by outsiders – how important is it that a country’s struggles are documented also from within – and by extension, how do you feel about the majority of images of Mexico seen around the world? Is part of your motivation to add to or change that visual conversation? 

In the representation of the world, and of reality, we have found that we can only add a piece to the puzzle. To understand our world we need to add more perspectives and more ways to see our reality. Adding diversity and different perceptions will help us to create a better understanding of our reality and the times we are living through. It is necessary to create a dialog between more than one or two points of view. Now, more than ever, we need to create an extensive narrative of our history to re-construct our past, present and future.

2020 Magnum nominee Yael Martínez's depictions of dreams and nightmares give voice to experiences of loss amid the fraying of contemporary Mexican society.

YAEL MARTÍNEZ: THE SYMBOLIC CONSTRUCTION OF A TERRITORY WHERE VIOLENCE PENETRATES ALL

Love hotels are a uniquely different Japanese tradition. In a country where homes are small and families stay together because of high living costs, love hotels originally began as a private refuge for young couples still living at home, but have since become an integrated part of Japan’s increasingly futuristic landscape. The hotels are usually located near motorway interchanges and rooms can be rented by the hour or by the night. Everything is provided to meet the needs of couples, from condoms to sex-toys, and the rooms, considerably large by Japanese standards, are lavishly decorated according to various themes and settings. Access is gained electronically by using a credit card, often from an underground car park, and secrecy is of the utmost importance. The process is completely devoid of any and all human contact, apart from that shared by the couples themselves.

The history of love hotels (ラブホテル, rabu hoteru) can be traced back to the 17th century, in the early Edo period, when establishments appearing to be inns or teahouses with particular procedures for a discreet entry or even with secret tunnels for a discreet exit were built in Edo and in Kyoto. Modern love hotels developed from tea rooms (chaya (茶屋)) used mostly by prostitutes and their clients but also by lovers. After World War II, the term tsurekomi yado (連れ込み宿, lit. "bring-along inn") was adopted, originally for simple lodgings run by families with a few rooms to spare. These establishments appeared first around Ueno, Tokyo in part due to demand from Occupation forces, and boomed after 1958 when legal prostitution was abolished and the trade moved underground.

The introduction of the automobile in the 1960s brought with it the "motel" and further spread the concept. Japanese housing trends at the time were characterized by small homes with sleeping areas being used as common areas during the day and, as a result, little opportunity for parents to engage privately in intercourse. Married couples therefore began to frequent love hotels. By 1961, there were around 2,700 tsurekomi inns in central Tokyo alone. Hotels of the time featured unusual attractions such as swings and vibrating beds. The Meguro Emperor, the first castle-style love hotel, opened in 1973 and brought in an average of approximately ¥40 million monthly.

In 1984, the Businesses Affecting Public Morals Regulation Law placed love hotels under the jurisdiction of the police. For that reason, new hotels were built to avoid being classified as "love hotels"; the garish, over-the-top, bizarre designs and features of the past were significantly downplayed. Beginning in the 1980s, love hotels were also increasingly marketed toward women. A 2013 study showed that couples' selections of rooms at love hotels were made by women roughly 90% of the time. The Businesses Affecting Public Morals Regulation Law was amended in 2010, imposing even stricter limitations and blurring the line between regular hotels and love hotels. Keeping in mind legislation and a desire to seem more fashionable than competitors, an ever-changing palette of terms is used by hotel operators. Alternative names include "romance hotel", "fashion hotel", "leisure hotel", "amusement hotel", "couples hotel", and "boutique hotel".

Peter Marlow’s images explore the empty rooms of love hotels that play host to the intimate moments of Kyoto inhabitants.

From 1972 to 1975, Susan Meiselas spent her summers photographing and interviewing women who performed striptease for small town carnivals in New England, Pennsylvania, and South Carolina. As she followed carnivals from town to town, she portrayed the dancers on stage and off, photographing their public performances as well as their private lives. She also taped interviews with the dancers, their boyfriends, the show managers, and paying customers.

At the first exhibition of the work, and later in the book Carnival Strippers, Meiselas included the voices of the people she photographed, presenting their words alongside portraits and documentary shots of them. “The women brought me in, and the book later brought a hidden world to public attention, sharing a complex story from the inside out,” Meiselas writes in her new book, On The Frontline.

Her subjects offered a variety of perspectives on sex within the context of poverty, class and society at large. Through the words spoken by her subjects and the expressions captured in her photos, Meiselas narrates a derogatory attitude patrons had toward the women in the show, and, in fact, women on the whole. Some of the quotes Meiselas included in her published book, overheard from men in the  show’s audiences, reveal sexist attitudes: “Agreeing with you, living with you, taking care of your clothes – that’s what a woman’s for,” says one man.

Certain quotes serve as an apt reminder that some things haven’t changed much since the early 1970s. In a conversation about touching women without their consent, one male audience member is quoted as saying: “A guy touches it before you, then another guy’s touching it, then another guy, then it’s your turn…From the garbage collector to the President, that’s the way it is – it’s not what you do, it’s what you get caught doing.”

“With a few exceptions, the ones that do touch you have to hurt you in some way,” says Lena, a stripper. “They think of carnival people as low anyway, and a carnival stripper they think is lower.”

The male perspective explored by Meiselas is multi-dimensional, presenting a patchwork of views other than a stereotypical macho position. There are some for whom the show is just background noise: “The girl shows don’t mean that much. When you come to Tunbridge it’s to meet your old friends from other years. Most of the action is in the parking lots,” said one customer, who had been attending fairs since 1958.

Another man’s view is remarkably sensitive. He says: “These girls that allow you to have contact with them, in a way I look up to them, they’re not selfish. I think it’s hard to do what they do. They’re actually giving of themselves, they’re sharing, and they’re making people happy. They make me happy, anyway. That’s about the most intimate thing you can do with a woman.”

The testimony from the ‘carnival strippers’ themselves portrays myriad views, but the vast majority of the women say they are motivated to work in the shows because of the independence it gives them. “If you want to be your own woman, to be a single person, you can’t do a hell of a lot better than that,” says Patty, a manager and former stripper.

One stripper, Debbie, articulates the complex relationship between class and a woman’s independence. She says: “To me, there’s rich people, right, rich and high and sophisticated, and then there are these people who have to worry and have to fight for what they want…You gotta eat. When you eat and get your own money, that makes you your own woman. You don’t ask nobody for nothing.”

"The women brought me in, and the book later brought a hidden world to public attention, sharing a complex story from the inside out"

A lack of access to an independant income appears to have led many of the carnival’s strippers into the job. Shortie, who blames her alcohol problem on the work, says, “This isn’t what I want to do. This is not my life. This isn’t really what pleases me. It’s just something to get my start.” And the women’s convention-breaking jobs do not necessarily represent more radical views on sex, gender and relationships: “I figure a woman’s place is in a house,” says Cindy, a stripper, “but I ain’t got no house to go to.”

Some of the women struggle with the negative way in which society views them because of their work– “I just don’t like the thought that everybody thinks that I would lay down for anything or anybody,” says Coffee, a stripper. For others, the challenge is the job itself, opting to mentally disengage from what their body is doing as psychological self-preservation: “It’s a protection for myself. You put a wall up between you and what’s really going on,” says Lena. And others find fun and enjoyment in their work – “I think that’s what I like about it – all the attention, everybody looking at me. It’s a fabulous feeling,” says Lisa.

A study of the role of women in society in the 1970s through the microcosm of the dying traveling ‘girl show’ industry, Meiselas’s Carnival Strippers brings to the fore differing views on women, sex, society, and class, exploring the sometimes hard-to-define line between independence and exploitation. “Being a stripper is as close to being in a man’s world as you can be,” says Lena. “It’s a tough life. You need strength and character. The men depend on you – to entertain them and to bring in money for them.

And when they come in, it’s up to the girl. She’s got forty guys in there. They could tear her limb from limb. She’s got to control them, keep them back, and all she has is her wits and talents. The men can’t see it for what it is. The women look at it as being revolutionary – for the first time in their lives to say, ‘I’ve got you eating out of the palm of my hand.'”

Susan Meiselas’s seminal work presents a nuanced view on the dynamics of America’s traveling ‘girl shows’ in the early 1970s.

Chris Steele-Perkins Racists give Nazi salute in London. England. G.B. 1980.

Lewisham, London, 13 August 1977. 500 members of the far right National Front plan to march across the borough and into its town centre; about 4,000 counter-demonstrators have come out to stop them. About 5,000 police are in attendance but by late afternoon pitched battles have broken out on the streets. 56 police officers are injured and 214 people are arrested; police riot shields are used for the first time on the UK mainland. Here, pictures by Chris Steele-Perkins and Peter Marlow show that heavy-handed policing of counter-protestors was as much a part of the story as the activities of the far right minority on the day.

Peter Marlow Race Riots in Lewisham. Police making an arrest. England. London. GB. 1977.

It’s an event that came to be dubbed The Battle of Lewisham, and seen by many as a high-water mark for far right activity on British streets. But, says Steele-Perkins, it didn’t seem like it at the time. There on the day, “running around, trying not to get hit”, he thought it could be part of an ongoing spiral into chaos.

“It was out of control!” he says. “It was a kind of peak in London, of that kind of fighting in the street between the police and the demonstrators, but there wasn’t any sense that that was the case at the time. I thought it would go on for years.

Chris Steele-Perkins Rioters held back by police at National Front Demo. London. England. GB. 1977.

Chris Steele-Perkins Injured policeman during a National Front Demo. London. England. GB. 1977.

Chris Steele-Perkins National Front Demo, anti fascism graffitti. London. England. GB. 1977.

“Part of the idea I had at the time was that civil disturbances could escalate into the situation we had in Northern Ireland,” he adds. “The streets in west Belfast were battle zones with soldiers with live ammunition on the corners, and I thought this could happen in mainland Britain.”

Steele-Perkins kept on photographing far right supporters throughout the 1980s, capturing images that still look disturbing today. Those who turned out onto the streets to support views such as ending immigration and repatriating all settled immigrants to their ancestral homelands sported shaved heads and White Power t-shirts, and were happy to be photographed giving Nazi salutes.

The images are accurate, he explains, but they only tell part of the story and he thinks they’re less effective because of it. “The far right is depicted in photographs as the burly boys because it’s easy to do it that way,” he says. “Skinheads shouting perhaps looks more intimidating than people with long hair shouting.”

Chris Steele-Perkins White racists from the British movement in East London. London. England. G.B. 1981.

In taking these photographs, Steele-Perkins was following a long tradition for Magnum Photos, whose members have documented those on both the right and left of the political divide since – well, since the very start. The work Magnum co-founder Robert Capa brought with him from the Spanish Civil War and from World War II showed exponents of radically disparate views, from the International Brigades in Madrid in 1936–1938, to a French Nazi-sympathizer who had her head publicly shorn upon the Liberation of Paris in 1945.

Other photographers at Magnum have continued to carry this baton, with Eve Arnold capturing members of the American Nazi party listening to Malcolm X in 1962, and Bruno Barbey showing a far-right demonstration in Paris during the more famously leftist protests of 1968. But today Steele-Perkins is critical of the images he took of Britain’s far-right, describing them as “short hair shorthand”.

The racist skinhead subculture depicted in Steele-Perkins and Berry’s images grew out of an earlier, broader skinhead culture originating in the late 1960s amongst young working class people in London, predominantly living in multicultural areas, who were influenced by mod and Jamaican rude boy fashion. In the ‘80s, political affiliations amongst skinheads diverged, with a far right fringe attracting extremist and racist individuals — it was this group which in much of the public’s view came to be most associated with the wider skinhead aesthetic.

Ian Berry Skinheads at a Chelsea v. Crystal Palace football match. London. England. G.B. 1980.

Steele-Perkins recognizes the dangers of focusing on aesthetic tropes.“The real problem is the people who don’t talk – the political classes behind it are really to blame. The others are just foot soldiers, some of whom are not too bright and just want to get into a rumble. […] This is where photography and representation have a problem,” he adds. “The message is maybe not carried in the picture in same way [if it doesn’t show a skinhead].”

Steele-Perkins, for his part, says he got “a bit fed up with photographing skinheads”, though he adds the he could continue doing so “because it’s still going on”. Recently he’s undertaken a project focusing upon the other side of the story of multiculturalism in the UK, this time in much broader terms, working on a huge project titled The New Londoners. The work, which was made over four years, saw Steele-Perkins photographing individuals and families from 187 countries around the world who have made London their home. “I hope it’s a more nuanced way of dealing with immigration,” he says.

He adds that he doesn’t believe photography can change anything – but that he does believe it can it can stand as a record, and he hopes that The New Londoners will do just that in the future. By the same logic, he also defends photographers’ right to photograph far-right supporters, even if the sentiment they’re interested in shooting is not always visible.

“I think one should do it to keep people informed if nothing else,” Steele-Perkins says. “But I guess I’m not that interested in doing it. I find the company difficult to keep.”

Three Magnum photographers reflect on their experiences photographing extreme anti-immigrant sentiment in the British Isles, and the dangers of focusing on aesthetics when documenting the right-wing.

SHORT HAIR SHORTHAND: THE FAR RIGHT IN THE UK THROUGH THE MAGNUM ARCHIVE

“If I am looking for a story at all, it is in my relationship to the subject — the story that tells me, rather than that I tell” writes Bruce Davidson, who was inducted into the International Photography Hall of Fame on November 1, 2019.

The photographer’s critically acclaimed photo essay and book project, Subway, was “a voyage of discovery” for the American photographer; the result of half a decade spent exploring the ominous reaches of the subway system in the 1980s. Both a captivating study of light and color and a historical document of an elemental part of New York, Subway captures the many faces of the underbelly of this city.

The photographer’s descent into the city’s famed transit system followed a period of broader exploration in New York. After a spell of work as a producer on a movie, Davidson – as he writes in Subway‘s introductory text – felt a need to return to stills, to his roots:

“I began to photograph the traffic islands that line Broadway. These oases of grass, trees, and earth surrounded by heavy city traffic have always interested me. I found myself photographing the lonely widows, vagrant winos, and solemn old men who line the benches on these concrete islands of Manhattan’s Upper West Side.

I traveled to other parts of the city, from Coney Island to the Bronx Zoo. I revisited the Lower East Side cafeteria where I’d photographed several years before… The cafeteria was a haven for the elderly Jewish people surviving the decaying nearby neighborhoods. I photographed the people I had known there, survivors from the war and the death camps who had clung together after the Holocaust to re-root themselves in this strange land. I walked along Essex Street to visit an old scribe who repaired faded Hebrew characters on sacred Torah scrolls. He and his wife, both survivors of Dachau, worked together in their small religious bookstore. Occasionally, he’d allow me to take a photograph as he bent over the parchment with his pen. When the flash went off, he would wave me away. I would return later with prints that he put into a drawer, carefully, without looking at them. Sometimes, returning from his shop during the evening rush hour, I would see the packed cars of the subway as cattle cars, filled with people, each face staring or withdrawn with the fear of its unknown destiny.

The subway interior was defaced with a secret handwriting that covered the walls, windows, and maps. I began to imagine that these signatures surrounding the passengers were ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. Every now and then, when I was looking at one of these cryptic messages, someone would come and sit in front of it, and I would feel as if the message had been decoded. I started to draw a connection between the Broadway islands, the neighborhood cafeteria, and the pious scribe on the Lower East Side.

Bruce Davidson's vivid exploration of New York's subway system in the 1980s is an epoch-defining series that marked the photographer's shift from black and white to color.

BRUCE DAVIDSON: NEW YORK'S SUBWAY SYSTEM IN THE 1980S

In 2001, Carl de Keyzer was given authorization by the Russian military to photograph in prisons and former labour camps in the Krasnoyarsk region of Siberia, resulting in images which formed his project Zona. Initially expecting to witness a congruency between the reality of the prisons and the harrowing aesthetics he imagined based on the prisons’ reputation, de Keyzer was surprised to see the surreal vibrance of some of the former gulags, which had been redecorated to resemble “a kind of Disneyland.” Gulag is an acronym taken from Glavnoe Upravlenie Lagerei (Main Administration of Camps, a government agency), oftenused colloquially in the West to refer to a soviet prison camp. Russian language prefers the more general terms “the camps” – lagerya– or “the zone” – zona. Around the city of Krasnoyarsk, kraslag is the specific term for the sub-Gulag system of camps. Here, Carl de Keyzer speaks to Hatty Nestor about photographing under controlled environments in prisons and the degrees to which imagery and propaganda play a role in how we understand incarceration.

In Jackie Wang’s book Carceral Capitalism (2018) she describes the degrees of manipulation which regulate how the public perceives, compares and experiences prisons. She writes, concerning control and surveillance, that ‘policing represents the inscription of disciplinary power across the entire terrain which is being policed’. Such exertions of power are also enacted through representations of policing, including of inmates and how they are manipulated by authorities and the media. Wang exposes the economic and technological modes by which people affected by the criminal justice system are made invisible; similarly, by analysing photographs, we can define the cultural modes. We discover how images of the carceral realm have to potential to enact the fabrication of the reality they seek to encapsulate.

Carl De Keyzer confronts the viewer with these ethical issues in Zona: Siberian Prison Camps. In 2000-2002, De Keyzer spent a total of roughly seven months over three trips, visiting 50 camps. He photographed inmates inside and on the grounds of the prisons in an attempt to both expose the conditions of and destabilize these institutions in the public realm. The photographs are a form of propaganda — prison authorities staged many of the photographs and had an influence over almost all of the scenes De Keyzer witnessed. The intention was to influence public perception of the prisons, whilst controlling the creative agency De Keyzer could exercise. These images of inmates are fraught with an atmosphere of oppression, where the subjects De Keyzer captures subtly display the tension between chosen and staged autonomy. The predetermined set-ups of the scenes were intentionally designed, with the result that the viewer is forced to wonder throughout whether the prisons have been made to look more appealing than how they were in reality. What this series reveals to the viewer are not just the emotional currencies felt by the prisoners, but also the narratives of surveillance and control that De Keyzer experienced whilst completing the project. It is important to note when encountering these photographs, that they are a form of propaganda  – a vision exerted by the prison authorities and government themselves. I interviewed De Keyzer in November 2019, to further understand his role in visiting and documenting the Siberian prison camps, and his ethical position whilst doing so.

Gulags were active from the 1920s until shortly after Stalin’s death in 1953. They functioned as forced-labour camps, where those detained were subject to inhumane, labour-intensive work, such as digging, industrial work, and crop maintenance. Under Stalin’s rule, thousands died of disease, exhaustion, and starvation. The camps were famously grim, hostile and labour intensive, often working the incarcerated for long hours, in harsh conditions. When entering the prisons, De Keyzer was aware not just of the current conditions but the histories from the past which they contained. Indeed, it was this horrifying past that prompted the visit, as he noted: “The project started from the mind-boggling fact that before being Gulags from the 1930s’ Stalin era, they were concentration camps. I didn’t understand. Gulags were concentration camps first and now they were ordinary prisons. At the gates you could still see the year they were constructed (1932, 1938…). We would never accept Auschwitz, for example, as a prison”.

Propaganda is both De Keyzer’s tool and the topic of subversion; his work manages to comment upon that which he seeks to dismantle. Propaganda is a theme he has confronted throughout his practice – photographing NATO meetings, North Korea and Capitol Hill. Throughout his work, there is an uncanny sense of invasion; his photographs expose scenes which are politically contested, whilst infusing the photographs with an advertisement-like quality, and vivid color. As propaganda is both his theoretical interest and artisticmedium, the line between the infiltration of cultural manipulation and the generation of it through the photographic image, tread a fine line in his practice.

Yet the photographic image, for De Keyzer, presents problems in and of itself. In seeking to subvert the propaganda of the prisons, De Keyzer was confronted with layers of control. He was caught in an ethical bind: “I felt like I had a moral obligation to do this project right, to not be manipulated by the system because that is what they wanted to do,” he says. The authorities asserted their control through the staging of the photographs – directing the prison staff and commander who accompanied de Keyzer. It was a strange place to find himself, wanting to change representation but not having the complete freedom to do so: “I knew I was possibly being manipulated” he tells me, “because I was there to correct all the images of the old prison system”.

But the extent to which the prison authorities had fabricated the material conditions for the inmates transcended De Keyzer’s control, because he was placed within a setting that had purposefully been orchestrated to appear a certain way. De Keyzer notes that this orchestration was not methodical, and very often set up in what seemed a naïve and ad hoc way. He elaborates:

“Before my visit to some of the camps they had arranged things before my visit. Again, only on a few occasions. Very often they were surprised to see us with the approval papers from the general. Sometimes we had to wait a week before we could go into the prisons. When we got into the prisons we had noticed there was new paint on the fence and flowers on the prison tables.” De Keyzer’s reflections on his time spent at the gulags, published in the appendix of Zona, further reveal the level of orchestration he encountered: “In most camps we could open every door we asked for. In that sense, they showed us everything we wanted to see, except for certain situations. That was something they could arrange as they wished. […] the colonel who was with us understood that I liked people working and doing things, not just standing there staring at the camera […] He’d come into the cell and say ‘You’re being photographed, and you keep on working’ even when they weren’t doing anything, so they’d be given books to read.” De Keyzer recalls that occasionally, a Bible was put on a table somewhere, or they’d have to start cleaning their room, or playing ping-pong.

The viewer is confronted with the harshness of emotion, the uncertainty in the expressions of the prisoners De Keyzer captures. He was never alone upon visiting, accompanied by a commander and a Russian photographer, which posed an ethical tension in and of itself – who controlled the images, and were the prisoners free to pose how they felt appropriate? This conflict runs throughout the series – apparent in the expression of the prisoners and the angle in which they are captured. “You can see it in their faces, they were afraid, they had to obey,” De Keyzer explains, on his encounters with the prisoners.

Despite material changes in the prison surroundings — such as a new coat of paint — initially not appearing to alter what might be at the heart of the emotional qualities of the photographs, they are symptomatic of a larger ideology to render prisons as other to their material reality. Throughout the series, the bright, enigmatic colors are consistently juxtaposed with somber, eerie expressions. In Prison Camp Lunch Time (2000), the tension between the utopian backdrop – a fanatical river with golden grass – hangs behind two men. In front of it, there seems to be a dialogue between two prisoners. The viewer can see a man whose face rests in his hands, adjacent to the camera. There is a feeling of despondency, the backdrop a type of propaganda in and of itself. It reminds us that the reality of prison is far from the painting’s feeling of serenity. Similarly, in Women’s Camp 22 (2001) a group of female inmates sit in a cinema-like setting on bright orange chairs. There is a consistency in their postures, expressions. They all seem somewhat lifeless, indeed almost corpse-like, as they all congregate as an audience. Again, the scene is offset by a natural backdrop of trees and sky – less fanatical than the lunch scene – but its presence reminds the viewer that the prisoner’s experience of the outside world is distant. Yet the insight De Keyzer reveals alters the tone of the picture somewhat: “In this scenario, the room was dark, the lights were out so the prisoners could listen to ‘therapeutic’ music and see disco lights. Most had their eyes closed. I used a flash. In both photographs, we are reminded of the contradictions of documenting controlled prison environments.

The images prompt us to consider the impact of De Keyzer’s photos, as one of the few people who have created a visual history of the prisons. What ethical responsibility did De Keyzer bear as a documenter? Would documenting the camps further the problem of propaganda, or subvert it? Prompted with the choice, he explained:

“When you realise this you have two choices, either to say, no I don’t want to participate in this or you continue, going inside and trying to take advantage of the system which is taking advantage of you. It was a game that worked each way.” In his book, De Keyzer speaks of how this decision influenced his visual approach to the photographs, “I decided to use colour.… there wasn’t even a possibility to get the real situation. I don’t think so anyway. I never saw any really hard situations like torture.” Reflecting on this, De Keyzer also notes that he chose color as a way to show that the images came from the modern day — “otherwise, nobody would have believed this was 2001.”

He continues: “I quite liked that idea [of game-playing] because I don’t like [to use] mise en scene myself but when people do it for me I never say no. My colleague had the typical Russian habit of many press photographers to set up situations. So either he set up something with the prisoner, or the colonel or bodyguards set up something… in a way it was a double mise en scene.”

De Keyzer witnessed many surreal — and at times farcical — scenes. “I only once saw a tennis court. I asked who it was for. The prisoners, they said, and immediately looked for two prisoners to play the game. Then they had to find rackets for them, which took another half an hour. They seemed happy with that; I asked them where the balls were, but even after another hour’s search, they couldn’t find any. So we had this ridiculous scene with me photographing these two prisoners pretending to play tennis without any tennis balls. It was like a crazy mime scene.”

Through methods of surveillance, punishment and government control, institutional sites have become severely restricted to the public. This is also entwined with the media, its deep-rooted degrees of bias: the images we receive contribute to a longstanding distortion of the lived realities of those in prison. After all, the agency of those on the inside is suspended, and their appearance in the media is subject to how such outlets dictate not only their image but also the language which surrounds the prisoner. Images of lives encapsulate the way that narratives are transmitted and understood, reflecting not just the day to day realities of those on the inside but also the historical moment in which they are depicted.

De Keyzer explains it was possible to enter prisons, military sites and even abandoned factories, but the regulations on visitation at the time were minimal. Fifteen years later, he is the only person he knows of who had captured the inside of the prisons. Now, nobody can gain access. “A few years after my visit Putin closed all the camps and nobody could get in anymore. Now it is impossible to do what I did fifteen years ago. I haven’t seen any pictures since then and I heard from other people that what I did back then was impossible now.

When a system collapses there is always a period of lack of control. I think this happened in Russia after the collapse of the USSR. Between 1994-2004 a lot was possible. Visiting all kinds of places that were closed or forgotten. This void, lack of control, is always good timing to do things as a photographer or writer you couldn’t do before. “

One might query when encountering these images if they should be viewed as an extension of a system that hides and conceals incarceration, or a documentation of truth. Or, are they an objective depiction, a demonstration of how systems of surveillance might always sustain a form of propaganda? The ruthless histories which inform these photographs are clearly still evident to the viewer. As are the complications of the ethical terrain that De Keyzer had to tread. Perhaps the images dwell in a strange, intersubjective space, where we can attribute them to neither ‘fact’ or ‘fiction’. Interestingly, De Keyzer had originally anticipated filming the camps, as well as taking photographs, as he felt that moving image had the potential to rupture the propaganda of the camps:

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