I have always loved Captain Beefheart. Ever since I saw him and the Magic Band on the now long departed Old Grey Whistle Test growling his way through the incredibly melodic for him, Upon the My oh My. What was strange about his interpretation of traditional blues music was that it often went all over the place, the quirky guitar lines, somehow offbeat drumming and his snarling all seemed like a very strange blend of odd bits and pieces but somewhere in this concoction there was an underlying rhythm of sorts that ultimately brought it into sense, albeit in a totally original and unique way. I mention this for two reasons: firstly it gives me an excuse to show what I consider Anton Corbijn’s best ever photograph and, secondly; because I have been reading a new photo book that I got by Olga Matveeva and I couldn’t quite grasp what was unsettling me about it until now.

The Captain by Anton Corbijn

What an incredible portrait. By the way, I saw a marvellous documentary on Anton Corbijn on an aeroplane trip recently where, amongst other things, he went through the making of his awesome movie The American, easily George Cloony’s finest moment. Don’t read any of the moronic reviews by ‘movie critics’, this is classic cinema and is beautifully directed by Corbijn.
Enough of this tangent, lets take a look at Olga’s recent book, Feud, and let me share my thoughts on the book.

This book has been printed in a limited run of 600 and I was lucky enough that my friend ‘The Librarian’ Sebastian had the smarts to get me a signed edition. The book has been pretty well received and won first prize in the Vienna Photobook Festival in June this year, and its small but beautifully designed so that the spine allows the double page spreads to be looked at flat, and that is an extremely important feature as we shall see. So what was all that nonsense about the good Captain at the start? lets take a closer look at the book and let me share my personal take on it.

With this book Olga takes on a extraordinarily difficult topic in my opinion, that of national and ultimately personal dissonance which she describes as: ‘Feud is a category of intimate space. Close people who share common bed and who have common past, suddenly become real enemies. ’ The book was shot in Crimea over the space of a year from December 2013 and reflects the complex conflicts that have emerged (or surfaced) since the fall of the former Soviet Union. I have been reading the book for a couple of weeks now on and off and there are some wonderful photographs in here that I want to look at however, I kept having a nagging feeling about it that I couldn’t get straight in my head. Despite its compact size and excellent mechanics, its not an easy book to digest. That can of course be an excellent attribute as it challenges you to think, it can also leave you a little confused though, and that is what has happened to me. I think a deliberate part of the editing and sequencing of the book by Olga has been to mix not only medias but also formats, so we have black and white and colour and we also have double page full bleed, single page small 3:2 horizontal and vertical and double page, seperate 3:2, also, the photos themselves are a mixture of personal, often intimate shots and snaps of everything from television screens to toilet bowls….phew…… This is why I used the good Captain as an analogy at the start, if you are going to have diverse and offbeat elements you need an underlying rhythm to hold it all together and that is what I think is missing here and leads to the niggling doubts I have about the book. Take this sequence from early in the book as an example:

and……

then……….

My problem is that I simply can’t read this sequence, I can’t find the tempo to help me get whatever meaning or emotion that Olga wants me to draw from this. I can see the nipple, the exploding circle and its reccurance but its not enough . Having said that, there are some sequences that I enjoy even although I don’t find it easy to understand why, and that takes us closer to Magic Band world.

and…..

then…..

There are two things at play here with this sequence that are missing from the earlier episode we looked at: firstly, these are in my opinion simply just much better and more interesting individual photographs, and secondly; there is an underlying structure here that I can sense, the swell of the waves and the ring garland, the floating bed of foliage and then the foliage with ring light. This works in my mind and I can make artistic sense of this and I really like the separate shots. If we leave the rhythm thing aside for a moment I want to look at some really nice shots that Olga has in the book and strangely I find the best ones that I enjoy most to be the colour full bleed spreads and, as I mentioned earlier, the books physical design allows these to be spread flat which makes it easier to full appreciate them. Have a look at this one first.

I think this is shot, like a few others, is from a tv screen and this is something I like doing personally as well, I am fully onboard with the Daido idea of photography as making copies. This shots also fits Olga’s theme very well with its fiery colours and flag motive. Here is another quote from her short paragraph of notes at the back of the book: ’Everyone prepares his own concealed plan and builds the strategy of envision. Who started this provocation and what is the source of its nature?’

Here is another of these lovely double page colour shots that are a standout of the book for me.

Unfortunately, there are I think some pretty weak shots in here that break things up and disjoint the flow. I am not sure where some of these come from but I suspect that they might be shots that are personal to Olga but they don’t make sense to me as a viewer without inside track.

and again, I find this very weak and obvious and it’s a real shame because there aren’t that many of these but I personally find that this is probably the root of the missing tempo that I mentioned at the start and, as you can easily see from the other photos, Olga is a much more thoughtful and creative photographer than this kind of easy take suggests.

Getting back then to the shots that really work for me, have a look at these two shots that unfortunately for my money are too far apart in the books sequencing to have the potentially extremely powerful impact that they could have had.

and……

I think these are great and could have formed part of a really meaningful and poignant verse in the overall storyline.

Ok, I have now reached the point where I begin to panic that I have been overly critical. It would be unfair to make the judgement that this is not a good photo book, that is simply not the case, there are a large number of positives about the book that I hope came out loud and clear, right from the physics of the book to the lovely colour spreads and the short episodes where the book catches a vibe that I think works. I hope I have pointed out the challenge that my perceived lack of tempo brings, however, I freely admit that you could argue that this is a book about dissonance and the ragged pacing adds to that effect. Personally I don’t buy that but its still a nice book that tackles an original topic in a reasonably innovative manner, I just feel that Olga let something really important off the hook, maybe next time. I will certainly be keeping an eye out for her next work.

Free Art

I am a bit pressed for time this week so am going to skip the zine round up of the Kitajima set that I mentioned last week and instead will move straight into some nice free art shots from flyers that I have been picking up in my travels and there is a really nice mix this week. Then it will be on to a lovely fave photo by Jeff Jacobson.

I will say it again, I love these freebies and for a bit of fun at some point in the future I am going to try to sequence an edit of the rapidly growing collection just to see what happens.

Fave Photo, Jeff Jacobson

The fave photo this week is from Jeff’s ‘Last Roll’ book that I reviewed back when I started these mini reviews. My thoughts about it as a book have not changed a bit and, in fact, if anything I am coming to respect and love it more and more as time goes by. It really is a wonderful book for many reasons and it means a lot to me personally. I have wanted to show one of the photos from the book as a fave for a while, and in fact even had one in the draft a few weeks ago and took it out. The reason for this reluctance is that I find the entire book enchanting as a whole and I didn’t want to isolate any one part for fear of breaking the magic of the overall work. I have decided to choose this one though and show it this week and try to challenge myself to rationalise some of the reasons why I find this photo and Jeff’s book in general so compelling.

What I think it comes down to for me is this. Jeff has seen things that we will all see in some form eventually, he was just pushed ahead of us a bit and had the artistic ability to interpret this intrinsic, poignant but ultimately beautiful part of existence and non-existence. Jeff has seen a part of the true nature of things that we can’t because we are too absorbed in the meaningless trivialities that surround us and blind our vision. Not all of the photos in his lovely book have this spiritual quality but many do and this one is not the exception, there are far too many for it to be a coincidence for me and I am so grateful to Jeff for revealing these magical, sometimes paradoxically personal, yet universal moments to me.

Colin Steel, Sunday 19th October 2014, Singapore