Counter Investigations: Forensic Architecture at the ICA

Legal cases usually allow both legal teams - prosecution and defence, in criminal cases - to examine and make use of the relevant evidence. But while governments have their own evidence-gathering experts and the money and knowledge to commission additional external expertise if needed, the people and organisations that might find themselves having to defend themselves against or challenge the state generally don't have access to these kinds of resources.

That's where Forensic Architecture comes in. It's an "independent research agency based at Goldsmiths, University of London", according to London's Institute of Contemporary Arts, which is showing an exhibition of the agency's work.

The ICA's website says: "Forensic Architecture is not only the name of the agency but a form of investigative practice that traverses architectural, journalistic, legal and political fields, and moves from theoretical examination to practical application."

Actually, if the exhibition is a reliable guide, then the agency practices very little architecture as most people would think of it, and really carries out research encompassing interviewing, forensic examination, reconstruction and - the area where architecture is most at play - digital and physical modelling.

They've been commissioned by non-governmental organisations and families to examine evidence relating to potential human rights abuses, crimes and state violence, including police killings, state airstrikes, and the EU's handling of the migrant crisis in the Mediterranean.

It's a fascinating subject for an exhibition, and the ICA devotes a lot of space to it, including multiple videos and charts and a recreation of the floor-plan of an internet cafe where a murder took place.

Eddy Frankel was fairly scathing in his review of the exhibition in Timeout, and he has a point when he says:

"All along the opening walls of this show are long, involved, mega-academic essays on the ‘forensics of aesthetics’ and shit like that. Is it a concession to the usual blah-blah waffle of the art world? Or is it simply an inability to condense down all the inward-looking, shoe-gazing academic theory at the heart of Forensic Architecture into something that can really connect with people? Probably a bit of both."

The section of the exhibition he highlights is interesting in flagging that aesthetics plays a part in courtroom presentations of forensic evidence even though evidence itself is supposedly straightforwardly factual, but it's a point that has minimal relevance to the case studies presented. There are also far more accessible ways of saying that the human body records evidence of the impacts of some of the things it experiences.

Furthermore, it's not always clear what, if anything, resulted from the agency's work. In some cases this is because the work is ongoing, but in others - such as the reconstruction of an airstrike - it seems to have been left out.

Likewise I had doubts about some of the findings. An increase in deaths in the Mediterranean is attributed to a specific cause, whereas it looked to me like it could have been due simply to the seasonal increase in attempted migrant crossings during the summer. A video is asserted to show a soldier pretending to discharge a shell from a rifle, when actually something that looks very much like a shell clearly ejects from the chamber.

But Forensic Architecture is, as I said, a fascinating agency that seems to help provide a counterpoint, in situations of a massive power imbalance, to the ability of governments to control the generation of evidence and expert analysis. And this exhibition provides a substantial, if at times somewhat confusing and frustrating, insight into how it does that.

It's well worth dropping by.

Book review: Unreasonable Behaviour, Don McCullin, 1990

Don McCullin must have had about as many near misses, close calls and there-but-for-the-grace-of-god moments as anyone who ever lived.

As a war photographer for more than 20 years, he pushed deep into the heart of battle in the Congo, Vietnam, Cambodia, Northern Ireland, Beirut, El Salvador, Iran, Afghanistan and other hellholes, as bullets and bombs rained down from all sides. He says in Unreasonable Behaviour, his autobiography, that war photographers face even worse odds than war correspondents, because photographers have to "get out in the field where the risks [are] infinitely greater". The number of war correspondents who die on the job throughout Unreasonable Behaviour illustrates just how big these risks are.

People die either side of McCullin in this book, as well as ahead of him and behind him. I didn't count how many, but he makes clear that his survival on many occasions was little more than dumb luck, as in this extract on Vietnam:

There was no security in any of the different methods of covering war. Sean Flynn, the son of Errol, was said to go flamboyantly into combat on a Honda, toting a pearl-handled pistol, while Larry Burrows, the brilliant English photographer who worked for Life magazine, was the model of professionalism and polite diffidence. Both joined the list of the missing, presumed dead.

So why did he do it? Why did he leave behind the safety of England - and his responsibilities to his wife and children - for the dangers and irresponsibility of war?

For much of the book you have only the surface-level morality for an answer: "Your job is to stir the conscience of others who can help"; "I wanted to break the hearts and spirits of secure people".

Indeed, in the middle third of the book, as the Congo gives way to Vietnam, which gives way to Jerusalem, which leads to Biafra, with a return to Vietnam, which leads to Cambodia, and so on and so on, with little personal narrative linking the segments, the reading experience starts to resemble the act of idly flicking through a photobook in a shop, clumps of pages at a time, finding interest on each page you land on but little coherence.

And during the recounting of some of the earlier wars, McCullin's writing is at times as a little detached and flat - the written account of someone better suited to visual media, if you'll forgive the easy analysis - as in the following, which is not for the faint-hearted:

We were cowering under our helmets when the American said, "Godamnit, there's an awful smell here." I noticed that this hole was not firm underfoot. Even though we were in sand, it was too soft. I looked down and saw a row of fly buttons by my boots. We were both crouched on the stomach of a dead North Vietnamese soldier and our weight had caused the stomach to excrete. Despite the shelling, we both leapt out and ran off in different directions, to find other bunkers.

But there are also hard-won and convincingly expressed moral lessons, such as:

We all suffer from the naive belief that our integrity is reason enough for being in any situation, but if you stand in front of dying people, something more is required. If you can't help, you shouldn't be there.

And finally on page 216 we gain a clear insight into why McCullin thrust himself time and again into the inferno:

I needed the peace of my own country, England. Yet when I go home and sleep in my own bed, I soon become restless. I am not shaped for a house. I grew up in harsh surroundings. I have slept under tables in battles for days on end. There is something about this that unfits you for sleeping in beds for the rest of your life. My wars, the way I've lived, is like an incurable disease [...] I cannot do without the head-on collision with life I have when I am working.

And as the account creeps closer to the present day, the writing becomes increasingly affecting, to the point where at times I struggled to retain my composure wherever I was reading, as for example with McCullin's description of being held captive in prison in Uganda, not knowing whether he or his journalist colleagues will be the next ones to be led to execution by sledgehammer down the hall, or this, on the death of journalist Nick Tomalin in the Golan Heights:

When I got nearer, I could see no shape in the car. Perhaps he had been thrown out. I made my way to the other side of it and found him lying there. I tried to talk to him, so far gone was I with terror and grief, though there could be no doubt that he was dead. Picking up his glasses from the road, I ran back in the same eerie stillness.

But staggeringly [spoiler alert], the biggest, most powerful and affecting shock of all comes in the last few pages, after the takeover of the Sunday Times by Rupert Murdoch has seen the paper's weekend magazine replace hardcore journalism with more advert-friendly fare ("Lifestyles rather than life were coming into fashion on the magazine."), and after nature has started exacting a human toll on McCullin's loved ones that is even more harrowing than that exacted by man upon his fellow man:

I realised that you could shoot photographs until the cows came home but they have nothing to do with real humanity, real memories, real feelings.

As the final few paragraphs tick down, you yourself realise that McCullin is not at all in a good way as he's writing, and that the book is going to end with this legend of British journalism crying out in lonely anguish from a very, very dark place:

[...] mostly I'm alone in my house in Somerset [...] the ghosts of all those dead [...]

By the time I finished, tears were streaming down my cheeks...

But fortunately the book was republished in 2012 with a new preface, and if you read that first like I did, you know that McCullin managed to extricate himself from his loneliness and pain and find new life again ("twelve years on, I am extremely happy").

One wonders at what must have happened when the final section of the manuscript landed on the editor's and publisher's desks - had they known what shape McCullin was in? After they read it, did they try to buoy him up before going ahead with the publication? Did they consider altering the ending?

It's an enormously surprising end to the book, but perhaps it was this ending itself that helped to bring McCullin back to the light: he talks in the preface of being "truly staggered by the response [the book] received".

Either way, Unreasonable Behaviour stands as towering testament to an extraordinary life, one that perhaps wasn't easy on McCullin's family, but which captured evidence of and brought to public attention the most inhumane acts and moments of suffering, while also revealing something of the kinds of people who are driven to take such risks to expose the truth.

"If y'know what's good for ye," I was informed, "y'll do as ye're told an' clear off."
I stood my ground and said that I had never cleared off at anyone's behest in all my life, and wasn't thinking of starting now.

Book Review: Pour Me, AA Gill, 2015

Pour Me is short as memoirs go: just 241 pages. In part that's because, as Gill says early on in it, the alcoholism from which he suffered in his twenties meant that "there was no film in the camera" for those years, and that earlier memories were also dissolved: "childhood, school, holidays, friends ... all seemed to be faded and incomplete".

Incomplete, but not erased entirely: Pour Me does cover some of Gill's childhood, as well as the time between when he managed to stop drinking, aged 30, and when he wrote the book, 30 years later.

Stopping drinking saved Gill's life, and after "thousands of hours of learning the wrong thing" - art, cooking, gardening, bartending - he finally "failed into journalism", becoming one of the best-known food and TV critics in the country.

So I'll borrow a description of journalism that Gill says he liked - "journalism is what will be grasped at once" - and come to the point: Gill was a fantastic and endearing writer, and he had an interesting life. What more can you ask from a memoir?

He could be brilliant, as perhaps best demonstrated by the section on the speech he gave to a room full of dyslexic schoolchildren (he himself was dyslexic), telling them that the English language was theirs to manipulate no matter what their school might tell them about their abilities. This echoed two transformative elements in his own life: the moment when he came upon his English teacher literally tearing apart books to show them who was boss, and a crucifixion painting that particularly moved him with its depiction of human suffering, which was made in the period of the Lutheran reformation.

He was also enviably insightful - something he attributed to his artistic training ("It made me look, as opposed to merely see"). Consider for example this, from page 2: "I wonder what the rest of nature makes of a lawn? Arrogant, snobbish, entitled, needy, effortfully polite, sober." Or this, on famine (he wasn't just a critic), a subject that sadly is timely again: "It isn't staring into the face of starvation that thuds like a blow to your heart, it is having starvation stare back at you".

His turns of phrase were up there with the best of them, and he was funny, and he was empathetic, having experienced loneliness and sickness and desperation by the gallon.

I'm using the past tense, because Gill died in December 2016, a year or two after Pour Me was published. Could that be another reason why the book is so short? I'm not sure: it wasn't clear to me whether he'd received his diagnosis of terminal cancer before the book was finished.

I suspect not, because I suspect he'd have carried on writing it until the end if he'd known it was coming, just as he did with his articles, the last of which was about his experience of dying on the NHS. But then the book is so dense with insight and tales told only in snatches that it could easily have been four times the size, and the final paragraphs are filled with finality: "I misused a life for 30 years and I had 30 more of a second chance that I used better, though not as well as I might."

Perhaps those tales are told only in snatches here because they have already been told elsewhere - in Gill's journalism, a compendium of which is due to be published this year. I'll certainly be buying that too, so maybe I'll let you know.

What do people do all day? #1

Some insights from the Lunch with the FT collection of interviews:

Jeff Bezos, Founder of Amazon, interviewed by Andrew Davidson:

His working hours? "I do 60 a week, any less I get bored, any more, tired. I mean, what do people do who do less? How do they fill the time?"

Families, hobbies, television. He frowns, as if he doesn't quite understand.

Oleg Deripaska, billionaire aluminium magnate, interviewed by Gideon Rachman:

Why not cash out? I ask. Deripaska looks faintly indignant - "And do what?" he asks.

This week's best reads #2

Ryan Health on what it was like being a speechwriter for a European Commission president

David Allen Green on how it's not only the UK government that doesn't know what it wants from Brexit

European Central Bank president Mario Draghi on why Europe needs supranational rather than intergovernmental solutions

Alex King for Huck Magazine on how Greeks are making the best of their crisis

Anahad O'Connor for The NYT on how the sugar industry diverted health concerns elsewhere

This week's best reads #1

Martin Wolf on capitalism and democracy

Lunch with Edward Snowden

The Conversation on the closure of Fabric

Janan Ganesh on the closure of Fabric

New Yorker profile of the NYT's restaurant critic

Book review: Not The Chilcot Report, Peter Oborne, 2016

In Not The Chilcot Report, journalist Peter Oborne shows that Tony Blair outright lied to Parliament on at least one occasion and repeatedly deceived Parliament by distortion or omission, that several of his inner circle aided him in this, that his presidential style of government bypassed essential checks and balances, that he was fixated on regime change and prepared to try to game the U.N. Security Council to achieve it, that intelligence services allowed their work to be misrepresented in Parliament and the media, that Parliament and journalists were slipshod in not holding Blair and his circle to account at the time, and that Parliamentary committees of inquiry failed to do so subsequently.

He also asserts that these lessons have yet to be learnt. Chilcot is published on 6 July. Get ready for fireworks.

Book review: Tell Me No Lies - John Pilger (ed), 2005

Tell Me No Lies is subtitled 'Investigative journalism and its triumphs'. A more accurate although less sellable subtitle would be 'Stuff investigative journalism has uncovered', as the book is not about journalism or how it is carried out, but instead provides 27 examples of journalism's output in the form of book excerpts and articles, plus very brief introductions by the compiler, John Pilger.

This is not a book that affirm's one's faith in humanity. If an event must be investigated to be uncovered, chances are that atrocities or outrages are involved. Of the 27 accounts and 1 essay presented, around 20 deal with wars, massacres, terrorism or their effects. And even some of the other accounts are little or no less gut-wrenching.

One would expert reports of massacres to make for difficult reading, and one would be right. Yet it is often the individual stories or elements that are the most affecting, from mothers in Rwanda being forced to bury their children alive, to the budding child poet in Iraq, born the same year that I was but hospitalised with leukaemia at the opening of the reporter's story, just one of the victims of a reported 6-fold increase in childhood cancers in Iraq in the wake of the 1991 Gulf war, and who then dies at the age of 13. Or try reading about a severely disabled victim of thalidomide being kicked and beaten by other victims because of the greater size of his financial compensation without wanting the whole world to just go away for a while. And this after reading of mothers not being informed of their babies' thalidomide deformities while in the hospital, but being sent home with swaddled children and left to make the discoveries for themselves... Yeah.

Governments, in particular, do not emerge well from these pages. For example, call me hopelessly naive, but as a Brit approaching the end of his third decade who until recently had read voluminously but narrowly of only fiction and science, I had little idea that the actions of British Governments had been any cause for concern post imperialism, slavery, colonialism and Dresden up until the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Tell Me No Lies disavowed me of that ignorance. Nor had secondary-school history and 30-odd years of generally existing and consuming mainstream media given me even a ballpark comprehension of just how central the Cold War was to international relations during the entire period from the end of WWII to 1991. I thought it was mostly just the USA and Russia eyeballing each other and nearly losing all of our heads over Cuba.

I like to think that some of these failings are not entirely my own. For all of the Western World's 24-hour rolling news and minute-by-minute updates, there is a glaring lack of in-depth analysis taking into account and informing readers/viewers/listeners of historical context - an issue Pilger addresses in his introduction.

The book itself does not fill this gap. It is not a full and even-handed accounting of events, but rather a brief glimpse of the other halves of stories whose incompleteness you may not even have suspected. I for one would have benefited greatly from more extended scene-setting for each report, rather than the page or so of context actually provided. But in fairness it is not the book's aim to provide encyclopaedic accounts of entire events.

I asked in a previous post for recommendations of books that address the issue of the extent to which a country's leaders should lie to its populace if it's in the country's best interests, and I repeat that request here. There is also a wider debate to be had about the extent to which governments should be accountable to the views of their electorate and transparent in their actions. For example, is it acceptable to use more effective depleted uranium munitions which are safer for those behind them if there are questions over the safety of their fallout for civilians on the receiving end? How does ensuring the future ability of interveners to go on intervening stack up against the current tolls of those needing help? (Making the enormous assumption that the intervention is even well-intentioned in the first place.)

The book is not all hard going. Jessica Mitford's exposé of the US funeral business is bitingly witty, and Greg Palast's accounts of the removal of thousands of legitimate voters from the Florida electoral roll in 2000 has old-school panache and is probably the most revealing chapter in terms of how the investigation actually proceeded.

Also, I said at the start that Tell Me No Lies does not affirm one's faith in humanity. However, that's not quite the full story.

First, although the vast majority of the people in the book are either perpetrators or innocent victims of horrendous deeds, there are some individuals who stand out for their principled stances against the horror.

Brigadier-General Roméo A. Dallaire, commander of the UN mission in Rwanda, repeatedly refused orders to abandon the Tutsis completely to their slaughter by evacuating his peacekeepers in 1994. Chief Warrant Officer Hugh C Thompson physically interposed himself between his rampaging superiors and a huddle of unarmed Vietnamese civilians during the My Lai massacre of 1970, later throwing away a commendation that had sought to extend the coverup by citing him for fictional deeds as opposed to his genuine heroism.

And then there are the journalists themselves, many of whom put their lives on the line to reveal to the world appalling facts that would otherwise have remained hidden.

But beyond individual acts at the time, there is another faint glimmer of hope. If you can read about someone's suffering decades later and from another continent and still feel outraged and sickened, even if it's far too late to do anything, maybe there is a chance that our shared human bond, although often all-too-easily snapped, will be strong enough to make a difference next time, provided that we're sufficiently informed in time. Maybe.