Review: Andreas Gursky at the Hayward Gallery

People at the exhibition

Art is at least as much about what's left out as what's included. A sketch of someone can be all the more moving for excluding their surroundings; a photograph can highlight neglected details by zooming in on parts of a whole.

This also mirrors how the human eye and mind work. Our eyes can focus on only one small area at once, while our brain generally limits our attention to what matters most at any given moment, filtering out the rest.

But this is not how the world really is, and that's part of the point of the Andreas Gursky works currently on display at London's Hayward Gallery.

Many of Gursky's works are very large, and depict monumental scenes of people interacting with their environment on an epic scale.

More than that, he uses post-production techniques to splice together multiple images of the same scene, so that he can capture and reproduce more of it - and all with the same sharpness of focus, rather than with any blurring, curving or fading away at the edges.

This is not how we perceive the world, and yet it represents the world as it really is. Objects we aren't focusing on at any given time don't really become blurry, just as background noise doesn't really reduce in volume as we eavesdrop on a particular conversation - it only seems that way to us. In reality these things carry on as before, just as big or small, just as important or unimportant, regardless of who's looking.

Similarly, the things that seem monumental to us are actually hardly any more or less so than the things that seem inconsequential. The different threads in a carpet, as depicted abstractly in one Gursky photograph, are barely any different in size to the glacier and mountains depicted in another if considered on the scale of subatomic particles or the distances between galaxies.

Even when Gursky takes more egregious artistic liberties, such as when he manipulates the capture of two Formula 1 pit crews to make the team members more multitudinous and their exertions seem simultaneous with each other, he gets closer to the real truth by doing so. A single snapshot of a pit stop wouldn't convey the frantic speed of the action or the competitive importance of it as brilliantly as the hyperreal, toyed-with version.

Gursky

In collapsing several moments and perspectives into a single work, like David Hockney did with his Polaroid collages, Gursky gets closer to the reality of multidimensional spacetime.

Hockney

Not that Gursky always wants to portray everything as it really exists in the world. His depiction of the Bahrain grand prix circuit chops the track up into multiple kaleidoscopic pieces that lead to nowhere, while the one of the pit crews intensely isolates the cars and people in a sea of black space like a computer game emphasising a highlighted character or object selection from an array of options.

But even here one could argue that Gursky is getting closer to the truth. Even if, in the real world, photons fall from the sun onto surfaces at the same rate regardless of what those surfaces are made of or how they got there, likewise raindrops and wind, and even if all materials are ultimately made up of the same subatomic stuff, the deeper truth is that some things are different by virtue of their origin or emotional resonances. A Formula 1 car is different to a mountain because of the thousands of hours of human effort and ingenuity that have gone into its design and manufacture, while a tarmac loop in the desert deserves attention for the sheer absurdity of its having been forced into being.

Gursky somehow captures that. One of the many things he does with his pieces - as well as documenting the interplay and mutual impacts of people and the environment - is make us think differently about the world and our place in it. And that, again, is what art - some great art, if not all - is about.

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.

Just the essentials

Like most Londoners, I move flats a lot. I've lived in 9 different places in 8 years, which I think is pretty average for this city. Because I move so often, I try not to acquire too much stuff; nevertheless, the last time I moved - 3 weeks ago - I spent about 4 days packing in fits and spurts, no more than 5 minutes in the removal van, and then about 6 hours unpacking at my new place.

This is roughly the amount of stuff I have (the furniture isn't mine):

My stuff

Conversely, most of the people in Kiki Streitberger's Travelling Light photographic project, one of several such projects being exhibited until 29 August at the University of Westminster's 2015 Documentary Photography and Photojournalism MA course graduation show, took only about half a dozen things with them the last time they moved homes.

That's because Kiki's project focuses on Syrian refugees who have made their way to the UK by boat, for the most part taking not even only what they could carry but only what they could stuff into their pockets, as traffickers want to use all available space on their boats for more people.

For the project Kiki photographed not the refugees themselves, but the clothes and objects that survived their perilous journey. The photos are accompanied by descriptions of the items in the refugees' own words.

One of the people featured in Kiki's project is Alaa (his is the second entry on her own website's link to this project), a 14-year-old student who chose to share the T-shirt he wore on the trip, his asthma inhaler, his glasses, a book on Arab history, a notebook and a report card.

I don't have permission to reproduce the photograph or the full text, but Alaa's thoughts on masculinity, based on his history book, are surprisingly insightful given his age - although perhaps less surprisingly so given his own history.

I'll just quote the final few sentences of his entry, which read as follows:

"The school report is my last one from home. I brought it with me because I want to show people that I'm not stupid. When I come and ask for asylum, this doesn't mean I'm an idiot and I want people to know that."

FreshFace + WildEyed

Showing at the Photographers' Gallery is the 2015 FreshFace + WildEyed. Included are:

Jocelyn Allen's Covering the Carpet, in which she poses naked in contortions that hide her pubic hair from the lens, in reference to the removal of a painting from a London gallery in 2014. Allen's photographs are comically and perhaps sarcastically playful but also illustrate sculptural qualities of the human body. Seeing them in the flesh I was reminded of architectural plans, but of limbs, joints, head etc. This might be because Allen's face isn't visible in any of the photos either, so there's no immediate focal point for an intimate connection.

Aida Silvestri's Even This Will Pass, which presents highly blurred portraits of people who migrated from Eritrea to London, with the convolutions of their journey superimposed in thread. In the gallery, these are accompanied by the sitters' accounts of their journeys, including beatings, slavery, starvation, birth and miscarriage.

The exhibition is running until 5 July.