Phumzile Khanyile

“This work has taught me that no one is going to treat you well based on money – they either love you or they don’t. This journey has also taught me my worth. I come from Africa, where although we play with plastic crowns, we forget that the real jewels are literally beneath our feet. Plastic Crowns is based on symbolism. I use metaphors based on the power of being able to redirect one’s narrative, the power of our natural resources and jewels from this continent. The work is also a reminder to every single person that you can take part in your own storytelling. We are all worthy of a red carpet, plastic or not.”

Atikah Zata

“Saf is a farm labourer. He works on his brother’s rice field, carrying sacks of rice weighing up to 40kg. This story is a journey through Indonesia, a place that often sells itself as an agricultural country, but the reality doesn’t match expectations. There are many problems in the Indonesian agricultural system, including its treatment of farmers. As the climate crisis continues to worsen, urban farming communities play an increasingly important role in supporting food security for themselves and nearby communities. In this project, I am trying to document the farmers’ lives, their future and relationship with Indonesia.”

Chase Barnes

“The forces that direct and exert influence in our world are multiform and invisible. My series Wilderness of Mirrors endeavours to visualise contemporary mechanisms of control, which employ technology, anxiety and images as a means to destabilise and restructure belief. These discrete social and technological systems are embedded into the fabric of everyday life, and serve to reinforce and advance dominant structures of capital and power. This photograph was made in 2018 at the Renaissance Center, a complex of seven skyscrapers in Detroit, Michigan, containing a convention centre and the General Motors world headquarters. In the series, this image functions at face value – on a large LED display, a white hand operates a machine in the central tower of massive, labyrinthine architecture.”

Heja Rahiminia

“Since 1983, four years after the Islamic Revolution in Iran, hijab became mandatory for all women. Compulsory hijab for girls starts from a young age and they are forced to observe it in public places, work and study. Hijab has now become a political symbol in Iran. A few months ago in Tehran, a Kurdish young woman named Jina (Mahsa) Amini was arrested for allegedly not wearing the hijab in accordance with government standards. She died as a result of police brutality, and the incident became the basis of a widespread protest for women’s freedom of choice and against compulsory hijab as well as social injustices. This photograph is from a series about mandatory rules and especially the compulsory hijab as a tool of the regime to control women in Iran.”

Leia Ankers

“It has only been in the last couple of years that I’ve come to identify myself as a disabled woman. Embracing my disability has not been an easy journey, but in 2019 I was done pretending – I had let the fear of others’ prejudices control my life for too long. I started giving a lot of thought to the representation of disabilities in the media – always shown from a medical point of view and through dependency on others, rather than focusing on the entire person and what they have done for themselves. I want people to see that individuals with disabilities, whether they be visible or invisible, don’t have to live with this narrative of fear and pity, or have to be inspiring to be seen as deserving. I want to exhibit the strength and empowerment of people with disabilities and show how they have surpassed the limits enforced by society.”

David Severn

“This is Geoff Poulter, a former Nottinghamshire coal miner, who came out on strike with the National Union of Mineworkers during the infamous 1984–85 miners’ strike. The image is from my series Thanks Maggie, which explores life and culture within the Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire coalfield. He is wearing his prized mining helmet, which he wore from the age of 15, when he began work in the pits. Poulter was in the minority as a striking miner in Nottinghamshire, as the non-striking Union of Democratic Mineworkers had become the dominant union in that area. The sociopolitical reasons behind this are highly complex and much debated but, in part, the authorities had helped to orchestrate a divided workforce, pitting workers against each other and ultimately handing control to the government. The divide-and-conquer strategy succeeded and the strike was lost, greatly diminishing the prominence and strength of trade unions in Britain.”

Eli Durst

“In this image, a man in a New Age class spins around in circles – much like a whirling dervish – in the hope of accessing a meditative state. He spins 33 times, in reference to the age of Christ when he was crucified. This photograph was made in a relatively straightforward documentary style. I observed the class and made photographs throughout, sometimes asking people to stop or repeat a certain action or exercise. In this way, the photograph is an honest document of reality, a description of the surface of the world at that moment, something we might call truth. In another way, however, the photograph is a cipher, a physical description of a metaphysical dimension, invisible to the camera. It is a photograph of this man’s faith, a spiritual experience from which the viewer is excluded, something very far from fact or objective truth.”

Jamie Lee Taete

“I took this at a Trump rally in Wyoming in 2021. I noticed the car because it had personalised number plates that read QP8RIOT, a reference to the QAnon conspiracy theory movement. The car’s side and back windows, and about two-thirds of the windscreen, were covered in stickers relating to the driver’s various conspiratorial beliefs: that Covid-19 vaccines are poisonous, that JFK Jr faked his own death, that a group of global elites are involved in a massive child-trafficking ring, and – I think – that Donald Trump is the reincarnation of General Patton. There are many ways that these types of conspiracies can be harmful to the believer. But it’s rare to see someone whose beliefs put them in such immediate danger – to such a degree that they are unable to safely operate their car.”

Rik Moran

“Truth is inherent in my book, Chance Encounters in the Valley of Lights. As a story about a story – of Alan Godfrey, a Todmorden policeman who claimed to be abducted by a UFO – it plays to the way we tell them. We emphasise, exaggerate and embellish in the name of a good tale. What truths lie in Godfrey’s story when there’s no evidence beyond his recollection? Growing up nearby, this story has lived with me for over 30 years. I wanted to tell my truths, presenting the facts for the viewer to draw their own conclusions. This image shows the Todmorden, West Yorkshire, landscape where Godfrey had his encounter. Shot on Aerochrome film, which records infrared light invisible to the naked eye, it reveals hidden truths within the landscape: a fitting metaphor for the untold stories present all around us.”

James Bannister

“Las Vegas projects a facade of success and glamour. It’s something that we all buy into. We train our vision to see what the casino-hotel owners want us to see, and are blind to what they don’t. We see the easy lie, not the difficult truth because the world is complicated, and this helps us digest it. Despite the dire water situation – a symptom of being only two hours from the hottest place on Earth – lawns, pools and golf courses have become a status symbol in Las Vegas. A signifier of our relationship with scarcity and value. An investigation into presentation, photography can sometimes have a great knack of getting under the cracks of the image we project. I find the distance between the fantasy and the reality of ourselves very revealing. Arbus called this ‘the gap between intention and effect’.”

Alison Jackson

“I started my MA at the RCA hating photography because of its manipulative qualities. I ended up making this whole body of work about exactly that – about how you can’t tell what’s real or fake through photography; you can’t rely on your own perception. My work bursts the bubble that we can believe in anything we see in an image, exploring how seductive imagery is, even when you know that you can’t believe it’s true. Photography is not truth – it’s only resemblance. In my work, resemblance becomes real and fantasy touches on the plausible. I create scenes that the public have all imagined, but have never seen before. It’s an exploration of our insatiable desire to get personal with public personalities, raising questions about the power of imagery, which incites voyeurism and our need to believe.”

Ayesha Jones

“As I sat to think about these words, a man asked me, ‘Where do you come from?’. He wanted to inform me, unprovoked, that ‘I have mixed race kids too, you know’, like me. This image is from a project titled Where do you come from?. It is a response to being constantly asked this question, as a Black/mixed heritage person living in the UK. It is about the social construct of race. I have made photographs during time spent in the Caribbean, Wales and West Africa. Places that my recent and distant ancestors would have called home. This image was taken in my late grandmother’s car, at the top of a hill in Machynlleth, Wales. In the mirror is the place where I feel most at home, a bench overlooking the view below, a view enjoyed by my late grandparents, late father and now my son and I.”

“It basically started this whole journey, where I now go on palaeontology digs every winter and join these palaeontologists who are looking for some of the same bones my grandfather was,” Wilson explains. But these digs, and the work Wilson creates while on them, are not merely scientific, and their meaning is not tied only to her own family.

Wilson’s images of seemingly endless Texan deserts and long extinct creatures, alongside conceptual self-portraits in the style of geology and anatomy charts, speak to an origin story that reaches beyond traceable generations. Each bone collected is evidence of the slow, significant work of evolution, serving as a reminder that we, as humans, sit at the very end of that timeline.

All of this, Wilson explains, makes this work as much about our connection to the Earth, as about her own link to her grandfather. “It’s a sad reflection that we don’t take all of that time and perfect evolution into consideration with how we treat each other and our planet,” she says. “Millions of years from now, when some form of a palaeontologist can see the stratum of our dirt and our planet, what will our layer look like? To me, that’s hard to reckon with.”

The creation of DIG was also, in moments, hard to reckon with. It took Wilson some time to accept the work as a combination of the personal and the scientific; to allow herself to acknowledge that her story – and that of her grandfather – were worth telling. “It’s not only thinking about my connection with him over these years, but the connection that we all have altogether,” she explains. “As mammals, as humans, as a species, connecting to our ancestors – I didn’t really know what that magical feeling was, but it has really carried through this whole project.”

Sarah Wilson, DIG: Notes on Field and Family, is available to pre-order now (Yoffy).

Exposure on the glass plates had to occur in makeshift darkrooms on site, often in wretched conditions. The glass could crack on the route home, especially when travelling down mountains. The resultant artworks are documents of sheer physical exertion as much as anything else, and of whatever emotional and mental animus compelled each mission. The story of their creation is written into their surfaces, in the slippage and run of chemicals, the scratches and frayed edges.

Thematically speaking, these are images of geology; of millennia-old Celtic cultures, and of centuries-long struggles between local communities and the interests of landholders, state, and big business. Boyd alludes in his afterword to a family heritage rooted in Western Ireland, and early sites of human civilisation are in evidence, from the standing stones of Machrie Moor to the forbidding ring forts of the Aran Islands. 

More modern abandoned structures are cast in the same spectral light, like the wreck of the Speedwell on North Uist, and the MV Plassey, a WW2 warship beached on the Aran Islands. There are clearance sites – from which tenant farmers were forcibly removed to make way for livestock during the 18th and 19th centuries – at Hallaig and Assynt in Scotland.

Of particular interest are shots of the so-called Shell to Sea cottages, sites of a community struggle against the installation of Shell’s Corrib gas processing pipeline in the 2000s-2010s. The tale is a recent one, but the method of documentation, with its connotations of great age, grants it the same patina of myth as photographs reflecting more timeworn stories of struggle. At various points in the book, we seem to be cast forward to some point in the future, by which modernity will have become a distant source of morality tales, archetypes.

Boyd has worked with poets throughout his career, and regularly cites them in his work. In this case he has been inspired by Sorley MacLean and Seamus Heaney amongst others. Poems by Moya Cannon are even included in the book, dotted between the photographs. But perhaps the most notable point of reference for this work is the gothic prose stylings of Edgar Allan Poe, a world away from the earthy lyricism of Heaney and MacLean. There is certainly an illustrative quality of ghostliness, of melancholy, even of a lurking evil to some of these pictures: the trace of something ancient, disruptive of our normal sense of the world. This also seems to reflect the personal impulse behind this book, some of which was created during a period of depression: perhaps some psychological sense of alienation, of a spectrality to life, was being recorded and worked through. Indeed, what the text arguably leaves us with above all is a sense of the weight, and the catharsis, of the individual journey that it evokes.

The Point of the Deliverance by Alex Boyd is available to pre-order via Kozu Books.

“The objective of these landscapes was not only to show what Britain looked like at this particular time, but also to convey how it felt to drive through it, and to stand by while it moved around you”

Danny Fox

The journey – much like the nature of their collaboration – was intuitive. “When we started this project we didn’t have a clear plan of where we would actually visit,” Fox explains, “we only had a crude red line drawn across the map, vaguely marking the route”. With only eight hours of daylight a day, they drove up the east side of England, then diagonally through Scotland up to the Isle of Skye. They descended down the west coast through Liverpool, Manchester, and then into Wales, where they finished in Cardiff. “Eight days doesn’t sound like a lot of time,” says Ifill, “but when it’s winter, and it’s just the two of you, it becomes a very intimate and emotional experience. You see each other going high and low.” 

Working with different media also meant the journey was distinct for each artist. Ifill was jumping in and out of the van to take photos, but Fox couldn’t paint on the road. “I kind of sat there and thought about things and looked out the window,” says Fox. Note-taking has always been part of Fox’s creative process, and in this instance it became an important part of the final outcome. “The objective of these landscapes was not only to show what Britain looked like at this particular time, but also to convey how it felt to drive through it, and to stand by while it moved around you.” 

December 2021 was a precarious time. After almost two years of Covid-19 lockdowns, the UK was bracing itself for the winter months with the possibility of yet another forced quarantine. Ifill recalls the “sense of paranoia and hostility in the air”, but he also insists that the book does not take a political stance. “It’s more of an honest recording from a neutral standpoint,” he says. “I’m sure a lot of people are guilty of romanticising a place, or gently twisting your aesthetic, finely tuning it into how you want it to be interpreted.” This is also a benefit of a collaboration: “You’re forced into an angle on honesty.” 

When Ifill got back to his studio in Kent, he began processing over 30 rolls of film. He mailed the prints to Cornwall, where Fox painted directly onto the images at his studio using nail polish – a reflection on what was available to him on the road. “There wasn’t an art shop in every town, but there is always a corner shop or a pharmacy where you can buy a couple of colours of nail polish,” Fox says. 

The finished book is meditative and tactile. Much like the journey itself, the sequence rambles through photos, paintings, and handwritten notes with an impulsive, diaristic energy – perhaps an unintentional reflection of their symbiotic collaboration. Ifill and Fox explain that while travelling, place names became a form of wayfinding. “Detours were prompted by encountering signs containing names of places that appealed aesthetically or simply rolled off the tongue nicely,” says Ifill. Holy Island – a tidal island off the north-east coast of England – was one of those places. “We got out of the van and stood there for a while. It felt as though you’d reached the end of the world,” Ifill remembers. There was no real reason why they decided to name the project after this place; “It just seemed to be one of those rare moments in a creative collaboration where both artists are thinking the same thing at the same time,” says Fox. 

Ifill recalls an encounter with London gallerist Hannah Barry, who visited his studio prior to an exhibition of the work back in February. “She asked how we go about discussing the work in order to make certain decisions. I can remember Danny looking at her and pausing for a moment, then replying, ‘We don’t really talk. You have to be on a telepathic level when collaborating with someone else. That’s the only way it can work’.”

Holy Island by Kingsley Ifill & Danny Fox is published by Loose Joints.

Gough’s broader practice considers “how the natural world can be represented at this ecologically critical point”. The questioning of our capacity to infer qualities of scale, distance, and density seems an important aspect of this investigation: it subtly confounds the centring of human perspective which has been a hallmark of landscape art since the Romantic era (embodied in the all-seeing gaze of Caspar David Freidrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog). 

Crawling over the luminous, moss-blanketed surface of lava fields, plunged into caverns, sucked towards the black depths of geysers, Gough’s camera foregoes such a panoramic vantage point. And, as the nature of what we are seeing becomes harder to fathom at close range, our sense of ourselves as the seeing entities becomes oddly fuzzy at the edges.

The trick of taking the viewer right up to a visual surface to disorient them is not new. We find it in everything – from novelty online quizzes (of the ‘can you guess what this is?’ type) to the abstract expressionist photography of artists like Aaron Siskind. But in this context the techniques are put to a different, ecologically-minded use, suggesting a rejection of the anthropocentric gaze. We are nudged instead towards an imagined non-human gaze that is ground-dwelling and primordial. In this sense, Topographies II renders a kind of speculative intimacy with non-human life, and indeed with non-living geological forms, which is both vital and arresting. 

Topographies II by Jess Gough is self-published. 

12 Hz by Ron Jude is published by Mack. 

Enamoured with the history of the silk route and adventure, Robowski set out on a road trip through the remote plains of Central Asia. Interested in exploring new terrain and making personal connections, the photographer sought to avoid main cities. Instead, he stayed at the homes of those he met along the way, learning about the community and culture through a more authentic experience. On one such occasion in the town of Tamchy, at the lake Issyk-Kul, in the Tian Shan mountains in Kyrgyzstan, he met Kenje-Eje.

“As we sat on the floor of her living room she reminded me of a sitting Buddha,” he recalls. “Majestic and serious, she sat straight as a string. She never smiled and spoke very little but her incredible strength was visible. Her business trades with wool craft and she offered to show me how to make a woolen pillow. We went to her workshop, where she sat on the concrete floor, grabbed a knife and began cutting out traditional patterns, in felt.” It was moments like these that Rogowski thrived for during his travels, always alone and without a clear idea of where he would go next. “Being alone enables being exposed to people, to connect with more places and more people,” he explains.

It took four trips and nearly three months on the road, and Rogowski very quickly surrendered his journey entirely to chance and surprise. In Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, by chance Rogowski met Argul – a young girl who directed him down untrodden paths to hidden natural oases and mountains. Despite the spontaneity, the finished work is presented with a harmonious sense of space and rhythm. “The most important for me are insignificant views and imperfections in the landscape,” he says. “These little things that make the seemingly ordinary landscape become interesting to my eye. There are no guidebooks on this, you just have to go on our way and look yourself. A good indication of a unique view is the amount of kilometers and steps done, to find it.”

After months of delays due to the pandemic lockdown, the book
is finally ready. Suicidal Birds is self-published, with the help of Rafał Milach with the editing and narrative, and Milach’s partner Ania Nalecka with the design. “Rafał turned the project upside down very quickly. He rejected most of the post-Soviet relics,” he says. “They are interesting but also heavily exploited ideas. Instead, he convinced me to focus on the slow history of the road, which continuity is interrupted again and again by some unexpected events. An error in the perfect scheme. He turned a visually interesting but maybe a bit over-done project into something distinctive, for which I am very grateful.”

Inspired by the works of Stephen Shore and William Eggleston, Rogowski’s documentary evokes the vastness of the raw and largely untouched mountainscapes, and the sparsely populated, yet culturally-rich villages peppering the territories along the way. But humanity and the heart comes from the portraits of individuals who showed him — a complete stranger — kindness and encouraged him to ruminate on new and unfamiliar perspectives. “When I am not familiar with a culture I encounter, I always have this moment of realising how singular my ways are,” he says. “It is trivial to say that travelling broadens perspectives, but there are no better ways of learning that our truths are not always right. That our culture, although it seems so central to who we are, is peripheral to this world as a whole.”

Suicidal Birds by Sebastian Rogowski is available to purchase through his online store.

BJP-online: How did the idea for this exhibition come about?

Victoria Jonathan: When the organisers contacted Berenice and I, then acting as directors of the Jimei x Arles Photo Festival in Xiamen, China, to curate a show of Chinese photography, we naturally came up with the idea of the river as a central theme to the show, as a nod to the location of the Jumièges Abbey, which is near the Seine. The river is also a seminal theme in contemporary Chinese photography, with references to the traditional aesthetics and modern history of China.

The river appears both as evidence and as a metaphor for the transformation of China over the past decades, which has had unprecedented and radical consequences on the landscape and environment, but also on the economy, society and culture. The title of the exhibition, Flowing Waters Never Return to the Source, is an excerpt from a poem by Li Bai (one of China’s most celebrated poets from the Tang dynasty, who wrote extensively about nature), which echoes an excerpt from Heraclitus’ Fragments: “You cannot step into the same river twice”. The world is constantly changing and evolving, there is no going back to the past or the origin. This verse felt like a suitable illustration of the course of history (and particularly the acceleration of history in China), and of photography’s relation to time and of man’s impact on nature.

Through the vision of thirteen photographers and artists, this exhibition paints a portrait of a transitioning China, symbolised by the image of the river.

The exhibition’s structure employs the river as an avenue to contemplate three very different subjects — the historical visualisation of landscapes, urbanisation, and the environment. Could you explain your thinking behind the structure of this show?

Over the past 20 years, many photographers have produced work about the river in China. Constructions such as the Three Gorges Dam, cities like Chongqing, sites such as the Yangtze or the Yellow River, all of which point to the scale of urbanisation in contemporary China. This has inspired the work of not only photographers but filmmakers, visual artists and writers.

In Chinese tradition, the river is a key element of ‘Shan shui’ (mountain-water) — a style of classical Chinese landscape paintings that illustrate a specific relation to nature, made of respect and veneration. In Western art history, landscape painting only appeared during the Renaissance period (1300-1600), whereas in China, it was as early as the Han dynasty (206 B.C.-220 A.C.) that an aesthetic conscience of nature emerged. Shan shui painting, which began to develop in the fifth century, does not attempt to represent nature in a realistic manner, but to provoke a spiritual emotion. This became problematic with the introduction of photography in China in the mid-19th century. How would this medium imported from the West, which allows one to capture reality instantly, transform the traditional Chinese representation of nature?

The exhibition includes two very different artistic responses to this question, coming from Yang Yongliang and Michael Cherney, while other artists like Jia Zhangke or Zhang Kechun [below] directly refer to this tradition in their works.

The river is also an important symbol in Chinese modern history. Mao, who was an excellent swimmer, used the conquest of nature to demonstrate his own power. In 1966, he crossed the Yangtze at the age of 73, an event that was photographed and promoted through propaganda, and which triggered the Cultural Revolution. To this day, this epic swim is commemorated every year by swimmers crossing the Yangtze while holding portraits of Mao in their hands. One of Zhang Kechun’s photographs from the series The Yellow River [above] was shot during this commemoration.

More recently, the construction of the Three Gorges Dam between 1994 and 2009 intended to contain the deadly floods of the Yangtze river, and has enabled the development of the world’s biggest hydroelectric plant. More than two million people were displaced in the process, while 1300 historical and archaeological sites, 15 cities, and 116 villages were submerged.  Dry lakes, pollution, landslides — the environmental consequences are countless. The exhibition includes several works by photographers and artists who have documented the impact of this project on the local landscape, environment and society: Edward Burtynsky, Zhuang Hui, Chen Qiulin, Mu Ge, Liu Ke and Jia Zhangke [below].

Could you tell us about the decisions you made when selecting artists? There are two non-Chinese photographers in the exhibition — Edward Burtynsky and Michael Cherney. Why did you feel it was important to include their work specifically?

The exhibition gathers works produced in the past two decades (between 1995 and 2019), a period of accelerated modernisation and development of contemporary art in China. The artists explore economic and political transformations of China as much as they participate in the artistic rise of the country.

China joined the World Trade Organisation in 2001 — after its urbanisation rate went from 36 per cent in 2000 to 60 per cent in 2018. The economic reform started in 1978 under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping, but the past two decades saw the rapid acceleration of urbanisation and industrialisation, and the emergence of a new superpower.

One also must keep in mind that during the Mao era (1949-1976), the photographic medium was solely employed for propaganda. It is only in the 1980s and 1990s that artistic photography was reborn, mainly in underground circles. Photography as an art form has flourished in China in the past 20 years, with the emergence of artists and a new scene of galleries, festivals, and publishers to support their work.

Many non-Chinese photographers came to China during this same period to document the transformations on the landscape, and have produced exceptional works — Nadav Kander, Ian Teh, Tim Franco, and Cyrus Cornut, for example. We chose not to show these works in order to focus on Chinese creation, however we have included Michael Cherney [below], who has been living in China since 1990, studied calligraphy and developed an artistic work completely nurtured by Chinese traditional culture and contemporary reality.

Edward Burtynsky [above] is the only exception to the rule. He has documented the global effect of industrialisation on the environment for the past 30 years, examining the origin of consumer goods and the scale of the landscape transformation, born out of our pursuit of progress. Naturally, his lifelong project has led him to China and to the Three Gorges Dam. We included his work for its balanced, relatively neutral view of the dam in the making, showing its massive scale to provide a photographic counterpart to the works of the Chinese artists showing in the exhibition. Their depiction of the river, and more particularly of the Three Gorges Dam, is dependent on their cultural history and political constraints in China, and tend to focus more on human scale against the backdrop of the dam’s gigantic structure.

The other thing in common between the selected artists is that they all work with time. All the works shown in the exhibition were produced over the course of several years. In photographing the rivers, the artists strode along their banks multiple times, observing its changes for years. Most of them employed pre-digital, lengthy photographic techniques, such as wet plate processes, and medium or large format cameras. It is all the more striking when you think of central themes of their work: change and acceleration.

By showing 13 different points of view that examine Chinese landscape today, the exhibition confronts all the different realities that can be witnessed along the Chinese river. Whether they focus on the rural or the urban, nature or humanity — these artists grasp the different facets of a landscape, which is physical, but also cultural, social and political. They contribute to the shaping of a new representation of Chinese landscape through art.

Flowing Waters Never Return to the Source will be on show at Jumièges Abbey, Normandy, France, from 15 July until 29 November. The exhibition catalogue is published by and available to purchase from Bandini Books.