Where Three Dreams Cross @ Whitechapel Gallery

Whitechapel Gallery's winter exhibition, Where Three Dreams Cross, is a collection of photographs from India, Bangladesh and Pakistan documenting the development of photography in the region from its introduction in the nineteenth century to the present. It is undoubtedly a vast collection of images, with over 400 photographs forming the ambitious exhibition.

The photographs are grouped into five themes: The Family, The Portrait, The Performance, The Street and The Body Politic; an organising principle that is ultimately inadequate. These themes fall down under the scope of the project - an enormous variety of photographs from a vast stretch of history. Nina Caplan summed up the jumbled nature of the exhibition for Time Out:

The allocation is somewhat arbitrary (do courtesans really belong in 'Family'?) and entirely inadequate, since there is no chronological, historical or thematic coherence at all. The clusters of pictures are haphazard and inadequately captioned, failing to explain who, for example, Benazir Bhutto is, much less why Pakistani photographer Raghu Rai thought her election worth zooming in on.

There are of course many striking photographs in the exhibition. The images grouped under The Body Politic and The Street (upstairs in the gallery) I found the most resonant.

Many of these images capture political tumult. Rashid Talukder's black and white photograph of the return of Sheikh Mufijur Rahman to Dhaka in 1972 is visually arresting for the ocean of people surrounding the Sheikh's car. Syed Mohammed Adil's colour triptych of Pakistani flags, knives upheld by protesting women and a boy running past a street fire spell out the social unrest that has flared periodically in the country since the Islamic republic was declared in 1956.

Other photographs are remarkable compositions, like Raghubir Singh's coloured photograph of a red truck in Kerala, and another of a view from inside a vehicle, showing a reflected image in the rear vision mirror and an Apollo sign, standing out from the dust and haze of a West Bengal road, seen through the windscreen. ‘Boy at bus stop’ (New Delhi 1992) is particularly lovely for the charcoal storm clouds gathering behind the station still cast in sun. Dinesh Khanna's two photographs, one from a series of photographs of a doorways and the other of pillars and a very striking blue wall, are similarly captivating.

Despite its shortcomings, the ambitious scale of this exhibition makes it worth seeing, and visitors will be rewarded with a jumbled, varied and insightful view of life on the subcontinent.

Just a few links

Margaret Simons is doing freelance journalists a great service in investigating pay rates among Australian publishers. This is going to be a great resource for young journalists - such as myself - who may not know what is a reasonable industry wage. You can read her progress at her Crikey media blog The Content Makers.

Rachel Hills has posted a similarly useful piece at her blog, Musings of an Inappropriate Woman, about how to increase blog traffic.

Marieke Hardy's First person politics are virgin on the ridiculous, published at The Drum, has been included in links pages all over the net as a premier riposte to Tony Abbott's views on virginty, and I am including it here for its acerbic and insightful disposal of the ensuing rubbish spoken by those including George Brandis, seen here:

Accordingly I look forward to his maintaining a dignified silence when it comes to matters of Indigenous affairs, refugees, the legalisation of drugs, and absolutely anything to do with vaginas unless he's got a secret hidden one he's not telling us about.

Which means that political debates in future shall be between white, middle-class people who are mostly gentlemen representing the population and what they think about tax-payer funded junkets and the intricacies of Parliament House catering.

I haven't had much time to discover web delights over the last few weeks as I have found myself otherwise occupied (not gainfully, alas) for the time being at the Barbican Centre as the Media Relations Intern for Visual Arts. A welcome development!

Precious (Lee Daniels, 2009)

Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire is a film that has garnered a great deal of press since it's release last month. Indeed, Lee Daniel's cinematic adaption has been nominated for six Academy Awards, no mean feat for a film with a wretchedly harrowing premise.

Precious, played with grace by Gabourey Sidibe, is sixteen and pregnant for the second time with her father's child. She lives in Harlem with her mother, Mary, in what is an iredeemably toxic homelife.

There is a constant sense of danger when Precious’s mother is in a scene (I always think she’s about to burn those around her with her cigarette). Mary is a thoroughly repulsive character, but shown at the end to be human rather than an evil caricature; just a weak and warped one. Mo'Nique's performance in the role is devastating, and one which earned her a Golden Globe.

I had prepared myself for a film telling the despair and desolation of abuse; and while it is terrible at times, tremors of hope ripple through the narrative. Precious’s stoicism is heartrending – and when she finally breaks down it is all the more moving for it, but her defensive flights of fancy and the film's many humourous moments add lightness to Precious's undeniably hard life.

The acting is impressive. Mariah Carey and Lenny Kravitz are excellent and understated in their supporting roles, and Precious's classmates provide entertaining respite from the film's low points. A quibble, but I do wish that baby Abdul was a little less like a doll and more like an infant.

Despite the unglamorous material of the story, this is not a film of gritty realism. Hope manages an unorthodox triumph; and there is a pervasive sense of good and bad, and redemption through education.

PHOTOGRAPHY: William Eggelston @ Victoria Miro + Zineb Sedira

Currently showing at Victoria Miro in East London is an exhibition of William Eggleston's photography over the last decade. Championed as being 'the father of colour photography', it is true that Eggleston's photographs capture a sense of poetry within ordinary scenes and objects.

Untitled (bathroom with pink curtain, Cuba), 2001

From The Guardian

Guardian reviewer Adrian Searle, considering a photograph of a discarded newspaper, was struck by its composition, balance and symmetries, and 'air of random fixation' - traits attributable to most of Eggleston's abstract photographs in this exhibition. A green tiled wall behind a palm tree in Cuba, a telegraph pole standing before a yellow and red building in Memphis, a spoon on an angled wooden window sill; all images imbued with an aesthetic poignancy that transcends their pretty pedestrian compostional elements.

And as Adrian Searle also writes, 'colour matters, too'. Eggleston's photograph of a New Jersey motel makes excellent use of light and colour, with the moon illuminating the vivid blue of a pool slide and the motel lights shining golden in the night.

The review of the show at Londonist quotes Eggleston as likening his work to "part of a novel [he's] doing" which I think is apt; like a writer he is working at making the ordinary poetic - or depicting the banal in such a way that his audience is privy to its poetry.

Or in Searle's words:

“Some people seem to possess an almost uncanny ability to notice things – and not only to notice them, but to invest them with meaning and complexity. Intuition, attention and openness to the world are part of what makes a photographer great, an ability more certain than luck or happenstance. Whatever it is, Eggleston has it.”

***

Earlier this month I spent a day at the Pompidou Centre in Paris. It was the perfect place to be on a very cold day - and the last of five very cold days. Most of the day was spent in the National Modern Art Museum, which is currently holding an exhibition devoted to the work of modern female artists.

Feminism aside, the work that resonated most with me in the exhibition is this photograph, The Haunted House, by French-born and London-based artist Zineb Sedira.

      

The Haunted House (2006)

I love how the castle's clarity contrasts against the hazy horizon; also the scene's unreal quality and the sense of desertion.

Links? What links?

It was a small relief to learn that it wasn't just me feeling average last Monday - it was all of the UK. Next year I will be better prepared for England's Blue Monday. By being in Morocco.

Otherwise this was a week given over to reflecting on the closure of Collingwood's Tote Hotel. Clem Bastow and Marieke Hardy each wrote moving pieces about what could be the end of an era; Mess + Noise provided plenty of coverage on the Tote's last drinks, while Spike at Meanjin posted the excellent video 'Hitler finds out the Tote is closed' and The Vine's footage of the last song played by the Drones closing set, My Pal, with Joel Silbersher, is precious and very moving. The widepread emotional reaction to the closure of this 29 year old venue has made clear the sense of community felt by Melbourne's music lovers. Personally, I loved the Tote for some lazy reasons: it was a block and a half from my house in Collingwood which made it easy for me to see all sorts of bands at my leisure, and I didn't have to dress up to go there. Despite the Tote's rock reputation, it was a thoroughly unpretentious place to go for a beer and see a band. It will be interesting to see how Melb's music scene absorbs this assault; there are of course venues that can take up the slack - relatively new ones like the Birmingham, the Curtin and the NWC come to mind - but fingers remain crossed that the Tote is resurrected.

As I mentioned, the Drones had the honour of playing the last song on stage at the Tote. Love the Drones - so here is a photo from whothehell.net of Gareth Liddiard mid-set at a show in 2009, posted with a bunch of other stand out rock photos from last year.

And while I'm on the topic of music, I read with interest Amber Jamieson's post at the Team Crikey blog about her particular views on musical encores. I also feel strongly about encores, but my views are contrary to Amber's. I have been thinking for years that I will one day fashion a t-shirt decrying the mandatory encore. I suspect this one will remain stalled in the idea stage.

And finally, I recommend you look at The Guardian's The politics of sharing a bed if only for the pictures. Which position are you? In my repertoire: Heimlich, Spoons, Conjoined Twins and inevitably, Cliffhanger.

The Leopard

Giuseppe Tomasi de Lampedusa's The Leopard, an evocative sketch of the end of Bourbon rule in Sicily, is a distinctly sensual work of literature. It is a poignant account of the end of an era, beautifully crafted and well-translated. In The Leopard, Lampedusa is concerned with love, passion and beauty but too philosophy and life experienced through the senses:

…no bugs there but to make up for that the Prince found thirteen flies in his glass of granita, while a strong smell of excrement drifted in from the street and the privy next door, and all this had caused him most unpleasant dreams; waking at very early dawn amid all that sweat and stink he had found himself comparing this ghastly journey with his own life, which had first moved over smiling level ground, then clambered up rocky mountains, slid over threatening passes, to emerge eventually into a landscape of interminable undulations, all the same colour, all bare as despair. These early morning fantasies were the very worst that could happen to a man of middle age; and although the Prince knew they would vanish with the day’s activities he suffered acutely all the same, and he was used enough to them by now to realise that deep inside him they left a sediment of sorrow which, accumulating day by day, would in the end be the real cause of his death. [41]

Lampedusa's hero, Don Fabrizio, is a physically imposing man and but moves with grace and elegance. The Prince is an instinctive leader and an astute judge of character and circumstance, the pinnacle of proud Salina heritage. Yet Lampedusa pits the Salina wealth and grandeur, perfectly drawn in his luxurious language, against the hardship of the lives of the Prince's subjects to create an unforgiving comparison.

In the livid light of five-thirty in the morning Donnafugata was deserted and seemed despairing. In front of every house the refuse of squalid meals accumulated along leprous walls; trembling dogs were routing about with a greed that was always disappointed. An occasional door was already open and the cumulative stench of sleep spread out into the street; by glimmering wicks mothers scrutinised the lids of their children for trachoma; almost all were in mourning and many had been the wives of those carcasses one stumbles over on the turns of mountain tracks… [143]

The excesses of the aristocracy are made clear at the Palermo ball attended by the Salina family. Lampedusa's description of the buffet - one paragraph of many in The Leopard devoted to the dinner table - cleverly captures the extravagance of a milieu unmindful of the cost of its comfort.

...beneath the five tiers bearing towards the distant ceiling pyramids of home-made cakes that were never touched, spread the monotonous opulence of buffets at big balls: coralline lobsters boiled alive, waxy chaud-froids of veal, steely-lined fish immersed in sauce, turkeys gilded by the ovens’ heat, rosy foie-gras under gelatine armour, boned woodcocks reclining on amber toast decorated with their own chopped guts, dawn-tinted galantine, and a dozen other cruel, coloured delights. [177-8]

The arid countryside, scorched by the weight of 'six times 30 days of sun sheer down on our heads', seems to have been incorporated into the Sicilian character and is fundamental to the distinction between mainland Italians and the people of Sicily.

Notes of sadness imbue the closing sections of the book, which describe death and the end of life, the reduced stature of the Salina and their obsolesence in a unified Italy.

The Leopard is an evocative, sumptuous work and reading it is less a cerebral exercise than a physical sensation.

ABC's First Tuesday Book Club submitted itself to the pleasures of The Leopard in September 2009 - you can read the transcript of the panel's discussion, watch the video, here.

S'more links, as the Tote bows out

It is 9.42am and I am listening to Bruce Milne address the Tote's last drinks via Triple R's live stream. Here's Marieke Hardy at her cutting best on the Tote (where I introduced myself to her once) for ABC's Drum:

The glorious Tote hotel in Collingwood, Victoria has closed its doors for the last time, with beleaguered nominee Bruce Milne bowing out with shrugs and sighs. This time it's not even some po-faced inner city resident shaking a fist from their well-manicured balcony and complaining about the noise (move out of the f*cking city then, you twit) that has crippled the place, but a government helpless to control that pulsating, seething morass of testosterone Australian capital cities fondly refer to as 'Saturday night'.

And similar wit, Guy Rundle for Crikey:

Besides, getting rid of all that music makes it easier to put up oversized slab-tilt apartment blocks -- vital if you're to destroy whatever distinctive selling point a Victorian city has, and a way of avoiding innovative and dynamic solutions to population growth. Use Docklands as an example -- let corporate clients dictate the planning of remaining inner-urban land, and create that most amazing of things, a pre-fabricated urban wasteland. Label it "the Warsaw end of Collins Street" and put it on the Neighbours tour.

Now this is all making me too homesick to type so on to other interweb gems.

From the Book Bench: a brief guide to describing cheese, which I am totally going to put into regular practice.

The Book Bench also put me onto this post by Hendrik Hertzberg; a few weeks old but insightful; welcome to the twenty-teens. And to this too at Salon, where Laura Miller promises to read outside her comfort zone in 2010. Good to think about your own reading limitiations.

In feminisms, Macy Halford still at Book Bench has written about Riot Grrrl Kathleen Hanna’s papers being archived at NYU’s Fales Library; Halford wonders about blogging and the feminist movement.

Meanwhile, The Guardian’s feminist year ahead; and Maddy Costa speaks to Nic Green about her production Trilogy, a 'celebratory venture into modern-day feminism' on stage at the Barbican in January.

To leave you on a high note, the Tote may be saved yet.