Part five. Project: Documentary and the gallery space. Exercise. Cruel and Tender.

Part Five.

Project: Documentary and the gallery space.

Exercise. Cruel and Tender.

Another broken link. Luckily I have a copy of Cruel and Tender and downloaded the brochure directly from the Tate web site.  

What comes across from viewing the photographs is how impersonal they are.  The images manage to remove the people from their personality.  While lacking warmth they manage to convey a feeling of the times and circumstance of their taking.  

The images taken by Boris Mikhailov are a cold representation of the the Russia we are not supposed to see; cold, dirty, and desperate.

Likewise with the images of William Eggleston with their portrayal of rural America which he shows as class ridden, lonely, and materialistic.

All through the book there are beautiful images that highlight the contradictions of the times in which they were taken.

Rineke Dijkstra.

I must state at the outset that I do not understand the images of the new mothers.  Be it my age or gender but I can find no beauty or relevance in them.  Perhaps they are too personal or too raw, but I fail to see what Dijkstra saw.  

The images of the bull fighters I find far more interesting.  These are the faces of ordinary men who are extraordinarily brave.  They risk their lives for, what must be, the highest of adrenalin rushes.  To pit themselves against an animal that, if it could, would kill them.  Removing them from the bull ring and isolating them in this way allows one to see the evidence of their encounters and look into their eyes.  

Fazal Sheikh.

Somalia is a country in name alone without governance or effective government.  Ruled, as it is, by warlords and tribal leaders all the population can do in hard times is to flee to other countries, like Kenya, that do have functioning governments.  

The pictures taken by Sheikh demonstrate the plight of these people.  All they can do in times of need is to make their way to refuge centres and wait for the world to feed them.  It can’t help that the population of Somalia has grown from 2.5 million in 1960 to over 10 million today.  The picture of Amina Ahmed Abdi (mother of ten) points to the future problems of Somalia.  What chance does such a poor country have if it nearly doubles it's population every25 years.

The technique of having his subjects looking straight into the lens lifts them from their surrounding and again, as with Dijkstra, allows one to look into their eyes and souls.