No Olho da Rua 30/11/2010

SANDRO'S LETTER

Sandro showed us this letter from his sister. V basic/quick translation

Hi brother You abandoned us. we are now living in an area called 'New Progress' near Dinha's house..... ....if you don't want to visit us please send a message.....Mum sends you lots of hugs.... Love you and God Bless you. The number of the bus to get here is 2110 Novo Progresso....my phone number is....

No Olho da Rua, 28/11/2010

24 hours later Celia's camp is completely trashed. The banner is gone, window smashed, big rock on the floor inside. No sign of anyone.

Over the road we find Landia, Preto and Vinicius. The Gameleira tree has a new fence around it to stop homeless people from living there. Of course there are already holes in the fence so we have a long chat sitting under the tree.

We have a notebook including pictures of everyone who's ever been in the project. Over the years it's quite a lot of people. We want to record people's memories, to find out what's happened, collect stories etc.

It turns out that Vinicius (who we met for the first time yesterday) was the boyfriend of Sandra who was one of the original kids we met in 1995. A year or so ago Sandra was killed in a car accident (Vinicius was in the same crash and has a big scar on his right thigh, uses a crutch). In 1995 Sandra was with an athletic boy called Walter and we have fantastic pictures of them and their baby, of Walter being acrobatic, cleaning his house and so on. But he too was killed in a car crash, perhaps in 2000. Then Sandra and Vinicius became a couple and they were together 6 years. Their baby was also in the accident - apparantly it flew through the air and was saved because it landed on a woman. It's now living with Sandra's sister. These tragedies just go round and round. Preto and Landia are also tearful about not just Sandra and Walter, but also Lindomar, Otacilio, Edna, Edna's son Jonathon. It's generally cars and AIDS that are the killers.

We collect the first exposed films and re-load.

No Olho Da Rua 27/11/2010

Saturday - after a long period of inactivity, the project got back underway and the first step is always to find the kids. You never know where they will be, if they are around at all. They could be in prison, might have gone to another city, perhaps living in a favela or they may even be dead. But since 1997 they have always gravitated towards Gameleira district and specifically a huge gameleira tree next to a busy junction. At one time they had a 'house' under the tree, long since bulldozed by the authorities who have also been busy removing typical street kids habitats, completely filling the shady, dry underneath of road and rail bridges with rubble.

We drive around and find Celia's latest 'camp' (see above) outside an empty furniture store, just across the road from the tree. A salvaged advertising banner offers protection from rain and sun; the usual detritus of street living is strewn around, there are stones to sit on, washing hangs from railings. Piriquito (her partner) is in prison and she's there with his brother Alexandre and Weber. She has a kind of job doing embroidery. They are happy to see us and want cameras. over the next couple of hours we find Conchinia and Vinicius asleep in a person sized hollow under a footbridge, then Bilu who looks really well. He takes us to find Sandro and this is a shock. he's slumped back on a broken plastic chair, head wedged against the wall and a whiny fuzzbox of a transistor radio. He's totally out of it, can hardly raise his voice, almost impossible to understand him. Puffed eyes, swollen, cracked lips; his left arm paralysed from a recent stab wound, filthy. At least the people around there seem to look after him a little bit - two elderly ladies in a nearby bar obviously like him, despite all the trouble he must have caused. They say he's been around for 20 years, they've known him since he was a little boy.

Finally, after more driving around, we see Licão. He's with Patricia again (the last we knew they were apart) and she's several months pregnant. They are very happy. Licão has built a house under a mango tree, full of fruit, there are even christmas decorations! There's even a sign saying "No entry without Licão's invitation". Haidi is living nearby with a new man. There are several people we've never met too, including a sister of Elisangela.

By the end of the day we've distributed several cameras and we will be back tomorrow.

New artwork at Sunderland Station

A permanent new artwork by Julian Germain has been unveiled as part of the £7 million redevelopment of Sunderland Station.

Commissioned by Nexus who operate the Tyne and Wear Metro, 'FOUND' is a poignant photo essay of 41 images sited within the brick bays of the 120 metre wall that faces platforms 1 and 2

The still-life images depict objects retrieved from the lost property office and placed back in the environment of the Metro network - onto the seats and floors of the trains and stations where they were left behind.

On one level the exhibition is a celebration of commonplace things. Recorded in fine detail and enlarged to architectural scale, ordinary items unexpectedly invite our attention, encouraging us to observe and enjoy their surfaces and colours. In addition to this, Germain is marvelling at the capacity of our society to generate so much 'material' while considering our appetites for accumulating such an incredible variety of possessions.

The images in 'FOUND' are also references to people's lives - 'lost property' being the inevitable result of thousands of passengers from all walks of life, making thousands of journeys while carrying thousands of possessions.

We are all prone to lapses of concentration (perhaps because of tiredness, a daydream or some kind of distraction) and it is these that cause us to lose our phones, wallets, keys, shopping or indeed anything that we are carrying. In this sense, the photographs allude to human nature itself.

FOUND is a reflection of our society and of us.

FOUND is permanently sited at Sunderland Station, Athenaeum Street, Sunderland, Tyne and Wear, SR1 3HP, UK

For every minute you are angry
you lose sixty seconds of happiness



Exhibition at In Camera Gallery, Paris

March 11 - May 8, 2010

Vernissage 6-10pm, March 11

in camera galerie
21 rue Las Cases
75007 Paris
T: +33 (0)1 47 05 51 77
contact@incamera.fr
www.incamera.fr

Multivocal Histories curated by Bas Vroege

Images from 'Steel Works', first exhibited and published in 1990 are being featured in the Noorderlicht Photofestival in Gröningen, Holland, this month.

It features photographs by Tommy Harris, a selection of family snapshots collected by Julian Germain and some of Germain's colour photographs, framed in welded steel with engraved texts.

When Julian Germain published his book ‘Steel Works’ in 1990, he unintentionally laid the foundations for a new current in documentary photography. Germain combined his own work with that of a local news photographer, family snapshots and a reportage from the Sunday Times Magazine. In doing so, he exposed the social clear-cutting of Thatcherism. Bas Vroege, director of Paradox and lecturer at the Master's in Photographic Studies (University Leiden), gathered more examples of this sort of 'post-modern visual history writing'.

In her long-running project 'ReFraming History', Magnum photographer Susan Meiselas explores the impact of time and politics on the people of Nicaragua. The young Czech curator/photographer Ales Vasicek collaborated with Vojta Dukát, the legendary photographer/filmmaker of Moravian descent, who recorded the departure of the Russian troops on video in 1991. Vasicek supplemented Dukát's images with documents and photographs that provide background to the main location, the camp/town of Milovice. But he also shows the pictures he had taken in 2008, unaware of Dukat's work there, while working as a walk-on for a film production shot there, dealing with the fall of Srebrenica.

In all these long-term projects the photographer, who works in an increasingly independent manner, is an artist, editor, curator and researcher, all rolled into one. It is 'slow journalism' at its best.

Taco Hidde Bakker (NL)
Wouter den Bakker (NL)
Vojta Dukát (CZ/NL)
Julian Germain (GB)
Stephen Bell/Stanley Greene (GB/US)
Tim Hetherington (US)
Jian Jiang (CN)
Anastasia Khoroshilova (DE)
Susan Meiselas (US)
Florian Schwarz (DE)
Andrea Stultiens (NL)
Ales Vasicek (CZ)

Curated by Bas Vroege

Noorderlicht Photofestival takes place between 6 sep 4 oct 2009

http://www.noorderlicht.com/

Installation Photo above by Valentijn Brandt

USEFUL PHOTOGRAPHY 009

The latest issue of Useful Photography (no 009) is available, featuring photographs from manuals and books that help us become better photographers. Available from Kesselskramer Publishing. Click on image for more info....