USSR 1991

In the fall of 1990, Keizo Kitajima received a commission from Japan’s Asahi Shimbun newspaper to visit the Soviet Union, the opportunity to spend a year documenting both people and places in what was then a monolithic entity. 15 republics, 11 time zones, and thousands of miles spanning the two—the task was daunting in the very least. Having spent several years based in West Berlin, the Iron Curtain was a looming presence and Kitajima had often contemplated turning his lens towards the Soviet regime although the difficulties associated therein—censorship, freedom of access, and overwhelming bureaucracy—seemed insurmountable. And so it was, with a mix of anticipation and trepidation, that Kitajima entered the USSR in November 1990 to capture a moment in time where the winds of change roared at a howling pace.

Through Glasnost and Perestroika, reforms ushered in by Mikhail Gorbachev, the media—both foreign and domestic— was granted far more access than ever before to Soviet society. In light of his major commission from an established media outlet, Kitajima found the perfect salve for his concerns about undertaking such a monumental endeavor. Having been granted unparalleled access to people and places usually off-limits to regular citizens, USSR 1991 can be regarded as the final photographic archive and overview of Soviet life. Throughout the process, Kitajima’s camera was omnivorous, digesting society as he saw it. KGB mandarins sit cheek by jowl with pop singers, artists alongside activists, peasants next to politicians.

While much of the outside world’s opinion of the USSR at that point was of a mighty power constrained—images of dour citizens queuing for bread made nightly newscasts worldwide—Kitajima resolved to avoid conforming to both “Western Humanist” ideology (wherein the chaos and ugliness of the regime was represented in stark contrast to Western affluence) and also to falling prey to state propaganda depicting happy laborers, and stalwart soldiers. With these competing perspectives, Kitajima focussed on people and landscapes, or more often, people in their own landscape.

While Kitajima’s is often known for its high contrast black and white photography, USSR 1991 differs greatly as it was photographed with the now defunct Kodacrome slide film, and offers a stunning, painterly account of his travels. Kitajima’s artfulness is ever present—this is not formulaic documentarian photography, or front line correspondence from a hard-boiled photojournalist. Here there are hard shadows from flash bulbs and a vivid technicolor applied to a part of the world that was often perceived as dark, grey and grim. While there are de-rigeur ruins of industry, giant colorless stacks whose purpose is never clear from afar, they sit in stark contrast to vivid blue skies. Peasants in multicolor prints gaze to the distance, religious activists swathe their faces in bright red scarfs. It’s not all grim here either: fashion models pose in bikinis, teenagers sunbathe, and actors mug for the camera. USSR 1991 can, in some ways, be seen as an antecedent to August Sander’s People of the 20th Century (Menschen des 20. Jahrhunderts). Here, Kitajima also captures a nation (or in this case, nations) and its people in a time of upheaval, all the while maintaining a level of open objectivity. With its images of protestors, dissidents, and obstructionists, hindsight reveals that USSR 1991 is an engrossing and encompassing portrait an empire unraveling at the seams.

KEIZO KITAJIMA USSR 1991

 

(All rights reserved. @ ASX, Keizo Kitajima and Little Big Man)

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Poppy: Trails of Afghan Heroin

By Paul Loomis for ASX, November, 2012

The list of locations and scope of coverage in Poppy: Trails of Afghan Heroin is comprehensive. Poppy claims to trace the Afghan the entire recent history of the opium trade, to describe trafficking routes and opium’s impact on millions of people. It claims to do all of this on an enormous scale; across 13 countries and with more than 17 years of on-the-ground reportage. This massive project is allegedly accomplished by only two people: Robert Knoth and Antoinette de Jong. However, the book delivers on its promise. Knoth and de Jong’s photographs and text reveal complex networks of clandestine commerce with skill, sensitivity, and compassion.

The the book begins in Afghanistan, where desperate poverty coupled with a corrupt political environment allow the country to produce 93% of the world’s opium and gain 54% of its GDP from trading it, usually after it has been refined into heroin. But, in a testament to this book’s vast scope, the first photographs were taken before Afghanistan was the world’s leading producer of opium. In the 1990s the Taliban were in power and they forbid the use, cultivation, and trafficking of poppy and opium. Cultivation exploded in 2001, when the Taliban was toppled by the US led invasion.

The authors visit Afghanistan three more times after the 1990s, along with many other countries, and these stories are told through both text and photographs which alternate in sections. Both mediums are intimately tied to the reporters’ lives, which enhances the book’s cohesion. For example, the second series of photographs of Afghanistan begins with this quote:

“Loose fitting trousers, wide, embroidered tops, a selection of headscarves, recording tapes, microphone tapes, flea-powder, broad-spectrum antibiotics, painkillers, vitamin pills. I am packing my bags for yet another trip to Pakistan and Afghanistan. I am thrilled to be going. Robert and I have prepared this for months, and now we’re about to leave for one of the most beautiful parts of Afghanistan. . . I’m watching CNN as I pack. It is September 11th, 2001.”

The accompanying text and photographs go on to describe and document the iron rule of the Taliban immediately before the invasion, the fury of Afghanis against the US and their delight at the successful attack of that day. Once the journalists leave Kabul for the tribal areas, they find a drought ridden landscape and thousands of starving people. There are villages littered with children’s graves, and columns of men and donkeys move across the famously rugged mountains in search of food distribution points because there is nothing left in their villages. The drought has gone on for years, and those most affected by it are not concerned with wars or regime changes. They do not grow poppies yet because the Taliban is still power.

When De Jong and Knoth return eight years later in 2009 everything has changed. The economy is growing; some people are buying televisions and motorbikes, and mansions have sprouted in areas that were once government land. They discover that most of this growth is a result of the opium trade, and that the rest is from foreign aid. De Jong and Knoth return to the villages they saw so badly scoured by drought almost a decade before and find terrible flooding. The only signs of the economic upswing, poppy crops and a new road connecting the area to the outside world, have been swept away by flood water. Here it becomes clear that a region which has become highly politicized is populated by people trying to secure food and basic services, not attempting to topple the United States. Also clear is that large portions of its inhabitants perform a very basic calculus when they decide to grow opium or help the Taliban. That calculus is about survival, not politics.

In between these visits to Afghanistan, which, like the rest of the book, are chronologically ordered, Knoth and De Jong travel to twelve other countries, from the UK to Russia, from Pakistan to Ukraine and Somalia to Kosovo, tracking the path that Afghan heroin takes and the impacts it has along the way. Photographs make it clear how situations similar to Afghanistan’s play into the hands of traffickers across the region, and the text makes the photographs bloom with vivid descriptions and well researched description.

The images bear witness to the web of effects reaching out from Afghanistan’s poppy fields, and make foreign realities nearly tangible. Ragged militaries struggle to secure vast borders with inadequate resources. The unmarked graves of heroin addicts populate roadsides in Karachi, where the addicts cannot be buried with their families. Impasses of mountains so rugged it seems impossible to walk, crossed only by American helicopter gunships plated in armor and costing hundred of millions of dollars, but bordered by villages built of stacked stone. Young white women in red light, naked, surrounded by a crowd and immersed in Ukraine’s party culture, which is thick with heroin and prostitution. The faces of jailed heroin users, whose stories are all about traffickers powerful enough to go free. And the beautiful alpine meadows of Kyrgyzstan, where blue streams flow down from the heights, and enormous quantities of drugs find their way through from Afghanistan.

The text, through interviews, citations of studies, and travel stories, describes how the trade thrives on Smuta, the Russian word for chaos, and how the countries that appear most organized and free of chaos – the US and Western Europe, fuel the social degradation of more vulnerable states. It describes how governments must yield to the organizations that boost GDP, and how entire states are captured through bribery and coercion. It describes how dozens of armed groups have funded bloody power struggles through the trafficking and sale of Afghan heroin, and how communities across Europe have been devastated by its use.

Still, Poppy does not forward an agenda. The objective format will leave readers with many impressions: that drugs take many lives and contribute to instability and conflict the world over; that for many people the choice between participating in this system and absolute poverty is a non-choice; and that the foreign policy of powerful and distant nations has impacts both far reaching and un-intended.

Poppy works a kind of magic. It is not a news report or a compilation. Rather, the authors tell a complex story, and their insight, gained from decades of traveling opium’s routes, enables us to glimpse the poppy economy and its causes in surprising detail. Immerse yourself in this book and you will emerge believing the world to be a very different place than it was before Robert Knoth and Antoinette de Jong led you on Poppy: Trails of Afghan Heroin.

Poppy is a production of Paradox.

ASX Rating:

 POPPY: Trails of Afghan Heroin

In Europe: Order HERE

Robert Knoth & Antoinette de Jong, YdocPublishing and Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2012. € 39,50,

492 pages

hard cover

17.00 x 24.00 cm

ISBN 978-3-7757-3337-3

(All rights reserved. Images @ Robert Knoth/Antoinette de Jong, Text @ Paul Loomis and ASX)

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By Paul Loomis, August, 2012

Whether or Not the Guns are Loaded

Interrogations is a collection of photographs taken in Russia and Ukraine over six years of travel by Donald Webber. It comes to you in a cardboard sheath with open sides, and when you remove the book its cover has the pleasing texture of handmade paper and is the color of Pepto Bismol. Inside there are two types of photographs. The first type is atmospheric, involves few people, and documents rural Russia and Ukraine. The second type accounts for most of the book’s page length and is focused on a number of frightened people in the same room.

The photographs are printed on a high quality matte paper. It is not so rarified that you feel you are looking at an expensive large-format living room book whose purpose is impress on guests that their host likes art. The approach that the publisher of Interrogations (Schlit Publishing) has taken interferes very little; the materials and presentation make it feel like you are seeing a person’s private photographs, printed and compiled.

Interrogations is about power. Viewers are likely alert to this early on, but they are not informed about the circumstances the book documents, which makes for an challenging and worthwhile viewing experience. The first section of Interrogations, entitled “Prologue,” is a series of skillfully framed eastern european scenes that gain undertones of desolation and violence as you move through them. There are cold mountain days and snow drifts trying to swallow things, there are very sick boys in the sauna, burning fields, and a hand gripping the mouth of an old man, whose eyes are closed.

The last photo of the Prologue is of a woman in a robe. She is lying on a purple sofa and her robe is orange with dull red splashes. Behind her and the sofa there is flowered wallpaper broken only by a black, rectangular hole above her elbow. Although her position is relaxed, the look on the woman’s face suggests that there is something very wrong going on just out of sight.

This theme continues in the book’s main section, “Interrogations.” The section’s first image shows a very concerned young man standing in a room with wallpaper whose texture and color matches the book’s pink cover. From his image we are catapulted into a world as sinister as it is unexplained, a place where fear dominates, the principles of justice blur, and the viewer becomes entangled in questions.

The people in the photographs of the book’s main section appear to be of slavic decent. Each wears a jacket that seems to never have been washed, but looks quite warm. They themselves are unanimously dirty and wear a look of shame and apprehension that suggests accusation. As the photographs progress the subjects become more fearful. Sometimes they are contorted in ways that make it clear they are trying to avoid something directly outside the frame. It becomes increasingly obvious what that thing is, but not whether or not we are seeing a reenactment.

In photograph 36 (of 100) a man in a black leather jacket is leaning heavily against the wall beside him and away from a hand extending threateningly in his direction from the right side of the frame. His eyes are down, away from the hand and away from the camera. In the next photograph the hand is gone, but he looks more frightened and his eyes are up, staring at something around chest level to the right of the photographer. In the third frame the hand has returned, but this time it grips a pistol, which is planted against the man’s temple. The gun looks real, but is it loaded?

In the rest of the series the subjects are in various stages of confession or defense, hands flat on chests in order to appear as honest as possible, making sweeping gestures to mask fear or proclaim innocence, or broken by violence or psychological degradation. We also see them anxiously signing papers. The photographer is so close to the subjects that their feet and their captors aren’t visible, just their faces. Even when not crying or cringing, the trepidation in their expressions is almost palpable.

After this barrage of images many questions follow. Chief among them are questions of authenticity and of culpability. Are these “interrogations” real or is this just a graphic experiment meant to help us imagine the way that power is wielded behind closed doors? If the situations are real, then why is nothing being done, and do viewers have an obligation to act?

The book never openly admits its intentions. There is no introduction, and although there is an author’s note about the artistic experience of making the book, it comes after the photographs and offers no explanations. Although at first this approach may seem amateur, as a strategy it encourages the viewer to ask important questions about the nature of guilt, power, and accusation.

The the photographs are taken at an angle and proximity that position the viewer exactly where an interrogator would be, which makes viewers the extra eyes in a room meant only for the accused and accusers: witnesses. That status is compounded by the lack of information, which creates a situation whose morality is not pre-configured, that is not being held up as an example of prisoner abuse, but remains open. As a result, the burden of decision is left with the viewer.

The confusion that this book can subject a viewer to is potentially more powerful even than the keenly captured reality of coercion. It forces viewers to become a part of the judgement that is implicit in each frame, and puts them in essentially the same position as the interrogators with regards to information. Are these people criminals or actors or just normal people in a strange situation?

These questions are asked whether or not the guns are loaded, but it turns out that they are. The photographs were taken in a police station that Weber gained access to through his friendship with the police chief. He sat in the pink wallpapered interrogation room for dozens of interrogations and took hundreds of pictures. He claims that he had to wait for months for the police to relax, stop playing nice cop, and “do their jobs,” which means treating prisoners as they would without his presence.

The same sort of interrogation room exists all over the world, and is used by various organizations to a single end. When the larger community does gain visual access to such spaces, it is a coup, as in Abu Ghraib. Although it is unlikely that anything resembling justice will ever penetrate the police station where these photographs were taken, Interrogations can still be considered a coup. It takes a process whose power derives from its seclusion and tosses it into the open with a refined subtext that challenge its viewers and is effortlessly genuine. What then happens as a result of the challenge is nothing/up to us.  Highly Recommended.

Paul Loomis writes for ASX and graduated from the University of North Carolina at Asheville in 2011 with degrees in Ecology and Creative writing. He has lived in North Carolina, California, Ohio, The Netherlands, and the forests of Appalachia. He currently resides in Mexico City, writes fiction and non-fiction, and teaches Chemistry and Literature. He can be contacted here: tetra.loomis@gmail.com

Interrogations

Photographs by Donald Weber. Text by Larry Frolick.
Schilt Publishing, 2011. 176 pp., 90 color illustrations.
ISBN 978-90-5330-759-5
Hardback: £24.90, $40.00

(Text @ Paul Loomis and ASX, All images @ Donald Weber)

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