Elephant Project - A world without exit

Walked around the Heygate Estate for the first time this afternoon. It seems like the whole area has been designed to entrap people. Once you get in, the energy seems to change, and there is a feeling of being enclosed in a world that is cut off from the all the life outside. I noticed that people have created footpaths along the road side, even though this is expressly forbidden, so they can avoid having to walk along the footpaths which are suspended above ground with no obvious escape route. Where there could be shops or market stalls or play areas, there are garages, as if everyone has a shiny new car to protect. And it is so quiet, so empty of people, even in the middle of a Saturday afternoon. A world without exit.

It must have been very strange for Abi to come here with her family, after living in the Ethiopian Highlands. In Azezo you can't help but get involved and be aware of the life of the wider community around you, here it seems that people are forced to mind their own business.

The architecture seems to crush the life out of the area. It's architecture as ideology, the souless, crushing, core idea of post-war Socialism brought to life in concrete: we are all the same. I'm sure that the people at the council and the architects and academics who created this ideology never even dreamt of living in a place like this. I was intrigued when one of the tutors spoke about his, and his colleagues, affection for the area. Earlier in the same session he had mentioned that it took him over an hour each morning to get to college, so he obviously doesn't live here. In fact, I wonder if any of the Guardian reading intelligentsia ever actually live in places like this. Of course not. They just design, plan, photograph and write about them.

The whole Elephant project has a tension for me: I can't help think that we (or at least some of us, or at least me) are middle class people (or at least people who can afford expensive cameras and laptops) taking pictures of people who are much poorer and less privileged and that there is something inherently patronising, almost colonial about the whole exercise. By making this area the subject of a massive, multi-year documentary exercise aren't we guilty of objectifying the whole area as 'other', as something to be collected, like 19th century anthropologists in search of exotic tribes or shrunken heads. I find the whole thing unsettling. Why are we doing this? Is it fair on the people who live here to be scrutinised in this way?

What do others think?

Have started to take slightly more formal portraits. And am combining this with my interest in interiors. I'm particularly attracted to this sort of indoor natural light - the Vermeer / Tom Hunter kind of effect.
I also want to extend this idea of portraying what people might think of as more 'ordinary life'. The Sunday Times magazine today featured yet another Magnum anthology / retrospective, based on yet another Magnum compilation book. While all the pictures are brilliant, I can't help feeling the moment has passed. How many more times do we need to see Elliot Erwitt's whimsicial pictures of dogs, and how many more times do we have to see HCB's pictures from the 30s or even Alex Webb's picture of arrested Mexicans on the US / Mexico border, however great they are. And more to the point, when is photojournalism going to escape from this campaigning, self-consciously progressive ideology? Why should this style of taking pictures always be hijacked by people with a political agenda, and always an agenda that is critical of the same old subjects. From the Spanish Civil War onwards, this type of photojournalism seems to have taken only one side. Maybe that is why it has found itself so sidelined in recent years, and its most famous agency is reduced to publishing these endless retrospectives of better days.

From Azezo to Elephant and Castle

Have been starting to plan the Elephant and Castle project. I visited a family living in Elephant and Castle who came over from Azezo in Amhara, Ethiopia, where I was taking pictures for Ethiopia Link and Aysanew Kassa Trust last October. I was thinking of doing the project around the Ethiopian community in the area - portraits of the family, with particular emphasis on the elements of Ethiopian culture that have been transposed from Ethiopia and adapted to life in South London. It was interesting to see that there is a coffee ceremony in Elephant and Castle, just like in Ethiopia, the only difference being that there is an automatic coffee grinder. The picture is of three generations of the family I stayed with in Azezo.

Making a book

Have been putting the Spinach pictures into a book format - using myphotobook. This seems much better than other systems I have used, as it enables you to do a wide range of different formats, including one that goes across two pages. I haven't seen the end product yet but it does provide a good mechanism for organising a large body of work. If this works out I see this as a potential business idea: it gives a portrait of a company at work and it humanises the company. It could therefore be quite useful as a form of brand building, both for potential clients and especially, for potential new recruits.

Spinach: there's no place like work

Have done an edit of the photographic essay on the office. The best method was printing a small version of all of the first edit, around 60 pictures, putting them all on the floor and then picking the final edit - 11 pictures. This is a much better way of editing than endlessly flicking through images on a computer which rapidly becomes really irritating

Education in Ethiopia, part 2

These are the other three pictures I have used on the packs of cards for the Ethiopian charities. In choosing these pictures we deliberately wanted images that were positive - even sentimental, as these are most likely to sell. Although I actually think that some of the pictures I have seen of children in places like Ethiopia are slightly false as they fail to capture the sense of joy that is almost tangible, even in some of poorest places. I'm not sure what Salgado did to his subject in 'The Children' to make them so po-faced, maybe he had been influenced by the Kunstakadamie's obsession with the deadpan aesthetic!

The challenge now is to find the outlets that will sell these sort of cards in the long term. I think it will be relatively easy to sell the first thousand because all the trustees and long-term donators can sell them to family / friends etc., the challenge is to use this sort of photography for providing a constant source of income. Hopefully the Christmas card market will provide a means of selling these in larger numbers.

Education in Ethiopia

Have produced a set of greeting cards for the Link Ethiopia and Aysanew Kassa Trust charities, based on the pictures I took in school around Gondar last October (two of the pictures used are above). The challenge is to sell the first set of 1,000 packs of five - five different cards, with different images in each pack. It seems that people in the UK lack the impulse to give to charity that is virtually automatic in America. Perhaps it is the lack of religion in the UK - most charitable giving in the US is through churches, perhaps it is the inability to realise how far a little money here will go in places like Ethiopia. The schools and communities in Northern Ethiopia are so desperately short of resources and investment. Classes in primary and secondary schools of over a hundred are common and there is a chronic shortage of skilled teachers and books.

Heartland

I spent today taking pictures in Excelsior Springs, Missouri. I am here with my girlfriend visiting her family. I want to make a small book about the town, a spring town which once boasted that it had the 'best water in the world'. when people from around the world visited the town to bathe in the miraculous water. The city started to decline in the 1960s, so today there are a serious of grand building, either disused or in the process of being re-built.

This pictures was taken in the Elms Hotel, the famous hotel where Harry Truman found out that he had won the 1948 presidential election. The picture was taken waiting at the bar, at 3.50, ten minutes before the bar was due to open. The first picture I took was of an empty bar, but for the second someone sat at the bar, as if willing it to open. As I raised my camera a school bus passed through the frame. It created that serendipitous moment, adding that extra piece of motion, colour, excitement to the picture, what Roland Barthes meant by his phrase punkton - that which raises the picture out of the mundane. I suppose that is what I have started trying to do with my photography - Richard Woods Photography - taking pictures of everyday things and people in a reportage / photojournalistic style.