AMY SHERLOCK ON LEE GODIE
I have always found the question, “Who do you think you are?” (used rhetorically, as an accusation) to be an odd one. The implication is that one should know oneself, or know one’s place, as if it were ever a question of knowing, and not just imagining. Nowhere can the gulf between one’s own self image and external appearances be revealed with such brutality as in the self portrait: there is no better stage for one’s self delusions.
Afterimage by Amy Sherlock:
I have always found the question, “Who do you think you are?” (used rhetorically, as an accusation) to be an odd one. The implication is that one should know oneself, or know one’s place, as if it were ever a question of knowing, and not just imagining. Nowhere can the gulf between one’s own self image and external appearances be revealed with such brutality as in the self portrait: there is no better stage for one’s self delusions. Lee Godie had more reason than most to seek the succour of self-delusion. She lived out the majority of her later years homeless on the blustery streets of downtown Chicago. A self- taught artist, she drew and sketched, hawking her wares to passing business people and leaving the proceeds in the care a nearby department store.Her self portraits, many enlivened with paint or pen, some coquettishly flirtatious, others autographed like the calling cards of a budding starlet, were taken in a photobooth in a bus station in the city, which was also the location of the locker that housed most of her worldly possessions. I look at Lee Godie in these images and I think of Vivian Leigh’s Blanche du Bois in her worn-out Mardi Gras outfit – in that scene in A Streetcar Named Desire where she is so wide-eyed and fearful and Marlon Brando’s Stanley so devastatingly handsome – wrapping herself in her airs and her rhinestone tiaras to buttress a fragile sense of self. But I don’t pity Godie. She looks mischievous; she looks happy. She wouldn’t let any Stanley try to tell her that she wasn’t a queen.
MARIANNE HEIER ON RODIN
Rodin's small bronze sculpture shows a seated woman. The posture is knotty, awkward, as if she is forced. One arm is stretched behind her back and she is seated a little askew. You can see the bones in the ribcage under the empty, hanging breasts. The shoulder joints protrude. She is skinny, but her belly is swollen under the wrinkled skin.
© Agence photographique du musée Rodin - Jérome Manoukian
Afterimage by Marianne Heier:
Rodin's small bronze sculpture shows a seated woman. The posture is knotty, awkward, as if she is forced. One arm is stretched behind her back and she is seated a little askew. You can see the bones in the ribcage under the empty, hanging breasts. The shoulder joints protrude. She is skinny, but her belly is swollen under the wrinkled skin. The arms and legs are thin and sinewy. The whole body has sort of slumped. She bends her neck and looks down, her gaze almost directed inward, towards her own body. As if in shame. Everything here points downwards.
This sculpture from 1885 to 87 exists in several variants with different titles: Dried-Up Springs, The Old Courtesan or Winter. The titles tell us how the artist wanted us to see this figure. We are supposed to look through or past her, to imagine who she once was, not who she is. The work is about a tragedy, a loss, something that moves towards the end. The artist makes it clear that this woman belongs to the past. She is grief.
I'm on my way to becoming an ageing woman myself. The body of the helmet-maker’s wife is both familiar and foreign to me. While there are plenty of ageing men in Western sculptural tradition, ageing women are rarely represented. And while the ageing men are portrayed with respect, even admiration, as philosophers, leaders, authorities, the few ageing women are a sad sight. They are grotesque, pathetic, laughable versions of the young bodies they once were. The necklines that once framed round, bouncy, firm breasts, now reveal now empty, sagging sacks. The seductive contrapposto poses have become angular, stiff and unstable. Toothless grins replace soft smiles, faces are hollow. Time makes men experienced, worthy and wise, while it makes women grotesque, almost repulsive perversions of themselves. The artists do not hide their contempt. The once beautiful wife of the helmet-maker knows herself that she has passed; she feels the weight of the artist's gaze on her and bends under it.
© Agence photographique du musée Rodin - Jérome Manoukian
When I was young, I often struggled with the feeling of constantly being evaluated as an object of other people's gazes. Was I attractive enough? Pretty enough? Thin enough? Well-dressed enough? Pleasant enough? Too much? Too little? It was shameful and distracting, and it was a lonely experience, despite the fact that I probably share it with almost every other woman. I remember thinking that when my body was no longer fertile, I would no longer be perceived as an object. I would be free from the evaluative gaze and the eternal shame. The distractions would fall away. I would become a subject.
But the helmet-maker's wife, and the other ageing women in art history, are not subjects. They are broken, worn-out objects; pathetic now that they can no longer be used for what the female body was created for: reproduction. But they still exist in the world. What is their purpose now? They are difficult to control, impossible, opinionated and nasty; they belong to the dark. Useless. In contrast to the life experience of the ageing man, which is represented with respect and interest, the knowledge of the ageing woman is threatening, dangerous. She is portrayed as ugly, she is mother-in-law, witch. Disgusting, ridiculous. In this sense, Rodin's figure is perhaps a step in the right direction: the helmet-maker's wife is at least not obviously evil or mad, she is just sad.
Art historians have praised Rodin's ability to show the beauty of the ugly in this figure: that he was able to make the ugly beautiful. I think it's the other way around. Through his gaze, I think this body is made ugly. The helmet-maker's wife isn’t ugly. What we see is the artist's gaze on her, not herself. In fact, and without any rhetoric, I think the helmet-maker's wife is beautiful. Her thin body is interesting, dramatic, complex and hyper-elegant. Her face is sharp, deep and intelligent. She is rich in light and shade. I wish she had a name of her own. I wish she had refused to be ashamed, refused to sit in that uncomfortable, twisted position. Ageing women are not sadness. I wish Rodin had made a portrait of a person instead of a projection of masculine horror. I wish the helmet-maker's wife would straighten her back and meet my gaze.
NINA STRAND ON OTTO DIX
Otto Dix, Bildnis der Journalistin Sylvia von Harden, 1926.
Afterimage by Nina Strand:
‘But, where ARE you?,’ the lady sitting next to me screams into her iPhone. Dressed in black tights and something between a sweater and a dress, super stylish, she reminds me of Otto Dix’s Portrait of Journalist Sylvia von Harden (1926). All that is missing is the cigarette and the cocktail. Suddenly, she yells ‘I AM HERE!!!!’, but offers no location or further explanation. People around her are giving her meaningful stares, intimating that she should speak in a lower voice or maybe not even speak at all. But we’re in a crowded, noisy café, so she doesn’t bother me.
I saw the painting by Dix at the Pompidou this fall. ‘People must gravitate around this lady’, I thought while studying it, ‘she looks as if she’s seen it all’. Von Harden, who worked as a journalist in Berlin in the 1920s, sits at a small table in the Romanische Café, on which sit a cocktail and a cigarette case. The museum writes about the painting: ‘the cold, satirical realism typifies the New Objectivity movement to which the painter belonged. Inspired by early 16th-century German masters (Cranach, Holbein), he embraced the tempera on wood panel technique as well as the choice to exhibit the ugliness of humankind.’ But she isn’t ugly to me. In her red-check sweater dress and dark red lipstick, cigarette in hand, she sits in her pink corner of the café as if she owns the place The only thing that doesn’t seem right to me in the image is that the painter has given her a stocking that is sagging around her knee. This small detail seems staged, falsely painted into the work by Dix. Somehow, it suggests prejudice against her, like that of the people annoyed by the noisy woman in the café next to me.
She’s done with her call now, and is busy gathering her things to leave. Maybe she’s going to meet the person she was talking to on the phone. I hope she doesn’t feel she has to go, or that she has to be quiet, to take up less space. I think we should do the opposite: be like Von Harden in the 1920s. Have a table of our own. Talk more and louder. Claim our space.
MARGOT WALLARD
Afterimage by Margot Wallard:
I have an image that’s been on mind for many years. And I’m so fascinated by this image that I have it on the wall in my house. (I rarely put pictures on the wall).
It’s an archive family picture, a portrait of my grandparents when they were young in Algeria.
Archive pictures are attractive for obvious reasons, which is why I’m often wary of them. But this one is like an obsession for me. When I first saw it years ago, I was blown away and I still am whenever I look at it.
This is because it’s my grandparents from a time I never knew.
Because they seem foreign and yet so familiar to me.
Because it’s about the passage of time.
Because it’s about them as a couple as I’ve never known them.
Because it’s about them. How they pose in front of the camera.
Because it’s not only an old picture, it’s a magic picture. A magic moment.
NINA STRAND ON ALEX PRAGER
Afterimage by Nina Strand:
The idea of the recently published book The Photograph That Changed My Life is simple: over 50 photographers, musicians, collectors and actors are invited to ‘write from the heart’, as editor Zelda Cheatle explains in the blurp, about the most important photograph they have seen. Contributors include Adam Bromberg, Nan Goldin and David George.
The American photographer Alex Prager chose this still from Neša Paripović’s film N.P. 1977, in which the artist depicts his walk through Belgrade, as he moves with swift determination, taking shortcuts to get to wherever he is headed as fast as he can. The film was shown at Trondheim Kunsthall some years ago, and as the press release states, Paripović ‘uses the city as a mirror in which individual identity is constructed’. Prager writes that, having just begun producing scenes that walk a line between reality and artifice, she finds in this shot of Paripović’s leap across rooftops ‘the perfect balance of a meticulously staged scenario joined with the raw and wild’.
For this column, where every writer describes an image that they find impossible to get out of their mind, I’ve chosen this still, because it keeps me hanging on after having closed the book. This jump could end tragically, and those who haven’t seen the film don’t know the outcome. The uncertainty reminds me of the fate of the 75-year-old French adventurer Jean-Jacques Savin, who recently died while attempting to row across the Atlantic Ocean. Savin, who had crossed the ocean before in a large barrel, described the trip as a way to ‘laugh at old age’.
I was rooting for him to make the trip, since it would be a beautiful statement on the fact that age doesn’t matter. And even though he failed, it still is, since anyone could have died in the same conditions. Seen in this light, Paripović’s jump and hasty tour of the city also become a salute to the fact that anything is possible in any part of one’s life.
ALINA VERGNANO ON HENNI ALFTAN
Afterimage by Alina Vergnano:
Time has gone weird lately. Or at least, something has changed in the way I perceive its passage. Its velocity goes in waves: days go fast, and faster, and then suddenly they slow down, as if the hours were on the verge of stopping, only to start racing again. When I think about this elastic movement, my mind keeps returning to Henni Alftan and her series of diptychs, Déjà vu, and in particular to one: Haircut (Déjà vu).
Henni Alftan, Haircut (Déjà-vu), 2020, oil on canvas; 2 parts, Courtesy KARMA, New York.
What draws my mind, and eyes, to this image, is its simultaneous depiction of time passing and time standing still. When I look at those scissors with a straight cascade of chestnut hair in between the shiny blades, I feel the stillness evoked by the precise brushstrokes, but also a soft pull to the moment coming next. It is not the tug of a far-removed future, but still, it is future. These two canvases bring me back to a haunting childhood question: what do we miss when our eyes blink? In my mind, the void left between the two images is filled by a sound, a snip. Something has unequivocally occurred; it is something subtle, yet radical. The scissors have closed and the hair has fallen, even if we missed the moment when it happened.
In my own work, time and change are central and, when I paint or draw, my main preoccupation is how to preserve their flowing nature. Things tend to happen fast and fluidly in my studio, and I normally respond more to images that are somehow similar to mine in nature. But the eerie, quasi-stillness in Alftan’s work is magnetic to me. It is like watching a very very thin still, distilling our days. It is disturbing, but I can’t stop looking.
NINA STRAND ON ANNE IMHOF
Anne Imhof, Untitled (Wave), 2021.
Afterimage by Nina Strand:
One image still on my mind from last year – one remaining among a surprisingly high number of exhibitions held during another year of the pandemic – is from the 2021 video Untitled (Wave) by Anne Imhof. It was exhibited in the cellar of Palais de Tokyo during Imhof’s grand exhibition Natures Mortes, part of the annual Carte Blanche programme. The exhibition was scheduled to open in March 2020 but was postponed due to the various lockdowns.
Anne Imhof, Untitled (Wave), 2021.
The film depicts the artist’s collaborator Eliza Douglas on a beach, dressed only in a pair of trousers, whip in hand, contemplating the waves rolling in, sometimes lashing out at them. Her hair is loose, her body is free. Having walked through Imhof’s halls of mirrors and studied her works, as well as those of other invited artists, this one stood out. Who wouldn’t like to beat the waves at this point? The woman’s repetitive whipping movements seemed cathartic. It made me think about how the pandemic can be used as a reset. Enough is enough.
I thought about the video again when I read Anne Berest’s editorial in the French magazine Madame, the supplement of Le Figaro, about how she writes all the time, working whenever there is a window. She calls this the luxury of freedom, and reflects on how it sets a good example for her daughters, showing them the joy of working and having a larger project in life. I’ve been thinking a lot about this. It’s taken me years to learn to devote myself to my work, to learn how to say no without feeling I need to give a lot of excuses and explanations. Reading the text made me think of Douglas whipping the waves. She has this freedom. Berest has it. I want it too.
LILLIAN DAVIES ON JASMINA CIBIC
Jasmina Cibic, The Gift (still), 2021, three channel 4K video. Courtesy the artist
Afterimage by Lillian Davies:
In the early 1950s Stalin erected the Palace of Culture and Science in the center of Warsaw as a gift to the Polish people, newly part of his Soviet Union. There’s an Olympic-sized swimming pool inside the 42-floor tower, with a diving well and three platform boards. Jasmina Cibic’s three channel 4K video film, The Gift (2021) opens there, with sweeping color images and sounds of chlorinated water trickling through the drains. In her opening shots, three pre-adolescent girls, hair pulled back tight from their pale foreheads, walk one after another along the pool’s tiled edge. They are dressed to perform and to compete, wearing simple one-piece suits, two in navy blue, one in dark red. A stately piano melody and a cool female voice over accompanies them as they climb metal stairs and await one another at the top of the diving platforms. A dive, a front flip, and a pencil shaped plunge, the athletes pierce the calm surface of the crystal-clear water, finger tips first, or toes, at exactly the same moment, amplifying the cutting sound of a splash. Exuding youth, strength and beauty, like Zeus’s three muses, these young women embody ideals that are beyond themselves. Cibic filmed underwater, and seen from below, the moment they break the surface is like the burst of a firecracker, or three. For a split second after their plunge, they are unique, liberated, swimming slowly to the surface and an inevitable panel of judges.
Cibic’s newest film, unfolds primarily in Paris, inside the French Communist Party Headquarters, a gift from architect Oscar Niemeyer. Here, Cibic’s three male characters, “three gifts,” as she calls them, The Engineer, The Diplomat, and the most handsome, The Artist, played by Downtown Abbey’s Lachlan Nieboer, devise a plan: “We will organize a competition to determine the symbol of our renovated future.” And so it is, that each, speaking in turn of the ideological virtues of architecture, music and art, are put into competition to determine the gift that will appease and reunify an unnamed and divided nation.
Four actresses play a cast of allegorical judges, referred to in Cibic’s narrative as the Four Fundamental Freedoms: from Fear, from Want, of Speech and of Worship (terms borrowed from Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s 1941 speech aimed to spur American support for entry into World War II). The characters’ dramatic period hair, makeup and clothes — perfectly matched to Niemeyer’s 1971 construction date — are a contrast to the unadorned sobriety of Cibic’s three divers. Cibic’s judges’ polish and dress are reminders of the workings and power of spectacle, performances of gender, seduction and status, that fuel political debate and public opinion. The judges’ exchange begins as a sort of philosophical debate and quickly disintegrates into a battle of practical nonsense—jargon.
It’s a jargon that sounds like art-speak or International Art English, as named in the brilliant Triple Canopy study, that eerily familiar language drained of meaning through translation, repetition and misunderstanding. Each line of Cibic’s script is ready-made, like her characters and soundtrack for this film, pulled from archives, transcriptions and recordings of politicians and artists speaking about the ideologies behind modern artworks:
“Art itself if a gift of the creative spirit.”
“The artist is a political being: alert.”
“Art is not made to decorate apartments. It is a weapon to be used against the enemy.”
Not only historical ready-mades, each element—script, music and sites—of Cibic’s The Gift was given as such. MAC Lyon curator Mathieu Lelièvre Lelièvre cites the French social anthropologist Marcel Mauss whose 1924 essay remains preeminent for studies of gift exchange. For Mauss, gift giving implies a social contract performed in public rituals. There’s a stage, costuming and choreography that Cibic forces us to see. Gift-giving can be a tool of soft power, a political and cultural phenomena she’s been exploring since her exhibition for the Slovenian pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2013.
Joseph Nye coined the term “soft power” in 1990, shortly the fall of the Berlin Wall. For Nye, soft power implies “organizing an international agenda and structuring world politics by using resources of intangible power like culture, ideology and institutions.” Mobilizing art for political ends in other words, though sociologist Alexandre Kazerouni warns, in his recent paper, Musées and Soft Power in the Persian Gulf (2015), that Nye’s soft power is not economic power. It is the intellectual and ideological conception of an artwork that matters, not its market value.
Jasmina Cibic, The Gift (still), 2021, three channel 4K video. Courtesy the artist.
Though Cibic doesn’t mention him by name, Lewis Hyde’s eponymous book, first published in 1983, looms large. Hyde wrote as a poet, for other poets, searching for a history and meaning of gift giving, gift having, in a modern society founded on commercial exchange. His subtitle, How the Creative Spirit Transforms the World, reads like a line of Cibic’s ready-made script. As Margaret Atwood wrote recently in Paris Review, in his book, Hyde seems to be looking for a definition of the nature of art. “Is a work of art a commodity with a money value, to be bought and sold like a potato, or is it a gift on which no real price can be placed, to be freely exchanged?” Atwood asks. She proposes an answer in Hyde’s explorations, perhaps in her own work, something also glimpsed in Cibic’s cinematic ruminations: “Gifts transform the soul in ways that simple commodities cannot.” Stalin may have demanded the labor of ten thousand men to build his palace, but there is freedom in the water, in swimming under the surface. It’s Cibic’s triptych image of her divers’ splash, a sort of momentary escape, that stays in my mind, like a gift.
NINA STRAND ON LOUISE BOURGEOIS
Louise Bourgeois, Cell XXV (The View of the World of the Jealous Wife), 2001. © The Easton Foundation/VAGA at ARS, NY and DACS, London 2021. Photo: Christopher Burke. Shown at Whitechapel Gallery.
Afterimage by Nina Strand:
Louise Bourgeois, who called herself a prisoner of her memories, was three years old when the First World War began, and moved from France to New York two years before the Second. She began to make her self-enclosed structures known as the Cells in 1989. The objects collected within them, which one can only view from the outside, all had a personal resonance and history: ‘Each “Cell” deals with the pleasure of the voyeur’, said Bougeois in 1991, ‘the thrill of looking and being looked at. The “Cells” either attract or repulse each other. There is this urge to integrate, merge, or disintegrate.’
Her work has been on my mind a great deal during the last two weeks. The day Putin decided to begin a war against Ukraine, I visited two exhibitions in London where one could see her cells: The Woven Child, at Hayward Gallery and A Century of the Artist’s Studio: 1920–2020 at the Whitechapel Gallery. The first is a retrospective with a focus exclusively on Bourgeois’ work using fabrics and textiles. The second is a survey of the studio through the work of over 80 artists. Featuring Bourgeois alongside contemporary artists such as Walead Beshty, Lisa Brice, Paul Mpagi Sepuya and Mequitta Ahuja, the exhibition gives a peak into how an artist works. This grand survey also demonstrates how artists can and do make a change for the better in society, making one question whether an international ban on Russian artists is the right approach to take, especially since Putin himself silences those who speak against him.
Today we live in a state of constant crisis, with conflicts being waged all over the world, millions of displaced refugees, and the aftermath of the pandemic. With this in mind, Bourgeois’ microcosms, described by Okwui Enwezor as works that ‘turn life inside out’, have extra resonance. The 'Cells' represent different types of pain, Bourgeois has explained: ‘The physical, the emotional and psychological, and the mental and intellectual. When does the emotional become physical? When does the physical become emotional? It's a circle going round and round.’
NINA STRAND ON MOHAMED BOUROUISSA
Afterimage by Nina Strand:
The couple in the café next to me are either on their first date or their last. It’s difficult to know if they’re shy or bored with each other. They’ve been discussing a friend. I’m hoping he’ll never hear their opinions on how sadly he leads his life. I’m on time and happy for the entertainment these two bring while I wait. My friend arrives late. I still suggest we have a glass wine before we go in, it’s been so long. But he’s in a rush and so I quickly gather my things. He doesn’t look me in the eye.
We begin in a sky-lit room that contains only some speakers and small chairs to sit on. Everything is white. Everywhere is sound. Many voices are shouting the word ‘hara’, used by young people as a warning if the police get too close. I wonder if there’s a warning word I can shout to myself about a friend acting weirdly. The thing is, I didn’t really have time for this exhibition visit. This was his idea. ‘All I do is try to keep it together’, I say to him, or to his hair; his back is turned to me. He looks at the wall text – explaining how the artist uses his work to call attention to young people from ethnic-minority backgrounds – and says one should always compare.
We move further into the exhibition, passing a labyrinthine structure of fences with images of refugees on them. The complicated installation makes perfect sense to me in this tense situation. In the next room, we spend time in front of large photographs hung on only one wall. I am moved by the presence and focus the images acquire when exhibited like this. He says he couldn’t disagree more.
We’ve nothing left to talk about. When we pass a sort of garden planted with very thin trees, they seem embarrassed to be there with us. A man is vacuuming around them, something we’d normally laugh about, but my friend still doesn’t meet my eye. I look at his cap, which is on backwards. Who does he think he’s fooling? It does nothing for his receding hairline.
Does one break up with friends? I wonder if I said something stupid last time we met. This is probably my fault. It usually is. He walks quickly through the final room, which is plastered with too many unframed photographs – too many people’s stories we’ll never hear – and makes his way down the stairs. We usually write a wish and hang it on the Wish Tree placed there, but he doesn’t stop.
If I go back to my studio now, I’ll stew for the rest of the afternoon. I write a wish for his health and hang it on the tree, and go back to the café, hoping the couple is still there.
I can still hear the shouting of ‘hara’ for days afterwards.
Mohamed Bourouissa: HARa!!!!!!hAaaRAAAAA!!!!!hHAaA!!! Kunsthal Charlottenborg 09 Okt 2021 – 20 Feb 2022. Courtesy the artist, Kamel Mennour and Blum & Poe. Installation photos by David Stjernholm.
NINA STRAND ON HIROSHI SUGIMOTO
Hiroshi Sugimoto, Opticks 008, 2018, courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery
Afterimage by Nina Strand:
In a currently closed Paris I saw Hiroshi Sugimoto’s new exhibition at Marian Goodman Gallery, and I spent a long time looking at this beautiful blue work. It was a welcome escape from our lockdown situation.
Sugimoto’s subject matter include lifelike displays in museums of natural history, old American drive-in theaters as well as vast seascapes — as he has investigated time and memory throughout his practice. For him, photography functions as a system for saving memories, it is a time machine.
His current exhibition Theory of Colours at Marian Goodman consists of his new series Opticks. The title of this series is a reference to Sir Isaac Newton’s treatise Opticks, published in 1704. Opticks is according to Sugimoto essentially a series shot using a Polaroid camera, capturing the light that Newton refracted using a prism.
This new body of work is just as meditative as his seascapes. He has previously stated that photography is like a found object. That photographer never makes an actual subject; they just steal the image from the world. But not every photographer has the expertise in finding these ‘found objects’ as Sugimoto.
Known for his precise techniques, long exposures and perfectly composed large format photographs — the philosophical and conceptual aspects of his ouvre is just as important. His photographs reveal the time passing, and the mediums unique ability to render a trace of it.
NINA STRAND ON NICOLE EISENMAN, VANESSA BAIRD & LINN PEDERSEN
Nicole Eisenman, Destiny Riding Her Bike, 2020. Photo Thomas Widerberg. Astrup Fearnley Collection.
Afterimage by Nina Strand:
There's no place like home
On a painting, a drawing and a photograph.
Linn Pedersen, Kiddo, 2021.
The large painting Destiny Riding Her Bike by Nicole Eisenman has been on my mind since I saw it at the Astrup Fearnley Museum In Oslo a couple of weeks ago. A woman soars off her bike having crashed into a ladder set up against a tree, toppling a man who is trying to save the small cat that intently watches the chance meeting between the two humans. In the March issue of New Yorker, Eisenman explains the image in the article ‘Every Nicole Eisenman Picture Tells a Story’ by Ian Parker. ‘It’s a romantic painting of two people meeting. One is falling off a ladder, and the other is riding a bicycle into the ladder—and popping off the top of the bicycle. She’s flying through the air. And they kind of have their eyes locked on each other. I think it’s very romantic—a Douglas Sirk film still.’ Eisenman explains that the picture is connected to her recent relationship with the art critic and writer Sarah Nicole Prickett, and that the image became ‘this disaster happening, and a kind of romance inside this disaster’. In these days of isolation, I long to meet new people like this, romance or no romance.
Eisenman has mentioned her admiration for the Norwegian artist Karl Ove Knausgaard, to whose project My Struggle Vanessa Baird’s work has been compared. Baird has just published her new book There's no place like home with autobiographical drawings of living with her kids and her mother. Some drawings are accompanied by notes written by her mother about her different needs, reflections and thoughts. When I once interviewed Baird, she told me she called her drawings for short essays, hoping people could get something out of seeing her work. ‘My everyday life is like everyone else's, it's about recognition.’ This book with her mother certainly seems to depict a struggle, to paraphrase Knausgaard. In one drawing, Baird is sweeping a never-ending dirty floor, with several kids around her, while in a corner her frail mother is lying in a bed. On the top she has written: ‘Stuck in genes and affection.’
Another mother and daughter relationship is evoked in the photograph Kiddo by Linn Pedersen, included in her recently opened exhibition Omland at Golsa in Oslo. The image is the imprint left in the snow after her youngest daughter outside their house in Lofoten. It was dark outside, Pedersen tells me, and she was carrying groceries from the car as she walked past this impression her daughter had made in the snow. It reminded Pedersen of a cherub from a Raphael painting mixed with the Michelin man, an astronaut, and craters in the lunar surface. Many of the images in the exhibition are from the north of Norway, where she has moved back with her family after many years in the South. Omland in Norwegian means land surrounding an area, and the exhibition is a kind of rediscovery of her old surroundings, very clearly suggested in two images next to each other, one depicting a mountain and the other a mountain of souvenirs, old business cards, passport photos, notes.
A chance meeting, a daughter taking care of her mother and children, and an imprint of a young child in the snow. All three artists were working with a fulcrum in their own life and family situations, and during these weeks of a new lockdown in Oslo it became for me a triptych almost emblematic of the situation. We just have to make the best of it. And it helps to make or see art.
INDER SALIM
Inder Salim, We All Are Women’s Issues, 2003. Courtesy of the artist.
Afterimage by Nina Strand:
In the recently opened exhibition Actions of Art & Solidarity at Kunstnernes Hus (The Artists’ House) in Oslo, there is one image that embodies the title perfectly: We All Are Women’s Issues by Indian performance artist and poet Inder Salim. The photograph is from a performance by Salim in Bangalore, India, in 2003. Salim made himself into a walking billboard to protest against violence against women, using the double meaning of “issue” to show how everyone should take a stand against gender-based violence, and also that all humans come from women. As he writes in an email to me: ‘It was indeed a day-long walk on the roads in Bangalore City in 2003. There was no video possibility in those days, but I got some clicks by friends who accompanied me.’
At that time, he and his colleagues put up around 500 posters in Bangalore, and later on buses and walls in Delhi where Salim currently lives. The poster was also used by the women’s police department in Bengaluru, and by Vimochana, a NGO working for women's issues. Salim used the image as his business card for a long time, and it was also printed on a banner of about four and a half metres. ‘The situation in India, the unfortunate treatment of women’, Salim writes, ‘particularly in rural areas, is very disturbing’.
For the past 30 years, Salim has worked tirelessly within the genre of art as activism, using video and photography as well as other channels to make us look again at the world in which we live. His work deals with bodies, sexuality and gender & queer politics. Last fall Ishara Art Foundation invited to the exhibition Every Solied Page where Salim made a series of eleven different performances under the name Every Page Soiled, to be enjoyed here. As he explains his work: ‘Performance art is not body-centric, but revolves around material and subjectivities of all kinds in our respective presents.’
The exhibition’s press text claims that: ‘solidarity has re-entered the global zeitgeist with resounding force in the last decade. It has driven new thinking focused on countering systemic failures and outright abuses related to climate, economy, surveillance, health, gender and race amongst other issues.’ And it continues: ‘Actions of Art and Solidarity considers the central role that artists play within this historical shift in the new millennium, drawing parallels to synergic cases of the twentieth century.’ Looking at Salim’s career, solidarity has always been present in his performances: ‘Doing posters from my own pocket money was my passion in early days. Nowadays, I put up flags from my terrace with text to highlight different topics in our current situation.’
The latest, from five days ago, has a very simple message: ‘I love you.’
INGRID EGGEN
Installation photo by Ingrid Eggen of her Tranquilshiver #2, 2020.
Afterimage by Nina Strand:
This weekend, Ingrid Eggen opened the show CLAIM YOUR SUPERIOR BONE together with Admir Batlak at the small artist-run gallery Noplace. Her three new photographs made me recall a recent FaceTime conversation with a dear friend and colleague who had just attended a vernissage and needed a debrief. She said everyone there had been acting weirdly, and wondered if it was anything to do with her. We analysed the situation for a while, before concluding that it was simply an extreme COVID-influenced version of Norwegian’s general uncomfortableness. (In our opinion, being uncomfortable is the norm for Norwegians.) This made us laugh, since in normal times, exhibition openings are often quite awkward, but in this self-isolating time, they become even more so.
Eggen’s work is concerned with the body and its involuntary actions, the ones we deem irrational. As she once explained in an interview with me, these actions are on a par with affect theory: they turn us away from the rational and towards the notion that something more basic informs our actions, such as muscles, reflexes and instinct. For this new work, she had made three frameless photographs on polytex paper of hands twisted into each other, hung directly on the wall. As she says about the work, this is an attempt at advancement within an anatomical form. Both hands in each image belongs to the same person, but act as if they are from two different persons, with one holding the other back.
The title, Tranquilshiver, along with the unease they convey, reflecting the way we feel at this point in time, made me smile. A tranquil shiver: does that even exist?
CLAIM YOUR SUPERIOR BONE. Admir Batlak & Ingrid Eggen. 21.11.20 – 20.12.20.
NINA STRAND ON CLAUDE CAHUN
Afterimage by Nina Strand:
This is the last week of Fantastic Women – Surreal World at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, where the work of Claude Cahun, among 34 others, is displayed. Cahun was a pioneer of photography that worked with gender fluidity and identity, and in this sense we owe her a lot. In one self portrait, Cahun is dressed as a weight lifter with the text: ‘I am in training, don’t kiss me’ on her jersey, and a small heart on each cheek, as well as one drawn on her knee. Her quote on gender accompanies the work: ‘Masculine? Feminine? It depends on the situation.’
It’s almost too much of a coincidence that this show is on at this time in this small Scandinavian country, since it’s been an interesting fall for Denmark. Three years after the MeToo Movement swept over at least the western part of the world, Denmark has finally begun its own investigation into people in powerful positions. A quote by the famed writer Suzanne Brøgger is circulating on social media. She said to the Danish newspaper Børsen that she has no patience with people who complain about MeToo. She doesn’t listen to those inexperienced people who say that women are to blame for their own abuse because they could just say no thank you, dress differently or simply stop putting themselves in dangerous situations. She is at an age where she trusts her own experience, and yet the politician Pia Kjærsgaard is only two years younger, but is one of those who have opposed the movement in Denmark, saying that women must accept advances, and diminishing harassment to simple, innocent flirting. Kjærsgaard claims never to have experienced unwanted attention or sexual advances, and yet she doesn’t hesitate to dictate what other women should put up with. Has she really never been touched by a man without her permission? Luckily, this time she’s outnumbered by many famous men and women, who are standing together, keeping up the momentum of the movement. It all began when the 30-year old TV host Sofie Linde delivered a powerful opening monologue at the TV Zulu Awards, watched by mainly young people, which was the perfect audience to finally hear someone say that enough is enough.
The movement spread quickly from the media world to the art world, giving this exhibition at Louisiana extra importance. If you didn’t catch it, there’s consolation in the fact that this week the great retrospective of the work of Anna Ancher opened at the National Gallery in Denmark. Not a moment too soon.
NINA STRAND ON A PROTESTIMAGE
Found via Feminist News on Facebook. Photographer unknown.
Afterimage by Nina Strand:
There’s an image from the recent protests in Poland that I can’t stop thinking about. A woman stands in the middle of a street, in the midst of a demo, wearing a mask and waving a Pride flag in all the smoke and chaos. She seems angry, which is understandable and relatable. Why shouldn’t Polish women be able to decide what happens in their own wombs? It’s 2020 and I can’t believe that we’re here again, with the election of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court putting the American right to abortion in danger, and so the image from Poland hits me. I’m with her in this protest. I’m with her on the issue of choice. It’s vital to me that every single woman gets to decide what to do with her own body. And it’s terrifying how this choice is still being threatened. It reminds me of the image that went viral some years ago, from another protest, of a woman in her sixties holding the sign: ‘I Can't Believe I Still Have To Protest This Fucking Shit.’ She’d obviously done this before. We know that we, and our daughters, stand on the shoulders of our mothers, their grandmothers, who fought for the right to choose. And yet here we are again.
In 2017, I co-curated an exhibition called Subjektiv at Malmö Konsthall showing the work of Josephine Pryde among others, whose series It’s Not My Body shows MRI scans of a foetus in the womb montaged onto colour landscape shots. Pryde hadn’t been intending to take part in any ‘urgent response’-type exhibitions at that specific political juncture, but what caught her attention was another chance to NOT say how it feels to be a pregnant individual. She was interested in describing a shared material state, and included these pieces in the exhibition because she thinks human reproduction is extraordinary and that the history of women as property, as the designated site of reproduction, still haunts our popular mythologies and cultural exchanges. How these ghosts return, how they duplicate themselves and occupy imaginations, is a matter of intense relevance to her, and also to us four years later in these very trying times. So all these thoughts and feelings arise in my mind when looking at the Polish woman waving her flag in Warsaw. I do hope that we won’t have to see images like this in the years to come.
MATTHIEU NICOL ON CHRIS KILLIP
Simon Being Taken out to Sea for the First Time since His Father Drowned, Skinningrove, North Yorkshire, negative 1983; print 2014, Chris Killip, gelatin silver print. Courtesy of and © Chris Killip. Image from the exhibition Now Then: Chris Killip and the Making of In Flagrante, May 23-August 13, 2017, Getty Center.
Afterimage by Matthieu Nicol:
What image do I have in mind at the moment? It’s difficult to give a quick answer to the question Objektiv has proposed. In my work as a photo editor for the daily press, I see thousands of shots on my monitors every day. This ocean of images, mainly from agencies, formatted, and in the end, very similar, does not help with digestion. Rather than writing about press photos, I want to talk about images or series of images from exhibitions or festivals that has made an impression on me lately. But when squeezing, nothing came out. So I put this question in the corner of my mind for a few weeks, and let it decant. Regularly, like the backwash of a wave, a handful of shots came back; sometimes engulfed but eventually graved in my visual memory. Nothing new, nothing current. So I allowed myself to slightly modify the question: which image, absorbed a long time ago, has stayed etched in my memory and resurfaced regularly?
Among the icons of my “imaginary museum”, there is one that haunts me. A terrible image of infinite sadness but of absolute relevance. In Madrid, February in 2014, an exhibition soberly entitled Work, a retrospective of the work by Chris Killip, was presented at the Reina Sofia Museum. I knew the photographer’s work, and several of his series on the impoverished communities in northern England, the victims of deindustrialization in the early 1980’s in the beginning of Thatcherism. I’d seen them online or in catalogues, notably In Flagrante (1988). But this image was unknown to me because it was absent from the books.
I don’t want to linger on the formal composition of the scene, the position of the body and the closed eyes of the little boy in his Sunday best, floating in adult clothes, his head bent on the line of the horizon, the slight oscillation of a swaying boat, of which only the bow is in the frame. A form of a closed room, without doors or windows, perfectly executed. I would, however, like to emphasise the caption: Simon being taken out to sea for the first time since his father drowned, Skinningrove, North Yorkshire, 1983. Everything we need to know is there, in this exact wording. A subject, described by his first name, the reason for his presence, a place, a date. 18 words.
Although the image alone can produce this piercing effect, this “punctum” dear to Barthes, allowing the observer to appropriate it beyond all knowledge, code or culture; the caption gives us information that is essential to our comprehension. What is mind-blowing in this link between text and image is that it reveals the evidence of an extraordinary situation. It enables an immediate comprehension of the degree of commitment the photographer has with his subject. Killip’s approach is unique, the author is distant, out of frame and at the same time, completely immersed in a poignant intimacy. Only the construction of a long- term relationship with this tiny fishing village named Skinningrove, where he documents the daily life of its inhabitants, allows him to produce a scene like this and show it to the world.
With an image so prone to allegory, one could make it say a number of things: a rite of passage into adulthood, filial love, sadness and sorrow. One could also enter into dialogue with other images, I’m especially thinking of the one of Alan Kurdi, the little Syrian boy washed up on a Turkish beach in September 2015. This “shock image” that rapidly went worldwide, became the tragic symbol of the migrant crisis in the Mediterranean. In this reversed perspective we see a small, drowned body and not the survivor, his father, who subsequently testifies of the drowning to international media. Within me, the connection is evident: in my visual memory, these images are contemporary, and as a father of two children the age of Simon and Alan, they move me particularly. But the comparison stops there. We cannot suspect Killip of voyeurism. His restraint, his sense of propriety, his engagement, his empathy are all entirely resumed in this image and its caption.
During a presentation at Harvard University in 2013, where he taught from 1991 to 2017, Killip confides his discomfort on the use of this scene and a few other images taken that day: “I don’ t know how... if I should use these photographs or how I could use these photographs. I’m very unsure about what use they are... ». And indeed, the author dismissed the image from the two editions of In Flagrante (1988 and 2015). During a later conversation held in 2017 at the Getty center in Los Angeles, he clarifies: “In Flagrante means ‘caught in the act’, and that’s what my pictures are. You can see me in the shadow, but I’m trying to undermine your confidence in what you’re seeing, to remind people that photographs are a construction, a fabrication. They were made by somebody. They are not to be trusted. It’s as simple as that.”
En français:
Quelle image ai-je en tête en ce moment ? Il m'a été compliqué de répondre rapidement à cette question, à l’invitation d’ Objektiv. Dans mon travail d'éditeur photo pour la presse quotidienne, je vois passer plusieurs milliers de clichés par jour sur mes moniteurs. Cet océan d'images, principalement d'agence, formatées et finalement fort similaires n'aide pas à la digestion. Plutôt que de photos de presse, j’ai alors cherché à parler d'images ou de séries m’ayant marquées dernièrement dans des expositions ou des festivals. Mais en pressant, rien ne sort. Et j'ai mis cette question dans un coin de ma tête durant quelques semaines, et laissé décanter. Régulièrement, tel le ressac, reviennent une poignée de clichés parfois engloutis mais finalement gravés durablement dans ma mémoire visuelle. Rien de neuf, rien d'actuel. Alors je me suis permis de modifier quelque peu la question : quelle image, assimilée depuis longtemps, est restée gravée dans ma mémoire et refait surface régulièrement ?
Parmi ces icônes de mon « musée imaginaire » il y en a une qui me hante. Une image terrible, d'une tristesse infinie, mais d’une justesse absolue. C'était en février 2014, à Madrid. Une exposition sobrement intitulée Work, rétrospective du travail de Chris Killip présenté au Musée Reina Sofia. Je connaissais le travail du photographe, et plusieurs de ses séries sur les communautés paupérisées du nord de l’Angleterre, victimes de la désindustrialisation à l’aube des années 1980, début du Thatcherisme. Je les avais vues en ligne ou dans des catalogues, et notamment In Flagrante (1988). Mais cette image m’était inconnue, car absente de ces ouvrages.
Je ne souhaite pas m’attarder ici sur la composition formelle de cette scène, la position du corps et les yeux fermés de ce petit garçon endimanché, flottant dans des habits d’adulte, sa tête courbée crevant la ligne d’horizon, la légère oscillation d’une barque qui tangue et dont seule la proue est dans le cadre. Une forme de huis-clos, sans portes ni fenêtres, parfaitement exécuté. Je voudrais en revanche insister sur sa légende : Simon being taken out to sea for the first time since his father drowned, Skinningrove, North Yorkshire, 1983. Tout ce que l’on a besoin de savoir y est dit, dosé au mot près. Un sujet, décrit par son prénom, la raison de sa présence, un lieu, une date. 18 mots.
Si l’image seule peut créer cette fulgurance, ce « punctum » cher à Barthes qui permet à celui qui l’observe de se l’approprier, au-delà de tout savoir, de tout code, de toute culture, la légende ici donne une information essentielle à sa compréhension. Ce qui est sidérant dans ce rapport texte-image, c’est qu’il révèle l’évidence d’une situation exceptionnelle. Il permet de comprendre immédiatement le degré d'engagement du photographe avec son sujet. La pratique de Killip est singulière, l’auteur est distant, hors cadre et en même temps, totalement immergé dans une intimité poignante. Seule la construction d’une relation de long terme dans ce village de pêcheurs nommé Skinningrove dont il documente au long cours la vie quotidienne des habitants, lui permet de produire une telle scène et de la donner à voir au monde.
On pourrait faire dire beaucoup de choses à cette image qui se prête facilement à l’allégorie : celle d’un rite du passage à l’âge adulte, de l’amour filial, de la tristesse et du deuil. On pourrait également la faire dialoguer avec d’autres. Je pense en particulier à celle d’Alan Kurdi, ce garçonnet syrien échoué sur une plage turque en septembre 2015. Cette "image-choc", qui a rapidement fait le tour du monde, est devenue le symbole tragique de la crise des migrants en Méditerranée. Dans un retournement de perspective c’est ici un corps de petit noyé, mort, que l’on voit, et non le survivant, son père, rescapé, qui témoigne après-coup de la noyade auprès des médias internationaux. En moi, le lien est évident : dans ma mémoire visuelle, ces images sont contemporaines, et en tant que père de deux enfants de l'âge de Simon et d'Alan, elles m'émeuvent particulièrement. Mais la comparaison s'arrête là. On ne peut pas soupçonner Killip de voyeurisme. Sa retenue, sa pudeur, son engagement, son empathie sont tout entiers résumés dans cette image et sa légende.
Lors d’une présentation à l'Université Harvard en 2013, ou il a enseigné de 1991 à 2017, Killip confie sa gêne sur l'usage qu'il pourrait faire de cette scène et des quelques autres images réalisées ce jour : « I don’ t know how... if I should use these photographs or how I could use these photographs. I’m very unsure about what use they are... » Et de fait, l’auteur a écarté cette image de ses deux éditions d'In Flagrante (1988 et 2015). Lors d'une conversation plus tardive, tenue en 2017 au Getty Center de Los Angeles, il précise : “In Flagrante means ‘caught in the act,’ and that’s what my pictures are. You can see me in the shadow, but I’m trying to undermine your confidence in what you’re seeing, to remind people that photographs are a construction, a fabrication. They were made by somebody. They are not to be trusted. It’s as simple as that.”
This text is translated by Anja Grøner Krogstad.
JOCELYN ALLEN ON VIBEKE TANDBERG
Vibeke Tandberg, Old Man Going Up and Down a Staircase, 2003.
Afterimage by Jocelyn Allen:
I’m currently pregnant, and I’ve never been before, so it’s a big change for me and my body. I have photographed myself for over 10 years and at the moment I am working on a series about my pregnancy. As a result, I have been looking to see how other women have photographed themselves during this time, as well as post-birth, and early motherhood.
A series that sticks out in my mind is Vibeke Tandberg’s Old Man Going Up and Down a Staircase (2003). In the work she is pregnant and dressed as an old man with a mask on. I imagine she did this to playfully talk about the restrictions and difficulties that pregnancy can present. Tasks that were once simple like walking up and down the stairs become more difficult, but with pregnancy it is often only a temporary change. I like this series as it is quite different to other work that I have seen. It is playful whilst commenting about something very relatable that might ring true to you even if you have never been pregnant, but experienced something else like having a broken bone or feeling rough after a night out.
Tandberg’s work makes me think about my grandmother when I visit her house. She wants to do things for me as I am pregnant, but it is difficult for her because of the changes to her body now that she is older. She says she will make me breakfast, but instead I make her breakfast as I know it is much easier for me to do it. She gets frustrated whilst going shopping and everyone opens doors for her as it makes her feel like she looks old, whilst I get irritated by people meaning well but telling me to eat and rest well, like I have forgotten the basic needs of being human.
I am currently about halfway in my pregnancy and my movements are becoming more restricted. Picking something up off the floor requires some repositioning and my days of putting my socks on whilst balanced on one foot will soon be paused (this morning I did one, but gave in and sat on the bed for the other one). I know that even though my body will probably never be the same again, I will be able to do these simple things again. Whereas for my grandmother these changes are now permanent and her ability to do these things will only get worse.
ERIN SHIRREFF
Afterimage by Erin Shireff:
I was working at a desk sometime in the mid 2000s, back in Brooklyn after graduate school, endlessly scrolling through Gawker.com as I tried to avoid thinking about the vague direction of my life when this image rolled onto my desktop screen, no accompanying text, carrying the header “Ghost in the Machine.”
It was a typical Gawker post — New York-centric, slightly caustic — and it hit me in the way it was likely intended. I probably laughed. But the picture itself, a low-fi cell phone snap taken quickly (maybe on a Blackberry?), it stayed with me and provoked something less formed, more ambient in my mind.
After a beat you get that this isn’t documentation of a performance, the person in the photo isn’t pulling a prank. It’s likely a picture of one of the many, many people living in New York who don’t have a home, who use the subway as a place to sleep or rest. Someone trying to get just a bit of privacy within a life that probably affords them very little. So it felt wrong, or problematic, to think of this being a “relatable gesture” but I did. And I do. Abstract the conditions of this life I can’t imagine through a degraded photo on a website and I remember how when I first moved to the city from the desert I felt physically damaged, daily, by the number of faces — eyes — I had to see each day. Most days I felt enormously, thrillingly anonymous but that feeling could tip when the wave of humanity became a sea of individual people. Eventually I acclimated or maybe I just numbed out. Maybe I was already part way there when I looked at this picture and laughed.
It makes me think, too, about how I fetishize privacy. I am alone in my studio most of the day and I’m not convinced it’s a super healthy way to live but it’s a condition I rely on in order to hear myself clearly. That’s old fashioned I guess? The idea of privacy or aloneness being required for thought? Or maybe the notion of privacy itself — keeping something entirely to yourself, that being enough, not telling anyone — is just over. Sometimes I think we care about privacy only when we’re asked if we do, or when we think it’s being taken away.
Gawker is dead now, Blackberries are done. The sensibility of the writer that would have made that post has probably shifted. My own self-indulgent post-grad anxieties about creative autonomy that probably drove my connection to the picture in the first place — they’ve thankfully faded. Back then I printed it out on my desktop Epson and it’s here on the wall in my studio now like it was in Brooklyn for so many years. I’m gone, too. I travel on a different subway in a smaller city where it feels much harder to disappear. The ghost hangs above my sink in a black metal frame I picked up at Michael’s, discolored by shitty inkjet banding and years of UV damage. I guess now it’s a souvenir? I wouldn’t say it haunts me, but it’s never quit working on me, never not made me uneasy.
CAMILLE LÉVÈQUE ON YORGOS LANTHIMOS
A still from Dogtooth by Yorgos Lanthimos, 2009.
Afterimage by Camille Lévêque:
I’ve always been strongly influenced by cinema. I’m rarely interested in photography, but often in videos made by artists. Film stills remain on my mind in a way that’s slightly different from photographs.
Since the first time I watched it in March or April, I've kept a screenshot on my phone from the film Dogtooth (2009) by Yorgos Lanthimos, who represents the new wave in Greek cinema. He also made The Lobster (2015) and The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017). His films are very visual, and he has what I would call the eye of a photographer. They’re also extremely dark, and Dogtooth leaves you feeling anguished, but it hides its darkness behind a lighter appearance and colourful scenes. The movie as a whole is beautiful, but each individual scene is well orchestrated: if you paused at any moment, you’d have a really interesting still image.
Dogtooth is about an isolated family. The parents keep their kids completely outside the world by creating a fantasy to keep them at home. I have one scene in particular on my mind – the one that I saved on my phone. It depicts a birthday. We don't know whose birthday it is, but of course, only the family is present. At one point, the daughters perform a dance to their brother’s guitar, and it’s terrifyingly awkward. The scene arrives near the end of the film, and a lot of tension has been building. It reaches a point of almost unbearable uneasiness and you know something terrible is bound to happen, and yet it only becomes increasingly absurd.
I’ve grown up with an education in cinema and watched all the classics, so many films made these days don't interest me at all. I’m interested in an experience rather than entertainment. My expectations when it comes to cinema are ridiculously high. When I see a movie, I want it to change my way of thinking, and almost change my life, and Dogtooth does this, in a way. I regularly look at that scene on my phone. I really love the grotesqueness, absurdity and darkness in the film. But it’s hard to watch – almost like witnessing an accident and being unable to look away.