Picture Post #77: The Picnic

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'Because things don’t appear to be the known thing; they aren’t what they seemed to be

neither will they become what they might appear to become.'

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Posted by Martin Cohen

 

Another image from another war. The 1999–2000 battle of Grozny saw the siege and assault of the Chechen capital by Russian forces, and left the city devastated. In 2003, the United Nations called Grozny the most destroyed city on Earth.

But pause to look at this image. There’s a bizarre juxtaposition of suburban normalcy and wartime horror here. For a start, the table set with four chairs. Who else will be coming to dinner? Notice at the moment the two soldiers are a man and a woman, again echoing many a more homely, family scene.

Of course, as with most picnics, it is the setting that makes the moment, but here it is a nightmare scene of blasted apartment blocks and grey, smoking ruins. Not the family car, but the “family tank” is parked nearby.

On the table, the actual food is rather meagre.which may explain why both figures at the table look, frankly, rather miserable.

Picture Post #36 A postcard from Taroudant

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'Because things don’t appear to be the known thing; they aren’t what they seemed to be neither will they become what they might appear to become.'


Posted by Tessa den Uyl and Martin Cohen

A postcard from Taroudant, Maroc

One piece of advice offered is to lower the gaze, to not allow it to dwell, as if the eye serves distraction.

The woman seated in front of the painting is possibly homeless. Her posture dissolves with the two figures on the wall, characterised by their carved-out eyes, and urge us to imagine where this woman can put her gaze.

Eyes and hearts, their combination invites a myriad of symbolic attributions. One of them is that a woman with her eyes can reach the man in his heart. The carved-out eyes suggest that women, even when veiled, still look (and distract), which they should not... Or is the image saying something quite different, that the time for women to be veiled is consigned to history and that these days we can 'forget about the eyes’?

An eye is connected with light, and light with reflection. The ‘seduction’ begins with the question of where the reflection should pose its attention.

Picture Post #16: Life Behind the Pile of Petrol Cans

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'Because things don’t appear to be the known thing; they aren’t what they seemed to be neither will they become what they might appear to become.'

Posted by Tessa den Uyl and Martin Cohen

Azad Nanakeli 2011, Arbil, Kurdistan-Iraq

A tailor shop that is situated behind a pile of petrol cans. An image that offers a certain brutality about human life – yet in this harshness, but also lightness, man survives. In such ‘idiosyncratic sympathies’ is hidden our intimacy – and hence, similarity. How violent is it to earn one's daily bread out of sight of the street, and behind a symbol of capitalism and war and power?

Virtue will always raise its flags of dependence upon what it believes. Reducing intimacy to something impersonal in cultural terms, yet personal in providing a subjective state within which is created a distinct worldview. The subtlety between intimacy and brutality can then pass by unnoticed, or be easily exchanged, one with the other.

Yet human beings are blessed with something called imagination. And without imagination, intimacy cannot exist. Strangely, the most common scenes reflect our trouble with imagination. As if the common has very little value in regard. We let comparisons decree our personal preferences – and in so doing, not only do we refuse to imagine ourselves, but we refuse to imagine others. We refuse intimacy with the world.

Imagination evokes thinking, even though most thinking occurs within the already imagined. Imagination reveals a problem as to how we make the world intelligible. In this way, daily life offers us a myriad stream of common, unanticipated images like this, scenes in which a host of uncommon things can be traced.

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Poetry: On Nuclear Logic

Editorial note: Poetry touching on the great stories of our time, from Iran to North Korea, to Turkey to Israel, to...?

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A poem by Chengde Chen 

Dr Strangelove provided a fictional insight into something all too real

On ‘Nuclear Logic’

How to help the French living under Terror and their own Terreur

Posted by Perig Gouanvic

"Inside a Revolutionary Committee under Terreur (1793-1794)"
Finger pointing and cleansing the public discourse is not new In France

In France, there are very old beliefs, reminiscent of the Terreur era, about religion and minorities that should never be questioned. Multiculturalism is considered a danger. Let's consider, for instance, the fact that the Paris attacks terrorists, who were born an raised in France or Belgium have more in common with the skinheads of the 1980s than with the fundamentalists we see on TV. They drink alcohol, smoke pot, play murder rampage video games, and really have the "no future" belief system of other teenagers 20 years ago. Several observers witted that religion would actually be a pacifying, structuring, influence for these young people. In other words, supporting the strength of religious communities, not just stopping humiliating them, might actually prevent terrorism. At the present moment, the orthodoxy says that we should not limit "free speech" - especially the Charlie* kind - and even that we should celebrate humiliation of religion as the most exquisite mark of French Freedom and Rationality.

Picture Post No. 6: The Croquet Game

'Because things don’t appear to be the known thing; they aren’t that what they seemed to be neither will they become what they might appear to become.'

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Posted by Martin Cohen and Tessa den Uyl

New Mexico, 1874

This peaceful scene (the whole right part looks almost like a romantic painting) of a game of croquet set in the American South, generated considerable media interest, once it was established that one of the men pictured was none other that the notorious outlaw, Billy the Kid. Billy, it should be explained, was considered to be both ruthless and dashing, and had a dramatic end at an early age involving a shoot out with the sherifs.

Juxtaposed, then, as art critics might say, with this quintessentially genteel act, the game of croquet, redolent of English afternoon teas and cucumber sandwiches, we have a powerful perhaps slightly piquant reminder that even a murderer, a desperado, can have another, gentler  side. (Even if, as anyone who has actually played croquet knows, the game is actually quite cruel and remorseless, as players wreck the hopes of their opponents by blasting their wooden balls into the shrubbery.)

Billy himself, looking just a little bit dangerous?