Red sky at night...

This picture does only rudimentary justice to the beauty of the sunset currently going on in front of our house.

But even so, I thought it was worth sharing.

Wishing you all a good Wochenende.

Gemütlichkeit, pixelated

The Bavarian town of Oberstaufen is the among the first location in Germany to feature in Street View.

It looks like a charming place.

Even if it seems to suffer from periodic blurriness:

But, rest assured, dear reader: this is only a problem in virtual Germany.

(Pictures source)

On not understanding a thing

This, apparently, is about photography (via):

"I adjust some levels in Photogene, crop the image, run it through one of a handful of CameraBag or Lo-Mob filters, then use TiltShiftGen not to make a tilt-shift image but because a little bit of blur goes a long way, and because TiltShiftGen has a killer vignetting tool."

Yeah.


I...uh...point and shoot.


I'm beginning to wonder whether, at the tender age of 40, I may just be too old for this world.


(Or, as ICP might put it: "Fuckin' iPhones, how do they work?")

Remember kids: 'A little bit of blur goes a long way.'

Word.

A few things that I learned on vacation

1. It’s good to get away. Away, in particular from the computer. We spend probably a majority of our waking hours every day staring at screens and typing. While in France, however, we were online for about a total of an hour over 2 weeks. This is partly because of the curious absence of internet cafés in this part of the world, which has mystified me ever since I started going there some years ago.

I found the withdrawal difficult for the first two days but then I spent long periods forgetting that the internet exists.

And, as much as I love the internet, this was a Very Good Thing.

But nothing personal, you understand.

2. Jacques Demy was a genius. Not only did he make mind-bendingly beautiful The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) but -- thanks to Arte -- we can also report that his The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967) is just the thing for getting into that summer vacation state of mind.

Just take a look:



I mean, really: what more do you want?



3. Beaches are a wonderful invention. One has a very different outlook on life when, well, the outlook is like this.

Or this.

And when the most exciting thing that happens all week is the occasional docking of a dredger, you can be reasonably sure that you’re achieving the right level of relaxation.

(Sharp eyes will note that this vessel is the brilliantly named ‘Britannia Beaver’. Further comment, I think, would be superfluous)

4. Reading is a joy. This may seem obvious; however, I mean 'reading' in the sense of ‘reading something from beginning to end for the pure enjoyment of doing so and being able to linger over the better parts for as long as you like while pleasantly lost in thought’ and not, ‘desperately skimming a book or article to get what I need out of it in the shortest time possible.’

I (and we) spend a lot of time doing the latter and not nearly enough doing the former.

And they are very different experiences.

The joy is only increased by being able to focus on beautiful prose, of course, and I thank Erich Kästner, Ian McEwan and Thomas Mann for providing it.

(And, in Herr Mann’s case, in such enormous quantities: Buddenbrooks is pretty epic, and its German – parts of which are in local dialect or a bit archaic or both – is not the easiest for a non-native speaker used to humbler fare. However, it’s a gripping read, both deeply moving and very, very funny. I’m now encouraged to take on Magic Mountain: any advice? For those of you who're looking more simple -- but still beautifully written -- German reading, I can't recommend Erich Kästner's Emil books too highly. They're meant for children, apparently, but I found them to be a delight.)

Finally: The French, in their creativity, civilisation and love of state-supported civic life, have managed to combine point #3 and point #4 by putting libraries on the beach.

How awesome, dear reader, is France!?

Très awesome!

Thinking only nice thoughts

To clear the palate of the last, rather negative post before moving on to more pleasant things, I can only recommend Geoff's collection of his best photographs from 2009.

Especially this one. (We had such a baby bird in our yard this year, but didn't manage to get a photo.)

Thanks Geoff!

Let it snow, early 70s style

Given the wintry chaos that has struck in recent days, we thought it might be nice to remember a time when we could more wholeheartedly enjoy the white fluffy stuff.




Ahhh. Memories...

Be careful out there.

Tearing down the wall

The New York Times has a nifty set of images of before-and-after photographs along the Berlin Wall.

To get the full impact, you really do have to play with the little slidey back-and-forth effect they offer.

Very cool.

Somehow deeply moving.

Love-hate relationship

David Pescovitz at Boing Boing posted a photo of that rare beast, police-positive graffiti (or, maybe more properly, graffito, but I'm not about to get picky).

It reminded me of a phrase we ran across a couple of years ago in a little Normandy town that we like to think of as a home away from home.

It's not exactly pro-police, but it is surprisingly...differentiated.

Welcome to London: fotographieren verboten

Ah, London. Where the law-enforcement fun never stops!

Today's Guardian brings the story of Austrian tourist Klaus Matzka and his son, who were visiting the world-class metropolis and, as one sometimes does, taking some snaps.

This fell rather afoul of a couple of super-vigilant members of London's finest:

Like most visitors to London, Klaus Matzka and his teenage son Loris took several photographs of some of the city's sights, including the famous red double-decker buses. More unusually perhaps, they also took pictures of the Vauxhall bus station, which Matzka regards as "modern sculpture".

But the tourists have said they had to return home to Vienna without their holiday pictures after two policemen forced them to delete the photographs from their cameras in the name of preventing terrorism.

Matkza, a 69-year-old retired television cameraman with a taste for modern architecture, was told that photographing anything to do with transport was "strictly forbidden". The policemen also recorded the pair's details, including passport numbers and hotel addresses.

Matzka and his son, perhaps, stood out due to their unusual--indeed, vaguely Ballardian--tourist interests:

He said he and his son liked to travel to the unfashionable suburbs.

"We typically crisscross cities from the end of railway terminals, we like to go to places not visited by other tourists. You get to know a city by going to places like this, not central squares. Buckingham Palace is also necessary, but you need to go elsewhere to get to know the city," he said.

He said the "nasty incident" had "killed interest in any further trips to the city".

I'm not surprised. I know that feeling myself.

In a telephone interview from his home in Vienna, Matka said: "I've never had these experiences anywhere, never in the world, not even in Communist countries."

Anyway, this might be a semi-amusing anecdote if it weren't part of a broader problem, one that is symbolised by the the arrest around the beginning of the year of artist Reuben Powell, who was photographing an old building as part of an art project. As the Independent reported:

"The car skidded to a halt like something out of Starsky & Hutch and this officer jumped out very dramatically and said 'what are you doing?' I told him I was photographing the building and he said he was going to search me under the Anti-Terrorism Act," he recalled.

For Powell, this brush with the law resulted in five hours in a cell after police seized the lock-blade knife he uses to sharpen his pencils. His release only came after the intervention of the local MP, Simon Hughes, but not before he was handcuffed and his genetic material stored permanently on the DNA database.

But Powell's experience is far from uncommon. Every week photographers wielding their cameras in public find themselves on the receiving end of warnings either by police, who stop them under Section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000, or from over-eager officials who believe that photography in a public area is somehow against the law.

Which it's not.

And, as a service to our readers, we reprint in handy clip'n'save format, the following statement from the Association of Chief Police Officers, quoted in the Independent article noted above:

"Police officers may not prevent someone from taking a photograph in public unless they suspect criminal or terrorist intent. Their powers are strictly regulated by law and once an image has been recorded, the police have no power to delete or confiscate it without a court order. This applies equally to members of the media seeking to record images, who do not need a permit to photograph or film in public places," a spokeswoman said.

Just in case, though, I offer you this image of the Vauxhall Bus Station, so that you don't need to take any unnecessary risks.

(Non-terrorist source)

American nightmare

This is the World Press Photo of the Year 2008:


Taken by Anthony Suau, it shows, as the WPP site explains:

an armed officer of the Cuyahoga County Sheriff's Department moving through a home in Cleveland, Ohio, following eviction as a result of mortgage foreclosure. Officers have to ensure that the house is clear of weapons, and that the residents have moved out.

It is certainly...striking.

Der Spiegel has a nice collection of the other winners.

Year of the dead?

Rather like Harald Martenstein, Charlie Brooker does not expect 2009 to be, as Ol' Blue Eyes once put it, a very good year.

Dim your lights. Here's the highlights reel. The worst recession in 60 years. Broken windows and artless graffiti. Howling winds blowing empty cans past boarded-up shopfronts. Feral children eating sloppy handfuls of decomposed-pigeon-and-baked-bean mulch scraped from the bottom of dustbins in a desperate bid to survive. The pound worth less than the acorn. The City worth less than the pound. Your house worth so little it'll collapse out of shame, crushing you in your bed.

It goes downhill from there (the year, I mean, not the enjoyment of Booker's prose), though even a pessimist like me doubts whether my relatives will actually have to sleep on brain-stained bedclothes, "shivering in the dark as they hear bombs dipped in bird flu dropping on the shattered remains of the desiccated city above."

But it's the thought that counts, I suppose.

So, the new year is already looking pretty nightmarish, which is one of the reasons I decided to ring it in by spending its first few evenings re-watching George Romero's zombie trilogy.

There are few things like a good old fashioned zombie apocalypse to cheer a body up: the world may be bad, you think, but at least I'm not trapped in a shopping mall trying to keep my entrails from being ripped out and eaten by the undead.

Yeah. A little perspective is always useful.

Something else that might also help you get through the grim times to come might be a couple of wonderful (and quite remarkably zombie-like) photos of party-goers offered to us by Sorry I Missed Your Party (previously celebrated on this blog here.)

There will be many moments in 2009 when you need a little cheering up, a little, you know, laughter.

Just bookmark this page and come back whenever you need that little lift.

Enjoy...



Don't you feel better now? Good.

And remember: when it comes to real zombies, aim for the head.

(Image sources: here and here. Frightening combination thereof: here.)

College Days

Barack Obama, 1980

The rest of this excellent photo series available at Time.com. (via Boing Boing)

Searching the commons

The head cold I brought back with me from London is continuing to wrap my neurons in a fuzzy layer of cotton wool, making it difficult for me to think in linear terms. (Either that or I'm suffering from a brain tapeworm...not a pleasant thought.)

It was fortunate, then, to run across a link at Boing Boing which led me to a fascinating photo collection at Flickr Commons, to which the New York Public Library has just begun contributing, of images that have no known copyright restrictions.

As the NYPL states:

Starting this past January with The Library of Congress, and continuing with places such as The Smithsonian Institution, The Brooklyn Museum, The National Maritime Museum, The National Library of New Zealand, the Nationaal Archief of the Netherlands and numerous others, the Commons has grown steadily over the past year into a truly remarkable public photography resource.

Remarkable indeed. A quick browse through the archive brought up some interesting snaps. (Click for full-size images.)

Midsummer day, Bronx Park, 1911 (Library of Congress)

Blanche Rogers, with pistol. (Library of Congress)



Jiu-Jitsu for Women (George Eastman House collection)

So this is what righteous people look like

A disturbing exhibition is currently on show at the The California Museum of Photography, Riverside. Jona Frank's "In the Paths of Righteousness" features photographs of students at the Presbyterian Patrick Henry College in Virginia. The mix of buxom, corn-bred optimism (which I guess comes with being American) and utter fatuousness (which I guess comes with taking the Bible a little too literally) displayed on the faces of some of the people portrayed by Frank is potent and frightening

Exhibition homepage here, article in Süddeutsche Zeitung here.

Soldier boys

Today is not only Remembrance Day but also the 90th anniversary of the end of the First World War. (In Germany, Volkstrauertag falls on 16 November this year.)

And I have to admit that I am one of those soppy people who gets all emotional about the whole poppy-wearing, wreath-laying, old-men-with-medals-parading, two-minutes-silence-observing solemnity of it all. (And, at the same time, a bit irked by the very notion of a 'Veterans Day Sale'. Yes, by all means, honour wartime sacrifice by buying cheap crap...)

This has a lot to do, no doubt, with being raised among people who took their personal military history seriously. After all, the two generations of men who came before me on both the American and British sides of my family went off to war, and taking my uncles into account, their service included the army, navy and air force and extended to theatres from Europe to North Africa to the Middle East to India to the Pacific.

That's a lot of soldiering.

I don't think there's anything particularly unusual about that: the first half of the twentieth century saw both a lot of fighting and mass conscription, and the twenty years between the two world wars were almost ideally calibrated for the children of the veterans of the first to go off to fight in the second. (A chain only broken in my family when, with fortunate timing for my brother, the Vietnam draft ended just in time, in 1973.)

I grew up with hearing those veterans' stories and experiences at family get-togethers and army reunions. It seemed kind of normal to me as a kid that you leave home and go off to some part of the world where you might experience some pretty horrible stuff.

Which strikes me, now, as a fairly odd thing.

Although, these days, of course, it shouldn't. (There was a remarkable article yesterday about an American outpost in Afghanistan, it it well worth reading.)

But, on Remembrance Day, I tend not to think of flags or stirring poetry, but rather of the rather mundane experiences of individual people from my family who were in those two generations. Some of them I knew well, some of them I never met.

I think particularly of my grandfather (and namesake), John Dennis, who was in the Great War. I never met 'Jack', as he died before I was born, but I heard a lot about him.

I don't know much about his military service, but I was always told that he left his quiet Devonshire town as part of an infantry regiment and that he spent some time in Flanders and then some in Mesopotamia, the area now known as Iraq.

This picture, we think, was likely taken in or on the way to the latter.
Quite a handsome chap. Certainly, a pith helmet does wonders for any man.

In any case, Jack apparently didn't want to talk much about what he had seen at the front, which was not all that atypical. Returning home to a land that he found hadn't quite managed to make itself fit for heroes to live in, he became a lifelong left-winger. He also, for more prosaic reasons, became a bus conductor. (I have his union lapel pin, which actually says 'Workers of the World Unite'. Very Old Labour.)

He ran for local council in 1947, still looking quite dapper.

He lost the election. The area was, I think, solidly Tory. But according to family legend, he got more votes than anyone would have expected.

In my view, that was victory enough.

This other chap I knew well, if too briefly.


I can see, perhaps, why my mother fell for him. Despite the ears.

The uniform certainly does add something. (For her part, she always insisted that one of his best qualities was that he was a gentleman, unlike some of the other Yanks who were, as she put it, 'all hands'...)

My father, fortunately, never saw combat, though he did experience bombing raids and got more of a glimpse of war's reality when D-Day wounded arrived at the hospital where he worked as a supply corporal. (Unbeknowst to him at the time, his brother--who had followed family tradition and joined the navy--was stationed on a cruiser in the Channel that had been shelling the Normandy coast that day and had narrowly missed being blown apart by a torpedo.)

After the war, he worked at a psychiatric hospital on Long Island, helping soldiers psychologically traumatised by the war, an experience that he never talked about to me, but which my mother said deeply affected him.

Afterwards came the usual post-war stuff: work, love, kids and suburbia.

Not that long ago, my sisters found a huge number of photographic negatives from my dad's army days. One of them is above.

And this is another.


(The headline of the Scottish 'Daily Express' -- he had been re-stationed to Glasgow sometime after D-Day -- is 'Nuremberg is Blazing. Hitler Wires: Hold Out to the Death'.)

Of all the conversations I wish I could have today, most of them would be with these two guys.

You can't have everything.

However, I try not to forget.

German word of the week: "Schaulustige"

Last night three people were killed in a shooting in a busy pedestrianised area in nearby Rüsselsheim (the home of car manufacturer Opel). One of the victims, a woman who appears to have been in the firing line only by accident, bled to death at the scene of the crime.

In the initial absence of any substantial information about the whys and wherefores of this event, a terse, speculative piece in Der Spiegel curiously foregrounds a minor detail that nevertheless speaks volumes about human nature:

Vor Ort versammelten sich nach kurzer Zeit Hunderte Schaulustige.

Which might roughly be translated as: "Shortly after, hundreds of onlookers gathered at the scene of the crime."

The English word "onlooker" of course fails to express the ambiguity of the German term "Schaulustige" – which literally means "people who derive pleasure from looking". While "looking on" constitutes a relatively neutral description of a simple sensory act, the German term clearly entails an undertone of voyeuristic enjoyment, even at the sight of something gruesome, disturbing and painful.

Schaulust is when retired men in grey polyester pants hitched up to their nipples gaze at holes being dug in the street. It is also when you slow down your car on the motorway (thereby forcing others to do so, too) to get a really good look at the accident on the other lane. My own Schaulust has been tickled intermittently over the last three months or so by the unhappy couple who have chosen to stage the dissolution of their relationship in a car parked outside our house.

From a Lacanian perspective, one could explain this scopophilia as a pathological by-product of the split identity incurred during the mirror stage (for Jacques Lacan the constitutive moment of subjectivity). An evolutionist, by contrast, would probably say that Homo Sapiens is merely a nosey old bugger and that curiosity – far from killing the cat – is actually adaptive.

Is the tendency of this constant, everyday desire to tip over into the voyeuristic also visible in the heart-rending images that have been circulating in the wake of the Russian offensive in the Caucasus?

Although pictures like this, this and this would clearly be in the running for the next World Press Photo Award, we should not forget the far more visceral and humble desires to which they cater and on which they rely.

Garden city

The EinesTages section at Der Spiegel has a striking series of photos recounting the efforts by CARE to bring humanitarian relief to postwar Europe. (Those who cannot read German can still enjoy the images. Click on each picture to move forward.)

Among them is this image of a street garden in Berlin.

From the Spiegel caption: 'Vegetables between the tracks: Many people tried to help themselves in devastated postwar Berlin and planted little vegetable gardens all over the city. Along with packed groceries, the CARE packages sent from the USA often contained several varieties of seeds.'

I know that this image captures people simply trying to survive and is a document of hunger and deprivation.

Still, I can't help finding it somehow beautiful.

Although that might be because last night we cooked up the first vegetables we have harvested from our own little garden.

And they were very good indeed.

I'm waiting at the train station, waiting for my train

The wonderful einestages section of Spiegel Online currently has a series of photos of Jimi Hendrix on offer.

Of particular note are a few taken during his final tour in Europe, such as this one, taken in front of the Hamburg train station, where Jimi and band have just disembarked from a bus and are waiting for their train.

Cool.

Concentrating the mind, wonderfully

Almost exactly a year ago, I ended a rather long silent pause here with a post about death.

Although I didn’t feel like mentioning it at the time, I had, in fact, just returned from a two-week stay in the US, where I had witnessed the conclusion of my mother’s battle with lung cancer. Mortality was, as you might imagine, not so much an abstract issue for me at that time.

But as with all terminal illnesses, 'the end' was – by definition – hardly a surprise; in the months leading up to it, I had done a lot of thinking about what was coming. One of the things I reached for was Norbert Elias’s book, The Loneliness of the Dying. I had come to know Elias’s work through my research on the history of violence and crime, and it had come to play an important role in my thinking about the world. I suppose it might strike you as odd to consult a sociological theorist when dealing with a personal sorrow; on the other hand, maybe it is a sign of quality theory that it tells you something useful about real life.

In any case, The Loneliness of the Dying is quite a remarkable little book. It betrays, in parts, Elias’s tendency to express himself in a somewhat dry, sociological language, but there are other insightful and almost poetic passages.

I quoted one last year:

Death is not terrible. One passes into dreaming and the world vanishes -- if all goes well. Terrible can be the pain of the dying, terrible, too, the loss of the living when a beloved person dies. There is no known cure. We are part of each other. [...]

There are indeed many terrors that surround dying. What people can do to secure for each other easy and peaceful ways of dying has yet to be discovered. The friendship of those who live on, the feeling of dying people that they do not embarrass the living, is certainly part of it. And social repression, the veil of unease that frequently surrounds the whole sphere of dying in our days, is of little help to people. Perhaps we ought to speak more openly and clearly about death, even if it is by ceasing to present it as a mystery. Death hides no secret. It opens no door. It is the end of a person. What survives is what he or she has given to other people, what stays in their memory. If humanity disappears, everything that any human being has ever done, everything for which people have lived and fought each other, including all secular or supernatural systems of belief, becomes meaningless.

(The Loneliness of the Dying, trans. Edmund Jephcott, 1985, pp. 66 and 67).

In the brief comments I managed at my mother's funeral, I quoted another passage. ‘Death’, Elias wrote, ‘is a problem of the living. Dead people have no problems.’

My mother was born into a poor-but-respectable family in Stanley Baldwin’s Britain, and she finished school at 14 to go to work, which was typical of a girl in her class and time and place. And despite crossing an ocean and ascending into the relatively comfortable lower reaches of the post-war American middle class, she remained indelibly marked by those origins, which only seemed to emerge more and more during the last decade and a half of her life.

One might think it odd, then, to remember her with words borrowed from an academic, the founder of figurational sociology – and a German no less. (Albeit one who was a victim of the Nazis and eventually became a British citizen.)

However, I was pleased to find that the words I had groped for turned out not merely to be the unfortunate affectation of a son with Too Much Education: in talking to the woman who had supervised my mother’s hospice care, I discovered that Elias’s book – with its condemnation of the ‘veil of unease’ modern society had thrown around death and the resulting isolation of the dying that this caused – had been one of the works that had inspired her to do what she was doing.

And what she and her colleagues were doing was impressive indeed. Like my mother, my father (two decades earlier) had died at home, cared for by my mother with the assistance of hospice.

Watching the relentless approach of his death over 18 months had made a strong impression on my teenage brain, as you might guess. In any case, since I came late in my parents’ lives – they were in their mid-40s when I surprisingly arrived on the scene – this meant that by the time I was in high school many of their friends (the adults I was closest to) were in their 60s or older, and the usual attrition was already well under way. By the time I graduated, I had carried the coffins of some half a dozen people whom I had loved very much.

What I suppose I’m trying to say is that, fairly early on, it had become clear to me that death was a fairly normal part of life.

(I have no wish to exaggerate my experience: obviously, violent death is something I’ve no direct experience of, something that far too many young people in far too many parts of the world have to deal with. I am not comparing myself to them.)

In any case, I had to think about a lot of the above a couple of weeks ago, when I visited a remarkable exhibition at the Wellcome Collection in London.

In ‘Life Before Death’, German photographer Walter Schels offers a powerful meditation on the experiences of dying people. Schels contacted people at hospices and found several who were willing to be photographed shortly before and immediately after their deaths. The result is a series of portraits combined with stories (written by Schels’s partner Beata Lakotta) that – I think – express in a manner that is all too rare the curious mixture of profundity and banality that inheres in the experience of death.

In their low-key way, they manage to pull back the veil, at least a little bit, on the mysteries of the dying.

Joanna Moorhead’s profile of Schels and Lakotta for the Guardian makes clear what an emotional and logistical challenge this kind of project posed. Schels was motivated by his own fears regarding mortality (and his comments about his early life demonstrate that early exposure to death doesn’t necessarily inure one to its terrors). The essay also points out something that echoes Elias’s words that I quoted above:

But, horrifying though photographing the bodies was, more shocking still for Schels and Lakotta was the sense of loneliness and isolation they discovered in their subjects during the before-death shoots. "Of course we got to know these people because we visited them in the hospices and we talked about our project, and they talked to us about their lives and about how they felt about dying," explains Lakotta. "And what we realised was how alone they almost always were. They had friends and relatives, but those friends and relatives were increasingly distant from them because they were refusing to engage with the reality of the situation. So they'd come in and visit, but they'd talk about how their loved one would soon be feeling better, or how they'd be home soon, or how they'd be back at work in no time. And the dying people were saying to us that this made them feel not only isolated, but also hurt. They felt they were unconnected to the people they most wanted to feel close to, because these people refused to acknowledge the fact that they were dying, and that the end was near."

They both feel altered by their work on the project:

Both Schels and Lakotta feel the experience of being close to so many dying people has changed how they feel not only about dying themselves, but how they feel about living - and also, how they would support a friend or relative through terminal illness. "I know now how important it is to be there, or at least to offer to be there, as much as possible - and to not be afraid of asking questions, and of listening to the answers," says Lakotta.

She’s absolutely right. It doesn’t make death any less real or painful, of course. Here we reach, as in so many cases, the limits of discourse. But the end of life is one of those times where small gestures and simple honesty can have an enormous value.

Over the last few years of her life, my mother and I spoke quite openly about death. We had some different views on the matter of the afterlife, but, once acknowledged, that mattered far less than you might think. (As Moorhead observes of Schels, ‘He remains, as he has long been, an agnostic, having noticed that believers and non-believers alike showed the same fear of the unknown that awaited them.’)

Although no stranger to self-dramatisation, she faced her end with a clear-eyed stoicism that was remarkable. Don’t misunderstand: she was terrified. But somehow she managed to exude both calmness and a dark sense of humour almost to the end. And then there followed an awful period in which she could no longer express anything coherently. There were occasional moments of lucidity and recognition in her eyes. What was going on behind them, though, remains a mystery. The peaceful expression that, eventually, marked the end of her struggle is difficult to describe in words. But I believe I recognised it in many of the images that Schels captured.

The exhibit runs to 18 May. For those in London, I recommend that you go. Leave yourself some time. This is not something to rush through. Spend a good long time looking at the faces. And read all of their stories.

It is unsettling and saddening and uncomfortable. But it also generates, in the end, a curious sense of hushed tranquillity. (A similar set of emotions, I note, that accompanied my reading of Jim Crace’s powerful novel, Being Dead. Something, as The Wife has pointed out, that is rather more complicated than 'joy'.)

If you’re not in London, a sample of the images is available.

This has become far longer than I intended, so I'll conclude by leaving the last word to Schels (and by thanking him and Lakotta for their powerful work):

"What I was used to," says Schels, who has taken hundreds of portraits during his career, "was people who smiled for the camera. It's usually an automatic response. But these people never smiled. They were incredibly serious; and more than that, they weren't pretending anything any more. People are almost always pretending something, but these people had lost that need. I felt it enabled me as a photographer to get as close as it's possible to get to the core of a person; when you're facing the end, everything that's not real is stripped away. You're the most real you'll ever be, more real than you've ever been before".

Gerda Taro

Der Spiegel has an article (in German) on the work of photographer Gerda Taro.

If you click on one of the photos at the article, you should see a series of her photographs.

I had not previously been aware of her work (she appears to have been overshadowed by her colleague and companion Robert Capa), but a quick look around also brought up a slide show at the New York Times.

I particularly like this one:

Captioned by the Times: 'A photograph of a woman in Barcelona, Spain training for a Republican militia in August 1936, taken by Gerda Taro. '

Her story is fascinating but sad:

Ms. Taro’s celebrity was short-lived but outsize. Shortly after establishing herself independently of Mr. Capa, she was sideswiped by a tank after jumping onto the running board of a car transporting casualties during the battle of Brunete, and killed. Her funeral in Paris (on Aug. 1, 1937, which would have been her 27th birthday) drew thousands who hailed her as a martyr to anti-Fascism. The French writer Louis Aragon and the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda were among those in attendance. Alberto Giacometti, the sculptor, designed her memorial.