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From: Rodney Ward Category: Art Date: 17 November 2008 Time: 02:10 PM Review: Photography is everywhere all the time would'nt you agree? How many times I have seen a good photograph in a newspaper only to pause momentarily before plunging into the quite separate world of text. Sure The Independent set a certain standard a while back and for all it's deluded ideas about the impartiality of right wing conservatism, the Telegraph does take a bit of pride in its photography but how often is the hapless reader lucky enough to find an Independent or Telegraph lying around ? more likely after suffering the stench of some arse eating a burger on the train you will, in an effort to distract your gagging reactors in the epiglottal region, reach out only to pick up London Light, Metro, The Sun, The Star, The Times if you're truly cursed the Express and so on. Like a lot of things, they are no longer what they originally set out to be. The plain fact of the matter is that when a photographer is introduced to us, live or through some media, we tend to secretly consider ourselves equal to the title, digital camera phones abound, how someone convinces another to pay them seems an indulgence beyond belief, almost as absurd as paying someone to play football professionally, imagine that! Perspective is one of the four Vitruvian "laws" of drafting, scale, composition and proportion being the remaining three, I refer to the other meaning of perspective here, The World Press Photo 08 Exhibition at the Southbank Centre, London or check out www.worldpressphoto.org, I attended quite unconsciously, I mean, I turned up there to hear some of the London Jazz Festival, there are quite a few free events, one of them a nordic youth jazz band - God thats a boring concept but the reality was totally brilliant - And once I had come to terms with the fact that the audience resembled a national trust property tea room, well I started to look around the (Queen Elizabeth) Hall and noticed an exhibition beside the auditorium. Fearing premature rigourmortis and at the same time realizing that I looked even more boring than the audience I was sneering at, I took a tour of the World Press Photo exhibition. I think I was looking at a photograph of a man being blasted to shreds with a water cannon in Zimbabwe when I realized that I had stopped listening to the jazz, I had stopped listening and I had stopped fighting in that way that one does when two media vie for attention, this was photography - real photography, not the sort of indulgent shite put forth by Sam Taylor Wood and her nauseous pals, not the pathetic shots of flesh, tittilation faux prurience in the redtops, no this was Story telling and Theatre and photography. Theres a lot of content and I'm afraid I do not have names or dates, hopefully thats all in the web link, I urge you to attend for several reasons, some of them mundane, like, you could take children there, you can buy cups of tea and cakes, there's bookshops, its free but its really for this one, quite large (hence my blather about newspaper photography), black and white photo, the picture is of a beautiful, almost magical location in a forest in Afghanistan, there are three very dignified men wearing turbans and tunics, they stand beside the large old tree trunks, cautiously they look towards an American soldier dressed in the distinctive nazi style helmet and camouflage, the picture is full of tensions, ambiguous stress-points, the beautiful place, the three traditionally dressed men, the soldier....... The text tells us that "American Military Strategists"...have designated this place as a possible location for Al Quiada activity, and have decided to flush them out. Knowing what we learn, barely through media information about the totally inadiquate abilities of military strategists, we can see in this photograph the reality of this mindless nonsensical situation, looking at that photograph you felt present, and able to assess the madness, it's like walking on Boxhill in Surrey on a beautiful summers day and suddenly it all stops....it does'nt have to be Boxhill, it could be anywhere you least expect, you just know that those men in that place will never be the same, theres no time for judgement and the whole exhibition is full of these large photographs which tell us far more than any amount of news-readers, text or the smaller reproductions in the newspapers. So thats what photography is when its not being shown at The Photographers Gallery because one of Po Faced Martin Parrs exhibitions is sneering at the British Working Classes instead. oops,watabitch