Auto-Tune the News #2: pirates. drugs. gay marriage.

Auto-Tune the News #3 has just been released. While it’s not as good as #1 or #2 (above), it’s still worth a laugh. Best if you have an understanding, if not an appreciation, of the tropes of both contemporary pop music (especially Kanye West) and American television news and politics.

(I originally intended a mention of this to be part of a piece stewing on Creative Commons. “Auto-Tune the News” is the sort of creative reinterpretation that makes me understand and support the philosophy behind the Creative Commons movement. However, I don’t think CC will ever work for photography. It’s hard to imagine what a remixed photograph looks like…. That’ll have to wait a bit.)

I wanted to share my latest project which I shot over two weeks in March, which I probably hinted at in some earlier posts. This Time Tomorrow: Post-War Bosnia at the Crossroads is my attempt to describe a complex feeling that is settling in around Bosnia about its hopes for a prosperous future.

I have been introducing these pictures with this text:

Bosnia is facing a growing challenge to efficient and prosperous survival as time advances with a peace treaty functioning as a constitution. We read more and more often news stories about Bosnia’s instability and ill-prospects for a unified future with two ‘entities’ – the Federation and Republika Srbska – butting heads amongst entrenched political and ethnic divides. Citizens and the economy are inching toward a precipice prepared by political interest and ineffectual international oversight. War is not going to be the answer, but innocent people will suffer just the same.

But here is the longer version (with informative links!) that I hope will more fully explain the situation in Bosnia today:

For almost fifteen years since the Dayton Agreement the country of Bosnia and Herzegovina has stayed together through one of the world’s most complex political arrangements. Bosnia’s constitution, which mandates two ‘entities’ (consisting of the Federation of Bosniaks and Croats and the Republika Srbska of Bosnian Serbs), is an annex to a peace treaty. Further, the EU’s High Representative gives the international community final veto power over the country’s tripartite presidency. It is obvious to most observers that this inefficient and corruption-rich system cannot exist indefinitely. In recent months politicians from all sides are protesting frequently about the untenability of the current arrangement as a challenge to their sovereignty (as an ethnic group, an entity or, rarely, as the whole nation of Bosnia and Herzegovina). Old tensions remain, there are divided cities where one ethnic group doesn’t cross an invisible line for lingering fears, real or imagined, of conflict.

I hope these images can communicate the tensions that remain in Bosnia with high unemployment, political stagnation, a looming economic catastrophe and a pessimistic outlook on the future. Old interests and battles, frozen in 1995, remain relevant for much of the population and distrust is high. How will this nation, and the international community, reform and reconstitute one of the world’s more clumsy attempts at nation building?

This is a strange project for me, and of course I’m thankful for all the positive reviews so far, but I can’t quite wrap my head around these pictures. Maybe its the ephemeral thesis, trying to capture this feeling I was talking about, and I’m not convinced the pictures are successful in that vein. Of course they’re also a bit too focused on the Muslim portions of Bosnia, where I was living and where most of my friends are, but the ‘idea’ remains. I look forward to your feedback, questions or suggestions.. I’d love a conversation here on Dva.

Many thanks are due to my friend Jasmin Brutus for hosting me in Sarajevo and Dado Ruvic (who I just wrote about here on Dva) for showing me around Zenica. Two wonderful men and photographers, thank you both!

I love the new essay up at Burn today, Chris Bickford’s After the Storm. And, surprisingly, the music (by Justin Rudolph) really adds to the piece. I’m no fan of music in online slideshows most of the time, but this is an exception. Such nostalgia and wistfulness communicated both in the photos and the music. Definitely worth a look.

S novom godom, dorogie druzia….

I was feeling in the mood for some holiday music and found some of my favorite Russian songs on youtube. They’re from the Soviet-era farce “Ironiya Sudby, ili S Legkim Parom” (literally, “The Irony of Fate, or Here’s to Your Easy Steam” but maybe better as “The Irony of Fate, or Enjoy Your Bath”). The movie’s as ubiquitous and beloved in Russia as “A Charlie Brown Christmas” (Youtube 1, 2, 3) is in the US, though the movie focuses on the New Year holiday rather than Christmas.

The songs and movie are funny, poignant, whimsical, and just a bit subversive. The captions in the video are okay, but not great. Here’s a better translation of the first song, “Esli u vas netu teti,” which starts out “If you have no home/It won’t be set on fire.”

The main plot, an irreverent love story, is made possible only because Soviet development is so undramatic and ordinary as to render St. Petersburg and Moscow identical and interchangeable. A Muscovite man stumbles home drunk, not realizing he’d traveled from Moscow to St. Petersburg. He walks down what he thinks is his street, enters “his” apartment building, uses his key to open “his” apartment which has only slightly different layout furnishings, and is awoken from his stupor when the apartment’s female owner comes out to investigate the noise. Romantic comedy ensues. Here’s a small New York Times review and the IMDB entry. Watch out for the 2007 remake/sequel of the movie; I haven’t seen it but have heard it’s not very good. There’s a reason the original is played and replayed each year…

I could probably make a good excuse for posting music links here given my documented history writing about its huge influence on my work. And especially in this case, since Tunde Adebimbe sings about a ‘Newspaper Man’ in this first song.

“Dancing Choose” on ‘Later… with Jools Holland’

So, expect to see more hints of my musical love here on the blog.

“Golden Age” on ‘Later… with Jools Holland’

TV on the Radio, from Brooklyn, is one of my all-time favorite bands, their lives shows are epic (I’ve had the luck to see three), and they just released a new album called Dear Science. Heartily recommend it!

In some better news, I’m happy to share a link to a piece of work I’m pretty proud of. The music/literary blog This Recording approached me some weeks ago to write an essay about New York for their series on the city. The editor in chief, Alex Carnevale, had seen my New York project “I See A Darkness”, and wanted me to share my views about the city and how it comes through in the pictures.

This project was started in 2005 when M. Scott and I were both living in New York as (unpaid) interns for the Black Star agency. As this essay says, I had no aims of creating a long-term project when I started shooting the streets as I went about my life in the city, but soon after leaving the city and looking at the work I had started I realized that I had started something that I had to continue working on. Over three years later I have this version of ‘I See A Darkness’, which is still growing and will hopefully be a book in the near-future. Please check back here (or, better, be in touch with me via email) for more info as that comes up.

Enough about it here, please go a see my essay In Which Thrust To The Fore New York Casts Its Own Shadow at This Recording. You’ll have a chance to learn more about my process as a photographer, my deep influences from Mikhail Bulgakov and Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy and even listen to some of the music from BpB’s album ‘I See a Darkness’.