essays and reviews
A Landscape of Wales - Dewi Lewis Publishing - 2010
Shadowless Light by Jim Perrin (2010)
The donkey-foal behind
the fence of faded-orange electrified tape on my daily walk is learning how to
bray…
There is more:
A year ago on uncertain purple hooves, suckling at his dark mother – now
the cross on his back, the lips curled, and a squeaky wheeze comes out…
There is more:
Bullfinches softly descant from the ash-tree beneath which the foal stands,
orange lichen mottled across its bark. Behind the woodyard at the bottom of the
field rows of evenly spaced poplars…
There is more:
Their topmost silver branches form overlapping feather-budded vee’s, that
scumble or obscure a faint mauve flush creeping through oakwoods still
winter-sombre behind…
There is more:
Gleam
of snow rims the Crete de Madoual. Last autumn I peered over and saw a sanglier, a wild boar. An encounter.
Our eyes met…
Always there is more:
In the spring that will come soon here to the Pyrenees, white blossom of
the wild cherries is scattered, conspicuous throughout the woods.
Hold now – here is the point at which my words will begin to fail me.
Eye and mind together are radiant in their attention, their perceived
images ever on the point of dissipation. The picture thus becomes unruly, and
escapes. Thoughts of spring and the wild cherry in this far and imagined place
cut me loose from the dispassionate or even the real, engender their peculiar
blind compulsions, pitch me headlong into romanticism, association – into a
flux of shifting registers and of synaesthetic confusions scarcely controllable
however aware I might remain of them. Writer’s tongue and ear are not so cool
as surgeon’s gaze or photographer’s lens, concentration of both of which are
fixed and singular. My jazzy impulse, my adherence to shifting witness of the
eye, wishes to play fugues around James Morris’s images. Would perhaps thus
travesty the strange knowledge that emerges from his stilled and chosen
moments? Of which we are avoidant:
Chosen moments or meditative texts? If you have not seen the Wales that
is the subject of these photographs, then what obstacles of preconception have
you put in the way? For this is how it is. This is Wales. In one man’s vision,
momentarised and selective, untainted by an idealising, a rhetorical, a
sentimental, a proselytising imagination.
A bus shelter in the Gurnos, by Merthyr; bollards, railings, an alien
listless palm. White sheets dry beyond a black, pollarded tree.
Long-haired girl slouches against the shelter, tiny screen of her mobile
phone six inches from her face, her whole attention world-occluding, fixed
thereon.
Downhill, posture contorting back and away, flowery bag over her shoulder,
gargoyle-figure of a woman stares fixedly at her.
We might set the mind loose now, by way of experiment, on one of these
moments that are separated out from the flux by infinitesimal gradations of the
camera’s shutter:
She dreams her from the straitened life into the secret wood, up past
Cefn Coed, on a warm spring night by Ogof y Ci where the blind white trout swim
their underground stream; the bed of emerald moss of which she has old memory,
spring light dappling across…
You think not? No Rosie Proberts here, no singing assonance? You think
because this is unromantic Gurnos? These lives so excommunicant? From Dafydd’s
woodland mass? Did you look for, did you miss, Max
Boyce and his giant leek as your glance slipped across the moment at the
Millennium Stadium?
The textural and the intertextual. There are the absences which define
every photograph. For these two in Gurnos only the hooped bramble across the frame’s
corner, keeping them in? I wonder where you are coming from; and so do these
photographs. Look at them as mere list of subjects from Welsh topography and
the sense of something quite other than that which you will encounter here is
aroused:
Expectations:
Wales, the most beautiful, the first place, the landscapes-peerless of Ruskin
and Shelley; Wales of chapel and rugby and miners and smoke-wreathed
valley-side terraces; Wales of sheep-stippled slate-fenced hillsides and high
shapely mountain ridges. Wales of the flooding gold diffused evening light from
off the sea; Wales of the capes and cliffs and wheeling wild birds and offshore
islands, old stones at the field corners, marts with the gnarled faces, the
squat and solid men, crook-holding, watchful and wary; the penned and leaping
sheep…
Ah!
We are at the singing again. But you have seen and heard all that. And how
often…!
You will not find it here. Instead a post-industrial Wales. Defeated
miners, sold-off steel, supermarket sites. A muddy low-tide at Barry Docks,
largest coal-exporting port in the world. Once. And the ring-of-steel castles
of the Conqueror are gawped-at tourist attractions; even the landscape packaged
and red-for-beware-geraniumed:
“Photographs bear
witness to a human choice being exercised in a given situation. A photograph is
a result of the photographer’s decision that it is worth recording that this
particular event or this particular object has been seen. If everything that
existed were continually being photographed, every photograph would become
meaningless. A photograph celebrates neither the event itself nor the faculty
of sight in itself. A photograph is already a message about the event it
records. The urgency of this message is not entirely dependent on the urgency
of the event, but neither can it be entirely independent from it. At its
simplest, the message, decoded, means: I have decided
that seeing this is worth recording.”
John Berger, “Understanding a Photograph”.
Amuse
yourselves now. Imagine what the opinions of those who promote tourism in Wales
might be on whether or not “it is worth recording that this particular event
or this particular object has been seen”. Would
there be – resistance?
By the ‘No Fishing’
sign on Penarth Pier a man in high-visibility full waterproofs leans out of the
rain into the window of the juice-and-coffee bar, the sea and sky gradations of
grey barely differentiated by the horizon; the pavilion of the Netherlands
National Circus squats in medieval travesty of form among cars and a slick
glisten of mud at Barry Island whilst hunched figures, figures leading
children, carrying children, bustle towards it, and two fat boys on mountain
bikes wheel past.
So seldom is that which we see that which we wish to see.
Instead,
we invent, or we interpret. Susan Sontag’s dictum that “Interpretation is
the revenge of the intellect upon the world” should
always be borne in mind.
Remember too Foucault’s warning: “There is in this hatred of the present
or the immediate past a dangerous tendency to invoke a completely mythical
past.”
Michel Foucault, ‘Space, Knowledge, and Power’.
Things
are not as we would like them to be, let the gargoyle-human’s gaze linger at
the bus shelter long as it will. The fairies departed long ago, and all that
stock of stories only gauzes or slenderly inhabits the mind-landscapes we might
invoke.
A woman sticks her head through the toll-booth door at St. Fagan’s; but it
is in a museum now. There are no Rebeccas, no drovers, no everyday commerce or
smoking fire in the hearth. She glimpses concept, thesis, explanation,
objectification of the historiographical project, in a roving moment of
semi-concentration whilst those infinitesimal time-gradations of the shutter
freeze her.
In her puzzling predicament.
She will move on from here to re-planted barn and re-furbished stable and
folk-life remnants painstakingly collected, restored, annotated. Some of these
she will remember vaguely, glimpsed in period costume-dramas on the television,
an industry extant to research them. Where is Wales in all this, where in this
folk-life museum the marginalised gwerin of today, and as to the fro, its
cohesive structures gone (watch out for the chapels in these pictures of a
present nation), how socially inclusive is its culture now? How much has vague
notice of the eye in common with focus of the camera lens? And was she ever
astride Kerr’s Ass?
The
winkers that had no choke-band,
The
collar and the reins…
In
Ealing Broadway, London Town
I
name their several names
Until
a world comes to life –
Morning,
the silent bog,
And
the God of imagination waking
In
a Mucker fog.
Patrick Kavanagh, “Kerr’s Ass”.
In
a Mucker fog…! We will consider the light in these photographs bye-and-bye, and
colour too. Firstly, the implication of Kavanagh’s verses – their implicit
assertion of imagination’s dependence on real familiarity with what has gone
before (pay heed here to Foucault’s warning!) The plight of that woman-observer
slinks back into notice. Our sub-conscious dependence on knowledge of
tradition, the way her enquiring figure flags it up; and all that loss. A
passage from the Welsh-born folk-historian George Ewart Evans to elaborate
around the point:
“I
have suggested that the old rural society was society’s unconscious, possessing
two more-or-less distinct levels like the unconscious of the individual: the
preconscious into which sink out-dated customs, half-forgotten science,
outmoded fashions, and words and phrases once the coin of polite conversation
but gradually demoted into the rural dialect; and beneath this at a level more
rarely exposed the true phylogenetic unconscious where the most archaic beliefs
and modes of thinking have lasted until recent years. This level is a rich
repository of much of the rural history of these islands. Yet historians whose
stance appears to have anchylosed in the correct atmosphere emanating from
nineteenth-century ‘scientific’ history have rarely attempted to bring this
evidence of irrationality within their purview.”
George Ewart Evans, The Pattern Under the Plough.
I
have no argument with Evans’s perceptions here, think them helpfully suggestive
and in the main quite accurate. Also, they align significantly with the
elliptical, graphic intertextualities of James Morris’s photographs. With their
sense of ongoing history, colonised national
status, marginalised or subverted identity.
These
images to me are extraordinarily moving, disturbing. They take implicit account
of all the valences in prior treatment of Wales by other photographers and ever
so politely question around authenticity, purity of intent, by presenting a set
of images where rhetorical content is triple-distilled to highest proof:
history mashed in, romantic aesthetics boiled off, folk-narrative boiled off;
and what is left is clear, singular and fiercely resonant.
What
is left…
As
to the nature of that and our attempts to evade it, James Morris rather plays
with us. He scatters, for example, throughout his sequence of images,
sardonically almost, or at least teasingly, certain verbal clues:
Original
Barmouth and the bulky, aimless figures in their
cropped-trouser uniforms picking with bowed heads through holiday goods, more
inflatable tat stacked ceiling-high in the first-floor window above – of Cloud
Nine.
Here
is Sunnysands Caravan Park, Gwynedd, its sea-wall
boulder-defences, its grey waves and gravel, its chalets along a harsh and beachless coast.
I
no longer live in this small nation, and yet it is the country of my blood and
of my heart. Something I wrote two years ago, as I left:
“From all of this association begun in my formative years and continued
down to the present day there has grown a peculiarly intense relationship or
even identification with this particular landscape of Wales, which is so unlike
any other that I’ve encountered in journeys worldwide. And yet the land has
changed by drastic degrees in the course of the years. The quarrymen and
shepherds of whom I knew so many in the past – sacks over their shoulders, blue
scars, folklore and magic in their world-view, hospitality in their hearts and
democratic spirit in their daily intercourse – have vanished from it. No child
could walk alone – as I did fifty years ago – into a welcome here now, nor gain
from their liberal education. An alien wind has blown in. The old cottages have
had their makeovers, the Range Rovers are parked outside, and the people who
knew of place in its every resonance are dispossessed, marginalised, whilst the land itself is abused and betrayed:
renewables, resources, recreation slip in as buzz-words for the intellectually
vacuous and the new-devout (who care nothing for landscape’s spiritual
significance); and alongside them the obsessive materialism of our whole
nation, to which the hills and their old ways stood for me as resistant symbol.”
Foucault’s warning about a mythical past should not make us timid about
considering what was real, what was valuable – valent even, possessed of
competence and power – and has now gone. The art of statement by selection of
image, meaningfully pursued, also necessarily comprehends omission and
absence.
Let us now consider an implied complex narrative constructed in these
images around the national colour red:
Red road-sign for Bethlehem; red ‘no
entry’ sign at Caerfili Castle; red faux-national
costume outside the red smallest house; red logo of the Dragon Hotel at
Swansea; red gas bottles at Greenacres Caravan Park; red lifebelt by the
misplaced Hyddgen memorial; red chairs (not bardic but plastic, one broken in
the mud) and red rain-capes under the grey tubular steel arc-en-ciel of the
International Pavilion; a red dog-shit receptacle at Townhill; red in the crowd
at the Royal Welsh and on the street on match-day in Cardiff; a red sign for
toy trains at Llanfairpwll; red plant and netting on a Llanelli supermarket
construction site; a red ‘to let’ sign among boarded dereliction in Caerffili; pensioner’s red skirt in Llandudno; red
Pepsi-Cola loop and Tesco Extra and Metro signs; red car in Ebbw Vale; a red
Snowdon Mountain Railway carriage, photographer’s tripod by a red rucksack
nearby remotely pointed at a group, their whole attention world-occluding,
fixing their own images upon a landscape; red van pinpointed in the converging
angle of paths at Pen-Pass, red shed at Holyhead allotments, and a red-painted
house for the bridge of the blessed ford. There is even a red absence – that of
the red flags forever kept flying to signify no entry again at the Sennybridge
battle ranges; which were taken from the people of Wales on a promise of return
by the English war-machine and were never given back, the farms bricked up, the
chapels and even the stone circles of older times shelled…
“Photographs bear witness to a human choice being exercised in a given
situation”? Croeso i Gymru..! At least, in the once-green land, there are the
cabbages of Cadoxton, prize and magnificent.
But no industry, no steelworks – the Angry Summer of the miners has given way to the aimless one of tourism. Above the last
colliery, roadside memorials, ambiguously. Here in the Pyrenees, last year in
my small local decaying proud industrial town at its thriving art-nouveau
cinema Le Casino, I saw a magnificent and heartfelt French documentary, Charbons
Ardents, about the workers’ buyout of this self-same Tower
Colliery above Hirwaun. How often has this film been seen in the country of its
setting?
Consider the ironic eye. We can turn it back, mischievously, on its
possessor: James Morris, famously, beautifully, painting with light and shade,
the recordist of rich organic textures of indigenous mud buildings in Butabu.
And of Welsh pervasive liquid mud under frailing mist-fingers of Welsh skies.
Light, I said we would come back to. How uniform it is here, and how
unilluminating. How brave and challenging to present it thus. The people so
often without shadows. Remember your folklore? On Friars Point at Barry they
are Lowry matchstick figures, flocking towards the cliff-edge, freighters and
aeroplanes heading down-channel and out-of-frame.
There is no sneering in this book, only profound observant sadness. “Wylaf
wers, tawaf wedy” – I shall weep for a while, then be silent. We are good at
elegies, us Welsh:
“Stauell
Gyndylan a’m erwan pob awr,
Gwedy mawr ymgyuyrdan
A weleis ar dy benntan.”
(Hall of
Cynddylan each moment pierces me / With memory of great talk /
I
witnessed at your hearth.)
As verbal
epigraph to this book, grim old R.S. Thomas’s poem, “Reservoirs”:
“There
are places in Wales I don’t go:
Reservoirs
that are the subconscious
Of a
people…”
There,
facing, as intertextualising visual epigraph, is a photograph
of Craig Goch, Elan Valley. A blank and rusting sign points into the
photograph; puddles stretch across the roadway atop the curving dam; there is a
‘No Through Road’ sign, an interpretation board and a
pewter stretch of water between bracken spurs of sodden terracotta under a grey
sky. A wire fence stretches across the foreground. Remember, these are not
snapshots, not chance observations lightly picked, but photographs carefully
composed using a heavy 5x4 plate camera. Remember Berger on the photographer’s
decision and choice? What’s been dispensed with throughout is this:
“…a
watercolour’s appeal
To the
mass, instead of the poem’s
Harsher
conditions.”
I am
uneasy around the notion of ‘the mass’, recall
too the resistance to R.S.’s poetry among an older generation of Welsh people;
not an outright anger, but an offence taken at the gloom and the grim
caricaturings. It would be very easy, I think, on viewing these photographs, to
resort to the rhetoric again, to expound on aesthetics, think in terms of
subtopias and dystopias and begin quoting D.H. Lawrence at his most vehement:
“ …the
promoter of industry, a hundred years ago, dared to perpetrate the ugliness of
my native village. And still more monstrous, promoters of industry today are
scrabbling over the face of [Britain] with miles and miles of red-brick ‘homes’,
like horrible scabs. And the [people] inside these little rat-traps get more
and more helpless, being more and more humiliated, more and more dissatisfied,
like trapped rats.”
D.H. Lawrence, ‘Nottinghamshire and the Mining Countryside’.
There are
obvious dangers in this line of argument, but those dangers should not deter us
from the great socialist writer Gramsci’s imperative to “turn violently and
face things as they really are”. Here are the graphic images of what
is being done by government, industry and developers to our land, and its
effect on the inhabitants. Study it in the faces on Llandudno pier and along
the promenade; consider the aimlessness, the unfocussed searching; look at the
external aesthetics which are the conditions imposed on these lives, spent
among historical relics in process of being rendered meaningless.
Consider
the affronts: an arbitrary shipping container alongside Hyddgen’s remote
memorial, with a road-sign between them bearing an exclamation mark; private
housing estates at Ty Ddewi and Llanelli that seem
the same place, all individuality – even of one of the holy places – entirely
lost; a gas pipeline at Trecastle, through the Brecon Beacons National Park;
and forestry, clear-felled, the land like a battlefield scarred, soured and
ruined, washed away even down the drainage ditches, silting the rivers and
lakes. Sixty years ago, as the mass afforestation project began which
was to destroy Welsh rural communities and traditional ways of life, a
government spokesman asserted that “we intend to change the face of Wales.
We know there will be opposition but we intend to force this thing through.” At the
present time the government is intent – and is providing a billion pounds in
enabling funding for the project, much of which will be siphoned off by the
usual fraudsters – on massively increasing the numbers of wind-turbines, the
presence of which along with their ancillary works in entirely inappropriate
locations throughout the Welsh hills is yet another act in the ongoing
affective destruction of the natural landscapes of Wales.
Atrocities..!
To record
a landscape not in terms of familiar and clichéd images of its remnant natural
beauty, but in terms of our brutal unawareness of and disregard for it and its
indigenous culture is a radical and necessary enterprise.
Consider
too in these images – in Lawrentian terms, if you must – the imposition of
harsh and angular human geometries of form on the sweeping, organic shapes of
the land. Consider the ontological force – and I re-visit this image
continually to puzzle out the technical means by which it gains its power – of
the ten-storey Swansea tower-block. How distant we have become from the natural
matter of life, how abusive of it, how lost and wondering?
“Devotees
of post-war planning could… stand here and trace the fading outline of the
ideal geometry that post-war public authorities dreamt of imposing… the zoning,
the distant green belt, the clearances and huge new estates, the roads…”
Patrick
Wright, A Journey Through Ruins.
Susan
Sontag in her seminal extended essay on photography from nearly forty years ago
wrote – echoing and borrowing from Herbert Marcuse’s great Essay on
Liberation – that:
“A
capitalist society requires a culture based on images. It needs to furnish vast
amounts of entertainment in order to stimulate buying and anaesthetize the
injuries of class, race and sex. And it needs to gather unlimited amounts of
information, the better to exploit the natural resources, increase
productivity, keep order, make war, give jobs to bureaucrats. The camera’s twin
capacities to subjectivise reality and to objectify it, ideally serve these
needs and strengthen them. Cameras define reality in the two ways essential to
the workings of an advanced industrial society: as a spectacle (for masses) and
as an object of surveillance (for rulers). The production of images also
furnishes a ruling ideology. Social change is replaced by a change in images.”
Putting
aside for the moment those degrading bargains struck with the populace which
were at the root of Marcuse’s argument – and which are evidenced here by the
beggarly streets of Ebbw Vale, satellite-dished to receive their dole of soaps,
sport and porn – might it be that Sontag has it wrong in limiting the camera’s
capacities to reality-definition by surveillance and the provision of
spectacle?
Is the
camera not also, in the hands of technicians of sacred truth, as here a mirror,
a means potentially to a liberating awareness, a looking-askance at the glass
beads given in exchange for the land; and through that, the quiet and
revolutionary anger at last having been kindled, of concerted resistance to the
destruction of that which we should hold most dear? The God of imagination waking/ In a Welsh
fog? Instilling in us the profound and essential truth about our land
which the poet Robert Williams Parry, of Talysarn, so memorably and simply
expressed?
“Y mae lleisiau a drychiolaethau ar
hyd y lle”
There are
voices and phantoms throughout the place.
They are
present in these crucially important images, that give up level after level of
meaning to an attentive regard. Hear them. See them. The better part of your
living requires that you attain this awareness. As does the Welshness of Wales,
and any prospect there may be of its survival.
Ariege, January 2010
Press reviews for Butabu – Princeton
Architectural Press. Published: Nov 2003.
The New York Times.
Book review. Sunday December 7th 2003.
The British
Photographer James Morris easily takes the palm for the year’s most
haunting architectural images with this album of the baked mud buildings
of West Africa. These sensuously hand modelled and boldly painted
structures mix the raw vitality of folk art with the mad flights of
imagination generally ascribed to high-style mavericks like Gaudi and
Gehry
One wonders how long Morris had to tarry to achieve such
luminous gradations of light and atmosphere in these breathtaking
pictures. The graceful way in which he incorporates human and animal
figures into his compositions – helpfully, because the scale of these
idiosyncratic buildings is difficult for the untutored eye to gauge
without them - adds immeasurably to their engaging humanity and
exquisite strangeness.
Mud, mud, glorious mud;
Photography/Arts
The Times (London)
Tuesday December 16, 2003
JAMES
MORRIS SPENT FOUR MONTHS HAULING HIS CAMERA AROUND THE DESERTS OF WEST
AFRICA, EXPLORING THE ASTONISHING SHAPES OF ANCIENT MUD BUILDINGS.
JOANNA PITMAN APPLAUDS THE RESULTS
IN A BLAZE of raking
sunlight, an elder from the village of Kolenze in Mali, in long,
yolk-yellow robes, walks past what appears to be a giant piece of civic
art.It is a huge, decorative cubic sculpture, adorned with rows of
protruding sticks and carved out into a pattern of triangular and oblong
shapes. The man in yellow is not just there for decoration in James
Morris's photograph. He is also a human yardstick with which to convey a
sense of scale, for the monumental block is, on closer inspection, not
an artwork but a house built of mud.
In Mali, and in Niger,
Nigeria, Togo, Ghana, Burkina Faso and Benin, mud is not just used for
making pots. It has been used for hundreds of years to build sensational
structures -houses, mosques, palaces, temples, entire communities -
which are repaired and remoulded every year during engagingly splashy
mud festivals. And the very viscosity of this most malleable material
has produced some highly inventive forms that seem to encompass ancient
cultures, the spirits of the Sahara and even a touch of Surrealism.
Morris
visited the desert communities of West Africa during a four-month stay
in 1999 and 2000, hauling his bulky and heavy camera and tripod in and
out of clapped-out cars, motorised pirogues (dug-out canoes) and at
times on foot to find remote villages of elaborate mud structures.
But
in spite of the dirt, the exhaustion and the heavy consumption of home
brew millet beer, it was worth it -for him and for us. His lens loved
these sensual shapes. Morris let it rove across planes of cracked mud
walls resembling the knobbly surfaces of brown bread. He let it gently
caress the broad undulating outlines of buildings, sketching out a
muscular sense of
form and allowing walls to be transfigured and
metamorphosed into enormous planes of elephant hide or the broad
shoulders of a mud-caked buffalo. He placed it in the pillared arcades
of mosques, capturing a brilliant range of textures, the rich modelling
of the clay-like mud and the bristling timbers of permanent scaffolding.
And if you look carefully at all of Morris's West African architectural
photographs, now in a small show at Zelda Cheatle Gallery to coincide
with their publication in Butabu (Princeton Architectural Press), you
can see how the sun bakes the earth of these sensational buildings, and
then redefines their surfaces throughout each day.
In some ways,
Morris's photographs are architectural only in the most abstracted
sense. The motivation behind their framing and design is perhaps more
concerned with the geometric puzzles and strange amorphous shapes of
their outlines, so that the photographs are turned into an unfamiliar
visual experience in which space and structure contest with pattern for
primacy. And time after time, pattern seems to win out. We see stripes,
curlicues, jaunty paisley effects, composite columns, gothic arches and
Moorish windows; and everywhere strange, Gaudi-like indentations in
triangular and oblong shapes, eroded by the wind into smooth-edged
lozenges.
Some of these softly undulating buildings look as if
they have somehow risen out of the ground fully formed. One
spectacularly handsome picture, of a house in Fortal, Niger, looks like a
block of skin, its surface pitted with tiny varicose veins that have
run riot and spread to cover the entire body. Morris seems to see the
world graphically, in terms of pattern, and in this photograph the
simplicity of his design gives us precise blocks of harsh black shadow
in sharp contrast with the Cubist mass of mud, a sensuous plastic
sculpture of a seemingly natural form.
The liveliness and
surprise of this image depend on the fact that Morris has recognised and
used not only the forms of the building itself but also the temporary
and accidental forms created by light and shadow. As such it avoids the
vacuous predictability that afflicts the work of many photographers
faced with comparable subjects. And in the far distance, he finds a
small boy standing on top of another structure, bent over and poised to
jump, his legs and arms bent in anticipation of the impact.
His
shot of the mosque at Bore in Mali manages a remarkable clarity that
depends on modelled shapes and on surfaces mottled with light and shade,
pitted and crumbling with age. It is tempting to wonder how these
apparently Western style monumental columns of stone with their moulded
bases and chunkily designed tops could have been plucked from some
southern European cathedral and transported all the way to Mali. But in
the end, the dry mud floor and the exposed timbers remind us that these
columns too are merely mud, put together generations ago and simply
resurfaced every year.
Morris has managed well to understand and
anticipate the behaviour of West Africa's favourite building material.
His photographs describe both the look and the feel of these beautiful,
remote buildings. And their strength lies in the fact that they are
almost (but not quite) free of the tugging presence of the mundane
world.
Monday November 10, 2003
The Guardian (London)
THEY
ARE WEST AFRICA'S MOST EXCITING, AMBITIOUS BUILDINGS. SOME OF THEM HAVE
LASTED 700 YEARS. AND THEY'RE MADE OF DIRT. JONATHAN GLANCEY REPORTS
The
great mosque of Djenne in Mali is one of those buildings that haunted
my boyhood imagination. It never seemed real, more a surrealist
fairy-tale illustration. Even when I got to visit it some five years ago
(after it was designated a Unesco World Heritage Site) and found it
fronted by a busy market and surrounded by buses, I still found it hard
to believe. Here, somehow, was a composite of the spirit of Sahara,
surrealism and even a touch of Spain - Dali, Gaudi - mixed up in walls
like termites' nests, made of west African mud. It seemed at once a sort
of natural outcrop of the muddy sandbanks of the nearby River Niger, a
structure built by some desert spirit and, inevitably, a place of
profound and ancient worship, older than Mohammed, older than Christ.
The
mosque's riddles have partly been solved in the pages of a new book by
James Morris, the photographer, and Suzanne Preston Blier, professor of
Afro-American studies at Harvard. Butabu: Adobe Architecture of West
Africa is a well-researched and beautifully presented study of the
sculptural mud architecture of Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Togo, Benin, Ghana
and Burkina Faso. Far from being the work of nameless desert djinns
(local spirits or "genies"), these often beautiful buildings were
designed and built by architects for kings and emperors, making the best
of local materials and know-how.
What these magnificent mosques
prove is that mud buildings can be far more sophisticated than many
people living in a world of concrete and steel might want to believe.
Mud is not just a material for shaping pots, but for temples, palaces
and even, as so many west African towns demonstrate, the framing of
entire communities. The very fluidity, or viscosity, of the material
allows the architects who use it to create dynamic and sensual forms.
Morris's
photographic trips through the region in 1999 and 2000 record a world
of architecture that, sadly, is increasingly under threat. Perhaps it is
mostly poverty rather than culture and memory that keeps this rich and
inventive tradition of building alive. The tendency in this part of the
world, as in any other, is to move from naturally elegant traditional
buildings to fast-buck junk.
Morris's lens all but caresses the
buildings it focuses on. Walls resemble elephant hides, or adopt
esoteric geometries. Many of the buildings appear to have been conjured
rather than built laboriously by hand. On close inspection - and
Morris's camera allows us to get very close - it is fascinating to
experience the way in which the interiors and exteriors of these
buildings flow one into the other, to feel the mood of the buildings
change as light and shadow shift through the course of the day.
Intriguing, too, to understand how the mud architects of west Africa
made, and continue to make, a play of primary geometries just as those
working in the Graeco-Roman and modern tradition did and do. And,
finally, it is possible, with a keen eye, to imagine how the designs of
these buildings flowed into the southern European consciousness - in
particular, the Spanish experience.
Architects Newspaper (New
York 12/8/03)
Butabu
Mud appears to be the most elegant building
material of all in Morris' stunning images. This might be the most
important book on vernacular architecture since Bernard Rudofsky's 1964
Architecture Without Architects."