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A Voiceless Song and the Ice Cream Man: Photography as Political Metaphor

Author(s): Ioan Davies


Source: International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, Vol. 3, No. 3, The Sociology of
Culture (Spring, 1990), pp. 373-385
Published by: Springer
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20006958
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A Voiceless Song and The Ice Cream Man:
Photography as Political Metaphor

loan Davies

In my copy of Beaumont Newhall's The History of Photography,1


revised and published by the Museum ofModern Art in 1982,1 find
the following note on page 307 explaining his bibliographical
selection: 'The books listed below have been chosen as an introduc?
tion to the vast literature on the history of photography . . .All of
the books are helpful for reference, most of them are well-researched,
a few of them areinspirational.' Very few of the books listed in
Newhall's bibliography are in mine, and virtually none of mine are
in his. (The only cross-references I can think of are historical
documentary collections.)
This essay is directed towards understanding how a genre such as
photography is able to generate a Vast' literature within which there
is no apparent commonality of discourse, even though both the
theoretical and the descriptive accounts use the same yardsticks for
determining which historical moments are important and which are
not. (In one sense this is surprising. If only because of the range of
social changes they map, literary accounts are notoriously divergent
in both a natural history sense and a critical one; a reading of, say,
Baudelaire, Gombrich, H?user, or Clarke will demonstrate similar
divergencies in art criticism. But, photography is 'new.' Considering
the mode rather than the length of its normalizing history, on the
other hand, the convergence may not be so surprising: photographic
theory, too, has been generally fixated on 'facts' whether chronologi?
cal or perceptual). Before we can tackle the larger question, however,
it is necessary to consider what the term 'discourse' means in
relation to a genre or to its critical appraisal.

II

Discourse is a term bounded by the conditions under which


conversation is possible. In another sense, discourse is not only

Politics, Culture, and Society


Volume 3, Number 3, Spring 1990 373 ? 1990 Human Sciences Press
374 Politics, Culture, and Society

about the contours but about


the objects of conversation. To
understand discourse we
to understand
have not only who is/are
engaged, not only the parametic reasons for its being, but also its
con-textuality?the way and the what it references. The science of
discourse, in Alan Blum's words, 'must show not only how it speaks
about things, but how it produces things to speak about, and, thus,
how in its speech about things (analysis) itmakes essential reference
to the thinking experience which produced the things.'2 The problem,
then, is related to knowing that the 'things' we have used as the
occasion of discourse are bound to us as their creators. Any
explication of discourse must hence be based on a critical interpreta?
tion of our ongoing practices.
The problem is obvious. If 'objects' are always artifacts, to what
extent is our speech simply an exercise in narcissim?3 In one sense
all discourse is meaningless. It's like being at a party where people
only talk about what they did yesterday. We listen because they are
our friends and because our friendship is tautological?because of
an ambience that confirms our mutual respect. This mutuality,
however, depends on the existence of an Alter, the enemy who
attacks our ideas as silly, or the stranger who wants us to make
sense. Only when such others speak do we make sense of our
speaking. Discourse cannot therefore, simply be viewed as a con?
versation between author and audience: it is an open ceremony (a
carnival, a party) in which enemies, strangers make common cause
with an ongoing dialogue.
The question now becomes: on what grounds do we create the
grounds for discourse? Photography provides all the ingredients
necessary to underwrite such an investigation. Like language, it is
insiduous. It is present now at every corner of our lives: at weddings
or the beach, in newspapers or journals, in the corner store where Liz
Taylor stares at us from the cover of the National Enquirer as we buy
formula milk for our six-week-old baby, whose own simulacrum
appears on the box. We dare not move without the camera snapping
us at our most personal moments. Penthouse would have it that we
have sex
because of the camera. Even our deaths?as the recent
funeral of the Mafia Godfather in Toronto demonstrated?are
construed as incomplete without the camera trained on us to detail
our acquaintances.
Consider that formulation, though: like language? What alter?
native modes do we have? Susan Sontag and Iris Murdoch have
made noble gestures towards claiming for the interlocutor image a
status Plato denied it.4 Their attempt (which should be conjoined as
much as it should be set apart) barely touches upon the crux of the
problem of coming to terms with the image.
loan Davies 375

Plato's complaint against image-makers was, after all, that they


interjected a false sense of reality into everyday conversations.
Instead of confronting reality, poets and artists bypassed it; instead
of reaching for the sun, they grappled with fire, a diminutive and
derivative version of the whole. By framing his indictment in such
terms, Plato evinces on the one side a concern with conversation as
the speech of the people and, on the other, a concern with the
capacity of language to reach beyond the mundane. Thus Plato has
it both ways. On the one hand, the voice of poetry in the conversa?
tions of mankind; on the other hand its necessarily transcendental
grounds. As existing poetry comes from neither of these sources, it
must be banned from the Republic. But what is the alternative?
Plato's problem is in linking two such utterly discrepant realms. If
the image is false, itmust be specifically misrepresentative of either
the real or the good, the everyday or the ultramundane.
Julia Kristeva5 takes these polarities as the stuff of discourse. The
Menippean Discourse, she says, allows us to understand the biplay
between an aesthetic based on practice and one based on a deistic
apriori. The implication (even if Kristeva herself is centrally con?
cerned with understanding the novel) is that if we are to move from
moral dialogue to 'carnivalesque' discourse, we must first validate
the means ofthat shift. Not only that, we must learn how to handle
'ambivalence' as an object without 'denaturing' it via the rigid
symmetries of 'contemporary semiotics.' One of the hallmarks of
Menippean discourse, in fact, is that it operates on the knife-edge
between the praxical-based logic of living through the everyday and
a moralism that acts as the deus ex machina for our mundane
encounters.

It is instructive, in considering such a paradigm for discourse, to


assess the extent to which theoretical discussions around
photography address the question of what questions we should be
asking. Is it possible, for instance, that we should be concerning
ourselves less with 'the logic of consumption' (Sontag's phrase) than
with what Bahktin calls 'the interanimation of languages'?6 In his
essay 'A Small History of Photography,' Walter Benjamin suggests
that far more interesting than the issue of whether photography was
an art is the issue of art as photography.7 If the question of visual
aesthetics is an important one, moreover, it cannot properly be
discussed without equal consideration of the medium's literary
dimension. 'The camera is getting smaller and smaller, ever readier
to capture fleeting and secret moments whose images paralyse the
associative mechanisms in the beholder. This is where the caption
comes in, whereby photography turns all life's relationships into
literature, and without which all constructivist photography must
376 Politics, Culture, and Society

remain arrested and approximate.'8 What Benjamin does, in fact, is


to place photography precisely at the intersections between art,
technology, literature and social experience.
It is this conception of converging discourses, that provides the
basis for both Kristeva's and Bakhtin's reading of the novel.
'Language,' writes the latter, 'is not a neutral medium that passes
freely and easily into the private property of the speaker's inten?
tions; it is populated?overpopulated?with the intentions of others.
Expropriating it, forcing it to submit to one's own intentions and
accents, is a difficult and complicated process.'9 The issue, therefore,
is not language, but languages?languages that focus, as in poetry,
on the word 'stripped of others' intentions, or, as in the novel, force
the writer to distance himself 'from the different layers and aspects
of his work.'10 Whatever route is taken?and this is the critical
point?any act of creation must not only define a self-critical stance,
but establish its dialogue with the ongoing rhetoric of the language
it expropriates.
Bearing this in mind, the nimbus of theory and speculation that
surrounds photography can be addressed in a fresh way. The
photograph implies a dialogue not merely with painting, as
Cameron, Heath-Robinson, Nadar, Stieglitz, or even John Ruskin
would have it, nor, primarily with technology or literature: it is
dialogue with all or none of these. They way we choose to view it
must therefore be a strategic decision, and one that is taken in full
awareness of the linguistic and experiential context.
Thinking about photography is not, then, simply an exercise in
aesthetic appreciation, nor can it stop at a discussion of the work of a
photographer. To accept such parameters is to take the 'thing-ness'
of the text as given by itself; that is, to operate within the boundary
presented to us by the object and within the terms of the biographical
moment. It is not to call the thing into question: rather our
engagement with it calls our exercise into question, whatever we
say. But this is the whole problem. We are operating here on the level
of a praxis that, for want of a better term, might be called Semiology
I11: the text presents itself to us?our task is, humbly, to understand
it from the inside (see Barthes S/Z).12 Viewed from the outside,
however, such a project reveals itself as seriously incomplete. More
recent critique hence focuses on extrinsic factors. What Bakhtin
proposes, for instance, is that the text must be situated within its
intertextuality, set between and in relation to other codes and
encodings. In privileging such connections, we have moved on to
Semiology II. We now ask the McLuhan question: what is unique
loan Davies 377

about this genre, this code, this medium?but only in relation to its
own alterity. Where semiology / takes the inherent properties of a
text or medium as self-enclosed?we read out from the text?
Semiology //concerns itself with the inter-text as a revelation of the
strengths and limitations of the text itself. Semiology ///goes even
further. Our questions now concern the text in motion; we interrogate
not the product but the process of textuality, More precisely,
semiology ///attempts to complete what Barthes failed to do in his
1972 Mythologies: to relate ideology and the reading of codes to 'the
actual practice of living people'13 Semiology ///thus brings the text
out of its own code, out of the discovery of its place in relation to other
codes, and resolves it into practice; that is, the imposition on and
appropriation of practices.
It seems obvious from the foregoing that semiology /// offers our
most crucial vantage-point for grappling with the existential
problems of a medium like photography. Duplicitous by design, it
provides a unique way of examining both the particular (Semiology
I) and the universal (Semiology II). Going far beyond the reading of
texts, in other words, semiology /// is a reading of ourselves, our
practices, our ideas, and our legitimations in order to understand
how we make sense of the images we choose or choose to ignore. It is
a reading, not merely of the things we contemplate, but of the
'thinking experience which produced the things' we contemplate, to
use Blum's phrase again.14 If Semiology /foregrounds the object in
and for itself, and Semiology //functions as a methodological trope
to facilitate the arbitration of competing languages, Semiology ///
combines in one project the polarities of theory and action. It is all
the more unfortunate, then, that photographic (and film and art and
literary) criticism has condemned?and even more critically, inured
us?to living in the worlds of Semiology I & II. And why? Because
they are comfortable. Because each in its own way tells us what is
important?the inside, the outside; the centre, the frame; the text, the
con-text. And in doing so each allows us to situate ourselves?again,
comfortably?in the kingdom of signs. Naming (as in Umberto Eco's
Name of the Rose) is what it's all about. Armed with a repertoire of
categories, we have only to fill in the blanks (mow the lawn, cultivate
the roses, play or watch hockey, attend the odd Bar Mitzvah, dash
off an article on the importance of photography in Finnegan9s
Wake). Semiotics /// is much more troublesome, both as academic
activity and as life style. Eschewing names, absolutes, certainties,
either/or, it compels us to move in life's marginalia. This, on the
other hands, is exactly what makes it worth doing.15
378 Politics, Culture, and Society

III

These reflections are stimulated by two collections of photographs


by the Canadian/Ukranian artist John Paskievich.16 (Both the
Canadian and the European designations are important, as they are
with Jusef Karsch or Sam Tata: Canada at present is a land of split
identities and this duality displays itself particularly in this
photography). The time for merely taking photographs which will
sit in museums or galleries alongside paintings is long over. And so
is the photograph which can only be 'read' through its captions?
though most of our photographs, from family snaps to those in
newspapers and magazines, are necessarily so read. Paskievich
presents us with a challenge. Formal cross-references in the framing
of his images suggests that what seems segmental must be read
simultaneously. In setting up such cross-references he forces us to
compare the deepest recesses of our own culture-our prisons-with the
surfaces of the cultures we snapped out of. At first sight there would
seem little similarity. Waiting for the Ice Cream Man is a collage of
essays, poems, prison reports, stories, and photographs compiled by
Larry Krotz as a commentary on the experience of Stoney Mountain
and other prisons in Manitoba. This is ourselves stripped bare;
Paskievich's images are a zoom into the centre with the words as a
frame. A Voiceless Song, a. collection of photographs from Slavic
countries, has no quotations from poems, autobiographies or
government reports, but it does have two tendentious introductions
by Martha Langford and Joseph Skvorecky, but is not so much a
zoom-in, rather a wide-arc critical examination of societies that are
made to appear as prisons. If Ice-Cream Man is bounded by its
references (we cannot read the photographs without knowing the
textuality of their incarceration: the zoom is into the faces who have
been framed by real bars), in A Voiceless Song, the texts do not have
to be read because they are confirmations of the images the
photographs are selected to show that these Slavs live in a political
prison. In the prison collection almost any photographs would have
illustrated 'prisoners': the photographs are of inert, frozen, broken
people. In A Voiceless Song, the photographs have to be pre-selected
(staged?) in order to illustrate a metaphor.
There are several things that suggest themselves if we take the two
books in juxtaposition to each other. The Ice-Cream Man is a
creation out of the experiences of prisoners, where Paskievich's
images emerge alongside prisoners writings, and other quotations:
the words are, if anythings, more important than the images in
providing a sense of a total experience. As with many good
loan Davies 379

FIGURE 1
Photograph of a prisoner at Stoney Mountain in Manitoba.
Photography by John Paskievich.

collections of prison writing the examples are both international as


well as native to the particular prisons from which they emerged,
and thus they attempt to establish a dialogue between different
kinds of text: short stories, autobiography, poetry, anti-prison
manifestoes, the penal law and the photographic images themselves.
If these various texts make a statement, they are perhaps best
summed up in Krotz's introduction: 'This book does not hold out any
detailed solution except the premise that the present institutional
system is expensive, wasteful, destructive of community and of the
lives of both inmate and keeper.'17
380 Politics, Culture, and Society

To talk about the photographs is thus to talk about images which


do not so much illustrate the text as to complement it by inviting an
extended discourse of seeing prison in the round. If prisons are
places with real bars, walls and definable patterns of interaction, the
task of the text must be two-fold: to establish how the walls come to
exist, and to inscribe on the walls the experience of the inhabitants.
The textis therefore constantly making connections from the
inmates to the legislator and the judiciary. Metaphor hardly has a
place?except for us who appropriate 'prison' as a metaphor for
something else.
Paskievich's photographic images zoom into the cells in order to
emphasise the frame of the prison. As in John Berger's essay 'Why
look at Animals?'18 it is the unnaturalness of the body in the cell that
becomes the focus of our attention. In a sense the prison frame must
be stated over and over again in order to highlight the photographer's
purpose in being there at all. But ultimately it is the series of texts
that shatter the frame by taking us away from the prison back to the
wider concerns of why and whither imprisonment.
This contrasts strongly, but suggestively, with A Voiceless Song
where the images in their frozen metaphorical frames are assembled
to tell the whole story. This book might be put in the context of the
growing industry of photographic albums which deal with place and
people in relation to one or two specific texts. In the better of these
cases text and image are suggestive of each other in that they are
assembled to act as point-counterpoint. Two collections of poems by
the current English Poet-Laureate Ted Hughes display the pos?
sibility of a creative collaboration between photographer and poet,
though it is difficult in such symmetrical publishing not to feel that
whether the poems were written first or whether the poet wrote with
photographs in mind is of crucial significance in the success of the
venture.19 In Remains ofElmet (Hughes, 1978), the poems came after
and in many respects the images are so striking that the poetry
seems strained in comparison. Nevertheless, it is the business of
having to confront two genres talking about apparently the same
topic that is challenging to the reader. Some of the collections made
by Jan Morris suggest a further possibility where there are three
kinds of text: the photographs on place, a narrative by the author
which establishes a personal sense of place, and collections of poetry
which evoke the places photographed. Perhaps the most convincing
of these collections is Wales: the First Place where photographs,
poems and narrative combine into a deeply personal but engaged
narrative.20

In both the Hughes' collections, place is both real and metaphori?


cal, while in Morris and Wakefield's Wales the place is rich with its
loan Davies 381

own metaphors which vie with each other in order to define place. In
Paskievich's A Voiceless Song metaphor is imposed on place: the
Slavic lands, all of which are communist, are to be seen as echoes of
the Manitoba prisons, the expressionless faces of the Salvs twinning
with the faces of the prison inmates. There is an intertext against all
of this that read,
might of course,
be and it is displayed in
Skvoresky's preface with its evocation of a people yearning to be
free. The origin of the metaphor is not in Skvoresky, but it is clear as
we scan from book to book. The concepts totalitarian and total
institution were both developed in the 1940s. They appear in the
work of Hannah Arendt, Arthur Koestler, Robert Jay Lifton and
Erving Goffman, and soon became central to most political science
and sociology in the United States. Just as prisoners lived in a
policed environment, so did communists. The two books are therefore
illustrations of this metaphorical linkage. There is, however, a world
of a difference between the two books. Ice-Cream Man creates within
itself the grounds for the prisons' deconstruction: it invites the play
of text to consider the fragmentation of existence and expression
(though itmust be admitted that it is Paskievich's photography that
provides the
totalising framework). A Voiceless song has none of
this in it: both in construction and in its images it is the more
totalistic of the two books, and it comes out like this because there is
no alternative to the images. The people do not speak, and perhaps if
one image stands out in the book (see Paskievitch 1983:91) it is of a
peasant woman carrying a heavy load under a triumphant horse, in
the Ukranian fields. It has all the appropriate elements: the concrete
slabs, the wings of progress, the antedeluvian worker, the flowers
sprouting all around, nothing on the horizon. Its message is one of
total hopelessness. The photograph confirms the message of all the
others and of Skvorecky's essay. Is this what Paskievitch intended?
The issue is whether this is a particularly useful means of doing a
photography which sees itself in discourse with writing.
The of the two books in which Paskievitch's
intention photographs
appear might ultimately to be to create a situation within which the
ideologies which maintain the two kinds of totality are exploded.
Paskievitch is presumably as opposed to prisons as he is to the
Communist regimes of East-Central Europe. And yet in Ice-Cream
Man the conditions for exploding the prison system are present in
the text while in A Voiceless Song they are not. In reality, however,
the prisons are less likely to be changed than Eastern Europe is
(which is, indeed, in a state of ferment as I write). Paskievich's
photography in both books celebrates the tyranny to which he is
opposed. Why is this so? The answer might be found by returning the
semiological issues with which I commenced this essay.
382 Politics, Culture, and Society

FIGURE 2
Photograph of a woman bearing a heavy load in the Ukranian
Fields. Photography by John Paskievich.
loan Davies 383

Paskievich's photography, by situating itself in relation to other


texts, raises a number of questions about the nature of intertextual
reading. He clearly does not situate himself in Semiology Iwhere the
image is all, and he obviously aspires to a reading which crosses
genres. In Ice-Cream Man, over which book he had little apparent
control, his images impose themselves in a context where multiple
readings are made available. If we read the images first (which is
almost inevitable because of the production of the book) a series of
portraits framed by the cells provide the dominating motifs. If is
only when we explore the writing that the intertextual querying of
the images becomes possible, and discourse and ambivalence (in
Kristera's senses) grow more evident. Thus Paskievich's images,
stilted and framed as they are, are drawn into a discourse. In A
Voiceless Song none of this happens. The texts 'introduce' the
images and thus the possibility of polyvalence is denied. The images
and the texts sit in authoritarian control over the subject-matter. In
fact, Paskievich who seemed in Ice-Cream Man to be drawn into the
possibility of discourse and the introduction of a Semiology II,
retreats into a Semiology Iwhere all the images and text are reduced
to a single image, an imposed metaphor of Slav imprisonment.
Obviously to advance to a Semiology III the authoritarial self
would have to be deconstructed and the concept of relationship
between images and writing would have to undergo even greater
scrutiny than I have so far provided. If Semiology I is concerned
with rethinking the image, and Semiology II is concerned with the
possibility of the play between different languages, Semiology III
offers the possibility of rethinking the languages themselves.
Fortunately two recent exhibitions in Canada suggest routes that a
critical photography might take.
The idea that the image is part of the problem is not new, but the
idea that both the image and the writing that accompanies them
must be rethought together is an important advance in our thinking
about the fluidity of artisticexpression. I have mentioned that
Paskievich's photography suggests an authoritarian control of
image. One of the routes to be taken in confronting image with text is
to accept the authoritarian nature of images when set in particular
contexts or made with certain ideological frameworks in place, and
then to see ourselves fighting against this authoritarial control. Just
as we have to negotiate ourselves through schools, work, family,
politics, so we also have to negotiate ourselves against the images
that frame us, from wherever they may come. In a world where we
are increasingly made in the image of the media, one of our
strategies of survival may be to re-make ourselves knowing how
384 Politics, Culture, and Society

these images are put in place and coming to terms with our own
autobiography. In his exhibition of images and text (at the Winnipeg
Art Gallery, April 1988), 'Some Sons and their Fathers,' the English
sociologist Dick Hebdige portrayed a world in which the images of
father-son relationships as portrayed in newspapers, magazines,
family albums,
photo war posters are set against the real everyday
experiences of a young man (himself) growing up and confronting
the split identities that media and family relationships created.21
The account is by Hebdige as he negotiates into and out of these
public and private images, and tries to put a shattered dream-life
together again.
This subjective encounter with image may be the beginning of
learning how to write of the difference between living and imagining,
pulling the images into narrative, and providing for an auto?
biographical approach to photography. This, of course, is precisely
what is absent in A Voiceless song, where the subjects can never
speak back against the images, but are in every sense trapped in
them. Hebdige suggests the beginning of such a dialogue.
An even more radical approach is suggested by Geoff Miles in his
exhibition 'Foreign Relations. Re-Writing A Narrative in Parts' (at
Gallery 44, October/November 1987).22 The language of the
philosopher, of the mythologist and of the photographer suffer from
a tendency to provide 'comfort of unity over disunity, coherence over
fragmentation, sameness over difference, singularity over
plurality.'23 The task of the philosopher/photographer is to restore
variety and difference and to look without having the 'colonizing
gaze.' He can do this by a parodying photography, by a deliberate
use of imagery and text which forces the viewer to rethink his notion
of the 'quote' as well as of the techniques of the photographer.
Ultimately this requires an abandonment of the authoritarial,
phallocentric pre-eminence of the image and a quest for a form of
discourse that would break open the assumptions behind most
existing attempts at intertextuality.
Neither Hebdige nor Miles suggest a clear way into a photography
in-Semiotics III, but they do suggest ways that might be open if
photography is to escape both from its imitative art frame or from its
clearly authoritarian ideological one. The crucial aspect of all this is
that photography is a language which we have barely learned how
to use except by appropriating it into languages that are already
out-worn. To rethink photography we have to rethink it in the
context of languages with which is in contact, and that involves
rethinking our complete languages about sexuality, politics, myth
and even prisons.
loan Davies 385

References

1. Beaumont Newhall, The History of Photography. New York: Museum of Modern


Art, 1982.
2. Alan Blum, Theorizing, London:Heinemann, 1974, p. 34.
3. See Richard Wollheim's Art its objects,
and where the object is the centre of
study, but subject can only be introduced as an adjunct to the object.
4. Susan Sontag, On Photography. New York: Dell Publishing, 1977. Iris Murdoch,
The Fire and the Sun: why Plato banished the Artists. Cambridge, Cambridge
U.P. 1980.
5. Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language. New York: Columbia U.P., 1980.
6. Sontag, p. 179.
7. Walter Benjamin, 'A Small History of Photography' in One Way Street (London:
New Left Books, 1979), pp. 240-257.
8. Ibid., p. 256.
9. Bakhtin, p. 294.
10. Ibid., pp. 297, 299.
11. Imust apologize to Phillip Corrigan for appropriating his interpretation, and I'm
not even sure that this is what he meant, but this is clearly use of his ideas and my
contextual reading of them. See Phillip Corrigan, 'Doing Mythologies,' Border?
lines, vol. 1, No. 1, 1984, pp. 20-22. For a closer reading of the same problem see
Reda Bensmaia, The Barthes Effect. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota
Press, 1987.
12. Roland Barthes S/Z (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974).
13. Dorothy Smith, 'Theorizing as Ideology,' in Roy Turner, ed., Ethnomethodology
(Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1974), p. 42.
14. Alan Blum, Theorizing, p. 34.
15. And, of course, I am using Semiology as a crutch on which to hand all academic
discourse. My remarks might equally apply to Popperian social science,
structural functionalism, marxism, even Freud.
16. Larry Krotz, ed., Waiting for the Ice-Cream Man: A Prison Journal: Manitoba
1978, with photographs by John Paskievich (Winnipeg: Converse, 1978); and
John Paskievich A Voiceless Song. Photographs of the Slavic Lands, intro. Josef
Skvorfecky (Toronto: Lester and Orpen Dennys, 1983).
17. Krotz ed., 1978: 12.
18. John Berger, About Looking New York: Pantheon, 1976:1-26.
19. Ted Hughes and Fay Godwin, Remains of Elmet, London: Faber & Faber, 1978.
20. Jan Morris and Paul Wakefield, Wales: the First Place. New York: Clarkson N.
Potter, 1982.
21. Dick Hebdige's article 'Some fathers and their Sons,' was originally published in
Ten: 8, Quarterly Photographic Magazine, 17. (1985), 30-39, and reprinted in
Borderlines 11. (1988), 29-35. Another version of engaging the subject with
photographic images is developed by John Berger and Jan Mohr in Another Way
of Telling. New York: Pantheon, 1980.
22. See Geoff Miles, Foreign Relations: Re/ Writing. A Narrative in Parts (Toronto:
Gallery 44,1987: exhibition catalogue).
23. Miles op. cit., 13.

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