Thursday, October 8, 2009

Zine Review #1: "Being the Adventures of One Fine Summer: A Personal Zine in Photobook Form" {Magpie Killjoy}

Magpie Killjoy is, as usual, experimenting: with form (publishing a zine as a glossy $7 book), with photojournalism (“There’s a lot that I don’t like about the photojournalist world . . . from the bullshit faux objectivity to the insistence that it is a photographer’s right to photograph—and profit off of—anyone and anything they see,” reads the Intro) and with a genre he calls environmental war photography. The results are mixed; some of the chapters are expertly crafted, with well-written narrative and photographs that support the storyline, while others read/view like gallery shows shoved in to book format.


Photo by Magpie Killjoy

The photographs, of course, are striking- punks playing guitar and fiddle in a West Virginia family's living room, tattooed fingers bloodied from digging in to roadkill, an abandoned mailbox at a mountaintop removal site, a tintype photographer on a shoot. The anarchist photographer and founder of Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness Distro has a knack for capturing overlooked and unusual detail.

Maybe I'm biased because I currently live in West Virginia and fight mountaintop removal full time, but Killjoy is at his peak with his environmental war photojournalism. “O Coal!,” the zine's first chapter, is a photo series of activists exploring MTR sites and cleaning up after a flood in the coalfields, accompanied by text outlining Killjoy's experiences in Appalachia. The chapter ties in contemporary and historical resistance- in one part, the author explores an old mine guard bunker in the woods, once used by a coal company to attack unionized workers. While the narrative veers towards simplistic, his evocative language challenges the reader to go and see the destruction for themselves. As a media maker caught up in press releases and advocacy journalism, it's easy for me to forget just how important personal narrative (from the perspective of both hellraisers and curious outsiders) is in capturing the emotional edges of struggle.

As Killjoy leaves the coalfields and heads west, the narrative falls flat. His talent for mise-en-scene and for conveying the stories he has heard is suppressed in favor of vague perzinish writing. At Haymarket Square in Chicago, he writes that he “ . . .may or may not have cried [because of the square being dominated by condos and a Clear Channel Billboard.]” “Well did you or didn't you?” I want to ask him, challenging him to go further with his writing, “Why does what has happened to the physical space matter so much?” The well-developed essay that begins the zine led me to expect the in-depth writing from subsequent chapters.

The photographs are still stunning, snapshots of lives being lived with a certain transgressive intensity. There is shadow play on a Tennessee River and in “Chapter Three: Butchering a Fawn on a Sunday”; a jarring visual essay of friends carving roadkill. The final photograph in this section is a bloody hand boldly holding the fawn's heart in the air, triumphant.



Photo by Magpie Killjoy

Killjoy's best photographs and writing serve as well-crafted dispatches from radical culture and resistance. By blatantly embracing subjectivity, “Being the Explorations of One Fine Summer” begins to deconstruct the false paradigm of the objective and distant photojournalist.

There is a stark difference in his work covering environmental atrocities and his other photographs- while the latter work well without much text, he uses essay to string the former together into coherent and alluring stories. It's not that I prefer one style over the other; perhaps “Being the Explorations of One Fine Summer” should have been two separate projects, not
a pastiche of summer adventures having little more than linear time connecting them.

Of course, every new experiment is by its nature haphazard. I hope Killjoy and others continue to work with the photo zine form and the complicated possibilities of anarchistic photojournalism.

Birds Before The Storm


1 comment:

  1. dude your review is like as long as the zine!

    here's to taking each other seriously,
    kylala

    ReplyDelete