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Dust Book - Aline Diepois and Thomas Gizolme

A highly charged body of work looking at our relationship with nature, and the continuing power struggles that occur between man, and the wild.

That hand. That Stare.

So much love for this image in the sheer multitude of aspects to this picture, the expressions on the faces (many of them bored) the amount of 'generic' photographic equipment. The knowledge that whoever they are waiting for arrives, this scene is going to erupt and so many photographs are going to be taken. Yet the knowledge that only 1 or 2 of these pictures will be published, or deemed good enough. Even though it is dealing with a complex social issue. It is just so bloody silly and cheeky. I love it.

A couple of years ago, i would have looked at these images, and said 'so what? they're pretty pictures, but they dont show anything' now, i look at these images, and the fact that they don't show anything is what is so important. After really getting in the problems of representing anything photographically, especially representing war and trauma (read Spectral Evidence: The photography of trauma) I now look at this image, and in it's 'nothingness' i understand that this is a response to embedded journalism with the british army in afganistan, to news outlets using 'amateur' images from mobile phones, to the quick turn around of images through digital means, and also to the problems of representing trauma. Where we are continually bombared by images from frontlines, where the content is very much explicit. These images are exactly the opposite, it highlights and questions the problems rather than just show the viewer. This is documentary photography as a reflective medium, and at its best.

I dont think ive ever seen any disaster photography that feel so dreamlike, and unreal. Almost as if they are from a movie set. They are either in your face destructive, or so emotionally personal that the message is lost, these pictures hover in that nowhere zone and perhaps it in there that there strength lies.