Jonas Bendiksen - Satellites

My reader review on Amazon about Magnum Photographer's Jonas Bendiksen's photobook Satellites (2008) 

'Satellites' is a great collection of photographs, in terms of scope and political awareness. It's also a triumph on a pictorial level, in its use of frenzied angles and colour. Sometimes this is minimal like lone figures at the edge of photographs walking through snow or fog, and others strikingly rich: the garish pink of a heroin-addict's dress; the hell-like yellow of a busy commuter's bus.

As mentioned, it functions at the edges, its use of colour maddeningly good (reminiscent of fellow Magnum photographers Gruyaert and Pinkhassov), and its crazy angles not unlike Eugene Richards' work.

Thoroughly recommended. Pictures at the edge, from un-newsworthy places made vibrant through Bendiksen's lens.

The film 'McCullin'

McCullin – a war junkie by his own admission. Survived Biafra, Vietnam, Lebanon, Northern Ireland. I’ve followed his work since I became interested in photography as a teenager. But with Don McCullin, you can’t just be interested, you immerse yourself in his images. I’d read ‘Unreasonable Behaviour’ – an account of his experiences as a Sunday Times photojournalist. I own a book of his photographs. But nothing could have prepared me for the film.

The camera lingers on his shots for longer than I could look. It forced me to confront the images. You can no longer marvel at the composition, his composure in taking the pictures amid chaos in the complete sense of the word. You are confronted by the Albino boy in Biafra clutching an empty can of corn beef. And you are confronted by McCullin’s words recounting how the children’s anuses were hanging out of their bodies. How they could hardly crawl, that they were basically dying before his eyes. And in Lebanon – in a mental institution for children – they couldn’t leave and the staff had been forced to lock some of the children up – so that they were swimming in their own faeces. Another image of the Christian falangists in Lebanon, saw them triumphantly celebrating with a lute over a dead body of a Muslim woman.

The relentless truth of these images, the relentless truth of McCullin himself is simply too much. The world is too much. This is a man who is haunted, and you see it in his face. He says he is not plagued by nightmares, but images and sounds plague him in the day. When his mind can’t escape his unremitting thoughts. His landscape photographs of Somerset  seem to be inhabited by the ghosts of war. They are beautiful but bleak. McCullin recently returned to war – to Syria. He’s 77.

Watching 'Shame' and a story

I watched ‘Shame’ (directed by Turner prize winning artist Steve McQueen, starring Michael Fassbender and Carey Mulligan) last night.

It was fucking bleak.

The film is brutal, relentless, devoid of charming subplots. It tells the story of a sex addict - a man in his late 30's/early 40's who lives in New York, has an apartment and a good job. And he has all sorts of sex, with all sorts. Prostitutes. A man gives him oral sex. Threesomes with women. Porn. Wanking. His sister turns up out of the blue and he can't stand the chaos she brings, the closeness, her need for him as a human being.

McQueen explores extremes. His first feature ‘Hunger’, was an exploration of just that – hunger – how IRA man Bobby Sands starved himself in ‘The Maze’ prison and in doing so exposed the Thatcherite, English government as ultimately cruel.

And now, sex. But not run-of-the mill relationship sex but empty sex. Or if not empty, never satisfying.

Recently I have been spouting 15 year old type nihilistic statements such as ‘I want to write the brutal because people are fickle.’ Now, I don’t know. Watching ‘Shame’ has sort of made me want to write something more human, less bleak. But I’m going to post this story that I wrote a couple of months ago, that is in a similar vein to ‘Shame’, but just less dramatic, utterly mundane.

Natalie is restless

Natalie is restless. She is 25, lives on her own, having separated from her husband. The last time she had sex was a year ago. She is pretty, although not remarkably so. Natalie feels the pain of not being touched. She consoles herself every night by masturbating. She has bought toys in the past, but she prefers her urgent, non-robotic fingers. Tonight she has decided to let a stranger into her room. Except she’s on the other side of the world. She calls herself Arihana and is from New Zealand. She’s 10 years older than Natalie and although her age shows (she is a smoker and a drinker), Natalie thinks her very beautiful, like one of those actresses from the 1940’s – a full-lipped vamp with a cascading, dark mane.

Her phone rings, momentarily distracting her from her fantasy. It is Ray, a guy who works at a supermarket check-out that for three days has pursued her for her number. Natalie relented and is ashamed of the fact she caved in so easily. She will not answer the call even though she hungers for a penis. Instead, she prefers to wait for the pre-arranged time her and Arihana agreed on last night.

She makes herself some toast but can’t eat it. She has a couple of beers, checks her facebook, looks out of her apartment’s balcony.

Natalie turns on her webcam. It is morning in New Zealand and Arihana is already naked. She is sat down on a clear, Philippe Stark chair. Her breasts are large, and drooping but her neck is magnificent. She has a bit of weight round her middle, but her waist is tiny. Natalie asks to see her legs and Arihana changes the position of her webcam so she can take a few strides and in the process show Natalie her toned, yet ample bum. Natalie is aroused, and as Arihana strides back to her chair she asks her in her New Zealand accent to take off her flannel shirt. Natalie obliges although she’d rather just stare at the naked Arihana for a bit longer.

She takes off all her clothes, and Arihana is moved by her inexpert undressing. It is not sexy at all, and therefore all the more sexual for Arihana. Natalie can’t understand why such a beautiful woman wants to interact with her. Although Arihana doesn’t tell her, she loves the fact Natalie looks so young. She is 25 and moderately pretty, but she could pass for 17. Arihana stares hard at the body before her. Natalie’s breasts are small but her legs go on forever.

Arihana starts touching herself.

Natalie’s 7-month-old son, Max, cries. For a couple of minutes she ignores it, but then mouths ‘Be right back’ to Arihana who is vigorously fingering herself. Max has shit himself, so that it spills out of his nappy and up his back. Natalie baths him and dresses him in a fresh baby grow. She kisses Max as she places him back in his cot. She grabs a beer.

Even before Natalie glances at the screen, she knows Arihana has vanished to someone else’s room.

- Eli Regan

Shuffles Nervously

Eli Regan
Shuffles Nervously

"People dine, just dine, but at that moment their happiness is being made or their life is being smashed."

Chekhov

This is the essence of what I wanted to capture in my vignettes in 'Shuffles Nervously'. The feeling that with some rough sketches in seemingly mundane settings you can suggest whether a character is breaking or celebrating.

The images can be read as the places in between where the characters exist- a lone bench, abandoned warehouses, shadows, a path, a road, an allotment. Both the vignettes and the pictures exist as a series of observational, alluding sketches rather than definitive portrayals of the places and people.

The voices used for each vignette make the stories come alive. They lift them from being my own true if subjective experiences and become fictional and communal happenings.

Aphex Twin - Flim

cards for sale

for more info on these cards, email ereganphoto@gmail.com
packs of easter cards of 4 for £3
any card £1.50, any 2 cards £2.

Untitled - Pete Regan

Atmospheric art film by Pete Regan, my brother. Melancholy in non-places. Beauty in the bleak:

I scrubs - E Regan (poetry pamphlet)

Hi all,

My pamphlet came out in May 2010. It was also the month I discovered I was pregnant, thus making me forgetful of all things poetry, and focused on baby.

If you're interested in purchasing it, here's the link:

http://www.erbacce-press.com/#/eli-regan/4540399102

and click either 'add to cart' or click on the cover image and order it.

Some lovely things writers said about it:

'Regan has studied photography, so she understands the urge to capture a moment that is charged with latent meaning, that balances on the tightrope of too much information and too little. She is, like a good photographer, alive to the minor malfunctions of the world, the anomalies that shape our lives much more than we realise. Her subjects are often trapped within a metaphorical frame, their lives trammelled by duty, convention, inertia. And yet still they dream, still they escape.

Not content to inhabit photographs, Regan also inhabits a photographer, becoming Diane Arbus in the throes of three photographic encounters. This brazen embodiment reveals the photographer’s duality: the urge to remain true to a situation, yet knowing it must be manipulated in the pursuit of that ‘truth’. Similarly, Regan gives herself licence to invent in the pursuit of her own truths.

Beyond the frozen moment, Regan is also a storyteller. Her poems offer oblique, fragmentary insights that can be rolled out into whole lives. But like all poets, and many photographers, she sifts her way through life in search, not of answers, but of laden questions. She leaves our heads full of pictures that have a life of their own' - Greg Leach, author of 'Twice Told Tales'

'Eli Regan writes highly original, filmic poems that explore the perspectives of outsiders. With great empathy she often constructs worlds through the voices of her protagonists; whether it is a Madrid prostitute, or a girl living in the slums of New York at the end of the nineteenth century. Regan gives voices to those denied a voice, and in doing so creates an alternative world that is genuinely subversive and compelling' - Amy McCauley, work has appeared in 'Rialto', 'Obsessed with Pipework', etc

'Regan's poems are equally concerned with eye and voice. Her interest in documentary photography gives her a striking way
into other people's lives, other people's stories.' - Michael Symmons Roberts, author of 'Corpus', broadcaster - Radio 4.