Interview with Robert Richardson

Artist Robert Richardson interviewed about his photography by Alexandros Plasatis

Robert Richardson

Robert Richardson is a visual artist who works across various media: typography, graphics, installations and video installations. In the last ten years, he has concentrated on exhibiting photography, although recently he has begun a series of Constructivist artworks. His work was included in Artists Postcards: A Compendium (edited by Jeremy Cooper, Reaktion Books, London). An exhibition based on this book has been showing at different UK galleries. He is also a poet, and co-edited, with William Pratt, Homage to Imagism (AMS Press, New York).




AP. Why do you take photographs?

RR. Taking photographs is now a part of me, and not something I can necessarily find reasons for doing. It’s linked to the act of looking and, even more basically, seeing. For me, there is something compulsive about it. I do a fair bit of travelling, and if I return from somewhere and do not have some good photographs then I feel disappointed. Through images, I am searching for enjoyment and meaning that I also want to share.

A recent photograph by Robert Richardson

AP. What’s the difference in the process of taking an art photograph and taking an “everyday” one?

RR. What might be thought of as an “art” photograph is quite wide ranging, which is to say there are a number of different photographies, for example fashion, landscape, architectural, photojournalism. In recent years, a conceptual approach to photography has become the one that seems to be favoured by commercial galleries. This is when, usually, the photographer creates an artwork by setting up an image, either in a studio or on location. In contrast, my photography is classed as street photography, which explains its self: it’s a form of documentary that is mostly, though not exclusively, centred on people (not necessarily always on the street. They might, for instance, be on a beach). In that respect it is close to photographs anyone might take in similar situations. The difference might be a greater commitment to photography as a means of expression through defined projects. There is also a more successful “hit” rate in terms of aesthetically pleasing compositions and an editorial ability to select the best photographs to be exhibited or published. Most people who take photographs achieve an occasional good one and even sometimes a great one, but to think of yourself as a photographer, you have to be more consistent than that: it must not be occasional, but often.

A recent photograph by Robert Richardson

AP. Does poetry and fiction influence your photography and vice versa?

RR. There is an overlap, but it’s not an agenda I’m particularly deliberate about. In photography there is sometimes a visual rhyming , when two (or more) shapes echo each other. This can also happen with colours. It is similar to the way words rhyme in poetry. Over the years, I’ve organized events linked to the Imagist poets. As their name suggests, a significant part of their poetics was the presentation, in words, of visual images. That’s a personal bridge between the verbal and the visual. With photography, though, I can deal directly with the visual cortex and bypass words. Words, although I love them, can be just too slow. Still images can also prompt fictions. We start to have ideas about who people might be, when actually we know nothing about them. Even when these ideas are slight and fleeting, they are, I suppose, fragments of fiction. Last summer I was in Brittany, and took a photograph of three people standing together. Even at the moment I took the photograph, I thought they looked like characters in some wonderful French comedy film.

AP. You take photos, you write poetry, you’ve written a novel that is yet to be published. Why do you do all that? What does art mean to you?

RR. Well, I suppose at its most obvious, it just means I am trying to express myself both visually and through words. As a design student, I was heavily influenced by the Bauhaus and in particular Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. He was a Hungarian professor at the Bauhaus, and both an artist and designer. He was also a great teacher and writer. I like that ethos of working in different media. I am very wary about easy answers to what art might mean to me. I suspect there are subconscious motivations that by definition I’m not aware of. I think art can embrace and create ambiguity, which other forms of expression tend to avoid, and it shouldn’t, I think, be propaganda.

AP. What sort of people do you think like your photography? How do you imagine them?

RR. People who respond to my photography probably like colours and imaginative compositions, and have an appreciation of the quirkiness and surrealism in everyday life. Those looking for a heavily stated political or social message are not going to find it. On the whole, I am trying to communicate a positive enjoyment of life, though sometimes there are more poignant and reflective images. I also hope that at least some of the work is edgy. I remain a fan of certain photographers and photography in general. I never want to stop being a fan of others, because that enthusiasm is also a motor for my own work.



Robert Richardson’s photography website www.bobzlenz.com

Two online slideshows https://vimeo.com/60999627 https://vimeo.com/59398157

Robert Richardson is a member of the Biennale Austria group, and there is work by him on its website https://biennaleaustria.wordpress.com/mitglieder/richardson-robert/

There is also work at the Biennale Austria Sales Point https://biennaleaustria.wordpress.com/sales-point/robert-richardson/

All photographs are copyright © Robert Richardson


About the interviewer
Alexandros Plasatis lives in Leicester and had short stories published in Overheard: Stories to Read Aloud (2012), Unthology 6 (2015), and Crystal Voices: Ten Years of Crystal Clear Creators (2015).

Review by Jonathan Taylor of "The Venus Papers" by Lydia Towsey

I had the honour of introducing Lydia Towsey's first full-length poetry collection, The Venus Papers (Burning Eye Books, 2015), at the launch event as part of Everybody's Reading Festival. The following review is the text of my introduction.

Lydia Towsey's new book, The Venus Papers, exemplifies one of my favourite forms of contemporary poetry: that is, the poetry which manages simultaneously to be both performative and musical, on the one hand, and beautiful, intellectually stimulating and poignant page poetry, on the other. Not many poets manage to sustain this balancing act - but who do succeed in fusing performativity with written lyricism in their work.

Lydia's collection is at once diverse and coherent in its fusing of such musical, performative and lyrical elements. There are various narrative strands which run throughout the book (which makes me glad I read it, for once, cover to cover, not as I'd usually read a poetry book, by dipping into separate poems). These themes include mother-daughter relationships and matrilinearity in general; Hungarian and Welsh heritages; the politics of immigration, filtered through the powerful allegory of Venus turning up in modern-day Britain; travel poems, vivid recreations of South Africa, America, Europe and so on; and, of course, the overwhelming significance of a good cup of tea.

I particularly enjoyed the ways in which Lydia's poems deal with politics: the politics of immigration, of dictatorship, of gender. In poems like "Incanto," "Venus Votes," "Things People Say About Venus in the Tabloids," and "Hungary," to name just a few, Lydia tackles deeply important political subjects, but in ways which are original, poetic, fascinating - defamiliarising what the media inures us to, what TV and newspapers ideologically obscure, often by rendering all too familiar, everyday, banal. Lydia's poetry does the opposite: making the horrific, the tragic, the unjustifiable seem themselves again.

About the reviewer
Jonathan Taylor's books include the novels Melissa (Salt, 2015), and Entertaining Strangers (Salt, 2012). His poetry collection is Musicolepsy (Shoestring, 2013). He is Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Leicester. See www.jonathanptaylor.co.uk.

Review by Dips Patel of Agnes Martin’s exhibition at Tate Modern

Tate Modern: 3 June – 11 October 2015

A recent exhibition I toddled off to gawp at of a morning that left me dazed and overwhelmed was of Agnes Martin. I will readily admit I’d never heard of her until I read a review of the exhibition in The Guardian and thought, “oh aye, I likes the look of that I do,” so I went!

Abstract work with a very very limited visual language (predominantly straight lines with very subtle, at times barely visible, washes of extremely pale colours: just blue, red and yellow with subtle variations on white in some pieces) and scale ranges from the very small-scale, almost intimate studies and drawings to the 6 feet square canvas' that just envelope your vision when you give them the chance, she really was an incredible artist and lived a proper independent life.

In her later life, she developed schizophrenia and produced a series of paintings which she produced as a means of helping her deal with what was happening to her. In the exhibition they were put in their own room, collectively called The Islands and I spent the best part of an hour just in that room alone. If you ever get the chance and you're somewhere close that's got her work on show, go see it cos it's just magnificent. (I even bought the exhibition catalogue after, which I rarely do as they are usually prohibitively expensive!)

I give it all this praise, but then you might look at it and think 'Dip, you are full of it!' C'est la vie, qui est de l'art! I thought it was awe-inspiring anyway…

About the reviewer
Dips Patel is a graduate in Graphic Design which means he can colour in without going over the lines and when he does he makes it look deliberate, cool and edgy. He much prefers fine art where the art of talking nonsense is finer still allowing him extremely moderate success in introducing his work to a wider audience. Hobbies include reading stuff, watching stuff, commendably misguided attempts at painting stuff and consuming copious amounts of coco pops, clementines, curries, cakes and cocktails, not all at the same time which is frowned upon in polite society.

Review by Laura MacKenzie of “House of Leaves” by Mark Z. Danielewski

I was first introduced to the works of Danielewski by a very enthusiastic clerk at a bookstore in Houston, Texas. He took it upon himself to be my guide to all horror books, great and small and, when he presented me with House of Leaves it was with an air of expectation and awe, for, he said, he had never before encountered anyone willing to read such an unusual novel.

“Unusual” perhaps doesn’t quite explain House of Leaves, Danielewski’s debut novel.  A form of ergodic literature, this novel requires an inordinate amount of work from the reader in order for it to be anything other than a confusing collection of disconnected writings. The book contains several parallel stories and is written in the style of a research project with journal and newspaper articles, letters, footnotes and appendices, all held together by an increasingly bizarre narrative.

The novel begins with the first-person narrative of Jonny Truant, a tattoo studio employee. In his new apartment, he finds a document written by Zampanò, the previous (deceased) tenant, which appears to an obsessional academic critique of a documentary film, The Navdison Record. The remainder of the novel contains Zampanò’s account; Jonny’s autobiographical comments; part of the film transcript; interviews with people associated with The Navidson Record; numerous footnotes; and an appendix of letters written by Jonny’s mother.

The essential story of the titular house is that, Inception-style, it seems to be a house within a house.  Its owner, Will Navidson, discovers that the house is changing as doors begin appearing unexpectedly in blank walls, leading to cupboards or corridors. He also discovers that the interior dimensions of the house are greater than the exterior, and the house continues to grow internally over time. 

When a hallway termed the “five minute hallway” appears in an exterior wall, Navidson, his brother and friends seek to explore the space that it has produced. They discover spiral staircases, corridors and cavernous rooms, all silent except for an intermittent growl, the source of which is never explained. This exploration of the house leads to the group becoming increasingly insane, and several deaths – even murder – occur. 

The house negatively impacts all characters: Zampanò, Jonny, Navidson and Jonny’s mother all display signs of increasing mental instability. 

Regardless, the inconstant house hovers, brooding, throughout the book, its presence simultaneously innocuous and threatening, ambiguous and definite. The unease felt by all characters – and readers – of House of Leaves is emphasised by the word house (or Haus or maison) being presented in a different colour throughout the text. In addition, the use of many real-world references in the novel’s footnotes create a link between the accounts and the outside world, leaving the reader with an unhappy sense of being connected with the events described in the book.

House of Leaves is, without a doubt, the strangest book I have ever read, and most certainly not for the faint-hearted. It sits uncomfortably within the horror genre, as it can also be described as a love story or a satire of academic critique. Despite its often frustrating style and complete lack of explanation as to the essence and consequence of the house, once you have read House of Leaves all other novels will be utterly unsatisfying in comparison. 

About the reviewer
Laura MacKenzie is a Scot who lives in Leicester. When she is not studying for a PhD in Politics, she enjoys reading scary stories and listening to progressive rock. A lifelong Hibernian fan, Laura often finds that listening to Yes helps her accept the news of yet another uninspiring football match result.

Outsiders: Review by Laurie Cusack of “Hotwalker” by Tom Russell

Outsiders

Sizzle your ears within the grooves of Hotwalker and you will be royally rewarded. If you have not come across Tex-Mex troubadour Tom Russell before, this is the place to start. Epitomising the underground vibe, Russell, operates on the fringe, he drops deep grooves, man! Hotwalker is littered with literary-magma, baby. It’s beatnik heaven. Street gems abound. Russell turns us on to influence after influence: Rambling Jack Eliot, Lennie Bruce, Jack Kerouac, etc. A storytelling maestro is Tom Russell who invokes hobo-magic, compadres  ̶  tapping into a lost America. His concept mines spoken word from a bygone age.  Americanana-schtick is conjured, selected and crafted by Russell for our indulgence. The “twang” is hair raising, evocative and thought provoking. He gives us a veritable musical history lesson inside his bold sound-picture.

The rough-neck raconteur approach he incorporates, works, which is accompanied by country power-chords that mesmerise time after time. This concept sucks you in. His sound is sweetly infectious. Ear-candy – I dare to suggest. Hotwalker acts as Russell’s homage to a disappeared “beatnik” America: “A Ballad for Gone America” may well have been its working title. And what Hotwalker really zings with is loss, creative loss.

Freak performer and poet Little Jack Horton’s reminiscences on Charles Bukowski and himself getting drunk together and stealing a train is one priceless anecdote. An array of whacky intros and gravelly commentary by Russell are delivered from the gut; they are insightful and truly reel the listener in. But his beautiful peon of a ballad about David Van Ronk concerning his influence upon the budding Greenwich Village folk scene in New York is a standout masterpiece. It rips the tears out of you because of its naked vibe. I wonder if this song helped inspire the Cohen brothers film Inside the Mind of Llewyn Davis. Another standout moment on the album is Edward Abbey’s “Benediction,” which captures Abbey’s playful anarchic tones masterfully. Bakersfield and the west coast Oakie sound in the Hoover camps are also explored with honesty and bravado: the other side of the tracks, dude. The American outsider is musically explored with compassion and insight throughout Hotwalker. If there is a flaw within Russell’s superlative concept – it leaves you gasping for more!
                                                 Long live OUTSIDERS.
                                                                                           Twang-on, Tom.

About the reviewer
Laurie Cusack is currently writing short stories for a PhD in Creative Writing at DeMontfort University, exploring the Irish Diaspora and issues surrounding it. He has been published online and has had stage plays and radio plays performed.

Review by Kevan Manwaring of “TransAtlantic” by Colum McCann

This impressive multi-linear novel weaves together apparently disparate lives from both sides of the Atlantic: early aviation pioneers, Alcock and Brown (the first to cross the Atlantic by powered flight); Abolitionist campaigner and former slave, Frederick Douglass; Senator George Mitchell, brokering peace at Stormount in the late 90s; Newfoundland journalist, Emily Ehrlich, and her ancestors and descendants.

Each narrative thread is exquisitely rendered in convincing detail, the result of painstaking research (courtesy of the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation). Each paradigm presented is so dramatically different (on the surface) that the project could echo David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas approach. However, the critical difference is: a consistency of style and tone. McCann isn’t playing genre-games, but seems more interested in how ostensibly diverse lives intersect – the echoes and resonances rippling throughout history, back-and-forth across three thousand miles and more. The novel isn’t trying to be flashy, but quietly builds up its complexity through an accretion of narrative detail. The framing narrative (hinted at in the fragmentary prologue) – a tumbledown house by a lough in the north of Ireland – doesn’t gain significance until a lot later, when we realise what lives have passed through it. The staccato sound of the gulls dropping shells upon the roof – to crack them open – seems to trigger the memories. The past is cracked open, one shell at a time. Although some remain unbroken, and “lay there like a thing unexploded.” This threat of narrative ordnance lingers over the novel, hides in every chapter, a gunman in the hedgerow, the bomb in the flowerbed – the violent parenthesis to peace. The end to slavery, the end to the Troubles – these are achievements of human endeavour fought for by brave men and women, and never to be taken for granted.

This novel honours the shoulders we stand upon without being bombastic or overly-aware of its own importance. It builds up the profundity in quiet ways, in the rendering of character and place. McCann is a master of the terse sentence, the elided phrase. His syntax is knapped down to its essence, and he builds his prose like a drystone-wall builder, slotting his hard, flinty material into place with a clink. And in a similar way, his plot falls into place – block by block – until it presents an impressive bridge across an ocean. An ambitious, humane novel of haunting beauty.

About the reviewer
Kevan Manwaring is currently undertaking a Creative Writing PhD at the University of Leicester (in the form of a novel). He is an Eccles Centre Postgraduate Fellow in North American Studies at the British Library, and teaches creative writing for the Open University. One day he hopes to have a proper job. Blog: https://thebardicacademic.wordpress.com/

Review by Dips Patel of “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” by Jean-Dominique Bauby

I'm almost positive at some point someone has mentioned this book to you but at the risk of sounding/reading like an arrogantly condescending/patronising bore, I will summarize just in case you don’t know the story.

Bauby suffers a cerebrovascular seizure (which I think is like a massive and uber-severe stroke) and remains in a coma for nearly 3 weeks. Upon waking he finds himself left in the condition known as “Locked-In Syndrome” where he is fully aware mentally but is left with severely restricted physical ability, in his case acute head movement and the blinking of his left eye. The book is about his life before this event (or what he can remember), what he recollects of the event itself and his life thereafter and what it means and feels to him to live in this condition on a day-to-day basis.

The entire book is dictated by him blinking that left eye (he works with a language expert who devises a system where she reads out the letters of the alphabet, arranged according to frequency of use, and he blinks when she says the right one until the word is spelled out).

It's a very thin (not even 150 pages) but beautifully recounted memoir of a life which was hit by an almighty whopper of an event and the fact it's even in print is a towering testimony to not only the patience, support and love of his family and friends but the sheer will of Bauby who passed away within days of the book’s publication. The film that was made based on this book is also worth your time watching, quietly beautiful with an astonishing performance by Mathieu Amalric as Bauby.

About the reviewer
Dips Patel is a graduate in Graphic Design which means he can colour in without going over the lines and when he does he makes it look deliberate, cool and edgy. He much prefers fine art where the art of talking nonsense is finer still allowing him extremely moderate success in introducing his work to a wider audience. Hobbies include reading stuff, watching stuff, commendably misguided attempts at painting stuff and consuming copious amounts of coco pops, clementines, curries, cakes and cocktails, not all at the same time which is frowned upon in polite society.

Review by Alex Hales of "Music Complete" by New Order

Well, now I don’t know what to think; over the last seven months since I bought the ticket, I’ve been eagerly anticipating a gig by Peter Hook & The Light, a chance to hear some long-time and very warmly-regarded music given a punchy reworking by a man who, although really genial and engaging, has spent the last eight years moaning ferociously about his erstwhile colleagues.

Music Complete, the new New Order album has come out this week and though I expected little, I took the plunge because I couldn’t bear the idea of there being New Order songs I hadn’t heard. I’ve been here before, of course, dashing out to buy Get Ready when it came out, and I still feel that appraisals of that LP – then and now – are a little too charitable.  Maybe the reviewers have heard something I have not, and maybe Hooky was therefore right to cast aspersions on the validity of a New Order in 2015.

What use a new album? What do they mean to anyone?  Is it a desperate imbroglio to recoup what was pissed away on the Hacienda and Dry? If so, the people who chopped and murmured their way through Blue Monday during a ToTP performance in 1983 have unquestionably paid their dues, and in a few days’ time I will experience for myself the thunderous renditions which Hooky gives to the old numbers.

And then I stick on the album. Restless is N.O.-by-numbers, albeit replete with arresting swathes signalling Gillian’s return; the icy blast of Singularity comes over all Joy Divisiony at the beginning (specifically, Insight and Shadowplay) but it is with Tutti Frutti and People On The High Line where the jaw really drops and the comparisons drawn are not with New Order’s earlier work, but with Chic, or Earth Wind & Fire. And it doesn’t let up there.

In summary, Music Complete is New Order’s most engaging record in donkeys’ years, and by a country mile; I’ll let you know next week if Hooky mentions it on stage, or if there are any clamours for its songs during the set.

About the reviewer
Alex Hales is a 42-year-old Southampton resident of occasionally amicable manner, enervated by the intransigence of dogmatism.

Review by Laura Millward of Hannah Stevens’ five stories in “The New Luciad: 2014/15”

When I tell people about Hannah Stevens’ collection of 5 stories in The New Luciad and that those 5 stories are on 3 pages they don’t believe it is possible. Stevens’ ability to create characters that you care about and empathise with in around 100 words is incredible.

Like all great works of art, Stevens’ writing gives us enough to start, but also allows the reader to add their own interpretation. In Wasps a small boy is in a car waiting for his dad. Stevens does not actually tell the reader that the child is a boy… the ability that Stevens has to encourage her reader to conjure up images is fantastic. This is the story that has really stayed with me, Your back really hurts now. You don’t know what you should do. What happens next? Stevens has written something that tells us so much, but still leaves us hanging and all this is in 94 words!

Another story that stayed with me is Robin. Opening on peaceful, hot sunny day, I was instantly in the garden with the protagonist. Suddenly the mood of the story changed with the discovery of a robin’s “ropes of tiny, white intestines” and a “thud” of a spade…

Bread has us witnessing what are perhaps the last minutes of a man’s life. “The room flips” the world is literally turned upside down as he may be reaching his final breath. And, again, we never know.

All of the stories are distinctly separate but all with the recurring theme of something or someone leaving. There is death, there is violence, and there are moments of compassion. You will be left with the feeling that you know the protagonists well when in fact you know nothing at all and this makes it flash fiction at its very best.

About the reviewer
Laura Millward was born in Northampton and has lived in Leicester for 7 years. She is a big fan of art, books, tattoos and coffee. Lots of coffee.