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    Contingency in Madagascar: PHOTOGRAPHY • ENCOUNTERS • WRITING
    Contingency in Madagascar: PHOTOGRAPHY • ENCOUNTERS • WRITING
    Contingency in Madagascar: PHOTOGRAPHY • ENCOUNTERS • WRITING
    Ebook195 pages1 hour

    Contingency in Madagascar: PHOTOGRAPHY • ENCOUNTERS • WRITING

    By Stephen Muecke and Max Pam

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    About this ebook

    As they set off for Madagascar in 2003, photographer Max Pam and writer Stephen Muecke adopted as their guiding principle the idea of contingency—central to which is the conscious embrace of risk and chance. In doing so, they established a new aesthetic in which image and text are inextricably linked to the notion of possibility. This stunning collection of photos and essays is the result of their vision, collectively illustrating the beauty and wisdom on offer in one of the world’s poorest nations. A contribution to the wave of new ethnography exemplified by Michael Taussig and Kathleen Stewart Allen Shelton, these encounters of events, images and experimental writing dramatize thoughts and feelings in the on-going construction of place.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherIntellect Books Ltd
    Release dateApr 18, 2013
    ISBN9781841506852
    Contingency in Madagascar: PHOTOGRAPHY • ENCOUNTERS • WRITING
    Author

    Stephen Muecke

    Stephen Muecke is professor of creative writing at Flinders University.

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      Book preview

      Contingency in Madagascar - Stephen Muecke

      CONTINGENCY IN MADAGASCAR

      First published in the UK in 2012 by Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK

      First published in the USA in 2012 by Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, USA

      Copyright © 2012 Intellect Ltd

      All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.

      A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

      Cover image: © Stephen Muecke, text and

      © Max Pam, photographs and photographic compositions.

      Cover designer: Holly Rose

      Production Manager: Jelena Stanovnik

      Copy-editor: Macmillian

      Typesetting: Holly Rose

      Series Editor: Alfredo Cramerotti

      Editorial collaboration: Jane Louise Fletcher

      ISBN 978-1-84150-474-2

      Critical Photography Series ISSN 2041-8345

      Printed & bound by Latimer Trend, Devon.

      CONTINGENCY IN MADAGASCAR

      PHOTOGRAPHY • ENCOUNTERS • WRITING

      By Stephen Muecke and Max Pam

      intellect Bristol, UK / Chicago, USA

      For Pru Black

      who brought us together

      A NOTE FROM THE EDITOR TO THE READER

      From the Middle

      Alfredo Cramerotti, Editor, ‘Critical Photography’ series

      Learning by doing, they say. Yes, but I learn a great deal also by thinking over and forming in my head the very idea of doing. I constantly negotiate what I have preconceived and what I actually do and consequently learn from both processes and the discrepancy between them. This is precisely what Contingency in Madagascar attempts to reveal to the reader. It is not a matter of exotic imagery or travel photography, but something else altogether.

      By implying that I am always implicated in what I do, no matter how hard I try to detach myself, neutralise my gaze, make myself invisible, this book places its authors, readers and myself, as editor, in the middle of a life drift: that is, the images capture the past and the future, in the present – less a case of trying to understand things from the beginning or anticipating a possible future from which to work things out retrospectively, more about placing ourselves in the middle of the stories and going with the flow, in one direction and then another, like life. Despite my best efforts to plan my existence, I know I will never succeed; any attempt to plot life will always be foiled by fate.

      In fact, the best way to explore an idea is to run alongside, rather than to take a snapshot, which often freezes and stultifies instead of offering an ongoing experience. As a medium, photography, at its best, is capable of reflecting on itself; not many activities and practices can do it. Sometimes I do not have enough information to gauge a situation or a potential narrative, so my cultural background makes up the missing connections. In this way, I can share with the readers the responsibility and the weight of that space/time situation to hold and evaluate, for a while. And little matters if I find the image equivocal; it is life itself and the reality in which it is lived that are just as equivocal. Learning by doing, they say. And sharing all the incongruities along the way.

      Alfredo Cramerotti | Mostyn|Wales | eCPR European Centre for Photography Research, University of Wales, Newport

      ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

      This project was supported by the Australian Research Council as a part of a larger research project on Culture and Commerce in the Indian Ocean; thanks also to the Transforming Cultures Centre at the University of Technology, Sydney, which nurtured the Indian Ocean Project from its first days and where Devleena Ghosh, M. N. Pearson and Sharon Davidson provided a fertile environment. Thanks also to Edith Cowan University. It was only possible to embark on something like ‘new ethnography’ thanks to the inspiring examples of Mick Taussig, Kathleen Stewart, Ghassan Hage and Michael D Jackson, great storytellers all. Augustine Zafy in Nosy Bé Madagascar was one of the many friends we made there. Thanks to Cathy Cole for canny writerly advice on the manuscript, Bob Hewitt for giving the project an airing at the remarkable FotoFreo 2006 and, of course, our editor Alfredo Cramerotti and the team at Intellect.

      INTRODUCTION

      Michael Taussig

      If the decisive blows are stuck with the left hand, as Walter Benjamin declared, then this book from the southern oceans, Contingency in Madagascar, is very much a left-handed book, a gift, one might say, to all right-minded thinkers. Ostensibly a book about anthropology as travel, and travel as anthropology, it is also about the ways we decide to shuttle back and forth between the strange and the familiar in trying to sort out new experiences as we keep pushing on in our travels, which, it turns out, are as much philosophical as geographical, as much about our craft as writers and picture-makers, as it is about the role of chance in the craftiness of craft.

      It is a deft, indeed shocking, move to settle on the unstable ground of chance and, politely enough, set aside the magisterial claims to authority that accrues with prolonged immersion in a foreign culture that an anthropologist would like to claim. For what we have here is the result of a mere three weeks in Madagascar, inflamed by the different sort of immersion that accrues to a writer obsessed with writing for some 30 years and to a photographer obsessed with photography for the same amount of time. What does all that obsession with craft have to say about what the craft is ostensibly about, in this case Madagascar, or should I say ‘Madagascar’?

      Over the decades both the author and the photographer have travelled far and wide in Indian Ocean, studied outside of their native Australia and Muecke has published extensively on indigenous Australia as well, beginning with that greatly unique book Reading the Country, co-authored with a watercolourist, Krim Benterrak, and the indigenous man, Paddy Roe. These books have been every bit about how you go about writing about the colony and postcolony, and it is this mix that makes their focus on chance extraordinarily interesting.

      Wherever we turn here, analysis gives way to poiesis, also known as ‘fictocriticism’. The best way of settling a philosophical problem of representation is through art, whether that be the art of storytelling or photography – so long as you have your eye on the role of the contingent in human, historical and, of course, in your own affairs. This crucial theme is not belaboured but gently makes itself present like light rain falling on the parched fields of determinism, whether in criticism or social science.

      Contingency in

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