Between 1979 and 1981, the Nobel Prize-winning writer V.S. Naipaul traveled through Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia and Indonesia to write a book, Among the Believers. It was travel writing, social criticism and journalism all in one.
Contemporary travel writers, like Paul Theroux, Pico Iyer and Bill Bryson fill accounts of their journeying with statistics, histories and much that should be considered solid reporting. French thinkers Jean Baudrillard and Roland Barthes have even used travel writing as a venue to critical theory.
PHOTO COURTESY FNAC
Writing about traveling is becoming more than a quick, fascinating read in the Sunday paper. It's sprouting its own hybrid genres and showing the potential to reach far beyond simple place-oriented documentation. Autour de la Mer Noire -- voyages d'hiver (Around the Black Sea -- Winter Voyages), by the French-born Slovenian photographer Klavdij Sluban is a minor, but very interesting example of this kind of itinerant journalism in photography. His travels took him -- as the title of his series indicates -- around the Black Sea: through Turkey and the former Soviet bloc states Bulgaria, Romania, Ukraine, Russia and Georgia. He shot photographs in a grainy, journalistic black and white.
Traveling by ship and rail, what Sluban saw around a great, cold and foreboding sea was a string of dreary societies weighed upon by both nature and governments. Spaces are oppressive, sometimes with heavy concrete covering the top third of a frame, and figures -- when they are not close-up icons of despair -- are small and intimidated by stark features of the landscapes, like the towering hull of a ship or a too-large horizon. In one photo, a distant silhouette of a man is shoveling something into an abyss; the photo is taken from the abyss' point of view. In another, a newspaper is viewed through a smudged window, its headlines barely legible through the grime, like it is a prisoner pressing up against the walls of some cell from behind which his or her voice can barely be heard.
But none of this generic despair does much to convey a unique sense of place for the region, nor a sense of art. These qualities come out, slowly and with concentration, through -- in a literal, documentary sense -- images containing the Black Sea and -- artistically -- through a theme related to windows and a sense of the surreal. While Sluban was riding on trains and ferries, he took the chance to portray his fellow travelers through, behind, and in front of windows. Always, as with the trapped newspaper, the windows are instruments of confinement that give way to the world beyond. The dark irony is that the outside world is accessible, though the courage to access it is not present. It is a subtle way of portraying a post-Orwellian world in which oppression has outlived Big Brother.
Autour de la Mer Noire -- voyages d'hiver is on display for the rest of this month at Fnac, B1, 337, Sec. 3, Nanking E. Rd., Taipei (
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