Guest Post 33: Dennis Low on the Gian Butturini/Martin Parr Controversy (d)

[Toward the end of September 2021 I received an email from one Dr. Dennis Low, a London-based photographer and researcher on the niche subject of historic zoo photography.

Dr. Low contacted me because I serve on the advisory board of the European Society for the History of Photography (ESHPh), with which he found himself in contention over an article recently published in its semiannual journal, PhotoResearcher. Dr. Low had drafted an extensive response thereto, which the ESHPh had refused to publish. Given my connection to the organization, he asked, how would I suggest he proceed?

I concluded that I could best serve the interests of Dr. Low, the ESHPh, and “the discourse” on photography by making space available here at Photocritic International for him to present his argument in full. (Click here to download a PDF of the original article to which he responds.)

Due to its length, I have divided Dr. Low’s paper into installments. Part 4 appears below. Click here for Part 1, here for part 2, and here for part 3, and here for part 5. When the series concludes, a PDF download of Low’s complete article will become available. — A.D.C.]

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A Reply to Moritz Neumüller’s ‘”A Stone Thrown At My Head”:

London by Gian Butturini — A Reception History, 1969-2021′ (d)

by Dennis Low

… If 2011 had been a year of disappointment for Paul Halliday, with his exclusion from LSPF [the London Street Photography Festival — Ed.], Arles, and the 150-year history of London street photography, there was more to follow. [See previous installment for details. — Ed.] Under the auspices of Martin Parr, that same history of London street photography would soon explode in a profusion of hitherto unknown names, diluting ever further whatever residual value Halliday’s Urban Detours had, as a geographically-bound, photographic archive.

Parr showcased his collection of London-based photobooks at the Barbican with an exhibition called Strange and Familiar: Britain as Revealed by International Photographers. In its vitrines lay Gian Butturini’s London which, interestingly, was shown again in Photobook Phenomenon, curated by Moritz Neumüller (2021, p.140n).

Predictably, Neumüller takes care to elide his own, far from insignificant role in Butturini’s contemporary exhibition history, presenting London, as he did, at two separate venues in Barcelona in 2017, before restaging it at Museo San Telmo in San Sebastián the following year (2021, p.140n).^[1] If Parr ‘should have picked up on the spread’ (quoted in Neumüller, 2021, p.136) – and Neumuller seems in full agreement that he should have – Neumüller himself should, too, have done the same.

Halliday attended the Strange and Familiar exhibition, and, by his own account, clocked Butturini’s London.^[2] His decline into photographic obscurity was, I would suggest, effectively finalised by that show; and, nor, by this time, did university’s academe provide any sort of consolatory solace. By one account, at least, Halliday cut an acerbic and detestable figure on the academic stage: ‘You are fucking bullying Paul’, tweeted Jenny Thatcher (@JennyAThatcher) in 2019, ‘You trolled the event bullying several women. I’ve never met you, never spoken to you, never worked at Goldsmiths. We all put complaints in about you & your behaviour towards women’^[3]. The comment comes after ‘Paul who I’ve never met decided to screen shot my chest to make a point [about] racism’^[4].

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Halliday’s response was to call the police: ‘I contacted the police and it’s now been investigated as a crime’[5]; ‘That “complaint” was investigated by the Met Police and now has a crime number’[6]. By July 2021, the police seem to have decided not to pursue any investigation, much to Halliday’s chagrin: ‘Well there are parallel institutional track-lines here’, he complained to Twitter at large, ‘The Met Police failed to investigate that racist attack and #LeedsUniversity where the sociologist is based, also failed to investigate a complaint around the #sociologist’s racist abuse’.[7]

Halliday switched targets and trained his sights onto the Metropolitan Police themselves, demanding to know why they’d ignored him when he sustained an injury to the throat, following the Euro 96 England vs Germany football match, twenty-five years earlier: ‘I nearly died that night, and the @metpoliceuk did nothing to assist me, took no statement, failed to investigate’[8]. Reminiscent of the grandiose posturing found in the earlier <www.critiqueofstreetphotography.org> interview, a totalising self-mythology, with a baffling logic of its own, soon materialised to bind the two events together: ‘I’ve had PTSD counselling in relation to this and also the utter clusterf*ck that is systemic racism in #UKHigherEducation’ Halliday told Twitter, ‘Sometimes, I’m not sure which is actually worse’[9].

And, true to form, this irrepressible self-mythologising would soon be pressed into service for the work; the Metropolitan Police’s inaction would itself become a delicious opportunity for self-promotion. ‘My response to what the @metpoliceuk did that day, was to survive and make a massive body of work about London’s streets’, tweeted Halliday, ‘And anyone that has an issue with the idea of a personal urban ‘project’, can go get a frigging life’[10]. All this, however, was two years on and yet to come.

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Whatever the precise circumstances of the original altercation, it remains apparent that, by mid-2019, a malcontent Halliday was gunning for a fight. Half-heartedly, he tweeted a petulant quip about the cost of tickets and snacks at Parr’s exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery.[11] Acquiring a copy of Butturini’s re-released London, however, he found himself an opportunity with a bit more bite.

Masterminded from the start by Halliday, the Parr-Butturini scandal can be usefully read as one individual photographer’s attempt to vent his frustration at his life’s work being overlooked; to cut the competition down to size; to finally draw a line in the sand and say, “This far, and no further”. In September 2020, to little fanfare, Halliday presented Urban Detours on YouTube in an online interview with Chitr Sanstha. As he did so, he quietly seized the book-title of the now-disgraced Butturini for himself, renaming his own project ‘London’. No-one in the world, except the American journalist, Andrew Molitor, stopped to notice:

It must have been crushing for Paul to see Butturini’s book. The latter is focused, intense. It has a powerful sense of time and place. The framing is consistently good. The edit is tight. The time it was shot was visually interesting. I don’t think Butturini’s “London” is really all that, it’s not my favorite book, but it is astronomically better than Paul’s efforts, and this damned Italian knocked it out in a summer. Paul’s 120,000 negative archive might as well go in the bin now, and he probably shouldn’t have started.^[12]

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Neumüller’s active suppression, in his article, of the public complaints levied at Halliday reinforces the Mercedes narrative and, in doing so, obscures the fact that a deep-seated and long-standing professional jealousy, and a concomitant battle over the psycho-geography of London, lay at the heart of Halliday’s entire campaign against Butturini. Neumüller would, however, reserve his most elaborate rhetorical illusion for long-time PhotoIreland colleague, Jennie Ricketts.

Neumüller and Ricketts crossed paths no later than 2015, when Neumüller was curatorial advisor and chair of board of directors, and Ricketts – former picture editor of the Observer – took up a role on the advisory board to PhotoIreland. They would go on to reprise the same roles annually, right up until the present day.^[13] It’s a working relationship that crossed over onto social media, too, with Ricketts regularly reposting call-outs and news from Neumüller’s @TheCuratorship account on both Twitter and Instagram, from 2017 until the start of 2021, when Neumüller closed his account, ahead of his article’s publication.^[14]

Curiously, while Neumüller leveraged PhotoIreland artists Jorge Luis Álvarez Pupo, and Azu Nwagbogu for substantial contributions to his article – interviews reproduced in full – Ricketts barely features. She’s mentioned in passing, and on just a couple of occasions. Early on, in Neumüller’s article, we learn that ‘In an apology tweeted six months after the beginning of the protest, and in reaction to a critical post by Jennie Ricketts, Martin Parr clarified that he had merely supplied an introduction to a facsimile edition’ (2021, p.136).

Twenty pages on, in the footnotes, the circumstances of that apology are recapitulated in only a little more detail: the apology was, explains Neumüller, ‘a direct reply to a tweet from Jennie Ricketts, of 17 November 2019, and hidden from the general timeline of his studio’s account’ (2021, p.156n).

Ricketts gets one more mention from Neumüller and, for reasons that will soon become apparent, it’s worth quoting in full:

One of the first reactions to the image was Jennie Ricketts’ one-word post on 28 May 2019: “Speechless!” However, after seeing the double page in the context of the book, her perception changed: “My initial reaction to the juxtaposition of a black woman and a gorilla was an emotional response based entirely on the optic presented via social media. Having had time to properly review the context of the imagery and text from the book, I realise it was the wrong conclusion.” At this point, blogger Ben Chesterton (@duckrabbitblog) still stated that he “would want to see the original before coming to any conclusions” and “decided not to share” the image, a cautious posture that he would soon give up […] (2021, p.153)

This seemingly unremarkable passage achieves three important aims. Firstly, it conceals any pre-existing relationship between Ricketts and Benjamin Chesterton; secondly, it reduces Ricketts’ significant contribution to the Parr-Butturini scandal to a one-word ‘Speechless!’ tweet; and, thirdly, Ricketts’ apparently instantaneous change of heart concertinas the timeline, effectively obliterating the events that took place between her ‘Speechless’ tweet of 27 May 2019 (which Neumüller misattributes, in his text, as 28 May; and, in his footnotes, as ‘published 2 December 2020’ (2021, p.153n)) and her volte-face, delivered in an email to Neumüller, on 3 December 2020 (2021, p.153n).

Just as he has to obscure the relationship between Day and Halliday, that had proved so crucial in gaining media traction for the Mercedes narrative, Neumüller has to elide the close relationship that Ricketts and Chesterton enjoyed, in order to conceal her role as Butturini’s most vociferous and influential detractor. Ricketts’ close relationship with Chesterton dates as far back as 2011, brought together by a mutual interest in the representation of marginalised social groups in photography.^[15]

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Over the following decade, Ricketts and Chesterton would regularly exchange tweets. In 2012, when Chesterton’s film company, Duckrabbit, was hiring a documentary producer, Ricketts pushed the job to her followers, tweeting ‘Great job opportunity’^[16]. She’d promote his company blog posts too. When Chesterton was outraged by the death of a Libyan driver, working for New York Times journalists, Ricketts promoted his post, adding vehemently, ‘It seems humanism bows to capitalism when mammon is God’^[17].

Other times, as when Chesterton blogged about a film concerning children working on a rubbish tip, the conversation became extended, earnest, and existential: ‘There is nothing ‘Romantic’ in working on a rubbish dump’ wrote Ricketts, ‘This film is heart-rending’^[18]; ‘Voice over aesthetic triumphs’^[19], Chesterton would reply; ‘Agree there too’, Ricketts would write back, ‘But the aesthetic voice of the photographer is more often louder than that of the subject in the frame’^[20]. There’d be more familiar interactions too: a friendly natter about Nina Simone^[21], an ebullient ‘Happy Birthday!’ message when, in December 2018, Duckrabbit turned ten^[22].

And nor were these regular, transactional strokes ever solely one-way. When Ricketts, in August 2019, stood for election at the Royal Photographic Society (RPS), Chesterton quote-tweeted her, adding: ‘Members. You know what to do’^[23]. And, the following month, when Ricketts announced her sudden resignation from the RPS, writing: ‘With regret, I have resigned as an @The_RPS Trustee due to personal reasons. Thanks and apologies to all those who supported me’^[24], Chesterton would offer his condolences. ‘Damn. Best to you Jennie’^[25].

Although this relationship is entirely suppressed in Neumüller’s article, the cosy rapport that Ricketts and Chesterton evidently enjoyed would form the backdrop against which Ricketts was first introduced to Butturini, Halliday, and the @LTHDebate account:

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‘It’s beyond comprehension that someone would think it’s a good idea to juxtapose an image of an elderly Black woman with a caged gorilla’, wrote Halliday, retweeting @LTHDebate, ‘What the hell is wrong with #BritishPhotography and the institutions that support such practices?’^[26]; ‘Jesus Christ’, replies Chesterton, ‘I decided not to share. Shaking my head’^[27];  ‘Speechless!’^[28] replies Ricketts.

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If Ricketts was ever speechless, she did not remain so for long, and soon chimed in on iterations of the same thread. ‘You want to give people the benefit of the doubt,’ tweeted the American historian, John Edwin Mason, ‘but can anyone, who’s in a position to be asked to photo edit a book, actually be that clueless?’^[29] ‘Believe me’, replied Ricketts, ‘ppl are absolutely that clueless! The phrase “lack of empathy” springs to mind.’^[30] ‘I can imagine the hurt this has caused. No parent wants to inadvertantly [sic] expose their child to harm’, she tweeted, empathising with Halliday’s role as father in the Mercedes narrative,  ‘[…] The problem is the perpetrator’s not yours’[31].

After a flurry of activity, Ricketts fell silent on the subject, as she concentrated her social media efforts on raising the profile of the RPS’s Hundred Heroines: Women in Photography project that she had been heavily involved in.^[32] She was, it seems, happy enough to retweet details of the RPS’s Decisive Moment exhibition that featured Parr^[33]; and Markéta Luskačová’s exhibition at the Martin Parr Foundation in August^[34], as well as notices from the Martin Parr Foundation regarding Bristol’s new Books on Photography Festival, in July^[35] and September^[36].

By November, however, Ricketts’ tone altered radically: having been told that Cold War Steve (a photographer whom she had described as ‘Brilliant’^[37]) had an event at the Martin Parr Foundation, Ricketts, suddenly became curt and defiant: ‘Unfortunately I have a problem with this @royal_wales. Martin Parr has still yet to respond on the subject of black “woman/ape” image. Until then from today I refuse to RT anything to do with @martinparrfdn or the man himself.’^[38]

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It is, of course, in response to this tweet that Parr wrote an apology (Neumüller, 2021, p.136), except neither Ricketts nor Chesterton were aware of its existence until February 2020. ‘What bullshit’^[39], tweeted Chesterton, ‘Over 6 months after the issue was raised’^[40]. ‘Likewise, I’ve not seen an apology’, tweeted Ricketts, ‘Where can we find it please?’^[41] Seven weeks later, Ricketts became a trustee of Autograph, a high-profile, London-based charity, headed by Mark Sealy, that champions ‘photography that explores issues of race, identity, representation, human rights and social justice’^{[42] [43]}. …

(Part 1 I 2 I 3 I 4 I 5)

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Notes:

^[1] See: [online] Butturini estate. (2020). [online] Available at: https://m.facebook.com/gianbutturini/posts/1834342203481956/?locale=zh_CN [Accessed 7 Jul. 2021].

^[2] Twitter. (2021). [online] Available at: https://twitter.com/PaulTHalliday/status/1280632885171585025 [Accessed 1 Jul. 2021].

^[3] Twitter. (2021). [online] Available at: https://twitter.com/JennyAThatcher/status/1142054117361311745 [Accessed 7 Jul. 2021].

^[4] Twitter. (2021). [online] Available at: https://twitter.com/JennyAThatcher/status/1142053670131048453 [Accessed 1 Jul. 2021].

[5] Twitter. (2021). [online] Available at: https://twitter.com/PaulTHalliday/status/1177320664384049157 [Accessed 1 Jul. 2021].

[6] Twitter. (2021). [online] Available at: https://twitter.com/PaulTHalliday/status/1177329481192747008 [Accessed 1 Jul. 2021].

[7] Twitter. (2021). [online] Available at: https://twitter.com/PaulTHalliday/status/1410973229515218945 [Accessed 7 Jul. 2021].

[8] Twitter. (2021). [online] Available at: https://twitter.com/PaulTHalliday/status/1410952157067624450 [Accessed 7 Jul. 2021].

[9] Twitter. (2021). [online] Available at: https://twitter.com/PaulTHalliday/status/1410966018348945408 [Accessed 7 Jul. 2021].

[10] Twitter. (2021). [online] Available at: https://twitter.com/PaulTHalliday/status/1411385318410948609 [Accessed 7 Jul. 2021].

[11] Twitter. (2021). [online] Available at: https://twitter.com/PaulTHalliday/status/1105883313913413633 [Accessed 1 Jul. 2021].

^[12] A. Molitor. (2021). Crit: “London” by Paul Halliday. [online] Available at: http://photothunk.blogspot.com/2020/09/crit-london-by-paul-halliday.html [Accessed 7 Jul. 2021].

^[13] See: Angel (2014). PhotoIreland Festival 2015 Team + Thanks – PhotoIreland Festival 2015. [online] Photoireland.org. Available at: http://2015.photoireland.org/festival/pif15/ [Accessed 22 Jun. 2021]; PhotoIreland. (2016). Catalogue. [online] Available at: http://2016.photoireland.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/PIF16_Catalogue_s.pdf [Accessed 7 Jul. 2021]; PhotoIreland. (2018). Catalogue. [online] Available at: http://2018.photoireland.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/PIF18_Catalogue.pdf [Accessed 7 Jul. 2021]; PhotoIreland. (2019). Spreads. [online] Available at: http://2019.photoireland.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/PhotoIreland_Festival_2019_spreads.pdf [Accessed 7 Jul. 2021].

^[14] Twitter. (2021). [online] Available at: https://twitter.com/jennieric/status/916314049696161794 [Accessed 22 Jun. 2021]; Twitter. (2021). [online] Available at: https://twitter.com/jennieric/status/1354504210247778305 [Accessed 22 Jun. 2021].

^[15] Twitter. (2021). [online] Available at: https://twitter.com/jennieric/status/133912527548583936 [Accessed 24 Jun. 2021].

^[16] Twitter. (2021). [online] Available at: https://twitter.com/jennieric/status/277350818196365312 [Accessed 24 Jun. 2021].

^[17] Twitter. (2021). [online] Available at: https://twitter.com/jennieric/status/449553087867682816 [Accessed 24 Jun. 2021].

^[18] Twitter. (2021). [online] Available at: https://twitter.com/jennieric/status/450597112611622913 [Accessed 24 Jun. 2021].

^[19] Twitter. (2021). [online] Available at: https://twitter.com/duckrabbitblog/status/450597326042976257 [Accessed 24 Jun. 2021].

^[20] Twitter. (2021). [online] Available at: https://twitter.com/jennieric/status/450598789842083840 [Accessed 24 Jun. 2021].

^[21] Twitter. (2021). [online] Available at: https://twitter.com/duckrabbitblog/status/993952831907524609 [Accessed 24 Jun. 2021].

^[22] Twitter. (2021). [online] Available at: https://twitter.com/jennieric/status/1068833207955701761 [Accessed 24 Jun. 2021].

^[23] Twitter. (2021). [online] Available at: https://twitter.com/duckrabbitblog/status/1158421176009601024 [Accessed 24 Jun. 2021].

^[24] Twitter. (2021). [online] Available at: https://twitter.com/jennieric/status/1174260741282680835 [Accessed 24 Jun. 2021].

^[25] Twitter. (2021). [online] Available at: https://twitter.com/duckrabbitblog/status/1174286531533639680 [Accessed 24 Jun. 2021].

^[26] Twitter. (2021). [online] Available at: https://twitter.com/PaulTHalliday/status/1133094767900995584 [Accessed 24 Jun. 2021].

^[27] Twitter. (2021). [online] Available at: https://twitter.com/duckrabbitblog/status/1133131280911085570 [Accessed 24 Jun. 2021].

^[28] Twitter. (2021). [online] Available at: https://twitter.com/jennieric/status/1133142014143471616 [Accessed 24 Jun. 2021].

^[29] Twitter. (2021). [online] Available at: https://twitter.com/jennieric/status/1133142014143471616 [Accessed 25 Jun. 2021].

^[30] Twitter. (2021). [online] Available at: https://twitter.com/jennieric/status/1133641110725779456 [Accessed 25 Jun. 2021].

See also: Twitter. (2021). [online] Available at: https://twitter.com/jennieric/status/1133642415787712512 [Accessed 25 Jun. 2021].

[31] Twitter. (2021). [online] Available at: https://twitter.com/jennieric/status/1133645232015335424 [Accessed 7 Jul. 2021]

^[32] Twitter. (2021). [online] Available at: https://twitter.com/jennieric/status/1165251905792221184 [Accessed 25 Jun. 2021].

^[33] Twitter. (2021). [online] Available at: https://twitter.com/jennieric/status/1162812629255147522 [Accessed 25 Jun. 2021].

^[34] Twitter. (2021). [online] Available at: https://twitter.com/jennieric/status/1165251905792221184 [Accessed 25 Jun. 2021].

^[35] Twitter. (2021). [online] Available at: https://twitter.com/jennieric/status/1151115033633533952 [Accessed 25 Jun. 2021].

^[36] Twitter. (2021). [online] Available at: https://twitter.com/jennieric/status/1169628576947331072 [Accessed 25 Jun. 2021].

^[37] Twitter. (2021). [online] Available at: https://twitter.com/jennieric/status/1196144972648656896 [Accessed 25 Jun. 2021].

^[38] Twitter. (2021). [online] Available at: https://twitter.com/jennieric/status/1196150076755849216 [Accessed 25 Jun. 2021].

^[39] Twitter. (2021). [online] Available at: https://twitter.com/duckrabbitblog/status/1228026544100122628 [Accessed 25 Jun. 2021].

^[40] Twitter. (2021). [online] Available at: https://twitter.com/duckrabbitblog/status/1228028859473420288 [Accessed 25 Jun. 2021].

^[41] Twitter. (2021). [online] Available at: https://twitter.com/jennieric/status/1228030897049481216 [Accessed 25 Jun. 2021].

^[42] Autograph (2021). Autograph | Mission. [online] Autograph.org.uk. Available at: https://autograph.org.uk/about-us/mission [Accessed 25 Jun. 2021].

^[43] Twitter. (2021). [online] Available at: https://twitter.com/jennieric/status/1246116522726166529 [Accessed 25 Jun. 2021].

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© Copyright 2021 by Dennis Low. All rights reserved. For reprint permissions, other usages, and questions, please contact the author: dennis(at)takemetothekittens(dot)com.