It was 1968. I joined the massive anti-Vietnam War demonstration in Trafalgar Square, and then the protest outside the American Embassy, ending in violent clashes with the police. In April, Martin Luther King was assassinated. In May French students and workers demonstrated on the streets of Paris and almost brought down the government.
1968 was a political awakening for me. Until that time I had been painting, but the revolutionary struggles pushed me towards a more direct way of working. One that could represent people across the world resisting war, repression and state violence. I started working on what became STOP.
I began by copying photographs from magazines and newspapers onto half-plate negatives, combining them with all kinds of autographic marks on acetate and then printing them in different combinations using a photographic enlarger. An image of civil rights marchers attacked by the National Guard could be combined with images of worldwide anti-Vietnam war protests and combined again with images of the bombing of Vietnam itself. I continued this multi-layered approach over many years, working with images from amongst others South Africa, Northern Ireland, Cambodia, Chile, Germany and Palestine,
This is an entirely visual book, but my aim is for the reader to read the images as though they were words - as a visual narrative. By overlaying blots, scratches, drawings and stencilled computer punch cards I break down the photographic images into the least representational marks that still register a human presence in struggle
I’m attempting to create a visual language beyond realism so that the reader actively engages in decoding images that don’t reveal themselves immediately. The reader can then develop an active relationship to the struggles depicted, rather than remaining a passive viewer.
STOP acts as a Rorschach test of reality. Walter Benjamin wrote of ‘blasting open the continuum of history’. I want to picture the shattered fragments of that continuum.
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