CAERDYDD

2011

work commissioned by
Visiting Arts UK

interview with
Taco Hidde Bakker

edited by
Elise Medde

for
FOAM #34 Dummy

You spent the summer of 2011 as an artist-in-residence in the city of Cardiff in Wales. During that stay you kept a blog which resulted in your photobook dummy Caerdydd Diary. In the introduction you stated that you “set out with the best of intentions to document the Welsh identity as I perceived it”. But to your disappointment you found none of that. Did you, coming from India, a former British colony, perceive any kind of Welsh identity before coming to Cardiff?

It wasn’t long before I landed in Cardiff did I know of Wales as a country in its own right. I went there with zero expectations. My point was to discover the contemporary character of the capital of Wales and its people. I was hoping to find something fresh, innocent, and visual. Sadly, nowadays the identity of Cardiff is dissolved into the British identity. Even the Price of Wales isn't Welsh! Long after the industrial era of coal mines and dockyard workers, redevelopment across Cardiff has made it a newly-scrubbed city in search of renewed purpose.

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Why have you chosen to keep the Welsh name for Cardiff in the title, despite having found no Welsh identity there?

On my long walks through Cardiff, only the street names served as a constant reminder that I’m in some place that's not in England. I took a hint from that and had the words Caerdydd Diary embossed on the dummy cover since very little else beyond that point is visually Welsh.

Did the absence of Welsh identity lead you to photograph Cardiff differently than you had originally planned? You could instead have decided to explore Wales outside of its capital to look for a distinguished Welsh identity, yet you decided to document Cardiff. The resulting photographs show many generic places of a city in decline, but in your written comments you often give the sad look of it a humorous twist.

The terms of the residency required me to work within a specific area that spanned three neighbourhoods of Cardiff, with which I developed an intimate relationship. I would walk the streets and back alleys for hours every day. What I found most surprising was the utter lack of street culture in the evenings. Everyone would either go home after work or go to the pub, and the streets would look perfectly empty. It gave me a unique opportunity to put a couple of hours of deep summer dusk light to good use in a city that looked like it had been deserted by its own inhabitants.

I briefly slipped in and out of depressions due to loneliness and had to struggle daily to fight it. I found my own melancholy reflected in the people I met and in the quiet streets that I inhabited. The diary is a record of those experiences conveying how my initial hopes slowly gave way to darker moods. I used humour to make it lighter on those who wished to expend their time to my troubles. As to the idea of documentation, all my work is documentary, but at the same time intensely personal and subjective. Caerdydd Diary is entirely truthful, yet, very little of that truth might be of any use to anybody.

While the cityscape scenes and still-lifes in your dummy are often accompanied by witty comments, all the portraits of people, except the one of fellow photographer JH Engström, are only accompanied by their names. Why?

On the blog, all the portraits were accompanied by little quotes from my encounters with the people I photographed. One of them claimed that I had misrepresented him, shortly after I met him and put up the image and words on the blog. I was upset by it, but agreed to take it down. When creating the dummy, I thought it would be best to do away with the stories as far as portraits are concerned and keep a sense of mystery around their personae. I didn't want to further compromise their privacy in what already is a deeply personal book.

How came about the idea to make a book dummy of your Cardiff series?

When I was in Cardiff for the residency, my wife Vidya Rao quit her job in a technology company in Bangalore and went to Madrid to study photobook design. After she came back to India, she wanted to put together a photobook dummy to submit to the 2012 International Photobook Festival in Paris. I came back with all these pictures and didn't quite know what to do with them. Since Vidya had been following my Cardiff blog from the beginning, she saw the potential to make a book out of it. Very rarely do photographers designing their own books get it right all by themselves, so to give Vidya the opportunity to do the photobook design seemed like an excellent idea. You can think of the photobook as a clean and tight edit of the blog. As for the design of the dummy itself, what I wanted to communicate through this work was expressed in our various choices right from the cover down to the details such as the format, size, paper, what to show and what to leave out.

What do you think about photobooks in the diary mode? Initially, I was a bit surprised to read on the title page of Caerdydd Diary that a graphic designer was involved. Now that you tell me told me that she is your wife it makes more sense. Otherwise the notion of a personal diary seems immediately emasculated in case a ‘stranger’ was involved in its creation.

Of course, photobooks presented as diaries isn’t a new idea. Others have produced wonderful books in the diary format, like JH Engström with La Résidence and recently Olivia Arthur with Jeddah Diary. I think a photobook gives the reader a unique experience, and in the case of Caerdydd Diary, one that gives the voyeuristic pleasure of peeking into someone else’s diary.

I could have chosen to show the Cardiff work as a simple catalogue of images. Boring, but perfectly valid. The decision to use the humble Moleskine came after much deliberation. Also, the text wasn't there when I presented Vidya my first edit. It was the conception of the diary format that made the text from the blog an important part of the story.

Is a book the appropriate outcome of this project, or, for example, could it work as an exhibition as well?

I would like to think of a photobook as the ideal outcome of any photographic project I undertake. I'm not too fascinated by prints put up on walls for the sake of buyers' private collections. A photobook works like a pocket edition of an exhibition. It keeps a body of work accessible and complete. Furthermore, I’m interested in the photobook as a medium of expression. With the contribution of a good designer, the final output strengthens the original message of the photographer and goes beyond limitations of what photographs put in sequence can communicate. While there are many good individual pictures in this series, there isn’t much in terms of storytelling value.

Could you describe an ideal audience for your dummy or for the book in case it will result in an edition?

Caerdydd Diary is poetry, and as such it wasn't created with any kind of audience in mind. I can only talk of an audience that isn’t ideal … the Wales Tourist Board comes to mind.

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