Crevices of culture - Village Magazine

VILLAGEAugust/September 

HERE is nothing to which Rod

Stoneman is not willing to turn his

attention so a broad canvas had to be

created to encompass his writings on every-

one from Andrea Mantegna to Banksy. The

hoary old statistic about our being daily

exposed to three thousand images is trot-

ted out here and might have given Stoneman

reasonable cause to consider limiting the

ﬁve-hundred years covered here.

But even having skipped the ﬁrst thir-

ty-thousand-odd years of human graphic

depiction since the Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc Cave

animal drawings it remains such a broad

canvas that there are occasional grounds

for suspecting that Stoneman is in danger

of losing himself in his own thesis:

“Undermining any tendencies towards

the univocal or unequivocal has led me to a

degree of continuous uncertainty about the

extent to which these analytical perspec-

tives objectively correspond to external

realities and the extent to which they are

determined by the point and place of the

subjectivity from which they are viewed”.

Fifty-four short essays and another

slightly longer one are bound together with

two-hundred photographs in this curious,

intermittently engaging publication which

melds memoir with philosophical, cultural

and academic exploration of the history of

the image. The entire production is immacu-

late and a veritable visual feast as the author

might have reported with his unquencha-

ble fondness for alliteration. But ‘virulent

vestiges’ and ‘crevices of culture’ hardly pre-

pare the reader for Stoneman’s musings on

/ when “, civilians perished, pawns

in the pitiless clash”.

Rod Stoneman is a political animal who

has spent over thirty years operating in the

middle and upper echelons of both ﬁlm and

television production on these islands. Yet

the ﬂeeting glimpses we get here of his ﬁrst-

hand experiences through these decades

leave us feeling short-changed.

In , as deputy commissioning edi-

tor for Channel , Stoneman commissioned

Anne Crilly and the Derry Workshop to

make a documentary called ‘Mother Ireland’

which included an interview with Sinn Féin

activist, Máiread Farrell. The events sur-

rounding the subsequent killing of Farrell

by the SAS in Gibraltar and the consequent

decision by Michael Grade and the Channel

Four board not to broadcast the programme

are related with sadly little new insight from

Stoneman’s unique perspective on these

events.

By contrast we are treated to accounts

that are mostly second-hand of events

extensively covered elsewhere such as those

surrounding the deaths of Che Guevara and

Captain – ‘I’m just going outside and may be

some time’ – Oates. The investigation of an

opportunity to make a documentary about

Oates which initially provides the slim jus-

tiﬁcation for his inclusion here

soon gives way to some beyond

bizarre – whoops – speculation

as to whether Oates’ and Hitler’s

motives for committing suicide

were somehow analogous.

Stoneman is immensely well

read and observant and meticu-

lous in detailing with elaborate

footnotes his every cultural ref-

erence and observation, when he

might instead on occasion have

credited his readers with – for

instance – knowing, or at least

knowing how to ﬁnd out, what

was meant by a Google Adword.

It may be a legacy of the author’s

many years of public service

that every base must not only

be touched but numbered, cata-

logued and cross-referenced.

So little faith has Stoneman in his read-

ers that we cannot even be trusted to reach

for ourselves the conclusion that the “moth

Crevices of culture

Meticulous and quirky but under-nourishing

visual feast. Review by Richard Callanan

Seeing is Believing: The Politics of

the Visual

Rod Stoneman

Black Dog Publishing

£19.95

Rod

Stoneman

CULTURE

BOOK REVIEW

Intermittently

engaging

publication

which melds

memoir with

philosophical,

cultural and

academic

exploration of

the history of

the image

“