TV personalities
By: Colin Pantall
Contributors: Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here Artists' Books Collection (Columbia University. Rare Book and Manuscript Library); Al-Mutanabbi Street Coalition
Publisher: [Colin Pantall]
Published: 2012
Place of publication: [Bath, England]
Language: eng
Subjects: Violence; Pictorial works; Booksellers and bookselling; Bombings; Iraq War, 2003-2011; Protest movements; Books and reading in art; Intellectual life; Social conditions; Censorship; Terrorism in art; In art; War and civilization; Vehicle bombs; Visual literature; Specimens; Television and politics; Television broadcasting; Influence; Television in art; Artists' books; Al-Mutanabbi Street Coalition
Other titles: Television personalities
Description: This collection supports and promotes awareness to the important mission and framework of the Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here Coalition's focus on the lasting power of the written word and the arts in support of the free expression of ideas, the preservation of shared cultural spaces, and the importance of responding to attacks, both overt and subtle, on artists, writers, and academics working under oppressive regimes or in zones of conflict, despite the destruction of that literary/cultural content.

"TV personalities is a book of three parts. The first part is a series of pictures I took of British television news from between 2000 and 2006. The second part consists of fragments of books I have read since 2008. Together, the pictures and words form a new narrative that is my tribute to the booksellers of Al-Mutanabbi Street. It's that you can burn books, you can blow them up, you can kill the messenger, but even with fragments of words, even with a scorched sentence, the truth will come out on the printed page"--Artist's statement from the Centre for Fine Print Research, UK website.

"I started photographing when I lived in Jakarta in the early 1990s. I wanted to be a tropical Eugene Atget, photographing the godowns, temples and mosques of the city. But Jakarta was no Paris, and I was no Eugene Atget. Next I thought I'd be Eugene Smith, but that idea lasted two minutes, once I realised I didn't like guns or the people carrying them. Instead I travelled around Asia with my wife, living the freelance lifestyle and photographing stories on the birthplace of Mao, the villagers of Komodo, and the myth of Shangri-La. It was fun, but fun is not lucrative; we might have spent too much time enjoying ourselves. Then our daughter was born, 911 happened, and the fun world of freelancing became a thing of the past. I did an MA in Documentary Photography and started writing more for publications like the Far Eastern Economic Review, and then the British Journal of Photography"--The artist's website (viewed July 8, 2015).
Notes: Medium: Inkjet, Xerox, scanned images and photographic prints on 140gsm sketch paper; wire bound on paper-covered card.

"Built to self-destruct."

On March 5th, 2007, a car bomb exploded on al-Mutanabbi Street in Baghdad. Al-Mutanabbi Street is located in a mixed Shia-Sunni area. More than 30 people were killed and more than 100 wounded. Al-Mutanabbi Street, the historic center of Baghdad bookselling, holds bookstores and outdoor bookstalls, cafes, stationery shops, and even tea and tobacco shops. It has been the longstanding heart and soul of the Baghdad literary and intellectual community for centuries. In response to the attack, a San Francisco poet and bookseller, Beau Beausoleil, rallied a community of international artists and writers to produce a collection of letterpress-printed broadsides (poster-like works on paper), artists' books (unique works of art in book form), and an anthology of writing, all focused on expressing solidarity with Iraqi booksellers, writers and readers. The coalition of contributing artists calls itself Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here Coalition.

Gift; Beau Beausoleil; 2019-2020.