Pragya Jain

Anita Goel

S C Gupta
email: gupta.drsc@gmail.com

Monitoring Checklist for Ceph Object Storage Infrastructure

Keywords: Cloud Object Storage, Infrastructure Monitoring, Ceph

Object storage cloud is widely used to store unstructured data like photo, emails, video etc. generated from use of digital technologies. The number of object storage services has increased rapidly over the years and so is increased the complexity of the infrastructure behind it. Effective and efficient monitoring is constantly needed to properly operate and manage the complex object storage infrastructure. Ceph is an open source cloud storage platform that provides object storage as a service. Several works have discussed ways to collect the data for monitoring. However, there is little mention of what needs to be monitored. In this paper, we provide an infrastructure monitoring list for Ceph object storage cloud. We analyze the Ceph storage infrastructure and its processes for identifying the proposed lists. The infrastructure monitoring list allows selecting requirements, in contrast to, specifying fresh requirements, for monitoring. The monitoring list helps developer during requirement elicitation of the monitoring functionality when developing a new tool or updating an existing one. The checklist is also useful during monitoring activity for selecting parameters that need to be monitored by the system administrator.

Introduction

The mass adoption and increasing popularity of digitization technologies has resulted in generation of data in form of videos, photo, blogs, emails, messages, chat data etc. Object storage cloud is a widely adopted paradigm for storing these voluminous data over the Internet. Ceph 0 is open source cloud storage for storing data as object.

The services provided to the subscribers for object storage solutions have rapidly increased and so has complexity of the underlying infrastructure. Monitoring is necessary in cloud to determine health of system and is beneficial for both service provider and consumer 000. There is a need to scale storage nodes, detect and repair failures, manage load surge and improve performance. Due to the elastic nature of cloud, there is a need to constantly monitor the infrastructure at runtime 0 to optimize the use of storage infrastructure with varying demand for storage. Also, disruption in system performance due to reasons like, node failure, system crash, network error, high memory load etc. requires monitoring during runtime. Moreover, processes for storing activity defined in Ceph require monitoring to detect any erroneous action. Furthermore, since Ceph is integrated with many popular clouds, like, Openstack and Eucalyptus for providing storage as a service, defining of monitoring functionality is essential for determining its proper working.

In Ceph, monitoring functionality is incorporated in different ways -(1) Commands are available to monitor storage cluster, (2) Existing freely available infrastructure monitoring tools, like, Nagios are adapted to suit need of Ceph, or (3) New code is written to include infrastructure monitoring functionality. Generally, freely available infrastructure monitoring tools are used for monitoring Ceph.

Several researchers have discussed different architectures 000000 for monitoring cloud for specific purposes. The focus is mainly on efficient ways of collecting and analyzing data. But, none of them address the issue of what needs to be monitored in object storage cloud. Several tools exist that support monitoring of specific features, like, Calamari monitors Ceph cluster, CollectD and Zabbix monitor system performance, Nagios monitors status of resources, Munin monitors storage capacity. Although the tools specify functionality it supports, there is no mention of requirement specification for the monitoring of Ceph.

In this paper, focus is on creation of the requirement specification for infrastructure monitoring of Ceph from the system administrator perspective. It helps during development of tools for the system administrator, in choosing and specifying requirements for the monitoring functionality.

Here, a infrastructure monitoring checklist is presented that facilitates in selecting requirement when developling tools and techniques for monitoring of Ceph. We have classifed the infrastructure monitoring into four components, namely, (1) Background process functionality, (2) Storage infrastructure attributes, (3) Storage usage data, and (4) OS process utilization data. The monitoring checklist is defined for the four identified components of Ceph. The checklist is for both the administrator and the developer, and facilitates during requirement elicitation in identifying the monitoring functionality to be included in a tool. During requirement phase of tool development, functionality needed for monitoring of Ceph can be selected from the checklist.

For understanding requirements of monitoring Ceph and for formulating the checklist, a study of architecture of Ceph, processes in Ceph for storing and managing data, monitoring commands and configurable parameters of Ceph was performed. A study of associated plug-in of some standard open source monitoring software was also performed. This collectively defines understanding storage architecture and available monitoring provisions for Ceph. Using the use-case based approach; the requirements for monitoring have been identified from the system administrator perspective. The components of infrastructure monitoring, based on interaction of system administrator with Ceph infrastructure are defined. The functionality of each identified component of infrastructure monitoring has been identified.

The monitoring checklist allows selecting requirements from the checklist, in contrast to, specifying fresh requirements, when developing new tool for monitoring. From the checklist, all or part of functionality may be selected. The checklist is for use during requirement elicitation phase, and also for validation and verification of requirements during testing phase of the tool development. The requirement checklist presented here can be easily updated to include any new functionality or feature.

The Ceph infrastructure checklist presented here has been applied to three popular infrastructure monitoring tools of Ceph -Calamari 0, Nagios [18], and CollectD 0 to identify monitoring functionality provided by them. The work is being currently extended to provide generic infrastructure monitoring list for cloud object storage.

In this paper, section 2 gives an overview of Ceph object storage. Section 3 describes Ceph monitoring commands and configurable parameters. Section 4 discusses the components of infrastructure monitoring. Section 5 describes the monitoring checklist in detail. Section 6 illustrates few examples on which the checklist has been applied. Section 7 lists benefits of using the infrastructure monitoring list. Section 8 is a survey of related work. Section 9 states the conclusion.

Ceph Object Storage

The Ceph 0 object storage architecture comprises of three main components -Radosgw, Librados and RADOS.

Radosgw is a client interface for object storage that allows end-user to store and retrieve data. It supports Swift and S3 compatible APIs for facilitating end-user to perform various operations, such as, create, read, update and delete data as an object.

Librados is storage cluster protocol that provides native interface to interact with storage cluster and supports different languages, like, C, C++, Java, Ruby and Python. It allows client to interact with Ceph storage cluster, directly, using the defined API.

RADOS 0 is a reliable, autonomous and distributed object store. It consists of two sub-components -Monitor and OSD (Object Storage Device) Daemon. Monitor maintains current status of each component of cluster. Usually, one monitor is sufficient for this purpose, but to ensure high availability, a few monitors are used and a quorum for consensus about current state is established among them. OSD daemon is responsible for reading/writing data to/from storage cluster. OSD daemons communicate with each other to check whether other OSDs are in up and running state and also to replicate data.

Ceph Monitoring Commands and Configurable Parameters

In Ceph, several commands 0 exist that provide health of storage cluster and state of individual components, like, their running status and condition. There are also some commands that provide usage statistics of storage cluster.

The component of Ceph storage cluster has some configurable parameters that can be set according to the need of cluster. These parameters can be set at the time of software installation or can be changed dynamically at runtime. Ceph stores its configurable parameters in its configuration file. The configurable parameters 0 are divided into four major sections -global, osd, mon and client.radosgw. Configurable parameters set in "global" section are applied to all instances of all components. Parameters set in "osd", "mon" and "client.radosgw" is applicable for instances belonging to OSD daemon, monitor and Radosgw, respectively. Configurable parameters define working of different processes running for the component.

Components of Infrastructure Monitoring

The classification of Ceph infrastructure into different components provides a framework for categorization of functionality of monitoring, from the administrator perspective. To understand requirements of infrastructure monitoring, a study of the components and processes executing on them has been performed. An in-depth study of different monitoring commands and configurable parameters of Ceph object storage has also been done. The infrastructure monitoring has been divided into four broad components as follows:

 Background Process -functionality of processes running in background  Storage Infrastructure -attributes of storage infrastructure  Storage Usage -utilization of storage infrastructure  OS Process Utilization -utilization of OS processes For Ceph, the authors define infrastructure monitoring as, "Monitoring physical infrastructure, logical infrastructure and associated processes". The components of infrastructure monitoring are briefly described in the following subsections.

Background Process

During working of the Ceph object storage, several processes run in the background to perform the tasks defined in Ceph. From the different processes present in Ceph software, we identified the processes that are required to be monitored during runtime as shown in Fig. 1. These processes are required to be monitored to check health of system. The background processes that are required to be monitored are -Heartbeat, Authentication, Data scrubbing, Peering, Backfilling, Recovery and Synchronization.

Heartbeat ensures that OSDs responsible for maintaining copies of data are in up and running states. OSDs check heartbeat of other OSDs periodically and report the status to monitor.

Authentication is used to authenticate and authorize the client accessing the storage. Monitor is responsible for authentication process. Client can have different rights for access, like, read-only, write, access to admin commands, etc.

Data scrubbing checks data integrity. The process runs on OSDs and compares objects with their replica stored in another OSD. There are two types of scrubbinglight scrubbing and deep scrubbing. In light scrubbing, metadata of objects is compared to catch bugs. In deep scrubbing, data in objects is compared bit-by-bit. Usually, light and deep scrubbing are performed daily and weekly respectively.

Peering is required for creating an agreement about state of all objects among OSDs that are responsible to keep copy of objects before replication.

Synchronization ensures availability of data in a federated system implemented with multiple regions and multiple zones. A cluster must have a master region and a region must have a master zone. Synchronization process runs on Radosgw. There are two types of synchronization -data synchronization and metadata synchronization. In data synchronization, data of master zone in a region is replicated to a secondary zone of that region. In metadata synchronization, metadata of users and buckets is replicated from master zone in master region to master zone in a secondary region.

Fig. 1. Background processes for Infrastructure monitoring in Ceph

Backfilling runs when OSD is added or removed to/from Ceph storage cluster. In order to rebalance cluster, objects are moved to or from OSDs. This migration takes place as "backfilling" at lower priority to maintain operational performance of system.

Recovery runs when OSD crashes and comes back online. In such condition, several objects stored in OSD get outdated and goes in recovery mode, when it restarts. To maintain operational performance of system, recovery process takes place with some limitations.

Several other processes like logging and journaling do not require monitoring during runtime.

Storage Infrastructure

The storage infrastructure of Ceph is logically divided into clusters which contain few monitors and a large number of OSDs. In a typical scenario, an OSD maps to a storage drive or a RAID group. The storage cluster is divided into pools, which are further divided into Placement Group (PG). Each PG maps to some OSDs.

A pool facilitates segregation of data, logically, based on user's requirement. For providing availability, pool is specified as replicated or erasure-coded. Replicated pool maintains multiple copies of data. In erasure-coded pool, data is divided into number of chunks associated with some code chunks. The data is stored in PGs within a pool. For fault tolerance, each copy of PG is stored in separate OSD. A set of OSDs that are responsible for keeping copy of a PG is called Acting set of that PG and a set of OSDs that are ready to handle incoming client request is Up set of that PG. Generally, Acting set and Up set of a PG are identical. If they are not found identical, it implies that Ceph is migrating data or an OSD is recovering or there is any problem. One OSD in Acting set is primary OSD. Client communicates with primary OSD to read/write data. Primary OSD interacts with other OSDs to replicate data.

Fig. 2. Ceph Object Storage Structure

Fig. 2 shows object storage infrastructure for Ceph. Monitoring is required at all the different levels of physical and logical infrastructure, for observing existing resources. It helps when there is a need to add or remove resources and to detect failing or failed drives for replacement.

Storage Usage

The amount of the logical and physical infrastructure that is being consumed is required to be monitored to identify full or near full storage. The logical infrastructure is monitored at different levels -cluster, pool and PG level. This helps in scaling up and scaling down the system resources.

OS Processes Utilization

The Ceph object storage uses CPU, memory, and network for its own working. Different processes, like, heartbeat, peering etc. run on different components of storage cluster and utilize CPU, memory and network. OS processes utilization is required to be monitored to improve efficiency and performance of system.

Infrastructure Monitoring List

For arriving at the monitoring checklist, the Ceph infrastructure was classified under four components -Background process functionality, Storage infrastructure attributes, Storage usage data and OS Process utilization data.

Background process checklist consists of functionality running in background of Ceph. During requirement elicitation, this list helps in deciding process parameters that need to be monitored for Ceph software. The background processes are monitored for three entities -monitor, OSD, and Radosgw.

Heartbeat and peering processes are required to be monitored for finding OSDs in "Up" and "Acting" set of a PG, respectively, to check if number of OSDs in Acting set are same as that defined in pool size and OSDs in Up set of a PG are equivalent to OSDs in Acting set of that PG. The users are monitored for authentication to check access permissions according to defined capabilities. Data scrubbing needs to be monitored for type of scrubbing, its frequency, and number of pending scrubs and errors to identify rate of corrupted files found in system so that any abnormality can be identified. Data and metadata synchronization have parameters, such as, errors during sync, wait time, count of shards that are checked or failed, and error listing metadata to determine correct working of system. Backfilling and recovering processes are monitored for their respective status so that impact on system performance can be decreased. Table 1 lists requirement checklist for background process functionality.

Storage Infrastructure checklist defines parameters for logical and physical infrastrcuture that needs to be monitored. During requirement elicitation this list helps in deciding parameters of infrastructure that need to be monitored for Ceph. The storage infrastructure is divided into five levels -cluster, monitor, OSD, pool and PG. Storage usage checklist consists of parameters that provide data about the usage of storage infrastructure. During requirement elicitation the list helps in deciding parameters for usage of storage infrastructure that need to be monitored. Storage usage data for monitoring is defined at three levels -cluster, pool and PG.

IOPS (Input Output Per Second) measure input/output load to avoid I/O bottleneck in system. Latency provides time taken in data transfer so that in cases of interruption the cause can be found.

Total storage capacity and free space availble are inspected so that alerts can be raised before system reaches near-full capacity. Amount of data stored and number of objects stored provide estimate of storage capacity. IOPS and latency are monitored at cluster and pool level. Notional value monitored at pool level determines utilized space excluding space used by its replicas. Table 3 lists storage infrastructure usage parameters at different levels. OS processes checklist contains parameters to determine utilization of operating system processes. During requirement elicitation this list helps in deciding parameters for utilization of OS processes that need to be monitored.

CPU, memory and network utilization data is monitored to determine consumption of OS resources during execution. It helps to identify processes and components that are under utilizing or highly utilizing OS resources so that extra resources can be provisioned based on demand. Table 4 lists parameters for OS process utilization.

Table 4. OS Process Utilization data

Parameters

Reason CPU Utilization Find CPU consumption by processes and system to identify processes and components which have high CPU load and which are under utilized

Memory utilization

Track available memory to determine processes and components that are consuming more memory so that memory can be upgraded

Network utilization

Track network traffic and identify network interfaces that have excessive use

Case Study

The infrastructure monitoring functionality lists have been applied for case study to three monitoring software -Calamari 0, Nagios 0, and CollectD 0.

Calamari is management and monitoring service specifically for Ceph. It exposes high level REST APIs and a user interface built on these APIs for monitoring Ceph infrastructure. Nagios is open source infrastructure monitoring software that enables organizations to identify and resolve IT infrastructure problems before they have drastic effect on system. Nagios provides some built in plug-ins for monitoring health of cluster and individual components of Ceph object storage, like, check_ceph_health and check_ceph_mon. CollectD is daemon that collects system information and helps system administrators to maintain an overview of resources to avoid bottlenecks.

Table 5 displays comparative checklist of the three monitoring software for storage infrastructure, usage and OS process utilization of infrastructure monitoring. In the table, "√" denotes parameter is supported by tool; "x" not supported. 1 st , 2 nd and 3 rd column for each is for storage infrastructure, usage and OS process, respectively. Fig. 3 displays percentage of parameters of each monitoring checklist functionality supported by tools in our case study. Some of our key observations are as follows- Calamari monitors 10% of background processes; 95.65 % of storage infrastructure; 87.5% storage usage; and 33.33% OS processes.  Nagios monitors mainly the status of storage infrastructure (69.56%). It does not monitor background processes, storage usage and OS processes.  CollectD monitors 100% storage usage; 100% OS processes utilization; 38.46% of storage infrastructure. It does not monitor background processes. Some interesting observations emerging from the case study are as follows- Background processes is only monitored 10% by Calamari  Storage infrastructure is monitored by all three -Calamari, Nagios, CollectD  Storage usage is monitored by Calamari and CollectD  OS processes is monitored by Calamari and CollectD It can be seen that tools offer different coverage for components being monitored and there is no consistency for same. Also background processes are hardly monitored because Ceph does not have commands to provide status of running processes. The requirement checklist presented here has been derived after performing a detailed study of Ceph storage architecture, processes running in it and exhaustive study of basic monitoring commands and configurable parameters over Ceph.

Usually, infrastructure monitoring software is developed for a specific purpose without planning or preparation of list of possible functionality that can be included. The checklist helps system administrator to choose functionality required to monitor infrastructure of Ceph with minimum effort. The developers use checklist to check functionality required for infrastructure monitoring during development of tool. The checklist allows developer and administrator to include more functionality in monitoring software rather than just basic functionality.

Related Work

Cloud monitoring has gathered focus in research. Several researchers discuss about research motivation, approaches used for monitoring cloud and different methodologies applied to monitor a cloud for different purposes. The frameworks and architectures highlight ways of collecting data from system required for monitoring and how to monitor. However, there is no mention of parameters required to be monitored in cloud. Usually, freely available monitoring software, like, Zenoss, Nagios are adapted for incorporating monitoring functionality for Ceph object storage. Our extensive search for work carried out for finding list of parameters required for monitoring Ceph object storage yielded no result.

Conclusion and Future Work

In this paper, we have presented infrastructure monitoring list for Ceph object storage. The list eases the task of administrator and developers by providing them a list from where the functionality can be selected. Designers and developers of new monitoring software for Ceph can also use the list as a reference for identifying possible functionality that can be incorporated in monitoring software. The list is extendible and can be updated to add new functionality and features.

Since our functionality checklist is specific for Ceph object storage, other cloud object storage may have some more functionality which does not lie in scope of this paper. In future, the authors aim to develop a generic functionality checklist for cloud object storage system. We also propose to prioritize the proposed list.

Fig. 3 .

 3 Fig. 3. Graph showing percentage of checklist used by monitoring software

  Alhamazani et al. 0 discusses methodology to monitor cloud for facilitating automated QoS management; Adinarayan 0 discuss challenges in monitoring private cloud and describe capabilities of IBM SmartCloud monitoring to tackle these challenges. Several frameworks are proposed by researchers for different purposes on monitoring the cloud infrastructure 000. Gogouvitis et al. 0 propose an architectural design and implementation of monitoring solution in context of VISION cloud project. Mdhaffar et al. 0 propose dynamic Complex Event Processing architecture for cloud monitoring and analysis; Uriate and Westphall 0 propose monitoring architecture "Panoptes" for autonomic clouds; Chaves, et al. 0 discuss design and implementation of private cloud monitoring system (PCMONS).

Table 1 .

 1 Background Process FunctionalityAt cluster level, parameters are identified as cluster health status, number and list of monitors, OSDs, pools and PGs in cluster. Detail of each OSD, current epoch, and OSD status can be monitored at OSD level. Pool level parameters are number of PGs in pool, pool is replicated or erasure coded etc. At PG level, parameters define state of PG. Table2lists requirement checklist for storage infrastructure attributes.

	Process	Parameters	Monitor OSD Radosgw
	Heartbeat	OSDs in Up set of a PG	-	✓	-
	Authentication Users with different capabilities	✓	-	-
	Data scrubbing	Type -Light/Deep, frequency, scrub pending, no. of errors	-	✓	-
	Peering	OSDs in Acting set of PG	-	✓	-
		Sync error, incremental sync error, retry
	Data synchronization	wait time/until next sync, object sync timeout, no. of shards to check/failed, no.	-	-	✓
		of items synced successfully/ processed
	Metadata synchronization	Time to wait for bucket log consistency, Error listing metadata	-	-	✓
	Backfilling	Count, frequency, time to wait for retrying	-	✓	-
	Recovering	No. of active recovery request/ recovered chunks, time to delay	-	✓	-

Table 2 .

 2 Storage Infrastructure Attributes

	Level	Parameters
	Cluster	Cluster ID
		Cluster health status
		Number and list of monitors
		Number and list of OSDs
		Number and list of Pools
		Number and list of PGs
	Monitor	Detail -position, name, address, port of monitor
		Current epoch -when map created, last modified
		Status -Running/ not running
		Status of monitor quorum
	OSD	Details -id, weight, type, name
		Current epoch -when map created, last modified
		Status -In/out, up/down
	Pool	Details -Name, Pool ID
		Number and list of PGs
		Replicated/erasure coded
		Cache tiering status
	Placement	Detail -PG ID, PG version, timestamp
	Group	PG state (Creating, Peering,

Table 3 .

 3 Storage Usage Data

	Level/Parameters	Cluster		Pool	PG
	IOPS -read, write	✓		✓	-
	Latency -max., avg., min.	✓		✓	-
	Overall storage capacity	✓		-	✓
	Amount of data stored	Total	&	Notional	Total
		Notional
	Number of objects stored	Total		Notional	-
	Amount of free space available/ used	Total		Notional	Total

Table 5 .

 5 Storage infrastructure, Storage usage, and OS processes case study

	Le	Parameters-	Parameters-	Parameters-	Calamari		Nagios		Collect
	ve	Storage	Storage Usage	OS Processes							D
	l	Infrastructure
	C	ID	IOPS -read, write	CPU Util.	√	√	√	√	x	x	x	√	√
	lu st	Health status	max/avg/min Latency-	Memory Util.	√	x	x	√	x	x	x	√	√
	er	No. & list of	Notional data	Network Util.	√	√	x	√	x	x	√	√	√
		monitors	stored
		No. & list of	No. of objects	-	√	√	-	√	x	-	√	√	-
		OSD	stored
			-	-	√	-	-	√	-	-	√	-	-
		up/down
	P	Name, ID	IOPS -read, write	CPU Util.	√	√	√	x	x	x	x	√	v
	o ol	PGs No. & list of	avg/min Latency -max/	Memory Util.	√	x	x	√	x	x	√	√	√
		Replicate/Eras	Notional data	Network Util.
		ure	stored

No. & list of

Status-in/out,

Pools

Total data stored -


"Banal Nationalism" in Landscape? Simon Roberts

Karine Chambefort-Kay
email: chambefort@u-pec.fr

We English by

Keywords: Simon Roberts, We English, anglicité, identité nationale, nationalisme ordinaire, photographie de paysage, paysage anglais, documentaire collaboratif Simon Roberts, We English, Englishness, national identity, "banal nationalism", landscape photography, English landscape, collaborative documentary

This paper studies the case of a landscape photography project by British photographer Simon Roberts: We Englishthe project comprising the book published by Chris Boot in 2009, exhibitions of the large format prints of the photographs, and the artist's dedicated website with a blog and forum for the public to propose subjects. We address the question of English national identity in Simon Roberts's photos through the concept of "banal nationalism" coined in 1995 by Michel Billig. The first part draws on Billig's thesis that the nation is "flagged" in the most banal everyday environment and activities, and discusses whether Simon Roberts's documentary photographs evidence such subliminal national "flagging". The second part shows the limits of the concept of "banal nationalism" when studying We English because of the complex, collaborative and reflexive nature of the project. By revealing how personal and intertextual references inform both the photographer's and the viewer's perception, the artist documents the dialectical process and negotiations at work in national identification. The third part contends that this dynamic approach of Englishness allows Roberts to propose his own re-imagining of the homeland.

Résumé

Cet article étudie le projet de photographies de paysage intitulé We English réalisé par le photographe anglais Simon Roberts. Ce projet est envisagé comme un ensemble qui comprend le livre publié chez Chris Boot en 2009, des expositions des tirages en grand format et le site internet que lui consacre l'artiste avec un blog et un forum qui a permis au public de suggérer des lieux à photographier. La question de l'identité nationale anglaise dans les photos de Simon Roberts est abordée à l'aune du concept de « nationalisme ordinaire » formulé par Michael Billig en 1995. La première partie de l'étude s'empare de la notion développée par Billig d'un « balisage » de la nation dans l'environnement quotidien ainsi que les activités les plus banales des citoyens, et se demande dans quelle mesure les images de Simon Roberts mettent en évidence un tel « balisage » national subliminal. La deuxième partie montre les limites du concept de « nationalisme ordinaire » concernant l'étude de We English en vertu de la nature complexe, réflexive et collaborative du projet. En révélant comment les références personnelles et l'intertexte influencent à la fois sa perception et celle des spectateurs, le photographe souligne que tout processus d'identification nationale est le produit de négociations et d'une dialectique complexes. La troisième partie conclut qu'une telle approche dynamique de l'identité permet à Simon Roberts de réinventer la nation anglaise.

Plan

Introduction Documenting everyday signs of Englishness "Banal nationalism" as defined by Billig "Metonymic stereotypes" or the check-list approach in We English Typically English features? Identification processes as negotiation Re-imagining the homeland

Introduction

Can elements of English national identity be found in landscape and people's outdoor activities? Can this be rendered through photographs? British photographer Simon Roberts tackles these questions in his project We English -comprising the artist's website, with a blog and forum for the public to propose subjects 1 , the book published by Chris Boot in 2009, and exhibitions of large format prints. The fifty-six photographs result from months of research work and from a five months' road trip around England that the photographer took in a motorhome. Over the whole year, Simon Roberts stopped in selected places to capture a sense of Englishness both in landscape and in people's outdoor activities. The subject matter, plus the travelling mode chosen by the artist, and perhaps the fact that took his two-year-old daughter and pregnant wife along with him on this trip, explain that 54 of the pictures are countryside landscapes: beaches, fields, caravan parks, campsites, villages, hills, rivers and lakes, or castles. These sites are settings for a range of leisure activities which include hiking, paragliding, angling, hunting, bird watching, horseracing, tobogganing, one baffling case of mud-racing, some picnicking, and quite a lot of strolling or relaxing. How can they be related to identification with the national community? Claims of English national identity have been familiar since the late 1990s in Great Britain. There has been a period of unprecedented soul-searching for the English nation under the combined circumstances of globalization, European integration (1992), Scottish and Welsh devolution of powers (1998), the debate on multiculturalism between 2000 and 2010 2 , and the prospect of the referendum on Scottish independence (2014). Such renewed interest in the English nation was epitomized not only by a resurgence of the English flag during the 1998 World Cup, but also by new political and scholarly attention to the question of English identity, culminating in 2003 with the publication of Krishan Kumar's study The Making of English Identity (Kumar, 2003). More recently, emergent English nationalism has also been described as a sort of backlash: a report published by the Institute for Public Policy Research in 2012 was entitled "The Dog that Finally Barked" (Lodge, 2012). Simon Roberts's We English is a photographic contribution to this debate. The topic of English nationalism is broached in a very blunt manner by the cover of We English. It was designed by FUEL, a graphic design company that had also worked on Simon Roberts's previous book on Russia Motherland (2007). It shows a green silhouette of England floating on a greyish background, the colour of the Northern Sea. England is thus quite provocatively represented as a free-standing island. It feels like a truncated version of Britain as Scotland and Wales have been left out of the picture, let alone other British Isles. The green silhouette is overlaid by St George's flag, the national emblem of England. The flag reads WE ENGLISH in black capital letters, which caps the decidedly nationalistic tone of the cover. What we have so far is no "banal nationalism", but overt, explicit nationalism. This imagery, however, was subsequently dropped for the exhibitions of We English in the National Media 1 Long after the end of the road trip and the publication of the book, the blog is still accessible online. It is used to publish information on exhibitions of We English. <http://www.we-english.co.uk/>, last accessed 23 March 2014. 2 As pointed in The Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain (2000), better known as the Parekh report, it was England, really, which was at the heart of the debate on multiculturalism: with 98 % of all black and South Asian people living in England, the question was about the future of multi-ethnic England rather than the Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain: "the key issue is not fundamentally one of British identity. It is one of English identity and how previous conceptions of English identity have excluded so many people who live and richly contribute to English society." (Runnymede Trust, 2000, 8) Museum in Bradford and the Midlands Arts Centre in Birmingham 3 . Besides, on opening the book, one cannot but be struck by the discrepancy between the cover and the general aspect of all fifty-six photographs: quiet luminous large-scale landscapes, which leave the viewer wondering where that nationalism has gone, and scrutinizing banal scenes for answers.

We shall discuss whether Simon Roberts's selection of sites and outdoor activities is a case of "banal nationalism" or perhaps, some other kind of political proposal. The first part of this paper will look at Simon Roberts's project as an attempt to find symbols of nationhood in banalor not so banal -leisure activities. A reading of Michael Billig's Banal Nationalism (1995) will inform this first analysis. Billig's concept of "banal nationalism", however, appears limited and maybe contradictory with the complex, collaborative and reflexive nature of We English. The second part will show how personal and intertextual references are exposed by Simon Roberts to define national identification as a dialectical process. The third part contends that this rather unique approach for a photographic project allows the artist to propose his own re-imagining of the homeland.

Documenting everyday signs of Englishness "Banal nationalism" as defined by Michael Billig

On the 7 th of January 2009, Simon Roberts posted a note on Michael Billig's book, Banal Nationalism, which he read when editing his project. The book is indeed relevant to the topic, as it is a cornerstone for scholarly literature on everyday nationalism. The phrase "banal nationalism" refers to the ways in which a sense of national belonging is sustained through the unnoticed, daily waving of "flags", or "flagging" of discreet symbols of a country. "To enable the established nations of the West to be reproduced […] a whole complex of beliefs, assumptions, habits, representations and practices must also be reproduced." (Billig, 1995, 6) Michael Billig elaborates on the famous concept of "imagined community" coined by Benedict Anderson. He agrees that nationalism implies an everyday identification of the individual with the group. National media and institutions, in particular, allow individuals to imagine a broader community beyond their personal acquaintances. However, Billig departs from Anderson's view when he insists that this routine identification process is mostly unconscious. According to Billig, the term "imagined communities" may be misleading because it implies that identification requires "an act of imagination" while it is "rather a matter of forgetting that we're being constantly reminded of the nation". "The remembering, not being experienced as remembering, is in effect, forgotten", quips Billig. Instead of a process of imagination, banal nationalism involves "a dialectics of forgotten remembrance" (7). From this point of view, national identities are neither a kind of essence nor psychological states: they belong with ideology (24).

A few examples of the nation being explicitly "flagged" are found in We English. In Rushley Hill Caravan Park (Peacehaven, East Sussex), St George's flag is standing right in the middle 3 As confirmed by the artist in an interview with the author (Brighton, July 2012), it was feared that the English flag and the racist overtones it had acquired in the wake of football hooliganism may not be welcome in two towns where ethnic minorities comprise about 40 % of the population (respectively 36.1 % and 46.9 % of the population.

Sources of the frame. A boy's Manchester United shirt can also be considered as a discreet assertion of Englishness. The same goes with the crowd of Sunderland supporters on their way down to the Stadium of Light wearing their team's white and red striped shirts. In the picture of Westward Ho! Karting park, however, it is the Union Jack that is floating rather decoratively along with the chequered black and white flag of car races. Other signs visible in the frame may act as reminders of a national context. By the entrance gate to Lindisfarne Castle, two signs read "National Trust". One of them, though, bears the flag of the European Union which probably funded part of the conservation work. On the picture of Derby Day at Epsom Racecourse (Surrey) people are picnicking by a skip which bears the red, blue and white logo of a company called "Britanniacrest". On the whole, details send mixed messages, pointing in turn to English, British nationality, European membership, or more local forms of belonging. Yet, people are subliminally reminded where they are, and to a certain extent who they are. That is what Michael Billig termed the "homeland deixis"4 .

There may also be some degree of temporal homeland deixis, especially as we are looking at photos of leisure activities mostly performed on weekends and summer holidays. Indeed, periods for vacation are regulated on a national scale, at least for families with children. There is a sense in many pictures that groups of people happen to meet because they share a common temporal organisation. This is more obvious in pictures dedicated to special events like the St George's Day Pageant in Scarborough Castle (North Yorkshire) or The Haxey Hood (Haxey, North Lincolnshire) 5 . What may bind people in a common sense of belonging is their being there on the same day as much as the historical dimension of those events. Thus "homeland deixis", whether visual or temporal, tends to naturalise the nation.

Besides those rather discreet signs, "banal nationalism" operates more obviously through the national features collected by the photographer in We English and re-represented for the public.

"Metonymic stereotypes" and the checklist approach in We English

Simon Roberts's pictures were not taken randomly across England. His trip was carefully planned and well researched as testified by his blog. Indeed, documenting typically English sites and habits means choosing isolated places or moments as representative of a broader ensemble. It implies a double process of selection and exclusion and a form of generalisation and simplification. The nature of the project, consequently, requires some of the "metonymic stereotyp[ing]" (Billig, 102) involved in "flagging the homeland daily". This approach is tantamount to creating a checklist of some sites and habits which encapsulate Englishness. The creation of such a list is a very English occupation in itself. Checklists have been elaborated by many writers and politicians over the years: Stanley Baldwin played the game in the 1920s, then J.B. Priestley and George Orwell, John Betjeman, T.S. Eliot, John Major (partially quoting Orwell), Jeremy Paxman and Kate Fox (Morrisson, 2000, 19).

To use yet another English cliché, we might say that collecting and listing are also an old English habit, of which Martin Parr is a good representative in the world of photography. As he often puts it, England is a nation of train-spotters, bird-spotters (featured in We English), and peak-baggers (as we are reminded by the picture of Scafell Pike Summit). Simon Roberts in turn started his collection of places and moments. It is indeed a collection rather than a proper survey, complete with its rarities and sentimental items. Nevertheless, the consistent style adopted by the photographer -that of the "distant observer" with large-scale views shot from an elevated viewpointis typical of the rigorous, systematic approach of collectors.

Typically English features?

The kind of places and practices photographed by Simon Roberts are not icons of England that a tourist would recognize. For example, Simon Roberts stopped short of including Stonehenge in his tour. He picked the Avebury Stone Circle instead, where he photographed members of the "Human Nature Ritual Art" workshop performing intriguing movements. Yet, all places display supposedly English features, two of which are prominent in the book. First, thirteen pictures out of the fifty-six in We English are seaside pictures. The fact that they are dotted throughout the book is a reminder of the insular nature of England. Wherever you go through the book, or in England, you end up coming across a stretch of coastline. Second, there is a variety of fields, hills and rivers, which all bear the traditional mark of the English landscape, namely the domestication of nature. Hedges, fences, dry stone walls divide space into managed land. Almost every picture in the book contains some form of man-made physical limit, to which the viewer's attention is directed by a picture of Grantchester Meadows where the tiny figure of a jogger is seen climbing over a cattle gate. Similarly, the picture of Bolton Abbey shows stone steps on which visitors cross the river. Even Lingell Fell, in the Wasdale Valley (Cumbria) which appears in the most "sublime" looking picture of the book, is criss-crossed by footpaths.

British land is managed -there is no wilderness; even the coastal littoral is overseen. It follows that landscapes and vistas are human constructs, which means that aesthetic principles, as well as social mores, were and are in play within the actual shaping of land. Pictorial renderings of countryside as pastoral depict Britain as undisturbed and undisturbing, thus contributing to constructing a simplified and benign rural imaginary, to picturing countryside as safe (Wells, 2011, 164).

On the other hand, as far as outdoor activities are concerned, few are specifically English. Except for glimpses of cricket and polo players, or pigeon races, what we see is a lot of picnicking and strolling. Only one picture points to the supposedly English taste for eccentric activities: Mad Maldon Mud Race (River Blackwater, Maldon, Essex). As Simon Roberts insists, "We English is resolutely not a catalogue of quirky pastimes undertaken by eccentrics." (Roberts, 2009, "Commentary", unpaginated) The book focuses on rather routine activities, like walking and sitting outside. It is interesting on that matter to compare We English photographs with some taken in other countries. Massimo Vitali's images of Italian beaches or Alexander Gronsky's pictures of Russian landscapes testify to the universal banality of such pastimes and perhaps to the increasing uniformity of lifestyles across the Western world. So far, Simon Roberts's photographs have been studied for their documentary quality and as empirical material to test Billig's concept of "banal nationalism". The notion has proven helpful in understanding how subliminal signals can be found in the landscapes and outdoor activities and how they frame a sense of national belonging that is both entrenched and mindless. It might be argued, however, that Billig's concept of "banal nationalism" fails to provide clues to how people actually respond to signals. The re-production of the nation seems to proceed from an ongoing scheme of a sort with the institutions and the media sending subliminal messages to the population. The notion of "forgotten remembrance" allows little enquiry into the ways such messages are appropriated by individuals. What is more, it is questionable whether "forgotten remembrance" is a satisfactory notion to study any photographic project, as photography is by nature an act of remembrance. Indeed, by the means of photography, cases of "flagging the nation" can be exposed, and thus become remembered. We will now argue that there is more to Simon Roberts's project than a mere catalogue of explicit or implicit signs of Englishness. We English also reflects on how the nation is both re-presented to people and received by them. We will show that the reflexive quality of the project allows the photographer to shift ground beyond traditional documentary.

National identification as a negotiation process

The collaborative dimension of Simon Roberts's project evidences that choosing typically English places and outdoor activities requires negotiation. The photographer decided to ask the public to participate in the selection process by posting suggestions on his website for places and events to photograph. "It struck me as a suitably democratic way of working" comments Simon Roberts, "positioning me as it did alongside my fellow countrymena citizen, not just an onlookerand attempting to involve people, to a certain degree in their own representation." The project thus acquired a participative dimension. It earned even more publicity as The Times Week-end Supplement had arranged with Simon Roberts to publish his whereabouts and one picture every week. In the end, more than 800 posts were collected through the photographer's blog, some of them containing whole lists of potential subjects. Simon Roberts then had to negotiate between his own ideas and those of the public.

What contributors to the website suggested were a number of places significant to them in many different ways: either because they evoked personal childhood memories, or because they were historical places, or because they were associated with previous pictorial representations, like Constable picturesque or Turner-like seascape or pastoral scenes. Some suggestions were reminiscent of the 1940s English checklists. As contributors sometimes tried to justify their choices, places and events were consciously recalled as personal or cultural references.

Parallel to this, Simon Roberts had to deal with his own personal complex network of cultural references, personal memories and desires. He used his blog to share those with the public and to provide some intertexts for his photographs. For example, the picture of children tobogganing on the 17 th hole of Tandridge Golf Club nods to the days when the photographer went tobogganing in the exact same place as a child. The invisible intertext here is a family photograph. In another instance, Simon Roberts actually posted one of his own family pictures from the eighties on the blog. Paintings, of course, are also crucial references. The photographer comments that the picture of Derby Day is "[his] own recreation of Frith's scene". Similarly, he finds in his picture of 'The Hood' that "the landscape is Constable-esque with the church spire, flat horizon and rolling skies." (Roberts, 2009, "Commentary", unpaginated) Studying landscape painting was central to the photographer's preparatory work, with special attention to Constable's landscapes. Once more, all this is revealed via the blog, with Simon Roberts posting shots of his notebook with personal thoughts on Constable's paintings.

Finally, intertextual references are photographic: Simon Roberts is aware that many British photographers have tackled similar topics or have even shot the same places. Typically, the photo of the kids playing among litter on Blackpool beach echoes Martin Parr's series The Last Resort (1983). Perhaps the picture of the gate to Lindisfarne Castle with the black lady standing in the middle of the frame will appear to some viewers as a sort of sequel to Ingrid Pollard's series Pastoral Interlude (1988). The list could be extended back to the early days of British photography, with The English at Home (1936) by Bill Brandt as a landmark. Interestingly, Simon Roberts has engaged in producing a "Photographic Timeline" of "works which have explored notions of the English landscape and Englishness" on his We English website. Here again, in line with the artist's collaborative approach, the public is invited to add names and works to the list. Nowadays, several years after the book was published, the list is still being continued. Therefore, We English as a project lives long after the pictures were taken. It points to the fact that viewing pictures involves a constant flux of intertextual references and that defining Englishness through observing the landscape in nature or in pictures is an ongoing process.

Thus, a vast framework of references is the backbone of the whole project, and it is made visible through various devices. Simon Roberts opts for transparency on the genealogy of his pictures and on his authorial choices. He questions himself and his audience on the cultural filters and the modes of perception that inform their understanding of landscape. Therefore it is crucial to take into account the whole project, that is, to include both the blog and the pictures in our analysis to appreciate the full scope and impact of We English. Beyond merely documenting the English outdoors, Simon Roberts reveals the different ways in which people connect with the landscape both in nature and in pictures. He offers an insight into the mechanisms through which the national community is constantly re-created in landscape, showing that everything is negotiated individually and collectively. This emphasis on dynamics and dialectics is a departure from Billig's "banal nationalism" which tends to consider the re-presentation and repetition of nationalism as a mainly ideological, top-down process. Contrary to this, We English points to the more complex and "embedded" aspects of national recognition (Hearn, 2007). This dialectical and dynamic definition of nationhood suggests that it is not merely imposed from out thereor up there, for that matterand that it can also be imagined from below. From this, We English can also be considered as Simon Roberts's own proposal for reimagining the homeland.

Re-imagining the homeland

Let us go back to Billig's criticism of Anderson's concept of "imagined community": Benedict Anderson's idea of the nation as an "imagined community" is a useful startingpoint for examining these themesat least, so long as it is realized that the imagined community does not depend upon continual acts of imagination for its existence. Once nations are established, and nationalism becomes banal, the poets are typically replaced by prosaic politicians and the epic ballads by government reports. The imagined community ceases to be reproduced by acts of the imagination. In established nations, the imagination becomes enhabited, and, thereby, inhibited. In this sense, the term "imagined community" may be misleading. The community and its place are not so much imagined, but their absence becomes unimaginable (Billig, 1995, 70).

Billig suggests that "banal nationalism" inhibits imagination because of its ideological nature. I will now suggest that the reflexive nature of Simon Roberts's project as a wholethat is, including the blog, the research, the collaborative dimension and the commentary in the booktends on the contrary to release or re-activate imagination. Far from retreating into a form of Little Englandism, Simon Roberts proposes his own re-writing of the national frame. Our contention is that the "Englishness" that is sketched throughout the book comes out as a social project, offering new models of cohesion. Therefore, after asking "what and where is the nation", then "how is the nation produced and sustained?" One last question is: "what is the nation for?" As shown by Jonathan Hearn, "the language of national identity is engaged by persons seeking more control over their social environment." Such symbolic resources are mobilized and questioned because they seem to "illuminate struggles for control over one's more immediate social environment" (Hearn, 2007, 670). Our reading of Simon Roberts's images is that they are perhaps more political than they seem to be at first.

The photographer brings about the question of national identity to develop a narrative of social cohesion, openness, and conviviality. Indeed, most of the pictures in We English were taken in public places. Most of the activities that are represented are collective. People stroll and stop for a chat, as in the photograph taken near Dunstanburgh Castle in Embleton, Northumberland. The general atmosphere in the pictures is relaxed. As a whole, the project seems to articulate a new mode of collective identification based on a shared experience of place. This is the last but not least case of "national deixis" in We English. After all, there is a good chance that quite a few people in the pictures may not be English at all. Perhaps daring foreign tourists? Or visiting Scots? By an unnoticed deixis, both the photographer and viewers take it for granted that the people out there are English. In fact it does not matter because they are just there, sharing the experience of leisure and place. Thus, new emphasis is placed on territory and on the ways people interact both with the landscape and with one another. Although cultural references have been shown to play a central part in Simon Roberts's exploration of English national identity, they seem to recede somehow in the photographs to foreground a new vision of England as a convivial, open society. Such a vision of the homeland breaks with the traditional view of England, and particularly of rural England, as a closed, stratified, ethnocentric society. Indeed, it has often been argued that a postmodern, multicultural, open nation could only be modelled on urban communities like London. It has even been suggested that the national idea should be abandoned altogether and replaced by an urban cosmopolitan model. For instance, Kevin Robins once noted that "London has generally been left out of discussions of the national culture and identityas if London were not properly, or purely enough, or manageably enough, British (or English, at that)." Robins proposed "a shift of focus, and to move from the national frame to an urban frame", arguing that cosmopolitan London, as "a plane of singularities, and of open sets of interactions and relations", offers new models of social cohesion and belonging (Robins, 2001, 473-93.) This postmodern vision forgoes the nation and tends to favour placeless, interacting communities instead. Similarly, Paul Gilroy calls for "conviviality", which he defines as "the processes of cohabitation and interaction that have made multiculture an ordinary feature of social life in Britain's urban areas and in postcolonial cities elsewhere" (Gilroy, 2005, xv).

Simon Roberts somewhat reverses that proposal by choosing to focus mostly on rural areas and by insisting on a sense of place, on a new kind of anchorage, or a form of reterritorialisation. Some critics objected to his project by saying that it delivered a romantic, outdated vision of rural England and that it failed to acknowledge the overbearing weight of London in terms of demographics and economic activity6 . I would suggest that, on the contrary, We English offers a renewed vision of England. New forms of cohesion and belonging are evidenced, but they are not exclusively found in urban areas. Simon Roberts does not reject the national frame, but reinvents it, by revealing the interactions and relations involved in national identification. The photographs of We English and the whole project actually display the openness of conviviality, which "makes a nonsense of closed, fixed and reified identity and turns attention toward the always unpredictable mechanisms of identification" (Gilroy, 2005, xvi). The nation is re-imagined through a new, dynamic, open vision of England.

It is worth noticing by the way that many signs in the pictures actually refer to American identity and culture: the bright yellow ice-cream van in Blackgang Chine Viewpoint reads "Uncle Sam's" while other vans in Epsom Downs Racecourse sell "Hot Dogs and Burgers". Thus "banal" English nationalism can hardly be found in such details.

"Every year, villagers in Westwoodside and Haxey compete for possession of 'the Hood'. The custom began after a certain Lady de Mowbray was out riding her horse one day, and a sudden gust of wind blew her hat off. The local farm labourers chased after it, and Lady de Mowbray was so pleased to get her hat back that she named the person who returned it to her 'The Lord of the Hood.' The event takes place on the Twelfth Night of Christmas in a field in Haxey, Lincolnshire, and it is believed to be England's oldest traditional tussle."(Simon Roberts, 2009, "Commentary", unpaginated.)

See the discussion on We English on the Flickr forum dedicated to documentary photography. Discussing Simon Roberts -« We English » slideshow in HCSP (Hardcore Street Photography), Flickr [Web] <http://www.flickr.com/groups/onthestreet/discuss/72157621992737841/#comment72157622002862193> (last accessed 16 June 2011).

Bibliography

, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London, Verso. BILLIG, Michael (1995), Banal Nationalism, London, Sage Publications. DANIELS, Stephen (1993), Fields of Vision: Landscape Imagery and National Identity in England and the United States, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. FOX, J.E. and C. MILLER-IDRISS (2008), "Everyday nationhood", Ethnicities, vol. 8, n o 4, pp. 536-563. GILROY, Paul (2004), After Empire: Multiculture or Postcolonial Melancholia, London: Routledge. HEARN, Jonathan (2007), "National Identity: Banal, Personal, Embedded", Nations and Nationalism, vol. 13, n o 4, pp. 657-674. KUMAR, Krishan (2003), The Making of English National Identity, Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press. LODGE, Guy (2012), The Dog that Finally Barked: England as an Emerging Political Community, Institute for Public Policy Research. MARTIGNY, Vincent (2010), « Penser le nationalisme ordinaire », Raisons politiques, n° 37, pp. 5-15. MORLEY, David and ROBINS, Kevin (eds.) (2001), British Cultural Studies: Geography, Nationality, and Identity, Oxford: Oxford University Press. MORRISSON, Blake (2000), "England at Sea", Independent on Sunday, 27 August. ROBERTS, Simon and DANIELS, Stephen (2009), We English, London: Chris Boot.

Notice biographique

Biographical information

Karine Chambefort-Kay is the author of a PhD thesis entitled "Photographic Narratives of Collective Identities: Class, Ethnicity and Nation in British photography, 1990-2010" She teaches at Université Paris Est Créteil and is a member of the research group CIMMA/ IMAGER. Her research interests include the various social uses of images in British contemporary culture, and the issues of collective identity and memory.