The Spinning Head

Please read my introduction post Photojournaliam, Advocacy And Eurocentrism: An Introduction before continuing reading the post here.

Part 1 of this 5-part series is here: Photojournaliam, Advocacy And Eurocentrism – Part 1: There Is No Other But Us

Part 2 of this 5-part series if here: Photojournaliam, Advocacy And Eurocentrism – Part 2: Angel of Mercy, Have Mercy!

Part 3 of this 5-part series if here: Photojournaliam, Advocacy And Eurocentrism – Part 3: A World Very Small.

Part 4 of this 5-part series if here: Photojournaliam, Advocacy And Eurocentrism – Part 3: Witness To The World.

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The Burden Of Proof

I have been a witness, and these pictures are my testimony. The events I have recorded should not be forgotten and must not be repeated

James Nachtwey, a Time Magazine contract photographer for the last 29 years.

We’ve made the mistake of resenting business people. Government response to HIV has been nothing less than shameful, genocidal in some countries. The business community has stepped in, providing research, providing retroviral drugs because they can see that if they don’t do something their labour force is history. They’re making a practical business decision which has lead to an improved understanding of humanistic values. I want to work with that community, so I’ve been working with the Global Business Coalition, an organisation that includes the 400 most powerful companies in the world. I also work with government think tanks.

Brent Stirton, interview with the British Journal of Photography, 7 September 2008

Photojournalism has always claimed for itself a humanitarian and socially concerned imperative. Photojournalism is perhaps one of the few endeavors that is always being asked to justify itself and its practitioners are constantly in the search of, or claiming, motivations and intentions that go beyond the creation of the practice’s artifacts: photographs, recorded / written / oral testimonies, and/or individual experiences. That is, photojournalists are expected to explain the human, social and political value of their work if they are to be taken seriously as ‘photojournalists’. Many speak like prophets while doggedly remaining employed by corporate media, and as a result, locked into the assumptions and priorities of a corporate, neoliberal world order. It can not only seriously distort their reading of history, but trap them in ways of thinking that seem very appropriate from the comfortable confines of the corporate boardroom. This pressure to ‘justify’ comes at the silencing of the personal and the human with a rare photojournalism arguing that her work is simply a pursuit of the creative, a need to satisfy a personal curiosity, a desire to express a point of view, or even just the desire to be published. The photojournalist, or concerned photographer, must almost always speak in moral and humanitarian voice, always be ‘in the service of the other’ – giving voice to the voiceless, a witness, a spokesperson against human suffering – a prophet. Details »

Please read my introduction post Photojournaliam, Advocacy And Eurocentrism: An Introduction before continuing reading the post here.

Part 1 of this 5-part series is here: Photojournaliam, Advocacy And Eurocentrism – Part 1: There Is No Other But Us

Part 2 of this 5-part series if here: Photojournaliam, Advocacy And Eurocentrism – Part 2: Angel of Mercy, Have Mercy!

Part 3 of this 5-part series if here: Photojournaliam, Advocacy And Eurocentrism – Part 3: A World Very Small.

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Witness To The World

We should admit…that power produces knowledge (and simply by encouraging it because it serves or by applying it because it is useful); that power and knowledge directly imply one another; that there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitution at the same time power relations. These ‘power-knowledge relations are to be analyzed, there, not on the basis of a subject of knowledge who is or is not free in relations to the power system, but, on the contrary, the subject who knows, the objects to be known and the modalities of knowledge must be regarded as so many efforts of these fundamental implications of power-knowledge and their historical transformations. In short, it is not the activity of the subject of knowledge that produces a corpus of knowledge, useful or resistant to power, but power-knowledge, the processes and struggles that traverse it and which it is made up, that determines the forms and possible domains of knowledge.

Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish, Page 28

It is a myth that refuses to die – the photojournalist as individual hero. The myth is renewed repeatedly each year in dozens of books, newspaper and magazine articles, exhibitions, and public statements by members of the photojournalism community including the photojournalists themselves – individual photographers spend consider effort on projecting an image of themselves as the last heroes of our times. We love our heroes and it has always perplexed me why this myth is so essential to the West for it does not exist in the same intensity elsewhere. The idea of the ‘witness to suffering’ clearly has a pedigree in Europe’s civilizing mission and sense of moral responsibility towards the world’s lesser people. So much of what still passes for photojournalist work retains within it the ethics and ethos of the white man’s burden. The photojournalist – the moral voice, the visual outrage, the photographic conscience as embodied in the public rhetoric of the near-saint-like James Nachtwey or Time Hetherington, is quite a sight to behold. And the photographer’s own sense of their righteous mission, and the allure of their swagger is in itself quite interesting. This was captured beautifully in a statement that Emphas.is founder Karim Ben Khelifa made, arguing that photojournalists had a certain allure, and that:

We have a romanticism around our profession. We realized that our work isn’t the end product, but how we got to it. This is what we expect to monetize.

The photojournalist as the individual hero – the myth underpins most all articles and exhibitions that feature photojournalism and war photography. Details »

For the last few years some of the most influential voices in photojournalism have spent their time making a strong argument for the revolutionary possibilities of phone photography, and iPhone™ photography in particular. Some have referred to it as an entirely new way of experiencing the world, others have spoken about it as a new form a photography – quantum photography, and other ‘famous’ photographers have criticized those who have been arguing against the trend of using such software as Instagram™ and Hipstamatic™ – tools available for phone photography.  And others who repeatedly argued that today … everyone is a photographer.

On the other side, magazines and editors have repeated featured and celebrated the increasing use of the iPhone™ to produce serious photojournalism works. Some have called for us to accept an entirely new economics of the iPhone based photography approach. There was all the excitement about the use of an iPhone™ image on the cover of Time Magazine going so far as to argue:

If there was still any debate about whether serious photojournalism can take place in the context of camera phones and cutesy retro filters, it’s over now.

There were repeatedly publications of the work of the photojournalist Ben Lowy (see two examples here, and here ), and the work of Michael Christopher-Brown’s iPhone™ images even making into the haloed pages of National Geographic magazine – that holy grail of anyone pursuing serious photography and photojournalism. And the front page of the New York Times.

So it was with some surprise that the decision by the Chicago Sun-Times to fire its entire photography deparment and train their writers to use of devices like the iPhone to produce visual content for the newspaper. was met with anger, and confusion. Details »

Please read my introduction post Photojournaliam, Advocacy And Eurocentrism: An Introduction before continuing reading the post here.

Part 1 of this 5-part series is here: Photojournaliam, Advocacy And Eurocentrism – Part 1: There Is No Other But Us

Part 2 of this 5-part series if here: Photojournaliam, Advocacy And Eurocentrism – Part 2: Angel of Mercy, Have Mercy!

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A World Really Small

I’m generally in favor of interesting people in important subjects that they wouldn’t otherwise hear about (which this does), but I am strongly against simplifying things for advocacy purposes (coltan in electronics is only an issue in other countries because it is outsiders connection to the conflict – there are many other things that people fight over – land, cows, petrol, fishing rights, for example – that have nothing to do with the world market and so advocacy groups don’t focus on them)

Ben Rawlence, author of Radio Congo:Signals of Hope In Africa’s Deadliest War, in a personal email exchange

The previous post focused on the role of the NGO in the communities they work in and this should be better understood. This post focuses on the factors that can limit the world view of an NGO that if thoughtlessly adopted by the photographer can seriously imepede meaningful acts of advocacy and change.

The world as seen from the gated, guarded and high-security compound of an international aid organization is a very small one. The view from within it is prioritized around the issues, objectives and goals of the aid organization itself, and that these, more likely than not, are quite far removed from the social, political, cultural and economic complexities that inform conflicts or catastrophes like famine, pestilence or disease. In fact, one could argue that an unthinking reliance on the NGO or aid organization can limit a photographer’s understanding not only about the reality of the issue she is covering, but also about how best to go about advocating for change. Details »