Denis Halliday, the UN humanitarian coordinator, who later resigned in protest, called the sanctions regime against Iraq ‘genocidal’. When asked by 60 Minutes correspondent Lesley Stahl if the deaths of nearly 500,000 Iraqi children was worth it, the then US Ambassador to the UN, Madeleine Albright, replied ‘We think the price is worth it.” Details »
The Spinning Head
A Photographer Confronts His World
Where The Head Spun July 4th 2010
It is American independence day, so lets celebrate:
A Harvard Kennedy School study has confirmed what we all already suspected; that when it comes to torture we are more likely to call it torture when others do it, and something obfuscatory when we do it. The conclusion of the report was pretty well clear:
The New York Times called waterboarding torture or implied it was torture in just 2 of 143 articles (1.4%). The Los Angeles Times did so in 4.8% of articles (3 of 63). The Wall Street Journal characterized the practice as torture in just 1 of 63 articles (1.6%). USA Today never called waterboarding torture or implied it was torture. In addition, the newspapers are much more likely to call waterboarding torture if a country other than the United States is the perpetrator. Details »
Digressions On Photojournalism Or Why I Argue What I Argue
…the plain reportorial style coerces history, process, knowledge itself into mere events being observed. Out of this style has grown the eye-witness, seemingly opinion-less politics – along with its strength and weakness – of contemporary Western journalism. When they are on the rampage, you show Asiatic and African mobs rampaging; an obviously disturbing scene presented by an obviously concerned reporter who is beyond Left piety or right-wing cant. But are such events events only when they are show through the eyes of the decent reporter? Must we inevitably forget the complex reality that produced the event just so that we can experience concern at mob violence? Is there to be no remarking of the power that put the reporter or analyst there in the first place and made it possible to represent the world as a function of comfortable concern? Is it not intrinsically the case that such a style is far more insidiously unfair, so much more subtly dissembling of its affiliations with power, than any avowedly political rhetoric?
Edward Said on George Orwell, “Tourism
Among The Dogs”, Reflections On Exile, Page 97
This is an essay about photography and photojournalism. It will, for the most part, not sound like an essay about photojournalism but I ask for your patience and a moment of close reading. Details »
Hey Buddy, Hold That Execution While My Memory Card Reformats Or What Does It Take Before Something Can Be Called A Story
Photographer Marco Vernaschi has gotten himself into quicksand, and taken the otherwise respectable Pulitzer Center On Crisis Reporting with him. And all I can think about are the forces, commercial and personal, that compel individuals to transgress boundaries of common decency, and institutions that celebrate these by publishing them.
Marco Vernaschi recently published a piece on the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting’s Untold Stories site about child sacrifice rituals in Uganda. When I first saw the piece I was left unmoved and frankly uninterested. The writing itself was uninteresting, and the photography – black and white pictures stylized, manipulated and otherwise manufactured to suggest ‘menace’, ‘evil darkness’, and ‘nightmares’, seemed only to be the latest in a long heritage of photographers trawling Africa for their piece of the continent’s apparently rich buffet table of the ‘demonic’, ‘diabolical’, ‘devilish’, ‘maniacal’ and otherwise deranged and deviant.
What in fact did surprise me about the work was that the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting was supporting and funding it. The work, and the photographer, just seemed a bit too over-the-top, too sensationalist and titillating and hence incongruent with so much of the rest of what the Pulitzer Center typically sponsored and supported. But I just dismissed my response as uninformed and moved on. Details »
The Strange Silence Of The Conscience
The New York Review of Books recently published an excerpt from Tony Judts new bookk Ill Fares The Land. Judt has been perhaps the most articulate voice speaking out against the poverty of imagination that has paralyzed our nation and left so many American’s in social, health, educational and economic deprivation. A state of affairs that would have been the scandal of any civilized, modern, just nation, but that in our American today barely seems to find mention in the corridors of power or the glitzy pages of our iPad-ready news publications.
In a version of the essay published on PULSE the excerpt includes some fascinating visual representation of our state of affairs. I reprint them here for your convenience.
His conclusions were heart breaking:
There has been a collapse in inter-generational mobility: in contrast to their parents and grandparents, children today in the UK as in the US have very little expectation of improving upon the condition into which they were born. The poor stay poor. Economic disadvantage for the overwhelming majority translates into ill health, missed educational opportunity, and—increasingly—the familiar symptoms of depression: alcoholism, obesity, gambling, and minor criminality. The unemployed or underemployed lose such skills as they have acquired and become chronically superfluous to the economy. Anxiety and stress, not to mention illness and early death, frequently follow.
Pointing out with his characteristic clarity that:
Inequality is corrosive. It rots societies from within. The impact of material differences takes a while to show up: but in due course competition for status and goods increases; people feel a growing sense of superiority (or inferiority) based on their possessions; prejudice toward those on the lower rungs of the social ladder hardens; crime spikes and the pathologies of social disadvantage become ever more marked. The legacy of unregulated wealth creation is bitter indeed.
As I scanned these statistic, and read Tony Judt’s words, moved as I was by their sense of urgency and sheer call to common humanity, I was struck by the fact that most all of this is completely absent from the works being produced by the best and the brightest of our photojournalists and photo agencies. I guess what I mean is; why isn’t this the most important photojournalism story of the last few years?
As I look across the recent photojournalism awards, and scan for works in newspaper websites, I see a dearth of serious and committed interest in the hollowing out of America. There are a few stories here and there, a large number based on news reports about the health care debate and the foreclosure crisis. Matt Black has been working away with his usual tenacity and dedication. But this is far, far more than about a news blip, or a protest march, or the foreclosure of a home or two. It is about a fundamental surrender of government and national responsibility towards the very citizens both are supposed to serve. It’s about finding ourselves in this strange, irresponsible, unconscionable and immoral place in history where we can approve billions for foreign wars – illegal, unjust and paranoid as they are, and yet fight tooth and nail to stop even pennies for the care of our own.
I see the statistics above, and I see the silence all around. And I ask why?
UPDATE: Anthony Suau. Why does that not surprise me. It turns out that Anthony Suau has been working on different aspects of this story and you can see some of that work on his archive site US Economy 2008 2009. I have written about Anthony in an earlier piece called Anthony Suau: Quiet, Serious, Profilic, Focused
Condemned To Obscurity Or A Personal Perspective On The iPad
Well, not strictly. Just a short statement of dissent against all the toy-obsessed hacks insisting that the iPad changes everything. Much like they insisted earlier that the iWhatever would change everything.
The writer Thomas Hettche recentl said something that struck a chord:
Why are people so keen to convince writers to use new media formats? We don’t write novels, poems, plays, essays due to a lack of imagination about what other forms are out there; to the contrary, we do it because we are convinced of being able to communicate in precisely that way something that can only be communicated in that way, and that is something which will silence the racket across all the media channels. Literature is about beauty, which language only reveals when, in rigor, passion, rage or ardor, you place yourself completely at its mercy as a writer or reader. If you do this, you have nothing to gain from the attention scattered across so many channels.
I think that his words are relevant to any act of individual creativity – literary, visual or other.
There are unexamined assumptions of speed, access, visibility and technical sophistication that distract from the very craft that we pursue. Beneath all this are the engines of profiteering and selling ,busily and desperately attempting to convince us that this next ‘product’ will ‘solve’, ‘improve’, ‘resolve’, ‘transform’, ‘revolutionize’, ‘change the game’ and what not.
It will not.
What I love about Hettche’s statement is the underlying idea of resistance to these market-business driven forces of ‘modernity’ and ‘revolution’. The idea that today, human agency, independence, and in fact, human liberty is in arenas away from the technically modern and towards the seemingly anachronistic world where not tools or toys but ideas, thoughts, and human values remain at the center. That is, choosing not to go ‘digital’ or ‘adopt’ the coolest new technical product, is an act of resistance to corporate forces that spend hundreds of millions on trying to convince us to do otherwise. It is a small attempt to stay focused on individual agency and voice, to avoid being drowned under the endless requirements of ‘upgrades’, and ‘updates’ and ‘versions’ and ‘releases’. It is to hold onto one’s sense of one’s human faculties – ideas, ideals, insights, understandings, thoughts, emotions, sensibilities, and values and retain them as paramount. It is to always use the tool to suit the inspiration, and to never allow the tool to dictate the inspiration.
It reminded me something that David Foster Wallace once said:
Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship… is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things…then you will never have enough…Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you….Worship power – you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart – you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.…And the world will not discourage you from [this form of worship], because the world of men and money and power hums along quite nicely on the fuel of fear and contempt and frustration and craving and the worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom to be lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation
As I scroll through the many online photography publications, and their tiresome and uninteresting multi-media productions, I feel a dearth of ideas, a lack of individual thought all being suffocated by the desire to appear ‘new’, ‘cool’, ‘of now’, ‘in the know’, ‘up with the technical’, ‘using the newest’. I see stories designed for ‘consumption’, aimed at the sell, easily digested, never controversial, rarely insightful, always predictable, and most each time, repetitive. I have a headache.
Six months from now this iPad will not be good enough. Today Apple calls it ‘the revolution’, but in six months as a new version arrives, and Apple will tell you that the original was not ‘good enough’ but the newest one will be the bee’s knees. Today, this toy is the ‘must have’ and tomorrow the same company will produce another and tell you the many limitations of the original that now can only be overcome with the latest.
We seem to fall for it every time.
The noise is beginning to give me a headache. Photography blog sites are discussing the iPad and its implications for the future of photography. It being posited as the best portfolio presentation tool available. The future. The platform for which all our works will now have to be produced. The magazines have released savvy, glitzy new applications – and each costs money, and locks you into what it wants to sell. The advertisements featured in these iPad-specific versions of the magazines look incredibly spectacular, and are mostly more arresting than the content. Pretty soon, photojournalists will be producing work that once again will look like the advertisements and dance and sing like them too!
I can’t find the individual in these works, but I can see savvy, marketing, placement, promotion, careerism, and the pursuit of that most sought after of trinkets; fame. Maybe that is my underlying fear; the loss of individuality, and individual thought. Of course, I understand that there are independent voices and commercial voices and that it makes no sense to speak about photography as a uniform field of creation. For some, the medium is the message, while for others, the message is the message. I realize that the latter are probably committing suicide.
I also see that many professional photojournalists are actually commercial photographers – their clients being the corporate newspaper publishers, their product the wars, pathologies, issues of concern being asked for by the media institutions. Not much of a difference there – they are just hawking the same products on the pages of the magazines. And no doubt, there are days when I so want it as well – the fame, the name. But each time I step towards it I get a headache. I want to be modern, cool, in the know, and of the moment. My ego strives to be ‘recognized’, appreciated and considered amongst the relevant. I want to be more ‘professional’, better ‘packaged’, more succinct and presentable.
Yet I cringe when I realize the price I must pay and I falter at the doorsteps of magazine editors, stutter during discussions of ‘hot’ and ‘popular’ stories that I think will sell, remain silent about the personally exciting ones that I know will be met with derision, trip over purchasing technical toys that can transport me into the world of the modern digital photographer. People see me as old-fashioned, somehow out of touch and intentionally difficult. But they are wrong. I crave not the trappings of modern possessions, but the possession of modern thoughts and ideas. The latter I can’t reveal on the slide show option of the iPad. I can only do it in a face-to-face conversation, and these are harder to come by. There is no time away from the iPad!
Am I condemned to conventionality, predictability and popularity?
Or am I condemned in my anachronism to obscurity and irrelevance?
How To Take Photos Of Africa Or Where Intent And Ideas Collide
Binyanvanga Wainaina’s essay How to Write About Africa remains one of the most powerfully insightful criticism and accusation of the continued dehumanization and oppression of Africa and Africans that continues in modern day language, photography, fine art, literature, poetry and the stultifying and lobotomizing rhetoric of so-called aid organizations and their employees.
It was an essay that stopped me in my tracks and forever changed the way I looked at Africa as a photographer and as a viewer of photography from the continent. It was also the essay that led me to search out more interesting, complex and human works from and about that continent. Details »
Proving The Wrong Point With The Wrong Arguments Or How Photography Competition Juries Harp On The Trivial While Ignoring The Egregious
There is a new tempest in a teacup, but ironically its the wrong tempest! A major award competition has had to ‘disqualify’ one of the winning works, and you can follow their thinking here:
This was the original photograph submitted to a competition:
From which the talented photographer, cropped, color converted, burned & dodged, erased and re-aligned to create this:
Individualism vs. Individuality: A Photographer’s Work Reminds Us Of The Difference
I recently came across the works (thanks to (Notes On) Politics, Theory & Photography) of a photographer by the name of Gregory Halpern. I had never heard of him before, but that is a failure on my part.
I was recently talking to some young photographer’s at a South Asia symposium at Tuft’s University and one of them asked me what kinds of photographers I admire. My response was simple; those who allow their individual intelligence and opinions to come across in their works and photographs.
Such is the works of Gregory Halpern, particularly this gentle, human and beautifully produced piece of work on Harvard University’s staff called Living Wage Campaign
http://www.gregoryhalpern.com/harvard.html
Cutting Past The Bravado And Recognizing Reality
The tremendous development of photojournalism has contributed practically nothing to the revelation of the truth about conditions in this world. On the contrary photography, in the hands of the bourgeoisie, has become a terrible weapon against the truth. The vast amount of pictured material that is being disgorged daily by the press and that seems to have the character of truth serves in reality only to obscure the facts. The camera is just as capable of lying as the typewriter” – Bertolt Brecht,1931, in Kahn, Heartfield: Art & Mass Media
You can see George Gittoes disturbing film called Soundtrack To War here (both the quote above and the movie is thanks to James Pomerantz interesting blog site A Photo Student):
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