The Picture isn't Everything

The earthquake from Nepal has been on the local news and it's all about Bath residents phoning home to say they're safe. There was a live report from someone's front room supposedly showing the mother getting the son's safety message. Now they're arriving home and the cameras at the airports

On the national news it's all been about Everest and reports about how many Britons are still missing and first-hand accounts. From a UK perspective Nepal is all mountains and trekking, probably because when people from the UK go to Nepal that's what they do for the most part.

It's a lazy manufacturing of empathy through choosing experiences we can easily understand - because we know people who have gone trekking, or stayed in a hotel in Kathmandu, or been in a restaurant. It's condescending really, and lazy, a general failure to frame what the earthquake might mean to such a rural, mountainous, landlocked, infrastructure-free nationand the people who live there.

But manufacturing a story within a familiar framework is what it's all about.  We've just had the alive-after-5-days story and we can await the inevitable person-rescued-after-10-days narrative to pop up. And it will be uplifting and bring tears to the eyes, but really... Nepal, China, Haiti, Turkey, Pakistan, they're almost interchangeable. I can't tell them apart anymore.

The need of a tale of salvation or redemption has almost become a condition of any disaster. The sickly tsunami film, The Impossible,  does this. When I watched it, despite my better judgement, that story of family salvation against all the odds got the tear ducts going. The rabidly conservative Bambi/Private Health Care subtexts were another matter and all part of what made it such an objectionable film. But the salvation was the thing, and for saps like me, it worked.

One disaster that lacked that redemption was the most spectacular one of all, 911. Here the spectacle conquered all. And, from my distant emotionally uninvolved point of view, still does.

It seemed like there was an attempt to reclaim the humanity from the spectacle through the identification and beafication of the Falling Man (or the passengers and crew of Flight 93). But it never quite worked or if it did, it was only temporary. Instead the pictures of these horrors became part of the spectacle and never quite escaped it.

It's always a problem for 911, that for all the heroics and the bravery, you never escape the fact that it looks exactly like a disaster movie complete with panicking city dwellers running while casting glances back over their shoulders.

There were objections to the Falling Man picture and it's not shown anywhere near as often as it once was. Nor are the clips of distant people jumping, nor is any of it.

But these objections are selective. Jumping pictures are thick on the ground in the history of photography (this Brussels fire and the Boston fire escape collapse.and here's the Budapest suicide and there's Okinawa...) and if it's not press photos of people jumping, then it's art projects with people jumping or looking like they're jumping. It's a short cut to a belly swirl.

And most of the time we see people jumping, it's a kind of photographic rubber necking. It doesn't really touch me or move me but I look all the same - it's like looking at a car crash. Perhaps we should drop the pretence of ethics and just admit it for what a lot of photography is; photographic rubber-necking, where there's no claim to empathy, or evidence or mourning. I find that preferable to hypocritical and selective hand-wringing.

The manufacturing of hope through generic survival tales is close to rubber necking, but maybe more objectionable. It gives us the ability to experience empathy and get tears in our eyes without making any leap of the imagination into what has really happened. It is applying a Hollywood narrative to a global disaster and making it generic.

I wonder if the real horror memory of the Twin Towers wasn't something that was seen (the visuals were spectacular and I still can't take my eyes off them even now - in the same way I can't take my eyes off tsunami footage). The real horror of 911 did come from those jumping off the towers, but it wasn't the images of the people falling that got me, but the sound of those poor people hitting the glass and the ground. There was nothing Disaster movie about that, it was far too physical and violent and real and it sent shivers down my spine even though not a body was too be seen.

Pictures are never everything. Something else might tell the story better.

Maybe that's the case in Nepal, but what that something else is there I don't really know. Like I don't really know anything about what happened there 5 days ago or what is happening there now. The story simply isn't being told.

You don't look like a victim

Jonathan Jones writes on the meaning of Thomas Hoepker's 911 picture of people sitting in the sun here.

This article is partially in response to what Frank Rich wrote about it in the New York Times. "He saw in this undeniably troubling picture an allegory of America's failure to learn any deep lessons from that tragic day, to change or reform as a nation: "The young people in Mr Hoepker's photo aren't necessarily callous. They're just American."

The idea is that one should look a certain way in the face of tragedy, part of the simplistic narrative that is expected of people when they are part of a photograph - a simplistic narrative that does not have an equivalence in writing. Here it is easy to explain the contrast between the glorious sky and the casual dress, the trappings of the picnic and the relaxed poses. These are all allowed to happen, but when it comes to a photograph, God forbid if anybody is caught doing anything that lies outside a very narrow band of expected responses.

Walter Sipser is the guy on the right - he comments here. 

"We were in a profound state of shock and disbelief, like everyone else we encountered that day. Thomas Hoepker did not ask permission to photograph us nor did he make any attempt to ascertain our state of mind before concluding five years later that, "It's possible they lost people and cared, but they were not stirred by it." Had Hoepker walked fifty feet over to introduce himself he would have discovered a bunch of New Yorkers in the middle of an animated discussion about what had just happened. He instead chose to publish the photograph that allowed him to draw the conclusions he wished to draw, conclusions that also led Frank Rich to write, "The young people in Mr. Hoepker's photo aren't necessarily callous. They're just American." A more honest conclusion might start by acknowledging just how easily a photograph can be manipulated, especially in the advancement of one's own biases or in the service of one's own career. Still, it was nice being described as a young person. I was forty at the time the photograph was taken."

I think the same inability to cope with something beyond the simplest of narratives happened with this 2006 World Press Photo Winner of a Beirut neighbourhood after it had been bombed by the Israeli Air Force.


It's all about looking and one view has it that the voyeur is Spencer Platt, the photographer. He's the middle man in the chain of looking. The girls look, the photographer looks and then we look. Of course, the real crime is that these people don't look like people living in a Hezbollah neighbourhood are supposed to look. They look secular and westernised and really a little too fit for orientalist labels to apply. And they're driving a mini (which has a story of its own). I think that is the real problem. And it was a problem for some of the people who saw them driving by as well.And it was also a problem for the people in the car. This is a great article from the BBC website in 2007..


"Four of the young people in the group are actually residents of the area and had to flee during the shelling.
This was the first time they returned to the suburbs and they were eager to check on their apartment and their belongings.
The driver was Jad Maroun, his sister Tamara, is the blond girl sitting in the front, in the winning picture.

The friends in the car got to know each during the summer's conflict

She isn't in this group picture. She couldn't make it to the interview because she was getting ready for her engagement party. 


 Bissan, Jad's other sister, pictured here second from the right, was sitting in the back of the car in the winning picture, taking pictures with her mobile phone.
She recorded a short video of their drive. On it you can hear people commenting on their appearance and the girls screaming back: "We live here!" 

Although Christians, the Marouns actually live in the dominantly Shia southern suburbs and their apartment block is now surrounded by flattened buildings.
Liliane Nacouzi, on the left, is a friend. A Christian, she's the only one who had never been to the area before. 

She held a tissue to her face in the winning picture because of the fumes from the fires still burning in the rubble. 

Nour Nasser, the only Shia in the group, is wearing a pistachio green top here but was hidden behind Liliane in the car. She also lives in the southern suburbs of Beirut. 

All the people in the picture, except Lana Khalil (second from left), were displaced by the war and were put up by their employers in the same hotel in the centre of Beirut, where they became friends"




Sally Mann said something about all photographs being at the expense of somebody. I think that is more the way that we see them. We are still not very sophisticated in our visual way of experiencing the world and want to reduce things to black and white and right and wrong dualities.

But that's not the way that we experience the world. Walter Lipser might have been in shock in the Hoepker 911 picture, but even if he had been laughing, so what? Maybe it would have been inappropriate, but then isn't so much of what we do inappropriate. Why must our behaviour be policed so much all the time, why can't any leeway be given for our nervous tics? Just as we should be allowed to wear what we want so we should be allowed to express ourselves how we want. 

Jesse Alexander's Cyanotypes

I like rephotography and there is something splendidly incongruous about Jesse Alexander's post-911 cyanotypes. Also check out his series on the nuclear bunker at Corsham - this is where the government would have moved if all-out Mutually Assured Destruction had happened.

As Jesse puts it in his statement;

"The cyanotype process, announced by Sir John Hirschel in 1842, is one of the simplest photographic processes. Whilst it was never embraced seriously as a mainstream means of printmaking, its ease and relative inexpense of made it a cost effective and accurate means to reproduce documents, particularly larger technical drawings; hence the term "blueprints". In this small series, I wanted to take images that were heavily used within the print media at the time, or events that were planned for their visuality...  I found the use of the cyanotype as the first, analogous photo-copying device, an intriguing way to scrutinize and re-present these iconic images that were so prevalent within the print and digital media. There is also a discord between the hand-made, and crafted nature of these singular images, made in a process that has now assumed a heritage status, and the pixilated, ephemeral quality of these news images." 

My Name is Khan and I am not a terrorist

So, it's 9 years since 911 and the war in Iraq has been won, terrorism defeated (except in Northern Ireland), Tony Blair have won this year's election if he had been labour leader and I am a sandwich.

To commemorate 911 you can do something stupid or you can do something not stupid.

Watching My name is Khan is not stupid. It is a wonderful film, an internationalist 911 masterclass in tolerance, a movie where Shah Rukh Khan channels Mr Bean, Dustin Hoffman and Forest Gump and surpasses them all in his role of Rizvul Khan, a man with Aspergers who sets out to tell the president that "My name is Khan and I am not a terrorist" after his stepson is killed in a racist attack. My name is Khan carries a  message of humanity, hope and unity, but with a hard dose of reality thrown in. It even gets in a little dig at Jack Bauer, there is a flash of weird street photography and the commentary on Hurricane Katrina is perfect. It is a film that carries a message for people all over the world, that is relevant to people in the UK, in Africa, in Asia, all over the world in fact.


Shah Rukh Khan says, "It’s not about a disabled man’s fight against disability. It’s a disabled man’s fight against the disability that exists in the world—terrorism, hatred, fighting ... My Name is Khan is also about Islam and the way the world looks at Islam but we are not taking any sides. We are only trying to say that there are only good people and bad people. There are no good Hindus, bad Hindus, good Christians, bad Christians. Either you are a good person or a bad person. Religion is not the criterion, humanity is."

For more on Shah Rukh Khan, you can attend the Shah Rukh Khan conference here, and look at how SRK has become a global phenomenon here in this documentary on  Austrian Shah Rukh Khanis.

The Full programme of the conference is here.