Deaths that aren't shown

Ginnalyn Soriano weeps over the body of her elder brother Julius, who allegedly fought back and was killed by police during what they said was a drug sting operation, at a morgue in Malabon, Metro Manila, Philippines, June 22, 2017. At the morgue, the family noticed Julius’ wrists had cuff marks. The arm had a bullet wound too, and the slug was still embedded in his arm right where the cuff mark was, suggesting that the cuffs had stopped the bullet. © Ezra Acayan




My latest offering on World Press Photo Witness is on deaths in photography and how death is shown or not shown.

See my previous post, Rethinking the Ethical judgement of photography here...

I often wonder that what really defines photography is not what is shown, but more particularly what is not shown, and why it is not shown, and who decides it is not shown, and whose purposes that serves.

The not showing of something, the censorship is far more powerful in some ways and shapes how we see and understand the world. We don't see death in UK publications very much for example. It wasn't always that way. It is now.

This is from the piece...

Examples of when suffering is deliberately not shown provide a counter argument to this idea. From its earliest beginnings, war photography has been defined as much by what it doesn’t show as what it does. This tradition of not showing death extends around the world and is quite revealing of the power of photography to shock, outrage, and move people. This power is evident in the fear governments have of photography.

During the Great Leap Forward in China, around 45 million people are estimated to have starved to death. Yet there are no images of these deaths. The only images the government wanted were positive ones. Atrocity images of piles of dead bodies, of cannibalism, of people eating mud and tree bark in a vain attempt to survive do not exist. If they did, perhaps the history of China would be very different.

The political goals of photography are equally apparent in the post-9/11 images of the Iraq War when, between 2004 and 2005, The New York Times, The Washington Times, Time and Newsweek did not publish a single image of a dead American soldier. That asymmetry of reporting is still something apparent today in the ongoing debates of who is shown and who is not shown to be suffering in US media.

It is the same in the UK. There is an increasing reluctance to show people suffering, and when people are shown to be suffering to focus on those overseas in places where disaster and war are presented as part of the natural scheme of things with limited captioning or reporting to contextualise the image or state otherwise. 

The solution to this is not to eliminate all images of suffering but rather to create a more level playing field. Some of the most terrible pictures I have seen in British newspapers are from the Hillsborough Disaster but I think they serve a purpose, I think they helped in some small part create a counter narrative that was really struggled for and is only now, 30 years after the event, gaining some kind of just end. The trial of the police officer in charge during the disaster did not happen by accident and would not have happened if it hadn't been fought for.


Photography and its publication (and the lack of it), serves political narratives. Photography is also subservient to news, and news is a commodity. It is something that can be traded and sold and photographers operate within that system, creating work that can fit both the demands of the publications they work for, and the narratives that help make a story newsworthy and palatable to governments, owners, advertisers and, finally, the public.

Perhaps that's why I think photographers such as Ezra Acayan, who record death, who lay out murdered bodies for the world to see, are so important. There are people (the murderers) who don't want those bodies to be seen, yet still he, and others persist. This is also from the piece

One of the contributors of Everyday Impunity is Ezra Acayan, a photographer who has photographed more than 500 murders (out of an estimated 12,000) and 100 funerals since the beginning of the War on Drugs in 2016. His pictures are beautifully composed, dramatically lit studies of death, grief and mourning that fit into a photojournalistic template. But they go beyond that as well. In an email interview, he describes the process of photographing the War on Drugs:

“I suddenly found myself in the frontline of this ‘war’, and at first I wanted to show the brutality of it all. Despite the large number of deaths, most of the public never saw the killings personally; almost all victims were poor and were killed in the slums.”

Read the whole article here.... 

Requiem: From the Cradle to the Flames

Requiem by Goran Bertok is a beautifully packaged affair. It consists of two books called Postmortem and Visitors, both covered in charcoal card, Japanese stab-bound with black thread, the titles cut into the covers.

There's a gatefold sleeve with two little boxes or pouches for the books to go into and it opens and closes quite delightfully.



Open up the books though, and it's not all delightful. Postmortem is a series of images from a post-mortem. They're more focussed on the face and its details; the layering of white mould on the eyes and the skin, the transformation of living skin into something dead and waxy, then something live and consumptive.



The other book is of a cremation. Again, the images are small on the page, very modest and low key as they show the flames of the cremation, at first as a full-bleed flames only image, before breaking into smaller images that show the burning skull as it becomes ever-more skull like and then gradually disintegrates into a ghostly union with the flames. There are intimations of horror and the spiritual here, it's death as a spectacle, and as such I wonder if these pictures, which are quite sinister couldn't be bigger, or if this would be too much of a shock to the system considering all the supernatural and hellfire images that spring to mind.

There's nothing new in the pictures. It's post-mortem work (think Serrano), decay (Sally Mann) and cremation (Sue Fox) , but that doesn't really matter. It's a strong book that has been beautifully made.

Buy Requiem here. 

"I am not a number. I am a free man."

Abdimalik Hajir

I was shocked by these pictures of those murdered by Al-Shabaab at Garissa University in Kenya . It had been toppish story on the TV news for a few days, and pictures had been shown of the outside of the university, with maps to indicate how close the region was to Somalia, and how distant and isolated it was.

In the days following the massacre, some newspapers ran profiles of some of the people who had been killed for their religion, or more for what their religion wasn't. But none of it quite hit home like these pictures.

People say all the time that we can't be shocked anymore by pictures of death, that we are numbed and immune to what they depict, and that's true when the pictures (or reporting) is lazy and just slips into generic massacre tale-telling.

But I never feel that to be true when the picture brings us closer to death and gets something across as the ones above do, or specifically the picture of the classroom.

The first picture shows the people lying dead in a classroom. They've been shot in the coldest of blood and all around them lie empty chairs with those little side boards that you write on, and a frame underneath where you put your books and your bag and your bottle of water. You know exactly where you are in this picture and you know exactly who's been killed.

There were four attackers, only four, and the result of what they did, the scale of what they did is evident in the picture of the bodies in the courtyard. These were students that were killed, who were living and working in classrooms and dorms on a university campus. We connect the two pictures and the language of the space works together to tell us what happened and how it happened.

None of the other pictures I saw in the newspapers or television, the pictures of security forces or sirens or frightened students ever got that across. It was just blind chaos that was more about the failures of the Kenyan army and police. Nor did the graphics, the maps or the analysis. Nor even the pictures of survivors being rushed away from the scene told any kind of story. It all just fell into an undifferentiated morass of news reporting, reporting that never really told you anything, supported by footage and pictures that said less than nothing.

But the classroom with its chairs and its mass of bodies; that made a difference to me. Somehow, Garissa stopped being a remote place near the Somali border of which we know little, and the people shown became much more real. The woman in the red dress; what did she study, who did she love, how tears have poured from the eyes of those who mourn her poor, murdered body. Or the man in the back with his hand up. You fan feel his pain, his bewilderment, and you wonder at who he was, where he came from and what he would have become. Pasts and futures haunt these pictures. There is something there that takes us and reminds us both of what has been lost but also points a finger at those who committed this crime.

There was a hashtage on twitter (#147notjustanumber ) for the Garissa killings, which had the intent of making the 150 (I think that's the latest figure) people killed more than  just a number.

But numbers are all around and so is death and so often the two overlap. Numbers conceal the human cost, reduce it to something abstract. The number of those killed in the Nepal earthquake at the weekend currently stands at 3,000, but that's just a number. It doesn't really mean anything, except when it is made to.

Sometimes the point is to show that a number is just that - a number. This is a picture of a coffin that was widely circulated (on Duckrabbit - and there were variations in other places) following the latest Mediterranean sinkings of  boats carrying migrants.





It's a picture that lays bare the cold venality of the way we use number to list lives that don't matter. You get lots of pictures showing rows of coffins but they don't touch the raw nerve that this one does, because this is a picture of one coffin, one number, one person. This is photography of a process - of how people are reduced to mere numbers on a box (or a cockroach).

And the picture of the dead students in the classroom does the same in a way. It shows the process of living and in so doing shows the process of dying and that it happens to people who don't deserve it.

If this is a man...
If this is a woman...

Photobook Gimmick of the Year (Joint ) Winner

Right, let's get the gimmick over with first because it's a top gimmick. In fact if there were a Photobook Prize for Gimmick of the Year, this book would win it (jointly with Melinda Gibson's Smell-O-Rama Fire Experience).

The book is everything will be ok by Alberto Lizaralde (co-edited by Cristina de Middel ) and the gimmick is a thermodynamic cover that changes colour when you touch it. Press your hot little fingers on the matt black cover and it bruises, it is marked. The black turns to white. It's like charcoal turning to ash, death in its physical form fading into something ethereal and immaterial.

That fits the idea of the book which is called everything is ok. It is a fact/fiction book that is crystallised through a little end quote: 'I made these pictures between 2009 - 2013. Jorge died in 2010.'



That gets you thinking and so do the pictures of tears that run throughout the book. They are real tears, real grief, and they make the book. A theme of absence, loss and acute violence runs throughout the book. Abstract images of holes in the ground, gaping fish mouths and concrete blocks in the sea are familiar but still  provide a feeling of disorientation, but it is the grief that tells you that something is wrong; the exhausted face of a woman spent through waping, the reddened face of the (same?) woman stuck in the depths of grief. Who was Jorge and how did he die? And who is this woman that grieves for him so? Or is she not grieving for him?



The book ends on a high note with fireworks, waves and celebration; the material becomes immaterial, loss loses its immediacy and the sky is bright with freed spirits. Which is the cover again though on the cover the loss of pain is only temporary granted by human touch, warmth and emotion. And perhaps that's the same real grief. It only goes away when you touch it.



Buy the book here.

The book is up for the Paris Photo first book award. See it here with the other contenders. It's a great list .

This is the story of the book from Lizaralde's website.


'In life we all go through good times and bad times over and over, tirelessly. I went through one of these cycles and transformed it into this book. It was my story but very well could it be yours.

"everything will be ok" is the chronicle of a magical journey that starts with the emotional collapse that comes after falling into the hole and ends, through a long healing walk, with the assumption that after all, and whatever happens, life is always worth the struggle and it can actually be pretty funny.

Through photographs taken over five years, the book is set up to form as a classical narrative structure in three acts that continuously crosses the line between documentary and imaginary together with the line between the personal and the unfamiliar.

The ink in the book cover, reacts to temperature so it changes color whenever it is touched, leaving the fingerprints of the reader visible for some time. It is, in a way, a living book that mutates and adapts according to the viewer whose warmth and contact heals the darkness.


And this is Anne de Gelas' great book on grief, L'Amoreuse, in which sorrow and heartbreak is made concrete and personal. It is fact full stop.

Anne de Gelas: A book that made me cry

all pictures by Anne De Gelas

L'Amoureuse by Anne De Gelas and published by Le Caillou Bleu is a book about loss. It's moving and heartfelt but also has a determination and hardness about it; the determination to confront unexpected and tragic loss, to be angry about it, to hate it, to accept it, to build it into one's life story and be able to move on to a place where the pain and anger is tinged with affection and love.



This is the basic story (rough translation from text above):

There is a never a right way to tell a child about the death of his father.

T., my lover and father of my son, died on April 5, 2010 of a brain stroke. He fell beside us on a beach at the North Sea. The violence of his death put me in front of a big void…a silence that echoed in my head only equal to the brightness of the blue sky which no planes crossed because of the ashes of a volcano in anger, my anger.

To face that loss, I plunged myself into the work that I had started more than 10 years ago consisting in writing a personal diary, now focussing on telling about my suffering but also about that surplus energy that burst within me.




Most of it was in French which I'm not terribly good at reading French, but the message still comes across. It's a story about family, childhood and being a woman who is suddenly plunged into a morass of solitude. How does that feel for you, for your family, for your future. What are the little things that will be missed, the little things that make a father and lover irreplaceable in a family's life.

It is also about physical and emotional love, and what it means to have that ripped away from you. What it means as a woman. There's a confrontation with both the immediacy of that loneliness, but also the wider void that threatens.

L'Amoureuse doesn't have a happy ending, because there's no happy ending to be had, but there is a resolution in the sense that life shifts, love changes and new beings are born out of tragedy. It's body focussed and seems almost therapeutic in feel - so has a touch of Jo Spence about it, but mixed with the nostalgia and joyfulness of Bertien van Manen's lovely Easter and Oak Trees; a book that reveals new layers with each viewing.

On the cover is a extended poem of De Gelas's last day at the beach with her son Max and her partner T. This brought tears to my eyes. It made me cry. I cry for films and songs and fiction, but photobooks?

The poem's called An (almost) perfect day - 4th April 2010.

This is how the poem ends...

I take your face between my hands, 
I still feel your lips on mine
That sweet, mutual movemnet of union
you say 'I'm cold'
I answer 'go straight home and get a coat'
I turn round to pick up my spade
out of the corner of my eye I see
your dark shape falling
I turn you over in the soft sand
they said 'diagnosis of the vital signs is very bad'
I spent the night telling you I loved you
kissing you
crying
looking at you and smiling
still happy to be at your side
impossible to comprehend death
ever

Death and Deceit

 

   

I enjoyed reading Joerg Colberg's musings on the defiance of death. It fits right in with internet discourse which is so different and less formal to that of other media, but at the same time, if you are selective and discerning to some extent, richer, more informative, thought-provoking and fun. And it can be lots of bad things too, but then so can everything.

Back to death and a link in to the previous post. From the top, we have Alexander Gardner, W.Willoughby Hooper's famine pictures from Madras, Memento Mori pictures, death by dismemberment from 1890 in China, an Indiana lynching from 1930, World War II deaths including Dimitri Baltermants Ukrainian mothers, Lee Miller's river corpse and the Nuremburg executions, the body of Che Guevara, Eddie Adams' Vietcong suspect getting shot, Jeffrey Silverthorne's morgue lady, the body of Mao, Joel Peter Witkin's kiss, an Andres Serrano morgue picture, Paul Watson's Mogadishu picture, a Sally Mann, Walter Schels' Nochmalleben, Saddam Hussein and Colonel Gaddafi. And just to bring things round full circle, I could have added some contemporary memento mori from Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep.

It's death all the way in other words but over a range of uses, formats and connotations, with readings that shift and shimmer and remain unfixed. Death is used to inform, to sensationalise, to memorialise,  sentimentalise, to portray as primitive, to villify, to justify and to glorify. It's a sign of community, a symbol of shame, of power corrupted and a chance to gloat. Death is used to warn, to remember, to spiritualise and  to signify and end to the old and the beginning of something new. It's used persuasively as evidence, unwittingly as a witness, a sign of our essential mortality and our attempt to defy that, to defy and deify. For Witkin, death is Grand Guignol, for Serrano  it's money. Death in Mogadishu comes packed with different meanings, collapse and chaos, hatred, humiliation as well as an embedded one of vengeance. Sally Mann reminds us of  the fluidity of life, of our organic core, how we  melt back into the ground. Saddam is a picture of chickens coming home to roost, of the thing that goes around has come around, and will go around and come around again. Gaddafi is vengeance, humiliation and hypocrisy.

At the heart of all death is some form of deceit, a grey area where the uncertainty of what lies beyond meets with our own attempts to change our fate, to shift the goalposts, to defy the end that awaits us all. Most obviously, we can see this with the Victorian memento mori, where corpses are propped up and eyes painted into to a facsimile of a family snapshot, only with one member as dead and stiff as a board. In the near dead famine pictures of Willoughby, the deceit isone of general humanity, of how, after taking the photos, he would send the famine victims on his way without giving them treatment, food or help.

The embalming of Mao, or Lenin, or Ho, was an attempt to sanctify and deify, to prevent death even as incompetent embalming collapses in on itself. Sally Mann's pictures of death do the opposite, allowing the flesh to melt back into the ground from which it once grew, as if it had never existed, as if it had never been part of a living body and soul, with a mind and a heart, part of a memory, a consciousness that still lingers somehow, somewhere in someone's heart

And Paul Watson's pictures of David Cleveland are inundated with deceit. For Somalis, the lie is that this was any kind of victory, that anything but bad came of it, and for the US - well it's not too far different really but with more contemporary resonances.

And what of Saddam and Gaddafi. These are desecrations, a humiliation of a figure and a regime, but desecrations that in their cruelty and inhumanity, bring back to life the very figures they seek to destroy. These pictures don't signify endings, only a return to the same beginning. That's their deceit.

But in real life, outside the photograph, isn't that what we do with death - we fear it, we cheat it, we glorify it and deny it. We do all those things because what do we really know in the end. And so in that respect, aren't these pictures as truthful as you can get, reflections of the human condition in all its ignorance uncertainty. It's not propaganda. It's just the way we are.

And that, dear readers, is the discourse of the internet. Notebook style. .

Tim 4 Ollie and Adam 0

copyright EPA

This is an image of victims of the cyclone in Burma, visual evidence of those who have died, those whose deaths the Burmese junta is trying to conceal. They point to the venality of a regime, that rather than save lives, wants to bury the evidence. Like everybody, I have seen lots of pictures of victims of disaster and war. but images like this one don't cease to move me. These figures are almost doll-like in their deathly poses. Their clothes have colour, there is hardly any trauma evident on the bodies, and a whisper of what they once were remains on their masked faces. At the same time, their positions are so removed of life, it seems as though they are hovering in a deathly limbo.

Which leads on to UNCONCERNED BUT NOT INDIFFERENT by Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin. This piece ran on the Foto8 site and also appeared in the BJP. It describes the South African double act's experience of being judges on this year's World Press Photo.

"Flicking through the 81,000 images originally submitted a sense of deja vu is inevitable. Again and again similar images are repeated, with only the actors and settings changing. Grieving mothers, charred human remains, sun sets, women giving birth, children playing with toy guns, cock fights, bull fights, Havana street scenes, reflections in puddles, reflections in windows, football posts in unlikely locations, swaddled babies, portraits taken through mosquito nets, needles in junkies’ arms, derelict toilets, Palestinian boys throwing stones, contorted Chinese gymnasts, Karl Lagerfeld, models preparing for fashion shows backstage, painted faces, bodies covered in mud, monks smoking cigarettes, pigeons silhouetted against the sky, Indian Sardus, children leaping into rivers, pigs being slaughtered.

The twelve strong Jury must endure a barrage of photographic clichés over a period of seven days and nights, in order to locate one single image, the World Press Photo of the year. There are also prizes for photographs in a variety of categories, but it is this single image that gets the real attention. How do twelve people reach a consensus? And what criteria could possibly be used to nominate just one image?

First we were assembled into a windowless room in Amsterdam, squeezed between a digital projector and a coffee machine, and sworn to secrecy. We are six photographers specializing in war, nature, sports, editorial and art photography, plus five photo editors and a curator.

The World Press Photo awards have been running for over 5 decades and in that time a clear procedure has evolved. It is a highly disciplined, mathematical system designed by psychologists to elicit consensus from a group of diverse, opinionated individuals. The total number of images had already been reduced to17,000 the previous week by the first round jury. Most of the pornography and pictures of domestic cats had been removed. Our job was to reduce that number to one. Each of us clasped a voting button in the half darkness, and as the images flashed across the screen we voted anonymously to keep it in the competition or “to kill it”. As we progressed the long serving secretary and master of ceremonies, Stephen Mayes, announced in dry tones the results of each round of votes, a stream of IN’s and OUT’s, occasionally elaborating, “birds of paradise IN, snakes OUT, suicide bomb IN, dead children OUT, women with acid burns IN, Chairman Mao impersonator OUT, Guantanamo Bay detainee IN, sumo wrestles OUT…” The mechanism used for voting, nine buttons connected to a central computer display was originally developed for a Dutch TV game show."



Broomberg and Chanarin go on to critique photojournalistic representations of war - "Do we even need to be producing these images any more? Do we need to be looking at them? We have enough of an image archive within our heads to be able to conjure up a representation of any manner of pleasure or horror. Does the photographic image even have a role to play any more?"

I know what they mean, but I think we do need to produce images such as the Burma cyclone victims picture - Broomberg and Chanarin question the relevance of photojournalism and cite the US media's censorship of images of American dead as an example of its current irrelevance - I think this censorship (which goes hand in hand with UK censorship of images of Iraqi/Afghan dead) shows how necessary it is for images of the dead, on all sides to be shown. Not everyone has the archive of images Broomberg and Chanarin have in their heads - not everyone has their images as heavily censored as those in the UK or US.

I also sympathise with the judging procedure of the World Press Photo, but isn't that a bit of a bears-shitting-in-the-woods criticism of a contest where they knew they would have to look at 81,000 images in a short period of time. And imagine how boring it could have been if all the stories had been of the "aftermath" nature proposed by Chanarin and Bloomberg. A week of powerpoint presentations of warzone typologies, museum exhibits and arbitrary archives! Ooo-eer, no thank you missus!

The other thing they say is that representations of war in photography remain the same - you can see pictures that mirror Goya's etchings of the Horrors of War. Why haven't the images changed? Possibly because the essential realities of war haven't changed, just as people haven't changed, in the last few hundred years, or even the last few tens of thousands of years - just because we've got ipods doesn't make us any different - as Roger Ballen so helpfully points out in his long-term projects from South Africa.

Tim Hetherington provides a response to Broomberg and Chanarin in By Any Means Necessary.
Hetherington won this year's World Press Photo of the Year, but really should be best known for his work in Liberia - long-term work made in difficult and dangerous circumstances, work that fully realises Hetherington's commitment and understanding of the complexity of representing poverty and war as an outsider.


"Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin," writes Hetherington, "begin their critique of contemporary photojournalism by referring to a quote by Bertolt Brecht in which he claims, without providing any basis, that photojournalism contributes almost nothing to our understanding of the world. In fact, he goes further, claiming that photographs are actually a 'weapon against truth'. Let us ignore, for a moment, the fact that photographs have been used as evidence in every war crimes trial since Nuremberg. Let us ignore the fact that photography has infiltrated almost every aspect of popular culture and private life – what Brecht dismisses as the 'bourgouisie'. If photographs do not reflect something of an objective truth, then nothing does, and we are left with an endlessly subjective, nihilistic understanding of the world."
......

"I’m not interested in playing the ‘concerned’ moral crusader by ramming violent images in people’s faces," he concludes, "but that doesn’t mean the world shouldn’t have access to them. Images don’t need ‘intelligent’ aesthetics to convey their message - again, think of the Falling Man – but they can benefit from them. Like advertising, visual journalism employs many strategies to communicate. In Yemen, I recently saw fly-posters of what appear to be dead Palestinian children. It’s the sort of thing that would be distasteful on streets of the UK and yet they are manifestly accepted in Yemen. These images highlight the plight of Palestine and inculcate anti-western sentiments. Similarly, images of starving Ethiopians were instrumental in focusing world attention, gathering funds and mobilising the international relief effort there in the 1980s. The fact is, images of pain and suffering make people uncomfortable and sometimes inspire them to action. We try to ignore them and we fail. And then we secretly look at them on the internet."

You can see both Tim's and Adam and Ollie's work at...

Tim Hetherington - www.mentalpicture.org

Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin - www.choppedliver.info

And how come the Mao impersonator didn't win anything! No wonder Broomberg and Chanarin are pissed off.