They Complain, And Complain And Complain...

It's great at the moment. Everyone is having a go at the institutions of art, photography and literature. There's a whole bunch of complaining going on at the moment.

You have

Philip-Lorca diCorcia Article in ArtForum

'Artists hardly even qualify as whores. Contemporary art is a cock ring on a giant erection pumped up by capitalism and keeping the masters of that game from cumming. I think they like it. I think the artists like it, too. They get to pretend to be profound. Some are. Most are hemorrhoids waiting to happen. The blood that pumps it all up is money. Green blood.

'Who has a problem with that? We all want some of it. Just please don’t take it seriously. No, actually, do take it seriously. If you did, I would be impoverished, and maybe my life would have been worth more.'

Which is great. He does hedge his bets a little bit in there. It would be interesting if he started laying into some of the people who collect his work, but alas, that would be going too far. The sentiment he expresses is enjoyable though.

 in the same way, Jessie Crispin isn't going to cost herself her living when she describes the Paris Review as boring in the Guardian.

Jessa Crispin on The Paris Review is Boring

'It’s not that she doesn’t understand these writers’ reasoning. “Everything is so precarious, and none of us can get the work and the attention or the time that we need, and so we all have to be in job-interview mode all of the time, just in case somebody wants to hire us,” Crispin added. “So we’re not allowed to say, ‘The Paris Review is boring as fuck!’ Because what if the Paris Review is just about to call us?” The freedom from such questions is something Crispin personally cherishes.'

Teju Cole started the latest Steve McCurry hatefest. in the New York Times It's not a tricky target though.

'In McCurry’s portraits, the subject looks directly at the camera, wide-eyed and usually marked by some peculiar­ity, like pale irises, face paint or a snake around the neck. And when he shoots a wider scene, the result feels like a certain ideal of photography: the rule of thirds, a neat counterpoise of foreground and background and an obvious point of primary interest, placed just so. Here’s an old-timer with a dyed beard. Here’s a doe-eyed child in a head scarf. The pictures are staged or shot to look as if they were. They are astonishingly boring.

And then McCurry  (or one of his interns was or somebody) was caught doing bad Photoshop and so people leapt to his defence in various places including in Time

Peter Van Atgmael in Time

'In the criticisms of McCurry, there were a lot of loaded words like ‘truth’ and ‘objectivity’ being thrown around. I don’t really believe in these words. I’ve never met two people with the same truth, nor seen true objectivity ever demonstrably applied to anything. They are nice words, but remain aspirational and cloud a more nuanced interpretation of reality and history. We shouldn’t mistake something factual for something truthful, and we should always question which facts are employed, and how.'

Which is nice enough, but McCurry's exoticism has a market and it is not too far off that of the travel brochure and I'm not sure where truth or objectivity comes into it anyway.

It's interesting to see where all these complaints appeared - in Time, in ArtForum, in the New York Times, in the Guardian even. If you think in a particular way, these publications are the vanguard of Conservatism dressed up with liberal credentials.

Basically photography is the sugar that sweetens the bitter flavour that these essentially conservative publications might otherwise provoke. Even The Guardian fits into this category, despite its outwardly liberal status.

Here's a snippet of Chomsky on the liberal press from this interview with a very young Andrew Marr: “Well I would call the press relatively liberal. Here I agree with the right wing critics. So especially The New York Times and The Washington Post, which are called, without a trace of irony, The New York Times is called the ‘establishment left,’ in say, major foreign policy journals. And that’s correct, but what’s not recognised is that the role of the liberal intellectual establishment is to set very sharp bounds on how far you can go. This far, and no further.”

There's white-washing, there's green-washing, there's blue washing, there's also arts-washing. the use of the arts and photography to gloss over your essential establishment credentials.

So maybe as well as questioning the art markets, and the 'ethics' of representation and image manipulation, we should also question the publications our work appears in. But that's difficult and besides which Brecht and Kracauer were doing that 80 years ago so it's a bit to much of a repeat of history.

And whilst we're at it, we could question the educational establishments we work for. Just don't do it too closely or again, we might hex things. Yes, let's move on from that. It's too close for comfort. Missile anyone? And don't even mention the f- word.

None of this complaining makes any differenc. It's self-contained in an insulated little critical space. Apart from the pure trading nature of social photography, pretty much all photography is compromised by its galleries, its publications, its institutions, and its lickspittling to the wealthy and the powerful, or simply serving the market by being part of the market. Most photographers are so poor that one sniff of cash and they will twist their principles up into a little knot that they can stick up their backside and sit on until such time as it is safe for it to come out.

Complaining about matters, or pointing the finger when that complaining or that pointing comes at no cost to you, is very easy. It's a kind of photographic institution. We all love doing it. It's a bad habit, like picking your nose or scratching your arse. But it doesn't really do anything except make you wan to scratch some more.

So rather than complain about things beyond our control, why not do something useful or productive or create something different that lies outside those institutions we all like to complain about. Which makes those institutions rather irrelevant.

I wonder if that isn't happening already. I've been interviewing people for a feature on workshops and education and you can feel people committed to creating something out of nothing, filling places where once there was nothing with communities of photographers, designers, artists. And these people are linking up and supporting each other and creating new outlets for ideas and work, and new networks of support. These communities (schools, galleries, publishers, workshops, networks) aren't really financially viable, and the directions they are going in are uncertain, but you can feel the energy and you can see the results. .

So there's something that's more constructive than moaning. But if you do moan, at least do it with a little bit of spark. Like Philip Lorca di-Corcia. Two thumbs up!

That's a Real Damaged Life in There! And a Photo Book. And...

Lisa, the night I met her through law enforcement. I followed up with her about a month later, beginning a journalistic relationship that continues today.

A few weeks back, The Eichmann Show aired in the UK. It was a drama about the filming of the Eichmann Trial in 1961, and was the first globally screened documentary.

During the drama there was a great line in there which encapsulates whether serious drama, documentary or anything should have an entertainment element in it. It's the part where a witness collapses during the trial and the producer Milton asks the director if he got the shot.

Milton: Did you get it?

Leo: We got almost everything but I think we missed the collapse.

Milton: Missed the collapse. Jesus, Leo.

Leo: We got a couple of seconds of it, but it's impossible to anticipate something like that. 

Milton: That was a stand-out moment, Leo, like someone crying out in the auditorium. Talking points. Human drama.

Leo: That's a real damaged life in there, not a fucking TV show. 

Milton: And a fucking TV show. AND. AND.

It's a refutation in some ways of the old Adorno idea that it was barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz, that anything that reeked of the culture (be it high, be it low, but especially be it popular) from which the Holocaust arose was to blame for that holocaust. And if you like, it's a position in which there is a coldness, a calculation, and  a displaced sense of one's own self-delusion that is even more in common with the foundations upon which the holocaust ( or other horrors of war) was built.

Keep on with the poetry, the drama, the entertainment and the TV shows in other words. I'll take them over Adorno any day of the week (and please, if you are really into Adorno or the rest of the Frankfurt school and I've made fundamental errors in this post, please fuck off and weave yourself a hair shirt!) 

Lots of people like that photograph-and-feel-the-pain stance. There's a Stafford Cripps kind of mentality prevalent in photography that you should suffer for your work and so should the people who look at it. And it'll do you good. And you'll like it. Same way you like wheat grass juice or quinoa or salad without dressing (my wife calls it English Salad) or thrashing yourself across the back with stripped birch.

I wondered about this week as I read through Laia Abril's brilliant Epilogue. The Epilogue is a book that deals with a really difficult subject through the heartache of a family, through missed opportunity and an ever present sense of regret. It's a difficult thing to do, to make a book like that. You have to be brutal. You have to tell the story and you have to make people want to read the story. You're designing pages around real people's lives, you are literally laying out their emotions on the page. The temptations to ease your foot off the gas a little must come up again and again. That's what makes it difficult. there is real anguish and pain that is still present in the lives of the people who surrounded Cammy and must be made apparent in the pages of the book. 

That's a real damaged life in there. And a photo book. And...

There's also an obsessiveness in there to follow the story to its dark heart. And that same obsessiveness is apparent in Tim Matsui's much shared article on winning a World Press Multimedia Prize for his work on sex trafficking. 

The title of the story is I Just Won a World Press Photo Award and a POYi, But I’m Not Celebrating . Again, there are real damaged lives in there, but there is also a story to tell and Matsui tells that story beautifully in the post (which I've read) and I'm sure he does in the film as well (which I haven't seen - but here's the trailer).

It's heartbreaking just to read and see the pictures and it's done with a purpose in mind, to use documentary storytelling to engage and more importantly to change attitudes towards sex trafficking - to make it visible and to understand what lies on the surface and beneath the surface and how we collude in it much more than we realise. There's also a huge journalistic interest in how sex trafficking is represented and managed at a police, community and legal level. It's ridiculously complex and Matsui isn't holding back in the scale of his ambition. 

It's a bit terrifying to be honest, and it demonstrates a level of commitment that really answers the question of why Matsui writes, films and photographs. He doesn't do it for photography's sake but for a wider purpose. He's committed to his belief in a way that few of us are and that is so very admirable. It's also a bit of a lesson for those of us who would like to think photography can change things, because he might be an example of somebody who is making that absurd proposition a little bit real. If you want to change things through photography, look at Matsui - this is one example of what you need to do. It's not just taking pictures anymore. It never was.

I don't know if the post was entertaining, but it was certainly engaging and was written to draw the reader into what Matsui is doing. He ended the post with some general thoughts on photography which are worth repeating. And not just for people who are making this kind of committed work. But for anybody making any kind of work. You can't sit back and be lazy. You have to be doing things, constantly. Non-stop. Never-ending. It's exhausting just thinking about it. But it's easier than ever if you have a mind for it. And remember that it's a story that you're telling. 

For now, let’s just say, we’re in a new era. If you want to make stories, you have to think about publishing and distribution by yourself. These things requires nimbleness, ingenuity, and willingness to go where the audience is. You can get to those places more easily then an entire publication can!

Photographers looking for validation through awards and publishing limit us to the traditional model. Think bigger. If you say you want to make a difference, then be proactive. Don’t rely on traditional distribution models.

Engagement is not necessarily a photographer’s core competency, but engagement is essential. That’s what partners are for. Find them and build something custom. If it is reflexive and good and novel, the traditional distributors will take notice. Change in the industry can occur.

Finally, we’re not just content providers, we’re journalists turning a critical eye on the world and giving voice to the voiceless.


Always remember that.

Documentary Photography and the Dinosaurs

all pictures by from Will theySing Like Raindrops or Leave Me Thirsty by Max Pinckers


I enjoyed reading Clementine Schneidermann's interview with Peter van Atgmael on Ideas Tap. Van Atgmael talks about various things; education, cameras and working approach.

My favourite part is when he snaps back at photographers with a conceptual bent; Broomberg and Chanarin, Cristina de Middel and Mishka Henner are named in the question.

These conceptual photographers are trying to kill the traditions, but they’ve been informed by them; the institutions they’re criticising aren’t going away. It’s good that they push its limits, but documentary photography is always going to exist. Even if it can sometimes be clichéd, there’s always a core of it that is going to be great. 

I have a certain sympathy with that idea of conceptual photography riding on the back of documentary - mainly because it does (and I'm not sure anyone says that it doesn't). I also have a sympathy for his bite back - in fact I think it's a good thing. It adds to the debate and is perhaps a response to the repeated announcements of the death of this or that kind of photography. 

(And in fact, immediately after the article appeared van Atgmael tweeted Not sure why I said that. I like a lot of conceptual photography. I think I was just grumpy that Chris Killip didn't win the deutsche borse prize as I cherish his work. It was a dumb thing to say. David Campbell alerted me to this  after I knocked this post out, but hey, this paragraph aside, we'll let it all stand because it's relevant. )

And there's lots to debate, most of it very reasonable. This is what Mishka Henner said in an interview he did with me a few years back

 “I found that I could discover something new by pointing a camera, but the more proficient I became with the language of photography, the more frustrated I was with it. I wanted to find new ways of communicating but the Photography World with a capital P can be quite conservative. I needed to go beyond it, I needed to get my work seen by people outside photography. One of the things that frustrates me is how photography is often taught according to a set agenda of what is good; and looking at photography in this way can be restrained and narrow. We’re surrounded by cameras  and from a basic point of view that changes the way we function. We don’t need to carry a camera around with us all the time anymore because everything is being photographed in any case.”
......
It’s a manifesto opposed to the idea of the purity of photography, opposed to the idea that there is any one right way of doing things. “An example of this,” explains Henner, “is a student who came in and told me she hadn’t taken any pictures all week and had nothing to show me. I asked her if she had uploaded anything to Facebook and she said yes, of course, loads of pictures. But she couldn’t see that the Facebook pictures were just as valid and maybe even more interesting than what she saw as the ‘Proper Photographs’.”

Which is all very reasonable and I agree with it all. It's about opening up photography to new ideas and new ways of working. 

And this is what Broomberg and Chanarin say about it in this post, Unconcerned but not Indifferent. This is about judging the World Press Photo, the surfeit of images and they reliance that war photography has on 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? Video footage, downloaded from the internet, conveys the sounds and textures of war like photographs never could. High Definition video cameras create high-resolution images twenty-four photographs a second, eliminating the need to click the shutter. But since we do still demand illustrations to our news then there is a chance to make images that challenge our preconceptions, rather than regurgitate old cliche?

Again, I agree with all that. But I agree with the response that Tim Hetherington (who never identified himself as a war photographer and was open to all forms of visual representation - "I wish people would stop wittering on about photography" was his view) gave in his essay By Any Means Necessary (thanks Lucas Pernin for the link). 

"Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin 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."

I sometimes get the feeling that there's this strange opposition between two imaginary sides that secretly agree with each other. I sometimes feel it is about how things are said, about taking an artificial stand for or against something, about being a gobshite for the sake of it. It's like the Life of Brian where the anti-Roman factions hate each other more than the supposed target of their hatred. That kind of factionalism gives things a label (conceptual, documentary, fashion, conceptual documentary etc etc...) but on the balance is probably a bad thing. But at the same time, the idea that something  '...is always going to exist'  does strike me as a tad of complacent. I bet the dinosaurs thought they were always going to exist and look what happened to them.

It exists until it dies and if it doesn't get new ideas and new blood, it will die. The days of misery-mongering photo-essays that just repeat the stereotypes of war, poverty and injustice (and rely on it - there's always that strange symbiosis going on there) are numbered. 

That's something van Atgmael recognises. It's also something that people like Jim Goldberg recognises. I like his response to all the Google Street View work made of people from a distance - something Goldberg has responded to very directlyon occasions by sitting  on top of the Magnum RV taking pictures and engaging directly with the subjects on occasions. It's a kind of fuck-you both to Google  and GSV projects. Not that Postcards from America doesn't have all kinds of ethical whatnots you could get into if you are that way inclined. 


So round and round we go. Conceptual is informed by documentary and documentary is informed by conceptual. Throw in some politics, some art, some film, some justice, some science.... the more photography reaches outside itself the better. If it stays locked in some little ghetto it becomes impoverished and, no matter what the tradition, it will die. 

And that's being recognised by photographers. So we'll end the week by saying congratulations to both Max Pinckers for winning the Photographic Museum of Humanity Grant 2014 for  Will they Sing Like Raindrops or Leave Me Thirsty  and to Lorenzo Vitturi for winning the Hyeres Photography Award 2014 for his Dalston Anatomy. 

Both of these recognise and are part of a documentary tradition and deal with very serious documentary subjects, but deal with them in new and unexpected ways. And thank God for that.