Rimaldas Viksraitis and Other True Stories

In this video of Rimaldas Viksraitis pictures, the translator mentions they are special because they tell a true story, a story of rural excess, of drinking and debauchery.

What is a true story is the big question. Well, keeping it simple because there is not too much happening up top today, a true story is a true story as opposed to a made-up story.

During the talk somebody asks how much the pictures are staged, how much they are straight documentary? Which  begs the question of whether the villagers' performances can't be straight documentary. It's the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle again, where the camera changes everything - just as a writer's questions or presence changes everything, or a film camera or microphone changes everything. People are affected by whoever or whatever is around. We are not invisible and nor are our cameras.

The question needs to be flipped around and we should ask when people claim something to be a performance or staged, in what way is it a performance, in what way is it staged, having as our starting point a taking it for granted that there is always a staging or interference of some kind in all photographs (just as there is in all social interactions). So if a photograph is staged, why is it staged and what is so special about this staging that the photographer has gone to all this trouble of directing his/her subject rather than letting them perform in the way that Viksraitis or Billingham or Mikhailov or Kranzler do.

That way we take truth for granted and we have a foundation on which we rely on, even when the foundation is entirely unreliable and made of sand. I think this is at least part of the agenda of Susie Linfield's excellent (and flawed) new book, The Cruel Radiance, to reclaim truth in the photograph and so return to a love of looking, seeing and showing rather than the hatred so prevalent among Anglophone critics and writers.

A little bit of Paul Kranzler to end this post. These are from Land of Milk and Honey - and note that seeing these pictures on the web is no substitute for buying the book or seeing the prints in real life.

The Day Nobody Died and The Warsaw Ghetto

Who is the audience and who is looking at your pictures? I think that is one of the questions that might be at the heart of Susie Linfield's collection of writings; a collection where she attempts (I say this but I haven't read the book, only snippets here and there - I'm guessing in other words) to reclaim photography criticism from the critics, to say what photography actually might be rather good at.

I think one key element of photography that is ignored is what assumptions are you making when you show somebody a picture (or text or film or anything). Show it to a person who looks at the kind of photography you get on this and other blogs or people who might seek out pictures of misery, death and destruction and there is not the same reaction as you get from the audience who just catches pictures in passing, the people for whom Nachtwey, Smith or Salgado mean nothing - the vast majority in other words.


This makes me think of Broomberg and Chanarin's Afghanistan project and The Day Nobody Died. Who is the audience? It is fair to say that inasmuch the project  is a critique of photojournalism and some aspects of documentary practice, it also has an assumed knowledge of its history and background at its heart. Its foundations are the essence of Concerned Photography, and a Sontagian view of it at that.

So for people who know nothing of the war in Afghanistan, or the role the British army or media play in it, the project serves no purpose - it is not for that type of person. And if you think people don't know about the war in Afghanistan, that there is even a war of some kind there, well you are making some assumptions there to begin with - they are definitely not part of the audience. So who is the project for?

This in turns reminds me of another Holocaust film, this one called Warsaw Ghetto: The Unfinished Film, a documentary about archive footage of an intended Nazi propaganda film on the Warsaw Ghetto. This featured interviews with both a cameraman and some of the people in the film. It is amazing footage and a direct line to how propaganda films are staged and to what purpose. One of the scenes mentions how the people of the ghetto are assiduously recording their lives, how they are writing about their daily existence and the way the Nazis are attempting to grind their humanity into the ground. Somebody asks why they are bothering, when their words may never be read, their voices never heard, their stories never told. But their words were read and their stories were told and in films like Warsaw Ghetto, their voices were heard again and their stories told again. Some of those stories might not have been the most poetic or elegant, some of those words may have lacked a certain grace or might have been repetitive, but they were told and they will be told again and again. And that is the right thing to happen and a good thing to happen.

Here's a positive review of the Broomberg and Chanarin project from foto8.

This is from the Paradise Row Gallery.

In June of this year Broomberg and Chanarin traveled to Afghanistan to be embedded with British Army units on the front line in Helmand Province. In place of their cameras they took a roll of photographic paper 50 meters long and 76.2 cm wide contained in a simple, lightproof cardboard box.

They arrived during the deadliest month of the war. On the first day of their visit a BBC fixer was dragged from his car and executed and nine Afghan soldiers were killed in a suicide attack. The following day, three British soldiers died, pushing the number of British combat fatalities to 100. Casualties continued until the fifth day when nobody died.

In response to each of these events, and also to a series of more mundane moments, such as a visit to the troops by the Duke of York and a press conference, all events a photographer would record, Broomberg and Chanarin instead unrolled a seven-meter section of the paper and exposed it to the sun for 20 seconds. The results - strange abstract passages and patterns of black, white and variegated hues - all modulated by the heat and the light - deny the viewer the cathartic effect offered up by the conventional language of photographic responses to conflict and suffering. Instead the viewer is, by default, invited to question their relationship with images of violence and the true nature of the relations between culture, politics and morality.

Working in tandem with this deliberate evacuation of content, are the circumstances of works' production, which amount to an absurd performance in which the British Army were, unsuspectingly, playing the lead role, co-opted by the artists into transporting the box of photographic paper from London to Helmand, from one military base to another, on Hercules and Chinooks, on buses, tanks and jeeps. In this film, the box becomes an absurd, subversive object, its non-functionality sitting in quietly amused contrast to the functionality of the system that for a time served as its host. Like a barium test, the journey of the box became, when viewed from the right perspective, an analytical process, revealing the dynamics of the machine in its quotidian details, from the logistics of war to the collusion between the media and the military.

The Day Nobody Died is the expression of a considered position informed by the last ten years in which Broomberg and Chanarin have followed, to quote Janet Malcolm, "...the camera's profound misanthropy, its willingness to go to unpleasant places where no one wants to venture, its nasty preference for precisely those facets of our nature that we most wish to disown..." Their work has focused on zones of conflict; Rwanda, Darfur, Iraq, Palestine… but has always forsaken the easy production of shock or pity and so has found itself in opposition to the traditional role of the photographer as a professional witness who serves as a moral proxy for the spectator back home. The Day Nobody Died, takes this position to an extreme point - its series of radically non-figurative, unique, action-photographs, comprising a profound critique of conflict photography in the age of embedded journalism and the current crisis in the concept of the engaged, professional witness. 

Theory for Photography, not against it

Following on from the previous post on Susie Linfield, Politics, Theory and Photography links to her new book, a collection of writings in which Linfield attempts to recover theory for photography rather than against it.

I wonder if the amount of critical theory on photography (and how it's exploitative, cliched, propagandistic and thoroughly wicked) is due to the rather grandiose claims made by photographers, especially the concerned variety (if you really care, there are better jobs where you can make a bigger difference) as well as the ubiquity of average images. And by the same token I wonder if the claims for its exploitative nature compare to those involved in the production of virtually any food, fashion or consumer goods.

It does seem odd that we focus so much of our attention on this sea of averages, when we should be looking (as critics do in film and cinema) at the truly outstanding work. True, there is not that much truely outstanding work, but then neither is there that much in literature or film (the great films of the last couple of years? I'll go for A Prophet - and after that?).


Here is Linfield's description of the book, which I look forward to getting my teeth into.

I teach criticism and read a lot of it, and some years ago I realized how different photography criticism can be in tone and approach from criticism of film, or music, or other cultural forms. Pauline Kael, Greil Marcus, and others are very immersed in their subjects; they write analytically and critically but with love. By contrast, Susan Sontag and her postmodern heirs in the realm of photography criticism were very removed from, even hostile to, the subjects they discuss. That observation, in concert with lessons derived from reading Brecht at the same time (albeit for different purposes), highlighted for me the antipathy to subject matter and the antipathy to emotion in books like On Photography.

Capa’s photos of the Spanish Civil War, or of China after the Japanese invasion, were very clear on political context. You knew what to do with your anger and your horror. Today, looking at images from Sierra Leone or the Congo, one can feel horror, disgust, and great sadness—but what to do in response is much less apparent. Which of the twelve militias now fighting in the Congo do you support? Visual atrocity is much clearer today, but we no longer have the political clarity to accompany it.

At the same time, a lot of what passes for “visual literacy” today is merely visual cynicism. People, especially young people, are very used to saying “photographs lie,” to pointing out how images are manipulated by Photoshop or other means. Such suspicion and skepticism isn’t entirely bad, but I don’t think of it as visual literacy. I don’t urge naïve acceptance or cynical rejection of photos of political violence; the book makes a plea for us to use photographs of atrocity as starting-points to engage with very complicated histories and very specific political crises. If we want to construct a politics of human rights that isn’t merely an abstraction, we need to look at these photographs of suffering, degradation, and defeat. We need to think clearly not only about the relationships among these images, how they function and what they communicate in aggregate, but about the specific conditions each one depicts, no matter how disturbing, shaming, and bewildering an experience that may be.

Photography: The Treacherous Medium

I read The Treacherous Medium by Susie Linfield again. In her 2006 article, Linfield asks why so many people who write about photography hate it so much, why even the act of looking should be so wrong, why photography should (as it is by Susan Sontag) be characterised as...“grandiose,” “treacherous,” “imperial,” “voyeuristic,” “predatory,” “addictive,” “reductive,” and “the most irresistible form of mental pollution.”

She goes on to write about the emotional element of photography as well as its multi-faceted nature, how one genre overlaps into another, how boundaries are blurred and identities mistaken - and possibly how this happens more often than we care to understand in contexts that are presented as otherwise.

I think that is one of the things that appeals so much about photography is this multi-faceted nature - the different claims people make for their work and the different claims we as viewers make for it on their and our own behalf. There are many claims but I think one of the most interesting is the normative claim - when people (who may be conceptual or art photographers more than photojournalists or documentary photographers) are presenting a world not only as it is, but how it should be, if only because that is the way it is - it could be otherwise but which do you prefer. I like to think that is what I do with my pictures as well, but how far I succeed is another question.