End This Horror!

One picture that keeps on coming up in discussions connected to the Aylan Kurdi pictures is Nick Ut's 1972 picture of Kim Phuc screaming in pain after being burnt by napalm.

You read it again and again; how the Nick Ut picture helped end the Vietnam War, or contributed to the mood that ended the Vietnam War (and you can read that in the Sun front page from 1972). But perhaps we exaggerate the power of the media, and of photography.

Flicking through my History of Vietnam book, I see that in 1972 (when the picture was taken) the US only had 6,000 combat troops in the country, and that Richard Nixon was getting 60% approval ratings and that later in the year, the US mounted heavy bombing raids on North Vietnam. How does the effect of the image weigh up against that, or against the ending of the draft, or the Watergate trials or the 1974 cease fire?

I keep on looking for things that tell me of the effect that pictures have on policy but I can't find anything. I also wonder if  the TV footage which appeared on news programmes around the world (the Vietnam War was the 'Living Room War' after all) more influential than Ut's photograph in some ways? The picture has become iconic and is a great picture but was Ut's photograph  a kind of index to the newsreel.

This happens quite a lot. We remember old television through photographs and then a new memory overtakes us and the photograph takes on a life of its own and serves different narratives ( of reconciliation and forgivness in the case of Kim Phuc, and the upholding of the American conscience).

I wonder if that isn't what is happening with Aylan, but rather than being an index to the newsreel, he's the index to the social media storm. The pictures of Aylan were published at the end of a week in which a contemporary Trail of Tears from Turkey up to Germany became very visible on our TV screens. And Aylan became the symbol of this trail. A terribly sad symbol, one of childhood and innocence, that we can all sympathise with. It's not really an accident that a child became a symbol. His death is truly tragic, but so are the deaths of all those who have died and drowned, and been beaten, raped and tortured on their pathways from Syria, Eritrea, Afghanistan, Somalia and beyond.


The outpourings of emotions and statements of intent are really welcome and will result in some change or crystallise some form of policy, but we'll see. People can say thing and, full in the knowledge that we are a fickle public with short attention spans, do another.

For the past 5 years, in Britain at least, we have had cuts to education, welfare, health, and housing for asylum-seekers and refugees. People who have already reached these shores have been forcibly repatriated to face torture and abuse. All the major political parties have engaged in anti-immigrant and refugee rhetoric.

So perhaps a first step in having change in the UK is to restore those things that have been cut. But I don't think that's going to happen. I don't think that the sudden pro-refugee sentiments will last either. New pictures will come along, new stories, new outrages, the racist undercurrents will return and the Daily Mail and all the rest will click back to default mode. Aylan will become just another flicker on the social media landscape, the Kony 2012 or #bringbackourgirls for 2015.

I hope it doesn't end up that way but let's wait and see how things stand in two weeks', two months', two years' time. Time. Yes.

End This Horror!


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Gaza and The Cathay Hotel Bombing: What's changed?

More from Historical Chinese pictures, this time from A.Fong's album of the Sino-Japanese Hostilities. 1,740 civilians were killed in these pictures, when a Chinese plane accidentally dropped a bomb on the Cathay Hotel. It's a bit unrepresentative because most of the time it was the Japanese very deliberately killing Chinese civilians. 

It's horrific - and it's interesting to see that Life published pictures of dead children with their bottom halves blown off. 

These are the kind of images you get to see if you work on the AFP picture desk. They come in from Syria, Iraq and Gaza and it's terrible to look at. Most of us don't get to see these pictures but if you're on a picture desk you do. This is what Roland de Courson writes about in this AFP blog post. Here are a couple of extracts ...

"Horrific images are nothing new in the Middle East," said the photo editor Marina Passos. "Ten years ago in Iraq, they were already decapitating people. Everyone remembers the four Americans whose burnt bodies were mutilated with shovels by a mob, then hung from a bridge in Fallujah in 2004. What has changed is that the horrific images used to come once or twice a month. Now it is every day."

........

When AFP sends out distressing images to its clients, it includes a content warning. It is then up to each client to decide whether to publish them. "Although we do not censor images of death, we are well aware that many networks will not play close-ups of gory injuries and dead bodies. So we stay wide," said Jihan Ammar, video coordinator for the region.

......

"Here in the video department, we were watching children being pulled out of rubble with no limbs. Parents screaming in despair," she said. "Not only were we seeing these graphic images on large screens in front of us, but they were also playing on Arab networks on the TV screens."

So they show the horrors of war on Arab network, but in the UK and in most of Europe and North America, we don't show those kinds of images. But as these pictures from Shanghai show, we used to. What changed?

Photographs as Decoration for our Conscience

I read this article in the Guardian by Jonathan Jones and got rather confused. This is the headline.

A shocking image of Syria's brutal war – a war that will continue regardless

Even the most horrific photos are not able to prevent wars happening, they remain decoration for our conscience... 

Well, there are a number of assumptions being made here; that photographs do make us act, that if they don't make us act they are somehow culpable, and that by not making us act they become flippant additions to our conscience. 

I think Jones is rather mistaken on all these things. He's placing the weight of the world on photography and photographers. Photography is about more than just making us act. Images such as the one featured above involve news, reaction, evidence, emotion, history, empathy and a sense of humanity. It ties into a historical  geology of images in which similar scenes are remembered/imagined or relived. 

Does it make us act? Not really? But why would you weigh photography down with that responsibility. Why not put that weight on the written word? Has the Guardian made us act on Syria? Has Jonathan Jones made us act on Syria? Has anything made us act on Syria and if it did what would that action be? Is anything so black and white that it can be solved by a two dimensional print of 1/125th of a second, however finely composed or filled with evocative faces?

It seems odd that Jones, who is a writer, should be placing that weight on photography when it is clearly the responsibility of writers and newspapers to make us act. They have a great heritage in the UK of doing so. Think of Harold Evans and the thalidomide campaign. Think of the Daily Mail and all it has done to engender hostility to minorities in the UK - acting isn't necessarily a good thing. 

Jones gets even more confusing when he says

This is a great photograph – and it wants the world to act

It's a photograph! It's inanimate even in its digitised form. It may be weaving
its way across the internet but it doesn't have a mind, a soul or a will of its
own. it doesn't act, it doesn't perform, it doesn't do anything.

So who does the doing. Photographers do the doing. They snap the pictures
and do the doing. As Jones says,

Where there are wars there are heroes with cameras

Heroes with cameras? Photographers are not heroes! There are some who
think they are, but they are sadly mistaken. They make for good stories
and I, for one, am interested in the photographer narrative, the stories
they tell, the way they connect history into images and enrich it in the process,
but heroes? No.

The sad thing is I do feel some sympathy for Jones. I get the feeling that he
wishes pictures did make people act, did evoke feelings that went beyond
sympathy, pity or indifference. Maybe pictures do that sometimes? Maybe?
I really don't know. I'm a bit like Jones really. I wish they did, but sadly
they don't.

Chairman Mao: 'Chinese democracy must follow the American path'

by Ernest Cole, from House of Bondage. A good class of photographer in every way!

I laughed my socks off when I heard about this on the radio this morning. Then I read it and laughed some more - not because of what was written but because of who was identified as the author.


In national terms and on a personal level, Russia telling America how things are is aggression, hypocrisy and megalomania talking to aggression, hypocrisy and megalomania, the only difference is the Russian side has a bit more of a conscious menace to it and the American side thinks it's some kind of music-hall preacher.

Just because somebody says something doesn't mean it isn't complete caca.

I'm currently reading Frank Dikotter's latest book, The Tragedy of Liberation. It's the story of the history of the Chinese liberation from 1945-1957 (a prequel to Dikotter's amazing book on the disasters of the Great Leap Forward, Mao's Famine).

It's a barrel of laughs as one might imagine, a story of the wanton misery inflicted on a people by a people. The funniest part is before liberation, when Mao's envoys were negotiating at Peace talks with President Truman's envoy, George Marshall. Mao sent Zhou Enlai as his envoy. Zhou, writes Dikotter, '...was a master of deception, cultivating a close relationship to Marshall to present the communists as agrarian reformers keen to learn from democracy. Zhou even persuaded Mao solemnly to declare that 'Chinese democracy must follow the American path'. Mao would agree to almost anything on paper, as long as nobody was checking what he was doing on the ground.'

Fantastic isn't the word for it. True tragedy is there in bucketloads. When Mao begins land reform, areas have quotas of who is to be killed ( 1 in 1,000 was an average) and cadres went into the countryside to encourage killing. Soon people were being killed for what they owned - kill this 'landlord' and you get a horse's leg, kill that one and you get a jar. 

Villagers made lists of people to be killed, but then added to the list as they realised that if they left any members of a family alive, they would seek revenge. So the lists just kept on getting bigger and bigger.

Even the definition of landlord was suspect (the word Mao used was a sinification of a Japanese word introduced in the 19th century). In many places there were no landlords, so the cadres outrage was taken out on the nearest thing available - Sichuan Province, for example, 'it was enough for a farmer actually to make a profit in order to be classified as 'a landlord'.'

Every individual was given a class registration. There were good classes, middle classes and bad classes. 

Good Classes

Revolutionary cadres, soldiers and martyrs.
Industrial workers
Poor and lower-middle peasants

Middle Classes

The Petty Bourgeoisie
Middle Peasants
Intellectuals and Professionals

Bad Classes

Landlords
Rich Peasants
Capitalists

In this atmosphere, being poor was good and praiseworthy, so productivity dropped dramatically because high productivity meant higher wealth which meant you were more at risk of denunciation, criticism and death. 

Any form of pleasure was also frowned upon. So in Shanghai and other cities there was a gradual closure of brothels, gambling dens, bars and other forms of entertainment. It became a dead city.The way people looked also changed with make-up, jewellery and hairstyles all disappearing. 'The fashion was simplicity almost to the point of rags.'

People resisted, rebelled and found ways to blend in with the atmosphere of violence and hatred that was created but it was a terrible, terrible time that was set to get even worse over the following ten years. 

Mao's China was an extreme example of an ideology gone wrong, but I wonder how much it is the ideology as much as the sense of control that matters - the ideology is by the by. I saw this on Benjamin Chesterton's Facebook yesterday, and wondered if this fatwa against photography wasn't pretty much the same thing. 


India's leading Islamic seminary Darul Uloom has issued a fatwa, saying "photography is unlawful and a sin"...

Mufti Abdul Qasim Nomani, Mohtamim (vice chancellor) of Darul Uloom Deoband, said on phone, "Photography is un-Islamic. Muslims are not allowed to get their photos clicked unless it is for an identity card or for making a passport."

The last bit is kind of inconsistent - if it's haram it's haram, surely. Anyway, he strikes me as a bit of a Maoist in his fanaticism (and the article points out that there are many people who disagree with him - very politely).

It's all part of that fanatical hair-shirt no-fun tendency that ideologues tend to have. There's a tiny possibility you might get it in photography as well, a pursed-lipped, cat's-arse moth of disapproval of all thing non-ideologically sound, the kind of shrill pointing that Donald Sutherland did at the end of the remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. So I wonder what photography's good classes, middle classes and bad elements would be. I came up with this (just now so it's might need reworking).

Good Classes

Concerned Photographers
War Photographers
Died in the course of action Photographers
Collaborative Photographers
Car Photographers
Technical Staff

Middle Classes 

Food Photographers
Social Photographers
Photography Writers
University Lecturers
Artistic Directors


Bad Classes

Agency Workers
Magazine Editors
Art Buyers
Picture Editors
Academics
Gallery Owners

Fashion Photographers
Commercial Photographers

  And given the nature of the post, it seems a good time to Puritan Wife Swap again.