Kathryn Flett: "Call me a prude..."

Kathryn Flett writes on children viewing photographs in Saturday's Guardian.She asks whether children should see either pictures with a sexual element (specifically Mapplethorpe's) or pictures showing the aftermath of violence (specifically Stuart Griffiths photographs of mutilated servicemen).

I think I'm with Flett on this one, but the question is whether adults should see more of images of violence - with Remembrance Sunday just past, I can't recall seeing any picture on the television or in the papers that remembered the horrors of war in the way that Griffiths' pictures do. The idea that we are overrun with pictures of violence and suffering is laughable - in the UK at least, graphic images are self-censored and controlled.

This is what Flett has to say - read the whole article here.


Anyway, there I was on one of my child-free weekends, soaking up the culture, clocking the penises and the Patti Smith portraits, when I spotted a couple of cool-looking mid-30s mums and dads plus their offspring, ranging from babies to not-quite-double-figures, all "enjoying" the Mapplethorpe oeuvre en famille. At which point I felt almost comically middle-aged and reactionary. And for the second time in a fortnight, no less, having experienced similar bemusement at the sight of groovy parents, singly and in couples, hauling their kids around one of the edgier exhibits at the Brighton Photo Biennale – the horribly mutilated subjects of Stuart Griffiths's fine but harrowing (and also very large) colour portraits of maimed ex-servicemen.

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Having first been struck by the Small Children + Scary Pictures = Who Knows What equation at Stuart Griffiths's Brighton private view, I wondered what the photographer felt about his work being right up there with a Pizza Express pit-stop and 3D Despicable Me as part of a cosy family day out: "Well, I grew up with a very rose-tinted, Action Man view of the army as somewhere where men were able to be men – but my son, who has grown up with my images, doesn't have that at all. I've asked him if he'd ever want to join up, and straightaway he said no, he doesn't want to end up like one of my photographs. As far as he's concerned, war is bad and that's that," says Griffiths.
As anti-war propaganda, then, Griffiths's pictures are undeniably powerful tools – and all the more so for having been made by an ex-soldier. And then there is a human narrative largely missing from the Mapplethorpe oeuvre that might engage even relatively young children (though I think mine are too young) in a potentially positive way.
The picture at the top is an illustration of Hilary Mantel who writes a disturbing but entertaining article on the visceral and psychological indignities  served up when an operation goes wrong. The illustration reminds me of Eikoh Hosoe's Ordeal by Roses. Read the article here.

Lazhar Mansouri, Marc Garanger and Battle of Algiers

I'm on a bit of an Algerian film thing at the moment - having watched The Prophet, Hidden and Battle of Algiers in the last couple of months.

The Battle of Algiers reminds me of  the photographs (top 3) by Lazhar Mansouri and in turn those of Marc Garanger (bottom 4), all of which are quite amazing.

In turn, Donald Weber's Interrogation pictures (see previous post) represent a different end of the spectrum as Marc Garanger's portraits, but without the baggage contained in Garanger's (or other colonialist/embedded) pictures - the meaning of which has unravelled and re-entwined with time - which is interesting in itself.

The quote below is from a Foto8 interview with Marc Garanger

In 1960, Marc Garanger, 25 and pressed into the French military service, found himself over the course of a fortnight making identity card portraits of 2000 women in occupied Algeria on the orders of his division commander. Each woman was photographed once, on a single frame, seated on a stool against a white wall. A language barrier prevented the photographer and subject from communicating verbally. But in these brief interactions were moments of extraordinary intensity; many of the women in the pictures glare at the camera, while others appear more placid. Even as they are literally being identified and cast as colonial subjects, they stare back, and so these pictures have come to be recognised as a celebration of pride and resistance in the face of power, dignity maintained under duress.

Donald Weber's Interrogations

 Petty Thief

 Delinquent and Shop Lifter

 Prostitute and Drug Dealer

A few years ago I taught a group of Russians from Moscow. It didn't matter what their politics were, whether they loved Putin or hated him, whether they thought Estonia should be bombed into the stone-age or not; they were all unanimous on one thing - head 50 miles outside of Moscow and you were in a different country where things would only get worse, where alcohol was the only refuge and where hope had deigned to tread since the invention of fire.

I think of their descriptions when I see the pictures of Donald Weber - all rough and bleak, a kind of Winterreise without the lyrical edge, they have the sentiments of what I imagine a Siberian in October must feel with the winter ahead.

Weber's latest series is Interrogations (in the current issue of the BJP). It's portraits of petty criminals confessing in police interrogation rooms - where they don't have the good cop, bad cop routine but the "bad cop, really bad cop" routine. Interrogations is special, a case of the photographer distancing himself from the subjects at hand, and having difficulty doing so. Maybe the project raises questions of complicity - on the part of us, the viewers, Weber and the police and subjects themselves. So with that in mind, I put a few questions to Donald which he was kind enough to answer.

How did you gain access to the interrogation room?

I've known the major of the deparment for five years now. We've worked together since I first started travelling there. Always knew it was a project I wanted to photograph, but also knew it was one of the most difficult places to see, this is about as close as you can get in the police procedure.

What were you photographing? When did you choose to photograph?

Solzhenitsyn talked about the moment of recognition, he always wondered during his execution what he would look at, would he look up at the sky and look for a bird, or would he look down at the ground, head bowed? It's about a moment of recognition, once that flicker of acceptance occurs, things undoubtedly change. So I was looking for these moments, that passage from knowing what was once will never be again.

 You have mentioned the "moral communion" you had with your subjects? What was that "moral communion"? Did you ever intervene in the process, were you ever referred to or spoken to in the process?

The process was about a four month struggle to become completely disengaged from all sides - from me as the photographer in the room, from the interrogators to the interrogated. At first I rarely photographed, I discovered the police were actually holding back and behaving themselves; I thought for sure they'd be extra violent. I didn't want to see either of this, but the process itself. I have a very high level of patience, I would just sit there from 9am in the morning to the evening, and just wait. I went days without actually taking pictures. It's a game of chicken, and I always flinch last. In time, the police would just give up on trying to "perform" and just go about their jobs, which allowed me to do mine. It took a few months, but we got it. I saw some very terrible things and was quite disturbed by the whole process, still am, but I believe I am not a judge of their crimes nor of the methods. I am not there to intervene in the process, that would be a betrayal of my years of trust built up with the police. The work formed in this manner because I was not interested in the physical violence, but the psychological violence that we as humans seem to have a special affinity for. 

You said you found the process "morally repugnant"? In what ways? How do you reconcile that with the project?

Well watching the methods was not pleasant. Humiliation, violence, degradation. How could you not be repulsed? But the reasons I was there were not for judging them, but was to actually show something very special in the terms of the secrecy of the act. I made a special document precisely because it was about the 'absence of the void,' that it showed humans at their most vulnerable and most cruel. This series could easily be judged along the same lines as a war photographer that constantly gets criticized for not doing anything, for not jumping into the fray. What I saw was a process; we may not enjoy or agree with this process, but it's a process that has a very long history in humanity - confession.

Do you think your documentation made you complicit in the interrogations?

Not at all. In fact the person who is complicit in the interrogations is you, the viewer, and that was the point.

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.

Sharmila Tagore and The Look of Love

picture: Sally Mann

The last post looked at The World of Apu and how Satyajit Ray directed the 14 year old female lead, Sharmila Tagore - very simply. Look up, look down, look left, look right resulted in a sumptuous and beautiful scene filled with yearning and love.

I think with any kind of photography, there is a visual Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle at play. We can pretend to be objective or we can pretend to be subjective, but the person determining the picture is outside our control.

Some people have the intelligence to use this. So Sally Mann exploited the boredom of endless reshoots to capture her children complete with elegance, grace and a certain attitude. Her children look moody, grumpy and bored because they are moody, grumpy and bored - with their mother mostly. And that is what makes Mann's work so special. Rineke Dijkstra used minimal direction to allow her subjects to fill the space with bewilderment or their own expectations of what they think they are supposed to be.

In-your-face photographers also get the look they want. Look at the pictures of William Klein, Mark Cohen and especially Bruce Gilden and you see people who are monumentally stressed. They might be stressed because they are living in big cities (or in Cohen's case, a small industrial town), but it's more likely it's because they've got Bruce Gilden in their face with a Leica. So what we see is people who are pissed off (or smiling manically) because Bruce Gilden is in their face. Which is not necessarily the way we read the pictures, but possibly makes them finer than they are before we discovered this universal photographic truth - your camera affects everything it sees.



Hurry up, mum! It's only the bleedin' focus!