I am in Dubai to teach a photo workshop. I am feeling disoriented and lost here and can’t really even think of anything intelligent. In fact, that I loved this video should tell you about where my mind is and how well it is working. Have a drink!!!
This man works with Leicas, those cameras infamous for being ‘discreet’ and ‘invisible’.
This nonsense that has accompanied this lovely camera has misled and confused many a young and experienced photographer.
Watch Bruce Gilden – you don’t have to like his work, or him, but watch him. Using these so-called ‘discreet’ cameras, he is working direct and in-your-face.
Its aggressive, its based on pre-focus and pre-exposure, and its a translation of his vision into specific images.
Forget being invisible, start being risky. Step out, and put that camera in your face and get close to the subjects. Be invisible by being insistent and professional and focused.
I am not a fan of Bruce Gilden’s work – not all of it at least, but he is an example of what I mean when I say that being invisible is about being part of the situation you are working in, and making sure you take your space in that situation. Its not the size of the equipment, or the ’shutter noise’ and any of that nonsense. Its just the photographer’s determination to fit in and to take what s/he came to get. With politeness and with the subject’s permission of course. Of course.
It is one of the most persistent myths in photography – the photographer (and his/her equipment) so silent and discreet that they may as well be a fly on the wall.
It is believed to be a skill fundamental to street and documentary photography.
It isn’t. And no matter how often I tell students this they seem to forget!
Invisibility is a state of mind achieved largely by being visible and in the center of the situation until such time that your presence there is permitted and assumed and people begin to go about their actual business.
Here is Joel Meyerowitz working the streets of New York City. Far from discreet or invisible, he is in fact ‘in your face’ most all the time anticipating movements and the placement of objects (people, street signs, gestures. etc)
Having a small camera can help, and a quiet shutter is more polite, but they are not the key to this kind of work .
So forget your shyness, stick that short focal length lens on and charge into the crowd! (Speaking of which, I will post about Bruce Gilden’s technique as well – talk about in your face and taking risks!!)
Gary Winograd’s technique reveals the tenacity, focus and consistent willingness to fail that lies at the heart of great photography.
We can hide behind our equipment but the fact remains that the secret to producing compelling work, or at least attempting to since most of us will never produce even one masterpiece (and Winograd produced dozens in his life time!), requires nothing more complicated than hard work, consistency, determination, and a willingness to spend hours out in the locations where one is searching for an image.
A rather pedestrian reality to the myth of great photography. I can’t think of any one of the masters who did it any other way.
Watch Winograd in action as he works a location to get a few frames – its obsessive, its filled with failed attempts, and it is risky.
And its fast! Using pre-focus techniques, hand held light meter readings (or maybe not!) Winograd works with a speed that at times defies belief!
See it before you shoot it.
The image is made in the mind before it is captured on the frame or CCD.
A very basic lesson that I find few of my students remember these days with their super fast, 1000 auto focus point digital cameras and the infinite ability to just ‘fix it later’.
So here is some old man, perhaps you know him, talking about this issue.
( Full disclosure; I have never been a fan of Adam’s work, finding it rather overly technical and cold. But I respect his rigor, and his commitment to the craft, and the singular passion and belief with which he carried it out.)
There is an increasingly perceptible gap between our need for social transformation and America’s insistence on stability, between our impatience for change and American’s obsession with order, our move towards revolution and America’s belief in the plausibility of achieving reforms under the robber barons of the ‘third world’, our longing for absolute national sovereignty and America’s preference for pliable allies, our desires to see our national soil free of foreign occupation and America’s alleged need for military bases.
Eqbal Ahmed in a dialogue with Samuel Huntington, from No More Vietnams: War and the Future of American Policy
The streets of Pakistan may not be filled with photogenic ‘rebel types’ to fill our evening TV screens here in Europe and the USA. However, voices for change, social justice and rights are strong and largely coming from a new generation of students, activists, intellectuals and ordinary citizens. I can’t help but feel that we are saying farewell to the accommodations and compromises of our parent’s generation, and that a new Pakistani society is working its way up into the seats of power and civil society. And that it is a society that is young, educated, religiously conservative but without being fanatical and intellectually empty.
And as always, when it comes to nations of ‘the other world’, these changes are largely being missed by a media largely obsessed with matters of American policy and insisting on seeing Pakistan less as a diverse, complex and sovereign nation and more as a ‘vassal’ state to American state power and geopolitical priorities in South Asia.
The rock band ‘Laal’ (means the color red in Urdu) has been a musical voice for these transformations. Below is a beautiful version of one of Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s poems put to music, at a time when the citizens of Pakistan have confronted power and achieved the reinstatement of the ousted Supreme Court Justices - a landmark moment in Pakistani political, social and civic history.
This video itself captures the anger, frustration and marginalization that sits in the hearts of the ordinary Pakistani.
Faiz’s words give these feelings the immortality, dignity and the honor that they deserve.
The video has English translations for those of you who may not understand Urdu. Particularly Faiz’s magnificently musical, lyrical Urdu!
The testimonies now being given by a number of Israeli soldiers who took part in the recent war on Gaza, a war that Richard Falk, the UN’s special rapporteur on human rights, called a criminal act, offer us a glimpse into acts of human and individual courage.
There is no other way to describe the actions of these young men who were involved in what was nothing short of an international war crime against the unarmed civilian population of Gaza.
The Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz has been publishing a series of testimonies – the paper’s Amos Harel’s has two pieces, IDF in Gaza: Killing civilians, vandalism, and lax rules of engagement and ‘Shooting and crying’.
The Inter Press News Agency also had a piece, Israeli soldiers expose atrocities in Gaza
The matter is so large that even the otherwise obfuscating New York Times just had to give it some attention in a piece called Further Accounts Of Gaza Killings Released
And you can read Richard Falk’s views on the matter here Israel’s war crimes which was published recently in Le Monde Diplomatique.
These soldiers are finally exhibiting some bravery because it takes none to hide inside armoured vehicles and tanks and tear apart an unarmed civilian population.
But to speak honestly in the face of a nation whose conscience, morality and sense of moral right and wrong has been drowned by sectarian and ethnic prejudices requires nothing short of courage. These soldiers were commanded to kill for god, (and yes, there were rabbis with the soldiers handing out booklets telling them that palestinians can be killed with impunity to protect the ‘holy land’!) and country, a command that in all nations sanctions murder in return for medals, political posts, and mythical immortality. They could have chosen the easy way out, and just moved on.
And we should not underestimate this act.
This is not the first time Israel’s soldiers have spoken out. They are in fact a rare example to the soldiers of all nations who have been asked to commit acts of murder against innocents.
We should also not forget this; that they are offering us an example of the individual conscience over collective passions and hypnosis. Not an easy act.
Our International institutions of justice and law have failed us, usurped as they are by the powerful and militarily footloose!
The young Israeli men (and maybe women?) know well that their silence will not be questioned, and that no international institution will be able to touch them – Israel enjoys an impunity in the court of law that most all other nations (other than the USA) probably envy!
And yet they are speaking out, reminding us the real nature of war once all the nationalist and political jingoism has been cut through - lies that in fact some of Israel’s more ‘cultivated’ minds like Amos Oz, or David Grossman and Yehoshua (to name a few) insist on reproducing for us and by their reputations transforming into ‘truths’!
Now once again and probably for just a little while the thin veil, woven mostly by cowardly political, journalistic and corporate apparatchiks, is lifted to show us what life is like on the other side of the Israeli guns.
Richard Falk in his piece on Israeli war crimes was not optimistic that anything will or can be done to bring to book the military and political leaders who carried out their acts.
As we listen to these young men fighting to save their conscience, morality and souls, we can only wonder if anything will become of their words and acts?
Probably not.
Not yet at least.
But we can hold on to the belief that these testimonies are now part of the official records and histories. And for as long as we continue to collect those we can have hope that some day, if not tomorrow then the day after, justice will indeed be done.
To courage, then.
UPDATE: More details are continuing to emerge, as they have been for many years by the way, of the’ lax rules of engagement’ (read as: kill first and wonder later) under which the Israeli army has operated in the West Bank and Gaza for decades.
FURTHER UPDATES: The Guardian updates the situation with this piece about t-shirts being sold to the IDF, and further revelations about the killings of civilians by the Israeli army.
Its quick and simple; we were taken to the cleaners by a group of people who knew exactly what they were doing. Or at least that when things fell apart they will just get away with it! If you still have the patience to try to understand what the sub-prime and the associated economic crisis in the USA (and the world) is, take a look at this:
more about "Confused? The Crisis of Credit Visual…", posted with vodpod
Michel Lewis tries to understand the Icelandic man, and the destruction of an entire country at the hands of fishermen-turned-bankers. Paragraph that made me laugh and reminded me of the rhetoric of the ‘Asian Tiger’ era:
Icelanders—or at any rate Icelandic men—had their own explanations for why, when they leapt into global finance, they broke world records: the natural superiority of Icelanders. Because they were small and isolated it had taken 1,100 years for them—and the world—to understand and exploit their natural gifts, but now that the world was flat and money flowed freely, unfair disadvantages had vanished. Iceland’s president, Olafur Ragnar Grimsson, gave speeches abroad in which he explained why Icelanders were banking prodigies. “Our heritage and training, our culture and home market, have provided a valuable advantage,” he said, then went on to list nine of these advantages, ending with how unthreatening to others Icelanders are. (“Some people even see us as fascinating eccentrics who can do no harm.”) There were many, many expressions of this same sentiment, most of them in Icelandic. “There were research projects at the university to explain why the Icelandic business model was superior,” says Gylfi Zoega, chairman of the economics department. “It was all about our informal channels of communication and ability to make quick decisions and so forth.”
∞
William Pfaff ponders on why the citizcns of the Republic looked away while the Bush Administration tampled all over their constitution and interternational law. A comment that stuck out:
Very few people among the American public seemed to care-except Fox television executives, who recognize a commercial opportunity when it hits them between the eyes.
Fox began a drama in which each program was devoted to the American president’s torturer doing whatever had to be done to thwart a new threat to the American republic. The hero would apply one of the tortures pronounced legally OK for Americans to use, until the terrorist, gasping or screaming, blurts out where the nuclear bomb has been planted.
This turned out to be one of the most popular programs on the air. It seems that President Bush himself watched. People in the torturing business joked that they got some good ideas from the program.
∞
The New York Times Book Review, generally predictable and pointless, did however carry an interesting review of a very interesting writer and on a very interesting subject. Rashid Khalidi, is a professor of Arab studies at Columbia University, the director of its Middle East Institute and holds the ‘Edward Said’ chair of Arab studies at the University. His new book is called Sowing Crisis: Cold War And American Dominance in the Middle East. For all the simpletons who may have asked ‘Why do they hate us!’ it may be time to actually read something and ask a more intelligent question. An excerpt:
Immediately subsequent to the sudden disappearance of its Soviet rival, in 1990–91, the United States engaged in an extraordinarily confident assertion of its suddenly unrivaled power in the Middle East via its leadership of a grand coalition against Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in the Gulf War of 1991, and in convening the 1991 Arab-Israeli peace conference in Madrid, which led to the 1993 Oslo Accords, signed on the White House lawn. Both were unprecedented initiatives in various ways. Although nominally a collective effort, the 1991 Gulf War was the first American land war in Asia since Vietnam. Meanwhile, Madrid witnessed the first multilateral peace conference in history bringing together all the parties to the conflict, Arab and Israeli, and all relevant international actors. Moreover, it constituted the first and only serious and sustained American (or international) effort in over half a century at a comprehensive resolution of the Palestine conflict.
In light of these apparently radical departures in American policy immediately after the collapse of the Soviet Union, it would be useful to revise our understanding of the Cold War as simply a prolegomenon to the current era of unfettered American dominance over the region. Such a revision would help us answer a number of questions: Was the United States previously as constrained by the presence of its Soviet rival as sometimes seemed to be the case, and as these two novel departures immediately after the demise of the USSR seemed to indicate? Alternatively, was America in fact more dominant in the Middle East throughout the Cold War era than may have appeared at the time?
∞
The stranglehold of the orthodoxy, especially in its political and religious form, has to be loosened and slackened. The answer lies in more and more Muslim communities moving towards democracy. There is no short cut to democracy. . . . There is no place for pharaohs in the modern world. (Mushirul Hasan)
Martha Nussbaum has had a deep and committed engagement with India – a land she calls ‘her second home’, for many years now. This American philosopher with an interest in ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, political philosophy and ethics, has found a deep interest in modern India’s struggles with democracy and ethics.
Nussbaum is currently Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago, a chair that includes appointments in the Philosophy Department, the Law School, and the Divinity School. She also holds Associate appointments in Classics and Political Science, is a member of the Committee on Southern Asian Studies, and a Board Member of the Human Rights Program. She previously taught at Harvard and Brown where she held the rank of university professor.
Her latest missive on the situation in India comes as a bit of a surprise because it addresses a subject few have had the will to address; liberal Muslims confronting violence, discrimination and injustice, and yet choosing the path of the law, non-violence and intellectualism to confront it.
A new essay Land of My Dreams: Islamic liberalism under fire in India Martha Nussbaum offers a fascinating history of one of Delhi’s great liberal educational institutions, the Jamia Millia Islamia. As Nussbaum describes it in her piece:
Jamia was born radical. Its curriculum emphasized the study of nationalism as well as the study of Islamic history and the Qu’ran; its admissions policy welcomed male and female, Hindu and Muslim; its pedagogy emphasized debate and contestation in the teaching of all subjects, including religion, denouncing the mere “passive awareness of dead facts.” The school had strong links with theorists of progressive education such as Bertrand Russell and Rabindranath Tagore and thus gave substantial weight to the arts and vocational education.
The piece is as much about the Vice-Chancellor of the institution, Mushirul Hasan, whose story, as Nussbaum points out, reminds us of 3 things:
First, the values we associate with classical liberalism-such as the defense of the freedom of speech, the freedom of conscience, and procedural due process-are not exclusively Western values. During the independence movement in India, they were reinvented by a colonized people who had seen just how little their Western masters honored such norms.
Second, these values are not tepid and centrist, as we sometimes hear, but rather, truly radical in a world of nations increasingly under pressure both from external violence and from internal quasi-fascist forces.
And finally, Hasan’s story shows that there is a distinctive and genuinely Islamic form of liberalism, long-lived and drawing inspiration from religious texts and their central concepts.
Unfortunately The Boston Review magazine allows people to comment on the essays they publish. The reactions to Nussbaums’ piece stretch the realm of decency and coherency. I suspect that in the coming weeks the number of ‘comments’ consisting of slurs, abusive dismissals, sexist denigrations and outright insults against this scholar, philosopher, humanist and ethicist will only grow. These commentators do a disservice to not just Nussbaum, but to the very community that apparently think they are defending by abusing the writer and her works!
Martha Nussbaum is also the author of a book on the rise of Hindu fundamentalism and the threat to Indian democracy called The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence, and India’s Future which was reviewed by Pankaj Mishra in the New York Review of Books
Contents
Introduction
1. Main Elements of the CIA Detention Program
1.1 Arrest and Transfer
1.2 Continuous Solitary Confinement and Incommunicado Detention
1.3 Other Methods of Ill-treatment
1.3.1 Suffocation by water
1.3.2 Prolonged Stress Standing
1.3.3 Beatings by use of a collar
1.3.4 Beating and kicking
1.3.5 Confinement in a box
1.3.6 Prolonged nudity
1.3.7 Sleep deprivation and use of loud music
1.3.8 Exposure to cold temperature/cold water
1.3.9 Prolonged use of handcuffs and shackles
1.3.10 Threats
1.3.11 Forced shaving
1.3.12 Deprivation/restricted provision of solid food
1.4 Further elements of the detention regime….
This is the Table of Contents of the recently released ICRC Report On The Treatment of Fourteen ‘High Value Detainees’ in CIA Custody.
It is also clear and precise in its indictment, for example:
The allegations of ill-treatment of the detainees indicate that, in many cases, the ill-treatment to which they were subjected while held in the CIA program, either singly or in combination, constituted torture. In addition, many other elements of the ill-treatment, either singly or in combination, constituted cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.
Senator Patrick Leahy, Chairman of the US Senate Judiciary Committee, has been speaking across the country trying to garner support for an investigation into the actions of the Bush Administration and its now nearly countless violations of American and International Law. We, Americans and non-Americans, need to join our voices to his. In his own words, his actions are meant to:
One path to that goal would be a reconciliation process and truth commission. We could develop and authorize a person or group of people universally recognized as fair minded, and without axes to grind. Their straightforward mission would be to find the truth. People would be invited to come forward and share their knowledge and experiences, not for purposes of constructing criminal indictments, but to assemble the facts. If needed, such a process could involve subpoena powers, and even the authority to obtain immunity from prosecutions in order to get to the whole truth.
Whether this will come to pass, I can’t tell. That he is at least demanding it gives me hope.
That is how this non-profit journalism site, let by Paul Steiger, the former managing editor of The Wall Street Journal. Stephen Engelberg, a former managing editor of The Oregonian, Portland, Oregon and former investigative editor of The New York Times, is ProPublica’s managing editor, describes itself.
It makes for important and insightful reading, not the least because it reveals how so few took so many for so much!
This crisis is underpinned by theft and lies – by criminal acts that were either ignored or willfully accepted as the price of success. And the investigations and court cases are only now beginning.
As an aside; ProPublica, despite lacking ‘cool tools’, or fancy multimedia, or even celebrity/entertainment gossip, appears to be quite successful.
They are one of a few such models being attempted by an industry that is struggling to find its way forward. I find it interesting that a group of mainstream editors are in fact returning to the foundations of journalism; investigation, public interest, non-alliance with corporate advertisement dollars and the avoidance of the push of profits.
I do not have data to judge how well these organizations are doing – though their reporting is first class. I will add further information as I find it.
But I can only hope that this return to the responsibilities and intent of the 4th estate is successful and emulated by others.
There are articles/essays that I find myself repeatedly returning to. They stand the test of time and in this age of throw-away journalism and me-too punditry, these masterpieces are reminders of why real writing and engaged journalism holds such an appeal and how it can cut past prejudices and indifference. I will continue to link to others in this post as I think of them.
Ken Silverstein’s Parties of God is perhaps one of the clearest and most honest pieces written about the emergence of popular democracy in the Middle East and in particular within Islamic political institutions. Its appearance in a mainstream American magazine was surprising, and necessary. Favorite paragraph:
Talking about political Islam, or Islam at all, is difficult for Americans because our stereotypes are so strongly held. Islamists are imagined as poor, uneducated fanatics who, having turned to God for comfort and sustenance, are particularly prone to irrationality and violence. They do not allow their women to drive (when in fact women drive in every Muslim country except Saudi Arabia); indeed, every woman in a veil is seen as a victim of male oppression. When Islamists in Indonesia attack Playboy or Muslim Brothers in Egypt denounce racy Lebanese dancers, it is a sign not only of backwardness but of sexual repression, which is smugly asserted to be a root of Islamic terrorism. (It is doubtful that Osama bin Laden, who has at least three wives, turned to terrorism out of sexual frustration.) Fear of appearing sympathetic to movements that are frankly hostile to the U.S. government is, I suspect, another barrier to frank discussion of Islamic movements, as is the media’s clear bias in favor of Israel.
Pankaj Mishra’s 3 part essay on Kashmir – Death In Kashmir, The Birth Of A Nation & Kashmir: The Unending War, about the conflict there remains amongst the best primers on the situation ever put to the news/magazine page. A must read for anyone trying to figure out what is going on in Kashmir, even though it was written in 2000 at the height of the militancy, it still remains relevant and honest and insightful. There are too many favorite paragraphs but here is one that reminds us that life in this so-called ‘heaven on earth’ was very difficult and cruel even before partition:
The oldest among Kashmiris often claim that there is nothing new about their condition; that they have been slaves of foreign rulers since the sixteenth century when the Moghul emperor Akbar annexed Kashmir and appointed a local governor to rule the state. In the chaos of post-Moghul India, the old empire rapidly disintegrating, Afghani and Sikh invaders plundered Kashmir at will. The peasantry was taxed and taxed into utter wretchedness; the cultural and intellectual life under indigenous rulers that had produced some of the greatest poetry, music, and philosophy in the subcontinent dried up. Barbaric rules were imposed in the early nineteenth century: a Sikh who killed a Muslim native of Kashmir was fined nothing more than two rupees. Victor Jacquemont, a botanist and friend of Stendhal who came to the valley in 1831, thought that “nowhere else in India were the masses as poor and denuded as they were in Kashmir.”
(Continued…) Many predicting the death of the newspaper are wrong. It will not die. It will change. The newspaper will become something different, its content will not compete with the internet, but complement it. It will be read differently, and it will not just be on your mobile phone. It will be everywhere, and all sorts of media will continue to play a part. Video has many limitations, not the least of which is that it has to be seen end to end and anything longer than a minute or two is taxing and difficult to concentrate on on a tiny hand held device.
So there are a lot of issues and obstacles even in the new world. Books are still around because they are cheaper, easier to carry, easier to store, easier to retrieve and share than anything technology has offered so far. I am willing to bet that the book will survive a long time.
The sky is not falling. Its colors are changing.
i think people like Anderson complaining about lack of editorial opportunities or credibility of amateurs are missing the point.
We are indeed facing change, but it is also an opportunity. However, to find the opportunity we have to stop repeating the cliches of the camera industry or video industry, or those selling video journalism workshops and all the rest interested in selling us new toys. We have to start to recognize that the economics has changed, that the previous outlets that kept us satiated are no longer able to do so for financial reasons. that new toys, new software, sound along with pictures, is not the essential answer. That media storm does not know what the future is going to be, that just because you have video, audio and text will not really make you a star. Those who are doing better today are the ones who were doing better in the past anyways. assuming a greater creative and editorial and also cost burden may make it interesting for a magazine/newspaper occasionally, but its an unsustainable model. media storm stories cost a lot of money, and use a lot of resources, and take a long time to produce.
In the end, it is the big boys of news that will continue to thrive here. And if you want to play with them, then you will have to fit into their structure somehow.
This piece sees photojournalism as an autonomous craft. It is not. It was from its birth intimately tied to the economics of publications. When photographers challenged these they were left to starve. Look at Eugene Smith’s career. Now, finally, we are able to liberate ourselves from this stiffing, suffocating environment. Now, finally, photojournalists can free themselves to be something beyond mere picture takers for ready-made stories or hacked together propaganda. Its a brave new world complete with uncertainty and possibilities.
I say this as I sit here and stare into the void – confident that I have strong new ideas, scared that no one will value them, determined that i have no choice but to step into the void itself. Your second reference about ‘tenacity’ was right on the mark. Like any field where you pursue a passion a love and a need to be free of the machinery of the capitalist, you must be prepared to pay a heavy price. Our societies do not value those who do not serve the interests of others, but merely their own whims, curiousities, loves and fears.
By the way, in conclusion; i am wrong in all that i say!
We are all wrong. We cannot predict what will happen tomorrow. We can only look at the facts in our face. I am wrong. I will be proven wrong and that is just fine. What i am not prepared to do is to accept the incomplete justifications for known realities. It is too easy and too unthinking. Simply telling me that photojournalism is dead, long live citizen journalism, is nonsense. There is no such thing as citizen journalism. Citizens are not journalists – it denigrates the works of real journalists. Citizens can only be bystanders, or witnesses to random events. They cannot analyze, help us understand, nor can they be expected to follow up and follow through. They cannot and will not investigate, pursue, search, question and create a context.
phew, and a good morning to you all!
asim
(Continued)…Photojournalists will have to liberate their minds from these constraints – the weekly magazine editor looking for the ’sensational’, and the printed page looking for the simplistic, to go after stories that are beyond news, beyond crisis, beyond the sensational and concentrate instead on the creative and the excitingly compelling. Too many pander in the obvious. Too many are purveyors of cliches. I see so many photographers on your blog who continue to represent the world through the false exotic. Steve McCurry too, with his recent work on Buddhists, carefully eradicated any evidence of the presence of the Han Chinese and the oppression of the Tibetans by the Chinese administration. Instead, we received an idealized, fossilized, pre-18th century vision of the place. Everything that would suggest our engagement with the current dilemmas facing Buddhism, Tibet etc. were just not there. Cliches, false exotics. They may have technique and such, but they lack story telling creativity and often just plain curiousity that could reveal new ideas and new ways of telling. Furthermore, they have to stop ‘documenting’ the obvious that is in front of them. For I am not talking about story telling as a method to layout photographs. I mean the very ideas themselves – the issues and the subjects that are pursued, need to take a leap forward.
We have seen these changes in art, in literature, in poetry and such. Yet, photojournalists young and old seem trapped in conventions, and prejudices. they are offering variations to the same most of the time, rarely if ever a creative leap.
Why is this story idea shift important? Because it will allow us to engage a new community of people and work with groups, institutions, individuals and organizations far beyond that which we have so far. Not that this is new, but it has to become a standard. Photojournalism and photography schools are failing at this miserably. Places like ICP produce hacks mostly, machine-tool photographers, me-too documentarians pushing out and working within structures of conformity. Worse, they are never trained or educated to understand that there are markets outside of the editorial space. Even I do not know this market, but I know that it is there. It is more a matter of positioning yourself beyond the technicalities of photo making.
Ernesto Bazan, a photographer i believe you should feature on your site, has taken a very individual path to photography and such. Workshops, his own publishing book, engaging students, a personal vision, a passion for the craft, a willingness to work in many different arenas, a talent to engage a wide range of people beyond the photo editor and the weekly magazine. His career is a testament to the incredible opportunities available to professionals and creatives. If you look at his work, his passion, you would not think that things are falling apart. Rather, that there are more ways today to be a professional photographer and photojournalist than ever before! That the old standards, the old outlets, are not necessary if you are creative, driven and intelligent enough to articulate to others.
So Anderson lamenting the decline of editorial sales is not related to the rise of amateurs. The amateurs are in fact not competing with the professionals. Again it is not as if they are a competitive alternative. But, that editors are choosing to do away with a requirement of quality and rigor in order to save cash. And why would i say that? Because where publications have the funds, they choose to work with the professionals consistently. Look at the New York Times Sunday Magazine – Kathy Ryan still have the budget, and she works with the best she can find. Until her budget is cut, and then things will change. But she is not trawling Flickr. But the news pages maybe, Time magazine is, but then again Time and Newsweek have lost their vision, their raison d’etre so to speak and since they are now mostly run by MBA hacks, there isn’t a soul there that can understand how these magazines need to change. MBAs work with formula’s and strategies driven by an obsessive slavery to ‘customer preferences’. This is one of the great falacies of our time. Where customer preference is important, so too is creativity and offering an interesting product. Something Apple understands, or peer-to-peer designers do too 
(ok, poor analogies, i admit ) Our newspapers are run and controlled by people who see news as just a product, apply MBA tools and spreadsheets to ‘improve sales’, assume that if you pander to the infantile and the consumerist, sales will increase.
And yet, The Economist goes from strength to strength, and Time/Newsweek are weaker than ever before. The Economist offers nothing fancy, merely pretentious high brow and often complicated and engaging news. They too are a public magazine and yet have found a segment to grow and expand. Newsweek is pandering to the useless and the empty for example.
These rends more than technology is what has displaced hard news stories and hard documentary journalism.
Our industry, photojournalists, do not want to face the realities. Newspapermen/women do not want to admit their limitations. It is easier to suggest, sexier and commercially more lucrative for many companies, to suggest that what we are facing is a tectonic shift in technologies of use. This sounds like the internet bubble when the store front was to disappear and the internet to win all. Well, guess what? That did not happen, the sky did not fall, brick and mortar companies in fact won that battle by adjusting and become smarter about the dual store front strategy and outlasted and out foxed most all the badly designed and poorly managed internet only firms. Today, a new generation of internet firms have a solid real world foot print e.g. Amazon, which maintains of the largest and most sophisticated warehousing and warehouse management systems in the world. The future is an amalgamation. (Continued…)
(Continued…) We have lost our love of the story. We are no longer telling interesting stories. In fact it could be argued that photojournalism today is basically middle class voyuerism. It carries with it the stifling and infantile morality of a middle brow suburban family and attempts to deliver ’shock’ stories to titilate them into watching. Or it just reduces to historical and charter-tour cliches stories that could be rich, complex and eye-opening.
Just look at National Geographic – if its Iran, its Persipolis. if its Bolivia, its the Antiplano. if its Pakistan, its the Taliban. Tiresome, boring, repetitive, predictable, uncreative, uninteresting stories about some of the most interesting and evolving countries in the world! Even the formulas and mechanics of photojournalism are boring and predictable. This magazine refuses to go and explore places in new ways, to produce angles that are creative and interesting, and that challenge our thining and ideas about a place. Is Persipolis really all that one has to stay about Iran today? This incredibly complex and incredibly interesting country is left silenced!
The Missouri School beliefs are so old and hollowed that they produce not more than what i call comic book photojournalism. By the way, I was at the MPW in 2002 so i have seen this personally. Look at the recent multimedia piece that MediaStorm did called ‘Common Ground’ – this is so trite, so simplistic, as to be boring and predictable from frame #1. Family packing, family walking to car, family hugging – its like a linear story book, with pictures that attempt to create nothing interesting, to provoke no thought or make any argument. Its is a join-by-numbers photography, which after a while, the viewer can start to complete herself!! The picture illustrate the obvious!
Someone once said that Bertold Becht’s work was never about pathos or emotions, but always about the need to provoke though and make an argument. That is a good comment about the state of photojournalism.
And keeping true to the argument for the need for the particular; photography has been growing in areas that we have not been paying attention to. More photo books are being published and bought, more workshops are being held, more people are broadening their repertoire of works and finding creative ways of funding their projects. That is, the changes being bought about today are in fact creating some powerfully interesting responses.
Not the least of which is – people are starting to tell new stories in new ways. And i do not mean multimedia here – multimedia is merely a mechanism that can never hide the banality or predictability of a subject. It is a means to an end, but if the end if poor, no amount of flash and dash will save anything.
We have to remember that it is newspapers that are turning increasingly to amateurs. It is not a ‘rise’ of the amateur. The amateur picture has been found to be mostly free, easily found, and little paid for. This is its reasons for popularity. There is no such thing as ‘an army of amateurs’ – these are rhetorical constructs that have no meaning. What there is in fact is an ‘army of photo editors with no money and personal careers to save’ who have desperately tried to hide the fact of their economic and editorial castration by distracting us with false arguments of ‘citizen’ journalism, an euphemism for ‘cheap’.
Our only hope (i speak of editorial photographers, photojournalists etc. and not of fashion, commercial and other photographers who by the way are doing just great what with all the increase in advertising as a business) is to accept the challenge of the reliance on the amateur work to produce work that could only be done so by a professional. of course multimedia will be an important part of this – it is a tool of course – and allow us to tell great stories in new ways, but i personally believe that the challenge we face is the need to tell new stories, better stories, from new angles and to overcome our class, nationalistic, religious and other prejudices to find broader and more engaged human experiences to share.
Now, I am not so naive to believe that the latter recommendation will change the state of photojournalism and its economics. Far from it. What I do believe is that by broadening, extending our ideas of what photojournalism is about, it will allow us to free ourselves from the constraining mediocrity of the typical photojournalism end game i.e. publication in a magazine like Time or Newsweek. Too much of what passes for photojournalism is done with the belief, mostly hidden, that the customer is the magazine editor, that the structure is the linearity that is necessitated by the printed page. Photojournalists and news photographers shoot for a sheet of paper. Their universe of individuals and characters is restricted mostly to editors, writers, photo editors, their assistants, other photographers and hangers-on. 99% of photojournalism magazines, festivals, competitions and such caters to itself. It is one of the more closed artistic/non-industrial crafts in world. Our language, our references, our aethetics, or ideas of what is ‘photojournalism’ and what is not is so limited, has change so little in the last 50 years, and has such little relevance or interest outside of its own community, that we have stagnated. Visa Pour L’image or Look3 may as well be a gathering of astro-turf salesmen. There will always be a few curious outsiders, but they are not really that important to the event, nor are they engaged to carry something away from them. (Continued…)
A long suffering friend received this long, winded discussion from me as his breakfast treat – dated July 2008 (and not November 2007 as I had previously stated!), I let loose some thoughts about photography and photojournalism and the worries that we were all dealing with. It was written in a single breath and hence carries within it errors of insight and judgment. But I think it remains interesting enough, particularly now when we are so desperately trying to understand why the world of the photographer is changing.
∞
I apologize. Over 4 cups of coffee I had to get these thoughts down. A recent piece in the Columbia Journalism Review created an avalanche of thoughts that i had to get down.
See here: http://www.cjr.org/essay/flickring_out_1.php
Anyways, this is a long commentary, at times rambling, so i apologize and ask that you proceed with caution
The Columbia Journalism Review piece was interesting. I have kept up with a number of publications that come out from my Alma Matar so I had seen this piece earlier. As with many such pieces, I was once again left with a sense that they tend to say things a bit too obviously, and with an exaggerated sense of prescience that may in fact not be warranted.
What I am saying is that perhaps the situation is not all that bleak.
First, you notice that the piece concentrates on daily news stories only. In fact, it is one of the errors of this piece that it conflates the works of a Kratochvil with those of a local newspaper photographer. And most such pieces continue to speak of photography as one monolithic craft, which in fact it is not. Even the much read Vincent Laforet piece made this mistake, to say nothing of the banal suggestions he offered at the conclusion of it. I was dismayed more by the reactions of readers who actually thought they walked away with some insights
But, I digress.
We must speak of photography in the particular. Daily news photographers are facing a threat from amateurs and local professionals who the latter who have shown that they possess the same tools and the same drive. Particularly when it comes to the coverage of international i.e outside USA events and such. But there is a false belief that this is happening because of the emergence of camera phones or multimedia. This is an example of the cart before the horse, an example of incomplete evaluation of an industry and an insistence on not seeing the real driving forces behind the decline of news, and of photojournalism as a related part of the news industry.
The first assault on daily news photojournalism emerges far before the arrival of multimedia and take places in the form of economic cutbacks and the economics of wire photography. Wire agencies were the first attack on the staff photographer. Reuters, AP, AFP and others argued that their local stringers, could work harder, for cheaper, and get the needed images without the newspapers having to send out their staff. Over time this in fact has become the model. We have to keep in mind that major American newspapers started cutting back overseas bureaus and reducing photographic staff way before any multimedia capabilities arrive at our doorstep.
Russell Baker writing in the new york review of books pointed out in a piece about the decline of the newspaper as we know it that:
“Journalism was being whittled away by a Wall Street theory that profits can be maximized by minimizing the product. Papers everywhere felt relentless demands for improved stock performance. The resulting policy of slash-and-burn cost-cutting has left the landscape littered with frail, failing, or gravely wounded newspapers which are increasingly useless to any reader who cares about what is happening in the world, the country, and the local community. Cost-cutting has reduced the number of correspondents stationed abroad, shriveled or closed news bureaus in Washington, and crippled local reporting staffs which once kept an eye on governors, mayors, state legislatures, small-town rascals, crooks, and jury suborners. It has also shrunk the size of the typical newspaper page, cutting the cost of newsprint by cutting news content.”
you can read that piece here: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/20471
There was a transformation in the newspaper industry in the 1980s. Most all the major newspapers went from being family own operations to publically owned or privately supported businesses. And with that transformation came the primacy of profits over responsibility, economics over effectiveness. It also became a mantra in the USA that the local trumps the foreign; readers were increasingly narcissistic and wanted to read about their class and its petty needs (fashion, holiday travel, accessories, technology toys, cars, real estate, design and interior decoration) and about gossip (celebrity).
Hence, there has been no reduction in the fees and payments made to photographers working to produce fashion, style, food, architecture, interiors etc. As more and more magazines have offered more and more space to such works, these photographers who focus on such work, have and are doing just fine in soliciting major fees and in fact even taking their works into galleries. There the problem is that there is a large nunber of competitors, but the wons that come out in front demand very high fees.
But foreign news and photojournalism (stories of pathos and emotion) have lost out, because the newspapers are not interested in selling or representing this. The principal fall of such work comes from a belief that it just does not sell well. And advertisers too are reluctant to allow their ads to sit besides stories of HIV victims in Zimbabwe for example. When a pharmaceutical company pays a magazines hundreds of thousands of dollars in ad revenue a month, it can without trying convince editors that that story about kids suffering from the after effects of some depression drugs would not be a good idea to run.
My point being – there are powerful economic forces at play that have resulted in the decline of photojournalism. These same forces compel editors to seek cheap and free images of sites like Flickr. This is a cause and effect debate; flickr has not led to the decline of photojournalism, but in fact the decline of budgets as led to the desperation to use flickr, wire agencies, local stringers etc. Another proof of this is that day rates for photographers have not increased in the last 10 years at least because the budgets created from the board do not allow editors to do this.
So Allisa Quart’s piece misses all this that is taking place in the news industry, and that has a direct impact on all facets of the industry. It is as if we photojournalists have our heads in the sand, and in fact continue to falsely believe that multimedia will save news photography. It will not. Amateurs are not replacing professionals, but in fact have become the last resort of editors desperate to find content for little money. There are rare situations where the camera phone has given us images we would not have otherwise seen, there is no doubt. And this is to be celebrated but not considered a threat to professionals. Abu Ghraib being an example. Such situations are rare and far between and cannot replace the need for the daily. Furthermore amateurs do not commit themselves to a story, they merely do the convenient as it presents itself to them. Professionals will always been needed to pursue, commit, investigate, take risks, go the distance.
Photos are not journalism. Journalism is an endeavor with a commitment to communal and social responsibility. It is a public service with the objective of keeping check on abuses of power, the rights of the individual, the protection of the well fare of the community, the exposure of the illegal, the tracking down of the downright unjust. I said this before in a lightstalker post, journalism will rely on amateurs the day it itself become amateurish. It is not multimedia that will save journalism or photojournalism, but a commitment to quality and a commitment back to the public service. We are far from this realization.
So what next? This is not just a tirade. There is another underlying reason why photojournalism is dying, and that we are still not prepared to confront. The reason is that most photographers and photojournalists are purveyors of cliches and repetitive, predictable stories. Mental asylums, prostitutes in third world countries, drug addicts in third world countries, the homeless, street kids, dying HIV/AIDS patients in Africa, polluted cities, Latin American migration pathways, KKK, burqa/taliban/fanatics in Islamic countries, China pollution, China growth, China mingyons, China modern, China rich, India AIDS etc. etc. One could create a Chinese menu of a couple of pages to represent a belief amongst photojournalists that photojournalism is about pathos and emotions, and that there are some ’subjects’ that are what it does. (Continued…)
Rafael is an Israeli arms manufacturer and here is their attempt to convince ‘feminine’ India of her need for protection thanks to the modern, macho, western Israeli man?
With lyrics such as ‘I believe In You. You believe In Me. Together. Forever. We Will Always Be. Dinga Dinga Dee’ we have a glimpse of the sophistication of the world this video emerges from and is distributed in to.
One of first things my father exclaimed when I returned from the USA with an engineering degree in hand was ‘So, now can you fix my refrigerator?’ Some part of me wanted to believe that he meant it as a joke, but another part realized that in fact he was being serious; an education is an investment for future returns that must manifest themseves in practical achievements and solid job/working capabilities.
Why else would you want to send your child for an education?
∞
The New York Times recently carried a small piece by Patricia Cohen called In Tough Times, the Humanities Must Justify Their Worth. It regurgitated arguments against a humanities education that we have been hearing for decades, perhaps since the very birth of the field itself.
And these are arguments that we all of course well understand; at a time when millions have lost their jobs, other millions confront the possibility of being laid off, and still more, mostly students, prepare to enter the ‘workforce’ it is natural and indeed common sense to question whether one has employable skills. Particularly in the USA where most of its graduating body will be burdened with large college loans that become payable within weeks after they leave their institutions.
(When did an education become bondage? More about that in a separate post.)
Ms Cohen aptly in facts asks:
But in this new era of lengthening unemployment lines and shrinking university endowments, questions about the importance of the humanities in a complex and technologically demanding world have taken on new urgency.
Derek Bok, ex-President of Harvard University and a man we would expect can defend a liberal arts education on grounds other than ‘practical’ is quoted as saying ‘“The humanities has a lot to contribute to the preparation of students for their vocational lives.’
Despite an attempt to remind us of the importance of a Humanities education in helping students navigate life beyond the pay check, Ms Cohen ends her piece with this ominous note:
As money tightens, the humanities may increasingly return to being what they were at the beginning of the last century…the province of the wealthy.
That may be unfortunate but inevitable…The essence of a humanities education — reading the great literary and philosophical works and coming “to grips with the question of what living is for” — may become “a great luxury that many cannot afford.”
Unfortunate indeed!
∞
I believe that a humanities education is today more important than ever before!
There, I have said it. So now let me explain.
I think that Mark Danner said it best in his commencement address to the graduating students of the Department of English of the University of California at Berkeley in 2005.
Titled ‘What Are You Going To Do With It!‘, he argued that:
whether you know it yet or not, you have doomed yourselves by learning how to read, learning how to question, learning how to doubt.
And this is a most difficult time-the most difficult I remember-to have those skills.
Once you have them, however, they are not easy to discard.
Finding yourself forced to see the gulf between what you are told about the world, whether it’s your government doing the telling, or your boss, or even your family or friends, and what you yourself can’t help but understand about that world-this is not always a welcome kind of vision to have. It can be burdensome and awkward and it won’t always make you happy.
We are living through the aftermath of one of the most corrupt, venal, covert and violent American administration never elected to power. During those 8 years we have seen our finest journalists, intellectuals, politicians and citizens derailed by lies, obfuscations and the seductions of access to power.
And as citizens we have been convinced to support torture, accept the loss of our civil liberties, celebrate pre-emptive war, condone war crimes, remain quiet about the rape of a nation, look away from nepotism, ignore cronyism, tolerate blather masquerading as politics, surrender our citizen’s rights, believe that the enrichment of the few is in fact ‘liberty’, believe in ‘ghosts’ called ‘Islamofascism’, gamble with our pensions, imprison ourselves in criminal mortage scams, watch our kids die in wars of greed, walk away from our jobs without support or rights, tolerate being unemployed, toleratebeing homeless/evicted, privatize the National Treasury, rape our protected parks, devalue community, suspect civic duty, consider the lunacies of the christian right, fear every thing, accept a dysfunctional health care system as ‘best of class’, believe that only ‘the individual’ matters while society as a whole does not. And a lot more.
To say nothing about the ecological disaster unfolding around us, a clear consequence of exclusively technical minds unable to balance technological progress with ecological responsibility.
To say nothing of the financial disaster unfolding around us, a consequence of corruption and greed in an industry where the word ‘ethical’ and ‘asshole’ are synonyms.
To say nothing of the loss of our civil liberties and the abuse of our democratic institutions by a lunatic cabal called The Bush Administration, and their imitators across the globe, a consequence of a citizenry too easy befuddled by slogans and sound bites, and too involved in its ‘technical’ pursuits to give a damn.
One would think that if there ever was a time for ‘..learning how to read, learning how to question, learning how to doubt’, it would be now!
∞
This issue – the role and value of the humanities in public and civic life, occupied Edward Said for many decades. His two books on the issue, Representations of the Intellectual and Humanism and Democratic Criticism make for essential reading for those trying to understand why we should even bother with subjects like philosophy.
In Representations of the Intellectual, Said quotes from C. Wright Mills’ Power, Politics , and People: The Collected Essays of C. Wright Mills, reminding us:
The independent artist and intellectual are among the few remaining personalities equipped to resist and to fight the stereotyping and consequent death of genuinely living things. Fresh perception now involved the capacity to continually unmask and to smash the stereotypes of vision and intellect with which modern communications (i.e. modern systems of representation) swamp us. These worlds of mass art and mass-thought are increasingly geared to the demands of politics. That is why it is in politics that intellectual solidarity and effort must be centered. It the thinker does not relate himself to the value of truth in political struggle, he cannot responsibly cope with the whole of live experience.
You may want to re-read that.
In Humanism and Democratic Criticism he goes on to add:
That the humanities as a whole have lost their eminence in the university is…undoubtedly true. As Masao Miyoshi has claimed…the American university has been corporatized and to a certain degree annexed by defense, medical, biotechnical, and corporate interests, who are much more concerned with funding projects in the natural sciences than they are in the humanities. Miyoshi goes to to say that the humanities…have fallen into irrelevance and quasi-medieval fussiness, ironically enough because of the fashionability of newly relevant fields like postcolonialism, ethnic studies, cultural studies, and the like. This has effectively detoured the humanities from its rightful concern with the critical investigation of values, history, and freedom,[my italics] turning it…into a whole factory of word-spinning…and specialties, many of them identity based, that in their jargon…only address like-minded people, acolytes, and other academics.
If you think that that is just hog-wash, check out this story unfolding at Harvard Medical School! And for an even greater depth and insight, read this fantastic piece by Marcia Angell called Drug Companies & Doctors: A Story of Corruption where she also reveals the involvement and influence of pharmaceutical companies have at American universities and colleges.
Our education programs, even the ‘acceptable’ ones are under attack by corporate and industry interests.
So who is educating whom, about what?
∞
Martha Nussbaum wrote an entire book arguing for a greater stress on a humanities education. Called Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform In Liberal Education she presented a series of case studies of a new generation of creative educators in America, and various arguments for the singular importance, nay, centrality of a humanities education for the future of American democracy and society.
In an essay discussing the book, she points out that a ‘liberal’ education:
“”liberates” students’ minds from their bondage to mere habit and tradition, so that students can increasingly take responsibility for their own thought and speech. In his letter on liberal education, Seneca argues that only this sort of education will develop each person’s capacity to be fully human, by which he means self-aware, self-governing, and capable of respecting the humanity of all our fellow human beings, no matter where they are born, no matter what social class they inhabit, no matter what their gender or ethnic origin.”
But what prevents us from understanding this?
Nothing more complex than fear. As Nussbaum explains:
Liberal education is in one way frightening. For it requires opening the personality to change and questioning, to the possibility of moving out of the security of one’s own comforting habits. In this time of fear, it is all too easy… to resist this challenge, to look for comfort to a less challenging idea of education, rooted in pre-professional and economic aspirations. To close one’s “inner eyes” is comforting; to open them with an educated compassion is difficult and painful.”
∞
The New York Times may not understand why all this matters. But then again, this is the newspaper that for example showed us during the build up to the war on Iraq that the pursuit of journalistic truth and the execution of the responsibilities of a democracy’s 4th estate were just another “…great luxury that many cannot afford.”
In a world where power has increasingly sophisticated tools and techniques to ‘convince’ a citizenry of its priorities, we need more who can think, question and understand.
We are attempting today to extricate ourselves from decades of crass corruption and scandal. America today stands at one of its lowest political, economic and cultural moments.
It is now, more than ever, that we need a generation that knows ‘…how to read, … how to question, … how to doubt.’
UPDATE: 25th July 2009: Chris Hedge’s new book Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy & the Triumph of Spectacle includes an impassioned plea for the need to centralize a humanities education. He argues, similar to what I have argued here, that it is the inability to ask the larger questions, something that one learns through a strong humanities foundation, that we have ended up in the economic and other crisis we face. He argues that the increasing focus on a for-profit vocational training reduces individuals to knowing simply how to ‘maintain the status quo’, to jimmy a few things around to keep them going. Hence the incredible financial bail outs that maintain the very system that eat itself and the country’s wealth! You can hear an interview with Chris Hedges here & here.
Arundhati Roy’s had some amusing comments on Slumdog Millionaire and India’s desperate need to celebrate ‘own’ it in some fashion. Favorite paragraph:
“To have cast a poor man and a poor girl, who looked remotely as though they had grown up in the slums, battered, malnutritioned, marked by what they’d been through, wouldn’t have been attractive enough. So they cast an Indian model and a British boy. The torture scene in the cop station was insulting. The cultural confidence emanating from the obviously British ’slumdog’ completely cowed the obviously Indian cop, even though the cop was supposedly torturing the slumdog. The brown skin that two share is too thin to hide a lot of other things that push through it. It wasn’t a case of bad acting – it was a case of the PH balance being wrong. It was like watching black kids in a Chicago slum speaking in Yale accents.”
Vinod Mehta’s complaints about the same movie but without the acidic wit!
D.T.Max discussed one of my favorite writers David Foster Wallace. Favorite paragraph (too many, but here is one)
His goal had been to show readers how to live a fulfilled, meaningful life.
“Fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being,” he once said. Good writing should help readers to “become less alone inside.” Wallace’s desire to write “morally passionate, passionately moral fiction,” as he put it in a 1996 essay on Dostoyevsky, presented him with a number of problems. For one thing, he did not feel comfortable with any of the dominant literary styles. He could not be a realist. The approach was “too familiar and anesthetic,” he once explained. Anything comforting put him on guard. “It seems important to find ways of reminding ourselves that most ‘familiarity’ is meditated and delusive,” he said in a long 1991 interview with Larry McCaffery, an English professor at San Diego State. The default for Wallace would have been irony—the prevailing tone of his generation.
But, as Wallace saw it, irony could critique but it couldn’t nourish or redeem. He told McCaffery, “Look, man, we’d probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is?”
Pankaj Mishra explains the banality of modern day democracies. Favorite paragraph:
“Shallowness and ignorance have been our lot in the mass consumer societies we inhabit, where we were too distracted to act politically, apart from periodically deputing political elites to take life-and-death decisions on our behalf. We were shielded from many of the deleterious consequences, which worked themselves out on obscure people in remote lands. The free world’s economic implosion is bringing home the intolerable cost of this collective deference to apparently efficient elites and anonymous, overcomplex institutions.”
Deadly chemical and biological weapons may be missing from the stockpile of one of the world’s largest producers of such weapons of mass destruction
These ‘agent’s’ may fall into the hands of dangerous lunatics who may decide to reek havoc on innocent civilians!
Why are we not scared?
Why has our media not inundated us with slogans, graphics and a symphony of melodies to draw our attention to this ’sensational development’?
Because the nation in question is our own United States of America and the ‘agents’ are missing from the inventory of a U.S Army institution that has already been confirmed as a source of deadly biological weapons, and whose employees have already carried out attacks against civilians!
Why are we not scared?
Read on.
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In late 2001 and early 2002, journalists, politicians and others began receiving Anthrax laced packages and envelopes. The attacks killed 5 people and seriously injured 17 others. It was quickly labelled Al-Qaeda’s ’second wave’ – 9/11 attack at the World Trade Center being the first.
Intoxicated by the hysteria in the aftermath of 9/11, many a respectable journalist, pundit and politician fell over themselves to ‘reveal’ evidence of Saddam’s Hussein’s involvement in this chemical weapons warfare.
It was obvious to all who the attackers were after all they were signing their packages with statements like ‘DEATH TO ISRAEL’ and ‘ALLAH IS GREAT’.
We were quickly told, obviously told, that it could only have been those damn towel heads again – the bane of American existence and way of life, them with their penchant for irrational acts of violence as taught to them by their hateful religion (here I am paraphrasing the respectable but fear ridden Pope Benedict XVI – more about his insanities and idiocies in a separate post!), them who ‘hate us for our freedoms’ as someone so eloquently put it!
We went to war. Saddam was hung. The Anthrax was forgotten, at least mostly.
Justice achieved?
∞
A few days ago the far-from-the-mainstream, non-profit press reported that the United States Army has decided to shut down its research at the U.S Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID).
Lest you think that this will significantly harm our research into health cures, the USAMRIID is in fact a U.S. Army biological weapons research facility in Maryland a.k.a. a germ warfare research and development center.
And the reason for the closure – the Army is unable to maintain an accurate inventory of all the deadly biological agents in its refrigerators and laboratories!
(WHAT!)
Even more shockingly, this is the same facility that the FBI has identified as the source of the Anthrax used to in the 2001 attacks! And the employer of the man now confirmed to have been the perpetrator!
(No, sadly it was no towel head)
It is now known that Bruce Ivins, who worked at this very lab for over 18 years, engineered the attacks, stealing the deadly materials with ease and bypassing the lax inventory and control mechanisms, sending out letters to his intended victims by signing them with the words ´DEATH TO ISRAEL´and ÁLLAH IS GREAT´.
The FBI has revealed that the evidence against this man, who committed suicide before he could go to trial, is indisputable – see recent article in Science magazine.
However, this is the FBI, and I seriously doubt that we know the whole truth. The blame for the entire episode has been placed on the shoulders of one lunatic, but I at least find it unlikely that it ends there!
We may never know the extent of this or who else was involved and may still have access to the deadly materials.
We may never know the truth.
But we do know the lies.
∞
In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks these Anthrax attacks played into the hands of the scaremongers, and those desperate to find an argument to go to war against Iraq.
The atmosphere of that year derailed many a fine journalists – so many ‘award winning’ journalists suspended their responsibilities, common sense and intellectual courage and refused to challenge the slop that was being cast at them. A couple of examples from 2 major international papers to support this point:
The Guardian: Iraq ‘behind US anthrax outbreaks’
The Wall Street Journal: The Anthrax Source
Then there were the professional scaremongers, those who anxiously commit all their reserves to feed their prejudices and paranoias without waiting for any evidence. Laurie Mylorie, publisher of something called ‘Iraq News’, was repeatedly interviewed and featured as a ‘journalist’ which allowed her in an interview in 2001 to say things like :
There is also tremendous evidence that subsequent anthrax attacks are connected to Iraq. The cumulative evidence that Iraq was a key player in the September 11 attack and subsequent anthrax attacks is overwhelming. (Newsmax archive)
And in another interview, she continued thanks to her ‘research’ with this line without actually stating any sources for her claims that:
…at least two labs have concluded that the anthrax used in the U.S. was coated with two additives linked to Iraq’s biological weapons program: bentonite and silica.
Bentonite is a trademark of the Iraqi weapons program. Iraq is the only country in the world that uses it.
The German newspaper Bild also reports that according to Israeli security, Mohamed Atta, who organized the 9/11 attacks, was given a vacuum flask of anthrax when he met with the Iraqi counsel in the Czech Republic.
We also know that Saddam has enormous quantities of anthrax. In 1995, before U.N. weapons inspectors were expelled from Iraq, they estimated that he had produced 2,000 gallons of anthrax – enough to kill every person on earth. God knows how much he has now, in addition to his weaponized smallpox and other deadly biological weapons. (Newsmax archive)
Oh, by the way, what is this unique and deadly ‘additive’ called Bentonite? A quick research on any geological and mining book will tell you that Bentonite is mined extensively in Wyoming and South Dakota. It is not “a chemical additive” and it is not unique to Iraq. It is widespread and common, it is mined and used for drilling mud i.e. getting the rock chips out of a drill hole when drilling for oil or deep water. Oh, it is also mined for the clumping-type kitty litter.
And in case we comfort ourselves that this is just one lone moron or a few exceptions, we just have to turn to The David Letterman Show to find that in fact a US Senator by the name of John McCain (remember him?), went on TV and gave these statements in an interview:
LETTERMAN: How are things going in Afghanistan now?
MCCAIN: I think we’re doing fine …. I think we’ll do fine. The second phase – if I could just make one, very quickly – the second phase is Iraq. There is some indication, and I don’t have the conclusions, but some of this anthrax may – and I emphasize may – have come from Iraq.
LETTERMAN: Oh is that right?
MCCAIN: If that should be the case, that’s when some tough decisions are gonna have to be made.
Oh come on, he did not say that! Yes, he did, and thanks to the internet, you can watch it here!
(Aside: by the way, this is the same interview in which John McCain, when asked about his ‘counter terrorism approach’ responded by saying “The more serious these people [terrorists] think we are and believe we are – and we are serious – then I think they might, you know, go back to selling camels or whatever enterprise that they might want to engage in.”)
Interestingly, there have not been as many journalists or celebrity US Senators speaking out since we learned that in fact the attack was carried out by an American, who worked at a US Army germ warfare research facility, who stole the weapons grade Anthrax from a lab that had trouble tracking its inventory, who had become delusional and who signed his letters with ALLAH IS GREAT and DEATH TO ISRAEL to exploit the racism and Islamophobia being fostered in the post 9-11 America.
In the meantime, innocent scientists working at this lab were harassed and abused simply because of their ‘Arab’ ethnicity.
The USAMRIID center is now being closed because it cannot track its inventory!
The germ warfare programs are being investigated because there is evidence to suggest that they are in fact a greater source of danger to America than any delusional belief in imagined chemical terror attacks.
We challenge lesser nations to prove themselves worthy of the weapons of the civilized. The Americans have constantly been worried about Pakistan’s ‘loose nukes’. In fact, the consistently Islamophobic New York Times Sunday Magazine recently published a major piece on how Pakistan’s nukes were ‘not in control’ – I wrote about this in an earlier blog piece called ‘The Most Dangerous Nation’.
And yet, here we are, in Maryland none the less, confronted with the real, factual event of a closure of a major germ warfare center, a center from which an American military researcher, a man who worked for nearly 18 years at the lab, stole weapons grade chemicals, and carried out terrorist attacks against innocent civilians on America’s shores.
And whose inventory of deadly bacteria, viruses and germs is not properly accounted for!
Who should we be watching?
Is anyone worried?
