Offering Silence To The Oppressed Or How Photography Can Become A Weapon Of Repression

An exhibition called ‘Beware The Cost Of War’ recently opened in London.

Reading about it in the New York Times ‘Lens’ blog left me deeply disappointed and concerned.

Let me explain.

(Aside: Yoav Galai, the curator, is someone I have called a friend for some time now and I hope that he will forgive me for this very critical review of what is something he clearly put a lot of work in to. It is not personal, but merely a reflection on this propensity in our world to fear speaking, to raise a voice, to add details and specifics where generalizations only confuse, perpetuate injustices and acquit the guilty. I am sorry Yoav. I must say my piece.)

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In their book Another Way of Telling photographer Jean Mohr and writer/intellectual John Berger present an experiment where a series of Mohr’s photographs, each with their captions removed, are shown to a number of ordinary strangers and each is asked to explain what they see in the photograph. As Jean Mohr himself explains:

Was it a game, a test, an experiment? All three, and something else too; a photographer’s quest, the desire to know how the images he makes are seen, read, interpreted, perhaps rejected by others. In fact in face of any photo the spectator projects something of her or himself. The image is like a springboard. (page 42)

The result was that each individual described the photograph differently, thereby rending each photograph meaningless, and completely erasing it of history, context, intent and meaning and replacing them with what were little more than randomly created ideas based on fantasies, prejudices, and ignorances. The photos gave nothing to the viewer, the viewer merely imposed their ‘knowledge’ – factual and otherwise, onto the image. The images became springboards indeed, but they also became empty vessels into which the viewer could put anything and make them what s/he wanted. The images offered nothing, taught nothing, revealed nothing and as a result added nothing.

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Jean Mohr also collaborated with the writer/intellectual Edward Said to produce what I consider to be one of the finest, most important, book of photojournalism ever – After The Last Sky. This book, about which I have written elsewhere, is a masterful collaboration between a photographer and a writer. It is one of those rare photography books that has managed to lift itself from the fashionable but frivolous shelves of photography books and into the more relevant Middle East History section of a bookstore.

The book grew out of an unusual context; in 1983 Edward Said was a consultant to the United Nations International Conference on the Question of Palestine (ICQP) and he suggested that some of Jean Mohr’s photographs of Palestinians be hung in the entrance hall to the main conference site in Geneva, Switzerland. The official response to this suggestion, as Said himself describes it in the book, was unusual; they would allow the photographs to be hung, but no words could accompany them, and no explanations.

It was then that Said and Mohr came up with the idea of writing about the Palestinians – about adding the words to the photographs. As Said explains:

Let us use photographs and text, we said to each other, to say something that hasn’t been said about Palestinians. (page 4)

But they were aware that the problems they faced was not a lack of text on this matter, but perhaps too much of it. But it was also clear that:

…for all the writing about them, Palestinians remain virtually unknown. Especially in the West, particularly in the United States, Palestinians are not so much a people as a pretext for a call to arms. (page 5)

Confronting this challenge about how to convey the Palestinian experience to a reluctant audience was not going to be easy, and yet it was crucial and clear that text was going to be a fundamental act of resistance, and that its place for a people oppressed was fundamentally important because:

Stateless, dispossessed, de-centered, we [Palestinians] are frequently unable either to speak the ‘truth’ of our experience or to make it heard. We do not usually control the images that represent us; we have been confined to spaces designed to reduce or stunt us; and we have often been distorted by pressures and powers that have been too much for us. (page 6)

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“Beware The Cost Of War” is an exhibition of Israeli and Palestinian photographs now being shown in London. In a review written on the New York Times blog ‘Lens’, a review titled Stirring Images, No Names the writers explain that:

“Beware the Cost of War,” a show opening Friday at the Blackall Studios in London, will be conspicuous for many reasons — one of them being what it lacks: captions and credits next to the images, which were taken both by Israeli and Palestinian photographers.

The notion is that, without words, the pictures will be freer to speak for themselves.

In a slide show of some of the images we are shown scenes of grieving Palestinian and Lebanese families and of Israeli families. The curator, Yoav Galai, we are told:

…hoped viewers would discard customary ideological and political preconceptions as they looked at the images, many of which are deeply disturbing…

He is later quoted as saying:

“I realized it’s hard to show what’s really happening,” Mr. Galai said. “Once a photograph is out there, people ascribe whatever they want to it. So I thought, why not take all the pictures and tear them away from their narrative?”

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Yoav Galai is a young photographer. An Israeli who has documented the destruction of the Palestinian social, cultural and physical space in occupied East Jerusalem, he and I have frequently communicated via email and I respect his individual voice and determination.

But sadly I find myself in deep conflict and disagreement with this entire exhibition, and the silencing of the experience, history, and narrative of the Palestinian people already suffering from decades of silencing, marginalization, and erasure. The entire impression of ‘balance’ here is specious, and frankly misrepresents the situation which is simply one of a powerful military occupier systematically repressing and controlling an otherwise unarmed and desperate Palestinian population.

Tearing away the narrative, the history, the context of a photograph is the best way to further enable people to ascribe whatever meaning people want to images, and hence, only confirm and not question their prejudices, hates, ignorances and fears.

That Israeli historians, intellectuals, writers and journalists can clearly speak of this, admitting to the injustices their government has been executing against the Palestinians, only reminds us of the vast gap in intellectual and physical courage that imbues our societies when it comes to the question of the rights of an Arab people.

This exhibition in its current format ends up committing a number of sins against the history of the situation it claims to speak about, and even about the lives of the people involved.

• The exhibition removes context, so that we never know who is the occupier, and who the occupied. It pretends to suggest that everyone is a victim, when in fact that is not true. Israel is an occupying force, its citizens repeatedly voting into power civilians leaders, most all with deep military track records and connections, based on their ability to ‘handle the Palestinians’. The Palestinians are an unarmed people now trapped in quite possibly the most extensive, professionally administered, rationally planned, efficiently executed occupation regime in history.

• The exhibition removes chronology, so that we never know whether the act occurred this year e.g. the brutal and unnecessary massacre of nearly 2000 Palestinians of Gaza in early 2009 prompted by Israeli domestic political needs and condemned in the recent UN Goldstone Report vs. the aftermath of a suicide bomb that occurred many years ago and the likes of which have not been repeated in years.

• The exhibition removes history, so that we never know what it is that violence represents i.e. acts of legitimate violence in order to resist and overthrow and illegal occupation vs. acts of repressive violence meant to occupy, steal, and control.

• The exhibition removes the ugliest of constant and material facts; the dehumanizing and degrading check points, the summary arrests, the illegal (and yes, please, they are illegal) settlements, the military patrols that enable them, the hideous barbarism of the fundamentalist, fanatical and humanly deviant Jewish settlers, the summary executions, the entire infrastructure – administrative, military, political, under-cover of the occupation regime, the displacements, the senseless closures, and the constant threat of violence that hangs in the air and frequently manifests itself into reality.

The exhibition in fact become a tool of oppression, creating ‘balance’ where there is none, offering the easy consumption of ‘violence’ while ensuring that nothing provokes us to realize the truths that create the violence, the injustices that continue to be perpetrated, and the powers that have to held accountable for what is a clear and simple crime against humanity and massive violation of international law.

As writer Peter Lagerquist comments after hearing and reading about this exhibit:

It’s not only offensive but brutalizing, because it perpetrates another violence on those pictures, and their subjects. They are robbed of meaning, the viewer is robbed of their ability to think critically about violence, rather than merely wringing their hands over it…All that we are left with here is diffuse pathos, the knowledge that violence is bad.  And this simply is not enough; we need to understand something else.

We don’t have to love the Palestinians, but why must we insist on shutting them up? Why must we be so dismissive of values and laws that we with such fanfare created and offered at Nuremburg and enshrined in so many UN charters and Geneva Conventions? Why, when it comes to the ‘lesser’ people, do our voices suddenly find no air, our minds no thoughts, our courage no will and our photographs no captions?

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An oppressor wants to erase the voice of the oppressed. ‘Balance’ serves the interests of those exercising disproportionate violence and control over a weaker people and society. A people displaced, dispossessed, ignored, dehumanized, and incarcerated, in flagrant violation of our most valued principles of international law, justice and rights, do not need us to ‘remove’ their context, history and experiences of their suffering. On the contrary, it is precisely words, text, and voice that need to be used to unveil their experience. It is crucial to our responsibilities as reporters, journalists and photojournalists, to speak with courage and clarity and add our voice to those of the weak to counter, and challenge the easily heard and broader disseminated voice of the powerful.

Michael Massing took on the issue of specious ‘balance’ that today’s media organizations strive for and identified it as one of the major problems with journalism today. In a piece called The Press; The Enemy Within he quoted the writer Ken Silverstein (I am a big fan of Ken’s work!) who was then working on a piece about voting fraud in St. Louis and who found clear evidence of Republic Party manipulation of votes but was not allowed to say it as such and encouraged to ‘balance’ it with comments about similar actions, though far less systematic, by the Democrats:

I am completely exasperated by this approach to the news. The idea seems to be that we go out to report but when it comes time to write we turn our brains off and repeat the spin from both sides. God forbid we should…attempt to fairly assess what we see with our own eyes. “Balanced” is not fair, it’s just an easy way of avoiding real reporting and shirking our responsibility to inform readers.

Any easy was to shirk our responsibility to inform readers, and I would add, help them understand the perspectives and principles that are in fact consistently and necessarily defensible. And we are being cowards to not admit that there are principles of law, justice and national behavior and they are enshrined in documents that we love to quote e.g. Sudan, Kosovo, or Kuwait when it suits our needs.

I quote Edward Said from his work Representations of the Intellectual when he points out that:

Universality means taking risks in order to go beyond the easy certainties provided to us by our background, language, nationality, which so often shield us from the reality of others. It also means looking for and trying to uphold a single standard for human behavior when it comes to such matters as foreign and social policy. (page xiv)

My point would be that for the contemporary intellectual [or individual] living at a time that is already confused by the disappearance of what seem to have been objective moral norms and sensible authority, is it unacceptable simply either blindly to support the behavior of one’s own country and overlook its crimes or to say rather supinely “I believe they all do it, and that’s the way of the world?”

To speak consistently is upholding standards of international behavior and the support of human rights is not to look inwards for a guiding light supplied to one by inspiration or prophetic intuition. Most…countries in the world are signatories to a Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted and proclaimed in 1948, reaffirmed by every new member state of the UN. There are equally solemn conventions on the rules of war, on treatment of prisoners, on the rights of workers, women, children, immigrants and refugees. None of these documents says anything about ‘disqualified’ or less equal races or peoples. All are entitled to the same freedoms. (page 97)

This exhibition, sadly participated in by Palestinians photographers themselves, further oppresses the Palestinian experience, because it reduces everything to merely violence and sensationalism. This is the legacy of wire photography, and of mainstream photojournalism that chases blood, celebrates murder, and titillates through the tragic.

At a time when more than ever we need to speak with courage and clarity at the systematic dispossession of what little has been left to this blighted people, we have photojournalists and curators participating in a project of silence and obfuscation.

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“Beware The Cost Of War’ unfortunately attempts to balance what is so terribly imbalanced. And in that process it misleads. There is nothing to be gained by wringing our hands at the hideousness of blood and flesh torn by bombs. There is nothing to be understood by images of mothers crying. There is no value in the sight of another babies still body. To produce something that can really only provoke pity – a debilitating and cowardly emotion, is to produce nothing at all. (I am reminded of Nietzsche’s argument that… the thirst for pity is a thirst for self-enjoyment, and at the expense of one’s fellow men. It reveals man in the complete inconsideration of his most intimate dear self, but not precisely in his ’stupidity’.)

As photographers we must demand that the text be returned to us who made the works. Our eye and our text is our intent, our ideas, our values and our risks. We must insist that our images not be exploited or left open to the random violence and fantasies of an indifferent and/or confused viewer. Context matters, history matters, and memory matters. We must insist that our words are not dismissed, that the intents with which we produced our images is not marginalized, and that our images do not become merely ‘illustrations’ but are clear statements of our work and our beliefs.

Our words anchor the image, and give it something that itself does not contain; meaning and intent. The caption is crucial because it is also the photographer’s insistence on controlling the use the image is put to, and to what extent it can be manipulated. In a world overrun with meaningless illustrations, the caption takes on even greater value. Context becomes a powerful weapon against propaganda and obfuscation. And a means towards clarity and understanding. We should not surrender or relinquish this right easily. In a conflict mired in millions of words of propaganda, from both sides of course but certainly largely from the mouths of the powerful who have an unbalanced access to mainstream print, internet, and tv media, the words of those who have witnessed first hand are paramount.

Epilogue: A few days ago a Swedish magazine invited me to publish my portraiture from Gaza in its pages. A highly respected publication, it offered me the choice to submit as many images as I liked, with just one condition – they would not use the words that accompanied the work. They only wanted the pictures. You can see this work, images with words, as it appeared in a recent issue of The Virginia Quarterly Review. I refused to let them publish the work, arguing that erasing the words reduced them to meaningless aesthetics, and silenced the voices of the individuals who sacrificed their time and patience in the most horrifying of conditions so that I may carry to the world their sufferings. As photographers we either forget, or prevented from being complete individuals; thinking, creative individuals with opinions, ideas and realizations. We must defend this completeness, and the sanctity of our individual experiences, understandings and conclusions.

Update: The No Captions Needed site, authored by two professors, one from Indiana University and the other from Northwestern University and described by them as ‘…a book and a blog, each dedicated to discussion of the role that photojournalism and other visual practices play in a vital democratic society.” also discussed the ‘no caption’ approach at this exhibit which you can read here: Visual Ironies

Personal Note: This post was edited to ensure that it is understood that it does not claim that the curator(s) intended to oppress the voices or remove context, but simply that the current format inadvertently ends up doing that. This is a criticism of the format, not of the individuals involved, all of whom I am more than sure have the most determined and committed intentions to raise awareness of the situation in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

Staying Faithful To The Totality Of Experience Or New Frontiers In Photography

It is something that those of you reading my posts will by now recognize I hold very dear; the absolute and crucial need for a new generation of story tellers to reach past the conventions, cliches and crass generalizations about ‘the other’ that have so informed and influenced a whole generation of photographers, photojournalists, writers and editors.

Some of these are so familiar, so obvious, that they have become truths in and of themselves and no longer require questioning or examination; The hijab as oppression, the refugee as victim, the Muslim maulvi as fundamentalist, the Jewish settler as fanatic, the drug addict as lost, the African as violent and so on and so forth. Our challenge remains to cut past the obvious and to allow ourselves to explore spaces, lives and circumstances with humility and a genuine recognition of the humanity, history and individual agency of our subjects.

I am reminded of a wonderful essay by the Kenyan writer Binyavanga Wainain that appeared some years ago in the British literary magazine Granta. Title How To Write About Africa., it was an acerbic, at times tongue-in-cheek, poke at the conventions that shackled ‘Western’* writing about Africa. I quote a small piece:

“In your text, treat Africa as if it were one country. It is hot and dusty with rolling grasslands and huge herds of animals and tall, thin people who are starving. Or it is hot and steamy with very short people who eat primates. Don’t get bogged down with precise descriptions. Africa is big: fifty-four countries, 900 million people who are too busy starving and dying and warring and emigrating to read your book. The continent is full of deserts, jungles, highlands, savannahs and many other things, but your reader doesn’t care about all that, so keep your descriptions romantic and evocative and unparticular.”

I highly recommend reading the entire piece. As an exercise, try doing it without laughing.

James Gibbons, in a recent review of books from Africa and about Africa, points out that:

Wainaina’s essay is more than an acerbic takedown of lazy and half-informed Western perceptions. Embedded within it is a manifesto of sorts. If we turn inside out the sardonic rules and prohibitions, a vision of African literature emerges that departs from the dark-continent fantasies still entertained even by sophisticates in Europe and North America…In one sense, this is a call to normalize African writing, to make its human scale comparable to that of literature set elsewhere…The dilemma for imaginative writers lies in staying faithful to the totality of their experiences while shunning images that simply confirm … biases. The sporadic media coverage of Africa runs a familiar gamut, broadcasting a continent in perpetual—and, it is implied, essential—peril. The challenge of African writing is to provide some new news.

I love that phrase staying faithful to the totality of their experience and what it implies for the new possibilities opened up to a new generation of photographers and journalists. It was very much what Edward Said challenged us to do with it came to things Islamic and Muslim in his work Covering Islam: How The Media and the Experts Determine How We See The Rest Of The World. And for that matter, even Amartya Sen in a work already on our recommended reading list The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture and Identity where he takes typical ‘Western’ assumptions and generalizations about India, her heritage and her people to task.

At the 2008 World Press Photo awards Stephen Mayes, managing editor at the VII photo agency and a WPP judge, pointed out that too many photographers were chasing the same too few stories. That too much of the world’s experiences were being ignored as photographers attempted to find formulas for success and recognition that increasingly seemed to hinge around shooting the same stuff as that which may have already been published or recognized.

This seems even more egregious if not outright irresponsible when the formulas for producing new and interesting stories has already been offered to us. We just need to consider it, absorb it and act on it.

* ‘Western’ here does not refer to a physical land, area or people, but more a metaphor of a certain world view and presumptions about the conditions of man, the relationships between nations, and the role of the ‘haves’ towards the ‘have nots’ etc.

Speaking Of The Obvious Or Profiling Photographers And The Selling Of War

A fascinating little piece of reporting from The Stars & Stripes that simply reminds us what this entire US military embedd fiasco is all about. In a piece called Files prove Pentagon is profiling reporters we learn that the US military and the Pentagon profile reporters before allowing them to embed with the military forces. Basically, if you are in, then you have been taken. There are some still running around pretending that their embedded reporting was done with a wide degree of ‘liberty’ and ‘latitude’ and without any specific constraints imposed on them.

Even a recent World Press Photo competition winner has been repeatedly espousing in public forums, rather vehemently and defensively I would argue, the nonsense that he was ‘never told what to shoot’, revealing once and for all the delusions such photographers impose on themselves when they refuse to acknowledge the walls of the prison, while celebrating their ability to move about freely within it.

I have repeatedly spoken out against the US military embed program, much to the dislike of many, some of whom of course have happily participated in this journalistic charade and even gone on to decorate their chests with trinkets received in competitions and such. I wrote about the embed programs recently in a piece called Wrapping Photographers Into The Packaging of War, and in another piece called How We Refused To Embed With Brittany Spears, and in a more acerbic piece called Creating Tempests In A Teapot Or What Else Is A Photoeditor To Do.

I am sure I have written more about it, particularly in my lengthy tirade against modern day photojournalism also available on this blog site. I will spare you the link.

UPDATE: The same newspaper, Stars & Stripes, recently reported that the military has cancelled its contract with the private contracter who was responsible for creating these media profiling and analysis report. In a piece called Military Terminates Rendon Contract writer Kevin Baron quotes a military spokesman Col. Wayne Sharks as saying “The Bagram Regional Contracting Center intends to execute a termination of the Media Analyst contract.”. Later a Rear Adm. Gregory J. Smith is quoted as stating that ““The decision to terminate the Rendon contract was mine and mine alone. As the senior U.S. communicator in Afghanistan, it was clear that the issue of Rendon’s support to US forces in Afghanistan had become a distraction from our main mission.”

Oddly, the quotes only claim to cancel the contracts as they relate to Afghanistan. There is no claim in fact that the US military has canceled its engagement of this firm, Rendon, to carry out its controversial media analysis work. In fact, the article goes on to reveal that Rendon will continue to produce these profiles, and in fact that these reports have been regularly used by the Defense Department and the CIA to provide “…a range of media analysis services beyond just the profiles and was just the latest contract for services it had provided the military for years.  The company has a long history of contracting with the Defense Department and the CIA on controversial media projects.”

So what appears to be a ‘change in policy’ is eventually revealed to in fact not really be that. Or certainly nothing more than a juggling around of ‘responsibility’. The article was confusing and obfuscating and does not attempt to separate between the US Defense Department, various departments of the military forces, the ground operations in Afghanistan, Iraq or elsewhere. It does not make clear what this ‘cancellation’ means, the scope of its impact, the implications for future policy on the handling of embedded journalists. In fact, it just ends by pointing out that this contractor has been working for the Defense Department and will continue to do so!

Did I miss something?

Open See – Another Jim Goldberg Scream

Open See: Jim Goldberg

I love Jim Goldberg’s work. His new book is fabulous and best of all, complicated. Jim continues to employ his seemingly random photographic methods using all sorts of different formats, borrowed images and even scratching and writing on the photographs themselves.

Open See:Jim Goldberg

I have noticed a lot more photographers doing this – I even remember one well known photographer working on his prints on the terrace of the Hotel Pams during Visa Pour L’image, painting away on the prints with blood mixed in water. There, on the terrace, in full view of a curious public, it appeared an artifice. But I digress.

Jim’s work is informed by a far stronger, determined and clear vision. He is again a photographer whose technique and method I may not want to emulate, but I respect and admire them for what they produce. He remains one of those rare photographers where the whole is far more than the sum of the parts. You can see samples of the book’s images on the Magnum website, but it is obvious that it is the book that you want to possess and not merely glance at the images.

Many may not, some may not remember, but one of the pioneers of the ‘touched’ photograph was a the American photographer by the name of Peter Beard. Beard did a lot of commercial work, even a cheesy calender shoot for Pirelli tyres, but he always did it in his own way. Less his commercial efforts, I found his more personal works far more compelling and exciting, particularly because of the incredibly complex, free wheeling and intriguing scribbles and sketches that covered the images.

Peter Beard: Hippo And The Hand 1955/2006

I believe I read an interview with him where he argued that the image is incomplete until and unless the photographer has worked on it. This comment reflects an old fashioned idea of the need for the human touch and frailty on what is otherwise a purely mechanical product. Perhaps Beard did not value this instinctive, creative side enough and felt the need to push the works even further. Or that the spectrum of his creativity extended itself beyond the framing of the image and to the final image which appeared in his mind as he captured the negatives. It is however a process that produces unique objects, much like Jim Goldberg’s work which appears to continue this very practice of the ‘worked on’ image.

Wrapping Photographers Into The Packaging of War

They took the New York Times on a war tour. The Battle For Pakistan it was called when the magazine finally published the photographs their boys had so carefully constructed and bought back. They had all the elements that would suggest valor, fear, desperate battles, the struggle of ‘a state’ against an unseen but clearly fearsome enemy. Though to my eye it appeared to be a lot of pictures of Pakistani soldiers ‘posing’ – the kinds of pictures I know these soldiers often pose for whenever I have had to photograph them. They know the routine – it is a veritable war zone cat walk, Pakistan’s Next Top Soldier! There are ‘buckets’ of IEDs, emptied villages, men behind bars wearing their self incriminating, evidence acceptable in our modern courts of war, skull caps and beards. The Battle For Pakistan, a nation of 170 million, with a cultural and ethnic diversity that baffles most, was apparently being fought against a few hundred men with outdated guns and plastic buckets IEDs!

They also took CNN on one, all expenses paid, luxury jaunt around the Swat ‘war zone’. Their reporter, breathless and in awe of his actually being inside this valley. Pakistan military confronts Taliban in key Swat city is a breathless regurgitation of the voice of the Army, the reporter not even attempting to ask any hard questions. Dressed in the requisite ‘toy soldier’ garb of multi-pocket pants and manly watch, it appears that he is attempting more to celebrate his presence in a ‘hard’ zone than actually doing any reporting. The soldiers languish in the background, looking bored and at ease. Some questioned are raised – but none that would break the ’spell’ of this great war. Kills are celebrated by some army spokesperson who i am sure off camera is caring father, husband, lover or son.Everything that the dead lying around the valley of Swat are not. A collection of random weapons – most look like they were from the early 20th century are laid out on tables, and some men – less than 5 are paraded in front of the journalists. Who are these men? What is their story? What are their crimes? What are their rights? We do not ask – they are ‘Taliban’ says someone and that is enough. The war looks like it is going well.

What should have been no more than a police action 2 years ago, is now being sold as Pakistan’s great war to protect America! A see-how-we-love you performance piece funded by American dollars and fueled by Pakistani greed.

What has happened in Swat remains largely unknown. The media has been blocked from entering. Refugees streaming out of the region – expelled in fact because they were ordered to leave or feared random slaughter from the Army, speak about there being no war in the valley, and the killing of innocents who are then paraded as ‘Taliban’ fighters.

We will also not know what has happened in Swat because few if any of the foreign journalists working on covering the region have any idea or interest in the social, economic, and political history of the area. These people have no stories. Pakistan is largely covered by journalists who are ill equipped to report on it. They do not speak any of its languages, they have little or no knowledge of its history, they do not understand its ethnic groups, their histories, or even the fundamental political history of the nation since its creation, and definitely not prior to its separation from India. They know little or nothing, other than what they need to know looking down through the telescope of the ‘war against terror’.

Slugging around a few cliches’ mostly picked up in elite living rooms in Islamabad, they venture out in righteous conviction that this is a war against the ‘Taliban’ – a word that today incorporates pretty much any entity we wish to place inside it and hence has no meaning at all! And yet, we are at war against this abstraction, quite like our war against ‘terror’ and that other one against ‘drugs’. In theaters soon – the war against ‘angst’!

The people of Swat, much like the people of Waziristan, or Mohmand, or Bajaur, or Mardan or any other ‘conflict’have no history, no political-economy, no agency, no connections to the wider nation, no memory, no emotions, no love or longings, and no human capacity for creating culture, life, society and values. They are just dead bodies, ‘Taliban’, refugees, that scuttle around as we need them.

I suppose some of them are being ‘professional’ i.e. ‘do your job and shut up!’. It means never asking the editors any questions, returning to challenge assumptions, attempting to offer insights based on their experience, working to alter the ‘angles’ being created in towers in Manhattan. You give them the pictures they want, and the best of them are extremely good at it.

I have to believe however that these photographers are smarter than their works suggest. They have to be. I have to believe that they are just subsuming their intelligence to deliver to the demands of what today are clearly even more exalted jobs; paid positions or contract positions with major magazines whose budgets can only hold a few.

I am reminded of something that Paolo Pellegrin admitted to after his coverage of the evacuation of the settlers from Gaza. His statement revealed a large gap between the theatricality and emotions that were created in the images – a necessity to support the master narrative of that ‘pull out’. That is, the wrenching decision that Israel had to make and the incredible concessions she was prepared to offer, and the suffering she was prepared to inflict on her own citizens, for the sake of ‘peace’ with the Palestinians. The photographs repeatedly show determined, pious, righteous, resisting settlers as Israeli police ‘fight’ to evict them from their homes. The world watch with a mixture of pity and awe and the photographers delivered the images that captured these scenes. Many went on to win major photo awards that also showed the ‘innocent’ settlers even single handedly resisting the determination of the Israeli forces. A heroic strugle, a heroic people, a grand national sacrifice, a nation torn, a people wounded, families destroyed, lives interuppted, all for peace.

And yet, while narrating his work, Paolo offered this incredible insight on his Magnum In Motion piece about the Gaza evacuations called The Evacuation – you can hear his words by clicking on Image #18 that shows Israeli police dragging a settler onto a waiting bus:

This obviously actually happened, and these [the images] are documents of real moments. But you felt that it was also a theater. The event was at some level orchestrated and in some cases the arrangement that was made was that the settlers in a particular community or settlement decided that they could not walk away from the settlement on their own feet because that was not the way that they wanted to leave. So they decided [that] they were going to be dragged away. That it was a decision. And that was an element in this story, the fact that obviously this was happening, but at the same time it was also the result of two parts (parties?) coming together and each with their own agenda.

There is a gap, between the intelligence and awareness of the photographer, and the photographs he returns with to fulfil the story he has been asked to deliver. Even the Magnum In Motion piece maintains the emotional and pathos atmosphere of the piece, at no time allowing any suggestion that this entire event or certainly major portions of it was also political theater. The piece ends with the heroic and lament ridden music of the Israeli national anthem the Hatikva - a shockingly poor choice given that the settlers were being pulled out from occupied territories! The designers of the piece remain true to the story that is being packaged, the emotions that are being sold, the angle that is accepted, agreed to and acceptable to the world. And certainly not be coincidence, the angle that the Israeli government, its think tanks, lobbyists and pundits defined for us.

Photojournalism and photography too easily depoliticizes what it documents, elevating the visible act that is otherwise mired in various forces outside of the photograph, to being seen as ‘complete’ and ‘true’ in and of itself.

The photographer’s mind and body can sense that he is part of something more than just ‘real’ events, that he has become part of a performance, and within that performance, complete with its pathos and sorrow, he has to continue to work and shoot the ‘right’ angles, the right emotions, the right ‘feel’ so as to not ruin the whole thing for the rest of the audience – the editors, the readers in the papers the following morning. Besides Paolo, who obviously realized that he was playing a part in a script that someone else had written for him, there were hundreds of other photographers. The same hundreds by the way that are repeatedly prevented from access to Gaza, or Jenin or any number of other sites in the occupied territories.

When They take us somewhere, we should ask ourselves why!

Which is precisely what the embedded journalists now touring the ‘war’ zone with the Pakistani army ought to be doing. Why are they being taken? Where are they being taken? Why now and not before or after? A modicum of skepticism would be useful even when producing what are clearly ‘filler’ mutli-media pieces to feed the ravenous hunger of the 24-7, multi-channel needs of our the business of modern news.

Kamran Asdar Ali,  acting director of the South Asia Institute and associate professor of anthropology at the University of Texas-Austin, has written a valuable piece called Pakistan’s Troubled “Paradise on Earth” in the Middle East Research & Information Project (MERIP). He points out again that:

The Taliban have plainly appealed to smoldering anti-feudal resentments in the Swat valley in recruiting their cadre. A handful of families own the fruit orchards and cow pastures that are the main sources of livelihood in the valley, and their agreements with tenant farmers are often honored in the breach. Wages for rural labor are low. The large landlords (khans) are also likely to hold the concessions for the timber forests and the contracts to operate the gemstone mines that also employ the working class of Swat. “Paradise on earth” or not, the Swat valley has seen a large percentage of its able-bodied men out-migrate since the 1950s.

Until 1969, Swat was run as a princely state under an autocratic wali, in a continuation of the administrative structure set up under the British. Though he is remembered as benevolent and forward-looking in his social policies, the wali held a complete monopoly over taxation and the exploitation of natural and mineral resources. Revenue collection rights were given to elites and every household was taxed at a high rate to fill the state’s coffers. The princely state had its own laws and also the privilege of raising an army; indeed, the wali had a personal guard, a cavalry unit and heavy artillery. The Taliban’s desire for autonomy has a precedent.

When I met with Maulana Fazalullah in early 2008 he was considered a ‘dangerous’ man. While the army patrolled the highways and mountain tops attempting to control the so-called Taliban, I was able to walk in to Maulana Fazalullah’s compound at the Imam Dehri center and sit down with him for tea. We spent a couple of hours during which he insistently talked about the corruption and brutalization of the people of the valley of Swat. The men sitting around him echoed his stories with those of their own; the corruption and venality of the police, the exploitation of their forests and water ways, the destruction of their way of life and values at the hands of property speculators and hotel owners, the continued struggle to find a decent life under the boots of the feudasl who decided everything on a whim. Fazalullah never spoke about the Americans, Afghanistan, the ‘war against terror’ or such. He just spoke about Swat, about the areas near and around his village. As we sat there nearly 400 volunteers from villages all over the valley had come down to help construct his new madrassa. They had bought their own food and supplies and were working 24 hours a day to construct the center. And money as well. The army sat on the mountaintops and watched. I am sure they could see that dozens of armed men milling about the compound as well. But it was the highways that they wanted to patrol, the local people they wanted to harass, and the foreign photographers they wanted to take to their ‘posts’ and ‘command centers’.

It does not take a lot of intelligence to see that you are part of a game whose rules are being defined beyond the headlines and journalist pieces.

Ali Eteraz wrote a fascinating piece about the Islamization of Pakistan’s constitution under the direction of Zulfiwar Ali Bhutto. He describes in a piece called Pakistan Is Already An Islamic State, that foreign media’s penchant to see everything in Pakistan exclusively through the distorting prism of ‘the war against terror’:

…these views, rooted in the “war on terror” frame of thinking, diagnose Pakistan’s relationship with Islam incorrectly. The real issue in Pakistan is not that from time to time a group of militants, while demanding the implementation of sharia, begins attacking civilians. This, while deplorable and painful, is a consequence of Pakistan’s constitution. The essential problem in Pakistan is its flawed constitutional framework, which forces every citizen to refer to their idiosyncratic and personal views on life through the lens of “Islam.” Such a state of affairs has the effect of concealing every political, material and economic demand behind theological verbiage, and that situation ultimately favors religious hard-liners and militants who are willing to use violence.

Further pointing out that:

Most people in the world, including some Pakistanis, live under the illusion that the country is secular and just happens to have been overrun by extremists. This is false. Pakistan became an Islamic state in 1973 when the new constitution made Islam the state religion. Under the earlier 1956 constitution Islam had been merely the “official” religion. Nineteen-seventy-three, in other words, represents Pakistan’s “Iran moment“—when the government made itself beholden to religious law. Most western observers missed the radical change because the leader of Pakistan at the time was Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, a whiskey-drinking, pseudo-socialist from a Westernized family. Those that did notice the transformation ignored it because the country was reeling from a massive military defeat in 1971, which led to half the nation becoming Bangladesh.

And that this had devastating consequences for how the people of the country had to use Islamic idioms to demand even the most essential and basics of needs from a government now drowning under the Islamization programs of the self-styled prophet General Zia-Ul-Haq. Even Nawaz Sharif, now desperately attempting to pull on democratic underpants, once attempted to draw up legislation that would have him titled Amir-Ul-Momineen – The Great Leader Of The Believers. Pakistanis do have a wonderful penchant for shallow grandiosity and empty bombast!

And finally, Tariq Ali has recently written a Diary for London Review of Books piece that reminds us of the venality and corruption that is Asif Ali Zardari, and the pathetic state of a nation that is increasingly convinced that in fact it was he who simply murdered his wife, the highly popular, democratic myth known as Benazir Bhutto!

Of course these nuances, particularly those raised by Ali Eteraz and Asdar Ali are difficult to catch in our morning internet read. Pakistan does not really exist, other than as a pawn in a chess game being played in Washington D.C. The people dying on the frontiers of Afghanistan are not real people. President Obama was shedding tears for the killed Iranian activist Neda the same day that his drones slaughtered 60 people in the tribal areas. The cynical exploitation of ‘human concern’ in one instant, and the callous, calculated, inhuman, purely barbaric and cannibalistic indifference to the erasure of another speaks poorly of the popular belief that modernity and morality go hand in hand. The Pakistani government (it should be called the Pakistani Cabal), now in the hands of a rank criminal, is a pawn that can only move in two or three preordained directions. And our reporters arrive in it and report on it with those ‘rules of engagement’ subliminally and explicitly defined.

Let the wars begin!

How We Refused To Embed With Britney Spears!

I woke up this morning and read the following piece of news:

“Sweden’s four national newspapers, Aftonbladet, Expressen, Dagens Nyheter and Svenska Dagbladet boycotting Britney Spears concert at the Globe July 13. The organizer needs to press photographers must sign a contract that gives her the copyright to the images, and the right to decide which images may be published. ‘If they do not tear the contract we will not shoot,’ says DN’s image manager Roger Turesson.”

And I soon wafted into a day-dream that took me back to the world in late 2002 as the final touches were being put on the US military journalist embed program, and this announcement hit the front pages of a oh-so-imaginary-but-courageous New York Times:

“America’s four national newspapers, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times and The Chicago Tribue are boycotting George Bush’s  Gulf War to be held in 2003. The organizers of this event demand that press photographers sign a contract that gives them [the organizers] the right to decide which images may be published and what, if anything, they will be allowed to document. ‘If they do not tear the contract we will not shoot,’ says New York Times photo editor Jane ‘battlefield” Schmoe.”

I have been accused of naivete, and stupidity by those in positions of ‘power’ at magazines and newspapers for constantly harping on this.

Today, with memories that do not go beyond the 24 hour news cycle, editors justify their decisions to continue to ‘embed’ their reporters with the arguments like ‘there is no other way to do it – its too dangerous otherwise’. They fail to realize that this is precisely what the embed program hoped to achieve beyond its simple control of the ‘image’ of the war.

We live in the very house we built!

(UPDATE: 25th July 2009: NBC’s new prime-time titilation is called The Wanted that unites ’special operations’ operatives with self-declared ‘journalists’ to hunt down what they describe – without evidence, right to defense, process of law, right to counsel, a fair trial and a full hearing of course, are the world’s most dangerous ‘terrorists’. Where they get this list is easily guessed at. But, my point is underlined by such lunatic programming – our ‘journalists’, our ‘military’, our ‘intelligence’ and our ‘government’ continue to conflate. and continue to loose credibility. we are not even pretending any more!)

By getting in to bed with one of the belligerents we asked our journalists and photojournalists to participate in acts of war. The Iraqi and Afghani has been dehumanized but can we for a moment imagine what it must look like from the hell they are standing and looking from?

Dressed as toy soldiers in camouflage our reporters/photographers are seen strutting around in US military camps, sitting inside US army Humvees during patrols, chatting it up with US army personnel as civilian bodies lay shredded all around, sharing meals with those who break through doors and threaten families, walking away with soldiers as they humiliate and drag men to prisons, sharing sleeping quarters with those who torture them, and speaking fluently the language of the pillager and occupier.

That is, as pure and simple collaborators with what are illegal, and brutal wars of occupation and pillage.

Is it any wonder then that it is ‘too dangerous’ to cover it from outside the embed?

I will add that real reporters have covered the war in Iraq from outside the ‘voice over’ of the US military. Urban Hamid and Dahr Jamal come to mind, and also the group of young photographers who took considerable risks to produce independent stories from the country and the war and horror that was bestowed on her by our leaders.

I will also add that there are those who did embed, and came back with stories and images that spoke beyond what they were intended to do. Chris Hondros comes to mind, Zoriah and also Ashley Gilbertson to name a few. But these are exceptions that reveal ways that individuals have attempted to get something more out of a bad situation. They are all unique characters, not easily usurped by others and their work beyond Iraq continues to confirm this. I am sure that there are others, but again, these are people working ‘against’ the strictures of the embed program and allowing themselves to think beyond what is being shown.

And perhaps in a great irony, I remember an Iraq photojournalist telling me that it was the ordinary soldiers that were most keen on helping him see the things the Army did not want us to see – they helped him and encouraged him to photograph the insanity of war perhaps in the hope that the images could stop their involvement in this madness!

It can be done, it has been done by more and it is the only and the right way to report these wars. But it takes commitment and a willingness to understand why we are ‘reporters’ and ‘photojournalists’ in the first place.

It can still be done.

The newspapers can still come together and finally refuse to participate in the embed program and possibly even pool their financial resources to allay costs. Imagine if tomorrow all reporters simply refused, announced that they were going to arrive independent of military cover and start to work to establish an independent presence inside Iraq and Afghanistan and make the investments to rebuild trust and credibility with them, and with us here in the USA.

We need to rebuild our commitment to journalism and in particular in the eyes and minds of the people who are dying for ‘our protection’ and our supposedly sacrosanct ‘way of life’!

Newspapers and news agencies around the world have in fact organized boycotts on a number of occasions.  A little research shows however that they mostly tend to be aimed at pop stars, and sporting organizers. There was a slightly annoying incident with the National Football League some years ago, another with the Indian IPL cricket leage and then another with the football World Cup, and another with the Australian Cricket Board. I believe that the band ColdPlay was also the target of a threat of an organized boycott.

If we can confront the power of Britney, why not then the US military?

UPDATES: Some pieces that I came across that highlight the situation in Afghanistan a little better include Escalation Scam by Norman Soloman and a review by Ann Jones of the HBO film Fixer called Everything That Happens in Afghanistan Is Based on Lies or Illusions. I also found the hilarious but vividly revealing blog site for freelance reporter P.J.Tobia who is reporting the daily realities of Kabul and other places he visits.

NOTE: I realize that this boycott, like any against a pop star or a sports league, is less about ethics and standards and more about money. Rights to images determines of who gets the financial benefits of the images. However, the same argument can also be made for why American newspapers so eagerly jumped into bed with the US military; there was just more money to be made. It is easier to give people what they want than to adhere to the ethical obligations of your profession. Journalism is not just a business but, much like health care, also a public good. It is why profiteering by medical insurance companies or health care companies, so repulses us. Remember the Hippocratic Oath? We believe in the sanctity of the profession and its ethics reflect the ethics of our society; we care for all and it is just. It is what defines a civilized and developed society. Journalism is similarly – a public good and has priorities and responsibilities that go beyond money making. It has to balance profits with professional responsibility to serve the public. So yes, of course, embedding was easy and profitable and every one was doing it and it was going to be a huge seller since the nation was drunk of mindless patriotism that demanded blood and soon. We wanted pictures of heroes and liberators, not questions about the immorality and illegality of the wars, the fake intelligence reports, the lies at the UN or about ‘yellow’ cake and so on and so forth. I know all this. I still remain naive, and stupid, and idealistic and believe that regardless of the market share value improvement, it was the wrong decision and one that continues to hurt the newspapers and us as a society and a now-struggling democracy.)

Broken Promise: Israel Known & Unknown

HAMID SAMONI Father of Zakaria Hamid Samoni, 8 years of age, who was killed by a rocket fired from an Israeli helicopter

The Summer 2009 issue of The Virginia Quarterly Review magazine dedicated to matters Middle East has been published just as Amnesty International releases its report on Israel’s 22 day assault that began on December 27th 2008 on the territory of Gaza.

The report (download a copy at this link) provides a broad human rights and war crimes background to the work that writer Elliott Woods and I recently completed in Gaza thanks to the generous support of the Virginia Quarterly Review and The Pulitzer Center On Crisis Reporting.

Elliott Woods essay Hope’s Coffin focuses on Gaza’s young generation and its view of the future. My essay Portraits of Survival steps away from the conventional Gaza conflict photography and concentrates on portraits of people left to deal with the scars of this recent conflict. You can also read our field reports that we compiled for The Pulitzer Center while we were on the ground in Gaza.

Peter Lagerquist has also contributed with an amazing piece called Tracing Concrete that examines the who examines the legacy of British methods of detention and barricading in Palestine, a legacy that now live on in Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.

The issue emerges a few weeks after some other news. Noted Israeli writer, journalist and intellectual Amos Elon passed away on the 25th of May 2009. His voice, his views and his courage in speaking honestly about the situation in Israel/Palestine will be greatly missed. As Tony Judt says in his obituary:

Amos Elon’s commitment to Israel, the country where he lived and worked for most of his life, was never in question. But for just this reason his awkward stance, relentlessly engaging with the country’s failings, set him apart. His courageous refusal to endorse the clichés with which Israel’s defenders parry every criticism contrasts not only with the defensiveness of contemporary left-wing Israeli commentators but also and especially with the pusillanimous apologetics of Israel’s American claque.

His pieces in The New York Review of Books – Olmert & Israel, and Israelis & Palestinians are just samples that offer us insights into his clarity of thought and courage of conviction. And it his breath of vision that also offered us insights into the failings of the Palestinian leadership that is also responsible for the mess their people are in today. Again, from Tony Judt’s obituary:

His sympathy for the “stateless, dispossessed, and dispersed Palestinians” did not blind him to the ineptness of their leaders. He had met enough Arab and Palestinian politicians to know just how inadequate they were to the tragedy of their peoples and the tasks facing them.

His pieces provide us an important and complex backdrop to the crisis in the region and the forces that work against what most would call a just and civilized solution.

In addition, the Israeli journalist Amnon Kapeliouk also passed away recently. He wrote frequently in Le Monde Diplomatique and was a incisive thinker about the state of Israel and her politics. His pieces for the Le Monde Diplomatique like Limits to Tolerance , Israel’s Failed Invasion, and Israel: An Army In Power remind us once again of the powerful voices within Israeli society, politics, media and culture that are not cowed by her leader’s trenchant and shrill assault on things human, moral and just.

We do not know Israel. I am always struck by the fact that so few photojournalists have paid attention to the complexities and conflicts within Israel. As a photographer I remain dismayed at how little photo-journalistic work has been done on the country itself rather than its occupations next door. I believe that today we can learn more about the nature and reasons for the occupations and wars by looking inside Israel. To understand why life in Gaza is as it is one has to look at the Israeli communities around Gaza.

Writer Peter Lagerquist has argued this frequently and even created a powerful proposal for a magazine piece on this. As yet my attempts to take his ideas to photo editors have only been met with blank stares. It seems that we are either not ready to ’see’ Israel, or not ready to engage in the complex.

In the Arab world the country is seen as a monolithic pathology, a state consisting of homogeneously fanatic ‘yehudis’ with a thirst for Arab blood. To say nothing about the many ‘James Bond/007′-inspired conspiracies that simply exaggerate her powers and influences around the globe, to say nothing about bestowing its incompetent and mediocre leaders and secret agencies like Mossad with intelligence and a genius they hardly deserve!

Its complexities are lost to most, and with them the chance to engage and join the voices that are from within Israel speaking out against her injustices. We know well the righteousness and religiously sanctioned occupations of the West Bank and Gaza, the continued discrimination and harassment of its Arab citizens, its amnesia about the violence and inhumanity that underlined her founding, its celebration of violence as emancipation, its militarization of its culture, politics and society, its complete ignorance of the very continent and culture it actually sits in, and its aggressive and destructive influences in the politics and societies of its neighbors. We know it and we condemn it.

But we should also know that Israel needs to be engaged and entangled with. In particular, we need to connect with those within her who are confronting its structures of power and repression. As academics, intellectuals, politicians, students, writers, photographers, artists, activists and critics we have to add our voices to the minority within that is also risking its safety, welfare and security confronting what Kapeliouk called an army with a state!

Kapeliouk was one of the founders of the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, which recently won an award for their ‘citizen journalism’ campaign where they handed out video cameras to Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip to document human rights violations. B’Tselem then uses the footage to advance human rights and law enforcement in the region. And how many know that some fine work about the reshaping of East Jerusalem has come from a young Israeli photographer. Yoav Galai has spent many months documenting the destruction and reshaping of the Arab neighborhoods of East Jerusalem. Its a story and situation that deserves even more attention. He continues to write about the area in his personal blog site as well.

Elon and Kapeliouk offer us examples of courage that we would do well to emulate. Not just when it comes to Israel, but to our own societies. Their voices may now be silent. But their ideals, courage and vision must be carried forward.

World Press Photo And The Numbness of Repetition: Stephen Mayes Speaks

Stephen Mayes, World Press Photo Secretary for six years, gave a widely noted keynote address at this year’s event in Amsterdam. In what can only be described as a strange coincidence, he echoed sentiments I had written about back in the summer of 2008 that photojournalism today has become repetitive and conventional.  To quote from my earlier post:

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. 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 titillate them into watching. Or it just reduces to historical and charter-tour cliches stories that could be rich, complex and eye-opening.

In a strikingly similar vein you can hear the far more experienced and articulate Stephen Mayes speaking at the World Press Photo awards this year.  You can hear an audio recording of his talk.

I was particularly struck by his comments that reflected much of my thinking on this issue.  As he says in his talk (as scribed by Jens Haas from the Notes From Nowhere blog) :

The overwhelming impression from the vast volume of images is that photojournalism (as a format for interpreting the world) is trying to be relevant by copying itself rather than by observing the world. Nowhere is this more obvious than at World Press Photo where every year the winners stimulate a slew of copyists (in style and content). It’s easy to understand why when we consider that the last twenty years has seen an explosion in the numbers of professional photojournalists and a collapse of the traditional markets. As more photographers compete for less page space, a lot of work ends up in competitions as the only outlet – and as the largest, World Press Photo gets more than its fair share.

Every year, the jury is astonished by the repetition of subjects and the lack of variety in the coverage. From the infinity of human experience the list of subjects covered by the entrants would fill a single page, and (excluding sports as a specialist area) could be reduced even to three lines:

- The disposed and the powerless
- The exotic
- Anywhere but home (the American election would be one of the exceptions to this rule.)…

This is the general view, the blurred impression of 470,214 images and of course there are many exceptions. But meanwhile hospitals and the sick (and especially mental hospitals), the afflicted, the poor, the injured are photographed way in excess of their actual numbers. And I have a feeling that there are as many photographers as drug users in the Kabul’s Russian House. As one juror said this year, “90% of the pictures are about 10% of the world.”…

- Over represented: commercial sex, suffering black folk, Muslim women in veils, same sex couples kissing, holding hands
- Under represented: middle class, affluent drug users, real sex, personal sex, black culture and expanded vision of black life outside Africa.

I encourage you to listen to his entire talk.

I recently raised this issue in a workshop I held in Dubai for young photographers just starting out on their careers or thinking about pursuing photojournalism as a career. Too many too quickly confine their ideas about ’subjects’ and ‘focus’ to the conventional arenas of photojournalism as they know and understand it. Few were able to jump to the realization that photojournalism is also about story telling, and that there are so many stories that are just not being told! And all too often they chose subject based around pathos and emotions. Few could think of ideas that were built around a new set of objectives for example to provoke thought and make an argument. None thought about stories from within their own lives, or their own social spaces in the UAE.

There is a whole new world of photography. Its greatest change is not in the technologies that we are being told will save us – not in multimedia, not audio sound recordings or any such, but in the fact that we can now do our own stories, new stories, and take them out to the world without first having to get the approval of an editor, a curator or a jury. And with this liberty comes the possibility of re-inventing what photojournalism is, and how we go about telling stories, and of course, the stories we tell.

So lets begin.

A Kinda/Sorta Conversation With Magnum’s Peter Marlow

No I have actually never had a conversation with the great Peter Marlow. I have never even met him. But he wrote a blog post back in 2007 to which I responded with some comments.

I am posting these comments here now because I realize that these comments, made back in July 2007, contain within them the seeds for what eventually has become my ‘The Idea of India’ project I am currently working on. It surprises me to see the continuity of thought that I was able to sustain – something I can’t claim I have ever achieved before – and that eventually, nearly 12 months later was expressed as this new project.

Peter’s original post explored how the Balkan conflict was ‘officially’ represented in Serbia, and that even today it is best referred to as ‘NATO aggression’. As an American visiting Serbia for a series of exhibitions Peter found himself in a slightly uncomfortable position and had to carefully negotiate what is still clearly a very sensitive issue in the country. While giving a talk at a workshop that he held for Serbia photojournalists, Peter explains that he..

…showed a press card created by our New York office, bizarrely for the ID photograph they used a shot of me wearing anti-flash goggles on the deck of the aircraft carrier. As many of the people in the room had shot the story from the ‘receiving end’ I could feel a strong reaction as soon as I mentioned the ‘Kosovo Crisis’ and my own coverage of it. I asked the audience if this was the right terminology, and was told rather sharply by one photographer that the correct expression was “The NATO Aggression”.

I was reminded of a recent experience I had had in Japan while on assignment there for National Geographic (France) magazine and decided to write a response to Peter’s post which read something like this:

peter;

your experience with the serbian photojournalists reminded me of a recent experience i had with some japanese manga artists. while on assignment in japan i had the opportunity to speak to a couple manga artists famous for their works depicting the horrors of the aftermath of the hiroshima bombings. i was moved by the power of their work and by the immediacy of their memories of the terribly day of the bombing. their work powerfully depicted the sufferings, and later the humiliating abandonment of the victims by their own fellow japanese.

however, i was also very perplexed when i realized that throughout our conversations we avoided any discussions about the broader, historical context of the event. no one mentioned that japan at that time was a nation at war, that millions had died in countries in asia resisting her expansionism, that her occupations iin south-east asia and south asia were brutal and resulted in unmentionable atrocities and so on and so forth. we only talked about hiroshima decontextualized from wider events.

the issue of history, japan’s role in WWII, her occupations and war crimes of course remain controversial issues even today and her history books continue to face criticism for their avoidance of specific facts.

see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_history_textbook_controversies

these are painful issues and not easily resolved. and i am not suggesting that the war justified the hiroshima bombings. i am merely suggesting that ignoring facts is an act of will, a choice that one makes perhaps because one is determined to hold on to one’s prejudices or beliefs. or simply that playing the role of a victim takes less effort!

calling the war in kosovo merely ‘NATO aggression’ is neither historically correct nor a defensible position. it is an act of transforming oneself into ‘a victim’, hence excused from broader moral issues. it encourages us to simply not make an effort beyond our current beliefs. it is a prejudice that suggests a determination to not examine or give a hearing to the wider issues at play in the conflict, including human manufacturing of history, the use of propaganda, the cold lies and manipulations of politicians, the atrocities and injustices carried out ‘in the name of the nation’ and other abstract, little examined assumptions.

your suggestion for a series of workshops in serbia is a fabulous idea. i do believe however that photography can avoid falling into the trap of pandering to any one side ‘of the same story’, but to use photography’ to develop an awareness of the broader story, to help a nation question her prejudices, to encourage citizens to confront uncomfortable truths and view points and use photography as a way to raise awareness, change ideas, and develop new dialogues where previously only rhetoric may have existed.

kosovo and serbia have continued to hold on to their rigid myths with little or no effort to develop a new dialogue that may spare them further wars and further suffering of their people. prejudice, hate, and self confirming and aggrandizing beliefs still fill the air in both regions. photography may never convince people to change their ideas, but it can certainly begin the process by encouraging them to step into uncomfortable situations and confronting those we may have previously dismissed or disliked.

i am sorry that this is so poorly written. i am still waking up here in sweden.

today we are told that photography has no role to play in bringing forth the truth, and that it is merely to be reduced to illustration or art. but i disagree. photography is not just the pictures, but also the research and act of stepping out to take the pictures. these intellectual and physical elements also differentiate one photographer from another. some are better at it than others in clearly measurable ways!

and they are perhaps the most important elements in helping us learn, grow and change – we have to read, and we have to step out into new world, confront people there, and actually engage and deal with them. this is where photography outdoes literature, poetry, paintings etc. because it is the only creative endeavor that forces us to create and maintain a dialogue with our subjects. other endeavors allow this dialogue, but do not necessarily demand it (i will say nothing about works by people like jeff wall etc.)

imagine, a group of serbian photographers having to do personal stories about life in kosovo, or on the edges of divided cities like mitrojvica! i can see the workshop going far beyond the banality of aesthetics, exposure control, RAW processing or frame filling! it steps into a whole new world where perhaps we can once again begin to discover the reasons why man picked up the camera in the first place and started to bring pictures back home – to amaze us with the incredible things we saw in the world, and to surprise us with what we had never expected!

Asim (July 24th, 2007)

Creating Tempests In Tea Cups Or What Else Can A Photo Editor Do!

The following recently appeared on the pages of the New York Times:

“A picture on May 5 with the continuation of a front-page article about the porous Afghanistan-Pakistan border, and the strategic advantages it offers to Taliban insurgents fighting American troops, showed a silhouetted Taliban logistics tactician, who was interviewed for the article, holding a rifle, creating the impression that the weapon belonged to him. The Times subsequently learned from the photographer that the rifle belonged to the owner of a home in Pakistan where the interview took place, and that the Taliban tactician had held the weapon only for the purpose of the photograph.

“Had The Times known this information at the time of publication, it would not have used the photograph to illustrate the article.”

The image in question is here:

Photography By Zachary Canepari

There have been a round of blog and online discussions on this matter so I will not repeat most of what has been said. In fact, most of it is trivial, misleading and completely misses the point.

When I read this public ‘apology’ by a paper that I have repeated accused of indulging in shoddy, manipulative and in fact irresponsible journalism (see my two blog posts titled The Worlds Most Dangerous Nation and Only Interesting If Its Madness) when it comes to regions Pakistan/Afghan I could not help but laugh.

I found their language and their justifications condescending and manipulative.

∞

It is condescending because it attempts to convince us of the ‘integrity’ of this newspaper which will not let stand even the most ‘minor’ infractions. It attempts to create in our minds the idea that this publication adheres to only the highest and most rigorous standards of journalistic ethics. So high that even this young photographer’s minor infraction deserves a public flogging and a kowtowing to the readers.

We are supposed to forget that this is a newspaper that has repeatedly sent its photographer’s into the US military embedded photographer program, and that continues to in fact provide most all its reporting from Iraq and Afghanistan from these embedded (read: censored, controlled, scripted, manufactured, crafted, sculpted, curtailed, manipulated, overseen and monitored) positions and perspectives. We are supposed to believe that journalist ethics are less about the way we gather the news and more about the way we present it.

We are supposed to forget that this is also one of a number of American newspapers whose journalists failed to ask even the most basic of questions and failed to examine even the most public of facts during the build up to the invasion of Iraq. Their ethical reporters were on the front lines of journalistic jingoism, helping sell the war to the American public.

And far from being an anomaly in the past, it even now continues in its refusal to ask hard questions about what in fact is actually taking place inside Southern Afghanistan, and continues to publish reports and pieces by a number of its journalists whose entire reporting relies on official government sources from the American, Afghani and Pakistani sides.

The same news publication’s journalists and photographers continue to win international and domestic awards despite the fact that they have mostly been at the mercy of a masterfully planned and executed military propaganda machinery.

And yet the newspaper has never taken it upon itself to let us know that it understands that the perspectives it reports in its pages when it comes to Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan are completely and near-absolutely colored by military and political interests that rather not tell us the truth but only that which will help us continue the misguided and unjust conflicts in the regions.

Into this foray arrives a young photographer, who produces for effect a picture that he knew he would need to produce to have it published in this newspaper. He should have been sanctioned for his manipulation, but a public flogging seems completely over the top. It has unnecessarily, and for a trivial manipulation, damaged the career of an otherwise talented and hardworking individual.

In the scheme of journalistic manipulations, from reporting from within the embed program to mindlessly repeating the inanities of ‘power brokers’ just to maintain access to them, Zachary Canepari’s infraction is trivial. It should have elicited nothing more than a behind-the-door reprimand. Lets keep in mind that neither the photograph nor the manipulation were important to the story that was run, or affected what the story attempted to discuss.  In fact, it was a pointless illustration (its just a silhouette!) and the story could in fact have stood on its own even without it!

∞

The apparent apology is also manipulative. It places the entire responsibility on the shoulders of the young photographer and hence (as has been done many times by many publications in the past) acquits  the editors at the publication.

Editors (and not just photo editors, but the main editors) have significant influence in determining what kinds of pictures are made because they have a significant influence on what kinds of pictures are published. And the dirty little secret of photojournalism is that all photographers, particularly young and ambitious ones, learn quickly what editors want.  All photographers want their pictures published and they, either through experience or by watching the work of others, quickly absorb and understand what kinds of pictures a certain editor is looking for and prefers to run.

No where is this ugly reality more true than at wire agencies. Having watched the mind numbing repetitiveness of images being produced by local Palestinian, Afghani, and Kashmiri wire news photographers, I could not help but understand that they are simply taking orders from the desk editors, who are in turn, simply taking orders from their client publications. Wire photographers only shoot what sells, and what sells is what the editors are buying. The machinery of mass produced conflict imagery is little examined or understood, while the fantasy of the ‘independent’ photojournalist ‘exploring’ and ‘discovering’ the world carefully managed and sold.

And even major news magazines do this, as I have learned from direct experience. Editors will in fact even call their photographers and tell them what kinds of images they want. The same has been confirmed to me by a few other photojournalists working for major American news magazines – that editors will tell them what they want in the image, in particular, the kind of ‘mood’ and ‘atmosphere’ they are looking for.

This has happened to me on at least 2 occasions while working for two different American weekly news magazines. The editors, disappointed that my images from one of Pakistan’s frontier cities, were not ‘appropriate’ insisted that I had to produce images with a greater atmosphere of ‘menace’ and ‘threat’! When I failed to do so, they simply went to their archives and used the work of another photographer because it fitted the ‘atmosphere’ they were trying to create more than my work did.

On another occasion and with a different weekly news magazine I had an editor explicitly ask me if I could confirm that the people in the region of Mohmand, (FATA) Pakistan that I had photographed were ‘Al-Qaeda and/or Taliban supporters’ because that would be the only way she could actually consider running the work. When I refused to ‘confirm’ this, the work was shelved.

Photographers learn quickly what will publish and what will not.

Zachary Canepari, an otherwise fine and talented young photographer, has recently been shooting a lot of assignments for the New York Times newspaper. I find it impossible to believe that he was not  aware of the kinds of images and the mood that the editors were looking for.

Organizational cultures influence our behavior within them. We become aware, without even explicitly being told, which behaviors are awarded and which sanctioned. Young photographers shooting for the New York Times, (or other mainstream American newspapers) quickly learn how certain regions of the world need to be depicted and the kinds of images that in fact get published.

It is why we continue to see a the same sorts of pictures being produced from places like Afghanistan and Pakistan that we have been seeing for years; burqa clad women, bearded and demonic looking protestors, maniacal mosque worshippers and fanatical mullahs. And it is why it comes as no surprise that these shallow, embedded and conventional depictions continue to win major awards.

The visual language that a photojournalist employs does not occur in a void but in fact reflects a publication and editorial environment where that language is understood, received and celebrated. Those that speak this language the best are awarded with publication, fame and ‘authority’. This remains a little discussed fact and most all editors in fact distract us from this broader reality by constantly nit picking on minor image manipulation issues. As was recently done when a jury dismissed the work of a Danish photographer for making the sky look a bit too blue!

The outcome of that last non-existent controversy was the photographer declaring that in the future he would only participate in competitions with pictures made in ‘black & white’!

Can there be a better description of the idiocy of these discussions than this one? A competition that will accept the absolutely artificial and manipulated representation of the real world that is b&w photography,is the same one whose jury was ‘angered’ that a photographer had made his sky a bit too blue!

We are truly in the land of morons!

∞

There are serious questions about journalistic integrity and ethics that need to be asked. From the kind of language that is used in reporting, to the means by which news is in fact actually gathered to how suceptible to power it has become. These are questions at the heart of the crisis that inflicts American journalism today. However, useless discussions about the extent of Photoshop manipulation or ’set up’ images seem rather besides the point and nothing more than the grand standing of photo editors who realize that these trivialities are pretty much all that is left for them to pontificate on as the broader decisions about content and context have been taken away and handed to MBAs and advertising executives!

The Limits of Photojournalism And Things More Worthwhile

It is perhaps the most interesting, creative and compelling book of photography I have ever read. I have looked and read it over a dozen times in the last 8 years.  Edward Said & Jean Mohr’s ‘After The Last Sky: Palestinian Lives’ is perhaps the only example that I know of of a brilliant writer and a sensitive photographer collaborating to produce something remarkably insightful, intelligent and provocative at the same time.

For the first time a writer has worked directly from photographs to produce essays that speak to the deeper, human and ever lasting issues concerning the question of Palestine and the lives of the Palestinians in exile and under occupation.  And has done so without resorting to hysteria or sensationalism. As a book, an endeavor, setting aside its subject, it is a masterpiece of photojournalism that informs and elevates its subject beyond images and words alone.

And similarly, Jean Mohr, a wonderful Swiss photographer I fear is mostly forgotten these days, has traveled beyond the devastated and desperate Palestinian landscapes to excavate the gentle and human rhythms and to reveal the humanity and daily ordinariness of Palestinian’s life.

This is real photojournalism; engaged, creative, insightful, committed, patient, lasting, influential and thought provoking.  It is photojournalism that attempts to contribute to the dialogue about an issue, without seeming desperate to sensationalize or be recognized.  It is photojournalism that goes beyond the personality of the photographer, and instead highlights the lives of the subjects, and issues on hand and the questions that are relevant.  It is real photojournalism, and for the last 8 years, Said/Mohr’s ‘After The Last Sky’ has been my personal measure of how photojournalism should be done.

Anything less is mere picture making.

I met Jean Mohr in Jerusalem in 2003 at an exhibition sponsored by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). He was one of my earliest influences and inspirations, and in fact my early work on the Sattar Edhi Center in Karachi, Pakistan was inspired by one of his pictures from the same center.  Lets be honest, I set out to imitate him! I was drawn to him because of the complexity of his images that never crossed the line into voyeurism, sensationalism or some desperate attempt to titillate.  In person he was appropriately shy – I seemed to scare him.  I thought I saw his champagne glass shake with fear when I introduced myself to him and said that he had been a major influence on my work! The creative, exciting conversation that i had imaged we would have never materialized.  After a few minutes of clumsy and formal introductions and pleasanteries, Jean Mohr was pulled away (or found an excuse to leave?) and I never got a chance to speak to him again.

I have on my shelves a few hundred books of photography and photojournalism.  Most of them large, expensively bound tomes that suggest gravity of intent and purpose.  Serious artists at work.  Only a handful have I poured over in detail, savoring each page, and learning something new from it.  Robert Frank’s “The Americans’ is one that I have come back to again and again.  That is a cliche.  Said/Mohr’s “After The Last Sky’ is in fact not even on my photography book self.  It is instead placed in along my other books.  And that I think is it’s highest achievement.

Said/Morh’s “After The Last Sky’ is the only photography book I know that is filed under ‘Middle East History’, and not under the ‘Photography’ section of any mainstream bookstore.  In fact, that is where I remember finding  my copy – in the ‘Middle East History’ section of the Barnes & Noble store on 555 5th Avenue in Manhattan in 2001.  And that is this book’s greatest achievement – that it has lifted itself away from the shallow and limited value of being just another photo book to being a book about history!

My shelves are laden with these high art tomes of photography.  Most mere decorations.  Clutter.

And so much of today’s photojournalism is mere clutter.  Illustrations really, not illuminations.  We no longer seem to know the difference.  We no longer appear prepared to go beyond the picture and to reveal the more complex political, economic, social and historical issues at stake.  Perhaps worse, there is something rather close to middle class voyeurism in what passes for essential photojournalism.  This is perhaps a little discussed subject when it comes to the field of photojournalism i.e. the class divisions between those who make the pictures and those who become the subjects and how it influences what, who and how we represent.

A brief perusal of the kinds of subject matter that is recognized as ‘photojournalism’ or ‘documentary photography’ reveals this bias;  drug addicts (anywhere), transvestites (anywhere, but especially in Asia), prostitutes (anywhere, but especially in Asia), drugs and drunks in Russia, street children, the mentally ill (like shooting fish in a bowl!), strip clubs/strippers, prisons, the physically handicapped, hungry/pleading Africans, crazy/blood thirsty Africans, exotic ritual/false exotic culture stories that offer us the ‘other’ as primitive etc.  All subjects popular with young photographers, grant committees, and photojournalism education institutes shoving students out towards the ‘downtrodden’ neighborhoods to find their stories. All about comunities that can ’shock’ middle class sensibilities and offer us a mean to sneer, pity, or simply express remorse.

There have been many discussions and endless arguments about where photojournalism stands today and what ails it.  Few seem prepared to say that it has stagnated, and that its creative energies are being wasted on the purchase of new toys and technology gizmos rather than on the complex and demanding art of constructing and telling new stories from new angles and in new ways.  To the human art of seeing our world for its complexities and attempting to speak about them.

I continue to look for stories that connect us to them, reminding us that their lives and our lives are connected in intricate, obvious ways if we would only bother to look. From Kivu to Khartoum, to speak of African alone, what transpires there is directly connected to what transpires here.

Maybe a new photo reportage on Zimbabwe perhaps that does not fall into the simplistic and easy narratives about a nation misruled by a yet another mad African leader – see again Mamdani on Zimbabwe . Or something on Africa’s HIV/AIDS crisis that reveals to us how effective indigenous, small scale programs of prevention and care have been in contrast to the waste and corruption engendered in the multinational/NGO industries involved in the matter – as demonstrated by Helen Epstein in her book ‘The Invisible Cure’.

And maybe that is why Said/Mohr’s work continues to stand out because it is not constrained by the limits of the image, or the need to have a story published in a weekly news magazine, or the preferences of a particular photo editor.  It reveals connections, human, political, social and historical, between its subject and us and does so without cleansing the matter of its uncomfortable realities.

It remains a work liberated from the constraints of the craft, and the media structures that sustain and also constrain it.  Jean Mohr does not like to write, but in the book’s Introduction he reveals the personal, moral and perhaps dissident motivations for his nearly 50 years of work on the lives and displacement of the Palestinians.  He tells of a conversation with ‘… a respected reporter and a perfect connoisseur of the world of photography.’ where this individual asks:

‘And what projects are you working on at the moment?’

‘An exhibition…and…I’m working on the completion of a new book, something very close to my heart.’

‘What’s it about?’

‘The Palestinians’

There was a rather long silence…my friend looked at me with a slightly sad smile, and said ‘Sure, why not! But don’t you think the subject’s a bit dated? Look, I’ve taken photographs of the Palestinians too, especially in the refugee camps…its really sad! But these days, who’s interested in people who eat off the ground with their hands? And then there’s all that terrorism…I’d have thought you’d be better off using your energy and capabilities on something more worthwhile!’ (From After The Last Sky, page 7)

It seems to me today we are all working on ’something more worthwhile!’ i.e. avoiding works that question our prejudices and misunderstandings, or are just politically impolite and rude, or focus on issues and angles that may reveal new truths and insights to situations considered known.

I simplify; photographers like Jason Ezkenazi, Jon Anderson, Simon Wheatley, Sara Terry to name a few continue to pursue the complex, complicate and demanding.

I am speaking about works that take risks, that reveal independence of thought, and a commitment to confront our seemingly endless need to simplify.  Works that are not constrained by the need for the obvious image, but given flight by the possibilities of what the subject can reveal.  Works that are about teaching us which questions to ask.

I have struggled with these thoughts for every year that I have been working as a professional.  They are guides in my personal journey as a photographer, with all my current works revealing the vast distances I  have yet to travel to reach these ideals.

In the mean time, today, the last day of 2008, I have a copy of ‘After The Last Sky’ in my hands, and a prayer in my heart for the voiceless and forgotten people of Gaza.  As Darwish himself said it best (didn’t he always!)

Where should we go after the last frontiers,

where should the birds fly after the last sky?