377. Changing formats, weights and cultures

With the advent of digital photography, not only has the notion of film gone out the window (camera), but so has the monopoly of formats dependent on 35 mm or 120 mm film. No longer is the width of film imposing on camera manufacturers what the proportions of any images should be. We are starting to see transformations that would have not been possible earlier in the analog era. Of course lenses are now also being designed so that such variables can be increased together with the chips that capture the images.     One such example is with the new Panasonic DCM- LX2 camera, that not only offers one but three size options.... 4:3 ratio, 3:2 ratio and the 16:9 ratio so identified with Wide Screen Cinematography or the new HI Definition Video. Such a wide screen ratios, was something you could do previously with the dedicated Hasselbald Xspan 35 mm camera, 24 mm high x 65 mm wide, however, I found the Panasonic format of 16:9 slightly easier on the composition side and the camera, including a Leica Vario-Elmarit lens, the camera costs only about $500 US (for a 10.2 megapixel file) a lot less than the Hasselblad option, isn't it?     These sort of transformations, with less costs and greater variables, together with increased file size are the dream come true for creative individuals willing to explore all that there is to offer in this digital era. I wrote last month of the CASIO, 10 megapixel camera. I now have to add to our arsenal of light cameras to travel with, this new LUMIX from Panasonic that is just as nice to handle as the CASIO and offers very different and new alternatives as well. One of the problems of being on the forefront of such new options is that it doesn't all work as one would like it. For instance, the Lumix, although it offers a 10.2 megapixel RAW file, it does so only for the 16:9 ratio and does not open yet with any of the known applications for digital images. One is not able, as I write this, to use it with Photoshop, for instance. Panasonic offers you a software application to open up their RAW files that leaves a lot to be desired, especially if you work with a Macintosh. In short, the option of using RAW format files is not yet available in a practical way so we are missing the key ingredient of a RAW plug-in that works. Yet, these things also change very quickly and one simply has to remain alert to when the solution has been added to your preferred software package.   However, you can work using JPEG compression. So, while we work out how to use the Panasonic LX-2 RAW files, we will be using a JPEG option. The images are sharp and feel very well exposed and above all, offer new creative alternatives that are very attractive. I have been alternating between taking pictures with a Nikon 200 and a wide angle and the LX-2 and in some instances I am getting better results with the LX-2. By the way, the new Nikon 80, which is also a wonderful new addition to the arsenal of digital cameras, has a new RAW format that equally to the LX-2 has yet to be made compatible with all the usual imagining software we are using. As you might know Sony acquired the line of Minolta-Konica cameras and combined them into the new ALPHA series, altogether with their own technologies, so we have a very successful new line of cameras, which produce very high quality images, and yet do this with an interchangeable lens camera, that is very light weight. I still do not understand why the Canon semi professional and professional cameras are made to weigh more than any other cameras. It would seem their design department, would be put through a terrific test if they were given the limit in weight of let us say a Sony Alpha camera. Nikon is increasingly doing just that.   We are told that the number of cameras used world wide -standalone and embedded (as in a telephone)- has increased 600% in just the past four years, and it will double again over the next five years. The total number of cameras sold worldwide, of all kinds, in 2000 was 85 million units. For 2008 the projected sales are ONE BILLION cameras. There is no question that the increase in the number of cameras has also increased the number of images recorded. The internet has become the most rapidly expanding form of making those images available to everyone, so let us then ask, how is photography going to be transformed by all these changes that are presently underway? How is in fact, is culture being transformed by the phenomenal growth of photography? I give you of many examples. I was visiting the tombs of the Ming Dynasty near Beijing, and found myself photographing a group of people from Manchuria, in their costumes and special attire that looked to me quite interesting. They were at that moment, tourists just as I was, when all of a sudden a very friendly man with very powerful hands and arms, pulls me over without saying a word, and me not knowing what was going on, was very hesitant at first to follow his lead. But I soon realized that he had good intentions, as with a broad smile he told me in a very broken english: "picture". I imagined that he just wanted me to take a picture of him, but no, that was not how it was going to be, he wanted to be photographed together with me, by one of his people who happened to pull out a digital camera from underneath the folds of her dress. We had become empowered by the digital camera, to photograph each other as equals, as surely I was as exotic to them, as they would be to me. No longer was the power of the photographer what it used to be (just because we had the instrument, and they did not, with which to make the images). We both were now on equal footing.     One last thing, the boy in this picture was making his homework by the roadside, next to his mother who was selling some candy, in Pingyao. The kid would continue doing his home work of learning and writing Chinese characters, only when a car or motorbike would come by and shine the lights of the vehicle in his direction, otherwise it was too dark to see. I believe the dedication and commitment this little boy had to make his homework, no matter what the conditions were, can be a humbling example for all of us who work with new technologies, I know it was for me.     Pedro Meyer Beijing, China September 2006       http://zonezero.com/editorial/august06/august06.html          

Wednesday, 20 September 2006

379. Emphasis

  From the body photographic to the photographed body (variations of a discourse regarding spirtuality in contemporary photography) by Juan Antonio Molina     Probably the objects of a religious, moral, aesthetic and logical sentiment are just at the mere surface of things - F. Nietzsche -   I   All the concepts appearing in each title of this essay, which indicate its contents, seem to be in a crisis. They refer us to a language that is already out of the critical and theoretical discourse. At times, it seems that they never belonged in there anyway. However, these are terms that -when translated to the language of critics, art theory and contemporary cultural studies- refer to processes -such as subjectivization and ideologization, playing with the structures and signs, and anthropological, ethnographical or psycho-analytical methodologies- to the almost political criticism of representation and the “ “performatic” ” existence (or insistence) of the work of art.   It is fortunate that my starting point is a series of works belonging to the same collection. This will help me focus on my subject matter, placing it in a specific context of circulation, consumption and referred to particular values. In fact, the works I have selected to demonstrate my hypothesis have been produced in a ten-year span (1994-2004) by Latin American photographers. This particular time-space stratum allows me to uphold my lines of research and speculation regarding contemporary photography.   In consequence, the collection can be seen as a sort of laboratory in which I can corroborate certain theoretical propositions. A space in which the aspirations of consumption, value exchange and even the “cultural” value of the work of art, become real. This is an ambit where the work recovers -or at least fulfills an aspiration to recover- that controversial “aura”, which basically has to do with its own historicity, with its reminiscence, and a kind of new rituality in which it will get involved.   Although I see the concept of “emphasis” in the direction that goes from the author to the work, I can’t help to be attracted by the possibility to relate it to this magical dimension, which establishes a flux that goes from the work of art to its origin. An origin in which we will find the author, but also the circumstances that define the current existence of the work itself. In this essay, I will take on this mythical dimension -even though indirectly- to recover, as part of the emphasis, the connection of the work with the representation processes, which somehow reproduce certain archaic relationship structures between the subject and his material and spiritual reality.   To talk about the spiritual in relation to photography entails two risks, the spiritual sounds far too abstract, while photography is seen as being far too concrete. First, I will try to approach both concepts through the two aspects I find to be the most interesting: Today’s need to approach the spiritual as subjectivity incarnated in the object, and the possibility to approach photography as objectuality dissolved in the middle of emphatic processes of subjectivization. This will lead me to comment not only about the body of the photographed, but also about the body photographic, a double approach that I deem substantial to every analysis of representation, in any mode or bearing.   But before, I’d like to digress about something I think is necessary to put my analysis in context. My interest in marking certain zones of the Latin American photographic production through its references to spirituality is related to my own ponderings on the subject in the last few years. This attempt includes the analysis of the relationship between the representation of the body and a certain kind of subjectivity, and considering this relationship as the one that defines the features and content specific to the contemporary Latin American photography. The references I have made to photography as a “weak object” are sustained mainly by the detection of these elements of subjectivity that contribute to a sort of explosion of the photographic object, undermining its monumentality and solidity. I believe that without the detection of these elements, any analysis would be incomplete or biased by the historical and circumstantial aspects of the photographed object.   In consequence, I will lean towards commenting about a group of works marked by a certain anthropological intent. These are images resulting from the reformulation of the concepts of document and evidence. These are propositions based on autobiographic research or the game played between history and biography. Several variations of the representation of the body or the reference to the corporal, but above all I will highlight the fact that all of these variations coincide in an intense game played between the subjective and the objective. And in the fact that this game of correlations responds to the contemporary manifestation of a critical spirituality.   If we pay attention to the judgments made in other disciplines (such as psychoanalysis, sociology or anthropology) we would be talking about spirituality in crisis. Julia Kristeva -who reveals the “transfigured” soul in the contemporary psychic life- puts the problem with a lucid skepticism. The first pages of “The new illnesses of the soul” are a recap of what seems to be the symptoms of a social disease rather than of alleged individual pathologies.   Even when she describes the contemporary subject as being “saturated with images”, it is in a world where “there are no longer boundaries between pleasure and reality, between the truth and the lie”1, she seems to describe a panorama similar to Baudrillard when he evaluates the moral and ideological consequences of living in a world of simulation. In this sense, what is more interesting for the purpose of this text, is that Kristeva’s analysis is, if not a criticism of representation, at least a criticism of its discourse: “ …Is there a “you”, an “us”? The expression is standardized, the discourse is normalized, that is, Dou you have a discourse?” 2   This subject with no precise identity and no discourse to configure it, could be the subject liberated from emphasis foreseen by Nietzsche. The irony of destiny is that the utopia of the free and blissful man returning to his natural state (which is mostly amoral) has been substituted by the reality if the individual diluted in the mass of consumers, who is closer to the image than to nature. Paradoxically, the image is the haven of emphasis; we find it in the soap opera, in the news, in the political discourse, in the commercials, in propaganda and in art.   Although rescuing the confrontational side and the liberating utility of emphasis in art is still a praiseworthy task, it doesn’t imply a precise hierarchy in relation to the rest of the media. Any attempt to distance art from the mass media would be not only incomplete, but also incongruent with the reality of contemporary art. However, beyond any moral judgment implied in any comparison (Nietzsche himself puts the question of emphasis beyond morals), it is possible to detect a healthy energy in the most “emphatic” art, which challenges the powers that be, undermines the totalitarian discourses, that refutes the current state of the aesthetic discourse and vindicates individuality, challenging the pressures of the standardizing impulse of the mass society.   As I’ve suggested, in the case of art in general and photography in particular, the meaning of “emphasis” inevitably leads us to an aesthetic object filled with subjectivity, yet “emphatically” impregnated, this is, having a rhetorical density superimposed to the “natural” quality of the object. “Emphasis” as I put it here, is also self-referent, is a demand for attention on the object itself and on its emphatic character. This means that it does not only affect the structure or the content, but also establishes the surfaces, conditions the aesthetic reception of the object and brands it as an aesthetical object.   I believe that the surface, in the case of photography (as in other bi-dimensional arts), it is particularly important to these subjectivization processes. The surface of the photo is crucial to attach the sign to the referent. It is there where the processes of intervention and obstruction take place, and should weaken this relationship, which establishes the identification effect that seems key for photography to function. Any manipulation of the body of the photographed will go through a manipulation of the body photographic, either adding a new layer of meaning or infiltrating a texture of meanings, an ideological plot (in the end meta-linguistic) that modifies and multiplies the attributive unity of the photographic sign.   The sociological and anthropological references of Baudrillard, the psychoanalytical and linguistic references of Kristeva or even the philosophy of Nietzsche give a nuance to my questions about the function of photography in the current circumstances of the critical relationship between subjects and history. When I talk about a kind of photography in which critical spirituality is manifested, I also refer to an exercise of representation that preserves the traces of a pathetic relationship with history, something that seemed to be lost in the conditions of a mass society and that many times seems to survive transfigured in neurosis, specially if we realize that this kind of artistic production no longer seeks its stability in meta-accounts but is concentrated in micro-structures that touch, move and sometimes hurt the relationship of the subject within reality and with himself.     II   The presence of Ana Mendieta in an exhibition or in a photography collection is always a good excuse to revisit the theme of the importance that performance art and ephemeral art have had for the inclusion of photography in contemporary art, from the time of Conceptualism to the present. This was how a crack in its alleged specificity and the autonomy of the photographic language was generated, which was first seen in more complex and plural aesthetic systems. In the context of this analysis, it is also a good excuse, to illustrate with concrete examples, the recent increasing contamination of the photographic image by this spiritual element I have mentioned.   If I were to mention a strong and indisputable precedent of this close and problematic relationship between the representation of the body and the intuition of the sacred in the current photographic practice, I would definitely comment on the work of Ana Mendieta.1   I understand this intuition of the sacred as a key for the unfolding of much more dramatic affective relationships between the subject and his reality. This affective, dramatized -or sometimes-ritualized- component gives a very particular nuance to methodologies that apparently are so close to the anthropologic investigation. Regarding photography, the work of Ana Mendieta is a good reference for the revision of the representation processes, for the reformulation of the place occupied by the body in those processes. And specially, for the contextualization of a  ““performatic” ” element that is crucial in a big part of contemporary art.     I want to understand “performatic” in two senses. First, referring to a procedure character of the work of art, which puts the very concept of work in crisis as a definitive object, and thus static. From that point of view, even when facing photography as a definitive object, we are forced to invert its logic and locate the elements of the process that construct it and give dynamism to its time-space structure within its structure of meanings.   To do that, it must be understood that such elements constitute an exercise of representation previous to the photographic act, although they infiltrate photography, preventing it from stabilizing and becoming a definitive object. The staging, acting or representations of what will be photographed, constitute aesthetic and ideological constructions. These events will charge the photo with an internal energy that will also decrease its autonomy and self-sufficiency.   Secondly, the “performatic” refers precisely to such energy, which is also directed to the re thinking of the traditional statements by which the photographic was evaluated and defined as such, but also as an art. In fact the “performatic” can be located in that trend and that possibility that contemporary art uses to evaluate, criticize and define itself. This is something that is also a process and also resists the logic that might be imposed by the definitive object.   In both cases the “performatic” is a privileged way for the fusion of subjectivity within the objectivity of the work of art, and one of the mechanisms by which the ideologization of the contemporary artistic object has been constructed. The relationship with a photographic image that reproduces the apparently sculpture-like results of a “performatic” process would include an imaginary dissolution of the photographic object and an inclusion of the performance art among its referents. It would force to live the process and the acts previous to the photo imaginarily. To quote Rosalind Kraus, we could say that if in the “expanded field” of the sculpture we can find the installation, in the expanded field of photography we can find the performance art.   This is basically the way in which the work of Marta Maria Perez operates, in which is not difficult to find connections with the work of Ana Mendieta. In Marta Maria Perez ‘s work the “performatic” element not only belongs to a pre-photographic moment, but it is also included in the picture as a technical moment and as a structure of meanings (as a text we might say).   This shapes the work in a way that invites us to get closer to it through more complex ways than those accepted by the traditional documentary photographic work. The works of Marta Maria Perez not only renounce to define themselves as documentary photos, but also to make the statement of being testimonies of a strictly photographic technique. Then, the value of the photo as an object, does not depend of its capacity to exhibit the marks of a refined craft or technical proficiency in an inert manner. Its meaning would be incomplete if its “performatic” element were not accounted for, which suggests the potential social operativeness of the work that is outside the traditional limits of the photographic object.   That operativeness no longer has to do with the ways in which the photo reproduces the image of a subject or an object, but rather with its capacity to reproduce relationships between subjects and objects, established coded relationships that are, in a way, ritualized within a specific cultural context. In Marta Maria Perez’s case, it has been mainly about the magical-fetishist relationships that Afro-Cuban religions operate with. In the case of Maruch Sántiz, we would be talking about the importance of the taboo to establish order and give meaning to the subject-object relationships in certain communities. Another variety is Milagro de la Torre’s, who began in the object-evidence, in which the primary function is to identify, but also to accuse. In the end, it’s an imaginary reconstruction of an absent subject, starting from the detection of the subjectivity in a residual objectivity.         I do not witch to get to speculate about the feminine role in the symbolic re-thinking of objects and bodies, but especially in the case of Maruch Sántiz, she defines the gender of objects, functions and meanings she works with. At any rate, if I were to stress that other variety of emphasis, I should add the names of Cirenaica Moreira and Priscilla Monge, who do explore the social and symbolic function of the feminine, the sexist paradigms of representation and the dominating role playing in the consumption of the image. They turn such exploration into a provoking and confrontational resource, but also into an exercise of self-enunciation and an experience of identification. I should also mention the work of Maria Magdalena Campos, but stressing that her representation of identity, as a visual construction, is always perceptible in her record of her racial identity.   That is why the work of Maria Magdalena Campos can have coincidences with a work such as Rene Peña’s. Notwithstanding the differences in methodology, or the fact that one artist is male and the other one female. Both have worked simultaneously, very worried that racial and sexual stereotypes that determine the consumption and even the production of images. Both have played with staging and the simultaneous dissolution and reaffirmation of their identities.                                   III   The term “neo baroque” has a specific meaning and use, particularly when identifying the style of certain zones of Latin American art. It’s a terminology that is very well adapted to some manifestations of the figure within this type of art, and connects it to literary, historic and mythological precedents. I’d like to evoke that term to refer to that part of the photographic production in which emphasis is expressed through the rhetorical construction of the figure and the ideological construction of the body, resulting on the quasi-pictorial construction of the photo.   The coincidence of these three variables is preceded by a dynamics that acts upon (acts, updates, stages and simulates) the aesthetic function of the object through the aesthetic function of its making. The expressivity of the surfaces, their illusory textures, their condition of dramatized matter, would refer -almost with nostalgia- to the contact, to the making and presence that were in the origin of each work.   The final appearance would refer to a sort of abundance, not necessarily determined by the proliferation of visual elements, but by its intensity. And by the way, that intensity of the visual stimulus invites the most sensorial part of the reception of each work to have pleasure. This lust of sorts can be concentrated in the photographed body, but also in the body of the work. It seems to me that the emphasis in the surface of the photograph is the bearing of a particular eroticism that affects the photographic image.   There are works by Victor Vazquez where this effect is appreciated in an especially acute manner. This value that comes from craft, is also stressed in the work of Luis Gonzalez Palma. Some critics have interpreted it as “New Pictorialism”. In reality, it is about playing with tangential relationships between photography and iconographic paradigms, already coded by the history of painting, or rather by the history of representation in Western Culture. I believe certain reminiscences of Christian religious models can be seen in these iconographic paradigms. These models have been transformed, subverted or even parodied, but they still are active, almost clandestinely, giving more aesthetical effectiveness.   I find these references in the way Gonzalez Palma has represented “angelical” figures, or in the way Marta Maria has recuperated the theme of the stigmata in her most recent work. But above all I think about the work of victor Vazquez, who has worked with the duality of naked body/tormented body, as a metaphor of pain and pleasure, since they compose the plenitude of flesh. Bodegon de Yemaya (1994) is an exemplary work in this sense, since it duplicates the eroticism of the flesh in the eroticism of the artistic object, and this process is a manipulation, and an aesthetical re-making of the sacred1. I’d even say that the sacred is evoked from the representation of the body is somehow annulled by the representation itself.     This effect has its own implications in photography, which seemed historically destined to sacralize what was represented and making it an object of cult. The different varieties of the representation of the body in photography, uses aesthetic procedures that sometimes reverse the fetishist logic of the represented, by amplifying the erotic/aesthetic quality of the very photographic object.2 The best work of Victor Vazquez, Juan Carlos Alom, Marta Maria Perez, Mario Cravo Neto or Gerardo Súter have implemented this transitional effect, which re-thinks and even questions the tradition of nude photography, by implying a self-referential dynamics, which is a premise for the critical relationship with the very act of representation and the resulting objects.       On the other hand, the absorption of the sacred by the aesthetic, bestows that very subtle vibration given by the rubbing between desire and prohibition. Even in a work such as Nestor Millan’s, which is totally aesthetic, the representation of the body has that ambiguity between cult and desire, repression and sublimation. Perhaps this is why in many of his pictures, the body seems to be submitted to a sort of violence that results in a gloomy and anxious tone.       IV All of these variables are self –referential. Not only regarding the fact that photography seeks attention for itself, but also because the author seeks attention for his identity, either by showing it or concealing it, but always representing it. The photos that have driven me to make this analysis are the result of a journey from the interest for the collective configuration of identities towards the interest for the conformation-dissolution of individual identities.Even in the mentioned examples, which in a more or less parabolic manner deal with the collective determination of meaning, we can find self-affirmation procedures, which leads us to think that individualism is one of the strongest ideological trends of contemporary photography.  This is remarkable but only in a context such as the Latin American, where individualism implies a criticism and a resistance to accept the representation/identity/militancy coordinates of the guild.Self-referentiality is unavoidable in a practice that seeks the intangible and the untraceable. Let us remember that many of these pictures are more about subjectivity than about a subject. But it is in that diffuse subjectivity where we get closer to the author’s self. But while the subject remains latent in some corner of the weft of meanings of the work, subjectivity is expanded as an aura surrounding the aesthetic object, supporting it and building it. It is the self as subjectivity, and not the subject as a figure, which in the end is revealed in each one of these images. Fantasy, dream or revelation are expressions of such subjectivity, and also memory, so insistently evoked in the works of Eduardo Muñoz, Graciela Fuentes, or Albert Chong. All of these authors seem to be marked by a particular experience of transit, migration or displacement. In consequence, memory becomes a resource for anchoring, seeking and rescuing the origin or just a testimony of a passing. Photography recovers its primal commemorative function and dramatically exhibits its documentary quality.More than nostalgia, there seems to be a critical revision of the past. There is a sort of tension between the present and the past, which is heightened by the ideological construction of the photo by opposites: biography and history, private and public, individual and collective.  In a visual level, these opposites meet in a texture of montages. All of it has an effect of abstraction, made by a superimposition of plains and moments.It is also an effect of inter-textuality, which helps photography to show itself as a self-reproductive object. For them, the personal history is a history marked by visual experience, especially in the work of Chong and Muñoz, the location and relocation of documents implies a reiteration of the acts of looking and reading. This is achieved by amplifying the reproductive possibilities of the photographic image.               In Muñoz’s case, quotes can vary from individual to more “cultivated” sources that explore the history of contemporary photography or cinema. Albert Chong uses more melodramatic referents, such as a kitsch element that is relocated in the structure of his work. Along with the recuperation of biographical evidence and reconstruction of the affective universe, the ornamental is also infiltrated, with the purpose to reconstruct a very personal aesthetic experience. Apart from the meaning of this eclecticism in terms of the relationship of several cultural referents, I also see it as part of a quasi-therapeutic condition characteristic of this kind of autobiographical work.   These photos show a dynamic surface, with a strong expression and powerful capacity for visual, psychological and emotional impact. The work of Graciela Fuentes is an eloquent example of that coincidence between the body photographic and the photographed body, which is based in the representation of images projected on a human body. In these pictures, the skin looks like both a surface and atmosphere. That is the evidence of subjectivity, but also its context giving the body human a territorial quality in which the signs of placement and displacement. Tatiana Parcero makes a similar attempt by superimposing maps over the body or parts of it. Although her results have a much more cartographic character, and the superimposition of plains does not have an effect of tri-dimensionality and atmosphere like the work of Graciela Fuentes.           V   We live in a time of pragmatism where art is forced to adopt strategies to find its place, ways to be disseminated and realization as an artistic object. Art seems to be understood as strategic, as mainly discursive, even as propaganda. The utilitarian and effectist vision is dominating, in the sense that an effect or result is sought and can be traced to the very origin of the production of the artistic object. Because of this, contemporary art rejects leisure. The work of art is expected to drive to an experience outside of the artistic object. Political, sociological or economical, it is outside of the traditional spaces assigned to the artistic experience.   In such a context, production, reproduction and spiritual expression are seen as exchangeable values, but also as being too abstract for the political and pragmatic purposes of the discourse of contemporary art. In fact, spirituality is something to be intuited instead of perceived. Something that is beyond the physical construction, even when language makes an effort to construct it and configure it.   Another not less profitable possibility for the new ideological order that prevails in contemporary art, is that a kind of photography like the one I have commented about here, has only recognition as a folkloric asset. That it will be consumed thanks to its marks of a real or imagined collective identity, an evaluated for belonging to an exotic geographic, cultural and artistic environment.   Facing such risks without concealing the existence of local specificities and features might be a challenge, not for photographers but for art critics and that other strategic manifestation that is curatorial work. The result could even help to understand the coherence of these photographic practices and the more critical and propositional zones of the current art. In that sense, an optimistic vision is valid. A vision that in these aesthetic productions, looks for a critical spirituality instead of spirituality in crisis.     Juan Antonio Molina juanmolinac@prodigy.net.mx         http://zonezero.com/magazine/zonacritica/enfasis/index.html    

Wednesday, 13 September 2006

381. If you liked documentary work, you are going to love Digital Images

  part 1 | part 2 | part 3 | part 4   We somehow were brought up with the notion that documentary pictures were the equivalent of a testimony that was credible because it was a photograph.   In other words, the very nature of being photographic was a good enough reason for all of us to consider the photograph as a reliable witness of events in our daily life. Because something was depicted in an image we had the firm conviction that things were as we saw them.   After all we could compare that which we saw with that which we photographed and knew that they were identical. Or at least we thought that they were.   So the question is, aren’t they? and as so many other things in life, the answer is ambivalent. Yes and No.   Yes, because there are certain unequivocal equivalents, that make us feel that the comparison holds up, between that which we see and what has been photographed. However, upon closer inspection and scrutiny, we start to find all sorts of loopholes that bring up a high degree of doubt to this otherwise empirical comparison between the photograph and reality.   So what would some of those loopholes, just mentioned, be? For instance, white other than a few cases of visually impaired eyes, and that such black and white photographs are at best, an abstraction of what reality looks like.   Or if you prefer colors, then the same theory applies; what colors are we actually talking about? as all film based images have their specific color bias, and it all depends on who does the printing of a picture what the color actually ends up being.   Another of such loopholes has to do with idea that a photographic image can be self explanatory by just looking at it. We now know that the personal interpretation of the viewer brings to the reading of the image, his or her own prejudices borne out of ideological, educational, psychological or cultural reasons. In other words the photographic image is malleable in what the viewer wishes to read into the image. If you liked documentary work, you are going to love digital images.   Another interesting topic has to do with what we call the manipulation of the image. The traditionalists have it that they go about their work without any sort of manipulation, of course overlooking that the very act of photographing is by it’s very nature already a process of editing and thus an intervention.   The idea that traditionalists defend so vehemently about photographing life as it is found, flies in the face of the very reality they so staunchly defend. Take the instance of photojournalists, who by their very presence with a camera, already alter the behavior of those that they are photographing. People tend to pose, they tend to present themselves as they imagine they look best, either for narcissistic reasons or for political ones. And if you photographed a place devoid of people, no one can deny that the angle from which the image was shot, the sort of lens used, or the time of day, will alter significantly that which we get to see as THE reality.   Even surveillance cameras have a point of view and if you will, a certain aesthetic as well. Although not determined by a photographer because it operates in fully automatic mode, it was nevertheless defined at the time the camera was set it in place for the first time.       In 1996, I gave a key note speech during the opening ceremony of the Fifth Latin American Colloquium of photography in Mexico City, in that presentation I mentioned that surveillance cameras would in fact become the most ubiquitous documentary photographers in the world given the very nature of their work. Lo and behold a few days later on the front page of one of the main newspapers was precisely such a documentary image, done by a surveillance camera depicting a bank assault.     top         Let me elaborate on this documentary image I made some years ago. It is called “ where is the money” which is a translation from Spanish “donde esta la lana” were the word “lana” is both the word for sheep’s wool as well as the slang term for “money”. You can observe that already in a translation from one language to another, the interpretation of what was said in a caption or title, has it’s variations that is nothing to dismiss so lightly.   In the image, I have changed the order of how the picture is presented by altering the right to left order, which I did in order to match the picture of the man with the money. I made the light be consistent coming in from left to right into the picture and placed the man with the money in such a way that he would not obstruct the view of the sheep being separated from their heads. The original picture I took was with the light coming in from right to left, and I needed it with the light coming from the opposite side. So I simply switched the image along it’s horizontal axis.   In the image with the man, what I did was to cut him out of the picture, so I could place him anywhere it suited me. Just as you do when people are asked to move from one place to another before taking a picture. Or alternatively, the photographer changes his or her place relation to the subject matter.     You should be aware that all of the components of the final image happened to occur in that same place and time. I took the picture with the woman cutting off the head of the sheep and turned in another direction and photographed the man asking me for money.     In the traditional way of looking at such an image, such practitioners would have no objection if the image in question would had been arranged prior to the click of the camera, For instance, I could have asked the man standing there with the money to turn around and stand in the place the same spot as the final image. Or I could have moved my position from where I was taking the picture. In either case, such practices have never been frowned If you liked documentary work, you are going to love digital images. upon, or considered to be any sort of manipulation. But the fact is that it is as much a change as what I did after the fact with the computer.     The issue that I think should be foremost on our minds, is in which way would the image I produced alter the information of what the picture conveyed. If the answer is that the information only enhanced the picture by pulling together two very symbolic elements that in fact took place at that moment in time, then we have a better photograph, not a worse alternative.   What I have often considered quite unsatisfactory about the photographic process, is the importance of luck. Sure one can get lucky and find the confluence, of what my friend Max Kozloff would describe as being the moment when “content and geometry, make an appointment”, but what happens when you don’t have it? So, notwithstanding luck, I can now give preference to the control that I can have over the process, rather than to be solely dependent on luck.   top     I am perfectly happy to wait for luck to make its singular presence as long as I can do something when it evades me. In other words, luck is no longer the only alternative to coming up with a striking image. To a degree it is taking the control of the studio, out on the streets allowing us to make all sorts of new appointments between content and geometry.   The changes not always have to be very substantial, as in this picture taken in Rio de Janeiro (below). The main alteration I made had to do with the possibility of throwing out of focus the background, something that would normally be very sharp as happens when using wide angle lenses.     My strategy was to concentrate the gaze of the viewer on the bald head of the woman, eliminating all distracting elements such as spot lights and the detail of people that would only detract from the main character. Why would this picture be any less documentary than anything done previous to the use of digital images and computers? I don’t think that critics of such images, have really provided enough evidence to show us that the nature of photography has been anything other than enhanced through the process of digital technologies. This picture was made in London, in the most straight forward traditional way of producing images. With a Leica camera, a very bright lens, negative black and white film which was then scanned.       But what is that we are looking at? A woman committing suicide? A woman that has been left to die in the bath tub? We really don’t know. All that we can observe is that she is almost drowning and is trying to catch her last breaths of air. What is after all the reality of what we are looking at? My observations are derived from what I am able to see in the image, yet there is one element that will confuse the best of observers, not knowing where the image was taken.   As it turns out it was in a wax museum. And the lady in the bath is a wax figure, a portrayal of a very famous criminal act in London. However, nothing in this documentary picture provides us with the information that the event photographed is only a surrogate. What we believe we are looking at, has nothing to do with the reality behind the picture.   The fact that we can redefine content according to our expectations in a photograph lies at the very heart of why documentary images are really of questionable merit as true evidence of anything. Digital photography has not changed the nature of documentary work in a negative way, as some would have us believe. On the contrary it has given this genre a new lease on life. We have always had documentary images that were misleading as to their content, there is nothing new in the nature of digital photography that does not have some precedents in the silver halide era or even before.   We should feel good, because there is a fuller awareness by the public of the potential for perverse manipulation of the photographic image (be it digital or analog). The fact that photography is no longer so credible, in a gullible sort of way, should give us pause for celebration, and not a reason to be concerned.   It is good that the photographic image has lost it’s aura of being a totally reliable source of information, something it is not, and never was, all of this lands us in a much safer place. Those in a position of power have to contend with a much more sophisticated audience, and the more damaging forms of exploitation can no longer take it for granted they will be trusted just because they present us with a photograph as evidence of something.   The last time I can recall of someone manipulating a world wide audience with some photographs, was General Colin Powell, at the United Nations, when he presented as evidence for the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq a few pictures that a year later he had to apologize for having done so. Already at the time of the presentation at the UN, I had written an editorial in ZoneZero, stating that as “evidence” they could not be trusted, given the fact that they were only photographs and therefore subject to manipulated interpretations, which in time would be proven to be just that.   http://zonezero.com/editorial/febrero03/february.html   It was more than thirty years ago that the same thing happened with regard to the alleged attacks by North Vietnam on US battle ships in the Gulf of Tonkin that later led to the war in VietNam. The information that was provided by President Lyndon Johnson, of the US, was all fabricated and repeated and amplified by the press. Those grainy pictures of the day, were part of the evidence that led people to believe in the reliability of the information. I think we will love digital images for making us grow up and mature in understanding the very nature of documentary photography.   top     I had just concluded my last remarks for this presentation, when all of a sudden here was yet another huge controversy about the manipulation of photographs, this time by a lebanese photographer Adnan Hajj.   In an article in the New York Times, on August 9, 2006     “Mr. Hajj, a Lebanese photographer based in the Middle East, may not be familiar to many newspaper readers. But thanks to the swift justice of the Internet, he has been charged, tried and convicted of improperly altering photographs he took for Reuters. The pictures ran on the Reuters news service on Saturday, and were discovered almost instantly by bloggers to have been manipulated. Reuters then announced on Sunday that it had fired the freelancer. Executives said yesterday that they were still investigating why they had not discovered the manipulation before the pictures were disseminated to newspapers.   “The matter has created an uproar on the Internet, where many bloggers see an anti-Israel bias in Mr. Hajj’s manipulations, which made the damage from Israeli strikes into Beirut appear worse than the original pictures had. One intensified and replicated plumes of smoke from smoldering debris. In another, he changed an image of an Israeli plane to make it look as if it had dropped three flares instead of one. “Still, his activities have heightened the anxiety photo editors are already experiencing in the age of digital photography, when pictures can be so easily manipulated by computer.   “These advances, made broadly available to the public and professional photographers alike through Photoshop or similar software, may have made readers more skeptical of what they see in newspapers.“They doubt the media because they understand what digital photography is,” said Torry Bruno, the associate managing editor for photography at The Chicago Tribune. “Everyone who plays with that knows what can be done.”   “But even as technology makes it easier to manipulate photographs, the blogosphere is making it easier to catch the manipulators. Mr. Hajj’s picture ran on the news service on Saturday. The first inkling of a problem came in the form of a tip that morning to Charles Johnson, who runs a Web site called Little Green Footballs. Mr. Johnson had been among the first in 2004 to question the authenticity of documents that CBS News used to suggest that President Bush had received favorable treatment in the National Guard.   “It is not clear where the tipster first saw the photos, but they were available on the Internet. Mr. Johnson, who has a background in graphic design, said that as soon as he saw the pictures, he could tell they were fake. He posted the news on his Web site on Saturday at 3:41 p.m. California time (he is based in Los Angeles), which was early Sunday morning in Beirut. ‘The post was spotted by a Reuters photographer in Canada, who quickly notified the editors on duty, and they began an investigation.‘Paul Holmes, a senior Reuters editor who is also responsible for the agency’s standards and ethics, said the agency dealt with the matter within 18 hours. “By the time I checked my e-mail at 10 Sunday morning, we had killed the doctored photo and suspended the photographer,” he said. The agency subsequently stopped using the photographer and has removed the 920 digital photographs of his in its archives. It is reviewing them to see if any others have been improperly altered.   ‘Mr. Hajj told Reuters he was merely trying to remove a speck of dust and fix the lighting in the photos, Mr. Holmes said. Several bloggers have contended that Mr. Hajj was driven by a political agenda, critical of Israel. Mr. Holmes said Reuters was trying to contact Mr. Hajj but he was not responding to messages.   ‘Jonathan Klein, the chief executive of Getty Images, said the only way to avoid such problems was to “employ people of integrity, and if you find infractions, not only take action, but take visible action.’’ I of course agree with Jonathan Klein, about the idea of only hiring people of integrity. You have to consider that there are people who can be crooks and be fraudulent in any other walk of life, so why be so surprised that it is happening in the world of photojournalism?e degree of comfort is that the technology available is itself the antidote to resolving such problems, just think at the speed at which these fraudulent images were uncovered and made known world wide.   Next however, we also need to uncover all the double standards and hypocrisy behind the way images are made other than with the computer. Photographers, enticing their subjects to hold up dead babies for the camera, in a flagrant act of creating propaganda in one way or another. Or when the editors pick out pictures to match the texts of what they want to convey as their main message. News organizations have used such means always. If you want a President or leader to look in distress, well, you look around for precisely the image that conveys that, no matter that the image had nothing to do with the story being reported other than it is on the same person. That sort of trickery is never reported as being as false as that of the picture from Lebanon that was so discredited for faking the scene.   As I see it, all forms of manipulation, be that altering the content of the image, altering the caption in relation to what is really happening, or just placing images with texts that match in style but are not a representation of what the event being reported was all about, lead to the same thing. Some one is using the power of the photographic image in a inadequate way. But in parallel to all the other changes that are taking place, the fact that there is manipulation is now coming under scrutiny as never before. That can only be applauded.   Pedro Meyer Mexico City. August 9th, 2006   top     http://zonezero.com/magazine/articles/meyer3/04.html    

Thursday, 10 August 2006

383. Black and White, Images. Salvaging of Ancient Photographic Archives

Marilyn Domínguez Turriza INAH Center (National Institute Anthropology and History) Campeche Juan Carlos Saucedo Villegas Institute of Culture       A brief history of photography in Campeche.   Photography has been a part of everyday life and been accepted by all social classes since its very beginning, thus it has become a means of expression of society. Photography is a valuable source of information and is considered a social document, since it allows the reconstruction of the past. Photography has been a part of Campeche since the 19th Century, however it has not been deemed as historically, socially or politically important and in a number of occasions it has been considered as a useless, low-value object. Photography arrived to Campeche in early 1840, just a few years after its invention. The German Baron Emmanuel of Frierichstal arrived to the Yucatan peninsula and obtained images of the Mayan ruins with a camera Lucida, but he also made some portraits with daguerreotype plates in the cities of Campeche and Merida. Other foreign photographers that arrived to the peninsula were John Lloyd Stephens, Frederich Catherwood and Desiree Charney.     The local press of the 19th Century has records of getting the services of traveling photographers that would stay in Campeche for a few days.   In the edition of January 28th, 1847 of Amigo Del Pueblo, Ricardo Carr announces that he has brought with him the latest invention from Europe to make the most accurate portraits with or without color, either of a single person or a group using the same plate. All copies are guaranteed to be exactly as the original and to be entirely satisfactory and he will be happy to show samples of pictures and frames to any visitor to his studio, the price of each photograph is 5 Pesos.   We cannot tell which was the first photographic studio established in Campeche, some say it was Manuel Rejon’s, later property of Joaquin Hernandez. At any rate, the constant presence of traveling photographers demonstrates the interest of the locals in the new art or science of capturing reality.   The Municipal Archive of Campeche has over 600 photographs taken between 1880 and 1950, which were obtained through the collaboration of the local people, who responded enthusiastically to the call for images of the two ancient family portrait contests organized by the authorities. There are images of landscapes, architecture, political life, society, everyday life, fairs, carnivals and portraits, mainly within the city and port of Campeche.       After the family photos, the postcards made in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries are perhaps the most appreciated in Mexico. In the case of Campeche we can mention the ones made by Cicero & Perez, and Ernesto Aznar Preciat, in Ciudad del Carmen, Juan B. Caldera, postcards from another towns are available. There are hundredths of family photos that are not officially archived or registered, but in recent years, The National Anthropology Institute via its Campeche center, has taken to collect these images that include views of towns and cities and everyday life scenes. Historian Gaspar Cahuich mentions that Francisco C. Cicero, descendent of one of the first families to establish in Mexico during the Spanish Colony in 1654, lived in Campeche in 1910. Cicero & Perez owned several buildings in downtown Campeche, among them, a store in front of the park, “La Estrella” that sold the postcards. These postcards, made between 1910 and 1920, are the fruit of the work of Mr. Cicero who climbed to the rooftops to take unforgettable images of old Campeche that included everything he considered to be representative of the town: churches, the waterfront, shrines, markets, slaughterhouses, etc. Cicero’s efforts to record old Campeche have had a big pay off. Many families keep those old postcards, which are still reproduced today and framed to be hung in living rooms or business offices or to illustrate a magazine or be part of an exhibition. After this very brief history of photography in Campeche, we will now refer to the project of the magazine Blanco y Negro Imágenes. First of all, we need to acknowledge the active role of the Director of the Campeche Center of the National Anthropology Institute (INAH), Carlos Vidal Angeles, who always has had the interest of forming an ancient photography archive and that currently holds more than 5000 images that can be consulted by the public. This project had an unlikely beginning in a popular restaurant in downtown Campeche. There was an old picture of the small town of Dzitbalchen, in the municipality of Hopelchen, hanging on the wall. During the conversation about that picture, the owner of the place told us its date, the name of the photographer and even the name of the mules in the photo. That is when Mr. Vidal Angeles recognized the importance of preserving the images kept by the inhabitants of all 11 municipalities of the State of Campeche. Not only the images, but, whenever possible, the stories behind them should be published. In February of 2004, INAH Campeche finally published the first issue of the Blanco y Negro Imagenes magazine. The Blanco y Negro project has focused on the salvage of these images through research in archives, spoken accounts, registries digitalization of pictures, copies and reproduction of photographs of all 11 municipalities of the State of Campeche, and their publication in a periodical publication.     Anonymous photographers captured most of the images in the last three decades of the 19th Century, although some have the name of the author or the photo studios that include studios in Merida, Yucatan, Tabasco, Campeche and Mexico City. Although there are images of streets and public places, most photographs depict family members.   We have managed to rescue forsaken photographs in family albums kept in closets and trunks, most of them dating back to the early 20th Century and up to the 1970’s. The first issue of the magazine was dedicated to the Municipality of Hopelchen and featured a number of late 19th and early 20th century images. The experience was very encouraging, the local historian did not hesitate o give us his own photos and presented us to people who were willing to cooperate with us. Among them was Mr. Arturo Solis Lara, who has devoted himself to preserve, classify and register both ancient and contemporary photographs for over 30 years. In his place of business, an auto part shop, he has a camera ready to record any event he considers to have any relevance. Mr. Solis also keeps a record of deceased persons, foreign visitors, local fiestas and other relevant community events. After the publication of the first issue, we realized the potential of the project; therefore we sought the support of the Campeche Institute of Culture and the University of Campeche. For the second issue, dedicated to the municipality of Champoton, we rescued an important number of photographs and historical documents such as an electricity bill of the first year that service arrived to that municipality, and original score and lyrics of the internationally famous Danzón Champoton, hand- written by its author Ramón Bocos who composed it out of nostalgia during a visit to Acapulco in 1945.   The issue dedicated to the municipality of Hecelchkan, features the collections of Mr. Jorge Euán Tay and Mr, Yanuario Guzmán Ortíz who contributed with more than 300 family pictures along with other information. Other pictures featured here included photos of the first generation of teachers graduated from the Escuela Normal de Hecelchakan.               In the issue devoted to the municipality of Tenabo, the collection of Mr. Carlos Marentes Sosa stands out, with over 200 photos. Other collection featured was the one belonging to Professor Brunilda López Valle, 92, who clearly remembered everyone depicted in her 250-photograph collection. The Palizada, Candelaria and El Carmen municipalities have one thing in common: The Usumacinta river, the boats and ferries of those towns were the vehicle of every social, political, economic and cultural event in the region. The issue devoted to Palizada featured the collection of the Del Rivero family, who arrived to the region in the 19th Century as merchants. They installed the first electricity power plant, and built everything from dance halls to cinema theaters, ventured in the sugar cane and cattle businesses, and also the production of bricks and ice among many other activities, all included in their photo-albums, which amounted to over 400 pictures.     Jonuta is a town only 15 kilometers away from Palizada, that belongs to the State of Tabasco, due to its closeness, we decided to look for any photo collections that would depict the history of the region. We found there the collection of Mr. Omar Huerta Escalante, a self-appointed promoter of pre-Hispanic culture, founder of an archeological museum and a great collector of ancient photos. Mr. Huerta gave us excellent images of Candelaria, Palizada and Ciudad del Carmen, taken by his father in the 1920’s, unpublished pictures depicting the region’s economic development such as images of the San Rafael chewing gum plantation, property of the Mexican Gulf Land and Lumber Company.     Candelaria got its municipality status until 1997, before that it was largely occupied by the rainforest. In 1963 a colonization program was established, and we have featured the pictures of the odyssey of the more that 500 families that moved from Coahuila to Campeche to colonize the region.     In the case of the municipality of Clakamul, research was also quite an ordeal, since it only was created in 1996; therefore its communities are very new. Apart from the photos of the archeological sites of Becán, Calkmul and Chicaná, we did not find enough material to be published, since there were no communities established before the late 1960’s. An exception is the community of Zoh Laguna, an old chewing gum collection camp in the middle of the forest that dates back to the 1930’s, which later became a prosperous sawmill that had every service available for its workers. This sawmill belonged to the renowned company Caobas Mexicanas, which also operated in Yucatan and Quintana Roo. One of its founding workers was an amateur photographer that took pictures of the community since its very beginning. He photographed the construction of the houses and the production processes of the mahogany wood, the opening of roads for its transportation and the everyday activities of the community. After the sawmill went out of business, this man moved to Chetumal in Quintana Roo and then to Guatemala. However, his wife stayed in Chetumal and we sought her with little hope, but we were happily surprised to find her and she gave us the most amazing 500-photo album. These are only a few examples of what we have experienced in our quest for images all over the State. Now we only have to refer to our general method to edit the magazine and some curious anecdotes that occurred. To define the contents of every issue of the magazine, the first step was to contact the local historian of each municipality, who was in charge to write an historical profile of each community and helped us to locate the people that kept the old photos, the oldest families, the most popular characters and the most important places.     After making contact with them, they gave us information concerning other families that might have more photographs. The main challenge was to convince people to provide us with the pictures so we could digitalize them. We had to explain their documentary value and sometimes we offered them to clean them and give them a digital back up when we returned to them. The information of each image was obtained by interviewing the elders of the community, who provided very important data.     There is no other similar project in Campeche, except for the project of Mr. Humberto Caldera, who only dealt with his hometown, Ciudad del Carmen. Therefore, Blanco y Negro is one of the most significant projects for the salvage and dissemination of ancient photographs. We are very satisfied by our accomplishments. The material contained in every magazine has become in one of the most important sources of historical knowledge of these communities, of how their inhabitants were, what were their social, cultural and religious activities, but also to remember their forgotten traditions, and in many occasions to reflect upon the changes suffered by their environment, the old houses transformed into offices or businesses, the disappeared parks and streets turned into avenues. The images presented by Blanco y Negro present us with the costumes of yore, their garments, hairdos and moustache styles that mark the different epochs and social status. Blanco y Negro is already an effective instrument to help future historians and social anthropologists in their research. We have salvaged around 3000 photographs that were doomed to oblivion. Most of them are in black and white. Our goal in making an historical family photo archive is to identify the person in the picture, place, date, technique and, if possible the name of the photographer, including the pictures that did not make it to the magazines due to their poor quality.     The main goal of Blanco y Negro is to rescue those images that captured a precise moment, an event, a funeral, festivities or any other subject that the photographer, either amateur or professional, deemed worthy of being recorded and ended up in a family album.     To wrap up, in all eleven municipalities of Campeche we have had the satisfaction of obtaining a great variety of pictures that belonged to families of every social level, which evoke beautiful moments of the past of great artistic value.     Marilyn Domínguez Turriza marilyndominguez@hotmail.com       http://zonezero.com/magazine/articles/campeche/index.html      

Wednesday, 09 August 2006

385. Miguel Ehrenberg (1952-2006)

      It is not easy to say something about a man that was a younger brother, a major accomplice and an unreserved friend. He was also a great still photographer and cinematographer, a soundman, and documentarist. In other words, he was a devoted filmmaker with a great vocation. Parts of his legacy are documentaries such as "Doña Herlinda y su hijo" (Dona Herlinda and her Son), "México plural" (Plural Mexico), "Tango es historia" (Tango is History)... all of them memorable films.   He even was an actor, playing the role of the rebellious Captain Marti in the film “Salvador” by Oliver Stone, yet in real life he was an obsessive, uncompromising activist. Atheltic and good-looking, he suffered an intracerebral hemorrhage that turned him into a hemiplegic (he was the one that coined the term “person with special challenges”). He became a major audiovisual storyteller. As a documentalist, he left his mark, he wrote: “I am interested in documenting other people’s stories. After all, the most extraordinary thing for me has always been the human condition.” His condition, the condition of my brother, was always an example of endearing tenacity.   A cousin of mine, described Miguel’s birthday at the hospital, a day before he died: “I heared the party at his room in the hospital was lovely and joyful”. Miguel was born a day before his death, 54 years later.   Felipe Ehrenberg             http://zonezero.com/magazine/obituaries/ehrenberg/index.html    

Monday, 03 July 2006

387. Rescuing the city's image through its arts and crafts

  The Manuel R. Palacios Historic Archive of the City of Oaxaca has now its very own building. It now has a splendidly edited general guide of its documents and a much better organization. The catalog “Rescuing the city's image through its arts and crafts” is one more in a long line of achievements. It was made in 2003 along with ADABI Mexico. Now a CD-ROM will be made with the support of the City’s Authorities. This CD will include beautiful 19th and 20th Century photographs of people that serviced the community and now allow us to revisit our recent past. This photo catalog is not only an historical record, but also a pleasant visual journey for all the people of Oaxaca.   Policeman: Tiburcio López, 1919 (Click on image for a full view)   The goal of this project was to have a photographic record of the old time water carriers, merchants, chauffeurs, shoeshine boys and prostitutes. The project has collected 7,216 images. About 10% of them show some deterioration. Digital scanning has helped to preserve and extend the life of these photos.   All photos include descriptions of the trade, workplace and guild (or even the name of the brothel) along with the names of the people depicted in them, which have been fed into a database for research.   None of these trades have disappeared in the 21st Century; water carriers have substituted the old clay pitchers for plastic ones, this trade has not vanished, but evolved. The same goes for shoeshine boys, merchants, chauffeurs and prostitutes who are all still with us.   The photographs were taken by the city’s authorities to keep a record of the people working in these trades in the city of Oaxaca.   All the records are quite interesting, yet the one about prostitution is one of most appealing. It is the biggest archive, ranging from 1890 to 1957. The authorities kept a strict control of the business, recording the names of every house, owner and girl that worked in them, including the dates in which they started working and when they left town, their nationality, age and complete physical description.     Although authorities tried to avoid clandestine prostitution, there are some independent prostitutes portrayed in the archive.         Prostitutes: Emilia Reyes, 1895 > (Click on image for a full view)           The records about the water carries are also very significant. Through these records we can do research about the cost of water and the social and technological aspects of the trade. It’s quite interesting to see the humbly dressed water carriers with their donkeys posing in front of the elegant sceneries.       < Water carrier: Pedro Escobar, 1903 (Click on image for a full view)                     The Carriers regulations of 1891 in its Article 11 banned carriers from using foul language or working under the influence of alcohol, which carried severe penalties including mutilation.           Carrier: Tiburcio Martínez, 1902 > (Click on image for a full view)               The records of merchants, unfortunately, have a bit less quality than the rest of the records.   The chauffeurs were the ones with the better social standing. Their trade forced them to be better dressed and have much better manners and language. They also had to have a timepiece to inform their passengers of the times of departure and arrival.   Chauffeur: Carlos Ruiz, 1920 (Click on image for a full view)     Most of the shoeshine boys, ironically, did not have any shoes in the photographs, which invariably feature their inseparable shoeshine box. Most of them were 10 to 16 years old.   The information that we have about these people depends a great deal on the calligraphy of the city official that wrote the record, and the skill of the photographer to capture the “essence of their model.   Shoeshine boy: José Coronado, 1917 (Click on image for a full view)     The photographs from the late 19th Century up to the 1930’s were full-body shots, which show the faces, garments and accessories. After the 1930’s the photographs became dreary due to the advent of the typical modern-day ID photo that only features the face. The calligraphy of the city officials also lost quality and beauty.   The original registry entry numbers have been respected which explains the leaps in the order of numbers, use of letters instead of numbers, etcetera.   We would like to thank ADABI Mexico for their contribution to this project.     Nora Olivia Sedeño Torres Director of the Historic Archive of the Oaxaca Municipality         http://zonezero.com/magazine/articles/oaxaca/index.html    

Tuesday, 20 June 2006

389. Gustavo Varela

  Date: June 3, 2006 5:50:39 PM   Gustavo Varela Diaz Nacido en Montevideo, Uruguay en 1950. Fotógrafo autodidacta desde 1962 con una cámara de mi padre. Después de varias NIkon y cientos de rollos de película descubrí la tecnología digital hace tres años, aún sin abandonar mi último cuerpo FM2, y desde el año pasado, abandoné definitivamente el 35 mm. Esa decisión, en la que influyeron mucho las lecturas de los artículos de Pedro Meyer en Zone Zero, incluyó no sólo la venta de mi equipo sino también un nuevo PC, nuevo monitor y curso de Photoshop para cambiar y experimentar con varias digitales desde una pequeña Sony P32 hasta llegar a una Nikon D70s con la que estoy encantado pero la que llevo siempre en algún bolsillo y donde quiera que vaya es una Sony W5. Me interesaron desde hace mucho las texturas y los colores en pequeños fragmentos de muros o afiches callejeros descascarados, deteriorados por el paso del tiempo. Hice en 1997 mi primera muestra, "El Lenguaje de los Muros", con ese tema que, Don Alfredo Testoni, el gran maestro de la fotografía uruguaya, llamaba "el paisaje aproximado". En 2005 obtuve el primer premio en el concurso internacional que organiza la Xunta de Galicia y trabajé en un proyecto que se expuso en Punta del Este junto al artista plástico Roberto Cadenas en el que se mostraba simultaneamente a sus pinturas y collages y una "relectura fotográfica" en la que trabajé varios meses en el esfuerzo de no caer en la mera reproducción de sus cuadros sino, a partir de imágenes macro, lograr nuevas obras que representaran el espíritu de la pintura de Cadenas. Perdón por la extensión pero traté de ser lo más sintético posible para darme a conocer respondiendo a vuestro "Déjenos saber sobre Usted". Con respecto a Zone Zero solamente debo felicitarlos por la calidad y por la trascendencia de los editoriales con los que (casi siempre) coincido. Periódicamente navego entre la Galería y los Portfolios para conocer la obra de otros fotógrafos en otros países, en otras culturas y enriquecerme gracias a la tecnología y a Internet. Para terminar, sólo me permito hacer una sugerencia relacionada con esta nueva tecnología y las facilidades que nos da Internet. No soy lector (?) de Zone Zero desde hace mucho y de pronto cometo un error pero no he visto mencionado a ningún fotógrafo uruguayo (quizás por omisión de los mismos uruguayos) y creo que deberíamos darnos la oportunidad de constatar que no estamos tan lejos del primer mundo si hablamos de contenido y no sólo de avances tecnológicos. Un muy buen ejemplo de ello es el mencionado Alfredo testoni, fallecido no hace mucho, fotógrafo de prensa, grabador, artista plástico que desarrolló a través de la fotografía muchos temas y técnicas diversas en que fue pionero a nivel mundial desde los primeros "Muros" y los "Retratos psicológicos" de la década del 40 hasta "la Sociedad de Consumo" de fines del siglo XX. Me ofrezco, si Uds. quieren, a brindar material o contactarlos con quien puede tenerlo. Espero no consideren un atrevimiento mi sugerencia, que está sustentada en el deseo de que todos podamos conocer a otros fotógrafos de América y en mi admiración por quien fué, a pesar de haberlo conocido personalmente en los ultimos años, mi maestro. Perdón nuevamente por la extensión   Un caluroso saludo desde Uruguay Gustavo Varela  

Saturday, 03 June 2006

391. Leonardo Ricciardi

  Date: May 19, 2006 5:29:52 PM   Querida gente de Zonezero:   Les escribo en primer lugar para que me incluyan en su lista de correo, en segundo lugar quería agradecerles todo lo que hacen por la fotografía amateur. Les cuento que estoy estudiando fotografía en una escuela de Buenos Aires , Argentina. Me enteré de esta página por una amiga y quedé impactado por la calidad de los trabajos y la diversidad de los mismos. Un abrazo y nos mantenemos en contacto.   Leonardo Ricciardi  

Friday, 19 May 2006

393. One million people march in Los Angeles

  May 1st. 2006. May 1st was an important day in American History. Millions of Hispanic workers, most of them of Mexican origin, came together to express in unison “Aquí estamos y no nos vamos, y si nos echan, regresamos” (Here we are, and we are not turning back, if you kick us out, we will come back). What the organizers referred to as “A day without immigrants” became a wave of nationwide protests and a call for undocumented workers unity across the United States. The purpose of the protest was to stop the Border Protection, Anti-Terrorism, and Illegal Immigration Control Act that was passed by the American House of Representatives on December 16, 2005, and under which “unlawful presence” would now be considered a crime and a felony. Go to site      

Friday, 05 May 2006

395. Raúl Corrales (1925-2006)

  Raúl Corrales, cuban photographer dies at 81   EFE Servicios Havana, Cuba - Cuban photographer Raul Corrales, known as one of the leaders in his field in the post-Revolutionary period, died April 15, state television reported. He was 81.   Born in 1925, Corrales was for almost 60 years "a paradigm of Cuban photography" and his death represents "a regrettable loss" to Cuban culture, the station added.   Along with Alberto Diaz "Korda," author of the most famous photo taken of Argentine-born Cuban revolutionary icon Ernesto "Che" Guevara; and Osvaldo Salas; Corrales is recognized as one of the leading figures of the so-called "Epic Photography of the Cuba Revolution" period that followed Fidel Castro's rise to power in 1959.   He also is known for important photographs of the April 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, one of which was published Saturday by the Granma official daily.   According to the television report, Corrales, whose cause of death was not revealed, was buried Saturday afternoon.     2006 © The Denver Post           Snapshot of Raul Corrales by Ciro Bianchi Ross Cubanow- He was one of the great Cuban photo-reporters. Critics highlight his ability to synthesize, to show details and his sculptural treatment of light without blotting out the meaning of the direct message, a way of looking at life and the noble way in which he treated human beings. One of his photos: The Dream, is considered among the one hundred best images in the history of photography. But beyond this or that title, Raul Corrales (National Plastic Arts Award) gave testimony and graphically documented the early years of the Cuban Revolution. There isn’t one important event in that period which his lens did not capture.     That was from 1959 to 1964, when Corrales was a member of the photographic teams in Revolucion daily and Cuba magazine. Before, in Carteles magazine, his work had also been outstanding. He reached the most unimaginable places in Cuba to show how the poor farmers in the mountains and the coal makers in the marshes, the sugar-cane cutters and the miners lived and died. Those coverages were true denunciations, a call for awareness.       “When there is no longer misery in Cuba,” said one day to Raul Corrales the also classic Alberto Korda, “you’re going to starve to death.” By sheer miracle, Corrales hadn’t starved to death until then. Before he started in photography, he was forced to undertake the most modest jobs: newspaper boy, fruit seller, a shoe-shine boy, cleaning boy… Also, a valet to Mexican filmmaker Jorge Negrete during his presentations in Cuba… He was able to save enough money to buy a small 127 mm camera. He took pictures with it but he didn’t print them. He was happy to look at the negatives with a magnifying glass before a lamp. That was when he landed a job with Cuba Sono Films and became a professional photographer. It was 1944. Long gone are those times when Raul Corrales, carrying a 4 x 5 Speed Graphis camera and a bag full of frames and bulbs, wondered throughout Havana looking for news. When he turned 80, he had an archive with thousands of unprinted negatives; four books published –one of them dedicated to Ernest Hemingway- and his prestige becomes greater each day inside and out of the island.   Cubanow © Ciro Bianchi Ross           http://www.zonezero.com/magazine/obituaries/corrales/index.html    

Saturday, 15 April 2006

397. A matter of size

    It used to be (up until the late eighties) that in most parts of the world we would make our prints for exhibitions, in the 11 x 14 inch range. The reasons were many, but one of the more important ones was the high cost of photographic paper, as well as the scarce availability of papers.   I have to confess, I had a degree of envy combined with admiration for those photographers in the so called "first world" who could without too much thought, produce beautiful images that were "much larger", such as 17 x 22 in. You would of course need to also have a darkroom large enough to handle such large formats. An enlarger and easel to allow for those sizes, as well as all the corresponding trays, for developing the prints. In other words, the production of large prints required not only the papers but also the facility that enabled the handling of larger sizes.   As time moved on and we entered the digital era, all these issues started to take on an all together new direction. It all started very slowly, the first printers with ink jet technology that would enable larger prints to be made, were the Iris printers. But these printers were very expensive and the stability of the inks used was not very good.   In tandem to this we started to see images on monitors that were published over the internet. We also had the problem of slow connections to the internet because the bandwidth available was modest. This required the publication of rather small images. Monitors were also small, and quite unstable in their color representation. So it was anyone's guess what the other person saw when an image was published over the internet. One of the most visited pages we had in ZoneZero, was a page to calibrate your monitor.   However in a matter of a decade, all these issues were successfully addressed at an incredible pace. Technology burst out in every direction and found new solutions for such problems. Epson was one the first ones I found that came out with printers that really had a level of quality to match an analog photographic print. Although the size of their first printers only allowed for prints up to 17 x 22 inch. That was already a huge difference in what one was able to produce in those small darkrooms, of yesteryear. The cost of the printers had come down immensely, the pending problem to resolve was the longevity of an image. The prints looked beautiful, but their stability was questionable.   Another item worthy of mention was the introduction of literally hundreds of new papers one could print on, with a huge diversity of surface textures. But not only that, the speed to make a print was incomparable to the darkroom days, and one could print from a small space quite large prints. The costs had come down and were now very competitive with chemically based solutions.   Monitors started to grow in size and quality, flat screen monitors started to displace the bulky and mostly unreliable CRT monitors (Cathode Ray Tubes). Bandwidth connection to the internet became increasingly prevalent throughout the world, growing alongside ever larger screens that could display images published over the internet, pictures that all of a sudden competed favorably with the 8 x 10 inch or the 11 x 14 inch images we printed earlier in the darkroom. Such images, not only had the same size but were even more luminous than their paper counterparts, as the back lit quality of such photographs allowed for a wider tonal range on the new flat screen monitors which started to become prevalent all over.   So photographers that could publish their work over the internet, at the size of 8 x 10 or 11 x 14, could hardly make a big impression if the size of a print for an exhibition corresponded to the same sizes one could have either in a book or on a monitor. But such a logic was also accompanied by some incredible technological breakthrough that would make it possible to print very large scale prints, within the budgetary limitations of a photographer.   EPSON, started to introduce the first large scale printers that had the right combination of price and quality. Not that they were the first printers on the market that could make large scale images, but they were the first ones that could actually offer reliability, quality and at reasonable cost. The investment required for a digital set up, became more and more the equivalent of what we used to spend to set up a darkroom. The speed at which digital technology has been adopted, is a result of the convenience factor combined with relatively attractive prices.   Prints today, depending on the inks used and the papers on which the image is printed, have started to surpass the life expectancy of a good silver gelatin print. The variety of papers available to make images on, far surpasses anything that was available before. With that, the technical nature of making a large prints, is I believe settled. Now, why do we need large prints?   I think that with the technology practically solved, the attention has to now be centered on content. What is the purpose in making small prints for exhibition purposes, when the image can be seen on a monitor with even better quality, and the relation between the image and the viewer is, I believe, a new and enhanced one, that is how I see the issue of making large prints today.   Interestingly enough, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, as you probably know, has a completely remodeled new building. Their photography department, now has gallery spaces that vary in height. The first rooms which show work that was done in those earlier years I mentioned before, with all the smaller prints, has a roof height like they always had in that same museum, but then as the images start to grow in size, the Museum had to acknowledge such a new reality by having additional galleries with a much higher roof to accommodate the increasingly larger prints that were both being collected or exhibited.   Oh! one last thing, as the size of prints grew, so did the needed space for tables on which to place the prints in order to review them, and of course, so much more space in which to store all those large prints, in case they are framed. As the saying goes, "there is never a free lunch". Together with all the good things I wrote about having large prints, I can also list a number of problems, such as the need for more space, now instead of the darkroom we need more space in what is called the "light room". More complications in transportation, small prints travel with greater ease than large prints. If a print goes bad, you waste a lot more material (paper and ink) than when you create small prints. But the pleasure derived from seeing your images displayed in a large format, will probably outweigh all those inconveniences along the way, and probably your audience will also respond favorably to seeing those bigger prints in the context of an exhibition on the wall.   Pedro Meyer April 2006 Coyoacán, Mexico   As always please joins us with your comments in our forums.       http://zonezero.com/editorial/abril06/april06.html     Coyoacan,  

Saturday, 01 April 2006

399. Matthew Parker

  Date: March 25, 2006 4:47:57 PM   Dear Zone Zero,   Wow, I can't believe I just found you. I have recently made the leap to digital. It's still hard to do my darkroom work in daylight! I love your sight, and just spent the last three hours experiencing it, and I'm not half way done! Love it, thanks! I hope to see it daily.   Sincerely, Matthew Parker  

Saturday, 25 March 2006