351. Chaos by Josef Koudelka

  Weighing in at just under 5 pounds, the physical characteristics of Chaos (Phaidon Press), Josef Koudelka's latest book, are by themselves worthy of comment. At 110 pages, the book is 12 by 17 inches long, filled with panorama images which, when spread individually across two pages, measure 29 inches long. Even more remarkable, there are 61 vertical images (remember, these are full panoramas) out of a total 108 photographs in this beautifully reproduced book.   The combined effect of the size and weight of this book made my usual flipping from the back of a photography book toward the front impossible. And even if you have the strength to hold the book at arms length, the largest images are beyond any reasonable limits of what could be considered proper viewing distance. This, alone, forced me to put the book down and start at the beginning. Intentional or not, the design of this book itself, is a declarative statement. I had to begin with the finality of letting go of the way I usually look at a book of photographs.   Panorama photographs have been around for a long time. In the last few years, this format has become very popular. However, the shape of the panoramic frame is so spectacular, I sometimes find it difficult to asses whether an image works or not.There are times when the relationship between form and content in these images is misleading, where a photograph appears to be strong simply because it looks so spectacular.   This is not true in Koudelka's case. In fact, this body of work is so compelling, so purely seen, it almost neutralizes any emphasis on the frame. This is not to say that Koudelka does not delight in the panorama format. Quite the contrary. But Koudelka is Koudelka, and he has more important fish to fry.   When I look at the images in Chaos, I hear the music of Miles Davis, of darkness and beauty. One could argue that the subject of this work is desolation and emptiness. And certainly these are part of almost every image. But the depth and breadth of this work comes from a kind of self-imposed challenge, one which wonders how dark an image can be and still maintain beauty. And how long can a photographer sustain this kind of imagery without being repetitive or technical? Jazz musicians face a similar problem when it's their turn to solo. With absolute certainty, Koudelka hits a dazzling low note with this work (in his case, think of an acoustic bass or cello, drawn with a long bow) and holds it with complete confidence right through the resolution of the note itself, which in this case is the entire length of the book. It's astonishing. Only Koudelka could discover a celestial sky living in what looks like a piece of shattered tin hanging in a desolate cityscape (p.41). Or a bombed out building, walls riddled with bullet holes which, in a more predictable image by any other photographer, would be a statement about the horrors of war. But for Koudelka, it is here that the past and eternity come together in the same moment. This relationship is not forced. It is there, wholly recognized and documented for us to witness (p. 17).   There is, of course, the occasional image grounded in a reality that is more familiar to the rest of us. A large statue of Lenin is tied onto a huge barge floating in a waterway under a dreary, gray sky. There are no people, no indication of movement or direction. Where is Lenin going? Has he arrived at his resting place? This haunting image speaks not simply to the past, or a bygone era, but of unfinished business, or unfortunate things that will linger and may never die (p. 59).   Unlike his previous work, there are only four photographs with people in them. And in each case, they are not only anonymous, but almost freakish, living strangely out of time. That is, out of any time we might be familiar with.   Although I find this entire body of work compelling, there is one flaw in the book. With a visual vocabulary as extensive and poetic as Koudelka's, I am used to seeing his photographs displayed as individual images, without any direct referencing from one image to another. Exiles, his last book, is a perfect example of this done well, where he used one image per spread. In Chaos, because there are as many as three vertical images on a single page, it is virtually impossible for them not to inform each other. This creates a distraction as well as a disruption in the cadence and rhythm of the book. Are these groupings intentional or the result of compromises forced by the design and format of the panorama itself? Either way, I found myself covering the verticals with white paper so I could view them individually.   This said, Chaos is a virtuoso performance by Koudelka, not simply because it shows us the full extent of his command and understanding of the medium of photography. But by exhibiting his unique ability to venture far from the melody (documentary photography) without losing sight of it, he continues to define what a documentary photograph can be: a reflection so full that it is at once deeply human, richly poetic, and modestly spiritual in the broadest sense.   A Jungian analyst once told me that, though we all enjoy interpreting our dreams, what a dream really wants is another dream, and another and another. This is also true about photographs. And no one seems to understand this better than Koudelka himself.       You can contact Nubar Alexanian at: nubar@nubar.com       http://www.zonezero.com/magazine/articles/nubar/koudelka.html    

Tuesday, 22 May 2007

353. Signs & Relics by Sylvia Plachy

  In the foreword of Sylvia Plachy's new book, Signs & Relics, Wim Wenders writes: "Whoever came up first with that saying 'a picture is worth a thousand words' didn't understand the first thing about either one." He goes on to describe a personal revelation that it wasn't until seeing this book that he understood that photographs could do " all sorts of things" he never thought of. Wim Wenders has it right. Signs & Relics has the breath and depth of a book that is uncommon in our fast-forward culture, overwhelmed as it is with pretentious images. This is not simply because Sylvia Plachy touches all the bases of making good photographs consistently. In fact, it could be argued (successfully) that she is not interested at all in what we think of as good photography. Rather, she is that rare photographer whose work is soulful and honest, with a visual vocabulary so steeped in the poetic, that her images celebrate her subjects as well as the medium of photography she loves so much. All this, combined with the courage to share her humor, her sadness and her delight in seeing the world, creates a body of work which truly amplifies the definition of what good photography is. I cannot remember the last time I've felt so excited by a book of photographs. Indeed, Signs & Relics has become required viewing (and reading) in my classes. In a recent lecture about my own work, I surprised myself by holding this book up, assuring the audience that it contained everything anyone needed to know or understand about photography. And it does. My enthusiasm aside, after spending time with Signs & Relics, you will never look at a fork in the same way. Or a chair. Or trees, frogs and roads. And perhaps you too, will someday look at the smoke billowing out of a train and see it's connection to the moon on a cold winter night in an otherwise ominous setting. Best known for her work at the Village Voice, her first book, Unguided Tour, is a wonderful collection of photographs from her tenure as a staff photographer there. Her second book, Red Light, was published in 1996 and is a bold and daring look at the sex industry. But Signs & Relics is by far her best work. And though I am tempted to compare it to the proliferation of pretentious photographic books being printed by the pound these days, this personal agenda of mine would unfairly burden this treasure.   You can contact Nubar Alexanian at: nubar@nubar.com     http://www.zonezero.com/magazine/articles/nubar/planchy.html    

Tuesday, 22 May 2007

355. Iraq: Why the media failed

        Iraq: Why the media failed Afraid to challenge America's leaders or conventional wisdom about the Middle East, a toothless press collapsed.   Apr. 10, 2007 | It's no secret that the period of time between 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq represents one of the greatest collapses in the history of the American media. Every branch of the media failed, from daily newspapers, magazines and Web sites to television networks, cable channels and radio. I'm not going to go into chapter and verse about the media's specific failures, its credulousness about aluminum tubes and mushroom clouds and failure to make clear that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11 -- they're too well known to repeat. In any case, the real failing was not in any one area; it was across the board. Bush administration lies and distortions went unchallenged, or were actively promoted. Fundamental and problematic assumptions about terrorism and the "war on terror" were rarely debated or even discussed. Vital historical context was almost never provided. And it wasn't just a failure of analysis. With some honorable exceptions, good old-fashioned reporting was also absent.   But perhaps the press's most notable failure was its inability to determine just why this disastrous war was ever launched. Kristina Borjesson, author of "Feet to the Fire," a collection of interviews with 21 journalists about why the press collapsed, summed this up succinctly. "The thing that I found really profound was that there really was no consensus among this nation's top messengers about why we went to war," Borjesson told AlterNet. "[War is the] most extreme activity a nation can engage in, and if they weren't clear about it, that means the public wasn't necessarily clear about the real reasons. And I still don't think the American people are clear about it."   Of course, the media was not alone in its collapse. Congress rolled over and gave Bush authorization to go to war. And the majority of the American people, traumatized by 9/11, followed their delusional president down the primrose path. Had the media done its job, Bush's war of choice might still have taken place. But we'll never know.   Why did the media fail so disastrously in its response to the biggest issue of a generation? To answer this, we need to look at three broad, interrelated areas, which I have called psychological, institutional and ideological. The media had serious preexisting weaknesses on all three fronts, and when a devastating terrorist attack and a radical, reckless and duplicitous administration came together, the result was a perfect storm.   The psychological category is the most amorphous of the three and the most inexactly named -- it could just as easily be termed sociological. By it, I mean the subtle, internalized, often unconscious way that the media conforms and defers to certain sacrosanct values and ideals. Journalists like to think of themselves as autonomous agents who pursue truth without fear or favor. In fact, the media, especially the mass media, adheres to a whole set of sometimes explicit, sometimes implicit codes that govern what it feels it can say. Network television provides the clearest example. From decency codes to subject matter, the networks have always been surrounded by a vast, mostly invisible web of constraints.   Seen in this light, the mass media is a quasi-official institution, an info-nanny, that is held responsible for maintaining a kind of national consensus. Just as our legal system is largely based on what a "reasonable" person would think, so our mass media is charged with presenting not just an accurate view of the world but also an "appropriate" one.   What "appropriate" means in absolute terms is impossible to define. In practice, however, its meaning is quite clear. It's reflected in a cautious, centrist media that defers to accepted national dogmas and allows itself to shade cautiously into advocacy on issues only when it thinks it has the popular imprimatur to do so. The "culture wars" of recent decades are largely a backlash by enraged conservatives who correctly perceive that the "liberal" media has conferred its quasi-official seal of approval on issues like gay rights and women's right to abortion. In fact, the mainstream media only dares to deviate from the imagined national center, from "appropriate" discourse, within a highly circumscribed area.   Parents may be justified in basing their decisions on what is "appropriate." But for media organizations to do it is extremely dangerous -- and even more so in times of war or national trauma. After 9/11, the area of allowed deviation shrank even more. What was "appropriate" became deference to the nation's leaders. Patriotism and national unity trumped truth.   The outburst of media patriotism after the attacks reveals how fragile the barrier is between journalism and propaganda. Fox News, whose newscasters sported American flag pins and where the "news" consisted of cheerleading for Bush administration policies, was, of course, the most egregious case. One month after the United States began bombing Kabul, Fox anchor Brit Hume actually said, "Over at ABC News, where the wearing of American flag lapel pins is banned, Peter Jennings and his team have devoted far more time to the coverage of civilian casualties in Afghanistan than either of their broadcast network competitors." Reading this statement five years later is a salutary reminder of how pervasive such jingoist, near-Stalinist groupthink was in those days -- and still is on Fox.   Fox was the worst, but the rest of the mainstream media was clearly influenced by the perceived need to be "Americans first and journalists second." This was manifested less in obviously biased or flawed stories than in subtler ways: the simple failure to investigate Bush administration claims, go outside the magic circle of approved wise men, or in general aggressively question the whole surreal adventure. This failure was even more glaring because the run-up to war took place in slow motion. For nine months or more, everyone knew Bush was determined to attack Iraq, and no one really knew why. Yet the mainstream media was unable to break out of its stupor. At a critical moment, that stupor appeared almost literal.   In an infamous Bush press conference on March 6, 2003, just days before the Iraq war began, the assembled media bigwigs were so lethargic and apparently resigned to the inevitability of war that they seemed to be drugged. ABC News White House correspondent Terry Moran said that the press corps left "looking like zombies."   I'm not saying that there's no place for patriotism, or fellow feeling, in journalism. 9/11 was a special case. Thousands of Americans had just been killed, and a heightened emotional awareness of our shared national identity was both inevitable and unexceptionable. Who, for example, would quarrel with the "Portraits of Grief" series the New York Times ran, honoring each of the victims of 9/11? Running this series had clear political ramifications. The Times, for instance, has never run a series about the 3,000 or more victims of automobile accidents killed every month in the United States. But it was a legitimate news decision.   But when it comes to forward-looking analysis and reporting -- as opposed to elegiac coverage -- patriotism and groupthink are journalistic poison. Hume's implicit argument that it was "un-American" to report extensively on civilian casualties was an extreme example. But in newsrooms across the land, thousands of smaller, unnoticed cases of self-censorship or selective reporting were taking place. 9/11 in particular was a sacred taboo that even the most cold-blooded, dispassionate journalists feared to disturb. They'd seen what happened to Susan Sontag, who was crucified for daring to say that the 9/11 attackers were not cowards, that President Bush's tough-talking response was "robotic," and that America urgently needed to rethink its Middle East policies. (The New Republic ran an article that began, "What do Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein and Susan Sontag have in common?") Bill Maher lost his network TV show after he refused to kowtow to the "terrorists are cowards" line, and Noam Chomsky was virtually declared a traitor for calling America a terrorist state and warning that a violent response to 9/11 would backfire.   A personal example: In a Salon piece I wrote before the 2004 elections, when the worst of the patriotic fervor had long subsided, I wrote, "Heretical as it is to say, the terror attacks proved that it is possible to overreact -- more specifically, to react foolishly -- to an attack that left 3,000 dead." The idea that we had "overreacted" to this sacred event was so explosive, even then, that my editor flagged the line and questioned me about it. In the end the line stayed, but I write for Salon -- one of the few major media outlets that were consistently against the war from the beginning, one that has no corporate owner and is aggressively independent. How many such sentiments ended up on cutting-room floors across the country -- or were never even typed? As Mark Hertsgaard noted in his important study of the media's weakness during the Reagan years, "On Bended Knee: The Press and the Reagan Presidency," the most effective censorship is self-censorship.   In short, the attacks not only killed almost 3,000 Americans, but also killed the mainstream media's ability to challenge the administration -- one that was expert at framing all dissent as bordering on treason. When Ari Fleischer infamously said that "all Americans ... need to watch what they say, watch what they do," the mainstream media obeyed. This timorousness was brought into stark relief by the far more trenchant and critical perspectives offered by analysts, often academics, who didn't write for a mass audience, and who therefore had not learned, as so many mainstream journalists have, to defer to the best and brightest and make their opinions conform to an imagined American center.   Time and again, in the run-up to war and during its early phase, I was amazed at the difference between the clear-eyed analysis to be found in books, and the mushy centrist pap that dominated the papers and TV. It was a kind of surreal battle of books vs. the mass media -- and books won hands down.   Rashid Khalidi's "Resurrecting Empire," written before and during the early days of the Iraq war, accurately predicted the quagmire that America was about to step into, hammering home the notion that for people in the Middle East, who have a long historical memory of imperialist oppression, our "noble" mission would not be seen as such. Michael Mann's "Incoherent Empire," also written just before and in the early days of the Iraq war, exposed the incoherence of Bush's "war on terror." Mann pointed out that there is a fundamental difference between "national" terrorists like Hamas and "international" ones like al-Qaida, and that treating them as if they were the same, as Bush moralistically did and still does, was a catastrophic blunder. And Malise Ruthven's "A Fury for God," which came out before the Iraq war, traced the historical and intellectual roots of violent Islamism through the Muslim Brotherhood to Sayyid Qutb, noted the corrosive effect of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on Muslim minds, and cautioned that "another Gulf War will do far more harm than good."   Not all was lost. Some of the best breaking commentary was on the Internet, on blogs like Juan Cole's "Informed Comment" and Helena Cobban's "Just World News," but these sites had a limited readership. There were some notable exceptions on the print side, like the superb reporting of Knight Ridder's Jonathan Landay and Warren Strobel, who aggressively reported out the Bush administration's bogus claims about the "threat" posed by Saddam Hussein. The Washington Post's Walter Pincus also questioned Bush administration claims about WMD (his big pre-war story on this subject, after almost being killed, was relegated to page A-17). And the New Yorker's Seymour Hersh and Mark Danner, writing for the New York Review of Books, also distinguished themselves with excellent coverage of Abu Ghraib, following the thread that led directly from the blood-spattered rooms outside Baghdad to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.   But such authors and journalists were few and far between, and they were almost never seen on TV. Long into the Iraq war, much of the mainstream media continued to fixate on Saddam Hussein's missing WMD and bloviate about the challenges of "reshaping the Middle East," ignoring these deeper arguments. It was a stark illustration of the difference between journalism and scholarship.   Even before Iraq and the Bush presidency revealed its feet of clay, American journalism was not in one of its heroic phases. The press is less aggressive than it was in the Watergate era. Its adversarial role has been weakened. It defers more to authority. It is tamer, more docile, less threatening to what the great Israeli journalist Amira Hass called "the centers of power."   There are a number of reasons for this softening of journalism's backbone. One is economic. The decline of newspapers, the rise of infotainment, and media company owners' insistence on delivering high returns to their shareholders have diminished resources and led to a bottom-line fixation unconducive to aggressive reporting. There are big bucks to be made in being aggressively adversarial, but most of those bucks are on the right, not the left. The meteoric success of right-wing media outlets like Fox News and ranting demagogues like Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter has not encouraged media owners, too shortsighted to see that there are viable alternatives to the kind of bland national nanny-ism manifest on the networks, to pursue real journalism. (The blogosphere represents the beginning of a national revolt against the now-discredited media gatekeepers.)   Another is the opiating effect of corporate culture: Major media has become increasingly bland and toothless, just like the huge bureaucracies that own it and that are increasingly indistinguishable from each other and from the federal government. It is harder to "monitor the centers of power" when you work for a gigantic corporation that is itself at the bull's-eye of power.   Then there is the Faustian trade-off of "access" journalism, to which, as the Judith Miller debacle revealed, more and more prominent journalists have succumbed. As Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg told Editor and Publisher in 2003, this is a cardinal journalistic sin. "It is irresponsible for anyone in the press to take your understanding exclusively from government accounts, from the president or secretary of defense or lower-level officials," Ellsberg said. "That definitely includes backgrounders that purport to be the 'real' inside story. Just as press conferences are a vehicle for lying to the public, backgrounders are a vehicle for lying to the press, convincing the press they are getting the inside story when all they are getting is a story that is sellable to the press."   As the war drums beat, the Beltway press bought and bought and bought -- before they discovered they'd been sold.   A closely related issue is the rise of a super-class of journalists, mostly TV talking heads, who are as wealthy and famous as the people they cover -- and who routinely hobnob with them at parties and social events. These celebrity journalists may make a show of their "toughness," but they swim happily in the conventional wisdom that flows all around them. And as it relates to the Middle East, that conventional wisdom is bankrupt.   Which leads us to the third and final area where journalism failed in the aftermath of 9/11: ideology. Evaluating why America was attacked required journalists to learn about the history of the Arab/Muslim world -- and not just skim one of Bernard Lewis' tendentious articles discounting Arab grievances. Evaluating how dangerous Saddam Hussein really was required knowledge of the contemporary Middle East -- not just a quick read of Kenneth Pollack's "The Threatening Storm," which argued that Saddam posed so great a threat to America that war was necessary. Assessing Bush's entire "war on terror" required a dispassionate exploration of terrorism itself -- an understanding that terrorism is essentially a form of asymmetrical warfare, that it often succeeds by provoking an overreaction, that it can be waged in the service of legitimate goals, and that most terrorists are not cowards or madmen -- free of 9/11 emotionalism. Indeed, every one of these issues needed to be looked at completely objectively, without sacred cows of any kind.   None of this happened for three closely related reasons. The first was simple ignorance: Most mainstream journalists simply didn't know very much about the Middle East, and in thrall to a kind of bad humility, deemed it above their pay grade to find out.   Second, American society in general has a strongly pro-Israel orientation -- one that journalists generally share (or are too intimidated or ignorant to contest) -- which inevitably guides their assumptions and beliefs about Arabs, terrorism and the Middle East in general. The historian Tony Judt argued in the London Review of Books that the support so many liberal journalists and pundits gave to Bush's war is best explained by their backing for Israel. This orientation, because it is deemed "appropriate," affects virtually every aspect of the media's coverage of the Middle East. Arab and Muslim perspectives, because they tend to be anti-Israeli, are rarely heard in the American media; if they had been, many Americans might have had quite a different assessment of the Iraq war's chances of success. Instead, the U.S. media works within a tiny ideological spectrum on the Middle East, using the same center-right and right-wing sources again and again. To take just one specific example, the New York Times, when it needs comment on Israeli affairs, often relies on experts from the Washington Institute on Near East Affairs (WINEP), a center-right, pro-Israel think tank. The Times rarely asks center-left or left-wing Middle East experts like Cobban or M.J. Rosenberg to comment on Israel. There is no evidence that the Iraq debacle, which these right-wing pundits almost universally supported, has led the media to rethink its sources or its ideological orientation.   Still worse, perhaps, the taboo against discussing this subject in public helped stifle vitally needed debate about the war. As Michael Kinsley pointed out more than four years ago in Slate, the fact that a large motivation for the war was influential neoconservatives' support for Israel was "the proverbial elephant in the room: Everybody sees it, no one mentions it." Kinsley correctly points out that there were honorable motivations behind this silence: no one wanted to put in play the crude anti-Semitic smear that this war was drummed up by Jews whose primary allegiance was to Israel. This is a caricature. As Kinsley and I have both argued, for the neoconservative Jews who played a key role in brainstorming the war, it was simply taken as axiomatic that America's interests and Israel's are identical. But that assumption of shared interests is itself highly problematic, to say the least. Some commentators, like Philip Weiss, have begun to raise the sensitive issue of the role played by the neocons' concern for Israel's security. In years to come, historians will ponder why America under Bush adopted, in effect, the Israeli position toward the Arab world without the ramifications of this radical and extremely risky move ever being discussed, or indeed the parallels even being acknowledged.   Finally, the media was unable to deal with the abstract and highly ideological motivations for Bush's war -- especially because those motivations, as Paul Wolfowitz notoriously admitted, were never really made clear. To oppose the war, one had to challenge the two real reasons behind it -- the neoconservative crusade against "Islamofascism" and the cold warriors' desire to assert American power -- head on. But this meant not only taking on the sacred cows of 9/11 and Israel, but also dealing with the refusal of the administration to publicly acknowledge these abstract reasons, and challenging a White House that "for bureaucratic reasons," in Wolfowitz's words, was hiding behind its trumped-up "evidence" about Saddam's WMD. For the mainstream media -- unprepared, intimidated, caught up in the torrent of Beltway wisdom and flag-waving -- this was far too much to deal with. As Kristina Borjesson noted, the result was that the media signed off on a war that it itself did not understand. There could be no more damning indictment.   We should note one more reason for the media's Iraq failure: the Bush administration. The mainstream media, especially in its current enfeebled form, is simply not equipped to deal with an regime as secretive, manipulative, vengeful and, not to put too fine a point on it, malignant as the present one. Watching the mainstream press try to contend with the Bush-Cheney gang is like watching the Polish cavalry galloping up in 1939 as the Wehrmacht tanks approach.   So has the media learned its lesson? And what does the future hold? In many ways, the media has definitely improved. After the war turned south and the WMD failed to appear, most news organizations began to get much tougher on the Bush administration. The New York Times, in particular, has found its backbone, roasting the administration for its incompetence and duplicity and turning an increasingly skeptical eye on its claims of progress in Iraq. And from the beginning of the war, the media's reporting from the field in Iraq has been far better than its analysis.   The problem, of course, is that the press only really turned on Bush when his ratings began to fall -- another indication that the Fourth Estate has become more of a weathervane than a truth teller.   The final verdict is not yet in. The media has improved, without question, but it has a lot of making up to do. The structural problems -- psychological, institutional, ideological -- that played so big a role in its collapse have not gone away, and there is no reason to think they will. And then there's war, which reduced so much of the media to flag-waving courtiers. If the media has learned that a bugle blast can be sounded by a fool, that not every war the United States launches is wise or necessary, and that self-righteousness is not an argument, maybe something can be salvaged from this sorry chapter after all.   Gary Kamiya       http://zonezero.com/magazine/articles/salon.com02/02.html    

Tuesday, 10 April 2007

357. Mercedes Iturbe (?-2007)

  The National Institute of Fine Arts and Literature of Mexico informed that Mercedes Iturbe, director of the Carrillo Gil Art Museum died last night in her home in Cuernavaca, Morelos.   The Institute highlighted her work promoting art both in Mexico and abroad. Until just a few months ago, she was the director of the Museum of Palacio de Bellas Artes. She always distinguished herself for opening up important spaces to Mexican and foreign artists that have left a mark in contemporary art.       Mercedes Iturbe was a well known art historian and promoter that devoted her life to coordinating major cultural events dedicated to artists such as Luis Buñuel and Alejo Carpentier. She also founded the Juan Rulfo literary prize in France in 1984. She was born in Mexico City and got a psychology degree in UNAM. She obtained a MA in Art History in the Sorbonne 1 University in Paris, France. She was also a journalist and television host, she published numerous articles in many magazines and newspapers both in Mexico and abroad. She also published several essays for painting, sculpture and photography catalogues. She also wrote the book Espiritus Complices (Accomplice Spirits) published in 1999.   She was also the director of Salon de la Plastica Mexicana (The Mexican Visual Arts Hall), director of cultural promotion of the Treasury Secretariat and Cultural Counselor of the Mexican Delegation in UNESCO. She also was the director of the Mexican Cultural Center in Paris, France, the Festival Internacional Cervantino and deputy commissar of Culture of Mexico in the 2000 Hanover Universal Exposition in Germany. In 1990 she received the Knight’s degree for Arts and literature of the French government.   She also organized major exhibitions for artists such as Juan Rulfo, Luis Barragán, José Guadalupe Posada, Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Josef Koudelka, Alberto Gironella, Frida Kalho, Jean Michel Basquiat, Juan Soriano, Juan García Ponce and Gabriel Orozco, among many others.   April, 2007 © El Universal         http://zonezero.com/magazine/obituaries/iturbe/index.html    

Saturday, 31 March 2007

359. Asca S.R. Aull

  Date: March 17, 2007 5:20:52 PM   Good evening, Pedro   Thank you for your ever-generous and fraternal opportunity to share in your devotion and support for the photographic arts... I'd also like to say it is an absolute pleasure to experience and participate in your quality and website... You and your organization are truly remarkable and I will forward your site to my friends around the globe who are photographers as well... I have submiited some of my work for both your portfolio and gallery opportunities...bien sur...(smile)   Respectfully and most-appreciatively...Asca S.R. Aull  

Saturday, 17 March 2007

361. St. Valentine's Day

  I am well aware that not all cultures enjoy the same special days for celebrating an event nor do so on the same day, in this case most of the western cultures celebrate Valentine's Day with variations. On the other hand, in the Chinese culture, for instance it's "The Night of the Sevens", In Japan and Korea it is called "White Day" which is of more recent origin and associated with marketing efforts by candy makers.     Go to exhibition      

Wednesday, 14 February 2007

363. History Brushed Against the Grain

    There isn’t a single document of culture that is not also a document of savagery. As it is not itself free of savagery, the process of conveying it from one to the other isn’t either. That is why the materialistic historian distances from it as much as possible. They consider a duty to brush history against the hair. Walter Benjamín     When Raquel Tibol wrote the foreword of the catalog of the First Latin American Photography Colloquium, she proposed not a characterization of the photographic production in question, but rather a model of what Latin American photography should be, both to be photography and to be Latin American. This brief text (and the exhibition featured in the Colloquium) has been an obligated reference since, mainly for understanding which were the ideological schemes that would be used to evaluate Latin American photography in the decades to come. Raquel Tibol’s participation in this project was significant, because it meant that the art historians and critics were legitimating photography. Nevertheless, it is obvious that the authority of the critics discourse is mostly based upon an ethical proposal and not on proposing a photographic theory in Latin America.     The effort to build an ethical model for Latin American photography has a precedent that is not quoted that often, yet it is much more meaningful, in the work of Edmundo Desnoes. Mainly in a truly ambitious essay published in the book Para verte mejor Latinoamérica (To see you better Latin America), which featured photos by Paolo Gasparini (México, Siglo XXI Editores, 1st edition 1972, 2nd edition 1983). This essay (which has all the characteristics of a manifesto and a “vaguely apocalyptic tone” as Berman would say) and also La imagen fotográfica del subdesarrollo (The photographic image of underdevelopment) criticize the uses of the image in Latin American societies (with the exception of the Cuban society, which was, at the time, deemed a viable social and cultural model).   These discourses present photography as embedded in a mechanism of collective alienation. A mechanism for creating a mass of consumers, placed outside reality. To be outside reality in this case, would mean several things, to be outside the image (since the image ratifies reality as being real) means to be outside representation; to have access to representation only as consumers and not as proprietors (in this level, terms such as “creator” or even “maker” would not suffice). To be outside reality also implies to have access to reality only in an indirect, illusory and ultimately misleading manner. But chiefly, to be outside reality must be understood as being outside History.   In his essay, Desnoes talks about subjects that have no possibilities of constructing, narrating or representing their own vision of History, thus, incapacitated to understand themselves as historical subjects. He overlooks that the efficiency of photography within this alienation apparatus, comes from the persuasion capacity of realism. Nonetheless, he proposes using this persuasion capacity to undermine the system, to denounce its perversions. Realistic photography (ultimately propagandistic) should serve as a vehicle to get inside History, to reverse (at least symbolically) the relations of power.     Neither Raquel Tibol nor Edmundo Desnoes discussed the possibility of subverting the persuasive qualities of photography, of taking its credibility away or of playing with the boundaries between credibility and fiction. This would have taken the discussion into the field of aesthetics (which Desnoes refers to as the “ridicule mansion of art”), when as a matter of fact -as I’ve mentioned- they were interested to keep the discussion within the field of ethics.   Any sufficiently unbiased analysis of contemporary Latin American photography would demonstrate that, through non-realistic photography, alternative doorways are being opened for a new relationship between subjects and History. As I’ve suggested before, these alternative relationships basically come into being through the construction of alternative histories, but also though legitimating alternative subjects, which are not necessarily collective and are defined (or rather undefined) as weak subjects.   If Gianni Vattimo, in his study of the death of art –which inevitably leads to the conclusion that the concept of photography is a weak object- introduces the term of the explosion of the aesthetic; from his analysis of the end of modernity, we could deduct a sort of explosion of history, which also is an explosion of reality and an explosion of identities. From this explosion, the “dialect” would emerge as the paradigm of diversity and marginality of language; but also as evidence of a new project of emancipation, that Vattimo explains as “…the summarizing effect of rootlessness that comes along with the first effect of identification”.   The panorama of contemporary photography in Latin America is a very good example of the behavior of this system of dialects in the artistic space. It’s an expansion of the linguistics field; skepticism and irreverence towards History; acceptance –and sometimes an almost festive multiplication- of plurality and the briefness of reality; an amplification of all things local that has an effect of de-localization; a precarious construction of identities that go between self affirmation and self negation; but mainly, a renunciation to be exhibited as a homogeneous, solid and stable body.   In those conditions, if photography could open doors for the participation in history, it would do so by renouncing to the messianic vocation appointed to the image in the past. There is no longer the feeling of a need to redeem the subject from a historicity that surpasses him (like Lefevre’s sea), but rather a need to take this historicity to a scale that equals the subject’s, even if this effort means to be working with fragments, residues or even waste.   At any rate, this could be another way o brush history against the hair. In fact, all this reversal of History brought about by postmodernism, responds to that essentially modern claim, a claim inherited by photography from its very beginning. Perhaps if a new possibility can be attributed to photography, it is not about reflecting with fidelity (which is suspicious) the external reality, but to evidence in a critical manner, the hidden structures of reality, its weak, unstable, discontinuous spots. The contemporary photographer can make Lefebvre’s doubt his own:   Am I in a dream, in the imagination or in the harshest part of reality? I no longer know.       Juan Antonio Molina juanmolinacuesta@yahoo.com.mx   *CREDITS: La historia a contrapelo. Modelos visuales y teóricos para el análisis de la fotografía contemporánea en América Latina. Situaciones artísticas Latinoamericanas. San José de Costa Rica. TEOR/éTICA/The Getty Foundation, 2005 This text is published by the kind permission of TEOR/éTICA       http://zonezero.com/magazine/zonacritica/contrapelo/index.html      

Wednesday, 31 January 2007

365. Susan Sermoneta

  Date: January 23, 2007 1:18:38 PM   I'm registering - and I'm really happy to have been led to this site.   Photographs of my father are on Flickr, and Cathy Greenblat (whom I don't know) saw them and emailed me the link for "I Photograph to Remember." Then Daniel Meadows responded to my email sending him the link to "I Photograph to Remember" by telling me about this site and more. (Hooray for Flickr, hooray for the internet!)   I look forward to exploring the site in depth and at length....   Susan Sermoneta New York NY http://www.flickr.com/photos/en321/  

Tuesday, 23 January 2007

367. Photojournalism is dying - readers rejoice -

    by Andrew Orlowski   Photojournalism is dying - readers rejoice -   Letters Recently, we invited top UK photojournalist Sion Touhig to describe the grim economics facing photo journalists. His passionate essay: How the anti-copyright lobby makes big business richer prompted dozens of emails over the holidays.   Sion's piece described the concentration of power in the photo business over the past twenty years, but it was unusual in one important way - it broke a taboo.   When discussing "new media", and new technologies, it's easy to find eulogies to transformation and "empowerment". But it's very rare to find a discussion of the consequences - especially when the consequence means we're worse off than before. The result of all this individual empowerment, suggested Sion, is that big business ends up getting richer and more powerful.   Perhaps as many as two thirds of the emails we received strongly objected to the very idea. Many of these reflected a grim fatalism - there was nothing we could do, and photo journalists should just face it. And get another job.   (A very small subsection of these objected to points he hadn't made, or organisations he didn't refer to - which may or may not be significant).   Here's a selection, culled from a postbag that could fill a pamphlet.   Very cool article, which does highlight a massive problem with the so-called "online community". Let's forget about the public who will take anything for free given half a chance and lets have a look at the self proclaimed protectors of the internet who, it seems, have the same inability to see past black and white as any of the unwashed plebs who think installing a program is what we mean by programming.   The issue that we have with copyright isn't bad in itself, it is the blatent land grab by business. I don't mind paying £13 for a DVD but what I do mind is being told I have to pay another £19 for a UMD for my PSP and paying for a second licence.   The fault is with stupid people who are so mindlessly screaming "copyright is bad" that they are killing the little guy and destroying thier own argument in court and losing battle after battle after battle in court against the pigopolists.   Vishal Vashisht   Welcome to the world of globalization. Didn't you think you'd be invited? Photographers are no different than factory workers, telephone operators, or for that matter once-highly-paid software engineers. They're competing in a much bigger world suddenly, where there's plenty of content and prices and wages are falling accordingly.   How many stock photographs does the world need? If I have one million stock photos, do I need another thousand? What if I have ten million? Photographers' traditional jobs came from inefficiency; editors didn't have other choices than to send a photographer out to take pictures. Now they have choices. It's very efficient for them. Bad for you, though.   I think the internet, by its intrinsic nature and not by machinations of the multinationals, is going to be very hard on journalists and creaters of throwaway content like news and fiction. If we ever learn to read books electronically, expect authors to lose out big time too.   I remember watching all the factory jobs going to Asia in the '80s and thinking, "At least they can't export my fancy-pants engineering job." If you're old enough, you perhaps covered this news. Did you also think you were bullet proof? Well, in 2001 I went from the most employable guy I knew to chronically unemployed. It was quite a wake-up call.   We expect our cell phones and computers to get cheaper every year. We expect our cars and appliances and food to stay cheap. We all go to the warehouse stores to get a deal. Yeah the quality isn't as good as the domestically made products we used to buy, but they're *so* cheap. What right do we then have to whine when we get the sack because our work went to Calcutta or Taiwan? What right to complain about frankenfoods or low quality goods? It's what we are asking for, and what corporations will work hard to provide.   This fact won't change unless consumers change. Figure out a way to get consumers to pay more for quality, and you've got a cure for what ails your job.   If I want to stay employed, I have to find ways to be better than the software folks in Beijing or St. Petersberg. I have to be so much more productive that my fat American salary is justifiable. I suppose it's true for photographers too, if your output is really special, you can still get work. If it's just good, I doubt that's good enough anymore. Sigh.   Kurt Guntheroth   Weirdly, a small number of readers imagined Sion's piece to be an attack on the Free Software Foundation - which wasn't even mentioned, directly or indirectly. A couple also accused Sion of asking for extended, or permanent copyright periods. Which also wasn't mentioned.   I'm sorry your chosen career is experiencing a "downturn" like the buggy whip industry of yore. That is not the fault of either the Creative Commons or the FSF. Your self-serving, Luddite diatribe against those organsations won't change that. Maybe it's time you started working for an hourly wage like the rest of us and give up on your dream of money floating back to you in perpetuity for work that is over and done.   John Frey   It is not people who use copyleft who have created such disregard for copyright; the main contenders seem to be the personal greed of the common person, followed shortly by the less personal greed of the media corporations who wish to stop the greed of the first and feed their own appetites.   This in itself is breeding contempt for copyright, the idea that an individual can take a piece of media and use it creatively has never been in doubt and was always allowed in law (depending on country), it's not a surprise that business seek to use works for free and that they mostly assume the copyrights don't exist that because the work in on the Internet or send via email that it is public domain.   I only hope that the creative world can find its FSF, normally a small programmer or team spread around the world does not have the power to take a company to court. but the FSF will take companies to court who violate the GPL or LGPL software licenses; this would at least help your current situation.   Martin Owens   "Such a move dishonestly offers a false 'interactivity' between the publisher and audience, shows contempt for readers by assuming they'll accept rubbish, and adds insult to injury by encouraging them to produce the very stuff they'll be seeing - and paying for nothing."   If the readership accepts the the rubbish - and historically, all too often, people have done just that (how else can you explain the success of the Weekly World News, for example?) - then publishing quality journalism is business suicide, since quality always costs more than rubbish.   Don't misunderstand; I hate crap journalism. I also recognize that John Q. Public has an IQ of about 75 of a really good day, has no taste whatsoever, and couldn't distinguish between Paris Hilton and Betty Ford without subtitles. Who do you think buys the garbage advertised in spam?   A small amount of quality goods and services will always have a niche market, but as long as the majority of people are essentially nothing more than breeding machines with disposable incomes, the vast majority of everything sold will remain crap.   Morely Dotes     But wait, it gets grimmer...   My question revolves around one of the central concepts in your article: that you were more concerned about being paid for your "labor" rather than the work itself. That got me thinking...   There used to a lot of labor in photography. Often freelancers had to have their own darkrooms. In addition, cameras were bulky and film - at least good film - was extremely expensive. After development, the transportation of the work was also non-trivial, as it involved protective packaging of either film or finished prints.   Now the manufacture and distribution of the finished work - the prints - is unbelievably cheap. Digital cameras technically never run out of film (because you can always dump the pictures into a computer), and distribution is as easy as sending an email or uploading.   If photographers are expecting to be paid for the labor of making pictures now, well, there's just not much money in it. Furthermore, the tools of the trade are now accessible to just about anyone, and the specialization is gone.   But you correctly single out the societal affects of citizen journalism or other forms of news rubbish. Unfortunately, that's not just a photographic phenomenon ... all media are affected by a bunch of amateurs who think they can write/photograph/chronicle something better than the professionals. The loss of an authoritative Fourth Estate is the result of this activity, and that is a detriment to all of us.   Matt   I have no idea of your age, but I'll bet hard-earned cash you're younger than I. When television first came along, the immediate reaction was it was going to utterly destroy radio. It did have a devastating effect, but radio survived. Radio did so by reinventing itself. Many stations did close, but many did survive. You need to take a lesson from this and reinvent yourself. How? No idea; not my problem. But you'll never win if all you do is fight and complain. Or explain maybe.   Albert Einstein once said something on the order of, "If you keep doing the same thing expecting a different result, you might be insane".   You can't do the same thing in the face of a changing world and expect to survive. Think typewriters, color film labs and Swiss watches.   I know, I know, but they're breaking the law or screwing with the law or enforcing it selectively. My friend, the law is the law only when people believe it's the law ... and enforce it. The law can be changed in an instant and often is. And those with deep pockets will always hold the advantage.   Nobody forced you into the business you're in ... that was your choice. If your business no longer serves you, well, you again need to reinvent yourself.   David P.   You correctly class "User Contributed Content" as theft (I saw it as such the first time I saw it solicited, it amazes me that so many people don't see it) and a danger to the professionals in the field, but this is in fact nothing to do with the "anti-copyright" lobby.   The organisations involved in "User Contributed Content" could have done the same with chemical photographs (and some did), the advent of cheap digital cameras and communications has simply made it economically feasible, at least until the readers get fed up with the poor content. This would have happened without any "anti-copyright" groups, because the person who took the picture generally owns the copyright.   People have a tendency to assume that anything not chained down is 'free' for their use. Yes, there are some people who want to get rid of copyright altogether and say that anything anyone produces 'should' be free for everyone, but they are in a (admittedly vocal) minority, the vast majority have no problem with a creative person being able to profit from their work, what they are against are the abuses of copyright (like extending it to more than a lifetime after the author's death). And they are also against large organisations which steal or trick copyright assignments from creative people (like the big music companies, who do things like signing up a musician or group for 5 albums and then only producing 4 of them, thus preventing them from producing any more themselves).   Indeed, many "anti-copyright" people would be in favour of the author retaining copyright but organisations being forbidden to acquire it (the copyright owner can, of course, say that anyone can use their work freely if they want).   Chris C.   I sympathize with your plight. I'm a "pro-am" photographer myself. What you do has value and is being demeaned by the masses, but - Copyright is dead. Its death is attributable to technology and started with the first printing press, accelerated with the Xerox copy machine and has been finished off by digital copying and character recognition. Technology can not be legislated away. Your plight is truly helpless.   What your industry is experiencing has hit industries since the buggy whip and the Industrial Revolution. You are a craftsman in an age of mass produced product. It is only a matter of time until all "craft" is dead except a handful catering to the very rich.   I've seen the newspapers dying since the 1960s. They are too slow and too cumbersome. Radio and then TV butchered the newspapers. Now the internet is finishing them off. My reason for cancelling the newspaper wasn't even related to the technology issues. They changed ink or paper adding something that started causing me severe toxic reaction. My computer monitor doesn't make me ill and allows me to target my news interests.   When the Tsunami hit a few years back I knew about it and had identified and made contribution to relief agencies a day before the newspapers had the story. Magazines are even worse. With live video feed possible from anywhere in the world photojournalism just doesn't cut it anymore as a competing medium.   I'd suggest wedding photography. My niece just got robbed blind ($2k for a three-hour shoot with the poorest quality photos I've ever seen, washed out highlights, poor composition, etc.) and seemed fine with the situtation. The $2k did not even include a standard bride and groom print package! The wedding photography industry could use some fresh talent and seems willing to pay for it.   Good luck. Lee   So who takes pictures of the wars? They'll emerge spontaneously, no doubt.   Fascinating article, thanks kindly for taking the time to write it up and present it in such an understandable way.   That said, I think that at least part of the problem, as you see it, is based in the simple fact that images are no longer a scarce resource. Along with willy-nilly image lifting, we also have good and cheap digital cameras that vastly simply 'webbing' images without bothering with all that bother that we all so loved in the days of kodachrome and cibachrome.   Images are now abundant. The living to earned by exploiting the economics of scarcity is gone. The living to be earned by providing the service still exists, and if anything, is just as lucrative and rich as it ever was. Some wedding photographers are gone with the wind sure, but many others are exploiting all the new media to great market advantages. I'm just using wedding photography as an easy example.   Keep up the good work, things most certainly have changed, but are not all bad. At the end of the day, if you are trying to restrict access to things that are readably available, you will loose. So don't do that.   Chip Mefford   And that's the best many readers can offer. There was little in the way of economic innovation, or policy innovation, that might help photojournalists. Just a sense that anyone who obstructs the mechanics of the networks, or the economics of big business, is really being impertinent.   It's a Brave New World. Be Happy. ®     Related stories: How the anti-copyright lobby makes big business richer by Sion Touhig       http://zonezero.com/magazine/articles/the_register/03.html  

Saturday, 13 January 2007

369. How the Anti-©opyright Lobby Makes Big Business Richer

        Comment: We're continually being told the Internet empowers the individual. But speaking as an individual creative worker myself, I'd argue that all this Utopian revolution has achieved so far in my sector is to disempower individuals, strengthen the hand of multinational businesses, and decrease the pool of information available to audiences. All things that the technology utopians say they wanted to avoid.   I'm a freelance professional photographer, and in recent years, the internet 'economy' has devastated my sector. It's now difficult to make a viable living due to widespread copyright theft from newspapers, media groups, individuals and a glut of images freely or cheaply available on the Web. These have combined to crash the unit cost of images across the board, regardless of category or intrinsic worth. For example, the introduction of Royalty Free 'microstock', which means you can now buy an image for $1.00, is just one factor that has dragged down professional fees.   I already hear you telling me to stop crying into my beer as the world doesn't owe me a living, and that expanding imagery on the Web has democratised the medium. I'd partially agree with both arguments, as in my work of newspaper and magazine photojournalism you're only as good as your last picture, and photojournalism in recent years has become infected with an unhealthy sense of elitism and entitlement which could do with a good kick up the arse.   So what's the problem? Well, lets look at one trend which would appear to suggest more "democracy" in the media - but actually doesn't - and that's 'User Contributed Content', or 'Citizen Journalism'.   The mainstream media has propagandized hard for Citizen Journalism ever since the mobile phone images of the July 7th London bombings, but sadly, this enthusiasm has little to do with journalism or democratising the media.   User Contributed Content should be more accurately termed 'Audience Stolen Content', because media groups rarely pay for Citizen Journalism images and more often than not, either claim the copyright or an all-encompassing license from contributors, when they send their pictures in. That's a copyright grab in all but name.   Only a fraction of the savings or additional income derived from publishing and syndicating user-contributed images is then actually reinvested in journalism. Most of it simply helps pay the media company's shareholder dividend. Massive newspaper job losses and wage cuts have cut a swathe through newsrooms this year and the slack is often taken up by stolen content, stolen from their own readers.   So much for media "democracy". Some newspapers and magazines are enthusiastically accepting such "content", simply because it's cheap or free, and the quality of the content largely reflects that.   Such a move dishonestly offers a false 'interactivity' between the publisher and audience, shows contempt for readers by assuming they'll accept rubbish, and adds insult to injury by encouraging them to produce the very stuff they'll be seeing - and paying for nothing.   It's a race to the bottom, and is a fundamental failure by publishers to invest in their businesses for their readers benefit. It has consequently put massive pressure on professional photographers, who have to reduce their rates, or submit to copyright grabs themselves in order to get work, which is drying up and being replaced by stolen audience content.   Quite how putting professional photographers and journalists on the dole is supposed to increase the quality of public knowledge of events, or the overall 'creative commons' escapes me at present, because despite the ongoing commodification of images, not all images are equal.   You won't see any mobile phone images from Darfur any time soon for example, and as one contributor put it, to a recent Center of Citizen Media weblog entry predicting the 'Decline of the Professional Photojournalist':   "9/11 generated a tremendous amount of citizen content, but it is very obvious to me that professionals ruled that event without question. Citizens in general do not have the stomach, the dedication or the brains to stick with it"   True 'citizen journalists' are people like Iraqi news journalists working where western photographers dare not go, to document the destruction of their homeland. Despite putting themselves and their families in peril 24 hours a day, most if not all of them earn a pittance and many relinquish their copyright on images and stories which make the front pages of the worlds newspapers. Just this year alone, 32 have died.   Baghdad has a mobile phone network, but mobile phone image gathering is virtually unknown (unless it's execution footage), as it would be tantamount to a death sentence for most residents. Instead, another form of journalism keeps us passively 'informed' from only one perspective - embedding.   In November 2001, I photographed a protracted gun battle in Kunduz, Afghanistan alongside a notable French war photographer. After transmitting his images for the day, he received an email from his photo-agency, telling him that financial support to cover stories would no longer be provided, and his relationship with them was being 'restructured', because it had been acquired by a corporation.   A report last year in the New York Review of Books pointed out that weakening investigative journalism has far more profound implications for democracy.   OK, never mind the citizens, what about me? Well, I, and people like me are being robbed too.   Probably by you.   Copyright? It's already dead   It's ironic that internet campaigners spend so much time complaining about the injustices of copyright, and extolling the virtues of a copyright free economy - because copyright is already dead. This is true both as perception and reality.   The perception is "if it's on the web, it's either free, or I'm gonna nick it anyway because, hey, 'they' can afford it". The reality is that there are now more copyright-free or near-free images on the web than copyright images. Most of them will be on Flickr (owned by Yahoo!), MySpace (owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation) or the major corporate image portals. Neither Flickr nor MySpace exist to commercially leverage images, but clients now go there trawling for free content, so they don't have to pay a photographer for it. It has caused a crash in the unit cost of any images which aren't given away and which are licensed for profit.   So as a consequence, the only entities that are now able to make decent profits from photography are large corporations - because only those corporations have the infrastructure to aggregate images into massive hubs.   Fifteen years ago my sector had over a dozen photo-agencies which worked with freelance photographers, providing images to newspapers and magazines. Some specialized in sport, some in long-term documentary projects, some in hard news. Some were co-ops run by their members, some were big, some were small. In other words, the 'photo-eco-system' was reasonably diverse and a wide variety of imagery was produced by professional photographers earning decent fees.   Nearly all those agencies are out of business and now only a few major image corporations like Getty Images, Corbis - owned by Bill Gates - and Jupiter Images dominate the market and produce 'wholly owned' work - the corporation owns the copyright - either from staff or contract photographers. The work varies across the board, from high-end stock photography to news images.   If wholly-owned or virtually copyright-free (more commonly known as Royalty Free) content can be aggregated into a hub, and the economies of scale means the hub drives out smaller competitors, then huge profits be made.   It's a volume and service business now to such an extent that you could argue that the individual image has been rendered almost worthless. People either won't pay for images, or will only pay a small fee - as little as 50 pence a time for images offered by iStockphoto, an image library owned by Getty Images. All this commodified 'off the peg' stock imagery has infected the attitudes of editors commissioning 'live' photography. These commissioning editors now see photographers as widget makers, and the cheaper the widget, the better.   With mass rip-offs on the Web and the unit value of images crashing, photographers can no longer make a living independently from their work, and so are driven towards working for these corporations to earn a living. As digital content becomes more commodified, the more certain it is that only big business can profit from it, thanks to their economies of scale. And to put the final nail in the coffin, along comes "citizens journalism".   Share cropping revisited   Amateurism isn't intrinsically harmful, but it's now a factor in penalizing and impoverishing creatives who choose to pursue authorship as their sole, full time, economic function. Instead, we're expected to work for charity.   "Crowdsourcing" is the latest buzzword, but under our present economic system its simply globalisation in practice - being the same force which drove 19th Century artisans into factories to sell their labour power to the factory boss. In this case, the lowest cost producer – the amateur photographer throwing their images onto the Web, to be 'content mined' - is also the consumer. The amateur will buy a newspaper or magazine simply for the thrill of being in print. It's the same model that mine owners used when they paid their workers in 'company money'.   So the upshot is, a copyright-free environment has simply enriched large businesses at the direct expense of individual authors. But shouldn't the little guy enjoy the same protection of copyright law that the big corporations do?   We can't afford to. Suing for multiple copyright theft is simply not feasible for individuals. There have been some signs of collective policing. For example, photo agencies in the US recently ganging up to sue the celebrity blogger 'Perez Hilton' for hundreds of thousands of dollars for unauthorized usage for their pictures placed on their websites, and software companies like PicScout have spotted a market for software which tracks illegal photo uses.   (Perez Hilton generates lots of advertising revenue which isn't passed on to the photographers whose images have been stolen, and are used on the blog.)   Only the big money corporations have the means to enforce their ownership rights, so the widespread theft of individual authors rights benefits them the most, and this has a chilling effect, as it discourages authors from placing their work on the Web. Instead of fighting the big corporations, the technology utopians have decided to fight the law that protects the little guy.   The Orphan Works Bill that the US Congress almost passed earlier this year had clauses that would have devastated individual artists, weakening their ability to pursue fine violators of 'their' content. If it goes into law, it will much make all content on the web easier to steal and much harder to pursue and stop.   So in practice, it discourages professionals putting high quality images on the web and creates the very cultural barrier which Copyleft and Creative Commons advocates seek to abolish. Advocates who put out material under a "copy me" license or in the public domain usually have a day job. I don't. My photography is my job. Authors who do this it's usually a publicity gimmick or a loss-leader.   To throw the baby out with the bathwater and abolish copyright altogether, or to behave like it doesn't exist is equally short-sighted, and brings us the very cultural atrophy that anti-copyright advocates claim to be against.   Most anti-copyright arguments are based on a distaste for unfairly held "property". But for individual authors, it's not, and never really has been a property issue - it's our labour we're talking about. Copyright exists to allow us to earn a living, but routine flouting of this law simply strengthens the ability of large companies to seize that labour and sit on it for profit – as their property.   In reality, what is happening on the web is the transfer of the authors' labour to large corporations for nothing. Anti-copyright lobbyists have become either unwitting allies, or shills, for big business. ®     © Sion Touhig. Sion Touhig is a photo journalist who has covered the conflicts in the Balkans, Afghanistan and the Palestine. He was News Photographer of the Year, 1999, and featured in Life/Time Magazine's "Pictures of the Year" for four years. He blogs at SionPhoto.       Related stories: Photojournalism is dying - readers rejoice by Andrew Orlowski       http://zonezero.com/magazine/articles/the_register/index.html    

Friday, 12 January 2007

371. The Getty Museum, Trust Project

Help create an archive of photographic materials from the pre-digital age   Digital photography is replacing traditional photography. And it's happening so fast that traditional photography, and the knowledge about how to create it, is in danger of disappearing altogether. We need your help.   Scientists at the Getty Conservation Institute need your old photographic papers, film, negatives, and prints to build an archive of knowledge and materials from the era of classical photography. This archive will become a reference collection for future generations of photo conservators and scholars, and will allow them to research and authenticate the treasures of the classical photography era.     Surprisingly, the large photography companies—Kodak, Ilford, Fuji, Polaroid, and Agfa—did not save samples of the hundreds of different films and papers they developed over the last century. We're hoping that you did.   What can you do Send us samples of photographic paper and plates, film, negatives, sample books, and dated photographs. We need examples of all types of materials from every year since 1827. So, send us the box of Kodak Elite paper that might be collecting dust in your attic, that Foma film from 1985 that you think you'll never use, or the extra photographs from your 1988 (or 2006!) trip to Yosemite that didn't make it into your photo album.   We need samples that are dated and include the manufacturer's information. Even damaged materials are useful to us if they are stamped with a date and have the manufacturer's name or logo stamped on them.   Below are some examples of materials to send.   • Photographs—don't send us your family treasures; send the extra copies and rejects. • Please only send photographs that have a date and/or manufacturer's name or logo printed on them. • Instant photographs from Polaroid, Kodak, or other manufacturers. • Unexposed film in the original canisters—black-and-white, color, and Polaroid. If you have the original packaging, send that too! • Unexposed photographic papers—ideally in the original box. If you have an unopened box you can part with, this is especially helpful. • Exposed photographic papers, including prints, contact sheets, and contact prints if they include a date and manufacturer's name or logo. • Film, sheet, or glass-plate negatives, and transparencies.     Still not sure if you should send us your materials? Read our Frequently Asked Questions, below. Think you have something really unusual? See a list of the highly-sought materials we're looking for.   How to send Send materials to the Getty Conservation Institute at the following address:   Project in Conservation of Photographs Getty Conservation Institute 1200 Getty Center Drive Suite 700 Los Angeles, CA 90049-1684   Before sending materials, please read our Legal Disclaimer. Please include your name and a return address with your donation.   We will send you an acknowledgment once we receive your donation and will also add your name to a list of contributors that will live in perpetuity with this important archive. Let us know if you do not want your name added to this list.   Frequently asked questions   What to Send Us   • What types of photographic materials do you need? answer • How much should I send? answer • My film isn't very old. Do you still want it? answer • I have old, damaged film that may even have been exposed. Do you still want it? answer   Why send us your materials   • What will happen to my materials? answer • Will my materials be returned to me? answer • Will I be acknowledged for my donation to the project? answer • Is my donation tax deductible? answer How to send us materials   • What is the best way to send these materials to the Getty? answer • Will the Getty pay for me to ship the materials? answer   Questions about the project   • Who will be able to use the archive? answer • Are there other institutions creating archives like this? answer • Why is it so important to get samples from each year? answer   What to send us • What types of photographic materials do you need? We need film, unexposed printing papers, and photographic prints. Photographs should be dated and include manufacturer's information.   Please do NOT send us any cameras, processing equipment, or chemicals.   • How much should I send? We need samples, not large quantities. For example, don't send us every print from the same roll of film. Two or three prints from the same roll of film is plenty. Similarly, if you have 50 rolls of film from the same manufacturer's batch, send us two or three rolls.   If you have unexposed film or paper in its original packaging, send the entire package and its contents, if you can. For example, an unopened box of unexposed paper is ideal since we can verify the manufacturing batch and date. It's not necessary to send more than one box from the same manufacturer's batch.   • My film isn't very old. Do you still want it? Yes! We need samples of all types of materials from the entire history of classical photography. That's anything made from 1827 up to today by all manufacturers, regardless of origin.   • I have old, damaged film that may even have been exposed. Do you still want it? Yes! As long as it is dated and includes a manufacturer's name or logo, even damaged material has scientific value.   Why send us your materials   • What will happen to my materials? The materials you send us will become part of an important archive of photographic materials. The archive will be publicly accessible to conservators, scientists, and researchers around the globe.     Some of the 20th-century prints and photographic paper samples recently donated to the archive. Photo: Annelisa Stephan. No. Your materials will become part of a permanent archive. So, please don't send your family treasures. Send your rejects, extra copies, and anything you would throw away.   • Will I be acknowledged for my donation to the project? Yes. We will send you an acknowledgement letter and add your name to the list of donors, which will become part of the archive.   • Is my donation tax deductible? We expect donations to be of minimal value. Therefore, the Getty will not provide documentation for tax deduction. If you want to donate valuable photographic materials to the Getty, please contact gciweb@getty.edu.   How to send us materials   • What is the best way to send these materials to the Getty? Send the materials using the service that is most convenient for you—the Getty accepts mail from all carriers, including the US Post Office, UPS, FedEx, and DHL. You do not need to worry about wrapping the package in a special way.   • Will the Getty pay for me to ship the materials? No. We are not able to reimburse donors for shipping. However, there are inexpensive shipping options. The US Post Office's third class mail is less expensive than standard mail. You may be able to send the materials through the US Post Office's Media Mail Service, which is significantly less expensive than standard mail. Check with the Post Office.   Questions about the project   • Who will be able to use the archive? The archive of photographic materials will be housed at the Getty Conservation Institute in Los Angeles, and be open internationally to conservators, scientists, and researchers.   • Are there other institutions creating archives like this? No. In fact, scientists at the Getty Conservation Institute decided to create this archive because they could not locate any other institution or corporation that is saving these materials. Although many museums have photographs collections, and some museums collect cameras and photographic equipment, there is no existing institution specializing in the collection of photographic materials.   • Why is it so important to get samples from each year? First, many different photographic processes and materials have been created since photography's invention in 1827. Getting samples from each year will help create a record of all these processes, even those that may have been very short-lived.   Secondly, over the years, the corporations that produce photographic materials have changed the recipes they use, so the chemical content of the same product can vary from year to year.   Finally, even when the same recipe was used, the specific chemical composition of photographic papers and film can vary between production batches. A roll of Kodak T-Max film produced in May of 1993 may have a slightly different chemical makeup from a roll of the same film produced in June of the same year.       www.thegetty.edu December 2006       http://zonezero.com/magazine/articles/gettymuseum/index.html    

Tuesday, 05 December 2006

373. China Power of Photography, 2006

  Published under permission: Abbeville Press, Fine Arts & Illustrated Books   Photography was a powerhouse medium from the date of its birth in 1839 and was already on steroids and flexing its muscles when it was barely out of its teens. In 1860, Mathew Brady took a photograph that proved the medium had the power to affect events. His earliest portrait of Abraham Lincoln was the first photograph in history that influenced the election of a nation’s President, and it did so because of a change in the distribution of photographs.     Mathew Brady: Abraham Lincoln, 1860                   Brady took this picture the day that Lincoln arrived in New York from his home in the middle of America to seek the Republican nomination for President. Almost no one in the east of America knew much about Lincoln or had seen a photograph of him, but he was rumored to be very ugly. He was uncommonly tall and awkward, and his dark skin was heavily lined. His opponents sang a song that ended, “Don’t, for God’s sake, show his picture.” A politician’s face was extremely important then, for Americans firmly believed that a man’s face revealed everything about his character.             Brady pulled Lincoln’s collar up to make his neck look shorter, posed him to look serious, dignified and wise, and retouched the lines of his face. He gave Lincoln a good character and made him look presidential.   Later that day, Lincoln spoke at the Cooper Institute in New York. He was a charismatic speaker; a listener once said, “While I had thought Lincoln the homeliest man I ever saw, he was the handsomest man I ever listened to in a speech.” After the Cooper Institute speech, one reporter said he was the greatest man since St. Paul. Lincoln later said, “Brady and the Cooper Institute made me President.”   The photograph worked because it could be, in effect, mass reproduced and widely distributed. By 1860, photographic negatives had pushed aside the unreproducible daguerreotype, and the recently invented visiting card photograph was tiny and cheap. Everyone wanted to know what the greatest man since St. Paul looked like, and tens of thousands of Brady’s photograph were sold in inexpensive versions. Magazines printed engraved copies of it too, and a lithographic company, Currier and Ives, copied the image. They reversed it, cropped it, and colored the image -- a lot of changes, but lithographic copies of photographs were often what people saw, because small prints could be bought for as little as 20 cents.     CAMPAIGN BUTTON   The tintype came along at about the same time, and the Lincoln photograph was made into tintype buttons, the first campaign buttons ever to appear on men’s lapels – the predecessors of Mao buttons. Because of Brady’s photograph, voters really knew what a candidate looked like for the first time. In effect, photography was creating celebrity. At the same time it created the emphasis on appearance that today makes a candidate who looks good on television have a better chance at winning than one who does not. Already in 1868, a magazine wrote that “The advantages which a handsome candidate…has over his competitors are … infinitely greater than they could have been before the invention of photography.” ----- Photography registers all kinds of appearance, and its potential for surveillance was established way back in the 19th century. Police photography began almost when photography did, in the 1840s, and surveillance really came into its own with the Franco-Prussian War in 1871. When the Prussians defeated France, the French government agreed to let them occupy Paris for 48 hours, but Parisians were so bitter about this that they rebelled and established the Commune, the first socialist government in history. The French government then laid siege to its own capital city. During the siege of Paris, the Communards, proud of their cause, posed for photographs.     Braquehais: Communards   Here is a group portrait of Communards, eager to have a memento of their rebellion. After the French government defeated them, the police commandeered any photographs they could find, distributed copies to railroad stations and ports to prevent escapes, and imprisoned and even executed men they identified from the pictures.       Photographs were thus proved to be highly useful to the state for identification and control of its citizens. That such pictures may be imprecise was probably not conceded at the time by the authorities. Men can change their appearance many ways, most easily by growing beards and moustaches or shaving them off; it is quite possible that some people in the pictures managed to escape and that other, innocent men too closely resembled someone in the pictures and were unjustly condemned.         The usefulness of surveillance depends on the accuracy of interpretation. When aerial photographs of ballistic missile installations in Cuba were taken in 1962 and threatened nuclear war, one American military advisor said they were really pictures of baseball fields. Back in the 19th century, people believed utterly in the truthfulness of photography and didn’t question interpretations. Now we believe photographs lie. And at one point, even the 19th century wasn’t so sure about that.     Edweard Muybridge: Running Horse 1878   When Muybridge’s camera arrested the motions of a galloping horse in 1878, it proved that thousands of years of art had been sorely mistaken. Horses did indeed, as some had conjectured, have all four legs off the ground at one time, not before and behind the body like a rocking horse, as artists had always showed them, but gathered under the belly. This bit of news was shocking. Muybridge proved that what people thought they knew because it was what their eyes saw was not true at all. A leading art magazine remarked, “To the great surprise of photographers and of all those who saw these prints, the attitudes are, for the most part, not only disgraceful but of a false and impossible appearance.” Horses weren’t supposed to look like Muybridge’s photographs. They were supposed to look the way painters had always shown them. Muybridge’s photographs revealed that perception depends heavily on representation; we see what we have seen before, what we have been taught to believe, what we think we know. Photography was already changing the nature of perception. The pictures provoked an artistic quarrel between knowledge and vision.     Thomas Eakins Bronze (of a horse) & The Fairman Rogers Four-in-Hand, (painting) 1879   When Thomas Eakins painted a carriage pulled by four horses, people objected that the wheel didn’t look like it was moving, because no one could see the spokes of a moving wheel clearly. The photographs depicted facts so perfectly that realism no longer looked very real, so maybe the camera wasn’t so truthful after all. Rodin said, “It is the artist who is truthful and it is photography which lies, for in reality time does not stop.” Rodin, among others, thought it preferable for art to look truthful to experience than to be truthful to fact, but Muybridge’s achievement had driven a wedge into the very definition of truth, long before we decided that photographs were liars anyway.               IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT   Muybridge devised a way to project his still images so rapidly that it looked like the horse was running across the screen; he has been called the father of the motion picture. Movies and movie stills always worked together, and at least once they had a great and even a measurable impact. Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert both won Oscars for their starring roles in the 1934 comedy, It Happened One Night. Colbert played a rebellious heiress running away from her rich father, Gable a reporter who joins her because he hopes to get a story. One night they’re forced by lack of money to share a motel room, but in this more delicate era, Gable divides the room by hanging a blanket on a rope.   Both of them stubbornly insist on the same side of the curtain. She won’t budge, so Gable decides to give her a lesson in how a man gets undressed. First he takes off his jacket – he’s demonstrating -- then his tie, then his shirt. Then he takes off his shoes, his socks. When he’s wearing nothing but trousers and doesn’t show any signs of stopping, she zips as fast as she can to the other side of the curtain.   Gable became a major star and sex symbol with this movie. Women swooned over him, so American men copied everything about him. Men who had been clean shaven suddenly sported moustaches. They went out and bought the kind of jacket, sweater and hat he wore, and they wore their trench coats as he did, with the belts tied rather than buckled. He simply set men’s fashions.   In 1934, American men all wore undershirts, but when Gable took off his shirt in the motel, he wasn’t wearing one. If Gable didn’t wear an undershirt, then obviously undershirts were not truly masculine. Men stopped wearing them. Sales of undershirts reportedly plunged by 75 percent. Undershirt manufacturers complained to Hollywood that they were going bankrupt, at a time when the country was in a deep Depression. So in 1939, Hollywood made a movie in which Gable took off his shirt and was revealed to be wearing – you can probably guess -- an undershirt.   Gable and Norma Shearer: Idiot's Delight 1939   That movie was Idiot's delight, with Gable and Norma Shearer. The movie wasn't that good, so I'm not sure that the undershirt industry entirely recovered.   Cinema and fan magazines and the new photographic magazines like Life in the 1930s heightened photography’s power to create celebrity, influence fashion, fads, and behavior, and make a dent in the nation’s pocketbook.   News photographs also got a big boost from the increasing dominance of the visual media. The Vietnam war has been called the first television war, but it is recalled all over the globe in the form of still images rather than television clips.   Eddie Adams: General Loan Executing a Vietcong Suspect February 1, 1968   The Tet offensive began on January 30, 1968. Major American and allied military bases were attacked. So were South Vietnamese cities and towns, even Saigon, which was presumed safe, even the American embassy there. This picture and others were shown on television the next evening, and the day after that Adams's picture appeared on front pages across America and was reprinted and shown on TV across the world. Then two American networks showed film of this execution and distributed the film to foreign news organizations. The film on the American station ABC stopped the moment before the shooting and resumed with images of the dead man on the ground. The station inserted this photograph into the pause.   The Tet offensive was shocking to Americans, and many think it was the turning point in the country’s support of the war. The North Vietnamese and Vietcong attack came after months of an extensive public relations campaign by President Lyndon Johnson’s administration to convince the nation that we were finally winning the war. When the first bulletins on Tet came over the wire, Walter Cronkite, the most highly respected television anchor in America, exclaimed, “What the hell is going on? I thought we were winning the war.” Then came a gruesome image of a man having his brains blown out on the front page, an image that was horribly fascinating, that depicted a killing that went against all our democratic principles and laws, and that also told Americans in one small frame that our government had been lying about the war. The executioner, who was the highest ranking police officer in South Vietnam, killed his prisoner without a trial. The photograph, which quickly became a lasting symbol of everything that was wrong with the war, seemed to say that we were supporting a government that wasn’t worth fighting for.   One of President Johnson’s speech writers and confidants said later: “I watched the invasion of the American embassy compound, and the terrible sight of General Loan killing the Vietcong captive. You got a sense of the awfulness, the endlessness, of the war and, though it sounds naïve, the unethical quality of a war in which a prisoner is shot at point-blank range.” He was not alone. Anti-war demonstrations increased dramatically. Approval of the President fell fast and far, and two months after Tet he announced that he would not run again. This was not, of course, because of a single photograph, but that photograph came to symbolize the horrors and uselessness of the war and the lies of our leaders.     WHOLE EARTH, NASA   Even our views of our place in the universe have been affected by photographs. In the 1960s, some people were worried about the damage we were doing to the earth with pesticides and the threat of nuclear war, but little was being done about it. Then at Christmastime of 1968, three American astronauts on the Apollo 8 mission orbited the moon and sent back images of earth on live television that looked “like a sort of large misshapen basketball that kept bouncing around and sometimes off the screens back here.” After they returned to earth, NASA released still photographs they had taken, including one of earthrise taken on Christmas eve.   William Anders Earthrise December 24, 1968   William Anders, the astronaut who took this picture, said “Let me assure you that, rather than a massive giant, [the earth] should be thought of as [a] fragile Christmas-tree ball which we should handle with considerable care.” It was as if we had looked in a mirror for the first time and discovered that we were rare, beautiful, and dangerously vulnerable. This picture and others from space were published all over our newly small earth. It was stunning to think of our home as a minor planet adrift in a great void, and yet this photograph showed that the moon was dead and earth alive. Suddenly in America a mass ecological movement began among young people, and the first Earth Day was celebrated in 1970.   An English scientist named James Lovelock finally had backing for his theory, which he called the Gaia hypothesis, that Earth itself was a living being, kept alive by the constant interactions of every part of the organism, from rocks to oceans to air. The recent emphasis on global warming stems from the realization of the interdependence of all parts and all events on the planet, a realization that was made vivid and inescapable by photographs from space.       Text abbreviated from: The Power of Photography: How Photographs Changed Our Lives by Vicki Golberg (Abbeville Press, 1993)       Photography today is at a very peculiar juncture. There are more photographs around, in more media, than ever before. In 1998, it was estimated that an American saw about 11,000 images a day, a number that surely has only increased. The internet is just one more place to see pictures of every sort, as well as one immensely more efficient way to distribute them. Obviously no one can take in that many images, much less remember them all. The overabundance of images is impossible to process, so people stop looking. They learn how to skim photographs as they know how to skim texts, and they know without being taught how to slide their eyes across a picture without really seeing it. It is harder than ever to make a memorable photograph that will make people stop and really look. So the question arises: can photographs still have real power? Yes they can. They do.   Digitization has convinced everyone that photographs lie, but there are classes of photos that everyone still believes. When a photograph proves that a horse won by a nose, we believe it and give that horse a prize. When an X-ray shows a tumor in the brain, we believe it too, and an operation follows.   And there are classes of photographs that gain power partly by being so plentiful, so that individual pictures may seldom make much difference but the sheer weight of large numbers sending the same message over and over exerts a heavy influence. I think primarily of advertising photography, including television commercials, billboards, pop-up ads on the net. In America, at least, and presumably in capitalist countries generally, advertisements set many cultural scenarios: what’s cool, what’s sexy, what’s healthy, what’s good looking, masculine or feminine, what’s prestigious.   More meaningfully still, they do exactly what they are meant to do: they create an atmosphere of desire and a strong urge to consume. Advertising is necessary in economies where production outstrips necessity; people must be encouraged to buy things they do not absolutely need. The photographs feature beautiful people in beautiful homes leading beautiful lives. Ordinary items are turned into compelling, even fetishistic objects by the power of the camera. Even though we know that ads lie and exaggerate, their constant repetition stirs up vague discontents, envy, and hopes, and whatever they advertise the real message is the same: BUY IT -- so these photographs are vital to the manufacture of one major product of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century: consumerism.   Another class of photographs that wields a strong influence as a class rather than as single images is the class of astronomical photographs. These have been thrilling since the first pictures of the moon were taken in the nineteenth century, but the Hubble telescope, Chandra, the X-ray telescope, radio telescopes and the power of digital imagery sent across millions of miles of space have for some time been changing our view of the universe.   Earth was already relegated to a minor position in the cosmos by the Apollo 8 photographs, but now we have a true window into the solar system and so far beyond that we have come surprisingly close to the beginning of it all.     NASA: DETAIL OF ORION CONSTELLATION   That has created religious controversies, philosophical inquiries and spiritual yearnings that I think must have amplified the mystique surrounding the turn of the millenium.     NASA: MARS   The world is breathless to know if there is the possibility that life existed on Mars or elsewhere, a riddle at the heart of humanity’s view of itself. When the first successful fly-by of Mars took place in 1965 and the first photographs of that planet came back, some wag said that one word would have been worth a thousand pictures.   Some individual pictures taken back on our planet still have the power to move minds and spur actions.   9/11: SEPTEMBER 11, 2001   The pictures of the destruction of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, stirred horror and sympathy across most of the world.   Very few images of the current war in Iraq will be remembered, no matter how wonderfully they were composed or how urgent the action they depicted, but some amateur pictures taken with cell phones surely will be. The Abu Ghraib photographs, made by soldiers who participated in the abuse, have been seen by millions upon millions and become instantly recognizable icons of the most unholy sort.     Lynndie England Man on Leash                     Abu Ghraib Hooded Prisoner GRAFFITO OF THE PRISONER AND STATUE OF LIBERTY, IRAQ   Their effect hinges on two elements: the content of the pictures, and digitization. The content has entirely discredited the moral stance of the United States, bred hatred for it in millions of hearts and served as the excuse for if not the cause of any number of attacks on Americans in Iraq. But the power of these photographs to influence many minds stems from digitization. Digitization of cameras, mass ownership of such cameras, including cell phone cameras, wide ownership of scanners and access to the net have made it easy to put photographs of anything and everything onto the web, so that a culture has grown up that says that just about whatever you do is worth photographing and sharing with your friends or even with untold numbers of people you will never know.   Soldiers now can have tiny cameras and take pictures on the spot, pictures by amateurs with no training but with access to places that professional photojournalists do not have. These pictures can reach friends, families, or immense publics without ever being censored by the military or by editors, essentially a new phenomenon in the history of war photography. The secret of their power is in the distribution network. It is immense, uncontrolled, and largely uncontrollable.   This distribution network has spawned other changes in war photography. “Live” coverage of deadly scenes in “real time” is one, but I’m thinking particularly of the videos and stills or frame grabs of terrorist beheadings of kidnapped prisoners. These images have a dual purpose: to strike terror into the hearts of the kidnappers’ enemies, and to recruit combatants to the terrorist cause. They have been quite successful in both purposes. In the past, I believe that pictures of wartime brutality – pictures of World War II concentration camp victims, for instance, even Eddie Adams’s picture of General Loan executing a suspect -- have chiefly been used and been read as evidence that people who committed such atrocities are evil and are enemies. Yet here we have the paradox that photographs of brutality on our side, such as the Abu Ghraib pictures, make recruitment more difficult, while photographs of brutality on the other side have aided recruitment and are thought to have provoked additional beheadings by convincing some that Islam can become great again via terrorism.     Reuters: Beirut manipulated picture of explosion August, 2006       The issue of manipulating digital photographs is also a major issue. This photograph of an explosion in Beirut during the war ini Lebanon last August was digitally doctored by the photographer to increase and darken the smoke, making the damage to the city look even worse than it was. The Los Angeles Times printed the photograph without realizing it had been manipulated. When that was pointed out, the paper fired the photographer. The care that news organizations take to assure the public that the photographs tell the truth is itself an acknowledgement that photographs, which were already powerful in the 19th century and exerted that power across the twentieth, continue to do so in the 21st century.     Vicki Goldberg©2006 vickigoldberg@gmail.com       http://zonezero.com/magazine/articles/goldbergvicki/index.html        

Friday, 17 November 2006

375. How is a paradigm born?

    A group of scientists put five monkeys in a cage, and inside it, they placed a ladder with a bunch of bananas. When one of the monkeys climbed up the ladder to get a banana, they hosed the rest with ice-cold water.   After a while when a monkey climbed on the ladder, it got beaten up by the others.   Later on, none of the monkeys climbed up the ladder to get the bananas, then the scientists replaced one of the monkeys.   The first thing the new monkey did was to climb up the ladder; the rest beat it up right away. After a few beatings, the new monkey did not climb on the ladder at all.   The same thing happened with a second new monkey. The first substitute participated gladly in the beatings. A third monkey was changed with the same results. The fourth and the last one were finally substituted.   Then the scientists had five monkeys that never had been hosed with cold water, yet, they beat up any monkey that tried to reach the bananas.   If we could ask them why they beat up anyone trying to reach the bananas, the answer would very probably be:   “I don’t know, things have always been like that…”               http://www.zonezero.com/zz/25/Articles/how-is-a-paradigm-born.html    

Monday, 16 October 2006