Photography in the Age of Digital Reproduction

(nota bene: this essay was originally written for a Fotofestival in S. Carolina, where it was to accompany a slideshow of imagery culled from contributions offered up by the members of Lightstalkers. The mass of imagery, ably edited by Andy Levin and Bob Black, hewed to no particular theme, but its lack of definition nonetheless did not prevent one from grasping the current trends in mainstream photojournalism. Lamentably the more innovative or experimental elements were largely absent from the fold, but I felt I could still write up an essay that attempted to ascertain where we stood as communicators in the brave new world of digital media, and that is what I decided to discuss. For various strategic reasons, the essay did not appear at the festival, but on rereading it a few months later, I feel that the assessment is solid and that one needn’t have immediate reference to the slideshow in question in order to understand the tenets of the essay.)

Although the slideshow presented here stakes no claim over the territory originally arrogated by the famous Family of Man show, it cannot help but evoke some associations, particularly when we continue to view the state of the world today in terms of such fraught notions as the “human condition.” Much has changed over the years that have elapsed since that ambitious but flawed attempt to sum up the world at mid-century, and while the concept of family received a thorough beating from postmodern critics, the notion of a basic human connectedness somehow has survived and even flourished, seeking its reincarnation in new communication technologies. More than rockets to the moon or supersonic jets, contemporary mass media have served to shrink the globe and connect the centrifugal points of its compass. Along with the internet and cell phones and computers, the digital revolution has also transformed the nature and practice of photography in ways that have yet to be understood or fully exploited.

I remember as a child visiting the 1965 New York World’s Fair and upon entering one of the pavillions being greeted with the Disney theme, “It’s a Small World after All.” Its bouncy melody propelled one through a rosy panoply of futuristic delights. That banal promise of a world happily united through technology turned out to be as hollow as the puppets through whose plastic lips issued that silly song. The world is indeed smaller than ever, but no less dangerous – or marvelous, as we can see in this striking series of images taken by photographers from all over the world. Yet while the ties are all the tighter, the knots don’t seem to bite much into our flesh. Gross inequities continue to demoralize and destabilize the relations between developing and developed nations, but even while a migrant laborer on a banana plantation culls the fruit that eventually provides breakfast for some office worker in a steel and glass tower, that distant but intimate tie created by our international political economy remains somehow invisible. Conflicts are smaller too, they are “local” and widely dispersed. World War seems almost a quaint notion nowadays. But the connections between these local events are more insidious though just as exigent as ever, less a matter of overt alliances between nation-states and more a question of arcane ideas and clandestine links between nebulous entities such as factions or sects or ideologies. We are no doubt all united, all bound together in fateful ways, but we do not yet constitute a civil family. It could be argued that it is ever more imperative for our journalists to explore and document these connections, lest their bewildering complexity frustrate and lead us to a numb resignation. We are just as puzzled as ever by our unfolding history on this planet, and we still need globetrotters like these to etch the milestones that mark our progress.

The possibilities for communication and greater understanding are larger than ever, and photographers can still play a major role in shaping how we think about our world. A digital image is beamed by sat phone from the top of a Nepalese mountain to some media hub from which it is then uploaded to the internet and made available to a variety of screens at billions of points on the globe. The transit of this image negates, if not actually annuls, Time and Space. It also cuts across political and social borders. We hear much about how we are supposedly inundated with imagery, oversaturated and desensitized. Certainly the media wraps us round as never before, and we all feel as if we were living at impossibly accelerated speeds. But I doubt that the wonder and the terror that we experience as we fly through the void on this tilting ball could ever be diminished by the imagery that washes over us; rather it is my hope that this sea retain its salt to sting our eyes. Guy deBord’s specular society remains a threat to our authentic social connections, to be sure, but the greater threat lies in thinking that all imagery is inimical to our making sense of the world. The stories that you find here, many of which were produced independently of the mainstream media, are one indication that the art of storytelling via the still image has in no way lost its power to communicate the meaning and the matter of our existence. While imagery is all the more ubiquitous and instantaneous, and thus in danger of becoming banal for being common as dirt, it is nonetheless capable of affiliating viewers, shooters and subjects in a web of mutual interest and knowledge that is visceral and not vitiating. The images gathered here are as provocative as the proverbial stumbling block, and you will no doubt experience the same satisfying if painful confidence in their reality as did Samuel Johnson when he refuted Berkeley by kicking a rock.

Rubbernecking: On Portraiture

One of my favorite photographers Josef Koudelka once remarked in an interview with Frank Horvat that for him "there are few portraits that I admire." I was struck by this comment because my own view is so different -- there are quite a few portraits that I admire, and they dont appear to be of any one type so it is difficult for me to know just what it is that I like about portraiture, whether it be of the posed variety, something along the lines of Rogovin or Sanders, or the more impromptu spontaneous type, of which HCB's superb snaps of Matisse or of Faulkner are such outstanding examples.

It was portraiture that got me into the business of taking pictures, and yet when I am assigned to bring back a portrait of a subject, I cannot help but sweat it, and I cannot quite think why. Perhaps it is the discrepancy between the illustration that the editor is really after and the genuine portrait that I myself hope to capture. For me portraiture is the most difficult of arts and yet there are so many superb practitioners to be found.


In the same interview, Koudelka mentions that he has a habit of photographing his feet. Conventionally speaking such imagery is not portraiture, though it occurs to me to ask why a head shot should merit such distinction while a foot shot should be dismissed as a photographer's mere eccentricity (and Koudelka himself appears to agree, "When I am tired I lie down, and if I feel like photographing and there is nobody around me, I photograph my own feet. They are not great photos, some people dislike them"). Why are they not great? Why are they not worthy of greater attention? Is it because we have uncritically swallowed the notion that the eyes are windows unto the soul? (Havent we heeded Avedon's warning that such imagery is nothing more than a very convincing lie?) Are feet really any less distinctive or informative -- certainly the image of Koudelka's feet here tells us a lot about this famously peripatetic and homeless photographer. Bear in mind too that the one thing that unquestionably identifies each and every one of us is the humble fingerprint. In that case, the police archives constitute a perverse museum that rivals London's National Portrait Gallery.

Even hands are given priority over feet, as in this Yousuf Karsh "portrait" of Thomas Mann:


And here is his better known portrait of Thomas Mann:



More of his remarkable work can be seen at the George Eastman House collection. Again the hands are given some prominence, and I suspect this stems from cultural ideas about the Hand of the Artist (regardless of whether he or she be a writer, musician or painter). The synecdoche is an important indicator not so much of the character of the individual depicted in the portrait but of contemporary ideologies regarding art and creation. (But I am compelled to ask again, should we require a portrait, say, of a long distance runner, would it not be advisable to focus on the feet? What is more telling, Florence Griffiths Joyner's excessive fingernails or her toes?)

Clearly the force of this portraiture lies in the sharp physical detail afforded by the lighting and the fact that these are all shot in large format. Such technique requires a laborious setup and thus the results are very much posed but nonetheless striking in the impression they give of the utterly convincing presence of the subject. Overall the range of emotion is not great: a Karsh portrait is invariably iconic, monumental. Yet Karsh himself clearly believed he was capturing the essence of his subjects' character: "If it's a likeness, alone, it's not a success. If, through my portraits, you can come to know the subjects more meaningfully, if it synthesizes your feelings toward someone whose work has imprinted itself on your mind--if you see a photograph and say, 'Yes, this is the person,' with a little new insight--that is a beautiful experience." In his view the purpose of portraiture is not to capture a likeness but to communicate the subject's character; you are supposed to get to know him or her better. More often what he really captured was their social role or occupation: Miro with a paint brush, Martha Graham the dancer, Churchill the bully-bully leader, and in this he is not really so very different from August Sanders who sought to depict social types through his portraits. But Karsh was no sociologist; he was perhaps something of a transitional figure, a portraitist who focused on the individual's social role but eschewed the environmental detail that otherwise would define that role, preferring to focus on a putative human essence. His theme was The Great Man in History. On the other hand, an "environmental portraitist" like Arnold Newman at times almost buries his subject in the environment, as in his famous portrait of Igor Stravinsky, who appears at the extreme left edge in a frame dominated by the triangular shape of his grand piano, or as in this portrait of Jacob Lawrence framed by his own paintings:


And here is my favorite, the consummate portrait of the Power Broker, Robert Moses:

This could very well be the quintessential environmental portrait, the city builder framed against a panoply of the city whose form he stamped with a will as rigid and unyielding as the girder on which he stands. The symbolic elements of the picture couldnt be more apt, and yet the photo is as unspontaneous as they come, purely factitious, a set-up. Entirely opposed to my own aesthetic, it remains one of my favorite photographs and an outstanding example of portraiture. But do we really get to know Robert Moses any better through it? Could it be that Newman's shift of emphasis onto the environment signals an unconscious fear that portraiture is somehow empty, inherently incapable of telling us anything at all about the subject, except confirm that which we already know?

Sometimes I think that the role of portraiture is nothing other than to comfort us, to confirm us in our thinking about a particular individual and the role he or she plays in the larger social and historical processes that shape us. In Karsh's work Churchill is just as we would have him be, the bulldog leader, and Newman's portrait of Moses has him looking every bit the Power Broker. In a sense, such portraits are not about the individual at all, but about affirming an underlying ideology about individualism and potent subjectivity. In a sense, then, Luc de la Haye's subway portraits are the ultimate anti-portrait, since the relentless repetition of vacant staring faces, set out in a checkerboard pattern so as to absorb each face in an abstract design, virtually guarantees their nullity. And yet, there is still this need to look into faces and espy something unexpected, a fugitive spirit, a quirk.

So what is the purpose of portraiture? Why this lust for faces, why this need to look one in the eye? I suspect that in part portraiture serves a need to do just that -- look another in the eye without risking a confrontation. We confront the other without incurring their displeasure; we study them at our leisure and our pleasure. We customarily think of photographers as voyeurs, with the implication that their viewing involves some guilty pleasure -- but we are all guilty of a deep-seated scopophilia that obliges us to look with an unacknowledged need for some kind of forbidden knowledge. In a sense portraits are like the fruit of that very tree that cost us our freedom and our innocence. Perhaps it is precisely because we violate an unspoken social taboo; the looking is transgressive. We all crane our necks when we pass the scene of an accident. But what do we learn, once we see?

Crossing the line, confronting and passing beyond normal limits, may be something subtler and more significant than we assume. It could well be that our need to look fixedly at the world involves a drive that is nobler than mere pleasure, though we ought not to discount the value of that pleasure. Rather than primitive sex or aggression, perhaps there are unsuspected metaphysical or ontological motives at work here. Again, Koudelka implies this when he states his own purpose behind the incessant photographic activity that appears to characterize his daily existence: "The philosophic aspects of photography don't interest me. What interests me are its limits. I always photograph the same people, the same situations, because I want to know the limits of those people, of those situations, and also my own limits." This certainly characterizes his Gypsies book, a book whose narrative, interestingly, is punctuated periodically with conventional frontal, look-you-in-the-eye portraits that never fail to draw you in.



It might be that the limits of what we know are what we really hanker for; when we rubberneck we are hoping for a glimpse of that bone and blood that normally hides below the surface and cheats us of our false views of identity and immortality, which is probably why Renaissance intellectuals kept memento mori on their desks. The scene of the crash offers us a moment of honest appraisal, but only if we take our eyes off the road. Modern institutions work so hard to hide all that from us that we are left with a craving for reality which ironically we satisfy by looking at pictures.

Which brings me back to HCB's snaps: their seemingly casual and effortless approach to capturing individuals who were among the greatest figures of the twentieth century would seem to fly in the face of professional photography and its painstaking attempts through lighting and arrangement to render a Portrait of the Great Man. But what could be more unexpected than to see Matisse the great painter as a somewhat comic figure surrounded by his pet doves? Or this snap of Faulkner, the Great Brooding Southern Writer, out strolling with his pet dogs? Is this the man who wrote the screenplay for The Big Sleep?



Though I never thought so before, I would argue now that HCB may well have been the greatest portraitist of his generation. Without any of the paraphernalia of professional photography -- all the pomp and circumstance heralded by the bags of lights and big cameras, the import of which is to justify one's day rate -- HCB simply snapped his subjects in the stream of life, "a la sauvette," and like any such moments seized from the flux, they surprise us with their lived reality, their unquestionable affirmation not of the individual but of the imperious reality of that particle of space and time. They are genuine, human and humane, but they are not conventionally humanist.

I would elect one other photographer to my pantheon of great portraitists a la sauvette: Eugene Smith. True he has been criticized by purists for his manipulation of some of his portraits -- he superimposed symbolic imagery in his famous portrait of Schweitzer and he essentially posed the famous portrait of the spinner in his essay, A Spanish Village. But his work is populated throughout by portraits snapped on the run which convincingly capture individuals in the coils of life. While I suspect that Smith probably clung to ideas of individuality and essence, his fundamental practice as a photojournalist more often than not won out. Here is his superb portrait of Charlie Chaplin from Limelight, and I offer it up fully conscious of the many ironies posed by a portrait of an actor in costume and on stage -- where do the representations end?

The Web and the Future of Journalism

I just came across a blog, Invisible Inkling, written by a very fiesty and perceptive grad student in Mass Communications at San Jose State University. Ryan Sholin's site is full of thought provoking commentary on the current state of journalism and its need to come to terms with new communication technology. For a quick and concise look at some of the basic tenets, read through this thread on "10 obvious things about the future of the newspapers"; not only the original list but the copious responses too contain lots of good ideas that all of us must seriously consider. There are huge opportunities here in terms of distributing our work, reaching more people in new ways using new narrative tools -- if we pay attention to what is happening on the web in a comprehensive manner. But I have to agree with Ryan that newspapers and the media as a whole have been very slow to adopt and adapt -- and have done so in a very desultory piecemeal fashion. For example, they all have "multimedia" pages, but they dont bother to exploit the technology to the fullest in order to give us a deeper "reading" experience. You want people to enter the tent, you had better provide an experience that lives up to the hype you're barking.

Just look at points five and eight for starters:

5. You don’t get to charge people for archives and you certainly don’t want to charge people for daily news content. Pulling your copy behind walls where it can’t be seen by readers on the wider Web. Search rules. Don’t hide from it.

8. You ignore new delivery systems at your own peril. RSS, SMS, iPhone, e-paper, Blackberry, widgets, podcasts, vlogs, Facebook, Twitter — these aren’t the competition, these are your new carriers. Learn how to deliver your content across every new technology that comes into view on the horizon, and be there when new devices go into mass production.

Quite so. We are all looking for ways to make money from the net so that our work does not go uncompensated and we can continue to do it: but charging readers in this manner is probably a retrograde procedure. For an analysis of the problem, read Vin Crosbie's article on "Rebuilding Media." Above all, and this is something I have been working on steadily ever since I got my first grant, we must look into all the "new delivery systems" so as to extend our presence in every direction. Really, the web presence of most media outlets is rather disappointing in comparison with other websites -- even the so called "multimedia" productions are rather conservative in approach and offer little more than slideshows. MediaStorm is a notable exception, but when you visit, say, Time Magazine's site do you ever see anything approaching that level of innovation? No. Why not?

I will be writing more about this important theme, but meanwhile you couldnt do better than to have a look through this stimulating site, as you will be well rewarded. And kudos to Ryan for taking on the industry head on.

Upcoming articles and the nature of blogging

Just an announcement about upcoming articles so y' all dont lose interest. Next up will probably be a longish piece on portraiture, sparked by a comment made by Koudelka, as well as an essay on the nature of memory, photos, amnesia and the past. Also, on my other site, More a Question than a Reply, there will shortly appear a very long essay about sex tourism in St Domingo.

When I read other people's blogs it always strikes me how prolific they are, while I am here posting maybe two or three times a month. I suppose I will never acquire the rhythm of posting regularly, but then for me the weblog interests me primarily as a new means of distribution, a means of connecting with an audience and breaking out of the Ivory Tower of academic criticism, which was the dream of 50s critics like Clement Greenberg. The question is whether web readers will tolerate longer articles instead of what amounts to blurbs, as we generally find on blogs. There is no doubt in my mind that the new medium, just as with the advent of the printing press, is conditioning the nature of reading in new ways -- so can sustained thought and reflection survive the web? I think so. I recently listened to a report on NPR about a project that is putting all books online - a kind of internet Alexandria -- and apparently people are logging on and reading novels and treatises and all the rest. I personally dont like to read long things like books online -- I like books with covers, but I do find that i read more and more online, so eventually my prejudice may disappear.

Anyway, stay tuned for more essays -- or should I say, check your feeds? I am of the TV generation so such phrases stick with me still.

Almost Home: The Collective Oculi

A girl runs through a cemetery. A photographer is standing nearby, looking at picnickers and families, pondering the use to which so many people are putting this space, this necropolis, which they have converted into a park for their weekend amusements. They clear a space for themselves in the house of death, and in the midst of their mortality they enshrine the ghosting pleasures of the flesh. A bit of warm sun on one’s skin, banished quickly by the cold snap of the breeze coming from the sea. The girl intones as she passes, “almost home, almost home.”

©Nick Cubbin/Oculi

What is life but a suspended transit between two points, distant and yet curiously familiar, that we neither know nor remember, but anticipate with dread and curiosity. Two moments that withhold the meaning of our journey from us until we stop running and submit to the inevitable, disappear from the trail, leaving perhaps a few crumbs behind to point the way. That unresolved tension between interrogation and revelation, between setting out and arriving is the very thing that informs our most heartfelt and meritorious attitude in life and gives us the motive for our aesthetic. It provides for grace. The willingness to pitch oneself along the trajectory of this unknowingness is what lies behind the best documentary photographs. As Salgado once observed, a photograph is “more a question than a reply.”


©James Brickwood/Oculi

That photographer standing there was Nick Cubbin, a member of a group of remarkable shooters from down under who have provided us with a salient example of photographic values that from time to time are in danger of disappearing beneath the fog of market-driven notions about the purpose of reportage and the agency’s role in selling it. In the wake of the digital revolution and the restructuring (or disappearance) of many agencies, the rise of “collectives” as an alternative model of association has become a phenomenon of note, and it is well worth reviewing the accomplishments of Oculi in order to gauge the consequences of this recent development.







©Donna Bailey/Oculi

Resolutely fixed in the pursuit of a vision of transience, tentative connection, and interrogation, their power derives from a delicate equilibrium of fleeting presence, of things captured but not quite there, of suggestion and undertone. It is not surprising that many of their photographs, in fact many of their photographic projects, are situated on the flimsy line that divides mundane reality from the fantastic, which, juxtaposed, might convert that moment into a revelation. The imagination and sheer gusto with which they seize upon this enterprise has virtually guaranteed that the world should take note of their adventurousness, and instead of indulging an effete aestheticism, they have robustly gone about redefining the terms whereby meaningful work can engage an otherwise image-addled audience. By creating Oculi, they have carved out a space in which personal work is meant not just to thrive but to bust out the walls and annul the false distinction that would define such work as interesting but irrelevant, as least to the market. This is the same distinction that generally divides the collective from the agency: a collective forms to promote a certain esthetic vision, while an agency forms to sell imagery to the media. Oculi manages to straddle that divide.






©Jeremy Piper/Oculi

In their work they have promoted, in Roland Barthes’ words, a photography that eschews a “civilized code of perfect illusions” and opts instead for the “awakening of intractable reality.” Oculi is no hothouse, ArtWorld warren; it is a group of marvelously intrepid realists, dancing like butterflies but stinging like bees.

This is not to say that Oculi is all of a piece. The range of ideas and styles is impressive, though they tend to revolve around the themes I am adumbrating. One can recognize Oculi’s signature in the work of Trent Parke, one of the founding members who is now with Magnum. His Dream/Life is practically synonymous with the collective. The slash in the title says it all: this is not dreamlife, but something located on the porous line between the two. Many of the Oculi photographers are to be found travelling along this line, searching its crevices for the image that manages to hold contradictory realities in a momentary relation. This habit of walking fine lines extends to their reportage: Oculi sits between two major trends in reportage, if we may generalize a bit about what comes out of Europe and the US. While the latter tends to promulgate a straightforward newsy kind of storytelling, focusing on individual’s lives, trying to get inside their skin, giving us a closeup of what it is like to be a drug user or a senior citizen with Alzheimer’s, the former is more lyrical or poetic in its search for innovative form. While the American trend is to identify a type and then try to humanize that type by exploring it in its specific context and allowing the immediacy of the camera to lard the story with detail, the European tendency is to try and capture the feeling of the story in a form adequate to its emotional register. On the one hand, social realism a la Zola; on the other, something that is still in touch with the surrealist roots of modern photography.

One is never quite at home in an Oculi photograph: the landscape may be familiar, the people solid middle class citizens of a developed nation, but there is always something strange in the midst of the familiar, that touch of the uncanny which for Freud was the mark of modern art. Indeed the term he used was “unheimlich”-- that which is unhomely. Viktor Shklovsky, who originated the idea of ostrananie or “estrangement,” would have loved these photographs for their power to dislocate the viewer and unhinge one’s expectations. But this expression of homelessness, of eternal restive searching, does not derive from an aesthetic principle or movement, and the meaning of these works is not to be found in mere tricks of style. No chemical, digital or mechanical tic could produce these riveting portraits of horses in their multifarious identities:





©Glenn Hunt/Oculi


Or these of pigeons:



©Steven Siewert/Oculi

©Nick Moir/Oculi
They derive instead from a deep connection not just to one’s theme, but to history and nature --- after all one is not a disconnected, free floating agent. One is implicated in the whole process of living and being, and the photograph that results is a miraculous product of a simultaneously tenuous and trenchant bond between subject and object – or perhaps it be between two subjects.



©Tamara Voninski/Oculi

This is not to say that the collective is all of a piece or that its members slavishly follow a formula of sorts. Each member is utterly an individual and each project featured on the site is original, distinct and visionary – this is what distinguishes the group above all, its members each have a vision, and here we find not only the clue to its success, but the grail of all our seeking: resolute adherence to one’s vision and some measure of market viability --- both of which are supremely important to us, for we are ultimately communicators and must submit our ideas, our glimpses of truth and meaning, to the marketplace wherein our utterances are inevitably constrained. In these days of megalithic photo agencies and the numbness produced by media saturation, we could learn a lot by looking through Oculi’s collective lens.

Oculi, "you got eyes."

Peace to Jim Johnston and Family

The indefatigable Jim Johnston, whose blog, Politics, Theory and Photography is a model of openminded and wide ranging intellectual exploration, has suffered the loss of a son -- my heart goes out to him and his family.

La Jeunesse Dorée: PDN's 30

The list of winners is finally viewable here.

There is a preponderance of fashion and other types of photography which does not interest me much, though it is all very accomplished work. However, there is indeed some stand out documentary and travel imagery that I find notable.


First off there is Kathryn Cook's excellent coverage of the Bolivian elections. These elections are part of a putative shift to the Left in Latin American politics which includes Lulo in Brazil, Chavez in Venezuela, Morales in Bolivia, and Ortega in Nicaragua. Course whether this is in fact a genuine shift to the Left is highly questionable, as each of these candidates are very different pols with very different constituencies determined by very different circumstances. Ortega is a pragmatist who has ably managed to keep his "revolution" alive by working within the prevailing power structure; Chavez is a demagogue, a little in the Peronist line, who spouts alot of Bolivarian rhetorical tripe in order to contain and coopt troublesome elements in Venezuelan society that might otherwise prove unmanageable; -- of all the candidates Evo Morales could prove to be the most interesting because he appears to be genuinely motivated by the planks of his political platform.

Secondly, there is Aaron Huey, whose marvelous image of a ruined mosque in Uch Sharif, Pakistan was featured on Tewfic El-Sawy's blog.

Rena Effendi's black and white work in Baku, Azerbaijan. Here is a candlelight procession:

And Alvaro Yballa Zavala, who strives to capture a different perspective on the war in Iraq; rather than combatants, he depicts mundane moments of life under seige, so that "viewers can imagine themselves in these situations."



Well done everybody.