The Spark of Accident

Vanishings

2011-12-06T13:51:00.004-04:00

"The places we have known do not belong only to the world of space on which we map them for our convenience. None of them was ever more than a thin slice, held between the contiguous impressions that composed our life at that time; the memory of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues, are as fugitive, alas, as the years." -Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past

The force of this statement was brought home to me a few years ago when I suffered a brief bout of amnesia while bedridden with a nasty illness -- I allowed myself to become dehydrated and as a result my brain apparently short circuited. In the middle of cooking some red sauce (inspired by watching The Godfather) I simply forgot where I was and what I was doing. I lay back down in bed and the crisis eventually passed, but that very night I took out all the family albums, with pictures going back to the 19th century, and forced myself to name every person and every place in each photo. My long-term memory was intact, but bits and pieces of my recent history continued to elude my grasp for some time after. What I once thought was so secure, so sure, the keystone of my entire existence -- that is, my very self -- I now realize is entirely tangential, a gift that I receive anew every time I open my eyes -- and every time I close them I say a little prayer to ward off the worrisome thought that I might not again enjoy that grace.

I now religiously drink eight glasses of water a day.

Of course this was an unsettling experience, because it struck at the heart of one's very identity and brought home as almost nothing else can the fragility of experience and the structures that make us who we are. And yet it was also, if viewed with some detachment, a very instructive and interesting experience because it compelled me to reflect on the nature of identity, of memory, of time, and ultimately of photography itself. We tend to think of our past as a place we can visit at will, either by reflection or by physically revisiting a particular locale, but the truth is that our past is past, it is lost somewhere in the drift of time, and its presence is as fugitive and contingent as the synaptic sparks that leap from neuron to neuron in the fatty tissue we call our brains. Science tells us that we are ninety percent water; we are just water flowing in a river that is never really ever the same at any given point. You can never go home again, and if you do what you are really visiting is not an unchanging and permanently defined place, but a series of associations evoked by the physical experience of being there.

If it is true that we are essentially what we tell ourselves, that we know ourselves and our world through the collection of stories we grew up with and which are continually reinforced or adumbrated by the master narratives of our society, then it is just as certain that each individual story is a mere chain of images and we are all of us photographers clutching with perhaps an unwitting desperation the album containing the Kodak moments that collectively make up our identities. Our other senses collude in this conspiracy of delusion and reality -- the taste of a madeleine carried Marcel with convincing presence to the Sunday mornings spent in the house of his aunt in Combray; the sense of smell was for Roland Barthes the most seductive of the gang -- but ultimately what we find at the end of the nostalgic journey is an image, a visual reality, its colors tinged by the longing or repulsion we feel for its content. And we all know just how real such images can appear to be. I once woke from a dream in which I owned a beautiful Triumph TR6 -- I got out of bed and, still in the grip of this illusion, went to the garage, cursing softly while I searched for the keys that I would never find.

Which brings us to the essence of what we do as photographers. In the words of that greatest of essayists, Michel de Montaigne, we "do not portray being; (we) portray passing. . . . If my mind could gain a firm footing, I would not make essays, I would make decisions; but it is always in apprenticeship and on trial." That last word is a pointed pun on the underlying meaning of "essay": to try. Essays are nothing more than trials, tests, that assay the value and meaning of life. Life is so tenuous, our understanding of it inherently provisional, that we can do no more than test its contradictory propositions and accept their transience. We live today by one credo and tomorrow by another. We are, by virtue of this cold war with reality, double agents, unwitting traitors to our own virtually unshakeable belief that things are fixed and solid, while even the granite of this flying ball we call earth is melting away before our eyes.

But every once in a while we catch ourselves in the midst of the pitch along whose trajectory we have been hurled by the ineffable forces to which we ingenuously ascribe some anthropomorphic purpose, and we are astonished by the enormity of the processes by which we are buffeted as well as by our pathethic inconsequentiality. Inevitably such wisdom costs us dearly. Like Oedipus we purchase it with some horrible mutilation, with a pound of flesh, or worse a few ounces of that precious animating spirit that buoyed us with an optimistic belief in our immortality and the providence of our journey through time. It is at once terrifying and supremely comical. God's own Absurdist theater.

It would seem that as photographers we cannot help but be elegists, creating dirges for what once was and will never be again. So many photographic projects overtly allude to this passing of time -- Milton Rogovin's triptychs from Buffalo are a notable example, but even sociologically oriented work such as August Sander's can be said to be as much about time and history as about social types, because after all the baker that Sander shot is not at all like the baker that Harvey Wang captures in his book of New York portraits. This paradox of change and fixity that photography embodies, perhaps better than any other aesthetic medium, is what gives it its unique character and poignancy. The banal family album achieves some measure of distinction when one considers the drama of evanescence and stubborn presence that is recorded there.

But it is not all about arresting moments from the flow of forgetfulness -- there is a contrary impulse of discovery and wonder. Each new moment carries with it the possibility of revelation and surprise -- The BBC reported that a Pole woke up from a coma that had lasted 19 years: his awakening was miraculous -- the drab communist regime disappeared in a flash for this man, and in its place he found a brave new world of consumerism and astonishing wealth. "What amazes me today is all these people who walk around with their mobile phones and never stop moaning," said Mr Grzebski. "I've got nothing to complain about." Maybe it is only when we are deprived of things we take for granted that we appreciate their value and our good fortune -- and maybe we must have each moment torn from us in order to be alerted to what each new moment has to offer.

Eduardo Galeano recounts an episode from a Louise Erdrich novel in which a senile grandmother, who has lost her memory, smiles down at her great granddaughter, recently born, who smiles back at her because as yet she has no memory. “La felicidad perfecta. Yo no la quiero.” Nor does Mr Grzebski, I wager. Nor do I. So I keep shooting, piling up the memories as a dam against time, etching a very sketchy history.

9/11 Then and Now

2011-09-12T17:48:00.003-04:00

My book about my experience on 9/11 and its subsequent effects is soon to be ready courtesy of Blurb. I will publish the link when I am satisfied with the results after reviewing the dummy.

Room to Move: Space, Digital Technology, and Industrial Changes in Journalism, with an Outline for a New Enterprise

2009-04-16T08:55:00.004-04:00

“I can`t get the best unless I got room to move” John Mayall

I. The Problem

We tend to think of crises in terms of cramped spaces, pinched wallets, the walls closing in. Crises are defined by lack, by loss of liberty, by defeated expectations and dashed hopes.

It aint necessarily so.

Regardless of how one feels about President Obama’s measures to stimulate the economy, one thing about his perspective on the crisis is clear: he sees it as an opportunity to clean house, to institute sweeping changes that will reorient American enterprise and change the way we do business, to open things up rather than close them down. Many comparisons have been made between the current crisis and the depression, and while critics are correct in pointing out that the analogy is faulty, again one thing is clear: FDR also saw the crisis as an opportunity to grow, to expand, to create.

The end of newspapers is perhaps merely the end of doing business the old way, and if the captains of that industry had been sufficiently innovative, perceptive and diligent, they might not have had to scuttle their ships. The record of their attempts to shift to online production and figure out the future of journalism forms a truly pitiful tale of scant imagination and feeble will. The fact is, their interests were too deeply invested in the old way of conducting business, and management was not of the generation that enthusiastically seized upon and immediately understood the potential of web communication. When the geysers opened up a web page, all they saw was a screen version of the same page they had so long produced with ink and paper. Instead of reviewing their modus operandi, instead of reflecting upon first principles, they fatally sought to reproduce their practice in essentially the same form that had served them so well in the past.

This has all suddenly become grounds for lament, because although the crisis for newspapers arrived long before the current debacle, it was mishandled just long enough to allow the papers to survive until present circumstances tipped the balance. Papers that had limped along doing business as usual with only half hearted attempts to absorb the lessons of the new medium, have now been forced out of business.

And, interestingly, this lack of understanding revolved around an insufficient grasp of the parameters of the space that digital technology had opened up. Rather than cramping our style, digital production bears the means of freeing it up. Rather than costing the industry, it can cut down on costs. And rather than cutting back on reportage, it can proliferate it.

“All the News that is Fit to Print”

In one of the better discussions of these themes, “Goodbye to the Age of Newspapers,” Paul Starr has argued that the newspapers developed a means of reporting news whose form was an inadvertent result of the market forces governing the enormous profits they reaped.

The key to the rise of independent and powerful newspapers in the United States in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was their role as market intermediaries--that is, in connecting large numbers of sellers (advertisers) and buyers in a local area. That role required changes in content, language, and design, so as to appeal to a wider public that included women, working-class, and immigrant readers. Instead of narrowly focusing on politics and business, newspapers now had an interest in presenting a wider range of stories. The result was a succession of editorial innovations in the coverage of sports, crime, entertainment, and community life, and the addition of such features as interviews, comics, and gossip columns. The coverage of politics and business changed, too, as newspapers increasingly presented more color, context, and analysis instead of reprinting long speeches by politicians or merely chronicling events--a shift that intensified once radio and later television took over much of the business of breaking news.

The fatter the paper the better. This principle, survival of the fattest, ruled the newspaper industry in its heyday, and it spawned a broad type of newsgathering that served community interests very well, even though the whole enterprise, in terms of its economic ends, had little to do with the high minded calling of its journalists. One subsidized the other. This breadth and eclecticism, this smorgasbord of intellectual content, benefitted the readership inadvertently because it guaranteed that they would receive if not necessarily digest a panoramic view of the world and thus avoid being locked into a hermetic semantic bubble in which one’s opinions are merely confirmed rather than challenged. As the internet replaces the newspaper, according to Starr, it could be that we will see less “incidental learning” and “greater disparities in knowledge between news dropouts and news junkies, as well as greater ideological polarization in both the news-attentive public and the news media” due to the fact that websites are generally more narrow in scope and ideologically motivated.

The issue for Starr and others is whether or not emerging models of digital journalism can guarantee the same breadth of coverage and community service. What form will online news take and where will we derive the revenues to support the enterprise?

The Potential for Advertising

The cause lies in the damage done to the economic underpinnings of print media. According to Starr, “the Internet has undermined the newspaper's role as market intermediary. Advertisers do not need to piggyback on the news to reach consumers, and consumers have other ways to find out about products and sales.” How did this come about? Why should not advertising continue to play a role on the internet and thus subsidize the journalistic enterprise that exists alongside the consumerist propaganda? Why should not the online paper continue to serve as a market intermediary? Advertisers still piggyback TV and radio news.

It is not clear to me as yet that the damage is irredeemable or that it has even been adequately defined. The whole argument about advertising revenue, for example, is repeated uncritically. Take the classifieds, which has been cited as an instance of the loss of connection between advertisers and buyers insofar as the papers cannot compete with the likes of Craigslist or eBay. These new alternatives are thought to be better positioned as market intermediaries since they do not bear the cost of news production. This argument turns out to be specious on closer examination. The classifieds, in and of themselves, cannot be said to have borne the cost of news production either. The costs of news production are covered by excess profit, which stems from several sources, and the industry was committed to that subsidy, so the issue of news production does not enter in to the discussion at this level – what counts is whether or not a particular market offering generates revenue and serves as a means of drawing readers, and there is no reason to discount the possibility that a sufficiently retooled classifieds for the web would not have continued to perform these functions. The question remains: why couldn’t the newspaper magnates come up with a new means of funding the enterprise, just as eBay, Craigslist and other successful websites did?

What are the factors operating here? Well, one thing that the pundits rarely discuss is the form that the operation should take given the potential for change and improvement offered by the web. Again, the concept of space figures in. Newspaper owners didn’t consider the means whereby space is created and navigated on the web, so they lost ground to competitors like Craigslist, because those younger entrepreneurs were quick to seize upon certain innovative measures.

This is what the Journalism Iconoclast has to say about that:

Rather than make a searchable, easy-to-use classified system online, newspapers shoveled non-Web friendly newspaper classifieds onto the Web. These weren’t searchable, didn’t contain links and photos were an afterthought. . . . they even carried the same space restrictions over from print onto the Web. Space in print is limited. The whole print model was built around scarcity.

There is no scarcity on the Internet. There never will be.

So, when people started seeing ads on the Web advertising homes with a frpl, instead of fireplace, it’s not hard to see why when Craigslist hit, the gig was up. Craigslist is not a technological wonder, its UI isn’t very good and it feels quite dated.

But it at least didn’t have ridiculous print abbreviations. And it was searchable, it allowed for links, it had photos and it was easy to use.

Precisely. There was a total failure of imagination and it killed the whole endeavor. The key for success lay in recognizing that the web is a different medium with its own formal properties and if one is to capitalize on the medium, one must synchronize the content with the new forms. The simple act of clicking, which moves the whole mighty mountain of information that is the web, has not yet been sufficiently understood or exploited. It is not at all like turning a page. The people at Craigslist went far enough in their understanding to appreciate that a searchable database with links would significantly improve access to the classifieds, and they quickly attracted devoted users. They also recognized that the protocols governing print classifieds were no longer germane, so they discarded them.

One may object that Craigslist doesn’t charge for its service, whereas a paper does. A paper puts a price on each word used in a classified ad. But Craigslist does charge for certain services and does make money. According to its factsheet, it supports its operations “By charging below-market fees for job ads in 18 cities, and for brokered apartment listings in NYC.” The job ads cost “$25 in most cities, $75 in SF.” Given their reach, with “Local classifieds and forums for 570 cities in 50 countries worldwide,” this means of generating revenues apparently works quite well and allows for the majority of users to benefit freely. Part of the genius of the creators is that they grasped an essential principle governing the net: they thought locally and acted globally. There is no reason the newspapers couldn’t have concocted something like this.

Here in the South, a truly proactive classifieds could easily provide an online journal with significant funds as well as a means of connecting the journal with a broad variety of users. For example, if the interface were improved (something more innovative than Craigslist), if features of eBay and Paypal were introduced, and then if some means were created whereby customs and shipping could be facilitated (which is a serious problem among Latin American countries, given corruption and protectionist tariffs) – a shipping company that cultivates links with the various national customs offices so as to ensure speedy and cheap delivery of products – then a subsidiary and very lucrative business could be developed that in turn would contribute toward the cost of news production.

I will have more to say about advertising and the means of subsidizing news production below, but one other assumption needs to be mentioned here. One of the things about print advertisement is that space is at a premium. Because there is limited space, the advertiser is forced to pay higher prices to rent that real estate. Since space is not a premium on the web, since “scarcity” is not a factor, advertising rates are lower. This does not mean, however, that revenues from online advertising cannot contribute adequately to the cost of news production, if that mode of production is retooled and scaled down. New types of ads, too, can be thrown into the mix, thus making it more desirable for advertisers to rent space on the web.

As the Iconoclast points out, the newspaper companies have to become more than just newspapers – which in a sense they always were, given that the moneymaking and the newsgathering formed separate spheres and employed different personnel with little contact between them. Just as Apple Computers converted itself into Apple and began developing a host of subsidiary enterprises, so too digital journalism has to develop and sell products that are subsidiary to the central purpose of the enterprise. The Economist, for example, is part of a larger enterprise, the Economist Intelligence Unit, which employs political and economic analysts on a freelance basis around the world to file monthly reports on their countries, which in turn are sold to business leaders, politicians, libraries, think tanks, and so on at a decent profit.

Citizen Kane and Miss January: the Universality of Desire

Current wisdom holds that the web doesn’t make money (unless you happen to be a pornographer); but it does enhance the ability to do so. And as to the huge profits reaped by pornography on the web, why hasn’t anyone done a serious comparative study in order to determine whether that model would work for other industries? The fact is, examination of their methods reveals the same principles that underlie advertising.

What, for example, is the fundamental structure of any given pornographic website? The “come on.” They flash a nude image, invite you to click on it to see more, and at some point they transfer you to a page where you are asked to pony up. Having excited you, they weaken your resistance, rivet your attention, and pit your reason against your desire. They exploit what Hegel called the Divided Self. This is precisely the MO behind advertising and consumerism. Walk the aisles of Macy’s and you will immediately grasp, if you are not totally dazzled by the ostentatious displays and the clerks spritzing perfume all over you, that the design of a department store is intended to produce the same effect as a porno site. It is all about the display of desirable objects. And instant gratification.

But you demur, news is serious business and there is nothing sexy about that. Well yes and no. We like to think that we are serious, and of course there is good reason to complain about the way news and entertainment have been mixed up, with the former becoming adulterated as a result. But desire is still an inevitable part of the mix, and in fact news does elicit desire. We speak about news junkies, and while the phrase is facetious, it does point to a motive force that we tend to overlook.

First of all, desire is not exclusively a matter of sexiness. Not only are there different types of pleasures – intellectual as well as sensual – which are equally exigent if not equally sensational or immediate – but there are also different types of desires or drives that can be exploited by those who wish to sell a product. We remember Freud for what he had to say about the sex drive, but we forget that he also wrote about the death drive and the fascination that death and violence exercise for us. It may be unpleasant to admit it, but one draw for the news is the ugliness of life, the tragedy. This is also why the soaps are so popular, or why movies fetishize guns as much as tits and ass. We talk about image fatigue and apathy, but I think there may be just as much cause to worry about an inordinate love of tragic or painful imagery. Horror has its attraction, otherwise we would not have books with titles like “My War Gone by, I Miss It So."

Am I suggesting that online papers adopt the coquetry of the porn sites and tease its readers with images of violated bodies? No, of course not, but I am asking people to be honest about what we produce and recognize that we too are eliciting desire and coming on to our readers, albeit in a different manner. Let us admit, as a first principle, that people do desire news. That simple fact is rarely mentioned, and its consequences are never examined.

Click Me Baby: Sex and Technology

One thing that pornographers grasped very early on was that the site itself, crudely laid out as it may, was sexy; that is, the mechanics of viewing also functioned somehow to incite or abet desire.

I was at a high level conference recently where all the political and business leaders of the country had convened to discuss the future of the country. Despite the gravity of the themes discussed, one thing I noticed was that everyone was always consulting their cell phones, fiddling with their Blackberries, checking their emails or messages and so on. Most of the activity was aimless, and in fact I suspect that the ostensible purpose of retrieving information of one sort or another was irrelevant to the actual motive force, which was pleasure. That is, people just love fiddling with gadgets, it gratifies desire in and of itself apart from the “serious” purpose of the activity that the gadget purportedly exists to facilitate. There is, in a sense, a disjunction between the form and the content, insofar as each function separately to gratify desire – but they also work in tandem and their separate dynamics can be exploited to reinforce one another.

Go to any internet center, and you will see all the people furtively engaged in clicking on links. Clicking is obsessive and compulsive. Clicking is full of promise, it is a wink and a nod, a beckoning finger. It is digital coquetry. Plot-wise, it is the embodiment of suspense, which is of course a major motive force in the construction of riveting narratives.

The upshot of this is that online newspapers have an unwitting ally in their quest to elicit desire and pull in readers. This is why a thorough examination of the form of the online paper needs to be carried out. Many pundits are arguing that survival of the papers as they switch to web production depends on their ability to invite more reader participation, to include viewers in the process of producing the news. This argument has not progressed much beyond rather lame suggestions about the pros and cons of citizen journalism and attempts to elicit participation through blogging. But no one has bothered to take this argument where it needs to go, into an examination of how the structures made available through digital coding satisfy the surfer’s craving for excitement and what sort of narratives can be created out of the mix. Instead of timidly reproducing what has gone before, we must break with the past and profoundly reshape future journalism.

II. A Solution

What are online news sites – are they in fact legitimate sites of production in their own right or are they mere adjuncts to enterprises that continue to function in their customary manner? CNN.com would appear to generate plenty of interest, but when one thinks of CNN of course one thinks of the television version. The same with the online papers. The sites are all afterthoughts rather than genuine independent enterprises with their own direction and vision. Herein lies the problem. Their structural dependency has consequences for their function and their form. They are thought of as extensions of an original, already established enterprise and they adopt the form and thinking of the parent company. It is high time that the new online journalism cut the umbilical cord.

Web Space, Grub Street, and the Reinvention of Journalism

Much of the writing I do is severely restricted, a thousand words here, no more than 1,500 there – all because a printed paper or magazine has limited space. But on the web there are no limitations on space, so why do the papers insist on maintaining these same strictures? The consequences for photography are even greater. Why should my multimedia pieces be only three minutes long? Chris Anderson’s sublime report on Lebanon ran for 15 minutes and viewers were riveted to the screen. There are various unexamined arguments regarding reading on the net: that no one reads large amounts of text on a computer screen and that surfers prefer to click around and have short attention spans. They don’t read; they browse. But reading habits are often dictated by the content as well as the form – if we don’t think this way, we are unwittingly discounting the power of our narratives to transform people. By doing so, we betray everything we stand for. And nowadays, as people use their computers at home more and more, they do in fact read larger segments of prose, simply because the material is available there on their screens. Whole books are downloadable now, and I doubt that many readers bother to print the file out on paper afterward.

No one has really tried providing alternate types of narrative, so there is no real way to tell. When Grub Street started up in earnest in the mid-eighteenth century, articles were in fact quite long and people read them avidly. This new cultural practice coincided with the rise of coffee shops. Today’s chains like Starbucks and Barnes and Noble are no different. You can see people sitting with their cappucinos and laptops. The whole environment is geared toward leisure and leisurely reading. Moreover, the range of subjects was just as great, if not greater than what we see today in papers – scientific articles of every type, fictional pieces, poetry, editorials, all jostling side by side in ample journals that approached the size of books. Advertising did not yet exist; subscriptions and the cover price paid for production, and the content did not suffer though the economy of this industry was obviously much smaller. The journal format eventually gave way to the tabloid, but there is no reason to believe that the tabloid, given further technological change and economic pressures, might not eventually give way to yet another form, or even return in some ways to the original amplitude of the journal, even with a reduced economic base.

Because, again, the thing about web production is that the resource has no limits – production need not be based on concepts of scarcity. Space is limitless. Yet the articles, instead of expanding, are more often truncated. The multimedia are nothing more than slideshows, with little or no attempt to exploit the kinetic energy or the soundtrack in imaginative ways. After a century of filmmaking, these productions remain stuck in the age of the kinetoscope – with the notable exception of companies like MediaStorm or Magnum in Motion, but how often does one see their multimedia outside of the factory walls? And why cannot the photograph itself now command more respect, more space and more control over what is being “said” in the pages of the new online journal? Why cannot the photo once again have free reign in a genuine photo essay as in the heyday of the magazine? The fact is, all the reasons for cutting back on photos no longer hold. The photograph can become a genuine motive force on the pages of the new journal. I will explain how below.

Meanwhile it is important to remember Fred Ritchin’s basic tenet regarding journalism on the web: “One cannot simply “repurpose” what has been previously accomplished onto the Web, as so many publications are doing, particularly the “brand-name” ones. There has to be an awareness that the old conventional strategies are not always applicable anymore, and that a new medium requires new thinking.”

The Value of News and the Niche Market

What I am proposing takes advantage of what economists call niche marketing. In other words, in order to boost the value of a product, one must create a “niche” in the market so that the product receives its appropriate value. For example, markets in the North are flooded with the kidney shaped mangoes that Haiti and Mexico export; however, here in Santo Domingo we cultivate something like 10 different types of mango that look nothing like those and in fact are superior in taste and texture. Above all there is a small drop of gold called “banilejo” that is superb. They are also easier to pack and ship and can be picked slightly green without forfeiting the taste, since they ripen just enough afterwards. These mangoes are now being marketed abroad as a specialty item that commands a higher price and is slowly creating a devoted following. Depending on how one packages the news, a niche can be created to promote its unique qualities.

Now a porn site does not depend on advertising to make money; it sells the right to view the imagery. And we all know, or have been told, that a paper cannot follow suit; attempts to charge surfers for the right to view content have failed. Except, let it be said, in the case of specialized papers, such as the Wall Street Journal, because these focus on a particular community of readers who are willing to pay for specialized content that they cannot get elsewhere. Newspapers, on the other hand, are forced to compete with other free services such as Google, since general news items are accessible and unrestricted. Nonetheless, one doesn’t get solid analysis from general news posts, nor does Google or any other news feed offer features. Features, in fact, have become an increasingly popular product for news organizations, and are now competing with hard news for drawing readers. The New York Times reported back in October that in fact such features along with the new offerings such as podcasts and so on had indeed boosted readership of their website. The point to understand at this juncture is that news organizations do in fact sell desirable products – news interpretations in various forms (features, editorials, investigative reportage, etc). They may not be as sexy as this month’s bunny, but they do create demand. And some webzines such as Salon.com operate on a hybrid model that creates a scale of access – premium content is charged.

While surfers may not be dazzled sufficiently to pony up for the right to view most news material, many still do in fact seek out the news, they hit the New York Times site regularly. They do so because it is free. No! Just because something is free does not mean that it is desirable. They do so because they seek certain content, which happens to be freely accessible. In other words, there is an equation here, a relation between the two elements, which determines the market value of this product. What value? You cannot fix a price on a feature. No one will buy.

And yet there is value. Ask yourself, why were advertisers compelled to pay such high rates for space in a paper? They did so because their hefty investment returned heftier profits in the form of increased sales. But why use a newspaper to get the ad across, why not stick with television or radio or billboards, all of which are more modern media and probably more effective? Some might argue that the newspaper allowed advertisers to target the local community efficiently and comparatively cheaply. While a chain like Walmart might prefer the broader coverage afforded by a TV spot, and be able to pay for repeated announcements, a local business would not sensibly invest such sums if it could achieve broad enough coverage within the community it serves, since the paper would succeed in reaching the desired target and “repetition” would be achieved by the natural if unpredictable passing of the paper from hand to hand.

But that still doesn’t quite explain the advertiser’s decision. They also did it because the ad would appear alongside serious content whose proximity lent integrity and respectability to the advertiser. It functioned like an imprimatur. An ad in the pages of the Times has a certain cachet. This is why advertisers often worried about the placement of their ads and whether or not the accompanying story or photos detracted from the presentation of the ad. Newspaper content does indeed have value – like the web it can be said to enhance sales, even if in itself it does not sell, or sell well enough to cover the costs of its production adequately.

Of course it is still about the numbers, but numbers don’t suffice. TV spots are charged according to the popularity of a show, billboard rates are based on the daily circulation of traffic. Just as advertisers would pay more to air an ad alongside a hit show, they would pay to advertise in the Times with its high circulation. So why doesn’t the web version, with its even higher circulation, exact the same tariffs?

First of all there is the issue of space – online ads don’t command the same tariffs because space is not at a premium. This argument has been repeated often without being carefully examined. Online ads do in fact bring in revenue; according to TNS Media Intelligence, as cited by the Times, “Overall online advertising, however, is strong. Display advertising, the graphics-rich ads that newspaper sites carry, grew 7.6 percent in the second quarter [of 2008].” Yet revenues fell during that same quarter by 2.4% compared to the same period for the year before. Moreover, the various new elements included on newspaper websites, such as blogs, multimedia and podcasts, have managed to draw in more readers: “Unique readers in August were 17 percent higher than a year earlier, at 69.3 million, according to a Nielsen Online analysis of newspaper sites for the newspaper association.”

Part of the problem with the switch to online production and complaints about reduced revenues is that these newspaper giants are saddled with the cost of the older mode of production which in turn was justified by the excessive profits of the older mode of advertising. This whole model needs to be discarded and a streamlined economy put in its place. Then the revenues from online advertising will not seem so inadequate. Moreover, the ad space itself could be entirely rethought – linking and other formal aspects of the web could turn advertising into a whole new ballgame and excite both advertisers and consumers in new ways. An ad, for example, could be turned into a short computer game. If journalism is to become more interactive, why shouldn’t the advertising? The online journal could retain web designers who would act in the place of ad agencies to create ad campaigns that exploit the potential of the web. Here is another subsidiary business that could create considerable revenues for the company.

Then there is the peculiar nature of news as a commodity, and this is where the need for thinking in terms of niche marketing enters in.

One of the things that distinguishes news content is that it is an unusual type of commodity. It is a form of intellectual content that commands a special kind of value. Starr points out that news is a “public good”:

News distributed to the public is a public good in two respects. First, from a political standpoint, news contributes to a well-functioning society inasmuch as it enables the public to hold government and other institutions accountable for their performance. Second, news is a public good in the sense economists use that concept. When someone consumes a box of chocolates, no one else can have them, but that is not true of news. The news itself is never really "consumed" at all, which is why anyone can pass on news to those who have not paid for it – and in the digital environment, information is so easily and instantly passed on that news is, in a sense, even more of a public good than it has ever been.

Markets under-produce public goods because private incentives are insufficient to generate as much production of those goods as there would be if all those who derived a benefit from them had to pay. Still, for a long time, thanks largely to their role as market intermediaries, newspapers have been able to produce this particular public good – newsworthy information, necessary to hold government accountable – on a commercial basis. And that way of getting around the problem of financing news for the general public is now coming to an end.

To grasp this problem fully we must have recourse to one other time tested economic concept, which is Marx’s distinction between use value and market value. A commodity, which can be any object at all that enters on to the market, enjoys two different types of value. Coffee, for example, has a use value that describes its purpose as a comestible product. But once it enters the market it also has an added value in terms of the price people are willing to pay for that product if they do not themselves produce it. This value is contingent on many factors that don’t necessarily have anything to do with the intrinsic value of the product. Low grade coffee could achieve high prices on the market if there is a scarcity of coffee due to bad weather or blight. Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee fetches higher prices on the market than the equally good or even superior coffee grown here in Santo Domingo due to advertising and adept marketing strategies.

News is a commodity too, but its use value is such that it would appear to be a hard sell. It does not enjoy rarity; it is not in scarce supply; it is easily “pirated,” copied, and handed around freely; it is not an immediate need in the sense that foodstuffs are, which satisfy an urgent inescapable demand; it is not a sensual but an intellectual commodity and thus requires a sophisticated appetite to appreciate it. Nonetheless, its use value is recognized by all as a public good, a valuable intellectual tool, a rigorous mode of information with a system of checks and balances to ensure its accuracy. As a social institution, it is important enough to be considered the Fourth Estate. It thus enjoys a unique prestige (as well as opprobrium), and as a result it serves as an excellent vehicle for advertising or subsidiary enterprises that stand to gain from the inherent ability of news to lend out its prestige as well as guarantee connection to a host of consumers – because news does in fact reach a broad audience. The New York Times site registers something like 20 million viewers.

Outline for a New Enterprise

One thing that Starr mentions in his article is the fact that if we were to switch to an endowment model to finance the news, the sums needed would have to be enormous – to pay a journalist his or her salary of, say, a hundred thousand a year, the endowment would have to be at least a million dollars, since the salary would be paid by the interest generated from the principle sum invested. While the fat cats may require such a salary, I do not believe that good journalism depends on their existence. Woodward and Bernstein certainly were not earning such sums when they investigated Watergate. Moreover, salaries are not the biggest problem of news production; it is the mode of production itself that is prohibitively costly. The truth is, the cost of production can be drastically cut by virtue of going online. A severely reduced staff, much smaller office space, no print shop, etc. Reporters don’t necessarily need an office, since they can work online and deliver reports from the field. If anyone enters the offices of a newspaper one is immediately made aware of the vast sprawling machinery of production, so much of which is no longer needed. If reduced revenues are a problem, they are offset to some extent by the reduced costs. Online production doesn’t require as much money.

Clave Digital, Santo Domingo’s leading digital news organ, and really quite a stellar operation, is run out of a small building that is perhaps a quarter or less of the size of the building that houses Listín Diario, the leading traditional paper here. Clave employs a small team of reporters and photographers to gather the news, and another handful of editors to run the show. Regular columns are provided by freelancers, and when big national events such as elections occur, the paper employs freelancers to amplify coverage. It is a streamlined and efficient operation that manages very well to provide the community service that Starr discusses.

The new journal I am contemplating would embody the principles of web 2.0 and adapt the form of the traditional photo agency. It would be decentralized and would not require a large central headquarters. Most likely the technological infrastructure (the servers etc) and the financial infrastructure would be located in one building, to be determined largely on the basis of affordable real estate, tax considerations, cheap electricity, and reliable internet connection, while the rest could be connected via VOIP and other web technologies.

There would be four basic elements:
1. Editorial: a core of editors overseeing the content and thematic direction of the journal.

2. Media Team: this would be a subsidiary company set up on its own entrepreneurial terms and initiative, so as to ensure an incentive to do their best work. It would not, however, play a subsidiary role in the construction or production of the news. It would work closely with content providers to create narratives and scenarios – unique platforms – that would give in depth stories their best means of being viewed, while they would also develop new forms of advertising unique to web technology. The company would be free to farm out its services to other enterprises.

3. Business: Accounting, Sales, etc. This aspect of the enterprise would be responsible for developing disparate businesses intended to create excess profits needed to subsidize news production. Several initiatives have been mentioned: a web-friendly classifieds; a web-oriented advertising “agency” (in tandem with the media team); creation and promotion of a “think-tank” or investigatory body that produces political and economic analyses for sale to specialty customers; resale of stock imagery; a book publishing venture that retails documentary and other long-term studies that arise out of the process of reporting the news.

4. Reportage, depending on field teams hired on a freelance basis and making equal use of photography, text and sound. New kinds of reportage would be explored, exploiting all available technologies; therefore, a more intimate working relation would be cultivated between digital designers and content providers. Photo essays would reclaim their past glory. Some articles could even be driven by the photos rather than the text. The photos themselves could be put to new uses, as narrative maps, as jumping off points to other narrative tracks, etc. The articles would break new ground formally and thematically – narratives would not necessarily be linear but would instead operate within a “field” that would in turn offer options to readers as to how to navigate through the story. We would be publishing new types of articles that break with the old categories and seek the fluidity of cross disciplinary studies. We would create bridges between traditional practices so that a truly broad perspective on any given issue could be created via linkage to other sources, much like a bibliography. We would concentrate on developing features, investigative reportage and commentary, while spot and breaking news could be included in the mix in the form of RSS feeds or some such thing, thus providing a daily compendium of leading stories, much as Salon.com already does. Longer documentary essays, previously the exclusive territory of magazines, would be returned to the fold. Other types of articles on art, science and such could be provided by outside specialists in these fields. Thus critics, social scientists, artists and writers could all contribute.

The business end of things would also be run along the same principles running the aesthetics, or content, of the enterprise. Take Ritchin’s concept of synergy: just as a photograph “becomes, like other media, a gateway to other ideas and other media,” so too the various aspects of the business could also create links between different enterprises and thus create opportunities for everyone. For example, Magnum in Motion already has an innovative media team in place, but instead of just selling the product, they could also sell their service to other enterprises like the one I am proposing; and of course further links could be developed, such as a regular feed of Magnum images (as they already do with Slate.com). This allows Magnum to diversify and thus amplify its market offerings, while it also provides the journal with an expert team that is already focused on the same goals, journalism-wise, that the journal espouses. Other aspects could follow suit: participation from readers could be facilitated by making use of Utube, which already has a huge following and thus allows the easiest means of acquiring the equivalent of “iReports” and such from the citizen journalists out there. Editors could single out superior contributions for further development and perhaps offer a monetary incentive, but otherwise the whole enterprise would cost the company nothing.

The result would be not a newspaper, because it is composed neither of news in the old sense nor of paper; it would not be a magazine or a webzine, because it would absorb these into an even larger and more fluid entity; and it would not be a pale version of television. It would be an online journal, a record of our times produced according to the terms set by our times.

Part of the key to this enterprise would be its focus. In order for it to work, it needs to have a clear identity just like any other brand name on the market. The few successful webzines that exist, such as Salon and Slate, have identifiable thematic and ideological concerns that attract readers. They function much like older magazines such as The Nation. Since the new journal aspires less to ideological unity and more toward broad coverage of issues, the focus would be provided by concentrating on a geographical region. This enterprise would cover Latin America. It would aspire to be a leading authority on the issues facing this region, and it would be bilingual, so that readers in both North and South America could enjoy access. The concept of community is being radically altered in the wake of new media that bring disparate corners of the globe together and essentially annihilate time and space. Hence, while a news organ needs to be linked to a community, the nature of that community needs to be reconsidered. This does not mean, however, that a local newspaper could not adopt some of these measures and still maintain an intimate connection to the local community in which it operates. The virtue, again, of Web 2.0 thinking is that it manages to join the local and the global in meaningful and beneficial ways.

Sources of Revenue and New Content

The endowment model is already up and running, and has always been a part of journalism. Much of the best journalism is the product of organizations working outside the purview of the established media; grantors like the Guggenheim foundation, NGOs such as the Open Society, and even governmental organs such as the old Farm Security Administration, have all contributed to fostering excellent journalistic work, from Let Us Now Praise Famous Men to After the Last Sky. (It is worth noting at this point that the form of these memorable works is really quite different from generic journalism.) And what sort of work is likely to be remembered years down the line, the many newspaper articles published in the dailies, or books like Herr’s Dispatches and Griffith Jones' Vietnam Inc, which were enabled by the fact that the authors were working for the papers. One thing that the new online journal could do is foster the creation of just such works with the express intention that they should be developed with these long term goals in mind.

Closer affiliation with major educational institutions would allow for greater synergy and the opportunity to develop focused investigatory and documentary endeavors. For example, instead of reaching out, say, to Columbia University’s prestigious School of Journalism, an online journal of the sort I am proposing could link up directly with that same university’s School of Foreign Affairs and develop programs in tandem with them that would seek to fortify democratic values in Latin America and so on. With the combined resources of the social scientists and the journalists, all sorts of sociological research could be executed in new ways that achieve greater comprehensiveness and marry on-the-ground local expertise and journalistic rigor with the conceptual breadth and depth of academic thought.

Affiliation with certain types of corporations would also be feasible. Microsoft, Apple and other digital technology companies are essentially in the business of communication, just as we are. A marriage between the two would not necessarily impinge on journalistic freedom, since these types of companies are merely interested in providing the vehicle for content, and the content itself is less of a problem politically for them. A company like Apple promotes itself in terms of innovation – well what could be more innovative than sponsoring a new kind of online news service that takes full advantage of the new technologies to revolutionize reportage? By lending its support a company like Apple would simply be putting its money where its mouth is.

There are in fact already examples of working online newspapers: John Vink’s Ka Set, which covers Cambodia, operates on a shoe string and does a marvelous job of providing insightful reporting. The potential for these operations to grow and redefine journalism for the 21st century is indisputable.

Narrative form, Participatory Journalism, and the Spieltrieb.

A few desultory comments remain to be added here about how we can encourage reader participation in ways that cultivate an informed, well educated readership able to handle responsibly the demands of an open society. I have written about the relation between pedagogy and journalism elsewhere; here I wish only to point out that current arguments about the need for reader participation are somewhat superficial, since they do not grasp, yet again, the formal potential of the web or the fact that the redefinition of space allows for an entirely new relationship between the reader and the author.

Instead of focusing on the mere expression of opinion, let us first recognize some basic principles about human thought: above all, the fact that individuals require means whereby their creativity can be tapped and expressed. Creative activity of whatever sort is a basic constituent of human happiness. I remember reading Edith Hamilton’s The Greeks when I was young and being impressed with what she claimed was the Greek definition of happiness. I have never forgotten the words: “the exercise of vital powers in a life affording them scope.” Vital powers, in the sense of those forces within us that perpetuate life and vitality – the exercise of our imagination, for example, of our ability to shape our environment and create order. But the second part of the clause is equally important: we need an environment in which there is scope for the free exercise of these powers. An open society guaranteeing our individual freedoms. Or a web space in which there is ample room for narrative and conceptual exploration.

This principle is fundamental to human culture. What is the story of Genesis but another version of the same moral? Adam is placed in the garden to cultivate it, render order, exercise his imagination and create a beneficial space along the lines of the original creation. Or take the field of psychology. Friedrich Schiller wrote of the “spieltrieb,” the child’s exigent drive to play, through which it creates an ordered imaginary world that helps them to learn and master the real world. We are all perpetual children. As Nietzsche once wrote, “a man's maturity consists in having found again the seriousness one had as a child, at play.”

Thus the whole argument about the need for readers to participate actively in the “creation” of the news must take into account that this need is motivated by profoundly instinctual forces. And that the impulse has less to do with the expression of opinion per se and more with the creation of narrative form. Who could have predicted the remarkable success of the Wikipedia? Who could have predicted that people would wish to collaborate in the construction of an online encyclopedia, a word that is practically synonymous with boredom, with dowdy dryasdust pedantry and claustrophobic library cubicles. Homework! But no, the Wikipedia people understood that their enterprise gave contributors the chance to play.

An examination of the Wikipedia would surely result in new ideas about how to renovate online journalism and cultivate similar practices intended to foster a community of communicants. Just off the top of my head, I could conceive of a similar kind of forum adapted to the communicational goals of journalism, whereby, given any enduring news story (Iraq, for example), contributors could be channeled through a wikipedia-like blog in which various aspects of the story would be developed and explored – Iraq’s history, culture, and so on – so as to round out the news and provide context. The rules for the blog would be similar to those guiding the Wikipedia. Thus we could avoid the rather tedious and querulous blogging that characterizes most of the online forums.

Another means whereby reader participation can be cultivated is through creating new platforms for the stories – insufficient attention has been paid to the radical experiment carried out by Fred Ritchin and Gilles Peress, Bosnia: Uncertain Paths to Peace, which presented an entirely new narrative concept intended to convert the reader into an active creator of the story. This bold experiment takes advantage of the necessary pleasure we all take in putting things together, in rendering order, according to our tastes. And instead of treating the narrative in a linear fashion, this experiment made the bold move of organizing the story geometrically, within a field.

Such an approach to narrative is so far-reaching that I think people have not as yet begun to understand its extent. In the words of Fred Ritchin, “The solution I have in mind involves a simultaneous elevation of the photographer to author and his or her downgrading from authority to discussant; an overt embrace of certain aspects of media malleability, including its potentials for synergy; an active solicitation of divergent points of view as well as layers of context; and the empowerment of reader and, whenever possible, the subject.” No one, so far as I know, has acted on these principles or tried to put them into practice in a comprehensive manner that embraces not just the presentation of photojournalism (which was the focus for the original experiment) but the industry of journalism as a whole.

I am not proposing that the online news service dispense entirely with established forms of story telling or that it indulge in unnecessarily lengthy and complex articles that are perhaps best reserved for other disciplines. Greater synergy, for example, between academic and journalistic institutions does not mean that the latter should usurp the functions of the former, but it does mean that a journal of record can expand its coverage through linkage to academic websites where readers could be directed to find all sorts of information, thus cultivating “divergent points of view as well as layers of context.” I have already done this on the website I created to cover issues regarding the sugar plantations. It is a bit like creating a bibliography, but it can function much more dynamically and of course much more effectively since the material is just a click away. Brevity is certainly a virtue, so long as it does not result in cursory reportage, paragraphs composed of no more than one or two sentences, ideas dwindled to mere bytes and bits – I am not interested in telegraphing the news, which is already handled aptly by the news feed or electric ticker tape. I am arguing for more, for room to move, for an intelligent and more liberal use of the space that the web has opened up for us.

We are faced with the exigent need to make sweeping changes in our practice and our thought. I refuse to lament the situation; I prefer to embrace it and perhaps dare to shape it to some extent. It may be that it is harder to adopt such an attitude for those who live in developed nations and have enjoyed the benefits of the old way doing business; but for those of us who live in developing nations and are accustomed to a different rhythm of life, in which one lurches from crisis to crisis and becomes inured to the shocks that flesh is heir to, this is more easily viewed as an opportunity to take up the reins that others have loosed.

Alices in Wonderland: Thoughts on Narrative Discovery, Getting Lost, and Where to Find the Rabbit Hole

2008-12-14T12:09:00.004-04:00

The changes to journalism in the digital age involve not just questions of economic compensation, technological innovation regarding new methods of delivery as well as new forms of presentation, and the redefinition of our practice as newsgatherers (will we cull still images from life or a video stream, will we combine the offices of writer and photographer? etc). They also impose upon us the obligation to review the role that narrative plays in our endeavors and decide on what sort of narratives serve our purposes best, how new media can shape those narratives, and what our narrative traditions have to offer us, both in terms of orienting us as well as providing clues to the type of content we wish to purvey. While we ponder the brave new world of clicking and linking, we also have to reflect on first principles, so it behooves us to consider the basic functions of narrative in general. It turns out there are important reasons for doing so.

Since the advent of new social theory in the late 50s and onwards, which also spilled over into literary theory as a result of the focus on language and semiotics, theorists and critics have shifted focus from traditional social determinants (economic and political factors) to the ideological function of narrative both in its capacity to foment and confirm key social values and also its use as a kind of social glue, reconciling contradictions that might otherwise tear a society apart (of course, what theorists have tended to overlook is the capacity of avant garde narratives to create new values. More on this later.)

Ever since Levi-Strauss’s famous formulation regarding the ideologically conservative function of mythic narrative, these theorists have examined the key role that storytelling plays in a culture, how it forms the ground of our being. The basic principle is that “mythical thought always progresses from the awareness of opposition toward their resolution”. Levi-Strauss analyzed the Oedipus myth, but there are many basic myths that fit the paradigm. Take, for example, the story of Adam and Eve. The bible makes it quite clear that incest is taboo; yet, if we are to accept this account of creation on the surface, it would appear that humanity is the product of incest, that society could not have arisen if it were not for incest. So human society is the bearer of a dirty secret, an “original sin,” a fundamental flaw that must be repressed or expunged. The narrative posits an ethical dilemma that seeks resolution: on the one hand, the need to privilege one human strand over all others, one tribe, the chosen people. Thus there is need to demonstrate its “noble” lineage, which must remain pure and intact, going back to an original creation. On the other hand, there is the need to admit differences between the various tribes, the fact that they are not all the same either in value or in substance, and that if it were not so, then all of humanity would be damned and civilization would be inherently evil. The contradiction is resolved via the narrative that is spun through the Book of Genesis, and I will spare you the literary analysis; the point, however, is that the narrative is busily at work performing a valuable ideological service to society.

The strength of Levi-Strauss’s argument stems from his recognition that the content of the narrative is only half the equation; the other and more crucial half consists in its form. That is, it doesn’t matter whether any particular story overtly emphasizes a certain set of heroic values, as in Mel Gibson’s mawkish We Were Soldiers, a film that extols the virtues of family, comradery, plain talk, and “honest feeling” to the point of making you want to choke on your apple pie. What matters is that it participates in a generic family of narratives that are structured in such a way as to formulate heroic behavior in a particular mold. Think for just a few moments on how romantic love and marriage are “structured” by the many stories that surround each of us from a very early age: princesses saved by princes, outside threats annihilated (and usually figured as ugly, lustful, and somehow unnatural or unwholesome), marriage/kingdom and children/subjects all wedded together in a finale that slips the noose of Time, thus intimating the superiority of the arrangement, its everlasting value. How many stories participate in this basic structure, from the Grimm brothers to Disney? Such stories create expectations in its listeners and tap into emotional reservoirs in order to elicit an almost Pavlovian response that gets channeled along very strict lines. You are made to desire a certain end and will follow a specific path to achieve it. The power of its hold on us is considerable. I remember vividly the reaction that a professor of mine had while we sat in a theater and watched Spielberg’s E.T. He wept. This was a highly respected professor of art and literature, a connoisseur who made a living on the side advising wealthy patrons of art, and a man of consummate culture and critical understanding. He was a Cambridge gentleman. And he wept at the sight of a silly plastic extraterrestrial doll fashioned out of the emotionally retarded imagination of an overrated Hollywood director. I myself cry ever time I see the Alistair Sim version of Dickens’s Christmas Carol. When Tiny Tim comes out with that “god bless us everyone” I can’t control it.

And that is the thing, it begins at a very early age, long before we develop the critical faculties to analyze the stories, question the values, and alter our behavior. These are what we now call Meta Narratives, narratives so firmly entrenched in our consciousness, with forms so fundamental, that we are not even aware of their existence. Because as Louis Althusser argued, ideology is unconscious. First we absorb rudimentary narratives such as the taunts of children: “Tom and Nancy sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G. First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes baby in a baby carriage.” These establish the basic terms with almost mathematical precision: A meets B creates C. As we get older the theme grows with us. It gets developed in pop music: “ Love and marriage, love and marriage, go together like a horse and carriage,” sung by Frankie Sinatra no less. And of course it reaches its narrative zenith in soap operas, musicals, novels and other more sophisticated cultural forms. Such narratives train us to be good bourgeois citizens: to subordinate or subsume the potentially threatening or extravagant drives of sexual love to the demands of middle class family life focused on the production of more good citizens to keep the marketplace going and stoke consumerism, which in a sense is a passive mode of pleasure seeking and functions as a kind of perverse, inauthentic, or parodic aestheticism. False perceptions, false realities.

What we are talking about is plot rather than theme, and as Aristotle realized, its social or cultural power is peremptory, and that is why he placed so much emphasis on the aesthetic realm. He considered art more valuable intellectually than history, though the former is fiction and the latter putatively “true.” The story neednt overtly extol the virtues it secretly desires to impress on the audience. The theme and the plot could work against one another, as they do in the Mel Gibson film. This is the worst type of ideological condescension and subterfuge. While the film broaches themes that would appear to be egalitarian, multicultural and broadly humane (extensive scenes are given over to the enemy’s viewpoint and stress their humanity), the plot surreptitiously reinforces its basically conservative and Americo-centric value system. The enemy is depicted as “normal” and “human” insofar at they evince American behavior traits, and in the end the American way wins. The plot, at bottom, is a competition in which the “best man wins” – a metanarrative at the very core of the American value system.

Of course, as I hinted above, there are narratives that probe and question and create new values. And even while these also operate more or less along the same lines as the mythic structure that Levi-Strauss analyzes (plots, after all, must reach a “resolution”), the outcome need not be conservative. It can break chains as well as forge them. There are narratives that invite you to discover and learn, just as there are narratives that merely plump up the pillows under the fat asses of couch potatoes. There are narratives that reassure or console, and there are narratives that leave you hanging, or that leave you with questions rather than answers. And while both types make use of similar motifs very often (compare Disney’s Sinbad with Homer’s Odyssey), those motifs or methods as they appear in narratives of discovery may provide us with a key to understanding why narrative pleasure is so powerful and how we might harness it for the purposes of journalistic communication.

I cannot speak for others, though I am curious to know what early narratives grabbed hold of you – for me it was any narrative built on this motif of discovery and escape: James and the Giant Peach, Alice in Wonderland (or Through the Looking Glass), the Narnia tales, the Ring trilogy, The Phantom Tollbooth, many of the Grimm fairy tales (darker than the Hans Christian Andersen set), Exodus, Stuart Little, The Odyssey, and a host of others. I have noticed that my six year old daughter likes to watch Discovery Kids and Dora la exploradora on TV and also that most of the childrens literature I buy for her (or my mother sends on down) generally makes use of the motif of journey and discovery. It may well be the most basic narrative motif of all. And I suspect that its raison d’ être consists in the fact that discovery and intellectual curiosity compose a drive every bit as exigent as the death or sex drive.

Which started me thinking about what we do as journalists and what characterizes the genre in which we work (whether it be imagery or text is immaterial actually). Journalism is historiographic, for example: it seeks to be the paper of record, the evidentiary testimony. Journalism is also educational: it seeks to analyse the meaning of the events it reports. And journalism is certainly didactic; that is, it has a moral function within the culture. It is very much concerned with how we live and with assessing that way of life. In a sense journalism is journey of discovery and enlightenment, an exploration certainly, an adventure. It travels the world in search of meaning. It seeks to make sense of things. So, logically, we must look to journalism to provide us with the same, or some, measure of excitement inherent in narratives of discovery and exploration.

And one of the peculiar features of this type of narrative is its ironical emphasis on getting lost – and found again (like Dorothy repeating the mantra, there is no place like home) – which is more than just a convenient plot device intended to get the story rolling (of course, you have to go down the rabbit hole in order to begin the journey). It is also a state of being that implies as well a state of reading or comprehension which in turn bears consequences for how we think about the process of understanding itself. If we reflect on these principles we may well learn how better to fashion our journalistic narratives in order to tantalize our readers as well as inform them. The importance of loss is that it is a prerequisite to recovering one’s bearings, it constitutes an ideological reorientation. One must shed one’s prejudices and presuppositions in order to prepare to receive real knowledge. It is a twist on the Socratic tradition. The dialectic is designed to refute doxa or “opinion.” Alice is forced, largely through the devices of nonsense literature, to question her assumptions about reality, discard orthodox notions, and reinvent herself. It is an old old trick, best exemplified by Christ’s use of parables in the Gospels. His whole assault on the establishment amounts to confounding the pharisees and their literal understanding of their own history. He challenges them to rethink the meaning of what they do through posing ostensibly impossible conundrums that don’t appear to make sense. Stick a hookah in his mouth, and he is really no different than Alice’s caterpillar. Add an impish smile, and you’ve got a Cheshire cat.

Anyone who has read Proust knows that the “longueurs” induced by his hypnotic and ostensibly rambling sentences were considered by the author to be a strength of his style rather than a debility; that is, the boredom they sometimes induce was intentional because they free your mind, they allow you to drift and daydream and escape control to some extent. The pleasure derived from getting lost in a narrative, from becoming absorbed into it, is the secret of narrative power. It is a wonderful paradox: loss is gain, lost is found, aimless direction is purposeful, and wandering is wisdom. It is the exact opposite of bourgeois thinking – what are you taught in college? Choose a track (major) and stick to it. Attend class, hit the books, keep your eyes on the prize, and follow all the prescribed steps that lead you to the ultimate goal, a well paying job.

OK, let me drop down from the theoretical stratosphere for a moment and plant my feet where every photographer ought to be, right on the ground. Forget literature for a moment. Listen to what Alex Webb has to say about taking pictures:

I only know how to approach a place by walking. For what does a street photographer do but walk and watch and wait and talk, and then watch and wait some more, trying to remain confident that the unexpected, the unknown, or the secret heart of the known awaits just around the corner. And so I began that first morning by walking into crumbling, tattered Port-au-Prince. The roiling, boisterous street scene of hawkers, beggars, and money changers, timeless and familiar, engulfed me. . . . (Introduction, Under a Grudging Sun.)

Engulfment in the experience, walking willy nilly, getting lost and wandering without direction, and all the time waiting to discover, to intuit, to learn – and to keep going. For one of the things that tickles me about that book is the Haitian epigraph that Webb attaches: dèyè morne gainyain morne (beyond the mountains there are more mountains). Which hints not only at the trials and tribulations we face, but the desire that the journey never end, that we continue to traverse the mountains and get lost in them.

Such a different experience from what we find in the newsroom, which is all about deadlines, speed, straight lines connecting A to B to create C. And of course it has to be. But let’s not forget that within that institution there is still some room to maneuver, there is still some time for dawdling and reflection. As Josh Korr of Publish2 reminds us, the choices are not quite so stark. We neednt resign ourselves to a choice between, as he puts it, the “curly fries” of nude Britney content and the limp “broccoli” of intellectually fortifying content; instead we can have that broccoli cooked up with a “crispy Thai chicken . . . and red pepper in chili jam sauce.” While the newspapers may report on the bare bones of a particular event, or worse report on nothing at all and provide mere “filler”, there are magazines like the New Republic, the Atlantic, the Nation, or webzines like Slate, which provide articles with more meat so we can better understand the meaning of that event. And of course, via linkage, the various elements can all be brought together in one place so as to provide a smorgasbord of information rather than a diet of bread and water. Narrative comprehensiveness can be furnished not only by beefing up individual narratives but also by bringing various narratives into relation with one another, in a kind of web mosaic.

That is one solution. People love to click or surf the web. Clicking, linking, is the equivalent of Alice’s little bottle that asks, Drink Me. One slug and you are translated to another realm of being. That potential for discovery, loss, transformation and wonder is kept alive by clicking on links.

What Korr has in mind is certainly a viable possibility and could easily be incorporated into the media’s MO. What I have in mind is something different and less likely to function under institutional direction, but could certainly align itself with institutional initiatives of various sorts via linkage. It is a bit like a pilot fish attaching itself to a great white shark. While the great white commands everyone’s attention, the pilot fish can reap the benefits by riding alongside for a while. If, for example, CNN were to run a story that I was covering too in my own way, then the trick would be to divert some of the visitors of their site over to mine. If established media were to adopt Korr’s suggestions and provide a plethora of links, then it might be possible to negotiate with them and have them directly link to your own. Of course, you can already link from your site to theirs, and getting your own site out there in the public eye is merely a matter of setting up the metadata so as to encourage Google’s creepy crawlies to register the site and push it toward the head of the search list.

That is another solution. But there are also solutions inherent in the forms we choose to present the material we wish to communicate. We need to explore different types of website construction and push html, flash and other softwares to their limits to see what we can come up with in terms of presenting solid material in new ways. The problem with so many news sites and blogs is that they are content to provide the same old tabloid style layout and add in a dash of linkage for seasoning. Instead we should approach the canvas like a mad collagist, break up the old plates and throw ‘em in there too.

Current innovation is largely subsumed under the category of journalism as film, as a cinematic experience. This manifests itself as a variety of multimedia forms that assemble oral history and other soundtrack material along with what are basically slideshows of still images, though occasionally we get a more kinetic result with the addition of video or attempts to move in and around the still imagery a la Burns. The leading exponents of this trend are, of course, MediaStorm and Magnum in Motion, the latter of which has just produced an unusual website that presents the results of Jonas Bendikson’s documentary project on modern slums, the Places We Live .

While I looked over Jonas’s elegant and concise multimedia site, it occurred to me that it performs its function with remarkable facility and style. It is supremely adapted to the viewing habits of browsers too, it flies along without sacrificing any of its gravity, it keeps you riveted but it doesn’t drag, doesn’t overload. It is important, experimentally speaking, because it marks a very deft adaptation of the protocols of journalism to the exigencies of webstreaming and surfing. It also incorporates a certain amount of “play,” a dimension of learning that we cannot afford to overlook when we put these things together. And like any decent experiment, it raises lots of good questions not only about its primary theme but also about the form and its potential, which can stimulate more innovation.

The motif of the closed room at the end of each string that a viewer travels, which allows you to revolve 360 degrees while the inhabitants of the room narrate their stories, is not just an innovative means of presenting oral history, which is one of the vaunted advantages of multimedia presentations, but serves as an interesting metaphor of the project as a whole. Traveling around the site is very much like entering the rabbit hole and ending up in the small room at the end of the tunnel with no way out, until you drink from the little bottle that promises to transform your being, (in this case, your thinking about people who live in the world’s slums).

But despite the packaging, the basic narrative is still very much traditionally journalistic: it moves from a general statistical background to the human interest story at its core. You are given information about a city at the head of each journey, a sort of data-map to accompany the geographic one, and then you meet different families to get their stories, their points of view regarding the conditions under which they are forced to live. And you don’t just hear them – you are right there in the room with them, so there is a virtual reality brought to the encounter that significantly amplifies the experience. This in turn humanizes the story, as they say in the biz, it provides the emotional and rhetorical content that brings life to statistics and forges a connection, a sympathetic rapport between the viewer and the subjects. That connection can be a very powerful tool for change.

But other facets of this fascinating issue – which I happen to believe is one of the most important facing us, that is the issue of development, urbanization, and population displacement – are left out of this engaging picture, so many of its crucial explanatory features are ultimately missing and a complete understanding of this phenomenon is not possible via this site. What is the history of this movement? What are its antecedent features and causes? To what extent and why is this phenomenon a feature of post-colonial societies? Why is this a problem of the Third World, as it appears to be on the site, and not the First World – or is it? (in fact it was, in a somewhat different form – this was a dominant theme of the European 19th century, as a result of industrialization, so in order to understand this phenomenon, we also need to investigate the workings of global capital and development in the past as well as our own time.) What are the consequences of such population movements and concentrations? What are the environmental, economic, political and cultural consequences? Not that any site could achieve such completion or be an encyclopedia unto itself. But these are all questions traditionally subsumed under journalism when it sets about investigating larger themes, they are not outside our conventional framework, so we should not hestitate to broach them.

Therefore, the question arises, at least for speculation’s sake – why shouldn’t we expand our discursive territory even while we expand our aesthetic plane, and thereby provide more and different types of material (information as we say nowadays)? Why shouldn’t we cross boundaries and combine disciplines and create truly polyphonal sites? Why should the idea of giving voice to a multitude of people be limited merely to reproducing oral histories? Why shouldn’t we conceive of the site as a kind of library with an overarching theme, a place where a variety of readers will find a variety of content that not only caters to each one’s need but also seeks to pull it all together, to make sense of it all, to find you while you wander around its many corridors. I don’t think you need sacrifice the elegant concision of a site like Jonas’s in order to provide more information, either. One of the points on the map could conceivably lead the surfer back in time as well as to another place, and provide historical imagery and oral history just as in a Ken or Ric Burns documentary. At the back of the site is a list of pertinent links, and these can be used to direct the viewer to other sites providing historical, sociological, political and economic information.

Will the cinematic model of presentation prevail or will other models supplant it? I suspect that it has a significant future and its potential is yet to be tapped. It is a bit like the Nickelodeons of old, which eventually developed into the greatest of twentieth century art genres. And given that movies still play such a large role in the culture, and all the “reader expectations” as academic theorists like to say, are already in place, it is all too easy to play into that set of expectations and direct them toward the consumption of news material. As software and the ability to stream content across the web improves, thus facilitating easier downloads, the appeal of such presentations will surely grow. The phenomenal popularity of sites like YouTube, which even politicians are now using in order to communicate with the masses, is evidence of the fact that cinematic experience, its kinetic quality, exerts a strong appeal on people and perhaps best defines or satisfies the readerly habits of a 21st century audience. But there is an older model that, for all its dusty associations with the past, also promises great things for the future, not the least of which is the potential for liberating the reader, for providing a truly eclectic content that allows for individual exploration and discovery. I am sure many of you know the movie Seven. In it, the disaffected older detective Somerset spends his nights in a closed library solving crimes by researching through the books on a multitude of subjects. Up on the second floor, the guards play poker and appear to be uninterested in “culture,” but they indulge the detective’s intellectual tastes by playing classical music on the portable stereo. The library accommodates all types.

And this raises a fundamental question facing all of us as we reinvent journalism in the coming years: what exactly is the function of the reporter these days? The old categories don’t seem to have much value in this new and developing context: we are called upon to be more than just photographers, writers, sound recorders, historians, editors, researchers, or computer whizzes. We wear all those hats and others too. Course we don’t want our photographs to get swallowed up in a kind of mental pap suited for the dietary needs of this century’s cyber astronauts. We want our images to stand out, to play their full role. But discursive polyphony need not work to reduce everything to mush; it can work to put things into relief too, and even make them hard to swallow.

And it is not just a matter of whatever particular tool you happen or have to pick up. Snap a shutter, push the record button, put pen to pad, or rearrange some dpi’s – these functions of production are matched by a much more significant demand – that we change our very thinking about what we do and what we ultimately produce.

Several people on a Lightstalkers thread seemed to feel that our practice was no longer a matter of being a mere content provider, that we had to dress up the meal too. Actually I think the analogy is poorly thought out – dressing up a meal is providing content. Granted, you don’t eat the table setting, but you do consume it in another fashion. We are still content providers, very much so, and the danger is that we may allow a love of novel presentation to eclipse the content that is our ultimate raison d’etre. Our job is to provide meaning, and we can ill afford to confuse the means with end.

Exploit and explore new forms of presentation? By all means. Diversify our production in order to tap into different markets – books, websites, exhibitions, lectures? Certainly. But by no means should we ever forget the fact that we are providing knowledge as well as entertainment, and the health of our aesthetic practice depends on a confident grasp of the inherent value of that knowledge. Again I insist that ultimately we are involved in aesthetic production; that is, we work in the realm of perception and understanding. We are narrators, story tellers, so it behooves us to consider very carefully the roots of our practice, recognize its ideological effects, and work toward creating narratives that do more than telegraph information or merely confirm what we already know. We need to pull together the various pieces that our institutions would keep apart. We need to confront a system of disconnection and disembowelment with a strategy of linking and connection, because the effect of this drawing and quartering of our being is none other than the emptying of memory, its adulteration, which leads in turn to our inevitable repetition of a farcical history instead of recreating it – and ourselves in the process. A truly living memory, our authentic history, is born out of just such a painful process, born out of dying, created out of destroying, found when one is lost.

Narrative Pleasure, Digital Journalism, and "Slow News"

2008-11-27T11:41:00.001-04:00

Our journalistic endeavors tend to be dominated by the need to get the material published – that is, we want to get our story out there so that people know that something is wrong (or sometimes right) with the world – and we have historically been limited by the inherent strictures of the established media (considerations of space, editorial agendas as to what stories ought to run and how they should appear stylistically, etc). We can all cite famous examples of good material not getting published or getting published only in a severely truncated form. Marcus Bleasdale’s superb Congo material is a recent example of the hurdles we must jump, since he had such a hard time publishing it although it won some distinguished awards before the fact and partly because of those awards eventually appeared as it ought to have in the pages of several different magazines.

Along comes the web and suddenly we are presented with possibilities for self-publishing that go far beyond the traditional vanity press. And given that POY has recognized web publishing as a legitimate genre worthy of prizes means that self-publishing on the web can escape the stigma of the vanity press as well.

But we are faced with significant problems still. Those of us who work independently – and the web facilitates our independence in many ways – are confronted by problems such as how to assert our presence on the web, how to draw in readers, how to conduct business and ensure that we make enough money to keep working, how to deliver content in an efficient, speedy and sufficiently comprehensive manner, and so on. And in the end, because we are still in the process of a transition that may take years before these new forms of publication, distribution and narrative structure finally gel, we settle for half-assed measures – we end up publishing rudimentary slideshows on rather timid and tepid websites run by the established media, and we receive ridiculously little compensation in return. The amount of work required to put together a good multimedia piece is in no way compensated by editorial rates still based on (1) criteria related to print media, and (2) cost cutbacks stemming from the past and related to past ways of doing business.

So how do we bypass the established media and go directly to the consumer? One question asked by Mike Fox on a Lightstalkers thread about business models for digital journalists is whether or not the web can support our endeavors; that is, will viewers be willing, for example, to pay us directly for our content, perhaps downloading a story, either in pdf format or multimedia, onto their iPhone and viewing it there. As Mike points out, browsing the web is a different procedure from browsing a magazine or newspaper, so viewers of the future can be expected to be more selective, more likely to target specific themes (using a search engine to “alert” them as to new relevant material), and unlikely to review more than a few initial entries on any particular subject list after the search engine does the initial browsing and gathering, so that we have to ensure that our work shows up near the head of such lists. Clearly, this new form of “reading,” these new forms of consumption, present significant challenges to us, and perhaps some opportunities too.

There are two issues confronting us, then. How do we get paid? And how do we deliver content in a manner that guarantees its integrity and its ability to reach as many potential viewers as possible? As to the former, I suspect that new criteria for setting prices will eventually emerge and they will not be based on circulation figures but perhaps on file size, number of images, format, and so on. How we deliver the material concerns me more here, and essentially I would argue that if we manage to deliver it in a way that promotes narrative pleasure, then I think that we can answer affirmatively Mike’s basic question about whether or not consumers would be willing to pay for that content. That is, rather than content being a hindrance to conducting business – as editorial wisdom has it, people wont buy magazines with pix of starvation or death or other such journalistic clichés, presumably because readers suffer from image fatigue or they prefer babble about celebrities – it will in fact become one means of enticing more viewers.

Let’s consider a different genre in order to get a fresh perspective on this issue. Why do we go to the movies? Movies are full of violence and devastating imagery every bit as unsettling as anything a photojournalist can come up with. And viewing them doesn’t necessarily make us happy. We cry as well as laugh at the movies. We grip the edges of our seats, we endure ghastly scenes of torture and mutilation. A few examples: The beach landing in Saving Private Ryan. The abandoned parents in their lonely home at the end of the heartbreaking Tokyo Story. The famous slit eye in Buñuel’s L’Age d’Or. The slow and clumsy killing of the KGB agent in Hitchcock’s Iron Curtain. The murder of peasants in Platoon. The death of Apu’s wife and his subsequent abandonment of the child that resulted from their union in Satyajit Ray’s third film from the incomparable Apu trilogy. The beating to death by bats of Ed Pesci’s character in Casino. The battering that Jake LaMotta receives at the hands of Sugar Ray in Raging Bull.

Almost every one of these is a masterpiece and despite the brutal or heartbreaking content, every one of these compels our attention and evokes praise rather than condemnation. Why?

Narrative pleasure. Let me be quite clear: I am not talking about pleasure in a simple sense, the emotional equivalent of sugar on the tongue. I am talking about a psychological state in which is united intellectual, emotional and physical contentment that is brought about not so much by the specific image or theme but by its existence within a structure that provides order, makes sense, and either creates new values or confirms old ones, thus playing an important ideological role in the culture that ought not to be underestimated.

Narrative pleasure results from structure, not content. Narrative pleasure is the aesthetic version of Plato’s sociopolitical concept of Justice – a place for everything and everything in its place. It derives from elements such as those considered by Aristotle in his Poetics. Unity, for example. The relation of beginning, middle and end. Suspense and its resolution. The relation of form to content – a quick example of what I mean by this last point can be found in the film Vantage Point. Here we are treated to a story about the assassination of a president given a narrative treatment that undoubtedly is meant to recall Rashoman on the one hand and the historical assassination of Kennedy on the other; that is, we are treated to a replay of events seen through the eyes of various players in an ostensible attempt to explore the significance of perspective, truth, and coherence. What philosophers like to call hermeneutical horizons. The film is an utter disappointment because in the end all the narrative perspectivalism, the splitting up of the plot into distinct points of view held by each character, serves no purpose other than to prolong the suspense, and the actual plot is revealed and followed in the most prosaic and straightforward manner during the last segment, so all we get in the end is an exciting chase and nothing whatsoever said about the larger themes. There is ultimately a disjunction between the form and the content.

This is the problem with current methods of telling and distributing our journalistic stories. Our methods are disjunctive, piecemeal, choppy, reductive, and formally inconsequential. We furnish bites and bulletins rather than stories with sufficient body to make it worth our readers’ while to stop and absorb their meaning. We fail to provide meaningful, comprehensive and inventive structure capable of contextualizing the violence and the heartbreak in a way that redeems that content and makes it compelling, rather than just another journalistic cliché – just another skeletal child with flies in its eyes – that either repels or bores the viewer. If we take care to create narratives as compelling as those we flock to see at the cinema, then I see no reason why we cannot count in the future on people to solicit our material, download it, and pay us for it.

A pdf file, for example, could tackle a subject in a number of different ways, if we are willing to take the time to master the software and learn the principles of graphic layout. Take for example what I have tried to achieve on the Gagá page from my Dominican Batey website. If you look that page over, you will see the photos and text laid out in a variety of manner, and in a couple spots I have made use of imagery that in itself is not particularly good but combined in an adequate structure manages to tell the story in what I hope is a compelling fashion (I am referring to the section of photos with young kids running about, caught up in the excitement and sexuality of Gagá, as well as the section on whips). Granted, I may have created overly large files that download rather too slowly, but such things can be easily fixed. The point is, I didn’t ignore the narrative structure; on the contrary, I exploited it as fully as I could in order to present the material so as to elicit interest, certainly, but more importantly present it as a fully thought out story, with poetic as well as analytical elements, so ultimately the narrative model is not that of the typical “news story” but instead something more like a novel, in which one finds subplots, a myriad of characters, and a more eclectic mix of materials.

That latter point, for me, is very important. As I have argued elsewhere, I think the future of journalism on the web ought to be more eclectic, more polyphonic or intertextual, and cross-disciplinary. This means, inevitably, that we all need to expand our skill set, as the current jargon would put it, in order to keep up with changes in the industry and remain employable. I don’t think this means all that much extra effort, though it does beg questions about adequate compensation. However, while LS members have complained recently about the decision of various news organizations to equip their writers with digital cameras so as to cut back on expenses and consolidate the various aspects of news gathering, I have to say that this has been a salutary development as far as my own survival is concerned, since after years of living with lean cows I am finally getting more work precisely because I can provide both textual and visual content – and frankly I thoroughly enjoy playing both roles. Instead of viewing the consequences of digital journalism as a threat to our existence I think we need to identify their advantages and exploit them diligently so as to control to some extent their direction and their impact on us. And also, allow us to discover in ourselves unsuspected talents and resources that might just add to the pleasure of the work we do.

The formal presentation of news hitherto has been dominated by physical structures that are no longer relevant to the forms available to us in the digital age – the left to right, page turning format inherited by magazines from books as well as the fragmented columns and bars layout of newspapers like the Times are relics of the Gutenberg galaxy. Our job in the future is to take up where Gilles Peress and Fred Ritchin left off with their experimental narrative presentation of Bosnia. Our job is to reflect on the nature of html and flash and consider how these might best serve the creation of viable narratives for the next generations, most of whom, even in third world countries where the digital gap impedes consumption of materials from the internet due to the lack of computerization and wide band access to the net, are being schooled sensorially in a whole new mode and whose consciousness must inevitably be altered by this fact.

I am coming to believe, as well, that brevity is not necessarily a virtue and that in fact the web is capable of sustaining a more in-depth, comprehensive and “long-winded” approach to story telling. Sure, browsing and clicking is usually a matter of brief encounters, but I am no longer convinced that this is evidence of a deterioration in reading habits or that the web induces a kind of ADD in its browsers. There is browsing, but there is also genuine research – which after all is where the net originated, in scholarly research and the need for researchers to communicate with one another. One of the responses I got from my first multimedia piece, on Dominican syncretic religious practices, was that I left out this or that sect, that I didn’t explore this or that theme – in short, that I was too cursory and too brief. Some of the viewers were prepared, indeed expected, a more filmlike treatment of the theme, something longer and more satisfying. I explained that given the current limitations of webstreaming I didn’t think I could provide such a structure, though I agreed it would be superior; and I wonder still whether this will eventually be possible, but I am convinced that our survival, our prosperity, depends on our ability to create such narrative structures and improve upon the current means of streaming information across the web.

You may be aware of a movement called “Slow Food” which has arisen in response to the prevalence of fast food outlets globally and the putative unhealthfulness of such food. What I am advocating here is a greater investment of our time and energy in what could be dubbed “slow news” – news presented in greater depth and without strict allegiance to the time worn principles that govern the reporting of “events.” While it bears resemblance to what is usually called documentary, this approach goes beyond the discursive boundaries normally associated with that genre. I am advocating a form of digital reportage based more on the investigatory practices and principles embodied by the scholarly researchers who originally formed the raison d’être for the creation of the internet. Rather than report that a particular event has occurred, we explore its meaning; rather than note its passing, we fix it, we monumentalize it, we expand upon it through a variety of discourses. We assume that news is inherently, as the name suggests, a matter of reporting that which is “new” or current or instantaneous. Digital cameras and new forms of transmission have promoted this aspect of the news gathering industry, since they allow for speedy delivery of content. While this model will certainly continue to dominate the industry, I think that the web allows for an expansion of this other aspect of journalism, the analytic and investigatory branches of the trade. While we are hardpressed to find work on the frontlines of current events, we may well find that new opportunities will arise in this other market and that even the established media, once they figure out how to make the web pay, may eventually invest more money and effort in this area as well, so that a new kind of journalism can thrive and provide us with the means of making a living as well as pursuing what has to be one of the most interesting vocations available to people with a drive to understand the world about them and the curious habits of humankind.

The Independent Journalist in the Digital Age

2008-11-27T11:39:00.003-04:00

Why does one write if not to bring together the pieces? From the moment we enter school or the church, our education draws and quarters us: it teaches us to divorce body and soul, reason and heart.

Wise doctors of Ethics and Morals ought to fish the shores of Colombia, where they invented the word "sentipensante" to define the language that truth speaks.
Eduardo Galeano, El Libro de los Abrazos (my translation).

I recently read a thoroughly depressing article on the state of the media – depressing largely for its execrable jargon (derived from the pseudo-analytic concepts of Mad Ave marketing), its paucity of ideas, and its blithe ignorance of the true mission of journalism. Nowhere in the article was there any hint of the idea that journalists might be pursuing their sometimes hazardous and often ill compensated careers because they are called to it. It is a vocation.

This article (http://www.journalism.co.uk/2/articles/532538.php), which presents the Guardian’s Digital Director, Emily Bell’s assessment of the economic disaster facing the media, was full of dire predictions (“The western media is on the brink of 'two years of carnage',” ) and Adspeak: the papers and TV news programs for example are referred to as “brands”. Nonetheless she points out rightly that the challenge for the established media is “getting the success of traditional, offline revenues to move online.” Certainly, as we all move online, the issue of how to make the web pay is paramount, particularly for those of us who work independently, since pay scales have not kept up with the costs of production and we are not receiving a guaranteed salary, so expenses are not always covered and day rates are disappearing.

The problem is that an exclusive focus on the marketing aspects of this transition, without reference to the other facets that will also determine significant changes in the form and content of future journalism, is unlikely to serve all us who endeavor to protect our independence and promulgate a higher form of journalism. Instead, journalism will continue down the path it chose back in the early 80s, when it decided to market itself as a branch of entertainment. Of course this does not mean that news should not “entertain” its audience, so long as we understand that entertainment to be of a serious variety, equal to the pleasure that one derives from reading a great novel, for example; but the goal of informing, of educating, of truth telling should never be subordinated to the goals of marketing, because that will inevitably result in an adulteration of content. Witness Emily Bell’s conclusions and consider how her perspective enjoins this rather superficial vision of web journalism:

“The traditional news media are failing to produce 'differentiated' content online amongst a 'hurricane of knowledge and publishing' caused by the growth self-publishing online, such as blogging, she added.” Aside from the fact that the phrase “differentiated content” is a calculated bit of stilted diction designed to dress up a rather vulgar concept of interactive communication between reporter and reader, there is also a gross overvaluation of web content and the phenomenon of blogging – with the patent suggestion that journalism should adopt blogging as a model of effective (read: profitable) communication. This viewpoint leads Bell to conclude rather facilely that “outlets should move away from the editorial models of the 'age of representation', where news organisations published what they thought readers should know, . . . to an age of participation and a better understanding of who the audience is.” The use of academic theoretical jargon again dresses up what is really an elementary argument with certain hidden and, it seems to me, pernicious assumptions. One of the implications intended to sway the reader is the characterization of editorial practice in the “age of representation” as authoritarian, in contrast to a putatively more democratic editorial practice in an “age of participation,” based in a “better understanding” of the audience. But of what does this better understanding consist? Frankly, I suspect that rather than serve the best interests of the audience, if we take that to mean their education, this slippery phrase covers up an intention to manipulate the readership in order to profit from their “participation” in the production of “differentiated content.” In other words, it is just bread and circuses to divert rather than educate the readership; and what is more, this entirely cynical approach to marketing news is based on a false aggrandizement of the reader’s ego, since the reader is invited to weigh in on the issues, and thus derive satisfaction from having had his or her opinion solicited. It seems to me that Bell’s vision is nothing more than journalistic demagoguery.

Bell concludes, “Journalists should be actively encouraged to see news as a conversation.” Again, it might seem a laudable concept – conversation, or dialogue, presumably being superior to lecturing – but what are the consequences for journalism if what results from this conversation is nothing more than the kind of blab one generally gets from blogging? To be fair to Bell, her version of this “conversation” is not intended to be quite so degraded, but despite the example she gives (http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/robertpeston/ ), it is not at all clear just how this conversational paradigm will significantly improve journalism.

I can only hope that whatever looms on the horizon will not be so debauched as to succumb to the cheap blandishments of web entertainment. Unfortunately, judging from the superficial character of this article and its very poor writing, it would seem that the model for journalistic communication via the web is still tied to, if not to say straitjacketed by, the prevailing habit of “browsing” content instead of analyzing it, and “text messaging” instead of thoughtful composition. Instantaneity and brevity rule the day; but what we want is a more expansive journalism, a more eclectic approach, and a more innovative use of materials. Again editors will argue, as they did in defense of the switch to infotainment, that instantaneity and brevity are what the people want, that the readers’ mode of consumption is already established and the media must follow suit if readers are to be placated and “circulation” is to grow – but we are still in the infancy of the digital revolution at the beginning of the Information Age, so we can hardly characterize reader habits as yet as though they were cast in stone. Books are online, whole newspapers are online – these and other such forms require readerly habits of a more deliberate and slow paced nature, and undoubtedly as more and more people download them, more such people will be induced to adapt their style of reading.

As I reflected on this article I began to speculate on the form or forms that journalism might take in the coming years, and what this all means for those of us who remain independent contractors. Here are some of the possibilities:

1. Television probably wont change all that much, since the means of production are not easily appropriated by an independent contractor. Given the high cost and complexity of the means whereby televised imagery and sound are transmitted, an individual can gain access only by working with the established media – that is, large corporations able to purchase and maintain the necessary resources. You can sell them your video, but you cannot so easily appropriate the means of production and create your own tv studio (though as more tv moves online, perhaps independent tv stations will proliferate). And even if you could, you still have to buy time on the air, and that is exceedingly expensive.

2. Print journalism on the other hand is wide open to appropriation by independent producers, since all one needs is a laptop, a camera, some software and other such tools that are readily available to the average consumer. Buying air time requires nothing more than paying a webhost, and that is a negligible expense. Thus, the means of production, per se, are not an obstacle to the independent producer; instead, compensation becomes the central issue.

3. If more and more of us strike out independently, will established media outlets be forced to operate more like a photo agency? Will the economics of the web oblige them to work more with “stringers” who are on site – “embedded” in the best sense – and thus cheaper and faster and savvier than the globetrotter? This seems to be the trend, though magazines for example presently find it more useful to buy imagery from the wires. But I could foresee a time when photo desks will have rolodexes filled with the contact data for independent contractors at various locations. In fact, they already do, but they still rely on agencies to find them the reporter on the spot. As agencies continue to weaken, editors will be forced to do more of the legwork.

4. Lamentably, certain factors will contribute to a decrease or depression in wages: The proliferation of independent contractors who are not unionized or protected by an agency, which means we are all disunited and easily played off against one another; the fact that media outlets will have no obligation to pay insurance or other benefits to these contractors, who are not employees of the company; low cost of imagery available from the wires, which will put competitive pressure on the independents to keep their own prices low; restrictive or nonexistent expense accounts; continuing pressure to produce stories quickly, instead of allowing for genuine investigation and substantive analysis; and the continuing uncertainty regarding how to make the web pay.

5. The low wages and the reliance on foreign stringers might boost employment of photographers in developing nations, while making it harder for photographers in developed nations to make a living.

6. Technological development along with economic necessity will probably force us to wear more hats: the reporter of the future will unify in his or her practice various activities that hitherto were the exclusive domain of the photographer, the writer or the soundman. While I welcome this development, since it allows me to fulfill all my creative urges and gives me a bit more control over the content, I also deplore certain consequences: more work for less money, plus the almost impossible task of shooting imagery, recording sound, and writing up material all at the same time. Moreover, I have come to suspect that the current rage for multimedia presentations, at least in the form they are produced presently, which except for a couple standouts, is a rather timid affair, is a lamentable pandering to the lowest type of entertainment, not even a circus but a sideshow with a few crumbs of bread.

It seems to me that we are met at an interesting crossroads: while the possibility for independent endeavor is perhaps greater than ever before, given the current technological environment, the individual is also much weaker, beset by uncertainties in the economic environment, the political environment (including the demise of agencies, the lack of institutions, like unions, to protect our interests, etc), and what I consider the ideological environment, in which is formed the concepts and values that govern our practice and give us social standing – in a word, respect. As to this latter, again, current technology is a two-edged sword: it places editorial power in our hands to the extent that we can edit material more easily before submitting it, it gives us more control over our output, but it also “democratizes” photography to the point that editors feel they can stuff a point and shoot in the pocket of a writer and send one person out to cover the story instead of two. The photo, rather than a revelation, is more than ever a mere illustration, an adjunct to the article, a bit of color, a graphic accent intended to vary the page layout, nothing more. As a result, we are dispensable – our function can be assimilated by others. The idea that a photo is a quality statement with its own peculiar expressive power is eclipsed by the virtues of digital on which editors depend: its instantaneity, speed and ease of transmission and handling, its convenience. Lip service is paid to the photographer’s eye, saliva is spilt over talk of exciting imagery, but in the end the ruling factors remain logistical rather than aesthetic (and by aesthetic I mean the principal means whereby we apprehend experience and make sense of it). As such a photo becomes just another mass produced, anonymous, undistinguished utilitarian object. Adornment. It loses its power to surprise, to disrupt, to unsettle (though not to offend), and to perplex. It conforms, in the words of Roland Barthes, to the “civilized code of perfect illusions”; it behaves itself like a good bourgeois in good company. A sad fate, if you ask me.

I would rather drink absinthe and die in a drafty attic.

Digital Journalism and Independent Reporting

2008-07-03T16:21:00.002-04:00

It is clear we are living through a period of a possibly radical transformation of mass communication; it is not clear just yet what it all means. . . . It may be a mere expansion of the Gutenberg Galaxy, or an entirely new paradigm on the horizon. Aside from a shift to new materials, new (and costly) tools that are geared ever more closely to the capitalist cycle of planned obsolescence and periodic upgrading, there is a concomitant – and to me much more significant – shift to new means of reaching people, means which promise distinct advantages: broader distribution, longer “shelf-life,” richer discursive content, escape from editorial and ideological agendas imposed by the habits and methods inherent in traditional media establishments, greater control over one’s work, and greater facility working as independent freelancers. The fact is, or so it seems to me, that it is easier these days to dispense with the support (as well as constraints) to be had by working under contract with a paper, a magazine, or an agency, though we all seem to fret as much as ever over the hope that someday we might get a plum post, and the insecurity of freelancing certainly warrants a bit of fretting. It costs money to cover a story, particularly if it requires travel and a long-term commitment to its gradual unfolding, and who is going to pay the bills? Are we to be stuck reluctantly to the usual arrangement controlling the financial end of our business, or can we explore new ways to fund our activity?

One of the signs that we are undergoing great change, and fighting the anxiety that goes with such change, is the constant stream of threads about new software, new cameras, new equipment of every sort. While it mostly bores me, I admit I see its relevance – we need to assess our tools after all – but instead of the usual shoptalk that characterizes most forums, we should be exploring the themes, perhaps more abstract but also more important, that bode for our futures as communicators. Where do our priorities lie? Are we mere consumers (oh, should I get the D300, the D700, the DP-1, the D-this or D-that)? Or are we producers? If the latter, then it seems to me that the questions we should be discussing here ought to be more along the lines of, “what stories should I be telling and how should I tell them?” What new narrative forms are capable of being developed and how might those forms affect consciousness? To what extent do new forms like multimedia slideshows help us to accomplish our goals, tell better stories, or, as some messiahs promise, free everyone from the power relations that obtain in traditional narratives? How might we make use of software like Flash to create different kinds of narratives, or like Omeka to encourage our “subjects” to become authors themselves and interact with our narrative machines according to their wont? What are the implications of narrative experiments such as Ritchin and Peress’s Bosnia site? Is multimedia the only formal innovation available to us, or does the New Journalism depend on a wholesale reevaluation of our activity and an embracing of all sorts of formal practices that hitherto we either discounted or were unavailable to us?

Which brings me to consider whether in fact we should define ourselves merely as photographers – perhaps it is better to call ourselves storytellers, narrators, essayists, anything that allows us to escape the restrictions that the establishment would otherwise impose upon us the moment we assume the title “photojournalist.” And this means as well that we should consider making use of all the tools available to us: in addition to mastering the various software that run our computers, cameras, filing and editing systems, we should master html, Flash, moving film technique – and of course, language. Text. Writing. Why should a reporter limit him or herself to the journalistic clichés of the past (the five W’s and so on), when literature, history, anthropology, sociology and other discourses can be of so much help in filling out the dimensions of a big story? And who says a photographer cannot also be a great writer? I can list many.

You see, I think we are chasing red herrings when we limit ourselves to discussions of multimedia slideshows and soundtracks when in fact the potential for new communicational practices is really much greater than we realize and involves not so much the creation or implementation of new technological forms but a reassessment of older forms of communication along with their integration into the new media. That is, a simple thing like a website offers us unsuspected expressive power if we take the time to reflect on its properties and the new horizons it creates by its very nature. Not just images but words in this context take on a new life, because the structure allows for greater eclecticism and different kinds of linkages which potentially can transform narrative consciousness.

Take as an example the work I am doing on the Dominican batey website: while much has yet to be done (and there will of course be multimedia slideshows along with some recorded oral history), the real point there is that a new way of telling a story can be conjured out of materials that have always been with us – mere images and words – but combined in new ways that allow for a richer discursive experience, a multidimensional semiotic environment that frees up metaphor and restores conceptual “play” to our investigatory machinery – at one moment I am a reporter and at another a philosopher and at another a historian, but each role is played janus-faced and it is not clear where one begins and another ends. We are said to be living in the Postmodern age, a basic tenet of which is that rigid or pure categories are no longer sacrosanct nor manifest channels of truth; rather, collage, pastiche, metaphoric play and eclecticism are the order of being and meaning. Miscegenation. In a kingdom of mongrels, the bastard shall be king. If we are to survive, perhaps even thrive, then it behooves us to embrace this eclecticism and cease to think in the narrow terms that defined our practices in the heyday of magazine journalism (because despite all this talk of slideshows and soundtracks we still behave pretty much like the photojournalists of old). The model of career professionalism that prevails currently, perhaps best embodied by Nachtwey, is not necessarily the model we should be cultivating, as it is not really available to all of us, despite the fact that our universities now specialize in turning out photojournalists along just these lines. Sorry, Time and Newsweek have only so many contract positions, so most of us are forced into some kind of freelance position, which, if we take stock of the situation intelligently, might offer us possibilities for freer action and more valid work instead of being company hacks. What appears to be a stumbling block may in fact be the very thing to break our chains. But we need to be a little more enterprising, a little more imaginative, a little more gonzo.

One thing is sure: new media offer us the promise of once again becoming significant communicators, like the photo-essayists of the forties and fifties, instead of mere one shot illustrators of stories conceived, written and vetted by others. Instead of getting by as an afterthought in the trade, we could instead author our own existence, engineer our own agendas, and become truly independent contractors.

One of the ironies of our current situation is that we are enticed by formal possibilities that can free us, while we are stymied by financial obstacles, such as the fact that we still rely on the media establishment to pay us – or else who can fund our projects? So the task ahead lies in defining the models that might serve to keep our efforts alive if we decide to work independently of the establishment. So far, lamentably, I can think of only a couple workable but admittedly insufficient models: first of all, that embodied by Salgado, who manages to work independently by taking on commercial assignments that subsidize his documentary work. He also parcels out his documentary work to different publishers, breaking up larger projects into little smaller stories and shopping them off to different global regions. His ability to work in this way arose out of the fame that ensued upon publishing his early work (Serra Pelada, Other Americas) and some lucky strokes (such as being present at the attempted assassination of Reagan). Nonetheless it remains a viable model for the rest of us. The second model is that espoused by Luc de la Haye, who once argued that he didn’t need the support of the media establishment to continue his work so long as he had access to grant money or funds from think tanks and other such organizations. This is the model I have followed, largely because I am a product of America’s graduate school system, in which students survive by applying for grants, so I am just following my habitual MO. Nonetheless, this model too is available to others, though it is limited by the fact that there are few grantors and competition is fierce. However, most of us think solely in terms of the usual photographic organs instead of expanding our grant research beyond the precincts of our profession, and once one decides to look elsewhere, the number of possible grant sources increases encouragingly. All kinds of institutions offer grants, and many of them on the basis of criteria that have nothing to do with photography per se, but instead reward applicants on the basis of their ethnic or gender affiliations, their thematic concerns, their geographic location, or their innovative approach to journalism, among many other criteria.

These models are not, in the end, what we need to focus on in terms of fashioning satisfactory financial arrangements for the future, but the eclecticism they represent may provide clues as to how to proceed. I cannot really say, and I remain, as a result, a very poor man. On the other hand, I am slowly developing a body of work that I can call completely my own, conceived and executed according to my own lights, and whatever its faults, it is original, at least in the sense that it all originates with me. I work for myself, and that is really what it means to be independent. Course, I might be better off financially if I didn’t have a taste for the finer things in life (like a good bottle of Malbec from time to time); but high living and low funds have been features of our profession ever since Capa, so there’s nothing surprising there, and one must learn to live with the consequences of one’s decisions. This does not mean that one should just be content to live with less, nothing of the sort. On the contrary, I think we all need to focus on ways in which we can turn our special talents into a reliable means of earning a living and demand from the market (which can clearly benefit from our contribution, perhaps now more than ever) reasonable compensation for our labors. So rather than expend so much energy on discussing and evaluating the newest software and equipment, we might be better off discussing ways of making money instead of spending it.

The tools are just tools, but they threaten to become fetishes if we overvalue them. The thing that counts is your vision, which, if it is sufficiently vital, will achieve its inevitable form regardless of whether or not you own the biggest, best, newest thingamajig on the market – the real point is to protect that vision, to ward off the mediocrity and stultification that results from the standardization of our tools and unthinking conformity to the dictates of institutions built out of the boneyard of yesterday’s thinking.

Photography in the Age of Digital Reproduction

2008-01-19T10:11:00.001-04:00

(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

2007-06-14T18:54:00.001-04:00

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

2007-06-06T07:26:00.001-04:00

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

2007-05-15T10:44:00.000-04:00

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

2007-04-23T10:36:00.001-04:00

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

2007-04-15T09:24:00.000-04:00

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

2007-03-14T08:31:00.000-04:00

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.

Travelling with Tewfic

2007-03-10T10:04:00.000-04:00

"le film, c'est le traveling." Jean-luc Godard.

Being that it is Saturday, but I have been somewhat remiss in posting on this log over the past weeks, I feel that I ought to post something, but will let up on the heavy duty commentary! Saturdays have special significance for me, because those were days when my father would pack us up in the car and explore New York, travelling into its numerous subcultures guided by my his inconsumable interest in its many eccentric characters. That love of exploration deeply impressed me and pretty much accounts for why I find myself doing what it is I do.

So I thought it would be nice to commemorate the day with a nod toward the concept of travel, in its best sense, and bring to your attention one of the most enjoyable web logs that I have come across recently and which I regularly consult.

Tewfic El-Sawy's The Travel Photographer is a great example not only of a thoroughly engaging and enjoyable blog, but also of the very concept of travel -- not so much as a genre of photography, which in a sense provides merely the context for Tewfic's musings, but more as a general approach to writing, thinking, and living. Because through the medium of Tewfic's wideranging interest, his generous appreciation of his fellow travelers, his love of the endless variety of human life and culture, as well as his indefatigable energy, we are treated to a spectacle of global cultural expression that I find as nourishing as my daily breakfast and a lot tastier than Special K.

Travel photography is sometimes criticized for its being an adjunct of consumer culture, and I must admit that to the extent that it serves the tourist industry, it is an egregious and problematic genre; I live in a place that simultaneously benefits from and is inevitably damaged by tourism, so I am naturally ambivalent about its virtues. But Tewfic's take on travel is of a different nature altogether: he is not after cinematic adventure; exoticism is irrelevant, and the merely picturesque, the mainstay of many a travel rag, has no hold on his imagination. He is after something more modest and more profound -- human communication, pure and simple. Connecting with others and exploring their world views.

In the past week I have travelled with Tewfic to Turkey through the lens of the great Nuri Bilge Ceylan; to Afghanistan with Veronique de Viguerie; to Kashmir wth John Isaac; to India with Steve McCurry; to Havana with David Alan Harvey; as well as to the Kumbh Mela through Tewfic's own steady lens -- all without leaving the sheltering sky above me. It has been an exhilirating ride -- not for the distances covered but for the distances closed, the connections made, the communication effected. In the end, travel is a deeply personal and intellectual process whereby the enlightened reader -- and after all, seeing the world is a kind of reading, a perpetual search for signs and a puzzling over their meaning -- is compelled to test the limits of one's understanding, and the extent to which one manages to push away the comfortable envelope of our assumptions that cocoon our perceptions may well be the governing criterion separating the traveler from the mere tourist. Tewfic is decidedly working on behalf of the former.

I could go on, but let Tewfic be your guide from here on, as few people have ever been issued their credentials to better purpose.

Milton Rogovin

2007-03-08T08:47:00.000-04:00

1973

1985

1992

©Milton Rogovin, from Triptychs, 1972-1994

One of the best portraitists of our times, Milton Rogovin, has received the Cornell Capa Award and I thought I would just make mention of it here, though both Jim Johnson and Alec Soth have commented on this remarkable photographer whose simple, direct gaze has furnished some of the most powerful portraits of our time. His simplicity is the key to his vision and the enduring interest of his work. While I agree that his focus on "the forgotten ones" is something that distinguishes his imagery and certainly has served as an important guiding theme, I do not believe that we can define the value of this remarkable body of work solely in terms of his abiding interest in the common man.

One of my favorite books of his is in fact Triptych, a marvelous journey through time and space. It is a very strictly defined time and space, too, perfectly in keeping with the highly detailed and specific nature of the gaze he turns on people. This is Buffalo's Lower West Side, over a period of three consecutive decades. Photography by its very nature is a meditation on evanescence, on passing -- we photograph what is there for a split second and gone. The trace that remains on our negatives or our sensors forms a curious record of reality, since it testifies unequivocally to the momentary presence of that particular set of objects in time and space, and yet is itself a chimerical imposture conjured up out of a multitude of compositional elements that ultimately form the photographer's perspective. A portraitist like Rogovin keeps his intervention to a minimum, and there is no doubt that he must think of himself as one who hews to an objective viewpoint--no postmodern irony here regarding the nature of representation. The concept underlying Rogovin's relation to his subjects is more naive but no less profound, because it yields perhaps one of the most intimate and human portrayals of the passing of time that I know of. A terser, more poetic look at The Ages of Man would be hard to find.

It is interesting to compare Rogovin with his predecessors, particularly someone like August Sander. While Sander was interested in a kind of typology of his society (and it is important to note in passing that his photographic genius saved his work from being a mere catalogue of social types), Rogovin is clearly interested in the individuality of his subjects, their inexorable quiddity, and this little trip through three decades of Buffalo time provides ample evidence of the inexhaustible curiosity and sympathy Rogovin bears for each of his subjects. Each triptych, in its way, is unique. One would think that such a rigid formula would vitiate the effect of the portraits and create a monotonous rhythm, but I can find no lapse of interest or energy in the series.

One of Rogovin's virtues is that he brings us back to a very simple truth, that the simple act of looking squarely at something can yield profound pleasure and understanding, that taking the time to actually look instead of peruse or scan as we are wont to do is in the end the essence of photographic revelation. Our Kodak moments are lacking not so much because they are artless but because they are thoughtless, the product of a reflex snap of the shutter. Instantaneity is not necessarily an advantage: thought comes dripping slow, and the photographer is caught between two very different rhythms whenever he or she lifts the camera to the eye. The accumulated weight of culture and history and temperament presses against the flimsy shutter with inexorable desire, while the lure of quick gratification -- the lynchpin of our consumer culture -- has induced in us dismayingly itchy trigger fingers. Snapping is at once so facile and so fraught with conflict and possibility. Salman Rushdie once observed that a snap was a moral decision taken in an eighth of a second. The decision only appears split-second; but it, like the moral it captures, is, or ought to be, the fruit of history, of reflection, of deliberate cultivation, perennial and persistent like the olives of centuries old trees. Rogovin's patient and painstaking collection of humanity in the coils of circumstance is a testament to the power of dwelling in this contemplative attitude, wherein the blink of the shutter is an almost unconscious or natural consequence of a profound intuitive grasp of the momentousness of the mundane.

The Unblooded

2007-02-26T12:11:00.001-04:00

"One thing that Wall knew for certain when he took up the profession in the late 1970s is that he would not become a photojournalistic hunter." Arthur Lubow

The NY Times Sunday Magazine has published a piece about Jeff Wall’s work on the occasion of his new show at MOMA, and the article provoked some commentary on Lightstalkers which I found intriguing. In yet another variant on the by now rather tiresome Postmodern obsession with the tenets of Representation, Wall adopts the vocabulary of street photography to render semblances of American life in elaborately constructed tableaux. Although diametrically opposed to the kind of photography that I myself practice and write about here, Wall’s thinking, cogently set out in the article, not only intrigued me enough to study the photographs, but after such study obliged me to reflect on the curious and almost complete disappearance of genuine street photography from the canons of the Art World. Mainstream critics routinely write about Wall and other stars, but rarely if ever deign to consider the incredibly rich traditions of documentary and photojournalism where the street photography esthetic still reigns. I find this a singular failure of imagination on the part of our critics, but one that doesn’t surprise me given the tenacious hold that Poststructuralist theory has on American Academe and the Art world.

Though it is a bit like comparing apples and oranges, I think I can clarify my beef with the currently entrenched thinking about meaningful photography by providing a simple comparison of certain images that share specific figural motifs. With all due respect to Wall and his meticulous work, the comparisons are not meant to critique his specfic thematic concerns, so I admit that he and his admirers may well find the point I wish to make rather specious, but I ask for a little forebearance as I attempt to introduce a caveat. Here are the images:

Jeff Wall/Museum of ModernArt

Eugene Richards/VII

Jeff Wall/Museum of Modern Art

Larry Towell/Magnum

Jeff Wall/Museum of Modern Art

Jon Anderson/Dark Horse Images

In each case it seems to me that the hunted image as opposed to the contrived image presents the more complex narrative and is richer in meaning, more open and more mysterious. The elaboration that is a hallmark of Wall's work, which you can plainly see in the third image, "After 'Invisible Man' by Ralph Ellison, the Prologue," is often singled out for praise, as Arthur Lubow observes: "Like a commercial light box, a Wall photograph grabbed you with its glowing presence, but then, unlike an advertisement, it held your gaze with the richness of its detail and the harmony of its arrangement. You could study it with the attention you devoted to a Flemish altarpiece in a church, and you could surrender yourself to its spell as if you were in a movie theater." The mix of metaphor is revealing: on the one hand, Old World harmony and detail signifying high seriousness; on the other, modern packaging of a spellbinding "experience" in a form commensurate with mass media. It would seem almost too calculated but for the fact that Wall undoubtedly is aware of the ironies and seeks to explore them. However, the ironies stem from the method and thus are as hidebound as the rest of this ultimately claustrophobic exercise in self-referentiality. One can get lost in the magnitude and detail of a Wall, but the experience seems something of a ruse in the end.

At one point in the article Wall is quoted as saying, "I couldn’t get into ’60s art photography — Friedlander, Arbus and Winogrand and Stephen Shore,” Wall says. “These guys were in a photo ghetto. They were into their own world, with photo galleries and their own photo books." What is one to make of such a statement? These shooters, whose fanatical engagement with the world around them managed to cement life and art perhaps as no other American artists ever had and eventually create a mass audience for their work, can hardly be said to have ghettoized themselves in any form prejudicial to the import of their work. One is left to wonder whether the pomp and circumstance of a Wall installation is in any way a guarantee that Art has escaped the ghetto or merely tricked out the pad with a bit of day glow and UV.

In any case, I am left wondering when the critics will rediscover the tradition that Szarkowski championed, a tradition whose reliance on the flux of life virtually guarantees its unending interest. Lubow writes, "what appeal was there in a genre whose practitioners seemed to have already taken their best shots?" Yet each so very different and consistently full of surprise, I can hardly believe that one could conclude the genre was tapped out. The issue, in my view, is ultimately one of control: does one allow the object world a hand in matters and thus allow for surprises, for discovery; or does one retreat to the chamber of one's solipsism and fashion homunculi after one's own image?

Back from Vac

2007-02-09T13:00:00.000-04:00

well not exactly. My blogging has been unceremoniously interrupted by the advent of a particularly nasty tropical bug, so I have been taking a break from my usual endeavors. That will change shortly with the publication here of more musings. Hold tight folks and thanks for checking in.

El sentido de la vida es cruzar las fronteras

2007-01-23T21:10:00.001-04:00

This is not about a photographer or photography, exactly. The renowned journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski has crossed the last frontier and I felt compelled to take note of his passing here. For a great interview about the significance of his work, and in particular the meaning of crossing frontiers, one ought to read this piece from El País. It is for Spanish speakers, but maybe you can babelfish it.

In some ways Kapuscinski is an apt companion for those of us who travel with lenses instead of pens. His essayistic portrayal of the world is very much in tune with our own methods of capturing life on the run: like Montaigne he was an essayist through and through, a man who tested, probed, explored contradictions and was happiest when he hit upon the trenchant ironies that after all are the only satisfactory truths that life offers us. He had a novelist's eye for character and detail, a flair for storytelling, and a healthy love of humanity despite a clear-eyed view of its foibles.

When I look back on what has led me to this particular point in life, I find that essayists have had a huge influence on me. First there was Joseph Mitchell, whose portraits of New York -- a New York that still existed in tattered form when i was a child -- compelled my father to collect us kids together and go on Mitchellesque explorations around town. The love of exploration, of meeting different people and learning about their lives was instilled in me by those magical outings. I am not the only photographer influenced by this writer: Diane Arbus's early forays into the eccentric followed directly in his path. Then came Montaigne in my college years, who introduced me to the pleasures of traveling conceptually through ideas in a similarly picaresque mode.

For Kapuscinski this idea of crossing borders is the essence of his endeavor. As El País points out, "Hay otras barreras que también es necesario saltar: la de la cultura, la de la familia, la del idioma, la del amor... "Mi vida ha sido un cruzar constante de fronteras, tanto físicas como metafísicas. Ése es para mí el verdadero sentido de la vida." One must constantly cross all types of barriers -- cultural barriers, linguistic barriers, and family barriers as well as national borders, class lines, and so on. Perhaps it is the inevitable effect of our being outsiders to the places we visit that we should find our most fruitful interrogations undertaken from this vantage point of transit rather than rootedness, but the perspective that derives from being in between and on the edge is somehow the most sane we can adopt. However that may be, it requires a nimble wit, and Kapuscinski had it in spades.

"Caminante, son tus huellas el camino."

A Beach, a Book and Modern Photography

2007-01-19T07:31:00.000-04:00

Two shows have opened at the International Center of Photography that, were I presently in New York, I would jump at the chance to see. The two poles defining modernist thinking about photography can now be seen side by side: First off, Martin Munckasi, whose remarkable image of boys playing in the surf apparently inspired Henri Cartier Bresson to take up the camera because it showed him in a flash its potential for capturing stolen moments on the run, is being given an entire show of his kinetic and sometimes oddly framed compositions (odd for their time perhaps).

According to Michael Kimmelman who did the write up in the Times, Munckasi "favored scenes of daily life, absorbing avant-garde ideas about odd angles and abstract compositions. His sports photographs epitomized his special gift for action and movement: capturing a soccer ball just as it neared a goalie’s outstretched hands or a motorcyclist at the instant he splashed through a pool of water.” It would appear that this impulse in Munckasi's work led Henri Cartier Bresson to recognize that "the world is movement, and you cannot be stationary in your attitude toward something that is moving." Sadly this celebrant of women and joie de vivre, of speed and energy, ended up destitute, immobilized by circumstance, and died in his apartment while eating out of a cold can of spaghetti. I cannot think of a more ironic or cruel end for a man who, like other Europeans flooding into Hollywood and bringing us the archetypal modern art form, the cinema, represents the modernist fascination with motion -- in essence they made it possible for us to see two dimensional reality in new ways, because the motion inevitably leads to skewed perspectives if you follow where it leads. Academic notions of spatial propriety were trounced by a bunch of scruffy immigrants off the boat.

The other pole is represented by HCB, whose own esthetic becomes much clearer to me now in light of the comparison between these two photographers. The beach shot ignited him: “I must say that it is that very photograph which was for me the spark that set fire to fireworks,” he recalled years later. “I couldn’t believe such a thing could be caught with the camera. I said, ‘Damn it,’ took my camera and went out into the street.” What in fact happened was that HCB took off on a photographic journey that would eventually lead to great things, Magnum among them. But the means of his journey is what particularly interests me because it is so typically reserved: he travelled and created a scrapbook of his imagery spanning the years 1932 to 1946. It is this scrapbook that the show at ICP concentrates on. How like HCB to work in this manner. While Munckasi set out to conquer the fashion world and magazines in the land of opportunity, HCB quietly travelled and surreptitiously lifted oddly complex images out of the streets at home and abroad -- but his was an entirely private endeavor the results of which he pasted secretly into his scrapbook. The kodak family album was transformed into a documentary format that managed to define the modern world not only through its broad ranging content but also through its powerful organization of form which tied esthetic ideas from the world of painting to a livelier sense of the flux of life. In a sense, too, and I say this without facetiousness, HCB was a blogger, patiently recording and logging the serendipitous moments that caught his eye -- private moments of no particular import, certainly not newsworthy. (Even when, subsequently, HCB would turn up at an event to document it, he seemed almost perversely determined not to record it as such, but instead always chose to focus on the peripheral, the inconsequential. He would never have survived at a paper.)

I can see much more clearly now the significance of this famous photograph of the bicycle whizzing past a complex arrangement of perspective and form: it is about trapping that fleet moment, that evanescent event, within a rigorous formal structure whose effect is multiplied with every added line and shape. That tension is present in many of HCB's photographs, and ultimately it is what makes him the more interesting of the two photographers. Alongside the love of materiality's inevitable ghosting, there is a contrary impulse, a need to fix things in place, to render an supremely convincing illusion of their solidity.

"Of all the means of expression, photography is the only one that fixes forever the precise and transitory instant. We photographers deal in things that are continually vanishing."

Announcements

2007-01-13T09:40:00.000-04:00

First off, a quick announcement about another weblog, "More a Question than a Reply," which I am in the process of setting up. I am collecting there all my journalistic essays on various cultural and social matters I encounter on my travels. As I find the time and energy I will use it to explore the combination of imagery and text in order to play with different narrative structures. A little bit of Joseph Mitchell, a dash of Ryscard Kapuscinski, and a healthy dose of documentary photography. At present there are a few essays in Spanish as well which discuss the history of the colonial city of Santo Domingo, the sugar plantations, and a bawdy tale of bestiality. One of my favorite pieces, "Death of a Patriarch," about burying our great grandfather, has been dusted up and posted anew. One or two of the Spanish language essays have yet to be translated. I will eventually be posting essays on the public transport system in St. Domingo (sounds dull, but it is one of my best), the sex trade, some recent assignment work, and pieces about India, Brazil and other countries.

Second thing to note, John Loomis's Blueeyes Magazine has just published its newest issue, number 14, featuring Matt Black's poetic documentation of life in Mixteca.

Click and Flick: Storytelling on the Web

2007-01-12T17:12:00.001-04:00

The recent discussion of Robt Hood and Ed Kashi’s Flipbook film on Lightstalkers provoked some of us to question the technique, along with the marketing and, on a higher level, the overall nature of multimedia storytelling -- or any kind of storytelling -- on the web.

I got curious and decided to dig out the original experiment that one of the members alluded to, some of you may remember it: Gilles Peress and Fred Ritchin collaborated on an unusual narrative process facilitated by the web whereby the reader can plot a variety of paths through the “essay,” thus ceding some authorial control to the viewer, opening up possibilities for more complex connections, and compelling the viewer to take an active part in the consumption of news—which may well be the most important aspect of the experiment. As Matthias Bruggman pointed out, the current spate of multimedia potentially induces the usual passive participation that we get from watching TV. We want to engage our audience, not turn them into couch potatoes.

Fred Ritchin’s argument, printed in 1996, can be seen HERE. But I wanted to reproduce a selection from his concluding statement in order to spark some thought among you all and perhaps a willingness to take up the experiment where it left off. That is what I intend to do, along with further experimentation with multimedia. Ten years after this interesting project, it seems that little has been done to explore the possibilities of communication over the net, other than what can be seen on the Pixel Press site. The new craze for multimedia is turning us all into sound recorders, but really I dont see much real innovation in most of them: they are slideshows with a song, or maybe some oral history (as if that were somehow a superior means of providing authentic content, a notion I just dont buy and I find, to my dismay, is almost universally assumed to be true by the current Left in the debate about the politics of representation). Their brevity ensures that the oral history or ambient sound be too clipped to allow for indepth commentary.

Here are Ritchin’s comments:

” Certainly ‘Bosnia: Uncertain Paths to Peace’ is a flawed and fairly primitive attempt to build a new model of photojournalism. But at least one commentator feels that it succeeded in important ways. In Print magazine, the only publication to cover in depth what we had tried to do, Darcy DiNucci wrote: ‘Clumsy as today’s low-bandwidth presentations must be in some particulars, the site indeed pioneers a new form of journalism. Visitors cannot simply sit and let the news wash over them; instead, they are challenged to find the path that engages them, look deeper into its context, and formulate and articulate a response. The real story becomes a conversation, in which the author/photographer is simply the most prominent participant.’

Can such a project happen again with better results? Certainly it should be possible. In the masses of new Web publications coming out there is hope that some will recognize the need to tell stories differently about issues of serious interest, . . . many photographers and their collaborators already know that conventional photojournalism needs new ideas.

Undoubtedly these new attempts to tell stories on the Web, some accomplished with very meager financial resources, will also affect previous media so that partially non-linear, layered photo essays will appear in magazines and newspapers. Ironically it may not be the linear photo essay that is eventually revived after its long decline, but a new essay form that makes the collage of television seem rather predictable.

The new medium of the Web brings with it many valuable legacies – one is the possibility of exploring the world differently, with greater complexity and from many points of view, in order to help photographers, reporters, editors, readers and even subjects understand what is going on in deeper and more meaningful ways. Whether these new models come from personal homepages, students frustrated by conventional journalism, relief agencies, new media companies or more conventional ones, we can only benefit. They are sober alternatives to forthcoming virtual reality systems. They may also be productive extensions of deconstructionist critiques that encourage new and timely strategies of knowing. Once implemented, their impact on the ways in which we think and act should be considerable.”

Reflecting on these words ten years later, I have to say that I agree with Matthias, the current experimentation with multimedia is somehow flawed, if the ideals expressed by Ritchin here are taken to be the goal for which we strive. And I am dismayed by what seems to be a failure to followup on the promise of this endeavor and the fact that mainstream narrative venues appear not to have been induced to experiment, despite the hope expressed by Ritchin in the penultimate paragraph. Unlike Matthias, I dont believe that multimedia is necessarily reactionary just because it doesnt allow for an active participation on the part of the viewer -- I happen to think that, like reading, it does in fact allow for a kind of active participation and we cannot really discount the power of the reader to make his or her connections in an autonomous manner (anyone who has read Proust probably will remember that author's famous ruminations on boredom and the nature of reading -- I rest my case). I know that I certainly dont sleep through a good multimedia—I was glued to all 15 minutes of Chris Anderson’s report on Lebanon. And I am aggressively pursuing a multimedia agenda of my own, which depends on the argument that multimedia should make greater use of film technique. But be that all as it may, I am not surprised that multimedia in its current form is so successful given that such form is really a recapitulation of the narrative status quo favored by the institutions that govern the media, and we are still left with this unanswered challenge from Ritchin and Peress.

And Multimedia puts special strains on all of us: we have to capture sound and image almost simultaneously; we have to learn new softwares, learn new behaviors or skills, buy new equipment, spend more time at the screen instead of shooting, etc; we work harder, longer, for basically the same amount of money (or proportionately less). I like a challenge, so I dont mind learning these new things (in fact I am enjoying it all) but I like a fair paycheck too, and I am a bit worried by two aspects of the current situation: (1) that marketing these things is not an open and transparent process in which we all share equally and with full knowledge (the current players have not been open about their practices and thus no one is helping to establish fair protocols whereby we can all formulate some notions of fees etc;—we are already screwed by the fact that fees for digital processing were never adequately threshed out by everyone, so practices vary, with the result that many clients simply do not compensate us for all the extra time we spend editing); and (2) control of the market is largely concentrated in the hands of a few players intimately connected to the mainstream media, and this leaves the individual players in a very weak position. One thing about Ritchin’s project was that it was intended to open things up for people outside the mainstream, and thus exploit the web’s nature as an open communication medium. I would hate to see that openness be thwarted.

Since "Bosnia," new softwares and greater bandwidth delivery have facilitated the creation of narratives built round Flash as well as html -- you can see some interesting experiments in the work of Alfredo Jaar and Kim Köster's 99rooms site. But the essential modus operandi remains the same: the viewer clicks through scenarios, thereby following links. Narrative threads are composed of linkages, so the question becomes how to make the linking stimulate the linker and amplify the meaning of the imagery.

This led me to speculate whether gaming held a clue to the future of narrative. Friedrich Schiller established the fact that the “spieltrieb” (play-instinct, or drive) is at the back of all learning processes, and it manages to consolidate our divided nature (form vs content, sense vs intellect). Perhaps there is a lesson to be learned here after all: that we need to reintroduce a bit of playfulness into narratives, a bit of indeterminacy and hazard or chance. Let people wander at will and learn formatively. In the case of the 99 rooms, I was disappointed by the fact that ultimately it came down to a simple mechanism: mouse around until you find a switch to click on (event/action structuring); click it and watch something happen; find the exit and move to the next tableau. The scenarios initially are intriguing, but the repetitive clicking and content become tiresome.

HERE is the link to the narrative experiment that Peress and Ritchin created. Enjoy it.

The POYi and its Respect for Web Publishing

2007-01-11T19:00:00.001-04:00

In the midst of my feverish attempts to post my imagery via the new World Press online interface, the agony over which was shared by other Lightstalker members, I was pleased (once I had managed to submit and then had a few rums) to see that POYi has been fairly creative this year in its recognition of web publishing as a legitimate outlet for our work. Not only do they include a category for Multimedia (as they did last year) but they also have created a new category for "Best Photo Column." They define the category thus:

"A regularly reoccurring, self-generated enterprise that uses a narrative style to blend words and images and reflects aspects of a community or lifestyle. The forum may be defined as either a photo column, photo journal, or photo blog. This should be an individual’s entry, not a team entry. The “entry” will consist of three (3) individual photo columns. This will allow the judges to examine the theme and consistency of the reoccurring column. The photojournalists must provide a brief “statement of purpose” for the column, appearing in the caption field of the first image. Judges also will weigh the quality of the text that accompanies the images. The column must be “published” in some form — either in print and online, or combined. Entries should be submitted in their original published form as either a .jpg or .pdf page from the print edition, or a URL link to the online edition. Independent and personal web sites will be considered as “published.” "

I had some questions about just what sort of column they might be looking for, since most photo blogs either run a photo a day, or talk about the industry, or comment on the art of photography, and none of those quite seem adequate. It appears that what they are looking for is something like Ryscard Kapuscinski meets photojournalism, and I am for one am pleased to see it. Throughout 2006 I was posting travel essays to my website (before I had bothered to look into blogging) and then started up Trozos de un Viralata to harbor Spanish language commentary on the culture and society of this little island I inhabit. Well, this little event has proved the catalyst for me to create a third blog and collate all my travel essays on that forum instead. More a Question than a Reply is going to harbor essays in Spanish and English on various journalistic themes, mostly related to my travels, and I hope to experiment more with the mixing of imagery and text.

What does this all mean? Well I view it as a development every bit as bracing as the appearance of fourth screen devices. It means that my attempt to take control of the means of production and distribution of my own material is now a reality and has been recognized as such by a leading industry organ. Essentially, POYi has given its imprimatur and these self-generated intiatives can now compete legitimately with content produced through traditional print media. But I am free of big media's priorities and protocols, free of desk jockeys, and free of interminable delays while an underpaid and overworked team strains to meet its deadlines. I am also free, as yet, of any remuneration for my labors, and that is something that has yet to be tackled.

When the Gutenberg bible was published (1455), the forms of mass communication were altered forever and the ecclessiastical establishment was initially quite worried about it, because it put the Word in the hands of the people. One could read and decipher it on one's own without sacerdotal mediation. This was one of the motive forces behind the Protestant Reformation (normally dated to coincide with the posting of Luther's 95 Theses in 1517). Now we are entering on yet another paradigmatic shift in communication that further consolidates the power we have over the word, and I am presently fairly excited about the opportunities and the challenges it presents us. ¡Venceremos!

The Fourth Screen, The Seventh Mass Media: the Newest Wonder of the World

2007-01-10T14:13:00.001-04:00

No it is not a photograph or directly related to photography, but this phenomenon and the thinking behind it are clearly going to have tremendous consequences for the future of mass communication and the distribution of photography and photojournalistic stories. The appearance of Apple's iPhone, the device that handily combines a phone, computer, and ipod, and whose salient virtue is its mobility, has already created a buzz on Lightstalkers, which you can check here and here. That last link leads to a thread that deals with this blog, but it ends up, in typical LS fashion, dealing with an entirely different theme. As it bears some important comments by Sion Touhig, it is worth consulting, as are his recent comments on his blog.

As we all know, we are witnessing the beginning of a seismic shift in the alignment of the mass media plates that make up our informational globe. I think it is safe enough to predict that, while print journalism isnt going to disappear any time soon, it will certainly morph into something that is far more focused on communication via the web. I dont know about you, and it may be because I live in a country where the selection is somewhat limited, but I rarely look at and never buy magazines anymore. I can get most of the content via their web pages, and while my internet connection is rather expensive, it is the only reliable means I have of connecting to the world outside these borders, so I make sure to pay that bill before all others. My point: globally speaking, and in spite of the so-called Information Gap, the audience for such devices is huge, and content providers are going to have to realize that their material is best served by other than traditional distribution networks. We are a poor country, and many of us do not own personal computers, but it is less costly to pay for an hour of internet connection at the local café than to buy a magazine. Moreover, while many of us wont have PCs anytime soon in all our homes, you can bet we will be buying iPhones. We already buy Razr phones and all the rest. There are practically no landline phones in our homes, but everyone has at least one cell phone. If content is adequately priced for mass distribution, the incentive to buy will be huge; and while photojournalism is not going to be one of the biggest "channels" offering streaming video, it will surely outdo its current distribution rates. And dont forget that while not everyone will want to download the Times or El Mundo onto their iPhone screen, documentary work that appeals thematically to a particular audience would have a greater chance of reaching that audience. I can foresee Dominicans downloading my multimedia piece on cockfighting, for example, simply because that is a theme that is dear to their hearts, though they might not otherwise be interested in documentaries per se. And I could see such presentations achieving a cult status, the way that videos do currently on YouTube.

But it is incumbent upon us photographers and above all the agencies we work with to start considering our options. We need to ride the wave on this one, and not play catch-up as we did when digital hit us. While Magnum in Motion is out in front, and busily consolidating their lead, the other agencies are limping along, and that is going to have severe consequences for the photographers they represent. According to industry pundits these devices and the exigent evolution of mass communication into what is now being called the Fourth Screen and the Seventh Mass Media are going to revolutionize the way we distribute information henceforth. It is only a matter of time before such devices are universal. I believe that this is mainly a matter of change in distribution rather than production, but it will probably have some effect on the narrative forms we choose as well (it has been noted that multimedia better serves the storytelling purpose of photojournalism than does the isolated jpg). Regardless of the esthetic consequences, the financial stakes are high and the time has come to act. Instead of herding like sheep at the Apple stores to buy this thing, we should be pick up the crook and do some herding ourselves -- line up the people for our market and define our market strategies while we have time to speculate. Let those who have ears, hear.

Your Best Shot and The Detail that Makes It Work

2007-01-10T09:54:00.001-04:00

Leo Benedictus of the Guardian is running a series of articles grouped around the idea that a photographer should select his or her "best shot" and discuss it a bit for the benefit of the readers. So far he has interviewed Alec Soth, Bruce Davidson, Loretta Lux, Martine Franck, and a few others. It is frustrating trying to locate these on the Guardian Unlimited's website, as there is no specific category or slot for them. You just have to keyword it in their search field (use quote marks around "best shot" for best results). But the search is well worth the effort.

I was apprized of these articles when I read Jim Johnson's blog today, and I was intrigued by the idea. First of all the photographers do not pick their best shot, they pick their personal favorites, and for quirky reasons. This is particularly useful as our quirks are often more revelatory than our conventional thoughts and choices. Their discussions of the pix are not particularly profound, they are not particularly analytical, but they manage to communicate two important things: first of all, the very personal relationship they have with their imagery, and second the fact that the capture of their imagery and its meaning depend on processes that are intuitional and somewhat beyond their control, which of course is the underlying tenet of this very blog.

Here is Martine Franck on her shot: "I was there for an hour, just sitting quietly in a corner, observing. I never imagined for a second that the bird would perch on the monk's head. That's the wonder of photography - you try and capture the surprises."

She adds, "The picture is somehow a symbol of peace, and of young people getting on with old people. Although I certainly didn't think that at the time -- in the moment, it's just instinctive. Afterwards, maybe, you realise what the photograph means." The meaning of what we shoot is grasped intuitively in the moment of its capture, but it is understood rationally or intellectually only after the event, sometimes long afterwards, which is why I like to pin up pix of mine in my office and ponder them. I often live with pictures for years before I discover their meaning and make a final approval. Something is there beckoning, but I cant always quite wrap my mind around it, so I let it whisper to me until my intellect matures.

Alec Soth's personal choice was interesting to me because he too pointed out an important feature of the meaning of photography. We often prize photos because of the odd associations they elicit, the "spark of accident" that connects us in unexpected ways to the photo. After discussing the qualities he prizes in the picture, and the process whereby he set it up, he makes the following observation:

"There's always one little detail that makes an image work, and for me it's that water in the lower left. It was raining out, and it feels like the Falls are creeping in, tugging at her dress. There's also that thing about rain on your wedding day, which is supposed to be good luck. It rained on my wedding day, and Melissa sort of reminds me of my wife, so I have this funny relationship to the image that way - one that doesn't matter to anyone else."

There is that spark again. Does this association with the water outside hold for the different viewers as well? Do they even notice it? (The image appears in cropped form with the article, and in fact until I clicked and enlarged it, I couldnt see what Alec was talking about.) Does that mean that photos consistently work on two semiotic levels, a personal and a public register? Clearly, the meaning of the photo is largely contained by the bride in her dress -- she dominates the scene, our eyes naturally peg themselves to her. But what causes the eye to wander round the frame to discover the greater meaning? (And let us not forget more transgressive wandering, outside the frame, if extraneous elements intrude and should lead us away -- a technique that I myself favor and which has a long esthetic tradition: witness the structure of an Oriental rug.) This meaning is not extrinsic, nor is it negligible. Alec insists, it is the "detail that makes an image work." I cannot help but think that herein lies the secret of photography and its special contribution to the Arts. I dont think there is a form of esthetic representation more ironic, more paradoxical, more elusive than the photograph. One hundred and sixty-odd years of mechanical reproduction and we have yet to plumb its mystery.

Dos Épocas -- de Nuevo

2007-01-09T17:03:00.001-04:00

Well, I have only been at it for a week and I already have the pleasure of watching one of my posts give birth to another blog, so I can write a little plug for it. Gabriel has taken wing and created a blog entirely devoted to publishing elements of his interesting story about the riven Quintanal family. Check it out here. Three posts already and full of good stuff.

Ten Photographic Things I Liked about 2006

2007-01-09T07:54:00.001-04:00

What the hell. For fun I thought I’d join the legion of listmakers in this hackneyed New Year’s ritual, even though I have never been able to divide up time in this manner. My experience of time never seems to run according to these neat segments and I have never felt compelled to mark the beginning of the new year. For me it always seems to come around Spring anyway. These are not the best moments, the most important moments, and they probably have no significance for anyone other than myself.

However, I need a break from the cerebral effort I have expended so far on this blog, so here goes, in no particular order:

1. Lightstalkers was singled out by PDN as one of the top ten blogs. I am not sure I would call it a blog exactly, but it is certainly an important feature of web communications whose potential is not yet fully realized. Why has Lightstalkers been so important to me this year? Is it the original vision held by the Kuwayama brothers, its nature as an advanced communications tool for journalists? Is it the chance to connect with people outside the borders of this little island? The chance to learn technical digital stuff about which I am hopelessly ignorant? The opportunities for self-promotion? The work that came to me through it? The chance to use one’s profile page as a virtual agency and portfolio? The chance to show one’s work? To broadcast or test one’s ideas in a fairly sympathetic but critical space? The camaraderie? The ability to connect with people on the other side of the globe about whom you would otherwise be entirely ignorant? The support? All these things apply, and none suffices to explain the virtue of LS. A Mexican student recently interviewed me about all this for her thesis on the information age, and I was forced to think about it more soberly; having done so I concluded that two things make LS special: its freewheeling, slightly anarchic MO, which is very different from other cyber forums; and its experimental nature. As Teru so eloquently put it in the Manifesto: “We live and work in uncharted, unstable territory, navigating the grey areas of geography and technology. We travel in countries that are still in development or recently destroyed, using gear just barely out of R&D. For better or worse, we are the beta testing generation of the post-industrial era. This is our homemade “do-it-yourself/don’t try this at home” field guide and users manual to the 21st century.” Why these two? Because they form the crucible of creative effort.

2. Blogging. Well, this is not entirely photographic, but I became aware of it through the photographic community, so it will do. I started thinking about blogs as a result of the unfortunate and rather shrill dispute over the Lebanese fauxtography scandal, and then I became aware of its positive potential after being persuaded by LS member Luis Andrade to start one of my own in Spanish, thereby helping me to master that language. Subsequently I turned my thoughts to using the blog format to write about photography (OK, so I am a little slow on the uptake). I was pleased to discover that blogging can release one’s creativity because it removes the usual obstacles to publishing one’s thoughts publicly, and I also found that it gave me a platform for discovery. My curiosity about things now has free reign.

3. Magnum in Motion. Along with MediaStorm, the recent expansion of Magnum’s multimedia production has got us all talking about multimedia, its nature, its potential, how to make it, how to sell it, and how it might rejuvenate photojournalism. While the pieces that Magnum has lined up tend to focus on the photographers’ thoughts, rather than provide oral history from the subjects’ point of view, the virtue of this work overall is that it is constantly evolving and exploring new ideas. Magnum is channeling some of that old cutting edge spirit in a new enterprise that could be of tremendous importance to the development of photojournalism in this century.

4. The Attribution and Reassessment of a Remarkable Photo. Well, just the reappearance of this remarkable photo, really. Someone on a blog compared it with two famous paintings of assassination scenes by Goya and Degas. (I apologize here for not properly citing the blogger and for borrowing his idea.)

The comparison made me appreciate the photo more. Jahangir Razmi’s photo has the same iconic quality that distinguishes Goya’s remarkable canvas, and this is unusual for what is essentially a spot news photo. As one would expect from a photo, there are formal inconsistencies or “flaws” (though it should be clear that such “accidents” are precisely what makes photos so interesting, in my view); but the photo succeeds in capturing this event with the same sweep and range of feeling that Goya depicts. You may think me insensitive for commenting on the formal qualities of an image that is really quite frightening, as though it were mere "art" and not a record of a real event -- but I do so precisely because I want to remind people that photography is not alone in recording real events and some painters are journalists too; meanwhile, it is well to remember that our formal armament is what helps us bring meaning to these raw images. I myself wouldn’t mind accomplishing something that approaches the condition of a Goya painting, but I doubt I ever will.

5. Jill Freedman, who made The Online Photographer's "Ten Best Living Photographers" list. Hey, I like her work and was glad to see her appear on the list. One picture will suffice. “Like those who collect stories from the shannachies, or storytellers, I am collecting moments. For who will remember the old ways?” Nuff said.

6. I discovered Oculi (I said I was slow) and Glenn Hunt’s marvelous work Equus, about horse culture round the world, a selection of which has just appeared on Foto8's site. I will save my comments for a later essay, but what can one not like about an innovative collective that manages to defy easy description and be so consistently surprising?

7. James Whitlow Delano’s Death Throes of a Great Rainforest at Noorderlicht’s 2006 survey of Asia. In James’ words, “The rainforest of Borneo is one of the oldest in the world. Previously it covered the whole of Borneo and parts of western Indonesia, reaching as far as The Philippines. Today large parts have disappeared due to commercial logging. The very existence of many impoverished native tribes is threatened by this. Some have begun armed resistance, others turn against the migrants who, likewise in search of a better life, have arrived to work the land as it is cleared.”

Magisterial, original, ambitious – these are just some of the terms that occur to me as I review the incredible catalogue of visual poems that James has captured. And I especially like the fact that it marks a return of serious investigation into environmental issues. In this drama there are many players, but the protagonist is sublime, an enormous primeval forest, and there is no doubt that it is a living breathing thing.

8. Patrick Yen’s zeal for Web 2.0 thinking. Ok, the guy is a pain in the neck sometimes with his programmatic statements, but that is the role of a gadfly, and the truth is, we need to listen to what he says. He is pointing the way to the future. Have a look at his Gonzo Global Photojournalism site.

9. Cristina Rodero Garcia went to the Burning Man Festival. Gotta see the show on Magnum's site folks.

10. VII Photo Agency. For innovation, for resuscitating a bit of that old Magnum magic, and for taking that older formula (a cooperative composed of “photographes engagés”) and updating it for the web. They have been showing the way – how to adapt to the present market and make use of digital technology for a leaner, meaner operation – and provide a meaningful alternative to the monopolies like Getty and Corbis. An interesting interview with John Stanmeyer about it all appeared in Take Great Pictures.

Sanseacabo.

Grant Gets Close: The Transfiguration of the Flesh

2007-01-07T10:28:00.001-04:00

(click on the picture above to view the entire sequence of images from the beginning)

Grant Lamos, a photographer who works mainly in black and white and maintains a photo-a-day style blog called Street Zen, has been steadily working his magic on what many might think would embody an unpromising and mundane assignment. He shoots celebrities at premieres and other events around town, but he shoots them in an extraordinarily direct, realistic, even brutally honest fashion that strips them of the hucksterish aura normally clinging to famous characters, yet he does not rob them entirely of their dignity. And the irony is that by doing so, he transfigures them. Here for example is Abe Vigoda:

By knocking all the glamour out of the event, by presenting them all snaggle toothed and warty without the distraction of color and makeup and flattering light, he succeeds not only in bringing them down to earth, making them oh so very human and magnifying their imperfections, but he also sends them right back up to the stratosphere without missing a beat. The direct, confrontational, right up in your face stance, which produces incredible detail so that every flaw, every pore, every bit of life’s harsh lessons can be seen etched into these faces, succeeds in recreating these totems of material success and monumentalizing them in an unexpected manner. They are the Easter Island idols of a bankrupt starmaking machinery that typically deludes itself about where the value of its properties lies and overlooks the very real and astonishing power that ordinary daily life conceals. They are like ancient runes, Ur-celebrities, whose features we read anxiously to discover the secret of their superhuman humanity.

To my eye there is more than a little bit of Weegee in this series. The puckish, ironic and deflatory gaze, best exemplified in his famous picture “The Critic,” is shared by Grant, and of course the contrasty lighting, the mix of irreverance with a sympathetic feeling for humanity, the delight in the comic, if not to say burlesque, nature of our pretensions, all are in tune with the cigar-chomper’s wry take on life. But there is much more. Some would jump to the conclusion that the power of Grant’s work lies in its demystification of an essentially empty ritual that seeks to create the illusion of royalty, perhaps even deity, for a secular and egalitarian society. He debunks the whole show, like a perverse carny barker who would have the crowd just go away. But I think the genius of these bracingly intimate portraits is that they rescue the human being from underneath the oppressive weight of all this ostentation and return it to a state of fleshly grace. The sheer lumpy, pocked meatiness of these faces is so palpable, so much there, that one cannot doubt their reality, the eternal leadedness of being. And in recovering that substance, Grant recovers their spirit as well. They are much more vivid.

All this reminds me of another artist, Chuck Close, whose monumental head shots have long been popular in the art world.

His brand of Photorealism, however, had a very different thrust to it, though it too was initially concerned to render detail with an almost unreal immediacy due to its magnification. Ultimately it was not about fleshliness or corporal being; it was about atomization and a focus on the compositional element of the paint – he focused on detail to the point that he emphasized its essential non-human materiality. Grant’s focus is resolutely on the carnal. He makes the “stone stony.” You can almost smell the breath exuding from the forced smiles. Here is his Grant’s tribute to Chuck:

There is something similar to the art of caricature in these portraits. Caricature tends to exaggerate disproportionate features in the subject and give it a force that is larger than reality. But while it strives for instant recognition of the personality by reducing it to one prominent feature, Grant’s work strives for something like what Viktor Shklovsky, the Russian modernist, called estrangement (ostranenie). It is dislocating, disconcerting. It causes you to readjust your coordinates. Sometimes you have to look twice or more to identify the character otherwise so familiar to you on screen, and other times you feel like Grant has captured the very essence of that screen persona. While Robert DeNiro here looks like some boozer stepping out of a Paddy’s bar near the Deuce, Nick Nolte has never looked more Nolteish,
and the unfortunate screwiness of the screen character that Rosanna Arquette has been forced to play ad nauseum is here presented conclusively.

Everything is so convincing, so sharply defined that these people appear trapped in the image – trapped in the camera’s flash, trapped on the red carpet, trapped in a role that has subsumed their identity to the point where it threatens to disappear. This is not to say that all the celebrities come off looking bad or ugly, nor do I find the “ugliness” ugly at all. On the contrary, many of the young starlets look quite beautiful: though the light be harsh, they radiate a kind of charisma still, but there is no doubt that many of them have the look of a deer caught in one’s headlights and they seem almost hysterical at times. While Hilary Swank seems somewhat grotesque in terms of the exaggerated features, it is not disagreeable; but Paris Hilton’s self satisfied vixen is somehow, even though she is quite fetching in her furs and her face betrays no flaws.

In the end this lapse into vivid carnality, this pratfall from an illicit grace, is just what saves them all and makes them all the more memorable. Grant has cast them in the role of a lifetime, to play themselves with unimpeachable conviction, and the interpretations, while not freely given, are endlessly surprising.

Making Friends in the Blogosphere

2007-01-06T10:26:00.000-04:00

My new effort here has been plugged by Jim Johnson on his wideranging, broadminded, eclectic, and endlessly fascinating blog, "(Notes on) Politics, Theory and Photography." I am indebted to him for doing so and for seeing fit to include me in his copious links, which are a veritable encyclopedia of interesting sites. So far I have also linked up with Sion Touhig's Sionphoto blog, John Loomis's quirkily named Drinking with a Dead Man, Stefan Rohner's Ball-Saal, Velibor Bozovic's Vebahood, Jonathan Auch's the thousand words, Roland Quilici's Miradas, Jeremy Sutton Hibbert's Tokyoland, Wayne Yang's Eight Diagrams, and a few others.

The idea of making friends in cyberspace has always somewhat perplexed me, as I find it odd carrying on sometimes quite penetrating discourses with people whom I have never met face to face. I consider some of these people real friends now. I have gotten used to it since becoming a member of Lightstalkers, but the phenomenon is nonetheless rather odd. Ferdinand Tönnies made a famous distinction between Community (gemeinschaft) and Association (gesellschaft), the former a feature generally of small rural communities connected by blood and the latter a feature of a new abstract type of social organization brought about by capitalism and urbanization -- association through the cash nexus, through the workplace, through bureacratic institutions and so on which are entirely bloodless and potentially alienating or anomistic. When the web came along, I remember that everyone was crowing about the potential community building inherent in the forums that cropped up everywhere, and while I was skeptical about the predictions of a radical redefinition of community, I have to admit that something like that is in the wind. I wouldnt say that the blogosphere or forums like Lightstalkers are genuine communities as defined by Tönnies, but they do seem to straddle the fence between community and association. They are bloodless and abstract, seen from one angle, but almost filial and all too human in their ability to tie one person to the next with the filaments woven by common purpose, curiosity, and passion for ideas. And they have tremendous potential to connect people from all over the world, the political and cultural implications of which have hardly been plumbed.

Networking is no new thing. The circle jerk that defines the networking in Academic parlors is one sort of community building, albeit one that ironically seems to cut the participants off from the rest of the world, as the jargon that serves to dress up one's intellectual bonafides, like medals on an Eisenhower jacket, has succeeded in alienating outsiders who might otherwise have joined in the discussion. But here we have another sort of networking, which, if I understand correctly the thinking behind web 2.0, is inclusive, eclectic, open, and inviting. My hope is that while all we photobloggers are linking to one another and reading one another's weblogs, we succeed not in creating merely a tightknit circle of photo fanatics but a genuinely freewheeling and expansive community of individuals driven by intellectual curiosity and the desire to explore. The existence of photo blogs written by the likes of Jim Johnson, a political theorist, and Joerg Colberg, an astrophysicist, give me hope that indeed we have achieved a valuable eclecticism here.

One thing I can say without a doubt: the fact that I can publish my thoughts at will, rather than having to wait on approval from a desk jockey at some magazine, has made me much more productive and creative. Creativity is a drive every bit as exigent as hunger or sex, but one needs resources to feed it. The web is one such resource, its particular virtue being its ability to entirely sweep away the obstacles that hitherto obtained in the pursuit of mass communication. There are no gatekeepers.

Well, I only hope that as this blog changes and grows it can live up to the example set by the rest of you.

¡Mi Comandante Se Queda!

2007-01-06T09:34:00.001-04:00

Much has been written in the North American media about the shift to the Left in Latin America, but I for one have been left wondering whether the recent elections in Ecuador, Bolivia, Venezuela and Nicaragua constitute a coherent shift, or whether some other factors are at work which have escaped the pundits. I think there are very few North Americans who understand the nature of Latin American politics, the authoritarian traditions that are so deeply embedded here and which consistently hinder the development of stable democratic institutions, as well as the lasting influence of Spanish colonialism, its social organization, which places family and clan at the center and the larger social good at the periphery, and the lasting psychic effects of the institution of slavery, whether it involves exploitation of Indian or of African populations.

Thus it was with some satisfaction that I viewed a masterfully done multimedia piece about Chavez’s recent re-election, put together by a young photographer from Slovenia, of all places. Manca Juvan has managed to say quite a lot in her brief show, not only because the images are so strong and so well mixed, but also because of her take on the story, which is always the deciding factor in photojournalistic storytelling. When it comes to telling a story, strong images are just one element, but the narrative point of view is often what translates the work to a higher sphere. The question for me always is, what do you choose to look at? What is particularly notable is that her insights are the result of a complete outsider taking a very inside look at a city that has baffled many other onlookers. This is often the perspective of the best documentary work, an outsider working on an inside track, which flies in the face of the current ideology espoused by theoreticians of identity politics, who would have us believe that only a member of an oppressed minority can adequately represent his or her experience in any given discourse. Karl Mannheim had a name for this sort of perspective, which he described in his book, The Sociology of Knowledge. He called such travellers who venture beyond the borders created above all by class, the "freischwebende inteligenz" (the freefloating intelligentsia).

Manca took the brave decision to look at the elections from inside the teeming, violent and oppressive barrios of Caracas, a city that exemplifies all the problems associated with urban development in Latin America. Crime and violence are out of control, and yet this is ironically where Chavez derives his control of the country, for it is among this desperate, incendiary, enraged underclass that Chavez finds his greatest support. And this presents him with a quandary: he cannot act too strongly against “la delincuencia” which has everyone complaining in Caracas, because he would alienate the underclass, but he can try to coopt it, employ it on his behalf, as many another “caudillo” or strong man has done in the past. And that is why so many Chavistas have a thuggish air about them – they are thugs.

I suspect that Chavez, for all his talk of socialism, anti-Americanism, anti-globalization, and Bolivarian revolution, is really just a demagogue in the Peronist mold, with a dash of Castro's charisma wrapped in green. Lots of bread, a few circuses, and choice words intended to play on the fears and prejudices of a disinherited mass of urban slum dwellers. What would El Libertador think of present day Venezuela and the city where he was raised? Probably not much, as he was defeated by the same forces which at are work today in South America and which caused him to relinquish his dreams of a federated nation guaranteeing the inalienable rights of man. The dissolution of Gran Colombia put an end to lofty democratic designs and validated, at least in practice, the subsequent use of dictatorship as a means of governing and solving problems. The rousing song that serves as a backdrop to the multimedia sequence is inevitably tinged with a bitter irony, for it is unfortunate that while el comandante indeed is sticking around, he must do so by appealing to the popular love of authoritarianism.

Manca is a young photographer, but she has already traversed Afghanistan and other Asian countries, bringing back several strong stories from there, as well as having covered her native Slovenia with flair. In 2006 she was named Photographer of the Year in Slovenia, and she has published her images in several major magazines and papers. There is a maturity to her work that is rare to see in a new photographer, and it is instantly apparent that her vision is very much her own, though it does partake of certain current esthetic trends in photojournalism. Unlike Chavez, Manca does not deal in utopian promises, she delivers a social vision that is altogether humane, soberly realistic, and above all genuinely sympathetic. Hers is a compassionate eye, but not a naïve one. She is nobody’s fool. Compassion and realism make for a strong documentary vision, and I expect that Manca will eventually dominate the ranks of the younger generation of photojournalists who will take the genre into the 21st century.

Kill the Lawyers?

2007-01-05T16:24:00.000-04:00

“Nature always gives us happier laws than those we give ourselves.”

“Consider the form of this justice that governs us: it is a true testimony of human imbecility, so full it is of contradiction and error.”

("Of Experience," Michel de Montaigne.)

I was recently dismayed to receive a query from a major foundation responsible for supporting a lot of documentary work as to whether I acquire written releases from the people that I photograph as a documentary photographer. I immediately sniffed out the purpose of this query and wrote the following answer:

“Well, the short answer is a resounding no. These legal issues are entirely moot down here, and it would be ludicrous for me to burden myself with such forms. Course, I would never use my pix for questionable commercial purposes, so even in the North American legal context, I would have no need for the permission. Moreover, there are serious legal questions about the validity of such forms being signed in countries like the Dominican Republic and then being used to protect image usage in the States or Europe. There is no international law governing the practice, and a legal form that is good for the states is meaningless down here. Finally, just in terms of mere practical considerations, there is not a single Dominican in any of my photos who would ever object to having their picture seen in the normal venues where I would be willing to publish them. On the contrary, many of them are quite clear about the need to advertise their plight and hope for the best from it. I always explain to my subjects whenever I can just why I want the photo and I never take photos of people if they object.

Now if you are asking this question because (your organization) wants to use some of my photos, there is no problem at this end regarding such usage. Go right ahead, you have my blessing. However, if (your organization) is worried about some chimerical legality regarding such usage, and the organization feels bound, for whatever bureaucratic reasons of protocol, to conform to US legal strictures regardless of the ad hoc nature of these photographic situations, then I guess you will be obligated to use only such photos that come with written permissions. This will pose a problem for you, because there are bound to be very few of your photographers who can furnish such permission. while you all may well recognize that this measure is nothing but a sham, a paper tiger as it were, let me point out, and in so doing so tell you what you probably already know, that this is not a good road to go down and it is unwise to set a precedent like this when it comes to using documentary photos. The genre is seriously threatened presently by the increasing legal pressures being brought to bear on photographers in every field but especially in documentary and photojournalism. I think a strong case can be made for such photography as an exercise of free speech and I dont doubt that we will soon see some legal cases brought before the US Supreme Court. Aside from the fact that we are reporting in the field, and thereby are not actually bound by existing laws regarding usage and the rights of privacy, one must also bear in mind that we shoot in public spaces and thus we have to right to make use of the photos without seeking permission of the subjects who appear in those photos (though again this grey area has become the focus of some legal wrangling most notably in the case of Philip Lorca deCorcia, but that was because he was profiting from his images in the Art World market and not operating as a journalist -- nonetheless, "The suit was dismissed . . . by a New York State Supreme Court judge who said that the photographer's right to artistic expression trumped the subject's privacy rights." That from the NYTimes). On one hand the controversy is intellectually very interesting, but on the other hand the trend is worrisome to me. People in the so called First World live in societies increasing hedged round with laws and rules and restrictions, and it is one reason why I currently prefer living in the admitted mess (often dangerous mess) of a developing nation, where I am free pretty much to make things up as I go along. It suits me.

Anyway, as I said before my peroration, the short answer is no, I dont have such contracts. I might add that the contracts wouldnt be worth the paper they are written on, as almost all my subjects are illiterate and wouldnt understand the contracts anyway, effectively exempting them from any binding relationship.”

The subsequent response to my message confirmed my fears. The lawyer wants the photographers from whom the organization licenses and commissions work to obtain and make available all necessary releases from persons portrayed in the images, and to guarantee that the images do not infringe upon any third party’s copyright or right of privacy. The consequential damage that will ensue from making this a formal requirement is not to be underestimated by those of us in the field. While it will certainly inconvenience the foundations who rely on our imagery to promote their programs, it is bound to have a much worse effect on the photographers. If I win a big grant, say, from such an organization, I am virtually assured of getting no mileage out of it as the images will be unusable by them. Of course, the next step will be that the organizations require all their grantees to furnish such releases as part of the deal, which means that people like me, who work in developing nations where such agreements are worthless, could effectively be prevented from applying for important grants.

There will be those who would remind me that after all this is nothing but a legal formality and there are many photographers working in developed nations already accustomed to using such forms. France, as we have learned recently on Lightstalkers, from a debate about the use of blurred faces in pix taken by Simon Wheatley, is one place where the legalities of photographing in public places have become impossibly entangled and inhibitive.

Well, aside from the fact that, at least in my work, there are few moments I capture that lend themselves to prolonged legal discussions with my subjects about the need to sign a release, and putting aside as well the impossibility of handing out releases to all the people in the crowds I habitually photograph, the ludicrous nature of the thinking behind this measure is such that I can only agree with Montaigne about the imbecility of it all. Of what possible use is a legal document, albeit written in Spanish, in a country like the Dominican Republic where the subjects I shoot are all illiterate and the laws are all routinely ignored because they are mere smoke and mirrors? While the releases signed down here are not worth the paper they are written on either in a Dominican court or a North American court, they are also absolutely useless as a symbol of respect for the rights of the photographed subjects, and in reality are nothing more than flimsy sanitary paper designed to protect somebody’s ass back in the States-- and whose that might be is not really clear since I doubt that this really helps the organizations much. I think it is ultimately intended to protect the lawyer! Of course, if I have to, I suppose I will start carrying around such forms, but in all honesty the idea of colluding in this sham does not sit well with me, it seems a betrayal of everything that my practice of photography stands for, and I am not sure I can in good conscience cooperate. I would be deceiving my photographic subjects and my clients as well as behaving like a hypocrite, and I despise cant.

The problem lies in the extreme dissociation between legal and everyday realities. Here is an interesting story by Montaigne that sums it up nicely:

“here is something that happened in my time. Certain men are condemned to death for a murder, the sentence being, if not pronounced, at least decided and determined. At this point the judges are informed by the officers of an inferior court nearby that they have some prisoners who confess outright to this murder and throw a decisive light on the whole business. They deliberate whether because of this they should interrupt and defer the execution of the sentence passed upon the first accused. They consider the novelty of the case and the precedent it would set in suspending the execution of sentences; that the sentence has been passed according to the law, and that the judges have no right to change their minds. In short, these poor devils are sacrificed to the forms of justice.”

I rest my case.

Addendum: I was given permission to publish this on Lightstalkers and on my blog, as the organization wants the issue aired, but certain clarifications were made which I duly added to the essay above. A few questions could not be editorially absorbed into the body of that text, so I will take time to broach them here.

First off, questions were raised as to whether in fact such legalities are, as I claim, moot in the DR and whether or not in fact there is international law governing these matters. The answer to the second is easy: no. Just as copyright laws are notoriously difficult to enforce internationally due to the fact that no global consensus exists, this issue of free speech vs rights of privacy is as yet unlegislated globally and subject to local interpretations (or an entire lack of attention to the matter, as in the DR). The answer to the second is a bit complex: while I have never ever by any organization or legal body here been hampered in the pursuit of my work on the sugar plantations, and on the contrary have practically been forced to photograph in the most private of situations with narry a concern for the subject, there is in fact one area in which I have been counseled to proceed more judiciously, shall we say, and that is in working with Plan Dominicana on issues dealing with minors (child abuse, child labor, etc). Here we work more scrupulously to protect the identity of the children, though it is more a matter of conscience than of binding laws. I believe the laws are on the books, but they are ignored—or rather, they are complied with only because we see fit to do so, not because the laws are effective here. And we do it to protect the children, not to protect ourselves from litigation.

Now in a sense that for me is still besides the point. In an authoritarian society where the rule of money and power goes unchecked despite the written law, I think it is imperative to proceed in a manner consistent with the exigent and all-important right of free expression, because privacy rights here are invoked only to protect the cabal of rich businesspeople and landowners. If a case were ever cooked up against me on the grounds that I violated the privacy of a bracero in the pursuit of my story, you can be sure that it would be done so by the mill owners in an attempt to silence me rather than protect their workers’ rights, which are hardly of concern to the ruling class. This is one reason why artistic expression and free speech, which are exercised in pursuit of a larger good, must take precedence over the rights of privacy—regardless of whether we are working in public or private space, too. After all, a mill owner could claim that I had trespassed on private property when I entered a batey and therefore my pictures constituted a violation of privacy. You see the danger of this kind of argument?

I was asked if my subjects would object to having their pic appear on the cover of the foundation’s annual report, as I had already answered that “many of them are quite clear about the need to advertise their plight and hope for the best from it.” Clearly, though I do not spell out the various uses which I deem legitimate, as they wouldnt understand it anyway, there is good reason to act in faith that such usage as outlined here is in conformity with the need to advertise their plight.

Finally, the foundation clarified a crucial point: “Our lawyer doesn’t have a problem with us using them, as long as you sign a contract stating that you have all necessary permissions, releases, etc, and that your work does not infringe upon any third party’s copyright, trademark, or right to privacy.” How can I guarantee any of this? how can anyone? As I stated, the release that I would have them sign, albeit written in Spanish and in proper legal form, would be useless as there is no clear precedent for its use internationally. To talk of copyright and trademark in the context of braceros who own nothing more than a machete is of course irrelevant, but to talk of “right to privacy” in this context is even more ludicrous if not insulting. The whole point of my documentary is that these poor devils have no privacy whatsoever: they live four to a room on metal bunkbeds without mattresses, they own nothing, not even their own identity; they are stateless, without rights, in a legal and national limbo. that is the whole point. Besides the fact that “privacy” as a concept, which is every bit cultural as well as legal, is construed in an entirely different manner here in Latin America, there is the added fact that privacy as a right cannot be said to exist in the context of the quasi-Apartheid like conditions of the bateys. These people belong to the mills and as such the only privacy to speak of belongs to the mill owners, and therein lies the danger.

Dos Épocas

2007-01-04T17:32:00.000-04:00

Long term photographic projects can win a viewer over for a variety of reasons: some photographers provide compelling narratives that hang together because of certain formal qualities, while others enthrall you simply because their theme is unusual, or their take on an otherwise conventional theme is fresh or offbeat. The best projects somehow manage to combine both. Bruce Davidson’s East 100th Street is such a project; no matter how many times I turn its pages, the book never ceases to fascinate me. I own a first edition, and while I have been tempted during lean years to sell it, I have somehow, thankfully, been spared that humiliation. There is a new edition available, but the improved rendering of the shadow tones in this edition is no match for the tarnished and tired old friend that has inspired me for so many years.

The project is simplicity itself, nothing more than a series of portraits taken with a large format camera. The format dictates the type of imagery obtained: studied and steady observations of people who return the gaze of the viewer. By adhering to this method and patiently cataloguing the people and the streetscapes over a period of a year, Davidson created a profound and lasting portrait of a community on the edge -- literally and figuratively, as a ghetto is by its nature a community that has been edged out of the mainstream, and this particular ghetto was geographically pushed up against Manhattan’s northeast edge created by the East River. Like many great books of photography this one defies easy categorization and straddles different genres. It is photojournalistic in its themes, but “artistic” in its manner, since it adopts a format usually reserved for studio portraits or arty landscape work. And while it deals with journalistic themes such as poverty, drug abuse, segregation, and urban decay, it refuses to examine these themes using the rhetoric of the day and it resolutely avoids casting them in terms of being problems with answers. The result is that the photos, while they are quite clear-eyed and unsentimental, are open to all kinds of nuances and human variety; in concert they achieve the quality of an ode.

Above all what makes such projects so compelling is their capacity for world-building. When I was a child I liked nothing better than to curl up with a book like The Hobbit, The Tales of Narnia, The Phantom Tollbooth, or Alice in Wonderland, because I could lose myself in the imaginary worlds they fleshed out with such convincing detail. My favorite photo books do this too, and of course theimmediacy of the lens makes the detail all the more tangible. Abbas’s Return to Mexico, Salgado’s Other Americas, and Ackerman’s End Time City are among the books that I prize most.

Currently running on Kit Roane’s Warshooter, a site that has consistently been presenting all sorts of thought-provoking work, is a very interesting project with great potential: Dos Epocas: Un Vuelo sin Vuelta, which deals with a Cuban family divided by the Revolution. The photographer is a member of Lightstalkers who goes by the nom de plume (or de camera) of Gabriel – an apt choice given that Gabriel is the patron saint of journalists. It is also a necessary choice if the photographer is to continue working on this theme and travelling back and forth to Cuba – a certain anonymity is required. Gabriel’s project has that same potential to create a world in which one can lose oneself, but in this case the world is bifurcated. The project is all about shards and shoring up a world that came tumbling down when one side of the family left for the States while other members remained in Cuba. Gabriel is a second generation member of the exiled family and as such his perspective is imbued with a kind of nostalgia that cannot ever be requited because it is not based on something real, it is based on an imaginary powerfully formed by absence – it is the essence of what the Portuguese call “saudade.” His family is Cuban, but he isnt quite, and he didn’t know Cuba – until now. This lends a powerful motive force to Gabriel’s investigation of his roots, and the palpable sympathy felt for all the characters involved in this story stems not just from his filial ties but also undoubtedly from the personal wounds that he is healing through the creation of this narrative.

And it really is some narrative. First of all, it is ambitious: it spans two nations, two generations, two epochs. Its thrust is genealogical, journalistic, historical, and sociological. Above all, it is very very personal, but of course it is also of public import because it gives insight into one of the most important events of the latter half of the 20th century. But rather than give us the grand historical march of jackbooted revolutionaries (the usual landscape of the photojournalist), Gabriel trains his lens on the minutiae of everyday life, the paraphernalia of family life. The narrative is made up of all the shards that remain to give these people documentary evidence of their identities and their histories. In Gabriel’s photographs we can read pages from a journal which describe one family member’s meeting with Castro, or the return plane ticket that remains an eloquent reminder of dashed hopes, or family letters (one in particular being a love letter that is priceless in its effusive sentiment), or the newspaper article detailing the confiscated properties once belonging to the family. The narrative proceeds by comparing photos of family members in the States with those of members back in Cuba, but this contemporary perspective is then given further comparison by introducing family snaps from the past. Thus the narrative travels between different countries and different epochs.

In a sense Gabriel has reinvented the family album, turning it into a postmodernist narrative of fragments and disorientation. But that is not all. The effect of flipping through this album is nothing short of novelistic: so many different lives, so many different subplots – all set against a compelling historical backdrop. It is very like Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, but here the best and worst of times are related by an observant photographer instead of an observant writer. I might add, and not altogether facetiously, that this project has all the makings of a great telenovela (soap to you gringos) – Gabriel if you sell the rights, remember me when you calculate the fees!

The family must have been wealthy: there is one snap of Gabriel’s grandfather with his two children (Gabriel’s mother and uncle) on a sumptuous lawn with a palatial home in the background. The palatial home appears to belong to the neighbors as it sits outside the fence that surrounds the family’s backyard. But it is obvious they lived in a very good neighborhood of Havana, and manicured lawns are pretty much a luxury in the Caribbean. These people were landowners and businessowners who were forced to leave Cuba when the revolution took a left turn. The North American branch of the family continued to prosper, or at least they managed to maintain a comfortable middle class existence, but while the family members in Cuba appear to have to struggle a bit (selling octopus on the black market, for example) they too appear to have done fairly well in spite of their reduced circumstances – in one photograph we see the family’s pool adjoining their Havana home. The real difference is less obvious and unrelated to economic circumstance, and I cannot be sure whether this is an effect of the photographer’s excitement on being in Cuba or whether in fact it reflects a malaise or tedium inherent to American suburban life; but it seems to me that the Cubans in Cuba are happier than the Cubans in the States. The photos come alive in Cuba, they are full of light and color and theatrical gesture, while stateside the photos are more subdued. To be fair, there are very few of the latter in the selection appearing on Warshooter, but I suspect that one motif that will eventually become more salient as the project nears completion is the rueful irony that attends most exiles, even those who succeed in refashioning their lives – one can build houses and businesses from scratch, but one cannot recapture the magic that endowed the original home with its mystique, its sacred aura. It is not just that home is where the heart is, but that the heart is ultimately what makes a home. Suburban America is not the sort of place where a Cuban heart can beat to its habitual syncopated rhythm.

Introduction: On Accidents and Essays

2007-01-03T14:51:00.001-04:00

A while back I started a thread on Lightstalkers about Walter Benjamin's famous phrase, the "spark of accident." It seems an apt phrase to describe the kind of photography that I do, and so I decided to use it as the title of this photo blog. I am new to blogging, but I got interested in this medium when I started a blog of my own in Spanish, Trozos de un Viralata, in order to help me master that rather unSaxonlike language. While that blog touches on photography from time to time, it doesnt focus on it, and after reading impressive photoblogs such as those written by Alec Soth, Martin Fuchs, Sion Touhig and Joerg Colberg, I decided that I should enter the fray with a photoblog of my own. I have shot my mouth off enough on Lightstalkers, so I guess I might just spare those patient people a while and collect my thoughts here instead. To that end, I am going to begin by dredging up some of the old LS posts and refashion them for publication here.

Blogging in my view is essentially a postmodern form of the Montaignesque essay. That great philosopher used the essay form to test ("essay") experience, to interrogate it from a variety of perspectives that were not necessarily consistent. In fact, contradiction and inconclusiveness lay at the heart of his enterprise: "I do not portray being, I portray passing. . . . If my mind could gain a firm footing, I would not make essays, I would make decisions; but it is always in apprenticeship and on trial." While most philosophers are compelled to systematize and rationalize life, Montaigne, who lived during a time of great social and religious conflict, eschewed system and favored paradox and irony over logic and sequential order. Blogging by its very nature -- an ad hoc diary of stray musings and errant thoughts motivated by nothing more than the author's fancy -- seems the perfect medium to carry on in his vein.

I think of photos as visual essays of a sort. Saatchi recently invited me to be part of their online gallery, which I readily accepted, particularly as it gave me the opportunity to consider what it is I do and how it might fit into the context of the Art World. The definition I gave of my photographs seems to be in line with Montaigne's definition of his writing: "A good photograph tells many stories, but only if the photographer opens him or herself up to the object world. I am not interested in creating something original, but in discovering things that others see but do not heed. In that sense, I suppose my photographs are more like questions than answers." Course, one could argue that this is nothing more than the classic stance of the street photographer, and I would agree. Alex Webb defined it best in the prologue to his book on Haiti, Under A Grudging Sun: "I only know how to approach a place by walking. For what does a street photographer do but walk and watch and wait and talk, and then watch and wait some more, trying to remain confident that the unexpected, the unknown or the secret heart of the known awaits just around the corner." That search for the secret heart of the known is quintessentially Romantic in tradition, not unlike what Wordsworth called "spots in time." While a postmodern searcher might balk at defining the goal of his search in these terms, the "unexpected" remains a legitimate goal for the street photographer, and that accident which provides the photo with its power and seduction is nothing more than the stumbling block that reality conspires to toss in the path of the wanderer, by means of which one's expectations or assumptions are shaken to the core.

Elliot Erwitt said in a recent interview conducted for a multimedia piece, "I always include Luck in the budget." That consummate photographer of comical accidents ought to know. Luck, serendipity, accident, contingency -- that little bit of reality that the photographer can never control -- is the animating force behind a great photograph, the enlivening spirit, the magic of the moment. When I set out to photograph, I like nothing better than to carry one small light camera and then to give myself over to the experience of discovering whatever might occur during the span of time that is curtailed only by the fatigue to which my legs eventually succumb. But one never knows whether that adventure will yield a surprise or not. For that reason, I consider any assignment a somewhat hazardous duty in every sense of the word, because while I am being hired to bring back the goods, I dont really know ahead of time what goods I might procure, if any. Like any other seasoned shooter, I try to maximize my endeavor by preparing properly for the assignment, researching the situation, lining up reliable contacts, and setting up a reasonable itinerary. But the essential irony governing my occupation is that my best work is inevitably the result of losing myself in a place and surrendering control. By giving myself over to the moment, instead of dictating its form and sequence, I am more likely to succeed in bringing back something that really is good, while it may or may not serve as goods.

The Argentinian writer, Adolfo Bioys Casares, once wrote, " . . . no creo en magos, con o sin bonete, pero sí en la magia del mundo" (I dont believe in magicians, with or without a magic hat, but I do believe in the magic of the world). That defines my attitude as well. I dont necessarily believe in the wizards who dazzle us with their visual prestidigitation, but I do confide in the magic that their practice serves to delineate or throw into relief. It is probably impossible to define what makes a good image or where the images come from, but a good photographer learns to rely on the fact that they will come, albeit of their own accord.