The Sony World Photography Awards shortlist has been announced, and some of those entries are being showcased in slide shows.  Doing so will build interest in the final decisions, but it also reflects interest already present.  That interest extends not only to the photos but also into discussions about how they should be judged.  Increasingly, the judging itself has come under scrutiny; as one example, one of the most viewed posts at this blog is on The Rhetoric of Prize-Winning Photographs.

To summarize the broader debate, winning photos have been declared to be too conventional, too safe, too much like previous winners, and too arty, while the contests have been faulted for elitism, cronyism, and selling out.  All this is simply more evidence that photography has arrived–that its status as a public art is being taken seriously.  Welcome to public debate, and by the way, what have you done for us lately?

Since the criticisms come from all sides, consistency is hardly a virtue, but what might seem to be contradictions need not be.  Can something be both explicitly artistic and safe?  Well, actually, yes.  Are you likely to sell out if already comfortably elitist or networked?  Well, yes, and by then it may even be second nature.  But are the criticisms always right?  No.  And even when on target, should they be the last word on what criteria should be used to judge photography?  Again, no.  Not, that is, if we really are going to consider photography to be an important public art.

So let me take up briefly the concern that photography awards can favor artistry over other values such as documentary witness, hard-boiled realism, formal simplicity, or critical provocation.  Of course, these are extremely important values, but we know that.  The question is whether photographs should win awards for doing something else; something like this.

This is a scene from the annual wildebeest migration in Kenya.  And it is a scene, a tableau, because this photograph looks very much like a painting.  More to the point, it has a lot in common with the landscape painting of the Hudson River School of Thomas Cole, Asher Durand, and others who drew on Romantic aesthetics to capture the grandeur of nature.  Using strong contrasts of light and shadow and movement and mass amidst a moody atmospheric haze, the composition suggests the enormous energies flowing through the land, water, herd, and sky, yet leaves their source or purpose illegible, as something that is too large to ever by captured by art alone.  This combination of awe and futility is epitomized by the beast leaping from the high bank, soaring improbably but magnificently through the air.  Perhaps he (or she) will stick the landing–I can’t help thinking of its similarity to an Olympic athlete–but the important fact is that the beast has to answer to crash’s law, the rough ground and uncertain fate of any animal having to survive in a harsh environment.  Ultimately scenes such as that are not about the individual, save for the spectator, who is to marvel the powerful forces shaping the earth.

The romanticism goes further still, as the photograph can be seen as elegiac.  The sublime offered the Hudson School a sense of consolation, for they were meditating on how nature was being lost to civilization: both displaced (destroyed) and forgotten.  The same may apply here: as the space and water left to the wildebeest becomes more limited, their migration routes disrupted, their numbers reduced further by poaching and other predations.  This beautiful photograph can hint at the dark finality of all of that, but its beauty also could be taken as a form of consolation, and with that an act of abandonment.

So why not just paint it?  The cynical answer is that painting would take more skill than photography.  If that’s your answer, go back to the studio and paint.  For those who recognize that we are not in a zero-sum competition among the arts, the question still points in the right direction.  Does the photograph offer anything that a painting would lack?  And does the explicit artistry of this photograph–specifically, its painterly quality–add or detract from the distinctively photographic contribution?

Frankfurt School theorist Siegfried Kracauer defined photography as being shaped by two generative principles: “there is on the one side a tendency toward realism culminating in records of nature, and on the other a formative tendency aiming at artistic creations.”  As he also noted, this tension generated aesthetic problems for the medium.  He could have added that it explains the subsequent division in the road between documentary photography and fine art photography, as each developed one media capability or the other while trying to avoid problems that could, if not mastered, lead to either paralysis or mediocrity.  But as Kracrauer correctly observed, the specificity of photography comes from the primacy of the realistic principle.  Although “a minimum requirement,” it is almost absolute: photographs are expected to show something that was in front of the lens prior to the creation of the image.  The more they deviate from this requirement, the more they become merely inventive, which is why fine art photography is inherently compromised: unlike the other arts, experimental optimization leads it away from its own medium.

Almost all photographs are not fine art photography, however, including those that are submitted to photo contests.  The habitus of photography is capacious, and almost every photograph taken has some value beyond solely aesthetic value, and almost every photograph submitted for an award professes to show us something, not just about the art, but about the world.   So it is that, outside of a fine arts context, the reality principle rightly holds pride of place, which in turn makes artistry suspect.  Awards do bring the tension to the fore, however.  If given only for documentary fidelity, the judges would soon have to be basing their decisions on the topics rather than the images themselves, or on purely formal criteria which, as Susan Sontag pointed out forty years ago, has become a “bankrupt” vocabulary for photography.  So what is to be done?

Kracauer recognized that the imaginative and realist principles don’t have to conflict: indeed, the formative tendency “may help substantiate and fulfill” the realist tendency.  In a nutshell, the judges for photography awards should be looking for exactly that conjunction.  Artistry can be quiet or explicit, but it should bring the viewer to see, understand, and work out a relationship with a reality that might be overlooked otherwise.  And, to get back to the question above, the photograph, because it is a photograph and not a painting, should be about a reality that exists regardless of human imagination, something having its own place and value in the universe beyond our limited ability to understand what that is.

Perhaps by imitating a painting, the photograph above can remind us that photography itself is not a mirror of nature, but rather one useful but still limited way of seeing.  And by hinting at the limits of representation, the image may also call up more emotional or intuitive responses to the world.  As Kracauer noted, the best photographic seeing “is of a kind which is closer to empathy than to disengaged spontaneity.”  That is the difference between depicting a sudden leap into the air, and bringing you closer to the beast.  Look at the photograph again and ask yourself, which is it?

Photograph by Bonnie Cheung/2014 Sony World Photography Awards.  Quotations from Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (New York: Oxford UP, 1960), p. 12 ff., and Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Picador, 1977), p. 136.  For the record, I’m not saying Cheung’s photo should win an award (or not win, either), only that it provides a fine example for public discussion of an important question about photographic excellence.

Cross-posted at BagNewsNotes.

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Well, you tell me.

The short answer is San Francisco Bay.  Or as the European Space Agency put it rather poetically, “An urban sprawl engulfs San Francisco Bay in a sea of lights.”  The inversion of making the land mass a “sea” is a license we readily give to words, while pretending that our vision should be anchored more firmly to reality.  According to the conventional wisdom, that anchor is supposed to be provided by the caption–the verbal description, which can be so easily or subtlely metaphoric, and you might want to think about that.

But I digress.  The question remains whether you are seeing The Bay Area.  Now that you’ve been told, perhaps, but could you pick it out of a lineup of other cities at night?  Those who live there, sure, they might be able to zero in a bit as if on Google Maps, but most people would have to take it on faith.

And so we do, and that may be a problem.  Not the problem that usually is promoted at this point: I really don’t think there is an epistemological issue here.  Yes, it could have been faked or there could be a mistake in labeling, but here as in many other places we can rely on institutional practices and social norms, not to mention the fact that most people have enough to do just telling the truth.  (I fall into the latter category, so save your breath about me making it up.)  It is what they say it is.

But is it?  The problem I want to raise is that once you’ve been given a literal description of the image, your imagination may shut down too soon.  The image is also an optic–a way of seeing–and we can think of the imagination as an extended way of seeing.  Thus, any image might prompt imaginative extension, elaboration, or transformation of what is being shown, an extrapolation into the realm of metaphor, you might say.  And why would one want to do that?  Not merely to play with possibilities, although there is no law against that, but rather to get closer to what really is there to be seen.

Fortunately, the ESA caption wasn’t strictly literal.  There’s another deviation in that regard beyond the “sea of lights.”  We are seeing, we are told, “an urban sprawl” (my emphasis).  That’s not standard American English usage, and so it opens a crack in the door of possibility.  “Urban sprawl” would have been more typical, and it would have implied that we are seeing a general phenomenon, one that can be found and that would be much the same in other cities and countries.  Such captioning is actually an exercise in abstraction, not direct reference to the hard ground of reality, and you might want to think about that as well.

“An urban sprawl” sounds more like a single thing–like an organism, for example.  An amoeba.  A virus.  A radiant life form, a body electric humming with energy.  Something that can pulsate, grow, replicate as it directs more and more energy through its neural pathways to become more intelligent, vital, beautiful.

And that can go dark in seconds, collapsing into a chaos of darkness as its energy disappears, systems crashing, gasping for the terawatts of power that no longer are available because the unseen earth has given up the last of its oil, coal, and gas.  Or because another virus has emerged, this one too strong and predatory to be stopped, whether digital or biological, all that is needed to make the darkness sovereign.

Or perhaps something else.  Pick your metaphor and try to see what the image is telling us.  Think about it: it’s not really needed to do what governments do with visual technologies: surveying, surveillance, and propaganda could each be there, but weakly so, and they have far better options elsewhere.  No, I think it’s provided because it’s beautiful and enigmatic, which is enough to intrigue and awe many people inside the space program and without.  Best of all, it’s what you need if you want to see what really is there.

Photograph by ESA/NASA.

Cross-posted at BagNewsNotes.

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Let’s start with one photo.

The caption reads, “Human remains are seen during the exhumation of a Stalinist-era mass grave on the military cemetery in the heart of the Polish capital Warsaw. The grave is believed to contain the remains of around 200 victims of a post-war campaign of communist terror.”

Perhaps the victim was screaming at the moment of death, but the gaping jaw could be an accident of decay or excavation.  Perhaps the lost individual will be identified, and perhaps the family can be notified.  Perhaps the remains will have forensic value, and maybe some remnant of justice can yet be done.

But, OMG, what an image.  The accidents of time have produced a howling, shrieking cry of pain and rage.  The body emerging from the earth is still shrouded with dust, as if still more ghost than material thing.  The immobility of being long buried is still binding the corpse, but it seems to be straining to be released, to rise up in glorious, savage revenge.  A revenge that will never come, as instead it will be interned again in a bureaucratic process constrained by a decided imbalance of power.

And so it has to settle for a more academic symbolism: there lies The Past, or Terror, or the Human Condition.  These are not small things, but they can have other emblems as well.  Yet, even so, I can’t help but think–or hope–that this image might haunt whatever idea is brought to it; that it might arise again in the night or at an odd moment, and that it might disturb, trouble, bring one perhaps to tremble for this lost soul from history’s slaughter pen.

OK, and now add a million more photos.  Start with the 10,000 that were sent to photo editors on the day this one was published.  Add another 10,000 for the many days before and every day after that.  Add also all the other images that you see every day in the news, advertising, and entertainment, and on Facebook, Flickr, and other social media.  Then add in what everyone else is seeing: the 200,000 photos that are uploaded to Facebook every minute, and the 27,00 at Instagram, etc.  And while you are at it, drop by a museum and see an exhibition of photographs.

Were you to do any of this, you might feel like Chloe Pantazi, who went to an exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum on war photography.  Pantazi came away feeling “numb,” as if she had been anesthetized, and, not surprisingly came to the conclusion that “Susan Sontag Was Right” when she condemned photographs for dulling our ethical capacity.  Well, even a stopped clock is right twice a day, so I guess it could happen, but the declaration also provides an opportunity to think for a few seconds and say, “Really?”

I haven’t seen the exhibition, nor do I doubt for a minute that Pantazi had the experience she reports, so we need not disagree about her review on those terms.  That said, Pantazi’s reaction is not surprising for several reasons: First, it is a very understanding reaction to over 400 photographs about war taken in a single experience of dedicated viewing.  Indeed, I would expect the same result from reading 400 essays, or 400 pages, on the horror of war.  What most of us would not do in that case, however, is conclude that words were the problem.  And yet that is the point of the photography review, as the subtitle declares: “A troubling new exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum of Art throws into question the medium’s very purpose.”

Which leads to the second reason her conclusion is so familiar: it is exactly the reaction one is primed to have after reading Sontag, not to mention John Berger, Allan Sekula, Martha Rossler, and others who have crafted the conventional discourse of photography theory along the same line.  (See the first chapter of Susie Linfield’s The Cruel Radiance for a provocative exposition on this point.)  What might be a normal–and temporary–reaction to intensive consumption of any medium becomes redefined as a universal failing of a single medium.  Once primed to be misused and disappointed by photography, it is easy to code one’s experience accordingly.  Let me add that putting the exhibition in a museum doesn’t help, as the fine arts context dominant there (as it is in Sontag’s work) interferes with correctly understanding a public art.

Again, the point here is not to reprove Pantazi for what might be a spot on review of a flawed exhibition.  But her reaction, the size of the exhibition, and even Sontag’s interpretative biases all point toward what is a very real condition of the image world today: excess.  And where there is excess, there will be exhaustion.

And as Pantazi rightly assumes (more so than the early Sontag, by the way), the emotions that come to be exhausted by images of horror are crucial for moral response, reflection, and engagement.  So this is no small problem.  But if we could set aside Sontag’s censorious tone, it is a problem that could lead to many creative solutions.

I’m out of time tonight, but let me close by suggesting that there is much more to excess than the likelihood of overwhelming us.  (And be sure to see David Campbell’s corrective argument about the much more manageable circumstances of actual practice.)  Indeed, photography as always been an abundant art: cheap, expansive, and ending up in every corner of the world.  (I have a bit more to say on rethinking abundance here, here, and here.)  What does need to be done is to take more seriously the curatorial function, which includes not only actual curators or editors, but also critics and citizens as they sort, select, and share images as part of their participation in the virtual world of public culture.

And we need to remember that at the end of any given day, what may be needed is not 400 photographs, but just one.  Like the one above, for example.

Photograph by Wojtek Radwanski/AFP-Getty Images.

Cross-posted at BagNewsNotes.

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