Yet another prize winning photographer has been accused of visual deception.  Subsequently, Paul Hansen’s World Press Photo of the Year passed the forensic review that was set up hurriedly–by WPP–to address the scandal, but it has become clear that the image was substantially “improved” in post-production.  All commercial photos are enhanced, and few news photos have ever appeared without some artistic manipulation, so there is at the least a sliding scale involved.  At some point, however, art becomes deceit, and with that the integrity of the press as an institution is at risk.  Thus, the press needs its own watchdog, and from the beginning of photojournalism there have been those who were happy to question whether the images in the news were telling the truth.

I’m fine with that, but what I don’t get is why captioning so often gets a pass.

This photo was captioned by Time as, “April 30, 2013. Israeli security forces arrest a Palestinian man during clashes with Jewish settlers, left background, near the Jewish settlement of Yitzhar, near Nablus.”  Now, the photographer and magazine were playing by the rules, carefully identifying who, what, when, and where in sufficient detail to place the photo within the event being covered.  We now know that the photo was not taken on April 29th and that it was near Yitzhar (the Jewish settlement) near Nablus (the Palestinian city) and not near some other settlement or city.  Given either forensic or historical questions, those could be crucial details.

Those are not the only questions that apply, however.  There also are political and moral questions, for example.  In respect to those questions, a very significant detail has not been identified.  Look closely: the man is double over in pain while trying to get something out of his eyes.  He is a large, well-muscled man yet unable to resist the two soldiers grabbing him, so the pain must be debilitating.  Now look closer still: the two soldiers are trying to spray something into his face. The one is spraying–you can see that he is holding and firing a spray canister, and that the foam or mist is coming out as white blur.  The other soldier is trying to hold and turn the man so that the first can hit him directly in the face.  Hit him squarely in the eyes, that is, and perhaps for the second time.

The caption did not say, “April 30, 2013. Israeli security forces try to force a second dose of pepper spray into the eyes of a Palestinian man during clashes with Jewish settlers.”  That probably would be the more specific, more accurate description of what is being shown.  It also would shift the sense of political blame: instead of a man being “arrested,” as if a criminal, we have Israeli soldiers siding with the settlers who rioted following a stabbing.  (The stabbing of a settler was of course criminal and should lead to an arrest, but ask yourself how rioting following a crime would be treated in your town.)   Instead of settlers violating the rule of law, here the Palestinian is the sole law breaker.  Instead of soldiers attacked a wounded man to deliver a second dose of punishment, we have merely an arrest.  Of course, I’ve had to make some suppositions here and may be mistaken, but keep in mind that this is a result of the caption not supplying key information.

The saving grace of photographs is that they can show what is happening contrary to the interpretation that is applied to them.  Even so, as many commentators have pointed out, captioning can significantly influence what is seen, what is remembered, and how it is used.  The caption tells you both what to see and what to ignore in the photograph.

Most of us would see a vicious beating.  The London Telegraph apparently wasn’t so sure, as it captioned the photo this way: “At least five people were killed when police fired on about 100 Muslim youths in the Kenyan capital who were protesting against the arrest of a radical Jamaican-born Muslim cleric whose teachings influenced one of the 2005 London bombers.”

Well. I guess we are to think that they guy on the ground is one of the lucky ones–after all, he’s still alive, isn’t he?  (Barely, I would guess.)  And if he is getting a good beating, perhaps we are to think that it might be deserved: after all, he is associated with one of the London bombers.  The paper is showing the violence, of course, but it also is coaching the viewer in how to look past it, minimize it, pretend that even though nasty things happen on behalf of homeland security one really doesn’t have to say that they happen.

So it turns out that there really are two sets of rules: the rules that guide reporting what is supposed to be said, and the rules that ensure that some things are not said.  That second list probably is longer than we would like to think (speaking of learned denial).  To give one indication, in my own not-scientific survey of documentary images, it seems to me that police brutality often is not mentioned.  To the credit of the news organizations, it is shown, but it it not mentioned.  That strategy probably is safer for the news organizations–they are less likely to be accused of being “political,” or of having their photographers beaten.  But the omission is not just a prudent division of labor: it schools the public in seeing and not saying.  In short, it encourages the worst form of bystander behavior.

Words were being manipulated long before photography existed. They still are being manipulated with all the power and subtlety that we expect of Photoshop.  When attached to a photograph, they can seem all the more innocent, as if providing nothing more than background information that can be checked instantly for its accuracy.  Except that those words often are not innocent, and they are persuading us to not see, not check, and not ask.

Photographs by Nasser Ishtayeh/Associated Press and by Thomas Mukoya/Reuters.  To read a better caption of the second photo, go here.

Cross-posted at BagNewsNotes and PetaPixel.

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Images like this one used to be depictions of the impersonality, alienation, and anomie of modern life.

Perhaps the retro chic and post-feminist nostalgia of Mad Men has changed the way we think about mid-century modernism, but the show is more likely to be a symptom than a cause.  For whatever reason, these completely uniform, featureless, rectilinear, steel and glass cages no longer have to carry the symbolic baggage of an earlier era’s popular sociology.  The Organization Man, The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit, The Lonely Crowd, Death of a Salesman, and other titles of sixty years ago documented the anxiety and desperation that hung like second hand smoke throughout the new society of imposing office towers and distant suburbs.

Individuals still have their preferences, of course, but modernism is now a period style rather than a dynastic order.  The technologies, architectural designs, and engineering have become ubiquitous and are used to support a wide range of artistic and political initiatives, while also no longer being directly coupled to either capitalist hegemony or authoritarian regimes.  (Le Corbusier once said the choice was between “Architecture or Revolution,” and, not to be outdone, the Soviet Union and China converted their revolutions into disastrous schemes for centralized, state-controlled modernization.) The modernism that was the leading edge of 20th century development has been relegated to the background in the 21st.

Just like the carpet at the office, you might say.  And with that demotion in status, it may be time to take another look.  Ironically, modernism’s abhorrence of decoration proved to be no safeguard against other kinds of excess, including hubris.  But cut back to scale, the functional simplicity, elegant abstraction, geometric patterning, subtle textures, and other characteristic features of modern design still are capable of evoking a sense of beauty and even of serenity.  Take away the imperial power, crushing hierarchies, and totalizing extension into all aspects of the lifeworld, and you are left with a sculpted space and muted tones that could nurture both comfort and creativity.

As with the two images above, modernism always was about radical manipulations of scale.  The same aesthetic could be found in a gleaming skyscraper and the chairs or staplers inside the building.  Usually it was about scaling up, however.  The sequence of images here provides a scaling down, much like the change in status that they represent.  One thing I like about the second picture is that the aesthetic is taken down yet another notch by the slight fraying of the wall covering along plastic baseboard.  Look closer still and you can see the line separating two swatches of carpet on the left.  Whether the original piecework or evidence of deterioration over time, these details give us a modern environment that isn’t so far removed from the human condition after all.

This corner, like the building above, will have become almost invisible.  Nothing distinctive to be seen either on the skyline or down the hall. They haven’t just faded into the background, they now are the background for another era still struggling to define itself–in fact, still struggling to even begin to become something other than another repetition of a culture hanging on past its time.  Perhaps one small way out of that dilemma is to see all of modernism as a useful backdrop to a future yet to be designed.  And when caught in one of those moments when the mind seems stuck, perhaps we might look a little closer at the surface of those things now taken for granted.  Things that, once the old urban angst no longer applies, we can see both for what they are and for how they might suggest better things yet to come.

Photographs by Michael Wolf, The Transparent City, and Lars Tunbjork/Agence VU, Office.  Both images are part of the slide show “A Major Case of ‘the Mondays’: Photographs of Office Life,” curated by Myles Little, Time Lightbox.

Cross-posted at BagNewsNotes.

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There is no doubt that landscape photography is popular, but is it really important?  When people take photography seriously, they almost always are doing so to focus on the people who are being shown.  War, poverty, politics, sports–whatever the subject, the point is to show what people are doing and experiencing.  They are shown in specific circumstances, but there is no doubt that who matters more than where.

So why would we value an image that shows us only the land, the flow of light over a hill, and the ease with which the earth exceeds human scale?  Perhaps this photograph from Donglan county, Jiangping, Cbina isn’t the best example, as it allows a concession for admiring human handiwork.  The exquisitely fitted paddy fields are the result of many generations of careful agriculture, and if their beauty, as if fine jewelry, can’t be appreciated from the ground, they are no less artfully wrought for that.

Like any garden, most landscapes reflect human engineering of one sort or another–and not least the framing and other artistry provided by the camera–so perhaps it’s not such a bad example after all.  The landscape could be a subtle exercise in narcissism: Humans can pretend that they are looking at nature while actually admiring their own reflection.  Or these photos could be another form of vanity: suggesting an easy harmony between humanity and nature (and perhaps nature’s God).  Such photos rarely feature nature’s harshness, where animals will eat their prey before it dies, and in any case the camera will not let you feel how cold the desert gets at night or how flies can drive you mad.

Some landscapes have been put to very good use, and very serious use, in the service of the environmental movement.  With images from Ansel Adams’ portraits of Yosemite to the Earthrise on the cover of the Whole Earth Catalog to the successive Sierra Club magazine covers to the many documentaries of environmental degradation, landscape photography has been a powerful means for political advocacy on behalf of a planet that cannot speak for itself.

I wouldn’t want to leave it there, however.  At some point, the environmentalism (which includes some posts at this blog) overwrites the images; they become merely means to an end, rather than something also capable of guiding other forms of reflection.  Let me suggest one such alternative, one that is consistent with an environmental ethos but not the same thing either.

Whatever else it is, the landscape photograph can be an image of abundance.  Whether capturing purple mountain majesties or the traces of the wind on a barren sand dune, the landscape shows a world that is immensely larger, more interconnected, more amazing than anything any human society will ever make.  Buddhism has tried to capture that immensity, and to contrast it to the paucity of human meaning-making, but I’m not sure the Abrahamic religions and the civilizations they are part of have an equivalent point of departure.  Sure, there are Biblical passages celebrating cosmic power, but that’s just the beginning of how one might marvel at the richness of this planet in this universe.

None of this denies the role of scarcity in nature or human affairs.  Indeed, the photograph above can be seen as a subtle meditation of how to build a sustainable relationship with scarcity on behalf of abundance.  But often abundance is misunderstood and under appreciated (“under theorized,” as they say on my side of the street).  A few have approached it–Georges Bataille, Paul Feyerabend, Anne Norton–but an abundance of writing on the subject is not yet the norm.

I don’t think complaints about over-consumption qualify as a sufficient account of abundance, as they presume a more beneficial scarcity.  And don’t conclude that this post a brief for obesity, gluttonous oil consumption, or other dysfunctional or non-sustainable habits that harm individuals, society, and the environment.  Both abundance and scarcity need to be understood apart from contemporary extremes, not least if we are to see how often those extremes are artificial rather than natural conditions.

Whatever has been said, I doubt that it begins to articulate how much we could learn, and how well we could live, if we were to really look at what landscapes can reveal.

 

Photographs by  Xinhua/Landov/Barcroft Media and Elmar Akhmetov/Sony World Photography 2013  award.

 

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Photographers are finding it harder and harder to make a living while print journalism is being pulled deeper and deeper into the undertow of history, but photography is experiencing a renaissance.

I don’t have the time today to say much at all, but consider two related examples of how photography is thriving as a public art: the rise in highly accessible distribution and in high quality curatorial work, all of which is coming to be taken for granted.

The distribution is amazing.  Life and Look are long gone, but the slide shows at In Focus, The Big Picture, and many other online newspapers and magazines are becoming increasingly prominent and sophisticated, and the images are relayed and given added value through the commentary and discussion at any number of photography blogs, all of which of course then flows through social media as well, which also is circulating billions of vernacular images while sending some of them up the media chain, and so it goes on day after day.

This media swirl could be a maelstrom, but in the midst of it all major media are investing in photo editors who are doing amazing work.  Sure, cliches still abound, as we are talking about mainstream media in mass societies, thank you very much.  People want some of that, and the press has to make a living, and frankly every day isn’t so unique as the Hallmark card might want you to believe.  (Speaking of cliches. . . . )  Even so there is plenty of curatorial work, not least by Alan Taylor at In Focus as well as other sources alluded to above, that is remarkably good.

And there is one source that may be an index of the changes that have occurred.  Time was never the gold standard in photojournalism (the division of labor with Life probably accounted for a lot of that).  But Time’s online LightBox just keeps getting better and better.  I used to go to Time for examples of what not to do, and now I kick myself for what I’ve been missing.

The addition of Mikko Takkunen is the most recent example of how Time is making a strong investment in photojournalism.  But there is much more going on as well.  Just today, I noticed their 365: The Year in Photographs, which I hadn’t seen yet for 2012.  The concept is as cliched as it gets, and yet the selection is outstanding: one that reflects a rich aesthetic sensibility that still serves reporting and reflecting on the news.

They aren’t perfect, of course, but the trend is definitely in the right direction.  And you can’t say that about a lot of the news business these days.  Let’s hope that investing in quality can become part of the business model again, and not just for photography.

Photograph by Narciso Contreras/Associated Press.  Dec. 1, 2012. Smoke rises from buildings due to heavy fighting between Free Syrian Army fighters and government forces in Aleppo, Syria.

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