On the Web: March 2007 Archives
From the review of Alan Trachtenberg's Lincoln's Smile, in the Philadelphia Inquirer:
Photographs, Trachtenberg writes, elegantly and eloquently, are "not so much a guide to reality as a uniquely modern means of questioning reality." They are locked in an eternal present, where something is always about to happen. Appearing at the intersection of image and speech, photographs present the paradox of "things appearing while disappearing, apprehended just in time, in time" - to "expire into new life."
(via Photo Kaboom)
2point8 has posted a few links to other Charlie Rose interviews with photographers, in addition to the one with Taryn Simon that I posted about this morning. Bresson, Avedon, Liebowitz, Natchwey, among others.
Late last night I ran across a link to Chad Muthard's Photo March Madness tournament bracket and just had to spend the next half hour figuring out how that would play out to the Final Four and eventual champion. I had a few issues with the initial seeding, but in the end my Final Four played out to be Jeff Wall, Harry Callahan, Edward Burtynsky and Walker Evans. Evans and Callahan in the championship game with Evans coming out on top.
Alternately, Christian Patterson has proposed a monumental undertaking, the Photography Family Tree, inspired by the Jazz Story Family Tree. I've seen another similar one done for the history of rock and roll music. Perhaps for a PhD thesis.
Zoe Strauss and Alec Soth have had a great cross-blog conversation about portraiture, starting with an Avedon commentary about photographing Henry Kissinger. I have been meaning to write a post about the demise of the prevalence of the August Sander paradigm for photography, but these two posts underlined the other main model, which is the mugshot. Interestingly, the "professional" mugshot is designed to record the visual identity of an individual for future reference while August Sander intended to subjugate the individual in order to summarize entire archetypes in a single picture.
Jen Bekman predicts a resurgence of black & white photography. If you're interested, hike up to the Upper East Side to see the William Richardson show at Gitterman Gallery. And the Henry Wessell "moment" we're experiencing.
"Is it possible to put an end to a form of human behavior which has existed throughout history by means of photography? The proportions of that notion seem ridiculously out of balance. Yet, that very idea has motivated me." - James Nachtwey
My wife and I watched Christian Frei's Academy Award-nominated documentary "War Photographer" a couple of weekends back. Kind of a NetFlix double feature with The Constant Gardener . The movie is a biographical profile of the the war photographer James Nachtwey, one of the co-founders of the VII agency.
The core of the film is Nachtwey's mantra, quoted above, that photography can have an effect on history. The film primarily focuses on his work in the former Yugoslavia, the Palestinian territories, and Indonesia. Nachtwey initially came across as a cold, callous intruder, pressing his lens into scenes of grief and mourning. The image above is a frame from the film and a fair amount of footage is captured with small microcameras aimed over Nachtwey's Canon SLR or tilted back into his face. This is intended to give a sense of what it's like to shoot, but its a poor approximation for having you eye pressed up into the viewfinder and the world outside the frame fades away in the intensity of looking for the right moment to squeeze the shutter release. The effect was quite odd, particularly early on. It mimics a Doom-like video game, with the shotgun replaced with a lens barrel.
So, the central question is can photography, journalistic photography, make a change as big as ending war? Nachtwey is not just interested in ending specific wars, he wants to end all war and he believes he can do that through his work. He's obviously very intense about it, forgoing the sorts of everyday comforts and relationships most westerners take for granted in order to pursue this dream. Which means he can come off as a bit self righteous at times, but maybe that's the guilt that comes with being exposed to this sort of life philosophy while sitting in your comfy little NYC apt watching a DVD while sipping micro waved hot chocolate.
From a war photography view, the film also shows how our viewpoint of war in the west has changed based which subjects the photographer chooses. Thru the Korean conflict and into Vietnam, to be a war photographer meant your focus was on the fighters and fighting. Now, in the wake of Vietnam, the armies are more wary about journalists (though interestingly, the embed program used in the early phases of Iraq seem to reverse that in ways many photographers found unnerving) and the emphasis became the civilian and noncombatant who feels the lasting effects of the war. In Nachtwey's view I suppose this is also because a dead or traumatized civilian makes a cleaner case than the equivalent soldier, that war must stopped
But the question remains, how effective can photography be in halting an activity that seems to lie at the very core of human nature? Sontag's Regarding the Pain of Others, a book about violent pictures, delved into this question, attacking the position that simply representing atrocity will. Evoke the proper revulsion and indignation. For some viewers, indignation will lead to thoughts of justice, retribution and revenge. Consider the varying reactions to the cellphone video of Saddam Hussein's execution. Iraqi Shiites lauded it as justice served, Europeans shook their heads at "barbarity", Iraqi Sunnis viewed it as shameful.
During the film, I couldn’t help but wonder about Nachtwey's view on image fatigue, that the volume of photos he taken of dead sons, grieving mothers, the poor, rebellious youth devolves into a heart-numbing mash. Over decades of seeing the same atrocities committed in every continent of the world and public reaction in the West generally responding as a collective shrug, it's hard to imagine Nachtwey doesn't hold onto his idealism simply as a bullwark against the realization that its all been for nothing and that we are condemned by our nature to continue to kill one another.
