Asked & Answered, Or What I Learned in History Class

Reading around on some photo-related blogs today, I realized that two apparently different questions prompt pretty much the same answer.

Q: What are unions good for (besides, weekends, vacations, minimum wage and working hours standards, of course)?
A: They help keep companies from killing employees (for the historically challenged - look here).

Q: What is photojournalism good for?
A: It helps keep companies from killing employees (same episode, slightly different lesson).

As I've pointed out here before, while critics like Sontag complain that photography has grown up hand-in-hand with war, it has grown up hand-in-hand with democracy too. Sometimes it is a good thing to remind ourselves of that.

Robert Bergman and "the democracy of universal vulnerability"

Untitled © Robert Bergman.

What could make a photographer happier than to have two high-profile critics arguing over her work in a high profile venue? Of course, the premise is that 'it doesn't matter what they say, so long as they are talking about you.' Have a look at this exchange between Andy Grundberg and David Levi Strauss occasioned by a review the former wrote for Aperture of a recent exhibition of work by Robert Bergman.* The exchange (which links to the original review) is located on the Aperture blog "Exposures." I doubt Bergman finds it edifying.

In his review Grundberg devotes many of his column inches to channeling Susan Sontag's moralism and directing it at Bergman. This is a critical approach that I wish Sontag had taken with her. Here is the gist of his criticism:

Nevertheless, there’s a temptation to dismiss Bergman’s pictures as latter-day Bowery Bum photography. Most of his ink-jet-produced, moderately sized prints show us the faces of people he encountered on the streets of major cities in the Midwest and eastern United States. They are posed portraits: the subjects gaze down or away into the distance, or else stare confrontationally at the camera. For the most par t, the people appear to be downtrodden or at least on the outs with conventional society; more than a few seem afflicted with a wasting disease. Unfortunately it is impossible to verify any of the questions a viewer might have about these people, since Bergman calls each image “Untitled” and provides it with only a date. No name, no location, no facts except those given by the lens—presumably Bergman wants his subjects to be open to whatever preconceptions and prejudices his viewers may project onto them. In the context of the gallery, though, this denial of extra pictorial detail seems less a social statement than an aesthetic position: we are forced back on Bergman’s compositions, his use of color, the consistency of his choices of framing, even his decision about which subjects to shoot.

[. . .]

Beyond this, though, it is really Bergman’s motives for choosing to photograph the people he does that remain the central question. Surely he can’t be concerned that these pictures in any way improve the lives of the people they portray, since we don’t know where or who they are. Perhaps the ambition is for our regard of the pain of others to make us more attuned to human suffering in general (come back, Susan Sontag, please), but this aim is attenuated by our prior experience of pictures in the same vein. We might expect anyone conversant with recent photographic practice to know this as an existing critical problem, which leaves us with a far less ennobled idea of what is afoot here: that Bergman is out to convince us that he is a great photographer.

Compare what Grundberg says here with the nearly identical complaints Sontag levels at Arbus in On Photography or Salgado in Regarding the Pain of Others. Pretty remarkable. Pretty banal. Moreover, in the current context this complaint is especially perplexing. Bergman hardly has been self-promoting, at least successfully so. Until recently (and he is in his mid-sixties) he has not sold his work or had gallery representation. This exhibition is, I believe, his first solo show at a prominent venue. As Levi Strauss points out, while his work is not "new," he has not been a denizen of the photo/art world.

Like Sontag, Grundberg seems to miss the point entirely. Maybe Bergman has, as he says, simply been trying to make great photographs. I recommend this interview in The Brooklyn Rail. That is different from trying "to convince us that he is a great photographer." Perhaps in his portraits Bergman is attempting to depict what, in a phrase he takes from a poet who was the mother of his late friend Danny Seymour, he terms "the democracy of universal vulnerability." Perhaps that is a naive view - we are not all equally vulnerable, after all. But still, we all are vulnerable. And it doesn't take much. What I am suggesting here is surely difficult to sort out. I grant that. But it seems likely to be considerably more useful than following Grundberg and Sontag's ghost down the path of moralism.
__________
* You can find other reviews of the exhibition, which ran last fall, here at The Washington Post, here at npr, and here The Wall Street Journal.

On the Ethics of Representation: Missing the Point Entirely

From: Stoned to Death, Somalia, 13 December.
Photograph © Farah Abdi Warsameh/AP.

Today The Guardian carried this column by Sean O'Hagan on the morality of photojournalism. His ruminations were prompted by this series of photographs by Farah Abdi Warsameh that won 2nd place in the "general news" category at the World Press Photo awards. (I've lifted one of the photos above.) The photos show a man being buried up to his chest and then stoned to death by a group of masked men. The man who was killed (should we say executed?) was named Mohamed Abukar Ibrahim and he had confessed to committing adultery. The judgment and execution, according to news reports, were carried out by an armed fundamentalist rebel group called Hizbul Islam. The rebels forced hundreds of local residents to watch the performance. I say performance because this is clearly political theater - horrific, no doubt - but no less theatrical for that. The rebels - who are party to a proxy war in the failed state known as Somalia - are trying to pacify the locals by terrorizing them.

O'Hagan engages in a hand-wringing exercise about the ethics of the photographer and the voyeurism of 'we' the viewers. In the process he, predictably enough, invokes that arch-moralist Susan Sontag. Against that background he raises a set of absurd worries about consent and communication between the doomed man and the photographer. I find this stunning. This is, after all a war zone; and it is entirely likely that the photographer was himself not given any choice than to record the events. This was theater after all. And repugnant as this execution is, it is one part of a broader political and military conflict. In closing, O'Hagan quotes Sontag:

"There is shame as well as shock in looking at the close-up of a real horror. Perhaps the only people with the right to look at images of suffering of this extreme order are those who could do something to alleviate it … or those who could learn from it. The rest of us are voyeurs, whether or not we mean to be."

This is Sontag at her most ridiculous. But even by these standards there is a case to be made for publishing these images. Might it not be possible that viewers "could learn from" them? We could learn that this was a terrorist act. We could learn that the 'government' against whom the rebel groups is, in fact, rebelling is sponsored by the U.S. and other western nations. We could learn how quickly many of our fellow citizens were willing to use these images to condemn "Islam." I'm sure O'Hagan could come up others if only he'd stop wringing his hands and ask questions.

On The Pleasure of Flinching

"While mainstream networks were still fretting over whether to show flag-draped coffins on the nightly news, wrestling internally over the complicated ethics of embedded journalism, and creating ever more extravagant banners and catchphrases, camera phones quietly and permanently altered the journalistic landscape."

And the upshot of the essay by Nicholas Sautin at Guernica from which I lifted this sentence is that the pervasive presence of digital technology and the resulting spread via the Internet of amateur images made in war zones and other terrains of atrocity have more or less corroded whatever "ethics of shock and incomprehension" may have exited in earlier eras. But Sautin arrives at the same destination as his predecessor Susan Sontag - the moralist who bemoaned the lack of a settled 'ecology of images.' For both the glut of images means that no responsibility can be placed on viewers; and hence all we can expect is political complacency.

My objection is simple. Political complacency, not just about distant wars in exotic places, but about mayhem and suffering and hardship right here in our neighborhoods exists independently of images and their effects. There is no 'right to look' that we might earn. Like Sontag, Sautin is wailing at the representations not the actualities, refusing to see that the two are separable. This is simply more hand-wringing; another attempt to blame media rather than ourselves.