Tragedy

Very belated piece of writing, but I was working on it for a while... 
Hope some think it's still relevant.

I spent my final year in Cambridge working on the so-called 'Tragedy' paper that included the study of tragedy from Ancient Greece to contemporary versions of the genre, but little did I know that I would return to a tragedy of our own as I arrived in Cyprus on the 11th July. Academics might criticize the way I use the word to describe a non-literary event, but the magnitude and effect of an event that has moved the entire island (hitherto deep in slumber) to tears and onto the streets has pushed me to reconsider the aptness of the word 'tragedy' in our daily, and very real, lives.

At university, we  spent time juxtaposing the use of the word 'tragedy' in the media as opposed to its use in literary and academic environments, wherein some scholars (I'm thinking particularly of Ronan McDonald) reach the conclusion that in real life, as opposed to art, one labels as 'tragedy' certain unfortunate, devastating events (mostly of accidental nature) in order to imbue them with transcendence, to give them a certain sense of permanence; a grandeur that ensures their place in a culture's, a community's, a family's long-term memory. In short, to ensure permanence in posterity of an event that is part of a nature so fickle and transient that it constitutes an almost absurd effort against nihilism.  

Yet one thing that non-literary and literary tragedies seem to have in common - despite many academics' attempts to polarize the two - is that they raise a storm of questions, an explosion (an apt term bearing in mind our situation) of question marks that remain bitterly unanswered. Why did Cyprus keep the containers? Was the President actually so keen to please Syria and Iran, that he neglected his fundamental duty of protecting the country he is supposed to rule? Why did officials decide to put the containers next to the largest power plant of the island?

What's more, the explosion at the naval base in Zygi on the 11th July has something else in common with our Greek ancestors' favorite cultural and educational pastime: maddened individuals who, possessed by some sort of illusion or delusion - the Greeks called it ate - overreach human boundaries and make choices that provoke divine judgment and insult the gods. To use a term closer to our modern sensibilities: they play with fire.

That's exactly what a shamefully large number of army and state officials did in Cyprus. Not once, or for a while. But for two whole years. Leaving 98 containers of explosives and other materials used to make bombs stacked up in an Aztec-like pyramid in an area right between the Evangelos Florakis naval base and the Vasilikos power plant, the island's main source of energy and biggest investment that, by the way, cost approximately 3 billion euro to build, and was only finished some months before the explosion with the addition of new equipment.

So in effect these high-minded low-lifes would convene meeting after meeting brushing aside the warnings of the naval base's director with an ease comparable to Oedipus' complacency - the man who solved the Sphynx's riddle, at least we had some proof of his capacity - when faced with warnings about his criminal fate.

This is typical Cyprus, some may say. Others will say that this was an accident - Oedipus, after all, was completely oblivious to the fact that he had killed his father, or, that it was his father that he had killed. He was also oblivious to the fact that he was sleeping with his mother, or, that it was his mother he had married and was sleeping with. Tiresias insists that this is no excuse. And so the man who thinks he knows it all plucks his own eyes out as an indication of his belated clairvoyance.

I cannot call an accident what happened in Cyprus on the 11th July. Nor can I accept the excuse that our dear president, the man who thinks he knows it all, did not know and was oblivious to the imminent danger that the 98 bulging containers posed not only to the naval base and sailors that were serving there, but to the entire Limassol community and the residents of the surrounding area. It was in fact his own deliberate political whim that insisted the containers remained in Cyprus - a country lacking the infrastructure of handling such a titanic amount of explosives - despite several pleas from EU countries such as France and Germany, as well as the United States, which explicitly offered to help remove the containers from Cypriot territory.

At a decision-making crossroads between favoring our EU allies or satiating the narcissism of Iran and Syria's megalomaniac regimes - to whom the containers originally belonged -  our dear president chose the latter path. He also decided to appoint the aging and incompetent Mr. Papacostas as Minister of Defense, who notoriously made a reassuring statement back in 2009 when Cyprus first confiscated the containers that these were 'absolutely safe and could be stored in a residential area if they had to'. It was his decision as well to extend the contract of the Deputy Chief of the National Guard - Mr. Savvas Argyrou - indefinitely, despite the fact that the aforementioned never graduated, or even attended, the Hellenic Army Academy.

Even so, says the devil's advocate, what matters now is the way the president handles the situation that has been created. Let's look forwards, not back into the past.

Yet there is no plucking of eyes  in the case of our communist leader. There is no remorse, there is no clairvoyance whatsoever. There seems to be, instead, an ever-fattening sheath of darkness, a result of the filth this man is steeped into, which isolates him from a substantial portion of the Cypriot community but perversely brings him closer to his sheepish loyalists.

After all, our man who thinks he knows it all appointed his own Tiresias, the esteemed Mr. Polys Polyviou, to ascertain whose fault it was, in a move that 'would guarantee transparency and would bring the causes of the event to light'. That was the spiel we became accustomed to hearing, up until the report was actually ready. Faithful to his ancient past, the president rejected the report which his own appointee delivered. Personal and political responsibility are not in the President's vocabulary, so surely, they mustn't be in anyone else's.

And now for the cherry, the icing, the frosting of the Banana Republic cake. Five months on, we've seem to forgotten it all. Perhaps it's because the Christofias administration is constantly surprising us with various other tragic developments, namely the economy and the lack of any substantial measures to save it. Or his pathetic image hopping out of a helicopter and onto Noble Energy's natural gas platform - another way to haze. Perhaps I shouldn't be this scathing. There is a less malignant explanation to all this. Mr. Christofias and his minions are deliberately failing to resuscitate our collapsing economy because they want to be the best in something, so they've decided to mishandle  everything they get their hands on in order to get into the Worst Government Administration International Hall of Fame, and thus secure fame in posterity as the only so-called communist government that made a mess out of their country (!) Or are they doing it in order to secure those last votes standing from the unions, to the detriment of everyone else? Is this their way of punishing private sector employees, who are all, as we know, naturally right-wing, fascist, supporters of the 1974 coup d'etat?

All I have to say is don't worry misters, you've already made it. Please stop trying.

What chaos

 

What chaos.

Harbinger of traffic

sliding red around the streets

stops and starts and then

Announces where we go

Where are you going

In the throngs and hoards of feet

In the throngs and hoards of faces

An embarrassment of fish.

Paris, 2.1

From the concept store 'merci' on Boulevard Beaumarchais to

an Afro-Antillaise market off Rue de Bretagne to

the museum of hunting and nature (!) to

a star-studded Colette

This day was a full day. Amen.

Entrance at 'merci' - you can get a glimpse of the store's
large book collection and cafe

One of the many vintage pieces of furniture found at 'merci'

Afro-Antillais & cajun... Lovely colours
(Can't help thinking maybe the palette of the
chair above is Carribean-inspired)

An installation at the entrance of the
Museum of Hunting and Nature

The museum is characterized by a blend of interactive installations.
Old hunting guns and flasks lie in wait in art deco furniture drawers.
Modern sculptures are interspersed among the 17th Century artifacts.

This is a cardboard installation - one of the modern additions of the museum.

A while later and we were back at Rue St. Honore -

which was filled with fashion personas -

Anna dello Russo outside colette

Terry Richardson is showing his photo exhibition 'Mom&Dad' at Paris' hottest concept store.

the colette bus - see the Terry Richardson signature?

Paris, 2

Ever wondered who on earth designed the following wigs/hair accessories/hair styles/hats worn by Lady Gaga?

His name is Charlie le Mindu and he is the 'haut coiffeur' behind the notorious 'lips' headpiece

and I was lucky enough to go to his Spring/Summer 2012 show, where he presented his newest collection called 'Burka Curfew'.

The first model was naked

besides a headpiece - what I interpreted as a phallic take on the Moroccan fez

Cobra head

back of cobra head

Headpiece and hair dress. Yes, real hair.

Paris, 1

The day started off in disarray.

I hauled myself to three wrong bus stops before finally finding bus stop Y which took me to King's Cross.

Not really. It stopped at Euston to my dismay. I hauled myself to KX on foot.

I got to Paris. It was sunny. I stepped outside the Gare du Nord and couldn't stop smiling.

Got lost for a while. Reached Gare de l'Est.

Went summer shopping at H&M because the weather is freakishly great.

Then started my epic underground journey. Turns out, there actually was a direct line linking my place of origin with my desired destination. An hour later, having suffered a shameful fall in the Parisian metro and having changed direction four times, I finally got there. 

It was all worth it.

Offerings of grumpy woman taxi driver
(who thought we were Italian and refused
to speak any other language besides Italian.)

View from Cafe de Flore at St. Germain de Pres

Projected arrow on the street...
Boulevard St Germain

...pointing to digital messages inside a building

Sonia Rykiel window
(for the love of knits!)

Sonia Rykiel window
(eerily reminiscent of Prada?)

Prada Spring/Summer 2011

That's all for now.

The face

 The face, the face

your face, their face

your nose, your eyes

your ears your highs

From an optician's window on Fleet Street

From an optician's window on Fleet Street
(the Poirot face)

 

Kika Ioannidou handbag
Bloomsbury

Kika Ioannidou handbag 2
Bloomsbury

Hidden face
(veggie face)

Marilyn on Dolce and Gabanna
(divine face)

THE POLKA DOT DOT DOT

First, there was Marc Jacobs 

and Helena Bonham Carter

Then, there was Stella McCartney

and everyone else who wore Stella McCartney.

Including Kate Winslet.

Then, there was - and always is - the demonic Dr. Strangelove

and his polka-dot glasses 

(hitherto always referred to as 'John Lennon' glasses)

And here is a summer take on the polka dot.

dot dot.

dot

The Action Painters feat. Frank O'Hara

My thoughts on O'Hara, Pollock and the lot.

 (First, to introduce the poems that inspired the essay.)

A Step Away from Them

The Day Lady Died

You can also check out this fun site based on Jackson Pollock's work.

An essay on movement. Take the city in and breathe it out.

Even[AN1]  when one is static in the city, stands without moving in a particular spot, the city will still move around him. Commanding as a structure, literally concrete and in a wider sense ‘unmovable’, the city is nonetheless defined by an inherent duality of movement within stasis, transience within permanence: it is the embodiment of process. In Frank O’Hara’s ‘Lunch Poems’, the process of the city is taken in by a poet who is himself often in motion, meaning that visual impressions succeed each other even more rapidly, that they overlap even more densely, a quality shared by the reader in his poems that become processes themselves, instead of mere representations of the city: ‘It’s my lunch hour, so I go/for a walk among the hum-coloured/cabs.’ The first line of ‘A Step Away From Them’ immediately draws the reader in the poem, in the experience that O’Hara is about to embark on. The present tense transfers the reader to the moment the poem is about to be engendered, and the use of the personal pronoun ‘I’ can be read as a means to elide the reader with the poet, heightening the sense of immediate experience – we share O’Hara’s direct impressions. This in itself is a cinematographic technique as it aligns us with the poem’s persona in a similar way that films make us, through the pattern and mode of images shown, share the perspective of a particular character. The images we are about to be exposed to in O’Hara’s poem will succeed each other, overlap and overcross in our minds in the same way the city unravels around the poet while he takes a stroll during his lunch hour. 

The fragmentary nature of the images in ‘A Step Away From Them’ can be read as a result of precisely this saturation of visual impressions and codes that define the city. The ‘dirty/glistening torsos’ and the ‘skirts…flipping/above heels’ are both products of the speed of city life as well as marks of the poet’s perception, which breaks the city’s seeming commanding structure into the sum of its less-than-clearly-defined-and-static parts. The poet does not want to describe what he sees to us, he wants us to see it, too. For this reason, the fragmentary bodies, both familiar in their metonymic association but also alien in their mutilating capacity seem to offer an antidote to metaphor, a poetic convention that O’Hara resists as it constitutes an unwanted mediation between his direct experience and the reader. This is the city we know; landmark place names such as ‘Times Square’ helps situate us in the geography of the city and the poem; but at the same time it is also particular to O’Hara, and it is this particularity, the idiosyncrasy of O’Hara’s way of seeing that renders the poems so vivid and alive, so new and so surprising.

The purposeful lack of mediation is something that O’Hara shares with the Action Painters or Abstract Expressionists, the New York school of painters who are as affected and inspired by the multi-referential quality of the city as O’Hara is. Jackson Pollock and his ‘drip’ paintings in particular share O’Hara’s desire for immediacy both in their rejection of figures and in their rejection of metaphor and representation. Pollock does not paint objects – he does not offer a second-degree rendition of a visual element existent in real life. As O’Hara writes in his book on Jackson Pollock for The Great American Artists Series, Pollock’s images ‘have no real visual equivalents. Upon this field the physical energies of the artist operate in actual detail, in full scale.’ So Pollock’s painting does not ‘make bigger’, ‘make smaller’, or ‘make different’ something that pre-exists it – the painting itself is the subject. The canvas becomes a field where he maps his action, his expression, his process of work without the use of symbol or distorting convention, in a similar way that O’Hara maps his walks through the city: ‘I hope the poem to be the subject, not just about it.’ If[AN2]  in Pollock, ‘paint is paint, shells and wire are shells and wire, glass is glass and canvas is canvas’ then in O’Hara ‘a glass of papaya juice’, ‘And chocolate malted’ are precisely that – his poetry is the opposite of double entendre. While I agree that ‘paint is paint’ and ‘glass is glass’ for Pollock, I think that it is possible to take this statement further and say that the same paint and the same glass – while not signifying anything ‘deeper’, not ‘representing’ something else – can nonetheless function differently in each of Pollock’s works. Glass is glass when he uses bits of it to give texture to the paint, and glass is also glass when he uses a slab of it to paint on instead of a canvas – but the same object, the same visual sign, functions in completely different ways. While glass will roughen the texture of a painting when used in the paint and as part of the surface, glass as canvas gives the painting a fluid transparency conveying continuation and clarity – a smoothness of touch as well as sight; here, it is the opposite of obstacle. The same goes with the line, a prominent feature of Pollock’s work, that is at times softly lyrical and thin, and at others passionately aggressive and wider, bolder. The multiple ways Pollock uses these ‘same’ elements, their fluidity, reinforces the concept of ‘canvas as an arena in which to act’ and painting as an ‘event’ (Harold Rosenberg). The personal expression of the artist means that he is not pre-conditioned by set codes of what each sign ‘must mean’ – he is free to leave his marks on the canvas in any way that follows from his purpose, his expression, and his ‘spiritual life’ (O’Hara on Pollock) at the moment he acts on the canvas. This means that one kind of mark cannot be given a particular ‘meaning’ that can be applied across all of Pollock’s paintings. His spiritual life, his thought and process of each painting is different, and so what visually appears the same can be infused with a completely different function in the context of each painting and can be the product of a completely different purpose.

The unity of purpose and the visual, the ‘spiritual’ and ‘physical’ is evident in O’Hara as well, who uses images as thoughts, or, whose images are not only mappings of physical displacement but also of the movement of his thoughts. The paratactical arrangement of statements such as ‘I look/ at bargains in wristwatches. There/ are cats playing in sawdust’ highlight that we are looking at the city through his eyes and mind, as we jump from wristwatches to cats – just as the line urges us to ‘look’ from one line to another through enjambment – in an association we assume is incited by physical proximity but which can also be a mental one. For this a city filled with visual impressions but it is also a city filled with the poet’s subjective mental activities. In the poem ‘The Day lady Died’, the stream-of-consciousness mapping of O’Hara’s hurried (?) walk in the city – form reflects content without smothering it – punctuated by the aggressive capitals of store names and publications, culminates in an encounter with ‘a NEW YORK POST with her face on it’. Who ‘her’ is is never explicitly resolved in the poem, but the title gives us a clue that this is a poem about the day Billie Holiday died. ‘Her face on it’ hangs at the end of the line, the one single image, out of the many in the poem, that has a lasting, suspended effect on the poet, and the one single thought that makes the poet, and the poem stop, or at least slow down:

and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of

leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT

while she whispered a song along the keyboard

to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing

The last two lines of the stanza transform the entire poem. Its ambiguity and evasiveness, its refusal to ‘pin down’ identity is exemplified as the ‘I’ who is ‘leaning on the john door’ blends with the ‘she’ who whispers a song, and the name of ‘Mal Waldron’ is introduced which leads to a collective ‘everyone’ and then retracts back into the ‘I’ of the poet again. The blend of time and space in this stanza is remarkable. The poet’s persona could be read as blending with the ‘she’ of (the absent, and dead) Billie Holiday in the act of ‘leaning’, as I always imagine her having to lean towards Mal Waldron in order to ‘whisper the song’. The conjunction ‘while’ implies that the whispering happens in tandem with the poet’s ‘sweating’ and finding support ‘on the john door’, and this is true in that it happens in tandem in his head. Physical reality and mental association are blended here, and the sense of breathlessness described in the last line is both the sense of awe that overcomes ‘everyone and I’ at the jazz club when O’Hara presumably last saw Holiday performing, and his breathless state having found out about her death. These last four lines, by putting a halt to O’Hara’s (literal and figurative) ramblings, render the present of the previous lines a product of an ignorant past as they absorb, through the tension they create between past and present, memory and materiality, the reader’s full attention, making us, too, ‘stop breathing’, as we stop reading, or speaking the lines.

Back to ‘A Step Away From Them’, and the importance of its title in rendering the simultaneous closeness and distance of O’Hara from the city’s visual impressions. ‘Everything/ suddenly honks: it is 12:40 of/ a Thursday.’ O’Hara persists in the tension between particularity and generalization – the Action Painters’ ‘push’ and ‘pull’ technique materializes in his poems through this sort of vivifying contradiction – in order to render the surface of his poem alive like the surface of the city. We can fairly say that not everything actually ‘suddenly honks’ in an urban moment of communion and harmony, but between the specificity of the digital 12:40 and ‘Thursday’ and the abstractedness of ‘everything’ and ‘a’ (preceding Thursday), we realize that at that moment in time, all of the bits and pieces, the fragments that O’Hara has been perceiving come together in a sound effect that is almost comforting in the aural image of coherence it purports. Despite the poem’s resistance to figuration – its refusal to flesh out fully the images of the Negro and the chorus girl (O’Hara focuses instead on a toothpick and the blond’s click) – it succeeds in bringing these fragmented, re-engineered ‘signs’ of the city in a choral unison entirely representative of the city’s shifting landscape and its general atmosphere. This is what O’Hara terms ‘the aesthetic of culmination rather than examination’, where totality is as important as the individual parts, and where the individual parts modify and generate an over-arching vibe which often invites a reassessment of previous impressions. This can be compared to the effect of the vastness of some of Pollock’s paintings, which have the effect of confronting and engulfing the spectator, creating an emotional response generated by the individual detail of the painting in its final culmination. The emotional response generated by the whole will modify our opinion of the detail, and vice versa. Confronting a Pollock you are confronting a complex network of marks and events, the culmination of one single, and yet multivalent, purpose, a city very much present and possibly aggressive or intimidating, but lyrical and fresh, new, in its particularities.   

---

 [AN1]In ‘Personal Poem’ this complicity is stated by the emphatic ‘Now when I walk around at lunchtime’, which is strangely retrospective and immediate at the same time – we are invited to read the poem as ‘one of many’ times of walking around during lunchtime as well as one particular time. 

 [AN2]His use of free verse and an ‘ordinary’ quality of speech that resists the kind of mysticism or imposed ‘significance’ usually associated with poetry led his critics to accuse him of ‘trivializing poetry’

Abstract Expressionism

Painting meets textile - nothing new about that.

This dress by Kika Ioannidou reminds me of Jackson Pollock's action painting technique.

I love the way it hugs the figure while splashes of paint colorfully explode on the fabric (it comes in blue/petrol hues as well.)

Kika Ioannidou

Jackson Pollock's No 7, 1950.

Red lipstick/ tan - check

MAY is the best time of the year in cambridge - even though it's June.

Hello everyone -

absence was long, I know.

BUT - now that exams are over and Cambridge is over I thought I'd share a bit of the Cambridge reward that comes every year after the terror of exams - May Week. May Week is actually a week in June. Mid-June. Some friends pointed out (many times) that here is a paradoxical name analogous to Oktoberfest (takes place in September) and the October revolution that actually took place in November? or something like that.

In any case -

Here we go.

This year I wore 2 dresses (for Trinity and Downing May Balls) by my mother - designer Kika Ioannidou - one was specially made and the other was taken from her pret-a-porter range but Oh My God is it gorgeous.

TRINITY MAY BALL 20th June 2011

Blue satin dress with matching cape by Kika Ioannidou.
I loved the color AND the details at the neckline and back.
From right: friends Andria, Rebecca, Alex, myself and Kyriakos.

Also notice my friend Rebecca's gorgeous dress with the bow detail at the bust.

I wore the dress with blue patent leather clog sandals from Kurt Geiger.

The infamous back detail of the dress. Craftsmanship!
From left: Evi, Andria, Alex, Kyriakos

Back detail of the dress.

Front detail of the neckline

                                             

Walking back home at 6am. This gives a glimpse of how the dress shows in motion.

This picture I love.

DOWNING MAY BALL JUNE 21st 2011

Dark blue chiffon strapless dress with bead detail at waist.

I chose to wear this dress with flats seeing as my feet were practically dead after Trinity. Hence my friend Rebecca is towering over me in this picture with her sexy, tropically coloured dress.

Detail of the bust and beads

Halfway through the night what was originally an elastic belt but was used as a hair scrunchy to keep my hair up became a hippie head band - the theme was Olympus so I thought I'd look the part.

I paired the dress with a midnight blue H&M blazer.

Posing.

Tribute

When you talk about death before it comes, robbing you not only of a person but of a set perception of life, you feel above it. It glides above you, unable to reach down into the river of your daily life and hawk you up with it. It stalks behind you, no more than the shadow of the berry bush as you walk past it, thinking it won't harm you.

But when that shadow gallops up and sleepy hollows what you have (there, you had it, it was there - you spoke, and laughed and told your secrets) the rider trips you down. Stampedes you down, into the earth that shakes and chafes beneath the spade and splatters onto the widow's skirt. We are but dirt. Dust made of dust. But

No. It can't be that. I saw you going down into that hole but that's not where you are. You're still around, me and my dreams are still around, you and the dreams cinematic of your past and future. Spool. Round and round, yes, round and round - diurnal in your motion, passing through the mind and eye so silent. Freud says it's death. Silence is. Pick the third maiden, the third casket, the third door, and mum. Who picks it for you? The sickness in your blood, the God above? The random house of cards? I refuse. I still refuse.

I look at my hands in the shower and think: this is me. It's all I have. Sinews, bones, freckles on my knuckles, my nails, those veins. My body, and mind, and all I know - where does the knowledge go?

I dress in the mirror thinking that this body is my sole possession. You stop dreaming when you see that. Vulnerable, naked, susceptible to change but can it change? These are my genes, and they dictate the path, the fate, the fat, the sick, the firm, the height, the mind. And my consciousness? Who dictates that? Or, better put, can it be tamed? Into a tolerable drive of thoughts that helps me sleep, and wake up again?

To go to bed is the hardest thing of all. To sleep, perchance to dream, is to release into the darkness. The absurdity of your dreams proves the uncanny. That man in your dream you know very well, you've seen him before, you have the sense of his history. Yet come the morning and your eyes wide open fail to put the pieces together; a determination of intimacy remains within the pool of bafflement.

The moment I lay my head on the pillow, I am alone.

On Photography

“Photography has the unappealing reputation of being the most realistic, therefore facile, of the mimetic arts.” Susan Sontag

The famous photo of Vietnamese children running
away from a napalm bomb explosion is one of the
most important photojournalistic images of the century

On a visit to the World Press Photo 2010 exhibition – featuring the winning photographs of the foundation’s annual press photography contest – I found myself walking past a collection of pictures with various themes, ranging from aerials of the Super Bowl match to very explicit shots of a man being stoned to death in Somalia. On the upper floor of the exhibition (that took place in Cyprus’ Electricity Authority headquarters, a modern building with high ceilings and glass that induces one to be silently in awe of the surroundings) the visitor could see the winners of the ‘News Story’ and ‘Nature’ categories, while those of ‘Arts and Entertainment’, ‘Sport’, ‘Daily Life’, ‘Portraits’ etc were displayed on the lower floor. The curator of this exhibition almost certainly wanted the viewer to move from strikingly disturbing subjects (corpses on the morgue floor of Madagascar’s capital, a close-up of a US soldier in her coffin, the head of a dead Palestinian girl found in the rubble of her home after the recent Gaza strip bombings by Israel) to images of relative relief (half-naked pictures of the exotic Senegalese wrestling team, images of modern flower-children in a festival in the States) as he/she descended the stairs connecting the two levels. Yet this in itself (leaving aside the News category photos) – the fact that samples of photojournalism were curated in a certain way, that I was encouraged to follow a certain order when looking at them – made me feel uncomfortable. I found the process irreverent because the museum-like context equated this sort of exhibition with those of other forms of artistic representation, where the artificiality, the non-realness of what is depicted is evident from either technique or material. Was the curator assuming that I was able to glide from images of death and horror to colorfully composed wildlife pictures?

The fact is that we tend to regard photography at once as an art form and yet as distinct from other kinds of artistic representation. Photojournalism is one of those strands of photography that makes this alleged distinction obvious (or so at least we think). This is reflected in the compound word’s terms, where ‘journal’ is defined as ‘a register’, ‘a record’ of daily life, a non-fictive, informative account, emphasizing photojournalism’s preoccupation with the real, the everyday as it happens; the validation of experience; what Barthes calls the undeniable ‘that-has-been’. We believe in the truth claims these photographs make because we think that, on the field, photojournalists have no time to stage a shot – what we see is the result of a spontaneous decision taken in the context of unpredictable circumstances. If this was the case, however, then why can we view these real events, these real deaths with such ease?

According to Susan Sontag, “photographic seeing has to constantly be renewed with new shocks, whether of subject matter or technique, so as to produce the impression of violating ordinary vision”. If, still at the World Press Photo exhibition, I find myself returning to the most horrifying photographs, such as the one of a dead girl covered in blood being dragged in the streets of Madagascar, with a compulsion to scrutinize the image further, does this mean that the image is not shocking enough? Barthes says that news photos have no punctum by which to ‘wound’ us, hence the lack of ‘adventure’ in photojournalism. However, for me there is a punctum in the picture described: first, there is the girl’s gaping mouth that makes it seem as though she is screaming (I don’t think you recognize that she is dead unless you read the captions), and second, she wears two colorful bracelets (or hair bands), one on either hand, that eerily resemble the ones I had as a child. The picture for me, therefore, is real, as it includes elements that I know for a fact, from experience, exist. Despite my ‘common reference’ to the picture, however, there is an issue with Barthes’ punctum as applied here: why am I not primarily drawn to the morally reprehensible fact that is this girl’s death? Why am I claiming as a punctum something that seems irrelevant to the manifestation of injustice photographed?

The argument that along with digitalization and the Internet comes the price of indifference towards such images definitely stands, but it also forms a paradox, since as technological developments allow more of us to take more real and more accurate pictures of objects and people, we simultaneously become less sensitive to this realness by means of our exposure to these selfsame advancements. This means that no matter how accurate or real-looking a photograph is (its resolution, its size, the shape and material we print it on), we continue to be fundamentally indifferent to it because it constitutes part of our daily visual intake. Images and footage from television, news websites online, video games, films and advertising contribute in raising the ‘shock’ bar steadily higher. Thus the image of an assassinated drug dealer whose blood trickles down the wall behind his head does not ‘violate ordinary vision’ - it is part of it.

The moral implication of this anesthesia is grave. To be “a tourist in other people’s reality” makes the photographer and viewer alike a witness of intense suffering, a voyeur. “Photography is an act of non-intervention”. Yet both of Sontag’s quotes seem tentative to describe in affirmative terms what exactly we are doing when taking or looking at news pictures. ‘Tourist’ is not a strong enough term, as it holds no moral value, nor is there a particular set of attributes given to tourists from which to derive such a value. ‘Non-intervention’, on the other hand, deliberately fails to positively assert an action. We are aware of the seriousness of the situations photographed. But in the context of an exhibition, in an art context, we seem to leave that to one side and focus more on observing for its own sake. By thinking about it in the way we would painting, for example, we shift the photograph into a realm of acknowledged artificiality and fiction.

It is a similar experience to that of reading Capote’s In Cold Blood. I, personally, was fascinated by the author’s formal choices and by the ‘plot’ - how ironic that a family’s misfortune got transformed into a ‘story’ I read before I went to bed. There were times when I stopped and thought about the implications of creative non-fiction, asking myself whether the pleasure I was deriving from the narrative of these people’s murders was a sign of perversion! Yet I always brushed those thoughts aside and passively continued reading the book. Passivity is also the main characteristic of our and the photographer’s state, as we can be seen to be “encouraging whatever is going on to keep on happening”. The continuousness of an action, however, is something indeterminate in a photograph, that captures a moment. In this way, the viewer can easily be swayed to perceive that single picture of one unique, static moment out of context.

The horror begins and ends there: we are shocked, but the shock doesn’t last for long. In our minds, the possibility for continuity shifts from the photograph’s subjects to ourselves, and we feel the continuing effect of the image as a flow of self-indulgent pity. We could say that the photographer taking the three pictures of a man stoned to death is no less than an accomplice in murder – or, alternatively, that he is so helpless in front of the spectacle that the only thing he can do is use his camera, and hope that by documenting this death he will help prevent others of the same type. But who is to say that he doesn’t feel even the slightest sense of self-satisfaction, knowing that the object he has created will be a cause for fascination, or even an opportunity for the furthering of his career? 

The ease with which we see these photographs corresponds to the easiness with which we offer ourselves to be seen nowadays. “A way of certifying experience, taking photographs is also a way of refusing it – by limiting experience to a search for the photogenic, by converting experience into an image, a souvenir.” Never has this been more true than it is now. Facebook and its Photo Tools have turned every occasion into one big fecund opportunity for taking what might potentially be your next (photogenic) profile picture. What John Berger says about women in Ways of Seeing, therefore, that they look at themselves being looked at, can now be applied to a great number of Facebook users, no matter what their gender. The motives behind taking these pictures are an example of a strange projection of voyeurism unto oneself: we take the pictures so that other people see them, want to see them, see us, see what we were up to. We take pictures in order to put them on Facebook.

In this way, our reality is distorted by our own self; we untag pictures of ourselves that others have uploaded if we think we look ugly or unglamorous or casual in them; some people even photoshop their portraits before uploading them! We live in a time when a lot of people think that a photograph is something that is meant to “make you look good”; we acknowledge the ‘bad pictures’, but we delete them from our memory sticks and forget them altogether. This of course all depends on our experience with it, but photography in many cases can become a medium that sugar-coats the ‘real picture’ – and so a big part of our nonchalance when looking at certain images of photojournalism does not derive from us having become desensitized monsters, but rather from us now increasingly considering (subconsciously?) the medium of photography as a tool of artifice, of selection, and even fiction.

You can see all the aforementioned pictures at http://www.worldpressphoto.org/index.php?option=com_photogallery&task=blogsection&id=20&Itemid=257&bandwidth=high

11 February 2008, 00:16

Elevator, part I

Secretly, there was a craving for

Marriage.

Not the kind of marriage that drags your

Hearse; the soul-finding kind.

She loved the idea – although it lingered

Solitary in the depths of her cerebral membranes

Unable, and unutterable.

You see, she had too much to expect.

First there was that elevator, of

Moods, or was it reality?

Then there was a cupid’s heart, a

Drawing,

Suspect to creation by fingers wonderful,

Divine almost in their strange nature.

With every breath, the mirror’s painting came to

Life, more profound than ever.

As her breathing turned into anxious, unscrupulous

Exhalations of air, the heart seemed so

Solid – invincible through infinity.

And the silver box kept moving

Upwards, she thought she’d

Hit the sky with a blow in the

Head so severe it would stay

Forever – in a sweet, painful way.

The lift stopped. His floor. The painting of

Panting anxieties faded into the miserable

Image of herself.

           

She stepped out. Door’s open, he said. Again,

Lying on that couch of dispirited dreams,

Watching.

I’m sorry.

Unhappy, some…times.

Me?! Sometimes. Shock… Paradox?

No. Perhaps inevitable. Don’t

Cry. Hug. Tear. Mascara.

Love.

You.

Elevator, part II

History repeats itself, I’ve heard them say.

Now I can verify it’s true –

It’s not just Bush, Bush Jr., Bush Jr. Jr.,

That gets to fuck up twice. Thrice.

So that elevator. Yes, much frequented.

Up and down, up and down, up and down.

I know what you’re thinking. That’s not it.

At least it wasn’t supposed to be it.

Okay, yes. Maybe.

He panted a heart on the glass – three years ago.

Now I was standing against the door

With his hair in my face

And my ass in his hands

And some whiskey breath slipping down my throat –

It became disconcertingly familiar, over the years. Homely.

It was hot while it lasted, so hot the mirror steamed up again.

Déjà vu.

The lift stopped. His floor.

He carried me to bed but –