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