Bruce Gilden’s Haiti Freak Show

The following was emailed to me and permitted for posting. It was written by Robert Gumpert (http://takeapicturetellastory.com/) –

Before getting into a discussion of Bruce Gilden’s work let me touch first on John Sevigny’s piece on “the aging hippie” Larry Towell’s current Haiti work, including the woman on an operating table whose breasts are exposed.

Sevigny’s is wrong in his assessment of blame on this. And he is wrong with his focus on the woman’s breasts. He is right that these shots would probably not be published in the US. However he fails to say they most likely would not have been taken in 2010 America because of HIPPA regulations (US government health privacy regulations)

Sevigny is placing blame on the wrong end of the equation – Towell is doing his job. And while Towell undoubtedly did not ask the woman’s permission, he did not ‘sex her up’ or play to her exposure. The problem is the double standard that the American media and by extension much of the world media uses for depiction of itself and “others”. We see this all the time with faces of dead as well as photos of dead bodies.

It seems to me Towell does his work with sensitivity and that is a rare commodity in today’s “photojournalism” and “documentary” community.

As to Gilden’s Haiti work, which is much like most of his other work. Bruce Gilden’s work owes much to two NYC photographers. Weegee a newspaper photographer with the worst of tabloid newspaper tendencies but who in much of his work made a human connection with his subjects that sets him apart. Diane Arbus was a fashion/art photographer who the world mislabeled a documentarian. She produced raw intense work with little connection to its subject. There is little doubt that she used them to depict her own demons, common in art but not documentary work. Documentary does not have the self as its subject.

Gilden seems a mesh of the two but with more of Arbus’s detachment. He is mainstay in the new wave of faux documentary work where personal style is more important than content. Where you apply that style regardless of subject or circumstance. It works for today’s market place. It works when style fits the subject and it works because photographs have always been a bit ambiguous in what they depict. Show a photo of a defendant in court to a defense lawyer, prosecutor, social work, cop, jury member – each sees something different. In faux documentary’s focus on style, as in Gilden’s work we all pretty much get the same message from the image: life’s a freak show or some other form of strangeness.

Photographers tramping off to parachute into conflict and disaster zones is hardly new, the best of them, like Don McCullin, photographed the dead and dying, the sick and the naked – with and without their faces. But most importantly they did it while preserving what ever dignity and pride the people in front of the lens had. That is the difference between them and so many photographers now producing beautifully crafted images, more art than document, or simply contentless. It is the difference as well between Towell’s work and Gilden’s.

Bob.