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Last week Joerg linked to Sometimes the Photographer’s Name Simply Doesn’t Matter with the words “Great post”.
Today, I return the sentiment. Why We Must See. Great post.
Great, partly, because it is straightforward, “I know quoting Susan Sontag is the thing to do when writing these kinds of articles, but I’ll try without. I don’t think I’m smarter than her (that’s very unlikely), but I want to see where I will be getting without using intellectual crutches.”
War wounds: Don McCullin on photography. The acclaimed frontline photojournalist speaks about the horrors of conflict, struggling with ‘this terrible name, war photographer’, and why shooting landscapes instead of battle zones has finally granted him a sense of peace.
WELL SAID MR McCULLIN
My post, Staring at Death, Photographing Haiti got a lot of attention. It was a simple format – an extensive collection of links to online photography coverage of Haiti. It was posted a week after the earthquake and very soon after was out of date.
It may have been apparent from my other posts on Haiti [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] that I appreciated words alongside images.
I was grateful for the interviews by the New York Times of Damon Winter, Maggie Steber and Daniel Morel.
Well, add Lynsey Addario to that list.
Even Orphanages Spawn Orphans in Haiti is the type of approach and reflexivity I admire in journalism. It is a great salve to the overly-anxious who worry that photojournalism has lost it’s soul.
Of course, I have a few buddies who’d insist that Haitian voices be heard also, so I don’t want to suggest that PJ audio interviews are the crowning point of crisis reporting – they obviously aren’t but they are a necessary component.
To hear the photojournalist’s voice and responses to their subject reminds us that photographers are not camera-wielding automatons operating in vacuums.
Screengrab
Chan Chao‘s portraiture is about the intimate moment he allows the viewer with his subject. For Chao portraiture is “communication through body language and facial expression.”
Santa Monica features the women of Santa Monica Prison, Lima, Peru. The prison is recognised as the site of detention for women caught and implicated in drug smuggling activities. There are dozens of foreigners from all over the globe. Santa Monica Prison contains an unusually diverse convergence of lives, stories and needs.
Not just in Santa Monica but in all his series, Chao intersperses his portraiture with environmental studies and in so doing expresses the inescapable strong-arm of military, government and judiciary.
In the portrait studies, Chao deliberately deemphasises the background; backdrops are evocative but not descriptive. The women of Santa Monica Prison are thus gifted something quite precious by Chao, their stage for a moment, and individual acknowledgment outside of a carceral context.
Two portraits from the 'Santa Monica Prison' series. © Chan Chao
Chao is well known for his nude studies for Echo, and his three-trip project to the border camps of Burma, his country of birth (See Chao describe his Burma project). Cyprus, again, reverently, deals with the portrait sitter.
All of Chao’s series should be viewed; together they create an winsome cloud of emotional sound. Wrap yourself up.
BIOGRAPHY
Chan Chao (born 1966 in Kalemyo, Burma) is an American photographer known for his color portraits. He and his family left Burma for the United States in 1978. Chao studied under John Gossage at the University of Maryland, College Park. When he turned 30, Chao decided to visit Burma for the first time since his family left but was denied a Visa. Instead, he travelled to the Thai-Burma and Indian-Burma borders where he photographed Burmese rebel and refugee camps. These images comprise his books Burma: Something Went Wrong and Letter from PLF, both published by Nazraeli Press. Nazraeli also published Chao’s book of female nudes entitled Echo. His Burma portraits were included in the 2002 Whitney Biennial. Chan Chao lives in the Washington, DC area. He teaches photography at George Washington University.
There is a place in the US where two men have been held in solitary confinement for 37 years. It is Angola Prison, Louisiana.
Robert H. King, one of the Angola 3 was released when his wrongful conviction was overturned in 2001. Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox remain.
The length of their stays in solitary are due to the seriousness of the crime for which they were charged – the murder of a prison guard. They have always maintained they were framed for the jailhouse murder. Interestingly, in the In The Land Of The Free trailer the correctional officer’s widow doesn’t believe Wallace or Woodfox were the killers.
MENTAL HEALTH IN SOLITARY
For the most visceral and psychological description of solitary confinement upon the mental and physical health of a human read Atul Gawande‘s vital New Yorker article HELLHOLE (March 2009).
Every wondered what effect isolation has on the human psyche?
What a crazy world with inexplicable institutions.
‘IN THE LAND OF THE FREE’ STILLS
Solitary cell
Herman Wallace (left) and Albert Woodfox (right) with Angola prison in the 1970s (background)
Photos from the In The Land Of The Free facebook page.
Susan Wright. © Matthew Rainwaters
Matthew Rainwaters‘ Offender, an assignment for Esquire and Texas Monthly, depicts “two very different inmates inside the Texas Department of Corrections.”
The first is some bloke with a history of fraud and a penchant for escape.
I am more interested in juxtaposing Rainwaters’ portraits of a husband-killer and the prosecution attorney.
LADIES
Susan Wright was convicted of murder after stabbing her husband 193 times. She was recently granted an appeal and may be released after re-sentencing.
Prosecuting attorney Kelly Preistner doesn’t buy the battered woman’s syndrome defense. During closing arguments she reenacted stabbing her assistant 193 times for the jury.
Kelly Priestner. © Matthew Rainwaters
COMMERCIAL PHOTOGRAPHY
Generally, I don’t know what to make of commercial work and portraiture done inside prisons. I think I’ve only featured it once before on Prison Photography with a nod to Andrew Hetherington’s work for Wired on a story about cell phones and security breaches.
Evidently, Rainwaters’ is motivated to go beyond the requirements of assignment; he’s got the prison photography bug!
In an interview over at electronic beats he describes the fortune of the two stories coming at once, but that they catalysed a body of work upon which he wants to expand:
Rainwaters goes onto explain he hopes to photograph at Guantanamo. This leap is remarkable. I would not expect a commercial or editorial photographer to make such a transition. For me it stands to reason that one discusses Guantanamo and illegal US prisons in the same context as homeland penitentiaries, but I don’t expect others to always hold the same opinion. That a photographer is pressing this line is intriguing.
I’ll be eager to show Rainwaters’ Guantanamo work when it surfaces.
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You can also see the selection of Rainwaters’ work at Behance.
Thanks to Scott for the tip.
Dawoud Bey suggested during his address to the Society for Photographic Education 2010 Conference audience, Saturday night that ‘diversity’ had become not an ideal but a political mantra of art institutions that papered cracks and contributed nothing to long-term involvement of people of colour.
Bey argued the word ‘diversity’ has been appropriated, misused and redefined. Bey does not foresee a reclamation of the word but calls for an abandonment of the institutional practices the word has come to stand for.
Bey wants ‘inclusivity’, a firm shared understanding of the term, and relevant action instead. Bey distinguishes:
Diversity to me implies that there is still some normative paradigm at the center that we are seeking to destabilize rather than doing away with it in favor of something quite different. It suggests that institutions have an inherently white and male identity that needs to be added to. To operate out of this paradigm is, of course, a kind of tokenism by yet another name and seeks to trade on the momentary (but always empty and short lived) self-congratulatory excitement of seeing a new color in still unexpected places. It would seem to me that by now we should be approaching a point where anyone should be expected to be anywhere.
I think it’s time to turn away from “diversity” as an operative objective and turn instead towards the more meaningful and substantial goal of making institutional spaces ever more inclusive and embrace the goal of inclusivity, in which everyone’s identity is central to the whole. One way to accomplish this is to consider how in fact the institution’s identity can be meaningfully transformed and expanded conceptually by this enhanced inclusiveness in a way to deeply transforms the very nature of that institution. Inclusivity implies a desire to actually change through institutional expansion, while diversity implies to me that those being brought in have to simply fit into the normative and dominant existing paradigms and simply add “color” to it.
[My bolding]
The full lecture which Bey transcribed to his blog is essential reading as it sums up with authority the history of localised art movements, the legacy of protest among minority communities against silenced or non-represented voices (even in shows dedicated to the work of African American artists for instance!)
Bey recounts the protests against the “Harlem On My Mind” exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1969. Bey reminds us that Roy DeCarava carried a sign outside reading, “The White Folks Show the Real Nitty Gritty.”
Bey traces many of his own successes not to umbrella changes in culture or industries but to committed artist actions doing the leg work for themselves. He is the inheritor of community spirit so to speak.
Bey drives the point home exquisitely by pointing to one of New York’s favourite and largest art love-ins:
And then along comes the Whitney Biennial 2010 to remind us just how little some things have changed … In an exhibition that ironically uses an image of Barack Obama on the catalogue cover, we find among other things absolutely no Latino artists and a total of three black artists among fifty-five artists in the exhibition. What is your response to that? What would the response have been in 1969? I can’t imagine that this kind of situation would have been tolerated at that moment.
[My bolding]
CONCLUSION
Again, cold hard figures don’t lie, and I think Bey has shown that history doesn’t lie. We’ve got a lot to do.
With the PG&E power plant in the background, from left, Terry Phillips, Jusuw a May-Loto, Meritiana Loto and Justice Phillips relax on their porch on Harbor Row in Hunters Point. Residents successfully lobbied to shut down the pollution power plant in 2005, the single largest stationary source of air pollution in the city at the time. © Alex Welsh
THE DOCUMENTS OF A PHOTOJOURNALIST
Last April, San Francisco’s Superior Court played host to legal wrangling between the San Francisco Police Department and a young aspiring photojournalist. The ignition to court battle was the gang murder of Norris Bennett in the marginalized Hunter’s Point neighbourhood.
A young (then unnamed) photojournalism student had photographed at the murder scene of Bennett. The SFPD issued a warrant for the images and seized them during a search of Welsh’s domicile.
The photojournalist invoked California’s shield law to regain possession of his images and have them withdrawn as evidence. In July, at the time of the ruling, my colleague, Brendan Seibel, wrote a splendid piece about it for Wired’s Raw File.
THE DEFINITION OF JOURNALIST
A shield law is legislation designed to provide a news reporter with the right to refuse to testify as to information and/or sources of information obtained during the newsgathering and dissemination process.
What is interesting is that the ruling soon became involved in determining whether or not the young photojournalist was “a journalist”. Seibel explains:
The warrant was overturned and the student won the case. First amendment activists and free press advocates celebrated the ruling.
THE COMPETITION OUTING OF A PHOTOJOURNALIST
Fast forward to November 2009 and Alex Welsh (San Francisco State University) wins Gold in the Documentary category at CPoY for the portfolio Hunters Point, ‘We Out Here’.
Welsh is the anonymous photographer.
The final photograph of Welsh’s winning portfolio is of an SFPD officer administering CPR to Norris Bennett’s body, with the added tragic caption that Norris was the second brother of the same family to be murdered.
I must say I was well aware of Welsh’s work at the time of its win. I posted it on my auxiliary blog Photography Prison, linked to Dvafoto’s respect and noted Welsh’s interview with NPPA … but I never put the pieces together.
That was until this week when I read The SF Weekly’s S.F. State student who invoked Shield Law reveals murder scene photo in national contest by Peter Jamison:
Legally, this is a very interesting story and ethically it is quite troublesome. Obviously, we don’t know the exact nature of Welsh’s digital files from Friday April 17th. We don’t know if his images held information pertinent to the case. Whether he did or not is of no consequence if you look at this case from only a legal argument position.
NORRIS BENNETT
If one searches Norris Bennett’s name on the internet, the returns are hundreds of articles about the shield law case, none about him, his murder or the investigation since. I don’t know if his murderers have been identified or how his family has coped in the aftermath.
To discuss this case without a curiosity for news on how his community and family fares would not be right. So while we may mull and judge the behaviour of Welsh, the SFPD and San Francisco’s Superior Court we should also think about the behaviour of mainstream media to forsake the emotional and familial stories following Norris Bennett’s murder.
Bennett was young. Welsh wanted to document the “strength, perseverance and hope of youth”. You can decide through Welsh’s images if he does them – and Bennett – justice.
Prison Photography 