This excerpt (0.01 – 3.17 minutes) from Darkness and Light is particularly interesting in light of the recent unanimous celebration of Phil Toledano’s Days with my Father.
Avedon admits that his work was invasive and disturbing and that those tenets always exist within the arena for art. Avedon also faced accusations of exploitation for his later work In The American West.
Avedon’s work is good comparison to Toledano’s because reactions to Toledano’s work has been beyond positive. We have seen it as loving and we have seen it as our privilege; this is probably the case, but it doesn’t explain the absence of any discussion on ethics (however brief). Just a thought.
Personally, I am a fan of Toledano’s Days with my Father, and I wonder … do we respond to death differently today, do we respond to the approach of death in photography differently? Here’s a CNN clip of Toledano “blubbing” about his project.
Happy Fathers Day.
Prison Photography 
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June 22, 2010 at 10:17 am
petebrook
This comment is from Robert Gumpert (http://takeapicturetellastory.com/):
I think we, the US in this case, respond to images of death differently than we we once did. That said isn’t it really the circumstances and approach that have always determined acceptability.
Weegee could pretty much photograph any dead, today that is not the case. During WW2 Smith photographed many dead, even US dead. Vietnam photos of the dead, all the dead, were pretty common and perhaps more importantly all were treated in much the same way. At least to my memory.
Today it is marked as a journalistic victory that soldiers’ coffins can be photographed and there are rarely see images of the dead from crimes. Certainly no images of the faces of the dead are not seen.
But as I said, it seems to me the determining factors are circumstance and style: We see in depressing numbers the death photos of the “others”, the circumstance is they are not “US”. I do truly believe this a “civilization” of the process soldiers begin in basic training – to kill another human being on a routine bases even in the circumstances of war, a dehumanization process seems necessary. It seems to me that depictions of the dead of “others” while saying “ours” are too sacred to be shown is a dehumanizing process.
As to approach: I am not a fan of Avedon’s work, either of his father or The American West. His approach was not just harsh, which I don’t have a problem with, it was theft of pride and dignity that is a problem for me. But photographers who have opted for the harsher road (McCullin is one prime example I always think of) always see to end up on the short end of the picturing death debate. The softer approach of Toledano is almost always acceptable.
June 30, 2012 at 10:52 am
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