Category: NFN

“Dear Dr. Hare,

this year, it seems that I just can’t bring myself to go to Europe for the summer. I don’t know what it is. Maybe the new apartment? I feel like I live the life of some pampered movie star here, compared to the old place up in the sky near Hudson River, with the wind howling and all. When a light bulb goes out, one mouse click on the building homepage, or a quick call, and a friendly person shows up and puts in a new bulb. We found a company that is now fixing our old furniture – pieces that broke down over the years, while moving from place to place, and I can’t help to see something symbolic in that. I look at the park, walk around the new place, still somewhat in disbelief about my new life, and wonder if the old saying is true after all – that once you cross a bridge to Manhattan, you never have to cross a bridge again.

Which is not entirely true for me: I have quite a few trips lined up across the continental US – the West Coast again (whatever people say, I loved it), Miami (which I also kind of like), and other places. Compared to flying to Europe, flying across the US feels to me like taking a cab. And, as you know, while I love to work hard, I also tremendously value convenience. But I do worry: Am I getting old and mellow?

And where does this leave my Mountain friends? I will be back in the Dolomites next winter, but for this summer, I just can’t bring myself to book a flight. Or, I know that I most likely will go in the end, but it puzzles me that I am even hesitating. Last night we watched the latest Bond movie (via Netflix – as you know, I do not go to movie theaters), and I found funny that each episode gravitates back to the same old sets. So far, I’ve not been like that – I have not been to the town where I was raised for many, many years, and I may never go back at all. I’m just not interested.

OK, I’m rambling. Not much new here. I had strawberries today and made a photo of them, on a new desk I just bought. I feel very well, don’t worry (with a lot of exercise and the warmer temperatures, the arm feels much better now and it may heal almost completely). You seemed so rooted and content in your office when I last saw you there, I wonder whether I feel the need to entertain a life away from my computer-plus-camera at all.

Jens”

“Dear Jens,

I look at the photo, and I think, isn’t that the table from the Swiss design company you mentioned? So, you are eating your Manhattan strawberries on your Swiss (if not to say mountainy) table, and tell me that you are losing your grip on your connections to Europe. What can I say? I think they are much deeper than it may feel to you now, and I think they are very valuable. Do go back, and do find a place in your life for friendship and for the past.

Of course, for the sake of our conversations, I may wish that you stayed, and for once kept a regular schedule with your sessions here. But I am not sure that this is what I should be saying. The fact that you are writing to me about this tells me that inside of you you know that your friends in the mountains will feel cheated. Do not they worry about your arm? Will they not feel your staying away as punishment and retreat? I think you should go, and make people see that you are still their friend.

But here is another consideration: If you feel that you need time to heal from the shock of the accident, then they shall have to understand. Only don’t make it seem like you are pulling back. Not everyone takes solitude as well as you do, and you know, I am not even sure that you take it as well as you think you do.

You are right to enjoy your new apartment, after the wear and tear of the last years, which, I know, affected not just your furniture. But never forget the old over the new. I can’t give you reasons for this little piece of advice, but it is dear to my heart.

Let’s speak soon in person,

Dr. Hare”

Magnum Nominee Geert van Kesteren just won the Infinity Award for Photojournalim for his book “Baghdad Calling.” From what I hear, the decision is not exactly viewed as uncontroversial… What follows is the take of Stephen Mayes, Director of VII Photo Agency in New York City, both on the book in particular, and on the repercussions of sourcing amateur cell-phone images for photojournalistic purposes in general. JH

Sixteen simple tales of displacement, fear and frustration put a human face on the refugee crisis that has forced four million Iraqis from their homes since the coalition invasion of 2003. Shia, Sunni, Christian and Jewish people, children, parents and partners, workers, professionals and even the son of a senior Saddam General, all are victims of concerted attack and random violence; ordinary lives made extraordinary by unsolicited horrors visited on their houses, since abandoned but not forgotten. And none more powerful than the story that kick-started van Kersteren’s second book on Iraq, the group of doctors forced into exile by the random attack on a colleague, whose brave smile from his hospital bed in Amman, Jordan belied the mortal wounds that took him days after that snapshot was made on a mobile-phone.

It’s a powerful shot [p.162], intimate and direct, made by a friend holding a phone inches from his face at a time of incredible duress. It’s easy to see how this “found” image inspired photographer van Kesteren to abandon his own camera in favour of the compound eye of a hundred Iraqis recording their lives up-close and personal with mobile-phones, documenting what seems most important to them (the State department records 1.4 million cell-phones in Iraq 2005 swelling to 7.1 million in less than three years). The picture of the dying doctor is very specific to the medium: as a personal snapshot it is intimate, immediate and posed to make a statement that is different from the public pose offered to a professional lens. The smile is for family and friends, intended to reassure and to leave a more benign memory than a raw document of pain and dislocation.

So far so good, but not much further. Van Kesteren took the principle of cell-phone documentary and ran with it, enlisting helpers to trawl the blogosphere and research connections for the wealth of self-generated imagery carried in people’s phones. He found and published 140 phone images, wrapped around the written testimonials with minimal text or explanation and in doing so has debunked the popular theory that the intimacy of the personal phone can somehow substitute for professional observation. It is a popular theory, part of the zeitgeist where the “user generated image” is at the interface of modern technology and culture. But just as giving everyone a car makes many drivers but doesn’t make the roads better nor even improve communications, so cell-phone cameras don’t necessarily enrich our understanding of the world.

Of the three defining characteristics of the mobile-phone image, intimacy, immediacy and ubiquity, ubiquity is proven. So is immediacy – these images are all as close as participants can get to the drama of modern Iraq, but intimacy is a fickle quality. Intimacy is by definition very personal, and as such it’s not necessarily transferable; the author’s intent and the viewer’s understanding are hard to connect even in professional imagery and in the egocentric world of the amateur snap where the image means what the snapper says it means, the significance evaporates with distance. Imposing assumed meaning on these random, often abstract images comes dangerously close to sentimentalism.

These 140 cell-phone images infer intimacy without actually sharing much and this assumed closeness does not substitute for real content. What we see is profoundly uninteresting: it seems that people smile for cameras in Iraq just as they do anywhere else. These images don’t inform, nor stimulate curiosity nor fill gaps left by the powerful spoken testimonials. Fully 40% of the images are general street scenes, which although taken beyond the confines of the Green Zone tell us little about life in modern Iraq. One is reminded of Martin Parr’s Boring Postcard collections that manage to make banal situations look banal, but this is hardly a service when applied in such dramatic and critical circumstances. Some of the images reach an almost delightful level of abstraction that lends them a spurious conceptual aura, such as the pixilated blur that a rare caption identifies as “Videostill mortuary” [p.278] or the inky smudge that we are told is how a town looks by night when the electricity is off [p.256]. I am reminded of Colin Powell’s indistinct satellite “evidence” of WMD and I am also reminded that I shouldn’t fall for the illusion again, even when applied in the seductive context of cell-phone authenticity.

The editors raise the subject of authenticity in the upfront texts, saying that many images were rejected because of “the risk of digital editing” and “suspect provenance or propagandistic nature”, thereby bleaching some of the most interesting aspects of the cell-phone genre. If we’re going to truly embrace this vernacular medium we shouldn’t pretend that it substitutes for professional journalism but instead take it for what it is: an expression of what people want to say using whatever tools they can bring to bear.

The unfortunate design exacerbates this dismal representation. The decision to print the amateur images on newsprint is presumably intended to convey the immediacy and veracity of up-close news imagery but actually creates a sense of disposability. The designer has chosen to run each image full-frame across double pages creating two problems: enlarging a picture intended to be seen at three square inches to over a hundred square inches does little to enhance the image, and it also reminds us of the amateur tendency to place the subject in the centre of the frame resulting in the book’s hungry gutter eating many of the key elements.

The end result is interesting as another modern typology demonstrating those subjects that people find most interesting to photograph: street scenes (often from within traveling cars), burned-out cars and celebrations. But what does this tell us about the plight of four million displaced Iraqis? It is a brave experiment and should be respected as that, but it is also reminder of the emperor’s new clothes. Many of us are mesmerized by the cultural presence of the cell-phone and we are hoping to invest value in this new tool of communication, but this theoretical wonder is not yet borne out in its practical application.

Baghdad Calling, Geert van Kesteren, Episode Publishers, 2008.

This is to thank all the readers who participated in the edit for the new book, Color White Gray Other. I think the selection of images was considerably improved by your input. There were at least two things I learned from making the editing process somewhat public:

First, many of you care what is actually depicted in an image. Who would have thought! But seriously, for me, although at first sight I have these tightly defined ongoing projects (traffic cones, mountains, type on shipping boxes, etc.), the subject matter is actually less of a consideration even at the editing stage. If I had to define in one phrase what interests me in an image, it would be whether it says something about the structure of things – and those things can be literally anything. However, Color White Gray Other has a personal narrative too – that is, digging myself out of the secure confines of “Old Europe” -, and that informed the editing as well. Many of you put your finger on this.

Second, I always want to know how people from *outside* of the field of photography view my work. After all, I find having to use a camera tedious at times, not only because the technical side creates dependencies, but also because of what to me seems like suffocating group think in today’s “fine art photography community” (each single word of that phrase makes me feel uncomfortable already). I do understand Dr. Hare’s verdict that “we love what we know,” and I do understand that it is deeply human to want to belong to a group, or a “school,” and that this, paradoxically, may be even more true for the seemingly freedom-loving yet guidance-craving art world. Still, for what I do, I need to keep the perspective of the outsider. In that sense it was very interesting to get viewpoints from readers who have no ready preconceptions of what a fine art photograph in early 2009 is supposed to look like.

So, a big thank you for the support, most notably to the ingenious Diane, who invited her readers to have a look at the project in its various states.