photo américain

Maha Maamoun and the Pyramids

A friend of mine from the year I spent at the American University in Cairo in 1989-90, Maha Maamoun, became an artist who uses photography. She is also a curator. We re-met in Beirut in 2007 where she was organizing the Meeting Points 5 arts festival and now I see her work has been in the 9th Sharjah Biennial. There is a statement by her in the most recent issue of Nafas art magazine. Her recent work, Domestic Tourism I and II, is described there, with photos.

For Domestic Tourism II she searched for scenes in movies that featured the pyramids as backdrop and put them together. She explains the chronology and rhythm she chose for the resulting film, which sounds evocative:

"I wanted to start and end with the present so that the film does not end up as a celebration of a romantic past vs. a rough present. Instead, it visits the past and shows its various formulations by a changing present.

The film starts with recent scenes, from the 2000’s, with their lighter and more superficial engagement in social and political issues, then the tone of the film heightens as we move backwards through the 90’s, 80’s, and 70’s, with cinema’s deeper engagement with the harshness of political and social realities. The tension is then released with the celebratory scenes of political and social glee from the 60’s and 50’s, where the pyramids act mostly as a backdrop to a celebrating and celebrated middle class. Here we reach the oldest scene I have, the turning point, after which the tension gradually builds up as we move up again through the traumatic political and economic upheavals of the late 60’s, phasing out to the present."

"Humanising Photography"

The Durham Centre for Advanced Photography Studies at Durham University in the UK organized a conference called "Humanising Photography" September 25 - 27, 2009. At some point I think they will be uploading audio recordings of all our presentations if you'd like to listen.

On the way there, as I looked over a newspaper full of daily news photography I wondered what photojournalism would look like if we turned our attention away from individuals and their immediate responses (away from the emphasis on capturing gestures and expressions) and instead focused on political and social processes and power relations. In the 1930s it was the new technology of 35mm cameras, such as the Leica, that enabled photographers to get up close, to photograph without being seen, without flash, to capture candid shots of people. The philosophy of humanism also emphasized the importance of the individual. It is hard to imagine photojournalism any differently, but I think the convention of focusing on individuals suits the staging and arranging of events for the camera that occupy a lot of a daily news photographer's time and also creates a certain narrow view on the world that blocks understanding of the deeper political forces at work. Prodding my thoughts was David Campbell's interesting essay "Constructed Visibility: Photographing the Catastrophe of Gaza."

I don't have an answer, but I think it's worthwhile to imagine a new style of photojournalism. Photos of individuals will always be important, especially for inspiring people to care about the costs of various politics and policies. But I'm interested in what role photographs can play in illuminating causes not just the consequences. (Campbell shows, for example, how the photography of the war on Gaza in January 2009 problematically created Gazans as simply potential recipients of humanitarian aid and was not able to show how Gaza is a place in permanent catastrophe, not just periodic breakdown.)

I presented a paper at the conference that describes a major style within photojournalism. Perhaps it is useful to analyze older, dominant styles, and to think about how they have become entrenched, in order to imagine new ways of depicting the world.

In my presentation I argued that there is a particular visual style that has been distilled and promoted by the famous agency Magnum Photos (not necessarily invented by it) especially from its founding in 1947 into the 1970s. Using high drama, abstract narrativity, artistic expression and documentary realism, the style creates coherent, orderly compositions that seek to comment on the "human condition" in an abstract, general way. They do this by emphasizing expressions, gestures and action which add up to a story that implies something important about human society is being revealed by the photographer. I think this style has deeply influenced what we consider to be exemplary photojournalism and so is now mainstream. (There is also a newer mode within Magnum, which emphasizes fragmentation and disorder and is more explicitly "arty.")

Here are some examples. Remember, I'm trying to describe the style of a group, not of these individuals.

[Robert Capa]

[Jean Gaumy]

[Raymond Depardon]

[Philip Jones-Griffiths]

After describing the historical circumstances of its development and the style itself I discussed what I think are the implications for this way of depicting the world. To be very brief, I suggest that it creates images that make broad statements about the human condition that ultimately obscure more than they reveal about politics or society. These abstract narratives flatten the world into banal truisms (such as statements about the horrors of war or the tragedy of poverty), limit diversity and pluralism in representations and gloss over the specifics of how politics or society operate. This style of depiction is the product of a certain moment in time, adapted to the needs of a particular (European) institution and molded by specific social forces.

Though it needs more study, I also suggest that this style of photojournalism participated in presenting the developing world as a region in need of development and humanitarian intervention (by Western industrialized countries) in the early post-WWII era, without taking into consideration the complex wishes or needs of the targeted population.

All in all, although the photos produced in this style are stunning and incredibly well crafted, I think this style is not well suited to the way we live now. We need new visual modes that correspond to how we experience the world as increasingly complex, multi-dimensional, and interconnected.

At the conference there were roughly three groups of people presenting work -- photographers, NGO workers who use photography as a tool, and academics. As primarily a photo editor/critic I suppose I overlapped the categories. The photographers were interested in how their photographs might influence people or express their own experiences, the NGO people were concerned with how photography can be used to empower marginalized groups (and they self-reflexively interrogated some of the issues that arise when Western groups attempt to effect change in the developing world), while the academics were generally addressing the question of what work photographs do (for example, how they are able - or not - to testify to human suffering, how they "bear witness," how they are used and reused for national or political purposes, what they reveal when examined decades after being taken and how their meanings shift over time and through different contexts of use).

A thread that kept emerging was the question of the relationship between aesthetics and politics (most explicitly discussed by Mark Reinhardt). The notion of affect surfaced a number of times. Mark (a political theorist) asked what particular aesthetic strategies induce what effects, what emotions. He noted that the problem with provoking sentimentality is that makes feeling primary and political structures secondary or invisible.

Eugenie Shinkle discussed certain examples of landscape photography that appears more and more in the context of humanitarian photography because it addresses the human costs of conflict and environmental degradation through the marks and scars on the landscape, not by depicting individuals. (I think this type of photography may be one way forward in crafting new styles of photojournalism -- think of Simon Norfolk, Sophie Ristelhueber, Edward Burtynsky.) Here are some examples, both of Israeli road blocks in the West Bank:

[Simon Norfolk]

[Sophie Ristelhueber]

Eugenie made the point that the aesthetic overlays the cognitive and the affective (brings together thought and feeling is how I understand that). So, she asks, what kind of affect is being created in these landscape photos through their particular aesthetic and what kind of political response do they provoke? She suggested empathy, a shared sense of belonging, and a linkage between the global and local. It was unclear what exactly about the photos created these responses. That is why, I would argue, it is important to look at the formal elements of photography (composition, design, use of light, form, framing, etc) in addition to political, social and historical context.

There is much more I could write about the ideas brought up at the conference, and clarifications I could make in my argument about a Magnum visual style, but this post has gone on too long already!

Beginning again, and art from the Middle East

I was inspired by discussions with David Campbell (Photography, Multimedia, Politics), Jim Johnson (Notes on Politics, Theory and Photography), and Mark Reinhardt (editor of the book Beautiful Suffering: Photography and the Traffic in Pain) to begin this blog again. We were on a roundtable together, along with Victoria Hattam, at the American Political Science Association conference in Toronto last week about the fear of images in political science and the broad topic of politics and photography.

So, I hereby rededicate myself to posting about photography and the Middle East, including some of my own photographs once in a while. Please keep in mind though that this will still be a "slow blog." These will be occasional posts.

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In the Nafas Art Magazine there is an interesting article by Nada Shabout, Are Images Global?, about interpreting art from the Middle East. She talks about how interpretation, critical writing and curating art from the region is being done for the most part outside the region, primarily in Europe and the US. She makes the useful point that a consequence of this trend is the lack of understanding of the art's historical context and development and goes on to say:

"There is little scholarship about modern art but, instead, an ever-growing number of exhibition catalogues arising from the increasing number of contemporary shows of Middle East art. The move from a period of invisibility through to one of celebration of everything related to the Middle East has fostered a sense of discontinuity, with contemporary production being seen as a new, detached phenomenon."

In my own writing about photography I am very interested in and concerned with historicizing -- putting photographs in the context of the period they emerged from in order to explore how and why they look the way they do. To understand visual images we have to investigate the myriad forces that acted upon them as they were made, such as markets, intellectual trends, politics, technological changes, the photographer's working conditions, etc.

She ends her article just when it gets most interesting:

"Finally, I would note that this displacement of centres of knowledge production has affected the development of art education and art history within the region. ... Nevertheless, some ambitious institutional initiatives around the Arab world, as well as new research and critical thinking by an increasing number of younger scholars, signal possible fresh directions for the field’s future advancement."

I have also noticed that contemporary institutions and practices throughout the region are creating a new creative economy, much of it transnational in nature. There is an overlapping network developing of artists, non-profit cultural groups, publications, galleries, cinema spaces, art buyers, educational programs, festivals, bloggers, curators, exhibits and funding. But I'm not aware of the new research and critical thinking she mentions because my Arabic is not good. I hope some will appear in translation.

Addendum added later:

I just saw that the latest Middle East Studies Association Bulletin (Summer/Winter 2008, though it just came out) has a special section called "Art Without History," introduced by Nada Shabout and with 6 other interesting essays on the topic. It's not online, but you might find it in a university library.

Ongoing series of photos taken in the alleyways in Evergreen, Baltimore

 

Photojournalists, LIFE magazine, and AUB in the 1950s

Yesterday I wrote about an interesting BBC video that shows news photographers at work covering the evacuation of Israeli settlers from a house in the West Bank city of Hebron for The Compelling Image blog. (Read it here.) TCI offers lots of great online classes for photographers of all levels. I teach a course called Developing a Photographer's Eye.

I have also been exploring the new Google archive of LIFE magazine photographs. It's a great resource for scholars and lots of fun for everyone, I recommend taking a look. If you want to license the use of a photo for publication you need to go through Getty. But the Google site has fairly high-res images (ones here are the smaller versions) and can even order prints.

I did a search for American University of Beirut and came up with these shots from 1953. (This is just a sample of ones I like.)

These are all by Lisa Larsen.

Listening to another student Mona Asfour (L), of Palestine and Su'ad Habri (R), preparing to be teachers sit in education class.

 

New Engineering School Building.

Studying on the library roof.

Students.

Sex education class.
[I wonder if this is still taught ... and what exactly was being taught at this time!]

alternatives to disaster photographs

Wandering around the web this morning I spent some time reading a call for papers for a conference at Durham Centre for Advanced Photography Studies called "Humanising Photography". (Proposals by photographers, scholars and humanitarian workers due Dec 19th.) The associate director of the center (at Durham University in the UK) is the geographer David Campbell, who has written quite a bit on the representation of war, famine and disaster. Two projects he was involved in are on the web: Imaging Famine and The Visual Economy of HIV/AIDS.

While I appreciate analysis of images of famine and disaster and how they shape the way the public understands the world (Africa in these cases), I am usually more interested in exploring the alternatives to these depictions. It seems to me that contemporary photojournalism is gradually expanding its visual language to incorporate new visions and ways of seeing that go beyond the simplistic, decontextualized, isolated close up image of an emaciated or suffering individual. (See some of the newer members of Magnum Photos like Jonas Bendiksen for example.) However, the most interesting photographs for complicating our perceptions of a place or a people or a situation seem to be those embraced by the art world.

In that spirit, here are a few artists I stumbled across this morning who create representations of places that go beyond the stereotypes and cliches of the mainstream media.

The curator/photographer Akinbode Akinbiyi addresses this issue directly in a short, interesting interview about the Bamako 2007 photography biennial (in Mali). He put together a smaller exhibit of photography, "Spot On: Bamako 2007," from the biennial at the Institute for Foreign Cultural Relations (ifa) in Berlin. (If you're in Berlin the exhibit is on now until January 11, 2009.)

Check out work by artists from all over Africa (including North Africa and Egypt) by going to the Berlin exhibit website.

Here's a taste.

Sammy Baloji

Baloji makes collages of colonial era photographs incorporated into present-day landscapes. As the exhibit explains: "...in order to understand the present, he reads the traces of the past. He finds such traces and signs in the architecture of Congo’s state mining company. Once the Gécamines stood for the richness of the Belgian colony and the extraction of copper and cobalt was the backbone of the Congoles economy. Under Mobuto’s regime, however, this sector of industry was run down because of the lack of investments and the dictator claimed the profits."

Mouna Karray

"The industrial and harbour city of Sfax, Tunisia, is the home town of the artist Mouna Karray. Since four decades, a series of political decisions has led to the point that public places in Sfax have gradually become non-accessible areas without any function. The remains of these places, redefining the image of the urban landscape, are shown by Mouna Karray in her series Murmurer."

Another artist I found this morning is Ahmed Mater Al-Ziad Aseeri, from Saudi Arabia. He is also a doctor and has incorporated x-rays into his work.

Mixed media on paper, 152 x 102 cm

He explains: "It is designed to be like the opening pages to a religious text. But much larger. Originally the craftsmen would always spend a great deal of time on these pages. They’re the first thing you see. Instead of a traditional geometry I have printed two facing X-ray images of human torsos. I prepared the paper using tea, pomegranate, coffee and other materials traditionally used on these pages. By using them you ensure that when you come to paint onto the paper it will have an extraordinary luminous quality – the paint will truly shine. And that’s what I want to do with this piece, to illuminate. I am giving light. It’s about two humans in conversation. Us and Them. Dar a luz. So many religions around the world share this concept of giving light, not darkness. It is one religious idea that has reached mankind through many different windows."

New issue of Middle East Report out now - The US in the Middle East

The latest issue of the excellent quarterly magazine Middle East Report is out now. Ok, I'm biased, being the photo editor, but it is widely respected for its analysis and I do think the photos are fantastic overall.

Photographers whose work appears in this issue include: Karim Ben Khelifa, Balazs Gardi, Eros Hoagland, Luiz Maximiano and Stephanie Keith.

In this issue be sure to check out the illuminating book review by Waleed Hazbun on US foreign policy towards the Middle East.

If you're going to the Middle East Studies Association conference in Washington, DC this weekend, stop by the MERIP booth in the book exhibit to say hello (and get issues of the magazine).

[Subscribe to Middle East Report or order individual copies online.]

Middle East Report 249
Winter 2008

SHRINKING CAPITAL: THE US IN THE MIDDLE EAST

The Bush administration entered office in 2000 determined to extend the
global dominion of the United States into "a new American century." Yet as
President George W. Bush prepared to depart the White House, the National
Intelligence Council released a report surmising that Washington "will have
less power in a multipolar world than it has enjoyed for many decades." The
winter 2008 issue of Middle East Report, "Shrinking Capital: The US in the
Middle East," examines the Bush-era changes in US regional policy -- and the
continuities with the past -- that have left Washington's clout diminished.

As Yahya Sadowski writes, the Bush administration's go-it-alone spirit -- 
and refusal even to speak to regional actors it does not like -- wound up
sparking a rash of diplomatic initiatives undertaken by US allies without US
approval or participation. Political scientist Waleed Hazbun situates the
Bush failures, which have caused such great damage to the Middle East, in
the historical sweep of US grand strategy and identifies a worrisome lack of
fresh thinking on the subject in the tomes of the Democratic foreign policy
establishment.

It is important to recall the legacies of the Philippines and Vietnam, as
Laleh Khalili writes, when evaluating the newness of Bush-sanctioned torture
and, for that matter, the US military's current focus on counterinsurgency.
Jason Brownlee finds more disturbing echoes of Vietnam in the 2008 field
manual covering "stability operations" -- occupation and militarized nation
building by another name. And, as sociologist Louise Cainkar demonstrates,
the draconian post-September 11 program of detention and deportation of
Arabs and Muslims could not have occurred so easily without the history of
anti-Arab and anti-Muslim sentiment in the US.

Cultural historian Melani McAlister offers a different lesson in her essay
on the global engagement of American evangelicals: Their adoption of the
language of human rights to highlight persecution of Christians in Africa,
Asia and the Middle East has simultaneously drawn upon Islam-bashing themes
and pushed the activism of many evangelicals in a more liberal and less
parochial direction.

Also featured: Sandra Beth Doherty looks at why so many women in Lebanon go
under the knife; Tamir Sorek reviews Aziza Khazzoom's Shifting Ethnic
Boundaries and Inequality in Israel; and more.

---

Middle East Report is published by the Middle East Research and Information
Project (MERIP), a progressive, independent organization based in
Washington, DC. Since 1971 MERIP has provided critical analysis of the
Middle East, focusing on political economy, popular struggles and the
implications of US and international policy for the region.

New Haven's Grove Street Cemetery

During a brief visit to New Haven a few weeks ago I took a walk in the Grove Street cemetery, established in 1797. Here are some photographs of things that caught my eye that day - Egyptian revival railings, a torn, worn American flag, weathered angels, and a Birch trunk scratched up by squirrels.

At home in Baltimore

It's autumn and the leaves are reaching their blazing, colorful peak after which they suddenly all drop to the ground. Everything has an ephemeral, somewhat melancholy feel, including the abandoned couch, upside down in the back alley.

NYC and Catherine Opie

We were in NYC for just an afternoon last week but we managed to squeeze in a visit to the fantastic B&H Photo store (professional photographer's heaven, if you have a little money to spend), a tasty lunch of mezze at a Turkish restaurant called Beyoglu, and a long visit to the Guggenheim to see the Catherine Opie exhibit of photos. Not much time to take photos, but here are two snapshots from the day.

Lunch.

View from inside the Guggenheim.

Here's a Catherine Opie photo from the exhibit:

Untitled #2 (1994), Platinum print, 2 1/4 x 6 3/4 inches

On view at the Guggenheim (this link takes you to the page of her work, including an online exhibition) are a number of her coherent, separate projects - such as Freeways (example above), Being and Having, Portraits, Mini-Malls, Domestic, American Cities, Icehouses, and Surfers. She began in the 1990s by taking formal studio portraits of friends in the queer communities of Los Angeles and San Francisco. They are striking for the way she photographed each uniquely dressed, tattooed and pierced individual against richly colored backdrops and baroque patterns. She refers to being influenced by the 16th century portrait paintings by Hans Holbein. She also photographed domestic scenes of lesbian families around the country, and her own family with her young son. As with most of her work they are done with medium or large format cameras, very deliberately arranged and meticulously lit. Also very tender, expressive and moving.

I particularly enjoyed Freeways, the small panoramic platinum paladium prints of overpasses and roadways in Los Angeles. The forms are sensuous and compelling as abstractions but also visual testimony to the vast - generally unnoticed - infrastructure that connects the LA area (and divides communities, as Opie mentions in the audio tour). By shooting in black and white on Sunday mornings when there are few cars around she heightens the abstract qualities of line, shape and texture, and directs our attention to the forms themselves rather than their usage in a particular era. The platinum process creates an almost antique, historic aura that lacks the contrast (bright whites, dark blacks) usually seen in silver gelatin prints (the most common black and white printing method). By printing them small she pulls us away from feeling their monumental scale as we would if we were standing there in person or if she had made massive prints as is so common these days. Instead of asking us to be awe-struck by the freeways' size in relation to ourselves, she has shrunk them down to a whole new scale. We peer at the prints from up close as if we are getting a glimpse into another world, our world made temporarily unfamiliar.

I also really loved the two series facing each other in one gallery, Icehouses (2001) and Surfers (2003). You can see a video of their installation with Opie's reflections on the images by clicking here. Instead of capturing moments of action among ice fishers in Minnesota and surfers in California she photographs the quiet time of waiting, and from a distance. The horizon lines in these are very important, as they align from photo to photo, but are often almost imperceptible as sky melts into snow or ocean. These photos are huge, 50 x 40 inches and were made with field camera on 8x10 inch film. Both series are about temporary communities, not individuals (no people are even visible in Icehouses, only the little shacks within which people do their fishing). 

 

Untitled #9 (Icehouses) 2001, Chromogenic print, 50 x 40 inches

 

Untitled #9 (Surfers), 2003, Chromogenic print, 50 x 40 inches

It's an excellent show all around. I haven't even mentioned the urban landscape shots of mini-malls in Los Angeles (also without people, which highlights both the signage that points to the presence of multiple cultural communities and the dreary architecture) and similarly large scale, detailed but low-key panoramic shots of Wall Street and Chicago that are also quite compelling.

Her aesthetic of capturing the mundane and the overlooked, and the in-between moments, without drama but with incredible technical finesse and intense detail really appeals to me. So very different from the photojournalism that I normally work with, but more in tune with my own photographic sensibility.