photo beirut

Representing the Middle East: Looking for the everyday

This past week I participated in an interesting "webinar" about stereotypes in photographic representation of the Middle East through Open-i, which is an online photojournalism education network. Some of the audience members are involved in a World Press Photo course for photographers in the Middle East and North Africa. The other presenters were Alexandra Avakian (National Geographic photographer) and Laura Junka (photographer and PhD student in cultural studies in London). Rula Halawani (photographer based in Jerusalem) was to be there too but unfortunately couldn't attend. Paul Lowe (former Magnum photographer, now with Panos) was the organizer and moderator.

My comments revolved around how in order to understand something of the politics of photographs we need to know how they are constructed by various political, social and cultural processes. I also mentioned how photojournalism over the past 50 years or so has come to more and more emphasize the dramatic moment, the emotional story, and artistic framing and composition.

The problem with this I think is that the quieter moments, the mundane, the everyday, are often left out. But it’s on that level of daily life where the big political and structural forces of oppression, poverty, discrimination, or occupation, affect most people.

Even if we are not in positions to affect the structure of forces that produce the stereotypes, we can still promote the creation of new and different photographic work and find ways to help audiences, teachers, and editors appreciate different visions and visual styles, like Alexandra, Laura and Rula do.

I think Rula  was effective in showing this with her project "Intimacy” where we see the hands of Palestinians and Israeli soldiers handling ID cards and bags at checkpoints.

She doesn’t show faces or dramatic interactions, strong emotions or conflict. She captures the daily, normal tensions of living under occupation, which I think says a lot more about most Palestinian’s lives than photos of boys throwing stones, as important as those are too. Rula's project confronts stereotypes because the images don’t fit into the standard conventions of photos of the Middle East.

Alexandra's photo of a man selling fish in Gaza in 1993 while an Israeli soldier jumps out of his jeep to chase stone-throwing Palestinians also gets at what I'm talking about.

Caption: Gaza City, Gaza, July 1993: A man sells fish while an Israeli soldier jumps out of his truck to chase Palestinians who had been throwing stones. Credit: Alexandra Avakian

Normal life continues during conflict, as seen here, but is often not depicted. This photo is not about contrasts or surprising juxtapositions. We can see from the man's demeanor that this is just a part of trying to live life in Gaza. Israeli military actions were ongoing and closely intertwined with daily life for Palestinians. Alexandra told us that most of the photos in her new book Windows of the Soul: My Journeys in the Muslim World, were rejects -- not used at the time. They are complex and layered, maybe too much so for the prevailing conventions, especially in the late 1980s through the 1990s.

Laura spoke eloquently about the difficulties of photographing Palestinians as neither terrorists nor victims. She spent the summer of 2003 taking photos of Palestinians at leisure as a way to get beyond these tropes. But at the same time she was careful to point out that violence and occupation were still always part of everyone's lives and evidence of that lingers in the photos. She explained that in this photo of a family at the beach there are layers of important information that are only available through explanatory captions.

Caption: Summer at the beach in Gaza, 2003. Credit: Laura Junka

The family has borrowed this tent from their neighbors who received it from the Red Cross when their house was bulldozed by the Israeli government in retaliation for one son's involvement with violent resistance to occupation. Knowing this adds a whole new dimension to the scene, creating a poignant and complex sense of joy mixed with sorrow.

The emphasis in photography of the Middle East is usually on conflict and contradiction, on up-close confrontations between individuals. And of course, as in most photography, there is an emphasis on depicting people.

But there are other visual modes to powerfully depict realities the region. For example see a double page spread in the most recent issue of Middle East Report where we used photos of road blocks by Dirk-Jan Visser.

 

Blocked by Dirk-Jan Visser.

Here is the text I wrote to go with the photo sequence:

"Foregoing the usual depiction of Israel and Palestine as a site of dramatic confrontations between individuals, Dirk-Jan Visser has chosen instead to reveal a more mundane and insidious aspect of Israeli power. Photographing some of the more than 500 road blocks throughout the West Bank in a repetitive and neutral style, without the embellishments of unusual camera angles or clever compositions, these seemingly innocuous places add up to a typology of obstacles, attesting powerfully to an extreme disruption of Palestinian life."

Although stereotypes and conventions of depicting the Middle East are still a problem, I do see more and more photographers pushing the boundaries, looking for new visual styles. Some are also finding ways to visualize structural political problems (the road blocks typology is an example) and to expand the repertoire of images of the region in order to more fully represent the multiplicity of people's identities and experiences.

Misdirected gaze in Jerusalem

Yesterday's New York Times ran an article by Isabel Kershner, "Real Estate Shopping Is Used as Political Theater on Jerusalem’s Contested Ground," accompanied by this photograph by Jim Hollander of EPA.

Caption: New York State Assemblyman Dov Hikind, center, led a delegation during a cornerstone ceremony in the settlement of Nof Zion, in Jabel Mukaber in East Jerusalem on Wednesday. Credit: Jim Hollander/European Pressphoto Agency

Hollander does an admirable job of highlighting that this is a media stunt for Assemblyman Hikind's constituents back home by including the crush of reporters and photographers clustered around him and his delegation. Hikind would likely have preferred a close-up shot framing him as rugged pioneer (note the casual jacket instead of suit and tie) against the rolling hills and Old City of Jerusalem he has so deliberately placed in the background by his choice of position. Choosing to let the strong, warm toned  sunlight fall directly on his face, rather than cast his face in shadow by standing at a different angle, accentuates the sense of righteousness. Hollander punctures this intensely crafted scene by using a wide angle lens to reveal the structure around it -- the media for whom it is staged.

However, the New York Times, despite referring to Hikind's political theater in the title and using a photo that reveals the stage, still plays into the politician's hands. He (plus his point of view) has successfully become the center of the story both visually and in the text.

The Times could have resisted this misdirection of our gaze away from the core issue of land use. For example, the article mentions the Israeli practice of demolishing Palestinian homes for lack of extremely rare and hard to get building permits. The Times had access to striking photos of homes demolished in a Jerusalem neighborhood just the day before. I found a number of good photos in a quick search of agency websites, especially by Menahem Kahana of the Agence France Presse, such as this one.

Caption: Palestinian girls stand amidst debris after Israeli municipality workers partially demolished their family house which was built without municipal permission in the Arab east Jerusalem neighborhood of Whad Kadum on November 17, 2009. Credit: Menahem Kahana/AFP

A photo of the settlement, Nof Zion, in the Palestinian neighborhood of Jebel Mukaber, would have been another good choice that would help inform viewers of the reality of settlement growth. This photo from the Jerusalem Post website's article on Hikind's visit reveals the fortress-like housing that has already been built in Nof Zion.

Credit: Ariel Jerozlimski

The newspaper's website did add a couple of photos by Rina Castelnuovo that were not in the print edition. However, they underplay the demolitions, while more informative images about the toll demolitions take on families were available from the photographer and elsewhere.

This is the photo from the NY Times website.

 

Caption: Palestinians attached a flag to the rubble of a demolished house in East Jerusalem on Wednesday. Credit: Rina Castelnuovo

Another shot of this house by Castelnuovo is available through the agency Redux. (I won't show it since I didn't license its use.) The one on the Redux website shows much more of the house. The angle is not so dramatic and the sky not so blue (it was likely taken from the opposite side of the house) but the effect of dispossession is stronger because the house is recognizable as a dwelling rather than, as in this photo, an indistinct pile of rubble slipping out of the bottom of the frame, and quickly out of our consciousness.

The NYT website includes a second photo that downplays the demolition of Palestinian homes by showing  neighbors watching in a detached manner, as if this was an unimportant incident. But the photo isn't really about the neighbors or about any of the residents, it's about their laundry.

Caption: Neighbors watched in East Jerusalem as a Palestinian home was demolished. Credit: Rina Castelnuovo/NYTimes

It makes an interesting photograph, but conveys little information about the event and its meaning -- just as a staged photo op by Hikind and his group reveals nothing about the actual politics of territorial control and spatial domination.

Yasser Alwan's portraits and Paris Photo 2009

Paris Photo 2009 begins today. Unfortunately I am in Baltimore. The focus this year is Arab and Iranian photography and the central exhibition space is devoted to the Beirut archive I have written about before, the Arab Image Foundation. The Paris Photo website includes a selection of their photos that are on display in Paris.

Tonight a group of photographers will discuss the art photo scene in the Arab world and Iran with guest curator of Paris Photo Catherine David at the Institut du Monde Arabe. Among them is Yasser Alwan, whose wonderful work I have recently used in a publication by the Solidarity Center called "The Struggle for Worker's Rights in Egypt," written by Joel Beinin. His photos are included in Paris Photo in the Sfeir-Semler gallery space along with Wael Shawky and Akram Zaatari (who I have also written about on this blog, here).

Many of Alwan's photos are portraits that show people as individuals in the context of their work or in the public sphere. Details of the street, workshop, tools of their trade, and clothing give the viewer clues to the texture of their lives. Although these portrayals convey a sense of dignity as well as compassion for the hardships of working class Egyptians, the photos do not devolve into abstract statements about the "human condition," a problem -- to my mind -- with some documentary photography. 

The people in Alwan's photographs are always being themselves, even if caught in a particularly self-possessed, carefully composed moment. This is not "decisive moment" photography like that of Henri Cartier-Bresson or poetic street photographers like Robert Frank, both of whom preferred the candid and thus seemingly revealing gesture or expression. Alwan allows his subjects the privilege of projecting their image of themselves to the camera knowingly and with confidence. People in the Middle East, especially the working class, have historically not often been allowed that kind of agency or control over their own appearance. This doesn't mean that the resulting photos are somehow less true or meaningful. As in all photography, the fraction of a second exposure can only convey that momentary slice of time. Things look different in the next instant. But in this brief moment of speaking to the camera Alwan's subjects tell us something about their resilience and uniqueness with complex expressions of defiance, curiosity, humor, patience or sadness. 

I urge you to look at Alwan's photos on his website and also to explore Paris Photo, in Paris if possible! I would love to hear comments from anyone who gets a chance to see the exhibitions.

"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!

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."

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.

Representing youth in the Middle East

The Winter 2007 issue of Middle East Report will come out in a couple of weeks. It's main focus this time is the politics of youth. As photo editor it was my job to find the best photography we can afford to accompany the articles. Sadly, I discovered that photos of youth (I'm not talking about kids, but 15-24 year olds) largely correspond to the popular image of the region as repressed, stern, and violent.

[Below are some examples of the usual clichés. However, these are all very good photographers, whose work I respect.]

One of the more common images of Middle Eastern youth:

[Spencer Platt/Corbis]

My goal was to find photographs that show youth being youth. By this I mean doing things like going to university or school, working, hanging out with friends, playing sports, engaged in entertainment like amusement parks, picnics, shopping, cafes, and using the internet. While I did find some photos like this, the vast majority instead chose to represent young people engaged in political demonstrations and rallies, religious observances, or as victims of war, poverty and oppression. These images do capture some part of the reality of life in the region, the problem is that these extra-ordinary moments are the dominant image while the everyday is rarely seen.

Another very common image of youth:

[Atta Kenare/AFP]

There are exceptions, of course. For example, there has been much interest in the youth of Iran for years now. Primarily the focus has been on the Tehran upper and middle classes, those who go skiing, shop at high-end stores, and wear fashionable outfits that only barely abide by the Islamic Republics restrictions on dress. Those images have become fairly commonplace. So common in fact as to become already a bit of a cliché. At first this new image was helpful in breaking up the old stereotype about stern-faced youth covered in black chadors or wearing beards, shouting death to America. They showed what some Tehran youth are up to. It's important to see there are plenty of young people who party, play music, flirt, have fun. But how representative of youth in Iran are those photos? As far as I know, it's just one thin slice of the population. In addition to the photos of hip and trendy youth, I wish there were other images depicting a wider range of youth and their various tastes, activities, levels of religiosity, and socio-economic positions.

An example of the sexy young Iranian woman cliché:

[Lynsey Addario/Corbis]

...which is meant to be understood in opposition to this sort of image of faceless women in chadors.

[Rob Howard/Corbis]

Another big exception to the standard picture of Middle Eastern youth as stern, religious and radical is the image of young people hanging out in shopping malls. However, the popularity of this image comes, I think, from a widespread belief in the (false) dichotomy of "traditional" versus "modern." It seems editors and viewers get some sort of satisfaction from seeing a supposed contrast between men and women in modest dress and veils wandering past global fast food franchises or international brand name stores in the sleek, familiar space of a mall.

An example from Bahrain:

[Spencer Platt/Getty]

I think the problem lies in that feeling of familiarity that is found in the popular images of hip youth and mall goers. My guess is that these newer images are popular because they seem to contrast with what outsiders believe is the dominant culture in the region. Perhaps editors choose them because they depict Middle Easterners as familiar and similar to European and American viewers. We can relate. But at the same time they are seen as surprising because of the usual image of the region.

Unfortunately, what gets lost in this search for the familiar (or its opposite -- looking for the image of religious extremism) is a whole range of other people and experiences. One article in the next issue is about youth in the southern suburb of Beirut, an area called Dahiyya. It's the neighborhood that got a lot of press coverage last summer because Hizballah's media and other offices are located there. During the war Israeli airstrikes took out many residential/commercial buildings there. But this article is about something else entirely. It discusses how youth in this mostly Shiite area figure out what are Islamicly appropriate modes of entertainment for themselves, which is defined differently depending on the individual. Many of these religious young people want high quality, interesting places to spend time and see friends but they don't want the alcohol, popular music and certain norms of behavior between men and women that are present in cafes in other parts of Beirut. The authors discuss a variety of places these youth are comfortable hanging out, like certain sports clubs, sleekly designed internet cafes, segregated beaches, restaurants, an amusement park and a mall.

Searching for photos of youth in the Dahiyya, however, I could only find pictures of them in Hizballah rallies, listening seriously to Nasrallah's speeches, or sadly searching for belongings in the midst of the rubble after last summer's war. Granted, photographing In the Dahiyya isn't easy. The dominant news story, which shapes what editors want, is about Hizballah and the war. (I found very few photos from before the war, no one was interested at that point.) The other difficulty is gaining access. Hizballah controls journalists' visits, many don't get permission from the party to photograph in the area, and people are at times suspicious of a photographer's intentions.

But even knowing the difficulties, I can't help but be frustrated. Observant young Muslims (and indeed youth across the Middle East of all sorts) are as animated, smiley, independent and intelligent as any teenagers and yet they are rarely represented this way.

Two examples of images depicting youth in their everyday reality:

[Alexandria, Egypt. Mark Henley/Panos]

[Algiers, Algeria. Giacomo Pirozzi/Panos]

It seems that as a young person in the image world that represents the Middle East you are either provocatively pushing the bounds of conservative, traditional society (such as Tehran beauties, Beirut nightclubbers and consumers of "western" brands) or caught up senselessly in religiously-inspired politics and extremism.

These categories and assumptions need desperately to be challenged by image-makers and image-buyers. There are certainly photographers who are thoughtfully depicting the nuances of the real Middle East, but they also need to make a living licensing their work to magazines, newspapers and agencies that are often still stuck in these invidious ways of imagining the region. One photographer I spoke to here in Beirut who does good work said he was shocked as he looked through his own archive trying to find photos of youth involved in normal, everyday activities.  He found very little.

Politics and photography

I just read a great interview with Simon Norfolk from last year, which includes photos. Norfolk is a photographer whose work I've included in Middle East Report a couple of times (and once on my blog) and who uses a large format camera to capture how landscape is shaped by war (broadly defined). The interview is by Geoff Manaugh, who writes a fascinating blog called BLDGBLOG, about architecture (also broadly defined). Both interview and blog are also quite funny at moments.

Here are some excerpts:

Norfolk: So I started off in Afghanistan photographing literal battlefields – but I'm trying to stretch that idea of what a battlefield is. Because all the interesting money now – the new money, the exciting stuff – is about entirely new realms of warfare: inside cyberspace, inside parts of the electromagnetic spectrum: eavesdropping, intelligence, satellite warfare, imaging. This is where all the exciting stuff is going to happen in twenty years' time. So I wanted to stretch that idea of what a battleground could be. What is a landscape – a surface, an environment, a space – created by warfare?

BLDGBLOG: And that's how you started taking pictures of supercomputers?

Norfolk: Those supercomputers – big BlueGene, in particular – those are battlegrounds. BlueGene is designing and thinking about a space that is only about 30cm across and exists for about a billionth of a second, and that’s an exploding nuclear warhead. BlueGene is thinking about and modeling that space very intensely, because what happens there is very complicated.

That computer is as much a battlefield as a place in Afghanistan is, full of bullet holes.

...

All of the work I'm doing, I might even call it: "Toward a Military Sublime." Because these objects are beyond: they’re inscrutable, uncontrollable, beyond democracy.

On why there are rarely people in his photos:

I think people kind of gobble up the photograph. They become what the photograph is. For me, people just aren't that important; it's about this panoptic process, it's about this kind of eavesdropping, it's about this ability to look into every aspect of our lives. And I think if you put people into these pictures, I don't know – it would draw viewers away. It would draw viewers into the story of the people. It's not about, you know, Bob who runs the radar dome; it's about this thing that looks inside your email program, and listens to this phone call, and listens to every phone call in the world in every language, and washes it through computer programs. And if you say plutonium nerve gas bomb to me over the telephone, in an instant this computer is looking at what web pages you've been to recently, it's looking at my credit card bills, it's looking at your health records, it's looking at the books I check out of the library. That's what frightens me – it's not about: here's Dave, he works on the computer systems for Raytheon...

So I've always tried to pull people out of the pictures – and, if they're in my pictures, it's usually because they represent an idea, really. I think if you're going to talk about Dave, or Bob, or Wendy, you have to do it properly. You either do it properly or you don't do it at all.

...

BLDGBLOG: It often seems like the most interesting thing about these places is what cannot be photographed.

Norfolk: Absolutely – absolutely. That's why, whenever you see warfare now, it's photographed in that same dreary, clichéd way: it's metal boxes rolling across the desert. Every time you switch on CNN, or buy a newspaper, you see guys in metal boxes – because that looks good. These photojournalists, and these TV crews, they don’t explain the process: they show things that look good on TV. A satellite orbiting in space doesn't look good. A submarine – you know, the greatest platform we've ever built for launching nuclear weapons and for surveillance – that has no presence whatsoever in how most people understand what the military does today.

The same is true of electromagnetic stuff – information warfare, cyber-warfare – and I wonder what photojournalists of the future are going to photograph? Are they still going to photograph guys with guns, shooting at each other? Because quite soon there aren't going to be guys with guns shooting at each other. We're quite soon getting to the era of UAVs and stuff. People aren't even going to know what shot them – and there will be nothing to photograph.

...

I mean, I didn't get fed up with the subjects of photojournalism – I got fed up with the clichés of photojournalism, with its inability to talk about anything complicated. Photojournalism is a great tool for telling very simple stories: Here's a good guy. Here's a bad guy. It's awful. But the stuff I was dealing with was getting more and more complicated – it felt like I was trying to play Rachmaninoff in boxing gloves. Incidentally, it's also a tool that was invented in the 1940s – black and white film, the Leica, the 35mm lens, with a 1940s narrative. So, if I'm trying to do photojournalism, I'm meant to use a tool that was invented by Robert Capa ?

I needed to find a more complicated way to draw people in. I'm not down on photojournalism – it does what it does very well – but its job is to offer all its information instantly and immediately. I thought the fact that this place in Afghanistan – this ruin – actually looks a little like Stonehenge: that interested me. I wanted to highlight that. I want you to be drawn to that. I want you to stay in my sphere of influence for slightly longer, so that you can think about these things. And taking pictures in 35mm doesn't do it.

So the content of photojournalism interests me enormously, it's just the tools that I had to work with I thought were terrible. I had to find a different syntax to negotiate those things.

...

The thing that pisses me off about so much modern art is that it carries no politics – it has nothing that it wants to say about the world. Without that passion, that political drive, to a piece of work – and I mean politics here very broadly – how can you ever really evaluate it? At the end of the day, I don't think my politics are very popular right now, but what I would like to hear is what are your politics? Because if you're not going to tell me, how can we ever possibly have an argument about whether you're a clever person, your work is great, your work is crap, your art is profound, your art is trivial...?

For instance, I'm doing a lot of work these days on Paul Strand – and Paul Strand is a much more interesting photographer than most people think he is. The keepers of the flame, the big organizations that hold the platinum-plating prints and his photogravures, or whatever – these big museums, particularly in America, that have large collections – they don't want the world to know that Strand was a major Marxist, his entire life. He was a massive Stalinist. That just dirties the waters in terms of knowing who Strand was. So Strand has become this rather meaningless pictorialist now. You look at any description of Strand's work, and he was just a guy who photographed fence posts and little wooden huts in rural parts of the world. If you don't understand his politics, how can you make any sense of what he was trying to do, or what he photographed? These people have completely laundered his reputation – completely deracinated the man.

---

What I like about his comments is the way he describes trying to photograph large political processes  that are usually invisible to us but are evident as traces in the landscape. His explanation of why, in order to do this, he needed to shift to using different tools from what photojournalists use resonates with my interest in the structures of photojournalism, how news photographs are constructed and why they look the way they do at different times in history. 

I also appreciate his thought that to evaluate and understand what a photographer is doing you have to understand their politics or views on the world. The example of Strand made me wonder, then what did he see in the fence posts? What was he trying to convey? Did it really relate to his politics or did he also have aesthetic interests that were to him separate from his politics? My hesitation with this idea is that one's political beliefs don't determine how you photograph something, but can inform it. Too many people are skeptical of, for example, Palestinian photographers covering Israel/Palestine because they assume their politics (which critics presume to understand) influence their reporting. But in reality there are many more factors than personal beliefs that influence a photojournalist's way of telling a story. [I have an essay on this subject coming out in the Jerusalem Quarterly in mid-October or so.]

You can see Simon's photos on his website and in his books. And read the rest of the interview at the BLDGBLOG site.

Displaced -- new issue of Middle East Report out

The latest issue of Middle East Report is now out and I highly recommend you buy it (you can order it online from the website.)

[Photo by Klavs Bo Christensen. Abu Karar with his wife, three kids and his sister in their house in Sayeda Zainab, Damascus, Syria, June 9, 2007. Their son (picture) was killed in a random shooting by American soldiers in Baghdad. Abu Karar was a contractor for the Americans. After receiving a death threat, the family fled Iraq. He now runs an outdoor teashop in Damascus.]

As photo editor, I was responsible for finding the photos for the issue and am particularly pleased with them. It's often hard to find photographs of the region that go beyond the usual clichés that focus on incidents of violence or paint a picture of exaggerated religious traditionalism. When it became known that I was looking for photos of refugees for this issue I was inundated with submissions. This was of course helpful and is how I found out about some great photographers like Annie Tritt for example (see her excellent work on Iraqis in Jordan in the magazine).

But what was made dishearteningly clear was how many photographers have done stories on refugees. This made me sad in two ways –- first that there are so many refugees and displaced people in the world and secondly that they have become what seems to be for some photographers a subject to launch their careers. I have no problem with photographers covering refugees and their lives in-depth, I am not making a complaint about “aestheticizing suffering” either. What bothers me are those who make generic images of an emaciated person sitting on the ground looking abject as if this is all the description that is needed to summon up the experience of a refugee. It’s insulting to the subject who, regardless of how much they have lost, still has a life embedded within society and family and their own particular history. It's also not good photography or journalism.

However, I did see good work too, the best treated the subjects visually not as abject cases for sympathy or as the sorry result of bad politics, but real people with stories to tell and lives to be lived. In this issue you can see Annie Tritt’s work on Iraqi refugees trying to get by in Jordan, a country that does not classify them as refugees but as visitors. On the cover and inside are photos by Klavs Bo Christensen of Iraqis who now live in Syria. Paul Taggert and Tariq Saleh show some of the brutality of the battle over Nahr el Bared refugee camp in Lebanon and Jake Price contributes a photo that captures the uncertain situation of Iraqi refugee children. Johan Spanner and Andrew McConnell provide portraits of internally displaced people in Iraq and Somalia.

Here is the description of the issue, I hope you will order it.

Middle East Report
244, Fall 2007

DISPLACED

Downplayed in the media, dithered over by the international community and (until recently) ignored by the Bush administration, more than 4 million Iraqis have fled their homes since the US-led invasion of their country in  2003. Even before the Iraqis' flight, the Middle East held the dubious distinction of being one of the foremost generators of refugees -- Palestinians, Sudanese, Somalis and others -- in the world. In the mass uprooting and dispersal of Iraqis, as demonstrated in the fall 2007 issue of Middle East Report, "Displaced," there is much that is sadly familiar. 

What is novel about the Iraqi displacement crisis, writes anthropologist Julie Peteet, is the near silence about the displaced, the absence of camps and the belated humanitarian assistance. The crisis magnifies the trend noticeable in the 1990s toward categorizing the displaced as something other than refugees and thereby minimizing the legal obligations of states and international bodies to help them.

Madona Mokbel surveys the plight of Iraqis in neighboring states, where they are denied access to jobs and services, and also face the growing resentment of the native population, who blame them for rising prices and groaning infrastructure. As political scientist Stefanie Nanes finds in Jordan, this blame is misplaced. Given the limited capacity of neighboring states to absorb refugees, the question is why the US and UN have been so slow to respond, argue researchers Kathryn Libal and Scott Harding.

The displacement of Iraqis of course recalls the 1948 expulsion and flight of Palestinians, who continue to live in a harrowing limbo. Muhammad Ali Khalidi and Diane Riskedahl, analyzing the Lebanese army's summer 2007 assault on the Nahr al-Barid refugee camp, conclude that the only thing uniting Lebanese factions is "antipathy for the Palestinians living in their midst." Relief efforts, reports Mayssun Sukarieh, are received with ambivalence by Palestinians who wish their supporters would focus on campaigning for Palestinian rights -- including the right of return. Middle East Report interviews the activists of Zochrot, an Israeli organization working to recover the suppressed memory of the Palestinian displacement in Israel.

Also featured: Stephen Dedalus chronicles another forced migration that has passed almost unnoticed in the West -- the Pakistani military's displacement of perhaps 250,000 people from rebellious Balochistan; Joel Beinin visits settler-besieged al-Tuwani in the South Hebron Hills; Laleh Khalili reviews Bernard Rougier's Everyday Jihad; and more.

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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. 

What is my photography about? And why do I need to know?

Since this blog is partially a tool for me to work out what I want to be doing with photography, I thought I'd post some recent ideas. (Sorry, it has nothing to do with Beirut this time.) First of all, I have been trying to describe what my photography is about (and actually has always been about, I now realize).

Here's a stab at it:
In my art photography [as opposed to what I've done in news, travel, and documentary] I want to investigate how unintentional, unplanned or unauthorized physical marks and scars give a place its texture and uniqueness. I’m fascinated by the traces that people leave on the urban landscape through everyday living/working and a desire to communicate, and by the way natural forces change the human-made environment into something new and unexpected. It seems that without these imperfections all around us our lives would lack a certain philosophical aspect. The process of decay and transformation on the micro level of physical details, the ephemeral nature of everything, somehow has poignant meaning, and is deeply attractive, to me personally.

Sounds a bit pretentious...it's hard to put this into words. But I think it's a good exercise to help me concentrate on what I want to achieve.

In addition to the graffiti photos I've been posting on this blog, here are a couple of my better photos (from what I have available on my computer, which is a small part of my photos that are currently in storage) to give you an idea of what I'm talking about.

Bundle of linoleum perhaps, from the ruins of Clipper Mill, Baltimore.


Doorway from the stairway into a main hall in the former textile mill, Royal Mills, Rhode Island.

Mt Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge, MA.

Inside the abandoned textile mill, Royal Mills, Rhode Island.

Pomegranates split and dried on the bush, Jerusalem.

Clipper Mill, Baltimore.

[You can see more of these sort of photos on my website.]

I have also been thinking about how art photographers approach their work.It seems everyone has a theme these days, a specific subject they are exploring. It is this sense that makes me feel I should create a narrative for my photos, a structure to explain them. Was this always the case for photographers or is this part of what's necessary now to market the work? Did Paul Strand, Lee Friedlander, Brassai, William Eggleston, Helen Levitt, Manuel Álvarez Bravo, etc, feel the need to define the themes of their photography in the way that contemporary photographers like Edward Burtynsky, Jeff Wall, Gregory Crewdson, Rineke Dijkstra, maybe Alec Soth, and others do? Perhaps I'm just noticing a change from photographers who focus on photography, to artists who use photography and have more conceptual concerns. There must be photographers out there who simply photograph what interests them as they live life without creating projects and themes and coherent series, but I don't hear about them much.

On a somewhat related note I also notice that international interest in art from the Middle East is in work that comments on regional politics, society and history -- rather than that which focuses on abstraction or aesthetics. Perhaps that's what artists in the Middle East themselves are focused on, but for example, international interest zooms in on Lebanese artists who reflect on the civil war in some manner, or on artists like Shirin Neshat who use identifiably Middle Eastern motifs.

I really like photography that comments on and deals with social or political realities, so I'm not criticizing, just thinking. 

Anyway, I'll end this before it gets too convoluted. Please post a comment if you have any thoughts about these subjects.