Ben Peterson forwarded me the article from Frieze Magazine below:

//feli t

//////////////////////////////////////////

Issue 132 June-August 2010

SHOOTING GALLERY

The limitations of photojournalism and the ethics of artistic representation

by Christy Lange



On 12 May 2009, the front page of The New York Times featured an image
of three soldiers seen from behind, perched behind sandbags on a rocky
lookout over a lush green valley in eastern Afghanistan. All three
soldiers wear helmets and flack jackets and are gripping their rifles,
looking down on an invisible attacker below. The soldier on the left,
however, 19-year-old Specialist Zachary Boyd, is wearing flip-flops, a
bright red T-shirt under his camouflage vest and pink boxer shorts
patterned with the ‘I (heart) NY’ logo. <http://tinyurl.com/22ql97y>

The Associated Press (AP) photographer David Guttenfelder shot the
photograph when the US Army troop he was embedded with came under
attack and Specialist Boyd leapt out of his bunk, not yet fully
dressed, to man his post. In this sense, Guttenfelder’s picture
delivers classic reportage: a candid, immediate view of the heat of
battle. But the photograph can also be interpreted as deeply
reassuring. Media reports of the image focused on the patriotic
message emblazoned on the soldier’s boxer shorts, while Defense
Secretary Robert Gates publicly praised Boyd’s bravery, declaring: ‘I
can only wonder about the impact on the Taliban.’ The photo instantly
sparked a Google trend for ‘pink boxers’, and Guttenfelder was
subsequently awarded second place in the ‘people in the news singles’
category in last year’s World Press Photo competition.

But the image is also a proxy for the front-page photographs we
haven’t been able to see in the American press over the course of the
conflict in Afghanistan and Iraq: those that depict American soldiers
who have died in battle. While images like Guttenfelder’s are seen as
affirmative, images of dead soldiers are criticized or censored. When
the AP released a photograph of a mortally wounded marine in September
2009, Gates condemned the agency’s decision. Only in February of last
year did he lift the 19-year-old ban on publishing images of US
soldiers’ coffins returning from battle. The classic idea of war
reportage (epitomized by Robert Capa’s 1936 photo, The Falling
Soldier) has changed in this war.

Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, who have been photographing zones
of conflict since 2000, have written extensively about the
contemporary limitations of photojournalism due to the restrictions of
being embedded and censorship by photo editors. After serving as
judges of the World Press Photo competition in 2008, they wrote
critically about the clichés and compromises prevalent in today’s war
reportage, and the inherent contradictions of evaluating such
photographs. They described their experience of sitting in a room for
up to 20 hours a day scanning thousands of photos, using a buzzer
designed for a game show to ‘keep’ or ‘kill’ each image after just a
few seconds of viewing them without captions. The winning photograph
that year, selected from 81,000 entries, was Tim Hetherington’s
photograph of a US soldier in combat in Afghanistan, in which a young
man is shown leaning against a rock, helmet in one hand and the other
hand covering half of his face in a mixture of shock and exhaustion.
For Broomberg and Chanarin, Hetherington’s picture ‘represents a
nostalgia for the days of photojournalism at its sexiest, most
lucrative and effective’.1 Their experience revealed the prevalence of
what they considered a ‘particularly sanitized depiction of war’,
while also exposing the problems of applying aesthetic criteria to
such images. In response, while embedded in Helmand Province in 2008,
they created the video and photographic series ‘The Day Nobody Died’,
for which they enlisted the help of the British Army in shipping a
50-metre roll of photographic paper from London to Afghanistan. They
then exposed strips of the paper to the sun for 20 seconds during
events they normally would have photographed - from a visit to the
troops by the Duke of York to the deadliest day of fighting -
resulting in a series of monumental photograms showing abstract
swathes of colour.

As an artist embedded with the British Army in 2003, Steve McQueen
encountered some of the same restrictions that Broomberg and Chanarin
reacted to. After just six days in Basra, during which he was rarely
allowed to leave his bunk without an escort, McQueen abandoned the
possibility of making a documentary film. ‘It was too hostile an
environment,’ he said. ‘Obviously for the military you are just a
token artist. You’re just in the way.’2 Instead, he created ‘Queen and
Country’ (2006-ongoing), a series of postage stamps featuring
portraits of British soldiers who have been killed in Iraq. McQueen’s
project employs vernacular photographs chosen by the soldiers’ own
families, but within his conceptual framework, these private portraits
demonstrate the obstacles of visually representing war. (The Royal
Mail still refuses to accept the series as commemorative stamps.)

The winning press photos by Hetherington and Guttenfelder on the one
hand and McQueen’s art work on the other can be seen as two poles
defining the spectrum of possible representations of war with a camera
- one employs the rhetoric of reportage, the other uses a conceptual
strategy, or the rhetoric of the metaphorical. Arguably, the
photojournalist has a professional and ethical imperative to capture
the immediate circumstances, while the artist has the license or
luxury to turn his camera away from these events, even to question the
photograph’s ability to accurately represent them. Does one approach
function more effectively than another? And by what criteria can we
judge their effectiveness? When it comes to images of the events and
consequences of war, how close is too close? And how much distance is
too much?
As Susan Sontag points out in Regarding the Pain of Others (2003),
written in response to the events of 9/11, observing atrocity or
making images of suffering is a privilege, if not a luxury. Both the
photojournalist who tries to make a ‘realistic’ image of war and the
artist who refuses to must ‘finesse the question of the subjectivity
of the image-maker’.3 When it comes to picturing atrocity, any
authorial impulse is inherently conflicted: ‘The photograph gives
mixed signals. Stop this, it urges. But it also exclaims, What a
spectacle!’4

Particularly since 9/11, the paradox of the spectacular image has
sharpened the line between classic reportage and artistic approaches.
The majority of the immediate images of that day’s events were taken
by amateurs, while the photojournalists who arrived later focused on
the aftermath - a form of reportage that writer and artist David
Campany has termed ‘late photography’.5 This strategy consciously
turns the camera away from immediate and obvious events, and
concentrates instead on their traces. According to Campany, such
post-spectacular imagery is characterized by its cool, forensic look
at the evidence of violence, which comes to stand in for what we don’t
see. Photographer Richard Mosse adopted this approach in his series of
large-scale photographs, ‘Breach’ <http://tinyurl.com/33bkk56 > and
‘Nomads’ <http://tinyurl.com/m3cbx2> (both 2009), which he shot while
embedded with the US army in Iraq. ‘Breach’ exposes the makeshift
headquarters of US soldiers constructed in seven of Saddam Hussein’s
former palaces. These colour photographs show the ironic contrast
between the grandiose marble palaces and the flimsy, provisional
American military accommodations erected inside. The monumental images
in ‘Nomads’, taken with a large-format camera in the Iraqi desert,
show cars so riddled with bullets that only their mangled shells are
left. Both series are self-conscious about the limitations of
reportage - the destroyed cars left abandoned on the field of battle
don’t attempt to picture the war’s immediate drama, but they do evoke
its human victims. Mosse sees his work as operating between the two
poles of contemporary art and photojournalism: ‘The documentary
photographer has a terribly difficult life compared with the
conceptual artist. But, like Prometheus and Loki, we’re both tied to
the same rock.’6 ‘Late photography’ incorporates the seriality of
Conceptual art while consciously keeping imagery of disaster at bay.
It constitutes what Campany calls ‘a second wave of representation’.
How does our impression of the war change if we only see ‘traces’
rather than the ‘faces’?

Alongside aftermath photography, another group of images falls outside
the usual spectrum of war reportage - those not made by
photojournalists or artists: the views of Saddam’s hideout, snapped by
the soldiers who first raided it; the unauthorized images of soldiers’
flag-draped coffins returning home, documented by a private contractor
on a cargo plane; and the photographs taken by military personnel of
prisoners at Abu Ghraib. This last group of images were taken by
amateurs, staged for the camera, and not intended for public viewing.
Once leaked to the media, their photographs were supplied as evidence
of torture perpetrated by American military against detainees at Abu
Ghraib, and resulted in prison sentences for many of those directly
involved. In an essay titled ‘The Photographs Are Us’, published in
The New York Times in 2004 <http://tinyurl.com/3y3xn6x> , Sontag
argues that these pictures show how the act of photography itself at
Abu Ghraib became immoral: ‘The horror of what is shown in the
photographs cannot be separated from the horror that the photographs
themselves were taken.’7

Though these snapshots do serve to condemn those who appear in them
and took them, their shift of context from the private sphere to the
media complicates their story. For all the gruesome details they
expose, they conceal others. In Errol Morris’ 2008 documentary film,
Standard Operating Procedure (and the book of the same title, written
with journalist Philip Gourevitch) the documentarian set out to frame
the infamous images in the context of the statements and motivations
of the people behind (and in some cases in front of) the cameras at
the prison. Examining all the primary source images, Morris goes
behind the lens to try to fill the gaps in our knowledge. He focuses
on Specialist Sabrina Harman - the young MP who, in 2003, took the
notorious photograph of the hooded man standing on a box, and was
herself photographed flashing a ‘thumbs up’ beside the corpse of a
detainee. Interviews reveal that Harman started documenting her
experiences in Iraq long before she focused on tortured Iraqi
prisoners. Although she joined the Army Reserve, she originally wanted
to be a forensic photographer and work for the police force, like her
father and brother. While in Iraq, she took as many photographs of
sunsets, local people and children as she did prisoners. Harman also
took a series of 90 photos featuring the same mummified cat’s head,
which she pictured in a variety of settings, including ‘on a bus seat
with sunglasses, smoking a cigarette, wearing a tiny camouflage boonie
hat’.8

In frequent letters to her girlfriend, Harman - who was eventually
sentenced to six months in prison and discharged from the army -
stated that she began photographing the detainees ‘to “record” what’s
going on’. When she discovered the corpse of a prisoner who had
supposedly died of a heart attack after being interrogated, Harman
peeled his bandages off and photographed ‘everything I saw that was
wrong’. Afterwards, still wearing her turquoise latex gloves, she
posed for a snapshot giving the thumbs up next to the man’s dead body.
Does the meaning of this picture shift when we learn that she appears
in almost every photograph, no matter what the background, flashing
the same cheerful smile and thumbs up gesture? Morris’ investigation
acknowledges that these images don’t amount to photojournalism and
should not be treated as such. How does our image of the photographs
Harman took change when we become aware of their context and of her
sense of authorship? Do we read Harman’s images differently when we
learn of her ambivalent relationship toward the events in front of the
lens, and her desire to create an ongoing, personal forensic record?
<http://tinyurl.com/dyubdb> <http://tinyurl.com/2ukdxs7>

The strategy employed in Standing Operating Procedure - that of giving
form to the massive archives of amateur images that were not intended
to have a form - is also employed by Sean Snyder in ‘Untitled (Archive
Iraq)’ (2003-5), a compilation of 98 photographs circulated by
soldiers and veterans on the Internet. While Snyder extracts the most
banal images for display, Thomas Hirschhorn’s Incommensurable Banner
(2008), an 18-metre-long banner bearing images of war also found on
the Internet, delivers the kind of gruesome and morbid imagery that
Snyder withholds from us. Both the explicit and the banal appear in
artist Monica Haller’s book, Riley and His Story. Me and My Outrage.
You and Us (2009), produced in collaboration with her friend, Riley
Sharbonno, a nurse at the Abu Ghraib prison who took more than 1,000
photographs on his tour of duty in 2004-5 <http://tinyurl.com/yzm6ooq>
. Haller assembles a selection of them in a thick hardback tome,
interspersed with Sharbonno’s own testimony about his reasons for
taking photographs, which gives shape and meaning to the images. In
the book’s first sequence of photos, taken on a trip to get medical
supplies, Sharbonno’s camera is poised directly over the barrel of a
gun mounted on the vehicle. As the landscape goes by, both lens and
gun aim at the rubble of former houses, then at a shepherd passing
with his flock. Many of the images have the sense of someone seeing
something for the first time or photo-graphing things as if to verify
them for himself.

The first images of Abu Ghraib that appear in Sharbonno’s archive show
the prison from outside - a perspective rarely seen in coverage of the
scandal. Many of us will be surprised to see its resemblance to a
sprawling parking garage, always engulfed in a yellowish dust cloud
and lit by a hazy white sun. His texts reveal what the camera can’t
show: ‘The prison is built on a mound of human remains.’ But the bulk
of the book is composed of photos taken in the ER tent after mortar
attacks on the prison. These snapshots reveal a palpable sense of
chaos in this makeshift hospital, which is accentuated by the dust
particles that blur the lens. At times, Sharbonno’s camera scans the
room taking in the activity: the injured are treated by nurses and
doctors wearing sweat-soaked army T-shirts and running shoes whose
reflectors flash back at the lens. Sometimes his focus comes in close
to capture forensic details: a piece of shrapnel covered in blood,
freshly removed, or gaping holes in patients’ flesh. These have the
‘authenticity’ and ‘immediacy’ that photojournalism requires, but
taking them was an automatic response for Sharbonno: ‘We were just
like, “Holy shit, is this really happening?” So I just snapped
pictures.’

These first-hand statements and views are no doubt arresting, but
presenting them has its own limitations; it is hard to separate the
original photographer’s authorship from the artist’s own. Haller’s
text on the front cover frames her as a kind of therapeutic
collaborator: ‘Right now, I am the artist. I want you to see what this
war did to Riley.’ Also, the book’s heavy-handed graphic design
repeats certain images and statements to heighten their effect. But
the experience of flipping through the photos and reading Sharbonno’s
statements eventually supersede the marks of authorship. One thing
still screams behind all the pictures - namely, their relationship to
the Abu Ghraib pictures we are all-too familiar with. Sometimes the
similarities between Sharbonno’s pictures and those of Sabrina Harman
are striking, not only in what they show but also in the way both
soldiers impulsively used the camera to defer what was happening
‘now’, as if to create a distance between themselves and what they
were witnessing, and to form a record, no matter how horrific, for an
unknown audience in an undefined future. But the consequences the two
groups of pictures suggest is clearly at odds - in these pictures, the
soldiers are fighting to save the detainees.

In contrast to the sincerity and indignation of Haller’s work, Omer
Fast’s complex four-channel video The Casting (2007)
<http://tinyurl.com/2f7qunt > is more layered and ambiguous in its
framing of representations of war. Fast’s work is based on an
interview he conducted with a young US Army Sergeant on leave who
describes an incident in Baghdad in which the sergeant’s squad shot a
man in an oncoming Iraqi vehicle. Fast filters the story through a
casting scenario in which an actor retells it, intertwined with an
unrelated narrative, as if auditioning for a role. The events are
reconstructed as highly artificial tableaux vivants, based on images
the artist found on the Internet. The scenes from the incident in
Baghdad were filmed in the Mojave Desert in California, using stage
make-up and cinematic effects, with Fast casting himself as
‘director’. His method is essentially the same as Haller’s but The
Casting relies on reconstruction and artifice to elude any claims of
trying to accurately represent the events as they may have occurred.
But what are the consequences of transforming an eyewitness account of
war into a highly stylized and even ‘performed’ work of art?

Though Fast’s work aims to interrogate conventions of war reportage as
well as films about war, it buries any possibility of a truthful
account of the events under layers of representation. Fast’s
simulacral constructions, as familiar as they are within contemporary
artistic practice, throw every primary source about what took place
into question, suggesting that there can be no faithful record. From
the artist’s position as both real and fictional ‘director’ of these
events, it is too easy to be cynical about the veracity or sincerity
of images of conflict or violence that took place far beyond the
artist’s view. Granted, we are bombarded with images of war, with
varying degrees of intention and authorship, but some of them are
bound to be more telling or more significant than others. Artists have
the license to frame this kind of reportage - or to manipulate,
mediate and interpret it - but they still rely heavily on amateur
images, vernacular photos and photojournalism as the basic vocabulary
of this language. Someone had to be there first.

According to Sontag, ‘real wars are not metaphors’ and if this is the
case, perhaps they shouldn’t be treated as such. When artists apply an
all-too constructed or allegorical framework to the first-hand
accounts of suffering or violence in war, they also risk undermining
the possibility of any truth at all. At some point we have to turn our
attention towards what the photographs depict. ‘Let the atrocious
images haunt us,’ wrote Sontag.9 By the nature of the atrocities they
show, they will always be conflicted images - but it would be worse
not to see them at all.

1 Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, ‘Unconcerned but Not
Indifferent’, foto8.com, 5 March 2008
2 Steve McQueen quoted in Adrian Searle, ‘Last Post’, Guardian, 12 March 2007
3 Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, Picador, New York, 2003, p. 26
4 Ibid., p. 77
5 David Campany, ‘The Red House’, Aperture, Issue 185, November 2006
6 Richard Mosse quoted in Hans Michaud, ‘In Conversation with Richard
Mosse’, Whitehot Magazine, December 2009
7 Reprinted as Susan Sontag, ‘Regarding the Torture of Others’ in At
the Same Time, Hamish Hamilton, London, 2007, p. 132
8 Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris, ‘Exposure’, The New Yorker, 24 March 2008
9 Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, p. 115

Christy Lange is associate editor of frieze, based in Berlin, Germany.


Frieze Magazine