Credit: Lee Friedlander/Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Extract from Whitney Museum:

“Driving across most of the country’s fifty states in an ordinary rental car, master photographer Lee Friedlander (b. 1934) applied the brilliantly simple conceit of deploying the side view mirror, rear view mirror, the wind shield, and the side windows as picture frames within which to record reflections of this country’s eccentricities and obsessions at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

Friedlander’s method allows for fascinating effects in foreshortening, and wonderfully telling juxtapositions in which steering wheels, dashboards, and leatherette bump up against roadside bars, motels, churches, monuments, suspension bridges, essential American landscapes, and often Friedlander’s own image.

Presented in the square crop format that has dominated his work in recent series, and taken over the past decade, the images in America by Car are among Friedlander’s finest, full of virtuoso freshness and clarity, while also revisiting themes from older bodies of work.”

Lee Friedlander: America By Car is organized by Elisabeth Sussman, Sondra Gilman Curator of Photography.

Click on the photo for an NPR article on the show. Or here for a NYT slideshow.

Lee Friedlander: America by Car

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Somehow I don’t think that anyone really knows what journalism is anymore. We do know what the journalistic industry used to be - various institutions telling us what is happening in the world. We have, increasingly, rejected that approach, finding the system manipulative, commercial, high-handed, ethnocentric, and untrustworthy.

Many have adopted the “journal” part of journalism, keeping a journal as a personal vehicle - what happened in my/your day, what do I/you think of what the old journalism industry is telling us, etc. Part of this trend is due to the powerlessness that comes with being a rather passive recipient of news that one cannot do much about - what is the point of knowing about one disaster after another if they will just keep happening and all one can do is send a bit of money? A blog gives at least the illusion of impact, and is usually less institutional and remote.

So what then should journalism schools - such as the one at the University of Colorado that is thinking of closing (see the previous post) - be teaching? Certainly knowing how to operate multiple technologies is only a partial answer at best - taking pictures, writing articles, interviewing, creating audios and videos, cannot be done well by any single person. And who or what should these emerging journalists be focusing upon?

We know that covering celebrities is cheap and titillating, and lots of potential readers and viewers are enthusiastic voyeurs. Viewing the horrific effects of the floods in Pakistan or an explosion in Afghanistan becomes a nasty voyeurism - they suffer from a seemingly safe distance - while watching an actress wear revealing clothing, or a sex-obsessed golfer talk about his woes, is salacious but not as fraught with self-recrimination. The Huffington Post, like English tabloids, is an example of the allure of sex and gossip to sugarcoat and render nearly irrelevant the news - like the previous Playboy magazine combination of centerfold and articles.

So what then should journalism be today? Infographs? Short video clips? Factoids? Obviously we would want more, but in a society of diminished attention spans, combined with the embrace of freedom of choice (consumerism) and the lack of political will, journalism has to be constituted quite differently.

Extract continues here.

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Copyright Lucia Colella: Designer, Educator. Qoute by Aaron Siskind.

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As a resident of the area I was glad to take part. I usually like to ask permission before I photograph someone, not particularly out of any moralistic concerns, I feel it just gives me more time to find the right image - for me - and I feel it also helps me from getting my head kicked in. But I’ve found it difficult working in an area that I also live in; and as such attempting to establish dialogues - with people I try my best to not make eye contact with at the best of times - to be quite disingenuous. There is also the premise that you can always walk away from people after the ‘project’ is done when working in places that you don’t live. Doing a work where you do live, well, that isn’t the case - so I’ve reverted to subterfuge.

As a result I’ve found that the practicalities of photographing people, without their permission and without at least the pretence of attempting to construct a pseudo relationship difficult. I’m not tough enough…I’m not Bruce Gilden.

I’m always surprised though that someone hasn’t run over Bruce Gilden in a truck and then reversed - and then driven over him again. I like his images - not all - but I’m not entirely comfortable with his methods. Yeah, I know, I can hear him crying from here. I’m sure though if he jumped in people’s faces, as he does, without his camera he’d be done for assault. But as he says in the clip below, skulking around unseen with a telephoto lens is equally as bad.

Yet the passivity of New Yorkers (in the clip at least) surprises me because if he walked down my High Street and took photos like that he’d be picking his teeth up off the floor - after he’d come out of the coma and gone through rehabilitation learning how to walk again with his new prosthetic legs.

But as he says, we all steal…[souls perhaps]…it’s just that some of us get caught.

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More information here, here and here.

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Whilst this is a disorder common amongst both males and females, female photo-onanism is more prevalent and commonly reveals itself in the infamous ‘Princess Trout-Pout’ a facial tick that is enacted at the sight of all cameras and involves revealing the suffers side on profile, a narrowing of the eyes and an outward pursing of the lips. The raising of middle fingers or two fingered peace signs are optional.

There is no known cure.

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On a separate note, I was very lucky over the summer to get to see a sneak preview of the new work of my friend Fanie Jason, who also as a Capetonian, has produced a stunning body of work that also eloquently and movingly examines the lives and spaces of those on the edges of memory and history - I admire him and his work and wish him well with it.

Zwelethu Mthethwa in Conversation with Okwui Enwezor Part 1/4 from Aperture Foundation on Vimeo.

Zwelethu Mthethwa in Conversation with Okwui Enwezor Part 2/4 from Aperture Foundation on Vimeo.

Zwelethu Mthethwa in Conversation with Okwui Enwezor Part 3/4 from Aperture Foundation on Vimeo.

Zwelethu Mthethwa in conversation with Okwui Enwezor Part 4/4 from Aperture Foundation on Vimeo.

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Her eyes look forwards and never back as she walks into the wind, whilst her whitened knuckles, at the hem of her skirt, try to stop the elements from revealing that which she hopes some will soon pay to see.

Cars pass and horns are excitedly beeped as my momentary sense of titillation fades and the sadness of her plight forms for this waif-like frame that walks into a cold wind. A sad comedic figure, made for the pleasure of others, who in the fading light of the day will sell herself to the highest bidder and for the lowest gain.

But the smirking figures at the bus stop see not a person but only a momentary distraction from the emptiness of waiting as she walks back and forth momentarily, swinging a handbag as she turns, before carrying on into the distance, looking ever forwards and never back.

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Tenderly

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A Change Is Gonna Come

Night Beat: Remastered

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The photo, above, by Alex Brandon for the Times-Picayune, was taken on September 4, 2005. The NYT caption reads: Lance Madison being arrested on Sept. 4, 2005, after a police shooting in New ORleans that killed two people, including Mr. Madison’s brother, Ronald.

It’s five years since Katrina blew. Five years since rumour grew into fact that the city was besieged by poor black looters terrorising all in their path. The media of course would play a part in helping to obfuscate the truth.

Following extract copyright New York Times:

“The narrative of those early, chaotic days — built largely on rumours and half-baked anecdotes — quickly hardened into a kind of ugly consensus: poor blacks and looters were murdering innocents and terrorizing whoever crossed their path in the dark, unprotected city.

“As you look back on it, at the time it was being reported, it looked like the city was under siege,” said Russel L. Honoré, the retired Army lieutenant general who led military relief efforts after the storm.

Today, a clearer picture is emerging, and it is an equally ugly one, including white vigilante violence, police killings, official cover-ups and a suffering population far more brutalized than many were willing to believe. Several police officers and a white civilian accused of racially motivated violence have recently been indicted in various cases, and more incidents are coming to light as the Justice Department has started several investigations into civil rights violations after the storm.”

Following from Bag News:

“I came out of Katrina with one perspective on it. And there isn’t a month that goes by that I don’t talk to someone who survived it who gives me a different perspective than I had before.”

– Russel L. Honoré, the retired lieutenant general in charge of relief effort. From: Rumour to Fact in Tales of Post-Katrina Violence (NYT)

“Give credence”? A “different perspective”?

I’m not sure why this photo made the print edition (5 columns wide) and not NYT.com but it doesn’t need much analysis. As a historical photo of the Katrina aftermath, the photo not only reinforces how blacks were hunted down and dominated by the New Orleans police but it elaborates the atmosphere in which African-American’s were stalked and killed by paranoid whites in the “better off” neighbourhoods.

Article continues on Bag News here:

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“Elderly man - Montgomery, Alabama (1960 - 69) copyright Jim Peppler - found on These Americans. These Americans contains found & vernacular photographs from the American Suburb X Collection. Also, select archives from the Library of Congress and the 1970’s EPA project entitled “Documerica”.

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All photographs copyright Maggie Harrsen

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I recently posted a link to Jodi Bieber’s images in Afghanistan the following text examines the prevailing moral ambiguities of Bieber’s Time Magazine front cover - and content - that seem to in a Capra-esque fashion appear to tell the viewer ‘why we [should] fight‘.

Extract taken from and copyright: (Notes on) Politics, Theory & Photography

“A couple of days go I posted a response to this essay by Susie Linfield in which she agonizes (and I do not mean that in a pejorative sense) about the fate of women in Afghanistan in the event the U.S. were to withdraw from military operations there. Linfield’s essay was occasioned by the notorious recent cover of Time magazine, depicting a young woman maimed by Taliban thugs for resisting an arranged marriage. My comments on Linfield was my second post on the matter.

The folks at Time importuned: “What Happens if We Leave Afghanistan?” And their reply was that the Taliban would be unleashed, placing the modest but real gains women have made in Afghanistan at grave risk. In the past couple of days, I’ve come across a couple of articles [1] [2] in The New York Times that suggest that the problem in Afghanistan is not just the Taliban, but other trends in Islam* as it is institutionalized there, putatively “moderate” or “mainstream” clerics who are more than willing to accommodate fundamentalists. In other words, the claim that we might just stay long enough to quash the Taliban (no minor feat, in itself) seems radically to underestimate the cultural problem. We are not, by military means, going to overturn or reform or whatever a traditional culture.

The text continues on (Notes on) Politics, Theory & Photography here.

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“…the question as to what future societies will go to war for is almost irrelevant. It is simply not true that war is solely a means to an end, nor do people necessarily fight in order to attain this objective or that. In fact, the opposite is true; people very often take up one objective or another precisely in order that they may fight. While the usefulness of war as a means of gaining practical ends may well be questioned, its ability to entertain, to inspire, to fascinate has never been in question. War is life written large…Literature, art, games and history all bear eloquent testimony to the same fact. One very important way in which men can attain joy, freedom, happiness, even delirium and ecstasy, is by not staying home with wife and family, even to the point where, often enough, they are only too happy to give up their nearest and dearest in favour of – war!”

Martin Van Crevald The Transformation of War, page 226-227 The Free Press, Simon & Schuster Inc, 1991

Extract found on The Spinning Head.

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“Photographer and filmmaker Tim Hetherington thought he knew what to expect when he arrived in Afghanistan to make a documentary film. He figured his team “would be walking around the mountains, we would be drinking cups of tea with elders, we’d occasionally get shot at, and it’d be pretty uneventful.”

[Really though?]

The reality was “completely the opposite.” Hetherington, along with co-director Sebastian Junger, decided to shoot at a remote outpost called Restrepo in Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley, where a platoon of the 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team was stationed.

After a disastrous combat operation called Rock Avalanche, during which American lines were overrun by insurgents and the platoon’s men were being killed at “a pretty close range,” Hetherington broke his leg on a night trip to a small village. It was critical for the platoon to get off the mountainside before dawn, and the company’s medic told Hetherington he’d have to walk down the incline despite his injury.

Hetherington left soon after to get surgery on his leg; when he returned to the unit, he felt a different, more substantial bond with its members.

“I think they saw that I was willing to go the whole way with them,” he says. “And that I came back.”

At other times, though, Hetherington’s camera couldn’t help but make him an automatic outsider.

Their film Restrepo is out on DVD in November.

The full story and audio interview can be found here.

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Forty-four years after Cathy come home was broadcast I would meet the woman in this photograph below, Leonora, in June of this year having being introduced to her by her caseworker Carol from Christians Against Poverty in Nottingham. Leonora and her children had been served with eviction orders from their home and were a few days away from being made homeless.

Up and down the streets of England, perhaps behind close doors, the spectre of poverty is being experienced within a thousand and more sad tragedies that are being played out silently and unseen. The fallout of economic decline are real, tangible and sadly their affects long lasting.

With the results of the comprehensive spending review soon to be revealed and the prospect of up to 40% public spending cuts being proposed by the coalition government the situation can only be seen to be compounded and drag more into the trap of poverty.

Ken Loach has made 11 of his films free to view on You Tube, Cathy Come Home can be viewed here.

The image above comes from the beginning of an ongoing work exploring the poverty trap.”

Copyright A. Jackson 2010

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Erwin Olaf Artist’s Talk, Edited Excerpt from Aperture Foundation on Vimeo.

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I’m not a wedding photographer but perhaps the argument is a generic one in commercial photography as a whole. Whilst I’ve argued many of the same points - it just seems a little bit desperate when other people say it.

You pays your money (or don’t) and you make your choice.

The end.

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Jazz (We’ve Got) (Re-Recording)

The Jam

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Breaks

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Saturday Come Slow by Massive Attack taken from the album Heligoland

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In the on-line photography community the acronym TFP is used to stand in for time for prints. It is an arrangement between, usually amateur models and photographers, wishing to develop their portfolios, wherein the model’s time is bartered in return for photographs from the shoot by the photographer. Each party are unknown to each other yet these strangers use social networks to arrange photographic shoots together.

In an attempt to explore this further I’ve undertaken a number of TFP shoots in locations that are alien and unknown to both parties.

I’m interested in the transaction that occurs between these two parties; perhaps not the transaction of time or photographic imagery itself but more so the social transaction that arises between the meeting of two strangers and the ways in which technology has engineered and mediated this meeting.

There exists a frailty, a tenuous link between where they are and where they wish to be. In terms of identity construction, perhaps there has and always will be a divide between who we think we are and who we wish to be but are the demands of a celebrity obsessed culture forcing, in some, a greater pressure for an idealised self to be realised, to be accepted, made visible and of course celebrated? Well, I’m not sure but as this is just a very early work in development I’m hoping that it will expand I’m looking forward to seeing how it develops.

Nonetheless, these are transactions that raise so many questions of the photographic process itself, but also of notions of identity construction and reflection and the ways in which technology is reconstructing the nature of our social interactions.

*Above subject to change*

All images copyright Andrew Jackson 2010

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More information here.

Image copyright: Chris Robinson

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Today I found out that Tim - due to medical incompetence - has been left paralysed in all four limbs and is in constant pain. He was awarded £825K today but as Tim said “no amount of money can buy back his former quality of life”.

Tim perhaps won’t remember me but I won’t forget him.

For a Sky News video of Tim’s story click on this link.

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Ten minutes later, though, when talking to the relatives in the waiting room I tell them, or at least one, that everything will work out. A red faced man with a fixed grin that acts as a levy to stop his eyes from overflowing, nods his head and talks of signs of improvement; as his son plays on his father’s mobile phone and his daughter, is lost, head down, in a magazine.

I know he doesn’t believe this, not really, he knows his wife – as he knew her – isn’t coming back. But what can he do? He tells me that he’s only an agency worker and he hasn’t been to work for a week, he mentions the mortgage and the costs of being here and already I think that all that you have known and believed to be is no more.

I’m lucky, in contrast my father is in control of his faculties he doesn’t have a head injury, I can sit and talk to my relative and I know that he is still there.

But I hate hospitals.

I hate having to walk through the curtain and see everything that my mind tries to run away from. That the body is weak, fragile and will fail; and that death will come to us all; but then you comfort yourself with the thoughts that if you can just get through this, just get through today it will be OK and I’ll worry about tomorrow when it comes.

What has this to do with photography you ask yourself? A few years ago I debated with a friend the ethics of another photographer photographing his father in hospital. How wrong and exploitative we thought this was..and perhaps still is. But sitting next to my father the other day, I took out a small compact camera and quickly took his photograph, wondering to myself when would I do this again and then put the camera back into my pocket.

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The familiar and repetitive narrative of war, from the jingoistic excitement to the flag draped coffins coming home and the ensuing resentments and questions of futility. The almost cloned narrative arc of the young idealistic photojournalist - going off to find fame and fortune and prizes through war - then only finding a reflection of themselves, one they find hard to look at…is perhaps a familiar fable. The film Killer Image about Robert King’s own career arc is an example of this.

Like the sad inevitability of war we will always have the narrative of the ‘woe is me photographer’ broken by what they have seen. This is going to sound hard, but, well Mr PJ, no-one told you to go and get your ass embedded.

No-one outside of the adrenaline and career driven voice that said that this is going to be exciting. Perhaps this is unfair, as I’m only using myself as an example here because if I had had the opportunity to go when I was younger I would have gone too.

But perhaps true also is what Robert King says, war didn’t fuck him up…he was already fucked before he went. War just brings it out…because you have to be a little fucked to want to go and see the sights of war.

Anyway, as Ashley Gibson discusses in his film (here) there has to be a new way to examine and discuss war through photography. Click on the image and come to your own conclusions.

N.B. Apologies for the random arrangement of text, growing Vine-like around the image above…Wordpress is an enigma, wrapped up inside a paradox of some unseen Geek’s making - apologies again.

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I’m not mentioning any names - as one doesn’t to get sued - but lets hope you win an award for your mantelpiece.

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Paradise Circus

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There can be little wonder then that many businesses, especially in bleak economic times, see little value in spending highly on photography – it’s currency of course devalued by its pervasiveness. Why should they spend lots of money hiring ‘professionals’ - they think - to do what any ‘Johnny on the spot’ can do?
But can they?

Anyone can take a photograph; but can they work to the highest standards when there is something riding on it; when there is a deadline, or a brief to be understood and creatively executed? Can they work independently or with direction, work in difficult circumstances and in unaccustomed environments to produce creative and technically excellent images - when they only have one chance to get the image? When they can’t go back and take that image again?

Anyone can take a photograph when there is nothing riding on it – when there is no pressure – when no-one cares if the exposure is wrong, the lighting too flat, the feel is just wrong. Do not underestimate the psychological pressure of knowing that failure is not an option; and when you simply have to come back with that image. An image that has already been art directed to fit into a page layout that has already been graphically designed.

Photography is not easy – it is hard. Years of education, of training, of experiences and thousands of pounds worth of equipment comes with a price. Using the office camera buff to take your images is just plainly a false economy. You will have an image…but will it be the right image you want for your company; what will that say about you and more importantly, what will that image say to your potential clients?

You pay peanuts and well…

…you get what you deserve.

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