Image Fixity

I’ve just been reading this excellent article on the various photo-scandals that have already unfolded this year. In light of some of the examples and issues it raises, I began to wonder once again about the motivations photographers hold for condemning image manipulation.

Aside from the obvious ethical concerns about changing the meaning of images, the reality is that many high profile cases of image manipulation are just boringly aesthetic changes (for example the case of Stepan Rudik) and don’t really seem to do any more to change the meaning or substance of an image than many of the choices the photographer already made before they took the photograph in terms of equipment, positioning, timing, editing, and so on.

Press Photographers, 1929, – Bundesarchiv Bild 102-08739

I began to wonder if by professing the fixity of a photograph’s content and claiming unaltered, unadulterated continuity between the moment of shooting and the audiences subsequent viewing that the photographer somehow feels they are making the image more real. More real because in making the image unchangeable it becomes more like the irretrievable and unchangeable reality it depicts, and less like the very malleable, changeable two dimensional visual artifact a photograph actually is.

I wonder also if condemning manipulation as a perversion of photojournalism’s mission to represent the truth of things offers a handy distraction from the more profound problems of photography, and of course the inherent unaccountability of much journalistic image making, which makes it all so easy for photographers like Paollo Pellegrin to accidentally or intentionally miss-caption images without it necessarily ever being noted. How many photographers have done this to some extent and not been caught, I wonder? Probably all of us, I know for certain I have mistakenly captioned images in the past in ways that have implications for the images understanding, or captioned them with less information than I might have done.

It seems to me that one of the real strengths of photography is its non-fixity of substance and meaning and its reliance on context, maybe either embrace this or stop using it?

MA: Adam Broomberg + Oliver Chanarin

We have weekly guest lectures as part of the photojournalism masters. Because the lectures are shared between about three or four different courses the specialisms of the speakers fit our interests to varying degrees. This week’s was from arts/photography duo Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin. Their work is pretty conceptual, often using recycled images or unconventional forms of photography. I found it all pretty exciting and refreshing to see how broad the possibilities are, and the enormous depth you can find in seemingly simple ideas. Just the idea of working so collaboratively is strange to many photographers and it’s exciting to see how well it can apparently work.

Broomberg and Chanarin’s projects offer plenty to think about in terms of what constitutes documentary photography. A relatively conventional and early work, Ghetto, looks at twelve modern ghettos, from Prisons to psychiatric hospitals. Given the potentially repressive role of the camera in such institutions (oh hai Focault) it’s interesting the way the artists attempt to get around this, asking psychiatric patients to choose how they want to be photographed and to trigger the camera themselves for example. At other times this legacy is inescapable, as they told us the camera gave them a strange air of authority in many of the places they worked in, with people assuming they were part of the institutional apparatus simply because they were taking photographs.

One project of theirs which we previously discussed on the MA and which generated lots of debate is ‘The Day Nobody Died’, made while embedded with British troops in Afghanistan. Rather than photograph the carefully choreographed photo calls that the media savvy army had laid on for them, the two artists instead exposed long strips of photographic paper each time an event occurred that they would have wanted to photograph but were prevented from doing so. It seemed to me a brilliantly subversive way of refusing to play the game that embedded photographers are often forced to.

Particularly interesting to me was their most recent project. War Primer is a collection of Bertolt Brecht’s Second World War newspaper cuttings displayed alongside four line poems, all rather cynically contained in a school textbook like volume. Brecht’s brilliant original works on two levels, as a condemnation of the phenomenon of war and as an analysis of mass media images and how they are encoded with messages and decoded (or not) by viewers.

Broomberg and Chanarin’s War Primer 2 adds images from the War on Terror over the top of Brecht’s originals. The images are carefully selected to match Brecht’s original poems, and many following the contours of the original images in a way slightly reminiscent of John Stezaker’s work. The results looked pretty staggering, not least because of how relevant the issues Brecht was raising still remain. The biggest frustration with the work is that at $560 and a limited print run I won’t be owning a copy anytime soon, and I’m not sure what Brecht would have made of his work being turned into such an unattainable art piece.