Read it here. Especially note the difference between accidental plagiarism and deliberate fraud.
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We are all sinners. Lest you wonder, I have not had a religious epiphany. However, organized religion can offer surprising insights into the human condition. For a while now, I have been fascinated by the Catholic concept of Indulgence, in particular by abuses in the Middle Ages: People were promised they could buy themselves out of all kinds of sins if they only paid enough money. It’s a bit of a stretch, but an entertaining exercise nonetheless, to ask to what extent looking at - and buying - photography in effect is a contemporary version of just that. (more)
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“Is it really so surprising that, as we grow wealthier as a society, more and more of our young people, when the amazing resources of the modern university are put at their disposal, choose to use them learning something satisfying and enriching and not for anything except cherishing the rest of their lives? Is it really so surprising that taxpayers are not in revolt over the existence of poetry professors? […] I spent last evening reading a fine Pulitzer prize-winning novel by a graduate of a state-university creative-writing program. I appreciate everything math majors do for us. I really do. But, as far as I know, a math major has never made me cry.” - W.W. at The Economist’s Democracy in America Update (3 Nov 2011): Via Twitter, Richard Bram aptly observes: “Some math majors became financial products gurus & came up with things that crashed the system in ‘08. Many people cried.”
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“I’m just wondering why I didn’t hear more about how we, as artists, can use a variety of skill sets and methods to expand the reach of our work, to recruit new viewers, to communicate a message in a manner that will speak to more people, without dumbing down the art in the process.” - Jonathan Blaustein
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“Imagine an industry where seventy percent of your products lose money.”
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We Are the 99 Percent is a Tumblr blog, where photography, social protest, and the internet have come together in an amazing way. Here is an interview with the people being the blog, this article talks about why Tumblr was used.
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An excellent documentary called American Juggalo by Sean Dunne, about “the often mocked and misunderstood subculture of Juggalos, hardcore Insane Clown Posse fans”. Also don’t miss The Archive and Man in Van.
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“WARCO: The News Game is a first-person shooter video game in which the player is a photojournalist gathering footage for television news stories on subjects similar to revolutionary conflict in Africa and the Middle East.” - Scott Brauer
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Jerry Saltz about what he saw in Venice: “many times over—too many times for comfort—I saw the same thing, a highly recognizable generic ­institutional style whose manifestations are by now extremely familiar. […] It’s work stuck in a cul-de-sac of aesthetic regress, where everyone is deconstructing the same elements. There’s always conformity in art […] but such obsessive devotion to a previous generation’s ideals and ideas is very wrong. It suggests these artists are too much in thrall to their elders, excessively satisfied with an insider’s game of art, not really making their own work. That they are becoming a Lost Generation.”
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“From architects to museums, curators to collectors, art fairs to galleries, art advisers to auction houses, everyone has been feeding at the trough of surplus capital emanating from regions where consumption of art is tolerated so long as artists steer clear of political and ideological pronouncements and keep their swords of critical relevance safely in their sheaths. The question was always how long the romance between illiberalism and hypocrisy would last.” - Okwui Enwezor (via)
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Brian Dupont just published the final post of a three-part series on copyright and fair use (part 1, part 2, part 3), which is well worth the read.
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Talking about photography, I don’t think there’s an elephant in the room. There is a group of elephants in the room, with different sizes and ages. Stan Banos just pointed one out and asked “When will we finally see people of color not only in front of the lens serving as ample, year round subject matter, but also as: photographers, judges, editors, gallery owners, workshop presenters and festival organizers in some representative proportion beyond mere tokenism?” I’d be incredibly happy if I had a good answer, but, alas, I don’t, and unless I’m missing something (always possible) I don’t think anyone else has one, either. Such questions are, should we say, inconvenient, but that’s what makes it a good question: The elephant will not disappear if we ignore it, so we might as well make an effort to deal with it. We owe it to ourselves, if when we use the phrase “the photographic community” we truly embrace the meaning of the word “community”. (more)
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I wrote a piece for The Wall Street Journal’s Speakeasy blog about Why We Want to Look Death in the Face - check it out!
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It might be fair to say that every conceivable photograph will be taken or has been taken already. What is more, every conceivable photo will then be posted on the internet. If anything that’s what we’ve learned so far. Whether this is in fact good or bad is an entirely different matter - that’s where things get interesting, of course. So for me the question is not whether or not a photograph of the corpse of Bin Laden should be released. Do we really want to pretend that it’s not going to happen? Do we really want to believe that somehow a photo might not find its way onto the internet? (more)
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The other day, I asked why stealing a wallet was not appropriation art. Maybe it’s too obvious a question, but unless I’m missing something the number of reactions was rather small (if you exclude a minor flurry of tweets). But regardless, there were some great posts, here’s what I found. (more; updated below)
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It’s a few weeks after the latest Richard Prince brouhaha, and as expected things haven’t changed. The art world has come down on the side of Richard Prince, with the argument basically being that it’s a terrible ruling for appropriation art because it’s a terrible ruling for appropriation art. I might be missing something, but in none of the articles I’ve read any of the defenders of Richard Prince has given an actual explanation of why this particular case is a valid case of appropriation art other than “He took that other guy’s stuff, and that’s what appropriation artists do.” Or “obviously it is fair use/transformative.” Well, if it’s so obvious why not explain it properly? (more)
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On September 11, 2001, Artist Laurel Nakadate put on a Girl Scouts uniform and took photographs of herself while the World Trade Center towers were burning and then collapsing in the background. The resulting photographs (I can’t find the one where she is saluting) are not particularly profound or interesting. But neither is taking a crucifix, submerging in your own urine (any yellow liquid will probably do as long as you call it “piss”), and then taking a photograph of it. All it takes to take the latter into an important piece of art, while the former still languishes in the kind of obscurity it probably deserves, is… no, not an art critic. It take an American Senator. In the case of Piss Christ, the photograph of the submerged crucifix, it was ultraconservative Senator Jesse Helms who used Andres Serrano, the maker of Piss Christ, as an example of what’s supposedly wrong with using tax payer dollars to support artists. Needless to say, Serrano’s work immediately became important art, because that’s part of the art business works. (more)
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A few days ago, US District Judge Deborah A. Batts ruled that Richard Prince had violated Patrick Cariou’s copyright when using some of the images from the Yes Rasta book to produce Canal Zone. Much has since been written about this ruling, here are a few of the reactions/takes: Rob Haggart/A Photo Editor, Ed Winkleman, Donn Zaretsky, Paddy Johnson. In a nutshell, photographers for the most parts are giddy that Prince lost, whereas the non-photo art world is appalled by the ruling. (more)
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Fred Ritchin makes the case for a meta-newspaper: “Given the growing desire to see what is important in a more coherent manner among busy readers, perhaps now is the time to begin charging for a subscription to such a meta-newspaper-and distribute some of the income to those working in the field and, where appropriate, those paying for them to be there. The world is changing at too fast a pace for us not to consider such a strategy-going beyond a list of what is out there to a presentation site where each piece complements the next and leaves us with a greater understanding of how our world is evolving.”
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There’s a war of images going on - along with the actual war. You probably already noticed. “Operation Odyssey Dawn” - the bombing of Libya - started with the now almost obligatory photographs of cruise missiles launched from US warships far away. Here is a gallery of the first images. Have a look at the credits - many of the images are courtesy of the military (as far as I could tell - sampling whatever was on display at Detroit airport yesterday - most US newspapers featured one of those images on the front page). In addition, you got the photojournalists on the ground, taking the usual photographs: Burning tanks, fighters striking poses, etc. And then you have the photography amateurs, meaning civilians and soldiers alike. Everybody is taking photographs, everybody is trying to shape the message. (more)
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Over at A Photo Editor (thank you for the shout out!), there’s a new post entitled Why We Love Bad Photography. I’ve always wondered why people love bad photography. But joking aside, what I consider to be bad photography is just that: photography that I think is bad. Does that make it bad? I think in many cases, I can give you some reasons why I like or dislike a particular photograph or body of work. But that doesn’t necessarily make it bad. (more)
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“Facebook has a larger photo collection than any other site on the web. According to an extrapolation of photo upload data reported by Facebook, the site now houses about 60 billion photos compared to Photobucket’s 8 billion, Picasa’s 7 billion and Flickr’s 5 billion.” (source, via) (more)
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Photography has always been a very useful tool for government agencies, and this includes, of course, secret services. German artist Simon Menner got access to the archives of the former East German Ministry of State Security - widely known as STASI, an agency notorious for its ruthlessness. As it turns out, the STASI’s archives are filled with photography (btw, they had a very high demand for Polaroid film). Simon compiled some of the photographs, with some explanatory text added, to share them on this site as Images from the secret STASI archives. Given what these images were used for it’s somewhat hard to write “Enjoy!”, but the absurdity of some of these photographs (the above demonstrates a secret hand signal) might make you laugh regardless.
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“The best photographic portraits, like the best painted portraits, present us not with biographical information but with a soul.” - Susie Linfield, The Cruel Radiance, p. 40
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David Campbell has published a must-read article about the seemingly ubiquitous labeling of photography as ‘porn’. I agree with David about most of his points, especially the ones in his very last paragraph (c.f. this post I wrote earlier). I also agree that labeling every kind of photography as ‘porn’ is not so helpful. That said, I do think David misses one of the crucial aspects that motivates why people talk about “ruin porn” (or whatever else). In his list of what the term “pornography” has come to mean, what seems missing is what I see as the main reason why people talk about “ruin porn”. (more)
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“So much ruin photography and ruin film aestheticizes poverty without inquiring of its origins, dramatizes spaces but never seeks out the people that inhabit and transform them, and romanticizes isolated acts of resistance without acknowledging the massive political and social forces aligned against the real transformation, and not just stubborn survival, of the city. […] As a purely aesthetic object, even with the best intentions, ruin photography cannot help but exploit a city’s misery; but as political documents on their own, they have little new to tell us.” - John Patrick Leary
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“What really dismays me […] is how three major organizations could send out three of the best photographers in the business and, within the space of just over two weeks, proudly publish nearly the same photo-story.” writes Michael Shaw. There are quite a few interesting points to be made here, maybe I’ll be able to untangle the ones I see. (more)
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You might remember the kerfuffle around Shepard Fairey and his use of that Obama photo for the “Hope” poster. Well, it’s all over now: As Nieman put it, “the big copyright case ends with a juicy little irony that you can read generously (‘work together’) or more cynically (‘merchandise’).”
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Talking about the war in Afghanistan, David Campbell writes: “Covering such a long-running conflict, the dynamics of which have not altered greatly in its nine years, necessarily produces a certain uniformity to the subjects conveyed. In Boston.com’s Big Picture gallery for November 2010 we see 43 high quality images that detail allied forces, Afghan civilians, Taliban casualties and American military families. There is also an inevitable regularity to the look of these images. […] I think we should ask hard questions about how to represent a war that has gone on for so long. I don’t think, though, that those questions are best pursued by a concern over the technologies of representation or the anxiety about aesthetics.”
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“Artists and institutions are increasingly using law as a weapon to protect free speech. But they are beginning to realize that this action is actually contributing to the demise of art. As in the Büchel case, these suits are affirming more and more that art has to be considered property in matters of free speech, and this moves the idea of art away from philosophical or moral principles. (In both cases, the rulings were based on property rights). This brings the realization that the law cannot resolve this alone. So instead, artists should call for the art institution (museum, gallery, periodical) to rethink its relationship to the arts and to artists, and they should do this for philosophical/ethical reasons and not for what is permitted by law. They should pledge a commitment to the idea of art, and consider when censoring speech the damage this would do.” - Charles Gaines
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It’s official, art is a foreign city. The makers of a series of books that includes, for example, Hedonist’s Guide To Beirut now present A Hedonist’s Guide to Art. And it is true, except for the slightly less eccentric dress code, the art world could be easily compared to Vatican City. But still I’m sure people would have expected that it’s more like a foreign country. (more)
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Alec Soth writes an open letter to The New York Times Book Review, asking why they review children’s book, but not art books.
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This past weekend, my wife and I went to estate sales. The early birds caught the worms, whereas the late birds - us - still came home with a trunk filled with stuff. Part of that stuff is this little book by David Douglas Duncan entitled I Protest! I had never heard of it before (*). I saw the cover of the book - it was lying on an unassuming pile of other books, and I picked it up not knowing that its author was a photographer. (more; updated below)
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When Time Magazine published the cover that showed the face of a mutilated Afghan woman (for an in-depth take on it read this article) I immediately thought of Ernst Friedrich, who published a book entitled War Against War a few years after the end of World War I (1924). Friedrich used previously censored images from the war to make his case against war - showing what war looked like. Just like in the case of the Time Magazine cover, the most shocking images are those of people with terribly mutilated faces. (more)
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“The explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig and the subsequent oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico killed 11 workers, destroyed wildlife, did untold harm to the Gulf coast ecosystem and brought economic hardship to communities […] And as Steven Meisel points out in a new fashion story in Vogue Italia, the oil spill is also super-duper yucky. The new issue contains a 24-page story, ‘Water & Oil,’ showing model Kristen McMenamy covered in thick, crude oil and collapsed on a rocky coast like an oil-drenched shorebird, if a shorebird wore designer clothes.” - story (more)
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If you haven’t seen the cover of TIME magazine or if you haven’t read the editors’ thinking about it, head over here. Also, there is a moving short film in which Jodi Bieber, the photographer, talks about taking the photograph. I’ve spent all day now thinking about the various aspects. A post over at Jezebel does a brilliant job summing up the real complexities of the issue, way better than I could: “Aisha’s abuse and mutilation took place last year, with U.S. troops’ presence in the country and alongside Afghan women’s significant progress on certain fronts. Women For Women in Afghanistan has some more details on her tragic background […] Such stories are obscene, not at all uncommon, and need to be told. But there is an elision here between these women’s oppression and what the U.S. military presence can and should do about it, which in turn simplifies the complexities of the debate and turns it into, ‘Well, do you want to help Aisha or not?’”
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Another great post over at No Caption Needed, about the above image and its use in/for a New York Times article. Notes Robert Hariman “the story that accompanied this photograph in the New York Times is one reason why we will continue to experience large-scale disasters.” And “by putting text and image together, the truth is revealed. Between the technological development that will in fact result from the disaster, and the artistry of the Times and many other propagandists spinning it down the memory hole, the opportunity for genuine societal adaptation will be lost.” There’s nothing I could add to that.
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The New York Tenement Museum’s photography collection is now online. Unfortunately, all the images seem to have a rather large and distracting copyright notice on them.
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“The immediacy of the Internet has opened up a new dilemma for those who feel compelled to respond to criticism of their artwork. No longer is the ear of the critic’s audience the private domain of the publisher. It’s now so easy to let all those same people who read the critique know how you feel about it. I highly discourage the urge.” - Ed Winkleman
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“Andrei Yerofeyev and Yuri Samodurov had set up the Forbidden Art exhibition at the Sakharov Museum in Moscow. The show provoked condemnation from the Russian Orthodox Church, among others, for artworks that included a depiction of Jesus Christ with the head of Mickey Mouse. Both men were ordered to pay a fine.” - story (via)
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The BP Oil Disaster is dominating large parts of the news, and a pervasive combination of frustration and anger is spreading across the country (check out the size of the spill here). Of course, there are good reasons to be angry at BP and at the government. But it might be worthwhile to step back a little and to realize that ultimately, we all bear responsibility. BP (and other companies) are drilling for oil in the Gulf of Mexico because our cars need more fuel, and we’ve used up all sources that are easily accessible. BP has a lousy safety record and was unprepared for what just happened because the people we elected let them get away with all of that. Make no mistake, I don’t want BP to get off the hook. But I also think that to prevent future spills it will take more than just oil companies cleaning up their act (and the Coast at the Gulf). It also takes us using less of the stuff that they extract from the ground at such terrible cost for the environment. So now might be a good time to revisit Susan Bell and Mitch Epstein’s What is American Power? (here is a photo of an oil rig from that project)
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Just like most people, I have photographs from my childhood, and I occasionally look through them. Of course, I don’t remember everything about each individual image - in the earliest cases, I don’t remember anything - but for most photographs I do at least remember something. I know what the images mean, I know about the situations. With memory being very fickle and complicated we could of course argue about what these memories mean and whether they accurately reflect what really happened. But that aside, there’s something about these photographs that helps define me in some way - and part of it has to do with the fact that the number of childhood photographs in my possession is limited. (more)
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Referring to my earlier link to a post by David Campbell, Jonathon Demske (thank you!) sent me the link to this talk by Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Adichie, which, trust me, you don’t want to miss. Well worth your time.
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The following is just part of why this article is a must read: “In a study published in the journal Media Psychology, researchers had more than 100 volunteers watch a presentation about the country of Mali, played through a Web browser. Some watched a text-only version. Others watched a version that incorporated video. Afterward, the subjects were quizzed on the material. Compared to the multimedia viewers, the text-only viewers answered significantly more questions correctly; they also found the presentation to be more interesting, more educational, more understandable, and more enjoyable.” The irony, of course, is that the online version has lots of links in the text - which will probably do exactly what the author is worried about.
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On The Media just published the transcript of a 2008 broadcast on editorial portrait photography. It’s a worthwhile read, even though some of the questions asked in the piece are not nearly as clear-cut as the author makes them look. What exactly is “fairness” in the context of portrait photography? That’s not as a simple question as it seems. What is more, when a photographer is hired to do her or his job, why would s/he then not do just that, namely what s/he is well known for? Shouldn’t we instead be talking to the photo editors who decide to hire a photographer known for, say, taking photographs from way below the waist line? Needless to say, with a photographer bragging “I went to art school, so I don’t know what those canons and ethics are.” you can be sure what people will be really talking about.
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“A cultivation of a narrative imagination is essential for moving past documenting pathos and helplessness, to see past victims and dependents, and see the humanity and individual autonomy of even the most seemingly desperate of peoples. This for me is the next great adventure in photojournalism. A sustained, humane voice that brings ‘the other’ into our lives as an equal to ourselves, with ideas and aspirations, and solutions and agency, inviting us to collaborate, and not begging us to save.” - Asim Rafiqui
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Seems like sometimes you can’t get past topics by calling them “side discussions on blogs.” You’ll remember my earlier post about Benjamin Chesterton raising a couple of important issues about a Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting (PCoCR) project. The PCoCR did react, after all: “Vernaschi’s photographs are gut-wrenching, black-and-white portraits of pain and abuse. We share his belief that photography can play a powerful role in mobilizing public opinion, in Uganda and beyond, to stop this abuse. But we now believe — and Vernaschi agrees — that we were wrong in the way we handled the cases of Mukisa and Babirye.” (more; updated)
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You want to take a little time and read this article by Benjamin Chesterton (of duckrabbit fame). In a nutshell, Benjamin looked into a story done in Uganda by photographer Marco Vernashi, to come across a couple of very worrying, if not outright disturbing findings: Some of the photographs probably violate the UK’s Protection of Children Act 1978. What is more, the photographer persuaded the mother of a dead child to have her daughter’s body dug up so he could take pictures. He then interviewed the woman and afterwards gave her money. Yes, you read that right. Benjamin contacted both the photographer and Jon Sawyer, Executive Director of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, which funded and promoted the project. (more)
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David Campbell has an excellent post about what he calls ‘famine photography’: “The photographic reporting of famine, especially in ‘Africa’, continues to replicate stereotypes. Malnourished children, either pictured alone in passive poses or with their mothers at hand, continue to be the obvious subjects of our gaze. What should drive our concern about this persistent portrayal?” You want to read the whole piece; but I can’t refrain from posting the following quote: “One of my refrains for how we should understand photographs in these situations is that the problem lies with the absence of alternatives as much as it does with the presence of the stereotypes.”
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“At the moment, the terms of trade favour publishers too much. A return to the 28-year copyrights of the Statute of [queen] Anne would be in many ways arbitrary, but not unreasonable. If there is a case for longer terms, they should be on a renewal basis, so that content is not locked up automatically. The value society places on creativity means that fair use needs to be expanded and inadvertent infringement should be minimally penalised. None of this should get in the way of the enforcement of copyright, which remains a vital tool in the encouragement of learning. But tools are not ends in themselves.” (full text)
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