“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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If you haven’t seen the video described in this post you probably only want to look if you have a strong stomach. And I mean a very strong stomach. I think we’re all (sadly) familiar with the kinds of videos where you see people get blown up, witnessing their last moments via some camera in a jet plane; but to actually hear helicopter pilots boast about their deeds… I literally had get up from my desk and go for a walk, because I had all faith in humanity sucked out of me - and I didn’t even make it up to the moment where they tried to evacuate the victims. (more, updated)
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Here is a great interview with artist Jennifer Dalton about the various problems haunting the art world. (more)
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Regardless of what you think about the whole Shepard Fairey Obama poster kerfuffle, here is an article you want to read (via). I think these two law professors just managed to show parts of the art world how to really approach and think about “fair use” and copyright. Needless to say, as Sergio notes, there are some problems; but the idea of an “altlaw” is - frankly - something I would have imagined coming from some artist’s studio in New York and not from a couple of law professors.
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I found a long and very sad article about Joe Dwyer, the soldier in this well-known image, who came home with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and who never managed to deal with it. If you only have time to read one article today, this is the one.
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I came across a whole set of great morning reads; so here they are as a good start into a new week: Colin Pantall compares the fashion industry with the Catholic Church, writing “the real reason I despise the fashion industry is because of the way they inflict their distorted, degraded insecurities on us, the way they try to devalue our minds, our bodies and our values in a way we can’t escape.” Over at No Caption Needed, Robert Hariman uses a satirical (fake) magazine cover to debate some conventions of photojournalism: “Communication depends on conventions of representation, but it can become trapped in them. As much as humanitarians rightly insist on the value of the individual person, there may nonetheless be times when we don’t need to see another face. Given the scale of the humanitarian disasters now and to come, more thought might be given to how even things can speak.” And lastly, Sergio Muñoz Sarmiento asks Are We Really Headed Toward Permission-Based Art Making? Not so, he argues: “This fear would be true only if artists continue to give up on the challenges posed by creativity and gave in to facile and lazy intellectual hyperbole.”
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You’ve probably seen this video by now, but if you haven’t check it out. For those with attention spans shorter than one minute and five seconds, you’ve got to watch it for longer than that to see the actual idea.
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Given my general lack of interest in fashion photography, I might not be the best person to write about the following. That said, since that lack to a pretty large extent is based on exactly what has been gaining quite a bit of exposure across the internet over the past few days I don’t think I should remain silent. See Rob’s take on it here. (more)
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My friend Mark sent me the link to an article called Driveby culture and the endless search for wow. I think I want to say a few things about this, because, in part, it is related to what I often hear about photography online. (more)
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The Spring 2010 edition of Nieman Reports focuses on “Visual Journalism: Fresh Approaches and New Business Strategies for the Multimedia Age” - photojournalism in the age of the internet. As a contributor I’m in very illustrious company. The articles are all online, have a peek!
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A few days after the Buchenwald concentration camp was liberated in early April 1945, German civilians from the nearby town of Weimar were made to tour the camp, to see with their own eyes what had happened just a few miles from their homes. On one of these days, photographer Margaret Burke-White was present, to record such a visit (see this link; in the above image, that’s MBW taking a reading with her light meter). Up until the Allies’ armies found the many concentration camps, photographers had covered the war in the usual ways, with the usual imagery. But at the camps, the liberators were staring into an abyss of utter horror, and much to their credit the photographers did not hesitate to record it so that everybody could see. The people of Weimar were made to see. Everybody else, who was not there, was made to see, too - newspapers and magazines all over the world reprinted the photographs taken by Margaret Burke-White and her colleagues.
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I’m sure you have seen this already, but just in case you haven’t… (via) Update (9 March 2010): Also see this link.
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The Armory Art Show takes the idea that art isn’t a commodity to be sold like the machines and tools on display at the Hannover industrial trade show (that I used to visit as a teenager) and dispenses with it neatly. If any of the Show’s objects at some stage were in the presence of an artist toiling over their meaning and worth (I’m not talking about money here), you wouldn’t know that once you encountered them at the Piers in New York City. Make no mistake, I had no illusions about the Armory Show before I went. So I did not undergo the kind of shock treatment that someone with romantic ideas about the commercial art world would experience if she or he was exposed to such an abomination of the human spirit for the first time. That said, the Armory Show still was a soul crushing experience, where your soul is not only crushed, it’s actually slowly and steadily ground into a fine powder.
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Ray Dowd has some very smart comments on the recent Korean War Veteran’s Memorial fair-use case.
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“Today, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit rightly decided that the US Post Office’s use of an image, based on a copyrighted sculpture, was not fair use. As a result, the Federal Circuit’s decision holds that the US Post Office is liable to the sculptor and remands the case back to the trial court so that damages may be determined. […] The Center for Internet Society (‘CIS’) filed an amicus on behalf of the Andy Warhol Foundation, and several other amici […]. In the amici, the CIS unsuccessfully argued that the US Post Office’s use was fair use, ‘We think fair use does and should protect this right, which is crucial to huge amounts of expression, including vast amounts of modern art.’” - story Update: Also make sure to read this post.
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“As an English-born student of European history teaching in the US; as a Jew somewhat uncomfortable with much that passes for ‘Jewishness’ in contemporary America; as a social democrat frequently at odds with my self-described radical colleagues, I suppose I should seek comfort in the familiar insult of ‘rootless cosmopolitan.’ But that seems to me too imprecise, too deliberately universal in its ambitions. Far from being rootless, I am all too well rooted in a variety of contrasting heritages. […] I prefer the edge: the place where countries, communities, allegiances, affinities, and roots bump uncomfortably up against one another — where cosmopolitanism is not so much an identity as the normal condition of life. Such places once abounded. Well into the twentieth century there were many cities comprising multiple communities and languages — often mutually antagonistic, occasionally clashing, but somehow coexisting. Sarajevo was one, Alexandria another. Tangiers, Salonica, Odessa, Beirut, and Istanbul all qualified — as did smaller towns like Chernovitz and Uzhhorod. By the standards of American conformism, New York resembles aspects of these lost cosmopolitan cities: that is why I live here.” - Tony Judt
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An interesting post about photography and public art. I’m vehemently pro-fair-use in this case. For me, the focal point is the word “public.” If an artist wants to have her/his art work protected then s/he should not agree to have it used as public art. And, of course, part of my thinking in based on the simple fact that most public art is just so painfully bad (this being my favourite example; here is another photo).
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“The last few years have raised important copyright issues and concerns for artists. There are three main factors which have impacted-and will continue to impact-how visual artists relate to each other, to art institutions, and to other intellectual property right holders when it concerns issues of copyright.” - full story
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“The true affront to Lance Cpl. Joshua Bernard’s dignity is that he died young, thousands of miles away from his family, where he was serving the wishes of a government that has a political agenda that it cannot pursue without resorting to violence on a mass scale.” writes Tom White about a photograph of a fatally wounded US soldier, a photo of which caused a bit of a stir some time ago. A must-read post.
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Colin today linked to this interview with Jaron Lanier. I’m sure by now you have heard of Lanier’s You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto, and what you might have heard is perfectly mirrored in the introduction of the interview. The book is described as a “doom and gloom manifesto […] even if” - brace yourselves - “Lanier insists that it is, overall, an optimistic book.” You gotta ask yourself: What does the author know, when there’s a journalist to tell it like it is? When you read reviews you will come to the conclusion that the book cannot possibly be “an optimistic book” - except, of course, that it is. How do I know this? The very old-fashioned way: I bought the book, and I read it (I’ll review it here at some stage).
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“In an interview with the newsmagazine Focus, Consumer Protection Minister Ilse Aigner has called for a law to better protect the private sphere on the Internet and has taken Street View to task. ‘This comprehensive photo offensive is nothing less than a million-fold violation of the private sphere,’ Aigner said. […] ‘I would like to see a reversal of the present system. Citizens shouldn’t have to take action to prevent the publication of their private data. Rather, Google should be required to obtain the consent of citizens when they want to publish a photo of their private home.’” - story
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Another follow-up, this one to my post about fair use. Here is a post about sculptors who produced a piece out of a photo by Alex Brown. I actually knew of that case, Alex had emailed me before I wrote my fair-use post. In my response to Alex’s email I wrote him that I considered this a case of plagiarism. That said, here is a suggestion for how to solve this particular case: Have the sculptors add Alex as a co-creator of the work and have them give him a share of whatever money they might make (if they make any). This solution might actually work for a lot of similar cases, and it would satisfy those who think it’s obvious plagiarism (the creative work of the photographer would be preserved, since he would be given credit for his work), and those who think it’s not (because the derived art work - if we want to call it that - would just remain part of the art world).
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Art critic Regina Hackett just blogged about this portrait painted by Jesse Edwards (see the artist’s website here). I couldn’t help but think about Rob’s post about ‘fair use’ from the other day again: When or where does ‘fair use’ begin (or end)? When is a use not fair? (updated below - twice)
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“Seattle photographer Mike Hipple […] received a letter from the lawers of a sculptor named Jack Mackie. Apparently a photograph that Mike took 10 years previous and was selling as stock, featured a woman dancing along the sidewalk with a portion of Jack’s sculpture ‘Dance Steps on Broadway’ visible. Mr. Mackie claimed copyright infringement in the letter.” (story)
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You’ve probably seen articles like this one, entitled Why information should remain free, by Tom White. It does seem to make a lot of sense, right? After all, the web does away with all those pesky problems about distribution, ink and paper - so why should information not be free? The problem with all of this is that it ignores the fact that someone will have to pay the salaries of the people who put that information online, and curiously enough, that aspect I almost never see addressed anywhere. It’s great to talk about how information should be free - even though it feels a bit like trying to argue with a bumper sticker, doesn’t it? (updated below)
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From what I read and hear from people there seems to be a steadily growing discontent with the coverage of the Haiti earthquake. If I tried to assemble a list of links it would probably be incomplete, here are just two articles I came across that struck me as noteworthy (no doubt there are many more). Haiti coverage: ‘Disaster porn’? is a collection of links plus short summaries itself. More to the point of photography, Does Haiti’s Crisis Call for a New Photojournalism? is a very interesting piece by Michael David Murphy. (updated below)
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“I think the crucial difference is that curating should really imply more than a process of selection. Ideally it should not only be based on in-depth research into a particular area, but it should also attempt to contribute new ideas that shed light on some unseen aspect or that allow us to see things in a new context. When I think of the best curated photography shows over the past decade, they were all based on several years of painstaking research and all attempted to say something new about their subject.” - Marc Feustel
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“Professional and amateur photographers have gathered in London’s Trafalgar Square to protest against terror stop and searches.” (story; photo by Michael Perrin, from the BBC’s website)
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When I looked into virginity pledge rings the other day (for use in this post), I had no idea that the concept existed outside of a religious context. Today, the Ostkreuz blog features an interview with photographer Pepa Hristová about “sworn virgins” in Albania: “‘Sworn Virgins’ are women, who have sworn for a life-long virginity in order to fit into the role of men. This has nothing to do with transsexualism. Instead, it is about a rise in the hierarchy of the strictly patriarchal society in Albania; from there on they are classified as men.”
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There are two must-read blog posts, both filled to the brim with links, about Haiti and photography there. dvafoto have this post, with some thoughts about photojournalism and its role. And Pete has a huge post, telling you where to look if you want to donate, see photos, see in-depth coverage, get some background, …
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