Here’s a running list of themes/issues/debates we have touched on in class…
• Art versus journalism
• Photographer’s responsibilities to subject?
• The decisive moment…accidental or purposefully caught?
• Is there a duty for the public to be informed of the news? If so, how much of the news?
• What gets covered, and how does “saleability” factor in? That is, which news sells? And why? (racial, economic, class, other factors in play?)
• Coverage of war—making it feel real. Does that encourage the viewer to think she “gets it”? And are there potential concerns with that response?
• Aesthetics versus content of image
• The authenticity (or not) of one image versus the portrayal of “a larger truth”
• What makes an image powerful?
- These concerns we listed, as a class, on the date we discussed war and work by Meiselas:
- various, sometimes competing roles of media: helping to start war(foment nationalist ideologies), continuing war/perpetrating war (photos as tools of violence?), stopping war (alerting public, compelling intervention), holding assailants accountable (photos in a juridical capacity)
- ethical duties to the subjects of photos
- photography as “universal language”
- photos as visual sound bites
- Is narrative required to make us understand (to play off first Sontag and later Reiff)?
- photos of violence vs. violence done to photos (i.e. violence in effigy)
- breaks with visual convention, e.g. Parr’s fashion photography
- the everyday versus the glamorous vis a vis fashion photography–one style visually admits to being posed, the other doesn’t. Does one form convey “the real” more than the other?
- modern versus postmodern worldviews
- “The curse of history” (per Peress): damned if you do document and damned if you don’t
- The photograph is the “moment where my language finishes and yours starts.”
- New Photojournalism of the late 1970s—transparency, subjectivity, expressionism, prioritization of the personal perspective
- the success or failure of making meaning, through pictures, of the reality that surrounds
- What constitutes “evidence”? What purpose/s should evidence serve?
- how images produce political meaning/constructing a narrative without any text (a la My America by Morris)
- the rhetorical power of images
- visual metaphors, eye contact, camera angle, associational juxtaposition; mirroring v. oppositional positioning
- the business/economics of covering crisis (which crises “win out” over others and why)
- spectacle and famine
- NGOs and photography/”advocacy journalism”
- “as if” images (per Zelizer)
- Stereotypes/clichés/tropes
- Metonymic structures
- “the civil contract of photography”
- the absent image (per Azoulay and Campbell)
- relating the local situation to the larger political/social/global forces
- colonial histories as shaping patterns of viewing
- affect v criticality
- Sympathy, empathy, anger – which is the best motivator in response to images of injustice?
- Pitching to policy makers versus concerted effort to educate wide public
- Role of social media in effecting change
- The economics that undergird conflicts/crises
- When research is crucial to photographer’s work
Upon reflecting on the different photographers we have studied this semester, I’ve found their choices to use black and white or color very interesting. This is an incredibly important choice for a photographer; the way viewers react to color compared to black and white can be drastic, and each aesthetic has the ability to convey different aspects of a situation, moment, or person. For my observation post I’d like to look at the different ways photographers have utilized color or BW, and what trends we can draw through these decisions.
In thinking about the choice to use color I am immediately brought to Susan Meiselas and Steve McCurry’s images. Though their photographs are incredibly different, they both made the choice to use color because they felt it was intrinsic to communicating the place they were photographing. On her use of color photography in Nicaragua, which at the time was thought of as a controversial choice, Meiselas’ writes, “I initially worked with two cameras, one in black and white and the other in color, but increasingly came to feel that color did a better job of capturing what I was seeing. The vibrancy and optimism of the resistance, as well as the physical feel of the place, came through better in color” (susanmeiselas.com). The controversy, or debate, of a war needing to be exclusively photographed in black and white feels outdated now, but Meiselas’ choice exemplifies her desire to not only record the events and people of the revolution but also to convey the larger feeling behind the revolution. Similarly, McCurry’s use of color in his series from India comes from the perspective that the Indian culture he was experiencing revolved around color. As I wrote in my response to McCurry’s images, though Meiselas and McCurry’s color both work to convey the vibrancy of a moment or place, they function very differently for me. McCurry’s color is very commanding—some photographs feel like they were taken because of the color. Contrary to this, I never feel that Meiselas’ images are overrun by color. Rather, her color adds to the image, but does not make the image.
Ashley Gilbertson’s choice to photograph Bedrooms of the Fallen in black and white is particularly surprising to me. As he told us in class, he felt color would have been too distracting and the rooms could be more easily digested through black and white. While I understand this decision, and think he is probably right in believing color would make the images overwhelming and easy to gloss over, I wonder what we miss about these soldiers’ lives and personalities from seeing their bedrooms in black and white. As Meiselas and McCurry obviously believe, color can translate a sense of energy—which to me feels incredibly important in photographing someone’s bedroom as a representation of them.
I’m interested to think through the different forms of information we receive from color or black and white, as well as the emotional effects that choice has on the viewer. I remember for one of our early assignments on VII, I looked at Ed Kashi’s work in Cimarron County, Oklahoma. I loved his photographs but I felt perhaps the choice to photograph in black and white established an impenetrable connection to the FSA photographs of the 30s and could have been stronger by being in color. Perhaps this is coming from the strong sense of nostalgia I find black and white images often produce. For Kashi’s project I think it could have been stronger by differentiating farming from the past through the use of color.
I think it is incredibly important to think about the different affective quality of black and white vs color – especially when thinking about the type of photography we have been studying. As we have heavily discussed, there are a lot of politics and difficult ethical debates that loom over conflict, war, famine, and even fashion photography. How a viewer aesthetically reacts to an image can highly alter his or her perspective or thought on the subject/subject matter, which of course influences the way they move forward after seeing the image. For that reason it is crucial that not only the photographer be aware of the way color and black and white can affect the viewer, but also for the viewer to become more literate in the work of a photograph.