Let me confirm what you already know. The Bang Bang Club was not a stellar movie. More accurately, it was the gritty-glam version of wartime tragedy. However, it contained this brief exchange:

Greg Marinovich: Where are they getting the guns?
Joao Silva: It doesn’t matter, just take the picture.

Meaning what? It’s someone else’s job to find out. Is it?

Maybe it is.

The montage of Kevin Carter being grilled about the fate of the little girl stalked by the vulture stood out to me. I felt simultaneously overwhelmed and emotionally manipulated, having been provoked, just as the producers intended, by the notion that Carter should’ve taken measures to save the child, aside from shooing the bird away and walking off.

No matter what you think about the industry’s relationship with images of suffering, it is clear that Carter was in no way responsible for the child’s life, no more than any other observer or outsider was. A chain of negligence by a slew of people, high and low, resulted in that girl finding herself in such a pitiable state, but Carter was the one who stepped in to document it, thereby drawing the ire to himself. Classic case of shoot the messenger.

When you’re in a conflict zone and half the job is avoiding a violent death, you have already given far beyond what the rest of us are capable of giving, and at that point, getting the shot is enough. And if it’s not enough in an ideal sense, it is still all that is humanly possible.

An individual working alone on one long term documentary project in peace time with no agency support is in vastly different circumstances than someone working within an infrastructure of reporters and editors. Perhaps the burden is on them in that case. I have been too quick to generalize in the past about what photojournalism lacks and its relationship to images of suffering. It is after all 5 parts photo and 5 parts journalism, and who takes on which part is fluid.

Thanks to a heads up at Horses Think, last Friday I saw Mitch Epstein and Paul Schiek talk at a PhotoAlliance event at the Art Institute. Jim Goldberg and Kenro Izu are next on the Calendar, if you’re interested. $10 for the general public, half off for students. Looking back at the archive, it looks like I missed Eirik Johnson and Bill Owens. Dang! And it turns out that a couple of my professors have given talks there this year too. I’ll have to keep my calendar updated in the future.

Schiek “opened,” as it were, for Epstein, showing his digital point and shoot snapshot work that he made as a student at CCA and his second project utilizing blown out highlights to create a ghostly, ethereal effect which he referred to as a kind of reductive information removal. I like the idea behind his blown out work, but I’m not sure that I like the execution. Some of them just seem to be offhand experiments of pushing digital to an extreme. His recent work as turned toward direct “sculptural” manipulation of the photos themselves to remove info – ie cutting portions out. He also talked briefly about TBW books, which he runs, publishing works by Todd Hido and Alec Soth (the current subscription edition) among others. All the books are a signature white and he showed a photo of himself dressed in all white on shipping day to send them out with “good vibes.” He concluded with a photo of his mom, recovered from cancer and flipping off a seal in an aquarium. Maybe a star in the making?

Mitch Epstein

Epstein’s work was less overtly personal. Power, for him, is like a set of Russian nesting dolls: nuclear power cracked to reveal political power, within which you find corporate power, then consumer power, religious power and so on. What I liked was his range – landscapes, interiors, portraits, a newspaper photo he found on a wall – and his inclusion of the act of photographing (or not photographing) in the significance of the pictures. For example, in the instance of being denied entry to the DNC and RNC, he says, “not getting in is just as important,” delivers as much of a message as getting in to shoot the brouhaha would. Or in the instance of the DOE rep who did not allow him to take a picture of solar panels because an air conditioning vent was in view, but who had no problem with him photographing a missile.

Mitch Epstein

He talked about his own process – how the project started out of environmentalist concerns (he gets the NRDC magazine) and out of a general concern for the future that all parents begin to have at some point; and about how he used the internet to do research, at one point getting the idea to photograph the “Terror-free gas” pump from a photo he saw on Flickr. In that vein, this is a project he hopes to take out of the traditional art venues and bring into the street through billboards and some sort of awareness campaign, perhaps even in the communities where the photos were originally shot. To conclude the talk, Epstein quoted Wallace Shawn on the role of artist as a vehicle of change – is this appropriate? is it enough to influence your own circle of friends?

That said, he came at the project without any overt political agenda, which he believes nudges the work into the realm of propaganda, and worked in a very open way. Each morning he would have a plan for the day, but it was all a “ruse” and would invariably be shot as the day wore on, full of unexpected events like the Cheshire, OH grandma who asks him, “would you like to see my gun?”

Mitch Epstein

American Power is the first of his projects which he has shot with a large format camera. In the past he has worked mainly with handheld cameras more suitable to the approach of going where you will and finding the unexpected, but this time he wanted to try “making less photographs and investing more into each.”

Asked to speak on “beauty,” Epstein pointed out that people find art and beauty more enjoyable than power. (Not generally true, methinks. Maybe I’m just jaded, or have a looser definition of “enjoy.”) He went on to say that our sense of beauty is tied to our sense not only of what is pretty but of what is visually awe-inspiring or downright scary, in the case of these plumes of smoke. There is some aspect of beauty that comes out of respect, which is not the same thing as agreement or endorsement or anything along those lines.

Mitch Epstein

The most interesting moment of the lecture for me came when he briefly asserted that much of how Americans view personal property, land and use of space is a legacy of Manifest Destiny and the pioneers’ land-claim mindset, where owning a piece of land was essential to survival on the most basic level.

This is a fascinating idea that touches on how we use or don’t use our public spaces (or the lack thereof), the popularity of single-family homes in suburbia and the need to own. Most of my friends, even the liberal or at least socially liberal, feel a need to own. Mostly this is a decision grounded in being wise with your money, but depending on where you live, the numbers don’t necessarily add up for ownership, yet if they know anything about what they want to do with their lives, they want to own a residence. So on a personal level, I am very curious about this idea, and I think it’s an interesting little puzzle of how a photographer might show these issues visually without resorting to photos of Old West relics.

On a more general level, it’s just fascinating how much we inherit culturally without knowing it. I don’t think any of my friends would really point to Manifest Destiny as the reason they think it’s important to buy a house, but I think it’s something that definitely has trickled down in the culture. That’s not to say that first generation immigrant families don’t have similar desires, but I think that comes from a slightly different place. Though, I would argue that there is a hint of the pioneer in some immigrant experiences. This is not an issue I know a lot about, but boy, I am interested now.

[Which reminds me - I need to read Gridlock Economy, which is about private ownership being a hindrance to innovation. In fact, a few weeks ago, I overheard snippets of a previously-recorded interview with author Michael Heller (mp3) conducted at no other than our very own KZSU.]

Li Lin

Li Lin’s Disappearing Landscape is one of the 798 Photo books I picked up. The book is divided into two parts – Wetland, frames of disappearing natural wetlands, and Artificial Landscape, frames of what will conceivably replace them. The more conventional landscapes of Wetland are interesting, but I really like the strangeness of the Artificial Landscapes, which was shot in Dongying city in Shandong province at what looks to be one of those cheesy amusement parks so characteristic of China.

The introduction by Liu Shuyong is also printed in an English version. The translation is a little awkward sometimes, but my Chinese is not so great, so it will have to do:

Artificial Landscape is a sarcastic photographic series that criticizes the artificial garden scenes installed in modern cities. The reinforced concrete structures imitating traditional gardens are mixed with [nationalist] dreams of political power blocs, and the dependence of commercial capital to the will to power. The crude, childish artificial landscape reflects people’s shallow understanding of Chinese characteristics.

I would say that despite the nationalism and the cheese, while more jaded folks are critical, there is a bit of naive enthusiasm and hopefulness in the reception some people give to these places. He goes to a bit of an extreme – the essay is titled “The Spawning of ‘Flowers of Evil,’ ” which, I have to admit, is an arresting turn of phrase.

If you are ever in Beijing you should pick up some of 798 Photo’s books. I think there are some slight tone and color problems with some of the prints but the shorter ones go for around 100 RMB, which is $13-15, so I can’t complain.

Michael Wolf

From Nick Paumgarten’s article “The Death of Kings,” a somewhat more meditative take on the financial meltdown:

It can be startling to discover how many offices in Manhattan have spectacular views. The first time you gain admission to an aerie in some other blue-chip tower and look out, you think that this particular office must be the finest in town, the seat of secret power, the heart of the plot. But the city is full of them. It’s one of the things about tall buildings: you can see a lot. The takeoffs and landings at the airports, the shipping lanes, the humans below reduced to units: it is easy to begin to think abstractly about the armature of empire. Sitting up there and talking for hours about pools of securitized debt, and seeing them depicted on dryboards, divided into tranches, you can find yourself viewing the buildings out the window as manifestations of that debt – the conversion of financial cunning into steel, brick, and glass.

I found myself inadvertantly thinking about how Michael Wolf’s Transparent City photos, some of which I saw at the beginning of the year, are more landscape than architectural photography. For many of us, field and stream have been replace in daily vision by monolithic stone, steel and glass. In photo after photo, geometric abstraction resolves into the matter of people’s lives. The grid of building structure divides each occupant from another, and each resides alone in his box, staring at computers and televisions.

Some of Wolf’s photographs are similar to Thomas Kneubuhler‘s work, but I get a much stronger whiff of compartmentalization from Wolf. Work exists in one box and private life in another. Every day most of us engage in a mass exodus from our homes to our workplaces and we do it again in reverse at the end of the day. Both fall visually into the mold of high rise geometry, and there is an implied parallel – we work in a small cube and we live in a slightly larger one. Swap in a couch for a desk chair and a TV for a computer monitor, and, from a distance, the scenes are pretty similar. Yet there’s something endearing about all the individual piles of detritus each person creates for himself placed side by side in large human colonies, but the dominant form of the grid does give the whole project a rigid feel.

These photos are not well represented by web viewing. They should be seen as large prints that you lean into to pick out little details, but I don’t find the grand scale of the structures dehumanizing or anonymizing. In fact, I find the act of honing in on one small detail while the rest of the print fills your peripheral vision more personal and engaging than taking in frames and prints as a whole. If he is showing near you, it’s a show that’s definitely worth seeing in person.