Praise poem for the photographer Omar Badsha
▻http://africasacountry.com/praise-poem-for-omar-badsha-2
Emmanuel Kant would have been distraught if he were to see Omar Badsha’s work. Neither great beauties nor scenic vistas meant to evoke sublime pleasure were the focus of Badsha’s.....
Horrific pictures of dead bodies won’t stop wars
Paul Mason
People who believe that showing violent images from conflict zones will deter killing are mistaken
Nearly four months on from the Gaza conflict, the image I remember most is this: we are in the crowded triage room at Al-Shifa hospital, whose tiles are echoing with wails and screams. A group of men is staring at a pile of curtains, blankets and towels on the floor. Then somebody uncovers what’s beneath.
If you watched TV reports that night you would have seen the blurred bodies of six children. My cameraman took a shot of blood being mopped off the floor to signify what we could not show.
But on Twitter they don’t blur things out. If you follow the Syrian conflict, you will see horrific pictures of dead children and their grieving relatives several times a week. If you’re following the Islamic State story on social media, you will see crucifixions, executions, beheadings – often posted by people trying to convince us that IS are bad and should be blown to smithereens themselves.
We are besieged now by images of the dead in conflict, usually published by people who believe it will either deter killing, expose the perpetrators or illustrate war’s futility and brutality.
It is an old illusion and we can trace it back to a precise moment in history. In 1924, the German anti-war activist Ernst Friedrich published a shocking book called War Against War!.
Friedrich had been jailed during the war for sabotaging production in an arms factory, and was a wild leftwinger. By the early 1920s, he had assembled a comprehensive collection of photographs showing the reality of the first world war. Probably the most offputting are those of facial mutilations endured by surviving soldiers.
But there is also documentary evidence of the brutalities of war: the hanging of a priest by a triumphant German soldier; a starved Armenian child, captioned by the words of a German politician who had claimed that “every mercy shown to lower races is a crime against our mission”.
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Often Friedrich himself indulged in crude propaganda: a picture of “Papa” posing proudly in his uniform on recruitment, juxtaposed with his shattered body three weeks later, with the comment “not included in the family album”.
Though hounded by censors and lawsuits, Friedrich’s book went into 10 editions before the Nazis banned it. The “international anti-war museum” he had opened in a terrace house in Berlin was closed by Hitler’s stormtroopers in 1933 and turned into a torture chamber.
Friedrich’s work represented a breakthrough. Before then, imagery of war had been subject to absolute censorship during conflict and diluted for the sake of “taste and decency” by the media during peacetime.
So War Against War! – republished in facsimile this year in the UK by the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation – poses a relevant question: why is it that showing people gruesome photographs of war injuries does not deter war? In a conflict such as Israel-Palestine, people on both sides feel compelled to fight. Other conflicts are wars of choice. Professional soldiers know what they are signing up to. One day spent on a trauma first aid course, even with fake blood spurting out of rubber prosthetic wounds, is enough to illustrate what it is going to be like.
The closer I get to conflict, and the people who endure it, the more I think: nothing we know about war can deter us from it. In fact, in the 90 years since Friedrich’s book came out, we’ve developed coping strategies to assuage the feelings of horror such imagery arouses.
Faced with horrific injuries, we develop prosthetic technologies and plastic surgery. Faced with lethal weaponry – we develop Kevlar or drones and stand-off weapons to keep our own soldiers safer. We professionalise armies and improve survival rates for the wounded.
Plus there’s international law. Today, no day of conflict passes without somebody accusing someone of breaking the Geneva Conventions. The implication is that war conducted according to the rules is regrettable but all right. Instead of the language of the jingoist, which Friedrich ridiculed, we have the language of the technocrat: collateral damage, civilian deaths to be regretted.
Finally, while the first world war was begun in ignorance about the horrors of war, by the mid-century, belligerents had learned how to use images of atrocity to fire people up to fight.
But why do we then report war? Last week, I attended the Rory Peck awards, where my Gazan producer Khaled Abu Ghali won the Martin Adler prize for the work he did for Channel 4 News. The room was full of people who risk their lives to get pictures of horrific injury, cruelty and death, and the executives who send them there.
There’s a growing frustration in this milieu not just that journalists are being targeted, but that a disbelieving public has come to see all graphic imagery of war as potentially fake, manipulated or propagandist.
Adler, a Swedish film-maker murdered in Mogadishu in 2006, imbued his camerawork with an unflinching gaze. It was the absurd human situations, the disarmed honesty of the combatants and pointlessness of conflict that he was there to record, not the mutilated faces.
Many Germans in the 1920s and 30s came to believe, despite the horrific photographs, that the war had embodied the noblest and most exhilarating aspects of human life; and specifically that warfare represented the ultimate in technological modernity and moral freedom. This remains a more dangerous myth than the idea that war is harmless, fun or simply heroic. Adler, and others like him, understood that showing absurdity is more important than showing injury.
I have no doubt the men clustered around the children’s bodies in Al-Shifa thought the war they were fighting was just. But the collective sigh when they saw the injuries convinced me they had seen through any illusions as to the conflict’s glory.
Pictures of war should not only show us what bodies look like. They should educate us about the absurdities, the accidents and pointless killing.
▻http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/nov/23/horrific-pictures-of-dead-bodies-wont-stop-wars
#the_guardian #war #photo #photograpy #violence #photojournalism #reportage
"Camera obscura "
by Marja Pirila (Leuku’s member)
In camera obscura darkness, silence and slowness compel one to contemplate the world in a novel way, from new angles. When the space transforms into a ”dark room” it conjures up the core and magic of photography again and again. That is when I feel most acutely that I am working with light.
The idea in embarking on the #Interior/Exterior project was a nocturnal inspiration after seeing some black-and-white images of Abelardo Morell in a photo magazine. In the room converted into a camera obscura I could capture an image of a person and at the same time that person’s room and the view from the #window – what an all-encompassing method by which to photograph a person’s living environment!
The originally documentary idea soon expanded in a new direction. The pictures began to form not only a person’s living environment but also to constitute an excursion into the mental landscape: reflections of memories, reveries, fears and dreams.
Working on this series was for me like taking photographs for a family album: visitations to #people and also to myself. To take the pictures I transform people’s rooms into camera obscura by covering the windows of the room with blackout plastic and placing on top of the hole cut in it a simple #convex_lens. Then the view outside the window is reflected upside down into the room forming a dreamy layered space. This and the occupant of the room I then photographed with a conventional camera.
Interior/Exterior is the most extensive and long-lasting project accomplished with the #camera_obscura method. So far I have photographed this series in #Finland, Norway, Italy and France, and the work continues.
— Marja Pirilä
▻https://www.lensculture.com/marja-pirila?modal=true&modal_type=project&modal_project_id=25376
#leuku #photograpy #photo #photographie #Marja_Pirilä #leuku_photo_agency
Japanese Swordsman with a Camera
By Rena Silverman
Postwar Tokyo’s bustling streets might seem very different from a traditional Japanese coastal festival. Not for Issei Suda, whose approach has always been the same.
“My shooting method was once compared to an ancient sword trick in which one slashes his enemy at the same time as he removes the sword from his sheath,” Mr. Suda, 74, said in an interview translated by Miyako Yoshinaga, who has recently curated “Issei Suda: Life In Flower, 1971-1977.” The show, which runs through Oct. 18 in her Chelsea gallery, consists of 37 of Mr. Suda’s precise 6×6 silver gelatin prints.
Looking at these images, nothing exemplifies his sword method more than the light that seems to have been quickly cast upon each of his subjects. In one Tokyo street scene, Shinjuku 1977, a man ascends a staircase in the shadows while his hat and paper bag illuminate the photo. It is impossible not to ask Mr. Suda about his use of his flash, which it turns out, is part of his method.
He laughed. “I use the flash even when I am not sure of its effectiveness,” he said. “I snapshot a passer-by or an object that I find interesting while walking. Sometimes, I photograph a person from behind. Surprised by my flash, the person often turns back, yet looks unsure if I have photographed him or her. When I take snapshots without talking to my subjects, they are of course surprised and often perplexed. They wonder who I am, and why I photographed them. I must say I am quite rude.”
His motivation?
“The complex expression my subjects wear as a result of thinking various things instantly and simultaneously.”
“I was attracted to the pan focus, as well as the strong contrast between black and white I found in Orson Welles films, which may have influenced my technique,” Mr. Suda said. “And I loved still photographs of the movies. I felt the power from just one image that was able to represent the entire movie.”
He bought his first camera when he was 20. He liked to wander around the streets and stop in a local photo studio, where he admired the owner’s vast photo book collection. Eventually, Mr. Suda’s mother gave him a Rolleiflex, the square format for which he is so famously known today. He decided he was indeed serious about the craft and enrolled in the Tokyo College of Photography, despite his father’s wish for him — as the only son — to carry on the family’s small business.
“I did not always know I wanted to become a photographer, but taking photographs was the only future I could #imagine,” Mr. Suda said.
Things were a little more challenging when he arrived at the college, because he had only a few sessions with the photo studio in Tokyo. “I remember my teacher once said to me sarcastically, ‘You only have a very good camera.’ ”
Still, he got through college and graduated in 1962.
A few years later, he landed a job photographing for an avant-garde theater troupe, with which he worked and traveled through the 1970s before becoming an independent photographer, and contributing photo essays about folk songs and festivals to magazines....
▻http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/09/30/japanese-swordsman-with-a-camera/#
Vietnam war photography
#war #reportage #vietnam #viet_cong #laos #napalm #us_army #army #saigon #photograpy #photojournalism #documentary #'60s #'70s #asia
Choosing Sides and a Camera
Builder Levy grew up thinking the world could be — had to be — a better place. How he would do his part was almost predetermined. He grew up in a family of what would now be called progressives. He called them Mom, Dad and Aunt Dolly. One day, bored, he put on one of his father’s records, “Which Side Are You On?” It entranced him.
“It was very emotional music,” Mr. Levy, 71, recalled. “The melody was piercing. And the words! It was talking about how the world needed to be changed and there was a struggle going on. It was about the Harlan County coal miners strike in the 1930s.”
That childhood epiphany would lead him to spend decades photographing coal country in Appalachia, where generations of men descended into mines, doing backbreaking, hazardous work. And the conditions they encountered above ground — trying to lift their families from poverty through union jobs that often drew the ire of their employers — proved to be just as daunting. But Mr. Levy felt called to do this #documentary work in his free time and summers because he, too, believed in organized labor, being a member for the United Federation of Teachers who worked in New York City’s public schools for 35 years.
▻http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQBHzzGrSPk
#photograpy #Builder_Levy #union #mines #
