Gordon Parks ~ The 'Segregation Series'

At The New York Times, the Lens blog has this set of "civil rights" images by Gordon Parks. These are images that are recently discovered and quite powerful. In this earlier post I wrote the following, partially quoting Parks:

According to the FSA web page Parks once explained to an interviewer that he could not simply depict racists "and say, 'This is a bigot,' because bigots have a way of looking just like everybody else. What the camera had to do was expose the evils of racism, the evils of poverty, the discrimination and the bigotry, by showing the people who suffered most under it." So, unlike [Larry] Towell who is claiming that we should not depict the powerful, Parks is claiming that is is difficult, if not impossible to do so. Hence, for Parks, the need to focus on those who endure racism and its indiginties rather than on those who engage in racist actions and practices.

Just so. These images carry that recognition into practice.

Representing Genocide: Intimate Enemy

"Great numbers . . . cause particular difficulties for our imagination. As if we observe humanity in a way that is not permitted for humans, and allowed only to gods. ... In other words, they can think in categories of masses. A million people more, a million less - what difference does it make?" ~ Czeslaw Milosz

Among my abiding interests in thinking about photography and its uses are how it effects audiences, and especially how photographers might use their work to prompt political reflection on any of a range of large-scale catastrophes that, to a considerable if shifting extent, are humanly created ~ war, famine, poverty, environmental degradation, epidemic, genocide, displaced populations, and so forth. The difficulty is a species of the one Milosz articulates ~ how to use photography as an instrument to help us grasp - to imagine, to conceptualize - any such immense event and the innumerable human suffering it creates.

A recent book, an extremely innovative collaboration between political scientist Scott Straus and photographer Robert Lyons, offers a provocative approach to this problem. The book is Intimate Enemy: Images and Voices of the Rwandan Genocide (Zone Books/MIT Press, 2006). It consists of introductory comments, first by Straus, then more briefly by Lyons, followed by fifty-plus pages of transcribed interviews Straus conducted with men convicted of having participated in the genocide, and finally, a series of photographs by Lyons.

Straus states the aim of Intimate Enemy quite nicely: "[T]he book is an experiment in trying to see and present details of the genocide in ways that are not already interpreted and categorized and do not sensationalize and shock. In so doing, the book aims to help readers confront unimaginable violence in a manner that stimulates, rather than stifles, reflection." The stress here on experiment seems to me just right. And two features of the experiment strike me as especially innovative. The first is how Lyons focuses the photographs themselves; the second concerns the oblique interaction between text and images.

Often, when photographers depict the sorts of catastrophe I just mentioned they depict individuals or groups enduring suffering and hardship. This practice has at least two sorts of unfortunate effects. First, it regularly generates resentment in viewers, or at least in critics who write about their reactions. Second, it raises the expectation that viewers should have compassion for those who are suffering. While I will not argue the case here, it seems to me that (i) these responses are themselves intimately related insofar as viewers often resent demands on their compassion when the latter has no purchase (due to distance, time or the scale of events) and (ii) both resentment and compassion are deeply and unavoidably depoliticizing.

Lyons approaches the task of representing the Rwandan genocide from a different trajectory. Intimate Enemy contains seventy-seven of his images made between 1998 and 2001. Nearly all of these are portraits. While some of these are of survivors, the bulk are of suspected or convicted génocidaires, that is, of individuals (nearly all men) who at the time were alleged to have participated in the killing of Tutsis or who had actually been found guilty in court of so doing. Lyons presents his portraits without captions or accompanying information (these follow in a 'List of Plates'). In short, he places a burden on the viewer to set her preconceptions aside when first confronting the portraits.

"Through stark black-and-white portraiture, with limited depth of field and a background obscure in detail but present nonetheless, I wanted to make the audience enter a more intimate space, ask questions, experience directly the ambiguous physical resemblances between génocidaire and survivor."

This is not simply an ex post adjustment; it was a conscious aesthetic strategy. And the invitation Lyons extends hardly is a naive one. As he wrote in his field-notes: "This is the most documentary project I have ever attempted. I am allowing the images little poetic and emotional space; viewers will have little room for escape." He sought to prompt, perhaps even compel viewers to confront ambiguity and the ethical questions it raises. In the process, I think, he deflates the moralism that fuels the dynamic, too familiar among those who view the "pain of others," in which compassion, thwarted or misplaced, fuels resentment or despair.

Exactly two years ago I wrote this post on the predicament of trying to use photography to depict power as well as powerlessness. In that post I tried to connect observations made by several photographers - Larry Towell, Gordon Parks, Sebastião Salgado - as well as demands articulated by some critics. Lyons, it seems to me, is not just depicting power. His portraits of Rwandan génocidaires in fact call into question the sharp distinction between power and powerlessness. He thereby allows us to bracket enough of the horror and repulsion to ask, 'how did these otherwise unexceptional men and women undertake such exceptionally violent and hateful acts?". The point is not to excuse, but to understand.

Moralism is an invitation to demonize, all the better to condemn. It seems to me that the space of ambiguity that Lyons seeks to construct subverts moralism by rendering the judgment on which it trades much less certain. The narratives that Scott Straus juxtaposes to Robert Lyons' photographs abet that ambiguity. These narratives are transcribed first person accounts of the genocide by some of those those who perpetrated it. Not only are they anonymous (for reasons Straus explains), but they are not the words of the individuals portrayed in Lyons's photographs. Straus and Lyons worked in parallel rather than tandem in Rwanda. Like Lyons, Strauss too worked in prisons. The narratives he supplies here are excerpts of interviews he conducted in 2002 with convicted génocidaires.

The effect Straus and Lyons create in Intimate Enemy is to reverse the conventional relationship between text and photographs. Here the texts illustrate the photographs. In combination, the texts and the images they illustrate, ultimately call into question the grounds of our judgment. They challenge our propensity to dehumanize the perpetrators of violence - as "monsters" or "psychopaths" or as "evil" - and focus on their actions and what prompted them. Perhaps more importantly, the disjunction between text and images generates a creative tension which, in turn, allows us to keep in view both the individual perpetrator and the grisly collective action to which he contributed. By seeing that context we are less able to reduce the agent to his or her actions. This is important because only once we understand the latter can we hope to formulate a just, potentially constructive response political response to political crimes. Ironically, perhaps, Lyons and Straus represent the Rwandan genocide by humanizing it. In so doing they help us to ponder if not entirely grasp what initially seems unimaginable. That is an incredibly important step.

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Background: Some time ago I received an email from Jörg Colberg who, despite the fact that we've never actually met, I consider a friend and whose good sense I trust and good humor I respect. Jörg explained that he was trying to put me in touch with another friend of his, photographer Robert Lyons. At this point, Robert and I have had intermittent email contact, but still have not met. In the process of tracking down some of Robert's work, of course, I also inevitably encountered his collaborator Scott Straus. Although both Scott and I are political scientists we have not met either. Such are the virtues of the internet! In any case, that is the background to this post.

Isaac Hayes (1942-2008)

Singer and songwriter Issac Hayes has died; the story from The New York Times is here. For those too old to watch South Park, Hayes may be best known for singing the theme from Shaft, which was, of course, directed by the multi-talented Gordon Parks.

Photographic Conventions & Their Vicissitudes: The Irony of "Vividness"

In a paper - the long, early version of which you can find in the sidebar - I argue that photographers and critics are misguided insofar as they typically suppose that the aim of documentary projects detailing the suffering of others is properly to induce compassion in viewers. This supposition, I believe, tacitly sustains (or perhaps is sustained by) the documentary convention of focusing on individuals precisely because compassion involves vicariously taking on the pain of some specific other individual. In th epaper I also argue, following Hannah Arendt, that this supposition is de-politicizing in specific ways.

I don’t want to rehearse my entire argument here. I want instead to take another tack. Let’s say that Arendt is wrong, that her arguments about compassion are flawed in one or another way. That would mean that my argument would be flawed too. I do not think this is so, but let’s entertaian the possibility just for the sake of argument. I want to suggest that the conventions of documentary photographers would still be misguided in more or less purely practical terms.

Let’s start with the purposes of documentary. Artist and critic Martha Rosler remarks that “documentary engages with structural injustices, often to provoke active responses.” That seems to me to be an unobjectionable characterization.

Next, is the issue of photographic conventions. I think it also is unobjectionable to claim that documentary images tend to be preoccupied with individuals. Consider the well known images I've for this post (credits at bottom). I did not choose them at random, but they are exemplars nonetheless.

So, it seems to me that there is some tension at work here between the notion that documentary grapples with “structural injustices” which are by definition general or aggregate and this conventional preoccupation with individuals and their particular travails. How does this tension work itself out in the process of inducing “active responses” among viewers?

Each of these photographs, it seems, is meant to capture some general phenomenon - poverty, displacement, war, labor, racism, sexism - but to do so by focusing on the predicament or experience of a particular individual. In so doing, each photographer is hoping to induce a response in her or his audience.

Among students of the media this strategy is said to be an effort to exploit "vividness." This essentially amounts to an effort to depict general patterns or phenemona through the prism of individual or personal experience. By contrast a "pallid" representation would rely on e.g., statistical information to convey the pattern or phenomenon. In any case, I have been reading an experimental study of the impact of news media and, it turns out, that "vivid" presentations of such aggregate level phenomena as unemplyment or environmental degradation have little or no effect on the ways audiences react to problems. As the authors note: "Human despair and devastation poignantly depicted, did not generally add to viewers' sense of national priorities." Later they reiterate this claim: "stories of personal suffering, pwerfully depicted, generally did not raise the priority viewers assigned to target problems."

The evidence from this experimental study clearly is not definitive (due minimally, e.g., to standard worries about external validity); but it is suggestive. And it suggests, I think, that perhaps the conventions of "documentary" photography, conventions that have been embraced by, for example, news media and humanitarian organizations seeking to raise awareness of human suffering and funds to alleviate it, may well be counterproductive. Vivid presentations may, by turning widespread social-political-economic problems into stories of melodramatic human interest, actually undermine the capacity of individuals and organizations to take remedial or preventive action.

[Photographs © Walker Evans, Luc Delahaye, Dorothea Lange, Susan Meiselas, James Nachtwey, Roy DeCarava, and Gordon Parks respectively.]

FSA:The American Vision

I was looking through this new book - Gilles Mora and Beverly Brannan. FSA:The American Vision (New York, Harry Abrams) - at the bookstore yesterday. It is a nice, fairly comprehensive compendium with many lesser known images by a large number of well known photographers, including Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, Russell Lee, Ben Shahn, Carl Mydans, Arthur Rothstein, Marion Post Walcott, and Gordon Parks. I also noticed that you can buy it for $53 US from Amazon ,while it is listed at $85 US on the cover. So, I may decide to use Amazon rather than the local bookseller on this one. Or maybe I will simply bite the bullett.


One of the interesting things about the FSA photographers, as I have mentioned here several times before [1] [2] [3] [4], is the predicament they raise in their work of relating to government agencies and assignments and agendas. I admire the work of many of the photographers associated with the FSA, but the admiration is hardly unambivalent. What if their liberal-left leaning politics were different? Would I still admire the images they made? What if their politics had been more transparent? What if their politics had been more consistently leftist rather than liberal? (If only we had something like New Deal Liberalism as a live option today! And if only that liberalism had been less thoroughly anti-socialist.)

The Predicament of Trying to Depict the Powerful as well as the Powerless

Here is a remark from Larry Towell that I noted a few posts back:

"I guess what I'm trying to do is explore power. Look at power, what it has done to the world, and particularly its victims. I don't think we should be photographing the politicians. I don't think we should be listening to them.

I think we should be looking at the victims of those policies, and having a camera around your neck gives you that freedom. That excuse. The only thing really worth documenting is the civilian victims."

I found the comment at the page promoting this film "Beyond Words: Photographers of War" even though Towell is clearly not inarticulate about his work. But I think that things are not as simple as he makes out. His comment reminded me of a remark that Gordon Parks made about photographing racists and bigots. According to the FSA web page. Parks once explained to an interviewer that he could not simply depict racists "and say, 'This is a bigot,' because bigots have a way of looking just like everybody else. What the camera had to do was expose the evils of racism, the evils of poverty, the discrimination and the bigotry, by showing the people who suffered most under it." So, unlike Towell who is claiming that we should not depict the powerful, Parks is claiming that is is difficult, if not impossible to do so. Hence, for Parks, the need to focus on those who endure racism and its indiginties rather than on those who engage in racist actions and practices.

Yet there nevertheless is pressure to proceed otherwise. For instance, I recall reading the transcript of an event that addressed Sebastiao Salgado's Migrations project held at UC Berkeley in 2003. The proceedings include an interiew with Salgado, a lecture he delivered, and a set of three "responses" to his words and pictures from members of the Berkeley faculty (an art historian, an anthropologist, and a geographer). Interestingly, each of the respondants - T.J. Clark (pages 25-6) , Nancy Schlepper-Hughes (page 30) and Michael Watts (pages 41-2). - raises the issue of whether, and if so how, photographers might shift their focus from the powerless to the powerful, from the oppressed to the oppressors, from the victims to thosse who occupy the social and political structures that victimize. In short, each of the respondants asks photographers to do what Towell thinks they should not do anad Parks intimates they cannot do.

Gordon Parks (1912-2006)

Listening to npr on my drive to work this morning I learned that Gordon Parks died yesterday at age 93. As a photographer, Parks is maybe most famous for this 1942 portrait of Ella Watson taken as part of a project for an, initially at least, very reluctant FSA.

Watson was at the time a cleaning woman in the building that housed the FSA offices in Washington. Parks, of course, went on to have a distinguished photographic career. And this was merely the begininng for a man who also became an accomplished film director (e..g., the original Shaft) , fiction writer and composer.