What makes a good photograph?

That's the question. There are five answers here - from Julian Stallabrass, Sean O'Hagan, Martin Pugh, Colin Graham and Jim Bell.  All surely well placed to reply. I supposed no women were so situated? That's not the author's fault. Their essays are brief and moderately interesting. I have trouble getting two enthused about undertakings of this sort.

The Grey Line

 At The Guardian, Sean O'Hagan has this nice column on a series of portraits - published as The Grey Line - that Jo Metson Scott has made of Iraq vets who have come out publicly against the war and the policies that sustained it.

From: Sean O'Hagan

Regular readers will know that I periodically write posts complaining about Sean O'Hagan who is photography critic at The Guardian. For my most resent criticism look here - it links to earlier iterations. The other day the following email from Sean appeared in my in box. I post it here without comment, not because there is nothing to discuss, but simply because his reply is - given my grumpiness - so embarrassingly decent and reasonable.

-----Original Message-----
From: Sean O'Hagan [mailto:sean.o'hagan@guardian.co.uk]
Sent: Mon 12/3/2012 5:30 PM
To: Johnson, James
Subject: here I go again...

James,

 I tried to post on your blog, but the screening process defeated me! Glad you are keeping up with my columns even if we "nearly never" converge.

Some further thoughts on your response to my recurring Deutsche Borse complaint. Would you accept that there is a difference between photography and the photographic?  Not just a semantic difference. It would seem to me they are two distinct practices that sometimes lead to a similar end - interesting, illuminating work. How, though, one judges, say, Killip's work against, say, Henna's is beyond me . What are the shared criteria? One goes out into the world with his camera and reports back. One sits in front of a computer screen, trawls Google Street View, appropriates images that have something in common - places where sex workers gather - and then (re) presents the images as his own.   It seems misguided to assert that they are both "photographers". (Also, Henna, like Phil Collins, Thomas Demand and John Stezaker, all of whose work I also like,  could just as easily be up for the Turner prize. Killip would never be considered.)  This is not just a question of terminology, it raises questions about what photography is....what it is for....as well as the art world's late appropriation of photography, and the teaching of the same.

My second point is to do with the curatorial thrust towards work that could be called conceptual, that is work where the idea and/or the process predominates. I know you will say this is the market, but nevertheless it leaves me uneasy that one of the few photography prizes in Britain with any credibility - and the one emanating from the predominant gallery for photography in the UK - seems so uneasy about photography that is about going out into the world with a camera. Paul Graham is particularly good on this - see his essay The Unreasonable Apple.
http://www.paulgrahamarchive.com/writings_by.html

Thirdly, the work itself. I like The Afronauts by Cristina Middel and a lot of Henna's work, but I cannot take seriously the notion that their two books are among those that "significantly contributed to the medium of photography in Europe betwen Oct 2010 and Sept 2011".  Off the top of my head, I could put forward Lise Safarti's She, Lucas Foglia's The Natural Order, Christian Patterson's Redheaded Peckerwood, and, if we are going to talk Google Stree View, Doug Rickard, for Christ's sake. But, hey, maybe that's just down to taste.

Anyway, enough from me. Glad to touch base and. for the record, we do converge quite a bit politically, so keep up the good work on that front. I will continue to read with interest and an ever-thickening skin!

all the best,
Sean O'hagan
ps will be checking out Maynard.

There He Goes Again - Sean O'Hagan on the Dire State of Contemporary Photography

'The Library of Chained Books,' Hereford Cathedral, Hereford, UK, 1992.
Photograph © Chris Killip.

Every year at this time the short list is announced identifying the contenders for the Deutsche Börse photography prize. You can find the 2013 press release here. And with clockwork regularity we are immediately treated to a misguided lament from Sean O'Hagan at The Guardian. You can find this year's installment of his annual complaint here. I have commented on O'Hagan repeatedly here in the past. Our views converge nearly never.

I do think that I finally have figured out why O'Hagan's views so regularly seem misguided. Consider the opening and concluding passages from his comments on the 2013 Deutsche Börse short list:

The only surprise in the just-announced shortlist for the Deutsche Börse photography prize is the name Chris Killip. He is the only documentary photographer on the shortlist and the only one with a substantial body of work stretching back over several decades. He probably won't win. The other three contenders – Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin, Mishka Henner and Cristina de Middel – are contemporary artists who use photography as part of their practice.

[. . .]

Killip is included in the Deutsche Börse shortlist for his series of photographs, What Happened/Great Britain 1970–1990?, which chronicles the decline of working-class industrial communities in the north-east. Does the Deutsche Börse photography prize 2013 shortlist reflect the state of contemporary photography? Probably. Should it be renamed the Deutsche Börse photographic prize? Yes.

I will note that virtually every year the nominating committee puts forward at least one photographer who does relatively straightforward documentary work. O'Hagan's lament is simply mistaken on that count. It is no surprise that this year's short list contains someone like Chris Killip.* That, however, distracts me from our underlying disagreement.

It strikes me that O'Hagan thinks of photography in terms of a pile of images. In that sense he misses the fundamental point (lifted from the inestimable argument of philosopher Patrick Maynard) that photography is a technology for depicting people, places, things and so on; it is a tool for making marks on surfaces, marks that we use to amplify our ability to envision and imagine the world. Having missed this point, O'Hagan goes on and on about why this or that photograph or pile thereof does not "really" count as photography. But he is missing the point in a truly fundamental way. Each of the nominees this year - Killip included - is using photography for some purpose. Failure to grasp the basic pragmatics of photography leads O'Hagan to make his truly dim closing recommendation.
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* To avoid muddying the waters, let me be clear that I quite like Killip's work. Unlike O'Hagan, I simply do not think that his approach to photography exhausts the legitimate range of possibilities.

From the Corners of Africa

At The Guardian, I discovered a story by Sean O'Hagan that usefully links to nearly a handful of photographers from across Africa - Adolphus Opara and Andrew Esiebo (Nigeria),  Michael Tsegaye (Ethiopia),  and Daniel Naude (South Africa).  Of these photographers I am familiar only with Esiebo; I've posted here on his work a couple of times. The work is uniformly impressive not only in its variety but in the way it departs both from the too common tendency to present of the entire continent as a disaster zone and from the temptation to depict Africa as a freak show. A good example of a photographer who, it seems to me, tacks back and forth between those unfortunate approaches is Pieter Hugo.

Tom Hurndall The Only House Left Standing

At The Guardian, Sean O'Hagan has published this essay on The Only House Left Standing a new collection of images and writings by the late Tom Hurndall. The essay is accompanied by this slide show of Hurndall's images. Hurndall, that rare thing - an activist/photographer - was murdered, shot in the head by an Israeli Defense Forces sniper in 2003 as he sought to save two small girls under fire in Rafah, Gaza.

Pieter Hugo

On route to Kigali International Airport, Kigali, Rwanda.
Photograph © Pieter Hugo.

Gatwaro Stadium, Genocide site, Kibuye, Rwanda.
Photograph © Pieter Hugo.

Some years ago I wrote this not-terribly-enthusiastic post comment on South African photographer Pieter Hugo and his work. Earlier in the fall seemed to be getting a fair share of quite positive exposure - from Sean O'Hagan here at The Guardian, for instance, or here at The New York Times Magazine - so I thought I'd see if it might do to reconsider. Hugo has done two major projects recently. One, Permanent Error, documents the environmental and human disaster of a massive dump outside of Accra, Ghana. The second, Rwanda 2004: Vestiges of a Genocide, focuses on just what the title suggests. I suppose there is nothing wrong with either of the two undertakings. Permanent Error seems fairly derivative - I think of Edward Burtynsky's images of computer salvage in the Chinese countryside or of Salgado's images of impoverished scavengers at massive dumps across the developing world. The same might be said of at least parts of the "vestiges" project - think of Nachtwey or Peress or Salgado. But there are some images of Rwanda that are strikingly provocative. These depict the Rwandan countryside, mostly now tangled overgrowth, all seemingly banal, where atrocities took place.

In the end, I have not updated terribly much. Hugo seems more able to resist the 'Africa as freak show' thrust of his earlier work. But he has now turned instead - with only mixed 'success' - to 'Africa as disaster zone.' (Note: in many respects the other photographers I mention above might be accused of falling prey to a similar pre-occupation.) He clearly is a talented photographer. But he is caught in the tropes that dominate photography of the African continent. I wonder if he might some day break out from those constraints. That, in my mind, would warrant some of the superlatives that rain down around him now.

Is Sean O'Hagan a Birther? On the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize

The prize for 2011, according to this release in The Guardian, has gone to self-proclaimed "documentary storyteller" Jim Goldberg of that oh so radical Magnum Agency (here too). Don't get me wrong; this is not a complaint about the judges's decision. The Magnum crowd, Goldberg surely included, are talented and produce lots of provocative work. The point is that the jury this year, like it regularly has done in recent years, has honored a pretty mainstream documentary undertaking. Moreover, they have honored a photographer who works for what arguably is the pre-eminent establishment institution in the field. No news there. I say all this just to remind folks about Sean O'Hagan's plaintive voice which is raised annually asking why, oh why the Deutsche Börse short list is so full of dreaded "conceptual" photography. O'Hagan, of course, is photography critic at The Guardian. You can find his most recent missive on the matter here.

On this topic O'Hagan has begun to remind me of those "birthers" who, despite all evidence to the contrary, insist that Obama was born on some other planet. In other words, his view seems wholly impervious to evidence or argument. And, like the birthers too, O'Hagan is seeking to
police the boundaries of legitimacy. They are obsessed with political legitimacy, he is worried about what is legitimate photography. I've pointed out several times - here and here and here - how far off the mark O'Hagan actually is. In light of this recent decision, we can, I suppose, anticipate a reconsideration in his column any day now?

Government 101

France, bureaucracy, Picardie, 2006. Pascale Hoornaert (b. 1952) works
for eight hours a week as town clerk in Ancienville (population 78), Aisne
department, Pidardie region. She holds the same position in two other
villages nearby, working a total of 31 hours per week. Monthly salary:
1,025 euro (US$ 1,348). Photograph © Jan Banning.

Lee, New Hampshire (population 4,145) Board of Selectmen, January 27, 2003
(L to R) Dwight Barney (Chairman), Joseph Ford, Richard Wellington.
Photograph © Paul Shambroom.

At The Guardian today there is this short notice of quite interesting work by Dutch photographer Jan Banning that consists of portraits of bureaucrats at work in eight different countries ("Bolivia, China, France, India, Liberia, Russia, the United States, and Yemen"). Banning suggests his "photography has a conceptual, typological approach reminding of August Sander’s ‘Menschen des 20 Jahrhunderts’ (‘People of the Twentieth Century’)." Put aside that by declaring the work "conceptual" he risks setting off yet another round of whining by Guardian photography critic Sean O'Hagan.* What strikes me about these portraits is less the comparison to Sander, than the series called "Meetings" that American photographer Paul Shambroom did several years ago. Shambroom toured the U.S. photographing local government 'in action.'

In Banning's images it is interesting to note the context; nearly all of the officials work under the watchful eye of the heroic or the powerful (Gandhi, Mao, Putin ...), often surrounded by the trappings of legitimacy. It is interesting to contrast these banal scenarios with the many images of disgruntled citizens manning the barricades or with photos of famous elected officials. Politics only appears glamorous.
____________
* For my previous (mostly) dissents from O'Hagan's various complaints look here.

Like a Thief's Dream

At The Guardian today Sean O'Hagan has this nice (sort of) review of Danny Lyon's (not-exactly-photography) book Like a Thief's Dream.* I have posted a couple of time here on Lyon and his work. Likewise, I posted here a number of times - mostly critically - on O'Hagan. Not this time. This sounds like a book worth tracking down. You can find an interview with Lyon on the book here.
__________
* Danny Lyon. Like a Thief's Dream. New York: powerHouse, 2007.

Does Sean O'Hagan Really Get Photography?

It seems to have become an annual event. The short list for the Deutsche Börse Prize is announced. And then Sean O'Hagan promptly writes a column in The Guardian complaining that the jury seems obsessed with "conceptual" photography at the expense of ... well, of things that O'Hagan seems to like better. And, on that matter, O'Hagan seems remarkably self assured. What he prefers, he tells us, is "straight photography – photography without pretensions." No examples of what he means. No sense of which of the now canonical figures in the history of photography would be drummed out of any possible consideration for the Prize. Just a broad complaint. In any case, here is his column from this week. Here and here are two posts, with relevant links, I wrote in response to last year's installment.

Nothing much has changed in my assessment this year. But instead of simply repeating myself, I'd ask you to consider a hypothetical. According to the Prize web page, the Deutsche Börse Prize is awarded "a contemporary photographer of any nationality, who has made the most significant contribution (exhibition or publication) to the medium of photography in Europe in the previous year." When, as will soon enough be the case, Sebastião Salgado completes his Genesis project (which, by the way, The Guardian has been previewing in installments) and publishes the planned for book and mounts the planned for exhibition, will he be eligible for the Deutsche Börse short list by O'Hagan's lights? It is not just that Salgado's work has "pretensions," but it arguably also calls into question in various ways naïve views of photography and its uses. I am not sure how, given his ongoing complaints, O'Hagan could not object if the jury included Salgado for the shortlist. But I am then not at all sure who he might deem worthy of consideration.

Guardian Photo Critic Misses the Importance of Black & White

Green Warehouse, 1978. Photograph © William Christenberry.

Palmist Building (Winter), Havana Junction, Alabama 1981.

Photograph © William Christenberry.

Sean O'Hagan is at it again. The photo critic at The Guardian has this review of a newly opened exhibition entitled "Myth, Manners and Memory: Photographers of the American South" (slide show here) in which he discusses work by Walker Evans, William Christenberry, Eudora Welty, William Eggleston, Carrie Mae Weems, Susan Lipper and Alec Soth. Fine photographers all. But the following statement brought me up short:

"Weems, the most political photographer here, confronts the turbulent racist history of the American south, placing herself in a series of resonant locations and contrasting the barbarity of slavery with the refined social etiquette that held sway among rich plantation families."

Oh, and did he forget to mention Weems is the only African-American photographer he planned to to discuss? So, the fact that Weems makes race evident (meaning she explicitly makes it central to her work), while all the white folks (here not just the photographers, but apparently, the curators of this show) apparently "don't" do so is political? Why is it not political that the white photographers (mostly) focus elsewhere - or are least seen to do so? I'd put the stress on this last phrase because they don't really.

In Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, for instance, James Agee (Evans's co-conspirator) explicitly talks about why they are not going to address race - and then offers pointed vignettes demonstrating the cruelty of race relations in Alabama circa 1937. And, after all, do the white folks in Lipper's "Grapevine series" not play a role in, or suffer the consequences of, the peculiar way race works and has worked in the South?* Do they have no race? What about this image by Alec Soth? Does it plumb racial themes?

Jimmie's Apartment , Memphis, Tennessee, 2002.
Photograph © Alec Soth.

Who is that in the photos clipped and taped to the back of the closet door? Do those images contrast with the shabby apartment in any way? And did Memphis figure in "the turbulent racial history of the American south"? Is it, perhaps, a "resonant location"? By and large, I find O'Hagan's photo criticism wacky - and I don't mean that in a good way. I've said that several times here before. In this instance, I wonder what he was thinking when he looked at this exhibition.
__________
* And, of course, race is an American problem, not one just for the South or just for blacks.

O'Hagan on Szarkowski

Photograph © Richard Avedon.

John Szarkowski died just over three years ago. I noted his passing here. Today The Guardian has run this appropriately appreciative essay by Sean O'Hagan on the late photographer/curator/advocate. As often as not, I find O'Hagan's offerings at The Guardian to be wildly off the mark, verging sometimes on being literally incomprehensible. Not this time. I think his basic point - that Szarkowski may well have been the most influential figure in 20th century photography - is plausible. Even if that claim is not entirely persuasive, it nonetheless points us in useful directions - away from photographs and toward photography and how different people use it for different purposes. (One obvious, ironic implication is that we need to be less pre-occupied with photographers.) In the 1960s Szarkowski integrated the art world, making photography a respectable medium in that domain. Now, I wish he had been less successful, because photography is too important to be placed in the hands of museums and galleries and curators and art historians. But the tale of how photography became an art form is worth recalling just insofar as it was an 'achievement', an artifact of a concerted campaign.

Self-Censorship and the Uses of Discomfort

From: Immediate Family. Photograph © Sally Mann.

In The Guardian today this a review by Sean O'Hagan of a newly opened retrospective of work by Sally Mann. (You can find an earlier notice here.) Here are two interesting passages. The first addresses an early series of images Mann calls Immediate Family.

"It featured black and white images of her three children, often naked or partially naked, as they played and posed in the woods, lakes and rivers around her home in rural Virginia.

The images, some of which are on show here in the 59-year-old American's first British retrospective, are by turns beautiful, disturbing and unashamedly sensual. Perhaps more problematically, all of them are, to one degree or another, staged. [. . .]

"Many of these pictures are intimate, some fictions and some fantastic," Mann said of the series, "but most are ordinary things that every mother has seen." Well, maybe, but not every mother has restaged and then rendered them in such a darkly beautiful and ambiguous ways. Intriguingly, none of the more outrightly provocative photographs have found their way into this show, which is an edited version of a bigger retrospective exhibition that has already toured Europe. Whether this is down to lack of space or fear of public – or tabloid – outcry is anyone's guess, but one could argue that something has been lost in this excised version of the series: the sense that Mann is walking a tightrope between reflecting childhood sexuality in all its lack of self-consciousness and staging it in often dramatic reconstructions. This, in effect, is where the true power of her art lies.

I will give O'Hagan the benefit of the doubt here and assume he is simply being ironic. Of course the reason the "more provocative" images in the series are not being displayed is that the gallery and/or photographer anticipated public complaints. So, instead of censorship we get anticipatory reaction. If I don't show you the provocative images I won't have to worry about being forced to remove them from the show. In other words, the censors have done their work effectively before the exhibition is even mounted.

Here is the second passage, this one a typically hand-wringing worry about what we have a "right" to show or to see.

The other, even more disturbing series on show here is entitled What Remains (2000–04), which approaches death and dying head on. Mann gained access to the University of Tennessee Forensic Anthropology Centre, a place that would not seem out of place in one of Chuck Palahniuk's darkly humorous short stories. Here, bodies that have been donated to science are left outside in the woods so that the process of organic decomposition can be studied by forensic scientists.

Mann's close-up images of these rotting corpses are not for the faint of heart, but, again, the prints – made by an old-fashioned chemical method called the wet-plate collodion process – have a Victorian feel that is almost painterly. One does, though, feel like a voyeur when looking at images such as this. They raise the ethical question of whether a person's decision to donate their body to science gives scientists the right, at a later date, to grant Mann permission to photograph that – decomposing – body. (And whether the result should then be displayed as art. )

From there O'Hagan quickly turns to the safe subject of photographic technique. Apparently it would be OK for a crime novelist to describe rotting corpses. And it is OK for forensic scientists to study them. And it is OK for us to watch the various CSI programs on television. But Mann's images (stylized as they are) are somehow beyond the pale?

Perhaps, I am wrong, but is O'Hagan here hinting that we ought to self-censor more than we already do? It is difficult to tell since he lauds Mann for her creativity and courage and seems to esteem her work despite "all the uncomfortable issues it raises." Doesn't Mann's work stand as an indictment of censorship and self-censorship? Doesn't it suggest that what we need is to see what photographers show and then engage in critical argument about where the bounds of taste and morality are located? Then photography can contribute in useful ways to self- and social and political exploration and discovery.

Impossible Polaroids

Today The Guardian is running this story about a company trying to maintain production of Polaroid film. As I've noted several times here, I don't get the Polaroid thing. And I am not terribly concerned with the technical aspects of photography (other than insisting that it is a technology that we use to do things with and, as such, - trivially - has crucial technical dimensions). In any case, Sean O'Hagan writes:

"Given the right kind of marketing . . . the . . . film will probably succeed, but the bigger question underlying all this techo-primitive innovation is, why do so many of us long for the Polaroid in all its clunky, clumsy, grainy old-fashionedness?"

Good question. Unfortunately, I find his answer incomprehensible (literally, I don't know what he means):

"The answer, I suspect, is to do with the kind of demands a Polaroid camera makes on the user, which are manifestly not the same kind of demands a digital camera makes. One is big, hands-on, clunky, somewhat difficult and, even in an expert's hands, can be hit-and-miss. The other is streamlined, compact, easy, and relatively fail-safe in terms of the end results – you shoot and delete until you capture the image you want. One is somehow "authentic", the other is arguably even more so but does not carry the weight of the relatively recent, thus overly fetishised, pop-cultural past.

Maybe it's me, but this last part (especially) seems like gibberish. It amounts to saying that we now have nostalgia for a technology that we used to like because it had a certain nostalgic character. Huh? That said, if Patti Smith thinks Polaroids are OK, who am I to argue?

Prizes, Critics, and the Uses of Photography

Fire-Escape (from the series “House on Myasnitskaya”), 1925.
Photograph © Alexander Rodchenko.

French photographer Sophie Ristelhueber has won the 2010 Deutsche Börse prize. You can find a report here. This has prompted Sean O'Hagan, photo critic at The Guardian, to renew his lament that “the Deutsche Börse judges have shown a distinct bias for a certain kind of conceptual art photography that might be better suited to the Turner prize shortlist.” The problem with this attempted gerrymander is three-fold, at least.

First, as I mentioned in this earlier post, responding to an earlier iteration of his complaint, O'Hagan doesn't seem to grasp what actually has happened in the selection process over the past few years. To save you having to follow the link, I pointed out that "Robert Adams won the prize in 2005. Esko Männikkö was picked in 2008 from a largely traditionalist short list. And last year the list was similarly recognizable." Conceptual Art? Not hardly.

Second, in the same post I suggested that O'Hagan seems to have a naive view of the purpose of prizes - they are, on my view, largely about agenda setting in one or another way. He seems to think there is some nefarious move afoot to subvert the claims of "traditional photographs." In a remarkably un-self-reflective way he fails to notice that his own complaints are attempts at agenda setting of just the sort for which he criticizes the judging panel. Would he, for instance, suggest that, say, Rodchenko or Man Ray not have been plausible candidates for a prize of this sort?

Finally, if we think more about photography as a way of doing things - say, following Patrick Maynard, as a technology that allows us to mark surfaces and thereby enhance and amplify our ability to see or imagine - then the defensiveness O'Hagan evinces is misplaced. There is no need to define the remit of a photography prize conservatively as being bestowed on someone for creating pile of photographs. We might instead simply see the point of such awards - at least in part - as recognizing creative uses of photographic technology for whatever the purpose might be.

The Ethics of Representation - A Follow-Up

As a follow up to this post yesterday, and to a couple of others from earlier in the year, I want to recommend this short video interview with Don McCullin at The Guardian. I thank Tim Atherton for bringing it to my attention. In general, McCullin's reflections - the straightforward moral seriousness with which he speaks of his life and experience - really do challenge those who treat photographers of war and disaster as ethically defective. More specifically, it makes me wonder whether Sean O'Hagan recalls having spoken with McCullin a month or so ago. If so, I am not sure how he could have written the column I criticized yesterday. It is all a bit mystifying.

On the Ethics of Representation: Missing the Point Entirely

From: Stoned to Death, Somalia, 13 December.
Photograph © Farah Abdi Warsameh/AP.

Today The Guardian carried this column by Sean O'Hagan on the morality of photojournalism. His ruminations were prompted by this series of photographs by Farah Abdi Warsameh that won 2nd place in the "general news" category at the World Press Photo awards. (I've lifted one of the photos above.) The photos show a man being buried up to his chest and then stoned to death by a group of masked men. The man who was killed (should we say executed?) was named Mohamed Abukar Ibrahim and he had confessed to committing adultery. The judgment and execution, according to news reports, were carried out by an armed fundamentalist rebel group called Hizbul Islam. The rebels forced hundreds of local residents to watch the performance. I say performance because this is clearly political theater - horrific, no doubt - but no less theatrical for that. The rebels - who are party to a proxy war in the failed state known as Somalia - are trying to pacify the locals by terrorizing them.

O'Hagan engages in a hand-wringing exercise about the ethics of the photographer and the voyeurism of 'we' the viewers. In the process he, predictably enough, invokes that arch-moralist Susan Sontag. Against that background he raises a set of absurd worries about consent and communication between the doomed man and the photographer. I find this stunning. This is, after all a war zone; and it is entirely likely that the photographer was himself not given any choice than to record the events. This was theater after all. And repugnant as this execution is, it is one part of a broader political and military conflict. In closing, O'Hagan quotes Sontag:

"There is shame as well as shock in looking at the close-up of a real horror. Perhaps the only people with the right to look at images of suffering of this extreme order are those who could do something to alleviate it … or those who could learn from it. The rest of us are voyeurs, whether or not we mean to be."

This is Sontag at her most ridiculous. But even by these standards there is a case to be made for publishing these images. Might it not be possible that viewers "could learn from" them? We could learn that this was a terrorist act. We could learn that the 'government' against whom the rebel groups is, in fact, rebelling is sponsored by the U.S. and other western nations. We could learn how quickly many of our fellow citizens were willing to use these images to condemn "Islam." I'm sure O'Hagan could come up others if only he'd stop wringing his hands and ask questions.

Taking Offense (3) ~ Dash Snow, Again

Today The Guardian has run this essay and slide show exploring the intersection of two things I find (at best) mystifying: Polaroids and tortured artists who (abetted by various perpetrators and hangers on) squander their lives in paroxysms of self-pity. Call me wholly unsympathetic. The "work" is banal and simply confirms my view that Dash Snow was a poseur with a trust fund, nothing more. In The Guardian piece Sean O'Hagan seems perplexed:

"It is one of the defining tropes of contemporary pop culture that everything illicit should be paraded rather than engaged in discreetly. Everything is not just permitted, but must be photographed, filmed, and posted on the web. In this context, Dash Snow is very much an artist of our times.

Often his photographs seem to celebrate drabness and/or clutter. Grimy bathrooms and dishevelled living rooms abound. The activity he records tends towards the puerile of the criminal, or both. There are snapshots of kids shooting up, kids snorting coke (in one instance on a flaccid penis), kids puking, tagging, flashing and falling down. Blood, nudity, graffiti and cocaine are the recurring themes, as well as Dash himself, the unsteady centre around whom all this determined dissolution is played out. There is desperation in all this too, but it is the now-familiar desperation of the self-indulgently confessional: Nan Goldin without the brilliant composition, the heightened colour or the underlying poetic sadness.

[. . .]

The question is, though, do they amount to anything else? Do they approach the mystery and mastery of art?"

Are you kidding me? If O'Hagan can't answer that question he's got no business hanging out his critic shingle.

Hey! Look At ME! (Part 3 or 4)

At The Guardian today is an article and accompanying slide show in which Sean O'Hagan comments on the opening in London of a new exhibition of work by Elinor Carucci. O'Hagan worries that Carucci's work is too focused on her children and that that might be exploitative. Ultimately, he concludes that the work is "responsible." Actually, I think this hand-wringing is pretty wide of the mark. The problem with Carucci's work, as I have said here regularly [1] [2] [3], is that it is so self-absorbed as to be wholly uninteresting. What O'Hagan misses is that the subject of each of Carucci's images is the photographer herself. This is true even where she herself doesn't appear in the photograph. In short, she treats her children (and parents and husband) as accessories to her own narcissism. As if to punctuate this interpretation, here is the final sentence of The Guardian review: "And, as Carucci acknowledged on Woman's Hour, the really intriguing question here is not just what the children will think of the work when they grow up, but what they will think of their mother." That is why Carucci's work is objectionable.