Unrequited Love? Simon Norfolk in Afghanistan

Bamyan Province, Afghanistan © Simon Norfolk

I've lifted this image from a series - A Love Letter to Afghanistan - by Simon Norfolk that popped up on my news feed today. These are unsurprisingly stunning photographs by a truly terrific, engaged photographer. What is slightly surprising is that the photo essay appears here at The Financial Times.

Contrasts

This past week The New York Times Magazine included this photo essay (above) from northern Norway by Simon Norfolk and this one (below) from Brazil by Massimo Vitali. Each photographer is pretty remarkable - in the sense of having a distinctive eye on the world - and the contrast in substantive preoccupations is pretty interesting.

Simon Norfolk on Politics & Photography

"I can't stand the kind of news photography that's coming out of Afghanistan - photographs of 'our boys' bravely defending our interests despite the fact they don't have enough helicopters. It makes me really angry. The thing I love about photography is that it gets me out of the house and looking at the world, but that's the thing I hate about it too - it makes me look at the surface of things and how they look.

I couldn't give a stuff about how things look, I want to know why things happen, and why they happen again and again. The photojournalists who go to Afghanistan may be very brave, and their photographs may be very good, but I think their politics suck." ~ Simon Norfolk

Afghan Police being trained by US Marines, Camp Leatherneck (2010).
Photograph © Simon Norfolk.

Norfolk is right to want to know why things happen and why they recur. And he is right to think that photography can help us ponder such questions. But, if that is so, he is merely being polite about the other photographers he mentions. Insofar as their work remains at the surface, it cannot be "very good," not for contingent political reasons but for basic photographic ones. In other words, if it simply tells us how things look, it fails in the basic task of depicting reality and so of inducing reflection. Photographs that remain on the surface may illustrate, but they will not amplify our ability to see and imagine and so dampen our political capacities. This is not a contingent matter but is central to the task of depicting.

Norfolk won third place in the "portrait" category of the World Press Photo competition for his series Burke + Norfolk: Photographs from the War in Afghanistan by John Burke & Simon Norfolk in which, as he points out in the same interview from which the above remarks are drawn, he is "trying to make people think about British Imperialism." He pursues this by contrasting his own images of Afghanistan with images made of the same country by the 19th Century British photographer John Burke. A quick look at Norfolk's larger project will make one wonder how, at least absent Procrustean measures, it falls within the "portrait" genre. This is terrific work, giving revised meaning to the notion of collaboration.

Simon Norfolk on Art & Politics

Image © Simon Norfolk. "BlueGene/L, the world's biggest computer, at
Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, California, USA. It is the size of 132,000
PCs. It is used to design and maintain America's nuclear weapons." On
his website, Norfolk notes that the computer is used for "modeling physics
inside an exploding nuclear warhead."
(Caption from BLDGBLOG Interview cited below.)

I have posted on Simon Norfolk and his work here a handful of times, but never at any great length. Several years ago, he did this interesting interview with with Geoff Manaugh at BLDGBLOG and tonight I was re-reading it because I am going to use some of Norfolk's work in a presentation I am giving in a couple of weeks. I thought I'd offer the following passage as part of my ongoing campaign against the tendency to try to sequester art generally, and photography in particular, from politics.

BLDGBLOG: It's interesting that, on your website, it says you gave up photojournalism to move into landscape photography – yet that seems to have coincided with a more explicit politicization of your work.

Norfolk: Yeah, absolutely.

BLDGBLOG: So your projects are even more political now – yet they’re intended as landscape photography?

Norfolk: I mean, I didn't get fed up with the subjects of photojournalism – I got fed up with the clichés of photojournalism, with its inability to talk about anything complicated. Photojournalism is a great tool for telling very simple stories: Here's a good guy. Here's a bad guy. It's awful. But the stuff I was dealing with was getting more and more complicated – it felt like I was trying to play Rachmaninoff in boxing gloves. Incidentally, it's also a tool that was invented in the 1940s – black and white film, the Leica, the 35mm lens, with a 1940s narrative. So, if I'm trying to do photojournalism, I'm meant to use a tool that was invented by Robert Capa?

I needed to find a more complicated way to draw people in. I'm not down on photojournalism – it does what it does very well – but its job is to offer all its information instantly and immediately. I thought the fact that this place in Afghanistan – this ruin – actually looks a little like Stonehenge: that interested me. I wanted to highlight that. I want you to be drawn to that. I want you to stay in my sphere of influence for slightly longer, so that you can think about these things. And taking pictures in 35mm doesn't do it.

So the content of photojournalism interests me enormously, it's just the tools that I had to work with I thought were terrible. I had to find a different syntax to negotiate those things.

BLDGBLOG: Ironically, though, your photos haven't really been accepted by the art world yet – because of your subject matter.

Norfolk: Well, I cannot fucking believe that I go into an art gallery and people want to piss their lives away not talking about what’s going on in the world. Have they not switched on their TV and seen what's going on out there? They have nothing to say about that? They'd rather look at pictures of their girlfriend's bottom, or at their top ten favorite arseholes? Switch on the telly and see what's going on in our world – particularly these last five years. If you've got nothing to say about that, then I wonder what the fucking hell you're doing.

The idea of producing work which is only of interest to a couple of thousand people who have got art history degrees... The point of the world is to change it, and you can't change it if you're just talking about Roland Barthes or structuralist-semiotic gobbledygook that only a few thousand people can understand, let alone argue about.

That's not why I take these photographs.

BLDGBLOG: Clearly you're not taking these pictures – of military supercomputers and remote island surveillance systems – as a way to celebrate the future of warfare?

Norfolk: No, no. No.

BLDGBLOG: But what, then, is your relationship to what you describe, in one of your texts, as the Romantic, 18th-century nationalistic use of images, where ruined castles and army forts and so on were actually meant as a kind of homage to imperial valor? Are you taking pictures of military sites as a kind of ironic comment on nationalistic celebrations of global power?

Norfolk: No, I don't think it's ironic. I think what I'm in favor of is clarity. What annoys me about those artists is that there were things they actually stood for, but what seems to have happened is their ideas have been laundered. They've been infantilized. I don't mind what the guy stands for – I just want to know what the guy stands for. I don’t want some low-fat version of his politics. And unless you can really understand what the fellow stood for, how can you comprehend what his ideas were about? How can you judge whether his paintings were good paintings or rubbish paintings?

The thing that pisses me off about so much modern art is that it carries no politics – it has nothing that it wants to say about the world. Without that passion, that political drive, to a piece of work – and I mean politics here very broadly – how can you ever really evaluate it? At the end of the day, I don't think my politics are very popular right now, but what I would like to hear is what are your politics? Because if you're not going to tell me, how can we ever possibly have an argument about whether you're a clever person, your work is great, your work is crap, your art is profound, your art is trivial...?

For instance, I'm doing a lot of work these days on Paul Strand – and Paul Strand is a much more interesting photographer than most people think he is. The keepers of the flame, the big organizations that hold the platinum-plating prints and his photogravures, or whatever – these big museums, particularly in America, that have large collections – they don't want the world to know that Strand was a major Marxist, his entire life. He was a massive Stalinist. That just dirties the waters in terms of knowing who Strand was. So Strand has become this rather meaningless pictorialist now. You look at any description of Strand's work, and he was just a guy who photographed fence posts and little wooden huts in rural parts of the world. If you don't understand his politics, how can you make any sense of what he was trying to do, or what he photographed? These people have completely laundered his reputation – completely deracinated the man.

The rest of the interview is actually quite funny, in addition to being interesting. The point here though is that it is nearly impossible to understand the current practice or the history of photography without considering how it intersects with politics. Seems right to me. One other thing to note is that Norfolk finds the conventional categories (e.g., art/landscape vs. photojournalism) that structure how photographers ply their trade to be stultifying. He is right about that too.

There is a Pretty Dire Assessment about How Photographers Will be Impacted by the Economic Crisis . . .

. . . from Simon Norfolk here at World Press Photo. The essay is short but far from sweet.

Beauty as a Tactic

One of my very first posts here and a whole slew of those I've written since then address one or another topic at the intersection of beauty and politics in photography. As I've made pretty clear, I find most discussion of this topic irritatingly simple-minded. That said, I came across this post, entitled "Beauty as a Tactic," by Canadian photographer Tony Fouhse at Slightly Lucid*. Not only do I generally agree with Fouhse that we need to think about the uses of beauty and the consequences of using it. But I am intrigued too by the parenthetical aside in this comment:

"James Nachtwey and Simon Norfolk take their cameras to war, not exclusively, but a lot. Both have an "eye" (though I prefer the word "brain") that can, and usually does, turn the horror they witness into beautiful photographs."

I think too much writing about photography wallows in overly romantic musings about intuition and sentiment and simple luck (although the latter is probably the most important of the three). Seeing is a cognitive activity and that means "brains" are going to be pretty important. It is no coincidence that Nachtwey and Norfolk appear pretty regularly in my posts. They are really smart photographers.
__________
* Slightly Lucid, by the way, is the very insightful blog of the apparently also very smart Montreal-based photographer Aislinn Leggett.

Discovering Remarkable People

Leon Greenman - Auschwitz survivor and life time campaigner
against racism, 1910 - 2008. Photograph © Joel Redman.

Over at the Magnum blog today Alec Soth noted that Simon Norfolk is guest editing an issue of The British Journal of Photography this week. He noted too that Norfolk had given the cover story over to Milton Rogovin. So it seemed like a good bet to drop in at the BJP page and see what was up. Well, since I'm not a subscriber, I couldn't access the Rogovin story. But I did discover this portrait by Joel Redman, which Norfolk singled out as follows:

"When I adjudicated the BJP International Photography Award recently I was told the rules didn't allow for a Judge's Choice. However, the great thing about being editor - King For A Day - is that I can put whatever I like in the magazine. So here it is: my Judge's Choice.

I couldn't swing the rest of the panel to back this fine portrait by Joel Redman, probably because my reasons for loving it are too personal. I knew without any caption that it is a portrait of Leon Greenman, who died earlier this year and who was also an Auschwitz survivor and a life-long anti-fascist fighter. I first met him on demonstrations in the early 1990s. In amongst the youthful racket was a silent, elderly man in a raincoat and beret with a large lapel badge saying 'I was there' - he had survived the Nazi death camps.

Auschwitz isn't an aberration, a myth or a 'detail of history', and the evil that made it had to be confronted wherever it reappears. I found his political tenacity astounding and the fury that he carried with him, uncooled after 50 years, totally inspiring. Joel Redman has done well to capture his wide-eyed curiosity and his inner toughness.

His death is a loss for all of us - the world needs many more people like Leon Greenman, not one less."

So thanks to Joel, Simon, and Alec for helping me discover Leon. And I suspect that Milton Rogovin would rather have Leon in the limelight than be there himself. He is remarkable too.

Best Shots (47) ~ Simon Norfolk

(73) Simon Norfolk ~ The North Gate of Baghdad, 2003 (23 October 08)

"When you see this picture in a gallery from 20 metres away,
you think, "God, that's gorgeous!" It's only when you look at
it in detail that you realise you're looking at a place
where people were slaughtered." ~ SN

The Usefulness of Walls for Politics (3)

Sept. 22., 5 a.m.: The border near Naco, Ariz.,

under the watchful glare of security lights.

Sept. 19, 4 a.m.: Two towns called Nogales, one in Arizona
(foreground) and one in Mexico.
Both photographs © Simon Norfolk/NB Pictures (2006),
for The New York Times

I came across these images by Simon Norfolk in this retrospective of his terrific work over the past half dozen years for The Times. They seem like an appropriate way to extend my series of posts on walls and politics [1] [2].

Simon Norfolk's "Military Landscapes"

I just noticed the new issue of Granta is on the theme "War Zones" and, in addition to contributions from a range of writers, includes work by photographer Simon Norfolk on "Military Landscapes." This brings me back to one of the first posts I wrote here: I think it imperative that we understand our landscapes as political and find Norfolk's work striking in his ability to do just that. I have not actually seen the issue, so don't know precisely which images it contains. But you can find Norfolk's work on his web site and in this current feature at lens culture. He describes his large photographic enterprise as "attempting to understand how war and the need to fight war, has formed our world: how so many of the spaces we occupy, the technologies we use, and the ways we understand ourselves, are created by military conflict."

Truthful images

On the 'Table of Contents' pages for The New York Times Magazine today we find the following comment:

"Back Story 8.20.06

An unfortunate byproduct of the revelation earlier this month that a photographer stringing for Reuters in Beirut had Photoshopped a picture (adding and darkening smoke clouds in a bombing scene - as if reality weren’t intense enough) is that we are discussing that rather than the remarkable images, neither doctored nor faked, being captured by brave and artful photojournalists every day in Israel and Lebanon. One of the most original of them is Simon Norfolk, whose photograph of a bombed bridge north of Beirut appears . . . in today’s magazine. . . . He works with a large format 4 x 5 camera, focusing under a black cloth, and uses sheet film, which means that he had to drive his pictures out of Beirut to Jordan and then fly them to Paris for processing. Very pre-digital. Very True."

You can find a number of Norfolk's images here. The photograph that appears in the magazine today appears below, with this caption: "No Way. The remains of the Halat-Fidar bridge in Lebanon on Aug. 4, hours after Israeli air strikes destroyed it and several other bridges along the main highway north of Beirut."

© Simon Norfolk for The New York Times

I largely agree that the controversy over altering photos distracts from the work of terrific photographers like Norfolk as well as from the realities of war and other man made mayhem. However, I am interested in the conception of truth that The Times invokes here. My concern is not that they are somehow using an idiosyncratic conception but rather that they are articulating one that is both common in discussions of photography and suspect. At this point I am merely noting the theme and will set it aside for subsequent posts.