Local (sort of) Event ~ Susan Meiselas at Syracuse University

If you are interested in photography and its uses, in politics, or in the intersection of those domains you should get to Syracuse this Tuesday evening to here Susan Meiselas. You can find details of the event here at the blog of Light Work, one of the organizations who is sponsoring her visit. I cannot make it, because I will be teaching. But I will say - as I have here many, many times already - that Meiselas is among the most creative photographers working today. Go if you can.

Against Hatchet Jobs

"Someone out there should offer an annual prize for the most lethal review of an art exhibition, because art reviews are getting way too polite. [. . .] The bloated reputations of so many artists of our time offer critics a lifetime's supply of truth telling, so why hold back? We should be going after this lot (and loads more) all the time, and at full volume. Instead, they are more or less guaranteed nice reviews that ignore the pustules of badness that seep out of chic galleries." ~ Jonathan Jones

This is the punchline from this essay at The Guardian today. I agree with the estimation of most product from the contemporary art world. However, I don't think we need more prizes. Indeed, part of the problem with art world denizens is that they too often have their eye on the prize (whichever one). And, while I admit to often finding myself tempted, we hardly need more caustic commentary. Critics should, I think, instead write mostly about work they admire or find compelling. Ignore the dreck. Silence is more effective than vituperation.

I have posted here many times about critics and what they are - or should be - up to. None of the best critics I've read - John Berger, Rebecca Solnit, David Levi Strauss, Dave Hickey - have taken the advice Jones offers - of publishing 'hatchet jobs.'  Commenting some years ago on what made John Szarkowski so perceptive and influential a critic, Robert Adams wrote:

"Szarkoski's writing made him envied, but the irony is that his competitors seem to miss some of the most obvious keys to his success. Among these is that he writes only about what he likes. It is a practice that cuts down competition from the start; to be clear about how and why something is difficult, whereas just to turn one's animosity loose on something weak is both fun and safe (who can accuse you of being sentimental). No wonder the affirmative essays stand out, and, assuming they are about respectable work, last longer. Weak pictures drop away of their own weight, as does discussion of them, but the puzzle of stronger work remains: we are always grateful to the person who can see it better."*

None of that means being un-critical, or failing to acknowledge the political, economic, social currents that conspire to render good work - creations worth discussing in the first place - so rare and exceptional. But I do think Adams is right. Need examples? How about John Berger's essay on sculptor Raymond Mason? Or, the essay on Susan Meiselas that Adams himself includes in Why People Photograph?**  These are the sorts of critical assessments I remember. The 'hatchet jobs' I forget.
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* Robert Adams. 1996. "Civilizing Criticism." In Beauty in Photography. Aperture, page 59.
** I admire Meiselas and her work very much as I have noted here repeatedly.

COAL+ICE

At The New Yorker you can find this report on what looks to be an exciting exhibition opening in Beijing (In know! Not exactly my neighborhood.) The show, curated by Jeroen de Vries and Susan Meiselas is called COAL + ICE and includes work by a bunch of remarkable photographers from both China and abroad. It tries to establish visual links between various links in the process of extracting and using fossil fuel - specifically coal. So, we have images from mining to pronounced, large-scale environmental change. The exhibition is up through November 28th.

The Uses of Photography ~ "expanding the circle of knowledge" (Susan Meiselas)

There is a nice, brief video produced by the Documentary Photography Project of The Open Society Institute in which Susan Meiselas talks about the uses of 'documentary' photography. She (unsurprisingly!) seems quite insightful and realistic about the impact photography might have:

"This is how understanding is key of we are going to be able to build bridges, and I do think photography is a lot about creating the bridge. People still have to walk over it. I think photographers are the ones who perceive the bridge as a possibility ... and it goes back to that hope that people will feel the connection. And that connectivity is the opening of the door."

I have argued elsewhere that the point of photography is to establish or to help establish solidarity. It sounds to me like Meiselas is talking about just that.

Susan Meiselas & Dumeetha Luthra : In Silence

"Article 25 (1) Everyone has a right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to social security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood i circumstances beyond his control.

(2) Motherhood and childhood are entitled to special care and assistance. All children, whether born in or out of wedlock, shall enjoy the same protection." ~ Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948)

Photograph © Susan Meiselas/Magnum Photo.

In conjunction with this report by Human Rights Watch, Susan Meiselas & Dumeetha Luthra have produced this video slide show - In Silence ~ Maternal Mortality in India - addressing the epidemic of deaths ~ so many that the actual numbers remain unknown ~ among women during childbirth.

Best Shots (67) ~Susan Meiselas

(94) Susan Meiselas ~ Dani tribeswoman walking on a road through

the Baliem Valley, Indonesia, 1989 (16 April 09).

Another review of Susan Meiselas ...

I have posted several times [1] [2] [3] [4] over the past few months on the uncomprehending - and mostly incomprehensible - critical reception the ICP retrospective on Susan Meiselas has received. Last week, this appreciative review appeared in The Nation. The author, Paul Roth seems to get it when he notes:

"In History is a remarkably complex installation, a kind of spatial assemblage of materials, including far more than just the still photographs for which she is best known. The show's multiplicity of objects and approaches makes clear that Meiselas seems to have developed ever more "difficult" approaches to historical documentation as her career has progressed, in evident frustration with the apparent oversimplification (and under-amplification) of traditional documentary photographic practice. One gets the sense that she wants to sidestep and supersede the forces ("the powers that be," in her choice of phrase) that typically control and mediate public experience of faraway lives through journalism. Increasingly, Meiselas has rejected even the positivist notion of "witnessing" that defines much "concerned photography." Her work, more than any of her peers, has come to occupy a radical (as opposed to a traditionally humanist or reformist) position in the creation of storylines about peoples and historical events."

But then, Roth seems to take it all back when, in the end, he asks:

"It is no great criticism to say In History exposes the conundrum at the heart of Meiselas's reflexive approach to her own image-making. Wandering through the exhibition, one can easily get lost in the consideration and re-consideration of the images, as though the politics of looking has replaced "looking" itself. What is left of the photograph when everything--subject, photographer and viewer--have all been called to question?"

It seems to me that Meiselas is pushing on the typically neglected reflexivity of photography as a technology - this is a theme that you can find, for instance, in the writings of Patrick Maynard or
Murat Nemet-Nejat - precisely to show that "the photograph" has no special standing and that we ought instead to focus on how differently situated agents - "subject, photographer and viewer" - seek to use photography for diverse, often conflicting purposes. If we are more resolute in that pursuit, photography indeed can prompt us, in Roth's words, to address "deeper, hidden, more mysterious and ineffable truths that lie at their heart, at their edges and, finally, outside the frame itself." But then we are not engaging in the documentary project to which the title of the review alludes. Indeed, it seems to me that Meiselas has left that project well behind her and that what we need is a revised language in which to discuss the work she and some few others are doing.

Berger on Meiselas

"When I recently watched Pictures from a Revolution, the film about her returning to Nicaragua ten years after she took the photographs, I kept asking myself who Meiselas, with all her reticence and discretion, reminded me of?

I couldn't find the answer, and anyway, like each one of us, she's unique. The next morning it came to me. She reminded me not of another person, but of a sculpture: the only existing sculpture by the Italian Renaissance painter Andrea Mantegna. I looked again at the reproduction I have of it. Yes. It is not a question of a look-alike (although their physical stances are similar) but of that mysterious attitude which is a presence. A presence is a source of energy offered to others. Yes." ~ John Berger*

There is a danger, I think, in exalting photographers - any photographer. And Berger is quick to insist that Susan Meisleas is "not a saint." Instead he suggests nonetheless that, like Mantegna's St. Eufemia**, Meiselas's work in Nicaragua (and elsewhere) presents us with "an example given and a wager made."
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* From "Susan Meisleas Nicaragua" Aperture (Winter 2008) page 24.
Statue of "St. Eufemia" (circa 1454) by Andrea Mantegna.

There is (another) Interview with Susan Meiselas

. . . here at FOTO8. The interviewer, Guy Lane, is, I think, much more closely focused and thoughtful than the person who conducted this interview I mentioned about a week ago. In particular, he prompts Meiselas to address the shameful (my word) New York Times review of her current ICP retrospective about which I've also written here.

There is an Interview with Susan Meiselas ...

... in the November '08 issue of The Brooklyn Rail. You can find it here.
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Update: Later that same day - actually that evening.

I have been stewing about this interview most of the day. Two things strike me as important to mention. The first is that the interviewer, Phong Bui (publisher of The Rail), initiates the conversation with what I think is an incredibly lame set of comments about a review in The New York Times of the current Meiselas retrospective at the ICP. Now, I've already noted here that the review was pathetic. But Bui launches into what I take to be a lament about the importance of "concerned" photography - a phrase and a notion I find insipid - and then punctuates his soliloquy with this gem from Eugene Smith:

“My camera, my intentions, could stop no man from falling. Nor could they aid him after he had fallen. [ . . .] If my photographs could cause the compassionate horror within that person, the viewer, they might also prod him into taking action.”

The problem here is not just that Bui repeats the canard linking compassion and documentary about which I've complained repeatedly before. If photographs prompt compassion in viewers they are politically useless. Failure to grasp that basic point, I think, disables much well-intentioned photography. Worse than that, Bui seems not to grasp Meiselas's work any more than the reviewer from The Times. He misses the political dimension of her work almost entirely. It seems to me that Meiselas is left trying to politely distance herself from the questioner's misinterpretations.

The second thing that has had me thinking is much more positive. Meiselas says this about some of her work among the Iraqi Kurds who were relentlessly, murderously persecuted (with the conniving of his American sponsors) by Saddam Hussein:

"... I don’t pretend that the making of the images stopped anything, though interestingly, they played an effective role as evidence in the trial against Saddam Hussein in 2006 (15 years after they were taken). But who was to know when I made them, and who would have thought that there would have been the invasion that put Saddam on trial as a result?"

This comment underscores two things. The first is obvious - photographs have uses that, sometimes quite fortuitously, escape the intentions of those who make them. So, when thinking about photography we need to keep our eye on use. Second, though, is the question of what counts as success in photography. This is something I've written about here before too [1] [2]. But the fortuitous use to which prosecutors put Meiselas's photographs of Iraqi Kurds is a potent reminder that success may be slow in coming and so difficult to foresee or assess.

Context and the Consequences of Neglecting It

Photograph © Susan Meiselas (1979)

Painting from the Series Riot (2003) © Joy Garnett

I've just read this exchange of sorts that appeared in Harper's (February 2007) between a painter Joy Garnett and photographer Susan Meiselas. The exchange culminated a fracas that arose after Garnett based a painting (2003) on a fragment of an image Meiselas had made in Nicaragua in 1979. Each woman offers her own take on the way Garnett appropriated Meiselas's photograph.

I have to say that I side with Meiselas in this dispute. The reason is not the legal one of whether the way Garnett appropriated her image was somehow or other covered by the fair use exception to copyright. I suspect Garnett is right on that score. And from what I can figure from the exchange that is not actually what bothered Meiselas.

The artist's statement on Garnett's web page describes her paintings as "visceral re-imaginings of current events both far and near." In this instance, unfortunately, what I think we get is more accurately seen as a politically suspect re-categorization.

In her contribution to the exchange with Garnett, Meiselas focuses on the importance of context in understanding her photographs. Indeed, she has tried in a fairly systematic way to reinsert her Nicaragua images back into their (changed) context. And she acknowledges the various ways that Nicaraguans have appropriated the image. The issue seems not to be appropriating as much as it is mis-appropriating. As she succinctly notes about this image: "What is happening is anything but a 'riot.'"

Garrett notes that the "Riot" series of which her painting is a part, was "born of frustration and anger" caused by the U.S. invasion of Iraq. It seems to me that it was informed by a considerable dose of self-indulgence too. That self-indulgence apparently blinded Garrett to the way that - in this instance at least - her frustrated "re-imagining" converged with the self-serving rationalizations of successive American administrations. The latter, after all, precisely have sought to portray any and all active resistance to our policies, or those of the repressive regimes we've sponsored, as senseless violence, terrorism, and so forth.

Meiselas & Jaar at Aperture TONIGHT

Susan Meiselas and Alfredo Jaar
In Conversation

Wednesday, Oct 08, 2008 6:30 p.m.
Aperture Gallery
547 West 27th Street 4th Floor
between 10th and 11th Avenue
New York, NY

Join Aperture for a special evening of conversation between photojournalist Susan Meiselas and artist Alfredo Jaar. Meiselas joined Magnum Photos in 1976 and is renowned for her coverage of the insurrection in Nicaragua and her widely-published documentation of human rights issues in Latin America. Jaar emigrated from Chile at the height of Pinochet’s military dictatorship in 1981. His installations, photographs, films, and community-based projects bear powerful witness to military con­flicts, imbalances of power, and political corruption.

Please Note: if, like me, you are not in the area the conversation allegedly is going to be streamed live onto the internet here.

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My only remark is that it seem tendentious to distinguish, as this press release does, between art and photojournalism here. I'd like to know what criteria you might use to sustain that distinction in a persuasive manner.

On Susan Meiselas: Times Critic Misses the Point, Captures his Own Eye in the Viewfinder

“Fleeing the bombing to seek refuge outside of Estelí,
Nicaragua, Sept. 20, 1978.” Photograph © Susan Meiselas.

Today The New York Times ran this astoundingly mean spirited review by Ken (no relation) Johnson of the newly opened Susan Meiselas retrospective at ICP in NYC. In the guise of reviewing the show Johnson actually generates a caricature of cynical, resentful photography criticism.

Johnson's overall estimate is that this is "a sad, disturbing and fascinatingly problematic exhibition." He starts like this:

"How do you reconcile the demands of professionalism with those of human compassion? To her credit and that of the exhibition, Ms. Meiselas — whose coverage of the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua in 1978 and ’79 made her one of the world’s most celebrated and criticized war correspondents — does not try to duck the question. On the contrary, the tension between opportunism and conscience emerges more or less inadvertently as the main interest of the exhibition — to the point that it trumps its ostensible subjects."

But he proceeds to castigate Meiselas for failing to navigate this predicament at virtually every turn.

Johnson describes her early project Carnival Strippers as “a form of adventurous slumming — like riding with a motorcycle gang” undertaken by “an ambitious young photographer with degrees from Sarah Lawrence College and Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education.” You'll note how he tacitly marries here a charge of elitism to his complaint about opportunism. Yet Johnson's complaint hardly seems in keeping with his observations about Meiselas's own concerns as she produced Carnival Strippers:

"The photographs are sympathetic to the women, but they have a grim, tawdry, hellish feeling. Sensitive to the possibility that they might be seen as exploitative, Ms. Meiselas recorded conversations she had with some of the strippers as well as with people who ran the shows and some of the exclusively male customers. Excerpts from these interviews are playing in the gallery, but they don’t do much to humanize the participants, who mostly sound jaded or pathetic."

He admits that Meiselas had been completely aware of the potential for exploiting her subjects. He admits too that she took steps to try to address that risk. So, while she may not have wholly succeeded in addressing her predicament (and it is not just hers), Meiselas hardly was mindlessly along for the ride.

It is hard to see, too, how Johnson's complaint addresses the work Meiselas actually produced. Just maybe photography of the sort we see in Carnival Strippers is not meant to "humanize." Just maybe - as I indeed think - it is neither possible nor desirable to humanize dire circumstances or the people compelled to inhabit them. It would therefore be a big a mistake to reproach photography and photographers, as Johnson does, when they fail to do so. Perhaps the images and interviews Meiselas produced are more usefully understood as evidence of just how "pathetic" people can become when faced with a "grim, tawdry, hellish" existence. The photographer did not make the strippers (or customers) pathetic and she did not make their lives grim. And while Johnson may prefer not to be reminded that there are many people who face precisely such lives and that they are all around him, that is not Meiselas's problem. It is his problem.

About “Kurdistan: In the Shadow of History” Johnson writes:

"It is hard to know what to make of the bewildering array of old pictures, letters and documents displayed in glass cases at the center. Mainly it supports the exhibition’s celebration of Ms. Meiselas as a tireless champion of the dispossessed.

With the Kurds now sitting on big oil reserves and engaged in what promises to become a Dubai-like program of building and development — barely hinted at by nondescript photographs Ms. Meiselas made in the region in 2007 — you wonder whose cause she will harness her career to next."

Here, in addition to the charge of opportunism Johnson serves up a truly astonishing red herring. So, the Iraqi Kurds are sitting on top of oil reserves. First, much of what in geographical terms might have been Kurdistan has stood on top of those reserves all along. Did that protect the Kurds from Saddam Hussein (supported by various U.S. administrations)? No. Will it protect them against the non-Kurdish Iraqis in the future? Let's just say I'm dubious. The same goes for the Turks and Iranians, who have scant love of the Kurds either. And what of the Kurds in those countries? Is Johnson claiming that the Kurds have not been dispossessed and oppressed over an extremely long period of time? Is he saying that bringing that history to light is somehow dishonorable? Is he saying that (purported) access to oil reserves erases the accumulated suffering and responsibility? Even for staff at The Times this is shoddy reasoning. But, were Johnson even slightly reflective, he might have taken his own bewilderment at the aka Kurdistan project as a hint.

Finally, about her work in Nicargua and El Salvador and especially of Meiselas's subsequent effort to track down and speak to the subjects of that early work he first concedes "The brief interviews are riveting." But we then immediately get:

"Ms. Meiselas’s impulse to return, reconnect and try to give a bigger historical picture seems at once admirable and self-serving. It is good for her image as a moral heroine, but it’s hard to see what difference it makes in the long run for the people she talks to. You feel like saying, 'Susan, it’s not just about you.'"

Johnson is right. This is not about Meiselas. But she hardly needs Johnson to remind her of that. Her initial work involved covering conflict that largely resulted from the decades-long support American administrations supplied to various Central American dictators. Her attempts to return to her subjects was an attempt to confront the predicament that Johnson finds so disturbing. And it is an attempt to get Americans - who , after all, will be viewing the work - to do so as well. On what grounds does Johnson criticize Meiselas? Why not go and find other photographers of her generation who never took the initial risks nor, having done so, never revisited the images and the predicaments that her early work exemplifies? Why not go and complain about Annie Leibovitz?

Johnson begins his report by discussing the photo I've lifted above as well as Meiselas's reflections on the situation in which she made the photograph. He transforms this oral predicament - take the picture or help the woman and child - into the hook for his report. yet he never seems to acknowledge - perhaps that would be too risky - that it hardly was a coincidence that there was Civil War in Nicaragua at that time. And he does not raise the issue of how government troops, say, might've treated photographers who assisted the locals whom they sought to terrorize. The stark moral choice he poses is too simple by a considerable distance.

I have not seen this exhibition. Perhaps the show does create these impressions. I doubt the problem resides with the exhibition. But even if it did, why then is Meiselas the focus of criticism? Why not criticize the curator, Kristen Lubben?

I suspect that the problem here is Johnson's own cynicism - a trait entirely too common among critics of photography. He "knows" all this. So does everyone else. And everyone has "always" known it all. So the only reason that someone like Meiselas might be photographing the episodes and subjects she does is opportunism and self-aggrandizement. What other motivation might there be? Johnson's cynicism easily and un-self-reflectively morphs into an incredibly arrogant moralism.

What if we shift attention from the ethical to the political. What about showing American viewers the consequences of the policies that our government has implemented in various exotic places. What if the point of Meiselas's work is to try, somehow - and with mixed success to be sure - to face up to things in the world with which we'd prefer not to come to grips? It turns out that there are many such things. And cynicism is a reactionary response to all those things on the part of those who don't want to admit their own complicity and their own powerlessness in the face of broader forces that shape politics and history.

The problem, Ken Johnson, is that this exhibition is about the nasty and brutish things that have taken place "In History," many of which are directly or indirectly the result of intervention or conniving on the part of the U.S. government or its minions. It is not, in other words, "just about you."

Opening in NYC

Point and Shoot (2008) © Martha Rosler

OUT NOW!

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From '50 Blue' - Copyright © Oded Hirsch

Politics & Other Diversions

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Arbil Taymour Abdullah, 15, the only survivor of mass
execution, shows his wound, Kurdistan, Northern Iraq,
December 1991 © Susan Meiselas/Magnum

Susan Meiselas: In History

A Year Late: Susan Meiselas

Somehow, I missed this story on Susan Meiselas from The New York Times when it appeared on August 11th ... 2007.

Added later that day: Oooopps. Well isn't this embarrassing! So, just take the time to re-read the article! It gives me the chance to plug new or imminent re-issue and initial release of three books by Meiselas's ...

Kurdistan: In the Shadow of History (1997) already is out from University of Chicago Press; Nicaragua: June 1978-July 1979 (1981) is due out from Aperture next month; and In History is due out in October from Steidl. As the essay in The Times makes clear, not only is Meiseals an extraordinary photographer, she is incredibly reflective and creative regarding the uses and dissemination and re-circulation of her images.

Shadows

Soldiers Searching Bus Passengers, Northern Highway,
El Salvador, 1980 © Susan Meiselas

I've just has a visit to No Caption Needed where Bob Hariman has written a typically insightful post this one on shadows. The second of the images Bob discusses, in which he notes the seeming vulnerablity of a soldier viewed indirectly via his shadow, reminded me of this especially harrowing shot by Susan Meiselas.

Susan Meiselas

A widow at a mass grave in Iraqi Kurdistan.
© Susan Meiselas/Magnum Photos

In The New York Times this morning is a profile of Susan Meiselas. It is a massive understatement to say that she is a remarkable photographer. It also seems, from reading this story, that she is an extremely admirable woman. The story raises several questions bearing on the ethics and politics of photography.

First, Meiselas is one of the six (yes, 6) women among the 52 members of the Magnum agency. I do not know much about the internal decision-making processes at the agency beyond the fact that the current members vote on admitting new members. So here is my question to the Magnum folks (and those at other agencies too): Is it plausible that there are no other "deserving" woman photographers? Just wondering.

Second, Meiselas identifies the predicment in which photographers find themselves when working in crisis situations of various sorts. What sort of responsibility, if any, do photographers have in such circumstances? Reflecting on her extended experience in Nicaragua and El Salvador during the late 1970s and 1980s she remarks: “Part of what happens if you stay and take pictures is that you feel you will protect people just by standing there, ... But you can’t stand there that long, and you can’t protect them.”

Finally, Meiselas also reveals her preoccupation with returning to the people she has photographed and places she has worked. “We take pictures away and we don’t bring them back, ... That became a central quest for me — relinking, revisiting, the repatriation of work: it’s become a kind of motif in my thinking.” This has recently (2004) led her to return to display large print reproductions of her earlier work in Central America back in the original locations. This is a project I know nothing about but strikes me as an extremely creative use of photography; it is called "Re-framing History" and it compliments her work on collective memory in Kurdistan.
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P.S.: Meiselas's recent extended project on the S&M club Pandora's Box is now showing at the Cohen Amador Gallery in NYC.