Toward activist photography.

THE BODY AT RISK: PHOTOGRAPHY OF DISORDER, ILLNESS, AND HEALING

INTERNATIONAL CENTER OF PHOTOGRAPHY

NEW YORK, NEW YORK

DECEMBER 9, 2005-FEBRUARY 26, 2006

THE BODY AT RISK: PHOTOGRAPHY OF DISORDER, ILLNESS, AND HEALING

BY CAROL SQUIERS

BERKELEY AND LOS ANGELES: UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS, 2005

200 pp./$29.95 (SB)

The exhibition "The Body at Risk: Photography of Disorder, Illness, and Healing" and its accompanying catalog present ten photographic projects by sixteen artists who visualize the way the human body has been affected by labor, poverty, war, violence, age, and illness in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The projects were carefully selected by the exhibition curator, Carol Squiers, and most of them fall under the category of documentary photography or photojournalism. Yet, by displaying bodies of work from different periods, the exhibition points to the conceptual and historical limits of these categories. Moreover, by focusing on the most urgent health-related issues facing contemporary societies today including world poverty, the AIDS crisis in Africa, and longer life expectancies, "The Body at Risk" also allows for a reconsideration of the critical viability of documentary or "concerned" photography beyond the homogenizing view of the genre that prevailed in the critical discourse of the 1980s. This exhibition questions the assumption that documentary photography simply carries information about the powerless to the socially powerful by exposing the complex institutional commitments, modes of operation, and varied representational strategies that inform photographic practice.

"The Body at Risk" takes its points of origin from Lewis Hine's photographs for the Child Labor Committee begun in 1910, and the photographs commissioned in the 1930s and 1940s by the Farm Security Administration (FSA) to document the health initiatives of the New Deal. Rather than presenting canonical images of farmers and migrant workers, the exhibition shows lesser-known photographs revealing what was perhaps one of the most radical social policies in American history: the creation of pre-paid medical care cooperatives that delivered discounted services co-funded by government and state agencies. This intriguing body of work, documenting children and adults receiving attentive medical care in clinics and workers' camps, not only resonates with contemporary debates surrounding health insurance by presenting a historical precedent for a national health care plan, but also shifts the familiar conception that FSA photographs are "victim photography" turned into "art." The exhibition uncovers the activist dimension of FSA photography by showcasing works that are linked visually and conceptually to Hine's project.

These historical projects are aligned with two contemporary projects of "activist" photography: Gideon Mendel's work on HIV and AIDS in Africa and Sebastiao Salgado's documentation of the World Health Organization's (WHO) global campaign against polio. Initially, Mendel photographed AIDS patients in Africa for the United Kingdom-based charity Christian Aid, but eventually started collaborating with AIDS activists in their campaigns against the inadequate response of African governments to the AIDS crisis. Mendel's work analyzes the health care conditions in Africa, while presenting powerful images of activists in local communities struggling against denial and ignorance through creative educational programs. Similarly, Salgado's work, commissioned by the WHO, focuses on the local efforts of individuals and communities to immunize children in the face of material difficulties and prejudice.

These bodies of work, although produced under different institutional frameworks, offer possible models for contemporary "concerned" photography by shifting their focus from a physiognomy of heroes and victims into a cartography of local struggles. The exhibition demonstrates the necessity of this shift when these works are seen against W. Eugene Smith's celebrated 1951 LIFE photo essay "Nurse Midwife: Maude Callen Eases Pain of Birth, Life and Death." As some critics pointed out, Smith's photographs often documented his compassion toward his subjects, rather than the economic and social forces that constituted their environment. By focusing on an individual figure, his work presents struggle as a form of charity for frail individuals. Genuine concern or compassion seems to be inadequate as a representational strategy when social and political conservatism is presenting itself as "compassionate."

With regard to the critical and political viability of documentary photography, more complex questions emerge in the exhibition from two projects that focus on depictions of direct violence toward the body: Donna Ferrato's photographs of domestic violence from her 1991 book Living with the Enemy and Eugene Richards's documentation of the Denver General Hospital Emergency Room from his 1989 book The Knife and Gun Club: Scenes from an Emergency Room. Do visceral depictions of violence carry critical currency today? The problem, again, is not simply that of "victimhood," but also the fact that violence has become a constitutive element of life under globalization. More important, information about violence and its visualization are often instrumentalized to justify policies that promote the use of violence in conflicts. As a result, violence is no longer concealed but is simply turned on its head. Opacity in the contemporary age is not the outcome of a lack of information, but precisely of its ceaseless proliferation. In this context, the subtle photographic project of Lori Grinker, Afterwar: Veterans from a World in Conflict (2004), which focuses on the physical and psychological effects of warfare on individuals, allows us to see what must truly remain invisible within contemporary visual culture: the wounded and deformed bodies of soldiers.

"The Body at Risk" also includes Ed Kashi's survey on aging in America and David T. Hanson's aerial photographs of toxic industrial sites. Thus, the exhibition presents a comprehensive account of the major health issues facing policy makers today. The catalog, written mostly by Squiers, also provides illuminating context to each of the projects by outlining the complex histories of health policies in America and their political ramifications. Both the exhibition and catalog extend the highly limited critical framework of identity politics, under which documentary photography is often discussed by exposing the radically different ways in which photographic practices actively form their objects and subjects of knowledge. "The Body at Risk" points to the urgent need to produce critical currency for photography today in the face of spectacularized forms of information through which violent political realities become excessively visible, but critically unaccounted for.

VERED MAIMON is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University in New York City.