Photojournalism in flux?

OLIVER CHANARIN AND ADAM BROOMBERG: FIG.

JOHN HANSARD GALLERY

UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHAMPTON, ENGLAND

FEBRUARY 6-MARCH 31, 2007

In the first half of the twentieth century, photography became an integral element of newspapers and magazines, with photojournalists effectively dispatching artist reporters to the rubbish bin of history. For some time, there have been fears that a similar fate awaits photojournalists. Their professional insecurity has multiple causes. Since the mid-twentieth century, television has been perceived as a threat, particularly with the arrival of 24-hour news stations in the 1990s. Politicians have also been blamed for restricting access, especially to war zones. Cultural theorists have been blamed for querying photography's evidential reputation from various angles. But lately, it has been amateurs--armed with camera phones at newsworthy events like Saddam Hussein's execution, and able to e-mail digital imagery to newspapers and television stations--who have provoked a new round of gloomy reflections on the future of professional photojournalism.

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On the other hand, the first decade of the twenty-first century has also been marked by an unprecedented interest in documentary photography in fine art institutions. The most obvious example is the last "Documenta" in Kassel, Germany, in 2002, which concentrated on what the event's curator--New York City-based Okwui Enwezor termed "counter-hegemonic strategies" from the world's cultural margins, with photography a favored medium; or "Cruel and Tender: The Real in the Twentieth-Century Photograph," the first major photography show at the newly opened Tate Modern in London in 2003. This exhibition was more sedate than the eleventh "Documenta," yet the organizers shared Enwezor's assumption that photography continues to be a valuable medium for recording and commenting on the world.

The above remarks are relevant to any assessment of the photographic team Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, South African Jews who now live and work in London. Both still under forty, they have quickly established an international reputation with a fresh approach to documentary photography that is evident in books like Ghetto (2003), about various forms of institutional confinement; Mr. Mkhize's Portrait (2004), about post-apartheid South Africa; and most recently Chicago (2006), a chilling portrayal of contemporary Israel apparently reconciled to a state of permanent emergency. All of these projects bear traces of Broomberg and Chanarin's formative experience as creative directors of the magazine Colors.

Published by the Italian clothing company Benetton, Colors was launched in 1991 to celebrate cultural relativism and global diversity, mainly via the "universal language" of photography. The case against Benetton has been well rehearsed since the 1990s: that advertising campaigns and promotional magazines that blur traditional distinctions between news and commerce merely trivialize serious issues; or that the stress on human diversity is nothing more than a bland update of New York City's Museum of Modern Art's notorious mid-1950's exhibition "The Family of Man." But a case for Benetton can also be made, especially if one references the editions of Colors edited by Broomberg and Chanarin, for instance, their 2003 issue on slavery (Colors 53), produced in collaboration with Anti-Slavery International. For many, human bondage is assumed to be merely of historic interest, but Broomberg and Chanarin deftly edit words and images to reveal its scandalous, present-day manifestations in various locations around the world, including the United States. Critics complain about the aestheticization of misery. Broomberg and Chanarin counter that they are exploring ways of addressing and raising the awareness of young people whose enthusiasm for high street fashion by no means precludes a willingness to seriously engage with current affairs.

Working for Colors, Broomberg and Chanarin learned about adventurous picture editing and, en route, they taught themselves color photography, with a preference for large-format equipment that necessitates elaborate preparation. Both their editing and image-making were enriched by their realization that nudges and suggestions can more effectively influence an audience than emphatic gestures. In other words, they are more attracted to the seductive strokes of Bertolt Brecht than the clenched fist of Sergei Eisenstein.

Basically, they served a hothouse apprenticeship under the patronage of Luciano Benetton, and this unusual formation has given them a useful mutability. They remain uncomfortable with the label of photojournalist, though they regularly contribute photo stories to major newspapers and magazines, and teach in the Masters of Arts program in Photojournalism at the London College of Communication. They are also reluctant to describe themselves as artists or art photographers though the current excitement in the art world about born-again documentary helps them gain further outlets. Although they would not want to be categorized as political image-makers, they are able to benefit from the return of issue-based art, identified and encouraged by curators like Enwezor.

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Their latest project, "Fig.," was commissioned by the visual arts organization Photoworks, based in Brighton, England, in association with the John Hansard Gallery, which is attached to the University of Southampton. It will be published as a book by Photoworks and Steidl, with an accompanying text by Marxist art critic Julian Stallabrass, in Fall 2007. The exhibition is a series of 5- x 4-inch contact prints; underneath each print is an embossed number, Fig. 1 to Fig. 76. The numbered prints are protected by identical transparent perspex containers that seem more like display cases than conventional picture frames. Instead of a catalog, visitors are handed a modest guidebook that provides titles and notes for the seventy-six exhibits, all organized in tidy rows. Cumulatively, the design of "Fig." evokes the natural history museum rather than the art gallery and neatly signals a major theme of the exhibition: the politics of collecting, classifying, and displaying.

Yet the strict, regimental presentation is also a ploy. To be sure, the will to order and the related fear of disorder brought about by foreign bodies are important topics. But "Fig." is also a cabinet of curiosities in which the collector-photographers are happy to follow their inclinations, unburdened by the logic of modern taxonomies. Consider the cluster of images linked by the theme of passport photographs. Figs. 31 to 38 depict eight women from various London model agencies and were first published by the Sunday Telegraph Magazine in a feature on idealized beauty. In the exhibition handbook, Fig. 38 is titled Lianna, Oxygen models, London, UK, and includes an explanatory note for the series:

The models in this series are presented full face. They were

instructed not to smile or obscure any part of their face. The light

is even and the background plain, like a passport photograph.

Fig. 39, Glyn Jones, Photo-Me engineer, Cornwall, UK, has the following text:

The format and style of passport photographs are set by the Home

Office. Photo booths across Britain are serviced weekly to maintain

these standards, and engineers are required to make test portraits of

themselves which they send to head office for approval. Glyn Jones, an

engineer for Photo-Me International, services machines in the Cornwall

area.

And Fig. 40, Discarded photograph, Kigale, Rwanda, also has a paragraph:

Passport photographs are produced in another way at the Sunshine Photo

Studio in Kigali, Rwanda. The head and shoulders are removed from

full-length images and the rest of the image is discarded. Until the

genocide in 1994, ethnicity was marked on passports in Rwanda to

distinguish Hutu from Tutsi.

The last sentence is the cold shower--a reminder that in certain circumstances a passport can be a death warrant.

But many other issues are raised in this suggestive sequence of passport photographs. For instance, we are asked to consider images that offer an inventory of female beauty versus images related to the identification and regulation of entire national populations. Or the similarities and differences between images that ironically mimic passport photographs, test images that ensure the standardization of passport photographs, and an actual passport photograph. Or conventions in Britain compared with conventions in Rwanda. And so on. This is editing of the highest order, guiding the viewer in an open-ended way. Again, more Brecht than Eisenstein: one plus one never equals two, and rarely equals three.

Christian Caujolle, the founder-director of the VU gallery and agency in Paris, published an article in April 2005 titled "One picture is worth a million pixels" in Le Monde Diplomatique. Responding to the various photographic "scoops" achieved recently by nonprofessionals, he concludes ominously:

This is a turning point in the history of pictorial representation:

instant digital images vs creative photography. The arrival of digital

imagery has put photography in the position of painting in the 19th

century faced with the arrival of ... photography. Now photography

must show it has Cezannes, Malevichs and Picassos, and that their

images will be newer, stronger and more moving. (1)