Brighton Photo Biennial is an ambitious celebration of international photographic practice and a firmly established event in the national and international photographic calendar. The provocative writer and critic Julian Stallabrass has curated a programme of exhibitions entitled, Memory of Fire: the War of Images and Images of War, exploring photographic images of war, their making, use and circulation, and their currency in contemporary society.
15 Aug 2013
Brighton Photo Biennial (BPB) is an ambitious celebration of international photographic practice and a firmly established event in the national and international photographic calendar. BPB 2008 was on show in high profile visual arts venues in Brighton and across the South East over six weeks from Friday 3rd October to Sunday 16th November.
The BPB 2008 keynote exhibition looked at the ‘image war’ in an environment of image-saturation and rapid distribution from digital devices, phone cameras, of vast mass media conglomerates, independent websites and news-savvy resistance and terrorist organisations. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have reactivated memories of past conflicts, particularly Vietnam, and their photography. This exhibition showed the images of all sides in the conflicts and included work by: Ghaith Abdul-Ahad (IQ), Larry Burrows (UK), Doan Cong Tinh (VN), Ashley Gilbertson (AU), Philip Jones Griffiths (UK), Bilal Hussein (IQ), Le Minh Truong (VN), Catherine Leroy (FR), Don McCullin (UK), Khalid Mohammed (IQ), Tim Page (UK), Stephanie Sinclair (US) and Bruno Stevens (BE).
Helen Cadwallader, the Executive Director of the Brighton Photo Biennial, interviewed Julian Stallabrass on 2nd October 2008 at the Old Courtroom in Brighton just before the Private View and launch of the festival, ‘Memory of Fire, the War of Images and Images of War’. This was the first in a series of four, ‘In Conversation’ events, produced by the Biennial, in collaboration with Brighton Art Gallery Museum.
Julian Stallabrass lectures in modern and contemporary art, including political aspects of the globalised contemporary art world, post war British art, the History of Photography and new Media, at the Courtaulds’ Institute of Art. Julian is a prolific writer, and his recent publications include, amongst many, ‘High Art Lite: British Art in the 1990s’. He has also written many art criticisms for many publications including for the Tate, Photoworks, Art Monthly and The New Statesman. His photography has been exhibited and published internationally.
Helen
The first thing that I wanted to explore with you, Julian, is - What was your intention for this Biennial?
Julian
OK, well the title says quite a bit, perhaps ‘Images or War’ but also ‘War of Images’. So to ask people to think about the broad spectrum of images of war that we see: both historical and current: to use historical images to get a handle on what it is that is particular about our currant situation. To think also about the way in which war is not merely depicted or documented through images, but some of the ways in which images are used as engines of warfare.
I mean there are striking examples of that in the Iraq part of the exhibition – ‘Iraq through the lens of Vietnam’. For instance, there are two elements in the Iraq show, which would be particularly pertinent to that; this idea of ‘The War of Images; one is the ‘shock and awe’ campaign that began the Iraq war, when the United States Air Force put on an extremely spectacular bloody fire-work display essentially blowing up half of Baghdad – for the world’s media who were safely ensconced in a hotel over the river, and with their lenses trained on the destruction. And they knew, of course, that this was going to be seen on live TV immediately and on web-sites and in the papers the next day. The idea was that these images would force the Iraq army to collapse, and indeed parts of it did do, rather quickly – so it is a specific use of the media as what the Pentagon calls a ‘force multiplier’ to multiply the effects of the military force that you apply.
The other aspect would be the Abu Ghraib images which we also show, and there the camera is used in a situation of imprisonment and torture: again as a force multiplier, much as the presence of women or the presence of dogs in that jail are intended to be force multipliers.
Actually this image, by Ashley Gilbertson, who is here tonight, could summarise many of the themes of the Biennial. So those Abu Ghraib images too, show the camera as a weapon of war, as well as merely something that documents.
Helen
Could you talk a little bit more about this image?
Julian
Yes. OK.
It shows a US marine, photographing a dead Iraqi resistance fighter. And one of the things that we are interested in, is not merely the images which get replayed in the press, but also a wide variety of images that come out of the war including those taken by soldiers themselves, those taken by official US army photographers, and again images which are used as propaganda, but also images which are used perhaps as trophy taking of one kind or another. Although, I must say that there are many kinds of reasons for soldiers taking this sort of imagery – which they do insistently it must be said. So actually one of the Biennial exhibitions that we had running down in Portsmouth, at Aspects Gallery, is by Julian Germaine, who is looking very seriously at collecting images of this sort, both from the past and from the present, but also asking people why they took them, what they do with them, how they circulate them: so that we can not merely see this as some spectacular curiosities, but get an idea of why it is that people want to do this and how they use them.
Helen
Interestingly, I spoke earlier with Ashley about this image and why soldiers take such images. Ashley explained that, often, at the time that these incidents happen many soldiers can’t quite connect with what is going on, and in a way it is literally a document, a record, sort of aide memoir. It sounds an extreme thing to say, but it is a way of recording and remembering something that maybe at that moment is too difficult to engage with as well.
Julian
Yes. There are many motivations I think. And Corporal Drainer, who was one of the people who took the Abu Ghraib photographs, in this book by Errol Morris, and in the film ‘Standard Operating Procedure’ which is being shown as part of the Biennial, he says that the reason he did it (and we may take this with a pinch of salt given subsequent events) but the reason he did it, he said, was to show people back home that he wasn’t bull-shitting about the wars: in some ways that they would believe his stories when he came back.
Helen
So, while we are reflecting on motivation and intention, and how this feeds into the production of images – perhaps you could consider now the positions undertaken by individual photographers. Maybe Philip Jones Griffiths for example? And through this perhaps move towards why you placed such a particular focus on photo-journalism in this Biennial.
Julian
Alright. I mean one thing to say about photojournalism immediately, is that it is varied practise. And we show, within photojournalism, that there are a great many approaches to image making: and indeed to the politics of the conflicts represented.
Many of the photojournalists who worked in Vietnam, were thoroughly supportive of the war, that shouldn’t be forgotten, and many of the journalists too – indeed the majority of them. It is only as a matter, perhaps, of historical retrospect that some of most celebrated (now) people like Page, and McCullen, and Jones Griffiths – have become, you know, the most celebrated.
Jones Griffiths in particular, is a very interesting example, he was a Magnum photographer so he was somewhat funded through the organisation, although not very much: and he barely published during his time in Vietnam. This was very significant. He did one or two stories. It came after a time, he had been there for a while, and the Americans in particular were beginning to regard him with extreme suspicion because he didn’t seem to publish anything. And they had agencies who were looking at photojournalists … and saying well “who is on our side and who isn’t?” – so he published a couple of rather anodyne stories: one for The Telegraph I think: which sort of seemed to be vaguely supportive of the American presence there. And then he was OK and he was allowed to continue what he was doing.
But he wasn’t published for various reasons of internal Magnum politics, (which are interesting but which I won’t go into) but he continued over years to pursue this very personal and particular study of what was going on in Vietnam. It seemed to him to be an enormous puzzle, what was happening in the country. It wasn’t at all obvious, you know, why the Americans were there, what the Vietnamese thought of them, all that kind of thing. So it is a prolonged period of research through photography, through talking to people.
He says, that he met some guy who was part of the US press corps – the official US press corps – he spoke fluent Vietnamese and offered to take him right through the country and Jones Griffiths said “Yes, I will do this with you on one condition – you don’t speak Vietnamese while we do it, just listen”. And Jones Griffith’s suspicion was that that Americans were hugely hated by the vast majority of Vietnamese, so this guy did this; he just listened. They toured through the country taking pictures. And that suspicion was amply confirmed. No-one when they thought they were speaking privately, had a good word to say about them, and the hatred was very very widespread. Even among people you would have thought would be supportive of the regime. So when Philip finally produced ‘Vietnam Inc.’ in 1971, this was a book which really came as an extraordinary shock in a sense. It was incredibly well thought through. The quality of the images was extra-ordinary, the combination of images and text of the book was really remarkable. A sort of high moment of photojournalism and documentary photography I think you could say. But interestingly, in a sense, divorced from the pressures of having to publish for Life magazine or having to publish for the Sunday Times, or whatever.
Helen
OK. I really want to keep pushing the photojournalism focus, because I think it is quite specific. Maybe we can explore that through the particular quote which has been used: the quote from the preface to the Don McCullum book, the quote by Susan Sontag, where she observes “a photograph can’t coerce, it can’t do the moral work for us, but it can help us on the way” which you selected earlier on as a reference to promoting the theme for this Biennial. Why did you select this quote and how does it reflect your views?
Julian
Well – it is partly thinking about what you can and can’t do with an exhibition, I suppose, or series of exhibitions. I think that you can select works, you can arrange them, you can make a kind of visual argument, and that you can give people a few short textual pointers to kind of make that argument clear. And I hope that I have done so, I would be very interested to know peoples’ reactions once they have seen some of these exhibitions. But I think that it is not effective to try to do more than that: to try to overtly propagandise; to present overtly anti-imperialist or anti-war views. I think that those may come out of seeing some of the exhibitions, but as I say, in the end the photography can be a means to critical reflection and indeed to thinking about morals and ethics – but in the end it is down to you the viewer, and what you do in that space is up to you, and I can’t – you can’t legislate for that.
I think about Hirschhorn images in Fabrica – this is a display of a large kind of political banner, it could almost be carried through the streets if it wasn’t so large, called ‘The Incommensurable Banner’ and it is a collage of, as Hirschhorn puts it, the worst things I could find – about war – about various wars. About the way in which – what modern munitions do to bodies essentially. Now there are plenty of people who use these photographs, these sorts of photographs. You see them on the web, they use them for entertainment, and I can’t know how it is that people will respond to, or use, the images in these exhibitions. But as I say, the intention is that they are there for people to critically reflect on the representation of war, the wars themselves, and perhaps particularly the role of the media and the art world in dealing with those images.
That is all one can do. We can put them out there.
Helen
Because Sontag is an interesting thinker about – obviously she has produced – she wrote the really interesting book ‘Regarding the Pain of Others’, because she does go into this in some depth, doesn’t she. She also changed her position on what photography can and can’t do. Is it worth maybe thinking about, maybe exploring that?
Julian
Yes. In her famous, her justly famous book, on photography I don’t know that she … her view is always quite complex and a little bit ambivalent I think, about the power of photographic images. But particularly in exploring the work of Diane Arbus, for instance, she is pretty critical about Arbus’s project, and about the way in which again people are encouraged, I suppose, to use those images; which seem in some way as exploitative: and their spectacular character. She questions how much of an insight it gives you into the subjectivity of those people, and she sees it as a sort of abuse of trust. And one might say similar things about a lot of photojournalism I guess.
In ‘Regarding the Pain of Others’, a much later book she takes much more seriously – well – somewhat more seriously: it is not completely black and white this – but somewhat more seriously the radical charge of a documentary imagery. But then this is someone who says that her whole life was transformed by looking at Holocaust photographs, you know, when she is a teenager. So I think, at the base of so much of Sontag’s writing, there is a – you know, her own pain transformation by being exposed to those images and really thinking about them. And it doesn’t stop her asking questions, very legitimate questions, about the role of the media and the daily flow of images. You know, the photojournalistic display of the latest spectacular atrocity, and what that means. But, obviously in Sontag, there is a very powerful description, I think, of the way in which photographs can serve moral and ethical – serve? – aid - moral and ethical thought.
Helen
Because I think this is a particular challenge of this Biennial theme, around conflict and war imagery. What does it mean to look at images of war and conflict? And what does it mean to take images, also, that have been circulated through the popular media and present them in the gallery exhibition? And therefore create – you are in a very particular kind of viewing environment - and therefore engaged with these images in a very particular way. And I know that people who encounter these images for the first time do have very strong reactions to them. That has been a particular issue to think through. I know that you have considered that in a number of ways. For example, making sure that captions are detailed. I don’t know if you would like to expand upon viewing condition.
Julian
Yes. I think in terms of captioning and interpretation I think that you can tell a lot about the Biennial or any exhibition indeed, by the amount and the character of its interpretive information. There are many Biennials which one goes to where that information is very scanty. I think what that is saying to you is that you are expected to know already, somehow. And those exhibitions are made for the elite of globe-trotting very aware and well informed curators, artists and cultural commentators. And only in a secondary way for a wider public. I hope that is – well I know it is not like that.
But let me show you some of these other sorts of images that we are showing in the gallery and explain something about why it is we wanted to show them, for one thing; but how we chose to do it. So there are two sets of images in particular I suppose.
These US army official photographs, which are strongly generic in character. They fall into very specific genre. I have tried to arrange those photographs so that those genres are obvious. So for instance a soldier being nice to Iraqi kids, a football is a kind of mini genre as well.
Various displays of military competence, including and especially, you know, international co-operation. Technophiliac displays and monumentalising images of US soldiers.
(showing slides)
Military sunsets
Now, this is the designers mock up of what these walls will look like, and what we have done is print them onto vinyl, which is mostly used for commercial display, and arranged them in a grid like this, so that I hope, as I say, their generic character strongly comes out. And you can see the captions there, on the right. So it is like wallpaper in a sense. Very flash wallpaper. It looks really good! But it is like wallpaper. And there is a practical side to that. We didn’t want to individually frame and hang all these things and also I think very usefully, it marks them off from the work that is framed and mounted. As being images which … I suppose - well we could talk about the ‘art’ label, that would be worth doing … but I don’t what to encourage people to look at these things aesthetically I suppose. So that is one thing.
And similarly, the Abu Ghraib images – there are images like this of course, which everyone has seen and everyone thinks they know. There are certain iconic Abu Ghraib images, but there are many more which I don’t think we have looked at enough, or thought about enough. And the gallery is a place where … which can encourage that sort of attention, and so I have had the rather ghastly task of curating I suppose, a selection of these, seventy or so, images. And again they will appear – they have appeared – in a similar panel.
But we can open this up to the audience later; it would be great to get your opinions of this.
Helen
Can you talk a little bit, maybe about the title? Because it is quite a specific title, in a way it speaks to your pointing out here – genre, compare/contrast, using particularity in generality. Could you talk a little bit about the title, because in a way it creates the frame for this Biennial?
Julian
Sure. ‘Memory of Fire’ is a title of a book by Eduardo Galeano, an amazing, and in Latin America very well known, Uruguayan writer, a radical. And his greatest work I suppose is called ‘Memory of Fire’ and it is a 900 page document of colonial oppression and resistance in Latin America. Going from, actually, pre-Columbian times right through to the 1980 (when I think it was published). And Galeano, I don’t know how many of you know his writing, but he writes, tends to write, in these really short episodes and they are often very imagistic pieces of text: he paints an image for you through words. And you can read these things individually, they all make perfect sense. But the more you read the more you get a wider picture of his world view and of that history that he is writing about: very poetically.
Similarly, I suppose, my idea for the exhibitions was that each could be seen individually, and each is a kind of visual argument. Longer, perhaps, and more complex than Galeano’s elements, but the more you see of the Biennial, the more you build up a kind of spectrum of the panoply of different images – different kinds of war imagery. Both historical and falling into different practices like museum photography or amateur photography and so on.
Helen
Maybe it might be worth just doing a quick overview of the many different exhibitions, perhaps? There are many.
Julian
This is our ‘Shock and Awe’ panel by the way.
Helen
This is the Key Note exhibition.
Julian
Yes. Well let’s go forward from this. A memory too.
We are interested in the way in which these images – historical images have a current currency (I am sorry, clumsy phrase!) but so looking at the circulation of imagery on the web, and this includes images from Vietnam, so many images, and indeed films, from the Vietnam War have become re-activated by our current circumstances. So it is thinking about their life in the present as well as those historical circumstances, in which they were taken and so on and so on ….and that is maybe worth dwelling on slightly.
So, I will quickly go through the elements if that is OK?
There is a small show about Cuban Solidarity pictures, posters with Vay at Vietnam, curated by Catherine Moriarty of the Design Archive; and often using photographic sources, (like this). And it is a really nice little show which is just outside the main show at the University of Brighton.
Then, at Bexhill, a show which is most definitively an art show, which shows the work of Simon Norfolk, Paul Seawright, and Breamberg and Channering. And it is sort of about the sublime, I suppose. In museum photography.
The original idea was to have a much broader exhibition which would look at the whole genre of museum war photography and ask people to think about why – about its success – and what it is that we get out of seeing very large spectacular images of destruction. And indeed what the museum gets out of showing them. I hope that this smaller exhibition still serves some of those functions.
And the other group show is at Winchester. It is now called ‘Photography in Revolution’ (I should have changed that title) ’Memory Trails from Latin American Left’. And what it looks at is the media depictions of radical action in Latin America; from the Mexican Revolution onwards. And how there are echoes, photographic echoes, that work there way down the decades, and how this imagery is constantly re-worked by subsequent generations.
So, the Mexican Revolution itself, very much a media war, interestingly even in 1912.
The Cuban Revolution, Che’s self portrait here (presentation) and then a strain of sort of elegiac documentary which is still very lively in Latin America. Salgardo obviously a part of that. Antonio DeLoc working with the Zapatistas, Sub-commandant Markus, ‘Melancholy in the Jungle’ and the very extraordinary work of Johnathan Mullar working with Guatemalan peasants who fled into the very remote areas of mountain and jungle; fleeing from the really genocidal campaign of the military against them, and when the situation eased, coming back to more civilized areas, but also unearthing their dead and reburying them properly. All the mothers of the Plato De Mayo are demonstrating about the Argentinean ‘disappeared’; which they started very bravely to do while the dictatorship was still in place. And the extraordinary role which photography plays for them in their struggle for justice and recognition.
And coming right up to the present, with the so called ‘Pink Wave’ of governments in Latin America. Hier Shavadz with Sean Penn (he may not be quite recognizable down on the left) and of course Che becoming no longer a sort of token of radicalism which is seen on T-shirts, but people taking his idealism seriously again; and seeing some of those ideals as being realizable in some way.
Small show – Philip Jones Griffiths, ‘Agent Orange’ – the Pallant House in Chichester. Philip, over about 30 years, pursued the story about the genetic malformations caused by the defoliant ‘agent orange’ which was sprayed over large areas of South Vietnam, and which still causes dreadful birth deformities there. Looking both at the plight of these people and at their struggle to live a normal life. A story which really no-one wanted to look at, other than him, for a long time.
Then at Charleston, the Bloomsbury rural retreat, farmhouse; a display which has a resonance with Bloomsbury and their pacifism; Frank Hurley’s extraordinary pictures of the First World War. He was such a great photographic technician that these photographs seem to have a very much more modern air, I think, about them, than ones that we associate with the First World War. He photographed in Palestine as well as on the western front, which is again interesting in terms of current wars. And the amazing thing about Hurley was that he got very frustrated about continually being shot at and not really getting the images that he wanted – not being able, on those large plate cameras of the time, depict the simultaneity of the events that were going on the First World War battlefields – so he started to montage his images. As here, using sometimes many negatives to make these extraordinary battlefield panoramas. This uses about 11 negatives. And again, these images have a remarkable resonance I think in our digital present.
Thomas Hirschhorn, at Fabrica. I have talked about this a little bit but I will just show you some more images. These are taken in his studio.
Helen
Why was it particularly important for you to want to show this piece as part of the Biennial?
Julian
Well, Hirschhorn is a very significant political artist. One of the most controversial and prominent figures of his age, and someone in the last few years, since the wars began really; has been working insistently with war imagery. So I thought that, for one thing to have a representative of artists working and transforming a war photography installation – was important, to have someone like that. Working as an element of the Biennial. And then this specific project was very interesting to me. Partly because I have been struggling myself with how much of this kind of imagery to show in my own exhibitions and the ethics of doing so. And Hirschhorn was presenting a very powerful case for saying that one should see and dwell on imagery such as this. He sees it fairly a-historically, and there are older and newer images here. Many are from the Middle East, but that is because he says those are the things that are available: it doesn’t really matter to him where these images come from; he is just interested in what it is that modern munitions do to bodies. And he sees it, and to some extent these images I suppose, again as a ‘force multiplier’.
That these people are not merely killed but they are kind of erased, mutilated horribly; and the people around them see that. And it is a strong discouragement to continue resistance, and that, I suppose, is Hirschhorn’s fundamental point. And also that these images circulate in the west, but only generally in rather disreputable circles. So to put them out there in the public, and confront people with them, and get them to think about them and to talk about them, is a valuable thing. And I think I would go along with that argument.
It also seems to me, that they do circulate though, that we do – sort of – know what these images are like and what those weapons do, but they are not there in the mass media; we don’t see them, they are censored from us. For that reason too, I think that they are worth showing.
Van Kesteren at Lighthouse, in Brighton, is a photojournalist; he worked with Magnum for quite a while making very interesting and striking images of the occupation of Iraq. And also building those images into multi-media installations; again another kind of practise that comes out of photojournalism and goes somewhere else. And he is showing two projects in the Lighthouse.
One of them working with Iraqi phone-camera imagery: particularly (between) about the images that are exchanged between the millions of Iraqi refugees who have been forced out of the country, and those people still there. Some of these images just being very ordinary, anodyne family shots, others taken from cars of corpses dumped in the street.
Harriet Logan showing at Battle Independent Photographers Gallery. Very interesting project on women in Afghanistan. She made 2 trips there, one during the Taliban rule and one afterwards. And collecting, not only photographs but also women’s own accounts of their lives during and after the Taliban regime. So this girl, whose name escapes me, is pleased because she can once more openly play with her doll which would have been considered idolatry under the Taliban.
And lastly, Julian Germain, Aspects at Portsmouth. Again I have talked about that project. (the images I am showing you here) Just my own collection of soldiers images rather than the ones he used.
So I hope that gives you an idea of the various components.
Helen
OK. Thanks very much. My final question to Julian before I open for questions from the floor. Now having looked at the huge range and diversity of the images that you have brought together under this theme: how much do you feel you have realized your curatorial brief?
Julian
(laughter)
I don’t have a distance on it yet, and I am very anxious to hear people’s opinions about it. I is very hard for me, having been working on this now for 18 months or so, and being very intensively involved with it, to imagine what it is like coming to these exhibitions cold. Not knowing what they are going to be like. When you see these things, I would like to know, I would really like to know what you think.
Helen
OK. Well I think that is a good moment to take some questions. We have given you a taster of the images. Of course it is going to be very different, your actual experience when you see these images in situ, but has anyone got any questions on the theme?
Julian
Or comments.
Helen
Or comments. Yep.
Question from the Floor
‘What is your argument?’ and ‘what did you leave out?’
Julian
The whole issue of women photojournalists is a fascinating one. And you know how it is when you curate; there are various reasons for which you can’t necessarily show some of the images that you wanted to. So Catherine LeRoy,I really wanted to show some of her images in the Vietnam section but it just wasn’t possible in the end unfortunately. And Stephanie Sinclair, for instance, who I think is one of the most interesting photojournalists working today, we show only a few, because she was rather expensive I am afraid. So there are these kind of budgetary decisions come up. But there is a Stephanie Sinclair, one of her images from a series that she did on women working in the US army. It is a fascinating series I think, and she is very sharp about that. And she is also, in a way (I was going to say) some of her male colleagues (I suppose that is fair) … her photographs of the relatives of those killed or maimed in Iraq are really remarkable I think. I don’t know how much that is to do with her being a woman but she certainly has – she is capable of – expressing a very deep photographic sympathy with those people.
Question from the Floor
Can I just ask another question. The other question is Harriet Logan has apparently come out of being a photojournalist, because there are issues about being in conflict areas. And I am just wondering about that aspect as well, because that is part of how reports and documents war, but virtue of her deciding to come out of it, to have children, and it meant her relationships are important: and I wonder where that sits within this whole show? How do you show diversity if people are choosing to come out of it?
Julian
Well I think again there is a huge variety of photojournalists and their reactions to war. There are some people who appear to be pretty much war junkies, and who just go on and on photographing conflict zones. James Nachtwey, there are other examples like James Griffiths. It is not that they entirely stop photographing war, but it was said of him he wasn’t a war photographer (I cant remember who it was who said this) … because a war photographer doesn’t keep on going back and back to the countries 30 years after the war has ended. He was interested in the country more than the war, would be quite a good way of putting it.
I think, for many people, like Harriet, unsurprisingly, you can only do this for a while. It takes a tremendous psychological toll on you. People find different ways of handling that. I mean I guess, that the shows don’t really explore that, that much. They are more to do with the public face and the use of this imagery. But these are fascinating questions and ones that you can only get at really by reading behind the images and looking at the accounts of photographers themselves.
Question from the Floor
Can I ask you is there a visual argument?
Julian
It is many and there are various from show to show but I can give you a few simple examples.
There is one in the black false walls with the vinyls on which has official US arm propaganda on one side, and the Abu Ghraib images on the other, so it doesn’t take a genius to work out the argument. It’s there. They are interestingly similar images, to the extent that they are both copyright free sets of images, because the Abu Ghraib perpetrators swore under oath that these were taken under official military duties therefore they became copyright free as part of the state production of images. Just as the propaganda images on the other side are.
Helen
Any more comments, observations, questions?
Question from the Floor
I am interested in your choice of how to present the Abu Ghraib images and the pictures taken by US servicemen. In terms of the final gridding, and the attempts to emphasize the generic nature of those images, and what that potentially implies about the other photographs that you have included in the exhibition, which are much larger format, printed at various sizes, framed individually, and does that suggest that photojournalists are somehow immune to the generic … or have you selected outstanding images very deliberately, or is there still space for a generic aspect and recurrent themes to emerge in those other images?
Julian
Yes. Absolutely. A great question. There is … I mean one of the ways in which – I hope – this Biennial departs from a more traditional model: which would say … well first this is all ‘comfortably art’ – and one should view it as one views art. And that everything is somehow recommended, perhaps even equally recommended in some sense.
And it is part of a curators vision to present to you a Smorgasbord of things which are a reflection of his or her taste, in some way.
And I hope that little of that applies here, and indeed there are symptomatic rather than exceptional photojournalistic images that I have shown. Ones that, for instance, might be seen as quite overt propaganda for the US military, even though they have been taken by independent photojournalists. And which have been displayed for their symptomatic nature rather than as exceptional images, that is absolutely right.
The framing thing: enlargement, framing, mounting all of that. It is a really tricky issue I think, and sometimes as this process has been going on, and especially over the last few days, when one sees these things installed on the wall, it has been quite shocking for me, I think, to see some of these images displayed like that.
But part of the issue, or one of the things that I would like people to think about, is this category of ‘art’. Now it seems plain that the right aspects of photojournalism, which have become identified as art in some ways. So that the Don McCullum prints, for instance: Don McCullum is someone who has been showing in galleries for really quite a long time, and we are used to seeing those images in art shows. And indeed in monographic shows like his Barbican show, where they are split up into categories which are more about big issues about the human condition, rather than … so they are divorced really from their journalistic context. And those images are beautifully printed, and beautifully framed art objects.
Now it may well be that with the passage of time, that there a bodies of photojournalistic work from Iraq which undergo the same transformation. I am a bit ambivalent about that process. But I suppose there is something useful about gallery display in terms of – at least getting people to slow down and looking at the stuff carefully – and also those prints, all of the prints, (I should say Spectrum, they have done a fantastic job with them, hugely grateful to them), are much better than looking at these things in reproduction. You see so many more details that leap out at you. There is a point to showing them there, I think.
So I hope that they will be looked at more slowly and with more critical reflection than you might in a newspaper or even in a book.
Helen
OK Next Question
Question from the Floor
It seems to me one of the things that this Biennial suggests, is that the photojournalism, that you have been talking about, that it is actually important and that we should look at it and that we should understand it. And it is something that the genre that has probably been in decline, one could argue, since its heyday in the 30s to perhaps even the 60s. And also diversified and come back to us in different ways. The classic reportage that some of which finds its way into these exhibitions. And I just think that it is a point that perhaps a very simple point, that we shouldn’t ignore, that is what this festival is partly about. To suggest that we look closely at these images again. You mentioned various things in your writings about it, the fact that the veracity of photographs of photojournalism has been challenged in recent years, and recent decades maybe. The fact that photojournalists’ motives have been called into question. You mentioned war junkies. Now we should look at it again as a means of understanding and gaining awareness of things that we couldn’t otherwise know about. Would you say…?
Julian
Yes. Absolutely. I think that photojournalism in the Vietnam War had a very powerful role to play, in stimulating and sustaining the anti-war movement. Unlike the very dramatic and popular anti-war movement that took form before the Iraq war even began, but then it seemed to fizzle out quite soon after military action took place. But that hasn’t happened. So indeed partly to look at that condition of photojournalism, and think about its powerlessness, in a sense, and the circumstances of its powerlessness.
And to think too about the press as a whole. In researching and reading around these issues for the Biennial, I am more and more struck by the corruption of the press, I suppose, by the way in which it has come to serve very narrow business interests. And indeed it has become such a narrow business itself, and one so much concerned with cost cutting, and producing spectacular but shallow stories. And the decline not only of photojournalism but also of investigative journalism. The fact that it is such a victim of the PR industry as well: the PR industry including of course those massive PR agencies which are the CIA and Pentagon and other bodies of that sort. If democracy is to be taken seriously and public dialogue is to be taken seriously, and one is to have a developing and critical view of what is going on in the world, including about these most serious issues, going out and destroying a country (which is what could happen) then we need a press. We need a real press. And it is failing, and the failure of photojournalism is a part of that, I think.
Question from the Floor
I haven’t actually seen any of the exhibitions, so this is not a personal comment, but I was wondering whether what you would reply to any criticism leveled at the overall feeling of the exhibition or the festival as being one of anti-war?
And also, is there any attempt to look at the more personal or emotional experiences of soldiers themselves?
What is interesting at the moment, is looking at the popularity of the Sun’s Campaign Supporting Our Boys – supporting the troops, which is hugely popular – by a large number of the British Public in terms of money that has been raised towards British troops.
Julian
Yes. Let’s think.
I am not sure that you would say necessarily that all the exhibitions, or even the overall curatorial argument is simply anti-war. As I say, I see these images – Helen was talking about the Sontag quote earlier – I don’t want to impose a particular view on you, I would like you the viewers to use the juxtaposition of images to think about aspects of the war, the media, photographic representation and so on.
Certainly there are ways of reading the exhibition which would render a powerful anti-war message. And I am sure there are elements in the exhibition which will upset people. I think they should. As I have said, I don’t think we see – for various reasons – see enough of this kind of imagery. And there has been a great deal of de facto censorship of the press for one reason or another, which means that we are often presented with a spectacular but very anodyne view of these current wars.
The other side of your question? Well the Julian Germain show absolutely looks at the conditions and motivations of soldiers, in their own image productions: and takes that seriously. This is not the kind of anti-war attitude which would not want to think about the conditions of the soldiers. And indeed there are plenty of images in both the Vietnam and Iraq rooms which also look at the plight, in a sense, of the occupying forces.
Helen
OK We have just got time for one more question and then we will have to bring this conversation to a close. Anymore comments or questions?
Question from the Floor
Hi. I would just like to ask a very quick question about the issue of ‘captioning’ that you brought up earlier on.
And I wonder whether captioning, and that interpretive mechanism, is one of the ways that the different registers of imaging that you have brought together across the festival can be made to enter into conversation with eachother. I mean that in a couple of ways. You said earlier on that one of the ways of captioning as a value and importance, is that we identify what we are seeing. And it just so happened that there was a Gilbertson image behind you when you were talking about that. I got the impression that detailed level of captioning was something that would happen with those particular kinds of images.
With that Gilbertson one, I think, there was a very intriguing moment to have that discussion, because that image in particular is one that seems to me to be open to a variety of different interpretations. The soldier on the right wasn’t a marine, he was an infantry man, and he was also a member of the military police – and so the possibility that this wasn’t trophy taking event, but rather was an event that had a judicial nature attached to it, would be something that could perhaps be considered when captioning the information.
But the question that I had, I suppose, in focus, was whether the same level of captioning that you described taking place with some of these photojournalistic images – would bury itself into the artistic, more conventionally artistic, images. Like Simon Norfolk’s wonderful ‘Flatness of Line in Conflict’. Are they ones that have a similar captioning – are they dealt with at the same level?
Julian
That is a very interesting question. And maybe Ashley, who is here, would like to talk about that image. I don’t know. But on the broader issue …
Interruption from the floor
