This is an image from Óscar Monzón's Sweet Car, which has just the right mix of everything that might happen in your car. Simple, and good.

If we wanted to know what a place looked like we would need an infinity of photographs, taken from all possible angles, excluding nothing, seeing everything at the same time. This is, at least at the time of this writing, an absurd idea. The closest we have to this kind of god-like vision is the Google Street View car with its many eyes, that photograph a particular location in a completely disinterested fashion, looking at everything around it.

The moment one starts to exclude something from the all-encompassing view your portrayal of some place will not be faithful any longer in the strictest sense. This is photography's greatest flaw. This is what makes photography such a fantastic art form. As Colin notes, what we value in a photographer when we enjoy her or his work to a large extent is based on the process of selection, on the artist's ability and willingness to make decisions, to prefer one thing over another, in fact over all the other ones in that particular moment.

In that sense, no photographic treatment of any place will ever be truthful. Too much will be excluded, and our brains would never be able to even process the infinity of images and information a truthful portrayal would provide.

Photography is exclusion. Looking at photography must be done with an awareness of that fact.

There is more. Even if we assumed that it was possible to get that infinity of photographs of a place, two people would probably still come to very different conclusions. Just imagine someone living in the place and someone visiting. And that would be just the most obvious difference one could think of. As I've already argued elsewhere our perceptions of photography are very much based on what we bring to the table, our personal, cultural, political biases.

So the simplest defense CNN could have used for their Appalachia edit would have been: Who says that this is not Appalachia? How do you know the real Appalachia? Your Appalachia is as biased as ours. And they would have had a point.

Both CNN's and Stacy Kranitz's views of Appalachia are biased (to be more precise, CNN did a biased edit of a biased body of work). That's photography. There is no way around it. To ask for a truthful portrayal of Appalachia is to ask for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. That said, CNN and Kranitz operate in different spheres. Kranitz is a visual artist. CNN is a news organization.

Once we enter the realm of the news we are in tricky territory - and it is absolutely no surprise that so many debates about photography happen right here, in the context of news. As I've argued in the context of manipulation and photography, the main problem is that news organizations like to pretend that there can be such a thing as unbiased photography. In a nutshell, news organizations are behaving like a politician or talk-radio host who already has been married three times but who is still preaching about the sacredness of family values. That just doesn't fly - people aren't stupid.

Photography of a place will inevitably be biased. To pretend that's not the case is a very bad idea. Instead, the solution has to start with acknowledging that. In the CNN case, they should have very openly stated that the images they're showing are their edit of the photographer's work. On top of that, they should have provided a statement about their edit: "This selection of images reflects..." As a result there would have been a hook for a debate. Photography of a place will be biased, but we need to talk about the biases - all of them (the photographer's and ours) because that is where we can learn something.

Any set of photographs, regardless of which context it operates in, derives its value not from pointing out that here, this is the way things are, but from the questions it asks, the commotions it produces inside us that make us learn something. We have no way of getting around our biases, but photographs can help us identify them - so we can hope to mold them, to change them, to maybe even remove some. Note that I'm using the word "bias" in a neutral sense here.

When we say that some photo project does not portray a place accurately, more often that not it indicates that the photographs simply do not gel with our biases: We do not want to see a place portrayed in that light. For the Appalachia debate, it seems very obvious to me that the criticism of CNN's edit originated from that direction. And that's fine, even though we still need to have a debate about that, having in mind that there never will be a resolution.

There are other photography debates where there are different biases at play, and where things might focus on something very different. I mentioned the case of Africa. The history of photography essentially starts out with an incredibly lopsided view of Africa, displaying biases that clearly are not acceptable any longer (colonialism, racism, etc.). When we talk about photography done in Africa, we need to be aware of those historic biases as well as our own contemporary ones. We need to talk about how/whether they are intertwined, especially since historical biases have left their traces in our own cultural heritage. We will never get to that unbiased view of Africa, either, but given the vastly larger number of biases (plus our often shocking lack of actual information about the continent), we should work very hard on understanding what is going on when we look at photography taken in Africa. For great and incredibly informative writing about this subject matter see John Edwin Mason's blog.

It is important to realize that in different contexts, the outcome of our debates might be different. In a news context the idea clearly should be to have us a bit more informed. Despite all the possible biases, that is how we should judge news contents (this is why the debates about the CNN presentation for the most part were successful). In an art context, the general idea usually cannot be described that easily. You can move photographs from one context to another, but you have to be careful with the new "rules".

When it comes to photography and place, the photographs really are only the beginning. We do need to talk about the biases that might be present in any body of work claiming to portray a place. But we also need to include our own biases in the discussion. We must not overburden photography with something it cannot do - providing us with an accurate portrayal of anything. Instead, we must acknowledge the maker's hand, and we should talk about its role - and our reactions.

This is an image from Rachel Cox's The past 8 Years, an extended portrait of the photographer's grandmother. (via)

Paula Winkler's Exceptional Encounters contains portraits of men found through internet sex forums. (via)

Jane Hilton's Dead Eagle Trail portrays American cowboys, who might just be the most quintessential characters of the American West.

Stuart Bailes' Ruin Value carries a heavy weight. Not unlike Nietzsche's heaviest weight it will either transform the viewer or crush them; as Bailes himself remarks, "It's about deciding to understand or not to understand". To understand what though? To understand infers a finitude, an end to a thought -an end of an idea. Indeed, perhaps the word 'understand' is not quite right, or perhaps it needs to be preceded by words such as 'endeavouring to': It's about endeavouring to understand or not to understand. We arrive then at an act of sorts, something that does not have an end as such. Again, like Nietzsche's burden, we are compelled to return eternally to the image, to the question it poses, never understanding, but forever lingering in its indeterminate proposition. (more)

The singular image in photography, like Bailes' unaccompanied works Ruin Value, The Empiricist or The Informants, can, by virtue of being seemingly infinite (there is no visible end unlike the linear inevitability of a photographic project) exist for much longer; the images can continually prevail in their eternally recurrent action. In this sense the singular image is always open, liberated by its own unhindered sovereignty. There is neither beginning nor end in the lone image, it appears free from precise conceptual agendas, and progresses in an action that does not move linearly towards a destined understanding, but exists recurrently in a continual evolution of understanding. For this reason, we arrive at an understanding of Bailes' images in not understanding them, but forever endeavouring to understand them.

Consequently, it then becomes harmful for the viewer to decide to understand, and say: "Ah, The Empiricist, it is about the limits of understanding through visual analysis alone". If this is the thought, the vital function of the image has been overlooked, and the work digresses back into an isolated picture lost amongst its sequenced others. The viewer has missed their chance to take the artist's thought, to take a measure of the artist's weight, and allow it to provoke a sometimes-disconcerting but necessary process within themselves.

The totality that is Bailes' pictures and their titles -their indivisibility into two separate elements- is the success of the work. There exists in Bailes' singular images a duality of simplicity that results in a complex mechanism for extended thought. The viewer is provoked to linger in the presence of these images as there subsists in them an ambiguity of both title and image that resists definition; that resists an appropriation of its content into mere information. It is Bailes' concern to do away with information that can be catalogued and stored, information that stunts thought with its pretence to being understood. The Empiricist asks, "How much information is enough?" Bailes' entire oeuvre asks, "How can I refuse information and resist understanding?"

~Christopher Thomas (cmlthomas88@yahoo.co.uk)

Stuart Bailes' solo exhibition is showing at Edel Assanti Gallery until 2nd June, 2012

As is obvious from the title, Jacob Mooty's Way Out West focuses on the American West, its myths, and the ideas that can be projected onto it. (via)

This image above shows part of Peter Puklus' Handbook to the Stars, the presentation of which I'm sure will make quite a few people unhappy. What you see in your web browser is never the full installation, instead, you need to scroll left and right, up and down to see images and groups of images. The corresponding book is already available - more on that at some other time.

Imperial Pictures by Matt Gainer focuses on the American Southwest borderlands, tying together ideas of the American West with the topic of illegal immigration from Mexico.

"Certainly anyone involved in an aesthetic practice -- anything tied to perception and communication -- is looking to innovate, to experiment with the form. That is a given. But this emphasis on the need to look different in order to attract attention and somehow correct the effects of so called image fatigue begs questions about the nature of image-based reportage, its status within the news industry, and the qualities that make it meaningful, which are not solely a matter of achieving a 'different look.'"

But even if you believed that photojournalism could gain something from a different look, there is another issue here. In the Lens interview, Lowy says

"I think that if you create a different aesthetic than people are used to seeing, you can attract the public -- you can bring them in and then all of a sudden that is when the content is delivered."

Many of the problems photojournalism faces might well lie beyond photojournalism itself - as Anderson notes. How photojournalists can deal with that I don't know. But I don't think converting iPhone photographs into mock-vintage images is the solution to the problem at all.

And I'd still love to hear from the New York Times why using the Hipstamatic app does not violate their strict rules concerning photo manipulations. You can't slap a "photo illustration" label on so many images - and then pretend there's no problem whatsoever with the Hipstamatic app. iPhones are able to produce very high-quality images (so by all means, photojournalists, use it). But the moment you produce those mock-vintage images by using the Hipstamatic app, you're engaged in some pretty serious image manipulation.

Of course, as H.R. Haldeman said "Once the toothpaste is out of the tube, it's hard to get it back in!" I am sure we're going to see more Hipstamatic photojournalism. I just hope it'll be one of those trends that will make everybody ask "What were they thinking?" in five or ten years...

Kourtney Roy's Auto-Portraits combine the self portrait with the idea of the staged narrative. I personally prefer the diptychs over the single shots - given the often added visual complexity.

Newsha Tavakolian's "Listen" portrays six female Iranian professional singers who are subjected to severe restrictions due to the country's Islamic laws. There also is a video installation that goes along the body of work.

Postera is an online tool and web hosting service. It allows artists, photographers, illustrators, designers, architects and visual people of all types to build and maintain beautiful websites.

It's time you get your work out there.

Anna Dasovic's Vredenhof 1939-1945 focuses on a rather unique World War 2 cemetary on a small Dutch island, working with archival photographs and documents. (via)