If you’re going to Wikipedia today (the English site), it’s blacked out. The same is true for Boing Boing. Google placed a black bar over their logo. These - and other - efforts are targeted against pending US legislation called (brace yourselves) the “Stop Online Piracy Act” or SOPA. If you’re curious why SOPA in its current form is a truly, truly bad idea, you can either watch this explainer by The Guardian or read read this article in Salon.com.
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We Are the 99 Percent is a Tumblr blog, where photography, social protest, and the internet have come together in an amazing way. Here is an interview with the people being the blog, this article talks about why Tumblr was used.
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Ai Weiwei, earlier this year “detained” by Chinese authorities and then released, has written a piece about Beijing and his experience: “This city is not about other people or buildings or streets but about your mental structure. If we remember what Kafka writes about his Castle, we get a sense of it. Cities really are mental conditions. Beijing is a nightmare. A constant nightmare.”
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Talking about the war in Afghanistan, David Campbell writes: “Covering such a long-running conflict, the dynamics of which have not altered greatly in its nine years, necessarily produces a certain uniformity to the subjects conveyed. In Boston.com’s Big Picture gallery for November 2010 we see 43 high quality images that detail allied forces, Afghan civilians, Taliban casualties and American military families. There is also an inevitable regularity to the look of these images. […] I think we should ask hard questions about how to represent a war that has gone on for so long. I don’t think, though, that those questions are best pursued by a concern over the technologies of representation or the anxiety about aesthetics.”
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If you haven’t seen the cover of TIME magazine or if you haven’t read the editors’ thinking about it, head over here. Also, there is a moving short film in which Jodi Bieber, the photographer, talks about taking the photograph. I’ve spent all day now thinking about the various aspects. A post over at Jezebel does a brilliant job summing up the real complexities of the issue, way better than I could: “Aisha’s abuse and mutilation took place last year, with U.S. troops’ presence in the country and alongside Afghan women’s significant progress on certain fronts. Women For Women in Afghanistan has some more details on her tragic background […] Such stories are obscene, not at all uncommon, and need to be told. But there is an elision here between these women’s oppression and what the U.S. military presence can and should do about it, which in turn simplifies the complexities of the debate and turns it into, ‘Well, do you want to help Aisha or not?’”
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If you haven’t seen the video described in this post you probably only want to look if you have a strong stomach. And I mean a very strong stomach. I think we’re all (sadly) familiar with the kinds of videos where you see people get blown up, witnessing their last moments via some camera in a jet plane; but to actually hear helicopter pilots boast about their deeds… I literally had get up from my desk and go for a walk, because I had all faith in humanity sucked out of me - and I didn’t even make it up to the moment where they tried to evacuate the victims. (more, updated)
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“The true affront to Lance Cpl. Joshua Bernard’s dignity is that he died young, thousands of miles away from his family, where he was serving the wishes of a government that has a political agenda that it cannot pursue without resorting to violence on a mass scale.” writes Tom White about a photograph of a fatally wounded US soldier, a photo of which caused a bit of a stir some time ago. A must-read post.
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“Professional and amateur photographers have gathered in London’s Trafalgar Square to protest against terror stop and searches.” (story; photo by Michael Perrin, from the BBC’s website)
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“I’ve noticed an interesting pattern. Visual artists are conflicted as to where they stand in relation to copyright laws. To be more precise, there seems to be two camps: those that favor strong copyright protection for artists and their copyrights, and those that favor either a relaxed form of fair use or worse yet, a ‘right’ to appropriate and lift from copyright owners without any legal repercussions. As a friend of mine noticed […] this makes complete sense. Those artists who favor stronger copyright laws are making money from their work, many times substantially. Those favoring ‘free culture’ or, ‘let information flow,’ are usually those artists making little to no money from their artwork. […] Hidden underneath this dilemma is a reality that many artists […] are reluctant to accept: that a viable artistic practice (at least in the so-called ‘art world’) is in fact no different than operating a for-profit business. One can veil or name this what one wants, but the reality is that successful artists […] face legal and business issues similar to those of a bar owner, an employer, a publisher, an Internet company, a shipping company, etc.” - Sergio Muñoz Sarmiento
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There are a lot of good and interesting points being made by William Patry in this interview (found here), which, I am sure, will have a lot of people get very upset. I don’t agree with all the various details, but I do agree very strongly with these following statements: “I would rather not draw a sharp distinction between creators and users. One of the transformational attributes of the Internet is to make all of us potential creators. The same is true of fair use: fair use is of benefit to all creators, including large corporations.” and “I would like to see copyright return to the U.S. Copyright Act, where we had a shorter term, and formalities, a copyright law that gave copyright owners enough incentives but not too much.”
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No, I’m not talking about President Obama. I’m talking about the art that is decorating the White House now, in particular Ed Ruscha’s I think I’ll…. But then of course, this painting perfectly expresses Mr. Obama’s presidency so far.
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PhotoQ managed to unearth the essay that AP forced the Noorderlicht Festival to remove - now you can see what the fuss was all about.
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David Campbell offers a smart take on AP’s censorship of part of the Noorderlicht Festival: “I think both [Noorderlich curator] Franklin and AP are naïve in their view that photographs themselves speak, as though they could construct a larger meaning without text or other related media that put them in context. However, in addition to their censorship of Franklin’s views, AP are especially naïve because the professional Palestinian photographs from within Gaza […] have already been widely circulated and read with a variety of texts creating various meanings. To suggest that these AP photographs should now be stripped of prior associations and rendered ‘apolitical’ is itself the most political stance one can take.”
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Like probably everybody else, I have been following what is going on in Iran, and this cartoon by Steve Bell, which I found here, might well be the most fitting visual commentary I’ve seen so far.
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A post by Rob Haggart pointed me to an issue of the jury of this years’s PDN Photography Annual being all white (find another take on this here, plus there is the original post that raised the issue here). With a jury of 24 people a complete lack of diversity does indeed look suspicious. I did not want to write something without having spoken with the party in question, PDN, so I emailed them yesterday. PDN told me this morning that they have looked at the comments and discussions following Rob’s post; should they decide to comment, they will do so on their PDNPulse blog. (Updated below)
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“I disagree with Phillip Gourevitch about whether the Obama Administration should release what remain of the unseen photos from Abu Ghraib, but he has written this thoughtful Op-Ed in The New York Times today.” - Jim Johnson
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“Maybe we could do without even the best art about childhood. Maybe we could ask ourselves the questions art asks on our own. But child pornography law does something worse than chill artistic thought. It allows us to ignore what actually abuses children all the time. Strangely, every single one of the scandals about child pornography in art galleries has involved photographs of healthy and affluent white children. Protection of the most vulnerable children, apparently, is not what concerns advocates of child pornography law. Rational protection of real children against actual abuse is not the highest priority of those who demand censorship of pictures. I almost wonder if it is the contrary. Is a strident demand for censorship of images a decoy? Does it deflect the facts of child abuse, the fact, for instance, that the overwhelming majority of cases of child abuse occur in the home and are inflicted by fathers, step-fathers or boyfriends?” - Anne Higonnet, in a very smart article with a lot of examples (via)
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Sorry for this politics only post, but this is a major event in US politics: Arlen Specter Switches Parties.
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There appears to be a category of publication that always ends up flying under most people’s radar, for reasons that I don’t find that obvious. If people buy the Sunday edition of the New York Times for the magazine, why is The New York Review of Books not more well known? Sure, they have less photography, but they easily give the Times’ magazine a run for the money as far as quality and scope of the articles is concerned. Likewise, there is Granta Magazine, which actually looks more like a little book, more literary in form, and whose magazines are each devoted to a single topic. And then there’s dispatches, which resembles Granta Magazine in form, but its design looks more modern, and it has more photography.
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The Federal Republic of Germany is turning 60 years today, and German magazine Der Spiegel celebrates with a special edition of its magazine. It truly is a Deutsches Wunder (German miracle) how East Germany and its history pretty much disappear behind the new Reichstag, (West) Germany’s first Chancellor and a kitschy (West) German movie star.
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The other day, Mark Danner published a piece entitled US Torture: Voices from the Black Sites, which makes for a depressing and infuriating read. If you don’t have the time (or stomach) for it, there’s a shorter version, published as Op-Ed in the New York Times.
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With so many people - especially from the right - railing against government funding for artists, here’s another way to think about it. Without the US government giving money to photographers to document life during the Great Depression, this iconic photograph, one of the most important and famous photographs ever to be taken in the United States, would not have come into existence (see details of the photo shoot here), and the same is true for many other, lesser known examples from that era.
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“An attempt by Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma to eliminate all arts and museum funding from the [stimulus] bill was defeated. Ironically, Sen. Coburn is the father of the outstanding young soprano Sarah Coburn, who has appeared many times at opera houses supported by the National Endowment for the Arts. Last year the younger Coburn went home to Oklahoma to sing in Lakmé at the Tulsa Opera - a production made possible in part by a $15,000 grant from the NEA.” - Alex Ross
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A casino or other gambling establishment, an aquarium, a zoo, a golf course, a swimming pool, a stadium, a community park, a museum, a theater, an arts center, or a highway-beautification project. Any ideas? Tough one, isn’t it? Not if you’re a politician! Have a look.
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New York City certainly knows about its priorities: With the city plastered with advertizements - they even project ads onto the walls of the subway tunnels so you can watch an ad while you’re trying not to look at the ads inside the trains - somebody who physically cuts up ad posters to turn them into something else certainly is not welcome: “Last night before a benefit he was scheduled to participate in at a loft in Soho, the street artist known as Poster Boy was arrested by an undercover cop.” (story)
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“Rocked by a budget crisis, Brandeis University will close its Rose Art Museum and sell off a 6,000-object collection that includes work by such contemporary masters as Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, and Nam June Paik.” (story)
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I went out this morning to watch the inauguration at a cafe, with dozens of other people from my fiercely and proudly liberal hometown, but I suppose as someone who is spending so much time using the web it’s almost a must to show what the front page of the White House’s website looks like right now.
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Today is the final day of the presidency of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. I spent quite a bit of time thinking about which image would summarize - also in a symbolic way - these past eight years, this pair and what they have achieved, and I think it’s this image.
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“Sad days have marked this transition from one year to the next. This sadness emanates from the events in Gaza, which illustrate the least glorious aspect of humanity. Here the horror of the human race appears in all its nudity. […] This display of horror is pornographic, […] privileging the principle of death over the love of life, suspending the renunciation and the reserve which make civilisation what it is and hastening the advent of destructive, instinctive barbarity which, in according primacy to violence, spreads death and transforms populated areas into ruins and graveyards.” - Abdelwahab Meddeb
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At least half of our modern world’s politics deals with propaganda or, as the players would probably prefer to call it, “messaging”. It’s not what you really do, it’s what you make it look like. Paul Krugman offers a compelling and simple discussion of how staging an image twice didn’t play out the same way for George W. Bush.
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“‘Am I crazy to feel so bad about Prop. 8 when something so great just happened?’ I asked my dear friend ‘Joseph.’ Like Obama, Joseph is in his 40s, was raised by a single white mother, had an absent black father and has worked all his adult life as a community organizer in the poorest of black neighborhoods. Unlike Obama, Joseph is a Christian minister. Also, Joseph is gay — and concerned enough about the consequences of that fact to be quoted here pseudonymously. ‘I feel exactly the same way,’ Joseph answered. ‘Sixty-seven percent of my state voted for a man who looks like me. Fifty-two percent of my state decided to deny me the right to live the life that’s natural to me. It’s really strange to believe that so many people could support me on the one hand and deny me on the other.’” - story
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How’s this for some small-town values: Obama: 83.1%, McCain 14.6% (source)
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(by Patrick Moberg)
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(image by Callie Shell)
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“Who are the people of America? What are we thinking? What makes us angry and frustrated? What gives us hope? Are some of us really all blue and some all red? Or are we mostly shades of purple? What is the American Dream today? InSight America is an innovative documentary project that aims to explore these questions on the eve of one of the most important elections in American history. Calling on the talents of some of the world’s most respected photojournalists, using the Web to update their observations daily, InSight America is a collage of personal investigations and reflections that attempts to capture the things preoccupying Americans during the weeks leading to Election Day.”
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… by my friend Richard Renaldi.
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“Art for Obama is an online auction of photographs to benefit the Obama Campaign. Fifty of the country’s most prominent artists and photographers have donated their work for this cause. The auction will launch on October 1st and will run for one week. All proceeds from the auction will go to the Obama Campaign, to the Democratic National Committee and to non-profit organizations such as MoveOn.org, which are currently devoting their energy to helping the Obama campaign. Proceeds will be distributed in strict accordance with Federal Election Commmission regulations.” (source) Participating artists include Tim Davis, Larry Fink, Katy Grannan, Lisa Kereszi, David Maisel, Richard Misrach, Alec Soth, Larry Sultan, and many more (seems like some were added since I first posted this). Note (updated 3 Oct): According to the organizers (they sent out an email), “In order to abide by FEC regulations, we will not be donating our proceeds directly to Obama or the DNC . Instead, the proceeds will go to MoveOn.org; one of the most effective advocacy groups for the Obama campaign, who is also involved in respectful, and progressive issues that concern us all as Americans.”
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If you’re like me you probably think you sort of know about enough about the financial market, and you kind of know what’s going on, you think you can maybe explain why bailing out some bank can be a good idea, and, anyway, all your savings are “FDIC insured” anyway. But the details are kind of muddy, and hey, who wants to know all the details anyway? But then, maybe it would help if someone explained what buying out AIG actually means and whether or not we’re in a mess. If you’re interested in that go no further than here (thanks, Richard, for sharing!) and listen (and then, when you’re done, do some breathing exercises to get your pulse back to normal).
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“What is censorship? Censorship is a form of prohibition and punishment. Ever since the 15th century products of the printing press have been subject to censorship and since the 20th century the same has applied to film, radio, television and the Internet. Censorship thus relates to public communication and content in word, image and sound.” - An excellent overview from the Persmuseum in Amsterdam. Many of the examples are from Holland, but that doesn’t take away from a look at censorship from 1600 until today.
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The story: Photographer Jill Greenberg is hired by the magazine The Atlantic to take a portrait of Republican presidential candidate John McCain for the magazine’s October issue. “After getting that shot, Greenberg asked McCain to ‘please come over here’ for one more set-up before the 15-minute shoot was over. There, she had a beauty dish with a modeling light set up. ‘That’s what he thought he was being lit by,’ Greenberg says. ‘But that wasn’t firing.’ What was firing was a strobe positioned below him, which cast the horror movie shadows across his face and on the wall right behind him. ‘He had no idea he was being lit from below,’ Greenberg says. And his handlers didn’t seem to notice it either. ‘I guess they’re not very sophisticated,’ she adds.” (source; let’s keep the “not very sophisticated” in mind!).
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Lies by The Rolling Stones. Hey, what a catchy tune! And such simple lyrics: “Lies, dripping off your mouth like dirt / Lies, lies in every step you walk / Lies, whispered sweetly in my ear / Lies, how do I get out of here?”
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I wasn’t going to cover this stuff here, but these two clips are too good not to link to them. So if you missed (“missed”) the convention coverage, here are two one-minute summaries: Democrats, Republicans. And now go and enjoy your weekends!
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What John McCain is now learning the hard way right is that properly vetting the pick for vice president is a very good idea (just as an aside, his pick of an ultra-conservative governor with basically no experience and a whole bunch of scandals despite her young age is extremely amusing). Proper vetting is also a good idea for people who just want to forward an image that supposedly shows Sarah Palin, posing with a gun and an American flag bikini: A two-second Google investigation reveals it’s not real.
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“An Associated Press photographer and a Democracy Now! TV and radio show host were among those arrested at an anti-war march on the first day of the Republican National Convention. Both were released hours later. […] David Ake, an AP assistant chief of bureau in Washington, said he was concerned by the arrest of Rourke, a Philadelphia-based photographer. ‘Covering news is a constitutionally protected activity, and covering a riot is part of that coverage,’ Ake said. ‘Photographers should not be detained for covering breaking news.’” - story
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Jacob Weisberg’s “There, I said it”: “If it makes you feel better, you can rationalize Obama’s missing 10-point lead on the basis of Clintonite sulkiness, his slowness in responding to attacks, or the concern that Obama may be too handsome, brilliant, and cool to be elected. But let’s be honest: If you break the numbers down, the reason Obama isn’t ahead right now is that he trails badly among one group, older white voters. He does so for a simple reason: the color of his skin. Much evidence points to racial prejudice as a factor that could be large enough to cost Obama the election.”
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Go no further than here to find the ultimate write-up of what was and is going on in Georgia (incl. a lot of background information etc.).
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Here’s a podcast of Richard Ross talking about his work “Architecture of Authority” (and the page gives some samples).
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“With a $3 trillion war bill and an economy that flounders as China’s soars, could America’s era of dominance on the world stage be coming to an end? Mick Brown and the photographer Alec Soth travelled across America and China to observe how the future of these two great nations is intertwined, and to find out whether, in the run-up to the Beijing Olympics and the US election, we are on the brink of a new world order. In the first of a four-part series, they meet army recruitment officers in Virginia and cadets at West Point.” Part 2: “Once symbolic of optimism and certainty, America’s credit-crunched suburbs may be facing a decline as dramatic as that of Detroit, itself once a beacon of industry.” (found via Colin Pantall’s blog) Part 3: “The thrusting tower blocks of Chongqing stand testament to the headlong economic growth that is changing the lives of millions of Chinese. Mick Brown and the photographer Alec Soth continue their investigation into the contrasting fortunes of the US and China by exploring the world’s fastest-growing city.” Part 4: “With the Beijing Olympics, China hopes to cement its position alongside the USA on the podium of global power. In the final part of their special investigation, Mick Brown and photographer Alec Soth examine how both nations are playing the Games.”
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