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Page 1: Anti Photojournalism

1.4 – 8.6.2011

Anti photo

�ournal ism

Keizersgracht 6091017 DS Amsterdam

+31 20 5516500 www.foam.org

Page 2: Anti Photojournalism

Photojournalism is in the midst of a remarkable, and singularly unexpected, renaissance. New practices, strategies, viewpoints, techniques, and agents have radically transformed the institutions and the fundamental concepts of the field.

While it has become fashionable to lament the death of photojournalism, actual events suggest that something quite different is taking place. New ways of reporting the news, new imaginations of what the news might be, have challenged the hegemonic figure of the photojournalist at its core – and given birth to the most interesting ideas.

An upheaval has occurred at once within the field – the exhaustion of an old paradigm and its displacement by new ones – and from without,

where different images, and different kinds of images, have ruined the absolute authority of the old ways. These critical approaches – at once ethical, political, social, aesthetic, theoretical, even epistemological – which we call, following Allan Sekula, ‘antiphotojournalism,’ themselves have a history and a multiplicity of forms, which is what we present here.

Classically, photojournalism has been governed by a number of tropes: the heroic figure of the photo­grapher, the economy of access to the event, the iconic image, the value of ‘the real’ and its faithful representation in the picture, the mission of re­porting the truth and conveying it to a faraway public, and often a commitment to a sort of advo­cacy or at least a bearing witness to terrible events.

Antiphoto-journalism

by Thomas Keenan and Carles Guerra

“The rule of thumb for this sort of anti-photojournalism: no flash, no telephoto zoom lens, no gas mask, no auto-focus,

no press pass and no pressure to grab at all costs the one defining image of dramatic violence.“

Allan Sekula, Waiting for Tear Gas, 1999

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Gilles PeressGilles Peress once famously described a certain forensic turn, away from what he called photojournalism and towards the matter­of­fact: “I work much more like a forensic photographer in a certain way, collecting evidence. I’ve started to take more still lives, like a police photographer, collecting evidence as a witness. I’ve started to borrow a different strategy than that of the classic photojournalist. The work is much more factual and much less about good photography. I’m gathering evidence for history, so that we remember.” This commitment to evidence took a strange turn itself when Peress, working with human rights investigators and other journalists, entered Kosovo in 1999. Having documented what he later called the ‘exile and return’ of refugees at the border crossing of Morina, Peress and others focused on the village of Cuska, a few kilometers east of Pec, where eyewitnesses confirmed earlier reports that the village had been destroyed and forty­one men executed in May. In addition to the testimonies of survivors and of the ruins them­selves, Peress and researcher Fred Abrahams found something else remarkable: photographs of the possible perpetrators of the attack, taken by the paramilitaries themselves. These ‘self­portraits’ became central to the investigation, and helped Peress, Abrahams, and Eric Stover create ‘a picture of the terrible crimes committed in the village, along with portraits of some of the

individuals who appear to have committed them.’ The results are gathered in a book, A Village Destroyed: May 14, 1999 (U. California Press, 2002). Since then, what Peress calls ‘the long arm of justice’ has gradually reached out to find and prosecute many of those accused in the Cuska massacre. Eleven men accused in the destruction of Cuska have now been arrested. A series of emails from Abrahams tracks the cases.

Gilles Peress (France,1946) began working as a photo­grapher in 1970. He joined Magnum Photos in 1972, and has twice served as its President. He has covered the conflicts in Northern Ireland, the former

Yugoslavia, and the Great Lakes region of Africa extensively. He has published a number of books, beginning with his reportage from the Iranian Revolution in 1979, Telex Iran (Aperture 1984).

Phil CollinsPhil Collins sometimes seems more akin to a foreign correspondent than a traditional artist. how to make a refugee is a videotape of a press conference, just across the border from Kosovo in Macedonia, in which two Kosovar refugee families are presented to the international media covering the 1999 NATO air campaign and the results of the ethnic cleansing of Kosovo. From time to time, the boy at the centre of attention, and the family, answer questions as they respond to the instructions of a photographer and his assistant. Collins’ intervention

Antiphotojournalism names a systematic critique of these clichés, and a complex set of counter­ proposals. It names a profound and passionate fidelity to the image, too, an image unleashed from the demands of this tradition and freed to ask other questions, make other claims, tell other stories.

Sometimes the gesture is reflective, self­reflective – what are we photographers doing here, what do we assume, how do we work, what do we expect and what is expected of us? Sometimes the desire is evidentiary – not in the old sense of simply

offering the ‘evidence’ of images to an assumedly homogenous public opinion, but in much more precise way: photographs have become evidence in war crimes tribunals. Sometimes the innovation is technological, whether it involves working with the hi­tech resources of advanced satellite imagery or the low­tech crowd­sourcing of parti­cipatory protest imaging. Sometimes the practices are archival, even bordering on the fetishistic.

And sometimes the question is simply whether we even need images at all.

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is minimal; he merely records the mise-en-scène of the event. His camera, alert to the presence and the effects of all the other cameras, discovers not simply how a media event comes into being but nothing less than the production of its subject, the refugee, as well. In later works he has explored the margins of daily life for young people in conflict zones, often by creating unusual pop­cultural situations, from screen tests in Baghdad in 2002 to a dance marathon in Ramallah in 2004 to kara oke contests in Turkey, Columbia and Indonesia.

desire to witness, we will lose the sense of what has happened.’ These photographs show us how that recording comes about.

Paul LowePaul Lowe worked as a frontline photojournalist in the 1980s and 1990s, from Grozny to Cape Town. His book, Bosnians (Saqi, 2005), documenting ten years of the wartime and post­war situation in Bosnia, reflected on his investment – at once personal, ethical, and visual – in the country and its experiences. While reporting from Bosnia, Lowe began to study not only the events of the conflict and their protagonists, but the construction itself of the war and its photographic presentation. He wrote at the time: “Why photograph war? I am continually asked ‘why go there, what makes you want to put yourself at risk, aren’t you some kind of adrenalin junkie?’ But I don’t consider myself a ‘war photographer’, rather a photographer of extreme situations, of ordinary people in extra ­ordi nary circumstances.” In this series of photo­graphs, which begin at the scene of a massacre in Ahmići in 1993, Lowe describes the contours and characters of a war in which images and their production played a major role in shaping reality. He hesitated over the absurdity of, as he wrote, ‘waiting, along with other journalists, TV crews, and photo graphers, to go and see a massacre,’ or the tragedy of ‘fighting to get pictures of suffering children.’ He decides instead to turn his camera toward the conditions of appearance of those pictures rather than simply taking them himself. Still, he says later, he remains convinced that ‘without journalists and photographers who are motivated by a desire to know and to find out by a

Paul Lowe (England, 1963) lives and works in London and Sarajevo. His work has been recognized by many awards, including multiple World Press

Photo awards. He directs the MA in Photojournalism and Documentary Photography at the London College of Communication.

Kadir van Lohuizen (The Netherlands, 1963) has won a number of prizes for his reporting, including two World

Press Photo awards. He is a member of Noor Images, and the author of several books.

Kadir van LohuizenDiamond Matters is an exhaustive work of research into the diamond industry in 2004–5. It spans nine countries (Angola, Sierra Leone, DR Congo, Belgium, India, France, Holland, United Kingdom), and shows ‘the journey of a diamond’ from mines in Africa to consumers in the western world. Van Lohuizen aspires ‘to picture the whole industry, to show the whole process,’ by which he means ‘the financing, working conditions, dealers, and those who really profit from the industry.’ After all, diamonds are not just any commodity. Their journey begins in countries whose wars are financed by the illegal export of raw diamonds, and ends in a zone of opulence that might seem impossibly removed from those origins but is now indelibly marked by them. From the brutality of the mines themselves, through the operations of traders and craftspeople in Africa, Asia, and Europe, and finally to the shops and showrooms of Europe, the diamond constructs an elaborate network of violence, desire, and money. And diamonds are not the only vehicles travelling on those pathways. Diamond Matters suggests, and indeed exemplifies, nothing less than an analogy between diamonds and photographs, which are themselves born of others’ misery and transported through an elaborate and often invisible global economy of exchange to consumers in distant destinations.

Phil Collins (England, 1970) lives and works in Berlin, and was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2006.

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Above: Diamond Matters, 2005 © Kadir van Lohuizen, courtesy of Noor Images, AmsterdamFollowing spread: how to make a refugee, 1999, (film still) © Phil Collins, courtesy of Shady Lane Productions, Berlin

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Goran Galic & Gian-Reto Gredig

Photographers in Conflict offers portraits of and videotaped testimonies from thirty­two photo­journalists accustomed to working in zones of conflict or disaster. Galic and Gredig photographed and interviewed their colleagues at Visa pour l’Image, the annual documentary photography festival that takes place in Perpignan. Neither in the photographs nor the interviews are any of the photojournalists seen in action. Rather, they are standing still, their hands empty. They look straight into the camera as they answer questions like: what is your favourite photo? What do you expect from your job? What relation does it have with day­to­day life? By inviting people who habitually express themselves through images to speak, thus capturing their gestures, tone, and rhythms against a neutral background, Galic and Gredig reveal the more intimate and human side of a profession which has always been characterized by its distance and invisibility. In their re petitions, hesitations, and passions, their words also serve as a sort of diagram of the implicit self­understanding of photojournalism as it is lived and expressed by its practitioners. “By isolating the photojournalists and placing them in front of the camera,” Galic and Gredig say, they seek to “reverse the asymmetrical power relationship between photographer and subject, and explore the self­perception of the photographers.” Made by photo­graphers, of photographers, this series renders visible and audible the institution of photo­journalism itself, in all its self­certainty – and its self­questioning.

American Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, as it travelled from New York City to his burial in Washington DC. Paul Fusco, on assignment for Look Magazine, found himself quickly distracted from both the coffin and the funeral cortege. In his own words: “I was worried about what would happen at the cemetery, but then the train started to move and the first thing I saw were hundreds of mourners lining the tracks to pay their last respects. I was amazed. It wasn’t something I could have imagined or anticipated. I went straight to the window. My instinct told me I had to photograph what was happening.” The images which resulted from the simple gesture of pointing the camera out of the window toward the spec­tators, rather than remaining inside with the object of their gaze, undo and remake everything one might have expected, a shock somehow coincident with the shock of the event itself. Over the course of the journey, Fusco took nearly two thousand images which, seen in sequence, work as a kind of litany, a long, moving farewell not only to Kennedy but to what had been, for many, a short season of hope. That gesture of turning the camera away from the icon toward the act of watching, and turning that watching into the story itself, marks a departure from the photo­journalistic tradition, coming from deep within it.

Paul Fusco (U.S., 1930) was a staff photographer with Look Magazine from 1957 through 1971, and became a member of Magnum Photos in 1974.

His books include La Causa: The California Grape Strike (Collier, 1970), and Chernobyl Legacy (de.Mo, 2001).

Allan SekulaAllan Sekula takes documentary photographs, of a sort, which explore ‘the imaginary and material geographies of the advanced capitalist world.’ Whether he is examining the shipping industry and the folds of maritime space, chronicling the uprising against the global trade regime in Seattle, or exploring the links between the Polish diaspora in Chicago and the new realities of post­Communist Poland, his images at once tell the stories of their subjects and offer a critique of the language of documentary. Always alert to a prior history of representations, they set up complex relationships between the public life of political economy

Goran Galic (Switzerland, 1977) and Gian-Reto Gredig (Switzerland,1976) have worked together since 2002. Their three­year research project on

Bosnia, Ma bice bolje (It will get better) (2003­2006), examines ‘the construction and consumption of reality.’ They live and work in Zürich.

Paul FuscoRFK Funeral Train is a selection from a series of slides chronicling the reactions of mourners to the passage of the funeral train of assassinated

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Above: Photographers in Conflict, Stanley Greene, 2009 © Goran Galic & Gian­Reto GredigFollowing spread: Prayer For The Americans, 1999­2004 © Allan Sekula, courtesy of Galerie Michel Rein, Paris

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and the lived experiences of workers, families, and citizens. As he says, this ‘may require a constant movement between modes of metaphor or allegory and modes of description.’ Prayer for the Americans had its origins in the February 2001 collision between what he calls a ‘frolicking American nuclear submarine and a Japanese fisheries training ship,’ in response to which Sekula was moved to craft ‘a purely hypothetical prayer […] for the Americans and Their Allies.’ He was recalling Mark Twain’s ‘mostly forgotten War Prayer,’ which showed him that ‘prayer is a compelling ironic exercise for the irreligious.’ A few months later, American foreign policy, and with it the world, changed, and Sekula asked: “Why add the private prayers of an unbeliever to the veritable Babel of prayers emanating from a religious nation? The torturer in chief prays for the troops and the troops in turn are asked to pray for the torturer in chief. […] Can a deliberate sequence or involuntary overlay of photographs constitute a prayer? A psalm? Or ‘merely’ this: a record of a pilgrimage to the hometown of the old Mississippi river pilot and America’s original anti­imperialist, conveniently misremembered as a ‘humorist’ and chronicler of lost boyhood.” The photographic prayer – composed of contem­plative fishing scenes and touristic kitsch – seems addressed to us as much as to any divinity, a plea for ordinary life, memory, and a certain hope, and its images constitute at least a compelling ironic exercise for the documentarian.

and 2009, show the transformation of forests in Indonesia and Brazil under the pressure of agri­culture, settlement, fire, cattle ranching, and logging. Changes are registered in different shades of green. The first two images are of Itauba County, in Mato Grosso, Brazil, where agricultural lands now extend well into former forests, primarily for cattle ranching and soybean farming. The second pair shows the border of Kalimantan Barat and Kalimantan Tengah on the island of Borneo, Indonesia, where new roads cut through tropical forests which are increasingly being converted into oil palm plantations. The existence of these extraordinarily detailed datasets (the Brazil images, taken by the Ikonos satellite, have a resolution of one meter, while the GeoEye­1 images of Indonesia have a half­meter resolution) testifies to the new image­making tools available to citizens and NGOs for documentation and investigation. The becoming­civil of these once­secret technologies signals at once the erosion of a state monopoly on a certain kind of image, and the emergence of a sort of satellite aesthetic in reporting and research.

Laura Kurgan (South Africa, 1960) directs the Spatial Information Design Lab at the Architecture School at

Columbia University, and makes maps with digital images and databases. She was named a US Artists Rockefeller Fellow in 2009.

Laura KurganLaura Kurgan’s Monochrome Landscapes (2004) used high­resolution satellite imagery of four threatened locations to explore the abstract tradition of single­colour painting, to analyze what can be seen and in what detail by surveillance satellites, and to contribute to advocacy efforts by environmental NGOs. Shades of Green pursues this project, focusing on two endangered forest areas. The images, acquired by satellites in 2008

The Atlas Group / Walid Raad

The Atlas Group is a project launched in 1999 by Walid Raad ‘to research and document the contemporary history of Lebanon,’ with particular emphasis on the fighting which stretched from 1975 to 1991. The information that Raad ‘locates, preserves, studies, and produces’ bears a decidedly oblique relation to simple documentary truth, especially of the journalistic kind. In a situation of seemingly never­ending civil conflict, which only becomes more surreal with time, direct docu­mentation seems to lose its force. Without abandoning the document, the Atlas Group seeks to challenge its conventional forms and to question the procedures by which the history of catastrophe is narrated. The documents available – which include notebooks, films, photographs and other

Allan Sekula (U.S., 1951) is a photographer and critic who lives and works in Los Angeles. He teaches at the California Institute for the Arts in Valencia. He was

named a US Artists Broad Fellow in 2007. Among his many publica­tions are Fish Story (Witte de Witte, 1995) and Five Days that Shook the World (Verso, 2000).

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Walid Raad (Lebanon, 1967) is an artist who lives and works in New York City, where he is Associate Professor of Art at the Cooper Union. He established

the Atlas Group in 1999. He received the Alpert Award in Visual Arts in 2007, and is a member of the Arab Image Foundation.

Hito Steyerl (Germany, 1966) is a filmmaker and author of a large body of theoretical work on such themes as gender,

immigration, and political resis­tance. She lives and works in Berlin.

objects – are of uncertain authority, attributed to both real and imaginary characters. The series We Decided To Let Them Say ‘We Are Convinced’ Twice, It Was More Convincing This Way presents photographs said to be taken by one Marwan Hanna during the Israeli attacks in the summer of 1982, but not developed until twenty years later. “In the summer of 1982, I stood along with others in a parking lot across from my mother’s apartment in East Beirut, and watched the Israeli land, air, and sea assault on West Beirut. […] In 1982, I was thirteen, and wanted to get as close as possible to the events, or as close as my newly acquired telephoto lens permitted me that summer. Clearly not close enough. This past year, I came upon the negatives from that time. I decided to take a look, again.” The images, which look remarkably photojournalistic, are subjected to a rhythm of proximity and dis­appearance, countered by chance rediscovery, which suggests a decidedly different notion of history: the images are always available for another look. And the familiarity of the scenes, marked by discolouration and stains, produces an unusual time­lapse effect: the event cannot be securely locked in the archive, in the past, but seems somehow not entirely finished yet.

office for their highest alert level. It is, if you like, the colour of contemporary fear itself. On the other hand, this work also shows the limit of video, since the moving image has to be frozen in order to translate it into a painting format. And video or concrete representation of reality reaches its limit in the end of constant online transmissions which convey just abstract fear as such, with a minimum of concrete mediation.” Of course, the more abstract, the more reproducible, and in fact Steyerl’s work is increasingly preoccupied with the question of repetition, ripping, reproduction, and in general the afterlife of the image in the age of online transmission. This drift, to which all images are subject, seems to rob the documentary image of its authority, but not simply. Steyerl calls this ‘documentary uncertainty,’ which she hastens to add is ‘not some shameful lack, which has to be hidden, but instead constitutes the core quality of contemporary documentary modes as such.’ Only by facing this uncertainty, perhaps hyperbolized by the abstraction of the red screen, and continuing to work with it, can we begin to develop a new language of the document which is at once honest and politically pertinent.

Hito SteyerlRed Alert is based on Alexander Rodchenko’s three primary colour monochromes (Pure Yellow, Pure Red, Pure Blue) of 1921. Rodchenko, who saw art as an instrument for social change, believed that in this work he had taken painting to its ‘logical conclusion,’ saying “I affirmed: It’s all over. Basic colours. Every plane, it’s a plane and there is no more to representation.” In Red Alert, Hito Steyerl seeks to translate Rodchenko’s work into the present. She is interested in what she calls ‘abstract documentarism.’ Her working assumption today, she says, is “that of these three primary colours only the red one is left. This red is actually based on the colour used by the U.S. Homeland Security

Ariella AzoulayAct of State 1967-2007 is an archive of images compiled by Ariella Azoulay from many sources. Un finished, incomplete, and open to new additions, it covers forty years of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, with more than 700 photographs taken by over 50 different photographers. The photographs are treated as documents that are at once political and historical. As political documents they open or offer a civil vista, in which the spectators can acknowledge the persons photographed as citizens, even if their citizenship has been denied by the ruling power to which they are subject. As historical documents, they function not as illustrations for the margins of a familiar history book, but rather as testimonies and traces of historical moments that are to be reconstructed

Following spread: We Decided To Let Them Say ‘We Are Convinced’ Twice, It Was More Convincing This Way, 1982­2007 © The Atlas Group / Walid Raad, courtesy of Weltkunst Foundation Collection and Anthony Reynolds Gallery, London

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Eyal Weizman with Yazan Khalili &

Tony ChakarIn May 2009, less than half a year after Israel’s 21­day assault on the Gaza Strip, the damage had already been chronicled in a book. Peter Beaumont, reporting for the Guardian, called it the ‘book of destruction.’ “We have a way of codifying the consequences of conflict. We collect the dead into lists and tidy ruins into databases. […] In Gaza the shells of buildings have been labelled and collated, exhibits from a violent event already passing into history after only half a year. G1086­01 designates the parliament building, a collapsed grey ribcage of concrete. The numbers are entered in the book of Gaza’s destruction. There are houses – more than 1,300 of them – and police stations, apartment blocks and offices, schools and hospitals, each labelled with neat spray­painted letters. Tagged fetishistically in blue and green.” The effects of the attack, which killed almost 1,400 people and destroyed or damaged about 16,000 buildings (15% of all the buildings in Gaza), will be long­lasting, and difficult to calculate in many registers. But there is already an inventory. In the wake of the attack, the ministry of Public Works and Housing for Gaza started producing an archive which catalogued the destroyed structures. The logic of the archive is that of a systematic property damage survey – a practical way to account for the necessary work of rebuilding, and its cost. In its dry, disembodied, bureaucratic logic, its surveyors’ photographs, diagrams, and captions, it might be the necessary, perhaps even the only possible, response to the magnitude of the destruc tion. And because buildings were here used as weapons, the destroyed structures become the architectural witnesses to the logic of the attack and the chaos of its violence. The book was assembled by the ministry responsible for urban planning, but as Beaumont points out, “it is not urban planning that [they] ha[ve] been forced to confront in recent months, but rather the after math of a wholescale urban un­planning through military force.” And it is not simply cities that have been destroyed. The most common type of building destroyed is the refugee home. Camps offered refugees new life, but were also

and investigated. The modular principle which lies at the basis of any archive, and which Azoulay adopts here, enables her both to offer the outline for a historical narrative that has not existed before, by unfolding photographs along a timeline, and to avoid narrating it in a conventional manner, which would tie events causally to each other. Instead, the thematic series unravel the historical line all along into parallel and crosscutting singular moments.

Ariella Azoulay (Israel, 1962) teaches visual theory and is currently Leverhulme Visiting Professor in the Durham Centre for Advanced Photography

Studies. She also has worked as a curator and filmmaker, and is the author of several books, including The Civil Contract of Photography (Zone Books, 2008)

Mauro Andrizzi (Argentina, 1980) has written and directed several short films. He is also a programmer for the Mar del

Plata International Film Festival. His film In The Future won the Queer Lion Award at the Venice Film Festival in 2010.

Mauro AndrizziIraqi Short Films is a compilation of short films, mostly shot on mobile phones and digital cameras, by participants and onlookers, fighters and citizens, from many sides in the Iraq War. Mauro Andrizzi found most of them on websites, where they serve as propaganda, fund­raising appeals, reportage, branding projects, souvenirs, trophies, or simply as acts of exhibitionism. Rarely were they subject to any editorial control, with the exception of ‘official’ films from insurgent armies. They seem to define an emergent aesthetic of war, far from the classical painterly drama. This footage, sometimes raw and handheld, at other times richly overlaid with postproduction effects such as text, slow motion, and filters, suggests that although the language of war may change depending on which side is telling the story, combat now comes to us from the combatants themselves, uploaded from the battle field and free to circulate online. Although war has long maintained an intimacy with visual representation, and seems unimagin­able without it, today its protagonists seem themselves to travel With a gun in one hand and a camera in the other.

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Following spread: Iraqi Short Films, 2008, (film still) © Mauro Andrizzi

Eyal Weizman (Israel, 1970) is a writer and architect, and directs the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths College, University of London. Together with Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti, he founded

the architectural collective Decolonizing Architecture, located in Beit Sahour, Palestine, which received the 2010 Prince Claus Award for Architecture.

seen by many Palestinians as the material, lived testi monies for what was destroyed and for ‘all that remains’ of the many Palestinian cities, towns and villages forcefully depopulated during the 1947­49 wars. As the collective Decolonizing Architecture pointed out, “the destruction of the refugee camp does not simply mirror the de­struction of the village – to destroy a camp is to destroy the already destroyed.” This archive suggests that the recurring image of the destroyed home is not an isolated scene of architectural violence, but rather a part of an ongoing history of destruction, a ‘destruction of destruction’ that continuously piles its ruins in front of our eyes.

Sohrab MohebbiSohrab Mohebbi has been studying how the Internet became a venue occupied by the opposition movement in Iran, coming to embody properties of a public space when other spaces are unavailable. He has also explored the role of visual images in making claims to, and even constituting, those emergent spaces. After the disputed Iranian presidential election of 12 June 2009, as events unfolded in the streets of Tehran, the city made itself available to cameras. Although photo­journalists were quickly banished from the scenes, other means of representation proved more difficult to remove. The protesters gathered in main squares and intersections, then floated through the streets and escape routes. After clashes with security forces, together with the protestors, Tehran posed for videophones. The short films that emerged from those encounters quickly found their own space and time on the Internet. By linking Google Maps to YouTube, ‘Deldaare’ and ‘xe’, two pseudo nymous citizen­journalists, identified the locations of the videos posted online by the protesters, and marked their locations on an interactive online map of the city. Mohebbi – researching the new role of online interaction in

protest, and the emergence of an alternative sort of image­based journalism – focused on two of their two maps, which mark and lay claim to the locations of the events of 18 September 2009 and 11 February 2010. Together with the videotapes linked from the maps, the interactive ensembles are both evidence of an uprising and one of its most significant manifestations. The monitors play a selection of the videos that are marked on each map, with numerals added in red by Mohebbi to help link the locations to the videos. Other online videotapes from the weeks of protest, though, adopted a less direct visual strategy. The ‘night protest’ videos made do with something approaching an image­less image. From the day after the election and continuing every night for two months and then on special occasions, people revisited an Islamic revolutionary tradition by chanting ‘Allahu Akbar’ at night on rooftops across the country. Videos of these night protests, dark and ethereal and reduced almost completely to their audio track, were also posted on the Internet. The videos are from various locations and dates, are posted by different usernames and presented here one after the other, unedited, without interruption.

Sohrab Mohebbi (Iran, 1980) lives and works in New York City. He graduated from the Center for Curatorial Studies at

Bard College in 2010 and is a Curatorial Fellow at the Queens Museum of Art.

Susan MeiselasIn 1991, after more than a decade of work in Latin America, Susan Meiselas placed herself in the destroyed villages left behind by Kurdish refugees fleeing Northern Iraq into Turkey and Iran in the wake of the first Gulf War. Already well known for her commitment to human rights and her sense of the role that photography could play in pursuing justice, Meiselas turned her attention to the photo­graphic exploration of a people without a state. After covering the exhumation of mass graves of Kurds killed in Saddam Hussein’s Anfal campaign three years earlier, she embarked on the project of building a public archive of the history of the displaced Kurdish people. Her interest was primarily visual: it was as if the only homeland Kurds had ever enjoyed was a photographic one.

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In Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and the Kurdish diaspora, Meiselas not only made photos but gathered family albums, local studio portraits, documents, and stories that interweave with her own photos to create “a sourcebook of a suppressed history.” “For me,” Meiselas says, “the essence of docu­mentary photo graphy has always been to do with evidence,” and this work takes that to a radical extreme: as if the existence of the people depended on this photo graphic evidence. In their massive scope and meticulous detail, Kurdistan (1997) and akaKURDISTAN.com (launched in 1998) teach us about the relationships of photography, memory, archives, and history. “It’s true,” she says, “that other photographers sometimes look at me and wonder why I’m wasting my time on other people’s images and other people’s histories,” but the stakes are clear. The questions she had once asked herself about her own photographs from Nicaragua – “I started to become fascinated with the trafficking of those images,” she told an inter­viewer – continue to haunt her, all the more powerfully now that their meticulous critical force is oriented toward an archive whose very existence testifies to the precarious life of its subjects.

Chanarin present a series of collages – an icono­clastic breakdown or dissection of the original image – that interrupts our relationship as spectators to images of distant violence. The work pursues their relentless interrogation of the photo­journalistic image. “Since its inception,” they said in 2007, after serving as members of the World Press Photo jury, “photojournalism has traded in images of human suffering. If one of its motivations for representing tragedy has been to change the world then it has been unsuccess­ful.” Likewise they wondered about what they called ‘the largely outdated expectation that a photo graph should mirror the scene witnessed by the photographer – it must be unmediated.’ Noting that ‘the dubious relationship between photography and reality is by now widely accepted,’ they called for a photo grapher who ‘announces himself present at the scene, making a simple conceptual framework and a level of artifice visible that interrupts the idea of the photographer as invisible, and the photograph as evidence.’

Susan Meiselas (U.S., 1948) is a member of Magnum Photos, and is President of the Magnum Foundation. She has received a MacArthur Fellowship and the Hasselblad Award, among many

other prizes, and has published a number of books, including Carnival Strippers (FSG 1976) and Nicaragua, June 1978-July 1979 (Pantheon 1981).

Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin

In Afterlife Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin offer a re­reading of a controversial photograph from Iran on 6 August 1979. Taken just months after the revolution, it records the execution of eleven blindfolded Kurdish prisoners by firing squad. The image was widely printed and won a Pulitzer Prize in 1980. The photographer was simply known as ‘Anonymous.’ Recently a Wall Street Journal reporter located him: Jahangir Razmi, a commercial studio photographer working in the suburbs of Tehran. Based on their discussions with him and an examination of the neglected images on the roll of film Razmi produced that day, Broomberg and

Renzo MartensRenzo Martens makes films that investigate, critically and not without humour, the ethical, political, and economic conflicts that generate certain images – and the impact of those images at home and abroad. In Episode III: Enjoy Poverty (2009) Martens explores the landscape of war, peacekeeping, poverty, development, humanitarian aid, and photography in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Putting himself at the centre of the film, he investigates the political economy of photo­journalism in conflict zones and the function of these images in relation to the post­colonial powers which dominate the scene. In his earlier Episode I, the filmmaker travels to Chechnya to examine not so much its wartime condition, or the plight of refugees, or the operations of the UN and NGOs, but rather to ask about the becoming­image of these scenes. The strategy is unusual: he asks his

Adam Broomberg (South Africa, 1970) and Oliver Chanarin (England, 1971) worked together at Colors Magazine and have been collaborating for over a

decade. They have produced many books, which in different ways examine the language of documentary photography.

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Kurdistan in the shadow of history, 1997 © Susan Meiselas, courtesy of Magnum Photos and ICP, New York

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subjects not about their suffering, but about his response to it. What matters is, it seems, the spectator, about whom the objects of our gaze rarely have an opportunity to speak. Martens says: “I made Episode I […] as a delegate of the viewing public, an audience that is mostly interested in themselves. So I didn’t ask the people how they felt now their legs had been amputated and those kinds of questions. But I asked them how they thought I felt. If they thought I was handsome or how I should seduce my girlfriend back in Brussels. […] I turned it around because in reality it’s much more about how we feel and less about how they feel.” This surprising reversal has the effect of re­focusing our attention on our reactions to images of conflict, and creating the possibility for the objects of our gaze to speak back to us about our seeing.

managed with words.” All of the footage was shot with television airtime in mind, by professional photojournalists, but an alternative editing practice here sends it another direction altogether. “We made these tapes for a number of reasons,” says McDonald, “but they were never really intended for an audience. Myself, and others, were disappointed that a lot of our best footage was not being seen on any networks that we were working for and as we had editing skills, and were usually on the same job for weeks on end, the temptation to edit the ‘best of’ videos was too great. Most cameramen/editors did the same, and it became a kind of ritual to try and outdo other colleagues, but mostly to share with each other and have a memento to take home and show friends. The idea of a music video was easy as a lot of tracks had appropriate lyrics, and it wasn’t hard to find something suitable for any situation. Music also allows you to use either slow motion or fast cuts, something that doesn’t happen in a news story, and therefore more of a challenge to edit.”

Renzo Martens (The Nether­lands, 1973) is a filmmaker and artist who lives and works in Amsterdam, Brussels, and Kinshasa.

Robbie Wright (Australia, 1962) and Shane McDonald (Austra­lia, 1960) are television camera­men. Today they are part of Crewhouse TV, based in Cyprus, but over the last quarter­century they have covered wars,

conflicts, ceremonies, and disasters, for broadcasters and agencies around the world. Jonathan Cavender (England, 1957) is also a cameraman, based in London and covering the world.

Robbie Wright, Shane McDonald & Jonathan Cavender

While covering fighting in Sarajevo and Mogadishu, among other places, television cameramen Robbie Wright, Shane McDonald, and Jonathan (Jono) Cavender made many short videotapes, using footage from the events they had reported on, set to soundtracks of contemporary pop music. Two included here are from Bosnia in 1993­94, two others from Somalia during the US /UN intervention in 1992­93. Cavender says “all the video’s were ‘cut’ during ‘downtime’ in Sarajevo, Vitez, Goma and Mogadishu.” BBC journalist Jeremy Bowen began his memoir, War Stories (2007), with the story of Crazy: “In Sarajevo, when the war was going on as if it was never going to stop, a cameraman called Robbie Wright cut some pictures to music. It was a pop video like the ones on MTV, only instead of being fantasy it was real. In lots of ways Robbie’s video said more about the war and about the city than I had ever

Thomas Keenan is Director of the Human Rights Project at Bard College.

Carles Guerra is Director of La Virreina Centre de la Imatge, Institut de Cultura, City of Barcelona.

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Curated by Carles Guerra and Thomas Keenan. Project coordinated by Jenny Gil Schmitz / Ninetofive. Exhibition produced in 2010 by La Virreina Centre de la Imatge, Institut de Cultura, City of Barcelona.

Cover image: Afterlife 1, 2010 © Broomberg & Chanarin

The exhibition has been made possible by Eizo, High End Monitors.

Antiphotojournalism is produced by:

Gilles Peress , The Long Arm of Justice, 2002 – 2010

Phil Collins, how to make a refugee, 1999

Paul Lowe, Fellow Travellers: The Media in Bosnia, 1993 – 1994

Kadir van Lohuizen, Diamond Matters, 2005

Goran Galic & Gian­Reto GredigPhotographers in Conflict, 2009

Paul Fusco, RFK Funeral Train, 1968

Allan Sekula, Prayer for the Americans, 1999 – 2004

Laura Kurgan, Shades of Green, 2010

The Atlas group/Walid RaadWe Decided To Let Them Say ‘We Are Convinced’ Twice, It Was More Convincing This Way, 1982 – 2007

Hito Steyerl, Red Alert, 2007

Ariella Azoulay, Act of State 1967 – 2007. A Photographic History of the Israeli Occupation, 2009

Mauro Andrizzi, Iraqi Short Films, 2008

Eyal Weizman with Yazan Khalili & Tony Chakar, The Destruction of Destruction, 2009 / تفاهت

(Tahāfut al­Tahāfut) تفاهتلا

Sohrab Mohebbi, Online Broadcast – Tehran from the Bridges to Rooftops, 2009 – 2010

Renzo Martens, Episode 1, 2003

Susan Meiselas, Kurdistan, 1991 – 2008

Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin, Afterlife, 2010

Robbie Wright & Shane McDonald, Crazy, 1993, These Are Our Lives, 1994

Jonathan Cavender, Final Countdown, 1992, Highway To The Danger Zone, 1993

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