symposium I

Absences, Losses and Refusals: In Search of a Documentary Ethic

Our present moment is tragic. Night has arrived. Grief, despair and frustration are the emotions that join us as we traverse contemporary culture and try to make a place and a living for ourselves. Terrorism, whether issued from Washington or Jerusalem, from the occupied Westbank or unknown Al Qaida headquarters, frames our lives. Fear is king and Time is Out of Mind.

Also in contemporary visual culture is our time nocturnal. Not the guiding lights of narration and analysis, of access, real plenitude, generosity, joyous lust; Newspeak rules, lights are too dim to clearly expose the conditions under which we crumble. Language, whether verbal or visual - looses ground daily; words and images - thus emotions and thought - are continuously attacked, corrupted, corroded, eroded; images retreat to the shadows, words take shelter, thinking is numb and powerless: no longer can you tell truths from lies, nor the living from the dead. Indeed, for photographs, death is today threefold or tripled, as photographs are trivialized in media (rituals of power), aestheticised in the institutions of art and culture (rituals of aestheticism), blindfolded and tied up in the realm of the social (rituals of mauvais foi).

Sure enough, our culture is often described as media- and image-saturated, as overwhelmingly filled with information and imagery, as construed by and through an ever greater number of photographs and other imagery. But is this really a central fact of our predicament and position, or simply a misleading truism? At least, such doxa of visual culture demand counter-narratives. Might it be that scarcity is just as crucial a property of the present as is abundance, that lack, loss and absence characterize our day as much as plethoria and plenitude? Might it be that in fact contemporary culture, in its tragic post- and neo-colonial moment is one of escalating censorship and information control, one of lack of information and lack of images, one shot through with scarcity in all aspects and senses of this word. In order to comprehend contemporary visual culture, the fantasies of abundance and overflow of imagery need to be supplanted and supplemented by notions of scarcity, absence, lack and loss. And this certainly applies directly to the conditions of photographic practice, in particular documentary photography.

Think only briefly of the wars (or should we say slaughters) having taken place over the last decades. For each consecutive war, information in general, photojournalism and image production in particular, has been more and more controlled, circumscribed, contained, censored and self-censored. No doubt, censorship, control of information and propaganda has been an integral element of every war scaled by mankind, but the horror of war is now suppressed and no longer known or seen or visualized for the general public. A trajectory runs from Vietnam to let’s say Nicaragua (the USA/Contras war on the Sandinistas), The Falklands to Kuwait/the Gulf War, Kosovo and Afghanistan, where the war becomes more and more unknown, and where the human body - maimed, injured, mutilated or dead - slowly disappears, is made invisible. The presence of human flesh, the most crucial characteristic of warfare, is turned into an absence. In the post-11 September Afghanistan attack, the image of the Al Quaida hiding in huge complexes of caves was heavily promoted in the press, lending an image of the war as somehow fought in the dark and under ground, whereas most of the bombing was carried out towards residential centres - villages or cities - and in daylight.

John Taylor, author of War Photography and Body Horror, the two most authoritative texts available on the subject of photojournalism and war, said that it was a mistake to have a photograph from Kuwait on the cover of one of his books, Body Horror, a badly burned body in the Iraqi sand. His point was exactly that in the media it became an invisible war, an abstract and conceptual war, where the human suffering was unseen, unpictured and, thus, not made comprehensible.

Now, there is not time enough in this talk for a sustained argument on photojournalism and war; my thesis in this regard must remain no more than a suggestion. The limits and the characteristics of visual culture as it unfolds are important to attend to. And certainly, the coverage of global conflict is a crucial example and test case.

My primary intention, however, in this introduction was to state my opposition to that almost unbearably powerful consensus around images - and thus photographs. The idea that they are in abundance, that they overwhelm us, that they flood our present and do not leave us in peace, that they invade our minds and occupy our bodies as well as control our living environment. I wanted, in short, to question the idea of an image-saturated world. Furthermore, I wanted to question the idea of image saturation as something which in turn make us loose contact with the images themselves and their possible effects, as something which handicap or undermine the power or authority of images. Belonging to this narrative is also a particular idea of how we respond to images: being overexposed to images, being forced to see too many photographs, we loose our ability to differentiate, to engage, to absorb, to analyze. Or even to feel and respond. We speak of compassion-fatigue; of being confronted with such quantities of images of horror and suffering that we, as the story goes, no longer can attend to the content of these images, nor connect with their display of human plight, nor feel compassion or empathy in response to the conditions of human life we are made to see. Worn out by images, our emotions are muted or deadened by photographs.

But just as quantity says nothing of quality, or just as the individual’s encounter with a particular image is not a fixed and predetermined relation but a negotiation, a discovery, a rebirth, an unpredictable experience; the story of images and photographs can not be conceived as collective amnesia. Yes, sometimes we turn away our head or close our eyes, to be able to bear the pain, or to see again; but to endure pain is not to ignore it, to survive grief is not to discard grief. For what I have suggested is exactly the contrary to the idea - or myth - of image-fatigue or to the notion of an unassailable overdetermined and unbearable mass of photographs. I believe that in this world of ours we lack photographs. There can never be enough of pictures. Our present is in want of images. More photographs. More images. More pictures. They are necessary and central narratives of the world. They give us visions, sights, insights; they expand the visible, and thus the real. Do not lament the flow of images; look instead for the unseen and untaken pictures, the unmade photographs, the unseen situations, the gazes and visions not yet translated into photographs. This is the work to be done, both the right and the responsibility of every photographer. Photographers, your task has only begun. Assist us in visualizing our world. Get out there. Get to work!

In what remains of this talk, I would like to try to chart a few contemporary paths of the photograph? My questions are many and I will probably not be able to manage much more than to share questions with you, much less answer them: What are the tools and possibilities of the documentary image in navigating and accessing contemporary culture and its layered realities? Speaking beyond the divide of fact and fiction, of news media and art worlds, of globalisation and local circumstance, how might images begin to address the white areas on the map in the contemporary world image? How can the documentary mode efficiently work with such things as the unpictured, the unseen, the forgotten aspects of visual reality? Might visual communications in fact even be able to reflect the collapse of current international politics?

I want to discuss a small number of selected art/documentary practices, in search of something akin to an ethics of the image - such an ethics being both one of production - making images - and one of consumption - reading images. My focus will be on the work of three artists: Alfredo Jaar, Fazal Sheikh and Margareta Klingberg. I will, to some extent, juxtapose these artists to each other, conceiving of their practices not in opposition to each other but as highly differentiated. Jaar and Sheikh are proponents of paradigmatic documentary practices. Margareta Klingberg, my third example, is of relevance here as a dialogic project assessing the nature of our current state of globalization, using photography as a means of empathetic and revealing cross-cultural communication.

Inferno & Paradiso is the title of an exhibition curated by the Chilean artist Alfredo Jaar, produced by BildMuseet. The artist, in this project turned curator, has described the exhibition as “an exercise in faith”. He asks how we, today, can believe in images? Can they any longer touch us? Can they move us, affect us? In pursuing this question - and doubt - he has asked eighteen leading photojournalists from across the globe to join him, by each, to the project, submitting two photographs - an Inferno- and a Paradiso-photograph. The Inferno-photograph is to be conceived as the darkest, most painful, difficult photograph the particular photographer has ever taken - with a special focus on the act of taking the photograph. The selected photograph is to reflect something of the act of taking such a photograph as much as put forth the very content itself and not only in regard of its content. The Paradiso-photograph is to be the opposite: the most euphoric and joyous photographic experience ever. In the final exhibition, the two times eighteen photographs were presented in a suggestive and powerful installation. All the images were projected as slides on the wall. Eighteen projections; two universes in photographs, first Inferno, then Paradiso, then Inferno, and so on, in an ongoing cycle - where the viewer was required to spend one minute per photograph (an exceptional amount of time, at least in comparison with our culture’s image viewing habits): Could then a photograph capture or assess the extremes of human existence - death, birth, grief, joy, wrath, peace, fear, love? What, indeed, might take place in terms of viewing photographs when we are given the opportunity to spend such time - one minute - with them? The reference to Dante’s Divina Commedia is not accidental. One might say that Dante was a documentary photographer of his time. The grand allegorical narrative of Divina, Virgil’s long journey to Paradiso, through Inferno and Purgatorio, to find and meet his beloved Beatrice, is all through a great documentary fresco over late 13th and early 14th century Florence, Tuscany and Venice. Throughout Virgil’s descent and ascent testimonies are given, witnesses step forward, persons tell of their convictions, points of view, destinies, to the listener, writer, photographer Virgil: “So bitter it is, death is little more; / but of the good to treat, which there I found, / Speak will I of the other things I saw there.”

Alfredo Jaar, after following the exhibition Inferno & Paradiso to some 20 venues in five countries, has claimed that his exercise was successful: He concluded that we have not lost our ability to be moved by photographs and photographs have not lost their capacity to move us. (There is obviously a therapeutic side to this project as well; in this context, my focus is less on therapeutics, more on the formal and rhetorical exercise of chasing and visualizing the limits of photographic expression).

While Inferno & Paradiso took a didactic approach towards an inquiry into the contemporary power of images and reigning practices in and of those images, Alfredo Jaar’s The Rwanda project, produced between 1994 and 1999, has continued a radical inquiry into the nature of the photographic image, its position in contemporary media, and, again, the possibility of stories at the extremes of human existence. Sceptical to photography’s power to elicit a sincere emotional response from a viewer in a culture used to conventionalized scenes of horror and brutality promulgated by the mass media, The Rwanda project has attempted to find other methods of representation when confronted with such ghastliness and atrocities? How to represent misery and tragedy without exploitation? How to image or photograph genocide (when even the very question is obscene)?

Alfredo Jaar travelled to Rwanda in September 1994, in the aftermath of the genocide. He took thousands of photographs, as he tried to comprehend the scope of the slaughter, including the lack of response from Western media. Yet, in the installation Real Pictures he shows not a single one of these images - as in fact in the entire Rwanda project (consisting of over twenty major installations). Rejecting the traditional news photograph, brought back from the scenes of slaughter; Alfredo Jaar chooses to present Rwanda almost entirely without photographs: Waiting, the only photograph from Rwanda including humans, living or dead, is taken by Jaar as he is standing in Uganda, looking at thirty-nine - named - persons, refugees, standing in Rwanda, waiting to cross the border on their escape from their home country.

In Real Pictures, the installation consists of a large number of black boxes, piled and arranged, as if they were coffins, monoliths, monuments,… Each box, resembling a portfolio box, contains a photograph. But the box is sealed. The photographs are not available to the viewer. Inaccessible photographs, images taken out of sight, censored, hindered to enter the world of diffusion and dissemination of images. On view, in the gallery, the piles of boxes were funereal, a “cemetery of images” (Alfredo Jaar’s own description), buried photographs that refuse to tell us the reality of the Rwandan massacre. Or not? On the top of each box, just legible in the half-light of the installation, a short text transmits a brief encounter with the particular image in the box.

Gutete Emerita, 30 years old, is standing in front of the church. Dressed in modest, worn clothing, her hair is hidden in a faded pink cotton kerchief. She was attending mass in the church when the massacre began. Killed with maehcetes in front of here eyes were her husband Tito Kahinamura (40), and her two sons Muhoza (10) and Matirigari (7). Somehow she managed to escape with her daughter Marie-Louise (12), and hid in a swamp for 3 weeks, only coming out at night for food. When she speaks about her lost family, she gestures to corpses on the ground, rotting in the sun.

Or

Ntarama Church, Nyamata, Rwanda, 40 kilometres south of Kigali, Monday, August 29, 1994. This photograph shows Benjamin Musisi, 50, crouched low in the doorway of the church amongst scattered bodies spilling out in the daylight. Four hundred Tutsi men, women and children, who had come here seeking refuge, were slaughtered during Sunday mass. Benjamin looks directly into the camera, as if recording what the camera saw. He asked to be photographed amongst the dead. He wanted to prove that the atrocities were real and that he had seen the aftermath.

Alfredo Jaar, engaged conceptualist, proposes: We cannot represent the incomprehensible and the unrepresentable. Thus it is better to refuse visual representation altogether. But in this act of refusal, disavowal and negation, the imagination - and thus knowledge - is again set ablaze. The text, which simultaneously guards and refuses access to and gives a glance of the photograph, as well as functioning as the photograph’s stand-in, relays grief, laying the dead to rest as it were. The work is a rebuttal of the media coverage of Rwanda, refusing images - blinded we stutter and stumble when asked to see death in the eye - in order to be able to begin again.

In fact, Jaar’s practice in the Rwanda project serves as a kind of a symbolic funeral for aspects of contemporary visual culture; a rhetorical - and empathic - gesture in the face of carelessly mediated and redundant media imagery. Reduce, simplify, find the zero degree, then start all over.

Real Pictures distances itself from the standard mimesis of photojournalism, instead forwarding the void between representation and reality. Only through focussing this void is it possible to acknowledge the desires of imaging, the quest for both content and for reconciliation. Reduction is a method for recharging the image, for eliminating dead genres and overcoming reified practices; and, indeed, for absence to confirm presence, the act of refusal may, in contradistinction, begin to, again, bridge the gap - impossible and unbridgeable - between representation and reality.

Fazal Sheikh’s work is in content affiliated with Alfredo Jaar’s work, but might in methodology and style be seen as its opposite. Fazal Sheikh’s pursuit of sustained encounters with the Somalian refugee community in Kenya, with exile communities in Tanzania and Malawi, with the war-ridden Afghanistan and its Pakistan refugee communities, with African asylum seekers in Europe - as in Ramadan Moon, a homage to Seynab, a widow from Somalia, fleeing first to Kenya, then to Netherlands, then threatened to be deported back to Kenya - have had the book as their primary vehicle. With A Sense of Common Ground, The Victor Weeps, A Camel for the Son and Ramadan Moon Sheikh has created a series of books and works which do nothing less than revive classical documentary.

Photographs - elegant, simple, straightforward and intimate portraitphotographs - and texts - particularly the stories of the photographed, usually told in first person, the subject’s own voice - combine to make precise, lucid and respectful portraits of the persons subjected to Sheikh’s camera. Subjected might be too strong a term, since the tone of Sheikh’s work is one of complete attention to the person or persons portrayed, only the very gentle, discreet voice of the photographer - a kind of midwife in the giving birth of the images.

Thus, although a documentarist at heart, the central mode of operation and the key images for Sheikh are not those of the reportage, the decisive moments, the representation of events and actions, but the portrait, the classical portrait - the singular encounter between photographer and subject, photography’s ability to mediate a face-to-face meeting between humans: the viewers of images, we, miraculously taking the position of the photographer, meeting the eyes that met the camera. Sheikh’s books - and exhibitions - are all works that tell of the possible and necessary encounter between persons; a kind of documentary mode that seeks first to establish respect and then do the work of representation: a month in the refugee camp before starting to take any photographs.

One decisive aspect of documentary work is to establish credibility; that the viewer trusts the images. The debate of the 1980’s - preceeded by many similar debates in the history of photography - on notions of staged and straight photographs, or manipulated and unmanipulated photographs, turned on conceptions of truth and authenticity; one common assumption being that the untouched or unaffected “reality” carries more of truth-matter than that of a modified or altered (by staging) reality. In the work of Alfredo Jaar, it is an insistent questioning of media practices, of political agendas, and of photographic methodologies that founds his credibility. And his evolved work has continuously matched, as we have seen, formal inquiry with highly specific topical content.

Credibility in the work of Fazal Sheikh moves along a quite different path. A poetics of presence and assumptions of dignity in every human encounter charges the work of Fazal Sheikh; a working ethic and aesthetics that smoothly translate to the viewer. The work is not aimed at visual practices per se, nor is it a counter-narrative to media culture. Formal critique is secondary to the proposals made by each single photograph by Sheikh and its accompanied texts. The ideal that gives the work its momentum might be - an impossible ideal - one of transparency. And this I don’t mean to be understood as a naÔve kind of position, or as an anti-theoretical posture. This is a precise working method aimed at forwarding content and defusing the presence of the artist. Remember that presence of the subject always has to be created, also in photography; “realism” is nothing but a style and an ideology, not a condition of the medium.

Without being in opposition to each other, the works of Alfredo Jaar and Fazal Sheikh make visible two necessary paths (they might be joined, carried out simultaneously) - formal inquiries and new content; systemic critique and the production of new subject matter; the critical meta-level and the fierce attention to everyday detail; to work out a new language and to find unseen or lost topics. It is somewhere at this intersection that documentary can be renewed - move out of a stale and entrenched language; find paths towards uncharted and previously unseen subjects.

Let’s also be clear on the many things that link the work of Alfredo Jaar and Fazal Sheikh, besides their ability to turn eurocentrism on its head. The most important shared trait might be their care for their subjects, their careful attention to what is at stake for peoples when it comes to representation. This, indeed, is still the most crucial ethical lesson from any documentary work: Think of who you are representing, what you are representing, how you are representing. You are speaking, but your speech carries consequences since it also speaks of, if not for, other peoples.

All of which is true for my third and final artist in this talk. Place is a complex phenomenon in contemporary culture; places carry multiple definitions and are never comprehensively described or analyzed. Places are never final, completed, just like selves, always subject to change and with no essence, only existence (the full existentialism lecture will have to come another time).

The landscape of northern Sweden - endless woods, mountains, marshes is the landscape of my childhood. I know it from inside. Arctic, not tropical, yet remarkable generous of what nature has to offer. Berrycountry. Hjortron, blåbär, lingon; Lakka, mustikka, puolukka. Cloudberries, blueberries, lingonberries are all across the north; throw in wild raspberries, wild strawberries and rubus arcticus, åkerbär if you’re in the right place. Beginning in mid-July with cloudberries, continuing with blåbär, ending in September with lingonberries. 70 % of the ground of Sweden is said to be covered by blueberry shrubs.

Berrypicking is not primarily an industrial enterprise. It is a family mission. Teenagers are, under protest, commanded out to the woods by their parents. They sigh at the advent of a good season when the riches of the wilderness will take hold of the lazy days of summer. Some industrious youth or adults may take it so far as to venture into picking for the purpose of making money, but those are very few; the possible revenue simply being to miniscule to support any Swedish taxpayer (even with some exemptions exactly for berrypicking having been installed). But berries are still in need by industry; to the restaurants and to the jam and marmalade industry. And thus there is a need for pickers.

So to correct this state of things, the global economy has stepped in. Or rather the dramatic differences between economies around the world. So the northern territories, since about 15 years back, there are thousands of guest workers, seasonal labour of a sorts, coming every season to work hard over the precious weeks of summer and early autumn and to make a living for themselves and their families. The pickers come from very specific places. All in all citizens of eight countries have tried their luck on this hazardous and demanding opportunity (Thailand, the Philippines, Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Russia, Belorus). And they do make a living, making half-a-year subsistence for their family from ten hard summerweeks. And they are exploited - by travel organizers, camp ground owners, berry purchasers, etc.

I pardon this long introduction to this project. It is the only way to make some sense out of the project From Home by Margareta Klingberg. And there would be much more to say about it, but brevity has to guide me now. Margareta Klingberg has over a five year period followed these pickers and in the process produced a major documentary project. What I am interested in is two things (and I will thus bracket many other concerns: post-coloniality, hybrid identities, justice and injustice in the global economy, class, etc.): first, that these pictures have completely changed the Swedish landscape. This landscape where I grew up will never be the same. Second that this is the ethical mission of new documentary, when at its best: To discover, uncover and create new subjects.

I must make clear that I am grateful to the photographer, Margareta Klingberg, to have, unequivocally and irreversibly, changed the landscape of my youth. I grant this the photographer, although it obviously would not either have been possible without the Thai and Estonian and other guest workers. But the point is that it is within and from the act of representation that the world is altered; the powers of change are at the hands of the one who represents - given that the representation in turn finds an attentive listener or viewer. These photographs of Margareta Klingberg, representing the underclass of seasonal workers traversing the globe in the race for subsistence, have changed the world and this is no small achievement. And for the world to change, we must first change ourselves.

Documentary practices are manifold in contemporary culture. From the docu-soap programs on television to the docu-drama strategies

in news coverage or historical re-enactment to countless modes of documentary within the art world at large, the straight photograph and the documentary as a genre has re-established itself centrally in the present; the loss of the objectivity of the photograph did not undermine the medium of realism; it rather strengthened it. The three practices I have outlined above are innovative, critical and committed. Only with precision and sustained dialogue can the powers of erosion and corruption be countered. The ethics of photography that is proposed is one of attention; precise and sustained attention to the photographic act and to each link in the chain of representation as the energy of exchange moves along in the triangle: subject matter/photograph/ viewer that this constitutes. Clarity of sight and concentrated attention make new worlds daily.