It's not very reassuring to see that excuse-making for illegal behavior is a constant around the world.
I thought this article in today's NYT, about the ethics of garnering fame via photography of suffering people, was interesting:
July 13, 2001
PHOTOGRAPHY REVIEW | SEBASTIAO SALGADO
Can Suffering Be Too Beautiful?
By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
ENTIMENTAL voyeurism" is the latest
jab, this one from Jean-François Chevrier,
a French art professor, in Le Monde. Clearly it's
tough being the world's most famous
photojournalist.
Even people who sympathize with what Sebastião
Salgado does — and what sane person would not?
— complain that his pictures are too beautiful,
which is not something you might normally complain
about when you look at photographs, especially
unforgettable ones.
But the key word is "normally," the 56- year-old
Brazilian-born Mr. Salgado not being a normal
photographer. He is a superstar in the Robert
Capa, Chim and Henri Cartier- Bresson tradition,
and what he photographs is not what most of his
audience, or at least most of the audience for his
latest exhibition at the International Center of
Photography in Midtown Manhattan, would regard
as normal life.
One hopes not, anyway. These pictures come from
his latest book, "Migrations." It is the product of
seven years of travel to more than 35 countries
(including Afghanistan, Rwanda, the Balkan nations
and pretty much every other troubled and terrible
spot you can think of), documenting what he calls
"the reorganization of the human family" that has
come about partly through the shift from "majority
rural to majority urban."
Having previously borne witness to widespread
starvation in Africa and chronicled manual labor all over the world, Mr. Salgado
here turns his immense energies to the millions of refugees, exiles, orphans, landless
peasants, homeless families, boat people, internees and others who today endure
incredible hardships to escape even more extreme circumstances.
This is a sprawling, frequently gruesome story — the scale and the gravity of it
should speak for themselves — and if the suffering doesn't prompt guilt, indifference
to it will. That's how emotional blackmail and effective moral photojournalism work.
Mr. Salgado practices both as well as anyone does these days.
The greater the suffering, the grander his artistic ambition, naturally. His is the
paradoxical situation of being a celebrated artist of forgotten people, which is a
starting point for much of the carping.
But let's dispense with petty criticisms first. The show, like the book, includes too
many photographs that aren't up to his best. Even great journalists need editors. Mr.
Salgado's wife, Lélia Wanick Salgado, oversaw the exhibition. It has a superfluous,
melodramatic video of pictures accompanied by music. The photographs are
accompanied by explanatory captions that are sometimes vague and not helpful.
There is no sense of independent oversight.
Resistance to the work, which after all exists ostensibly to gain recognition for
overlooked masses of destitute people, is fueled by signs of vanity. It is also fueled
by the cult of appreciation around Mr. Salgado, which has tended to equate doubt
about the photographs with lack of sympathy for their subjects, if simply because of
the sanctimony of its praise for him. It's a tricky business to get people to look at
other people they may have spent a great deal of time trying, consciously or
otherwise, not to notice.
That said, the good photographs are so stupendously gorgeous that they make you
forget everything else while you are looking at them. They bespeak uncanny formal
intuition, a ready repertory of apt allusions to art history and peerless timing (and
some luck maybe, too, which all great photojournalists have). This applies whether
the image is a panoramic blur of jostling commuters at a Bombay railroad station,
wherein a visual cliché of human overpopulation and modern travel is transformed
into a minor miracle of geometric and textural subtlety; or the fearful, glassy-eyed
glare of three refugee babies captured through a slit between rough blankets; or the
silent labor of people dragging a mastless skiff over glossy sand under leaden skies,
an image screaming with Christian symbolism like so many of Mr. Salgado's
pictures. You would have to be blind or dead-hearted or immune to aesthetic
pleasure not to be at least occasionally bowled over by such improbable skill.
But by now it should go without saying that Mr. Salgado is astonishing. Still at issue
are what you might call the mechanics of his astonishment: the beauty part.
"Exploitation of compassion" is another phrase from the professor in Le Monde.
Should pictures of suffering ever be so beautiful?
Mr. Salgado's supporters have always responded that the beauty of the
photographs lends dignity to the people in them, which is a good point, but the
question demands a more elaborate answer.
It was one thing to try to wake humanity up to suffering in the world via photographs
from the early years of the last century through the golden age of photojournalism in
the 1940's and 50's, when most people saw distant places and learned of faraway
disasters through photographs, but it is another thing to try to do so now, when the
number of images that flash across television and computer screens diminishes the
value of any single image you may see. Photographers deal with this problem
differently, but above all by struggling to make beautiful pictures: what causes any
image to stick in the mind, aside from shock content, whose impact tends to be
brief, are qualities like pictorial integrity and compositional originality, which are
fancy terms for beauty. If your subject happens to be the dislocation of people and
their suffering, then those people and that suffering become your compositional
devices.
Beauty takes many guises. A decade ago, apropos of another show by Mr. Salgado
at the center, Ingrid Sischy in The New Yorker held up Walker Evans as a
preferable alternative, Mr. Salgado's work faring less well because of "the
unrelenting application of the lyric and the didactic to his subjects," while Evans was
appealingly mordant and clinical. It's an interesting point. Evans's iconic tenant
farmers are memorable because they do short- circuit pity by cutting out all charm
and anecdote. We stare level-eyed at people who squint back at us, refusing, as
Lionel Trilling once put it about Evans's famous portrait of Allie Mae Burroughs, "to
be an object of your `social consciousness.' " He added, "She refuses to be an
object at all."
But this neutrality rubs two ways. For another exhibition this year, the center
unearthed anonymous photographs of impoverished Southerners made in the 1930's
by eugenicists who wanted to prove the biological inferiority of the poor, and the
pictures looked shockingly similar in format and tone to Evans's.
As always with photographs, what we see in them
is what we want to see, unless the photographer,
like Mr. Salgado, is explicitly didactic. Evans's
pictures, lean, laconic and deadpan, are great
works of ambiguous art, their ambiguity being a sign
of respectful communication, one of great art's basic
traits. Evans solved the beauty problem by
maintaining a fascinating indifference toward his
subjects. Mr. Salgado, a concerned journalist,
produces reportage and propaganda, an honorable
ambition but different from Evans's, which doesn't
preclude Mr. Salgado's making great art (see Goya
and David) but doesn't strictly require it, either.
Of course his photographs are exploitative. Most
good photojournalism is. As Cartier-Bresson once
said: "There is something appalling about
photographing people. It is certainly some form of
violation. So if sensitivity is lacking, there can be
something barbaric about it." Mr. Salgado chooses
to sentimentalize his subjects — all those beautiful
children staring back at us and smiling despite their
horrific conditions — to avoid seeming barbaric and
to demonstrate his sensitivity toward them. He is
conveying some essential faith in humanity, too; in
that respect, his work is sentimental voyeurism and
unabashedly manipulative (but not hectoring, which
is important). And that is why people respond so
strongly to it, for better and worse.
We respond not only because of the voyeurism and
the manipulation but, again, because of its formal
beauty. Two thousand years of Christian art is based on the premise that of course
suffering can be beautiful. Mr. Salgado's allusions to Western art, to the point of
their becoming a tic in his work, use art history to provide bona fides, both formal
and moral. Moroccan refugees huddling in a flimsy motorboat on rough seas, caught
in the spotlight from a Spanish helicopter intercepting them while trying to cross the
Strait of Gibraltar, immediately brings to mind Delacroix's "Christ and the Apostles
on the Sea of Galilee." Vietnamese peasants, in silhouette against a vast landscape,
mimic Millet's "Gleaners," which has its own biblical pedigree.
"Beautification of tragedy results in pictures that ultimately reinforce our passivity
toward the experience they reveal," Ms. Sischy argued years ago. If that were true,
then the whole history of Christian art would be a practical failure. But she is on to
something.
Mr. Salgado's work is ultimately separated from its art-historical references by its
specificity: these are not ancient martyrs, apostles and saints but modern-day fellow
world citizens — real, specific people, whom Mr. Salgado endeavors to make into
generalized saints and apostles, except that we know they are not. Maybe the most
affecting photograph in the whole show is a straight, comparatively simple image of
abandoned babies on a rooftop in Brazil, one of them in a high chair, with no adults,
no one else, in sight. The picture is affecting precisely because we know the babies
are there on the roof, and we urgently want to learn how they got there, what's being
done for them and who they are.
("May the idea never enter God's sublime head to journey one day to this land to
see for himself whether those people who survive here on the brink between life and
death are satisfactorily serving out the punishment that at the beginning of the world
he handed out to the father and mother of us all," José Saramago, the great
Portuguese novelist, wrote about Brazil in the introduction to a different book of Mr.
Salgado's photographs, conveying an irony, we might note, that Mr. Salgado rarely
uses.)
At the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, there is a popular
display of photographs of Jews killed by the Nazis, the pictures rising up the walls of
a room shaped like a smokestack. It's very theatrical. Nobody in the photographs is
identified. At the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York, many of the
photographs are accompanied by names. It's a small difference, but crucial. Names
make people into individuals.
Some of the most beautiful, loving photographs in Mr. Salgado's show are portraits
of children he took almost casually, because the children would gather around to
watch him work. They volunteered to have their pictures shot in exchange for
"allowing the visitor to work in peace," explains the wall text accompanying a group
of these photographs. "We can only guess what they are feeling," the text continues.
"Yet here at least we see them as they chose to be seen. In the universe of the
photograph, they stand alone. And perhaps for the first time in their young lives, they
are able to say, `I am.' "
Perhaps. Still, it would be nice if Mr. Salgado had told us their names. |
