I had to have a little chuckle at your latest comment! We have a number of points of agreement.But isn’t it a little funny that after wanting to say (wrongly I think) that the original discussion about this issue was too speculative, you now want to overlook what AP and Franklin actually said about pictures ‘speaking’, and offer some contrary opinions about what you think they really thought or might have meant, without any evidence for those claims?

Of course the conceptual point I originally raised was not at the heart of the conflict between AP and Franklin. I am interested in how two opponents in an argument can share the same view that pictures speak for themselves. That they expressed that common view in quoted statements, despite wanting to argue contrary political positions, shows how flawed that understanding of photographic meaning is.

Yes, this controversy badly needs the photographic press to ask some more hard questions of all the protaganists, as I stated in my second post. AP has made just one brief statement at the outset (see the link to the AP site in my second post), and that was in response to the Noorderlicht statement. Even if they aren’t pressed further, I think as a global media organisation trading on its credibility AP should be both more forthcoming and transparent on this issue.

There are many questions about the AP position, and I have posed these in my subsequent post.

The responsibility for detailing AP’s position lies with that organisation. They have made only one brief statement at the beginning of the week, and they need to be more forthcoming. Media companies need to be transparent. If they aren’t forthcoming, then the photography press should be asking more questions of all the participants in the controversy, as I argue in my subsequent post.

well…

You might see this as the power of the curator to create a political message.

Since we don’t know how the all the photographers feel it might be presumptuous for Franklin to write a text backgrounding all the photographs. In that case AP would be protecting its members primarily. If it was the work of a single photographer it would be different, unless that photog did not agree with the text.

I think it might be less of a censorship issue than it appears at first blush.

When it comes to having a statement following the exhibition, that could of course be a solution, but I imagine that they would still feel “tainted”. “yeah, I take part of this republican congress, but really, I am not political”-kind of tainted? I would not know the reasons for their choice though.

(A clarification in response to part of Robert’s comment — the show in the Netherlands exhibiting the work of Palestinian photojournalists is not a Magnum show, but one part of the larger ‘Human Conditions’ exhibition put on by the Noorderlicht Photo Festival, a regular event in Holland. That strand, ‘Point of No Return’, has been curated by Stuart Franklin, who is also Magnum’s current president).

There are also many questions prompted by this issue which have so far not been considered, including:

1. What do the photographers themselves think?

2. Not all the photographs in the strand Franklin curated come from photographers working for AP, so what do those agencies (such as Getty) think?

In relation to AP’s position there are further questions to ask, including:

1. AP has sold these photographs from Gaza to the world’s media without total control over the articles, columns, headlines, blogs or quotes they have appeared next to. Those various pieces of text could have enunciated any number of political positions, including one’s potentially much more hostile than Franklin’s essay. Why, then, did AP take particular exception to Franklin’s essay?

2. According to the Noorderlicht press release (above), AP rejected two compromise options: either a statement accompanying Franklin’s essay making clear it was a “personal opinion” and did not reflect the views of the photographers’ agencies, or some text from AP itself to counter Franklin’s essay. Why did AP reject both those options and instead allegedly threaten withdrawal of the pictures or legal action against the organisers?