The DEB will put in place a system to defend the position of established media groups (the recording giants of the music and film industries) and individuals who have become fabulously wealthy through their control of creative content (think Simon Cowell). It passed the House of Lords on Monday, and is already into its second reading in the Commons. The government is trying to get it far enough along that it becomes part of the legislative “wash up” as this parliament winds up before the election in May. The speed of its passage is preventing proper consideration and debate by the elected chamber, and is serving corporate interests over and above popular concerns.

The focus of the DEB is on those who illegally download digital files, and seeks to punish them in extraordinary ways – after a couple of warnings, internet service providers will be forced to cut the internet connection through which file sharing occurred, regardless of whether the individual, business, library, school or university providing that connection had anything to do with the download.  And to guard against future technological changes that might promote file sharing, the DEB cedes extraordinary powers to the Secretary of State (currently Lord Mandelson) to alter copyright law in any manner he/she sees fit. Unsurprisingly, ISPs and Internet companies are strongly opposed.

The best way to get a quick grasp of the issues is to watch this 9 minute video fronted by comedian and activist Mark Thomas (and note, in particular, Billy Bragg’s and Cory Doctorow’s observations):

What the DEB fundamentally misses is the way the web has transformed the creative landscape. The government should have spent more time reading the work of influential Harvard Law Professor Lawrence Lessig, the man behind Creative Commons.

Lessig wants a workable system of copyright, but one that understands “the essence of practical reason in the digital age” is “if you don’t want your stuff stolen, make it easily available” (Remix, p. 46). He asks: “what should we do if we know that the future is one where perfect control over the distribution of ‘copies’ simply will not exist?” His answer – the response to an unwinnable war is not to wage war more vigorously, but to devise a system of copyright that does not criminalise normal behaviour. (Remix, xviii-xix).

The DEB is waging an unwinnable war on behalf of the established producers. Central to the government’s position is that downloading and file sharing threatens the established creative industries. But does it? In Lessig’s book Remix (pp. 302-303n) he cites some studies that demonstrate there is no statistically significant connection between downloading and a drop in commercial sales of films or music. One of these says that Internet piracy accounts for less than a quarter of the drop in music CD sales – meaning that three quarters of the decline comes from commercial reasons for which the established companies are responsible. The DEB defends the collapsing business models of the big players in the film and music industries while endangering the virtues of the web for new forms of creativity.

Proof of the government’s flawed motives is evident when you consider other aspects of the DEB. While keen to defend copyright for major entertainment corporations, the government has been equally willing to strip copyright protection from photographers. The provisions of the bill that deal with “orphan works” delegate to the Secretary of State the power to transfer the property right to copy to someone other than the original owner. While that may have merit when it comes to historical works where owners cannot easily be traced, the wholesale change to copyright it proposes has rightly drawn the ire of photographer’s groups.

The only explanation for the government’s contradictory approach to copyright in the DEB is the power of corporate interests who want to punish file sharers. Even if the DEB passes, it won’t succeed in ending illegal downloads. That doesn’t make such activity right, but, to go back to Lessig’s arguments, why seek to fight an unwinnable war that will result in numerous innocent casualties? Why defend corporate copyright but not the photographer’s? Parliament needs to have the time to ask these questions.

If you are concerned about the provisions and passage of the DEB, then write now to your local MP (go here) and make your concerns for creativity and democracy known. A campaign is underway.

Photo credit: Tennessee Wanderer (Flickr), used under a Creative Commons license

This photograph recycles all the main elements in the dominant representation of ‘Africa’. As James Ferguson writes in his important book Global Shadows, “for all that has changed, ‘Africa’ continues to be described through a series of lacks and absences, failings and problems, plagues and catastrophes.”

Caption: Bududa, Eastern Uganda. A boy walks over the churned mud after heavy rains caused landslides on Mount Elgon on Tuesday. Three villages were engulfed, at least 80 people were killed and around 250 are missing. The Guardian, 6 March 2010, p. 23. Credit: James Akena/Reuters

The recent mudslides in Uganda that James Akena’s photo for Reuters symbolises are certainly worthy of reporting. The question is: regardless of the intentions of the individual photographer – a Ugandan who is an accomplished stringer – why did he choose this particular composition? And, equally important, given that he will have taken a number of images on site, how did this particular photo come to be selected by The Guardian to represent the story?

The choices that Akena made in taking the photograph, and The Guardian made in making it the largest picture in its ‘Eyewitnessed’ double page spread for the first week in March, are evident when compared to other pictures from the same event. On The New York Times Lens blog Stephen Wandera’s photograph for AP (see slide 2) shows a large crowd at the scene searching for survivors, while a Ugandan TV report also shows the community at large. These demonstrate that the photography of the lone boy is a specific choice with particular effects that tap into a long history of visual representation.

It is time for the photographic visualization of ‘Africa’ to offer something different. In this context, it is worth noting that only two days prior to the publication of the Bududa photograph, The Guardian ran a story in its business section headlined “Africa begins to make poverty history.” It opened with claim that:

For decades, it has been seen as the world’s lost continent. Now, a new study says that the view of Africa as a basket case is wrong.

As the continent prepares to welcome thousands of international football fans for the World Cup in June, it seems the image of an economically vibrant region the hosts are keen to project is closer to the truth than tired stereotypes suggest.

It’s an important — though contested — account of recent economic trends should give pause to those who simply recycle the old stereotypes, and some photographers are producing different perspectives that challenge those stereotypes.

One significant project doing this is Joan Bardeletti’s “Middle Classes in Africa,” a twenty-month project in six countries documenting the rise of this group and their potential role in the development of the continent. Three of the stories – from Mozambique, Kenya and the Ivory Coast – are on-line now. One of the pictures from the Mozambique story won a World Press Photo award this year for the “Daily Life/singles” category.

Caption: Un dimanche après midi en famille sur la plage près de Maputo. Joan Bardeletti/Picturetank

Bardeletti’s photographs show people, places, institutions and cultural events that are modern, well-resourced and more than a little familiar to the European eye. They reveal a complexity to ‘African’ life that belies the stereotypes. However, we have to refrain from seeing Akena’s photograph as ‘negative/wrong/false’ while Bardeletti’s are ‘positive/right/true’. These are tired forms of critique that overlook the fact that all photographers make aesthetic choices in the construction of imagery. In terms of what ‘we’ outside of ‘Africa’ see, the overriding concern needs to be less the presence of particular pictures than the absence of all the alternative possibilities.

This chimes with an interview Guy Tillim, the renowned South African photographer, gave to Daniel Cuthbert’s Verbal blog in July last year. Tillim observed:

The thing is, there are serious problems in Africa which did require our attention. One has to be careful with the positive/negative thing. Just because one takes images of dance halls in Lagos, and people being happy, it might end up being as much as a cliché as the suffering image.

Positives images are one that are self-aware or are interesting, penetrating and original no matter what they look at. Negatives images are ones that perpetuate the issue. Let’s face it, Stereotypes are currency in this industry and actively traded by western media.

The problem with images is that we are so visually driven, clichés are bound to be strong. There is a lack of context. If we see a crumbling wall, we think this is a metaphor for the human issue. It’s not, it’s often just a crumbling wall. What is positive and negative depends on your view.

Tillim’s recasting of what positive/negative mean is very important. Instead of it being a simple contrast of picture content — graphic images of famine versus smiling villagers, for example — he sees it as embodying an understanding of the purpose and function of photographs: “positives images are one that are self-aware or are interesting, penetrating and original no matter what they look at. Negatives images are ones that perpetuate the issue [the cliché].”

This is the position from which we should judge Bardeletti’s photographs. It will be interesting to see how many media outlets use Bardeletti’s photographs and stories once the project is completed in the summer of this year. Of course, there are many economic problems still facing the continent – such as the “land grab” of agricultural resources revealed recently by John Vidal – but a more comprehensive visual account of ‘Africa’ must include photographs like Joan Bardeletti’s.

The scale of the visual challenge was confirmed while revising this post this morning, because today’s double-page ‘Eyewitness’ feature in The Guardian showcased an image of the environmental devastation produced by salt mining on the Senegalese coast.

Caption: An aerial view of workers around pools of mineral-coloured waterholes dug on salt flats on the Senegalese coastline. Photograph: Finbarr O’Reilly/ Reuters

I don’t know why it was chosen, but my guess is that its aesthetics – the colour and form – were probably the main criteria. It certainly wasn’t the start of a story on the context signified by the picture. Whatever the reason, it doesn’t alter the political effect – another image of lack and absences in ‘Africa’, and another prompt for a more complex, self-aware, form of ‘positive’ photography.

[This is a revised version of my 14 March 2010 post for A Developing Story]

UPDATE 18 March 2010:

Asim Rafiqui has an excellent post — How to Take Photos of Africa Or Where Intent and Ideas Collide — that was serendipitously published on the same day as this one. It shares concerns similar to mine, and has a range of additional examples. It is a ‘must read’.

It was named as one of the winners in The Society of American Business Editors and Writers 15^th annual Best in Business Journalism competition. ‘Living in the Shadows,’ which we licensed to The Global Post, won for “Online excellence in projects for mid-sized web sites.”

Most credit goes to Sharron for her excellent photojournalism, in the truest sense of that word. Recognising the significance of internal labour migration in China, Sharron pursued a long-term project based around three families in Shanghai, shooting stills, recording audio and producing video. Thanks goes also to the multimedia team at The Global Post who structured our project into chapters.

I can’t say we ever thought of the project as business journalism, but we are very happy to be counted amongst those recognized for “the best business news reporting during 2009.”

Equally, we have been delighted to see the project deployed by Compassion for Migrant Children, who have used it to help raise awareness about migrant issues.

Most importantly, it demonstrates the power of multimedia – giving a voice to the subjects, providing context and developing a more detailed narrative – in the future of photojournalism.

The rule has been tested in its first year. WPP has announced that a winner — Stepan Rudik, 3rd prize in Sports Features — has been disqualified for removing an element from his photograph. According to WPP, “the photographer ventured beyond the boundary of what is acceptable practice.” (You can read the full WPP statement here; the British Journal of Photography report is here; and @photojournalism posted this link to Rudik’s photograph on Twitter).

Now is the time for WPP to be transparent about its decision. The statement from the organization is commendable in so far as it goes, declaring how it acted in accordance with its new rule and making the decision public. But where are the details on the image and the photographer’s transgression? How was the photograph altered, and how did this venture beyond the boundary of acceptable practice?

These questions need to be answered given that the judgement has been made in terms of supposedly accepted industry standards. Such standards won’t mean much unless they are obvious to all, and WPP needs to offer a more detailed account of this case.

UPDATE: 4 MARCH 2010

The New York Times Lens blog has more detail on the story here. It has a response from Stepan Rudik, and provides an important link to a post on PetaPixel which shows the ‘before’ and ‘after’ images from Rudik that show what the WWP jury objected to. These warrant a close look.

And here is the interesting thing…it was acceptable for Rudik to crop and desaturate an image of a hand being bandaged, but not acceptable to remove a small intrusion from something in the background of the cropped/desaturated photograph. No doubt Rudik violated the WPP rules, and I am not defending his removal of what is said to be part of a foot on the edge of the hand. My question — as always in these cases — is why is extensive cropping and complete desaturation acceptable but other changes not?

This is why WPP needs to be more transparent about this case. Its great that blogs like PetaPixel have done the investigative work, but we need to hear from WPP itself on what makes some changes acceptable and others not. How do these standards come to be “currently accepted” in the industry? We’ve heard from the photographer via PetaPixel, now we need to here from WPP.

Between Monday 8 March and Tuesday 16 March Ed will be speaking at a number of venues across town – all the details are on this flyer. He will also be opening his exhibition at HOST Gallery on Tuesday 9 March.

‘Curse of the Black Gold’ is an important and powerful project that demonstrates the injustices associated with fifty years of oil exploitation in the Niger Delta.

However, it’s much more than a book or exhibition. Ed Kashi’s practice demonstrates how photojournalists can pursue their stories across multiple platforms, with different partners, to great effect.

Ed’s reasoned optimism about the future of photojournalism (which prompted me to write more about the new media economy here) is a powerful antidote to those fixated on the problems of contemporary media. I’m looking forward to joining Ed in debate at the London College of Communication on Wednesday 10 March. If you get the chance to engage with Ed during his London visit you won’t be disappointed.

Britain is home to 166,000 charities that last year received £10 billion in donations. Those are statistics that challenge the belief that “compassion fatigue” is an incurable part of the modern condition (a claim I plan to examine in greater detail in the near future). To be sure, giving declined 11% last year, largely because of the recession. But the speed and scale of the public response to disasters like the Haiti earthquake (for which the Disasters Emergency Committee’s consolidated UK appeal has raised £80 million shows that compassion for what are understood to be immediate, natural disasters is as great as ever.

Keane’s documentary did not dwell on the particular problems of photographic appeals, but it was at its most interesting when it turns to Africa (around 25:15), a continent he describes as “fixed in the mind by charity appeals” that trade in the symbols of disaster and distress. Here the need to simplify and shock diminishes context, leading to compassion without understanding.

In his conclusion, Keane claims there is a new public mood with respect to charitable appeals. Comprising a heightened scepticism and weariness, he declares the template of misery out of date, and sees a more sophisticated approach moving us away from “the age of dependency.”

While a more sophisticated approach is surely needed, and something other than a template of misery long overdue, I am in turn sceptical about claims the public suffers from weariness. In many ways – as the success of recent appeals suggests – “the public” seems as happy as ever with charity as a response to the problems of development and disaster.

Rather than suffering compassion fatigue, there might even be an enjoyment of the “excess of compassion.” This is something, Keane argues, that deflects attention away from the important questions of who is responsible and how they are culpable.

This documentary is worth listening to, so click on the player below to hear a full recording. (If nothing else, enjoy this 56-minute programme for the patrician tone in the archival recordings of British charity appeals broadcast in the 1920s and 1930s!).

Here are the programme notes from the BBC:

“Fergal Keane examines the history of charity appeals and the relationship between charity organisations and the media.

Be it a malnourished child in Africa, a neglected dog or a day centre desperately in need of new equipment, it seems that there is no end to the number of people, animals or organisations that could benefit from a charitable donation. And if charities can harness the power of the media with a hard-hitting advert, a celebrity endorsement or an emergency appeal, then it is likely that their cause will reap far greater financial rewards.

Fergal charts the history of the relationship between charity and the media, and considers the way the message is conveyed, the impact of celebrity endorsement, the quality of charity programmes and the responsibility and risks to the media in encouraging us to make a donation.

The history of charity and the media goes back to the earliest days of broadcasting. The BBC’s first charity appeal was in 1923, when it broadcast an appeal on radio for the Winter Distress League, a charity representing homeless veterans of the First World War. The appeal raised 26 pounds. In 1927 the BBC set up the Appeal Advisory Committee, whose role, to this day, is to decide on the BBC’s choice of charity partners and to oversee campaigns including The Radio 4 Appeal, Comic Relief and Emergency Appeals such as the Haiti Earthquake Appeal, which was broadcast recently.

Commercial broadcasters have also played their part in raising money for charity. In 1988 ITV launched its own all-night charity appeal, in the guise of the ITV Telethon. The 27-hour TV extravaganza saw all of its regional broadcasters come together to raise money for disability charities across the UK and the programme was repeated again in 1990 and 1992. In 2009, Sky Sports ran an interactive red button campaign during the Champions League final so that viewers could donate to a David Beckham-endorsed campaign to raise awareness of malaria.

Programme contributors:

Diane Reid, BBC Charity Appeals Advisor
Lucy Polson, UK Representative for the charity SOS Sahel
Caroline Diehl, chief executive of the Media Trust
Jenni Murray, broadcaster
John Grounds, director of Child Protection Consultancy.

Broadcast on:

BBC Radio 4, 8:00pm Saturday 20th February 2010.”

Photo: Tod Papergeorge, ‘Central Park, 1978′

Durden asked Papageorge if he thought his work was part of what John Szarkowski called the New Documents:

New Documents was an effective title for that exhibition, but none of the photographers included in it—Garry Winogrand, Diane Arbus, and Lee Friedlander—nor any other photographers I knew at that time, would have used the word “documentary” to describe what they were doing in their work. If nothing else, Robert Frank’s The Americans had taken care of that by defining an aesthetic that depended on poetic transformation, rather than an (apparently) literal fealty to a series of facts.

As for me, my initial introduction to serious photography occurred in 1962, when I discovered a couple of early pictures of Cartier-Bresson’s while taking a college course in basic photography. They convinced me, literally on the spot, to be a photographer—and not because I had an itch to document this or that aspect of the world. I saw these pictures as poetry, Cartier-Bresson as a prodigious poet, and photography as a way to possibly do something roughly in the same camp.

Later in the interview, Durden asked Papageorge to expand on his statement (made in Papageorge’s essay on Gary Winogrand) that while photography pictures the world it does not follow that it has a moral responsibility to it. Was this not contrary to writers like Susan Sontag and other critics, said Durden:

It’s always been puzzling to me that capacious minds like Sontag’s, to say nothing of those of almost every art historian, look at a photograph and see not a picture, but the literal world held in their palm. With that, they’re revealing themselves to be no more sophisticated than the proverbial tribesman who believes that a photograph made of him steals a piece of his soul. There seems to be no cure for this universal form of innocence, or ignorance, but it is, to put it mildly, frustrating to spend years working as a photographer and writer about photography and realise that this misunderstanding is as prevalent today as it was the day I first saw those Cartier-Bresson photographs—and recognised them as picture-poems.

You mention Genet and writing, a good parallel. Let’s say that the young Sontag reads the front page of the Times, and then turns to Our Lady of the Flowers, both experiences generated by black marks on a page, yet utterly different in their intention and, presumably, effect. Is it so difficult for her not to see, then, that the photographs on that front page are similarly different from the Diane Arbus portraits she’s thinking of writing about?

For Papageorge, failing to appreciate the differences between news photographs and those of Arbus, Cartier-Bresson, Winogrand and others was the product of a philosophical error:

…Sontag (and legions of French critics and their progeny) was tarring photography with a tired brush, based on a much older relationship that obtained between pictures and moral lessons, and the unexamined belief that the pictures themselves were in some way at least related to the literal truth.

Of course, semiotics teaches us, if we needed the reminder, that a photograph represents a physical trace of the world, and therefore exists in an ontological space quite different from that of any of the non-filmic arts. I don’t buy that argument: ontologically, a photograph is a unique kind of picture, but a picture nonetheless, one that has radically transformed the piece of the world it describes, whether for artistic or journalistic or any other ends, but (obviously) has not transported it out of its picture-state into some nebulous truth-state.

I don’t want to draw any big conclusions at this point, other than to say that we need to think carefully about how Papageorge’s statements impact on the desire for photographs as documents. If work understood as ‘documentary’ is better appreciated as ‘poetic’, what are the implications of this for truth claims based on pictures?

During a recent panel discussion in London on “the new ecology of photojournalism,” Ed Kashi remarked that despite all the gloom and doom we should realize that this is now a potential golden age for photojournalism. He didn’t underestimate the problems but he urged people to think about the prospects for new forms of visual journalism across multiple platforms to diverse communities.

I think Ed is spot on with his reasoned optimism, but to appreciate where this might lead us, we have to drive a stake through the heart of a prehistoric argument that has dominated the last few weeks of the year.

‘Parasites, thieves, and promiscuous behaviour’

Rupert Murdoch and his trusty lieutenants (Les Hinton of Dow Jones, James Harding of The Times and Robert Thompson of The Wall Street Journal have launched a vicious rhetorical war against the free circulation of content on the internet, singling out Google and others for making aggregation and distribution possible.

This is part of a News Corporation effort to garner allies for their strategy to charge for news content. Plans to put their papers behind pay walls have been much trailed by Murdoch executives. The time it is taking to implement these proposals, combined with their unwillingness to follow through on their threats to block their content from Google’s view, demonstrates the purpose of these manoeuvres is to try and reshape the public debate, get as many other legacy media companies as possible to join them in similar strategies, and wring some business concessions from the successful new media companies in the process.

Murdoch’s protestations – which have been effectively countered by Eric Schmidt – have given some comfort to those in the photographic world who hope that the sight of a pay wall going up might mean the return a benevolent editorial paymaster. It’s time to put that dream to bed once and for all and face up to the challenges and potentials of the new era.

The problem with pay walls

What Murdoch and others are missing is the new ecology of the web and how that has changed things for good, in both senses. For those who want critical journalism in all its forms, the debate on pay walls is at best anachronistic and at worst counter-productive. We can see this in three different ways:

(i) Little money:

Building on the points in my first post of this series, we need to appreciate that even the most successful pay wall strategy will never fund investigative journalism. Pay walls are a form of subscription. But subscriptions have only ever generated about 20% of a newspaper company’s revenue. This means the most successful pay wall will never compensate for the collapse in advertising revenue.

Nonetheless, the idea that people paying for content is the holy grail of lost revenue is increasingly promoted by media organisations who are now more willing than ever to explore this option. It has become an almost theological commitment that users should pay. But this overlooks one very significant historical point – consumers have not previously paid for content. As Paul Graham argued, we have paid for the mode of distribution rather than the information being distributed:

Almost every form of publishing has been organized as if the medium was what they were selling, and the content was irrelevant. Book publishers, for example, set prices based on the cost of producing and distributing books. They treat the words printed in the book the same way a textile manufacturer treats the patterns printed on its fabrics.

This has been the case with newspapers too. Rupert Murdoch, now demanding customers stump up for his articles, had no qualms about selling at a loss by reducing the price of The Times to 10 pence a copy (or giving it away as a free item in bulks) during the British newspaper price wars of the 1990s. Having never priced his products in terms of the cost of content, now is an odd time for him to start.

It is possible that for highly specialized content consumers will be willing to pay something for access (see the conclusion to this debate). While recent surveys offer contradictory data on how much or how often people will pay, even the highest of these numbers offers no hope as a general solution to the economic crisis of distributing journalism (while the lowest condemns it as a flawed strategy). Corporate media debts are too vast to be eased by revenue from premium content, so we should not cling to the false hope that new money will fund the documentary stories that have long been under-resourced.

(ii) Who they block:

The second problem with the supposed pay wall solution emerges when we have a more nuanced understanding of web traffic to news sites. Companies like to make a big deal about the number of “unique users” visiting their URLs, and this summation of global clicks is an important indicator of reach.

But most visitors come quickly for something specific and leave equally as quickly. They aren’t reading “the paper” on-line, but searching for a specific piece of information, consuming it, and moving on. Indeed, although some surveys have reported higher numbers, the average time spent on a US news site in November 2009 ranged from just four minutes up to a high of 23 minutes.

If a news organization wants to extract commercial value from its online users, it needs to find a way to first attract large numbers and keep a proportion of these visitors on site for longer so that over time they become loyal. This means the target audience for such an economic strategy is much smaller. To illustrate this, consider the following metrics from the Daily Mail in the UK:

• 28.7 million unique users/month globally
• 8.9 million unique users/month from the UK
• Of the UK users 611,588 came to the web site every day
• Half of those UK daily users (c. 300,000) stayed for 20 minutes

So while the headline-grabbing number of 28 million unique users suggests a vast community of potential value around the Daily Mail, in fact their loyal on-line users number just 300,000, which is just 7% of their daily print readership.  (The Times editor recently confirmed a similar pattern on his site by contrasting 20 million uniques with the 500,000 who had developed a ‘genuine digital habit’.

If one were thinking about a pay wall to control access to content on a paper with these user numbers, where would it be built? Around all content so that each and every visitor had to pay to pass? Around content viewed a certain number of times so the daily visitors were forced to open their wallets? Or directed at those who stayed on site the longest?

Two recent posts by Steve Yelvington and Damon Kiesow brilliantly illustrated the counterproductive nature of this dilemma from their experience with local American papers.

As this graph from Kiesow’s Nahsua Telegraph in New Hampshire makes clear, if your advertising depends on reach, you don’t want to cut off the huge number of uniques on the left, some of whom might be transformed into loyal users if they have open access.  And the number of daily/loyal visitors on the right is too small to build a viable subscription model on.

All this shows a general pay wall for news content will slash the number of visitors and fail to generate even modest revenue for investigative journalism. This is not the counter-theological proposition that “all information should be free” (a view Jay Rosen recently found to be often proclaimed but little referenced by those in favour of pay walls. It is recognition of the harsh economic realities of the web’s ecology for news that too many traditional companies are failing to appreciate.

Some, though, are realizing that this disparity between the millions of casual users and the thousands of loyal readers points the way to a new strategy. A Fairfax executive in Australia recently remarked that transactions rather than advertising or content were the best on-line revenue streams. Crucially, transactions require news organisations to build a community around their brand and product, and then take a percentage of the transactions (hotel bookings, financial advice etc.) those community members conduct through the associations, links and relationships provided. Building a community based on the smaller, loyal audience is something a Daily Mirror executive outlined, while Slate has been shifting from the pursuit of a mass audience (7 million uniques) to a smaller, more engaged audience (target 500,000) because “one curious reader is worth 50 times the value of the drive-by reader.”

(iii) How they limit public good:

Proponents of pay walls say consumers must contribute to the cost of journalism because it is a public good. We should debate the assumption that journalism per se is automatically a public good given “the media’s” patchy record for accountability in recent times. But even if we rather rashly accept that the majority of the fourth estate is critical of conventional wisdom and questioning of those in power, pay wall advocates have this argument upside down.

The public good of journalism in the age of the Internet comes from the vastly expanded possibilities of circulation and distribution. Clay Shirkey has argued this recently (see video here) by calling attention to how a 2002 Boston Globe investigation of child abuse by Catholic priests in the city travelled globally from its Massachusetts origins to the global community of Catholics, mobilising social groups along the way, and ending with the Church having to take action internationally (such as in the recent Irish government report on abuses in the Dublin Archdiocese).

Shirkey’s argument is that it was the forwarding of the original article, rather than just its publication, which enabled people to mobilise and force authorities to act. Circulation was what gave the story value as a public good. So while Murdoch and others see public re-use as a crime against civilization, both Shirkey (and Jay Rosen in his interview with Shirkey here, starting at 9:30) demonstrate that in the new ecology of the web this forwarding (or “super-distribution”) of information and its public re-use is the condition of possibility for the very democratic ethos and public virtue media proprietors say they are desperate to defend. If information gets forwarded to journalists to cross-check and challenge their stories it can make them better, and the journalists’ stories get forwarded to people who are the most relevant thereby enabling social action. For Shirkey, this is the public good of publishing on the web. Murdoch might regard it as ‘promiscuous’, but pay walls would prevent the expansive sharing that is at the base of this public good.

Towards the new futures of photojournalism

Here is my point for photographers – forget all the fuss around the Murdoch-inspired debate about paying for content that has dominated the last few weeks of this year. Perhaps News Corporation will make pay walls work for some of its titles, but they won’t be the economic saviour of any media company. Nobody should pin their career hopes on them enabling a rosy future that will replicate a lost and largely mythic past. A new subscription-funded editorial paymaster looking for photographers to assign is not going to emerge, and holding out for media conglomerates to deliver this will only stymie creative development.

However, Murdoch is not really trying to create a new revenue stream (let alone one for documentary work). He is trying to change the terms of the public debate on the web in order to “call time on free distribution.” But that is an even more impossible task, because free distribution is both the intrinsic architecture and great virtue of the web. Tim Berners-Lee, who is credited with inventing the web, was recently asked why he put the web into the public domain as a free facility rather than a private enterprise. “Because otherwise it would not have worked,” he said. (Just watch the first two minutes of this video interview with Berners-Lee to appreciate this core value).

The successful visual journalist in the new media economy is therefore going to be someone who embraces the logic of the web’s ecology, using the ease of publication, distribution and circulation to construct and connect with a community of interest around their projects and their practice. Like the media players beginning to understand that developing and engaging a loyal community is more valuable than chasing a mass audience (while being open so those passers-by can become associates), photographers need to do the same. If people now understand they are publishers as well as producers this puts them in a new and potentially powerful position.

It won’t be easy (but when was photojournalism or documentary photography easy?), but the successful visual journalist will be someone who uses social media (in combination with the more traditional tools of books, exhibitions and portfolios) to activate partnerships with other interested parties to fund their stories, host their stories, circulate their stories, and engage with their stories. The social value of this is obvious, and this social value will be the basis for drawing economic value so the work can continue.

A good number of people (like Ed Kashi) are working this way now. Jonathan Worth has been pursuing a fascinating project based on his portraits of Cory Doctorow (read an interview with him here discussing this), and VII is promoting discussions around these themes.  In the last couple of weeks we have seen new digital magazine formats unveiled, and if developed these will be exciting platforms for visual work. What all these moves have in common is an embrace of the virtues of digital technology in an open web. Google has been one of the icons of the last decade, and while as a company it is far from perfect, its success marks the path for the future so long as we understand what is novel about the web.

The content of the image must not be altered. Only retouching which conforms to currently accepted standards in the industry is allowed. The jury is the ultimate arbiter of these standards and may at its discretion request the original, unretouched file as recorded by the camera or an untoned scan of the negative or slide.

For WPP, this clause is clear:

In essence, this means that the content of an image must not be tampered with. The new clause is flexible enough to allow the jury some room for interpretation, because enhancement may be defined differently, for example, for a portrait than for a hard news picture.

This new clause is most likely a reaction to the controversy sparked by the exclusion of Klavs Bo Christensen’s Haiti photos from the Danish picture of the year competition – a controversy I discussed here in April. (Note that some of the links in that post no longer find details of the Christensen debate – it seems that what was being openly discussed earlier in the year is now being closed down. A summary and two of the offending images can still be seen here however).

As Photo District News observed, this clause begs more questions than it answers. What are the “currently accepted standards in the industry”? The recurrent controversies suggest they don’t actually exist. And the flexibility accorded to the jury in permitting interpretation for different domains of photographic practice demonstrates that even if standards can be cited, they are far from universal or fixed.

Nonetheless, the WPP clause is significant because it shows that the grounds for judging the legitimacy of documentary photographs come, not from external or objective standards linked to notions of realism, but from accepted practice within the genre of photojournalism and its history. In this conventional wisdom black and white photographs have long been the gold standard, but isn’t desaturating a picture a form of tampering? And if that is permitted, what is not allowed?

The clause also demonstrates that WPP clings to the desire to regard either the negative or RAW file as the foundation of photographic truth, the point of origin against which everything else can be judged. Given the operation of photographic technology both past and present that seems to be a misplaced faith.

It will be interesting to see how all this plays out in next years competition. For the WPP clause to be effective, the organization is going to have to be transparent about its operation and the jury’s deliberations should a problem arise.

I’ve been reminded of this in the wake of three comments submitted to my web site during the last week responding to my post on Chomsky and the issue of how the Bosnian Serb concentration camps at Omarska and Trnopolje were reported in 1992. Exercising my freedom of expression, I moderate all comments to my site, and declined to accept these three. They added nothing to the debate on the substance of the issue. They were long on personal abuse and short on analysis, and one of them was sent via an organisation promoting Holocaust revisionism.

I’ll be more than happy to post the comments of a critic who wants to engage the details of the 1992 ITN reports with grounded arguments; for example, someone who has a reasoned response to my detailed 2002 study of the issue. But claiming “the ITN photograph was a contrived piece of crap” doesn’t really cut it, and betrays a studied ignorance of Penny Marshall’s and Ian William’s two lengthy reports.

The only substantive point two of these correspondents raised was my use of the 2005 Emma Brockes’ Guardian interview of Chomsky as one of the four sources for his comments on the ITN vs. LM case. Here is what I wrote:

In 2005, in his contested interview with The Guardian, Chomsky stated that “LM was probably correct” in its claims about the pictures and the camp, and that although “Ed Vulliamy is a very good journalist…he happened to be caught up in a story which is probably not true.” This is the first interview I cited in the email above, and the text comes from Chomsky’s own web site. Chomsky objected strenuously to this interview and The Guardian (wrongly in many people’s eyes) issued him an apology. However, his main objection related to his views on Srebrenica, and his list of objections is available here. Chomsky never cited the statement about LM or Vuillamy as being wrongly reported, so he has not previously viewed it as “the complete fabrication” he now calls it. Presumably he doesn’t want to retract his statement in the interview about freedom of speech, that “…in the case of Living Marxism, for a big corporation to put a small newspaper out of business because they think something they reported was false, is outrageous.”

I linked to the interview on Chomsky’s own web site (because The Guardian withdrew it), linked to his detailed objections about this interview also on his web site, and noted The Guardian’s apology. Neither Chomsky’s objections nor The Guardian’s apology touched on the quotes in the interview relating to the ITN vs LM case I drew attention to. However, despite that, and despite providing the context and the links to Chomsky’s site, this was regarded as lacking accuracy and honesty on my part. The problem arose, it was claimed, because I didn’t provide the links to the judgment’s of The Guardian’s readers editor and ombudsman in the ruling on Chomsky’s complaint that led to The Guardian’s apology. So let’s look at those links closely (here and here), and see if they make a difference to the point I was making.

The reader’s editor found in favour of Chomsky on three points in the interview – two relating to his view of Srebrenica, and one to the positioning of a letter from an Omarska camp survivor with Chomsky’s letter to the editor after the interview. In other words, none of the findings related to Chomsky’s remarks on the ITN vs LM case, because Chomsky raised no objection to the reporting of his remarks on the case. Secondly, the external ombudsman reviewed the process that led to the findings of the reader’s editor after a counter-complaint from a group who felt The Guardian should not have apologised at all to Chomsky. In his findings, which supported the reader’s editor, John Willis wrote:

the Terms of Reference from the Scott Trust to me made it clear that my task was to judge the adequacy and fairness of how the complaint was handled not the complex underlying historical debate which surrounds the Bosnian conflict.

Therefore, the respondent who felt the Willis review was an additional source of support for Chomsky clearly didn’t understand the role of the external ombudsman. Nonetheless, Willis makes a point at the end of his review that the revisionists never point to. In the wake of the controversy following the publication of the Brockes’ interview, The Guardian published a comment piece by the revisionist author Diana Johnstone, whose views about the conflict in the former Yugoslavia Chomsky was supporting. Willis concluded:

I am not convinced that the Guardian should have run the short comment piece by Diana Johnstone in the form it did. She was not the direct subject of the original interview and although comment and response pieces are part of Guardian culture, taken with the apology and correction letters and the Open Door article, this piece contributed to the impression that the newspaper may have over compensated for the original, albeit serious errors.

Ms Johnstone’s first paragraph referred to “some of the errors” being corrected which implied that there were more mistakes in the original interview than the substantial and clear apology from the Readers’ Editor had detailed and to that extent was not completely fair to Emma Brockes.

All this demonstrates my original summary of the Brockes’ interview, in relation to the issue I am concerned with – what Chomsky has said about the ITN vs LM case – was fair, accurate and more than reasonable. These further links simply confirm that, and in fact point to inconvenient details the revisionists never raise in their supposedly ceaseless pursuit of the truth. And remember – none of the people so keen to question the legitimacy of the Brockes’ interview have anything to say about the video I posted of Chomsky’s interview with Serbian TV where he repeats and expands on his unsupportable thoughts about the Trnopolje images.

Interestingly, the links to the findings of the reader’s editor and external ombudsman make clear that the widespread support for Chomsky in 2005 was whipped up by an organization called Media Lens. They have been busy recently too, with Edward Herman and David Peterson publishing a lengthy “critique” of Ed Vuillamy’s letter to Amnesty International in their own open letter to the organization, which has been republished on Counterpunch and Monthly Review. This piece covers a wide range of issues, and others have responded to it in some detail.

With regard to the ITN vs LM case, Herman and Petersen have much to say, though we have heard it all before because they simply recycle the discredited Thomas Deichmann and Philip Knightly allegations (just as Chomsky does). My original 2002 investigation picked those apart, so trying to debate the likes of Herman and Petersen is largely pointless because of the way they rely on their false and partisan sources and studiously avoid counter arguments. Indeed, by going back to the flawed Deichmann and Knightly allegations of 1997, Herman and Peterson are oblivious to the fact that Deichmann, and then LM editor Mick Hume, substantially revised and retracted their original claims about the ITN reports and the nature of the camps under cross-examination during the 2000 High Court trial. What that shows is they have never read the hundreds of pages of court transcripts from that trial to see how the revisionist arguments were challenged and changed. In contrast, I have reviewed all that material and it provides an important source for my 2002 study.

However, one point, by way of demonstrating the erroneous nature of Herman and Peterson’s claims, is worth highlighting. They feel they have a decisive point supporting the charge that the ITN reports were fabricated when they turn to the Serbian documentary Judgment for support. They write (in note 17 of their piece):

We strongly recommend this documentary. In Part Two, from roughly the 4:44 minute-mark on, the physical location of the British reporters and cameraman is unmistakable: They set-themselves-up inside the area enclosed by the chicken-wire and barbed-wire fence which, shortly thereafter, they would incorporate into their Fikret Alic images.

In my 2002 articles (part 1, p. 30, note 65) I dealt with this claim:

The RTS video Judgement maintains it has the clinching evidence: ‘Our crew filmed the ITN people as they manoeuvred into this area [the alleged enclosure] through a hole in the broken-down fence, then we followed’. The curious thing is that Judgment does not contain this supposedly crucial footage. If they filmed this manoeuvre, as they say, where are the pictures? Their absence testifies to the falsity of the claim.

I recommend, therefore, after viewing the complete Marshall and William’s video reports on my site, people follow Herman and Peterson’s invitation to watch this section of Judgment on YouTube, so here is the link. What is there is not what they claim. Indeed, there is nothing there – at the moment the narrator says the Serbian crew filmed the ITN crew stepping inside a supposed enclosure, we don’t see anything of the ITN crew ‘manoeuvring’ through a hole as alleged. Instead, there are various scenes in and around Trnopolje, similar to some in the ITN reports themselves. By the time we see an image of Marshall and her crew they are standing next to the fence that encloses the prisoners, filming a segment that would end up consuming only twenty seconds of Marshall’s seven minute report and even less of William’s.

This sums up the fundamentalist attitude of the revisionists – they see what they want to see, not what is actually there in the video. There are many other claims in the Herman and Petersen polemic that could be equally contested, and I have done so in my 2002 articles. But there are perhaps few claims more grotesque than their observation that,

…it is well established that Fikret Alic’s physical appearance—often described as “xylophonic” because his ribcage showed prominently through his extremely thin torso—was not representative of the rest of the displaced persons seen at Trnopolje by the British reporters on August 5, 1992.

Just watch the two ITN reports in their entirety. And look at the Ron Haviv photo in my earlier post. There were dozens, perhaps a majority, of men at Trnopolje whose physical condition exhibited signs of maltreatment like Fikret Alic. He was not exceptional. That is well established. What is exceptional is the revisionists’ unwillingness to see beyond their fundamentalism.

My correspondence with Noam Chomsky:

I’ll say some more about these interviews below, but one thing I have always wondered was whether Chomsky was open to evidence that these TV reports were in fact an accurate portrayal of the Prijedor region camps. So, having written the most detailed study available on this issue – Atrocity, Memory, Photography, a two-part academic article – last week I decided to write to Professor Chomsky and ask if he had, or was willing to read, my two articles, and if so, what he thought about them. He did reply, and the reply is revealing.

Here is the verbatim exchange:

To: Noam Chomsky <mailto:chomsky2@mit.edu>
Sent: Thursday, November 12, 2009 1:30  PM
Subject: Bosnian camp photos – the true story of ITN vs LM

Dear Professor Chomsky

In 2002 I published two lengthy, refereed academic articles in  the Journal of Human Rights on the controversy surrounding the ITN news reports from the Bosnian Serb camps in 1992. These articles (attached as PDFs) were the result of two years research using many primary sources, and they have been freely available on the web for the last few years.

I am aware that you have made a number of statements repeating and endorsing the substance of the Thomas Deichmann/Living Marxism critique of the ITN reports.  I am referring to two items available on your web site, namely the 2005 interview with The Guardian (http://www.chomsky.info/onchomsky/20051031.htm) and the 2006 interview with RTS (http://www.chomsky.info/interviews/20060425.htm).

In light of my research, I find those statements very disturbing. I believe if you examined the empirical details of the case you would recognise that the Deichmann/LM position is without foundation when it comes to the accuracy of the original TV reports and the meaning of the camp at Trnopolje.

I hope you will read my work, and I look forward to your response.

Yours sincerely

David Campbell

Within hours, Chomsky responded:

On 12/11/2009 19:13, “Noam Chomsky” <chomsky@MIT.EDU> wrote:

Thanks for the reference.  I’ll look it up.  I doubt that I’ll have any comments, unless you raised the matter of freedom of speech.  On the camp and the photo, I’ve barely discussed it, a single phrase in an interview, in fact, which didn’t say much.  I realize that the Balkans are a Holy Issue in England, far more sensitive than Israel in the US, so perhaps it is not surprising that a single phrase in an obscure interview, which said virtually nothing, would arouse utter hysteria, as it has.

As for the sources you cite, one of them (the Guardian interview) was known at once to be a complete fabrication, so ridiculous that the Guardian ombudsman quickly issued an apology and it was withdrawn from their website (over my objection — I think the antics of the media should be exposed).  As for the other, I said almost nothing about the photo and the camp, apart from repeating Knightley’s conclusions about what was probably the case.   I presume you agree that he is a credible source, whether right or wrong.  I’ll be happy to send it to you if you haven’t seen it, along with his bitter condemnation of British intellectuals for their shameful contempt for freedom of speech.  In the interview to which you referred, that is what I discussed.  If you disagree with him, you should write to him, not me.

I am well aware that the concept of freedom of speech is not regarded highly in England, so even this shameful escapade passed with virtually no criticism, in fact with euphoria.  I’ll be interested in seeing how you handled it in your articles.  I don’t see anything at all disturbing in my comments, except that they were perhaps too mild in condemnation of British intellectual practices.  I do, however, think you might consider your own reaction, and ask whether the words “very disturbing” might be appropriate.

Noam Chomsky

This wasn’t exactly an invitation to intellectual engagement (“I doubt that I’ll have any comments…”). And he doesn’t hesitate to conclude with an attack (that my concern about his statements is itself “very disturbing”). Given this, I didn’t bother with a direct reply. But a public reply is warranted given the seriousness of the issue, so I intend to examine in detail Chomsky’s response.

Let’s skip over the question of whether the Balkans are a “holy issue” in England; whether calling attention to his statements is evidence of “utter hysteria”; and his claim that freedom of speech is “not regarded highly in England” and that “British intellectual practices” are to be condemned tout court. I am neither English nor British, but the more important point is that Chomsky has said all these things many times before, and the repetition of these charges suggests he keeps a stock answer for enquiries such as mine. Engaging with the challenging views doesn’t seem to interest him. Of course, If Professor Chomsky decides to debate the substance of the two articles I sent him in a future reply, I will post his response and correct anything below should he demonstrate anything I’ve written is incorrect.

What Chomsky has said on the photographs of the Bosnian camps

Lets instead look at what Chomsky, in his own words, has actually said about the issue of ITN news reports, the photograph of Fikret Alic, and the Bosnian camps.

• From the outset Chomsky has viewed the issue as one of free speech above all else, and thus lent his support to LM’s case against ITN and its reporters. However, after the jury verdict found against LM, Chomsky was quoted in The Guardian (Media supplement, 21 February 2000, p. 9) as saying that it was “evil” if LM’s reporting “dishonoured the suffering of those in the Bosnian war.” That was the high point of Chomsky’s concern for the human rights of those in the Bosnian camps.

• In the 2003 Swedish controversy surrounding Diana Johnstone’s revisionist book, as discussed in the previous post, Chomsky endorsed the statement that said this book was “an outstanding work, dissenting from the mainstream view but doing so by an appeal to fact and reason, in a great tradition.” Johnstone’s book quotes and endorses the LM critique of the Bosnian camp stories (see pages 72-73). Given that it was published after the High Court trial found the LM case to be totally without merit, Chomsky is indirectly claiming the reiteration of falsehoods counts as “an appeal to fact and reason.” He goes further in his letter to Swedish friends when he states the case of Living Marxism “is important” and that Johnstone “argues – and, in fact, clearly demonstrates – that a good deal of what has been charged has no basis in fact, and much of it is pure fabrication.”

• In 2005, in his contested interview with The Guardian, Chomsky stated that “LM was probably correct” in its claims about the pictures and the camp, and that although “Ed Vulliamy is a very good journalist…he happened to be caught up in a story which is probably not true.” This is the first interview I cited in the email above, and the text comes from Chomsky’s own web site. Chomsky objected strenuously to this interview and The Guardian (wrongly in many people’s eyes) issued him an apology. However, his main objection related to his views on Srebrenica, and his list of objections is available here. Chomsky never cited the statement about LM or Vuillamy as being wrongly reported, so he has not previously viewed it as “the complete fabrication” he now calls it. Presumably he doesn’t want to retract his statement in the interview about freedom of speech, that “…in the case of Living Marxism, for a big corporation to put a small newspaper out of business because they think something they reported was false, is outrageous.” (I’ll return to the significance of that claim below).

• The second interview I cited in the email to Chomsky was one he gave Danilo Mandic of Serbia’s RTS on 25 April 2006. It covered a range of issues, but does include a significant exchange on the Trnopolje pictures. Despite saying in his email to me that “I said almost nothing about the photo and the camp…”, here is the relevant section:

NC: …However, but if you look at the coverage, for example there was one famous incident which has completely reshaped the Western opinion and that was the photograph of the thin man [‘in the concentr…’] behind the barb-wire.

DM: A fraudulent photograph, as it turned out.

NC: You remember. The thin men behind the barb-wire so that was Auschwitz and ‘we can’t have Auschwitz again.’ The intellectuals went crazy and the French were posturing on television and the usual antics. Well, you know, it was investigated and carefully investigated. In fact it was investigated by the leading Western specialist on the topic, Philip Knightly [sic], who is a highly respected media analyst and his specialty is photo journalism, probably the most famous Western and most respected Western analyst in this. He did a detailed analysis of it. And he determined that it was probably the reporters who were behind the barb-wire, and the place was ugly, but it was a refugee camp, I mean, people could leave if they wanted and, near the thin man was a fat man and so on, well and there was one tiny newspaper in England, probably three people, called LM which ran a critique of this, and the British (who haven’t a slightest concept of freedom of speech, that is a total fraud)…a major corporation, ITN, a big media corporation had publicized this, so the corporation sued the tiny newspaper for lible [sic]….”

Perhaps that is ‘saying almost nothing’ to Chomsky, but it contains a number of untrue claims and is consistent with his earlier views. Indeed, in describing the pictures of Fikret Alic at Trnopolje as the ‘thin man behind barbed wire’ photographs, Chomsky is using Diana Johnstone’s phrasing to repeat Thomas Deichmann’s erroneous allegations. Most importantly, the RTS interview shows that he accepts the interviewer’s declaration that “the photograph of the thin man” – which Chomsky starts to say is in a “concentration camp”, but corrects himself to say just “behind the barb-wire” – is “fraudulent.” That is a major claim, and one that is demonstrably wrong.

Examining Chomsky’s source: the flaws in Philip Knightley’s argument

In his email reply to me, Chomsky maintained that his RTS interview simply repeated Phillip Knightley’s conclusions about the case. I accept that Knightley has written some credible things on war reporting generally, but in the case of the Bosnian camp photos his analysis, such as it is, is filled with errors and wrong in its conclusions. I have a copy of the Knightley analysis, so let’s examine the document that Chomsky continues to draw on for his understanding of this issue.

The main elements of Philip Knightley’s statement on the case can be found here. I have a longer document written by Knightley (and circulated recently by Chomsky) that incorporates this but has some other details.

Those details make clear Knightley’s document dates from 1998-99, and consists of a statement Knightley gave to Helene Guldberg, who was then the publisher of LM and one of the three named defendants in the libel action brought by ITN. Although it is claimed that Knightley presented this statement to the High Court in London during the trial, the transcripts of the libel trial show Knightley did not testify, and there is no record of the role, if any, his statement played in proceedings. It seems, therefore, to have been a background briefing for the LM defendants as they prepared their defence.

The chronology of Knightley’s interest in this case is worth noting. He says he first came across the still image taken from the ITN reports when he was researching an article on female war correspondents for the Australian magazine The Independent Monthly. Knightley says this was in October 1994, but in fact the article appeared in the October 1993 issue (I have a paper copy). This reveals that, although he casts himself as the authority on war photography and reporting, he does not trace his memory of the Trnopolje pictures to their original broadcast and publication more than a year earlier.

Knightley then makes the interesting claim that on his first, albeit delayed, encounter with the photograph of Fikret Alic that “I was immediately struck by the fact that the image was too good to be true.” This judgment – or, more accurately, pre-judgment – then colours the remainder of his analysis.

Knightley says he examined the ITN report frame by frame, but given his summary conclusions and the lack of any detailed analysis in his statement we have to wonder how much attention he paid to the specifics of the report. Knightley writes:

I have no way of knowing what the ITN team members said or decided when they were compiling their report after their visit to Trnopolje. But I know enough about television war reporting to be able to say that once they saw the image their camerman had captured of an emaciated Fikret Alic with the stand of barbed wire across his chest, that image then drove and dominated their report. Their words were chosen to fit the image whether the facts justified them or not.

This conclusion is unsupported on two counts. The first is that the ITN reports (both Penny Marshall’s ITV story and Ian Williams’ Channel 4 story) concentrate at the outset by what the reporters found at Omarska rather than Trnopolje. Indeed, it is revealing that throughout this controversy LM and its defenders studiously ignored this fact and carefully avoided discussion of the larger camp at Omarska. Yet Omarska was the subject of the first half of both these television stories. The second half of each deals with Trnopolje, but the sequence of Fikret Alic at the barbed wire fence runs for 20 seconds in Marshall’s story and a mere five seconds in Williams’.

The claim that the image of Alic behind the fence “drove and dominated” these reports is, therefore, simply wrong. The best way to see that is to do something that Knightley did badly and I doubt Chomsky has done at all – actually view the reports in their entirety. Anyone can see them here.

Of course, if Knightley wanted an insight into what the ITN team members said or decided when compiling their report he could have interviewed them, as he interviewed Thomas Deichmann to get the details of his charges against ITN. After the High Court trial he could also have revisited the issue, because in testimony that very discussion was probed (see my article, part 2, p. 148), revealing that the ITN team decided against using the term ‘concentration camp’ to frame their report, thereby ensuring that the Alic images played a minor role in their coverage.

There are two other elements in Knightley’s flawed analysis that are worth highlighting. The first is his claim that, although ITN was right to report that Alic and others were detained at Trnopolje, the camp “was not a concentration camp in the Second World War sense.” This is also part of Chomsky’s statement to RTS (that the Alic pictures lead everyone to assume the camp was like Auschwitz), is what drives much of Diana Johnstone’s views, and was absolutely central to the whole LM campaign against the ITN coverage. The issues here are complex (and are discussed in detail in my article, part 2, pp. 145-52).  Trnopolje is not like Auschwitz. But the important point is that the line of argument which says ‘Trnopolje cannot be a concentration camp because it is not the same as Auschwitz’ betrays an impoverished historical knowledge about the phenomenon both of concentration camps generally and the vast Nazi system of labour, concentration and death camps that made up the Final Solution.

The second and final feature of Knightley’s flawed analysis I want to draw attention to is his claim that the image of Alic behind the barbed wire “changed the course of the war” in Bosnia. It is a view Chomsky repeats in his RTS interview where he states that the Alic photo was “one famous incident which has completely reshaped the Western opinion.” Both these statements are unfounded. Knightley alleges that the Bush administration of 1992 changed its policy to Serbia within 20 minutes of the ITN story being shown on American television, and that an emergency British cabinet meeting immediately agreed to send 1,800 ground troops to Bosnia. Neither thing happened as claimed, as I make clear in my article, part 2, pp. 158-59.

It seems that Knightley has taken the view about US policy changing quickly from a Sunday Times report in 1992 which made just this statement, something that demonstrates the shallowness of Knightley’s analysis. In fact, what then President Bush said was, having seen the report, he was personally outraged and would press for a UN Security Council resolution to ensure humanitarian relief convoys reached needy civilians. At no stage was there ever a suggestion of US ground troops being dispatched to Bosnia to intervene in the war. Indeed, the only US ground forces that made it to the region did not arrive until 1996 when they were part of the international mission overseeing the Dayton piece agreement, which partitioned Bosnia and rewarded the Bosnian Serbs for their ethnic cleansing. Equally, no British forces were dispatched in the wake of the report, and the only ones that made it to Bosnia were UN ‘peacekeepers’ sent to supervise relief convoys. They weren’t given a war fighting mandate and had to stand on the sidelines watching ethnic cleansing operations being carried out. The idea that the picture of Fikret Alic paved the way for the rapid deployment of western military forces to fight is a fiction of the revisionists’ imagination – and a forlorn desire of those Bosniaks who at the time were desperate for such action.

What about free speech in this case?

What unites Chomsky and Knightley in their outrage at ITN is the view that this whole issue is about freedom of speech above all else. When ITN decided to take legal action against LM for its claims about their reporters and the August 1992 story, many British commentators (in a challenge to Chomsky’s anglophobia) were opposed to the idea that a major media corporation would sue a smaller (albeit well produced and generously funded) publication. I discussed these issues in my original study (part 2, pp. 160-66).

There are important issues relevant to freedom of speech in Britain’s peculiar laws of libel, and many people want to see these laws overhauled. Indeed, only this week Index on Censorship and English PEN have released a major report as part of the Libel Reform Campaign that details the needed changes. This demonstrates, contra Chomsky, that there are many significant British voices concerned about freedom of expression. I support this campaign for libel law reform and support the recommendations of IoC and English PEN.

However, in the case of the Bosnian camp photos we need to separate a number of different strands. Questions about the veracity of the ITN coverage and details of the conditions at Omarska and Trnopolje need to be considered apart from the issue of whether it was right that ITN was able to sue LM. This is where Chomsky, Knightley and others fail so spectacularly. It would have been quite possible for Chomsky to say LM should be able to publish what it wanted without any repercussions even though what they published in this case was both wrong and offensive. In his first comment on the case, Chomsky adopted a position something like this. However, since then he has folded his freedom of speech concern into a series of claims that support the substantive details of LM’s untrue allegations, while at the same time disingenuously claiming he is not taking a position on the merits of the case. As a result, Chomsky, Knightley and their supporters refuse to see the different dimensions here, prioritise an absolutist view of freedom of speech, and then make revisionist arguments designed to belittle the victims of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia in order to buttress their outrage at what one media company did to another. In so doing, they choose to regard ITN as simply a corporation, and overlook the way the individual reporters pursued the story despite military censorship by the Bosnian Serb authorities. Indeed, at no point in this controversy have Chomsky and others been concerned about the freedom of speech of those reporters.

I also think that, as strange as existing British libel law is, it had an important and surprisingly beneficial effect in the case of ITN vs LM. The LM defendants and Thomas Deichmann were properly represented at the trial and were able to lay out all the details of their claim that the ITN reporters had “deliberately misrepresented” the situation at Trnopolje. Having charged ‘deliberate misrepresentation’, they needed to prove ‘deliberate misrepresentation’. To this end, the LM defendants were able to cross-examine Penny Marshall and Ian Williams, as well as every member of the ITN crews who were at the camps, along with other witnesses. (That they didn’t take up the opportunity to cross-examine the Bosnian doctor imprisoned at Trnopolje, who featured in the ITN stories and was called to testify on the conditions he and others suffered, was perhaps the moment any remaining shred of credibility for LM’s allegations evaporated). They were able to show the ITN reports to the court, including the rushes from which the final TV stories were edited, and conduct a forensic examination of the visuals they alleged were deceitful. And all of this took place in front of a jury of twelve citizens who they needed to convince about the truthfulness of their allegations.

They failed. The jury found unanimously against LM and awarded the maximum possible damages. So it was not ITN that bankrupted LM. It was LM’s lies about the ITN reports that bankrupted themselves, morally and financially. Despite their failure, those who lied about the ITN reports have had no trouble obtaining regular access to the mainstream media in Britain, where they continue to make their case as though the 2000 court verdict simply didn’t exist. Their freedom of speech has thus not been permanently infringed.

Concluding thoughts on Chomsky and the Bosnian camp photos

According to Alexander Cockburn, “Chomsky’s enemies have often opted for these artful onslaughts in which he’s set up as somehow an apologist for monstrosity, instead of being properly identified as one of the most methodical and tireless dissectors and denouncers of monstrosity in our era.”

I am not an enemy of Noam Chomsky. But I am a strong critic of his position on the Bosnian camp photos because his repeated statements of purported fact indicate that – in this instance – he is an “apologist for monstrosity” rather than one of its “tireless dissectors and denouncers.” Although he says he only speaks about the freedom of speech issues implied by this case, he has to this day consistently made and repeated substantive claims about the status of both the visuals of Fikret Alic and the camp in which he was interred, while trying to elide the fact of those statements. Chomsky’s insistence on seeing Alic and the reporters who witnessed Omarska and Trnopolje as pawns in a story that puts an absolutist notion of freedom of speech above the issues of human rights and historical accuracy is, to repeat, very disturbing. In fact, it is worth than that – it is shameful.

In writing that the words “very disturbing” might be an appropriate description for my concern about his statements on the Bosnian camp pictures, Chomsky demonstrated he sees no need to engage with the substance of arguments that contradict his views. For one regularly praised as an important intellectual of his time, that stance is a problem. In the words of Amnesty International’s Northern Ireland representative, “we all have a responsibility to stand up for justice and to stand against those who would take away the human rights of the most vulnerable.” In this particular case, that means we have to stand against Noam Chomsky’s revisionist and unfounded claims about what happened and was reported at Trnopolje in August 1992.

(I began drafting this post on 14 November 2009 – hence the URL date – but did not complete it or publish it until 16 November 2009).

Amidst all the legitimate issues this trial will provoke, one problem stands out – the Karadzic trial has already become another plinth upon which the revisionists who seek to deny the systematic ethnic cleansing of non-Serbs in Bosnia can parade their prejudices. And in this pernicious denial, the claims about the alleged fabrication of pictures from Bosnian Serb concentration camps continue to circulate and play a role.

Last week, BBC Radio 4’s “Moral Maze” hosted a discussion on the Karadzic trial and war crimes generally. On the panel was Claire Fox, and interviewed as “expert witnesses” were David Chandler and John Laughland. (Thanks to Gary Banham for the pointer to this programme). What was never disclosed during the discussion was Fox’s and Chandler’s earlier association with the infamous attack by the Revolutionary Communist Party’s journal Living Marxism on journalists who in 1992 reported on the Bosnian Serb concentration camps in the Prijedor region of Bosnia.

Photo: Ron Haviv, Bosnian prisoners, Trnopolje, 1992. Source: http://photoarts.com/haviv/

As I have detailed extensively in my investigation “Atrocity, Memory, Photography,” a network of individuals originally associated with the RCP used the fundamentally flawed 1997 article “The Picture that Fooled the World” to claim the western media (especially ITN) fabricated images of emaciated victims in Bosnia in order to legitimize US military intervention in the region. The simple fact that the 1992 reports did not lead to any such response, and that the claims about the journalists have been proven wrong, has never deterred them from persisting with the argument – as in this April 2009 article by Edward Herman.

Herman, of course, is a sometime co-author of Noam Chomsky’s, and last week also saw Chomsky’s role in the perpetuation of this revisionism revisited. Chomsky gave the Amnesty International lecture in Belfast on 30 October. AI’s Patrick Corrigan said Noam Chomsky’s message is as relevant for people in Belfast as it is for those in Beirut, Baghdad or Beijing:

We all have a responsibility to stand up for justice and to stand against those who would take away the human rights of the most vulnerable.

But not Bosnia, it seems. The Balkans are something of a blind spot for Chomsky, for he has become directly and indirectly associated with the revisionists. As I write in the second part of “Atrocity, Memory, Photography,” Chomsky lent his support to Living Marxism’s case against the journalists on the grounds of “free speech.” Although on one occasion he later back-pedalled by saying he wouldn’t have supported LM if its campaign dishonoured those who suffered in the Bosnian War, he nonetheless maintained that the journalists who witnessed the Bosnian Serb camps in 1992 “happened to be caught up in a story which is probably not true,” and that “LM was probably correct”. Under the guise of an absolutist defence of free speech, then, Chomsky has taken a particular, partisan and unethical stance on the conduct of the Bosnian War and its victims. For the oft-praised intellectual who bases his arguments on “fact” these statements are nothing short of shameful.

This background lead Ed Vuillamy, The Observer journalist who was at Trnopolje and other camps in August 1992, to write an outraged open letter to Amnesty protesting the organisations failure to hold Chomsky to account for these views and for giving him another public podium in the name of human rights.

Chomsky certainly gets an easy ride from sympathetic media. On 7 November, Seamus Milne wrote a hagiographic paean for The Guardian to the man he described as “the closest thing in the English-speaking world to an intellectual superstar.” Milne concluded his story by declaring that “in the Biblical tradition of the conflict between prophets and kings, there’s not the slightest doubt which side he represents.”

Such adoration is prompted by their shared antipathy to US foreign policy. As far as it goes, there’s nothing wrong with a critical approach to American security strategies, but when the opposition to “US imperialism” becomes its own absolute and distorts any other considerations, then we have entered the terrain of political fundamentalism. And when fundamental opposition to any policy associated with the US leads individuals to sympathise with the policies of Milosevic, Mladic and Karadzic in the name of a progressive politics, then we are in very dangerous territory.

In Milne’s report there is no mention of Bosnia or Karadzic. Perhaps that is because Chomsky and The Guardian have clashed previously on his attitude to the war in the Balkans. In 2005 Emma Brockes interviewed Chomsky after he was nominated as the world’s leading intellectual. Brockes commendably asked some tough questions of Chomsky including his apparent endorsement of Diana Johnstone’s book Fools Crusade, which has a revisionist chapter on Srebrenica.

Chomsky objected to the way the interview was written up, and his supporters endorsed his concern. That interview is no longer available on The Guardian after the paper apologised to Chomsky for its presentation, though it can still be read here. And it deserves another read in order to understand Chomsky on the Balkans.

In the subsequent controversy, Chomsky sidestepped the issue of what he really thought and said about Bosnia with the same freedom of speech defence he used in relation to LM. As The Guardian’s readers’ editor wrote in upholding his complaints, “Both Prof Chomsky and Ms Johnstone…have made it clear that Prof Chomsky’s support for Ms Johnstone, made in the form of an open letter with other signatories, related entirely to her right to freedom of speech.”

This is not a full and fair statement, as “freedom of speech” for Chomsky masks what appears to be a much deeper commitment to the revisionist account of the Balkan wars.

Chomsky’s original involvement came about after an interview with Diana Johnstone, discussing her book’s claims about the Balkans, appeared in the summer 2003 issue of the Swedish magazine Ordfront, illustrated with the famous photograph of Fikret Alic at Trnopolje. That interview prompted a media storm in Sweden (including the resignation of the magazine editor and an apology to survivors of the war), a seemingly partisan account of which can be read here. I cannot comment on the details of the whole issue – except to note that this document on the Swedish debate also takes LM’s position with regard to the Trnopolje pictures – but in relation to Chomsky we can see two things from this. First, Chomsky signed a statement that said:

We regard Diana Johnstone‘s Fools‘ Crusade as an outstanding work, dissenting from the mainstream view but doing so by an appeal to fact and reason, in a great tradition.

This “outstanding work” calls the truth of the Srebrenica massacre into question, and continues to recycle the canard about the pictures from the Bosnian Serb camps originally published by LM (Oliver Kamm has more details here). The letter Chomsky signed did go on to say “but whatever opinion one may have of that book, there are more fundamental issues at stake, namely freedom of expression and the right to express dissenting views.” Nonetheless, it is clear Chomsky thinks highly of Johnstone’s book. In a letter to Swedish friends, Chomsky engaged the substance of the debate in that country to defend particular points in Johnstone’s book, amongst which he includes further favourable references to LM. In general Chomsky concludes:

Johnstone argues – and, in fact, clearly demonstrates – that a good deal of what has been charged has no basis in fact, and much of it is pure fabrication.

This is a long way beyond defending people’s right to speak even if they are wrong.

If you think this is all passé, then remember that the veracity of a 17-year-old picture remains the foundation for revisionist accounts of the Bosnian War. It is a curious testament to the power of imagery, but one we should never let pass without critical comment.

Although Chomsky and allies claim the mantle of progressive politics for their critiques of their Balkans, they are in partnership with British conservatives and Eurosceptics such as John Laughland, who has detailed his primary concern for the plight of the Bosnian Serbs here, or Daniel Hannan (see here). This replicates the alliances between the LM crowd and the libertarian right in the US.

Although these individuals argue in terms of the threats to “free speech” they are in privileged positions from which they contribute regularly to the mainstream media, frequently appearing on the BBC, writing columns for national newspapers and contributing to on-line journals with the time and space to peddle their disinformation. The voices that go unheard most often are those who were photographed in the Bosnian Serb camps of the Prijedor region. It is their freedom and speech progressives should be most concerned about, and if the Karadzic trial can contribute to that goal, it will have been worthwhile.

This assumes ‘photojournalism’ is an accepted category of photographic practice.  It is an essentially contested category – there are a number of different accounts of what is or isn’t photojournalism, many photographers are happy to wear the label and may are not. I’ll call photojournalism the photographic practice where someone tells a story about some aspect of their world, where this story is compiled first using lens-based imaging technologies that have a relationship with that world. This encompasses what others call documentary or editorial photography, but excludes works of visual fiction produced with computer-generated images.

Of all the journalistic forms said to have died, none have had their demise declared more often than photojournalism. The recent Visa pour l’Image festival in Perpignan was previewed with articles lamenting a “dying field” because of the revolutions in the media economy, but such warnings have been frequent throughout the recent history of photojournalism (as in a 1999 editorial in The Digital Journalist, which was revisited in recent articles here and here).

Many of the concerns about the health of photojournalism have been well placed. The financial fragility of agencies like Eyedea and the liquidation of Grazia Neri show traditional business models are faltering badly.

This is the beginning of the end of a long decline. The traditional model of print distribution and direct editorial funding has been unravelling from the 1970s onwards, ever since weekly pictorial magazines like Life folded. This demonstrates photojournalism that required an editorial paymaster was in trouble long before the Internet was an issue or the global recession added to its woes.

How do photojournalists view the contemporary media revolutions?

As a community of practice photojournalism does not have a single voice with a consensus view. There are photographers attuned to the new media economy and working in new ways. But there have recently been a number of notable comments that indicate the world of photojournalism is paying minimal attention to contemporary debates about the revolutions in the media economy, or resorting to some commonly circulated but ill-founded views on how to proceed:

• The photographic press is yet to explore in any detail the impact of the media revolutions on its constituency. For example, Photo District News had a blog post in June 2009 that devoted a mere two hundred words to wondering (without discussing, let alone answering) “if the journalism business fails, who pays for photojournalism?” but it and similar organs are yet to offer more detailed accounts.

• One outlet that has offered a view is The Digital Journalist, which published two remarkable editorials in August and September 2009 – remarkable, that is, for containing some of the least considered commentary available. The August editorial held the Internet largely responsible for the current problems, made the mistake of conflating newspapers and journalism, and plumped for pay walls around news sites as the answer. In manner that would have befitted the East German regime in its dying days, it cried out – “Let us build that wall before it is too late.” It is very odd to see a major player parroting the same flawed arguments of the traditional media outlets that have done photographers no favours in recent years.

• The September editorial of The Digital Journalist then demanded that foundations hand over large sums of money to multimedia publications (including itself), who would then distribute those funds to individual photographers with “projects that deserve coverage.” I’m a fan of the named companies who are a big part of the future (or, more accurately, the present) of photojournalism, but are the foundations really likely to part with large wads of up-front cash? Importantly, why would we want a system of new gatekeepers, and what about the fact that many of those digital producers are already partnering with photographers and getting foundation funding for specific projects? These arguments and proposals seem fundamentally out of touch with what is or likely to happen.

• In an interview with John Temple, Pulitzer Prize winning photographer Cheryl Diaz Myer endorsed paying for on-line content (“I’m a fan of micropayments for the web”). In a demonstration of how unfounded examples gain an aura of truth simply by being repeated, Diaz argued that if the news media followed the iTunes model or the Financial Times subscription system then things would be better – ignoring the arguments cited in my first post of this series that demonstrate Apple’s model cannot be copied because music is a different commodity to news, and that the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal are atypical news outlets that distribute economically valuable information.

• Leo Hsu’s foto8 post on “The End of Newspapers” takes a novel tack on the debate by asking, “Without newspapers, without the received standards of print publications, what expectations will we have of photographs and their ability to speak “truth”? In the wake of renewed concerns about photographic manipulation (which I have discussed here) Hsu is worried about how norms that contest fabrication will be governed. It is an interesting argument with respect to the veracity of images, but its assumptions about newspapers repeat the common mistake of seeing information and its mode of distribution as the same thing. It is the community of practice around photojournalism that establishes and governs standards, and that is independent of any particular mode of distribution, as the on-line debates about manipulation this year clearly demonstrate. Most importantly, contra Hsu, it is the practice of journalism and not the institution of newspapers that have, in some moments, sustained democracy. We must not confuse the two and their different roles.

There have been some good analyses of the new media economies from within photojournalism – Aric Mayer’s review of the publishing crisis and the crisis in editorial photography come to mind – but overall there needs to be a better recognition in the field of what is going on and what it means.

What inspiration can photojournalism take from the media revolutions?

Many of the recent debates within photojournalism have concerned the coverage of issues and the aesthetics of that coverage. In the wake of the last two World Press Photo competitions there have been insightful and provocative comments on how photojournalism pictures the world by Stephen Mayes and Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, which prompted some heated feedback (see here for the comments on Mayes lecture and here for a response to Broomberg and Chanarin). Mayes observation that his years as secretary of the World Press Photo jury led him to regard the submissions to the contest as primarily “romantic” – that is, “marked by the imaginative or emotional appeal of what is heroic, adventurous, remote, mysterious, or idealized” – chimed with other critiques, such as Jörg Colberg’s thoughts on the visual language of photojournalism, which prompted an extensive discussion on the Magnum blog.

These are vital debates even if there is no single resolution. My concern here, however, is with how the revolutions in the new media economy provide photojournalism with new opportunities for the future. These opportunities are made clear by thinking about what the changing structure of information does for photojournalism, and this changing structure of information will undoubtedly assist photojournalism in responding to the concerns about aesthetics and coverage of issues. Inspired by the themes of my previous post, we can say at the outset:

• The web is where it is at. Photographers must not ignore the full range of outlets (print media, books, exhibitions etc) but the Internet is the only platform with a growing audience for news stories

• To be on the web means producing multimedia stories. ‘Multimedia’ can mean many things, from simple photo galleries through to stand alone topic sites with stills, audio, video and text together, but it is the combination of sound and image which offers the basis for the most compelling form for storytelling

To say as much is to state the blindingly obvious. Photographers have been using the Internet for years, but what is at stake here is something more than having a shop window on the web. It involves seeing oneself as a publisher of content and a participant in a distributed story, the form of which helps reshape the content of the story. Rather than just producing a single image or small series of images to be sold into another person’s story, multimedia on the web has numerous advantages for visual storytellers:

• It allows photographers to focus on a story, and produce more content with greater control over how those pictures are presented

• While the meaning of visual stories can’t be controlled, they can be directed through the construction of a narrative that draws on sound and text as well as photographs and video

• It potentially overcomes restrictions on getting longer and more complex stories published for a global audience, especially younger generations who do not consume traditional media

• It is an effective response to the conceptual challenge of how to provide context for a photograph

• It can overcomes photojournalism’s objectification of people by giving subjects their own voice

This gels with the changing nature of the atomic unit of the news media discussed in the previous post. Running parallel to a shift from ‘article’ to ‘topic’ will be the move from ‘single picture’ or ‘photo essay’ to ‘visual story’ as part of the multi-dimensional narratives that make up a ‘topic’. Moreover, the visual story will be set in context, linked, updated and distributed across the web.

There are increasing numbers of photographers beginning to work in this way, as sites like Interactive Narratives or KobreGuide demonstrate. However, what I am trying to highlight here is more than a shift from taking stills to producing videos. It is about rethinking the capacity to tell stories in line with what Fred Ritchin calls a “new visual journalism,” which he outlined in greater detail here.

Ritchin has long been a leading proponent on these changes. Back in the early days of the web (1996) he produced what is still one of the most innovative multimedia stories, “Bosnia: Uncertain Paths to Peace,” which was organized around Gilles Peress’ photography and published by the New York Times. Ritchin analysed this production in a significant essay called “Witnessing and the Web: An Argument for a New Photojournalism” and has recently developed these ideas in his important book After Photography where he outlines, conceptually and practically, a new practice called “hyperphotography.”

Hyperphotography is a “paradigm shift into another medium, or more precisely into an interactive, networked multimedia, which distances itself from conventional photography” (p. 70). For Ritchin this means “an entire photograph can…serve as a node, a hyperphotograph, an ambiguous, visual, uncaptioned, tantalizing segment of a developing conversation leading, if the reader is willing, to other photographs, other media, other ideas (p. 71). Far from being abstract, Ritchin’s concept has practical pointers on how information can be embedded in images, offering viewers the option of deciding which links they follow in a non-linear fashion.

This move from ‘photojournalism’ to ‘visual journalism,’ from ‘photography’ to ‘hyperphotography’ does not involve either giving up on the still image or abandoning the documentary function of photography. It might employ a variety of new media formats, such as those used by FLYP magazine or the In a City flipbook curated by DJ Clark for the British Council. Whatever its exact form, it uses the power of photography to help structure a multi-dimensional story that through its links, context and openness can be a strong form of evidence for the story it wishes to tell.

How are photojournalists going to get paid in these changing times?

We have to constantly revisit this conundrum, but each time we get back to this point we have to remember something very important.

We can’t approach this issue via some misplaced nostalgia for a golden age that if it did actually exist certainly no longer survives. Photographic stories or documentary have always been difficult to fund directly. If there was a time when the majority of photojournalists simply waited for well-paid commissions to produce important work, that time is no more. We have to doubt though whether the past was like that, because in reality few if any photographers have been able to sustain a career entirely through editorial projects they chose to do. Even Sebastião Salgado had to do corporate and advertising work to cross-subsidise work on the social issues he wanted to explore, and Simon Norfolk sells his prints to a wealthy clientèle through a fine art gallery in order to support his visual critique of the US military.

That means, as mentioned in the previous posts, funding is increasingly going to be indirect. This was confirmed by Stephen Mayes of VII in a an interview headlined “Inventing Twenty-First Century Photojournalism.” Mayes began by stating “as long as any of us thinks that we’re going to make money from selling photographs, I think that we’re going to be in trouble.” Instead he proposed this shift:

[The biggest clients] have been the magazines and newspapers, and I still think that newspapers and magazines will continue to be incredibly important to our profession, but I think where previously we’ve seen magazines and newspapers as clients, I now see them very much as partners. At VII we’ll work with the magazines for distribution, but we’ll work with another party for funding, we may work another party for access and expertise, we may work with another party for technology. So what I find we’re doing increasingly is working on these multi-partnerships, amongst whom it’s hard to see who is the client.

Mayes’ thoughts were reasonably conventional in so far as magazines and newspapers were his primary distributors. Nonetheless, they attracted some outraged comments, with two people alleging that journalism dies the moment one enters into a partnership with the subject. To which Mayes replied, “it amazes me how this question comes up only when discussing non-publishing partners as though the integrity of the news industry is somehow unquestionable. Like fish in water we often fail to recognize the constraints of our existing media…”

I couldn’t agree more. If some of the great photojournalists had adhered to this absolutism we would have been deprived of great pictures – think, for example of how a Larry Burrows needed the US military to get around Vietnam, or a Tom Stoddart required assistance from MSF to travel in Sudan. Of course partnerships vary and anyone concerned about integrity will have to work hard to maintain independence, but that applies in all situations. Aside from the fact the old editorial paymaster model is all but gone, the idea that taking money from corporate media funded by advertising, so that one can create content which will attract more viewers for that advertising, is free from all moral issues is…well, rather daft.

Nobody works in an ethically pure zone. VII has to face those issues with its sponsorship by Canon, anyone working with an NGO or foundation needs to confront them too, and in accepting a commission from a newspaper or on-line site the same applies. Negotiating those issues requires transparency and reflexivity. Operating in the networked world of social media is one way to achieve that openness and integrity.

In the end, creating unique, quality content in a myriad of multimedia formats is the best way to produce value. We know great imagery on the web can drive traffic to sites and around particular stories, and where there is traffic there will be networks, relationships and the opportunity to find ways to fund that content. This does not mean multimedia, visual journalism or hyperphotography will kill off books, exhibitions and the printed image. But those forms of distribution will comprise only a part of a successful photographers portfolio of activity in the new media economy.

Next…what the new media economy might mean for universities and academic publishing…

The photographic press has failed to unpack the whole story, although the British Journal of Photography ran an updated account on 9 September. Neither PDN nor BJP have done more than produce what is a rather lazy form of “he said, she said” journalism. This is clearest in the fact that no one has (a) explored what the agencies other than AP who have photographers work in the show thought about the controversy, and (b) gone back and questioned AP further about the claims it made in their one and only statement on 1 September – claims that Franklin and Noorderlicht have subsequently questioned. I emailed the questions raised in my previous post to Olivier Laurent of BJP and Daryl Lang of PDN, but they did not reply.

While the photographic press has gone quiet on the issue, the big news this week was PhotoQ’s publication of the second version of Franklin’s text, which means we can read the words AP found unacceptable and ask – how political is the Franklin text, were AP’s objections founded, and what would a political photography of Gaza show?

Like any argument, Franklin’s essay can be interpreted in a number of ways. It does not discuss any photographers or their agencies by name, and shows balance by noting the “atrocious cruelty evident on both sides of this long running conflict.” It states that Hamas rocket attacks precipitated the 2008 conflict and Franklin included in the exhibition pictures of the Qassam brigades preparing to fire on the Israeli town of Sderot.

On the other hand, Franklin’s criticisms are predominantly aimed at Israel for the “excessive violence and disproportionate force that one of the world’s largest armies has brought to bear on lightly armed resistance fighters and unarmed civilians.” Moreover, Franklin aligns the Palestinians with others (including Jews) as victims of “systematic ethnic cleansing.” As an analyst of international politics I would say that describing as Hamas as “lightly armed resistance fighters” and the violence as ethnic cleansing is problematic.

However, as the Noorderlicht organizers declared at the outset, there is plenty of evidence from international organizations to support the claim that Israel used excessive and disproportionate during Operation Cast Lead (as my earlier posts on Gaza showed). Only this week the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem released its report on the death toll from the Gaza war that contradicts IDF claims. As B’Tselem states:

The extremely heavy civilian casualties and the massive damage to civilian property require serious introspection on the part of Israeli society. B’Tselem recognizes the complexity of combat in a densely populated area against armed groups that do not hesitate to use illegal means and find refuge within the civilian population. However, illegal and immoral actions by these organizations cannot legitimize such extensive harm to civilians by a state committed to the rule of law.

Franklin’s text is certainly a political account with a particular view. But how could it be otherwise? Is there an apolitical or non-political ground from which to enter the debate about the Israel/Palestine conflict? I very much doubt it. We can have better or worse accounts, arguments more or less supported by evidence, but none of them, whatever they claim, could be considered without politics.

This is where AP’s objections founder, and why their claims that photojournalism can speak for itself in some apolitical way is so naïve. Of course AP has to prevent its photographers from engaging in bias or being used for propaganda. But we have to understand being “political” is something very different from being biased, ideological or partisan. Being political is about being engaged with the world, and that will always be difficult and sometimes controversial.

As soon as photojournalists start to picture the world’s conflicts and problems they are inevitably being political. Too many shy away from this reality by claiming they are just impartial witnesses, acting as humanitarians, recording the face of the victims, objectively documenting what they see in front of them, or any number of similar self-understandings. To witness, be humane and work compassionately and fairly are all important values in photographic practice. But they don’t magically remove one from politics. Photojournalists and their critics need to negotiate the difficulties of their political world (e.g. by providing context to their stories) rather than pretend there is some safe zone in which they are immune from politics.

This means that for AP to force the withdrawal of Franklin’s text by alleging it was partisan is itself a highly charged political act. AP should have accepted the compromise offer to run the text with a disclaimer that it was a personal statement and did not reflect anyone else’s opinions (which was always the case).

The final, and perhaps most important, point to note is that the situation in Gaza requires a more radical political critique than that offered by both Stuart Franklin’s text or any of the Palestinian photojournalism exhibited at Noorderlicht. As I have argued in an earlier post and a draft paper on the photographic coverage of the war, what has been missing is a visual story of the permanent catastrophe that Israel maintains in and over Gaza. We need to move beyond the images of individual victims. We need a photographic account of the governance of all facets of Palestinian life that keeps the residents of Gaza on the brink of disaster.

Those reports don’t delve very deep into this issue. As such, there remain a number of outstanding questions that, given the importance of the principles at stake, demand further investigation.

Because we haven’t been able to read Franklin’s proposed essay, it is difficult for anyone to offer unequivocal conclusions. This, however, is how PDN summarized the text:

Franklin wrote a 700-word essay about the recent history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. (Festival director Broekhuis provided a copy of the final draft of Franklin’s unpublished essay, but asked PDN not to publish or quote directly from it. The AP confirmed it was the same text they reviewed.)

The text describes Palestinians as victims of disproportionate force by Israel.

The essay depicts Palestinians as resilient victims of Israeli violence and disempowerment. Franklin acknowledges cruelty on both sides of the conflict, and cites specific instances of violence against both Israelis and Palestinians.

The essay does not mention the Associated Press or any other media organizations, nor does it name any photographers. Franklin refers to the photographers generally, noting that they are mostly married men who worried about their safety as they covered the conflict.

In his final paragraph, Franklin likens the Palestinians to other groups of people who have historically been oppressed—including Jews—and says the exhibit is not politically biased, but biased on the side of justice, human rights, and international law.

This summary would suggest the Franklin essay is in many ways unremarkable, offering opinions that many have voiced. Of course, there are many who will also object forcefully to such views, but one would hardly call Franklin’s essay radical.

1. AP claims it had a:

firm understanding that the photos would speak for themselves and would not be used to support a political point of view…In early August, in an e-mail exchange with Photofestival representatives, the AP agreed to a brief text describing the origins of the photos and Stuart Franklin’s role in bringing them to the exhibition…When Mr. Franklin later sought to include his own additional text, the AP explained that his political commentary was unacceptable under the clear agreement that had led to AP’s involvement in the exhibition.

In contrast, Ton Broekhuis, director of the Noorderlicht Photography Foundation, has stated:

First of all, it is vital to understand that there have never been official and unofficial preliminary agreements between AP and Noorderlicht or Stuart Franklin, but the verbal indication that Stuart Franklin’s approach – I quote – ‘would highlight the photojournalism and be balanced’. [According to Franklin]: ‘I have honoured this…No discussion was held with AP about text or their apparent right to censor my curatorial essay until a few weeks ago.’

Which account is correct?

2. According to PDN, Franklin selected images from 11 photographers who shoot for four wire services: the AP, Agence France Presse, european pressphoto agency and Getty Images. Did AFP, EPA and Getty ask for assurances on the accompanying text? Were they given any assurances? Did those agencies make any other stipulations about the use of their images? What is their view now?

3. What do the photographers themselves think?

4. According to the Noorderlicht press release, 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. If this is the case, why did AP reject both these options and instead allegedly threaten legal action against the organisers?

AP spokesperson Paul Colford told PDN his organization did not want their photos “to bolster a highly charged political point of view.” Given this, why did AP agree – regardless of the nature of any accompanying text – to have its photographs included in the exhibition in the first place?

The Israel-Palestinian conflict is nothing if not highly charged in all respects, and as an organization AP knows this better than anyone. Their photographers are regularly abused – just read some of the scandalous comments posted on the PDN web site in the wake of this issue that speak of these professionals as “Muslim cowards” and “Arab propagandists.” Or consider the conservative bloggers who revel in calling any images from the Middle East they don’t like “fauxtography.” Or recall the vitriol heaped on AP during the campaign to free their photographer Bilal Hussein from two years detention without trial in Iraq, which saw the AP logo disfigured to read “Associated (with terrorists) Press”.

Was AP simply afraid of further attacks from the right if Franklin was permitted to exercise his freedom of speech? If so, how is that a non-partisan stance?

As I’ve written here, although many claimed that Israel’s media controls meant few pictures of the IDF’s December 2008 invasion of the Strip saw the light of day, professional Palestinian photographers working for the likes of the Associated Press, Getty and Reuters were supplying images that got a good run in European newspapers.

The Noorderlicht Photofestival of 2009, which opens this week, is running work under the title Human Conditions, in order to “reveal the unseen, human stories behind conflicts.” One of the shows, curated by Magnum president Stuart Franklin, whose own recent work on “Gaza Today” can be seen here, contains the Palestinian photographs. As the Noorderlicht web site explains:

Franklin travelled to Gaza to speak with Palestinian photographers. The exhibition Point of No Return shows their work: raw photojournalism that was done under the most difficult circumstances imaginable. The photographs by Mohammed Saber, Mahmoud Hams, Mohammed Baba, Abid Katib, Said Katib, Hatem Moussa, Ashraf Amra, Eyad Baba, Khalil Hamra, Fadi Adwan and Ali Ali rise above the level of detached reporting.

However, it is not the Palestinian photographs that have sparked the controversy, but Stuart Franklin’s introductory text. The Associated Press objected to the content of Franklin’s essay, and wanted it “substantially moderated.” We do not have access to Franklin’s text, but a press release from Noorderlicht makes clear that AP objected to the fact that:

the essay acknowledged that criminal acts were committed by both sides, but assigned the principle responsibility for the extent of the bloodshed to Israel. Both Noorderlicht and Franklin believe this conclusion is justified by the critical reports from Amnesty International and the United Nations…

It seems AP threatened to withdraw their Palestinian photographers’ work or pursue legal action against the exhibition organizers. Outraged by AP’s attitude, Franklin withdrew the essay and left the photographs without accompanying text, while Noorderlicht charged AP was acting contrary to any principle of free speech.

AP’s director of media relations has responded to the disclosure of its threats by saying:

Early this year, The Associated Press agreed to a request to display some of its images from Gaza at the Noorderlicht Photofestival, with the firm understanding that the photos would speak for themselves and would not be used to support a political point of view.

The AP is an independent global news organization whose photojournalism stands on its own merits.

In early August, in an e-mail exchange with Photofestival representatives, the AP agreed to a brief text describing the origins of the photos and Stuart Franklin’s role in bringing them to the exhibition.

When Mr. Franklin later sought to include his own additional text, the AP explained that his political commentary was unacceptable under the clear agreement that had led to AP’s involvement in the exhibition – namely, that the photos would not be presented in support of a political position… (Emphasis added)

Here we have a set of fascinating assumptions about the meaning of images. For AP, the photographs ‘should speak for themselves’, but they assume that ‘speech’ would not have been ‘political’, because it was only through Franklin’s text these pictures would ‘be presented in support of a political position.’ What, then, does AP think these photographs would be saying, in an apolitical way, when devoid of text?

Interestingly, Stuart Franklin says that the photographs are also going to speak, but presumably that they are going to say something different to what AP imagines it hears. As Franklin wrote in the Human Conditions catalogue after withdrawing his essay:

I will say nothing and let the pictures talk. The pictures must speak and one day, we must hope, their stories will be told.

I think both 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 – such as the work of Getty photographer Abid Katib, which was among the first images of the war published in the UK (see one of his photos here) — have already been widely circulated and read with a variety of texts creating various meanings. To suggest that these photographs should now be stripped of prior associations and rendered ‘apolitical’ is itself the most political stance one can take.

(A hat-tip to Aric Mayer for a prompt on this issue).

(UPDATE 3 September 2009: I have revised the final paragraph to note Abid Katib is a Getty photographer, as was clear from my earlier post).

Odd conjunctions of this sort are common in the visualization of Darfur. Back in March 2009, when the liberal UK newspaper The Guardian wanted an image to accompany the print story of the arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court against President Omar al-Bashir, a photograph by French photojournalist Frederic Noy was chosen (in contrast to the web version, which has a portrait of Bashir). Showing a distressed baby boy – identified in the caption as malnourished – being vaccinated by partially obscured adults, it was taken at Koubigou refugee camp in eastern Chad. Noy would have had no control over the use of his image by a British newspaper, but the newspaper’s choice of this picture says much about how ‘Darfur’ has been made visually available to us.

As my earlier research on this topic has demonstrated (see my “Geopolitics and Visuality: Sighting the Darfur Conflict [2007]) photojournalism visually enacts the field it claims merely to document. In the case of Darfur, that visual performance has drawn on the established iconography of disaster in ‘Africa’ in which the political is rendered in terms of the humanitarian, and the humanitarian is signified by the bodies and faces of refugees.

Indeed, the vast majority of Darfur photographs have come not from the province but the camps in Chad, a product of the way photojournalists rely on international aid organizations to provide access to the edges of the conflict zone. My review of all the pictures used by The Guardian and The Observer in their coverage of Darfur from 2003 to 2005 showed that 43 of the 48 published photographs foregrounded individuals as symbols of the conflict, with two-thirds of these pictures focusing on refugees. And as Lynsey Addario’s March 2009 visual essay of the Otash camp in southern Darfur demonstrates (these being the most recent set of photographs used by the New York Times) the emphasis on the face of the individual remains the most common pictorial form for a political story, even one about the Sudanese government’s expulsion of humanitarian organizations from Darfur.

In fixing meaning, either photographs or text can have the upper hand, depending on their particular context. As Alex de Waal demonstrated in his review of the Darfur essay in David Elliot Cohen’s What Matters, the ambiguities of Marcus Bleasdale’s photographs were expunged by the force of the accompanying text written by Samantha Power and John Prendergast, which ensured the reading of the conflict as genocidal prevailed. However, in the case of the news photographs of Darfur circulating in European and North America, I would argue that the pictures have trumped the words. By constantly reproducing the stereotypes of the refugee as passive victim, these images have made a humanitarian account of the conflict dominant over all others. In turn, these photographs have distilled identities to a fixed essence such that the conflict can be easily mapped in terms of a tribal war or genocide that pits “Arab” against “African”.

Regardless of whether photographs or text are triumphant in directing the political meaning of a conflict like Darfur, what is missing from both is an appreciation for the wider context, abundant complexities, and many contingencies through which the fate of millions is determined. Although no single media holds the answer, the challenge for visual journalists is to find new ways to tell the story of Darfur so that this lack of certainty can be cogently represented.

Photo credits: Frederic Noy, Lynsey Addario

This is a cross-posting with the SSRC ‘Making Sense of Darfur’ blog

Two things strike me about the photographs in this story. The first is their focus on individuals, especially women and children, as signs of the conflict and its aftermath. In this they continue a long tradition of imaging conflict by locating the story in the bodies of those most affected. While that is obviously important, it does mean — as I’ve argued in my recent paper reviewing the photojournalism of the war in Gaza — that the larger context of the political infrastructures through which the lives of these individuals are produced goes mostly un-pictured. This context is referenced in both the magazine article and the audio slideshow:

And without concrete and steel, aluminium and glass, without tiles for roofs and cladding for stairs and bathrooms – all prevented from entering Gaza by Israel’s continuing economic blockade – no rebuilding has begun. For those who suffered most, the war continues.

However, the blockade of Gaza that is central to the catastrophization of this Palestinian territory — a blockade which preceded the war and now shapes its aftermath — remains visually unrecorded. To be sure, picturing this political infrastructure would be no easy task, but it is time for someone to try.

The second thing that strikes me about some of the photographs in this story is the way individualizing the issue intersects with a portrait aesthetic that is widely produced. This is demonstrated in the newspaper’s promotion of the magazine’s content (below), where the pose of Shifa Salman shares much in common with the portrait of the South African botanist or the models showing off “the top 5 summer shorts”. With the background cropped, Shifa could be modelling her garb as much as signifying a political issue. Given this, the task of picturing the political infrastructure that governs life in Gaza is even more urgent.

The story of this operation dominated the world’s media in January 2009, yet many felt that the reality of the conflict had been hidden from a global audience because of Israel’s exclusion of the international media from Gaza. However, European newspapers published the work of many photographers from inside Gaza working for international news agencies.

To consider how this photojournalism visualized the conflict, I have been researching the coverage offered in the UK by The Guardian and its Sunday sister paper The Observer. I am presenting a paper on this research – “Constructed Visibility: Photographing the Catastrophe of Gaza” – at the “Aesthetics of Catastrophe” symposium today at Northwestern University in Chicago.

Much of the pictorial coverage offered a familiar – and often literal – face of war, as the first photo from the conflict, the injured girl on the front page of The Observer of 28 December 2008, demonstrates. While the victims deserve coverage, and it is necessary to see the consequences of war, does the rendering of the Palestinians as suffering subjects above all else provide a comprehensive visual understanding of the conflict?

Given the paper is intended for eventual publication in an academic journal, and thus 45 pages and 8,000 words long, I won’t summarise the full argument. But the paper covers the following:

• The assumptions behind the demand to see;
• How IDF media controls did not so much blind the world as structure a particular visuality of the conflict;
• What we did see via the photojournalism of two British papers (with the photographs discussed printed in the paper);
• Whether what we did see was what we should have seen (i.e., the strategy of catastrophization in Gaza I have posted on previously here, here and here);
• The implications of this for our understanding of the photography of catastrophe.

The draft paper is available here. This is the first time I have put such an early version of work out into the public realm. The arguments are not finalised and would benefit from constructive engagement, so I welcome responses as I develop the analysis. Please read and comment.

Photo credit: Abid Katib/Getty

Updates in the Comments below

However, in today’s Guardian novelist Ma Jian writes in honour of the thousands who were killed. It is a moving account, notable for the stories told by the former solider, now artist, Chen Guang, and the survivor who saw his friends crushed by a tank.

It is also notable for the photographs (three below) that accompany the narrative — especially the graphic image of the dead on the cover of G2, the wide-angle shot of the square with serried rows of tanks, and the injured protester making his way past groups of soldiers. These are not pictures we see regularly, and in their rarity they function as a powerful testament to the violence that ended those momentous protests.

See also The Guardian’s gallery for the 20th anniversary of Tiananmen.

(Update 3 June — The New York Times Lens blog features a great story, Behind the Scenes: Tank Man of Tiananmen, looking at the various versions of the ‘tank man’ photo.).

(Update 4 June — NYT Lens blog publishes for first time Terril Jones photo of ‘tank man’ from street level, in Behind the Scenes: A New Angle on History).

More updates in the Comments below

Photo credits: AP; Jacques Langevin/Corbis/Sygma

Three soldiers peering into a remote valley, rifles at the ready, the enemy seemingly elusive. High tech weaponry is readied against the elements. This is a war machine looking for a reason, certain a threat is out there, but unsure of its form. There’s even a moment of pathos, with the man on the left in his pink boxers and exposed legs lining up with his comrades. Then there is the second photo, shot from behind in the same place, but showing a strongman taking time out for a gym session. One shows a vulnerable body, the other a muscular physique, but in each case the American soldier is the subject of the photograph.

What unites these pictures is their location – the Korengal Valley in northeastern Afghanistan. The embedding process is taking photographers and reporters to this location above all others, and photographers have been prominent in the coverage of US operations there. Balazs Gardi and Tim Hetherington travelled there in 2007, John Moore spent time there in November 2008, producing both stills and a multimedia piece, and Adam Dean and Tyler Hicks have filed stories from an April 2009 embed. (See background to the Hicks’ story here).

Although the visual skills of these practitioners are not in doubt, the stories they have produced are remarkably similar in both content and approach. US forces are the locus of the narrative and combat scenes are repeatedly pictured. The local community is largely unseen, except for when they encounter the Americans, and never heard. They are rendered as part of an inhospitable environment in which civilians are hard to distinguish from ‘the enemy’.

The effect of concentrating on one location and one side has been to badly limit our understanding of the strategic dilemma that is Afghanistan. The photographers might want to do otherwise but the embedding process is designed to produce this constraint. Its success can be judged by the way these stories effectively structure the visibility of the war in a way that foregrounds competing American military interests.

How we judge the photographers’ responsibility here is difficult. Logistically, being embedded is the only feasible way to cover some frontline locations. Without it we might not see anything. But the consequence of embedding is the production of a visual landscape that too easily fits with the idea that more troops or heavier fighting could lead to victory.  This political effect was part of Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin’s critique of Tim Hetherington’s 2007 World Press Photo-winning image of an American soldier in the Korengal. (Hetherington responded with a statement about photojournalism’s continuing political significance, which I have considered here).

Picturing the Af-Pak war comprehensively and in context is a major photographic challenge. It cannot be easily disentangled from the politics. We are stuck with the consequences of the Bush-Blair military intervention, but there is no simple military solution in Afghanistan that will guarantee security. Yet, as much as it might be wished, withdrawing international forces from Afghanistan is unlikely to be helpful in the short-term.

In this context, photography has its work cut out. It has been the multimedia stories that are most effective at addressing the broader issues (see John D McHugh’s series Six Months in Afghanistan, especially the film “Combat Post”), and more work of this kind is urgently needed if the human and political dimensions of the struggle for security in Afghanistan and Pakistan are going to be better understood.

Photo credit: David Guttenfelder/Associated Press, from WSJ.com Photo Journal, 12-13 May 2009.

This is a cross-posting with No Caption Needed. It develops thoughts from an earlier post on Afghanistan. Updates after posting are in the comments below.

Via Fred Ritchin’s After Photography (see his 24 April post) comes news of a Swedish government project Girlpower dealing with sexism in advertising.

One element is a magazine cover where, step-by-step, you can un-do the manipulation of the model to see how the glamorous cover was produced. You can go through each of the twelve changes that have been made, and at the end click on a red button to see the complete before and after images.

We know it happens, but in this case, seeing is really believing.

You know the pictures without even seeing them – the photographs of mothers and their distressed children, or western aid workers ministering to victims who are passive, pathetic, poor and sick. Over on the duckrabbit blog – a regularly insightful source of photographic critique – there is an interesting breakdown of the Medecins Sans Frontieres photoblog that shows how these representations are alive and well even for one of the best activist organizations.

As they note, the photographs used by MSF show aid workers who are white and western even though the bulk of humanitarian assistance, even when provided in the name of European organizations, is delivered by local people. The images also suggest that dependency rather than empowerment is the best modus operandi.

Recently I have been trying to think about photography in ways that shifts our focus from representation to enactment, from the meaning of pictures to the work they do (see ‘War images at work’). From this perspective, even the most common visual representations can have important and unusual effects in certain circumstances.

This is not entirely the case with the MSF photoblog, and the problems raised by duckrabbit are significant. However, that MSF pursues these visual strategies is not all that surprising. Their purpose is to put MSF at the centre of aid work, show they are making something of a difference, and get viewers to open their pockets to fund that work. Whether we like it or not – and its part of what the social psychologists call “the identifiable victim effect” – when people like us are pictured aiding individuals who are helpless, those pockets open more frequently.

This is not to overlook the problems of the MSF photoblog as an example of the limitations of humanitarian photography. But it is not meant to offer a full pictorial account of aid, development and Africa. As such, I would put the problem this way: it less about the presence of these stereotypes and more about the absence of alternative visual stories in news from Africa, in particular. When it comes to the photographic production of ‘Africa’, it is largely disaster and humanitarian photography that we see. Sure, we get the exotic nature stories and the romantic travel accounts, but you won’t see many complexities of African culture, politics and society in those glossy narratives either.

The absence of these alternative stories is often put down to the alleged lack of local and indigenous photographers, and the duckrabbit post makes this point. But I am a bit sceptical about this as the source of the problem. Can we say categorically that local people would be better storytellers? To me that assumption has as many problems as the reliance on the international photographic elite it seeks to replace. Are “local people” a single, homogenous entity with only one voice? Surely they are as diverse, plural and conflicted as our own societies, so which local voices are going to get to tell their stories, and which local voices are we going to pay attention to?

At about this point I’m going to be misunderstood as seemingly wanting to retain the status quo. Not so. The issue of greater attention to and work for indigenous photographers is an important issue of labour justice and political economy. There are many talented non-European photographers in this world whose work deserves greater play, and initiatives like majorityworld.com are important in redressing the economic imbalances. And nobody could object to more assistance and training for locals to tell their own stories.

But the idea that their work, simply because they are non-European, offers a fundamentally different and automatically better visual account of the issues and places they cover is as sweeping a generalization as that offered by the stereotypical images that dominate our media. It may be true in some instances, but, for example, having viewed the work of many talented Asian photographers at this years Chobi Mela festival in Bangladesh, I was struck by how familiar were both their subjects and their aesthetic style.

It is also getting to hard to clear divide from “the local” from “the international”. The Palestinian photojournalists who produced impressive pictures to cover the war in January were in many cases already employed by the big news agencies like AP and Reuters – that’s how they could get their work out so quickly. Are they local, or are they part of the global image economy? They are obviously local to the war zone, but in their professional practice they have to conform to the codes of their global media employer, and these norms condition the pictures that are taken and published.

We must get to see more work from local photographers in Africa, Asia and elsewhere. But we also need better work from European photographers covering those areas. If both local and international photojournalists take the time to engage with the issues rather than just parachute in and out we will all be better off. In the end, though, we should judge them, not on their birthplace or nationality, but on their ability to employ visual strategies in the service of a complex and compelling story.

From the realm of fashion, French Elle is being celebrated for running a cover story in which the models photographs have not been ‘Photoshopped’ (thereby confirming, as I’ve noted previously, that digital manipulation is the norm in this visual domain).

From the world of photojournalism, blogs like 1854, PDNPulse and the Online Photographer (with a follow-up here) have been buzzing with the story of the Danish photographer Klavs Bo Christensen who was excluded from that country’s Picture of the Year competition for excessive colour manipulation of his Haiti story.  Along with two others, Christensen was asked to submit his RAW files to the competition judges who felt that the colour in his photographs had been excessively saturated (their debate can be heard here), and removed his images from the competition as a result. Christensen was subsequently happy to have his files put on the web for comparison and discussion, thereby performing an important service to the photographic community.

My interest in the case is less in the rights and wrongs of Christensen’s images and more in how we talk about the rights and wrongs of these images. For those who feel the judges were right and Christenson was wrong, the case is relatively simply. Both the judges and the bloggers are in broad agreement. Photography is understood in terms of either art or documentary/photojournalism/reportage, with the latter supposed to be free of manipulation that gets in the way of seeing the world as it really is. You can make changes to digital images that replicate what would have once been with film and paper in the darkroom, but no more. It all seems straightforward with nice clear lines that should not be crossed.

If only. Framing the debate in these terms relies on a conventional understanding of the history of photography that cannot be sustained. The line between ‘art’ and ‘documentary’ has been blurred ever since John Grierson, who coined the term documentary in the 1920s, argued that its purpose was to generate a particular “pattern of thought and feeling” in the viewer. This sense, replicated in all the statements by well-known photojournalists that their function is to bear witness and record the otherwise ignored injustices of modern life, means there is always a particular perspective at the heart of documentary and reportage no matter how often people want to defend it in terms of simple realism.

There are also some more mundane reasons why the lines of judgment are not so clear-cut. As much as those who take issue with Christensen think that the RAW files are “pretty eloquent all by themselves,” are these files really like film negatives? Can anyone actually see a RAW digital file without any post-processing? (Could we actually see a negative without post-processing?).

All this suggests we are talking about the degree of alteration and post-processing that is deemed acceptable rather than either the absence or presence of manipulation. This is confirmed by reading some of the comments in favour of the judges. Mike Johnston summarized the view rather well:

And of course there’s nothing wrong with Photoshop (or any other image editor), or with darkroom manipulation. But in photojournalism those tools are expected to be used to increase the accuracy and veracity of the photograph to the scene—not decrease it. That seems to be Mr. Christensen’s failure here, not the tools he used. He’s simply made himself a suspect witness by overdoing his manipulations to the point of obvious unreality, subverting realism for cheap effects instead of reporting it with an appropriate modicum of dispassion.

This argument repeats the familiar terms justifying conventional photojournalism – veracity, witness, realism, dispassion. However, given these terms, allowing for some legitimate manipulation, the idea that one can increase accuracy and veracity – as opposed to simply record it without interference – undercuts the logic of the starting point.

Similarly, the Danish competition judges accept editing in Photoshop, thought some of Christensen’s images were satisfactory, but deemed most of them “too extreme.” So the issue is not whether you can manipulate or not, but how far one can go. The rules of the competition seek to make these limits clear:

Photos submitted to Picture of The Year must be a truthful representation of whatever happened in front of the camera during exposure. You may post-process the images electronically in accordance with good practice. That is cropping, burning, dodging, converting to black and white as well as normal exposure and color correction, which preserves the image’s original expression. The Judges and exhibition committee reserve the right to see the original raw image files, raw tape, negatives and/or slides. In cases of doubt, the photographer can be pulled out of competition.

So, although you have to have “a truthful representation of whatever happened in front of the camera during exposure,” even if you exposed the multi-coloured world in colour you can convert it to black and white. While Christensen was criticized for over-saturating his colours, he would have been in the clear had he simply, and completely, de-saturated them. The excessive addition of colour is a problem, but the total subtraction of colour is permitted. Is that clear?

Again, my interest is not in the rights and wrongs of the case, but, rather, the terms of the debate about what is right and wrong. We most definitely need photographs (including black and white pictures) we can use as documents, but we cannot justify documentary status through conventional understandings based on a mythical understanding of photography’s history and a supposedly secure analogue past. Photojournalism, as I’ve written elsewhere, as to learn to live with tensions and contradictions as it searches for a better foundation in our digital world.

It chimes with The Guardian’s investigation into possible war crimes committed by Israeli forces (this being a good example of investigative, multimedia journalism), as well the testimony of Israeli soldiers gathered by the veteran’s organization Breaking the Silence. Medical personnel, hospitals and civilians were all targeted, despite the Israeli Defence Force’s surveillance technology giving them the capacity to see individuals and targets clearly from some distance. Not only was the death toll high, but the destruction wreaked on Palestinian infrastructure – some 15% of all buildings in the Gaza Strip were destroyed, and half of all hospitals attacked – made this a clear case of urbicide, meaning the destruction was a goal of the offensive rather than a by-product of the fighting.

Israeli authorities have defended their actions claiming that their forces act within the rules of war. And they may be right about that. International humanitarian law does not prevent war; it tells combatants how to conduct war. In the attack on Gaza the IDF employed international legal experts in great numbers to work out how to prosecute the offensive by establishing when, where and how they were “entitled” to attack civilians and their infrastructure. This means the assault on Gaza was a case of “lawfare.”

Hamas, through its indiscriminate rocket attacks on civilians, is also guilty of acting illegally, and deserves prosecution along with those Israeli forces that targeted medics, civilians and urban infrastructure. But there are limits to what a discourse of legality can achieve in this context. As Eyal Weizman has concluded, “rather than moderation or restraint, the violence and destruction of Gaza might be the true face of international law.”

As such opposing the continuing occupation of Palestinian lands and the perpetual blockade of Palestinian society – note the on-going control of PA funds by the Israeli government as evidence of the continuing strangulation that makes a mockery of the idea Israel has “withdrawn” from Gaza – might be better opposed in terms of colonial power rather than legal rights.

Starting with stories like Ron Haviv’s Road to Kabul, and evident in the contributions to the Battlespace project, the close-up portrayal of daily fighting necessarily overlooks the larger political issues. The constraints of being an embedded photographer are clear from the way different practitioners (including Balazs Gardi, Tim Hetherington and John Moore) have all travelled to hotspots like the Korengal Valley to cover American troops in action. Although their visual skills are not in doubt, the effect of photographers like this concentrating on one issue and one side has been to badly limit our understanding of the strategic dilemma that is Afghanistan.

We cannot turn the clock back to 2001, but if we could, pursuing the political and legal strategies then advocated in response to the 9/11 attacks would have been better. Now, though, we are stuck with the consequences of the Bush-Blair military intervention in Afghanistan. Dealing with that requires reading the conflict more accurately, so that we can understand that the Taliban were never defeated, the fixation on Iraq distorted policy, and that there is no simple military solution in either Afghanistan or the Pakistan border region that will offer security.

Photojournalism is, of course, not solely responsible for this, even if the visual landscape it offers us too easily fits with the idea that more troops or heavier fighting could lead to victory. (This political effect was part of Broomberg and Chanarin’s critique of Hetherington’s World Press Photo-winning image of an American soldier in the Korengal – Hetherington responded with a statement about photojournalism’s continuing political significance; I considered this debate here). Sometimes, though, the stories that emerge from embedded photographers do reveal the futility of the fighting – John D McHugh’s powerful multimedia series Six Months in Afghanistan, especially the film “Combat Post”, is visual evidence for this claim.

Recent videos of public floggings by the Taliban in Pakistan (see the Channel 4 News report from 24 March below, which begins with a beating the Taliban were happy to have filmed) confirm why anyone interested in human rights wants to see fundamentalists opposed (though see the good questions raised about them here).

Equally, the story of the 11-year old girls in the must-see New York Times multimedia report “Class Dismissed in the Swat Valley” is a visual indictment. What these demands can’t do is prescribe the best way forward to an inclusive and non-violent future. The Obama administration’s “Af-Pak” strategy is an overdue recognition of the region’s problems, but its planned military tactics are likely to perpetuate the problem. Confronting the “neo-Taliban” – the new generation of Pakistani, Afghan, al-Qaeda and Kashmiri fighters who follow a jihadist ideology – with drone attacks that only add to the civilian death toll will be counterproductive. And, yet, as much as it might be wished, withdrawing international forces from Afghanistan is unlikely to be helpful in the short-term.

In this context, photography has its work cut out. It has been the multimedia stories that are most effective at addressing the broader issues, and more work of this kind is urgently needed if the human and political dimensions of the struggle for security in Afghanistan and Pakistan are going to be better understood.

Photojournalism’s representation of war is often standardized, familiar, even clichéd. Regardless of the time or place it can seem like we have seen it before, regularly and repeatedly. But if we always approach the problem from the same vantage point – asking how the event is represented – we run the risk of missing vital dimensions and important effects of the image, as this picture from Nepal demonstrates. 

This picture comes from that country’s decade-long civil war which ended in November 2006. The passenger was among 36 killed when Maoists bombed a bus near Madi in June 2005. As one of the 15,000 people who died in this period, he was an unknown statistic in what was, for the rest of the world, a forgotten conflict, an event that had disappeared from the radar even before it could be remembered. 

We could read this image, which is being recirculated through a book launched at this year’s biennial Chobi Mela festival of photography, as the making visible of something we should have known about. Or it could be another testament to lives lost, marked by hands of death. Or we could see it as a further instance of the indirect marking of mass death, preserving dignity while recording loss. While such accounts provide understanding, they do not draw our attention to the larger significance of this image. If we shift our focus from representation to enactment, from meaning to work, we can appreciate this photograph for its vitality in the present rather than merely its record of the past. 

As one of the 179 photographs by 80 photographers selected from the more than 2,000 submitted for the exhibition “A People War: Images of the Nepal Conflict 1996-2006,” this picture toured Nepal throughout 2008. As a book and exhibition, “A People War” contains what individually might be regarded as unremarkable images in the global archive of war photography. Its catalogue of uniformed guerrillas, grieving widows, destroyed infrastructure, damaged individuals and mobilizing soldiers could, by themselves, have been drawn from any number of conflicts. Despite the editors desire to forgo showing unvarnished violence (hence the photograph of the bomb victim’s hand), there are pictures that shock, especially those that record the lynching of a teacher and journalist.  

If, however, we view the images collectively and ask ourselves what work they are doing through the book and the exhibition, then they become something quite remarkable. Being shown within a year of the war’s end, this collection is an act of raw experience, a detailed encounter with what the conflict’s participants and victims have suffered so recently. Nepalese responded to this act in large numbers, with more than 350,000 people queuing to see it in 30 towns across the country – as in this picture from Surkhet. With thousands of free copies of the book distributed to public and school libraries across the countries, and a Nepali language budget edition made available for widespread sale, the organizers have ensured the photographs the broadest circulation possible.

People did not just look at the pictures. They engaged with the photographs. Mothers looked for evidence of missing family members, soldiers faced the consequences of their actions, and children witnessed what the future could be like if politics did not triumph over violence. To this end, the exhibition is also a warning to a fragile country. It functions as a statement in defense of the new federal republic, using the photographs to speak of a time to come, declaring that even if that future is not yet capable of being pictured, Nepalese know only too well what it could look like. 

Photographs by Kumar Shrestha and Kirin Krishna Shrestha/nepa-laya. 

This is a cross-positing with No Caption Needed. 

A People War-cover

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Reflecting on the Oscar ceremonies, MediaGuardian has documented the widespread use of Photoshop to enhance celebrity photographs in fashion and gossip magazines. Every cover, says one media insider, has been altered to some degree, with some of these changes exposed in the “Photoshop Hall of Shame” and “Photoshop Disasters”. So common is the practice that when an October 2008 Newsweek cover of Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin was not airbrushed, conservative anchors on Fox television complained that this amounted to liberal bias. (Fox knew about the political power of such changes because it had earlier manipulated the photos of two New York Times journalists it wanted to discredit).

Despite being widespread, digital manipulation provokes anxiety and unease, especially when news photographs are involved. The scandals surrounding Brian Walski’s 2003 photos from Iraq and Adnan Hajj’s 2006 pictures from Lebanon led to both men being fired from their jobs, and the governments of Iran and the US have been criticized when they released altered military images of missiles and a general.

What is commonplace in one visual domain (fashion) is regarded as taboo in another (news). Yet both realms are still regulated by a desire for photographs to be accurate and authentic documents. The persistence and power of this desire despite the long history of photographic manipulation (chemical and digital) is something that needs explanation.

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Of course, such an announcement is problematic because what is this thing called “photography”? It is a concept so broad, encompassing everything from the art image to the advertising campaign, from the hard-hitting news photo to the long-term documentary project, that any declaration of its demise has to be premature. 

Announcing the death of photography is often a coded way of saying that the still picture is no longer important. Yet this declaration to seems more than little premature. In the last year, some 250 billion digital photographs were produced. This number is growing rapidly, so that by 2010 (next year) some 500 billion digital photographs will be made globally. A quick glance at the video from the Chobi Mela opening (below) shows how digital cameras are prominent across the world. 

Even this sign of health is taken by some to indicate another likely death — that of the professional photographer at the hands of the amateur or citizen photographer. That claim, too, seems premature. A quick glance across any newsstand, or a short time spent surfing the web, will demonstrate that the place of the professional, skilled photographer — while undoubtedly under all sorts of pressure — is nonetheless still very prominent. Professional photographers have a particular responsibility. Our world is mediated visually. We — whether picture makers or image consumers — come to understand our lives in context through visual representations. That visual understanding then establishes the possibility for thinking about politics, citizenship, rights and action. 

In the global image economy some things are included and many things are excluded. The relations of pictorial power are not equal. The great virtue of Chobi Mela over the years, and the great impact of Drik since its inception, has been to make these questions of inclusion and exclusion — and how these inclusions and exclusions are politically important — unavoidable for all who take photography seriously. 

Photography is very much alive, very important, but also undergoing great transformations. It is changing rapidly in nature, technology and purpose and we need to understand how these changes will play out politically. It is no longer possible (if it ever was) to put our faith in photography as an objective record of the world out there, so how can we use images to document the all-too-common injustices of the present global order? The mainstream media produces and supports one set of global visions, but how can photographers challenge these visual accounts that so often lack both context and complexity? Chobi Mela’s many exhibitions are one way of addressing these questions. 

[My remarks at the opening ceremony for Chobi Mela V, Dhaka, 30 January 2009]

 
Chobi Mela V opening from David Campbell on Vimeo.