Transcript
Greg Brockett, Senior Curator: “For those who don’t know me by the way, I’m Greg and I'm in the contemporary conflicts team here at IWM, and I've been working on the Tim Hetherington Archive now for a couple of years.
And as part of that, we started up this AHRC funded networking event with Katy at the University of Leeds. Yeah, we've got a really packed schedule, so I don't really want to talk for too long before I hand over to Katy.
But I think just to say from the perspective of the archive, and now it's set up here at IWM, looking back at it in the context of history, it was really important to have a humanitarian aspect to this network. And I think if you look back at Hetherington's work, a lot of it was really grounded in his early humanitarian work. I think really specifically about his portraits he did in Sierra Leone showing the consequences of the war there, and that style and approach he took actually went with him through all of his conflict photography as well. And equally, the way Tim kind of, I guess, his very thoughtful process meant he also thought a lot about the ethics of what he was doing. And so, he spoke about the dilemma of being a Western photographer and then going and making work in Africa, which was then sent back and published in, in Western countries. And again, that's something we're gonna hopefully touch on today as part of this, part of this session. So that's it for me, from me for now. Katy is just gonna do another quick introduction then we’ll get into the first presentation.
Katy Parry, Associate Professor, University of Leeds: OK, so I just wanted to also give a warm welcome from myself. My name is Katy Parry. I'm an Associate Professor at the University of Leeds. And so, as Greg's already said, this is our second event. And I should say this is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and we're very grateful to the museum to be hosting us today, especially, I think, you know, it's one of the rare in-person events at the moment. And I just want to say a special thanks to Nick as well for all the help he's been giving us with planning the event. So, in the documentary film, War photographer, James Newquay states, “For me, the strength of photography lies in its ability to evoke a sense of humanity.” He says, “If war is an attempt to negate humanity, then photography can be perceived as the opposite of war and if it's used well, can be a powerful ingredient in the antidote to war. But this idealistic take has certainly been questioned by others and is a great deal of scholarly attention on the camera as a device for war, surveillance, humiliation, subjugation. So, it can be both a democratic tool and a tool of oppression. And of course, both perspectives can be true at once, and one of our aims today is to examine the, those contradictions of image-making and its role in the making of the world around. So, as Rebecca Stein has recently stated in her book on Israel/Palestine, “Camera technologies have been tethered to social and political dreams of various kinds, and these hopes and dreams often fall short when media failed to stem violence or deliver justice. And so, I find this idea of camera dreams really evocative, as it captures both the imagination and hope associated with dreams, but also the inevitable disappointment when dreams remain out of reach or unfulfilled.” So many photographers write of the need to keep pursuing a sense of social justice, even when you know that personal investment will not bring suffering to an end. So, Herrington's work, his talks, his writing, serve as a prompt for these discussions today, and we hope to reflect on his legacy, but also to broaden out our discussion to the developments in the 10 years since his death in Libya.
So, I'm not going to say much more than that. I'm now going to, we're going to move on to our first session and set of speakers. So, our next presentation is from Tom Allbeson. Where are you, Tom? Ah, there you are from Cardiff University. And Tom's talk is ‘What's in a name? Intellectual histories of war photography in the 20th century.’
Have you already?”
Dr. Tom Allbeson, Lecturer in Cultural History at Cardiff University: “I have, yes. Thanks a lot. Yeah, I'm beginning to regret that title now standing here. I was quite pleased with it when I sent it to Katy and Greg, but it's a bit grandiose now for a 15-minute paper. I guess what I mean by intellectual history is something quite straightforward, if you like. It's the development of an idea over time, and it's pluralised here just in recognition of the fact that in any particular moment, agreement on the meaning of an idea is likely is unlikely. I mean, even today in this room, I'm sure there's plenty of terms that we'll be using that we won't necessarily find common agreement on. I'm going to be looking at ways of thinking about war photography, and specifically I'd like to look at the idea of the concerned photographer, where that idea came from and how it's critiqued and modified over the decades of, say, from the Spanish Civil War to the Post Cold War moment. So, I'll be considering ways people think about and talk about photographing conflict over the course of the bloody 20th century and sketching different ways of thinking about conflict photography and crucially, the sort of political or cultural work people think it can and should do over decades of the 20th century. So, this draws on research for a book that I'm co-authoring with Professor Stuart Allen, who'll be taking part in the round table later on today, and I think it relates to our theme of humanitarian photography, or at least I hope it does, because it highlights some of the factors leading to the prominence of that term in the 1990s, and that's where I'd like to end up at the end of this paper. Thanks, Nick.
I've got quite a lot of ground to cover and so in case I forget to do this at the end, I just wanted to flash up a select bibliography of some of the work that I've been drawing on, work that's helped me think through some of the key issues of, you know, the migration of people, the transformation of practise, and the progression of debate. And so, in the interests of transparency, I thought I'd share those with you now in case I run out of time and then next is an outline of what I'd like to discuss, so I'll start with a broad definition of this notion of the concerned photographer, which is what I'd like to historicize in this paper, and then we'll loop back to look at the interwar period, and then progress chronologically and hopefully come into land in the 1990s.
Right, OK. So, as you no doubt know, Robert Capa's brother, Cornell Capa, established the fund for concerned photography in 1966 and curated the exhibition, ‘The concerned photographer’, which led to a book and a tour, and you can see Cornell Capa here in Japan, where the exhibition was shown. It was also shown across the river in 1971, the inaugural exhibition of the Photographers Gallery and I think there are events later this year commemorating the 50th anniversary of that. And in 1972, there was a companion volume with work by Mark Caribou, Gordon Parks, W Eugene Smith, Ernst Haas and Don McCullen. And Cornell Capper, in his own words, was “championing those who use their cameras as a tool of social conscience and a means of expressing their reverence and affirmation of life.” So that blurb and that line up in those two volumes proposed a model of the motivation and the output and the value of photography. It also entailed the specific narrative of Photojournalism's historic development and prescribed an agenda for future practise. And that's what I'd like to historicize a bit. When Cornell Capper articulated that, he linked contemporary photojournalists like McCullen to Matthew Brady to Lewis Hine and to Dorothea Lange and his history of photojournalism was consolidated, if you like, with the establishment of the International Centre for Photography in 1974.
Now, it's an interesting and an influential reading of the history of photojournalism, but it obscures a very different photographic family, connecting Cornell and Robert Capa to interwar Europe and the seismic political and cultural developments there prior to 1933. So, I'd like to loop back now because this is a pivotal moment for press photography, you get the confluence of radical politics, cultural revolution, and technological innovation, which results, I would argue, in the emergence of photojournalism proper. You know, it's not just a quantitative shift from the 1920s, resulting in more press pictures, but a qualitative shift in style, in presentation and in the significance of press photography. News pictures no longer just support or supplement words but are used in their own right to tell stories, to highlight issues and to construct arguments. So that's what I mean when I say the emergence of photojournalism proper in this era of mass media and mass democracies. Here, aesthetics and politics are inextricably intertwined, and the capacity for photography to offer critical commentary is realised at scale and implemented across numerous publications.
What Weimar Germany in the 1920s then, and into the 1930s, is a centre of gravity, if you like. As a consequence of the interactive cultures of post-revolutionary Russia and the newly-established German democracy with Berlin, a capital of innovation in press photography up to 1933. And, of course, with the rise of Fascism in Germany, you get a massive emigration of this new photographic talent and a dissemination of these new photographic techniques. First to Paris, then to London, then to New York, innovators like Maria Eisner, Simon Gutman, Stefan Lorant, Kurt Korff, Kurt Szafranski, left, and they transformed press photography wherever they went; across Europe, the UK and the US. And you see this in the launch of publications like Regard in 1933, Weekly Illustrated here in the UK. In 1934, Life, of course, in ‘36, Look, in ’37, Picture Post, in 1938.
Photographers, too, of course, many of them Jewish, also became refugees, and three of the most famous anglicised their names; Gerda Taro, David Seymour, and Cornell's brother Robert Capa. And these weren't just great photographers, and that's the key point. They weren't just war photographers; they were dedicated anti-fascists.
Capa’s first commission was to photograph Trotsky in Copenhagen giving a lecture on the meaning of the Russian revolution. Shim described himself in his own words as a revolutionary photographer in the 1930s, and Taro was steeped in the politics and the aesthetics of revolution. For instance, the film and photo exhibition in Stuttgart in 1929. So, when they photographed the Spanish Civil War, they did it from the Republican side. As partisans with cameras, if you like, not simply concerned photographers but politically committed photojournalists. And this era of popular front politics saw an establishment of worker photography organisations, you know, across Europe and also into the UK and the US and the US Film and Photo League, for instance. Now, these anti-fascist political commitments, of course, chimed with Allied War aims of the Second World War. And that's crucial to acknowledge. So, you get these politically committed photographers doing essential and widely circulated work during the Second World War period, and you also get press professionals like Francis Williams, editor of The Daily Herald in the UK, who start to work for government organisations like the Ministry of Information or Gardener Coal Cowls, proprietor of Look Magazine, who works for the office of War Information in the US.
You get a interpenetration of their photographic press professionals and the public information campaign during the Second World War, such that photography becomes a key weapon in the arsenal of democracy and it's praised for its contribution to the war effort in magazines like the War Photographic Society Journal and National Geographic. So, this unimpeachable war record, if you like, meant that in the post-war moment, Photojournalism Star was in the ascendant, that there was a consolidation of the professional status of photojournalists and, you know, art directors and magazine editors, it's evident in numerous developments like the establishment of the American Society for Magazine Photographers in ‘44, of course, the establishment of Magnum Photos in 1947 and the start of the World Press Photo Competition in 1955.
As Nadya Bair demonstrates in her recent book on Magnum Photos, news pictures in this post-war moment were a new kind of vernacular language for the post-war world. But of course, it was the Cold War moment as well, and that brought an important shift from an anti-fascist to an anti-communist paradigm. And in that moment the meanings of patriotism changed, as do the prospects of leftist politics and the people associated with left political movements.
So the US Film and Photo League is disbanded, for instance, in 1951. The Family of Man exhibition further promoted this sort of deep, politicised conception of photojournalism. It, it’s presented photojournalism as a humanist and universal enterprise, obscuring the cultural context of many of the photographs that are included in the catalogue and the exhibition which predate the 1950s. As Bair, Bair shows, the posthumous exhibitions and photo books that promoted the work of Robert Capa and David Seymour and Verna Bischoff, who died in Peru in the 50s, these indelibly linked the Magnum brand with photos of children and refugees and civilian victims, deprioritising the copious imagery those people produced of committed combatants in war zones. Thanks. So there's a complex back story then that's omitted from Cornell Capa’s formulation of the concerned photographer. The political commitments of the interwar years were erased by this sort of humanist, universalizing photographic family tree. The lineage presented in the late 1960s and early 1970s is a deliberate disentanglement of photojournalism from its leftist inheritance to forge a new post-war image of the profession that's in line with the cultural politics of the Cold War era.
Of course, that's not to say that there wasn't radical work being done in this period. You know, take or instance, Vietnam Inc. by Philip Jones Griffiths. I giggle when I think about what he would have said if somebody had described him as a concerned photographer, and he'd probably give quite a robust answer which probably sounded more robust in Welsh. Nor would I argue that photography of humanitarian disasters in this period, like the work by McCullen and Shield, Caron in Biafra and I wouldn't argue that they weren't trying to use the camera as a tool of social conscience and to affirm the importance of every human life. I’m not questioning Cornell Capa’s commitment to mobilising the power of photography, I’m merely observing that he wasn't a very reliable cultural historian, and that's important for our theme today. I think, because the concerned photographer ideal, like the decisive moment or compassion fatigue, is one of those key concepts that shapes and distorts perhaps debate about photography and those key concepts demand critical interrogation. And indeed, the concerned photographer ideal was questioned as soon as it was articulated. You know, Burger John Burger argued that McCullen's Vietnam imagery depoliticised war. Susan Sontag held at McCullen's imagery from Biafra, which he labelled concerned did at least as much to dead and conscience. Just to arouse it, and from a photographer’s point of view, Susan Marcellus in 1981, with her book Nicaragua is engaged with exactly those questions about what it means to mobilise concern through photography. So, these questions, these concerns, become more intense as we move into the 80s and the 90s. So, the Falklands and the Persian Gulf War prompted further reassessment by critics and photographers alike, with photojournalists uncomfortably positioned. If you like, as spectators. To major conflicts or public relations officers for the military, as some commentators at the time suggest. It and I want to turn now to consider how concerned photography was refocused as the 20th century came to a violent end in the 1990s. So there's an ongoing debate between photojournalists, critics, and intellectuals to critique and to reconfigure. How to mobilise concern in and through conflict photography, and I hesitate to use that word, mobilise after Omar's brilliant talk. Obviously I think this is most evident come the end of the Soviet Union and the innovative coverage of violent conflict that came out in the later years of the wars in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. So initially, graphic visual reporting seemed to prompt little public or political will. To act, to intervene and discussion of compassion fatigue in the early 90s seemed to go hand in hand with the reports of ethnic cleansing. Concerns were raised about whether the wars in former Yugoslavia rendered photojournalists compromised or even complicit in the bloodshed, since the violence of ethnic cleansing was engineered to intimidate, and one of the ways it could meet that aim was by the circulation of images of, of violence. You can see this debate played out between the photographer, Ron Haviv and two researchers improbably named Luck and Doubt in the magazine Human Rights Quarterly.
So this is the end of the century approach. People queried the role and the value of photojournalism in learning the lesson of never again which Omar mentioned in the previous paper, that bloody conflicts of the 20th century, and particularly photography of the conflicts of the 20th century, was meant to have taught.
In response, new photographic projects and new formats were engineered; photobooks and exhibitions that interrogated modes of documenting conflict. So, I'm thinking of many examples, but Gilles Peress serves very well with his first book, ‘Farewell to Bosnia’ in 1994, first book on, on this conflict, sorry, which is a revision of the classic mode of reportage, an explicit rejection by him of ‘good photography’. He's not seeking a singular image, or even a powerful sequence as you would in a photo-essay, but he's producing what he terms, “a visual continuum snatched from experience.”
Photographers also formed new partnerships with NGO's and human rights organisations in this era. For the graves, Peress worked with forensic teams, exhuming bodies from mass graves after the fact, and with Eric Stover, director of the Human Rights Centre at Berkeley. So this sort of work moves from a general humanist concern to a novel photographic paradigm, paradigm, not simply concerned, but engaged photography where witnessing is front and centre and advocating for humanitarian intervention is a key aim, as stated by Nachtwey, who Katy mentioned in their work collaborating with NGO's.
So, although as Fahrenbach and Radogno notes, the word humanitarian was first used in 1844, you know, oddly enough, the terms humanitarian and photography aren't put together to calling the phrase humanitarian photography until the 1990s. It's no coincidence, of course, that the discourse of human rights gained traction only in the final decades of the 20th century and I think humanitarian photography then we need to recognise, is not just an extension of humanism in photography, it's not just another name for concerned photography, but there's much more going on and I've tried to trace a historical trajectory via a few key milestones.
The advent of photojournalism in inter-war Germany, the cultural politics of anti-communism in post-war America, the crafting of that ideal of the concerned photographer by Capa, Cornell Capa and others, and then bringing us to the theme for today, the increasing salience of humanitarianism and humanitarian photography in discourses about photographing conflicts at the end of the 20th century.
I've not attempted to examine how the advent of digital photography, the war on terror, the war in Syria, phone camera imagery, social media, citizen photojournalism, how these things add a new chapter to the intellectual histories of war photography, and I'm really glad I didn't attempt to do that after Omar's brilliant paper, I think I've covered more than enough ground in 15 minutes. But in part this paper responds to a central problem that Katy highlighted about photography that really interests me. Why is photography so often characterised as a democratic medium? To paraphrase Brecht, cameras are just as useful to lie as, as typewriters as word proof, word processors, and as Twitter is, photography is neither essentially democratic nor anti-democratic. What's in a name then? Revolutionary photographer, war photojournalist, concerned photographer, engaged humanitarian image maker. These ideas prioritise different facets of the practise of photographing conflict and what's interesting to me about them is they probably tell us more about the value we place on photography and the relationship with visual culture within our societies than those terms tell us about photography itself. It reveals how we think about photography, how that changes over time, and the political, cultural and, crucially, moral work we expect photographs to do in any given era. Alright, thanks very much.”
[Applause]
Katy Parry, Associate Professor at the University of Leeds: “Also, who gets to define that work as well is something that we'll be talking about today and, and I know that's something that's going to come up in the next paper as well because, you know, it's very much there in the title of ‘Our Memory Belongs to us’ from the Daraa archive to the Syrian oral history project. So, I welcome Doctor Dima Saber from the Birmingham Centre of Media and Cultural Research. Thanks, Dima.”
Dima Saber: “Hi.”
Greg Brockett: “Click through presentation.”
Dima Saber: “Oh brilliant. Thank you. I'm going to start this claim, actually. I, it's my second day back at work from a six-month maternity leave, and so I did write something, I'm just going to read it because I really don't trust my brain to make any sense at this stage. So, apologies if, you know.
Right. So, so in, in September 2012, Yadan Draji crossed the Syrian-Jordanian border and foot with a hard drive containing hours of footage that he and four of his friends shot in Daraa in the first 18 months of the uprising. In 2020, documentary filmmaker Rami Farah reunited the surviving three on a stage in Paris and confronts them with their own footage as a way to reflect with them on their personal journeys as activist and archivist nearly ten years after the beginning of the uprising.
Comprising hundreds of hours of live recordings from protests, activists gathering, bomb attacks, funerals and testimonies, the hard drive formed the point of departure of Our Memory Belongs To Us, which is a 90-minute documentary film which premiered last April at the Copenhagen International Documentary Festival. So, it's not out, you're going to be the first people ever to see this trailer, actually. The film received special jury mention, thank you.
And shot by activists who were mostly operating anonymously, intense and very dangerous conflict affected areas and with very limited access to the internet and video technology. The data archive was recorded using different devices and in very multiple formats. The material comprises 12,756 videos totalling over two terabytes with 3482 unique videos, basically it took me about five years to go through the archive and make sense of it. That's why the film took eight years, actually.
So, we have an estimated duration of about 400 hours that we worked with, and we needed to turn that into 90 minutes that made sense for people, hence the difficulty. So based on my work on the data archive on the production of the film over the last eight years, my presentation today will be in two parts. First, I'll attempt to describe the migrant journey of the Dara Archive from an eyewitness documentation of the early days of the uprising in Syria to a collection of digital files on a hard drive in Paris, to a 90-minute documentary film expected in theatre later this year. Despite this, concerned with the effects of democratisation of production and dissemination on the ways our societies bear witness, and remember in times of war. Then if I have time, I'd like to share with you some initial findings from a larger project through the Syrian Archive, the student Oral History Project, which I'm working on in partnership with the Syrian Archive, and which will document the experiences of 100 Syrian image makers from Damascus, Daraa, Hama, Al Hasakah and Raqqa and in this part of my presentation, I want to look at what Pinchevski called ‘the democratisation of the archivist nation of memory’ to explore the pneumonic potential of crowdsource archive produced in times of war and the connection between the two is really the film began was about eyewitness video, but then very quickly, 10 years later, became about memory. So, the first question we asked ourselves when we started working with Yadan’s material was how should we call it? Is it a collection? Is it an archive in the making, not formed but in transition? Seeking roots but founded in an origin of trauma and displacement? Or maybe a migrant archive seeking fixed city in a nation state like the activists who shot it but with the history to speak for. The Declaration of the Revolution is one of the first videos saved on the hard drive, it’s just over 30 minutes.
Could you play that please?
[Film footage playing]
A preacher lifted on the shoulder of two men in speaking into a megaphone. We were hoping that no blood would be shed except in our war with the enemies of God and with our enemies’ designers, but what's been done is done and it's all the will of God, so be patient and be calm. God is great. God is great. Then the crowd then rumbles in one unified voice, “Revolution, Revolution, Revolution.” Five times, ten times. We understand from the title of the file and the date at which it was saved that this moment marks the first public declaration of the Syrian revolution in Daraa, and this is very specific because it's very geographically focused. So based on, so does citizen generated sequence of the first public declaration of the Syrian uprising in constitute historical record of the Syrian uprising and who gets to decide?
Are both the general issues around the archive, its definition and impact, and the specificity of this material and its meaning. And its collective production process of collation, travel and the duration of his transmutation from live witness to historical material awaiting engagement in use is a challenge of its important impact, which originated as an impromptu mode of citizen journalism, generating a potential resource for convention and media reportage of events in a short period of time, become, became an imperilled and invaluable collection of material. It pays witness to events and could potentially aid an understanding of the origins of the Syrian war and hold to account those parties whose violence and impact is represented therein.
When I asked him in 2016 about his source of inspiration to take onto the street back in March 2011, so I have to say that alongside the work on Daraa, I kept interviewing Yadan over and over again over the six years. He said, “The long years of oppression in Syria, the protests in Tunisia and Egypt and the coverage it all got on global media such as Jazeera, of course, encouraged them, but Syrians had already lost patience and were striving for freedom and social justice.” The people took to the street and when I asked him about his personal motivation, he said, “He understood very quickly, he was witnessing a very important and historic moment and wanted to document this moment in the history of his people and his country.” It's apparent then that the moment Yadan Draji and other activists started documenting Syrian uprising, the material that wondered its way into the Daraa Archive was not necessarily captured with intention or anticipation of preservation. In media witnessing Frosh and Pinchevski note that, “Every claim of witness involves a form of mediation, while every mediation is a mode of witnessing.” Can then infer that the primary motivation of recording the events in Daraa was not accidental, but purposeful. It was to say this is happening now like this to us, such an intolerable situation, the man's response from the moral economy of contemporary vicarious witness afforded by mass media and the ubiquity of social media, means that it's no longer possible to claim ignorance of events. And you've seen in the trailer, and he said, “Nobody could say you didn't know it was happening.” As such, the Daraa Archive underlines the immediacy with which a response was needed, and I think this is really good connection to our conversation about humanitarian photography and what it means and what it calls for.
As the non, non-violent protest slowly turned into a vicious civil war, Draji and I hate this word, and I put it in large brackets, Draji and his fellow activists, like many other citizens in possession of mobile phone with camera technology, began to understand the unfolding of events around them. Their intentions of documenting these events also change. Eventually they realise that the value of their footage is not necessarily confined to the present historic moment that they were witnessing but could potentially serve as a repository of shared memory of the people and places obliterated by the viciousness of the war.
But before I turn my, to the my attention to the relation between more archive and memory in the second part of this talk, I'd like to suggest an answer to the question I asked at the very beginning of my talk. How should we call it? I want to call it a refugee archive, a collection of records in the process of becoming something more fixed, more official, more usable, more stable. It's an archive in the making, an idea which alludes to the status as well to the experience of those who compiled its material and transported it. As such, it's like the people who made it; it's a refugee archive. And in this, the makers and their materials share a condition with those it depicts and who were forced to migrate, not in search of a better life, but simply in order to stay alive. And one of the things that this refugee archive has become is ‘Our memory belongs to us’, which brings me to the pneumonic potential of crowdsource footage in times of conflict. The work on the Daraa Archive has led me in 2019, I needed to get out of the Daraa as well because it became a bit overwhelming to look at the same images over and over again. To start thinking about the relation between crowdsourced images of conflict and processes of collective memory building.
So we started working with the Syrian Archive and it's part of a, an initiative by a non-profit organisation called Pneumonic, and they work on the Syrian Archive, the Yemeni Archive, the Sudanese Archive, and we just launched the Lebanese Archive actually two weeks ago, post October Revolution in, in Lebanon. And so, the project explores, or at least aims to explore in which, ways in which documentary practises and experiences of ordinary citizen, citizens in Syria have contributed to the production of thousands of multi-source digital testimonies which attest to the constantly evolving social, economic and political situation in Syria. The unearthing, as they call it, of these individual memories and narratives, would allow the archive team to investigate the meanings of the so-called Syrian digital memory of the 2011 Uprising and its subsequent war.
So basically, there's thousands of videos which are dumped on YouTube. It's not an archive, it's a dumpster and it's not organised, it doesn't make any sense. One way for us to make sense of it is to basically interview the people who are still alive, who shot this archive and then confirm their testimonies with their footage in an attempt to make sense of it as a narrative. And so, we want to interview 100 image makers from Daraa, Damascus, Hama, Al Hasakah and Raqqa, and there's a reason why it's their cities, so we can discuss this afterwards if you like and publish this in an open-source repository of their videos and oral testimonies.
Building on the legacy of local studies, our aim is two-fold. Because while local studies, and it's pretty interesting to actually look at the legacy for those studies, when you're working on something and now and it's basically it's the only place in humanities where we acknowledge testimonies of survivors as, as a legitimate form of history. So, the aim is two-fold; we want to advocate for the recognition of Syrians as survivors of a civil war and to make the collection of their oral testimonies an interesting, intrinsic part of any post-war reconciliation efforts. So, so far we've undertaken 2 rounds of semi-structured interviews, 25 people aged between 21 and 65. The first one took place 2019 and included 15 respondents from different cities. The second took place in 2020 and included ten respondents only from Aleppo, and there's a reason why Aleppo, and that's an obsession with Hamas. So there's a lot to say about history and previous trauma and how that made its way into the current testimonies. All the interviews were conducted in Arabic via Skype, WhatsApp, and Google Hangout. We recorded with consent, etcetera, etcetera. The sample included respondents from different affiliations. So individual freelancers, members of activist group, independent media centres and local coordination committees and freelancers contracted by international mainstream organisations like Reuters and AP because one of the things I'm really interested in is, is how these citizen journalists became institutionalised within large mainstream media and what that meant for what they were doing and why they were doing it.
We haven't included any pro-government use of perspective because, as this would have complicated the sampling criteria and you can also talk about the, the limitation of this. The interviews, the interviews were designed around 3 interconnected parts. In the first part, we asked questions about purpose and value, why they started to film and when, for which audiences, why they thought it was important to keep documenting the uprising ten years later. The second part considered film and image making as practise was questioned about why they filmed, what cameras they use and where they stored their archives. And then the third part we look at the pneumonic value of these archives as articulated by their own creators. We asked about history, collective memory and the way they thought their fellow Syrians and the world would remember the revolution in the years to come.
Very early findings from the first series of interviews echo in the most part Yadan and his motivation for documenting the uprising in Daraa. So I was, as I was doing the interviews with the new project, we kept interviewing Yadan and asking him the same question and, and a lot could be said about how he himself talks so differently within the next eight, last eight years about how and why he, he shot where he shot and why is important and, and what he'd like to see of it.
So, we were thus far able to articulate three main potentials and it's important to call it potential because it's theorising and making it up basically. For this crowd source archive of conflict, first testimonial and historic value that archives as the last available record of people and places which are no longer was a common theme to the conversation we had with all the Syrian respondents. One of the best when we asked Yadan for him out of the 12,756 videos he shot, which one is the most important? He said, “It's one video called Daral Ballad”, and it's 2 minutes long and he hides a camera in a napkin box in his car and he just drives around. Nothing happens. He's just driving around the city before it was all destroyed. And in the interview he talks to me about, “this is the baker, this is the shop.” And he said, “This is the last record I actually have of the place.” And, and it's kind of interesting to imagine that the sensation that narrative of death and graphic and kids and actually, when you ask the person for him is just the two minutes video of him driving around the city, his city that is the most important for him currently.
Second evidentiary value. The potential of the archives to be used as evidence against the Syrian regime and to hold it to account for its crimes in years to come is another reason Syrian photographers and videographers see value in their, in their footage today. But also for me, I mean, sorry for the long quotes with people probably haven't had time to read, but I can share that. Most interestingly is the stuff around creative value. In addition to seeing themselves as the custodians of the narrative of this, you know, revolution, the photographer and videographers we spoke to highlighted the significance of their archive for what could be considered as the creative memory of the uprising war. This brings to mind Keightley and Pickering concepts of Mnemonic Imagination through which they suggest moving beyond the association of memory with the past and the imagination of the future, to consider ways in which the past attains and regains significance for the present and the future by approaching remembering as a creative process. So of the millions of videos which today sit on YouTube, we measured one of the people we, we, we interviewed spoke about the importance of preserving the songs of the revolution for the generation to come. So for him, these videos are the last record of these songs and these songs are one of the most important things for him to preserve. For Hassan Abul, these archives are important because they could be transformed into important documentary films about the Syrian revolution to help immortalise it. So years after the uprising, when you ask these people what do we keep, what do we remove? Should we keep 5 million videos that are on YouTube? The issue of turning it into a film, making it into something that is organised, that sits in a cinema that people can engage with and see has been very, very important in the minds of people we spoke to.
Suleiman did make a film, one film about the Syrian revolution. ‘Our memory belongs to us’ is his and our attempt to extract meeting, meaning from the obscure chaos of the war while being mindful if possible, of the pitfalls, attending representation and relativization, especially when performed in the Western Academy. So I am extremely, I'm Lebanese and Syria is my home country and I feel extremely uncomfortable to be standing here telling this story to all of you. So, I think this is, it took us quite a long time to be able to accept that we are telling the story on behalf of the other people, especially the two of them, who actually died. So, oh, that was the quote from Hassan Abul, a bit late, sorry. So from issues of ownership, consent, harm, participation, vulnerability, subjectivity and objectivation to security, agency and responsibility, when working with materials such as the Daraa Archive and beyond it with material shot by hundreds of Syrian image makers, some of whom died, some of whom are still inside Syria, it's vital to protect identity, sustain objectivity, objectivity, and avoid objectivation respond to vulnerability and limit harm. Ultimately, it's also vital to ask ourselves ‘What's in it for those whose stories is being told?’ I hope a space within the mainstream narrative for their own testimonies and often very fraught subjectivities that is at least what the Syrian Oral History project is aiming for. Thank you.
[Applause.]
Q&A with Nicole Tung
Nicole is a freelance photojournalist who has extensively reported on conflicts and their consequences for civilians and veterans, across North Africa, the Middle East and Asia. In 2011, she photographed the anti-Gaddafi uprising and civil war in Libya where photojournalists Tim Hetherington and Chris Hondros were mortally wounded.
Greg Brockett: “My first question for you is: How you think the use of social media has changed the ethical choices made by photojournalists in the sense that it cuts out the editor and photojournalists are able to publish so much more quickly and perhaps think about those ethical decisions they have to make in much shorter space of time. Has that changed the way in which the ethics process works?”
Nicole Tung: “Yeah, I definitely think that social media has put more pressure on photographers to produce quicker and, you know, to have that feeling that or being compelled to have to put everything on social media simply because if you're, you know, not doing that, it's like you're almost not there at all. So it, it can, it has it's good things, I think as pros as far as being able to disseminate the images further but it's also got a lot of its cons, because I think especially having only single images and people only having very short attention spans with social media, you're not able to give people perhaps the context that is needed or in the traditional sense of people maybe looking at magazine pieces where they would actually be able to see more images, read the captions properly. Like, you know the scrolling whole scrolling thing really breaks that down and you have to get people's attention much, much quicker.”
Greg Brockett: “Great. Thanks very much. Any more questions? Yeah, we have got a question there.”
Audience member: “Yeah, I. Thank you for your presentation. I have a question on the embodied aspect of photography. So how when you were in, like, these war zones and like how is your body read and how do you think like the, the way that it is read as I don't know, I'm assuming you're American as a woman. Like, how does it the kind of structure the, the, your access, the context of taking pictures? I don't know if you can reflect on that a bit?”
Nicole Tung: “Yeah, I think because I'm a woman working in a very patriarchal region, I have mostly advantages actually over male colleagues I would say. Because women are seen as less threatening in general, but I think that', I mean, that’s not the only reason that gets me maybe into people’s doors. I think I do get treated as a, I've said this before in other talks that I get treated as a third gender because I'm foreign and I'm a woman. And it can be very advantageous because you can, kind of, go between women who my male colleagues cannot go near, and I can then also be in the same room as men who might be discussing something else.
So, you can get, if I had better Arabic skills, I would probably be a lot more interested into what women were saying. I get bits and pieces, but not everything. So I think, you know, the access really is also down to being culturally sensitive, being very aware of the customs and I've, you know, I've worked in this region for a long time so it kind of comes naturally now, but in the beginning I found it very difficult to read people's body language and that takes time to understand and adapt, and obviously speaking the language helps as well.
So all of those things will, you know, factor into your access and just being obviously aware of the background of people that you might be documenting and the perhaps, you know, the complicated, very small sectarian issues that might come up sometimes and asking, asking the right questions is very important as well.”
Greg Brockett: “Thanks. One from the front?”
Audience member: “Do you have time?”
Greg Brockett: “Yes, yeah, sure. Please go ahead.”
Audience member: “Thank you. Sorry. It, it might sound a bit intentionally provocative question, but I too have been working in Syria for a long time. But from, you know, an academic sort of perspective, not as a war photographer. And I genuinely now today honestly, I don't believe any of this matters anymore because we just, we thought that there's no way the world would watch this happen live and see the pictures and see the videos and just let it happen. With previous conflicts, someone saying this morning, maybe if there was a record of it, then we do something to stop the crime or to make any changes. And Syria is the live example of how, you know, governments can just get, get away with, with like killing their own people. And, and so beyond this, being your job really like the things that you do like we are academics and research is our job. Do you? Do you still genuinely believe nine years after, 10 years, it's nearly, you know, 10 years since the uprisings in Syria, that any of these images that you personally took in Syria made any difference?”
Nicole Tung: “No, the answer is no. And I think that was very obvious from the, very quickly I started covering Syria early in 2012 and from, from there things only got worse, things got more complicated, it became a war by proxy and, and, so then of course ISIS sort of dominated the headlines after that, and essentially the civilians, the everyday people were forgotten in most of the international media.
So, no matter how much coverage we do there, will it change the course of things? No. But I do believe that there is still an inherent value in keeping the pressure on governments and those people who are at the negotiating table by not just exposing stories, but in ensuring that these stories still have real estate in the newspapers and magazines and online that they're there and the stories are being told. One story that was published yesterday in Washington Post that I worked on was about ISIS sleeper cells. And again, yes, it's an ISIS story, but it's also about how the terrorist groups stalks regular people, civilians who are working in a local government council trying to improve their lives and yet are still stalked by this group and that is a worldwide problem.
So, I think that it's, it, it is a very, It can feel a bit like a very defeatist exercise by continuing to go there and thinking that something will change, it's a naïve concept I think that I got over very quickly, but if we are not there and if local journalists and activists are not there documenting this, then it might as well have not happened and that all of those events are resigned to some deep, dark place that no one will have evidence of eventually and and when we look, we look at like the war crimes tribunals that are taking place against top Syrian officials or, you know, there are cases where they've been tried and in, in Germany, for example and, look, this is very rare, but it is happening and there's a catalogue, including Caesar's, the Caesar Act, and Caesar photos that came out a few years ago that documented these crimes, these abuses, and are actually being, you know, used for, for good and hopefully to, to better I guess catch the criminals in a, in a short, long story short.”
Audience member: “Thank you.”
Greg Brockett: “Great. Thanks. So, should we do one more question? At the back. Yeah, I don't know, you might have to come a little bit further forward because the microphone is down the front here.”
Audience member: “Can you? Can you see me, Nicole? Should I come forward?”
Audience member: “So, I think you said, “After my initial shock of realising that what I'm looking at is real, I take a photograph. My works on Rwanda and on images of the genocide against the Tutsi and Rwanda, and what people repeatedly say to me is it didn't feel real, so I started taking photographs. It's only afterwards, when I looked at the photographs, that it became real.”
So I was really interested that for you, it happens in that moment that it becomes real and then you take a photograph. Could you talk about that process a bit more? Does it always happen like that? Um, yeah.”
Nicole Tung: “Yeah, that's a very good question. I think it really depends on the situation. It's like, you say, it's not for me, it sometimes happens in reverse where you, you have that realisation and then you take the picture. But that's not always the case. I think, I think it happened more in the beginning when I was very new to documenting conflict and, and, and war. In Libya there were instances in which I just, I couldn't take a picture because I was just so shocked by what I was seeing and witnessing - injured people, dead people, you know, I mean, all manners of violence in which it makes you realise that people can be killed in so many different ways.
Audience member: “Thank you.”
Greg Brockett: “OK, great. We have a little bit longer don't we? Or shall we break? We should break. OK, thank you very much and we'll get back on with your shoot, but thank you very much for joining, thanks for the presentation as well and hopefully speak to you soon. Cheers.”
[Applause]
Nicole Tung: “Bye.”
Simon Popple, senior lecturer, university of Leeds: “Great. Well, I hope everybody's enjoyed their lunch and are ready to ask some questions a bit later on, but I think we've got a very apt panel here to pick up on a lot of the things that we were discussing this morning. And it's remarkable actually because Katy and I and Greg were thinking about questions to give you sort of a, a sight foresight of what might be coming up and lots of those things have already been picked up, so it's, it's really good and I think some of this will be sort of following on conversions that we've begun this morning.
So, I'd like to begin by getting everybody to introduce themselves. So, my name is Simon Popple. I'm from the University of Leeds and I'm a senior lecturer in photography and digital culture. And on my left I have?”
Anastasia Taylor-Lind: “Anastasia Taylor-Lind. I'm a photojournalist, sometimes photographing war, among other things, for National Geographic Magazine, Time.”
Simon Popple: “Great.”
Stuart Allan: “Hi I’m Stuart Allan, Professor of Journalism and Communication at the School of culture, media and, media and culture at Cardiff University, I should know. Until very recently I was head of school and it’s the first time saying it out loud in quite some time feels very strange, but yes. Now on research leave, hence the very relaxed, comfortable demeanour.”
Zoe Norwich: “My name is Zoe Norwich. I'm a senior lecturer in African and comparative literature at Kings College London. I'm a recovering prof by STEAM Impact. I'm also the former chair of the Xiaomi Foundation, which is a small charity that works with survivors of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda.
Simon Popple: “And live online we have?”
Jess Crombie: “Hi, I'm Jess Crombie. I'm a senior lecturer in image making at UAL and a bit like Zoe, I'm recovering, a recovering NGO [laughter]. I still actually work as a consultant with lots of different organisations and helping them work out how to do what they do ethically in terms of communication. Thanks so much for allowing me to project my problem on-screen today, it’s appreciated.”
Simon Popple: “Thank you. Well, we can see you, see and hear you loud and clear, so that's, that's great. Thank you.
So, I wanted to really begin with a, quite a sort of general question which really draws on what we've been talking about this morning and the theme of today's event is really about the nature of humanitarian photography. Which the paper this morning think very usefully gave us a sort of historical context came from this notion of concerned photography as well. And to understand both from a sort of an academic and also from a practitioner perspective, what you understand as humanitarian photography. So, who would like to go first? Or shall I pick somebody? Stuart, maybe because I think you're writing about it, aren't you?”
Stuart Allan: “I have done a little bit of work on humanitarian photography, I think what interested me and it, it might sound like an unduly academic sort of way of formulating this as a problematic but I'm, I'm really interested in who has an investment in the notion of humanitarian photography and, and what they mean by it. Because I think it's quite often an almost textbook-like fashion taken as read that it exists, that it's a singular enterprise, that it, it has its kind of history which you can map and chart. But of course, on closer inspection you realise that it's riddled with tensions, there's a, really talking about photography’s, rather than a singular kind of orientation to photographic form or practise, and I think it is that kind of question of epistemology that really intrigues me; that sense of how humanitarian photography, you know, for those who want to kind of lay claim to that notion, what they mean by it and how in their view it's enabling. How it allows them to, to craft or recraft what counts as, as that as hope, humane photography in the productive, progressive way.”
Simon Popple: “Yeah, go on then.”
Zoe Norwich: “So, I come to photography through Rwanda. So, Rwanda is my lens into the photographic world. Rwanda, the genocide against the Tutsi is sometimes referred to as ‘a genocide without images’, so that's a phrase that uses in his work. A genocide without images because when it's actually taking place, there are very, very few images of the violence as it's happening. We don't have images of people with machetes in their hands and being killed. There's a little bit of video footage, the Nick Hughes, famous Nick Hughes video footage of people being killed in the street. But for the most part, it's not being captured, it's not being seen internationally as it's unfolding. What is seen are the ways in which that genocide seeps out across Rwanda's borders. So you have bodies literally coming down the river into Lake Victoria, and then you have the refugees who are flooding out of Rwanda into Congo, mostly refugees that weren't targeted with genocide, that are moving away from the incoming RPF that's coming to stop the genocide, and they end up in those refugee camps in Congo. So, in terms of visual imageries relating to Rwanda, you don't have images of the violence taking place, you have images of aftermath, images of remnants, and then you have photographers coming in who are starting to take photographs, people like [inaudible] starting to come in and take photographs of machetes, of corpses, of remnants of, of, of conflict, remnants of genocide, and so on, right.
And what's interesting for me is that we could ask whether that counts as humanitarian photography or not, because what they, there's a continuity here - those initial images of machetes, the initial images of badly wounded survivors continue, they become iconic in the Rwandan context, particularly survivors with, say, facial wounds standing in front of graves, standing in front of dead bodies. Those get taken ten years afterwards, right? People are still taking the same image and whilst they might have been news reporters, a lot of those photographers become more invested in the region. They become very marked by their experiences in Rwanda and a lot of them go back again and again and again. And this might be, I think, possibly the moment when we're talking about the transformation into humanitarian photography, when we're talking about that investment in the longer-term alleviation of suffering and working with NGO’s to start doing that. So, an example there might be Jonathan Torgovnik, South African photographer, comes in reporting on children born of rape and those mothers and the relationships with their children ends up founding an NGO. And, and that becomes one of his ongoing projects. You have David Jiranek, who goes in to take photographs on Commission and ends up working with an orphanage Imbabazi, the orphanage on the border of Rwanda and Congo, ends up working there, running a participatory photography project with young people and getting them to tell their stories for them. So, there's a transformation there between that, kind of war reporting into a longer-term investment. And my work and how it engages with this is I'm interested in what are the stories that are being told? Are these stories still of wounding? Is it still a fascination with witnessing acute violence? That international guilt about having missed the moment in 1994. Are we continually trying to retrospectively witness that or are there other narratives that begin to emerge? And who is controlling those narratives?
So for a long time, there are no Rwanda photographers whose images are circulating, and then that begins to shift about, sort of 6-7 years ago. And I played a small role in that shift in terms of trying to work with Rwandan photographers to get them onto international stages to help them work and be commissioned internationally to help them sort of get more work with NGO's and so on. And part of that was, was curating an exhibition of work at Somerset House with Mark Seeley, which was an exhibition called Rwanda and photographs: Death then, life now. And those are photographers that I continued to work with and that I do workshops with, sort of, I've done sort of 3,4,5 workshops with them in Rwanda looking at things like human rights cultures, creative reimagining's of the past, what does it mean to work with creative writers when you're a photographer, how can you form those kinds of creative partnerships? And then I also work with people with photographers in the region, so I work with a lot of Rwanda photographers. So, for example, I've worked on Kigali Photo Fest, which was the first photo festival in Rwanda, curated by Jacques Nkinzingabo, who founded the Kigali Centre for Photography and, and so on, it goes on and on. So yeah, I hope that's engaged with it somewhere?”
Simon Popple: “Yeah and I think you framed it really nicely in terms of that idea that photography is not all automatically within that framework of humanitarianism. It's often about inquiries and, and, and, and, and, and, and an investigation rather than something that's really more engaged at a later level. I wonder if either of the other two commentators have any have further thoughts on that?”
Simon Popple: “Yeah, right. Well, I think, I think the labelling of, of humanitarianism is, is a construct, isn't it? It's a, it's a, it's a largely western construct, isn't it? To explain a set of activities and photo practises that take place elsewhere in the world and often in places where people are in dire conflict and, and in dire circumstances. And it's really interesting to hear you saying that as a photographer that actually you don't really recognise necessarily that, that construct of a photographer, which I think is really, really interesting and it's not irrelevant at all. I think it's incredibly relevant to the debate that we're, we're talking about and I think that idea of humanitarianism, humanitarian photography, or concerned photography or social documentary, however we label, it's a set of practises that do certain things.”
Anastasia Taylor-Lind: “Yeah.”
Simon Popple: “And I suppose maybe by labelling them we put a set of expectations on what those photographs should deliver and what those photographs should be like, and I wonder if that's interesting to think about, actually, is such a label like humanitarianism actually a useful label? Does it constrain what photographers do? Does it actually allow photographers to get more to what they want to get to?”
Simon Popple: “Oh our legend.”
Anastasia Taylor-Lind: “Someone else.”
Simon Popple: “Would anyone like to come back on that?”
And again to take it back to Rwanda, sorry, but there was violence in Rwanda from ‘59 to ‘94 that was never photographed, that was never commemorated, that wasn't talked about enough internationally and that is what enabled more than a million people being killed in 1994, right?
Because it wasn't seen, because it wasn't witnessed. And so, in Rwanda, you have a case where for people, it's extremely urgent to be witnessing and that that those images are really, really important for people. I don't like a lot of those images because I think they're dehumanising, but they still have a purpose. And what I find really intriguing now is that when I work with Rwandan photographers they have problems with the UDHR definition of human rights, they have problems with humanitarian organisations, not least with the sometimes racist politics of, of humanitarian organisations, which Jess is doing brilliant work sort of addressing and, and so on, but that they still own those ideas, those ideas still are really sticky, though. The idea that a photograph can, can show and share and change people's lives still resonates for those photographers who are coming from a very different perspective.”
Simon Popple: “Did you wanna come in there, Jess?”
Jess Crombie: “Yeah, I, I think that, that Anastasia first of all that myth is, is really problematic and I see that in my students. So I, you know teach on the BA Documentary and Photojournalism course at UAL and the students, hi. The students that come in they come in thinking, they still think, not all of them, but lots of them that they kind of going to be Indiana Jones like going, going and discovering situations and discovering people. And so we spent a lot of that first year of defusing them of that idea and introducing them to lots of concepts around the idea of the colonial gaze, you know, the gendered gaze and all these kind of ideas, which some of them are quite, you know, are quite shocking and upsetting for them to kind of deal with wherever they are or whatever background they come from. So that myth first of all is most definitely there and it's alive and its feeling has not gone away and it needs to.
In terms of the, the, the, the, the, the kind of worth of that photography and what Zoe was talking about. Yeah, I spent lots of time in various different places and the people that I have met by and large, they understand the power of communications very, very well and the research that I've carried out shows that those kind of ideas that just because someone may not be able to read and may live in a place where they don't have access to lots of media doesn't mean that they understand where their images are going and how they can be used. It's just rubbish. Like every single person I've ever interviewed and met and talked to about this really doesn't, you know, really get it. And so I think it kind of boils down to, and, and, and often people like those are really, because they understand that how they want to share they, they understand that they potentially can change the situation depending on what they say and how that is then broadcast in whatever way it it, it gets broadcast. But what we don't do a lot of generally across the sector is, is consider that, that power and that ability of people to, to make their own decisions, and so the process of the consent, which is like talked a lot about in terms of like, ‘Oh, just sign this bit of paper and, and we’re, we're all good to go’, it kind of what it boils down to I think it and it's like you know you go in with this myth that you're this person who is going to discover a truth you're then going to share with the world and actually what you need to be doing is going in with this idea that you are in like a uniquely privileged position, whoever you are, wherever you're from, whether you're travelling overseas or walking down the road, to be able to capture something that might be useful for someone to share but you need to do that with the full consent and what that means is a conversation like long, timely, multi-stage conversation with the people you're gathering stories from. But, but I, I think that it's I and I would say but I think it's worth doing that, but I think it is the way it needs to be done. It needs to be very different and the kind of, the whole culture shift around equality and the idea that just because someone has suffered or someone is different from you in whatever way that they can't understand what you're going to do with their story is just completely rubbish and has to be, has to be changed fundamentally for anyone to be able to do a good job.”
Stuart Allan: “Yeah, I, I would agree with what's been said to a large part, maybe quibble with one or two small points here and there. Academic is my job, but I think the there is a real danger with trying to generalise here that we, we lose sufficient specificity and then you, you certainly can find examples of war photographers who would definitely fairly be criticised for the kind of critique we've, we've heard about, especially when they tend to be white, male and, and privileged and, and from Western context. And, and I think what's important though is to perhaps argue that we need a more modest conception of photography in this regard. And I think you will hear this certainly in speaking with war for people who would otherwise be labelled war photographers, saying that they, they don't like the term and, and they would want to kind of resist it. They don't like the adjective, they don't like what it kind of prefigures, and they're, they're unsettled by that kind of mythology, which you quite rightly kind of highlighted is is a real barrier, I think, to understanding.
But at the same time, I think there is something in that as a normative ideal of sorts, that sort of animates a particular kind of commitment to truth seeking, which I think they, they would probably want to kind of preserve. And, and that's not just because it's grandiose to kind of think of oneself in those terms. It's also about self-protection. It's about the recognition of the status of the photographer in a conflict zone and that they deserve protection, that there's a duty of care there for other organisations and, and they want, you know, to be safe, quite understandably in such context and the extent to which a photographer is just simply regarded as a combatant like any other, who happens just to be wielding a camera rather than a gun, they then become targets and we've seen far too many examples of, of what happens when that's the case.
So, I think we need, we need to kind of be careful with these terms; we don't want to celebrate them in an unconscious kind of manner. We want to recognise that I think the ways in which they claim a certain kind of purchase, which can be actually debilitating, I think for, for good photographic practise. But at the same time understand why in terms they continue to persist, you know, why do we still have particular ideals associated with war photography, humanitarian photography today when, when otherwise they might have fallen away? And there I would also just make a case for kind of stepping back and looking at the broader political economic context here. Extent to which news organisations, you know, simply will not support this kind of work and anything like the scale that it used to be the case. It is NGO's, it is others who are seeming to be interested stakeholders, particularly interest communities that are looking to, to generate the kind of imagery that they need to, as you quite rightly point out, to, to kind of sell what it is that they want to put across for better and good reasons or, or sometimes otherwise. And but you know, when the photographer then in turn is encountering people who are would have no self-identification as a photographer even, let alone a, a war photographer or humanitarian photographer, citizens who happen to, to be there with a smartphone, as we were hearing about this morning. Other people who have, again in that kind of rich ecology, of all the different types of photographic practise, have, have very different kinds of reasons for doing what they're doing, very different motivations, not all of which are, are altruistic. Of course, many of which are, are driven by commercial concerns or other kinds of considerations, or worse in terms of disinformation and propaganda. I think it, you can understand why someone who is putting their life at risk to deliver this kind of imagery would say, well, fair, fair critique but let's not, let's not go too far here because, as we did hear from, from Nicole, yeah, it does matter and, and it is evidence that's being gathered, it is a contribution, perhaps a more modest one than, than we've typically described it, but vital nonetheless.”
Simon Popple: “I'll take that to Jess. The point you made really interestingly during, during your last contribution was this idea of consent because it's always an issue that's worried me around these type, this types of these tropes of photography in the sense that who gives consent for the images, who has the right to represent who pictures who and it was really interesting what Zoe was saying that Rwandan photographers are now starting to, to self-represent in their own context. So just interesting to see maybe think about what, what people think about that a little bit more and is consent even possible in those contexts. But also, this bigger question about who has I think the right to represent and the sense again that the photographer, whether they're working for an agency or an NGO or whatever, has the right to represent something for the rest of the world. And I, I’m just wondering what you felt about that and what types of photography are the indigenous photographers actually making? How are they commenting on their own situation?”
Zoe Norwich: “So I've actually been doing a like a psychology study looking at how photographs make people see the people in the pictures as more or less human. And the two things we've been we found that, yes, certain images make people think of Rwandans as more human. So that's a really exciting finding. There's a certain kind of image that changes the way in which people see people. However, what we've been trying to work out is whether it's around authorship or whether it's around content. And we've run three randomised controlled trials trying to find that out and what we keep finding frustratingly for me because I want it to be authorship is that it seems to just overridingly be content; what is in the images, how what is being shown. So, what we keep finding is that images of daily life, images of people actively doing things are very humanising. Images where there is violence shown in a variety of different forms, but particularly through human remains and weaponry, are very dehumanising and it doesn't seem to matter too much who the author is. However, as somebody who works in photography and who works in literature and cultural studies and so on, I feel that Rwandan authorship is incredibly important and where I would, the reason why I would say it was important is because I think that Rwandan photographers do tend to produce different kinds of content because they speak Kinyarwanda, because they know the communities. So, for example, one of my colleagues, Jean Bizimana, grew up on the border with Congo, he knows rural Northwest Rwanda very well. When he takes images up there, he's not coming in and taking images of people outside their houses, he's going into their houses. He knows intimately those living spaces and, and how people are living, and you can negotiate and navigate. He's also much more able to get consent, right? Because if you're a visiting photographer and you're working through a translator, you're relying on your translator to be translating the consent documents and so on and so forth, and to be engaging in those longer conversations that Jess has been talking about, which can be really, really difficult with rural communities. I mean, I absolutely agree that they have the capacity to consent or otherwise, but it's just a question of how that translation is going and to what extent you're aware of, of, of how the translation is going, right? So, I think the Rwanda photographers have more of a tendency to, to emphasise in their work from what I've seen, dignity long-term investment in stories and agency in the subjects that they’re photographing. Did that answer your question?”
Zoe Norwich: “Yeah. Yeah. So, as I said, it was, it was much more people driven and much more agency driven and much more to do with, to do with what people are doing today.”
Simon Popple: “Yeah”
Zoe Norwich: “However, the other part of the puzzle is how are these images being circulated, right? So, the Duclert Report came out last year on Francis's involvement in the genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda. They chose an image that was by a Rwandan photographer, an image by Jacques Nkinzingabo that have been licenced by Agence France-Presse, AFP, right? It's an image of skulls in a memorial. So, all of those stories went out with a photograph of skulls, which we know makes Rwandans seem less human. The vast majority of Jacques’ work is with living people showing agency. But the photo editors chose skulls. So, to a certain extent it doesn't matter what they're producing if photo editors are consistently publishing a different kind of imagery, so it's not just about changing who the photographer is, it's about changing the commissioning practises and the power dynamics in international media.”
Simon Popple: “Hmm. And not an easy thing.”
[Laughter]
Simon Popple: “How about you Anastasia from your experience as a working photographer? I mean,
is it, have you ever been challenged when you're making photographs? Or have you, do you seriously, as I think you probably do, think about the context and think about what you're representing and how you're representing people in those contexts.”
Anastasia Taylor-Lind: “I do really believe that photojournalism is morally indefensible and I grapple with that all the time and I, I have had periods of my professional life where I've stepped away from making pictures entirely to be in an academic space or, or to write. I can just give you two examples of the way I feel OK about working in a war zone or anywhere, but I think it's particularly acute, like maybe one of the reasons we like to talk about war photography rather than any other type of photography is because it, it seems so acute and maybe we can boil down all of the things that we might be dealing with in other, you know, types of photography and you know, photojournalism, I mean that is not made in the space of an active war zone. I've been making projects around the war in eastern Ukraine since the revolution in 2014. This now eight-year collaboration is with Alisa Sopova, who's a, a writer from Donetsk city, which is now part of the Donetsk People's Republic.
And so, between the two of us, we have an insider and an outsider perspective. So as a reporting team, we find that each of us brings some things, my presence sometimes gives us access that Alisa may not get on her own, and likewise, she can understand things in a way that I don't always, I, I don't always get so those projects are traditional photojournalism of like, you know, guys with guns and behind sandbags and all, you know, all those tropes of photojournalism but they're also, you know, following the same families and the same communities. And I just covered the war in Nagorno Karabakh at the end of last year. And I went not just because it was just a war and I wanna go and photograph war. It was interesting, I thought, because it was the first war to start during the pandemic and journalists were one part of the, the catalyst for spreading COVID infections in Nagorno Karabakh. They, they were part of a group of people who brought COVID to people who were already displaced and disenfranchised because of the war and in, in that instance I photographed the same children and families and communities that I've photographed 10 years before, so my interest was in my friends and I, you know, I can't tell other photojournalists how to make pictures, but we are exposed to a lot of trauma as well, picture editors as well looking at violent pictures of trauma. It is, I think, if you are in it for the long-game and you intend to photograph in this way for the span of your career then, you know, you, you have to, you have to be mindful of. Anyway, I, I don't believe in you have a photo heaven or a hell but, you know, I don't want I, I'm the one who has to live with myself at the end of the day.”
Simon Popple: “OK, great. So, if Jess, if you’d like to come back in?”
Jess Crombie: “Yeah, I was just gonna say, sort of, aligned to a lot of what Zoe and Anastasia were just talking about and Anastasia, your example about working with the, that woman that you were working with to kind of and the different experiences you're bringing into that process, I thought was really interesting because I think what you know, you were to that answer, you know, who has the right to represent these situations? I think it's about having a plurality of voices, it's about having lots of different views, that's what we have right now is lots of, we don't have that right now, you know? We, we, we have one people who tell stories about other groups of people predominantly and one of the things that COVID actually done on this, there's not been many good outcomes from COVID but one good outcome, especially with the people I work with is that they are being forced to work with local image makers and because they can't fly everyone everywhere, so that's been great.
So that's really, that there is some 100% more of that happening than there was a year and a half ago, but I don't subscribe to that thinking you need to have personal experience in order to tell a story about being. I think, I think that's a bit of a risky road to go down. But what we do need is a swing in a direction where you don't just have one group of people telling all the stories and so you have everyone telling all the story, you know? Everyone telling all the story, so you do have different points of view. That’s important to see, we all need those varying voices, and we don’t have that right now. So I thought that way kind of working in partnership where different people are bringing different skill sets and those experiences into a project or piece of work or reporting on a situation is an interesting model.”
Simon Popple: “Would anyone like to come back on that or?”
Stuart Allan: “Go ahead.”
Zoe Norwich: “No, I’ve spoken more recently.”
Stuart Allan: “Well, I'll just say very briefly, I think it's, it is a really important, very challenging issue to, to, to my mind that part as human dignity and treating people with respect. And I think that, that has to inform our ideals, our normative ideals of what constitutes good photographic practise. I appreciate that that's very difficult to, to mobilise in a conflict situation or where, where, your, your life is at risk and those that are around you are being threatened and dangered. But, but I think it does again, just going to get back to what is humane humanitarian photography, I think that, that's that to my mind at least, is, is important to hang on to. I think there is as soon as you get into the, the ‘isms’ of humanitarianism and, and the larger kind of scopic regime to use a phrase that, that kind of governs what counts as photography within that context, you're at, you're at risk of, of losing sight of its lived constituencies, the ways in which it, it impacts on, on the others around you. And I think that, that, that we need to kind of reverse that kind of logic and bring that to more to the fore than it typically is recognised.”
Simon Popple: “I thought it was interesting that you describe the sort of photographic heaven and a photographic hell. And obviously clear where you want to be. [laughter]
And this idea that there is a value, an intrinsic value to photography and it's something that, you know we photographers and, and philosophers and, and academics and grappled with is about the value and the meaning of photography throughout over, over, over time. But it has some form of intrinsic meaning, and we know if you go back to what you were saying about Sontag, Sontag describes, you know, photography sometimes, as you know, as dangerous as that, that, that photography can kill. You know, and if you think about an historical example of something like the Paris Commune, where photographs were used to identify the Communards and they were executed by the state afterwards because they were identified by these photographs. So it certainly kills, it can certainly kill people. It can certainly put people in compromising positions. Can it save people? Because I think what lies behind the idea of humanitarianism, humanitarianism and the photography, and also the concerned photography is this idea that photography has some sort of positive effect. It can do something positive. Do you, do you, can you think of any examples or do you think that there is this sense that photography can do good?”
Audience member: [Inaudible]
Anastasia Taylor-Lind: “Show me the evidence. There is no evidence that, I mean, there's often anecdotal evidence often told by photographers themselves or their agencies, or the people who admire their work, but I, I don't know of any examples where, you know, I have also worked for Human Rights Watch. I've documented in a very forensic way the recent wounds inflicted on Rohingya genocide survivors. Those pictures have been with the Human Rights Watch package presented to the US State Department. So that gives me a ticket to say, ‘Oh well, I'm doing all right because my pictures, you know, they really were being used for that.” But I've had one assignment for Human Rights Watch in my whole career and I've been taking pictures of these things for 17 years. Like, they don't have that many assignments, you have to be really at the top of the pile to even be in the running for them. Like, they work with about five people, so even that's anecdotal.
Like, I could give you that line, ‘Oh well, when the State Department said they really did believe that the Rohingya were being, you know, that it, there was a crime against humanity and my pictures played a part in that’, but this is anecdotal and it's like once. There, there is no evidence that photographs stopped the Vietnam War, or like I, I don't even know where this, this idea came from. And photography is always gonna fail if we think that is its job or its role and we do because people like me and I have certainly, you know, brought into this that I think, ‘Oh yes, well. I'm going to save the world with my pictures.’
Simon Popple: “But that's what the question is predicate, it's really that sense that, you know, how do you define the meaning of those photographs and the value of those photographs in any context? And it's very, very difficult, isn't it? Yeah. Because you, you, you, suggesting something more positive, not positive, but slightly more I think less critical approach sometimes to think about also the way in which you were suggesting in the last thing that you said that photographs are valuable.”
Stuart Allan: “Indeed, I would. I would politely like to disagree. I think photojournalism is morally justifiable and that isn't to say that it is, isn't problematic at times, and that there you can find and identify examples of ways in which it's, it's gone wrong for whatever reason or purpose. But I think in general it's, it's well-intentioned and I think it has a positive influence on shaping public perceptions.
I think that it invites sort of a rethinking of what we mean by the public, though, and their expectations. I think that that's that is a really interesting point to, to highlight. Because I think our judgement of the public itself and I, I try not to think of the public in in the singular, monolithic kind of way, recognising a diverse array of, of rather fluid publics. But you know, when you look at even more domestic politics and you look at the rise of authoritarian populism and, and Trump, when you think about Brexit, when you think about every kind of otherwise everyday issues, how has that impacted on your perception in this country of the great British public? And, and these are the same people who were assuming that they will look at a particular image of suffering from distant others and, and be moved to write to their MP to say, “Please don't cut the foreign aid budget.” Some of them do, and that's important to remember. Sometimes when these images are, are broadcast and it's more likely going to have to be broadcast than, than put on the pages of a, a daily print and ink edition of the Guardian to have that kind of wider impact, you know, contributions to charitable organisations concerned with the particular issue in question will skyrocket. And you might say, “Well, isn't that, isn't that easy and it's not comfortable when people just write a cheque or, or put in their credit card details and, and that's kind of morally, you know, them off the hook for a little while longer.” Easy to criticise and, and, and also easy to exaggerate and to overstate. But nevertheless, it, it channels resource to areas which otherwise wouldn't have it, and a lot of that money often does a lot of good. So again, I think we need to kind of just be a little bit careful about the kind of the generalisations here, because we can all find examples. I, I would, I would be more inclined to kind of say that in general, this imagery really matters because it shapes people's perceptions, and I would include myself in that. I know and care a lot more about other parts of the world than I ever would have had I been relying on, and I, I do actually read the Guardian every day, you know, words describing the situation. There's something about the efficacy of a, of a photograph that, that makes, that forges that sense of connection, and I wouldn't sort of overstate it, I necessarily call it empathy. But I appreciate that's an animating drive of humanitarian photography, problematic in its own terms, questions of suffering, the voyeuristic quality of it quite often very easy to kind of critique. But there's something really important going on there that I think we, we have to kind of think through and, and, and maybe it's, maybe it's a question about vocabulary, maybe we don't have quite the right and sorry, that is a bit of an academic way out, but, but we don't really kind of have the right terms yet. Maybe the words we're using need to be recast that perhaps they, they are about a different kind of photographic era pre-digital, they are locked up in all kinds of colonial, Western kind of presumptions about the world and how it works. And then we need to kind of break from that and maybe one way to do that is to start thinking with a different set of terms and recognising that that much of the issues that many of the issues, I think we're talking about here are kind of falling through these more traditional categories, especially when you want to begin to attend to kind of the digit questions of digitalisation and that we need to think about these a little bit differently and the words that we use to describe them.”
Audience member: “Can we interject here?”
Simon Popple: “Yeah, absolutely, yeah.”
Audience member: “Um, I just wanted to. Very quick comment, thank you for lots of things you said…[inaudible] all the conversations this morning.
I was wondering if you've come across Refugees Media which is the UNHCR, a collection of photos of refugees because…”
Anastasia Taylor-Lind: “No, I haven’t.”
Audience member: “It's a very interesting way to approach like community because the first thing when you said the message about humanitarian photography it was the first thing that came to my mind. So, you can go there and there's a number of filters, so do you want women or men? Do you want kids? Do you want them smiling? Do you want them in a tent? Do you want one of them holding the UNHCR bags? Or do, and they are actually the images when you talk about advertising, they’re actually images made for journalists. So, you go there, and you click all these, so you, you've got all these countries. I was actually looking because I looked at this two years ago. I was actually looking if they've changed anything about this…”
Anastasia Taylor-Lind: “Really?”
Audience member: “Refugees Media, it's amazing the fact that this exists as an archive representing UNHCR, which is like the definition of a human, humanitarian. Sorry, that was very, very…”
Anastasia Taylor-Lind: “Thank you very much. I would have…”
Simon Popple: “I think that’s a great question. I think Jess was indicating she wants to go back on that.”
Jess Crombie: “Yeah, so I can’t see you asked the question, but it’s such a good question and, and, and literally the crux of everything that I spend my time doing. So having spent years or 10 years ago, I was asking myself exactly that question, “We're making all these decisions on behalf of people and we're making them with the best intentions but ultimately, we're still making decisions on their behalf and the power resides entirely with us.” And so, I'm going to say the children at the time persuaded them to let me go and talk to just over 200 people who had featured in their communications all around the world to talk to them about what they felt about the process of sharing their story and the later communications that they that they ended up in. And it was a piece of research called “The People in the Pictures’ which is available online if you want to read it but, and since then I spent time doing more of that and so that is exactly the question that I asked myself is, well, how do you take what those, the people who we tell stories about and, and, and instead of making decisions on their behalf, use the platforms and the power and the facilitation, and the abilities that we have in order to make decisions that reflects what, what those people might want? Bearing in mind that you're only talking to 200 people, the many hundreds of thousands of people that are, you know, or or, you know, you're talking to a representative group and talking about UNHCR, one of the, I’m doing some work right now with UNHCR, and one of the things that I insisted in the work that we do is rather than just talking to their staff about what they thought about these issues is that they brought together a panel of people who were, who had experienced refugee status or were currently experiencing refugee status to talk to about that, and that those people were involved throughout this process for that exact reason. And because what I hear over and over and over again, what I heard for the first time in ‘The People in the Pictures, and since then, in all the research that I deal with, all the conversations that I have with people is, is just people saying what I've been kind of saying all the way through this talk which my whole life I feel like I’ve been saying: We have, we have ideas, we have opinions, we know what we want to do. You have platforms, let's partner on this but we want to make decisions about what story gets told and how it gets told, because we don't mind, and we even want to share stories of us having a difficult time, but we don't want that to be the only story that is ever told about us over and over and over again. And that's what you hear and there's this really nice quote from a woman or lots of different people in Niger who said I won't try and pronounce it. So I say it has a bit, but a song is sweeter from its owner's mouth, and that's basically what people say to say to us over and over again. And so, what I spend a lot of time doing is trying to work out, well, how do you do that? How do you change the processes by which these organisations work? And I'm working in the NGO sector, I'm not working with the media who aren’t making inroads in this area, but yeah, it's such a good question and it's at the very crux of it because if you continue to make decisions on behalf of other people, you're not really changing any power dynamics. So yeah.”
Simon Popple: “Thanks, Jess. I mean, that's interesting in terms of you, and I think you, you touched on that Zoe, in some of the projects that you were talking about in the sense that people were, you were sort of assisting people to, to start to make photographs. Do you see that…”
Zoe Norwich: “They were already making photographs.”
Simon Popple: “Were they already making photographs?”
Zoe Norwich: “They were already making photographs but there was a small number of photographers, and they were reaching international networks. And so, it was about assisting with reaching international networks and then helping to support and foster the photographic, the growing photographic culture in Rwanda. And, but I was gonna agree with Dema that it is totally weird not so, this is the first conference I've been to in two years I think, something amazing like this because of COVID and because I got small kids and I was home schooling and la la la, and [inaudible]
Audience member: “I mean, don’t get me wrong. I really didn't need this as a person and like I know we each one of us individually, we have these networks. This is why our work is we because we are connected. It's where we all get together that we just end up being just all of us, and them there, and us talking about them. But in our everyday practise and life, of course, we all speak to them every day and, it’s just when we’re reporting, report each other.”
Stuart Allan: “Yes, yeah.”
Zoe Norwich: “It's a really gorgeous article and it makes me think of someone like Sarah Waiswa, a brilliant Kenyan photographer and when she's working with people who are living with albinism in creative manners to tell their stories, and that's very much a collaboration. And she's working with people who are coming in, who are devising their own, what they want to wear, how they want to be photographed, and it's very much sort of an ongoing conversation and that, that is challenging deep-rooted social stigmas in East Africa, right? When you have and when you think about ways of photographing people living with disabilities, when you think about the, the work that I'm doing with historically marginalised people, the, who were previously known as the Batwa in Rwanda, right? Those are people where there are still lots of linguistic terms of phrase in Kinyarwanda which diminish and belittle them. And it's about trying to challenge those at a very fundamental sort of core level through partnership, through collaboration and I, and I do think that photography has the ability to create a sense of intimacy, even if that sense of intimacy is false and that that has an, a way of working to, to rub against social stigma.”
Simon Popple: “Has anybody got any experience? And put this out to the audience as well of, of working to push photography itself as a practise out into, into different places rather than just either representing on behalf of, of, of, of people, or having small-scale projects where you've already got people who are working as photographers, and you include them? Is there a sense of, of yeah, Jess.”
Jess Crombie: “I’ll just say this very quickly because I’m interested to hear from the audience. But just that there's this sort of assumption that what’s known as participatory practise, you know, work where you're giving someone a camera or a mobile phone and going when you take pictures of your own life is kind of the answer to all of this. And but it's not.”
[Laughter]
I get that conversation repeated to me, but it's not, it's about editorial decision making, like right and it's what you know, Anastasia was talking about earlier about picture editors. It's about who gets to make editorial decisions happening as much kind of earlier at earlier level and I think that's what, so, so when you’re asking what people do. The work that I do now is really being sort of monster NGO, Red Cross and UNHDR and all these big monster organisations who are, you know, putting out images all over the place all the time are giving wholesale stories to the media who don't even credit the NGO, you know, just publish it as if it's their own stories is really problematic for loads of obvious reasons. And you know, what I talked about is exactly that, it’s not about how do you get someone to tell their own story, it's about fundamentally shifting who's making decisions. And so yeah, I just wanted to kind of, I think that's, that, that's a really important and practical thing that everyone can think about and do, you know, in whatever way you're able to, but it's really important that, you know, not to rely on smaller scale idea, however nice it may feel to do these projects.”
Simon Popple: “I was, I was thinking more about the sort of work that you were doing with, with gathering stuff that's already being made that's not seen as formal professional photography, but it is actually just what people do day-to-day with their phones. And it's that way of gathering that sort of information together and getting it through these editorial processes. And I think you've come up with a really, you know, a really strong way in terms of making a film, hopefully, which will reach you, want an audience for it, so you've done that to find an audience for these images, and I'm just wondering if there were other examples of people where they've encountered that type of approach to try and surface what's already there, not to try and impose practises or instil new practises, but actually, just to think what people are doing, because photography or whatever you want to call it, image making is endemic in most parts of the world, but it's just not recognised. It's not valued by, by us, it's not seen, but it's there and it has very important things to say and I, and that's what I was sort of interested in, the way that you've taken that and you, you have an archive now, so you've got a repository where this stuff can go and, and can be kept. It's not just dispersed to the four winds or or, you know, to, to, to this, to, to this, perhaps a digital network where it's lost. So, I just thought that was an interesting way of thinking about, actually, you know, again it's around terminology as as you were saying, Steven, it's, it's about the language that we use to describe these practises and most people don't recognise photography as photography, they think it's, you know, it's just using their phone to do something, whatever.”
Audience member: “Yeah, like I'm, I appreciate this conversation to like, kind of think about how power actually operates in this, and I think there's a lot about like we're, we're talking about it through the image itself, but it's, but we also have to connect it to the, the public, as you know you said, but also like who, who do we assume to be the humanitarian photographer and when?
Like, if, I don't know if, if there is, let's say, the Paris attack and I go there and, and take pictures of, of people suffering after the, am I a humanitarian photographer? Or we only conceive of humanitarianism if it is in the global south with black and brown bodies and then, and then there's this whole assumption of humanitarianism because where those photographs are going to be shown whose embassy is, is going to be sought? So, like the distinction between, let's say photographs and images that happen to be taken by an ordinary person being that versus the humanitarian image, which is by someone who is at least employed by a global institution. So that's a question, goes back to you, but that, but you know that, that's, that's the, the ongoing myth as you said about the humanitarian, what is humanitarian?”
Anastasia Taylor-Lind: “Magnum Photos has a print sale on at the moment. I think it's for $200 you can buy a photograph of a family digging the bodies of their loved ones out of the rubble in a Syrian city. And when you click on the link to buy the print, you know it 3D models view., nice white kind of John Lewis Western home with the picture printed to scale on it. Of course, in that print sale, there were no pictures of dead Americans being dug out of the Twin Towers rubble for people to buy and put on their walls.
And I think. We, I don't have any answers, but I think we have to have conversations like this and I only knew Tim through his work, not personally, but he was talking about these things ten years ago and I'm sure he would have, you know, he wasn't, he didn't think photo. I am angry. But more like, I'm kind of hurt, actually, I feel hurt. I feel some kind of, I don't know what, some kind of moral injury or something. There's something. Like everything. I can't really articulate it, but it's a physical feeling in my body and it makes me shake and it's, it's part of it is the distance between seeing someone really hurt somebody else in the most awful way like and watch, I'm not saying I have like, a right because I see it in real life or something, but there's such dissonance between the act of photographing, like, I don't know anybody who could make those kinds of pictures and it would sit right with them. It it, it really hurts to see people do those things to each other. I'm not saying that to make it about me or make you feel sorry for me, but like, this rooms nice and I like being around people who aren't photographers, who, who are really upbeat about photography and in a way it's nice to be the one who, I feel like probably a bit angry and a bit down on photography and when I'm around photographers I'm actually the optimistic one and I think having these like, because I do want to change it and I do want to not, apart from just be OK with myself like I do believe that photography can play. Yeah, I'm just going to be quiet now. But yeah, thanks for having me as part of this conversation.”
Zoe Norwich: “Can, can I, can I ask you about that feeling? Is it, is it like shock or is it rage? Or is it disappointment or can you?”
Anastasia Taylor-Lind: “It's, it's moral injury.”
Zoe Norwich: “Yeah. Hurt.”
Anastasia Taylor-Lind: “Yeah, it feels like, yeah, like, like, I'm a freelance as well. Like, you know, the, the reason we're here is because of Tim’s archive, right? Like, though, with the exception of 1 photographer, everyone who got injured or killed were freelance photographers. Like, they didn't have insurance like, you know, we have a huge problem with, with sexual harassment and racism in photojournalism.”
Zoe Norwich: “Yeah.”
Anastasia Taylor-Lind: “Magnum has just not kicked out but it turns out one of their ‘star players’ has been sexually harassing and assaulting young women of colour in the majority world for 30 years, people at the agency knew about it and allowed him to resign. And I'm using Magnum because that's one example, but Seven is another agency where they had you, sort of, Me too scandals. David Furst is, was the international pitch editor at the New York Times, who essentially controlled for I think a decade who got these crème de la crème assignments, who got flown from New York or Paris or London to Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq and, and he openly told women photographers, “I don't hire women because there are no women who photograph as well as men do.” So, this was the gatekeeper for the and you know, and there were issues obviously with representation and race as well, so. I, I, I, I don't really know what else to say except like there, that's, feels like moral, moral injury, yeah.”
Zoe Norwich: “Yeah, multi-layered moral injury.”
Anastasia Taylor-Lind: “Yeah.”
Zoe Norwich: “Thank you.”
Audience member: “I want to connect the conversation we’re having maybe to just go somewhere else little bit about the issues of access and proxy because looking specifically at Syria, for the couldn't go. Like, this one conflict where we had no access, so the only access we had with the people on the ground, and I don't know if my question is have you in your work looked at or thought about what we as people are making the people on the inside photograph for us? Because a lot of the videos and it's something we learned the hard way, working with activists in Syria is we learn all these training to teach them to, to take photos and videos. But basically, we wanted them to take those images, those sensationalist, like those skull images, they end up sending those from Syria, not because they think this is what they want to represent of their communities, it, it because this is what they think we want to see. And so, I was wondering if you and maybe when we're thinking about how can we keep the positive, you know, thinking about the role of the journalism of images of how this goes within our everyday practise. Are we thinking about what we're making these people do with our own practise like expectations or what we're teaching them, how we're teaching them to use the camera?”
Anastasia Taylor-Lind: “And just sorry, this is the last thing I'll say, but I just want to point out that photographers in Syria and in other, photographers who are reporting locally are paid less than the white Western photographers who have flown in to do that, significantly less so for me, that says everything about the value system.”
Audience member: “Like, that's everything, that's not just the photographers.”
Audience member: “Can I just interject as well? Well, I did work for newspapers as a photographer, photojournalist. There are actually with a lot of freelancers say from this country going to Syria to get pictures. A lot of picture editors were refusing to use this work because they didn't wanna, they didn't wanna, you know, create this thing of like, you know, you just go this far from war-torn places to make a name for yourself.
So yeah, I don't know if that answers anything but, but that, that that was what I heard on the ground when I was working for the newspapers and they, they certainly would not want to use anything. That's why that few images were used, you know of Syria say, you know, 20-30 unless it was like say the big agencies, you know the Magnums and the Sevens and all that sort of carry on. But yeah, I think the, the whole thing, you know moral injury is very, very interesting because it's, you know the, you know, picture editors, but then it's the, the newspaper proprietors as well. And it's, it's like well, does that sit well with this advertising thing and, and then we start going about social media as well, which you know is great because you get the message out but it's like a double-edged sword. Or is it shooting yourself in the foot? How do you, you know what? How do you make a living as a professional photojournalist nowadays, you know and then you look at NGO companies where it's like, you know, really effectively would be an advertising photographer. But then, looking at the other thing in terms of archives, I, I you know I, I gave up photojournalism in 2015 and I went to university, took on a PhD and, and it was in, in response to contemporary working class culture and, and I was [inaudible] what to do, you know? It turns out I'm a, I'm an ex-soldier. I, I started photography in the Dutch Army, I was a unit photographer and, and my research was looking at the, the personal photographs of, of, of British soldiers. Simple as that. And again, these people have no voices. They have no agency. In fact, one aspect talks about it, my exhibited some of my images as part of the National Media Museum, cause I've got a bursary to make my first book, and there was a women from the Royal Photographic Society that turned around and said to me said, “Have you got the MoD's permission to exhibit these photographs?” And I was kind of baffled by what she said that, that despite leaving the military in 1993, that I was still bound to this thing. It's because I've signed the Oath of Allegiance that forever I’d be damned, do you know what I mean? So anyway, that's what I make.”
Simon Popple: “I think we were almost out of time, but I just, if there's any other comments or, or, questions from the audience. And then maybe just to sort of give everyone a chance to, to have the last say, if you want to say anything else that you haven't said that you'd like to say before we, before we break for coffee and we carry on discussions then but is there anybody else you'd like to make a point or just say anything before we before we finish?”
Audience member: “I was just going to say about your, kind of, question around gathering these archives and most people will be aware of the ICP hashtag that was took down the photographs for an exhibition at the ICP in New York. And I think that's an interesting example of how during COVID, they were able to kind of gather these, you know, have a huge problem, for many reasons, and again, that comes back to, again because of the editorial side of both the fact that you were just chosen by a group of people in the opening gallery, but I think there's interesting mechanisms that maybe are opening up new kind of opportunities. And I don't know, certainly speaking with myself, Anastasia to your point about the kind of moral injury, I think probably most people in this room have that in however they're working with images I think. You know, we're talking a lot about photographers and at the gatekeepers too, and I think maybe there's work to be done around kind of thinking about those people in curatorial positions and editorial positions. I mean, Lauren Walsh put together a really interesting book which brought together NGO's, picture editors and photographers reflecting on their experiences, I think that's sort of the tip of the iceberg how you could open that up. I think there is so much to be talked about around that moral injury where it plays out because that's also affecting gatekeepers that we don’t even think of as gatekeepers in a way so, thank you.”
Audience member: “Just quickly, we're going around the world, not word the term moral injury a lot here. And the word was actually done just at Kings up the road. And just quickly grab Neil’s definition: “It's a, it's, so it's psychological strength that results in action or lack of action which violates an individual’s moral or ethical code.” And I think that action lack of action is key. This is not about finding something upsetting morally, it's just like you don't get PTSD necessarily from looking at something. I think it’s that action or lack of action that is key to that.”
Anastasia Taylor-Lind: “That is exactly how I mean it, by this definition.”
Audience member: “I think it’s getting used a lot around here differently, perhaps a little too liberally.”
Anastasia Taylor-Lind: “Thank you.”
Katy Parry: “Yeah. I just want to pick up on one point from Dima there about bringing voices together and, and us being here without certain other voices and, and when we put together the proposal kind of pre-COVID, the, the format for the day would be that we had a public engagement workshop in the morning with people who have experienced conflict, so refugees or veterans or veterans’ families and, and then they're invited to join in in the afternoon as well. So and I think you know, one of the things that we really wanted to get across in the kind of ethos of doing this was actually bringing those voices together. So practitioners, scholars, curators and people that have had that direct experience of conflicts as well. It hasn't happened today exactly, but the, we should hopefully for the final kind of research day that we want to have is actually bring together those people as well from, from the public engagement workshops and we have held a couple of workshops with refugees in Manchester asking exactly those questions that Jess and, and others have talked about in terms of what do you think about this representation and Jess’s work and The People in the Pictures, I use it in my teaching, it's absolutely brilliant and, and really important in this as well I think.”
The Piper’s Dilemma
Presentation by Nana Kofi Acquah
Nana is a photographer and writer, and recipient of the Tim Hetherington Foundation and World Press Photo Fellowship. Nana is based North of Accra, Ghana, and works all across the continent of Africa.
Nana Kofi Acquah: “Hello, my name is Nana Kofi Acquah, greetings from Accra, Ghana. I wish I could join you in person, I couldn't because of COVID. Actually, I'm bringing you this from quarantine. I tested positive for COVID last week, so I've been in quarantine. I'm vaccinated, so it didn't, It didn't go haywire. Get vaccinated.
Anyway, let's get to the point. So today I'm, I want to give you just 10 minutes of my time we talk about The Piper's Dilemma. OK, The Piper’s Dilemma. As we all know, whoever pays the piper calls the tune and this is where this title is coming from. But we're going to deal with a more complex topic than that. We're looking at humanitarian photography and the ethical relationship between photographic subject, photographer, and the spectator.
There is this trigon relationship between the photographic subject, the photographer and the spectator. But even before we get into discussing this beautiful trinity, I want us to look at the oxymoron in front of us, this is paradoxical, this oxymoron, this humanitarian photography. The word humanitarian is supposed to mean human beings helping human beings. Is that what really happens with humanitarian photography? We'll get into that. But let's look at the bigger, more dangerous word photography. So, photography is an extremely violent practise. Most people don't realise this, but if you look at photography, we snap, we capture, we slave, we shoot, we fire, we frame you and then we expose you.
Extremely violent practise. And we're supposed to do this in a humanitarian, humanitarian way. And if you look at the word humanitarian, it's, it's actually a, a word that is supposed to be polite. I've forgotten what that's called in English. Forgive me. English is the third language I speak, but basically it is an euphemism. Humanitarian is supposed to mean kind-hearted human beings going out there helping other human beings. But no, what actually happens with the humanitarian photography most of the time is that a bunch of privileged people to suit their conscience for polluting the air, for destroying the universe, for selling weapons and bombs and guns to, to some of the most troubled places on Earth would, would fund something and as part of that funding, somebody comes with a camera and, and, and, and takes photos of films. And in the process actually benefits more than the victims being, being, being filmed, you know?
So, we create a situation where we, we all say all human beings are equal but we know that some human beings are more equal than others. And normally it is the more equal than others category of human beings who tend to go down to the global South to where people, places where people like me are from to intervene with their great work, you know?
So, if you look at how people, brown people, black people, people from the global South have been represented in photography over the past couple of 100 years, it is worrying. It is worrying if the intent is humanitarian, if the intent is to help, why do we create images that further dehumanise an already dehumanised people? You know, millions of probably billions of dollars have been put in eugenics, you know, all these things to justify racism. We've, we've infested the religions of the world with our racist biases, colonialism took everything from us and all he created is for me to be able to speak English and, and, and slavery, you know. In fact, you still find the language of slavery and colonialism even in the practise of photography, you know?
So, so what are we saying? What, what I'm saying is that, I mean, we are here honouring Tim Hetherington and the great work he did, his heart, his passion shows, you look at his photographs today and you can see the vulnerability and the risk he took to really humanise these experiences. But we don't have enough people like him and because of that, photography, this practise, this specific practise of photography called humanitarian photography; that is supposed to help the global South, actually often ends up impoverishing us further and the dynamics what leads to this impoverishment and the difficulty this causes us stems from a very innocent part of this triumph, mainly the spectator.
You know, people are so used to a negative representation, racist jokes, images of, of malnourished African children with flies and children dying with vultures standing over them. People are used to these, these negative images for so long that when organisations like Magnum are held accountable for some of the images in their archives that they still sell, that they still, that they, they still exhibit, they get shocked, they get shocked that this offends somebody. Sometimes, if you think the photos are damming, you should read the captions that come under them and whilst we, we, we, we think through these things, we have to remember the [laughter], we're still, we're still dealing with Boris Johnson and co being held accountable for racist comments. That wasn't a big deal, and you know, the comedian, so what? And, and he could still become President, you know, a Prime Minister, whatever he's called.
And then you have, if you remember 2013, when black people mainly were hounded all-over, all-over London with vans, you know, like, like stray dogs. They were hounded, you know, ‘Go home or face arrest’, you know. And she went ahead to also become Prime Minister almost as if, if you can show how much you hate migrants or black people, you can become Prime Minister of the UK. This is the legacy you bring. This is when, when and, and this is, this is everybody in the UK, everybody in Europe, everybody in America. It is a system, not a person. It's not, it’s not an individual and what we are saying is that if you really want to practise humanitarian photography and you're coming from these parts of the world, you're coming from your high Thrones of privilege into Africa, into India, into some of the poorest parts of the earth to, to work, do a bit of history. You have to remember that most of these parts of the world are poor because they were looted because they were enslaved, because they were colonised, that the very crown on your Queen's head to, to the soil on your plantations hold our blood. You know, and so Africa is poor, and Africa is not poor because of a coincidence. This is Mali, this is Goundam. I've taken you to Goundam in Mali. This is a picture. So, Mali, one of the most beautiful countries in Africa, the Mali has massive gold reserves. And then when Obama and Sarkozy and whoever other, whoever else joined them when they violently overthrew Gaddafi as part of that spillover, a lot of arms got into wrong hands, and now Mali is a disaster. They have thousands upon thousands of internally displaced people. When you get to an area like Goundam, you have over 8 jihadist groups fighting for territory. You have bandits running helter-skelter, and most of the time, if somebody shows up in the hospital it, it's because their disease have reached a very critical, critical stage.
How can you be so rich? How can you have gold right from your southernmost borders to your northernmost borders, right from the eastern most to the westernmost, and yet be so poor? And I'm saying that as we practise this photography we call humanitarian photography. We have to remember that the reasons why Africa is poor is not because the people are lazy or incompetent. Many times, these people are poor because they were robbed. Because they were robbed, and they continue to be robbed. So, what can you do? As a practitioner of photography who is interested in truly changing the world, who is genuinely interested in drawing attention to the suffering and, and and to the problems of the world, what can you do? To the well-intentioned photographer, what can you do? And there's something I want to simply say that if you look at the trigon relationship, I said, we'll discuss photographic subject, the photographer, the spectator. The expression photographic subject is another problematic one. If I am the subject, it means you must be my Lord. You must be my, my queen. Your Majesty, your subject listens. So already there is a problem, you know?
The way we think about photography needs to change. The person being photographed is not a subject to the person photographing. Oh, that's not what it means. That is exactly what it means. So, we manipulate images, we, we, we shoot from angles. And by the way, these are images from, from Sierra Leone, something a bit more positive. So, Sierra Leone is a beautiful country. It's a land of giants they, they have this beautiful wrestling they do. There's just not enough time. My 10 minutes, I probably would do 15 minutes, forgive me. And, and, and, and, and yet, while working in Sierra Leone, I discovered one thing they have probably the highest record of hypertension in Africa.
Hypertension is something black people tend to suffer from and, and to do this story the, the question of the spectator comes in; who is interested? Who is watching this? And many times you have to find the person who can fund your project. So, this particular one I did with Novartis Foundation, you know otherwise you can't do the stories that matter to you. Yeah, you know, so also in, in Senegal, one of the things I personally discovered is that they use a lot of, a lot of monosodium glutamate. I don't know if you know what it is, monosodium glutamate. These are supposed to be MSG, like spices, you know, you know, like these MAGGI Cube and Royco and all these things. They put a lot in their food and, and it is believed to be a major contributor to the cases of hypertension and sometimes it is not always war, humanitarian photography isn't always about going to war and shooting people dying or refugees running. There are some stories that are more nuanced and the more nuanced the story, the more complicated it is, especially because most of us, most of us grew up on, on gory images and our sense of a strong photograph is something that is gory, somebody must die or be dying if nobody is dying, if nobody's crying, we are not in Sierra Leone. Shortly after the country was declared free from Ebola. You know, if we don't see images like this, people weeping, people broken, then we think the photographs are not strong enough, you know. But I want to challenge you to look at what is a strong photograph?
Why would you consider a photograph strong or why would you think, oh, this is just a nice composition. In Sierra Leone, I met Princess. Princess is the lady to your left in this photograph and she lost her two children, her husband, her siblings, her, by the time Ebola was over, she had lost about 24 family members. The only other survivor in her family was her sister, who is standing right by her in this photograph. And I thought I had seen the human condition in some of its lowest, some of its really lowest, until I met Princess. And, and she was talking, and she talked about how her, her husband's family came and took their home, and now she had nothing. No children, no husband, no job, nothing. And when she considered prostitution at that time, she realised that even for that she wasn't qualified, because who would want to sleep with somebody who has Ebola. You know, for the first time, this was the first time I remember standing behind the camera and the camera became my, my, my mask, you know, because I was bawling, my heart was bleeding and I was crying. And yet I had to ask myself, how do I photograph Princess in such a way that her humanity comes through. Because she's more than just a victim, she's a survivor. But even beyond being a victim or a survivor, she's somebody's Princess. She's somebody's Princess and this is what we are saying. Will this photograph win an award? Typically, it's not gory enough, and I've been, I've been a jury. I've performed jury duty for the World Press Photo. So, I know the kind of images people bring in, you know?. And we, we have to question these things. We have to question these things, you know? We need spectators who are interested in more than just the gory. There's a portrait of my parents. The only portrait I've ever made of my parents. My dad is 75. About a month ago he suffered a stroke, you know? And I made this photograph a few months before that, the only photograph I've ever made of my parents, sometimes the hardest photographs to make are the ones closest to you. Are the ones closest to you, you know? But are these what spectators are looking for? Are these what we want to feed them? You know? So, yes, let me, I think if I joke, I'll, I'll, I'll go through all these things and never finish. I think there's not enough time to discuss, to discuss this in full. But I wanted to challenge you. I wanted you to understand that. If you think of photojournalism, don't think going into the global South, maybe you should think of a lobbying or the Boris Johnsons and the Theresa Mays, and the people who call footballers funny names and throw bananas at them or send them banana emoticons. Maybe you should begin from there. Maybe you should go to the root. You, you come from a culture that that was built in eugenics, and all these lies that make you believe. Yeah, all human beings are equal, but some are more equal than others. You cannot have a bias and photograph objectively. In fact, it is actually impossible to photograph objectively. But when you have a bias, when you come from some parts of the world that some of us come from, it is extremely difficult. And this is your responsibility as a, as a, as a, as a centre point of this trying relationship, you are the photographer. Your work will always be subjective. Every single photograph you make will always be a self-portrait. And please, when you photograph people, they are not your subjects. There wasn't enough time, but I hope that this would already provoke conversation amongst you. My name is Nana Kofi Acquah and thank you for your time.”
