Regarding the Pain of Others
This week’s lecture was very interesting because I think it shows definitively how the invention/discovery of photography occurred in a logarithmic manner. The start of the medium had so many people stumbling into the ability to record the visual world onto physical mediums around the globe. As this initial burst of discovery gradually entered public knowledge the practices began to standardize and the inventions began to slow down. Around the time of silver gelatin, faster emulsions, and the fitting of multiple plates/sheets of film in one camera, the slope begins to level off with gradual additions like enlargers and color film, and color paper. That is until the addition of digital, but I am not a huge fan of that world, so I choose to ignore it.
Most interesting this week was learning about how the Japanese were able to grasp and run with the medium in such a unique and incredible manner. I was always curious why Japanese companies like Mamiya, Fujifilm, Nikon, and Minolta were so dominant in the analog market, but the introduction to early Japanese photography credits that curiosity. I imaging that artists like Ogawa, Kimbei, and Reiji would be the magnum photographers of the 19th century.
Black Death Spectacle, 2016, mkim777
Charles Nègre, [The 15th of August. Imperial Asylum at Vincennes], 1858. The Metropolitan Museum of Art
https://theconversation.com/how-napoleon-iii-used-photography-as-propaganda-to-hide-the-horror-of-his-new-paris-143506
Louis-Napoléon was an avid collector and enthusiast of photography. He enjoyed collecting many different types and styles of photography, and a few years into his practice of collecting he began to understand the storytelling potential, or rather the potential for propaganda in pushing his political agenda forward. Louis-Napoléon realized the effect of this new medium and the way the public perceived photography as true and credited realism. Around this time Louis-Napoléon was modernizing at such an incredible rate that he was forced to open a convalescent asylum to care for those wounded and injured during the construction. Louis-Napoléon hired Nègre to photograph the opening of this asylum and Nègre, just as any artist needs to make money to continue their craft, conformed to his requests to make point his camera based on the wishes of Louis-Napoléon. Samuel Raybone
Nègre organised the patients into two geometric blocks, angled to draw our attention towards Napoléon III’s marble bust, placed in the centre, and away from individual patients, whose stoic faces and discreet walking sticks blend into a seamless whole. […] These [working men and patients] are visually subsumed within a superhuman structure akin to Collard’s bridge. While the bridge symbolised progress, this unified mass of bodies offers a metaphor of social cohesion and “national gratitude” towards the Emperor.
“Nègre dared to show medical care only once but even then ensured the patient was so tightly bandaged as to disappear. The visibility of Napoléon III’s benevolence depended on the invisibility of his subjects’ illnesses and disabilities” Raybone explains.
Hugh Welch Diamond, Patient, Surrey County Lunatic Asylum, 1850–58. The Metropolitan Museum of Art
https://theconversation.com/how-napoleon-iii-used-photography-as-propaganda-to-hide-the-horror-of-his-new-paris-143506
Dr. Hugh Diamond also took advantage of this idea of realism in photography. He began to photograph his patients with a very specific and strange methodology. His hopes were to use the incredible truth of the medium and its ability to capture the smallest of details and show these images to the sitter to startle the illness out of them. He believed this process would “shock them into recognizing their own illness” Raybone concludes.
Cotton Mill Girl, Lewis Hine, 1908
Lewis Hine lead a very interesting life in the realm of photojournalism. In 1908 he was appointed the National Child Labor Committee photographer and he began sneaking a large-format camera into factories under the alias of a Missionary selling bibles, or an industrial photographer working on comission. His body of work went on to support years of war against child labor.
This image shot by Capa was made during the Spanish Civil war and is renowned for the astounding decisiveness of the moment, as Cartier-Bresson would say. While the subject is very controversial as photography has enabled the desensitization of death, blood, gore, and war since its birth, many believe this image was actually staged. Capa explains
“I was there in the trench with about twenty milicianos … I just kind of put my camera above my head and even [sic] didn’t look and clicked the picture when they moved over the trench. And that was all. … [T]hat camera which I hold [sic] above my head just caught a man at the moment when he was shot. That was probably the best picture I ever took. I never saw the picture in the frame because the camera was far above my head.”
Emmett Till’s open casket funeral sparked controversy across America decades after his death and continues to affect politics and the world of art to this day.
Black Death Spectacle was a massive controversy sparked by Dana Schutz 2016 Open Casket
Birmingham, Alabama, Charles Moore, 1963
While there are many controversial photographs made to capture the horrors of segregation, racism, and the clash of white power in the American 50s and 60s, this image holds some of the most significant weight. The power in this photograph is not necessarily the weight of the actions, the horror of the scene, or the stark white dog assaulting the black man, but lies in the desensitized nature of the bystanders and even the calmness of the man being attacked.
Serrano is widely known for this incredibly controversial work where he immersed christ on a crucifix in a vat of his own… piss.
This work created such a stir (no pun intended) that congress passed a new law stating that the National Endowment for the Arts (NEW) is “obligated to take ‘general standards of decency’ into account before granting an award”.
Later the US Supreme Court ruled
[…] that it is constitutionally sound for the government to establish criteria that bar funding based on certain viewpoints. Considerations of decency and respect for public values “do not silence speakers by expressly threatening censorship of ideas,” Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote for the court.
Head Below Wires 1999, printed 2012
© Roger Ballen, courtesy Hamiltons Gallery, London
Sources:
https://theconversation.com/how-napoleon-iii-used-photography-as-propaganda-to-hide-the-horror-of-his-new-paris-143506
https://2019foundations.home.blog/2019/12/16/black-death-spectacle-intervention/
https://www.clarionledger.com/story/opinion/2018/08/28/emmett-till-no-less-powerful-63-years-later/1030522002/
https://expertphotography.com/controversial-pictures/
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/roger-ballen-12038
https://www.rcfp.org/high-court-allows-nea-enforce-decency-standard/
