Aesthetics in Photojournalism
What place do aesthetics and beauty have in today's photojournalism, and where does it stand in the practice's established ‘authentic’ forms?
Using Photography to bring about social change has long been the driving force behind photojournalism, with photographers reporting on and drawing attention to situations outside the viewer's usual sphere of experience. However, thanks to the constant stream of information from social media and rolling newsfeeds, the public is so inundated with images of war, environmental disaster, and human migration that perhaps we are becoming accustomed to them.
We are witnessing a profound change in how news is reported and consumed. Advances in camera technology mean that anyone with a telephone is a citizen journalist, and these people are often the first to broadcast pictures. Photojournalists are reacting to this information overload by looking for fresh approaches to their art. Where once their interest lay in authentically capturing and disseminating a story, photographers are now applying new aesthetic techniques to elevate their work above the ordinary documentary image.
The approach is not without its critics. Competitions like the prestigious World Press Photo award prize to beautifully constructed images that arguably 'glamorise pain and suffering'. However, in a highly saturated market, a different approach to photojournalism may be required to emphasise issues. Hence, they 'become part of our collective consciousness, evolving into a shared sense of conscience, making a change not only possible but inevitable.' Does the juxtaposition of beauty and horror capture attention, spark debate and enable new ways of viewing the subjects of these photographs, or does it numb the viewer to the context, belittle the broader story and raise questions of authenticity?
The current and various global refugee crises are an example of how the sheer scale of a situation can inure us to the human suffering of the individual. Packed onto boats too small to hold them, crammed into large tented camps, migrating on masse to escape massacre, oppression and persecution; we are used to being bombarded daily with images of displaced people. So much so that we are suffering image fatigue, the knock-on effect of which is apathy. We begin to believe the narrative presented to us; the flood of similar imagery manipulates our perception of the situation. All refugees are poor, uneducated, brown-skinned, dirty, hungry, sad, damaged, unwell, suffering, pitiful. Photojournalists are complicit in this presentation of this lazy narrative; in merely affirming what the public believes about refugees they have removed themselves from the 'mission' of photojournalism.
So how does a photojournalist or documentarian covering interminable stories like human migration look for and present images to counteract this mainstream view? Ingrid Sischy feels that 'meaningful photojournalism today requires an appetite for challenge, a belief in the power of the medium and an internal alarm system against stereotyping'. Is there a call for an artistic approach to photojournalism to help balance the apathy?
Sebastião Salgado, arguably the world's most famous aesthetic photojournalist, is best known for his artistic portraits of migrant communities and manual workers, filled with religious iconography. He has long been lauded and criticised for beautifying his subjects. Immersing himself in their communities and lives and shooting in black and white, Salgado presents striking compositions that passionately document the issues about which he feels.
Take, for example, Salgado’s photographs of gold diggers in an open-cast mine in his homeland of Brazil – thousands of people are crowded onto makeshift ladders, scrabbling up the steep sides of a vast, human-made pit. Photographing the madness of this 1980s gold rush, Salgado captured its vast scale; by producing large and aesthetically dazzling images he can create something akin to religious awe - his images bear a striking similarity to various Renaissance artists’ depictions of hell - making the viewer realise the absurdity of what they are looking at.
Salgado composes his pictures to show respect for his subjects, presenting a beautiful interpretation of a situation that allows them dignity in the face of adversity and trauma. He maintains that you ‘need a lot of time’ to create images of depth and truth. You must put yourself where things will happen and get into the flow, at one with the people's mood. When the subject suddenly appears, you must be ready – and fast. ‘Photography is one 250th of a second,’ Salgado explains. And so much can go wrong. ‘There are a lot of variables. There must be light. There must be power. There must be personality if it's a portrait.’
However, some people disagree with Salgado's approach to his subjects. Ingrid Sischy, in her essay Good Intentions, criticises Salgado for his use of ‘Beauty as a formula’. By taking an image of suffering and making it an artwork for profit rather than an authentic record, Salgado is far too busy with his pictures' compositional aspects– finding the “grace” and “beauty” in the twisted forms of his anguished subjects. And this beautification of tragedy results in pictures that ultimately reinforce our passivity toward the experience they reveal.’ In Sischy’s opinion, the aesthetic formation of his photographs compromises the point he hopes to make. Thus, aestheticising tragedy is the fastest way to anaesthetise the feelings of those witnessing it. Beauty is a call to admiration, not to action.’
Beauty is a controversial theme in scenes of suffering. The Danish critic and artist Peder Jansson once said, ‘I find it hard to understand how anyone can think either about composition or style when they are in the middle of a war situation, among physically and mentally dying and murdered people.’ According to Michael Kimmelman, former chief art critic for The New York Times, 'The difference between exploitation and public service comes down to whether the subject of the image aids the photographer's ego more than the other way around.'
Sischy also uses Salgado’s photographs of the Kuwaiti oil fields ablaze to criticise him for decontextualised beautification. Each of these pictures varies, including those of firefighters, oil wells, flames, and smoke, but the photos say 'nothing of the ecological devastation transmitted over the wires.' Individually and as a collection, they are both beautiful and powerful. Still, they fail to feature the context – the retaliation of Saddam Hussein’s troops against being driven out of Kuwait by the forces of a coalition led by the United States. In this series, we can't see the reason for the devastation; we only see the photographer’s perception of the situation.
Another photojournalist criticised for his use of aesthetics is the American photographer James Nachtwey. His photographs of war and conflict are deliberately composed to force the viewer to examine them for clues to their context. Take, for example, his picture of Va Ling, a Cambodian boy at his mother's funeral. A powerfully composed image, foregrounds Va Ling holding a framed photo of a woman. The smoke in the background is reminiscent of the mass incense burning at Buddhist temples, and with his shaven head, Va Ling could be a monk in training. The graphic lines draw you into the picture, but they give nothing away. Without the caption, the viewer would struggle to decipher the story this photograph is trying to tell.
A similar example is Natchwey's 1996 Spot Image winner for the World Press Photo Competition, An orphaned boy in one of Grozny's broken streets after the withdrawal of Russian troops from the Chechnyan civil war. An arresting photograph, it is well composed, but the framing of the boy’s face and the blurred background lend it an artistic rather than documentary quality. Without its long caption detailing the war and its outcomes, would the viewer know this was a picture of an orphan in a war zone? Writing in The New York Times, Sarah Boxer finds James Nachtwey's photographs so ‘gorgeously produced’ that they are ‘almost grotesque.’
The American photojournalist Richard Mosse first rose to prominence a decade ago with his photographs of the wars in Gaza and Iraq, including those of Saddam Hussein's palaces occupied by US forces. With these pictures, he bears witness to a side of the conflict that we don't see in the everyday flow of war reportage. In Iraq, Mosse became frustrated with the limitations of mainstream photojournalism: 'By the time photographers arrive there is nothing left to see. This lack of trace interested me, and ultimately the failure of documentary photography.' The failure he speaks of is what others see as an inability to produce an authentic image – and he felt the solution required a different view. Around this time, Mosse 'looked to throw away my crutches and take a leap in the dark', explaining: 'Conflict is complicated and unresolvable, and it's not always easy to find the concrete subject, the issue and put it in front of the lens.'
Trying something completely different for his following two projects, he used a soon-to-be-discontinued film, Kodak Aerochrome, ‘and a recently abandoned military surveillance technology’. The result – The Enclave, shot in Congo over two years – renders his photographs of soldiers, warlords, refugees and subsequent atrocities with accents of hot pink, quite literally – and controversially – depicting what it means to bring what is hidden into the light. In doing so, Mosse created a different way of looking at conflict. In an interview with The Telegraph's Lucy Davis, Mosse said using infrared in his Enclave images' pushes the viewer into this extraordinary space, way past the threshold of the imagination and into science fiction, something pulsating, nauseous. We don't see in pink, but we don't see in black and white either – whichever way you look at it, documentary Photography is a constructed way of seeing the world.'
For his series Heat Maps, Mosse used a military-grade thermal-imaging surveillance camera. It captured only the shapes of people, their features distorted, black voids where their eyes and mouths should be. These people look ghostly, almost alien – luminescent in shades of black and white and, most notably to Mosse, anonymous. We recognise who and what they are – refugees in camps and on the move – only by their sheer number, and the surrounding landscape of tents and boats. Seeing them in these mysterious and other-worldly images removes the lines drawn between refugees and citizens. Mosse explains: ‘Unlike the migrants that have populated our newsfeeds for the past three years, they're shorn of facial expressions or cultural demarcations – gender, race, age or sex. It allows you to capture portraiture of extraordinary tenderness – there's a stolen intimacy to it. There's no awareness; there's no self-consciousness.’
Using what is predominantly a weapon of war to record the human consequences of conflict is a political gesture; Susan Sontag wrote in her pivotal collection of essays On Photography: ‘A camera is a sublimation of the gun’. By subverting the intended use of this technology, Mosse dehumanises the individual and in doing so visually illustrates how politics and the mainstream media typify refugees. In drawing the viewer’s attention to this duplicity – the assimilation of the individual into a faceless group, rendering them more straightforward to malign – Mosse is building a new language of compassion, starting a fresh conversation about an issue that has existed since biblical times.
Mosse's Enclave images and installations have become a focus for debate about contemporary visual approaches within Photography and the ethics of implementing these in photojournalism. Perhaps because of the controversy they stir up, his photographs – like those of Salgado and Nachtwey – arouse interest in and prompt examination of global issues that could be easily ignored and forgotten. ‘People's attention drifts. Media attention dwindles. Compassion is eventually exhausted. As photographers and storytellers, how do we find a way to continue to shed light on the refugee crisis and keep the heat on these urgent narratives of human displacement?’
Critic Susie Linfield argues passionately in defence of photojournalists and their approaches to capturing photographs of war and its repercussions, saying that ‘learning to see the people in them—is an ethically and politically necessary act that connects us to our modern history of violence and probes the human capacity for cruelty.’ Linfield wants us to look closely at these photographs and pay attention to the people in them. ‘If we want to construct a politics of human rights that isn't merely an abstraction, we need to look at these photographs of suffering, degradation and defeat,’ she explains. ‘We need to think not only about the relationships among these images, how they function and what they communicate in aggregate, but about the specific conditions each one depicts, no matter how disturbing, shaming and bewildering an experience that may be.’
Photographs are subjective, showing the viewer only what the photographer chose or could capture in one isolated moment. But the use of these aesthetic techniques adds an element of objectivity. This deliberateness elevates these images above the sea of suffering we witness on our phones, computers and televisions. And if the resulting photographs stimulate debate and discussion, this can only be a positive outcome when the alternative is apathy and ignorance. As Sontag explains, ‘The vast catalogue of misery and injustice throughout the world has given everyone a certain familiarity with atrocity, making the horrible seem more ordinary – making it feel familiar, remote ("it's only a photograph"), inevitable.' The evolution of our visual language is ongoing. Suppose the photographer is not exploiting the subject for artistic or monetary gain. At the same time, they may remain controversial, but these images of ‘beautiful suffering’ still have legitimacy and purpose.
References
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Funk, M. (2018). Sebastião Salgado Has Seen the Forest, Now He's Seeing the Trees. [online] Smithsonian. Available at: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/sebastiao-salgado-forest-trees-180956620/ [Accessed 28 February 2018].
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Nair, P. (2012). A different light. Durham: Duke University Press.
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Boxer, S. (2018). PHOTOGRAPHY REVIEW; The Chillingly Fine Line Between Ecstasy and Grief. [online] Nytimes.com. Available at: http://www.nytimes.com/2000/06/09/arts/photography-review-the-chillingly-fine-line-between-ecstasy-and-grief.html [Accessed 28 February 2018].
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Teicher, J. (2018). Is It Okay for War Photographs to Be Beautiful? [online] The New Republic. Available at: https://newrepublic.com/article/124034/war-photography-beautiful-damned [Accessed 27 February 2018].
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Online links
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http://westminsteraro.blogspot.co.uk/2010/05/bearing-witness.html
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https://www.creativereview.co.uk/nick-ballon-alma-haser-invisible-wounds/
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