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THE ART NEWSPAPER FRIEZE ART FAIR THURSDAY 13 OCTOBER 20 II
Photography
For the record Fictional images on the frontline between photojournalism and contemporary art
S
teady, take aim, fi re! Hold , point, shool! In her 2003 . treati se o n the camera 's role
in reporting the horrors of human
conflict, " Regarding the Pain of Others". the late Susa n Sontag wrote: "War-making and picturetaking are congruent activities." Images werecomplic it in feeding OUf appetites for, and even tually inu ring us to , the suffering they depict: "Shoc k can become familiar. Shock can wear ofL" This tense relationsh ip will be explored today al the Frieze Art Fair talk "S hooting Gallery: the Problems of Photographic Representation", It was inspired by .a 20 10 artic le of the same tilie. written for Frieze magazine by its assoc iate editor, Christy Lange, who is chairing the panel. The passing of over a century of mechanical reproduct io n ofi mages has meant we no longer have to witness an event first-hand in order to ga in some insight or perce ived lrUlh of it for ourselves. "Wars are now also living-room sight s and sou nds ," notes Sontag. She claims that "there have been so few staged war photographs s ince the Vietnam war [because) photographers are being held to a higher standard of joumalistic probity", but perhaps more pertinent is the not ion that bona fide war reportage might now be considered acceptable as art. Many eyebrows were raised, for example , when French photojoumalist Luc Delahaye quit Magnum in 2004 to become an arti st (although the two positions are still by no means mutually exclusive, as many Magnum members would attest). Delahaye 's most fa mous image, TalibclfI from his 200 I " History" series, depicts a dead fighter in a ditch, slaring up from hi s makeshift shallow grave. having had hi s shoes. his wa llet and seemingly his soul removed. The work stirred controversy not only because o f its b lunt frontality, but also because of its outsized format and high-defin ition detail. It also invited comparison with other monumenta lly scaled and staged art photographs by And reas G ursky and Jeff Wall, raising the issue of whether a documentarian could s imultaneously be cons idered an artist-and , equall y controversially to some, whether he cou ld therefore charge contemporary art prices. In the Dan ish Pav ilion's controversial group show "Speech Matters". curated by Katerina Gregos for the Venice Biennale (until 27 November), a similarly torrured figure, prinled panoramicall y and hung on its own wall , reverses and further complicates Delahaye's perceived transgress ion of photographic verisim il itude. The gruesome image, ZahralFarah, 2007, depicts the aftermath of the brutal gang rape, part ial inci nerat ion and murder of a 14-year-old Iraqi gi rl , perpetrated by US sOldiers -.except the photograph is actu all y o f an actress and was created by Amcrican artist Taryn Simon as the fina l freezc-frameofBrian De Palma 's dramat ised fi lm of the event, " Redacted". S imon is one of the art ists lak- . ing part in loday's talk.Alsoon the panel arc Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, the London-
Clockwise from lop: Tobias Zielony's Selklrk-2, 2009-11, is al KOW Berlin (RlI; an image from Taryn Simon's "A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters"; AHredo laar's From TIME to TIME, 2006; Clare Sirand's Signs of a Struggle, 2003 based South Africans whose photographic explo its in Afghanistan as embedded war arti sts (they created an abslTact print in Helmand Province by exposing a giant roll of photographic paper) are outlined in Lange's article. The real debate, however, is not about the artist's ro le in the
journali stic investigation into the bloodlines of 18 different families in Kenya, Indi a, Brazil and elsewhere. The presentation of her porfindings - unremarkable traits of all the surviving relatives, with explanatory text panels could be that of a genealogist or professional archivist. That is, of
, ' There is an increasingly thin line between photojournalism and the documentary 'look ' prevalent in current contemporary art , , truthful depiction of ' wars; rather, it concerns the nori on th at there is an increas ingly thin line between p hotojournali sm and the documentary " look" prevalent in current strateg ies of contemporary art. For example, Taryn Simon's major display' at Tate Modern (until 2 January 2012), "A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters", involved four years of
course, until you come across the incongruous pictures of an extended family of more than 100 European rabbits, an invasive species bred in Australja for the sc ientific purpose of its own extinction - to prevent any fu ture blood lines, in other words. Simon's harrowing found image of an albino child , killed in Tanzania for one of its supposedly " magical" , healing limbs, also
registers a jarring rupture in her exhaustive presentational rigour and classification, as do the skeletal remains of one Bosnian man's descendan ts-documented and recovcred from mass graves in Srebren ica after DNA testing. In a d iffere nt way, Broomberg and Chanarin 's recent London show, "People in Trouble Laughing Pushed to the Ground", also mined the seam between art and artefact-or conjecture and reality, if you prefer. Follow ing a residency at Be lfast Exposed, a photo archive dedicated to local depictions of the Troubles in Northcm Ire land, they selected the circul ar portions of images that had been blolled out by the archivist$' stickers-either accidentally or on purpose, it's unclear which -and revealed what had been hidden underneath. Essent ially presenting an altemalive, uncensored version of the archive, Broomberg and Chanarin provide fu ll disclosure. albeit without telling the whole story.
"How to In form Without Informing" is the subtitle of a new book,Aesrhelic Journalism , by A lfredo Cramerotti, co-cunttor of the Man ifesta 8 contemporary art biennial. He outlines a thesis positing thc recent "journalistic turn in contemporary art" as a reassessment of "trad itional information formats . allowing imagination and open-endedness". "Whi le journalism reports and fict ion reveals," he says, "aesthetic journalism does both." His examples range from the photojournalistic investigations of Sophie Calle to the researchheavy interviewing techniques employed by Walid Raad for the At las Group's semi-fictional video piece Hostage: the Bachar Tapes. 1999-200I.Crameroni argues that , while Raad invents a narrative and creates a character b:ased on the very real experiences of a Lebanese man deta ined alongside fi ve American men in a cell in Beirut, "what is important is not a detai led account of facts,
but how these are portrayed and why others are o mitted". This withho lding of ev idence, he adds, " is seen as a lack of professionalism in journalistic circles; however, what is deficiency in one field can be wealth in another". So, despite artists' increasing use of archival formats and documentary style, they still encounter the same old problems with reliability. What, then, is the purposc of such "aesthetic journalism"? Undoubtedly there is merit in the extensive field research embarked upon by Alfredo Jaar for The Rwanda Project /994-2000, to use anotherofCrameroui's examples. Yet by the artist's own admi ssion, his attempt to reignite a forgotten news story abou t the genoc ide was riddled w ith the same conlTad ictions of touristic, explo itative representation that he was raHing against. '" did 2 1 pieces in those six years," recal led Jaar in 2007, "and how can I say this? They all failed." Photojournalists, reporters, picture agencies and artists are all guilty in various ways of redacting, cropping or misinterpreting information. Many more artists could be labelled "aesthetic journalists" - why not other pillagers of a newsy aesthetic such as Marlene Gerhard Richter, Dumas or Wilhelm Sasnal, to name three painters currently showing in London? Arguably, any artist somehow involved in the depiction of modem life could be said to wear this hat , so for that reason, the term seems too nebulous to be useful. In an essay on Taryn Simon's "A Living Man Declared Dead ... ", Homi Bhabha offers a possible way out: "The resonance of her work does not fade into the virtuous visibility of aesthetic realism", because, he suggests, "S imon mobilises the viewer's attention by displacing it, even disorienting it". In other words, it's the removal of the fami liar safeguards in our relationship with the media that enables us to become more aware of its fl aws and faultlines, and so best to question what is being presented o r told to us. Perhaps it's useful to return to the peculiar pull or "punctum" of the photograph; not necessarily to those that depict war itself, but to those that question the med ium 's truthfulness and therefore our grip on reality. Take Clare Strand's series of crime re-enactments, "Signs of a Struggle", 2002-03, currently on show as part of the V&A's display of " Photography in the Wake of Postmodemism" (until 27 November). Her images appear to be archi ved police shots of fingerprint-ridden murder scenes but are actually carefully falsified, as though SlTand was invest igating the very limits of photography's usefulness as empirical evidence. Perhaps we shou ld ca ll this phenomenon "photo-criticali ty" or"crit ico-photography", rather than "aesthetic journalism". Because if artists are looking for truth in places where others might not think to look, or where they know it can't be fo und . then the photograph is just such a place . •
Ossian Ward
o "Shoaling Gallery: the Problems of Photographic Representalion" takes place Thursday 13 October at 1.30pm
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