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Report: ‘Photography and Politics and the Politics of Photography’ ICPT2014
Shot from a thermal imaging device attached to a helicopter used by the Massachusetts State Police to identify the Boston Marathon Bomber.
Between 5-7 December the Nicosia Municipal Arts Centre (in association with the Pierides Foundation) organised the 3rd International Conference of Photography and Theory (ICPT2014). The Cyprus Dossier attended as the conference’s official media sponsor. The breadth and scope of the conference was diverse and relevant. The conference’s theme Photography and Politics and the Politics of Photography was tackled from multiple perspectives, challenging and often provoking our preconceptions of the photographic medium and its relevance as a political apparatus. This was most apparent in John Tagg’s keynote speech (who was unfortunately unable to attend due to a last minute cancelation of his flight; the presentation was instead delivered by Yiannis Toumazis, director of NiMAC). Tagg, author of Disciplinary Frame: Photographic Truths and the Capture of Meaning and Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories argued that we should forget that there is such a thing as photography, or that photography has any kind of identity. Instead, the only meaningful reality of photography is discursive and wholly dependent on context: “the unwelcome ground of the encounter with utter absence out of which the power effects of photography must be made to arrive.” As such, when thinking about photography the question of ideology should come before the question of the identity of the photographic medium. His two examples, an infrared shot from a thermal imaging device attached to a helicopter used by the Massachusetts State Police to identify the Boston Marathon Bomber and Reaper drone military technology, sufficiently and rather unsettlingly illustrated his points. Walid Raad’s keynote speech/performance titled Walkthrough focused on his two projects The Atlas Group and
Scratching on Things I could Disavow (more here and here). Raad demonstrated how the conventions of display or the modes of address associated with authoritative voices (such as archives, presentations, galleries, museums, documentation, photography, etc.) could be delayed and challenged; thus challenging our preconceptions of ‘the medium’ and emphasizing not just context but also our very modes of perception. A fundamental component to his work is the interplay between fiction and non-fiction, two realms of essentially equal value to Raad skilfully woven together and presented as one: rendering the distinction almost irrelevant. In The Atlas Group, a fifteen year project between 1989 and 2004, his focus was on the contemporary history of Lebanon, with emphasis on the Lebanese wars of 1975 to 1991. In Scratching on Things I could Disavow Raad shifts his focus to the history of art in the Arab world, exploring the emergence of large new infrastructures in and around the Middle East. For Raad, the accuracy of a historical account, or the value of an artwork, are less important than other concerns, such as: Who writes history and why? Who makes art and why? What is a fact and who decides what’s relevant? What is art and who decides its value? How do we read history and what do we take for granted? How do we read art and what do we take for granted? An interview with Walid Raad will feature in issue 08 of The Cyprus Dossier, due out in February/March 2015.
Walid Raad, image from ‘Index XXVI: Blue and Green and Yellow and Red and Orange’
The conference featured a number of presentations with material relevant to Cyprus: Elena Parpa presented works from Mustafa Hulusi’s Recollections of Underdevelopment (2014). Hulusi’s photographs of ‘contested landscapes’, taken around the Karpasia peninsula in Cyprus, are treated with different grades of analogue ‘light strips’. A “deliberate intervention that effectively joins photography with the political by disrupting the aestheticization of his pictures and making us acutely aware of the way contested landscapes are never just innocent nature but a constructed entity bounded by political culture.” Via Hulusi’s work, Parpa argued that though a landscape photograph may be beautiful, it is difficult to designate an empty a-historical landscape. Karpasia’s natural beauty is nothing but the product of politics, war, economic underdevelopment and dematerialised militarization. Parpa aptly recalled the rejected Acheson Plan of 1964, devised by the Americans for the partition of Cyprus, in which Karpasia was proposed to be given to Turkey. Maria Hadjiathanasiou presented photographs by Doros Partasides of the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974. Hadjiathanasiou argued that suffering cannot be photographed, or indeed every fully captured by a photograph, only the results of suffering can. Partasides’ photographs depict the results of suffering from the 1974 conflict but
not the suffering itself. Further investigated were the “symptoms which influence and navigate the interpretative process and compose the viewing experience.” Hadjiathanasiou concluded that “any attempt to bring the identities of the photographs into a single functioning persona” proves ineffective, since they accommodate multiple personalities and a number of photographic identities.
Salamis postcard
Christina Roditou examined how photographers in the 1950s framed and represented Cyprus’ cultural identity differently according to ideology. As an example Roditou presented three representations of the archaeological site of Salamis, an ancient Greek city-state on the east coast of Cyprus. The British colonial government would authorize representations that ‘orientalised’ Cyprus as a tourist destination, local photographers interested in the Cypriot landscape and antiquities connected the island with its ancient Hellenic past and Greek photographers used the island’s architectural legacy to frame Cyprus as part of the Hellenic world of the Eastern Mediterranean. Roditou examined postcards and maps as well as photographs by Apostolos Ververis, George Papademas, Maria Chrousaki and visitors to the island like George Seferis and Athena Tarsouli. Maria Photiou examined the photographic practices of Palestinian artists Alexandra Handal and Emily Jacir, Lebanese artist Andrea Shaker and Greek Cypriot artist Katerina Attalidou. Specifically, her focus was on their experiences of borders, national narratives and “how the act of photographing serves as a reminder of exile and constructs a cultural identity of memory, remembering, longing and understanding of homeland.” Attalidou’s A Stroll in The City, Nicosia, As Much As History Allows and Handal’s No Parking without permission served as strong case studies. However, Emily Jacir’s Where We Come From stood out, consisting of answers given by Palestinians in exile who were asked the following question: “If I could do anything for you, anywhere in Palestine, what would it be?” Jacir, who holds an American passport granting her access to Palestine, fulfilled the wishes she received and documented them as part of the project. According to Despina Pasia, studio portraits are intended to create presence in absence. They are extensions not just of vision, but also of the rest of our senses. In her presentation, Pasia explained that after 1974 many Cypriots left the island to find work in Arab countries and brought back compact cameras with them. However, before Cypriots could take photographs of themselves, studio portraits were widespread and very popular across the island. Pasia examined a selection of such portraits as a cultural and political expression to be decoded but also as demonstrating the profound effects of affect and emotional attachment.
Nguyen Trinh Thi’s Landscape Series #1
Since the schedule was organised in such a way as to accommodate two presentations simultaneously in separate rooms, I was only able to attend about half of them. Anna Rådström presented photographs from Nguyen Trinh Thi’s Landscape Series #1 (2013). Figures are shown pointing at something but we are never told what, all that is left present is the barren Vietnamese landscape as quiet witness, drawing attention to social realities in Vietnam where people are not used to thinking as individuals. Carmen J. Victor examined a series of photographs by Richard Mosse of the Eastern Congo using Aerochrome
III infrared film, which causes vegetation to appear in highly saturated hues of pinks and red. He argued that making the invisible visible highlights the complex situation in Congo, where 5.4 million people died in wars from 1998-2007, which we seldom hear about. Jelena Stojkovic presented the work of Takuma Nakahira in relation to Adachi’s theory of landscape (or fukeiron). She concluded that contemporary media is saturating history and everything, including revolution, is being commodified. As such, it is necessary to rethink how photography is integrated in debates around the possibility of a politically effective means of practice. Witold Kanicki explored 19th century Polish photography and how it was an explicitly political medium. On the one hand, studio portrait photography of the time emphasized national consciousness by depicting its subjects wearing Polish historical costumes. On the other hand, photographers such as Karol Beyer, who took post-mortem portraits of victims of the tsarist army, used the medium as a reactionary weapon. Penelope Petsini presented a series of works by Greek photographers responding to the Greek crisis in terms of documentation (direct recording), interpretation (critical art) and historicization (historical and political context). These included Dimitris Michalakis, Petros Efstathiadis, the Depression Era project, Nikolas Ventourakis, and more. Feargal Fitzpatrick argued that “landscapes are culture before they are nature” by exploring the “complex intersecting politics of land, labour, capital, territory, nation, empire, culture and identity” evident in police surveillance photographs taken in Tipperary town, Ireland, during the ‘Land War’ in 1890 and photographs by Robert French, whose main subject was the then under-construction New Tipperary. Harald R. Stuhlinger examined the graphic and visual language/propaganda of brochures for new housing complexes in Vienna after WWI under socialist rule, as well as photographic material used to promote the advancement of living conditions these complexes promised to offer. Sarah Tuck presented works by John Duncan, Kai Olaf Hesse, Paul Seawright, Malcolm Craig Gilbert, Mary McIntyre and David Farrell. She argued for the importance of keeping at pace with events and the ‘representational logic’ of our time. Her case study was the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland, suggesting that staging the ‘event of photography’ could “test ideas about the civic contract as an agonistic process that provides the discursive conditions for the recognition of a public ‘truth’.” Iro Katsaridou and Ioannis Motsianos analysed photographs by German soldiers taken in Thessaloniki during the years of the Nazi occupation (1941-1944). They examined the “theoretical and ethical problems as well as the challenges encountered” with these mostly touristic amateur snap-shots of the city’s monuments or popular destinations. Armenoui Kasparian Saraidari focused on the “discrepancies and the connections between personal and public archives and their impact in postmemory, memory, trauma and forgetting of the Armenian Genocide and Diaspora.” She concluded her presentation with her own visual work on the subject, which you can view at her website. Peter F. Hermans addressed “the relation between photography and politics as renegotiating the relation between the concrete and the abstract” via the global circulation of digital images and the intertwinement of imagemaking networks with the gaze of warfare and surveillance. As an example, he argued that camouflage patterns are becoming a digitised vernacular imagery. Jan Babnik examined two projects currently ongoing in the border region between Sudan and South Sudan: The Ears and Eyes of God (2009-ongoing) and The Satellite Sentinel Project (2010-ongoing). He argued that to understand the role of photography “one should turn away from the questions of re-presentation and focus more closely on the logic of photographing itself.” Quoting Barbara Kruger’s “the body is a battleground”, Jörg Scheller argued that body-related photography (bodybuilding and fitness) is inevitably ‘war photography’ – biopolitics at its most basic – and must be taken into account as one of the most significant fields of represented power and ideology in Western Modernity.
Levi Prombaum unpacked Kobena Mercer’s essay Reading Racial Fetishism: The Photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe (1989) in relation to the “ideological critiques, indexical functions and historiographical selfconsciousness” of works by Glenn Ligon, Rotimi Fani Kayode, Lyle Ashton Harris and Isaac Julien responding to the aesthetic fixation of the black body in the United States in the second half of the twentieth century. Tanya Sheehan asserted that photographic technology is historically predicated on the ‘normal’ white body. Early photographers struggled with black skin, regarding it a technical problem to be solved. Kodak’s ‘normal’ campaign, promoting photographic technology that captures accurate tones of white skin and the webcam face detecting technology fail in the video HP computers are racist served as suitable examples. Alan Cusack presented a portrait of his grandfather and examined how collected and inherited photographs can become “important objects in the formation and articulation of teenagers’ culture and identity” in relation to myth, memory and heritage. He presented a research-led art project in which students were asked to interpret and enact the inherited photos of each other, dialogically producing new narratives with potential for important pedagogical and narrative research. Mette Sandbye examined the culture of the ‘selfie’ (word of the year 2013) and Japanese ‘purikura’ machine photography which preceded it. Referencing Lacan, that it is necessary to be looked at in order to come to existence, Sandbye considered the social value of this kind of photography and the affects it produces. Report by Peter Eramian