Is Sean O'Hagan a Birther? On the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize

The prize for 2011, according to this release in The Guardian, has gone to self-proclaimed "documentary storyteller" Jim Goldberg of that oh so radical Magnum Agency (here too). Don't get me wrong; this is not a complaint about the judges's decision. The Magnum crowd, Goldberg surely included, are talented and produce lots of provocative work. The point is that the jury this year, like it regularly has done in recent years, has honored a pretty mainstream documentary undertaking. Moreover, they have honored a photographer who works for what arguably is the pre-eminent establishment institution in the field. No news there. I say all this just to remind folks about Sean O'Hagan's plaintive voice which is raised annually asking why, oh why the Deutsche Börse short list is so full of dreaded "conceptual" photography. O'Hagan, of course, is photography critic at The Guardian. You can find his most recent missive on the matter here.

On this topic O'Hagan has begun to remind me of those "birthers" who, despite all evidence to the contrary, insist that Obama was born on some other planet. In other words, his view seems wholly impervious to evidence or argument. And, like the birthers too, O'Hagan is seeking to
police the boundaries of legitimacy. They are obsessed with political legitimacy, he is worried about what is legitimate photography. I've pointed out several times - here and here and here - how far off the mark O'Hagan actually is. In light of this recent decision, we can, I suppose, anticipate a reconsideration in his column any day now?

Government 101

France, bureaucracy, Picardie, 2006. Pascale Hoornaert (b. 1952) works
for eight hours a week as town clerk in Ancienville (population 78), Aisne
department, Pidardie region. She holds the same position in two other
villages nearby, working a total of 31 hours per week. Monthly salary:
1,025 euro (US$ 1,348). Photograph © Jan Banning.

Lee, New Hampshire (population 4,145) Board of Selectmen, January 27, 2003
(L to R) Dwight Barney (Chairman), Joseph Ford, Richard Wellington.
Photograph © Paul Shambroom.

At The Guardian today there is this short notice of quite interesting work by Dutch photographer Jan Banning that consists of portraits of bureaucrats at work in eight different countries ("Bolivia, China, France, India, Liberia, Russia, the United States, and Yemen"). Banning suggests his "photography has a conceptual, typological approach reminding of August Sander’s ‘Menschen des 20 Jahrhunderts’ (‘People of the Twentieth Century’)." Put aside that by declaring the work "conceptual" he risks setting off yet another round of whining by Guardian photography critic Sean O'Hagan.* What strikes me about these portraits is less the comparison to Sander, than the series called "Meetings" that American photographer Paul Shambroom did several years ago. Shambroom toured the U.S. photographing local government 'in action.'

In Banning's images it is interesting to note the context; nearly all of the officials work under the watchful eye of the heroic or the powerful (Gandhi, Mao, Putin ...), often surrounded by the trappings of legitimacy. It is interesting to contrast these banal scenarios with the many images of disgruntled citizens manning the barricades or with photos of famous elected officials. Politics only appears glamorous.
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* For my previous (mostly) dissents from O'Hagan's various complaints look here.

Like a Thief's Dream

At The Guardian today Sean O'Hagan has this nice (sort of) review of Danny Lyon's (not-exactly-photography) book Like a Thief's Dream.* I have posted a couple of time here on Lyon and his work. Likewise, I posted here a number of times - mostly critically - on O'Hagan. Not this time. This sounds like a book worth tracking down. You can find an interview with Lyon on the book here.
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* Danny Lyon. Like a Thief's Dream. New York: powerHouse, 2007.

Does Sean O'Hagan Really Get Photography?

It seems to have become an annual event. The short list for the Deutsche Börse Prize is announced. And then Sean O'Hagan promptly writes a column in The Guardian complaining that the jury seems obsessed with "conceptual" photography at the expense of ... well, of things that O'Hagan seems to like better. And, on that matter, O'Hagan seems remarkably self assured. What he prefers, he tells us, is "straight photography – photography without pretensions." No examples of what he means. No sense of which of the now canonical figures in the history of photography would be drummed out of any possible consideration for the Prize. Just a broad complaint. In any case, here is his column from this week. Here and here are two posts, with relevant links, I wrote in response to last year's installment.

Nothing much has changed in my assessment this year. But instead of simply repeating myself, I'd ask you to consider a hypothetical. According to the Prize web page, the Deutsche Börse Prize is awarded "a contemporary photographer of any nationality, who has made the most significant contribution (exhibition or publication) to the medium of photography in Europe in the previous year." When, as will soon enough be the case, Sebastião Salgado completes his Genesis project (which, by the way, The Guardian has been previewing in installments) and publishes the planned for book and mounts the planned for exhibition, will he be eligible for the Deutsche Börse short list by O'Hagan's lights? It is not just that Salgado's work has "pretensions," but it arguably also calls into question in various ways naïve views of photography and its uses. I am not sure how, given his ongoing complaints, O'Hagan could not object if the jury included Salgado for the shortlist. But I am then not at all sure who he might deem worthy of consideration.

Guardian Photo Critic Misses the Importance of Black & White

Green Warehouse, 1978. Photograph © William Christenberry.

Palmist Building (Winter), Havana Junction, Alabama 1981.

Photograph © William Christenberry.

Sean O'Hagan is at it again. The photo critic at The Guardian has this review of a newly opened exhibition entitled "Myth, Manners and Memory: Photographers of the American South" (slide show here) in which he discusses work by Walker Evans, William Christenberry, Eudora Welty, William Eggleston, Carrie Mae Weems, Susan Lipper and Alec Soth. Fine photographers all. But the following statement brought me up short:

"Weems, the most political photographer here, confronts the turbulent racist history of the American south, placing herself in a series of resonant locations and contrasting the barbarity of slavery with the refined social etiquette that held sway among rich plantation families."

Oh, and did he forget to mention Weems is the only African-American photographer he planned to to discuss? So, the fact that Weems makes race evident (meaning she explicitly makes it central to her work), while all the white folks (here not just the photographers, but apparently, the curators of this show) apparently "don't" do so is political? Why is it not political that the white photographers (mostly) focus elsewhere - or are least seen to do so? I'd put the stress on this last phrase because they don't really.

In Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, for instance, James Agee (Evans's co-conspirator) explicitly talks about why they are not going to address race - and then offers pointed vignettes demonstrating the cruelty of race relations in Alabama circa 1937. And, after all, do the white folks in Lipper's "Grapevine series" not play a role in, or suffer the consequences of, the peculiar way race works and has worked in the South?* Do they have no race? What about this image by Alec Soth? Does it plumb racial themes?

Jimmie's Apartment , Memphis, Tennessee, 2002.
Photograph © Alec Soth.

Who is that in the photos clipped and taped to the back of the closet door? Do those images contrast with the shabby apartment in any way? And did Memphis figure in "the turbulent racial history of the American south"? Is it, perhaps, a "resonant location"? By and large, I find O'Hagan's photo criticism wacky - and I don't mean that in a good way. I've said that several times here before. In this instance, I wonder what he was thinking when he looked at this exhibition.
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* And, of course, race is an American problem, not one just for the South or just for blacks.

O'Hagan on Szarkowski

Photograph © Richard Avedon.

John Szarkowski died just over three years ago. I noted his passing here. Today The Guardian has run this appropriately appreciative essay by Sean O'Hagan on the late photographer/curator/advocate. As often as not, I find O'Hagan's offerings at The Guardian to be wildly off the mark, verging sometimes on being literally incomprehensible. Not this time. I think his basic point - that Szarkowski may well have been the most influential figure in 20th century photography - is plausible. Even if that claim is not entirely persuasive, it nonetheless points us in useful directions - away from photographs and toward photography and how different people use it for different purposes. (One obvious, ironic implication is that we need to be less pre-occupied with photographers.) In the 1960s Szarkowski integrated the art world, making photography a respectable medium in that domain. Now, I wish he had been less successful, because photography is too important to be placed in the hands of museums and galleries and curators and art historians. But the tale of how photography became an art form is worth recalling just insofar as it was an 'achievement', an artifact of a concerted campaign.

Self-Censorship and the Uses of Discomfort

From: Immediate Family. Photograph © Sally Mann.

In The Guardian today this a review by Sean O'Hagan of a newly opened retrospective of work by Sally Mann. (You can find an earlier notice here.) Here are two interesting passages. The first addresses an early series of images Mann calls Immediate Family.

"It featured black and white images of her three children, often naked or partially naked, as they played and posed in the woods, lakes and rivers around her home in rural Virginia.

The images, some of which are on show here in the 59-year-old American's first British retrospective, are by turns beautiful, disturbing and unashamedly sensual. Perhaps more problematically, all of them are, to one degree or another, staged. [. . .]

"Many of these pictures are intimate, some fictions and some fantastic," Mann said of the series, "but most are ordinary things that every mother has seen." Well, maybe, but not every mother has restaged and then rendered them in such a darkly beautiful and ambiguous ways. Intriguingly, none of the more outrightly provocative photographs have found their way into this show, which is an edited version of a bigger retrospective exhibition that has already toured Europe. Whether this is down to lack of space or fear of public – or tabloid – outcry is anyone's guess, but one could argue that something has been lost in this excised version of the series: the sense that Mann is walking a tightrope between reflecting childhood sexuality in all its lack of self-consciousness and staging it in often dramatic reconstructions. This, in effect, is where the true power of her art lies.

I will give O'Hagan the benefit of the doubt here and assume he is simply being ironic. Of course the reason the "more provocative" images in the series are not being displayed is that the gallery and/or photographer anticipated public complaints. So, instead of censorship we get anticipatory reaction. If I don't show you the provocative images I won't have to worry about being forced to remove them from the show. In other words, the censors have done their work effectively before the exhibition is even mounted.

Here is the second passage, this one a typically hand-wringing worry about what we have a "right" to show or to see.

The other, even more disturbing series on show here is entitled What Remains (2000–04), which approaches death and dying head on. Mann gained access to the University of Tennessee Forensic Anthropology Centre, a place that would not seem out of place in one of Chuck Palahniuk's darkly humorous short stories. Here, bodies that have been donated to science are left outside in the woods so that the process of organic decomposition can be studied by forensic scientists.

Mann's close-up images of these rotting corpses are not for the faint of heart, but, again, the prints – made by an old-fashioned chemical method called the wet-plate collodion process – have a Victorian feel that is almost painterly. One does, though, feel like a voyeur when looking at images such as this. They raise the ethical question of whether a person's decision to donate their body to science gives scientists the right, at a later date, to grant Mann permission to photograph that – decomposing – body. (And whether the result should then be displayed as art. )

From there O'Hagan quickly turns to the safe subject of photographic technique. Apparently it would be OK for a crime novelist to describe rotting corpses. And it is OK for forensic scientists to study them. And it is OK for us to watch the various CSI programs on television. But Mann's images (stylized as they are) are somehow beyond the pale?

Perhaps, I am wrong, but is O'Hagan here hinting that we ought to self-censor more than we already do? It is difficult to tell since he lauds Mann for her creativity and courage and seems to esteem her work despite "all the uncomfortable issues it raises." Doesn't Mann's work stand as an indictment of censorship and self-censorship? Doesn't it suggest that what we need is to see what photographers show and then engage in critical argument about where the bounds of taste and morality are located? Then photography can contribute in useful ways to self- and social and political exploration and discovery.

Impossible Polaroids

Today The Guardian is running this story about a company trying to maintain production of Polaroid film. As I've noted several times here, I don't get the Polaroid thing. And I am not terribly concerned with the technical aspects of photography (other than insisting that it is a technology that we use to do things with and, as such, - trivially - has crucial technical dimensions). In any case, Sean O'Hagan writes:

"Given the right kind of marketing . . . the . . . film will probably succeed, but the bigger question underlying all this techo-primitive innovation is, why do so many of us long for the Polaroid in all its clunky, clumsy, grainy old-fashionedness?"

Good question. Unfortunately, I find his answer incomprehensible (literally, I don't know what he means):

"The answer, I suspect, is to do with the kind of demands a Polaroid camera makes on the user, which are manifestly not the same kind of demands a digital camera makes. One is big, hands-on, clunky, somewhat difficult and, even in an expert's hands, can be hit-and-miss. The other is streamlined, compact, easy, and relatively fail-safe in terms of the end results – you shoot and delete until you capture the image you want. One is somehow "authentic", the other is arguably even more so but does not carry the weight of the relatively recent, thus overly fetishised, pop-cultural past.

Maybe it's me, but this last part (especially) seems like gibberish. It amounts to saying that we now have nostalgia for a technology that we used to like because it had a certain nostalgic character. Huh? That said, if Patti Smith thinks Polaroids are OK, who am I to argue?