Chapters 7: Robert Capa: The OptimistThis last third of the text is the most challenging. Linfield profiles three photographers (Capa, Natchwey, and Peress) to highlight different approaches to the problems raised in the previous sections. She quotes quite extensively, describing numerous photos, but showing very few. In the absence of pictures, or an appreciation of the work based on extensive viewing, it is impossible to appreciate her reading of how these image makers deal with issues of suffering and truth.
Capa was one of the first great war photographers, winner of numerous awards, and highly respected by peers and public alike. He was, as she points out, never described as a voyeur or a pornographer. While ostensibly known as a war photographer, he specialized in work depicting life behind the lines. He did not point his camera at brutality. He in fact declined to shoot the liberated extermination camps of Europe. This she finds more telling of the times and the state of politics, war, and violence before midcentury.
Capa insisted he didn’t have a style. He regarded photography as something of a craft rather than an art. He was a journalist and not an artist. That should not be taken to mean he believed he had nothing to say. On the contrary, he was clearly politically committed and saw war as an occasional necessity. “For Capa, partisanship wasn’t a problem: it was the solution. “In a war,” Capa told Gellhorn, who would become a good friend, “you must hate somebody or love somebody, you must have a position or you cannot stand what goes on.” A political stance didn’t occlude vision but instead made it possible; politics was the purpose of his work, not an obstacle to it. (p192)”
Reading Capa’s work requires coming to terms with open partisanship. “One cannot look at Capa’s war photographs without engaging the thorny problem of how to be pro-peace and anti-tyranny, and without understanding that to be both at once is sometimes impossible. (p190)”
But how does one separate his work from the work of fascist or (Soviet) photographers, who had equally clear commitments? Linfield discerns a difference in their work. Statist images glorify the group and fetishize weapons and death. Capa’s portraits sought to personalize. “Fascist art, Walter Benjamin observed, “puts a spell” on both subjects and viewers, “and under this spell they must appear to themselves monumental, i.e., incapable of well-considered and independent actions.” Capa’s Loyalist portraits, in contrast, show the army as a collection of ordinary yet unique individuals who have freely come together—not as a giant, impersonal war machine. These soldiers—they look frankly, intimately, unguardedly at Capa—not only fight for the people, they are the people. Pro-Franco photographs, on the other hand, stressed uniformity and hierarchical
relations... (p198)”
Chapter 8: James Nachtwey: The CatastrophistLinfield positions Nachtwey as the seminal post-modern war photographer, widely reviled as nihilistic, voyeuristic, pornographic. She finds his images difficult because they are so “completely divorced from religious, political, or historic redemption. (p205)” How does one read photos of cruelty when there is nothing that helps them make sense?
“Nachtwey’s photographs show us how images have become more extreme as political clarity has dissipated; this is, I think, no coincidence. His photographs raise the question, in a particularly heightened way: what happens to documentary photography— to the photography of witness— when it no longer has a politics it can support? What happens to documentary photography when the wars of nihilism...become its subject? (p206)”
Perhaps the problem is not so much in the images; the troubling issue is what has become of the world which he now records - and what, if anything, can we do about it? “...to dismiss Nachtwey as a pornographer, a voyeur, or an opportunist simply evades the perplexities about contemporary violence that his work raises. (p211)” Nachtwey’s world is not Capa’s world.
Linfield notes that part of Nachtwey’s problem is aesthetic astuteness. Even though he works under difficult conditions, often rushed, he has an eye for composition that produces powerful images. This has led to charges of him caring more for form than content. “For such critics, Nachtwey’s aesthetic prowess is a moral lapse and his refusal of stylistic self-effacement a form of corruption. (p209)” It suggests as well a stinginess of character, an unwillingness to accept that beauty is not limited in its appearance or expression. “But perhaps it tells us, instead, that beauty—and its attendant, tragedy—are not the sole property of the peaceful, prosperous West; stubbornly, defiantly, they insist on appearing even in those places where the social world has been vanquished. (p213)”
Linfield suggests his aesthetic structuring may be a way of understanding what he has witnessed. Redemption comes through aesthetics. “Amidst chaos, he hints at unity; amidst nihilism, he discovers form; amidst fragmentation, he finds connections; amidst cruelty, he discerns grace. Nachtwey has sometimes described himself as a witness—indeed, a servant—who merely conveys the travails of others. But that is the opposite of what he does. His photographs are less a direct presentation of his subjects’ experiences than a transformation of them; he is distilling, structuring, cohering the conditions of their lives and deaths rather than simply transmitting them. Like Primo Levi, who recited Dante as he slaved away in Auschwitz, Nachtwey’s insistence on structure reminds us of an alternate, saner world even as he ruthlessly plunges us into anarchy: one might say that his documents of barbarism are also documents of civilization. Nachtwey is shaping pain, molding it into something (almost) recognizable in the hopes that we might receive it.... (p215)”
Linfield regrets Nachtwey’s choice to limit textual evidence when presenting his images, which leaves many viewers with a decontextualized survey of cruelty and suffering and undermines his stated intent to promote understanding. “Photojournalism works in the opposite way: meaning—moral, political, aesthetic—is deepened through specificity; only when we know what we are looking at can we begin to engage the why and how. (p218)”
Chapter 9: Gilles Peress: The SkepticThe book finishes out with a profile of someone I had never heard of before encountering him here. In looking at some of his images on the web, I don’t really see what Linfield is getting at, but perhaps what I have seen is not a good representation. Peress’ books are not carried by the UAE university library system (Nachtwey and Capa’s are) and even used copies of Peress’ books are priced starting at US$100, so it’s unlikely I’m going to be seeing any properly presented work soon.
Peress is a contemporary of Nachtwey but does not consider himself a war photographer, though he has worked in many areas of conflict. He sees his work, and photography in general, as a means to explore and question the world around him.
“Peress’s pictures are often hard to decipher, but they are never about the absence of reality. His subject is more complex: the difficulty of finding, conveying, and, most of all, making meaning from reality. And because that is a hard, indeed often impossible, thing to do, Peress’s photographs are about failure: not as an individual shortcoming that can be fixed but as an inescapable aspect of the human condition that can only be endured. For Peress, to take pictures is to enter into what he calls “a methodology of self doubt.” (p234)”
That is not to say there is no way of understanding the world. “...he has assailed photography’s inward turn, which he calls “the postmodernist incapacity for dealing with the world, which is [based on the belief] that there is no accurate description of the world, so there is no point in going out to look at the world. And if you’re not going to look at the world then certainly you’re not going to change it.” (p236)”
Linfield sees him embracing skepticism in order to more deeply engage and question the world. He sees the photographic process of involving more than himself and his subject. “...photographs, he has said, are open documents “where half of the text is in the reader.” The viewer must work to complete the photograph by digging into what it suggests and endowing it with deeper insights; the photograph is the “moment where my language fi nishes and yours starts.” Every image, Peress has said, has four authors: the photographer, the camera, the viewer, and reality. But it is reality, he insists, that “has a way of speaking the loudest”: that speaks, in fact, “with a vengeance.” (p238)”
His work, she believes, requires a higher level of engagement from the reader. “Peress’s unconventional, often startling framing makes it hard for the viewer to know where to look and what, exactly, she’s being shown—or what, at least, is most important to see. The pictures are the opposite of news photographs: they seem layered rather than flat, and they require time and concentration. (p240)”
In conclusion
The book ends there, without any kind of summary to help us understand what we have seen and considered. As noted previously, the biggest shortcoming of the text is the paucity of images, as well as a alck of awareness about how such images are made, consumed and debated in contexts outside Europe and NA. I otherwise recommend this to anyone interested in thinking at greater length and depth about how we interact with photos, particularly difficult, troubling, vexing photos. The writing is clear and easy to follow and it seems Linfield has something to say, rather than just saying something to produce a book and pad her CV. The issues she raises are important and have led me to examine my own reactions to some of the work she describes. I am inspired to write more on this, but will leave that for another day and another entry.
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