The story behind the Abu Ghraib series

by Giuseppe Di Bella, artist/photographer based in London

Art and myself vs. the British anti-terrorist branch and the FBI

The first time I saw the Abu Ghraib photographs I was unsure what I was looking at. Of course I very soon realised the seriousness of these images and their global impact upon political, social and cultural life. In the same way that many of us were, I was deeply disturbed and shocked by these images as they contrasted with the US military and political objectives under George W Bush presidency. These objectives were to bring democracy to the people of Iraq and to free them from the tyranny of its former president, Saddam Hussein.

Although the Abu Ghraib images provoked profound anger and disgust, I must admit they didn’t really come as a surprise. Sadly, these atrocities happen in every single war and are nothing new. I believe the Abu Ghraib photographs expose and remind us of the power relation in a war zone. An imbalanced power: the powerful against the powerless.

As an artist working with photography, I felt I had a moral obligation to respond to the Iraqi conflict and particularly to these tragic events. At the time (May 2004) I had concerns on the way public images were being circulated, treated and consumed by society; particularly gruesome and violent images. So it is from this perspective that I produced the Abu Ghraib series that consist into a collection of postage stamps that I put into public and global circulation. (Make it a better place – Group exhibition conceived and curated by Dinu Lee – The Holden Gallery – MMU)

The reasons I chose the postage stamp format as a vehicle for my ideas was because of its consumable, desirable and collectable characteristics. It is also a very democratic way to diffuse images and information. Traditionally, the postage stamp function is to pay tribute or commemorate the traditions and culture of a country. It is also a powerful form of communication as it travels around the globe advertising the proudest aspects of a nation, in contrast to the Abu Ghraib photographs. I was interested in how the mechanical act of licking and stamping a postage stamp could be linked to a notion of humiliation and abuse/torture as revealed in the photographs. I was conscious that this process could turn the viewer into an active consumer and make the user aware of the consumption and treatment of public images in circulation. This could also lead the user to become an active accomplice – in some sense – to the abuse and violence. The repetitions of images on the stamp sheets are also a reflection of the depersonalisation that happens to victims of such abuse. The intimate and personal details of each account, and the consequences for the abused/tortured is hidden and forgotten as the images are multiplied, repeated and ‘consumed’ by society.

The way I chose to present the work was also a very important factor, as I wanted the viewer to look at the stamps as objects of consumption. In addition, four series of franked stamps – therefore used/consumed – are presented framed and as such, as trophies. Ultimately, that is what some photograph seems to be about. Through this presentation, I wanted to highlight the contemporary society’s appetite to consume such gruesome and violent imagery.

As there is two version of the Abu Ghraib stamp (US/UK) I had to delegate the distribution of the US version of the stamp to a friend who lives in New York: Art. (Stands for Arthur) My friend Art, whom I have not met (not yet!), agreed to actively participate in this project. I sent Art, via an international courier company (I won’t name it here for legal reasons) more than 100 envelopes and postcards – all pre-addressed and with the Abu Ghraib faux stamp affixed on it. The instructions given to Art were clear: to buy US stamps and affix them onto the envelopes and postcards beside the faux stamp and to post them from New York.

When I contacted the courier company to inquire the lateness of the parcel I was told that the police, then subsequently the British anti-terrorist branch were investigating the content of the parcel for alleged ‘anti-American documentation’. I was also informed that the content of the parcel had been scanned and passed onto the American authorities for further investigation. I requested the courier company many times during that week to be contacted by the British authorities in order to explain my work, but my requests were systematically refused.

A week later, I required the courier company either inform the British authorities to release the parcel or to charge me with an offence I evidently had not committed, (The fact that I use a real postage stamp onto the envelopes and postcards, invalidated the potential problem any faux stamp could present to the postal authorities) The courier company agent put me on hold and eventually informed me that the British authorities found the work ‘offensive’ to which I replied that the images are indeed unpleasant; but they are a verification of the sexual abuse and of the torture to the victims, their families and their communities. They are an insult to humanity and human dignity. So, I cannot but agree with the British and other authorities that the images are indeed offensive. Later, I was also told that the British authorities could keep the work indefinitely, to which I answered that it was illegal even for the British authorities to hold something indefinitely, particularly when no offence had been committed. I demanded the immediate release of the parcel otherwise I would be seeking legal action to retrieve it. Eventually, the following day the parcel left for its final destination in New York. My friend Art started to post the mail and I was beginning to receive back the envelopes and postcards so important for my installation.

A few weeks after the British authorities incident, I received a phone call from my friend Art informing me that two FBI agent were about to pay him a visit regarding the Abu Ghraib work and myself. As he was obviously concerned about it, I suggested he simply answers their questions and not to worry too much, as it was clear they were inquiring about my artwork and me. The FBI wanted to know where he knew me from, if I had spoken to him about my political views and finally if I had a bigger agenda. (Making new stamps maybe?) The funniest thing about this laughable story is that the two FBI agents were dressed with back suites and black glasses.

After that, I did not hear neither from the British authorities or the FBI. Although I freak out about the British anti-terrorist branch, the FBI seemed to be less formidable because of the comical link inferred by their attire. Sometimes I wonder how much trouble I would have got into if I were a Muslim artist, or worse if was living in America?

The saddest thing during and about this story is that I was beginning behaving as if I were doing something wrong, something illegal. I felt my emails and my phone calls were being monitored. Some how I felt watched. Whether this was pure paranoia or not, I don’t know. The idea of being investigated by the anti-terrorist branch was somehow concerning, and although I am an Italian citizen, I could be easily mistaken for a person of Middle Eastern origin, therefore a potential threat to the authorities – or am I wrong? The reality remained that I had to bring the framed work abroad without having it seized by the authorities. I wasn’t prepared to take any more risks, because of the exhibition deadline, and little by little and with the crucial help of my friends, the installation material crossed the British border unnoticed and the work was successfully exhibited in Brussels. (Portraits de l’autre – Group exhibition curated by Virginie Devillers – Musee d’Ixelles, Brussels – Belgium)

The story of the Abu Ghraib series inevitably points to the events of the 9/11 and the Madrid and London bombings and their aftermath. Anti-terror laws have been implemented all over the world. We must wonder whether these new laws pose a threat to our freedom of speech and artistic expression and if they infringe our civil liberties. We need to ensure that the current war on terror does not completely annihilate our freedom; it should not justify everything and anything. More power is being taken from us when actually more trust should be given to people. The experience I have encountered with the authorities poses a fundamental question: Are we really living in a democratic society?

Global Documentaries – Your Comfort Is My Silence

by Ali Mincer

 

 

I went to Mark Durdens talk called ‘Global Documentaries’ at the Cornerhouse on Thursday. He spoke about Martin Parr, Paul Graham, Philip Chancel, Santiago Sierra, Andreas Gursky and Boris Mikhailov. He also referenced the work of Chris Killip and Nobuyoshi Araki. The images moved through both positive and mostly negative sexualised images of women and images of the working classes as either automatons or vulgar.

 

More than 50% of the images were actually of sexdolls, ‘tacky lipstick’, working class women sitting in dirty landscapes and Mikhailovs naked older women. We were even shown the place where women buy their shoes. Mark Durden selected the photographers and then selected the images. When he spoke about Philip Chancels images of Korean women he then spoke of ‘how sensuous, erotic, exotic’ they were. The audience was predominantly female. Talk about white noise – the torture method. I was told later I called out ‘I can’t take anymore – of these talks’. It took all my strength to stay in the room. Someone even called out ‘Do you think they have issues?’.

 

He told us that through these images of us, through these endless negative images of women and workers and the downtrodden, these men were revealing the very ‘ugly, shallow, hollow, tacky, fake’ face of global consumerism. No one was prepared to question the very holy grail of documentary though Mark seemed open to our questioning. I wondered why this work had more old boys colonial theory wrapped around it and were we to believe these photographers had in fact conquered us with their cameras? Whilst Mark seemed a very lovely person he was totally unaware of what he had just shown us. We offered alternative suggestions but Mark said he didn’t like their work. I explained that I found each individuals work very interesting but shown together in this particular context with these particular images he was giving out a very clear message. He also spoke of their influences including, Turner, Araki, Barnett Newman, Pollock, all male artists but no mention at any time was made of any female creative practitioner bar the fleeting barely audible reference to Sherrie Levine…

 

Ironically women have long been at the forefront of the deconstruction of those very images dealing with consumerist culture. From Barbara Kruger – ‘your comfort is our silence’ – to Cindy Sherman, Jenny Holzer to Jo Spence and many more. In lens based media for decades marginalised artists have been questioning these old boys visual clubs. How sad for us then that this mentality still persists in our institutions….

 

I went from there to the East German show at the Cornerhouse – the difference was pronounced and I wondered why that was. There wasn’t the same old boys colonial vibe to this show – it was predominantly women taking the images here and more than half the big hardback monograph books were by women. Very different from the documentary mentality in the West. I compared this to the old boy’s mentality I just witnessed in the talk.

 

I later called into a sweet shop and was confronted by long rows of photographs of naked, white, blonde haired women on the front of all the mainstream male magazines on the mainstream shelves and I knew I was back in ‘that mentality’ again…..

Abu Ghraib Stamps

If you remember my blog entry about Giuseppe Di Bella’s work, here is more of his project via his FlickR, reproduced here with permission:

White noise

By Charlie Devereux, liveblogging from The Democratic Image symposium

Here’s an example of the “white noise” Mark Sealy spoke about yesterday – the proliferation of information thrown at individuals involuntarily every time they go online.

Ask.com launched a marketing campaign in which they have tried to use the all-pervasive popularity of Google to turn some people against them (and instead use their own search engine).

In a classic case of ‘astroturfing‘ they have mimicked a grass roots revolution, jumping on the issue of the monopoly that Google holds over the dissemination of information over the web.

Unfortunately for ask.com their decision to appropriate some of the new Web 2.0 / ‘democratic’ tools that have become so popular has backfired disastrously. On a website they created for the campaign they allowed the public to comment and the public has reacted with vitriolic spite, with many who found themselves on the site feeling they had been conned into thinking it was something it wasn’t.

But the question is: has ask.com still profitted from the furore and am I contributing to it by writing this post?

Collaborative practice

By Charlie Devereux, liveblogging from The Democratic Image symposium

While yesterday’s debate focused primarily on the marriage between technology and photography, today’s morning session was more practical, with talks by two practitioners of collaborative photography.

Marysa Dowling (who posted earlier on this blog) has worked with her family and children in east London and Havana schools to explore relationships and concepts of identity. Irene Lumley has collaborated with sufferers of breast cancer and cystic fibrosis to give them “a different way of expressing their issues.”

What is apparent in both their work is the need for conversation and dialogue, and how there are constantly fluctuating levels of control: at the end of the day, who owns the work – the established ‘artist’ or the ‘participant’?

Irene Lumley said she believed in treating her collaborators as artistic equals. She said that she never displays an image taken in collaboration without first consulting the co-creator.

An issue that was raised was how work like this is treated by galleries and artistic establishments. John Perivolaris mentioned how a project for Look 07 was treated with a certain condescension when it was pitched to certain galleries, who questioned whether the quality of the work would stand up.

John pointed out that in some ways collaborative artists act as an interface between art institutions and groups of people who would normally be excluded from that world.

The nail and the door

by Jessica Reed liveblogging at the Democratic Image conference

Yesterday afternoon our wifi connection went down, but I want to write a great and relevant story Pedro Meyer told us about during the afternoon session.

A couple of years ago in Peru a project was organized around young kids and literacy – maybe photography could, after all, be a very good tool to teach young people various skills, and help them analyse their own world. The teachers decided to give them a camera, and told them to come back with a picture which would be an answer to this a question: “who is exploiting you?“.

One of the kids came back with a picture of a nail sticking out of a door. The teachers were all confused: “a nail on a door? they thought, “how could that possibly represent who is exploiting him?  He probably didn’t  understand the assignement, let’s talk to him”.

But one of the teachers decided to show the pictures to his classmates. To their surprise, all the kids vigorously nodded in agreement, immediately understanding the picture and what it represented. It turned out the kids were walking to Lima, miles away from their hometown, to work as shoeshine boys everyday. They would rent a nail from a man in order to hang out their kits every night, and the man would in turn take their money and mistreat them.

How important is it not to dismiss what the viewer is seeing in the picture?

Access

By Charlie Devereux, liveblogging at the Democratic Image conference

Following on from Jessica’s post about accessibility, during the lunchbreak I was speaking to Janice McLaren, projects organiser at The Photographers Gallery. She told of an intern who had recently completed a photography project in China where the children involved had never before seen a photograph, let alone had access to the myriad of images available on the net.

So when we talk about how the internet is democratising photography, we must bear in mind that until the whole world has online access then this debate is only relevant to one sixth of the world.

Autograph

By Jessica Reed liveblogging at the Democratic Image conference

Mark Sealy, director of photographic agency Autograph just gave a presentation highlighting the fact that if we talk about Democracy in the digital photography world, we should keep in mind that only + one billion people worldwide have access to the Internet. He also talked at length about the (mis)representation of “visible minorities” in relation to the while middle class males’ “white noise” which obstruct access to the global media platforms for an enormous amount of people left voiceless or misrepresented.

You can find more about Autograph’s mission and ongoing work here.

IRL vs. Online experiments

Bill Thompson was scheduled to speak at the conference this morning, but had to stay at home due to personal matters. He was, however, talking to us live via Skype, and asked himself/us a really good question: how will he remember the event? Will he remember it as being in Manchester with us, or being at home, following the symposium from his desk? His reply seemed to be simple: “I will remember it as being blurry!”.

He then mentioned following the general elections with his friends online, all of them chatting and drinking behind their respective screens – “I remember quite vividly, he said, as being an event I was truly following with my friends”.

Fair enough Bill (maybe you will want to comment on this one)!

Having equal access to something cannot necessarily be construed as democratic

By Charlie Devereux, liveblogging from The Democratic Image symposium

Pedro Meyer’s keynote talk was a tour through the development of technology and how this has affected his work and photography around the world.

Here are some facts he threw out:

– The omnipresence of digital means that film costs nothing nowadays. Today we should instead be looking at how much it costs to store the data. The cost and capacity of a hard drive is a better measure of how much photography costs today.

– The price of digital cameras is falling by 30% year-on-year

– The Mexican photagrapher Raul Ortega published a book with funding from the Chiapas government. He printed 4000 copies, 2000 of which remained unsold 4 years later. He then published it as a downloadable pdf on Meyer’s zonezero. 24,000 were downloaded within 30 days.

So, the argument goes, advances in technology (low cost + increased distribution) = more democratic.

Yes, but…

Having equal access to something cannot necessarily be construed as democratic – look at Coca Cola.

The debate continues with a video link up with Bill Thompson after the coffee break.

Giuseppe di Bella’s stamps

by Jessica Reed, liveblogging from the The Democratic Image conference

As I was walking to the conference this morning I found myself chatting with Giuseppe Di Bella, a French-Sicilian photographer based in London; I hope to get him to blog here this week-end. Talking about the myriad of exhibitions around the city, he asked me if I had seen his work. “Not yet”, I replied slightly embarrassed, “but I will as soon as possible”.

He smiled, “well there’s a really good story attached to my work, something you might like to blog about. It turns out I have the FBI following me around. They find my work to be suspicious”.

And how could they not! Giuseppe used photographs of Abu Ghraib which he then transformed into stamps, sending letters worldwide adorned with his controversial art. “Of course”, he pointed out, “I would also add a real stamp so as not to be accused of counterfeit. But they didn’t like my art one bit. They have been watching my actions closely, and even interrogated one of my acquaintance in New York”.

“Well”, I replied, “… that would certainly make a good blog story”.

Can the democratic republic of photography be glimpsed on the horizon?

By Charlie Devereux, liveblogging from the Democratic Image symposium

The title of this blog is a quote by John Perivolaris, who opened today’s symposium by throwing some questions to the audience.

Most important of all, considering the title of the conference, he asked that we consider how we define democracy.

“Democracy is a word much bandied about,” he said.

Here’s Wikipedia’s definition of democracy:

“While the term democracy is typically used in the context of a political state, the principles are also applicable to other groups and organizations.”

I think that if this discussion is going to take off we will have to arrive at some kind of definition for democracy.

The professionals, the media and the people

by Hughes Leglise-Bataille, Paris-based amateur photographer

“Time magazine has voted you “The Person of the Year” for “seizing the
reins of the global media, for founding and framing the new digital
democracy, for working for nothing and beating the pros at their own
game”. So, did you?”

In my native French, the word “personne” means both a person, and no one. By making us all “Person of the Year”, ironically, Time magazine has replaced the individual with the people, offering us as its cover a blank computer screen, like a mirror of billion faces. Is this a faceless crowd, or like these mosaics of thousand of images, does it have some recognizable features ? And most importantly, can we shape it ? After all, in “digital demo-cracy”, there’s the computer, the people, but also the power (kratos): by the people, for the people.

Trying to tackle this question, I can only draw on my personal experience as an amateur photographer. Covering news in Paris, I’m somehow “competing” with professional photographers from the media, often working side-by-side with them. At night, I quickly select the best shots and upload them to Flickr, with short captions describing the events, so people have the opportunity to discover the images at the same time they appear in the media. The question at that point is: why do they look ? What difference is there, what’s the added-value, how this so-called “citizen (photo)journalism” is complementing or competing with the mainstream, professional media ? I believe these differences can be broken down into four points :

– story-telling: for obvious reasons, the paper media can only show very few pictures of an event, often just one or two. But there’s no way one can tell an exhaustive and balanced story with a couple of photos. Therefore, the ones selected tend to be either informative but boring, or spectacular but biased. Even on the main media websites, it’s rare to have a portfolio of more than half a dozen shots. Amateurs have no such restrictions, and can choose to post on their blogs as many photos as they deem necessary to present all the angles of an event, from the mundane to the dramatic.

– access: depending on the type of event, amateurs can be handicapped by more or less restricted access to the scene. Without the proper accreditation, some places and personalities are simply off-limit. Sometimes, it’s the publication itself which is legally restricted, a growing trend in France with a recent law officially aimed at the “happy slapping” phenomenon but which in fact, will strongly limit the freedom of citizen photojournalism. The sheer complexity of the logistics also hinders the coverage capacity of an amateur: for instance, professional photojournalists often have a motorbike with a driver to move around.Therefore, citizen journalism is bound to be local. And that’s also where it can beat the pros: by being closer to the community, amateurs are less intrusive and better accepted (eg. the French suburbs where journalists, especially TV crews, have been regularly attacked since 2005).

–ethics: beyond the legal framework, professionals have rules, amateurs haven’t. While some may argue that these rules can sometimes amount to a form of censorship (eg. the collusion of political / business interests with the media), the lack of standards in citizen photojournalism is probably more worrying. Image manipulation (so much easier with digital photography), staged photos, bias towards spectacular / violent images, lack of respect for the subjects, etc. are all disturbing. Responsibilities probably lie with all parties: the photographers, the websites hosting their pictures, and the people visiting them.

–economics: stating the obvious, amateurs don’t work for the money, while pros have to make a living. However, the digital revolution has dramatically reduced the difference between the two and it’s now relatively easy for an amateur to have the same equipment as a pro, and to get some exposure. Exposure, that’s often what matters for the amateur: it’s not about the money, it’s about the (relative) fame of having one’s name in a newspaper, and/or thousands of visitors on one’s photoblog. The problem is that intermediaries have jumped on the opportunity, promising both the “fame” and (some) money by putting the amateurs in contact with the media. I tend to believe that unfortunately, this is both lowering the quality of the work and its economic value.

Finally, I would like to mention one important thing: citizen journalism, especially photojournalism, is often mixing up testimonies with journalism. To me, the people sending photos taken with their camera phones of the bombings in London, for instance, are just testimonies. What they do is no different than in the pre-digital age, when they would have told their story to the media. Now, they have the pictures to back it up, but in essence it’s the same process. Photojournalism isn’t just the recording of an image, and owning a camera doesn’t make one a photographer. But maybe it’s the media’s job to raise the standards, and demonstrate what good photojournalism can and should be ?

Thanks to the digital revolution, amateur photojournalism has become available to many photographers (“by the people”) and is able to reach a tremendous audience (“for the people”), but ultimately, does it mean better photojournalism and therefore, better democracy ? Or on the contrary, is it threatening professional photojournalism and forcing it to lower its standards ? From a strictly financial point of view, if the increase of the photographic offer has decreased its value, it seems the only way out is to compensate by increasing its quality. Call me optimistic, but I’m convinced the problem is not with the professional photographers (because they do take excellent photos and because even if you have to make money out of it, it’s not a job you choose for the money), nor with the public (people would learn and appreciate high-quality photos), but with the media owners themselves, who are trying to lower the costs at the expense of quality.

As for amateur photojournalists, I guess that in an ideal world, either they should be good and committed enough to ultimately become professionals, or they can exploit the niche of local journalism, for which they are better prepared than the professionals, and where the investment is lower for the media. But if everyone wants to be the “Person of the Year”, I’m afraid no one will…

Hughes Leglise-Bataille is winner of the NPPA – Best of Photojournalism 2007 awards in the Amateur Photoblog News and Photojournalism categories. Photos featured in articles in Le Monde, le Figaro, LCI (French TV news channel), Salon.com, MAX magazine.

poDcast on photography and the digital age

Pedro Meyer from the leading photography website zonezero.com (and who previously posted on this blog) was interviewed for our weekly openDemocracy poDcast. You can listen to it here.

Bad habits to break for a democratic future

by Mark Fonseca Rendeiro, journalist/podcaster at bicyclemark.org

“Time magazine has voted you “The Person of the Year” for “seizing the
reins of the global media, for founding and framing the new digital
democracy, for working for nothing and beating the pros at their own
game”. So, did you?”

They can shower all the awards and sing all kinds of praises about the work that I -a podcast journalist- have been doing for several years, it still won’t change the fact that I can barely pay my rent next month.

The mere fact that in order for people to potentially notice our work, we need TIME magazine to shine a vague spotlight on “us”, is pretty oxymoronic.

It seems to me that despite all the potential that the internet and personal publishing in all its forms brings to the world, we are still in the primordial ooze stage of what could become a long media evolution.

You see, many of us grew up with media habits. Many of them were passed down from people who raised us, or where we grew up: the evening tv news at dinner time, the local or national paper over breakfast, the brief radio news report in the car. Sure, loads of us were also internet children, but back in the 90’s, our options still revolved around a bunch of basic news corporations who were early adopters of putting news online. So whatever your media habits growing up, one thing was very likely – there were a select few places where you looked. And even if you didn’t love those sources, you were used to them, you took what you wanted and ignored it when you saw fit.

Fast forward ten years to around 2004. Blogs finally break into the mainstream after years on the fringe. Some people start to talk revolution. By 2007, they’re sounding the alarms and repeating that same lame speech about how the media landscape has changed because of blogs.

Trouble is, they’re talking about 10 blogs. 20 if you want to be generous. If you live in Germany maybe it’s 5 blogs. Regardless of the country, a handful of blogs, out of the ocean of possibilities, were recognized and referred to by the mainstream. The old players, those media channels we grew up with, the ones that managed to survive, they used their still wide reaching power to anoint a select few. You might know them as the A-List.

The A-list, in 2004, was already pulling in about 99% of the blog reading audience (I remember a PEW Survey back then). In other words, out of millions of choices, millions of voices, 10 chosen few get 99% of the attention. Not to mention they also get most of the ad revenue and syndication deals that make it possible to blog for a living.

Old habits die hard, just because you’ve got a world of choice and a wealth of information out there, doesn’t mean the audience will break with the media habits they were raised with; the reliance upon a select few sources that are labeled as the best according to certain unclear measurement standards.

So while the A-List might be writing about fluff topics like the latest mobile phone, a moviestar’s love children, or pasting the latest New York Times op-ed piece and writing one sentence about it. Somewhere, not being read by most people, there is a citizen journalist writing from the streets of São Paulo or Dili, describing to us (even though we’re not reading) how and why people are struggling to survive in extreme poverty.

Because even though it might be the year of “we the media”, we are still stuck under the boot of a media elite. And while the forest of choices is vast, the public still chooses the same 10 trees because some old lumberjack told them these were the best ones out there.

My hope and the reason I will keep doing what I do? The next generations will break free of these habits. Today’s youngest internet users will do something this current audience doesn’t, actively seek out sources and be critical of what is put in front of them.

Bicyclemark is a Portuguese-American podcast journalist based in Amsterdam. A former researcher at the Village Voice and blogger since 2001, Mark has produced a bi-weekly podcast on under-reported international news for over 3 years. He also writes news for the videoblog: The Eclectic Newsbrief.

Thoughts on democracy

by Margareta Kern, contemporary artist, in reply to David Levi Strauss’ article

Democracy is one of those terms that makes me feel warm at heart, giving me a sense that we have found the solution for the way we organise and govern our societies. It is a positive term, filled with a sense of hope and strength; a democratic society is one which is fair, in which each citizen can voice hos or her opinion and has a right to cast a vote which can influence directly the politics and economics of her/his country. So the more I examine my fantasies relating to what the term ‘democracy’ represents the more utopian it seems to me. Is democracy an utopian term?

Having just spent one month travelling through Bosnia and Herzegovina, the thought on the meaning of ‘democracy’ has grown louder and louder with each day spent there. The sense of isolation felt there is further complicated when viewed in relation to the broadband Internet access (only urban areas have good and affordable Internet providers). A sense of separateness and division seems to be strong as ever despite the greater accessibility to the different tools of communication and information.

To say that there is a greater accessibility and possibly self-control of images and text since the advent of Internet and digital image is probably true, but to add the term democracy to that process of greater access would seem like giving an incredible amount of credit to what in the end are pixels. Painting, which in the end is just acrylic or oil, has the power to move us beyond our ability to explain why; in the same way images have the ability to move us even if they are just a flicker on our screen. But they will only move us if we allow them to, and for that we will need to find a way, as David Levi-Strauss wrote, to “slow images down to regain our liberty (and our distance)”. However in order to slow them down, we may need to slow down first.

Margareta Kern is an interdisciplinary artist based in London. Her new project is Clothes for Death a-n BLOG.

Selective Democracy

by Mary Fitzpatrick, contemporary fine artist

“The raw material of news must pass through successive filters, leaving only the cleansed residue fit to print” Manufacturing Consent – Noam Chomsky

…The same can be said of the visual world including aspects of the gallery world. How many of you are aware that anyone making any work with a camera seeking funding must go through the North West Arts Councils Media department and not their Visual Art department? And how many of you are aware that 95% of the annual media budget usually goes to white male practitioners?

Women are encouraged to apply for funding – but then some weeks later we get a letter from out of the ether pointing out that the competition was tough. They justify it by saying that “photography doesn’t attract women” so that we can try and pretend that we don’t even exist – a director actually wrote this to me after my multiple rejection letters. The names of the award recipients are then jumbled up on their website so you can’t quite work out who has been funded in Media, except if you have a keen sense of smell. Women do tend to get grants in visual arts though most of the major grants over £5000 go to white male artists. One male artist is cited on their website as recently getting two huge grants totalling £65,000 in visual arts. I did gratefully receive one ‘be quiet’ grant at a later stage when I brought ‘the problem’ to their attention.

A few years ago after my many problems with this issue I did a quick audit on five recent years of the Arts Councils funds through studying five years worth of their annual reports. The results were astonishing but unsurprising – 90% to 100% of the Media fund was going in one direction only. Individuals who were funded were often given very large grants and at times double grants. At least 90% of their funds was going to male applicants only – nearly all white applicants. More often than not there would be only one small grant to a female photographer each year – if that.

The message I got through this is that they believe that the white male visual world is somehow superior and more deserving of support. Let’s not forget that this is public arts money. We are filtered out and reprimanded at the very early stages of any potential projects or exhibitions. In fact we are cleansed out to make way for the pure photographic visual residue. I myself was told at a meeting I “would never be funded to publish, exhibit or to buy equipment” by a female Media officer. In fact they even asked me why cant you be more like “this male photographer from London”. I’m not actually a photographer, but a fine artist.

I did a quick audit on some of the curated exhibitions utilising documentary such as ‘Making History – Art and Documentary from 1929 to now‘ at Tate Liverpool. If you look at this particular catalogue there are 71 images, of which 9 are by named female practitioners. However, if you looked at the actual exhibition space itself the male artists exhibited large bodies of work and often having their own rooms, whereas the few women in the exhibition had far less actual wall space. Probably 90% or more of the actual wall space was devoted to white male art and documentary practitioners. The show should have really been called ‘a white male view of Britain’. This is all the more remarkable when you consider that the curator was female.

This strange phenomenon is carried over into the Chinese Art show also at Tate Liverpool in which there is only a single female artist. An invigilator at the show told me the female curators couldn’t find any women in China making art. What they probably meant was that they had in this instance been kept creatively invisible through the various filtering processes that lead to ultimate selection and that this is still sadly a global institutional problem.

In the archaic cultural world – for we do have another world – we are filtered out and largely kept invisible at most stages of the visual colonial selection process. Like the ’so awful it was really funny’ Pollock film I watched the other night, in which Lee Krasner (the painter) meets Jackson Pollock (the painter) and from that moment onwards we only see her only standing in the doorway carrying the laundry basket, cooking or gasping at Pollocks’ genius whilst he paints throughout. At the end of the film -in small credits- we are told that she did actually carry on painting by way of minor hindsight.

In contrast I had 9000 hits to my website last month  from all over the world. Visibility is key. The website assures more visibility, which equals having a voice. You can’t just keep saying we’re all rubbish at what we do. These digital means allow me to do a massive body swerve around the institutional men and women who all work to maintain the higher visual good in this country. I can move around those power points I’m supposed to be filtered through and cleansed out of and still come out visible on the other side. I also work and exhibit a lot outside England. I was well supported by both Arts Councils in Ireland – even the Irish Government supported me.

Whilst I am aware that things have changed radically for us and there are many high profile women artists working today – I remain vigilant of the archaic colonial attitudes that still persist especially in elements of photography per se. We still have predominantly all male photography departments across the country. Digital technology is also relatively inexpensive and widely available too as are the many inexpensive printing options that have also become widely available to us. The media age gives us a lot of options, and I can reach a global audience. Marvellous. The funniest irony for me though, is that my work is motivated by and dealing with the aftermath of those very colonial mechanisms that seek to silence me as an artist. So it remains to be seen whether my blog is also filtered out – the truth hurts doesn’t it?

The good, the bad and photojournalism

by Eivind H. Natvig, photojournalist currently stationed in South Asia

The idea of everyone being a photographer is wonderful as long as we remember a few things: we live in an unpredictable world, and the value of our contemporary history being documented for the future is immeasurable. Events potentially being recorded as more people have fairly high quality camera equipment and great technical skills -at least in the western world- is an incredible development in itself. In the part of the world where I reside this is not the case: even the local media can be overshadowed by the expensive equipment of tourists walking by, hiding in expensive hotels when violence erupts.

My main concern with photojournalism today revolves around ethics. In my opinion to be able to call anything journalism, you also have to be able to explain how the material has been acquired. What is being emphasized in the photographs, and why? This is the essence of it all. There are many insecure professionals out there shooting what everyone else is photographing, but I am positive many do not even know why they point the camera where they do. How will the amateurs know better than professionals in the chaotic situations we face regularly?

There are also known incidents of “photographers” who promise changes in this part of the world to the people they shoot. They spread false hope and deceive people in crisis. It’s important to know what to say and how to behave, what to shoot and what not to shoot when dealing with human beings. Sadly a lot of foreigners I see here seem to forget that their subjects are human beings.

As far as I understand, the “citizen journalists” have spawned from a desire to get other news than what the established media feed them; personally I’m thrilled that people care. But I am not alone amongst professionals who have dedicated our lives to this, and we need to eat. Unfortunately, the same public that wants something else is not buying enough magazines. To some extent citizen journalists can offer some form of competition to the established photographers working in the western world. Free photographs available through FlickR for the sheer pleasure of being published as an amateur might tighten the budgets for buying photography or hiring photographers, but the potential for the viewing public to win from a photographer on every street corner is incredibly positive.

The greater events and catastrophes need compassionate, caring and professional individuals with a spine to tell stories without submitting to the propaganda and directives of playing parts – and not forgetting the human beings while doing so. Photojournalism no longer is about pointing and shooting, and objectivity has been pronounced dead and should be buried for good. But perhaps it should be about storytelling, rather than just registering an event.

We seekers of the truth should embrace others doing the same, as long as the individual rights are never forgotten.

On the democratisation of images

by Pedro Meyer (Zonezero.com), in reply to Bill Thompson’s previous post

I value and appreciate the comments made by Bill, but somehow I think we are looking at the same issues from very differente perspectives.

I would first like to dispell the notion that is implicit when he writes: “…Despite Pedro Meyers’s powerful description of the impact the network has had on the dissemination of his work”.

If my work is part of that of a thousand other photographers that we have hosted, then I think the implication is correct. If however the idea would be that only my personal work is the one that has gotten such visibility through ZoneZero, then I would have to dissent.

Then Bill goes on to make another very interseting remark:

We should remember that the Cambrian was a period of great experimentation in structure and function, but that there is good evidence that many promising models simply died out.

Again, this is a statement that is quite accurate in and of itself, but it somehow leaves you with the lingering impression that this ought not to be like that. That this is a flaw in the system or something we should consider as inappropriate.

I would venture to say that we can only welcome, both the experimentation, and the process of competition between all sorts of alternative solutions and ideas. What we have today is, even though imperfect, a system that makes the playing field for competing options a bit more just.

In the past a publishing venture that would have started in Mexico City to compete for the attention of a world wide audience in competition with the traditional power centers of photography would not have stood a chance in hell to even get to first base.

For all the criticism that has been leveled against “citizen journalism”, I find it quite interesting that the likes of Corbis (Bill Gates’ famous uber photo agency that has taken over a large chunk of photo industry of distribution) -which by the way has never earned any money- is now threatened by the competition of a new breed of agencies that are small, and sell the work of citizen journalists, and amateurs, for a fraction of the price of what Corbis asks.

I believe this is an example of the benefits of competition, and how today no one can sit back and relax and believe that they have it made for very long, or that they can corner the market on anything to do with the digital world. You could corner the market with silver, gold, grains, etc. but certainly not in anything related to the digital world. Just observe the constant erosion of the market share of Windows, not only from other options of OS, but in the way the world of computers is being constantly transformed by ever new ideas.

I like this debate with a very esteemed and highly critical mind, such as Bill Thompson. The competition of ideas is what this is all about. This is not about someone winning but about everyone coming out with new thoughts.

The notion that we can enter into such a discussion while being continents apart, in real time, as it were, makes for a way of looking at issues that over time will obviously leave us with a more enriched environment.

I think that this is powerful stuff and I am enjoying every minute of it.

How the Land Lies

by Bill Thompson, technology critic and blogger

The ability to record, manipulate and publish digital images has fallen into the hands of the masses in a revolution whose impact is far greater even than the introduction of the Kodak box Brownie in 1900.

The boundaries between professional photography, art and popular snapshots are blurring, just as the growth of blogging and citizen journalism makes it hard at times to distinguish between journalism, literature and a diary entry.

On one side those who make their money or reputation from photography are challenged to justify their continued importance or even survival. On the other the billions with digital cameras find a new way of expressing themselves via Flickr and Photobucket.

But we should not confuse access with accountability, and we should not automatically claim that digital leads to democratisation. Despite Pedro Meyers’s powerful description of the impact the network has had on the dissemination of his work, and the improved access that we now have, this is about openness not democracy and we should not elide the terms. In the media world there is much talk of ‘citizen journalism’, ‘participative media’, ‘the former audience’ and other terms seeking to describe the reshaping of the relationship between the creator and consumer of content at all levels.

It is sometimes called a process of ‘democratising media’ but this doesn’t seem the right way to think about it. Democracy is about power and representation, not merely about having a voice. It is also about the tyranny of the majority and the moral pressure on the winners in any vote or decision to take into account the needs and desires of the whole polis rather than just their side.

This is not, in itself, about democracy but about plurality. We are living through a Cambrian explosion in new media forms and voices, the online equivalent of that amazing period 540 million years ago when the fossil record shows the sudden – geologically speaking – appearance of many of the ancestors of modern species. Photography is part of that explosive growth.

We should remember that the Cambrian was a period of great experimentation in structure and function, but that there is good evidence that many promising models simply died out, leaving the world to our ancestors[1]. There is no good reason to suppose that these forms of life were, in themselves, unable to be sustained if conditions – chemical, physical – had been different or if they had simply been luckier.

So it is today. Experiments are being tried all over the net. Some will succeed and shape the future of media. Some will fail. Those that start to succeed may well shape the environment and make it more likely that others will fail, just as YouTube’s success has polluted the ecosystem and shrunk the niche for other video-sharing sites.

The power of production may have passed to the people but the power of selection online lies with an editorial process that is managed and controlled by those who build the sites, develop the algorithms and host the pictures. We may have taken power from news editors or the magazine publishers, but we have put it in the hands of the programmers at Google, Flickr and Photobucket.

Perhaps, however, we are not looking for democracy, not looking to give power to the people in a simple-minded way, but instead looking for equality of opportunity and digital mobility. The transformational power of digital production may lie solely in the way it allows everyone to create and share rather than in some poorly-considered claims that it can have a radical political impact.

[1] See Simon Conway Morris, The Crucible of Creation: The Burgess Shale and the Rise of Animals, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1998

Picture: via flickR

Ornamentalising the masses

by Esther Leslie, professor of Political Aesthetics at Birbeck University, London

Walter Benjamin wrote about how:

The growing proletarianization of modern people and the increasing formation of masses are two aspects of the same process. Fascism attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate. Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves. The masses have a right to change property relations; fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property.

That representation has two meanings which are relevant here – an image is a representation, but representation also means political enfranchisement. Fascism produces an image of the masses – they come to expression – ‘zu ihren Ausdruck’. This phrase has particular resonance in the context of visual culture, which is the type of representation of that Benjamin refers to in the essay this quote comes from ‘The Work of Art in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility‘.

An image of the masses – their chemical trace – is pressed into celluloid. They see themselves. There is a circuit of reflection between the masses as viewers and the masses viewed. They have been compacted into a Volk, a solid body of masses come to representation. But they are mute. These shaped, ornamentalized masses are bearers of a structure that they do not compose but into whose order they are made to slot by an authoritarian order external to them, and which has technology on its side. This is visual representation without political representation. To be truly representative, in a political sense, would not, according to Benjamin, involve voting – the bourgeois model of representation – but rather the abolition of property relations.

The relations Benjamin describes are none other than capitalist; he expresses in this thesis the idea that fascism was in 1933 the response to a crisis of capitalism, specifically a crisis that relates to class struggle, in that the masses have been exercising a right to alter property relations. They have made demands, acted as revolutionaries and threatened existing relations of ownership. That is to say they have genuinely represented themselves in expressing their right to change iniquitous property relations, which comprise democratic disposal over the means of production. Note that Benjamin terms this expropriation a right that the masses possess and demand. This explodes the bourgeois language of rights, which find its pinnacle in the right to own property.

So where does this leave us in relation to the very different process of digital self-activity as seen in art and politics? There is something of a slippage going on here with the word ‘democratisation’. Of course it is not a digital fascism at work, but there is a great deal of fantasy in imagining that in and of itself this digital capacity for access is democratising for viewers or makers. For at some level this too is an ornamentalising of the masses – they become the stars in a permanent reality-show of their own making, which, in and of itself, extols the virtues of the corporations who make it possible, who host it, who emblazon so much of it with their adverts and sponsored links. They ‘naively’ – these 65 million (rising) bloggers and the rest of them – give something away that perhaps couldn’t be sold anyway, but someone’s making something out of it somehow somewhere (and could this – if so how – be related to the labour theory of value?). They provide so much content and for free that a permanent fuzz of unseeable activity represents democracy without necessarily

1) challenging property relations in a fundamental sense, which is the precondition of genuine democracy – or

2) allowing any coagulation of debate amongst broader and effective groups (a necessary aspect – evincing points of common debate, generating a real public sphere) who can act on it (in physical real space).

Click here to disappear

Writer and critic David Levi Strauss joins our photography debate with an article published today on openDemocracy.net. Titled “Click here to disappear: thoughts on images and democracy“, the piece explores how the privatisation of image-making and the manipulation of image-reception in the global, digital age combine to diminish agency and freedom. Money quote:

I used to think that more people making images would necessarily lead to more conscious image reception, but I’m less sure of that now. It seems that it’s possible to make images as unconsciously as one consumes them, bypassing the critical sense entirely. One of the main culprits here is time pollution, or “the pollution of temporal distance” that Paul Virilio writes about. To regain our liberty (and our distance), we must slow the images down.

Images online are both more ephemeral (in form) and more substantial (in number). They flicker across our eyes and jitter through our minds at incredible speeds. We spend more time collecting and sorting images, but less time looking at any one of them. One can never step into the same data-stream twice. The images from Abu Ghraib suddenly appear and are everywhere, and then just as suddenly they vanish, leaving barely a trace. Photographic images used to be about the trace. Digital images are about the flow.

Read the entire article here.

The meaning of “you” vs. “us”

by Bill Thompson, technology critic/blogger (and one of openDemocracy’s external editor)

When Time voted ‘You’ the person of the year the first thing I thought was ‘why not ‘Us’ – are Time and all that they represent so separate from the bloggers and citizen journalists that they belong in a completely separate category?’

And of course, to Time, they do.

This is one of the reasons why so many people feel distanced from the mainstream media, and we see it clearly in the way Christian expresses his unhappiness and makes many criticisms of professional journalism and professional journalists.

Some of these criticisms are merited, of course. They demonstrate what I think is a central point in the current debate, which is that our enthusiasm for ‘user-generated content’ and ‘democratised media’ is a symptom of deep-seated unhappiness with the current disposition, one that finds expression in blogging and photo-sharing sites and other forms of personal publishing.

However dig a little deeper and the desire is not to replace mainstream media but to reform it, to correct the errors and make it better. Even Christian acknowledges that ‘the pros’ have a place, although he seems to feel that the pressure from the citizen journalists will be enough to change things for the better. I wish I could be as optimistic as him about ‘being on the right road again’, because this feels more like what happened with punk rock in the UK in the 1970’s, when the political momentum rapidly dissipated as more and more bands turned their rebellion into money and the attitude and approach was simply appropriated by the industry.

Taking a wider view, there is a real danger that we will confuse the growing availability of access to the means of production of images, sounds or texts with a shift in the balance of power that would merit the term ‘democratisation’. I don’t think that this adequately reflects what is going on. Pluralism is good in itself, and we should encourage everyone to make their voice heard and their images visible. But there is a massive separation between giving people space to express themselves and building forms of governance that can listen and take account of what is being said.

If the growth of self-publishing on the internet is an expression of increased democracy then it is the very earliest stage of that democracy, the gathering of the populace in the marketplace to discuss matters of common interest. The rulers are still asleep in their high castles, and the sound they hear on the wind may as well be the rustling of leaves in the trees as the murmurings of discontent.

Political change will only come if we make it come. The network, in itself, will not deliver it and we must not assume that it will.

How will our current world be viewed in the future?

by Marysa Dowling, photographic artist and artist educator

I wonder how our new found means and ability to self-represent in so many different and accessible ways will change our view of the past in years to come. How will our current world be viewed in the future? Will this revolution of digital representation help to give a more real and honest view of out times, leading to our current values, fears and hopes being fully understood in the future? Or will the opposite happen? Will people look below the surface of what exists to find out why it exists and how?

This leads onto a fear I’ve had since digital photography has been widely adopted, that the only pieces of our history left will be the aspects we have constructed and want to show, everything else is constantly being deleted along the way. There won’t be any mistakes. We won’t be able to go to a car boot sale and find piles of slides or negatives of someone else’s family history. Although, as we know, official histories and family albums are carefully constructed and chosen to fit in with our own contemporary motivations.

How much of this digital imagery will exist if it’s not being reproduced and printed? Perhaps it is an irrational fear, since such a great number of images exists nowadays.

These images are from a recent project with the Chisenhale Gallery, London. The young people involved worked closely with me to develop film and photographically based works around communication. We looked at visual communication in all its forms.

The posters were designed to question but also communicate something about these young adults desiring to have more control of their representation as ‘young people’, which is so often negative. They are highly visually literate due to the current saturation of images they are surrounded by and their constant engagement with technology. This enabled them to ask questions about their own thoughts, fears and desires but also about visual representation and how they are viewed. These posters were part of an intervention event in which the local community was asked to respond to the questions posed by the participants.

Perhaps you would like to respond as a way to extend the intervention.

Time’s person of the year: me?

Our Democratic Image blog officially launches today, and will run until the Democratic Image symposium, which will take place in Manchester on the 21st and 22nd of April.

In an effort to open a debate on photography in the digital age, we asked professional photographers, amateurs and artists to gather in this little part of the blogopshere to share their thoughts. One question we’ve been dying to ask them is this one:

“Time magazine has voted you “The Person of the Year” for “seizing the reins of the global media, for founding and framing the new digital democracy, for working for nothing and beating the pros at their own game”. As a “pro”, what is your take on the democratisation of art and media in the digital age?”

Our first featured entry is by Christian Payne, the blogger and podcaster behind Documentally.com.

So I have just been voted Time Magazine’s person of the year. Well, thank-you Time.

Thank-you for the recognition. Of course there are millions of other bloggers/podcasters out there doing a similar kind of thing, many of them better than me. But as I am to share this award with them I guess you already know that.

I would also like to thank the corporate media, people like yourselves, without whom I would not have been able to find my own opinion. I would like to thank them for making me switch off, for making me sick at heart, for making me angry.

Hoarse from shouting at the TV, bored of tired newspapers, and with radio’s banalities still ringing in my ears, I climbed the stairs to my spare room and turned on the computer. Another small revolution had started.

From that spare room – the room I sit in now – I began to explore the world, clicking into other perspectives, trying to get a bearing on some kind of meaningful truth. One not screened for my viewing dis-pleasure by the fat advertising executives glutting Corporations Incorporated.

Out there, online, there are so many distractions, so many opinions. There is diversity. Most importantly, when I shouted at this screen, it shouted back. As technology lowers the cost of publishing, suddenly there was a deeper, wider, discourse cutting through the fogs of official disinformation/misinformation/partial truths. I could make my own mind up.

What was I going to do with my newfound knowledge? Start a blog? But I am a pictures man, not a writer, and to take pictures I had to be there, not in the spare room.

So I went.

It wasn´t until I sat in the back of the dusty Turkish taxi and said “Iraq please mate” that I realised I was not on holiday.

As far as beating the ‘pros’ at their own game, that’s not for me to say. Those pros stuck on a roof in Baghdad have the right to say they are there, they have some form of expertise. They have their bragging rights (even if many could do their jobs – rewriting wire service copy, sending out their Iraqi staff to do the real work – equally well in London, Barbados or anywhere else). They also, of course, have their Masters, their 90 second time slot, their worries about feeding banalities to vacuum that is the 24hr news beast.

My advantages? I am not afraid to speculate, to use some intuition (that stuff editors and management boards like to crush as soon as possible). As long as my ‘news’ remains free then I’m comfortable with that.

If a blogger turns pro they were never really blogging. They were building a portfolio in the hope they too could be a part of the corporate media.

I’m not sure if I believe that last sentence, but it has the ring of truth to it. Why join a revolution only in the hopes of one day selling out?

The fact is no one has offered to pay me to podcast. If it were to happen, I’d have to see what direction my content would go. Would it go corporate? Would it lose what edge it has? Or would the money allow me to push further and harder, to do better?

My thoughts at the moment on this subject: I feel it is the duty of the viewer/subscriber to donate something to any podcast/blog they appreciate. It can be money, it can be praise or criticism, inspiration or friendship. In so doing they are trying to help keep something good alive; they are reviving our dwindling hopes for genuine freedoms.

These are early days and it’s hard to see where all of This is going. For now though I’ll happily accept my small part of the person of the year award. If only because I get the sense we are, after many wrong turns, on the right road again.

The Democratic Image: Introduction

by John Perivolaris, chairman and co-organiser of the Democratic Image

The Gulf Wars, 9/11, the Madrid and London bombings, Abu Ghraib mark changes in the currency of both the political and visual economies of representation that are redefining democracy in ways that are not yet clear.

While democracy currently serves as the questionable banner under which the current world superpower goes to war in foreign lands, access to the media of visual representation has undergone a radical democratisation driven by the same digital technologies that are consolidating the ability of global capitalism to project its power across cultures by economic or bellicose means.

In this context, what is the meaning of democracy? Can unprecedented access to visual means of self-representation on a global scale translate into meaningful representation in a sociopolitical sphere increasingly mediated by digital technologies? Is the basic condition of the new world order of digitised democracy a creative consent to capitalism? Can a democratic republic of photography be glimpsed on the horizon?

Photography’s investment in the visual economy of globalisation is now more than ever ironically obliged to recognise the inequalities of access to technologies of digital representation in the year that Time Magazine voted `You’, the citizens of a virtual world brought together by Web 2.0, as `The Person of the Year’.

Norway’s Foreign Minister recently declared that `far away’ is a concept that does not exist anymore. At the same time, Stuart Hall has reminded us that globalisation has `knitted together’ grimly unequal parts of the world. This being so, he asks how people are to occupy the same global space. How much difference can the democratic image tolerate?

It is questions such as these that The Democratic Image raises and which its participants will address, each in their own way.