Photography in the Aftermath: Part 3 (Oil)

No stranger to the post-industrial sublime, Ed Burtynsky might seem like a curious inclusion in an honor roll of photographers looking for a human face in the wreckage.

After all, isn't he the guy who made ship breaking (top) look like something out of the Romantics' playbook? [above left, Robert Hubert, The Arc de Triomphe and the Theater of Orange, 1787.] The scenes Burtynsky depicts are sublime, so monumental as to seem the province of the gods rather than of humanity.

But the sheer scope of the Oil series, which traces the movement of oil as it courses its way through the global economy, means that, if he’s intellectually honest, he can’t let us off the hook. So we get the whole story, starting with the oil fields of Alberta and California,

and proceeding to the oil refineries and supertankers (both here in Texas).

He can't resist Detroit and, like Moore, gives us a glimpse of that city's catastrophic decline.

But he goes beyond the scarred landscapes and post-industrial ruins. Breezeway, Pennsylvania (below) has been a thoroughfare since before the European settlement. Today, at the junction of the Pennsylvania Turnpike and Interstate 70, the town is a monument to American automotive consumption, a crossroads of fast food joints, gas stations, motels, and few residents.

Traveling across the planet, he then shows us the cost that those who live at the other end of the economic spectrum pay for our excess. For as sublime as the image that opened this post may be, the larger series from which it is extracted depicts the underbelly of our prosperity.

To sidestep the labor and environmental regulations that industrialized nations impose, shipping companies with junkers to dispose of sell them off to shipyards in developing countries. Workers dismantle the hulks by hand, with little to no protective gear, and the materials they handle include asbestos and PCBs. Burtynsky's images were made in Chittagong, Bangladesh, one of the leading ship-recycling sites in the world, but they might be snapshots from the Inferno.

As Burtynsky says, "These images are meant as metaphors to the dilemma of our modern existence; they search for a dialogue between attraction and repulsion, seduction and fear. We are drawn by desire - a chance at good living, yet we are consciously or unconsciously aware that the world is suffering for our success. Our dependence on nature to provide the materials for our consumption and our concern for the health of our planet sets us into an uneasy contradiction. For me, these images function as reflecting pools of our times."

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Next up: Alfredo Jaar and more from Rwanda. The best for last?

Photography in the Aftermath: Part 2 (Rwanda)

In our age of instantaneous communication, what is left for the still camera? Is it truly stuck with the unenviable task of clean-up? Does the noble tradition that gave us Jacob Riis, Lewis Hine and Dorothea Lange, Eugene Smith, Danny Lyon and Susan Meiselas now just putter around in the rubble? Is there another way for photography-after-video to engage in the civic discourse?

Thinking about those question in my previous post, I thought first of Jonathan Torgovnik’s Intended Consequences series. Torgovnik is a photojournalist of the old school who’s been a contract photographer for Newsweek since 2005. Visit his website and you’ll see classic breaking-news work, much of it assignment-based (the Haitian earthquake, elections in Guatemala, meth addicts in America).

But with Intended Consequences, he entered into the story long after the news had broken and the media apparatus had moved on to the latest disaster du jour. These pictures, many of them double portraits, depict Rwandan women and their children born of rape during the 100-days-long genocidal fury that scorched their country in 1994.

But rather than the ruins of war, the “wreckage” Torgovnik portrays is literally human. As with much documentary work, the meaning of these pictures is deepened by the accompanying text – the women’s testimonies about what happened to them. The narratives the women tell are, sadly, of a piece: about the killing, about slaughtered family, about repeated rape, gang rape, abduction, sexual brutality, HIV, and, for some, a chilling and thoroughly understandable ambivalence about their own children.

But Torgovnik is interested in far more than recounting a nightmare: “My project is about Rwanda but it’s not about Rwanda,” he says. Many of the militia who killed and raped in Rwanda escaped, setting up for business in neighboring nations. “The same guys who were raping in Rwanda are raping today in Congo,” he explains.

In 1968, Cornell Capa wrote, “The concerned photographer finds much in the present unacceptable which he tries to alter. Our goal is simply to let the world also know why it is unacceptable.”
In 2008, Torgovnik explained, “What I’m trying to do really is to show the consequences and, hopefully, through this project and through seeing how severe these consequences are people will maybe be a little more active and help people who are going through it now. Yes, Rwanda happened 14 years ago but it’s still happening today.”

“It’s beyond my understanding how the world is letting this happen now,” he adds. Like the classic concerned photographers that Capa acknowledged 40 years ago, Torgovnik wants to wake us up to, and take responsibility for, the nightmare of our collective making.

Click here for Part 3.

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Note: Jonathan Torgovnik has also produced a series of videos that incorporate the still images, film footage, and the interviews. You can view them here.

Photography in the Aftermath: Part 1

Roger Fenton: The Valley of the Shadow of Death, 1855

Paul Seawright: Afghanistan, 2002

We've been seeing this kind of thing for quite some time now, haven't we? For some decades, a whole slew of documentary photographs have been looking like reincarnations of their 19th-century forebears.

Arnold Genthe: San Francisco after the Earthquake and Fire, 1906

Robert Polidori: 5000 Cartier Avenue, New Orleans, 2005 

George Barnard: Ruins in Charleston, South Carolina, 1865-66

Joel Meyerowitz: from Aftermath, 2001

Digging up these time-traveling pairs is a fun game, one I could play for hours, but sooner or later I begin to ask myself, What's going on here? 

Documentary photography wasn't always so. Back in the 1970s, when I started studying the medium, the street shooter was still king in the documentary world. My teachers -- this was at ICP, the Mother Church of the Street Aesthetic -- held up Cartier-Bresson and Kertesz, Robert Capa and Garry Winogrand as the exemplars of all that was great about the still camera. 

Even Joel Meyerowitz, the doyen of the large-format, started out on the streets. But somehow, the guy who plunged headlong into the crowds to make images like 46th and Broadway, back in 1976, evolved into the man who lugged an 8x10 camera to Ground Zero to make the stately images that comprise the Aftermath series.

It's not exactly news that, sometime in the 1970s, the whole "if it's not good enough, you're not close enough" decisive-moment aesthetic -- street photography, for short -- began to lose its stranglehold on the documentary world. A lot of things contributed to its demise, but the most pertinent for my purposes is the emergence of the video camera as our major news delivery device. 

To put it baldly, video beat photojournalism at its own game. Of course, the photographers still showed up -- still do show up  -- for the battles and the revolutions. But they're not at the red-hot center of the action anymore because video is just so much better at creating the illusion that you are there, in the action, in the present tense, than any still photograph ever could.

Now that we can turn on our computers and watch a video stream of the tsunami in Japan, the still camera doesn't stand a chance. Or, to be more precise, it doesn't stand a chance at recapturing its you-are-there glory days. What it can do, and do quite movingly, is survey the wreckage. 

Everybody's Doing It

Once you start looking, you realize this style of working is ubiquitous, with both hard-core news hounds and Chelsea gallery artists snapping away in the wreckage. 

So David H. Wells (above), who started out as a straight-ahead  newspaper shooter, and Todd Hido (left), who got his MFA from Cal Arts, are both documenting the foreclosure crisis after the fact of the actual foreclosures.

Or the New York Times photographer Joseph Sywenkyi (left) and Robert Polidori (below) both show us what's left of Pripyat, Ukraine, after the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown.

Of course, what's missing here are the people involved. In some cases, their absence may be a blessing. Do we really want to see people being evicted from their homes? To look at the bloated bodies of Katrina victims?

"Look on these works, ye Mighty, and despair"
Putting these truly legitimate qualms aside, I nonetheless find myself wondering about the implications of this larger trend. At its most aestheticized -- I think here of Andrew Moore's lush images of what's left of Detroit (below) and just about anything by Polidori -- this kind of work can all too easily indulge our Romantic taste for beautiful ruins, for the post-industrial sublime, and in the process ignore the very real human costs and elide over the thorny questions of human agency.

Andrew Moore: Model T Headquarters, Detroit and The Rouge, Detroit

These images, with their exquisitely rendered decay, speak of the vanity of human striving and the ineluctable passage of time. But the Rouge isn't Ozymandias's shattered statue lying in the barren desert. Its demise has everything to do with deals made and policies enacted -- with decisions people made. Nor is Detroit some antique land, but rather a struggling city populated by our fellow citizens.

So my question is: Can this documentary genre -- aftermath photography -- speak to us about the people living in New Orleans and Detroit? Or is photography after video only able to survey the wreckage? 

I'll take up that question in my next few posts. Here's Part 2.

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Note: If you're interested in this way of thinking about the images that surround us, take a look at Lawrence Weschler's Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences. David Campany's Safety in Numbness is also excellent on this history -- his take on the Street Aesthetic as an historically bounded phenomenon is brilliant -- and I'm beyond indebted to him for kicking off my line of thinking.