A Dyke A Broad #101 War Photo Edition
What does war photography mean now there are so many cameras pointed everywhere? All the time. So many amateur correspondants offering their reports in photos, in videos, a mere 280 characters.
***A quick note to say that I’m going to pause subscriptions for a while because my posts may be irregular for the next few months.***
Hello from Paris!
I took the weekend off and didn’t watch the news, though I spent Sunday morning at an exhibit of women war photographers at the Liberation Museum (Musée de la Libération de Paris) and thought about Syria, Mali, Palestine, and of course Ukraine, and how there’s no shortage of grist for the current mill of photographers.
Their bios had little in common. Some of them entered the field intentionally—like the young French woman Catherine Leroy, who was inspired to visit Viet Nam in 1966 after seeing images of the war, and reportedly wanted to “give the war a human face.” Christine Spengler, though, had no intention of becoming a photographer, but was visiting Tchad with her brother in 1970 when a conflict erupted around them, and she began to document it. While Lee Miller was already a photographer known for her work in art and fashion, and collaborations with Man Ray, her focus abruptly changed when bombs started dropping on her head in London, where she was uniquely positioned to cover World War II in Europe—for Vogue.
I wonder what being a war photographer means now that there are so many cameras pointed everywhere. All the time. So many amateur correspondants offering their reports in photos, in videos, a mere 280 characters, and any of them could go viral at any moment.
Walking through the exhibit, I thought about how in history class as a kid, a teacher pulled up an image on a screen in front of the room and said, “This photo captured it, changed public perception of the war.” I don’t remember what war it was. But it did have an impact. I wondered if it could happen today. That one image could emerge from the ever growing sea of them and still make a difference. Or if we needed such a thing, one photo, now that we have waves of them. Often taken by participants themselves.
Like the demonstrators in Iran, who are risking their lives in the streets in response to the murder, first of Mahsa Amini in Tehran by morality police, then of dozens who dared protest her death, (see photos in this link, “En images : le soulèvement des femmes iraniennes après la mort de Mahsa Amini soutenu partout dans le monde”).
Monday morning, Ana told me that while I was at the exhibit, gazing at old photos, then making a very late lunch, I was missing echoing demos across the world, even just across town where protestors marched on the Iranian embassy, and the cops ended up using tear gas on them when they got too close.
There were big demos in London, too, where protestors actually clashed with cops.
I went on Twitter and in seconds found dozens of videos, hundreds of photos to chose from for your viewing pleasure.
Both official and “unofficial” sources.
I was glad protesters were there in the streets. Glad people were there to document them, inspire others, so that Mahsa Amini didn’t quietly disappear, then the next woman and the next.
I was glad, too, that the images were popularized, the camera work sometimes blurry and sometimes missing what we’d call the money shot, when a cop, for instance, lifts his baton. A soldier points his gun. Or a demonstrator lifts their fist like Angela Davis, brave and righteously determined. Which is such a cliché but somehow still is bought and paid for, makes the front page.
That is always a danger of documentary photography, that pros will use a cliché as a short cut to meaning, banalizing events for the viewer, making one event like every other. Or worse, an artsy photographer will give in to their impulse and estheticize the whole mess, make something ugly too beautiful to bear.
Here’s where I begin talking about myself of course. Because memoirists face the same dangers, making choices, selecting, editing, framing as surely as a professional photographer, giving the impression, not just of one truth, but a distillation of it. We rarely mention that we could just as easily shift points of view, leave that detail out, include another. Change the flavor, even change the meaning entirely.
The biggest difference is that few memoirists are risking their own lives, like Gerda Taro, killed while covering the Spanish Civil War. We much prefer to risk yours.
Until Saturday 31 December 2022, Musée de la Libération de Paris
Lee Miller, Gerda Taro, Catherine Leroy, Christine Spengler, Françoise Demulder, Susan Meiselas, Carolyn Cole, Anja Niedringhaus
In Other News… Has Italy Gone Fascist?
Sunday, Italians who went to the polls (abstentionism was high, for Italy) cast a quarter of their votes for an extreme right candidate—what we were afraid would happen in France during the last election. The New York Times has pretty good coverage of Giorgia Meloni. who would be the first woman to hold the job of prime minister. And also “the first with “post-fascist” roots.”
Here’s an introduction to her party, The Brothers of Italy, and why it’s called “post-fascist,” though frankly plenty of members would like to delete the “post” and go full on fascist. One stumbling block for their ambition, according to this analysis from the politically centrist Brookings Institute:
Pushing Italy toward a fully-fledged authoritarian system would not be compatible with delivering economic growth. One reason lies in the fact that Italy’s economy is kept afloat by European institutions. The European Central Bank ensures an implicit — and sometimes explicit —guarantee that Italy will not default or exit the euro. The EU Commission provides the Italian economy with a substantial aid program — the NextGenerationEU (NG-EU), amounting to 11-12% of Italy’s GDP over five years – that no political leader in her right mind could renounce. Aid is conditional on respecting and upholding the democratic requisites of EU treaties. In the context of the NG-EU program, reforms and incentives are subject to extremely strict control by the EU Commission. It will not be easy for Meloni to reduce civil rights or practice autocratic policies and still receive the EU funds. Transfers to Hungary, for instance, are currently delayed because Orbàn’s regime is not compliant.
This is important because a crappy economy is one reason for the surge in support for extremely alternative parties that have come and gone the last few years in Italy. So instead of dumping the European Union entirely, she may try to join forces with Poland and Hungary, and try to screw with the EU from the inside.
That’s not expected to work either. They probably won’t be able to round up enough votes to have an impact. In fact, one reason some Italians either voted for her, or didn’t bother going to the polls, is not just that she’ll be ineffectual, it’s that they don’t actually believe she’ll last very long.
As Yascha Mounk put it in his piece in The Atlantic, Italians Didn’t Exactly Vote for Fascism, “The electoral victory of Giorgia Meloni is nothing to be complacent about, but Italians are cynical about how long any government will last. Let’s hope they’re right.”
More Images
That’s it for this time,
Disgruntledly yours
K Lee Kozswell