Women in Photojournalism

Note: I am unable to find a citation to the effect that Gerda Taro may have taken the "Falling Soldier" picture, and it's possible that I imagined this. PetaPixel has published a version of this piece, and I worked with Michael Zhang there to make a couple of improvements to it. That version can be found here.

In the last couple of years (has it really been that long?) we've been hearing revelations of the trials of female photojournalists. Nothing, unfortunately, too unexpected. Every time around someone writes another version of the standard essay on this topic covering much the same appalling ground every time. See, for instance, this recent iteration here.

Women in the field of photojournalism are routinely harassed, hit on, and groped by their senior male colleagues. The managers who assign journalists to assignments are loathe to assign women to this story or that, for reasons that are at best vague and at worst perfectly clear. Many women graduate from school trained as photojournalists, and very few are able to make a career out of it.

As I say, this is expected. Depressing, but expected.

The standard essay, written every few months, covers all this ground. It's a pretty burly argument. Women probably have a right not to be fondled on the job, or at job related events. If this argument doesn't cover it, we're probably in the territory where no argument is going to make much impact. Right? I mean, is anyone actually willing to stand up and say that these things are OK?

Unfortunately, the standard essay never seems to stop there.

The point is raised that photojournalism is, to a large degree, performed by by white men, and therefore reflects a white male viewpoint. So far, so good, that seems very reasonable. The next step, though, is to assert that women's photographic voices are inherently different, and that by having more women doing photojournalism, we would see different pictures made in different ways about different stories.

Somewhere in here two separate problems arise.

Beatrice and Mom, by Andrew Molitor

The first problem which arises is that there isn't much evidence that women do in fact shoot much differently than men do. Insofar as there are differences, it is at least in part due to the pressures on women to take those specifically female pictures. We see lots of baby pictures made by women. This is an acceptable genre for women to work in, for myriad reasons, and so it is dominated by women. Men can do it too, though.

Most pictures of explosions are taken by men, not because women can't do it just as well, but for social reasons very much related to those that cause the baby photo business to be dominated by women. In the early days of advertising photography, when women were employed it was invariably to shoot "those female things" like soap, cleaning products, fabrics, sewing supplies, and so on.

Robert Capa (male) and Gerda Taro (female) shot the Spanish Civil War together, and there's considerable confusion about who shot what. Enough confusion, at any rate, to suggest that the female photographer's work is not easily distinguished from the male. There are suggestions that this picture might have been shot by the female member of the pair:

Falling Soldier, Gerda Taro? Robert Capa?

Let's not confuse a single example with truth, of course. The point is not these particular two people, it is not this picture or that one. The point is rather that across all of photography it isn't easy to distinguish the men from the women, and when you can, like as not there was some editor assigning women to shoot soap and men to shoot cars. Photographers influence one another at a furious pace, men influencing women and vice versa. This influence, together with individual style, seems to almost completely obscure any gender differences.

The second, and to my mind more serious, problem that arises is the risk of saddling would-be female photojournalists with some sense of obligation to be the voice of women. Arguably, the standard essay on women in photojournalism pressures women to stick to "those female things."

Women can shoot explosions, violence and death, those so-called white male topics, just as well as men can.

Catherine Leroy, Vietnam, "Corspman in Anguish" is a pretty important picture. Is there something inherently "female" about this picture? Not that I can discern.

While I think it is vitally important to bring cultural problems of harassment and assault to light, I think also we must be wary of perpetuating a different set of flawed ideas as we do so.

Having more women in photojournalism would be good, it would add new voices, new viewpoints. But let us not suggest that women can't photograph explosions, or that men can't photograph sewing supplies. They can. They do. And they ought to keep on doing it.

From forest to trees, Pre-visualization

Back to my recent theme of "In order to make photographs, we must be simultaneously deeply aware of the forest, and be completely oblivious to the forest."

It occurs to me that part of the function of pre-visualization, as espoused by Mr. Adams (for example) is to make this leap. I think you can argue that the process of pre-visualization is in fact specifically to make the leap.

One wanders through Yosemite, with the portfolio as a whole in mind, feeling that emotional response to the rocks, the trees, the water. One stumbles across something, or perhaps visits for the 1000th time something, and feels that it might belong in the body of work. One feels the right things there. The process of pre-visualization takes the pre-existing style notes of the portfolio as it stands, together with the emotional response one feels in the moment, together with the scene itself, and attempts to boil that into a singular object, a photograph.

In the process, one sheds temporarily the larger picture. The forest (both real and metaphorical, here), I think, fades into the background and brings the trees into focus. Ones view narrows to the single picture. It's not Miksang by any means. Adams took as very technical view of all these things, but I think that he saw it first, and derived the technical details from his hallucination of what it might be.

I've written about pre-visualization in the distant past, treating it then as a process of directed inspiration. One has to, I believe, make a creative leap from the needs of the photograph to the actualization of it, and that is not a trivial process.

An interesting, but I think accidental, connection arises here.

Creative inspiration is a well understood process. You can to a degree manage that "Eureka!" moment, by alternating between thinking very hard about the problem, and stepping away from the problem. Both are necessary. One examines the scene, the idea, and tries to fit ideas, solutions, to it. Perhaps futilely. Then one gives up, takes a walk, takes a shower, a nap. Then back to the problem, another break for an hour, a month, a year, and so on back and forth. It appears that the unconscious works away on the problem in quite different ways as you are resting. At some point, if you are lucky, the solution simply pops up fully formed.

The characteristics of this kind of inspiration are that the solution is more or less fully formed, it arises out of apparently nowhere, and finally that you are quite certain about it.

This resembles superficially the dance back and forth between the portfolio, the project and the individual photo.

So, currently on my mind: What is up with these fluctuations, these rhythmical back-and-forths that seem so necessary to creativity?

Up The Garden Path

In about 1953 Nicholas Monsarrat published a short story entitled "Up The Garden Path." My precis might be off in a few particulars, it has been some time since I read it. It goes roughly like this. A successful writer meets with a young man who wishes to become a writer, and who has a chapter written which is excellent. The successful writer lends the young man money to support him while he finishes his novel. Then he lends him more. The touches keep coming, and eventually it is revealed that the young man has been partying quite vigorously on the money, and at the same time has been borrowing funds from other successful authors and so forth on the strength of the same chapter of writing he's been showing around.

There is a falling out, naturally, shouting and tearing up of agreements and so forth. Some time later, the young man's novel appears. It is brilliant, it is vast, and it relies on among other things an in-depth experience with London nightclubs and the party scene therein. It becomes clear to the successful writer that the young man had in fact been writing, researching, working his ass off the entire time. There is an awkward meeting, and the story concludes.

The point to take away here is that this particular work, the novel the young man was writing, was built upon actual experience, on a life fully lived, which when combined with his artistic skill and a great deal of hard work, produced something great.

Looking over work by all the young turks of the sort that Jörg Colberg is so fond of, and having examined to some degree the world they inhabit, I get the notion that these people in general have no particularly rich life to draw on. They hang around with other young artists, occasionally trying to suck up to publishers, curators, and so on. They design one another's books, they host little pop-up galleries of one another's work (I'm not just an artist, I'm a curator!) They hustle, constantly, to get little grants and fellowships and whatnot.

On the face of it, their world appears to be extremely narrow, and rather insular. Or at any rate it is consistent with generally available information that is it so.

While it is possible that they are, some of them, living lives filled with breadth and richness, it is not clear when exactly they are fitting it in. Further, it does not turn up in their work at all.

All that is required here, though, is that a critical mass of them be basically boring people with narrow lives, fully immersed in the incestuous circle jerk. If enough of the players live this way, their work will set the tone, will circumscribe the set of tropes and ideas that can be deployed. And thus we end up with endlessly self-referential work that is about the artists, and occasionally about Art. Very little about bigger ideas, or even small ideas that exist outside that narrow world.

Occasionally work pops up which boils down to "I took a field trip to the real world, here are some snapshots of the horror that exists out there."

It strikes me that the names Sally Mann and Cindy Sherman almost never turn up in these circles. If there's a sufficiently large list of female photographers being constructed generally one or both will make the cut. This seems on the face of it to be rather odd. If we are obsessed with ideas like Female Gaze and Women In Photography and feminist ideas and so on, as every single person in this little social set is (or at any rate claims to be) surely these two names would pop up a lot. Cindy Sherman especially, who has mined these exact areas out in depth for decades.

It cannot be that these people are unaware of these artists, who are both predecessors and contemporaries.

Regardless of the reasons for the narrowness of the work, it is worth suggesting that if you wish, yourself, to make work that is not narrow, you should get out and live a little. See things, immerse yourself, have experiences. Absorb them fully, a quick field trip does not count.

And then work.

Photographing Artifice

I'm mildly obsessed with photography versus what is real, true. As a consequence, much of what I talk about presupposes that whatever you're pointing the camera at is real, true. As a general rule, though, this is obviously false. Lots and lots of photos are of some sort of artifice. A still life, an advertising shot, photographs of a play, or of performance art, virtually everything anyone posts on social media, and so on.

Consider a play. There's probably a story, a literal narrative. There might be a moral, or some sort of life lessons, or some other larger art-like experience in the play. A play, being built around dialog and motion, is not likely to translate particularly well to photographs. Your photographs will, if well done, accurately illustrate what the play looks like and convey in some way the experience of watching the play, but they are unlikely to reveal the narrative or larger meaning of the play. The story that we might find in the photos is different from the story we might find in the play itself. The photograph is, as it were, a picture of a mask, you cannot see the person behind the mask.

On the other hand, consider Gregory Crewdson, who arguably stages things that look a lot like a scene in a play. His set pieces are designed to be photographed, there is no dialog, no action. They look like a moment pulled out of a play, or a film, but are distinctly not -- specifically because you can read the underlying psychodrama in the photograph itself. You can, as it were, deduce the absence of dialog and action from the very fact that you can see the underlying story in the photograph. Crewdson gives us a transparent mask, allowing us to see past the notional play to the underlying story.

Take these are two endpoints.

An advertising photograph strives to be Crewdson-esque, in that you are supposed to see the story in the scene. You are supposed to see a photograph of a beautiful woman and a fast car, and to feel that story, to imagine yourself with them, driving very fast and having a great deal of fun. You are not supposed to see it as a photograph of a set, in the manner one might see a photograph of a play. Sometimes these things work, sometimes they do not.

Cindy Sherman also comes to mind, and again with mixed results. Her original work, of Untitled Film Stills was very much in the mode of Crewdson, except that instead of imagining something ambiguous -- maybe a play, maybe a film, maybe real people -- she specifically insists that we imagine a film. Later work becomes more ambiguous on this axis, we are to imagine some abstract larger story, and yet we recognize Cindy and know therefore that it is artifice.

In terms of larger meaning, this gives us a number of possibilities.

You might photograph a play in order to tell the story of going to the play. Or, if you are in Austin, perhaps you do it because apparently all theater actors in Austin are ludicrously beautiful people. Anyways, the story of attending a play is a perfectly reasonable story in the larger sense to tell. You could critique the play with photos, you could react to the play. All of this is quite separate from the story the play itself embodies.

More difficult is the game Crewdson and Sherman play. The artifice is clear, but they want you to see through the photograph, and then again through the artifice, to see a single underlying story (again, in the larger sense). Cultural criticism, feminist theory, whatever. They need to guide the viewer through not one but two separate layers of translation. They succeed, I think, because of the maniacal singularity and intensity of their underlying idea. Like a nova, if shines through layers of interpretation and nails the viewer between the eyes. Advertising seems to be to succeed or fail on roughly the same grounds, the intensity of vision in play, with a side serving of ability also required.

This brings us around to the item that triggered this whole thought process, a book reviewed by Colberg, which you can look at in its entirety by watching the video at the book's web page, or directly on Vimeo. Jörg's review is lightweight, of course; he sees a female photographer doing sexuality stuff and falls over himself, because, academia.

This is a book of pictures of performance art, of artifice. If you think any of this is remotely spontaneous, look at the colors. These are intensely styled pictures. In particular, the picture the book and Jörg both lead with, the nipple pinch, count a) the total number of colors in the frame, and b) the number of patches of color that match her shoes. For all its snapshot/selfie aesthetic, this shot (and most of the rest of the book) is styled with the intensity of a Gucci advert. Look at the labels hanging from the blinds.

So the question is, are we able to read through the artifice to an underlying story? Well. To my eye, not really. Sure, there's some muddled ideas of sexuality in here, quite a few of the pictures seem to be mining some "submissive man" motif, but by no means all. There's a lot material that seems to have been included simply because it's odd, or fun. While I agree with Jörg that it looks like fun, that is rather spoiled by the insistence of the actors on staring, dead-eyed, at the camera. The overall sensation that these are boring people with no ideas, who are nonetheless Deadly Serious About Their Art does this book no favors. It is possible that the thing is a wall of cultural references that I am simply not getting, but if so that makes the book mostly an in-joke, which is just another kind of boring.

If these is some radiant blaze of an idea in there someplace, it is buried under the Yoko Ono mannered weirdness flavored with a demand to be taken seriously.

If this were presented specifically as a bunch of pictures of performance art, that would be one thing. Pixy Liao seems, unfortunately, to be striving for more of a Crewdson/Sherman "through-reading" and not hitting it. Instead she's substituting in a bunch of modern tropes and hoping simple minded reviewers will assign profound thoughts to her.

I will say that while the content is pretty dull (this stuff hasn't been transgressive in decades, even in the USA, move on, Art Students) the styling is excellent. The consistency of look, the use of color, all these things are pretty great.

Shot Lists and Shooting Scripts

I am definitely fumbling my way here, so even I'm not sure any of what follows is right.

In my previous remarks, I closed with the notion that to really photograph well one needs to be simultaneously exquisitely aware of "the forest" and oblivious to it.

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.

Now, F. Scott Fitzgerald may have been on to something here, but in the first place I am perhaps not a first-rate intelligence, and in the second place that is to kind of miss the point. Adding further clutter to the mind does not in any way I can see aid us in the contemplative seeing part of the business. I dare say Fitzgerald did not have writing in mind when he wrote this, either.

I think that in practice the two opposing principles are stances that we switch between. In one moment, we have in mind the forest, the context and story to which we are directing our attentions. In another moment we are meditatively gazing through or at the finder, looking for that juxtaposition of forms, that expression, that play of light.

When you're in the second condition, though, you need to somehow carry with you the homeopathic imprint of the former state, otherwise you're just shooting vacuous exercises in form again.

I use shot lists, shooting scripts.

For my current long term project, documenting my alley, it has occurred to me that the cats are part of that gestalt. And so, from time to time, I pick up the camera to take photographs of cats in my alley. When I'm framing up the cat, I am interested in placing the cat against a fortuitous background, in getting close enough to the cat but not too close, in waiting for the fortuitous gesture from the cat. I have learned that the cats, which I think of as "in the alley" are frequently not in the alley but rather on someone's back steps, or curled up in a car port. I am contending with this - do I expand my scope outside the literal alley? Or do I focus on those moments when the cat is in the alley proper? Should I focus on the cats in motion, to suggest that the alley is a route rather than a resting place? Etctera.

My shot list grew to include "pictures of cats", which was the imprint of the story I carried with me into the alley, camera in hand. I shoot the cats, as contemplatively as possible, ignoring the forest. And then I learn that the forest is not quite what I thought it was, and around we go.

On quite another note, a friend requested some head shots of herself, for a small business she is re-opening. Her hair is different, the old ones won't do. We met at City Hall, which has a 30 foot wall of glass block and therefore the most beautiful light. I brought my five year old, having no place to park her anyways, and I felt it would add some energy to the situation anyways. We talked (the "client" and I) about what she wanted. Not formal, smiling, open, friendly. My friend, like so many people, is awkward in front of the lens, and dislikes looking at the camera.

My shot list, my shooting script, was simply to get an open, friendly, expression, looking directly at the camera.

At this point I tried to be that contemplative guy, just looking for the moment. My friend was watching my kid run around, and talking to her. I learned that if I spoke to my friend, engaged her, she would turn momentarily to the camera, to me. So that's what I did. I let the friend and the kid interact, and every now and then I'd ask a question, engage, and snap that moment as she turned, still smiling. She likes my kid.

So in both cases here, and this is typical for me, step one is to attempt to get the story straight ("be aware of the forest"). Then take pictures, without thinking much about the story ("oblivious to the forest") but only about what moment, detail, element I am looking for.

I am pretty sure this is more or less the template for a large variety of successful projects. Roy Stryker used shooting scripts to direct the FSA's photographic project, and probably borrowed the method from his earlier work. It turns up commonly in the "creative brief" component of commercial work. I think many a long term fine art project is driven by such a thing as well, albeit perhaps somewhat informally.

When it's really working well, I think the shooting script is organic, it changes as we shoot and learn. But the shooting is separate, it is contemplative and in the moment, and it is only later (perhaps a second later, perhaps a week later) that we realize something important, and the shooting script evolves.

The Dilemma, or Something?

Long time readers will know that I am moderately obsessed with various ideas around the notion of "being present" in, perhaps, a Zen Buddhist way, or in the quasi-religious practices of various first nations like the Navajo concept of the "smooth mind" and the Polynesian navigators. These are all variations on the theme of dismissing thoughts concerned with the past, the future, with externalities, in order to focus on the here and now.

Miksang, the zen photography technique, is recognizably just weaponizing the methods of zen walking meditation to the purpose of photography, and examples of it lay bare the essential problem here, about which I will have more to say shortly.

I firmly believe that something like these methods is necessary to take good individual pictures with any sort of reliability. In rough terms, you need to see what is truly there in order to make a good picture of it, and in order for that to happen you have to be exquisitely present. So, something that stills your interior monologues, that centers you in the here and now, is more or less a necessary technique.

The problem that most work produced through the methods of miksang makes so clear is that the pictures are not connected to anything, and are largely vacuous exercises in form.

The wonder of photography is that it is real. The photograph selects an instant in time and a little window on the world, but when we look at the photo of the tree, we believe in the forest just outside the frame profoundly, because the forest just outside the frame was actually there. Photography's power, as photography rather than simply as any old picture-making method, comes precisely from this reality, from that forest just outside the frame and from the events that occurred just before and just after the shutter snapped open for an instant.

In order to make powerful photographs, or collections of photographs, it is this power that we must use, because it is the lone tool that is in the box, ultimately.

If your ambition extends no further than to make visually striking photographs, well, more power to you and you probably need read no further. If, like me, your ambition extends further, to do more with your pictures, I may have something for you.

Indulge me and allow me to use the word "story" very broadly in this piece. Perhaps it's a literal, linear, story you want to tell. Or a series of facts and situations. But perhaps instead you have in mind something larger than a visual appeal, but ineffable, something you cannot even put in to words. A feeling, a sensation, a non-verbal gestalt of ideas and emotion. Call this larger purpose, whatever it is, the "story."

The story is carried by the interconnections of your photographs, with one another and with the world they imply. Photography's strength is in those connections, drawn from the underlying reality from which the photos are snatched. Even if your story is a marketing campaign, that is still a real car, a real model, with a real half-smile playing across her lips. While she may not truly love the car, her reality makes it easier for you to visualize yourself at her side, one hand on the car door, and keys in the other. If you're telling a gritty story of war and violence, that is a real gun, that is a real fire, that is a real bomb crater or at least a real hole. And so on.

In order to make these pictures, you have to be aware of the larger story and the world into which it is embedded. You cannot simply be lost in this instant, this moment. You cannot just wander the streets, amnesiac, drifting contemplatively from moment to moment, and construct a story. Or at least, I don't see how that would work. You need to retain the context, at least roughly, of what you are trying to accomplish.

The story may change as you work on it, of course. It is organic, it grows, shrinks, and changes form up to the very last moment when ink hits paper. But present it must be in order to inform, to direct, the photography.

And this, truly, is the dilemma. In order to make photographs, we must be simultaneously deeply aware of the forest, and be completely oblivious to the forest.

Phase One: The Camera for Photographers who don't give a shit about Photography

So Phase One, for those of you who don't follow the press on these matters, introduced a new camera back series for their XF system, which peaks out at 150 megapixels. It also has their super amazing new Trichomatic color science, and a bunch of other bullshit.

No photographer has a need for this. The number of professionals standing around saying "gosh, I sure could use like three times as many pixels, slightly better color science, and a hell of a lot less depth of field" is very very close to zero, if not actually zero. We have reached the point where the specifications on this thing are well past what anyone can actually use for, well, for anything. This thing is a device you use to take pictures which show off the capabilities of the device. It is the exact equivalent of the $50,000 turntable with a 500 pound marble platter that really needs 30 minutes to spin up to a stable speed.

But then, my god, the completely imaginary acoustic properties really spring to life!

I could explain in detail why none of the specs are anything that anyone, yes even a professional, would care about, but that would be boring and any readers that care can work it out themselves, I expect.

This thing isn't a camera, it's a fucking confession:

Octogenarian Trump-Voter: Bless me, Padre,
   for I don't give a shit about photography.
Priest: Say 10 Hail Marys and pay me $60,000

While we have the hood up on this hot mess, let's take a look at the thing:

Look, if I'm paying north of 50 grand for something purely to stroke my ego, I don't think it's out of line to insist that it either have tits or a discernible design language. This thing appears to have been drawn from a design brief thus:

A metaphor for amnesia. A box intended to hold only unfiltered Baltic air tinged with grief. A child's toy.

It's vaguely modernist. Sort of Bauhaus, but stupid. Call it Bauhuh? The result looks like an industrial robot for middle management.

I assume that they're basically just copying the RB/RZ cameras from Mamiya, which is where they started. Those were built as boxy-but-cheaper Hasselblad alternatives. They were priced for the budget conscious professional who wanted an excellent medium format studio camera, but didn't want to pay the Hasselblad tax. And was willing to hit the gym, buff up a bit, to carry the fucker around. There wasn't supposed to be much of a design language. And I swear my RZ67 still looks like a Ferrari next to these atrocities from Phase One.

They seem to be doing OK, though. Octogenarian Trump Voters have more money than brains, and some of them are OK with ugly-ass boxes as long as they have enough specs. I assume the name of the game is to have more expensive kit than the asshole next to you on your next Antarctic Photo Cruise, so all that matters is that it say IQ4 on yours while his just says IQ3 like some god damned peasant camera.

It's only a matter of time before you'll be able to buy them in pairs, one to shoot with, the other to smash to pieces on the deck of the ship. Maybe camera smashes could become a thing. And then we'll all make hot toddies with 300 year old scotch using pokers heated in the flames of a pile of $100 bills. Because, why the hell not?