Prix Pictet 2011

Amos Power Plant, Raymond, West Virginia, 2004 © Mitch Epstein.

Mitch Epstein has won the 2011 Prix Pictet photography prize for his series American Power.

A Question Prompted by The World Press Photo Awards

A man throwing the body of a dead child at the morgue of the
general hospital, Port-au-Prince, Jan. 15, 2010.
(AP Photo/Olivier Laban-Mattei/AFP)

I came across this photograph at "In Focus" over at The Atlantic where it was part of this post showing some of the 2011 World Press Photo winners in various categories. I generally take a pretty permissive stance on what is a justifiable subject for photography - whether art or documentary or photojournalism. There are lots of things that are a waste of time, or simply not to my taste, but so what. I am not too patient with the squeamish.

There are a lot of things about the world that it is hard to imagine. And photography is, as philosopher Patrick Maynard points out, a technology that usefully amplifies our capacity to imagine. Generally, I think this is a necessary task. And it identifies the intersection of politics and photography understood (regardless of genre) as an art. This image takes me right up to - maybe across - the bounds of possibility. I find it excruciating. And, no, I cannot imagine being this child's sibling or parent or neighbor. And I cannot imagine, either, being the worker at the morgue.

On the other hand, this is the reality of an epidemic. I have just shown my undergraduate students films on James Nachtwey and Sebastião Salgado, both of whom photographed the mass deaths from cholera in the refugee camps housing Hutus who had fled following the genocide in Rwanda. Their images depict earth moving equipment being used to scoop up piles of corpses and dumping them in mass graves. Gruesome, but important in keeping the epidemic from getting worse. This photograph nevertheless seems worse - meaning more brutal - to me.

So, my question is whether this image crosses the line. I am undecided. It seems as though various editors are undecided too. You will not find it reproduced among the images in the report of the WPF awards at The Guardian [1] or the BBC [2]; but it is included without comment in the reports at The National Geographic [3] and The New York Times [4]. At The Atlantic you have to click through this message - Warning: This image may contain graphic or objectionable content. Click to view image - before viewing the image.

Does Sean O'Hagan Really Get Photography?

It seems to have become an annual event. The short list for the Deutsche Börse Prize is announced. And then Sean O'Hagan promptly writes a column in The Guardian complaining that the jury seems obsessed with "conceptual" photography at the expense of ... well, of things that O'Hagan seems to like better. And, on that matter, O'Hagan seems remarkably self assured. What he prefers, he tells us, is "straight photography – photography without pretensions." No examples of what he means. No sense of which of the now canonical figures in the history of photography would be drummed out of any possible consideration for the Prize. Just a broad complaint. In any case, here is his column from this week. Here and here are two posts, with relevant links, I wrote in response to last year's installment.

Nothing much has changed in my assessment this year. But instead of simply repeating myself, I'd ask you to consider a hypothetical. According to the Prize web page, the Deutsche Börse Prize is awarded "a contemporary photographer of any nationality, who has made the most significant contribution (exhibition or publication) to the medium of photography in Europe in the previous year." When, as will soon enough be the case, Sebastião Salgado completes his Genesis project (which, by the way, The Guardian has been previewing in installments) and publishes the planned for book and mounts the planned for exhibition, will he be eligible for the Deutsche Börse short list by O'Hagan's lights? It is not just that Salgado's work has "pretensions," but it arguably also calls into question in various ways naïve views of photography and its uses. I am not sure how, given his ongoing complaints, O'Hagan could not object if the jury included Salgado for the shortlist. But I am then not at all sure who he might deem worthy of consideration.

Scientific Images: Prize-Winning Snow Flakes

And the 2010 Lennart Nilsson Award (Recognizing Extraordinary Image Makers in Science) goes to CalTach Physicist Kenneth Libbrecht. He makes pictures of snowflakes. I figured it would be difficult to make any connection between his photographs and politics; then I saw the stamps. Not only are they official postage, but they have the standard distributive politics and familiar foreign policy implications at work - one flake each from Alaska and Michigan with the other two being Canadian. Can you identify which ones?

And, of course, the Europeans had to get on on the act .... These are Austrian stamps:

View from the Day Job

In my 'real' life I am a college professor - hence the unstylish tweed jacket. But here I am introducing a colleague who was winning a well-deserved award for his research.

Speaking of Prizes ~ Linda Gordon Wins Bancroft Prize

Historian Linda Gordon, according to this report, has won the Bancroft Prize for her terrific biography of Dorothea Lange. I noted the imminent appearance of the book last summer and have since read it. Two points that Gordon highlights in her discussion of how Lange helped invent documentary photography seem important to me.

The first is that Lange came to documentary work from a successful career as a portrait photographer. Gordon suggests that she democratized the practice of portraiture by photographing working people with the same artistry and technique she had used on her wealthy clients. Conversely, Gordon stresses that Lange quite consciously came to focus her 'documentary' photographs on individuals because she believed that that was the most effective way to generate an active political response in viewers.

The second point is that Roy Stryker - Lange's boss when she worked for the FSA - contributed to the gerrymandering of photography into "art" and "documentary" mostly for partisan political and bureaucratic reasons. "He could not justify his budget if the funds went toward creating art . . . To repel political attacks, he had to ban 'artifice' in the making of photographs ...". So, just as Walker Evans and his allies were campaigning to establish the claims of photography as art, Stryker was actively creating the contrasting category of documentary. That dichotomy, which I think is more or less wholly unsustainable, continues to haunt - and hinder - discussion of photography and its uses today.

In any case, the Gordon book is a useful and insightful read. I highly recommend it!

Prizes, Critics, and the Uses of Photography

Fire-Escape (from the series “House on Myasnitskaya”), 1925.
Photograph © Alexander Rodchenko.

French photographer Sophie Ristelhueber has won the 2010 Deutsche Börse prize. You can find a report here. This has prompted Sean O'Hagan, photo critic at The Guardian, to renew his lament that “the Deutsche Börse judges have shown a distinct bias for a certain kind of conceptual art photography that might be better suited to the Turner prize shortlist.” The problem with this attempted gerrymander is three-fold, at least.

First, as I mentioned in this earlier post, responding to an earlier iteration of his complaint, O'Hagan doesn't seem to grasp what actually has happened in the selection process over the past few years. To save you having to follow the link, I pointed out that "Robert Adams won the prize in 2005. Esko Männikkö was picked in 2008 from a largely traditionalist short list. And last year the list was similarly recognizable." Conceptual Art? Not hardly.

Second, in the same post I suggested that O'Hagan seems to have a naive view of the purpose of prizes - they are, on my view, largely about agenda setting in one or another way. He seems to think there is some nefarious move afoot to subvert the claims of "traditional photographs." In a remarkably un-self-reflective way he fails to notice that his own complaints are attempts at agenda setting of just the sort for which he criticizes the judging panel. Would he, for instance, suggest that, say, Rodchenko or Man Ray not have been plausible candidates for a prize of this sort?

Finally, if we think more about photography as a way of doing things - say, following Patrick Maynard, as a technology that allows us to mark surfaces and thereby enhance and amplify our ability to see or imagine - then the defensiveness O'Hagan evinces is misplaced. There is no need to define the remit of a photography prize conservatively as being bestowed on someone for creating pile of photographs. We might instead simply see the point of such awards - at least in part - as recognizing creative uses of photographic technology for whatever the purpose might be.