Mexico Notebook: Interview with Adam Wiseman

Annuska Angulo in the bathroom of Progreso and Prosperidad, Escandon, Mexico City,
From the series "Moving Portraits" (2013) © Adam Wiseman 

Hannah Frieser, Jaime Permuth and I are collaborating to explore contemporary photography in Mexico. We're looking at trends and how they relate to traditions; events, institutions and venues; as well as pursuing conversations with curators, academics, gallerists and photographers on what's happening currently. This collaborative project will feature a variety of types of posts including interviews, book reviews, published letters, portfolios of images and more.

Hannah Frieser is a curator, photographer and book artist and former Executive Director of Light Work. Jaime Permuth is a Guatemalan photographer living and working in New York City and a Faculty Member at the School of Visual Arts.

Today we continue this series with an interview of Adam Wiseman by Jessica Hubbard Marr.

Other posts in this series include:
Q&A with Luis Mercado
Q&A with Ray Govea
Interview with Ramón Jiménez Cuén
Interview with Laurence Salzmann
Interview with Diego Berruecos
Interview with Mariela Sancari
Q&A with Eduardo Jiménez Román
Q&A with Claudia Arechiga
Q&A with Nahatan Navarro
Contemporary Photography in Oaxaca
Q&A with Aglae Cortés
Q&A with Maria José Sesma
Interview with César Rodríguez
Q&A with Nora Gómez
Q&A with Melba Arellano
Q&A with Jorge Taboada

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Rafael Ortega, on his balcony in Progreso and Prosperidad, Escandon, Mexico City, From the series
"Moving Portraits" (2013) © Adam Wiseman

Jessica Hubbard Marr: To begin, where do you live and what do you do?

Adam Wiseman:  I live in Mexico City; I am an artist and a freelance editorial photographer.

JHM: Describe your first experience with photography. What stands out to you most about this first encounter?

AW:  My parents have always been obsessed with photo albums, we have many volumes of them. As a child we moved and traveled a lot. My mother is Scottish, my father American. I was born in Mexico and as a child lived in Brazil, Mexico, Scotland and London.

With so much moving around, the photo albums were the only way I could keep everything straight. I developed an appreciation for visual language from a very young age. I struggled with dyslexia, pictures made much more sense as a means of communication than words.

As a young adolescent I began to travel alone or with friends and recorded my travels with a point-and-shoot; I loved it, wasn't much good, but I was always excited to get the film developed.  It wasn't until I started going to university that I became more serious about photography as a tool of personal expression and not one of just documentation.  It was at the age of 18 that I learned how to use a manual SLR, how to develop film in a darkroom, how to print and how to edit.

Elena Poniatowska in her garden in Chimalistac, Mexico City, From the series "Moving Portraits" (2013)
© Adam Wiseman

JHM: What were you drawn to most about photography?

AW:  I am drawn to its intuitive nature, I feel most of my good work is shot intuitively, to a certain extent; subconsciously, not intellectually.

There is simplicity and clarity in photography but also plenty of room for interpretation. I am drawn to photographs that are in some way unresolved, that have some ambiguity about them requiring the viewer to participate and fill in the blanks with their imagination.

I love the subjective nature of photography, how it distorts reality and manifests a particular point of view and yet it is often accepted as the gospel truth. I am fascinated by the idea of taking a photograph and thus removing a slice of reality from a larger context and changing its meaning by creating a new context either by placing it next to other photographs, or on its own, but without the reference of its natural environment.

Francis Alÿs in La Condesa, Mexico City, From the series "Moving Portraits" (2013)
© Adam Wiseman

JHM: What was your experience like studying at ICP (International Center for Photography)? What stands out to you about that education?

AW:  ICP was my first serious introduction to photography.  We were only 11 [students], so each of us had plenty of time to share our work and critique the work of our peers. We had access to darkrooms, cameras, lights and chemicals.

Experimentation was always encouraged: it felt liberating to be able to shoot so freely and to be in such a creative environment.  What stood out was the dynamic back and forth from one’s peers. I miss it today, having so many talented photographers around to receive feedback from and being able to look at other's work.

Guillermo Santamarina at the Muca Roma, Mexico City, From the series "Moving Portraits" (2013)
© Adam Wiseman

JHM: How did your work at Magnum impact you or inspire you?

AW:  My work at Magnum was as a printer. It was a wonderful opportunity to see how the photographers I had always admired worked. Looking at the contact sheets of each photographer would reveal how they achieved the iconic images which were eventually chosen, the images we all eventually knew so well which became part of the fabric of history: Bresson, Capa, Gilden, Koudelka, Erwitt, Meiselas, Peress, Webb, McCurry, Nachtwey… no longer just role models, they became my teachers. I was very fortunate to be there and most of them were very generous with their time.

JHM: Who has been a photographer, whether at Magnum or elsewhere, that notably influenced you and/or your current professional practice?

AW:  I have always admired photographers who have broken with tradition, photographers who discover a new way to express themselves and don't necessarily adhere to the unspoken rules of the medium. Martin Parr, Stephen Shore, Alec Soth, Bruce Gilden, Richard Mosse, Paul Graham, Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin are a few that come to mind.

Luis Mdahuar in Kurt and Rocio's garage, La Condesa, Mexico City, From the series "Moving Portraits" (2013)
© Adam Wiseman

JHM: What brought you back to Mexico City? How was the transition from the New York photography world? Challenges? Benefits? Differences?

AW:  I returned to Mexico City for practical and emotional reasons. A part of me always wanted to return and I was often nostalgic for when I lived there. My wife and I had also just had our first child and we were struggling to make a living as we slowly got our careers off the ground. Moving to Mexico turned out to be a good decision for many reasons, among them for my development as a photographer.

I was offered opportunities I feel would not have been offered to me in New York. I became the photo editor of a travel magazine, an experience that let me grow and experiment, develop a personal style and refine my technical skills. Being a photo editor in a big publishing house turned out to be too much of an administrative job for me and I soon left to become a freelancer. Despite it not being a good fit as a long-term decision, the experience was a very valuable one and gave me the skills I needed to then find my own path in the photographic and art world.

Melanie Smith in her studio, San Pedro Los Pinos, Mexico City, From the series "Moving Portraits" (2013)
© Adam Wiseman

JHM: How do you find a balance between editorial and personal work? Where do find inspiration for your personal work?

AW:  For most of my career, I have survived from editorial assignments. From very early on, I made a commitment to myself that every assignment should have a personal angle to it. I was not allowed to be happy with the work if only my client was. I could only be happy with it if I had discovered and photographed something that challenged me intellectually or aesthetically.

As a consequence, my editorial work developed into something more personal and my personal work began to take center stage. I never really felt I have had to balance the two, on the contrary they are each a part of the other's process.

Michael Nyman in La Colonia Roma, Mexico City, From the series "Moving Portraits" (2013)
© Adam Wiseman

JHM: What was the motivation behind your series, "Moving Portraits"?

AW:  "Moving Portraits" was part of a personal exploration looking to challenge the traditional rules of documentary photography and in this case, documentary portraiture.

It came at a time when I decided to step back from my semi-formulaic editorial process and think about photography in a more theoretical way: what is a portrait? What is the role of the photographer/subject? What is their relationship to each other? How is objectivity achieved with a medium that has such a subjective nature?

In a way, it was a personal rebellion to my years of being faithful to the unspoken yet strict rules of documentary photography. "Moving Portraits" was inspired by the need to break the rules. My goal was to capture the essence of my subjects through untraditional methods, in this case through deceit and by using a new tool for me; video.

Boca del Rio Bar, From the series "d.f.p.m." (2011) © Adam Wiseman

Mannequins, From the series "d.f.p.m." (2011) © Adam Wiseman

JHM: Deceit! I imagine being captured in such a novel approach was new for all your subjects, and especially the public figures who have their portrait taken regularly. What was the feedback from your subjects? Anything unexpected?

AW:  Initially, they were surprised and at first quiet, probably because they were trying to remember if they did anything foolish. After the surprise wore off though they found it amusing and I think liked the sneaky/cheekiness of it.

JHM: In 2013, "Moving Portraits" was featured in the exhibition "México a través de la Fotografía" at the MUNAL (National Museum of Art); it was the final work in the survey of 300 important works of Mexican photographic history. How did it feel to be included alongside such legendary work? Do you see the series as an indicator to where photography is evolving in Mexico?

AW:  I was flattered. I was also impressed by Georgina Rodriguez's bold decision to include "MP" - a video - in a show that illustrated the history of Mexico, but also the history of photography in Mexico. It was bold but necessary because technology is allowing for changes in traditional methods of expression and many photographers now incorporate video into their work.

Many of the pieces in this year's Photography Biennial include video. These videos are mostly photographic in the way that they use the language of still photography (carefully composed, camera in a fixed position, limited or restricted movement within the frame, and the lack of a story based narrative).

Many contemporary Mexican photographers are expressing themselves through video in this new way; Pavka Segura's new work, which might be described as video photographs, is a good example of this. Nahatan Navarro incorporates into his work "stolen" video selfies taken from electronic store laptops.

So yes, I feel that "Moving Portraits" is one example of how photography in Mexico is freeing itself from the medium and its rules, new techniques encouraged by advances in technology and changes in the market has made documentary photography more subjective and concept driven and less driven by the pursuit of a story-based narrative.

Three Kings Day, From the series "d.f.p.m." (2011) © Adam Wiseman

JHM: What was the inspiration for your most recent work, "Tlatelolco Desmentido"? How did you decide to represent/depict the current community at Tlatelolco?

AW:  "Tlatelolco Desmentido" ("Tlatelolco Disproved") is a look at the relationship between a building and the people who live in it. How one shapes and defines the other in spite of what the architect had originally intended. I was interested in Tlatelolco because it has been so scarred by history and is so far removed from the modernist utopia it was supposed to be.

I wanted to make a "portrait" of a place and a people in a moment in time. A portrait where the process not only allowed for an unpredictable result, mirroring the architect Mario Pani's experience, but that also involved the residents in the making, without the residents being the protagonists. The building is always the protagonist in this process, yet the building is defined by those who live in it.

Portrait of a Man Drinking Beer, From the series "d.f.p.m." (2011) © Adam Wiseman

JHM: What were some of the challenges in dealing with such a tragic historical event?

AW:  At first I had to decide how to approach the subject, how much of this project should be about the tragic events that occurred there?

From the very beginning, I chose not to make the student massacre of '68 the focus of this project. It had to be as present as it was in the minds and lives of those who lived there: not the main focus, just like it isn't constantly a part of everyday life. However, there is no denying that its ghost is there and will never go away.

Once I had decided to focus on the building and its residents, the challenge was primarily logistical and social: how to convince over 100 people to get involved in this crazy project?

To do this, I asked my good friend, artist and producer Enrique Cervera to help me. He was key to getting the Chihuahua building to open their doors to us and to keep them open for almost a year now.

From the series "Tlatelolco Desmentido" (2014) © Adam Wiseman

JHM: Were there any surprises in the process of making the work?

AW:  Absolutely! The biggest surprise was how eager and willing the residents were; over 90% of those asked took part in the project. The results of "Tlatelolco Desmentido" are far removed from what I expected would occur.

The whole project was a surprise. Another surprise was how the project evolved naturally, how it began and then where it led me, particularly from shooting the façade and the orchestrated lights to shooting the interior windows.

From the series "Tlatelolco Desmentido" (2014) © Adam Wiseman

From the series "Tlatelolco Desmentido" (2014) © Adam Wiseman

JHM: How are you inspired by Mexico City? What is unique about it, especially for a photographer?

AW:  Like any big city, its unpredictability. In the case of Mexico City, I think this is especially the case. I also love the way it solves its own problems through unconventional creative means.

I once read a description of São Paulo, Brazil as a city that looked as if New York had vomited Los Angeles… I think there is some of that in Mexico, not only the imagery, but also socio-politically, culturally and economically speaking.

JHM: Finally, what’s next?

AW:  Still lifes… I think.

From the series "Tlatelolco Desmentido" (2014) © Adam Wiseman

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Jessica Hubbard Marr is a specialist in photographic imagery with a focus on Latin America, an interest that developed thanks to many nights in the Manuel Alvarez Bravo/IAGO library in Oaxaca over the years. As a result, she subsequently received her M.A. in The History and Theory of Photography at Sotheby's Institute of Art/University of Manchester in London in 2011; Marr previously earned her B.A. in English from Kenyon College in 2005. Prior to working in the photography field, Marr worked with the non-profit, 'Friends of Oaxacan Folk Art' from 2008-2010, as both a photographer and cultural liaison. 

Since 2010, she has worked for TransGlobe Publishing in London, researching and writing about contemporary art and photography in locations ranging from Brazil to the Middle East. In 2012, Marr was appointed to the Global Nominations Panel for the Prix Pictect Photography Prize as a specialist in Latin American Photography. Her original essay, "A Glimpse into Enduring Moments" was featured in the catalogue of photographer Nadja Massun's solo exhibition, Alice in the Land of Zapata, at the Hungarian House of Photography in Budapest in 2012.

Marr resides in the US after spending the past six years studying and working abroad in Oaxaca, Quito, London and Mexico City. She credits these experiences to both expanding and deepening her appreciation for and knowledge about the photographic medium across cultures. 

She works as an independent photography consultant, researcher, writer, editor, and art advisor for both art/photography professionals and practitioners between Mexico, New York and London. 

Marr's photographic work has been published internationally in a variety of art and literary journals. Her first published photograph was taken in Oaxaca in 2008. 

Shifting Lines: The Increasing Consideration of Documentary Photography and Photojournalism as Fine Art Photography, Part I

© Alec Soth, from Dog Days Bogotá

In the latest in a recent series of articles on Thomas Hoepker’s September 11th image, Joerg Colberg of Conscientious published a well-written piece entitled “How we give photographs meaning.” In the post he opens up several threads of potential conversation: the importance of including context when reading an image, all photographs as fictions with no inherent meaning, the ethics of photojournalism, meanings as constructs, etc.

Given I agree with Colberg’s main points (and to dwell on the few second-tier points I have questions about seems nitpicky), I’m going to build on the conversation his piece continues by pulling out one particular thread of his post. This will also be a way to slow the conversation down and explore in depth one of those potential conversations his essay opens.

Colberg writes (my italics):

               “The meaning of a photograph is a construct that involves a group of people operating
               against a specific background (news, art, …), subject to the group’s personal, cultural and
               political biases. I think what we should be talking about is not how truthful photographs
               are, but how truthful we expect them to be, given the background they’re operating in.”

This quote raises a slippery question: how do we know what background we are operating against? Just where are those lines between fine art photography, photojournalism, and documentary photography?

It’s not immediately clear how we should approach establishing those lines in a photographic world in which someone like Alec Soth, to choose an example, can call himself a documentary photographer while simultaneously being a member of the premier photojournalism agency in the world and having a retrospective at a major contemporary art museum. Is it a question of where we see the photograph? If the same image is in both a gallery and a newspaper, should we say we’re operating against an art background in one situation and against a photojournalistic one in the other? Or is it a question of subject matter so that a picture made to describe a war, for example, is inherently photojournalism? But then what to make of Richard Mosse’s Infra? Is a photograph what the photographer says it is? Joel-Peter Witkin surely couldn’t claim his work is documentary. Then is it the observer that decides? What if you and I differ in opinion - who’s right?

© Richard Mosse, from Infra

To make things more complicated, the question is also a temporal one – the lines between genres are alive, constantly moving and shifting to reflect cultural changes, historical events, prevailing intellectual winds, and the photographic marketplace.

To look at these questions, I’m going to dust off and cannibalize a paper for this post that I wrote a few years ago that explores the history of the relationship between these three genres. More historical than polemical, it examines how the 1970s in particular played an important role in forming the contemporary photographic landscape of more elastic definitions that we live in today.

I’ll boil the paper down as much as possible to get rid of what’s not to the point and polish it up a bit, but I don’t think I can get rid of the fundamental academic feel of having written it in a university setting. I solemnly swear to you, however, that I won’t use the words “hegemony,” “epistemological,” or “syllogism.”

This post will be divided into at least two due to length. Today will give the background for what happens in the '70s which will be the subject of the second (and any subsequent) posts.

______________________________________ 

A number of factors combined during the 1970s to accelerate the movement between the photographic genres of documentary work, photojournalism, and fine art photography that have opened into today’s era of more fluid relationships. During this decade the rise of television and the concurrent decline in the magazine industry, the rise of galleries dedicated to showing fine art photography, the museum’s firm establishment of the photographic print as a unique and collectable object and the resulting development of the market for photographic prints, the development of artist's books, the evolution of an economic infrastructure that helped sustain photographers as artists, and the questioning of the ability of photography to document or record events factually all contributed to the rise of the new era.

The boundaries between documentary photography, photojournalism, and fine art photography have never been absolute and have increasingly overlapped during the course of photographic history. The '70s built on existing trends in photography. Photographic historian Mary Warner Marien writes about the '70s milieu in a book called Photography: A Cultural History:

               The presence of documentary and photojournalistic photographs in museums and
               galleries was not new…Nevertheless, in the past, image-makers, audiences, curators, and
               scholars had considered art photography, documentary photography, and photojournalism
               as having their own separate lines of development and different social agendas. (Marien 410)

© Eugène Atget

To pull out just a few examples, Eugène Atget consciously cropped the developing modern Paris around the historical construct he intended to photograph in his Vieux Paris images and he photographed in correlation to the interests of his various clients, revealing a strong subjectivity to work he labeled “documents.”

Dorothea Lange and other documentary photographers of the Farm Security Administration made their way into art exhibitions and Walker Evans exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in 1938. Evans defined his work as art despite often being considered a prototypical documentarian by asserting that his work does not have a utilitarian use such as a police crime scene photograph. He also noted the artifice involved in “documentary work.” FSA photographers used stylistic elements such as sharp focus, even lighting, and a frontal composition to code their images as factual and to indicate that they should be read as unbiased. “Documentary?” famously questioned Evans. “That’s a very sophisticated and misleading word. And not really clear. . .The term should be documentary style.” (Blake Stimson, The Pivot of the World: Photography and Its Nation, 210) Evans, in short, was aware of the common urge to view documentary images as mimetic, but was cognizant of the bias of the photographer’s perspective.

The Magnum photography agency in 1947 challenged the notion of what constituted photojournalism. Founded as a photographic cooperative, members of Magnum retain the rights to their photographs as well as the authority to conceive and execute their own projects. Although their work still needs to find a market, by removing the responsibility to answer to assignments designed by newspaper and magazine editors, the freelance photojournalists of Magnum defined the term "photojournalism" for themselves, broadening the scope of the genre to include longer projects done in essay form, which becomes close to indistinguishable from the type of work done by Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine. In turn, Riis and particularly Hine can be listed as either documentarians or photojournalists depending on the article or book.

Original front cover, uncredited image

Robert Frank’s The Americans (1958) marked a new era in documentary work in which individual and psychological issues replaced the historical, ideological, and political issues of earlier photographs (such as those of the FSA) and formed a style of intimacy instead of an attempted detachment. Working under a Guggenheim Foundation grant, and not under the guidelines of a newspaper editor or a government program, Frank documented 1950s American society of all strata during his cross-country road trips, photographing flags, politicians, cars, and racial dynamics. At the same time, however, he concerned himself with how the exterior world reflected his interior world. “I’m always doing the same images,” he has stated, “I’m always looking outside, trying to look inside.” (Stimson 105) The angry, bemused looks that manifest the photographer’s intrusion in The Americans might be said, according to Stimson, to be the singular moment of the document becoming art, though the document could be considered art since Atget. (Stimson 211)

From the 1950s to the 1970s, work that allowed more space for the personal and contingent in photojournalism became accepted and known as "new journalism." (Mary Panzer, Things as They Are, 27) Although more commonly associated with print journalism, the term “new journalism” became connected to photographers who injected a personal, first-person perspective into their reporting. The Vietnam War, for example, became the center of a perceived link between photojournalism and personal politics as photographers such as Phillip Jones Griffiths abandoned their supposed objectivity and took a stance in opposition of the war.

Lastly, new social documentary photographers emerged from the mix of anti-Vietnam War activism and conceptual art ideas of the era to add another dynamic to the idea of the photograph as a document. The interests of this informal group, which included Allan Sekula, Martha Rosler, and Fred Lonidier among others, included techniques not traditionally associated with documentary work, such as collage, to comment on social oppression without making "victim photographs" that evoked too much overt sympathy or voyeurism. Rosler says, "We wanted to be documentarians in a way that documentarians hadn't been…We wanted to use obviously theatrical or dramatized sequences or performance elements together with more traditional documentary strategies, to use text, irony, absurdity, mixed forms of all types." (Marien 429)

© Martha Rosler, Balloons

We can see that the terms “photojournalism” and “documentary photography” showed significant flexibility before the 1970s. “Photojournalism” went from encompassing the construction of events by the photographer - such as Alexander Gardner's openly rearranged Civil War battle scenes - to considering itself as objective reportage, including politics as part of its stance, and accepting first-person perspective in the form of "new journalism." “Documentary photography” went from being considered the recording of actual documents to being a passionate crusading appeal intended to provoke its audience to action with the work of Riis and Hine, a passive and objective lens with the FSA, an attempt to present psychological reality, sociological assessment, the recording of other art forms for documentation such as earthworks, and even the physical collage of images.

As Lili Corbus Bezner writes in her book Photography and Politics in America: From the New Deal into the Cold War, “documentary photography frequently intrudes into contradictory categorization; it exists uneasily, therefore, within the supposedly distinct domains of journalistic, artistic, landscape, fashion, and advertising photography.” (Bezner 1) Similarly, Beaumont Newhall, the first director of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, wrote in a later edition of The History of Photography, “Since World War II the [documentary] movement has lost impetus in the organizational sense. Its tenets have been absorbed and have become essential to the fabric of photojournalism.” (Bezner 12)

To be continued Friday

Opinion: Pantall, Colberg, Hoepker and Understanding Images

© Thomas Hoepker

Colin Pantall and Joerg Colberg have both recently discussed the above photograph taken by Magnum's Thomas Hoepker on September 11th, 2011.

Pantall uses the image to point to the problem of the narrow emotional range accepted in the responses of photographic subjects to a situation, as well as the difficulty many people have coping with something beyond the simplest of narratives in a photograph. I would continue his points by adding that there's a problem with the assumption that it is possible to come to any correct reading of the emotional state of photographic subjects and in believing we can correctly conclude the narrative of a photograph in any way.

Hoepker makes these very mistakes about his own image. In a New York Times op-ed column by Frank Rich, written in 2006 on the fifth anniversary of September 11th, he's quoted as saying about this image, "They were totally relaxed like any normal afternoon...It’s possible they lost people and cared, but they were not stirred by it." Slate writer David Plotz makes the same mistakes in a rejection of Rich's column: "The subjects are obviously engaged with each other, and they're almost certainly discussing the horrific event unfolding behind them. They have looked away from the towers for a moment not because they're bored with 9/11, but because they're citizens participating in the most important act in a democracy—civic debate...They came to this spot to watch their country's history unfold and to be with each other at a time of national emergency."

Hoepker and Plotz both assert singular, different, yet conclusive readings of what is going on in the image: "they were totally relaxed"..."they were not stirred"..."they have looked away...because"...and finally "they came to this spot to watch." These assertions of being able to give a factual reading of the events portrayed in the image is problematic; all conversation about a photograph needs to be framed as conjecture. Short of finding the subjects and photographer and asking, we cannot actually know what was happening or why an image was taken - and even their words can be questioned; memories are fickle, we all have agendas.

Colberg follows up on Pantall's post by asserting that a photographer's intentions can't be known and that we observe photographs with inherent biases: "We all like to think that the photographer’s intention inform the image and that when we look at a photograph we can see those intention. [sic] But if we ignore the simple fact that we have no way of knowing what the photographer’s intentions were (How would we know? All we have is a photograph), especially in a news context, we don’t just look at photographs, we look at them with our own sets of expectations (as Colin notes) and biases. We often see in photographs not what they show, but instead what we want to see."

I will add a question to the conversation - if the emotional state of the subjects and the narrative cannot be extracted from an image, and the photographer's intentions cannot be known, how about allegory and metaphor as a strategy for correctly reading images? Not if the word "correctly" is left in the sentence. Reading and concluding - or better yet, creating - the allegorical and metaphorical meaning in an image is informed by one's life experience and knowledge and a matter of subjective insights. As long as the observer remembers that their conclusions also remain in the realm of conjecture, however, metaphor and allegory can definitely be a way to analyze and discuss an image.

This is why I would take what I imagine is an unpopular position and defend Rich's column, even though I don't agree with his conclusions or his reading of the image. Unlike Hoepker and Plotz, Rich does not claim a truthful interpretation of the facts the image contains. Jonathan Jones writes in an article in The Guardian about the debate around Hoepker's image, "[Rich] saw in this undeniably troubling picture an allegory of America's failure to learn any deep lessons from that tragic day, to change or reform as a nation: 'The young people in Mr Hoepker's photo aren't necessarily callous. They're just American.'" And Plotz writes about Rich's column, "So they turned their backs on Manhattan for a second. A nice metaphor for Rich to exploit, but a cheap shot." That may be so, and we can attack the conclusion and the arguments Rich uses to construct it, but he avoids making conclusive factual statements about the image of the type that get both Hoepker and Plotz in trouble.

© Gregory Crewdson

Let's start to draw some conclusions from all of this with a few more questions.

If we agree it's not possible to know the true emotions or narrative of an image, nor the intentions of the photographer, and that allegory and metaphor need to be remembered as a subjective reading of an image, does that mean that Hoepker's image of 9/11 should be read in the same way as the above image by Gregory Crewdson?

Should all art photography, photojournalism and documentary photography be read in the same way?

Is a news image in The New York Times as "truthful" as one of Crewdson's constructions?

Do we know as little of the intentions of a advertising photographer making an image to sell a bar of soap as those of a photographer like Crewdson?

Is the answer that we just can't know anything about an image for sure, so all interpretations of it are equally valid?

I think Pantall gives us a way to answer these questions when he writes, "[We] want to reduce things to black and white and right and wrong dualities." To begin answering the questions above, we need to remind ourselves to avoid reducing our thinking about how to look at images to simple dualities - while going ahead and continuing to look at and discuss images. Photography does not allow us to make conclusive readings about images, yet it is part of our job as photographers, critics, curators, and writers on photography to attempt readings anyways. We investigate images and construct arguments for how an image could be read. We aggressively ask what is really going on, what the photographer's intentions are, what biases we have, and what meaning we can construct through allegory and metaphor. This is the foundation of using visual images for communication (and the root cause of really long grad school critiques).

© Nick Ut

Taking this point one more step, all readings of an image are not equally valid - it is not the case that because there is no photographic truth, all readings are therefore of equal value. The problem is that it's difficult to quantify the reasons why. A toddler does not deserve the same voice on an image's meaning as mine or yours. We have more experience looking at images, knowledge of context, life experience, and knowledge of history. My conclusion to all of this is we need to accept something I'll call spectrum reading. Spectrum reading would be the rejection of a duality that says because, for example, we can't know for sure the true emotional states of the children in the horrific Vietnam War image by Nick Ut seen above, they are therefore open to the same degree of speculation as the emotional states of the man and woman in the image by Crewdson. Or that the intentions of a photographer taking an image of a bar of soap are as vague as Crewdson's. Or that because we can't easily quantify the value of a particular response, that all are therefore equal.

We need to read the context of the image, take note of who the observer is, look at who is making the image and try to figure out why; we have to understand the accepted parameters for image manipulation in the media venue of the image, talk with friends and colleagues, etc...then we can make more (or less) intelligent arguments about an image and its meaning. The site Bag News regularly does a good job of this with political and news images. Pantall does this regularly on his site and did so here on this site a month ago looking at an image by the photographer Billy Monk. We can look for truth, argue about intention, divine metaphor - we just can't claim to be absolutely correct.

Lastly, I'm going to be a little more optimistic than both Pantall and Colberg on one final point. Pantall writes, "We are still not very sophisticated in our visual way of experiencing the world" and Colberg writes, "We don’t really understand photography." I'd like to suggest that although the ability to understand visual communication may not be as developed as with written communication, we're not where we were in decades past, either.

There has been a corrosion in the belief in the truth value of a photograph at least going back until World War II. John Szarkowski, the long-term director of New York's Museum of Modern Art, fundamentally refuted the ability of photography to explain large-scale public issues, such as Margaret Bourke-White's attempt to explain the effects of World War II in her photographic work. "Most issues of importance cannot be photographed," Szarkowski claimed, declaring the fields of photojournalism and documentary as non-effectual in his influential book, Mirrors and Windows (1978). His comments reflect a now long-standing trend towards doubt about photographic veracity which became widespread after World War II and continues today, an erosion of confidence represented by the debates about the authenticity of Robert Capa's Death of a Loyalist Soldier (below) and other World War II images. This loss of confidence has helped to create a distance between documentary photography and photojournalism and their traditional roles, facilitating their consideration as works of art or personal expression, an interesting conversation beyond the scope of this particular post.

© Robert Capa, Death of a Loyalist Soldier

This erosion of confidence in the truth of photographs is also seen in the almost immediate questions we have around the authenticity of an image like the one below. We see it, we question it's truthfulness. As the manipulation of photographs has grown, so has our own skepticism and disbelief - that is the foundation for a more sophisticated reading of images in our culture, an advancement in ability. We now largely understand that, "A snapshot can make mourners attending a funeral look like they're having a party," as Walter Sipser - the man on the right in Hoepker's photograph - wrote after reading Hoepker's comments on the image and Rich's column. We're still not a visually literate society, but we have a wider understanding of the power, lies, and meanings of images now than we did before.

Uncredited image from the Facebook page of "All Things METAL \m/"

Interview: Amani Willett

Interviewed by phone from his home in Brooklyn
January 16th and 19th, 2011

New York City-based photographer Amani Willett was recently featured in the book Street Photography Now and is a long-term member of the highly respected iN-PUBLiC collective of street photographers. His photographs have also been included in the books ReGeneration: Telling Stories From Our Twenties and Dawn of the 21st Century: The Millennium Photo Project. He has exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, among many other spaces.

In this full-length interview he talks about his years working at Magnum Photos, why street photography must evolve as a genre to survive, and his decision to enter a photography MFA program in the midst of a successful career. He also shares with us 15 new images not previously published or shown.