Re: Salgado in Sydney

[pgs@thillana.lcs.mit.edu (Patrick Sobalvarro)]

I very much like Salgado's work.  His composition is spot-on, and
really most everything about his images is gorgeous.  One ingredient
is indeed the Leica look, I think -- with black-and-white images one
particularly notices this -- but of course most of it is his eye and
his exposures and printing.

There's something else about this I wanted to bring up that I think is
related to what's been discussed here lately.  Many people talk about
Salgado as a social activist, but I personally admire him as a
photographer and as a person for the opinions he has expressed.  As a
social activist I think he's clearly a failure, like every modern
photographer.  I am in general suspicious of the notion of the
photographer as the voice of the unfortunate poor people in the world.
This is not a statement about my politics, but more about what I think
photography's aims really are and what it can hope to accomplish.

Consider the case of Bosnia.  There are many other cases, but I think
this one best demonstrates the impotence of photography: a few years
ago, newspapers in the United States and Europe contained many, many
photographs of dead children on the streets of Sarajevo.  The outrage
that might have led to decisive action to stop the killing of
civilians didn't materialize.  Here we cannot even blame racism -- the
readers were Caucasians and the victims were also Caucasians.  We
cannot blame inability -- as was amply demonstrated later, the United
States and Europe were fully capable of bringing a halt to the
hostilities, and a real public outcry would have caused the halt to
come sooner.  The photographs simply had no strong effect.  It seems
that people were simply inured to photographed atrocities.

I think this is in the very nature of photographs.  Photographs
abstract.  They enable the viewer to observe things that he or she
might never otherwise have seen, but the viewer is of course only an
observer and not engaged in what is observed.  No doubt you have had
the experience of seeing a photograph of a place and then being there
and completely forgetting the photograph.  A couple of examples from
my own experience -- when working in Sao Paulo: I'd seen the
photographs of the children but I had no idea that they would actually
try to sell themselves to me or that they might look like a child who
was my friend when I was eight years old or that I would be frightened
of a gang of them I met one day on my way to buy coffee.  Or
backpacking in Alaska: I had seen the photographs of the glaciers and
of course the glaciers were always there but mostly it was the
mosquitoes, worrying about our ability to ford the next stream, trying
to find a dry place to sleep before dark, and once we had pitched the
tent trying to stay awake long enough to eat.  The photographs are
simply irrelevant to the immediate experience of being there.  They
have a reality of their own but it is a very different one from that
of the experience.

I think this means that the photograph cannot compel compassion.
Photographs lie, by their selection of what to show; they have an
agenda, the agenda of the photographer; and they show us a moment
frozen in time so that we can consider their message dispassionately.
They have become like texts for the modern reader.  There is a lot of
power in this, of course.  We have each seen millions of photographs,
many of which have been in messages that tried to convince us of one
thing or another and so we are well-educated observers; a photographer
can depend on our fluency in his or her language and can talk to us
about things that are interesting and complicated.

But hand-in-hand with that fluency comes abstraction, and with
abstraction, the separation of the viewer from what is portrayed and
the intercession of thought before the reaction.  Susan Sontag said
that the street photographer fantasizes about hunting and possessing
what he or she photographs.  There is another fantasy she doesn't
write about, an artist's fantasy of controlling the emotions of the
observer so strongly that one compels him or her to take an action one
desires.  For better or worse, this is all but impossible with modern
observers, and we are all aware of it.  So I do not believe that
street photography succeeds as social activism.

- -Patrick Sobalvarro