Among the images streaming to us from Iran recently and all the commentary surrounding it there are two pieces I’ve found interesting as discussions on the images themselves. The first comes from the No Caption Needed blog which discusses the differing uses made of photographs by pro-Ahmadinejad supporters (established, timeless-looking portraits of the President and the Ayatollah) and pro-Mousavi protesters (recent images of current events). The posts on either side of this one are pertinent too, in their exploration of non-heroic images of protest elsewhere, and of the images from social media sources.
The second piece is an op-ed from Salon.com by Glenn Greenwald, on Helen Thomas calling President Obama on the suppression of images of torture by US personnel while he responds to the images from Iran and what they tell us about how “unjust” the situation there is. Greenwald goes on the discuss the question of how acceptable the idea of torture seems to have become in US public discourse and how to hide images of torture serves to increase its acceptability. His discussion is more detailed than I can summarize satisfactorily here, and towards the end he quotes law scholar Alice Ristroph who also makes the connection between the two sets of images and argues, despite what the president says about the US torture images having no informational value, that images can “convey ideas and information for which we have no words” and that they “can make us speak and think about subjects that we would otherwise like to avoid.”
Update, 8 July 2009: CNN has an article that describes the images of Neda as iconic, in the manner of the Kent State photograph by John Filo, and the Vietnam War photo by Eddie Adams. What’s interesting is that these iconic images are still photos (though Adams’ picture is accompanied by newsreel footage), and the Neda images are on video. I wondered which frame would be used as a still from this sequence which needs to be actively sought out to be seen without cuts of blurred sections, as many news organisations have shown them. It’s visceral power for me is precisely the fact that it is moving, that we see Neda lying down, looking up, then bleeding from her mouth and nose in a flood. It’s horrifying because it seems so inexorable. We can watch it happen, we can watch that journey from life to death and it’s fixed, with nothing anybody can do about it. The still image itself would be weaker by comparison, but maybe as something that can be circulated more widely it can be ultimately more potent.
A little bit later the New York Times, Randy Cohen in his Moral of the Story column took up the discussion about the US Government’s banning of the pictures. It’s a succinct summary of the issue and a good argument for disclosure. Cohen also includes this image in his article:
[image: Lefteris Pitarakis/Associated Press: "A placard was displayed during a demonstration at the Iranian Embassy in London last Tuesday"]
It’s a still (from the video) which I’ve seen reproduced elsewhere in protests, and here it’s being used quite deftly. The final, horrible image of Neda’s bleeding face is the central motif, but the whole thing is posterised, made graphically simpler. More easily reproducible? Less messy certainly. But more clear too, I think. The text makes the purpose of the image clear, and the green makes the solidarity with the protesters clear as well. This image is serving a purpose, much as the No Caption Needed blog above talks about with other photos from the protests. But this image is already an adaptation, a much more designed piece of work than simply being a photograph. Perhaps that’s inevitable, given that the video needs to be translated somehow into a flat piece of paper. But I wonder how the image will evolve and persist. Because it must, in some form. Neda’s death needs it.
I’m curious about the relationship between still and moving images, and so two bits of news caught my eye over the last couple of days. First, this little doco on photographer Alexx Henry’s movie poster shoot (”one sheets”) with the Red One camera (which I found via A Photo Editor). The Red camera produces images of high enough definition that any frame can be used as a still. The process is interesting to see (lighting a video shoot like a still shoot, the possibilities the camera offers, etc.), but what’s fascinating is the effect, the surprise of having still images come to life, and having them do so unexpectedly.
Then, this piece in the New York Times’ new Lens blog (appropriately subtitled “Photography, Video and Visual Journalism”) about Times photographer Chang W. Lee shooting the Second Chance series of mini docos with a Canon EOS 5D Mark II, a still camera that also captures high definition video. There are inherent advantages in shooting video with a still camera equipped to do so — you get to use a wide range of lenses, the larger chip size allows for shallower depth-of-field, and so on — but here Lee uses the convergent technology to tell the story, producing a piece that seamlessly switches from still images to video.
There’s nothing that new about this in a broad sense. The final shot of 400 Blows, for example, lingers on a still. And conversely there’s that quietly startling moment in La Jetée where the some of the stills escape their stasis. But these examples are movies; we wouldn’t approach them as still images or photography in the traditional sense. Maybe what makes this current trend different is that the resolution of the images actually does confuse the boundaries between the photographic and the cinematic. I’m sure that their existence as web texts adds to this as well. We see a still image in the cinema, and of course it’s part of a movie. The same thing on the computer screen, and it could be, it might turn, into anything.
[Tiananmen Square, Beijing, 2002. © Sze Tsung Leong]
“Cities are the largest, most enduring, and most encompassing documents of history, uniquely recording the variations and residues of time.” (Sze Tsung Leong, “History Images“)
[Běijīng, © Corrine Vionnet]
“These pictures are on the Internet, to be seen by any eventual visitors. I am just one of those visitors. It is the sheer quantity of these almost identical pictures that gave me the idea of superimposing them [....] The images made by tourists are picture imitations. They demonstrate the desire to produce a photograph of an image that already exists, one like those we have already seen.” (Corrine Vionnet, “Photo Opportunities“)
["Hide in the City - 08, 2006, Tian'an Men Square", © Liu Bolin]
“Each person chooses his/her own way in the process of contacting outside world. I choose to merge myself into the environment. Saying that I am disappeared in the environment, it would be better to say that the environment has licked me up and I can not choose active and passive relationship. In the environment of emphasizing cultural heritage, concealment is actually no place to hide.” (Liu Bolin, “Liu Bolin: China“)
["A Mass in Tiananmen Square", 1995, © Gao Brothers]
“[...] like a pair of disciples they continued to carry with them the ideological memory of the late 1980s, the return of the repressed Square.” (Zhu Qi, “A Pair of Disciples on the Margins: On the Art of the Gao Brothers“)
[Tiananmen, © Catherine Henriette]
Talking with some friends on the weekend, we all agreed on how annoyed we get when a novel that has been adapted to film is reissued with a new cover to match the movie poster. Often great cover design simply vanishes and is replaced with an image that looks suspiciously like the last movie, and the one before that. Coincidentally, Chris Cagle on his blog Category D has a recent post where he notes this sameness with movie posters. He makes the point that genre needs to be communicated quickly and efficiently, and, like genre cinema itself, the posters need a balance between repetition and originality.
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[book covers from LibraryThing]
These two examples above are of books whose movie adaptations are marketed as dramas with very similar tie-in covers. The Atonement movie cover (note McEwan’s original title) also has a variation with the characters reversed. It’s graphic design by the numbers which suggests a similarity between the films that’s not as close as it seems. And how evocative the original covers are! The French edition of Bauby’s book speaks of isolation and a small small hope, while the English one, with the size and shape of the typeface, suggests the dominance of Bauby’s isolation from locked-in syndrome (the diving-bell) alongside his persistence in imagining himself beyond it (the butterfly). Both have hand-drawn typefaces, a visual analogue to the painstaking process of constructing sentences blink-by-blink, letter-by-letter, that Bauby adopts.
Books are themselves sold by genre, but the shelves in any particular section of the bookstore show a much wider design range than the video store shelves, with their dark red action and horror sections, and happy blue comedy titles.
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Look at the similarity of the movie covers from The Road and The Children of Men (this movie has ‘the’ dropped from the title; notice how it almost disappears here). The original The Road cover has its red letters bleeding starkly into the black, and the original PD James cover with its isolated and empty pram says quite a lot about the major detail missing from the otherwise nearly-recognisable near-future world she creates. For a movie poster I quite like the Children of Men image with Clive; it’s simple and evocative. But do all stories of that ilk need the dark browns and stoic man treatment?
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The movie covers are mostly all photographic. I think it’s less to do with the medium of cinema, though, than with the need to sell the film with its stars. Books, as physical objects, can still count on thoughtful design to do this.
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Book covers do use a lot of photography of course, and, like the wide design vocabulary with original covers in general, the photographs that are used are themselves extremely varied. I’m pretty sure I’ve got covers of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas here in the order, from left to right, in which they were issued. The first one is simple and suggestive but still mysterious. The second one, with what is clearly a Holocaust photograph, gives some of the plot away, and I have to admit, made me concerned when I first caught a glimpse of it on the shelf. How could a real picture of a real boy who was the victim of such a terrible crime be used to illustrate a fictional story, no matter how serious? As I looked closely, though, the fact that his anonymity is preserved I think keeps the book from making this too-presumptious connection, while still evoking the horror of the contextual events. And though the movie cover has no major stars calling out to us, it still falls back on the more literal design style of the movie poster.
Most movie tie-in book covers aren’t as frantically busy as a lot of full-size movie posters (The Category D blog points us to this example), but they do cluster template-like around similar themes. They make the book cover into something less interesting, so much so that I’ll rush to get a book before the movie cover is issued, fearing that the original great design will disappear forever. Luckily there are sites like The Book Cover Archive and Covers to remind us what great book design looks like.
Over the last week I’ve spent some time assessing the work of photography students who are finishing up the first term of the year at the photo school. It’s always great to see the finished pictures that are result of those few weeks together. Aside from giving out grades, the role that I and my co-assessor play is one of engaging critically, acting as viewers of the work who give it the kind of scrutiny that might not get from most other viewers (family and friends, say). So it seemed a little surprising to me the amount of resistance that my co-assessors and I seemed to get.
We’d offer an observation on the work, or perhaps some suggestion for improvement, and it seemed that not a few students would interrupt us with reasons for why this or that wasn’t done: the photo store didn’t allow that option, or they just didn’t like printing on that kind of paper, or it was too hard, or they weren’t interested. I’m not putting about that the co-assessors and I were trying to be authorities from on high, nor that most students were like this; most weren’t, in fact. It just seemed something we noticed and remarked on, this time round.
It got me thinking about the process of assessment. Obviously the criteria for a particular assignment need to made explicit, but perhaps so does the purpose of assessment itself. Quite by coincidence, a couple of days later, I got a questionnaire from an academic at the uni doing a project on the assessment of creative work, and this crystallized a bit more thought on it all. The next few paragraphs are pretty much cribbed from my response.
Assessment provides a means of checking that the student is learning effectively, so the the university/general community can be sure that graduates have a certain set of skills.For the student, though, it is itself a way that the student can learn, both by doing the task and getting feedback about it. Least important for learning, but a necessary evil, it’s also a way of ranking for scholarships, admissions, etc.
With creative work though, I wonder if a student’s sense of self-worth is more at stake, a feeling that the work is somehow more personal than traditionally scholarly critical work. Perhaps there’s a greater risk of vulnerability partly for this reason, and partly because creative work is probably more public. In any case, I reckon that in its assessment, creative work shares with critical work the need for clear criteria.
And what’s being assessed? The work should show us something new or show us the familiar in a new way. It should demonstrate craft competence. It should say what it aims to say clearly (and I don’t mean necessarily that it should be simple). It should be aware of history and context. It should fulfill the brief/answer the question/succeed in doing what it sets out to do. One doesn’t want the work to be solipsistic or incomprehensible, yet it shouldn’t be obvious and cliched either. Maybe here’s where some personal judgment comes in. The assessor needs to have experience and openness and rigour and generosity, all in balance.
What should not be assessed is the trouble it took to make (eg I had to climb four mountains to have this epiphany so I could write this bad poem), nor should we be assessing the work with reference to how the maker feels or how much it’s an evocation of their feelings or person (firstly, you can’t judge the work because everyone feels something, and secondly, if the work is crap then is the maker a lesser person?). This last point is one that David Hurn and Bill Jay make in their book On Being a Photographer.
It seems to me that there’s not a lot of difference in assessing creative and critical work: specific criteria being addressed, with the possibility of some special thing about the work or the writing or whatever to take it into High Distinction territory. Is making scholarship and making art simply a question of employing different mediums? If so, should that make universities more willing to admit the practice of art-making into the realm of scholarship? Not just by teaching creative arts production in a university context, I mean, but by being open to treating it as scholarship too.
