This picture, by Camilo Jose Vergara, is part of a tribute by Slate magazine to the Twin Towers, where they appear just in the distance.
[image: Jose Camilo Vergara, View south from Buffalo Avenue at Bergen Street, Brooklyn, 1996.]
It’s impossible to look at these images, and others of the towers, without remembering what is to come. In this case, it seems, Barthes is right to link photographs to death: we see the photograph and we think of the inevitable absence of their subjects. So, as an antidote, I’d also like to mention Rebecca Solnit’s essay on the current anniversary (via (Notes on) Politics, Theory & Photography).
Yasmin Ahmad, Malaysian director of such films as Sepet (2004) and Mukshin (2007), died recently and suddenly. She seems to have been described variously and ‘controversial’ and ’sentimental’, but this seems to be because she told Malaysian stories with characters reaching beyond the usual categories of race and culture. I’ve not seen all her films, but to know there will be no more is stark and sad.
[image: James Lee, 'Yasmin Ahmad – filmmaker. Sepetang, Perak 13th October 2005']
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You can get a sense of her voice by reading her blogs, The Storyteller and The Storyteller Pt 2.
There are also a couple of interviews available as podcasts from The Centre for South East Asian Studies at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa, which you can also find by searching for ‘Yasmin Ahmad’ on iTunes.
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.
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.
