The Latest Thing that Facebook Has Killed: The Photograph

Go to Google and type in, "Has Facebook Killed the...?" and you will find that Facebook is suspected of killing lots of things. It may have killed "real relationships." And birthday cards. And church. Even the mosh pit. And photography, too.

Mosh pits I'm not qualified to speak about. But the question about Facebook and photography is an interesting one, and it is the subject of a fascinating roundtable discussion in the April issue of Art in America magazine. The leader of the discussion, curator and editor Marvin Heiferman, points out that an estimated 3 billion images are uploaded to Facebook every month. Only 15 percent of the digital images shot now are ever printed, and most of those digital images are now shot not with dedicated cameras but with cell-phones and smart-phones. Does the materiality of photographs still matter to us? Can we have the same relationship to an image on Facebook as we do with a print that we can hold, frame, or put up on a wall?

Probably, but probably not in essential ways. It's hard to say Facebook has killed photography when it has made photography such a commonplace tool for us to communicate our everyday experiences with each other.  How has Facebook changed your relationship with photography?

Iconic Monday: The Bang Bang Club

I have not seen the new movie, but I will. It comes out just as the photography and media communities grapple with the loss of Tim Hetherington and Chris Hondros--one of those unpleasantly weird coincidences that happen from time to time--and with any luck it will help shed some light on the work of war photographers. At the very least the film will serve as a conversation starter.

The Bang Bang Club was a group of four photographers--Kevin Carter, Greg Marinovich, Ken Oosterbroek, and Joao Silva--who covered the end of apartheid in South Africa. Memories being such tricky, unreliable things, it is easy to recall that time as more peaceful than it actually was. The period leading up to the national elections in 1994 was tumultuous and violent. It continued after the election as well, as white supremacist groups tried to create breakaway homelands. The world's press corp on hand to document it. It was the story of the day.

One of the iconic images of the period is the shot above, which shows the famed photojournalist James Nachtwey at work during the election period. Nachtwey was not a member of the Bang Bang Club, but he often worked closely with them. This image was taken by another famed photographer, David Turnley of the Detroit Free Press. While memories can be unreliable, pictures like this one are vivid reminders of actual events. In this case, the image also crystalizes the moral imperatives that are part of the war photographer's daily life.

The Risky History of War Photography

I expanded some of my thoughts on Tim Hetherington and Chris Hondros in this piece for the Huffington Post. What do you think?

Week in Photos: Wildfire...Budget Cutter...Reese and the Elephant

Go to Le Lettre de la Photographie for my full weekly review. The sample:

1. Circus Maximus

Reese Witherspoon, star of the new film Water for Elephants, may be one of the biggest names in Hollywood, but she was dwarfed by her co-star in a circus-themed fashion layout in Vogue's May issue. The images were shot by Peter Lindbergh.

2. Political Figure

Republican Congressman Paul Ryan, profiled in Time, can be seen either as a hero or as a villain, depending on whether you agree with ideas for cutting the federal budget, or President Obama’s. There’s not much middle ground these days in American politics. Photographer Marco Grob went for a neutral interpretation in this portrait, centering Ryan’s ambiguous expression within shades of gray. Nonetheless, one right-leaning magazine called Time’s story a “hit piece.”

3. Springtime in Texas

Sometimes spring brings wildflowers. This year a spring heat wave has brought wildfires to Texas. This photo, which shows a fire threatening a home in Strawn, Texas, presents the terror vividly. Photo by Tom Pennington/Getty Images

4. Rock Star

Here, a young man named Dean Potter takes a preposterously dangerous route up a rock wall in Yosemite National Park. Potter is one of several climbers revolutionizing the sport with risky new maneuvers. Note that he is not tethered to a rope. Note also that the photographer who shot this picture, Mikey Schaefer, was not in a safe place, either.

5.Rule Britannia

Flags were hung over Regent Street in London in preparation for the royal wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton.The alternate headline for this shot was "The Empire Strikes Back." Photo by Carl Court/Press Association/AP.

 
 

Tim and Chris

In the book Requiem, the late David Halberstam wrote these words about the photographers who died covering the Vietnam War:

War correspondents always know who is real and who is not. A war zone is not a good setting for the inauthentic of spirit and heart. We who were print people and who dealt only in words and not in images always knew that the photographers were the brave ones, and in that war...they held a special place in our esteem. We deferred to them, reporter to photographer, in that venue as we did in few others.

They were real because they had to be real; they could not, as we print people could, arrive a little late for the action, be briefed, and then, through the skilled use of interviews and journalism, re-create a scene with stunning accuracy, writing a marvelous you-are-there story that reeked of intimacy even though, in truth, we had missed it all. We could miss the fighting and still do our jobs. They could not. There was only one way for them to achieve intimacy: by being eyewitness.

There is so much to say about Tim Hetherington and Chris Hondros, and about the job of the war photographer. And much is being said in tribute, and much more will be said. I knew them both, but not especially well--in the case of Chris a couple of beers on a couple of occasions, telephone calls when he wrote once for the magazine I used to edit (he was a fine writer too, clear in his thoughts and his feelings). In the case of Tim it was an interview I did with him, last November, over coffee at a hotel lobby in New York. Not much, but in similar ways both Chris and Tim impressed me, immediately and lastingly, as...superior people. That's the term that comes to mind. Humble. Humorous. Giving. Dedicated. Real, as Halberstam put it.

Postcards From America: An Interview with Alec Soth

"The Arkansas Cajun's Backup Bunker," from Alec Soth's "Broken Manual" project

 When I spoke with photographer Alec Soth last week, I forgot to ask him if he’d ever read Robinson Crusoe. At the very least I wanted to suggest that he take a look at Jonathan Franzen’s recent New Yorker magazine essay about the novel, which Franzen calls “the great early document of radical individualism.” I thought Soth would be interested, since he is one of the foremost contemporary chroniclers of the American strain of radical individualism. 

Soth's 2004 book Sleeping by the Mississippi is a journey through a land of overlooked places and the people who inhabit them. Though he was certainly not the first artist to go looking for the American soul along the Mississippi, his work there produced a singular vision: Soth’s American heartland was a place where independence and loneliness cohabit, sometimes easily, sometimes not. Stylistically, the work was rich in narrative possibilities—Diane Arbus meets Walker Evans—and it marked a turning point in the documentary genre.

Glittering Prizes: 2011 Pulitzers

Congratulations to Barbara Davidson of the Los Angeles Times, who has won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography. And congratulations to Carol Guzy, Nikki Kahn, and Ricky Carioti of the Washington Post for winning this year's Pulitzer for Breaking News Photography.

Davidson's prize came for her story about innocent victims of gang violence

Teens attend the funeral of a friend killed at a high school football game. Photo by Barbara Davidson

Guzy, Kahn, and Carioti won for their coverage of the aftermath of the earthquake that struck Haiti in 2010.

A Haitian man tries to free a teacher trapped beneath rubble. Photo by Carol Guzy