Looking at a photo review and reading

 

PHOTO REVIEW

Firstly, I have been looking at some photo gallery reviews online. I have found a review of Sebastiao Salgado's new exhibition, and also a review of one of his individual projects. Salgado is one of my favorite photographers, as his photos are so lively and beautiful (partly because of his high contrast and big depth of field) This review of his exhibition "Genesis", was at the London Natural History Museum, and I saw it at the Tate earlier this summer. The review is from the Huffington.

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/joanna-eede/zebastiao-salgado-exhibition-review_b_3611694.html

I quite liked this review as an overall look at the exhibition, because it brings together the work of Salgado with his main theme, that of the continuation of the planet and the tribes within it. The photos show, as the review says, "remaining pristine environments, their animals and people", and that "they are not doomed societies, destined to die out naturally. There are solutions, and they lie in the recognition of two basic rights: to self-determination and to land." This set of photos can be summed up very well as this; the photos show the beauty and gradueuer of environments who are fragile and close to human invasion, but their wonder and beauty also makes them strangely hopeful, that they can and will survive. the review says that the photos are "biblical", which relates to the title, and they way they are shot, (black and white, full of contrast etc etc, which makes them feel timeless) though I also feel this misses the point, that the world should be beyond religion and human imposition of ideas. 
I also liked the review because it firstly because it saw that: "His stories do indeed inspire wonder, trigger the imagination and remind us that we live in an astonishingly beautiful world", and also because they show an awareness of the urgency and importance of the topics within the photographs (the disappearing tribes and environmental disasters) the two mix to describe a powerful and thought-provoking display. 

An actual review of a photograph of Salago was harder to find. I did find one review (http://easyweb.easynet.co.uk/~karlpeter/zeugma/crits/salgado.htm) which I liked a lot as a contrast because it criticizes him as well as praises. He is looking at the photos of "Workers", a book which takes photos of workers, and has been seen to criticize capitalism. The writer admits that Salagdo "has more than achieved his aim of emotional resonance and the grandiose overstatement", and that he gaines "outright adoration." However, the writer criticizes the "double whammy" of "High-contrasty/high energy graphics" of the photos, suggesting that the photos have not transitioned from the traditional photojournalism to the contemporary photojournalism (which now relies on books and not  photo essays.) the writer also suggests that the photos rely very much on a relgious background icons, such as the way the light is from behind like "the light of god", and the allusions to the "hell" of workers and the use of cross symbols. The writer argues that this is over-blown, heavy handed, and for sensation, as "Salagdo is not a religious man." This looks at one photo in specific, which shows a man surrounded by fire and explosions- a hellish work and situation, shot in a "filmic and unrealistic" high contrast (below)

The writer argues that this shot sensationalizes workers and oil company work, making it seem hellish, which might not be the case. To further his point, he explains that the descriptions of the photos "read like a dispassionate economic report, of facts and figures and industrial history, and it betrays Salgado's origins as a Third World development economist. His subject is the workers as undifferentiated mass, flowing and ebbing with the tides of history. He appears far less interested in them as individuals." and that "When Salgado does come close to one of his workers in their ones and their twos, his eye meets theirs and they in turn meet ours, but there is no getting beneath it. They manage to keep their dignity, but Salgado shows us little of their daily privations as sulphur carriers, lead processors or oil well fire fighters, the filthy occupations the First World has seen fit to wash its hands of, along with the compatriots Salgado seems to be equally pleased to have left behind, when he moved base from Brazil to France."
This is an interestingly different reading from Salgado, as most readings see him as very passionate and beautiful. I agree with some of his points, but i feel like what he really is trying to discuss is the ethical view point of photo journalism- is it OK to take photos of something terrible, and to take them in a beautiful way, IF it means that people see it, care about it and try and change it? This depends on your moral stand point; in some cases, people think everything should be allowed to be photographed and documented, while others see that photographs are ethically wrong, because they cannot represent something as true, real, un-mediated. In my opinion, photos bring to viewers a unique experience and while I feel squimish about ethics, I also feel that to know is better than to not. More ethical reading to follow! 



READING
Notes from "Lev Manovich | Essays : The Paradoxes of Digital Photography"

- Discusses the differences between digital and traditional photography, and argues that they are two entirely different things. He also suggests the paradoxical nature of digital photography- in one instance it breaks down older modes of visual representation, while reinforcing them, and also the paradoxical nature that digital photography in that it questions its own reality.

-Reasons that digital photography has become paradoxical... Now it has evolved, old traditional photography is seen as "beautiful/human/nostalgic/popular", which has preserved it as "better" than digital photography, while digital photography has also made it defunct by changing all of its traditions- in digital photography, you have numerous photographs, and techniques are closely related to cinema. Everyone has access to cameras, and therefore the way photography is seen and made is different completely. 

- Argues that though there is a difference between the two (digital is made of numbers and sequences etc) if you look at it one way, they are very similar, except that "digital doesn't exist", just as, with new programs of equations, "Pixels don't exist , by which he means they do not exist in a real sense, as a printed photo does, but are a concept on a screen made up of numbers, which can be altered at any point. 

- Says that digital photos are very easy to fake or re-work, and this could be seen (as by Mitchell) to make them "more false." In this, he suggests that society see's traditional photos as "truthful representations", and digital ones as "fake/constructed" (?) But he says this is an untrue idea, and that everything is constructed- paintings to photographs, new and old- so that this argument is a waste of time- no differences between digital/traditional here.

-We think of the two as "the same", because we have come to believe film and photos are "reality. "The synthetic image is free of the limitations of both human and camera vision. It can have unlimited resolution and an unlimited level of detail. It is free of the depth-of field effect, this inevitable consequence of the lens, so everything is in focus. It is also free of grain -- the layer of noise created by film stock and by human perception. Its colors are more saturated and its sharp lines follow the economy of geometry. From the point of view of human vision it is hyperreal. And yet, it is completely realistic. It is simply a result of a different, more perfect than human vision."

- "This is then, the final paradox of digital photography. Its images are not inferior to the visual realism of traditional photography. They are perfectly real -- all too real."

Article written 20 years ago and pretty out of date and ridiculous, i felt, coming from a place in which we all had access to technology. I think that some of the stuff he predicted were very much wrong, and some of the things different. I liked the ideas about paradoxical nature between digital and analogue, however- this seems to be true. In my project, I think this will be the case. When photos are analogue, we give them so much power and meaning, while when we take stuff with digital new stuff, we always refer back to traditional photography. I hope to access these sorts of points with my work.