Mini Magnum Meeting - Saturday 28th of Feb

Saturday's meeting was a small one, with Kate, James and Sean showing up. Here's a copy of Sean's little spiel with relevant images:


Sean O’Carroll – Friday Night - 27/2/09

DISCUSSION STARTER

I’ve decided to embark on journey through some of the images that inspire me. To move past the “wow” and to try and encapsulate in words just how the image in question “works”.

Chechnya, 1996 - Ruins of central Grozny (Top Right).
By James Nachtwey.

I suspect that for some photographers, the world of photojournalism does not hold the same appeal as other areas of photography such as conceptual art photography, for the simple reason that unlike so much photography, the images born out of photojournalism are less “created”. Something has to happen in front of the camera, and this something is not controlled by the photographer. Compare this with the work of Jeff Wall or Gregory Crewdson. In their works, every detail in the image was born first in the mind of the photographer. Even the work of a landscape photographer like Ansel Adams seems somehow more “created” than that of photojournalists.

And yet history delivers to us a handful of names: Capa, Salgado, etc. The very existence of such a list implies that there is such a thing as photojournalistic talent. And this in turn suggests that there is indeed something of the photographer in each photojournalistic image. It seems that the successful photojournalistic image is a happy marriage between circumstance and art.

Let us consider Nachtwey’s image of the boy in Chechnya. It is my hypothesis that a great many of the conceptual themes that make photographic art “work” – i.e. succeed - are the same themes that make for powerful photojournalistic images.

Quite literally, the presence of the boy’s face puts ‘a human face’ on what might otherwise be an image of the destruction wrought by war.

Behind the boy we have a perfectly symmetrical streetscape that seems to continue on into the infinite past as though to say, “we have come so far, and this where we find ourselves.” This could be the boy’s journey, or the journey of the human race. One side of the street is light, warm perhaps. The other is dark and cold. A striking symbolism of the good and evil that the human condition asks us to choose between as we journey onward.

But the boy does not see what we see. And we cannot see what those dark pools of eyes see. The boy is looking away from the destruction of the past. To what? Perhaps the fact that we cannot see what the boy sees suggests that it is in fact up to us somewhat. What can we imagine for this boy? What do we want him to be seeing? To be moving towards? There is then, an imperative to this image.

The image is dominated by the boy’s large – almost exaggerated - cranium. To me this suggests “mind”. Firstly, the boy’s mind; a young mind, a growing mind, an impressionable mind. A mind that is still forming its “take” on the world. Secondly, I feel that this large cranium, squeezed into the foreground of the streetscape, alludes to the very concept of mind, and the relationship between reality and our experience of reality – a philosophical question as old as humanity itself. Is the mind bringing about the circumstances, or are the circumstances shaping the mind.


I would like to briefly show a shot of my own to make this discussion a little more personal. I refer to “Miranda pregnant by salt lake”. I am showing this piece because I feel that it taps some similar themes to those found in the Grozny shot. I feel that the notion of “the future” is heavily present in both images. I will not draw any further comparisons here but rather put the comparison up for discussion.


We could go on and on talking about Nachtwey’s image, for there is so much in it. But for now I simply want to acknowledge the genius of Nacthwey. We must marvel at what I earlier called the happy marriage of art and circumstance. We might ask, does a photojournalist such as Nachtwey find the symbolic scene and then wait for that extra element? In this case the boy? Or is it fully unplanned and simply testament to his “eye”? I do not accept the idea that luck plays much of a part in such work.

Perhaps we could say that when the great, time honoured themes of art - and here I refer to both its philosophical and aesthetic aspects – are captured in the midst of an “event”, the result is a powerful photojournalistic image.

Do photojournalists in the field need to be conscious of the symbolism around them, or can/do they simply operate on some kind of gut instinct? Can we, as aspiring photojournalists, “practice” our photojournalism with respect to being more consciously aware of these artistic themes as we cover an event?