SOC IETY/ MEDIA

ANT PHOTO JOURNAL SM

STRATEGES OF .· THE VS BLE AN D

THE NV S BLE ALIOCHA IMHOFF AND KANTUTA QUI ROS

JOAN A HADJ ITHOMAS ET KHALIL JORE IG E Images Laten tes , 3rd par t of the project Won der Bei rut , 1997/ 2006

© Joana Hadji thomas et Khali l J ore ige . Cour t es y Ga l e rie I n Situ/Fa bie nn e Le clerc , Par i s.

ANTIPHOTOJOURNALISM - STRATEGIES OF THE VISIBLE AND THE INVISIBL E

Contrary to the controversies on the possibility for photography or cinema to document and represent the disaster and the Shoah (Claude Lanzmann , Gérard Wajcman , Georges Didi- Huberman , Jean- Luc Godard , Serge Daney) , some approaches , straying from the iconoclastie positions , propose a questioning made of contaminations , and that within the conceptual perimeter of photojournalistic practice .

In his book Aesthetic Journalism published in 2009 , the artist and curator Alfredo Cramerotti identified a " journalistic change of direction in art~ recently displayed in his remarkable exhibition curated at the Quad in Derby (UK) with Simon Sheikh : All That Fits : The Aesthetics Of Journalism (2011). An exhibition that was in keeping with a recrudescence of curatorial projects questioning journalistic aesthetics and epistemology such as the exhibition Anti­photojournali_sm (Virreina , Barcelona , 2010 ; Foam- Amsterdam , 2011) , organised by Carles Guerra and Thomas Keenan and which gathered, under the neologism borrowed f rom Allan Sekula , practices of artists at the edge of photography, video and installation , placing in crisis the photojournalistic representations of wars , politico- military conflicts , genocides or poverty.

The relevance of that questioning could be read by the yardstick of several mutations : the spectacular inflation of the economy through the decentralised circulation of images , concomitant with the crisis in historie journalism; the hegemony of new visualities of war, corresponding to a first break which would be that of the first Gulf war , visualities described in 1994 by McKenzie Wark as telaesthetics , then to a second break , that of the visual economy of the military imaginary post- 11 September . The media coverage of wars becomes , for the army staff, a strategic parameter of first importance . The American interventions in the Middle East set up non - lethal interventions , presented as therapeutic , while the real conducting of operations are made invisible (Derek Gregory, 2008 ; Nicholas Mirzoeff , 2009) .

The emergence of the phenomenon of journalists covering the war from their hotel , broadcasting images provided by the armies , images often produced at a distance and by weapons whose nature is double , at the same time tools for the production of images and instruments of destruction , leading to a becoming- machine of the gaze . On the other hand , the inflation in the representation of contemporary figures of poor , displaced people , migrants , non- citizens , victims of wars , that Martha Rosler in The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems (1974) was already criticizing as the " photography of victims" and that the postcolonial the~ry deconstructs today as essentialization of the

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MICHAL HEIMAN Attacks on linking #3 - Photo rape - War over the House

(AP, Photographer Unknown, Ha'aretz, April 4, 2001, Jenin Refugee camp), rnanipulated readyJnééie and stamps

digitally printed on canvas with _..a- tîa nging device, 470 x 255 cm . Courtesy the artist.

subjects photographed in a fatum and an allochronic distance . That fabrication of figures of otherness (geographical , cultural , temporal , racial , economical) especially in Africa , constructs postcol onial subjects photographed as substantially under- developed (Homi Bhabha , 1997; Jeremy Silvester and Patricia Hayes , 1998 ; T. J. Demos , 2011). Through the use of the notion of afropessimism , Okwui Enwezor (2006) pushed even further the criticism made by Susan Sontag on photojournalism in her famous book Regarding the Pain of Others (2003) , that showed how the spectacle of suf fering and the empathy facing the victims ' pain erase the structural dimension of the relations of exploitation and dominion . The postcolonial theoretician Achille Mbembé used the term "pornography of poverty" (2010) , exacerbating African necropolitics (2003) .

In that context , some artists place their critical practices in a tradition of subversion or appropriation of the imagery of the press (Michal Heiman , Sean Snyder). Others chose to fictionalize the archives (Walid Raad/The Atlas Group , Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige , Rabih Mroué) . In his series Attacks on linking - Photo rape , Michal Heiman collects and intervenes on photos published in the Israeli press, taken without the consent of the persans photographed, doubling up certain prejudices brought to Palestinian families by the Israeli army. The graphie interventions of Michal Heiman suture and reveal the visual predation inherent to those press photographs - that break with what the theoretician of photography Ariella Azoulay calls the

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SOCIÉTES/ MÉDIAS

ALIOCHA IMHOFF & KANTUTA QUIRÔS ANTIPHOTOJOURNALISME - STRATÉGIES DU VISIBLE ET DE L'INVISIBLE

ADAM BROOMBERG ET OLIVER CHANAR IN. P . 226 - 229 : Af terlife 2 , 2DD9 , photographie , collage ,

ve r re , p l o mb , tirage chromogène , 50 , 8 x 40 , 6cm . '-.~"0.~'\..~~~ ~~~ ~~'\..~~'-~~ -

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SOCI ETY/ MEDIA

ADA M BR O OMB ERG AND OLIV ER C HA NARI N. The Day Nobody Died / Th e Press Conference, J un e 9 , 2 00 8 , unique C- pr i n t 76 . 2 x 600 cm .

Courtesy t he artists .

"photographi e civi l contract" (2008) - and tha t Michal Heiman then points out and s tamps as "photographie rape ". Oliver Chanarin an d Adam Broombe r g , Renzo Marte n s , Alfredo Jaar , Phil Collins and John Smith represent more the figure of the a r tist as a journalist , by physically going into a conflict or a warzone , or the place of the perpetration of a genoc i de . However they distance themse l ves from the practice s of "autho r s ' photo­reporting" supposed to contravene the dominant codes of photojournalism with their subject ivity (Antoi ne d ' Agata , Stanley Greene) or their pictoriality (Luc Delahaye , Jo Ratcliffe). They r ather cons tr uct an updating of t he spectator ial economy, of the i deological link s between p r oduction of the image , the truth , media cons t r uction of political conflicts , architectonies of t he gaze , relations of authority between photograph and s u bjects photographed, reifica tion and con struction of a cultura l otherness . In 2009, wi th a film cal l ed Episode

I I I - En_:joy po vert:y, pra cticing a strateqy of

excess , the Dutch artist Renzo Martens took on colonial habitus with a controlled emphasis and gave a radical decons t ruction of the ba s es of human i tarian photojournalism and of the industry o f the imagery of misery.

At the opposite , "anti- photojournalism" can borrow strategies of subtraction and the paths of a photogr aphy wh i ch would t e nd to the i nobjectalit y : the " late nt images " (1997-2006 ) of the Lebanese c i v i l war by Joa na Hadj i thomas and Khal i l Joreige, which , i n a state of potentiality, can at any moment be updated , dev eloped and displayed; the minima l ist memorials , swaying between visible

and i nvisible , of Alfredo Jaar for his own photographs of the Rwandan g e nocide , (Rwanda project , 1994 - 2000 ) , of disappe a r ed image s (Lamen t of the ima ges , 2002 ), o r of the famous photograph by the photojournalist Kevin Carter of a dying Sudanese child (The sound of silence , 2006). Finally, in 2008 , Adam Bloomberg and Olive r Chana r in went to Af gha n i stan to the frontline next to the Brit ish army. In r esponse to t he events , from the spectacularly bloody to the most banal , and instead of taking out their cameras , Broo mberg and Chanarin unravelled a roll of photo paper fifty metres long that they e xposed to l i ght to produce non­figur a t ive photographs , counte r -images eluding the specta cular war photos de rigue~= (The Day Nobody Died) .

Al iocha I mhoff an d Ka nt uta Quir6sar---e-curat~ -crit i Cs a nd organiser s of e vents , exhibitions , fest i val s and retrospectives . Fou nde r s and a r ti s tic director s of the c urat i ng a nd distr i buti ng platfo rm for fi lm s , Le peuple qui manq ue , c reated in 200 5 in Paris , they were in 2 010 associate curators at the Pompi dou Centre , f o r, in part i cul ar , the eve nt Que fair e? ar t / fi lm/poli tique . Their fiel d i s situated at the inter section of cinema , vide o , crit i ca l theory and contemporar y art .