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- [00:00]
A
So let's start. Sorry for the delay. I'll make it brief so we have a lot of time for these two guys. I'll just say very briefly a few words about the forum, about this event.
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B
And why I hope it's going to.
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A
Be interesting and hopefully will perhaps lead to future events on this topic as well. First of all, my name is Christina Mooserd, I'm a fellow here at the Philosophy Department and I'm the Deputy Director of the Forum for European Philosophy. For those of you who haven't been at one of our events before, the Forum is an educational charity which is based here at the lse. And our mission, so to speak, is to bring philosophical thinking very broadly history into the public, identify questions that are of interest to the broader public, improve dialogue also between philosophy and other disciplines. And most of you will have our current program, so you can look at the kinds of things that we do. One thing that we thought would be a very interesting topic to address is the topic of photography, because there's lots of interesting issues that are philosophically interesting with regard to photography, one of them obviously being the one that we're going to talk about today, namely the ethics of photojournalism. But I'm sure we can all think of other topics as well. The aesthetics of photography, photography and its relation to other art forms, issues to do with reality and fiction, representation and so on. And so, in a way, I hope that this event today will be actually the start of a series of events, perhaps on that topic. So before I introduce the two speakers, I would just briefly like to thank Patrick Wilkin, my husband, who is a very keen photographer with a lot of interest in photography and who encouraged me to think about this in the first place. And then also Hugh Luke, who made very useful suggestions. In particular, he suggested that I take a look at Simon Norfolk's work and get in touch with him, which I did. So, just a few words about Simon. As most of you will probably know, Simon is a very well known photographer who has won many, many awards. He also has an interesting background in philosophy and sociology. So one more reason to invite him to this interdisciplinary dialogue. He's done, for a number of years now, really interesting work in, in Afghanistan. So he did a book entitled Afghanistan Chronotopia, covering the Afghanistan war in 2001, which won a lot of awards and it was widely acclaimed. More recently, he's returned to Afghanistan and has a new book entitled Burke and Dofu, which you can see here and which you will have the opportunity to purchase after the Talk, if you're interested. So that's the book there. And he also currently has an exhibition in the Tate model, which I highly recommend, if you haven't seen it yet. In fact, you could even go after this talk tonight. I think the Tate is open until 10pm tonight, so you can go and see it afterwards if you're interested. Okay. And his partner in this dialogue will be Robins, who is a philosophy professor and head of the philosophy department here at the lse. He has many different research interests, including ethical theory, philosophy of economics, philosophy and public policy, rational choice, and he has also published some interesting work on precisely the ethics of photojournalism. So we thought that he would be an ideal partner for this dialogue. And so, before taking up too much time, I will hand the word over to Simon and Luke. We will start, I think, with a presentation by Simon, then Luke will raise some philosophically interesting questions, and then we'll hopefully have quite a lot of time for questions and contributions from you. So I'll hand over to Simon.
- [03:48]
B
Good. Well, it's like you're hearing false pretenses because, I mean, 10 years ago I was a photojournalist, and I spent about 10 years since leaving college as a photojournalist making a living, very much dashing around London photographing events, and then running into newspapers with rolls of film. But in the last 10 or 12 years, very much a very deliberate, determined attempt to get away from a lot of photojournalism's values, a lot of the ways that it compromised, the things that I wanted to talk about, a lot of the problems it has with its economy, a lot of problems with political economy, but also primarily the problems with really attaching the meanings to the word that I wanted the word to have and my lack of control over that. So the word that I'm going to show you is the most current thing that I've done, which is, you know, hopefully interesting because it's the most recent thing that I've done, but also really interesting because I believe that it's the best stab that I've had at the moment at trying to resolve some of these problems, of how do you make a piece of work that leaps over photojournalism's problems in terms of its inarticulacy, its reductionism and all those kind of problems. And then afterwards, we can talk about whether or not that's successful. The work that I have on Taine Modern at the moment is a project that's about returning after 10 years to Afghanistan to see how that country is change and try and do something about the changes in that country. It's also meant to be something of a take on my attempt to redefine photojournalism, perhaps certainly try and have a go at redefining war photography. This is me. I'm a gay cosmonaut. This is my. This is the picture. This is the portrait I had made of myself when I was in Afghanistan in 2001. And I produced a piece of work that was quite successful in 2001 that was photographing the kind of the detritus and the rubble of what I found after this warfare had taken place was a sort of aftermath photography using a very large camera. This is the camera that I use. It's large wooden and brass cameras, shooting five, four film. And the pictures were pictures of the aftermath, the kind of smouldering remains of what had been in the place. And I wanted to go back to Afghanistan for a long time because politically, you know, when I switch to telly, I'm angry about what I see in what's going on there. And I feel that I ought to be engaged with that and have something to say. But for a long time, I never really felt I could find any kind of vehicle to take me there. I felt like I was blocked out of it, Even though I was angry about the photojournalism that goes on there. Angry about embedding and the way embedding has neutralized any kind of political response to what happens there. But also a feeling that if I went there and I photographed. This is a picture from 2001, this kind of neoclassical ruins of some great civilization, perhaps that's been in this place, that it would simply be a sort of comparator problem. There's a tradition in photography called rephotographic, and the kind of daddy of those is a man called Mark Klett, who took his camera to where all the places in the American Southwest where there's great American landscape photographs of the wilderness, inlaid and rephotographed those in the end of the 70s and again at the beginning of the 90s to see how the American west had been changed in 160 years. So the pictures that I, you know, that I could have done, it seemed to me that it would be a very dry sort of, on the left hand, 2001, and on the right hand, 2010, not particularly interesting, I don't think. And also extremely dreary after about four of them. I think you would have seen everything that I had to say in 2001. It's a crater in 2010. It's a pizza Hut, which not only is dreary, but it's also a wrong statement of what I believe is happening in Afghanistan. The way that the economy has changed and the way that money has been spent in that place. Something like $420 billion just the Americans are spent in that place. So money is being spent, but it's not producing the kind of results that you would expect to seek. And even in a situation like this, where this actually is the same as this, if you notice it, the only thing you can find is you see the lintel over this doorway here. It's about the only thing that is intact. And almost everything else in the viewpoint has changed. It just seems to me that's a rather dry sort of left hand, right hand. Where's Wally? Of a photo project. And it wasn't until I came across the work of John Burke that I found some vehicle for talking about Afghanistan. It'd be actually quite interesting. A big believer in Salvatore Arosa, who's the kind of the uber romantic, but more romantic than all the other romantics, more smouldering, more gorgeous than any other romantic philosopher, romantic painter. And his painting, says Locri Emiliora Silentio, which is his way of saying, if you've got nothing to say, shut the fuck up. So. So when I photographed in 2001, it was successful because it was trying to portray this place as a kind of graveyard of empires, as a place where all the great empires of the world had taken turns to sweep through this space and each one had left behind this kind of imperial detritus. Alexander the Great, on his way to India with sweeps through Afghanistan, trashes the whole thing and then builds his version. The Persians, the Mongol Hordes in the 12th century, the Russians in the 19th century, even the Americans now you could say were not in Afghanistan order to dominate that place, but rather went there in order to kill Saudi Arabian and his Yemeni friends and the rest of it. So none of these empires really in Afghanistan in order to control the place, but each one of them on their way to elsewhere, but each one leaving behind a kind of imperial detritus in this place. So I tried to photograph each one of these things as if they were kind of fragments, archaeological fragments, of some great empires that existed in this place. Garbage washed up at the high water mark of the each of these imperial waves and deliberate attempts to make that look like that. And that which is a western district, middle class district on the western side of Kabul, completely devastated in the 1990s is meant to look like this. And this picture is obviously meant to be that. And I've been looking at a great deal of romantic painting from that time as well. So a lot of the pictures were kind of bathed in a sort of golden light. That was something that I captured from looking at Claude Lorraine and Nikolat Toussaint, who's trying to bathe this golden light across these pictures, as a way of saying that what you're looking at is this the twilight of the final years of an empire, or is this the dawn of a new beginning? And in 2001, I have to say, I thought the war was over. I thought this was the dawn of beginning. I thought this was this liminal moment when Afghanistan could pick itself up and go on to create something new. And then I was shown this rather tatty little book, which was the first Burke album I ever saw. So John Burke was a photographer who only produced pictures for sale. People walked into a shop and said, will you photograph my cricket club or my kids? And he shot pictures of them and he sold prints of them, and that's it. He didn't produce his work into books, not really into magazines, etc. In the Afghan war. And so, because he didn't publish in that way, he had nothing that kind of persisted beyond him. The day he stopped taking pictures is pretty much the day his reputation died. In fact, within two years of his death, his entire business dissolved and every single one of his negatives was smashed and destroyed, and we had no record of him at all. And added to that was he wrote nothing in his lifetime about himself either. No diaries, no notes about his life, nothing whatsoever. All we have are his pictures, a few church records that we tell us when he baptizes illegitimate children, and a few notes in the commercial newspapers about the sort of history of his business. Otherwise, there's almost been nothing at all. So that's interesting for me because it feels to me that the work I did in 2001 was not so much photographic as archaeological. My job was to find something in the kind of rubble, pull it out from under the rocks, blow the dust off and go, look at this. This shows you what happened in this place. It's more like working in a crime scene. For me, it's more like an act of forensics than it is. But look, this tells you what happened in this place. This tells you the crime of what happened in this place. And it is very much a crime scene. So I was shown this album at the National Media Museum in Bradford and completely fell in love with it from the moment that I saw it. And this work is being made of a kind of. It's important to me that one of the real beefs I have with photojournalism is its lack of historical background. It's ahistoricity. For me, the whole purpose of going back to Afghanistan was to try to chuck it back into its historical narrative. Talk to soldiers, American and British soldiers. No notion whatsoever that this is the fourth Anglo Afghan War that we've tried. Three previous attempts to rebuild this country, three previous attempts to. If we drop enough bombs and killed guys that we can turn these people into liberal democrats and feminists. So the First Anglo Afghan War in 1838, 1848. The Second Anglo Af War, the one that Burke photographs is 1878-1880. The Third Anglo Afghan War, which quite frankly was rubbish even as wars go, was in 1919. It was like a bloody bar room fire. More action than that one. And this, for me is the fourth Anglia Afghan War. The fourth time that we've tried to invade this place and re. Establish some kind of imperial dominance and rebuild this country as a kind of civilized, Western liberal outpost. And each one of them more pathetic than the last. Each one of them based upon more rubbish lies. Each one of them the same kind of sorry arc of lied about intelligence, lied about how popular would be, lied about how brilliantly our armies perform, lied about how we weren't going to do any atrocities to get out of there. And each one of us doing a sorry, kind of tawdry deal to get out the back door as soon as possible before we get sucked into a kind of Vietnam. So this. Sorry, that's my. My history lesson. Sometimes it's quite sweeping. So this is this. This moment in the British Empire when Afghanistan is being kind of the kind of jam sandwich between the Russian Empire expanding south at a rate of knots and the British Empire expanding north at a rate of knots into the Hindu Kush and between, that is the Afghan Emirate, between the Russian bear and the English lion being eaten alive. And a period of quite colossal social engagement with Afghanistan, but not engagement through popular newspapers. They weren't particularly read at that time by the majority of population. Something that was transferred into the British, into the home audience through history painting. These colossal paintings at this time. And this Picture is in Wooldhamson Art Gallery. It's about 14 foot across the. Now, there's a reason why it was 14 foot across. It was meant to be looked at by 50 people at once. That's why the damn Thing's so big. These things were tremendously popular in that time. Nowadays, it's hard to find a gallery that will show them. This guy, Richard Catton Woodville, who was tremendously famous in his time, but you try to find a gallery that will show his worth. Nowadays, so unpopular, it's so untrendy, no one even wants to know about these things. And so that idea about what was happening in the imperial outposts is transferred into the heartland through history, painting, through music hall songs, through popular poetry, patriotic poetry, Rudyard Kipling and Henry Newbolt and these kind of people and popular novels through Kim and these kind of Kipling novels like Kim. And it wasn't something that came by newspapers or the political parties campaigned on these things, not at all. It came via these. These other kind of media outlets, which don't even exist anymore, you know, Music Hall Song, for example. And the kind of person who kind of articulated this better than anyone else was Lady Elizabeth Butler, who in her era was just about the most famous woman painter at the time. A woman who almost managed to bulldoze away into the Royal Academy. And if so, she would have been the first member of the Royal Academy, first female member of the Royal Academy, and came within a gnat's whisker of being voted in. And this painting, which actually says discovered that Tate owned his painting, although it hasn't been out of the store since 1949, they actually owned his painting. And I tried to get on the gallery wall. The main problem was it's about 18 foot across. So by the time he got on the gallery wall, there's no room for my stuff, and my stuff is what I bought. But this thing is very interesting because it is a very sharp political attack upon the British establishment. The first Anglo Afghan War ended in absolute disaster for the British. In fact, absolutely disaster for empires everywhere. The first Anglo Afghan War. British army sailed off, very easy victory, moved into Kabul, and then little by little, it started to go belly up. And in 1841, they were forced to perform a fighting withdrawal through the passes of Afghanistan, back into Javal, through the Khurd Kabul, and through the Khyber Pass. And in the Khurd Kabul, in The course of four days in January of 1842, an entire British army was massacred, 16,500 of them and 10,000 camp followers. Every one of them had their throats slit. And this is the famous only survivor of that entire butchery. Dr. William Brighton, who managed to kind of crawl into these are British soldiers galloping out of the fortress of Jebbah to Alabad to bring in this sorry remnant of an entire army. In actual fact he's the only white man who survived this Army. There's about 20 Indian soldiers. Soldier survived but anyway this is the only white survivor and he managed to stuff a copy of the magazine inside his hat. He got hit over the head with a sword and the magazine took the blow. And this is the reason why I survived it. And this painting was produced in 1881 just at that time when the British invasion in Afghanistan was going wrong for the second time. Quite a tart acidic little kind of knife into the side of the British establishment and she hung it in the right of the canyon in his Academy summer show as a kind of way of, as kind of up yours to the British elite. And what she thought about it. Interesting that Elizabeth Butler was married to an Irishman who was an officer to the British army. And this is Tony Blair sending the troops back into Afghanistan in 2005. Chin up lads, you're fighting for the 21st century. Steve Bell obviously knows a lot about paintings, more than he lets on. So this is John Burke at work and these two pictures appeared on the COVID of the graphic magazine in 1879 and I think probably are the first ever pictures of a war photographer at work to appear on the COVID of the magazine. And the first war photographer to ever be famous whilst he's still doing the job as a war photographer. Something of a celebrity. This idea, this hagiography of the war photographer that semi really kicked in off with the life of Robert Capper, a man who spent his daytimes on the front lines and his nighttimes making love to the most beautiful women in Europe. And in between just a little bit time to gamble thousands on roulette tables in Monte Carlo. But you know that whole idea of the kind of swashbuckler, the kind of romantic lone crusader against wrong, dashing into the war zone, gathering in these kind of trophies of crimes and then exposing them to the outside world single handedly righting wrongs. This rather sort of tousled romantic hero which is sort of still the kind of model of how war photography is meant to be kind of gathered in a collective really. So Burke is the first photographer to ever enter Afghanistan. These are the first pictures were ever made in this place. And what's, you know, I think that would be interesting, just historically interesting to show the work. I think actually there's something much better about Burke and I put this all the way through that John Burke is the greatest war photographer you never Heard of. The first thing that's really special about him is that the record that he gathers in Afghanistan is extraordinarily complete. Really complete. It's a really beautiful cross section of an imperial encounter, of a colonial encounter. Whereas a lot of the other photographers that are working this period only really shoot two or three different kinds of. They do pictures of English officers or they do landscapes, or they do archaeological. Burgess everything. He does pictures of archaeological sites or historical monuments in the city of Kabul. He does pictures of great vistas of British encampments. He does pictures of historical monuments or religious sites in the center of the city of Kabul. This is the Timbershaw Mausoleum. He does the first ever street pictures in Afghanistan. He does these amazing group portraits of British officers that seem to violate all of the norms and formalities of the way that you photograph British officers. Considering he's meant to look up to these people, he approaches them with a great deal of informality. Boys, just sit on the rocks. I'll do it from here. Fantastic. He photographs news events. This is the day when this entire column of soldiers left this fortress to go off and fight the last remnants of. Of the Afghan resistance. And he photographs archaeological sites as well. Beautiful pictures of Buddhist monuments that were all smashed in the war and then the last remnants of them were destroyed by the Taliban. This is all that we have to show that Afghanistan was one of the great Buddhist sites in the world. If you don't believe me, go to the British Life, the British Museum, and look at some of that gold hoard that's on show there. It's absolutely outstanding. So it's a very complete record of a colonial encounter and I think that makes him interesting. But there's something else that he does as well. If you look at Roger Fenton, all he does is pictures of, like, soldiers standing around their encounters, rather dry, rather stiff, and exceedingly formal and reserved. Google Earth. Don't worry about it. But what I think is interesting, the second thing that really lifts. Sorry, I'm trying to be in a bit of a hurry. But what really lifts people above the competition is if you look at a lot of the photography that is produced in the empire, and I was born in Nigeria, and if you look at the stuff that comes out of Nigeria in the 1880s and 1890s, it is brutally hierarchical. The racial superiority that is laid out in photography is absolutely enforced and is crushing, quite frankly. So that the pictures are really clear, you can see exactly who is in charge, who is the dominant class, who has been given the right by God to run the entire planet. And you can see who are the subjugated tribes and who are the subjugated races. And they occupy these very clear positions. These are my servants. These are my servants. And this is me in my bath chair. At least this one's kind of funny. I know he's having some kind of pedicure done, but this kind of clarity in this kind of. This racial layers, I think is absolutely enforced. And if you think about these pictures in the Empire being seen in India and Africa, yes, they had a purpose. But if you think about these pictures returning into the imperial heartland and being seen by the home audience, then you don't have a situation where photography is photographing racial hierarchy. But actually photography is actually a tool in the enforcement of that racial hierarchy. When the English audience see these things, they say, not, oh, this is how I'm fond of lives with servants. I know Bobby's the district commissioner, lives down the road. But rather, they say, this is the reason why we are in the Empire. This is the reason why God places on this Earth to civilize and raise up these people. If we weren't in these countries, they'd still be living in the jungles. So that idea that photography is something, a tool that enforces racial hierarchy and justifies and morally underlines and makes. It justifies it from happening. This is the reason why God put the Englishman on Earth to civilize these races and raise them up from barbarism and to Christianize them. And when Burke photographs these Afghan tribes, he doesn't do any of this. It's almost like he wasn't at school the day that they taught racial superiority to photographers. And I think there's a very interesting reason for that. And that's the reason that makes him a great photographer. I think, first of all, I think that John Burke is a young man who is sent at the age of 12 to the colonies. There's no mention of any other family. 1856 or 57, he sent out to India with his father, who joins the British Army. And there's no record of any other family. So possibly the family died at the famine or after the famine. So his father maybe joined the British army to save this bacon. So the young boy, John Burke, is sent out to his. He has no formal education. He's a country boy from County Wicklow. So he was never schooled in any kind of way. Never schooled in anything in the academies in terms of aesthetics or in terms of a lot of those things about how an Englishman is meant to behave in the outside world. Everything that he learns, he learns in the Empire. And so he doesn't see the great sort of paintings of Europe, but he may well have seen these sketches that were produced during the first. These are James Rattray, but you can see these kind of pictures of the way the English were looking at the Holy Land in particular in the 1840s and 50s. And the real nutters of them all were the French. After the Napoleonic invasion of Egypt, the French produced billions of this kind of garbage of the way the east should be seen as Orientalist, as exotic, as luscious and lavish silks and brocades. And also the way that these should be seen as sexualized. The mysterious goings on of the harem. This is Edward Said. So I think Burke is educating this idea of these people as not subjugated races and like kind of monkeys out of the jungle, but on the contrary, something rather mysterious and exotic, strange civilizations of which we can know nothing. So Burke does carry some of this, you know, these very kind of orientalist pictures of how the race look. But one of the things that you have in there when Burke arrives in, in Afghanistan is almost the beginnings of an anthropological experiment because six months later another photographer arrives and starts shooting a lot of the same stuff. His name is Benjamin Simpson. Yes, Benjamin Simpson, who arrives in the south of Afghanistan and starts photographing a lot of the same motifs, group portraits of Afghan types, cityscapes, archaeological monuments. But Benjamin Simpson is a very different kind of. Of photographer. Benjamin Simpson is an English Englishman, brought up in England, learns in England, is a school in England, attends the academy in England, returns art school in England and then goes out to India to practice his trade. So he's a much more accurate mirror of Empire's values of hierarchy and superiority and someone who lives in the very core of India as well. He lives in Calcutta, right at the imperial centre. Calcutta is the capital of India this time. Whereas Burke is someone who's living in this dog shit little kind of outpost at the very edge of the Empire. Ralpindi, Peshawar, Lahore, at a time when it was surrounded on three sides by unconquered tribal wilderness. And this is where he was posted to, where his father lived, where his father died within two years of arriving in the Empire and where he's taken under the wing of a practicing photographer, another photographer, who's quite famous, called William Baker. And Baker takes him into his business and Burke, very strategically, very quickly, within two years, is married to Baker's sister. Two years later he's got his name over the door of the company. Three years later, he owns the company. That's the kind of guy that he is. But Burke living very much inside this frontier bubble where Benjamin Simpson, missionary, comes from the Imperial court, comes from England, comes from the public schools of England, the academies of England, the art schools of England, and into the imperial heartland. Then he arrives in Afghanistan. When he photographs Afghans, he photographs them as dejected subjects, defeated and downtrodden, which is exactly how the English audience wanted to see them. And he photographs hierarchy. If you look at this picture, you know, look at these faces. Talk about downcast. I wouldn't want to have this on the wall in my house. It's so fucking miserable. But this is how the English wanted to see these races, as you know, defeated and downcast. And if you see this picture, which is a picture of five Englishmen and two Afghans, all the Englishmen are sitting down, the Afghans are standing up, and the Englishman's doggie is sitting down as well. Englishman dogs, Afghans, in that order. So that idea of Afghan, of hierarchy is absolutely enforced. If you look at John Bogue's pictures, these people don't look subjected, right? These people do not. This man here is not tantrum. On the contrary, he's looking back at you with a real kind of confidence. And he's dressed like a Ficin marker archer as well.
- [27:55]
A
Look at the one he's wearing.
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B
Look at this, right? These people are not subjects of the British Emperor. On the contrary, they look back straight at the camera with real kind of confidence. And I think even Burke's photographic style is different. Whereas I think Benjamin Simpson goes into the marketplace and says, you, you, you, you. You stand there and I'll take your picture. And these people go, oh, my God.
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A
What'S going to happen?
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B
They don't know what the f photographic processes they're about to be shot. And so they look at the camera like they're about to be shot. Whereas I think what Burke does, and interestingly, in a lot of his photography, you see this same wall reappear, but it's got a crack in it. So he seems to have a place where he does his pictures. So I think what he does is he gives out slots. Can you come at 3 o' clock on Thursday? Can you come at 2 o' clock on Thursday? And you come on Wednesday morning and I'll do your pictures. So no one comes back unless they want to be photographed, and no one comes back unless they gone over and put on the best stuff. Look at this guy. He looks Like a prince. So something more collaborative is taking place. But also these people are actually choosing to be photographed in the way that they want to, in their best outfits. And so they look back at the camera with a real confidence. Does this folk look like he's subjected and dominated? On the contrary, it looks rather sneaky and saucy if you ask me. And that's how these people look back at these pictures with some kind of pride you see, like a dominating race. So that's the difference between Burke's pictures and the reason why I think he does this is because Burke is an Irishman, a Catholic and a tradesman. And the English looked down their noses for all three reasons, but combined with one person, I think probably tradesmen was probably the worst of all those. But you have to remember that in the British Empire these racial hierarchies were enforced even more thoroughly than they were back at home. And as a Catholic and an Irishman, Burt wouldn't have even lived in the centre of the British Cantonments. He would have lived at the cantonments, peripheries, cheek by jowl with the educated English speaking Indians, mostly through the British army or the Civil service perhaps. And those incidences where you get racial mixing, the Anglo Indians would not be some lord aristocrat officer would start shagging servants. On the contrary, it would be at the very edges, the blurred edges of the cantonments where you would get those Englishmen that weren't even entirely Englishmen, Irishmen and Catholics would be marrying those Indians that weren't really entirely Indians either. Very English speaking, very English looking Anglophile Indians that came out of the British army, non commissioned officers in the army or middle ranking bureaucrats in the English civil Service. So, for example, because Burke doesn't share any of these values of the English, he doesn't photograph it. So when he photographs an Englishman, there's an Englishman in his picture. It's almost quite hard to find him. It's almost quite hard to find him. It's not a picture of a guy sat at the front with all his little servanty poos in front of him. The contrary, it's quite hard to pick out which one is the Englishman who was his shot in. I'll tell you why he looks Photoshop, Tim. Very, very interesting thing to say and I'll tell you exactly why. One of the things that Burke is doing when he photographs is that the film that he's using at this time is a wet collodion process. So he's shooting on a wet negative that he has to Cope with chemistry in a dark tent, put it inside a slide, put it inside the camera, take a picture, get it out and get the chemical off within about 10 minutes or so, because if it dries, it cracks and it destroys the negative. So he's working with this very quick process. And you can see that in those sketches, even with his big camera. One of the characteristics of that film is that it only records a picture from the red end of the spectrum. Any blue light doesn't make any kind of image on the negative. So if you see a picture with a blue sky and clouds, it's just a blank white sky. Blue doesn't appear in the picture at all. It's only in the 1910s that George Eastman said at the Kodak Company invents a panchromatic film that records all of the spectrum. This film only works from the red end of the spectrum. So anybody that has any red pigment in their skin, it records very, very dark. Afghans have a lot of red pigment in their skin, and it records very dark. You look at these guys, they look black. Then I might have Africans, but they're not that dark. It's the quality of the film. And anybody English who doesn't English, on the whole, white, Englishman, they don't have a lot of red pigment in our skins. And so the skin appears almost waxy, almost like it's lit from inside. The reason why he looks photoshopped in is because he looks like he's being lit from the inside, like a bull. And also because he's in the shadow, there's only blue light is falling on his skin. It's just the way that this guy works. And so he looks very, very angelic. Whereas the Afghans look like wizened, warlike tribesmen from the mountains. And these imperial photographers were conscious of the fact that this film did this. And so when they did these mixed group portraits, which they were very fond of, they knew that it emphasized racial differences. And it showed these kind of lily skinned sons of the Empire, and it showed these tribal, kind of wizened hill men that look like the skin's made out of all briefcases. Look at this guy, right? Afghans just don't look like that. So that idea of that kind of skin difference is something that's very important. You know, it's not something we do nowadays. Of course, we've gone beyond that. But that kind of racial difference is very important in these photographers. And when I photograph the portraits, if you go and see them at Tate, there's a whole room full of portraits or if you have a look at these books here, or even better, buy one of these books, because Tristan brought them all this way, is I tried to mimic this in the photography. So when I did these group portraits, I shoot them on a digital camera that produces a full curve. But I dumped all of the red, yellow and green light information. I just took the blue light, transferred that into black and white and then printed the portraits. So in the portraits that even I'm shooting the same as Burke, you see this accentuated racial difference. When you've got an American military officer with five Afghan helicopter, the military officers look like they're angelic, waxy almost. And the Afghans look very dark, very wizened. Because I wanted to kind of copy that idea of that skin difference. So, I mean, you bang on the money. Yeah, there you go. Right. So that's the first thing that I'd say about the kind of photographic technique that I use to try and carry this idea of birth. And then the second thing, this is the final thing I want to talk about is that when I photographed the work in 2001, I got out of bed at five o' clock in the morning because I wanted to bathe these pictures with this kind of golden light. Is this the beginning of a. Is this a question mark? Beginning of the first days of empire or the twilight of its final hours? And so I deliberately chose this kind of light to put her at this in Birmingham. This is actually the entrance to a local commander's headquarters. But they made these kind of bullshit victory arches to celebrate their victory of the Taliban. This is where one of the Buddhas was at Baliyam. So I deliberately bathed everything in this golden light. It's kind of subconscious, to be honest with you. I don't really think. I don't ever see anything that I do as being redemptive. I mean, I don't feel redemptive about it, but in a subconscious way, this work came out as quite redemptive sometimes the possibility that something new could be born, that something could come out of this ashes, that something would step onto the stage, that actually it was a new period in Afghanistan's history, sadly very wrong about that. And so I kind of deliberately bathed all of these pictures. This is the western side of Kabul, middle class district of Kabul that was wrecked in the fighting in the 1990s. But it's bathed in this kind of golden light because I'm deliberately quoting from all those painters that paint the ideas of romantic philosophy. Claude Lorraine and Nicolas Poussin, Casper Friedrich who are trying to find, doing paintings of the Italian countryside with all of these Roman ruins in these pictures disappearing into the ivy, just emerging from the undergrowth. Because what they're saying through those paintings is the greatest empires that ever existed, the empires of Roman Greece, all of these things disappear into the ivy one day, and nothing really lasts. Nothing is permanent. Vanitatus vanitatum omni vanitatus. The greatest things that men ever produce disappear eventually into the underground. Nothing is permanent in this world. The things that men do are all vanities. They're all temporary. And in this time, when I was in Afghanistan, I'm trying to find a vehicle to photograph my sense of disappointment, my sense of bitterness about what has happened in this course of these 10 sorry years with where my country has gambled its political reputation, the blood of 342 of its boys, the blood of 30,000 Afghans, more importantly, $420 billion has been spent by the Americans. Look at a website called costofwar.org and watch the numbers spin around something like 420 billion at the moment. And so I resorted to a kind of pre dawn light and a post sunset light because I wanted to. To kind of bathe these pictures in some kind of wrapped around melancholy of a kind. And so I did everything that I did in that period wrapped in this. I had to get out of bed even earlier to get out of this pre dawn light and this post sunset light to capture something about this way that this country has been shafted by my country, shafted by all of that hope that was embodied and let down by me too, because I kind of took my eye off the ball in 2000 because I thought this place was going to knock itself down, brush itself up and come on to something else. And I was very wrong about that. So that's how I photograph it. So it's a little bit difficult to talk about because I'm not showing you the pictures themselves. Please go across the river, have a look at Tate Modern, or buy a copy of the book and see whether you think I've succeeded that. But that's what I've done so far. Okay. Happy? Good.
- [37:37]
C
Look, thanks very much. Let me get up to.
- [37:47]
B
My part here. Right.
- [37:55]
C
Why don't we go straight to the part that you were talking about. And now let's see, If I go F5 here, then we get that.
- [38:05]
B
Yeah. Then we're back there. Okay, let's just go there.
- [38:08]
C
Yeah. So same picture.
- [38:10]
B
Right.
- [38:11]
C
And I just got interested in this, you know, this process, this collodion story where the red dons. And so you get this kind of image of the Africans that was very different from the English. And you see that this sort of same technique is being used here to, you know, convey a message in a way, in the O.J.
- [38:34]
B
Simpson trial, right?
- [38:35]
C
And then there is also the story of Margaret Thatcher. This is actually part of a bigger picture. And you see everybody sort of with normal skin tones and Flacher somehow is always extremely pale. And I think this was not her brightest hour or something, and that's why it's so effective to have her be completely pale. And that's how she comes out, apparently, when photographs are being made of her. Now, what I thought was kind of interesting is that, I mean, it seems that you can use particular photographic techniques such that the Afghans and the British look very different, maybe use some filters and so on in order to have Margaret Thatcher come out like that. And that's all perfectly fine. But then if you say, now suppose that, no, I'm just shooting the picture as it is, and then I'm photoshopping it afterwards, right? Then people get very nervous about this and they say, oh, you're manipulating images. It's terrible. It's terrible, right? So this. Apparently the National Geographic got in trouble for this. I mean, this is not a color issue, but it's just sort of, you know, making your pyramids fit into this vertical format. And a lot of people didn't like that. They said that's cheating, right? But people have different opinions about this. Like, here's sort of a pro and con, right? Rick Smollin says, we're very proud of the fact that we're able to use this technology to make the covers more dramatic and more impressive. On the other hand, manipulating images is ethically, morally and journalistically horrible. Manipulating images is like limited nuclear warfare. They're in yong, right?
- [40:18]
B
And so I just, you know, find this. I find this kind of an interesting issue.
- [40:25]
C
This, you know, what are you allowed to do?
- [40:27]
B
I mean, there seems to be something.
- [40:29]
C
Arbitrary about we can put on a filter. So let's just do the Margaret Thatcher thing so that she looks very pale and, oh, it's really effective. You know, you're gonna give this message like, this is not her brightest hour and so on, but if you were to do that in Photoshop, oh, I stare at my stare. And then there was also the issue sort of, what can you do with analog and what can you do with digital photography?
- [40:50]
B
I wonder whether you have any opinions.
- [40:53]
C
About this and, you know, whether in Your own work, you feel like, here are certain things that I would never do, or here are things that I feel perfectly fine. Here's what I do do with Photoshop and so on.
- [41:07]
B
Well, for me, the limits, a few things that have come through. Some of the work that I've done. The most important client that I have is the New York Times Magazine. And most of what goes on a gallery wall starts out as editorial assignments. And the best person that I've worked for for the last 10 years is the New York Times. And the New York Times has some very, very rigorous strictures about manipulation. In fact, they're the only magazine I've ever worked for that I've ever turned, told me what is and is not allowed. The rest of it is all done on some rather vague sort of gentleman's agreement that's never written down, and you only find out about it, but you violate it and get kebab. So the New York Times is the only magazine that ever told me what they say is accessible and what is not. It's the only magazine they've ever put pressure on me to say, have you done anything to this picture? Because if you have, we will have to refer to it as a photo illustration. So they're the sort of of like Photoshop Nazis, really. And I sort of take them as a kind of gold standard. I see. So what do they say? They've asked me. I know that there's a photographer called Edgar Martins, an English photographer, he's based in the uk, who last year produced a series of pictures for them about foreclosed homes in the United States. And it turned out that he had done a lot of manipulation. I mean, taking pictures of the elements of the pictures and flipping them and creating very symmetrical pictures by actually duping half and half and sticking them together, cloning out elements, removing elements, bringing things in from other pictures. Very heavy Photoshop work. And he passed them off as real pictures. And there was a huge stink at the time, and we were all informed that there had been a huge stink, and if any of us ever went near ever again, we'd all be knackered. So it's never given out as a series of formal rules, but we're all made very aware of those people that violate the rules, certain award winners who then have the awards removed from them. It's been a whole series of photo award winners that have lost their prizes, and in particular the World Press photo, which is the kind of gold standard that all the photogenams aspire towards, have over the last Couple of years remove the prize from people that they say have over manipulated images.
- [43:21]
C
I see.
- [43:21]
B
Take a picture from the Haiti earthquake.
- [43:25]
C
But that would be kind of a case. I actually have an example here that sort of illustrates it.
- [43:30]
B
Right.
- [43:31]
C
This is Rhonda as the first world failed to third. Corpses lying the streets of Goldman's area. As an airplane prepares to land. It's like, we're too late.
- [43:39]
B
Right.
- [43:39]
C
Look, the airplane is coming in now, but the corpses already there. And you know, when looking at this thing, I'm sort of thinking like, well, you know, suppose you did a super position here. I mean, how bad would it be really? I mean, do you really have to sit there all day when you have the idea to do this in order to get the airplane at the right spot? Just, you know, do a superposition and that's that you got a good idea. What the heck, you know. I mean. But that's sort of the case where the New York Times would say if you did a superposition position on this, you'd be in big trouble. Right, Right. There's something funny about it. I mean, it's really, you know, having the idea of having this airplane that's too late when the corpses are there. What that it's all about, right? I mean, sitting there in order to wait and get the right shot. I mean, what's the big deal about that? In a way. But that's one thing. I mean, I can see people get upset about this. But then there was the other thing too. You know, coloring things in, working with, you know, shades of light. I mean, you get this despair in your pictures, you know, getting the blue stuff in. So, you know, just getting the blue in in your pictures. I mean, do you feel like that's okay, I didn't paint the blue in.
- [44:48]
B
I got out of bed at 4 in the morning?
- [44:53]
C
No, but there's probably, you know.
- [44:57]
B
Reliant cloning objects. If I think I need to, like move the tree out of the way, then that's too much. If I feel that, I mean, I crop my pictures, I will do color adjustments to the pictures. Within reason, not very much saturation adjustments. Because those are something that are endemic in the way that the picture is captured by the sensor in the camera or by the film. So to me, those feel natural enough. And I'll do contrast adjustments as well. For me, I take it all from printing. I was a very good boy black and white printer back in the day. And so I sort of take it as a rule that if it's the kind of Thing that I could have done as a black and white printer in analogue, then it's acceptable for me as a photojournalist. If I couldn't have done it as analog, then I don't do it. Even though I can do it, I don't do it right. And that's kind of carried through. And that's sort of the time the New York Times is. That's also the kind of distillation of what they say as well. If you could have done it then, you can do it now, and if you colour. But if you couldn't have done it, then don't do it. Even though you can do it technologically, which is kind of nonsense, really, but you have to think that you have to make a line somewhere, so why not make it there? It's got to be something. I mean, the New York Times would run your fake picture, but they would just refer to it as a photo illustration, which is fine, I think, as well. But it's to do with an expectation as well, an expectation of truthfulness, an expectation of record and those things. And because the New York Times has this rather ridiculous idea that it's some kind of newspaper of record, an established line of fact, therefore it has to produce photographs which are also that. And, you know, the record of the New York Times, through the pathetic way that it backs the war against Saddam and the Patriot act and the Judith Miller thing shows that it is anything but those things. And it seemed that I. The New York Times. To me, it sounds like the voice of the State Department, that they think of themselves as being some kind of official record, and so the photography has to be that too.
- [46:50]
C
But it's interesting that the standard of.
- [46:52]
B
Truthfulness is set by how much could.
- [46:55]
C
I cheat with analog? This is a funny way of putting it, really.
- [47:00]
B
Shall we maybe open it up to the audience? Maybe restrict it up to this point.
- [47:05]
C
And then we can bring in some other points later. You don't call yourself a photojournalist. So I'm wondering if you think of truth as having a different threshold for you versus, you know, I mean, what is true? I mean, I can imagine there are truths which aren't just real. I mean, adding color might actually make for some deeper truth if you just really shot the straight photo and you've.
- [47:26]
B
Got the white comic sack inside.
- [47:28]
C
But, I mean, do you have a line that's somewhat further away than photojournalism? Does it give you a few.
- [47:39]
B
I believe it gives me a truth to be partial. And that's the thing. The reason Why I say I'm not a photojournalist is because I think I'm a propagandist. And my first desire is to make political points. I'm not particularly interested in recording the truth or whatever of the situation. I will use truthfulness in a photograph photograph to talk that situation, because I believe that you will interrogate my picture longer if you believe that it is true. And I believe that by having, by not being known as a shyster that fiddles around my pictures, then I believe that gives me more justification to sit at the table. But that's where it ends. And the things that I choose to photograph and the stories that I choose to tell are exceedingly partial and political. And if they're not, I feel that they've failed. But I don't think the best way to talk to you about politics is to tell you a little lies. And likewise, I don't think the best way to talk to you about politics is to shout at you either. The best way to talk to you about politics is to make my pictures as beautiful as possible. And for me, beauty is a tool of drawing you into a kind of dialogue with him. Because I believe that by making the pictures beautiful, you will sit and look at them longer, sit with me and look at them for longer, and you will squint at them harder and you'll ask how the question questions on you. The problem with a pitch like this is that you sort of bounce off its meaning rather quickly. I'm not down on photogenism. I think that photogency pictures do their job very, very well. It's the same as the text that sits alongside them. If the text in a magazine article was written as a haiku, you would sit squinting at it for hours, then trying to work out what the hell it meant. So the way that text is written in a newspaper, it's meant to offer all of its meanings instantly. Its meanings are completely transparent. It's not about truth and lack of truth, but rather it's about transparency for me. And that the reason why it's punctuated, the reason why it has capital letters in the right place, is so that I can move through it as fast as possible to the meaning that's sent behind it. And if your newspaper was written iambic pentameter, you just get annoyed by it. And likewise, the same is true of photojournalism. The picture like this offers up everything that it has to say instantly. I know exactly where I am. I know what that thing in the sky is. I know what the Semiotic meaning of these things with the colors over on the floor is this is a series of pictures in Africa. These are people that have been killed in some kind of massacre. The way they lay down. And this is the west riding or leaving on an airplane. All its meanings are completely transparent and are given to you immediately so that you can move past its symbols to the meanings behind us and what immediately, just as the text exercises. Now, the problem with that, I find, is that that is it's a great way to talk about some very simple stories. It's a bloody awful way to talk about stories with any kind of sophistication or meaning behind them. Anything that you struggle with, where the meanings are slightly more complicated or my position towards them is slightly more compromised or challenged or troubled. I can't use this tool. I used to be a photojournalist. It's a great way to talk about black and white issues. Here's the good guys, here's the bad guys. Here's the man in the street with the banana in the street, pointing where he fell over the banana in the street, looking across because he tripped over the banana and he fell over. Hang your man. You know, local newspaper photographers like that all the time. Whereas when I started to engage with particular issues about genocide, the first book that I did, I felt that my. It was like trying to play, you know, Rachmaninoff wearing boxing clothes. It's just the wrong tools for the job.
- [51:01]
C
Let's go to the next question.
- [51:02]
B
Yeah. Your raising of the question of text is quite interesting because actually it seems to me that we tolerate a much wider range of uses of the word journalist than we do with the word photojournalist. So journalists can cover everything from giving lots of colour, background, history, correspondent through to this man tripped over a banana. And I'm quite struck by the fact that, and I hadn't really thought about it before, actually, we don't allow photographers anything like the safe leeway in that, that we demand these particular things. I mean, the Martin's case is an interesting. And incidentally, he's denied it, actually, that he was ever given that brief. There's quite an interesting issue in the latest issue of Ag magazine where he prefers the Siegman's photographs at all. About his relationship with the mit. I think he's been disingenuous, to put it mildly, actually. I think that a lot more went on than he claims. But I think the point about transparency is in text. Most of us know and can read and interpret texts in a different kind of way that we would understand, say, how you, as a photographer achieved a particular impact. We're more alert about it. The language that most people work in, most of the time, they understand vocabularies, they understand working methods because they do it themselves. Perhaps a number of people in this room are, like me and Patrick, also interested in photography and do quite a lot of photography ourselves. To us, we can begin to decode that. It's actually much harder, I think. So the obligation of transparency in an ethical sense on a photographer. Perhaps that's why we have the difference between journalism, photojournalism and how. I'm just wondering how at a philosophical level, one gets that transparency without the photojournalist also having to write a soking great screed saying, this is how I did this, which might become a bit dull. Well, I mean, don't they write that screed, but they just don't have to write that screed in that we come with a series of expectations. I think that's my question. The rules are written by. When it says Reuters, we know what. We unpack the meaning of that word that says it's Reuters. Therefore, it really happened. The raw file is available to the editors. They promised that they didn't do it. There was that time when they did have that fellow did that Photoshopping thing and he got really screwed for it. So this fellow probably hasn't done it this time. And so we do write that text, but we just have to write the text down. Do you write the text which says, at this point, I use a particular focal length. Length. Which allowed me to suggest a juxtaposition between two people who weren't actually in any sense talking to one another. But I was standing half a mile away.
- [53:43]
C
I was able to make that distance.
- [53:44]
B
Of 50ft look like 5 inches. Well, you've got the Kevin Carter picture here, haven't you?
- [53:49]
C
Yeah. Yep.
- [53:51]
B
The bird vulture and the. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think. I mean, that's an interesting picture because.
- [53:58]
C
That raised a lot of other extra.
- [53:59]
B
Yes, but this particular foreshortening that was done with this very long lens brought together two objects and. Yeah, that passed the MIT rules. Yeah. Now, would that unpacking. Carter was working for the New York Times, would that unpacking you're talking about, the things that we bring to it work in that case? And I'm not actually sure they would. Okay. Is there an answer to that? I don't know. I just. I'm. Well, yeah, you could say I'm wrong. Unfortunately, this. This picture has Caused a. Kicked up a shitstorm of a completely different kind. Exactly.
- [54:38]
C
You know, it's just the point here about that bird was sitting a heck of a lot further away from that kid than what it looks like.
- [54:44]
B
Right.
- [54:44]
C
I mean, that's what we're talking about.
- [54:46]
B
You can use it to suggest now perhaps, is it. I don't know whether it's like, you know, an illegal mover or a slight of hand. I would put this in the sleight of hand category. Oh, yeah, I think that's slightly different. I think it's, it's. It's iffy, but it's not criminal.
- [55:05]
A
Well, it's interesting, right, because we talked about that earlier. If you had actually like manually moved.
- [55:10]
B
That child towards, then that would. That's wrong, Right? Yeah. Yeah.
- [55:16]
A
How do we draw that line?
- [55:17]
B
Yeah, how do you draw a line? And is it cast iron? And the rest of it zips around.
- [55:22]
C
He sits there for a long time, too, because he really would like to have the vulture spread its wings, the property. And he doesn't get it at the time.
- [55:29]
B
He waited.
- [55:30]
C
Yeah. Now, of course, if he would have made some movement to make the vulture spread its wings, that wouldn't be any good again. Right. Manipulating what he's actually making a picture of.
- [55:42]
B
Maybe you should move on to this.
- [55:44]
C
Question I had about.
- [55:49]
B
Issues of, you.
- [55:50]
C
Know, making a career out of defecting war scenes, suffering of other people and stuff like that. And, you know, you could sort of say, well, in a way, you're exploiting the suffering of others people. Right. And listen to your radio interview and you say, you know, I did very well out of Afghanistan. And now the question is, you know, when I look at how well I did, don't I have a responsibility and what's the nature of that responsibility and so on. I think here also comes the issue of I'm not a photojournalist anymore. Right. And so here are a couple of pictures that, for the journalists that got them, you know, made them raise precisely these questions. So here's Larry Burroughs. You know, he's killed in Vietnam. He says it's not easy to photograph a man dying in the arms of his fellow countrymen. Was I simply capitalizing on other men's grief? I mean, that's the question. That's sort of what's behind what you're saying too, when you say, you know, I did well out of Afghanistan and, you know, what's my responsibility now? So Larry Burrow said, I concluded that what I was doing would penetrate the hearts of those at home. Who are simply too indifferent. I felt that I was free to act on that condition. So he feels like that's what gives him a license. Other example here is, you know, Gavin Carter, Sudan, 1993. So this picture, you know, kicked up a storm. But people say, great picture, great picture. But then they said, what happened to the girl? What happened to the girl? And Carter responded, well, didn't do anything. Well, shouldn't we brought her to the feeding station? What actually was happening here was that there's this airplane coming in and her parents are going to the feeding station. The airplane is bringing food, and that's where her parents are, and they leave her somewhat behind. And that's when the vulture comes down and shouldn't they approach to the feeding station and so on? And Kevin Carter responds like, look, you know, if you care about little girls like that, there's a lot of places where you can donate money to help little girls like that. So leave me alone. All right? I think about three months later, he commits suicide. Now, it's not, you know, clear at all that it's connected to his experience in Saddam, right? But there's all this discussion about, you know, the bird and the girl here, another one that kicked up a storm like that, and all sort of a. About responsibility that people have because of the fact that they are making pictures of human suffering. So here's The Migrant Mother, 1936, shop in Oklahoma or somewhere. Dorothea Langs. And so many years later, they find the woman who is actually depicted in this famous picture, and she's not happy at all. So she's Florence Owens Thompson, and she says she felt exploited by Lang's portrait.
- [58:43]
B
I can't get a penny out of.
- [58:45]
C
It, she says, Lang didn't ask my name. She said she wouldn't sell the pictures. She said she'd send me a copy. She never did, right? So, you know, so same issue here. And then I was thinking, like, well, maybe one of the responsibilities that one has, or, you know, at least one has this responsibility that is that you somehow respect the dignity of the people involved, right? And this particular account here seems to be a violation of the dignity of the person involved. And then I was just wondering, you know, just an idea when I look at your pictures and also what you say about Burke, you know, just the fact that he doesn't shoot the corpses after the battle and so on, right? And when I look at your work, I mean, I was struck by this picture in. For most of it, I have no words, you know, it was all on genocide, right? So these are the steps in Auschwitz, right? And so I guess, you know, the idea is that you see that, you know, lots and lots and lots of people have gone up those steps, right? And that's sort of the inference that you make. And that's what brings you to, you know, the massiveness of the atrocity of the genocide in World War II. But again, of course, you know, there's no blood and gore in this, right? There's no violation of anybody's dignity in this. And so maybe that's a form of taking responsibility as an artist, in this case, problem as a photojournalist. So I'm sort of wondering whether, you know, you move from photojournalism to being an artist has something to do with, you know, well, I need to take responsibility, you know, in telling the story that I want to tell. And I feel like I can't do that fully as a photojournalist, maybe because people out there want to see the blood and go. So anyway, just something to play with.
- [60:47]
B
Well, I remember Simon's boring war story. I remember I was in Congo. I was in the drc, I was in Goma, and I was photographing for crs, which is cafod, the Catholic Relief Services. And they asked me if I would photograph a small refugee camp that had been kicked up from a lesser conflict, one of many little mini conflicts. And there was about a couple of.
- [61:16]
C
Thousand.
- [61:18]
B
Of these Maui, Maui people that were living in a refugee camp. And I photographed for a couple of hours in this place, and it was a pretty sad, old, desperate place. And I photographed those kind of regular pictures that I thought this organization wanted. This is when I was a photojournalist and I was making some pretty good pictures, and I was pretty pleased with myself. And in the middle of all of this, a guy walks towards me and says, hello, in English, and he says, are you English? I said, yeah. He says, oh, I'm from Leicester. And I was like, fuck me, what's going on? And he said, oh, I'm at Leicester University. I'm doing metallurgy. And I heard that my family were in a pickle. And I came out here to see. See if I could help him. And it was like a kind of collapsing because suddenly this thing that was these people were being great because they looked great, they looked miserable and they looked apart. And suddenly this man had come from this, stepped out of this crowd and had completely destroyed everything that I was enjoying photographically in this place. Because something. They weren't this type, this kind of metaphor of misery and suffering. Suddenly it had a name. It was called Richard. It lived in Leicester. It was Leicester University. And it was doing metallurgy. And I sort of couldn't take any more pictures out of that. Richard kind of like ruined it for me. And the whole thing just kind of like dissolved in front of me. And I found it a very, very disturbing moment because these people have been doing all the right things by looking miserable, huddling over their fires. The smoke was hanging over this thing. Landscape was extraordinary. And these little long days that they bended over sticks with a bit of plastic that they were living in, you know, it was making great photographs. And suddenly all of that great photography dissolved when Richard stepped out of the crowd. And I remember next day at home, making the notes that evening, making up the notes and realizing that I hadn't written down anybody's name, hadn't written any names. They were just Maui Mai refugees living at this location because of the following reasons, because of the conflict. And I'd never written down this lady's name or that man's name or this little boy's name, because, frankly, I wasn't interested in their names. And I remember thinking about the work of a photographer called Fazal Shaikh, who does a very similar kind of photography. But in Fazal Sheikh's pictures, it says Mr. Olrakhanwali and his daughter Susan and his ditches sister Mary. And he's here because of this. And he used to live in this place. And this guy is here, which is a completely different attitude. And I was a bit kind of like, disgusted, really. And that was one of the things that sort of made me one of the kind of damaging moments, really, in terms of turning away from photojournalism to try to find something else where I could actually engage with these people. Not in a liberal way. I'm not on the. Not in the idea of, like, you know, that I would write down this man's story, you know, what would tell the story of this man's life. Fifty words. Five hundred words. A thousand words. You know, Jean Paul Sartre's biography of Proust, what was it? You know, it became 10,000 pages before he gave up with it because he couldn't tell the total story of this man's life. But second, boring anecdote. I was in Rwanda shooting this book, and I volunteered a couple of days with an organization called African Rights, who go around gathering first person testimony of people who survived the genocide. And so they go around and they write down every single thing that happened to this lady. She Tells me and need little headshots. So I was just going around and. Little headshots of these people to go on these reports, and I volunteered a couple of days to go around the country with these people to shoot headshots. And my French. I'm English, right? So my French is rubbish. And we went to see this lady, and she had all these little kids, so I thought, oh, I'll do a picture with little kids. So I lined her up, lady. And the kids went. I thought it was a bit funny because it looked like the trapped family scenes, you know? So I lined them all up in sequence like that. And it was like a nice picture outside, little house, six of these kids. And in Rwanda, everybody has these beautiful French religious names like Teophilae and Immaculata and Annunciations, and then they have a Kinhuanga name afterwards. So everybody I met had these amazing, glorious names, like our. So they're all Annunciata Immaculata and stuff like this. And align these people up. And a lady steps out of the picture, picks up the little baby and puts the baby inside the house and then comes back and stands in the picture. And I was like, no, no, I vet the baby. I vet the baby. And she's like, no, what's the matter? Put the baby in the picture. It was the funniest part, right? And she says, no, not with the baby. And I'm saying, no, no, what's going on? What's going on? And she's talking to the trans. To the thing in Kinya Wanda, and I don't know what's going on. And she's saying. And I'm like, what's going on? We seem to be back where we started from. And she's saying, no, no, just with Violet. And I'm like, oh, Georges, Violet. Just with Simon, can I have the baby in the picture, please? And she said, no, no, just with Violet. I'm like, hang on. There's literally a Belle Violet. Oh, I see. She's saying, I was raped. The baby is the product of the rape. And when you photograph me with my family, I don't want that baby in the picture because I don't consider that baby to be my partner and family. Quite frankly, it's by the grace of God. I didn't throw the fucking thing in a lake when it was born. And the feeling that I had, like, through my incompetence and stupidity, had, like, taken a kind of stick and just rubbed it in this woman's wound, in her pain, it truly appalled Me, but also gave me this feeling that why am I there? You know that second part of that Larry Burroughs quote, why are you there? What are you going to do with these pictures? And I'm going to take these pictures, then put them under the box under my bed. Does that justify me sticking a knife in this woman's wound? Or am I going to take these pictures and win a big prize? Is that justifying me sticking a stick in this lady's wound? Or am I going to take these pictures and, you know, advance my career? Does that justify it? Or do I believe that somehow by showing this picture of this lady, it will do something towards making a world in which a lady in that circumstance, at some point in the future won't go through what this lady went through. So for me, that was the thing that sort of made my work, made me feel political about what I do. Because I feel that unless it has at least a hope of doing that thing, what the fuck am I sticking around annoying this lady for? Why don't I just leave her alone? You know, if I'm not going to do something useful. I don't know how you define that, but if I'm not going to do something useful in terms of changing the world. And Larry Burroughs says it was about busting his way through the indifference of the viewers that see this picture. And if I do something useful with that thing, then I am just a tourist of someone else's reality. Because I've got a white skin and a British passport and a credit card and a home plane ticket. And when it all gets too horrible for me and I miss my wife, I just go home. She can't go home. She can't get. She doesn't have any of those things. But one thing that I do have by virtue of that credit card and that passport, is that I have voice. She hasn't got no voice. No one gives a crap what happened to her or her stories. But people want to pay money to hear me talk about what I do. People want to go in a gallery and see what I stick on the wall. So it seems to me that, you know, from that day forward, I never use the phrase take, take a photograph. I make a photograph because to me it feels like when you take a picture of somebody, it's a two way obligation to yourself. It's a two way obligation. She lets me take a picture and I promise I will do something with this thing. I will try and make something different in the world. Otherwise there is no justification for me being here making her world a little bit more crap by asking her to repeat her story for the 15th so that I'm not a Christian. But I do think the only language that I have to describe this is in this Christian idea of witness that you stand in front of something and then promise to repeat that elsewhere to change the world, otherwise you're not justified being there. It's that picture I showed you of Samo Torres. If you've got nothing to say, shut the fuck up.
- [69:43]
C
Isn't that what you were doing there in the first place on those things?
- [69:47]
B
Yes, because it was very direct those days, because I was working for this organisation, but the rest of my time there was doing this Lady Dahl book. So either you make the Ladhar book count for something or don't do it.
- [69:58]
C
Does that mean there's no place for protojournalists?
- [70:05]
B
There is some place for them if they feel they are doing something in terms of creating a record, and there is some place for them if they aren't honestly believe, like Larry Burroughs, they are burrowing through indifference. Although, you know, you didn't read one of the words on that picture that you had up, which is in the bottom right hand corner, it said Life magazine. And I would say Life magazine is, you know, it's a mouthpiece for the British American government and its policy. And that was the problem with that picture, is it appeared in Life magazine and it didn't have a political effect, you know, because you have to take on board the political baggage that comes with being a part of the American media. If I take my pictures and then give them to Rupert Murdoch, then they will have Rupert Murdoch's meanings attached to them. Not my pictures, not my meanings. So that whole idea of what does the picture do afterwards is important to me. Where does it appear? What does it say? What does it mean? What does the audience think?
- [70:54]
C
So it has some kind of disclaimer saying, I'm on assignment, I'm just doing what I'm told.
- [71:00]
B
I was only obeying orders. Yeah, I don't think that gets you what gets you off.
- [71:09]
C
But, Simon, suppose somebody would say, look, you know, suppose somebody is really one of his Blood and Gore photographers and says, I think my pictures do a lot. They get in places like Life magazine where a lot of people see them.
- [71:24]
B
And I think it does make a difference. Does it? What? Well, I don't know. I'd ask them to say, well, tell me what difference it makes. I don't know.
- [71:32]
C
Well, look, I mean, suppose that an opponent of you. I mean, you know, somebody who's precisely doing that would say, well, but, you.
- [71:39]
B
Know, your pictures are very intellectual, they're.
- [71:42]
C
Very subtle, you know, and they reach a small audience because they are precisely so subtle.
- [71:47]
B
And, you know, how much would it.
- [71:49]
C
Really move them to, you know, to donate to causes and things like that, to be politically. Become politically active? I think my blood and gore picture is actually do more in shaking people and making them politically active, donating to good causes, volunteering and so on. Now, I don't know, it could be false, but it's not.
- [72:10]
B
Plainly, I know photographers like Gilles Perez would go along exactly what you're saying. And the British photographer Tom Stoddard, I think as well, where a picture appears and then as many times run a campaign and the campaign raises some money and he can say, that picture raised 43,000 quid for them.
- [72:25]
C
But there's still, of course, the violation of the dignity of the person depicted. Right. You made a lot of money with that picture.
- [72:33]
B
Great.
- [72:33]
C
I mean, you know, for good cause, let's say. Right. But it still remains questionable whether that's justified. People want to be depicted in that way.
- [72:44]
B
Let's get the questions in the right order. Right. You know, that person was violated by international capitalism the first time. It was. The second time was violated by a photographer. The major violation in that little baby's life was done by the way aid organizations work, the way that the world economy was organized around feed grain and population movements and the economy of Ethiopia and the rest of it. So that's where the violation occurred, not by someone taking the picture. That's pretty incidental afterwards. Well, first of all, I'd say that my work is seen in New York. I've always tried to work on a kind of layered sort of level. For me, it's very important that I work on what I think is like a democratic model of layers. So that if you want to pay me £6,000 for one of my prints, then thank you very much, I'm not going to say no to that. With £6,000, I can go out and make a lot of trouble. So I take that money and I roll from Peter and I use it to pay football and the other things that I want to do. But I also make sure that my work appears in a book that costs £40. And I also make sure that my book appears in a magazine that costs 1 pound 20. And I also make sure that my book appears on a very expensive website, which you can access for nothing whatsoever. Even if you're sitting in Afghanistan, you can access that website And I spend a lot of money making sure that it does work on other platforms along slow interconnections and blah, blah. So that for me, that idea that there are many access points into what I do is very important. And at those different levels, different things occur. I don't know how many people see the website because I don't look at it. But when my work appears on the website of the New York Times Magazine, it's seen by 8 million people. Let's open it up again. Yes. How has your relationship changed with the subject? Your subjects, for example, the stories you tell us. How does she change? How does your. How do I change with your subjects? You know, I never really had much interaction with subjects. I'm not one of these people that makes lots of friends when they go around taking portraits. I've always been in the sort of smash and grab end of the business, so I'd never really. I think that one of the reasons why I stopped doing portraits is because I felt the way I did it was pretty cruel. Your recent work is portraits? Yes. But the pictures from Afghanistan in this book, well, certainly falls into two kind of categories really, which is pictures of the Afghans and the pictures of Far and True. And the pictures of the foreign troops are very much influenced by my political feelings about what I think about the war and what I think about the embedding system and what I think about how the embedding system's encapsulated and neutered any kind of political response. And instead of photographers telling me that their pictures expose what happens in the war to the outside world, I would say, on the contrary, your pictures are the reason why. It's not that there's an opposition to the world to the war in this country. There's an absolute. Is there a war going on? That's the response to most people to the war. It's almost as if, unless you've got a brother that's fighting in the army, you would barely even know the war is happening. It has so disappeared behind the radar. And one of the reasons why it's disappeared behind is because the photographic record being made by photographers is so bloody awful and is so much in line with what the military propagandists want them to tell, that any kind of opposition is just absolutely with away. It's not even Vietnam. You can say there was people for the war, people against the war. Now everybody barely even knows the bloody wars going on. So what was the question about taking pictures? So the portraits that I did of the army was deliberately an attempt to portray them in exactly the way that my politics wanted to show them. When I photographed the British ambassador, I wanted to look like a colonial gorilla, and that's what he looks like in my picture. Is it hard to negotiate? Is it hard to negotiate? It was hard to negotiate the night before when the press officer phoned me up and said, oh, we're really nervous about this. Do you think they look like imperialists? And I said, no, don't worry about it. One thing I learned from working as A photojournalist for 10 years is that PRs, press officers, professional shysters, I would fuck them in the back as fast as they fuck them. No tears lost about that. These people are professional liars who do it every day of their lives. And if I have to lie on their faces to get what I want, otherwise, tough. This is business. This is not personal. It was interesting because I saw some of the photo you took and I posted on it in the Mail on Sunday. Ah, yes. And they. It's not that one thing, wasn't it? Yeah. And they were, you know, looking at.
- [77:31]
C
Them with the view of. Yeah, this is sort of one corner.
- [77:34]
B
Of Britain in Afghanistan, and this is like, you know, support for the imperialism, basically.
- [77:41]
C
Were you aware of that or how.
- [77:43]
B
The photos were going to be shown in that magazine? It was something I was asked to do in order to publicize the show by Tate. So I wasn't. I was a little bit compromised over that. It was sold by my editorial agent. I got three and a half grand for it, actually. There's quite a lot of dough. I was surprised. I thought they left a lot of politics in. I mean, they sort of put inverted commas at the front, says Simon Norfolk. And then a lot of it was just me ranting, so I was quite impressed by how much was left in, actually. Essentially, you thought it was the other way around.
- [78:17]
C
Well, I just read the headline.
- [78:19]
B
I didn't read it.
- [78:22]
C
What was the headline? It said something about, oh, you know, there'll always be an England or something.
- [78:28]
B
Yeah, yeah. A small corner that is forever England. Yeah, I think that's quite ironic, actually. If you read the thing, it was me going on about what a bunch.
- [78:36]
C
Of freaks they were, that I thought.
- [78:37]
B
It was barbaric, that I was outraged. And by putting inverted commas around it, they seemed to give me free rein to kind of just ramble on. The thing I was annoyed about was that they wrote that piece and they put my name on it that said Simon Norfolk, but they didn't show it to Me beforehand, which I think is a bit of a cheat, really. If you're going to say it's me writing it, either take the stuff that I've written or let me write something or at least show me what you've written before you put out. But I was surprised that that thing was quite as political as it was. I thought I kind of got away with it. But I'm never quite sure if I'm going to pull it off or if I'm going to get caught out or if they were going to pull a rug on me the day before the shoot and say, no. Yes, the ambassador. Huge stink. Yeah, huge stink. A friend of mine was on an airplane and somebody saw the ambassador the other plane and said, is that the British ambassador? He's that asshole that had himself photographed like some kind of Victorian imperialist. How could he be so stupid? And if people are saying that, then he knows about it too. So I know that there was that kind of stink. But the other thing that personally was that this young woman who was the press officer, her first foreign posting was at the British Embassy. And I spent three days in embedded embassy. And I knew what I wanted to get out of it. I knew they were going to hate it and that she was so incompetent of what she did that on the second night, when I was going back to the final day, a little bit of a got myself because it occurred to me that she would probably lose her job over me. Is what I'm doing there enough to justify to screw this kid's career? Because you're about 27 collateral damage. Yeah, but I mean, I think she probably would lose her job of relying me to photograph the things that I got away with. And I felt very bad about that. And then on the third day I got there and she said, you can do a picture of the Ambassador's residence. And when we walked in, she said, don't photograph a pool. That looks bad. I thought you cheeky sod. You think I'm going to go along with your game, not photograph because you don't want me to. There it is. He's got a smooth pool. It's a fact. But you're saying no, you're with us, you're inside us. You won't do what I am because you want to kind of go along with the team. I'm not in your fucking team. And I rather resent the fact that you think that this is a team that's being run by you on my behalf because you are running something completely out of my control. You are operating Foreign Point as if it's a private sodding club which I'm not invited to contribute in some way apart from giving you my bloody taxes. So don't try and expect me to try and come along with you. A bit like when you meet someone at a party who starts talking to you in a racist way because you've got a white skin and think you're going to go along with that little racist joke. I felt the same with her actually. I'm pretty angry about it. So she loses her job.
- [81:13]
C
So I was going to ask Simon a question about whether you know, he felt subjected to self suds but I think that question is already answered. Now Patrick, this is funny. I saw the show and here you talk about Burke and you and it strikes me that you're very different photographers. I mean he's a commercial photographer, he was there for a couple of years in some way embedded there in a way that you're coming in and out maybe 15 weeks I think you told me you obviously have a strong over.
- [81:47]
B
Political message of some kind is driving.
- [81:49]
C
The work and I don't get that from Burke necessarily So I'm sort of curious where you see the synergies and also the tensions between the two of you and also I mean an unrelated question I guess would be what is the ethics of representing him because he's an unknown photographer and you're sort of leveraging his work in a certain way for your advantage and I'm so interested about that.
- [82:09]
B
I mean it's interesting. That's a fun. Somebody said to me last week said so does Burke get any choice in you using his pictures?
- [82:16]
C
Well yeah, I mean you've obviously selected.
- [82:17]
B
But he doesn't, he's dead. One of the functions of being dead does he don't get to control.
- [82:22]
C
What's interesting too is that Burke is actually self censoring by not showing blood and gore because that would get him in trouble. Right?
- [82:29]
B
Yes.
- [82:31]
C
You're not showing gore for other reasons. Right. But you know, once again it's a very different photographer first as like a.
- [82:36]
B
Stabilistic but you think once someone is dead we shouldn't reinterpret anything that they do or talk about them ever again. I mean that's like an argument living in a permanent moment.
- [82:44]
C
Well your estate allows us to do that.
- [82:47]
B
Say again?
- [82:47]
C
Will your estate allow us to do that?
- [82:49]
B
Surely just a function of being dead, isn't it? Not a function of making any kind of public object as soon as it's a Public object, other people.
- [83:01]
C
The moral rights of the author. You have to respect the intention that the author had in making the work of art. I would have thought better or not.
- [83:09]
B
The entire function of work of art is that as soon as you make it a work of art, which is therefore a public object, it is open to be reinterpreted by someone else in a different way. If you don't want it, don't stick it on the wall. I think that's absolutely. If you want to write a diary and put it in a drawer under your bed, then it's a private thing, that's fine. If someone wants to tell me that they think this is a funny picture and makes them laugh and think about all the dead years, I can't stop them doing that. I had a guy buy my first Afghan book and say, yeah, the place was really fucked. And I wanted to show my mates how fucked up it was because he'd been hitting the British army there. I can't stop him doing that.
- [83:46]
C
So, you know, you die. This picture is being used in some commercial for washing detergents. We're going to put some white drapes on here and. And so on and that's it. Right.
- [83:58]
B
Is that right? Is that right? No, it's not right. And that's one of the reasons why. It's one of the reasons why I changed a lot of my work practices to move towards producing books. Not working for magazines, but producing books and producing work on a gallery wall. Because on a gallery wall is somewhere where I have a chance to fix a meaning to something. When I have a picture in a picture library, in a picture agency, or even the pictures that were sold to the mail on something magazine, I don't know they're being sold until they appear in the magazine. And I don't know what the captions are going to be on the text. And it's. The reason why I pushed away from television is because I don't have any conversation, in control of things. When I make a book, I am completely in charge of where that book goes, where the text goes. You look at this, you look at that, you turn over the page, here it goes and then you look at that and you can never break that. It's one of the reasons why I'm very wary about a lot of new media stuff because I don't know where the stuff will be in three years time. I've got a drawer full of floppy disks, I can't even read them. So what's going to happen to stuff that I put on the web in five years, 50 years time. But I know that if I put stuff in a museum and they pay 50 grand for it, then they will do something to look after it and look after its meanings. If I give it to them in a box with a text or with a book, then hopefully that book or that text will still be with those pictures in 50 years or one year's time. It's deliberate. Reason why I've moved away from fellow gentlemen towards the gallery thing is because I control more meanings there and if I can nail the meanings on now, then there's more chance that he'll still be there when I'm not around to talk for them. So something that came to me very much out of looking at the work of Paul Strand, who for his entire life was a Marxist shit, the man joined the Communist Party in 1956. Everybody left the Communist Party in 1956. It's absolutely embedded in every single thing that he did. It's his politics. His entire life was spent dodging the American government. And the stories that he did were all about his political beliefs. And yet you can read whole biographies of Paul Strand and you will see nothing about his politics. The academies and the conservatoires have drained the politics out of his work. And when I first saw Paul Strand as a student, I thought he was just a rather dreary pictorialist. He photographs mossy walls and ruddy faced peasants. If men who nothing to in actual fact they managed to drain so much out of him that he isn't even interesting anymore. So that idea of. And I think about this more as I go on and on, and maybe it's something function of not having kids either, but that idea of what does the work mean in the future when I'm not around to speak for it actually matters to me a great deal more. And I made an exhibition set of the. Like a box set of the Burke pictures, which I think we're going to sell them for $50,000 to museums only, in addition to five. But I've already said that if anybody owns a Burke album in the archive and they promised to put my box on the shelf next to the Burke album to get a 25% discount. Because I just love the idea of them sat there kissing each other next to each other for the rest of time in some archive somewhere, I just love that and I love it so much I'm happy to discount them 12 grand of the product. I just think that.
- [86:58]
C
Yeah, yeah, but it seems like, you know, you think about what you did to Burke as a, you know, sort of an interpretive, an interpretation which is respectful of the man.
- [87:07]
B
Yeah, right.
- [87:07]
C
Yeah. It's not like, you know, it's not the white sheets on there, you know, the difference is.
- [87:14]
B
Should we have a final question? Yeah. I mean, what that sort of polarizes things for me about. Because I think what's coming out of this, which perhaps is the same as any ethical debate, is actually it's very hard to draw up rules. It's more the quality and authenticity and good faithfulness of what you do, rather than should you do it or not. There are ways in which exploiting Burr, which would be horribly unethical, and ways which are ethical. And the problem with those is it's really hard to. To express those complex debates visibly. And I think that one of the things that your work is quite meditative in a way. It's actually. One can start to spin out stories in one's own head about it, looking at a photograph like that, and you can't in other ways. And perhaps that ambiguity is one that photographers have to come to terms with. Unless you make those really crude images, you can't actually control the message in that kind of way that once it's out of your hands, once you've made it, you know, you can have a limited degree of control over it. But Burke is not only dead, did he ever have any moral.
- [88:22]
C
Because I don't.
- [88:23]
B
I don't rate moral arguments, the moral rights argument, terribly much anyway, it's a bit of a mistake, but that's a different question. But I think it is an interesting one. These are all fatty groups. It's whether you do it well, whether you do it truthfully, not what are you doing? It's the same. It comes back. It's where it comes back to the manipulation debate. It's why you're doing it, what are you doing, how much are you doing with it, rather than is it per se, sort of wrong or right, which seems to be futile argument, for sure. I mean, it's very political and no one emerges from it very spotless. You wouldn't expect it if it involves getting your boots dirty in the kind of neat and bristle of. Certainly with this book, the most profound depths of human unpleasantness, which is what this thing was. It was four years worth of. Bathysphere into human awfulness. And on that note.
- [89:29]
A
Thank God.