Fragments: New Media and Visual Literacy
Part two - To Archive Or Delete. The Role of Histories and Taboo.
“Let me not forget the use of my own hands, that of a craftsman with eyes… that reflect the technology around me.”
– Lee Alexander McQueen
On August 20, Magnum announced that it had suspended a member photographer. This was the first time in the known history of the agency. What was cited was a “specific allegation” that had to do with the photographer’s conduct. What was interesting to me was Magnum said it would review its archive in response to the allegations it contained including exploitative photos of children, related to a story shot in Bangkok during the late 1980s. The series was deleted from the website. On October 28, Magnum announced it had extended the suspension of the photographer for one year after determining he had breached the agency’s code of conduct and bylaws. A code of conduct that had only been implemented in 2018. According to the statement from Magnum. the single “historical allegation” was alleged, but not detailed in the communique.
Fast forward to the blog post response I referenced in the last Substack, where a young Magnum employee, which I may not have mentioned responded all on his own and not with the express permission of Magnum, pointed out something interesting about the extensive 70 year history of the Magnum photographic archives:
“Moving forward, during my traineeship at Magnum, I have engaged with the archive on a weekly basis. I have done searches and looked through racist imagery and problematic material. I have flagged concern to various individuals which would always provoke discussions and sometimes actions would be taken. Its not lost on me that throughout the years that I was not the only one to flag these concerns. Many before me raised their voices and many after me surely do. What has been the most frustrating part of this discussion currently evolving in front of our screens is that white men tend to forget that there are BAME workers in Magnum Photos, as well as across the arts, doing the work before it was ever prevalent in the public realm.”
What’s interesting here is the supposition that the archive themselves are ‘problematic’ that a history of an art can not be shown as it is, or was, and that the intelligence of the audience of spectators, professionals and students can’t discern for themselves what each context is. That somehow the very act of bringing the light from the photographic process on the ritualized action of taking a photo is actually in some way or form covering it up. The other thing that is pointed out about the BAME community points out some confines that are deeper than even the American puritanism. How Musilim, Asian and Indian cultures, especially their sometimes draconian view of women, have a very different set of parameters than the Western world.
In the Clubhouse app, I am currently listening to Dita Von Teese, likely the most famous or infamous fetish model in the world, talking about the Power of Role Play. In this room, the conversation is very controlled. The audience is the audience and the information is clear. She is discussing how she played, a term in the BDSM community, with a rather famous male dominant who had wonderful vintage equipment. She also pointed out in her actual personal relationships she never played the same way, that it was a stage.
I’ve known quite a few photographers here in Los Angeles that had shot Dita back in the day. I myself had shot fetish models in the mid-2000s, the first decade of this century. It was then designated as Alt, alt modeling and alt photography, I will get back to this in a second. In the 1990s it was fetish, and it’s fashion variant was called Anti-Fashion.
Anti-Fashion became the mainstream.
Fashion designers like Galliano, Jean Paul Gautier, Vivienne Westwood and then Lee Alexander McQueen became global visual innovators and sensations for the self-actualized women they dressed. Promoting a punk, new romantic and over-the-top portal to the world. In other words, this was a radical departure from the previous decades of the century. This wasn’t without its critics.
The threat of the bite of neo-conservatism was actually quite worse than the bite itself. My time in Prague taught me a Czech phrase, zubi necti, that meant that the dogs of criticism really didn’t have the teeth to bite, but they certainly had the bark. The market begrudgingly accepted (though criticized) say McQueen’s ‘Highland Rape’ fashion show that really pushed him into the limelight, and Galliano got his job back after saying drunken anti-Semitic things by the mid 20-teens. Young people as well as older, established, libertines flocked to the fashion shows, the illustrated fashion press, the photography and biographies of the new avant-garde without hesitation. Lee McQueen specifically noted that he was dressing women to be “empowered”, “I want people to be afraid if the women I dress.” With authentic vision and voice we sometimes move outside of the vanilla orthodoxy and accept the taboo heterodoxy, even a toxic one if not “too toxic.” In the past this was the power of self-actualized, larger than life visual communicators that refused to be condemned by their ideas. In fact they were willing to fight for them. Not only fight for them, but find the hidden histories of their own heterodox paradox from the past. McQueen would posit, “I’m about what goes through people’s minds, the stuff that people don’t want to admit or face up to. The shows are about what’s buried in people’s psyches.”
But of course, fashion is the elite perspective. Literally, you buy it. Your cool, you buy your difference.
I met Hanin Elias in Prague in the 1990s, we were both performing at the Galleria NoD art space that was above the ROXY theatre and nightclub and owned by the Jewish Community Center of Prague. I was asked to interview her band Atari Teenage Riot by a magazine called TRAFFIKA and was filmed doing so, then we performed. I did poetry and they did a set of their Digital Hardcore music. Hanin was gracious in person, but their music was hard, biting, songs called for “Revolution” and to “Delete yourself.” One of the songs was “Destroy 2000 Years of Culture.” Hanin and her architect husband had never been to Prague, so the next day I met up with them for coffee and then they were off sightseeing in Prague’s mostly untouched 800 year history of architecture, she said, “Sure, destroy 2000 years of culture… but lets keep the pretty buildings.”
Another Czech connection I had in the late 90s was Magnum photographer Josef Koudelka. Koudelka was best known for his time documenting the Soviet invasion of the Czech capital in 1968. Magnum actually helped him get the work out to the world, and to save his life, they published it under the pseudonym “PP” for “Prague Photographer”. Koudelka’s book EXILES is considered one of the best of the photographic genre, it covers a time when he was living with the Romany (Gypsy) people over a ten year period. he wasn’t doing this for money or fame, in fact he had no publisher at the time, nor a periodical that commissioned him. He wasn’t even a full member of Magnum and didn’t have the full support of the collective. Koudelka did this work in cultural silence, taking odd jobs to survive and buy and process his film. It, like the selfless documentation of the Prague Spring tanks rolling through the streets of the Czech capital, was done as a response to a culture that was both racist toward the Gypsies and wanted to forget they existed. The purest form of heterodoxy I can think of, one where you don’t even know if your expression will be seen at all, but still have to do it.
Koudelka, Gypsies
Fast forward to the mid 20-teens and another Magnum photographer Antonie D’Agata publishes his Mexico Codex. A blogger condemns the work as an extension of imperialism, colonialism and at minimum culturally irresponsible. The blogger indicts D’Agata in a scathing article, saying:
“Brave would be to incorporate some sort of honesty in your work and perhaps think through a few of the fucking issues that you use to burnish the “aura”, “myth” or “image” of yourself. You are a fake, a charlatan and worst of all is that you are privileged in doing so, marginalizing and using the less fortunate in your stupid regurgitation of Grand Guignol theater, which actually has real world consequence.”
I have the book, gorgeously done by photobook publisher Editorial RM in Mexico. One thing that I will note here is that the book itself depicts a period of time that the author went to Mexico from 1986-2016, over thirty years. The book is also not just photography but stories written by D’Agata himself and other writers. Stories that have some of the deep dives the blogger expected. The blog itself doesn’t state this, it is busy giving articles from other sources about the femicide and cartel issues in the region on the Mexicali border. Useful information, but it doesn’t quite contextualize the book at all. Since this book was a short run art imprint, the chances of anyone reading the article looking up D’Agata would be misinformed of the intent of his photo project. In fact, they may find it exactly as the blogger stated and ignore the scope of the thirty year exploration of this culture of drugs, sex and death. One that D’Agata wasn’t just an observer but a participant, crossing that staged voice of the artist into the darker inbetween area of active desire. D’Agata would state in an interview his perspective:
“The only type of connection I have to the tradition of reportage is coming up with the most efficient ways to deny, denounce or destroy its prejudice. Beyond humanistic pretence, reportage always conveys twisted or insidious values. Its economic survival has always been dependent on logical means to perpetuate the efficiency and the profitability of a system controlled by the elite for their own benefit. And one has to remember that no photography can pretend to show the truth. A picture only shows a given situation under a very specific perspective, consciously or not, openly or not, relevantly or not. Photographers have to accept they can just convey fragments of illusory realities and relate their own intimate experience of the world. In this process of fictionalising an unreachable truth, it’s up to them to impose their doubts about any photographic truth, or accept being impotent pawns in the mediatic game.”
This is nothing new in the history of photography, even Magnum co-founder Henri Cartier-Bresson has images from his time in Mexico with writer Langston Hughes depicting sex, drugs, poverty of the region. Maybe after 70 years we would, as a global community do something? That is, if we had the power to do anything at all. Maybe our focus is misplaced as a slow shutter drag that needs a clarity slider to point out what is important.
HBC, Mexico
My gregarious friend, photographer, that I detailed a bit in the last article in this Substack and mentioned, without full disclosure, was there when I was serendipitously blacklisted on an Instagram meme account. He was not on the list, although his work was and is intentionally triggering at times. He honestly was helpful, but almost just as freaked-out as I was. What was going on? Coming from as I mentioned in the last article, the social anarchistic world of the original free-form Tumblr app, there were few bounds of what could be explored from 2007-2015 or so. There were no filters, it was, as Alexander McQueen said, “what goes through people’s minds, the stuff that people don’t want to admit or face up to… about what’s buried in people’s psyches.”
I can now pinpoint the exact moment of my mistake, there was a period when I showed inspiration from books and in some cases asked models that were seemingly down to graciously allow me a bit of a deeper perspective of the types of images they wanted to make. In one case I can remember asking an agency model if she wouldn’t mind showing me her Tumblr. We went over to my iMac in my former studio and pulled it up. The imagery was what might find on Tumblr in the mid-teens, anime, film memes, a few romantic notions and photo selfies, but it also had very flowery “Daddy” memes, bondage, raw sex gifs, pegging, and what would be considered fetish adult imagery if not porn. We continued the shoot afterward, and although nothing was really explicit I was certain that visiting her private world of image gathering on Tumblr (not Pinterest) had an impact on how the rest of the shoot was framed.
I crossed genres, I did the one thing that Derrida’s Law of Genres forbade. It would come back on me, with a vengeance. What I thought was empowering was maybe invasive, no matter what my actual intention was. I’ve tried never to push anyone.
It was good I left the industry when I did.
I’ve ended up in the Clubhouse room in a Club called The Visual Lounge, called “Let’s Talk Boundaries.” I’ve been moving between these visual rooms and the ones from the club Preservation of the Human Race.
It seems apt.
I think maybe 90% of our issues is simply misunderstanding each other and expecting malefactory bad-intentions. In other words, I think we have lost the trust in each other. We all seem rather defensive.
The conservative economist Isaiah Berlin in the 1950s came up with a useful tool for understanding now, the concept of two liberties. Positive Liberty and Negative Liberty, they serve completely different functions.
Negative liberty is the absence of obstacles, barriers or constraints. However, it also means that it is a severe individualism, that doesn’t really accept the collective response to things. Your liberty is above all else. It is saying things like, “I need my healthcare, my house, my wealth and everyone else can fight for their own piece of the pie.”
Positive liberty is the possibility of acting — or the fact of acting — in such a way as to take control of one's life and realize one's fundamental purposes. Positive Liberty says, “I have healthcare and I want you to have the same opportunities that I do, the same access to wealth and power that I do. I am willing to sacrifice what it is that I want to give us all what we ultimately want.”
Negative Liberty creates separation and fear. Positive Liberty is a sense that we are all one human family.
In the annals of Visual Literacy one event that can be traced to the Family of Man exhibition at MoMa in 1955 promotes the idea of Positive Liberty. Edward Steichen, the director of the Photography department of MoMa at the time and incidentally one of the first if not THE first fashion photographers, brought together hundreds of photos from around the world of the human condition. It was a breathtaking project with bold implications, if not only for its scope but also its execution.
The Family of Man exhibition was set up in such a way that no matter how you walked through the exhibit floor your perspective would give you a different experience than someone else. In fact no two experiences would be exactly alike. The photographs were selected from around the world and many different photographers contributed. Steichen had the exhibit book printed and subsequent editions included The Family of Women, which at the time was the only photographic book of its kind.
It was also the first book that included commercial fashion art imagery along with reportage and candid photography. It was a full spectrum of “human interests” based on a gender identity. One that had widespread impact, as it was not just sold as a fashion or art book, but was in libraries and homes and was an amazing tool for education and visual literacy of what could happen with photography. Not just one fake diary, but a sort of socio-economic portrait of all of us. The only thing lacking from these general surveys was and still tends to be, a lack of dissenting perspectives. But can’t we expect that, when we have something that is addressing the so-called mainstream?
I have to admit, I always lean to the rebellious voices. When I met my friend who has in his own way influenced this article, and in fact this Substack itself — as he was for years trying to get me to go off platforms that didn’t work for what I wanted to say, it was because of his imagery’s anarchy and boldness. He advocates even now to find your, “darker self” to embrace it. For all intensive purposes he did that, and has been successful in finding that exploratory point in others he works with. His imagery is successful in that his vision is consistent, and not for everyone. Certainly not for an international audience that includes cultures that suppress desire or think of it as an act of blasphemy.
His acceptance and others in this culture are in part and course because of the resurgence of older forms of sexual imagery and even the psychedelic culture in the podcast realm, use of DMT or mushrooms, acid, the new/old culture of exploration, a self actualization. After 70+ years its adherence to “finding yourself”, the darkest points may actually be where you find your inner light. However, Satan himself even masquerades as an Angel of Light. It is where people start to separate from each other, move away from acceptance of the prevailing need of all human beings to find safety in each other. When you are scary, you create fear. Fear is negative liberty, negative freedom, for you to become something someone else has to move away from you. It’s not uniting. We have to remember that Charles Manson came out of this culture, that the kids that followed him needed some structure some sense of history, but they only found it in him. He went too far, too deep. All he really wanted was a record deal, when he didn’t get it, he tried to start a race war.
I warned that listening to this, to him or those like him, was leaning toward a form of fascism. I was serious. It’s honestly no different than when the advertising world puts a sexy girl on to distract us from our real work, our real needs. But then, maybe it is important to heed these taboo heterodox creative statements.
D’Agata would think it was important,
“The violence of the communities I submerge myself into is proportional and adapted to the violence of the economic and political elite. Any weapon will do. I see sex, drugs and criminality as perfectly legitimate ways to stay alive when you are treated as a non-accountable entity. To share time with my characters in the most authentic way, I need to go beyond sympathy or empathy. I don’t want to understand the people I photograph. I want to be with them, but inside them. I don’t want to look at the pain, but feel the pain. Solidarity has to go through the flesh. Words and thoughts are not worth much. They just help to identify the nature of the gap between the other and myself. The common experience of sex and drugs helps me to fill the gap. Prostitutes and drug addicts resist economic oppression and social alienation with their own body and destiny. Violence is part of that process; it’s part of that world. Most people I meet in the margins of the cities had no choice and adapted to the conditions of life imposed upon them.”
And I suppose it is our archives that will be the final judge. Do we keep or delete it all?
The Epilogue will be The Social Media Barrier.