Projects in Documentary Photography

Ok, guys, after going to Haiti last year and having the same packing list this year, I thought I’d put out a revised version of the packing list so we really can pack as lightly as possible. Remember, the most important things are our health, our equipment, and each other…not jars of Nutella or a case of CDs or cosmetics or whatnot. Soooo, with that in mind, here’s the revised packing list, and if I think of anything else, I’ll be sure to post an update. Also, feel free to add to this or subtract from it if you feel the need.

CLOTHES
-TShirts (2 or 3 is fine, because you can wash them!)
-Shorts or long pants (your choice, weather’s fine all the time)
-A semi-nice outfit for travelling there and home, and for the inevitable party or night-out-dancing
-Some kind of hat or bandanna for headwear
-Chacos or other versatile sandals OR comfortable close-toed shoes w/socks (note: Merrill puts out some great closed-toed water-friendly shoes that require no socks, as socks are just one more thing to carry there and back. Also note, we’ll be on rocky and sometimes slippery terrain.)

TOILETRIES
-SUN SCREEN
-Insect repellent with DEET or garlic pills (I find garlic pills work better, as they don’t wash off when you sweat, and they’re more compact and less messy)
-Sanitary napkins/tampons
-Deoderant
-Shampoo and/or conditioner (guess what?: you can get them 2-in-1! huzzah!)
-Liquid soap
-Razor (liquid soap = no need for shaving cream)
-Facewash
-Goldbond Powder (sooo many uses, feet, neck, etc.)
-Brush
-Toothbrush/paste
-Hand sanitizer (wet-wipes create unnecessary waste)
Note: you CAN carry on all of your luggage, even liquids, if you buy el-cheapo 3-ounce containers and put them all in a one-quart ziplock bag. And sometimes, in the rush of the airports, you’ll find yourself glad that you’ve got everything you need on your back.

OTHER/OPTIONAL
-Watch (preferrably with an alarm)
-Sammy Towel (super-absorbent, quick-drying, compact - get them from outdoors/sports stores)
-Laundry powder (enough to fill a film container should be enough)
-Flashlight or headlamp
-Journal (Pradip’s being kind enough to provide these, I think, so we should thank him big-time) and pencils/pens (colored pencils are great with the kids)
-Sunglasses
-Snack food
-Shower caps (great for covering cameras in case of rain)
-iPod
-Instruments
-Toilet paper (I didn’t have need to have my own, some people did, though, during homestay…)
-Reading material
-Small day-pack for carrying snacks, water bottle, journal, etc.

MEDICAL
-Personal meds (Tyler will have his EMT kit, and I’ll have my WAFA kit, so no need to bring Immodium, aspirin, etc. - we’ve gotcha covered!)

NOTES
-You don’t need a sleeping pad, blow-up mattress, pillow, blanket…our families and the rectory kindly provide all of that.
-It’d be really nice to bring some gifts for your homestay families, small things like tshirts, colored pencils, etc.
-We ARE leaving in January, so even though you don’t need a coat in Haiti, you’ll need one for the bus ride to ATL. (Pradip, is there someplace we can leave these?)

PHOTO
-Putting your film and/or equipment in a separate bag so it can easily be hand-checked is verrrry important.
-It’s not the rainy season, but pretend it is and think of ways to protect your equipment.
-Getting some lens-cleaning supplies will make your life so much better.

Hope this helps!
Loves,
~jack

This is a quick list of some demographics on Haiti given by Kutlu Somel (of the World Bank) during a lecture to last year’s Doc Photo class.

Official name: Repiblik d Ayiti
Motto: “L’union Fait la Force” (Unity Makes Strength)
Capital: Port-au-Prince (Poto-Prens)
Languages: French is the official state language, though 90% of all Haitians speak only Creole.
Government: Republic
Officials: René Preval (President)
Jacques-Edouard Alexis (Prime Minister)
Currency: Gourde
Religion: 80% Roman Catholic, 15% Episcopalian, 5% Christian (other). 70% of population also practices voudou (or, voodoo).
Land Mass: 10, 714 sq. miles
Population: 8,300,000 (75% rural)
Population Density: 758 people per sq. mile
Literacy: 45%
Percent Below Poverty Line: 80%
Per Capita GDP: $460 US
Unemployment: 60% - 90% (approximately 30% of Haitians have seasonal or unsteady employment)
Percent land mass H²O: 7%
Population with reliable access to clean water: 40%
Life Expectancy: 53 years
Infant Mortality: 12% before age 1; 33% before age 5.
Annual healthcare expenditure: $54/per person (as compared with $4, 499 in the U.S.)
*90% of all Caribbean AIDS cases are Haitian
*Haiti was founded as St. Domingue under French rule in 1697. Independence was granted in January 1804 after the only successful nation-wide slave revolt in history.

Farmer talks about two ways of “bearing witness.” He states that at times a physician is obligated to “scratch” at the silent surface and at other times is equally obligated no to scratch. In both methods there is a recognition of the eloquence beneath the silence. These “methods of knowing” apply to all man kind, but how do they translate to photography and our roles as photographers?

Galeano’s poem insists that the human voice cannot be silenced because something in each of us deserves to be celebrated or needs to be forgiven. As photographers (and as human beings) when do you think we are using our photography to find celebration and forgiveness for ourselves and when do we allow others to speak through our work? Is there a place for both in documentary photography

Light reveals how he “…began to understand how the camera could help tell the story of [his] world…I started to notice there was a difference between what I was trying to do and what I was seeing in newspapers and magazines…[they] were interested in making a quick photo. They felt no historical sense of witness. They were good at what they did but most seemed uninvolved and disconnected from the people and the events unfolding in their viewfinders.” (Light, 191)

Light and Farmer both seem to have a sense that you must take a personal stance while remaining balanced in your approach of the situation. They argue that you should let the truth of any situation speak to you as you judge what needs to be corrected or has to be appreciated.

How is the “need for documentary work” linked with “the need to witness?”

Two quotes to think about as they pertain to our time in Haiti and our duty as photographers there:

“Don’t study the poor and powerless, because everthing you say about them will be used against them.”- Laura Nader

“If you want to help Hait you have to show the beauty of Haiti.”- Pere Ajax

Yesterday, during a four-hour rehearsal for Letters to Sala, our director (Beth Lincks) said something very true that made me feel both helpless and content.
She said, “The more I know, the more ignorant I feel.”
This was in response to her having found out that recently, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was detained in France on charges of torture, a charge in violation of the 1987 Convention Against Torture. This accusation was levied not only by France, but also by Sweden and Argentina, and several human rights groups including the International Federation for Human Rights, the French League for Human Rights, and the Center for Constitutional Rights (NYC).
The recent complaint was filed in a French court by state prosecutor Jean-Claude Marin, who said he’d have the power to pursue the case because Rumsfeld was physically in France. The lodged complaint accuses Rumsfeld of authorizing torture at Guantánamo Bay base and penitentiary (Cuba) and Abu Ghraib prison (Iraq). Included in the complaint are 11 pages of written testimony from Janis Karpinsky, the highest-ranking official to be punished in the Abu Ghraib prison scandal.
Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, said that the goal of these complaints is to assure that all officials involved in torture programs are brought to justice, and that “Rumsfeld must understand that he has no place to hide.”
And how will this turn out, this modern holocaust that will surely cause Americans to hang our heads in shame generations from now? Just like much of WWII-era Germany was ignorant to the true darkness of Nazism, the majority of the American population has no idea about the gravity of the horrors being dealt to the Middle East in the name of so-called “justice.” However, this doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist. The scenario is the same as it was in 1939: one country, one administration, on a self-righteous crusade against a select few races of people for the purpose of eradicating a “great evil.” Coming from a German family, I know what it means to carry a great generational shame though you never loosed a bullet or an unkind word. It’s difficult for decendants of WWII Germans to watch Schindler’s List; we dislike speaking German; seeing photos of bygone relatives in their SS uniform riddles us with shame. When I have children, and they have children, will they dislike watching movies about the war on Iraq? Will they look at photos of their soldier relatives with fascinated disgust? Will it make them uncomfortable to carry an American passport? I feel all of these things about both the Holocaust and the current situation in the Middle East. For how many more generations can this continue? And why are we embracing tactics that so many Americans died to eradicate just 62 years ago?
To quote Letters to Sala, “Will it be fair weather or foul weather? Will there be quiet or turmoil?”

Pathologies of Power
Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor

 Questions

Paul Farmer states that in order to succeed in creating meaningful and pragmatic interventions in human rights violations we must distinguish between our best analysis and our best strategies. Where does the role of documentary photography fall in Farmer’s idea of successful interventions?

Early in the chapter Paul Farmer explains how a MDRTB outbreak that originally spread throughout a New York prison, eventually spread to ‘public hospitals and beyond.’ Many times people view human rights violations as a terrible aspect of humanity that is most prevalent in impoverished cultures of the world. Empathizing from this frame of reference often comes from a secure ‘distance.’ How does Paul Farmer’s explanation make human rights violations more universal?

People may or may not believe that everyone human has a right to life, freedoms, and opportunities. How does this question become more challenging when the value and purpose of human life is undefined? What do you think is the purpose behind human existence?

Do many people realize that concentrated problems can become everyone’s problems?

Summary of reading and points for discussion

“Human rights violations are not accidents; they are not random in distribution or effect. Rights violations are, rather, symptoms of deeper pathologies of power and are linked intimately to the social conditions that so often determine who will suffer abuse and who will be shielded from harm.” (7)

“Structural violence” includes a host of offensives against human dignity: extreme and relative poverty, social inequalities ranging from racism to gender inequality, and the more spectacular forms of violence that are incontestably human rights abuses, some of them punishment for efforts to escape structural violence. (8)

On Haiti, Farmer observes that “political and economic forces have structured risk for AIDS, tuberculosis, and, indeed, most other infectious and parasitic diseases” and adds that “social forces at work there have also structured risk for most forms of extreme suffering, from hunger to torture to rape.” He discusses in each case exactly how this structuring of risk, in distinct forms, blights the lives of many, without touching the affluence of others. He moves from Haiti to Mexico, then to Russia, then to Peru, then to the United States, and right across the world, looking for – and insightfully identifying – institutional structures that push some into the abyss, while others do just fine. (xiv, xv)

Inequalities of power in general prevent the sharing of different opportunities… Farmer illustrates the diversity and reach – and also the calamitous consequences – of structural violence. (xvi)

The argument of this book has been that it is time to take health rights as seriously as other human rights, and that intellectual recognition is only a necessary first step toward pragmatic solidarity, that is, toward taking a stand by the side of those who suffer most from an increasingly harsh “new world order.”

We have a long way to go in the struggle for health and human rights. We cannot merely study this topic without proposing meaningful and pragmatic interventions; but to succeed, we must distinguish between our best analysis and our best strategies. (237)

Chapter 9: Rethinking Health and Human Rights

Time for a paradigm shift

This chapter reflects on the implications of the book’s central arguments for an emerging field of inquiry and action. The divorce of research and analysis from pragmatic efforts to remediate the inequalities of access is a tactical and moral error – it may be an error that constitutes, in and of itself, and human rights abuse. (22)

Civil rights vs. Social and economic rights

Article 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights insists that everyone has a right “to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.” Rights of prisoners are violated by the logic of cost-effectiveness, which argues that the appropriate drugs are too expensive for use in “the developing world” to which post-perestroika Russia has been demoted. (216)

Public health and access to medical care are social and economic rights; they are at least as critical as civil rights. (217-218)

The right to health is the right to life. Everyone has a right to live… The battle we’re fighting - to find adequate care for those with AIDS, tuberculosis, and other illnesses - is the same as the combat that’s long been waged by other oppressed people so that everyone can live as human beings. (219)

Anthropology allows us to place in broader contexts both human rights abuses and the discourses they generate… Social inequalities based on race or ethnicity, gender, religious creed, and social class are the motor force behind most human rights violations; violence against individuals is usually embedded in entrenched structural violence. (219)

Situations of human rights violations calls for the implementation of pragmatic solidarity: the rapid deployment of our tools and resources to improve the health and well-being of those who suffer this violence. (220)

Examples of inequalities at top of page 222.

“International organizations are not on our side. They’re there to help the thieves rob and devour… International health stays on the sidelines of our struggle” - a song by Manno Charlemagne, a Haitian folk singer. (225)

It is in this context of globalization, growing inequality, and pervasive transnational media influence (which both exposes and exacerbates such inequality) that the new field of health and human rights emerges… What then should be the role of the First World university, of researchers and health care professionals? What should be the role of students and others lucky enough to be among the “winners” in the global era? — Universities could, in theory, provide a unique and privileged space for conducting research and engaging in critical assessment. However, in human rights work this role is insufficient. Does ones action help the sufferers or does it not? (226)

Pa gen lape nan tet si pa gen lape nan vant (there can be no peace of mind if there is no peace in the belly). (228)

Analysis vs. Strategy

Analysis means bringing out the truth; it means documenting. How can we build an agenda for action that moves beyond good analysis? (230)

Discussion for class, 10.2.2007.

We have drawn out four conceptual focus points from Sontag’s essay:

Media:
What is not being shown? Sontag calls attention to the idea that the understanding of war among people who have not experienced war is based on a media that portrays reality as a “spectacle,” of often superficial headlines (i.e. Iraq, celebrities, and political scandals).

What is the difference between an image of a school after a suicide bomber and an image of the opening of a new school? Why are we drawn to the negative rather than the positive? How is this reflected in the images chosen by editors to publish in the media? Is the media driven by profit or a desire to help implement change? Is it possible to have the two overlap?

Salgado:

Salgado is known to document suffering. In one exhibition he did not name the subjects in his captions. Thus, he universalized the subject to such an extent that the viewer becomes hopeless, unable that change is still possible in the face of such momentous suffering. Do you agree or by choosing to not provide the location and name of his images allow us to bring it closer to home?

What are the effects of seeing suffering portrayed as something beautiful?

Medium:

Television, video, and movies surround us, but Sontag claims that photographs are what people remember the most. She goes on to say that “the problem is not that people remember through photographs but that they remember only the photographs.” Why does a photograph have the ability to be a dominant medium in our ways of remembering (and therefore understanding)? What can we do to ensure that the overall context of our images is clearly presented in the images alone instead of being forced to rely upon supporting explanations (i.e. text)?

Community:

If we are to act as sponges and soak up everything we learn and hear about someone in hopes to become a part of their community then what do the images we create mean to others who have not shared our experience? At the end of Sontag’s article she suggests that our pictures can never fully reflect the experience of war. What does this effect have on the viewer? How do we make sure that the viewer’s lack of experience of the “other” that we photographed take away from the understanding and meaning behind them? What photographic techniques can we employ to help the viewer understand the “other” in our photographs, despite not having shared our experiences with the “other”?

Witness in Our Time discusses the lives of documentary photographers.

Ken Light introduces us to documentary photographers searching for the “truth” within an image. He states that “a transformation occurs when you [the photographer] sees something important that is denied by those who have not or will not see it (p 4).” As photographers, especially when dealing with documentary work, what drives us to keep taking photos, even when we know it will possibly be denied and shoved aside?

Light also discusses that, as photographers, we attempt to “tell the truth… to translate the event or personality as truthful as possible (p 5).” Is it possible to stay unbiased about a subject you are documenting? While working on both your solo project and community project, are you finding it difficult to tell the absolute truth, or is it becoming a challenge? How can we possibly tell this truth without compromising the relationships we have with our subjects?

Sebastiao Salgado wrote that “there is no person in the world that must be protected from pictures. The documentary photographer is a vector connecting the different realities of people around the world (p10).” As both people and photographers, how do we feel about this statement? From the subject’s perspective, do you feel that a photographer has the right to photograph the truth, even when it is painful? Concerning us going to Haiti, is photography a vector to connect everyone together? Or it is merely exploitation?

Coming back to the idea of truth, Light says that “when it is done, you hope your work is faithful to the people you have spent weeks or months or years with. You notice things you missed. The truth is not completely here; it is slightly out of the frame. In the darkroom, other truths are unexpectedly revealed (p 5). How this relate to us shooting with 35? How about digital? Do you personally feel that documentary photography can be conveyed properly with digital? What is the purpose of doing all the darkroom work we have been doing the past few weeks?

What is your personal goal for this course? For documentary photography (or other documentary work) in general?

Be prepared to look at Ann Wilkes Tucker and Mapplethorpe’s works, and how it relates to the idea that “you don’t alienate either side by jumping into a controversial current issue (p186).” How does this relate to when we go to Haiti, as well as current media, such as the war in Iraq?

So, in class on Tuesday, I forgot to mention something very important: the questions that we were asking have no answers. At least not for us as a collective. The discussion questions on Magnum stories have to be answered by all of us as individual documentarians. Do YOU believe in subject manipualation? What do you think defines something as documentary? Let the rest of us hear what you think - post your thoughts on the class site. I’m sure we’ll all appreciate the stimulation. Kudos to Busey for being ahead of the game.

Pere Ajax talking about education and society in Haiti.

“Magnum Stories” is about us, the documentarian. It’s a gritty read, and forces us to ask ourselves, “What is our place in the world? What is our function? Do we have a function?”
Here are some quotes and questions to ask yourselves before class next week, to get the juices of quandary and controversy flowing. Also, we’ll be looking at different examples of documentary photography from Robert Frank and other documentarians to try to answer the question, “What makes documentary, documentary?”

“While Magnum photographers are getting involved in [telling a story a certain way], really they want to tell a different story, and so there is a dynamic tension between what they are supposed to do and what they really want to do.”
-What are we, as documentarians, supposed to do (if anything)? What do we want to do? Uncle Ben of SPIDERMAN said, “With great power comes great responsibility.” Do documentarians have a responsibility to society?

“[Magnum] was built on an idea of freedom that was both romantic and radical - that photographers might independently pursue their own goals, as historians of their own causes and interests…”.
-Is the camera a tool of culture, or is the documentarian a tool of culture?

“…their picture management systems clearly expresse the value placed on their work being read as sequences, rather than as individual pictures on particular subjects.”
-What is the importance of sequence?
-What is the relationship between sequence/context and story (or statement) in seemingly unrelated photographs?

-Photojournalism began in 1928 in pre-Nazi Germany in a context of informal portraiture, candid “reportage.” What do we gain and/or lose when we manipulate a subject, if anything? If we manipulate a subject in some way, is it still documentary?

-The documentarian has been called the “professional voyeur of suffering,” and Bill Daniel introduced us to the phrase “disaster porn.” Why are we, as humans and as documentarians, drawn to suffering?

-Can the documentarian remain unbiased? If so, then how? SHOULD the documentarian remain unbiased? Should our photos be based on a story, or should a story be based on our photos?

-How can we keep ourselves from being overly reductionist (breaking down a culture into sections and documenting something out of context) or orientalist (documenting the stereotypical, i.e., beaches and festivals in Tahiti)?

-How has photojournalism changed since 1928? Why? How has it stayed the same?