The clichés associated with photojournalism have long since collapsed. Although this crisis is not new, the reflection that the exhibition we are now discussing is.
Traditionally, the mission of photojournalism was to bring us closer to reality, often a distant and conflicting reality. The photojournalist had the task of reporting on this reality, on this “truth”, becoming a witness and offering “the image” – unique and representative – of the fact in question.
The crisis of photojournalism is not new, at least since the mythical image of Robert Capa’s militiaman that turned out not to be true. But now it is no longer content with a single image but with proposing other objects and telling other/multiple stories. Logical if we think about the multiplication of agents and channels of communication.
La Virreina. Centro de la imagen presents another good exhibition, curated by Carles Guerra and Thomas Keenan, which makes a good inventory and analysis of all the facets that affect the transformation of photojournalism. It begins with a work that lays bare all the mechanisms of news construction, with Phil Collins’ video, “How to make a refugee” (1999), which records the process of photographing a young Kosovar refugee, who is invited to take off his shirt, put on a cap, pose with other refugees and define a setting to represent what in the photographer’s imagination is the perfect image of a refugee and his family. The cynical thing about the matter is that the conversations held during the making of the photograph show an exaggerated concern for questions of “stylism” and no interest in knowing the personal or political circumstances of the protagonist of the image.
After this beginning, which cannot put the work of the photojournalist into further crisis, the exhibition presents an inventory of all the problematic aspects or new situations that affect it: the discovery of another reality that the photojournalist did not count on (through the snapshots that Paul Fusco took from the train carrying Robert Kennedy’s coffin, which showed numerous citizens who wanted to get close to him to pay their last respects to their president and which became a portrait of the America of the moment); the trivialization of images of horror (in the form of video clips made by the same television cameramen); the use of high technology (satellites) or of a much more generalized technology from which anyone can send news to the whole world (the case of the demonstrations in Iran recorded from mobile phones and broadcast on the Internet); the archive (as the last possibility to construct identity and create memory, as occurs with the archives of photographs of Kurdistan collected by Susan Meiselas or of the destroyed buildings in Gaza by Eyal Weisman). After all this, we can only be left with the ambiguity and even the cynicism of Renzo Martens’ gaze in “Episode III – Enjoy Poverty” to take us on a tour of the Congo and show many of the contradictions of our present that can never leave us indifferent: NGOs that have to abandon locations not because they have finished their work but because of the transfer of UN troops that protect companies that extract gold from certain areas; Unicef logos on each and every one of the bags used by refugees in the camps and, most importantly, that poverty is a resource and generates wealth but, unfortunately, not for those who possess said resource, that is, for the poor.
Continuing with the virtues of “Antifotoperiodismo”, we must mention the careful articulation of the exhibition, both in relation to the space and between the different works. This is the case of the relationship established between the slide presentations of images from Paul Fusco’s “RFK Funeral Train” (1968) and Alan Sekula’s “Prayer for the Americans” (1999-2004), one becoming the continuation of the other in the portrait of an unofficial but profound America; the view from the third room of Hito Steyerl’s red screens, located further back, which constitute a subtle and not at all illustrative commentary on the excess of images of conflicts and disasters; or, finally, the incursion of Eyal Weisman’s archives of destroyed Palestine into the space where Susan Meiselas’ archives of images from Kurdistan are shown, evidencing the possibilities of image archives to preserve identities in danger. This is precisely the most questionable area of the exhibition since it perhaps opens up the main theme of “Antiphotojournalism” too much and especially considering that Meiselas will be the protagonist of an exhibition in the same center. But even the presence of less interesting works, such as Laura Kurgan’s satellite images or Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin’s non-images of dead people, provide relevant elements or arguments to the main topic of discussion.
