janvier 15, 2010 9:36 AM

20minutes.fr| 14.01.10 |

MEDIAS - La diffusion des images de l'événement a été rapide, trop rapide. 20minutes.fr tente le décryptage d'un couac globalisé...

Ce jeudi matin, dans Libération, une photo fait tache. Alors que le quotidien consacre plusieurs pages au tremblement de terre en Haïti, l’un des clichés montre en fait... un autre tremblement de terre, au Sichuan, en Chine, en mai 2008.

Une confusion due à une cascade d’approximations, notamment dans les agences de photos de presse, là où piochent - moyennant finances - les journaux et les sites Web d’infos pour illustrer leurs articles. Mais problème: aux premières heures de la catastrophe, mardi soir, aucune agence de photo n’est présente sur place, en Haïti. Pourtant, des clichés, tous les mêmes, ont commencé à affluer sur le fil de la plupart des agences. Des photos qui proviennent en fait... de Twitter.

Afin de pallier l'absence de photographes professionnels sur place, certaines agences auraient ainsi décidé, comme lors des manifestations en Iran en juin dernier, d’agréger des clichés trouvés sur le réseau social et pris par des soi-disant témoins sur place.

Le couac

Parmi celles-ci, la photo publiée dans Libération. Une photo où l'on peut voir des immeubles effondrés et de nombreux sauveteurs, tout de rouge vêtus, mais qui n’était pas une photo de Port-au-Prince en ruines. «La photo du Sichuan? On l'a vu tout de suite», se vante Reuters à 20minutes.fr. Sauf que ladite photo a été diffusée par plusieurs agences de presse dont l'AFP, Chine Nouvelle, Sipa et Max PPP, avant d'être retirée peu à peu, soit de façon abrupte, sans explication, soit barrée de la mention «mandatory kill» (suppression obligatoire, en VF). Et cela n’a pas été le seul cliché dans ce cas.

L'agence européenne EPA, basée en Allemagne, estime que les agences ne sont pas responsables des erreurs commises par les sources originales. «On ne peut jamais être sûr à 100%, nous ne sommes pas responsables du copyright», précise l'agence à 20minutes.fr. La question ne se pose pas pour ce rédacteur en chef d'une agence de photo, qui a souhaité gardé l’anonymat: «La situation est précipitée, on reçoit de tels flots d'images. Les erreurs arrivent tout le temps, ça ne me choque pas. Que les journaux se trompent, j'en ai rien à secouer».

Le flux à vérifier

«L'erreur est humaine», reprend le service photo de Reuters. Rentrer en contact avec des témoins (et possibles photographes) sur place n'est «pas toujours facile» ajoute le service photo de l'AFP à Paris à 20minutes.fr, qui assure vérifier soigneusement ses sources «amateurs». Une source «difficile à contrôler» sur les événements comme Haïti, confirme Sipa à 20minutes.fr, qui se défend d’avoir récupéré des clichés «directement sur le Net», mais qui a été prévenue par l’agence Chine Nouvelle pour son erreur sur le Sichuan.

Politiques d’agences

Interrogée par 20minutes.fr, Chine Nouvelle a confié s'être servie sur Radio Tele Ginen, un site haïtien qui a récupéré de nombreuses photos issues de Twitter en se déclarant «non responsable des contenus publiés».

Toute la difficulté, pour les agences de photos, est de vérifier en temps réel, les sources des images. Reuters a choisi la prudence en ne diffusant que les photos de ses propres photographes, quitte à en avoir moins, et moins vite. L’AFP photo a, elle, parfois accepté des photos en précisant qu’elles «venaient de Twitter».

Mais dans ce cas, comment faire la distinction entre le compte Twitter d’un vrai photographe comme Daniel Morel et celui d’un Lisandro Suero, inconnu au bataillon, qui diffuse, à la vitesse de la lumière, sur le site de micro-blogging des photos sans copyright. Et se fait ainsi une belle publicité. Contacté par 20minutes.fr, Lisandro Suero se dit «très occupé».

décembre 16, 2009 4:31 PM

LE MONDE| 05.12.09 |

Analyse

Trois expositions, à voir jusqu'en janvier 2010 à Paris et alentour, attirent les foules. Elles constituent aussi une petite révolution pour leur façon d'utiliser les photographies. Des images, il y en a beaucoup. On peut les déguster pour ce qu'elles montrent, mais elles ont surtout été choisies pour servir un propos qui les dépasse : raconter une star et restituer son oeuvre.

Le cinéaste Federico Fellini est à découvrir au Jeu de paume, le jazzman Miles Davis à la Cité de la musique, l'actrice Brigitte Bardot à Boulogne-Billancourt. Ces trois expositions, Fellini surtout, échappent à une scénographie classique. Non pas des images soigneusement encadrées, alignées sur un seul rang avec le même "blanc" entre deux oeuvres, baignant dans une égale lumière tamisée pour ne pas faire souffrir les fragiles originaux. Mais plutôt une scénographie rock'n'roll : des photos encadrées ou pas, de formats multiples, accrochées à des hauteurs différentes et sur plusieurs rangs, qui parfois flottent dans l'air, dans des salles multicolores, à l'intensité lumineuse variable.

Ce n'est pas tout. Les photos sont mariées à d'autres supports, des films, affiches, livres, journaux, disques, sons. Beaucoup de textes aussi. C'est comme si un spectacle multimédia se développait au mur afin de raconter au mieux une star.

Deux scénographies opposées donc, qui répondent à des objectifs différents. Une exposition classique de photos montre une oeuvre : les images sont à contempler une par une, tout en résonnant entre elles. Dans nos trois expositions, l'oeuvre est ailleurs. Pour Fellini, ce sont ses films. Pour Miles Davis, sa musique. Pour un écrivain, ses livres. On n'expose pas des films, des musiques ou des livres. Que peut-on montrer alors ?

La plupart des expositions qui veulent répondre à cette question, en consacrant une exposition à un cinéaste ou un écrivain, un danseur ou un chanteur, sont décevantes. Car elles se servent des photos a minima : montrer un artiste au travail ou dans l'intimité, décrire son environnement, ses proches. Les expositions Fellini, Miles et Bardot sont plus ambitieuses. La photographie n'est pas simple illustration, elle contribue à construire l'aura de l'artiste, voire participe de son oeuvre. Pour Miles, il s'agit de signifier un style, une fierté, un basculement esthétique. Pour Bardot, la photo est au coeur de la fabrication de l'icône. Pour Fellini, les photos démontrent que nombre de ses films ont pour source ce qu'il a vu autour de lui.

Ces trois expositions tirent le meilleur de la force documentaire de la photo, de ses lectures multiples. Ainsi, le spectateur a le loisir de faire fructifier les images qu'il découvre au mur en les confrontant à ses souvenirs de l'oeuvre évoquée. La limite de ces "expositions portraits" est liée à la fascination exercée par la star. On se délecte à la vue de quelques épisodes savoureux de la personne adulée, alors même que les images, isolées, n'ont rien d'exceptionnel. Le visiteur peut aussi se perdre dans un bric-à-brac de documents, qui exige concentration et agilité de l'oeil. Mais sans doute sommes-nous mieux formés à jongler avec les écrans et les documents.

Une autre exposition, "La subversion des images", à voir jusqu'en janvier au Centre Pompidou, montre que cette façon nouvelle de présenter des photos gagne même les musées. Elle a pour sujet la façon dont les surréalistes ont utilisé la photo durant l'entre-deux-guerres.

Il y a quelques années, une telle exposition aurait présenté en majesté les artistes que sont Man Ray, Ubac, Tabard ou Parry, avec pour chacun leurs grandes images. Là, pas du tout. Comme chez Bardot ou Fellini, les photos n'existent pas pour elles-mêmes - leurs auteurs non plus -, mais pour servir un propos : raconter le making of d'un groupe qui avait l'air de bien rigoler, décliner les domaines où il a sévi (de la pornographie à la publicité), montrer comment ont été fabriquées et utilisées des images importantes. Là encore, des extraits de films, journaux, épreuves de travail, etc., s'invitent dans ce décryptage d'un mouvement.

Un exemple. Le portrait de l'artiste et écrivain Meret Oppenheim nue, par Man Ray, en 1933, est un de ses chefs-d'oeuvre. Surprise : au mur, on ne voit pas l'image, mais quatre épreuves de travail. La photo retenue est présente, mais publiée dans une revue, elle-même présentée sous vitrine. Pour l'amateur d'art, une telle approche stimule les neurones. Pour le spectateur vierge, il lui faudra des efforts soutenus et consulter quelques livres, pour se faire une idée plus précise des grands noms et grandes photos du surréalisme, et pour faire le tri, dans ce matériel excitant, entre photos sans intérêt et d'autres remarquables, entre documents de travail et chefs-d'oeuvre.

Depuis trente ans, la photographie a souvent été montrée comme de la peinture pour la faire admettre dans le monde de l'art. Ces expositions actuelles signifient qu'on peut la bousculer, parce qu'elle est devenue forte. Les deux approches restent nécessaires. L'histoire de la photographie est en constante évolution, qui demande à réévaluer sans cesse maîtres et images. Et tant mieux si, à côté, surgissent des expositions qui bouleversent les codes de lecture.

Service Culture

Courriel :

guerrin@lemonde.fr

Michel Guerrin

août 4, 2009 6:31 PM

By HILARIE M. SHEETS

IHT Published: July 31, 2009

Works from Mr. Soth’s exhibition at the High Museum in Atlanta.

ALEC SOTH has created a photographic career out of finding chemistry with strangers. On his frequent road trips through America, he’s drawn to loners and dreamers he spots from his car; sometimes he will do several pass-bys before striking up a conversation. Often that will lead to a portrait session with his large-format 8-by-10 view camera.

“It’s the bird flying around that swoops down and grabs the worm and then flies off,” said Mr. Soth, 39, who winced slightly at the ethical implications of that image. “But I have good intentions, and people very often enjoy that interaction. It’s almost like, finally, someone showed up and we can talk.”

Mr. Soth’s lush, painterly large-scale color prints, which reflect a striking intimacy and comfort between subject and photographer, first gained attention from the art world in 2004. A self-described “complete nobody” at the time, Mr. Soth, a Minnesota native, had made a self-printed book called “Sleeping by the Mississippi.” It included landscapes and portraits shot over five years on car trips alongside the river’s meandering path from Winona, Minn., to Baton Rouge, La., and drew on the American literary theme of the Mississippi as a metaphor for wandering and freedom.

After seeing a copy of the book, curators for the 2004 Whitney Biennial put him in the show; his image “Charles,” of a man in a flight suit standing on the roof of his house holding a model airplane in each hand, was used on the Biennial poster. An avalanche of coverage followed, touting him as one of the great discoveries of the show. This attention led to a more professional publication of the book by Steidl, along with representation by Gagosian Gallery and international assignments that precipitated his joining Magnum Photos.

Today Mr. Soth, who lives with his wife and two children in Minneapolis, projects an affable kind of Midwestern demeanor beneath a thick beard and baseball cap. He said he felt fortunate to have found success doing the thing he loves, but also discomfort with the glare of exposure.

That ambivalence plays a role in his new exhibition, “Black Line of Woods,” opening next Saturday at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, which explores the idea of retreating from the world through the habitats of monks, hermits and survivalists. It’s part of the museum’s “Picturing the South” series, for which photographers are invited to make a body of work responding in some way to the region.

The High’s curator of photography, Julian Cox, said he had thought Mr. Soth would be a natural for the commission based on the lyrical sensibility of his pictures from the Southern leg of “Sleeping by the Mississippi” and approached him in 2007. “He follows his own nose without a carefully choreographed plan, which is reflected in most every project he’s done,” Mr. Cox said. “His work doesn’t betray any direct influence of Robert Frank or other major figures in that idiom of the American road trip, but it’s a huge part of how he operates.”

As Mr. Soth began to research the South he became intrigued with Eric Rudolph, the so-called Olympic Park bomber, who hid out for almost five years in a North Carolina forest before he was finally arrested in 2003. The first image in the exhibition was taken at dusk in a desolate parking lot bordered by a dark forest where Mr. Rudolph was eventually apprehended.

“Even though he was a bad guy, it was this boy fantasy about hiding, and there’s something really romantic about that,” said Mr. Soth, who grew up in rural Minnesota, where the woods behind his house were both a playground and a forbidding place after dark. As the project took form, he found his title, “Black Line of Woods,” from Flannery O’Connor, whose estate in Georgia he sneaked into one night to photograph.

“She’s talking about where culture ends,” he said. “I wanted this work to be about the longing to escape.”

Mr. Soth has done four more photographic books, including most recently “Last Days of W” (Little Brown Mushroom), which portrays a country exhausted by George W. Bush’s presidency and was exhibited earlier this year at Gagosian.

That project, like all his work, took a serial form. “I long for the narrative arc and true storytelling,” Mr. Soth said. When he’s on the road he tries to let each picture lead him to the next; taped to his steering wheel is a list of things to watch for while he’s driving. A list composed for his current project included beards, birdwatchers, mushroom hunters, men’s retreats, after the rain, figures from behind, suitcases, tall people (especially skinny), targets, tents, treehouses and tree lines. Thus the photo of the tall bearded monk standing amid a forest of soaring barren tree trunks and the image of a giantlike man with a suitcase walking away on an overgrown path.

The word camouflage was also on the list, triggering Mr. Soth to pull up to a man in a camouflage Army jacket sitting on steps outside a building in Knoxville, Tenn. Mr. Soth introduced himself, pointing out his Minnesota license plate, and explained that he was doing a project that had something to do with wanting to run away.

“The conversation develops however it develops,” said Mr. Soth, who asked the man to show him where he had slept the previous night before taking his picture in a little pocket of brush up on a hill with signs for a Waffle House and a Shell station visible through the leaves.

Setting up his cumbersome camera on a tripod and disappearing under a dark cloth for some 20 minutes as he installs the large negative in the back and fiddles with the focus is an essential part of the process. “It isn’t that thing where you pull out a small camera and people get nervous,” Mr. Soth said. “They’re waiting around long enough that they settle a bit. That person’s standing there, but you’re hidden and you can just stare at them, moving the loupe over their face and watch to see if something happens as they move around.” When he sees what he likes, he says “Freeze” and takes the shot. Because each 8-by-10-inch negative plate costs $20, he may not take more than two frames in a session.

As Mr. Soth became immersed in the culture of survivalists and collected literature about changing one’s identity, he expanded the current project beyond the pictures in the South for the High. In a book to be published next year by Steidl, conceived almost as an instruction manual for dropping out of society, Mr. Soth documents people across America living outside the mainstream — on the desert, in caves — and their personal mythologies.

“Part of the work is about the failure of running away, too,” he said, noting that there’s always some level of engagement with the world, like the monk he saw talking on a cellphone.

Mr. Cox said that Mr. Soth “is very much out there on his own and in some fashion behaving like the subject matter of his pictures,” adding: “He communes with his subjects and his environment through the ritual of the photographic act. He’s a very natural type of communicator. That’s part of his magic formula for having his subjects turn themselves over to him.”

For Mr. Soth, who said he had been painfully shy throughout his youth, this rapport did not come easily. He felt pressure during college at Sarah Lawrence in the early 1990s to pursue the trend of staged photography, but he loved the work of Diane Arbus and wanted to photograph people.

After graduating, he started going to parks and taught himself how to approach strangers, often parents with their children. “Those early photo shoots were a lot like therapy,” Mr. Soth said. Some of these images will be shown for the first time in “From Here to There,” a large survey show at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis scheduled to open in September 2010.

“I’m famous for sweating when I photograph people, which doesn’t seem to happen when I’m photographing landscapes,” he added. “My own awkwardness comforts people, I think. It’s part of the exchange.”

août 2, 2009 12:28 PM

LE MONDE | 23.07.09 |

Le Palais des congrès de Rouen est laid et il fait du mal à la célèbre cathédrale, qu'il touche presque, sur la place principale de la cité normande. Mais allez le voir. Sa façade est recouverte pour six mois, jusqu'au début de 2010, d'une immense bâche de 25 mètres de large sur 14,50 mètres de haut sur laquelle est reproduite une belle photographie en couleur de Thibaut Cuisset. Un paysage normand : une route qui serpente dans la verdure. Une bonne nouvelle n'arrive jamais seule : le démontage de la bâche marquera le début de la destruction du Palais des congrès.

Un grand photographe, une image gigantesque installée au centre d'une ville : à notre connaissance, l'événement est inédit. C'est Thibaut Cuisset lui-même qui a assuré la réalisation et l'installation de la bâche à la demande de la ville, qui en a payé le coût - 27 000 euros selon Paris Normandie. L'image est barrée de la formule "Voilà mon atelier", écrite par le peintre Claude Monet en 1880. C'est Cuisset qui a trouvé la phrase et l'a incrustée dans son image.

"L'idée était d'accrocher une image de nature dans la ville, explique le photographe. Mais aussi de l'associer aux manifestations de l'été sur la place de la cathédrale." A savoir des projections en plein air imaginées par des concepteurs du spectacle de lumière "De Monet aux pixels".
Pour Thibaut Cuisset, outre le plaisir de voir une de ses images exposée au regard de milliers de personnes tous les jours, cette performance constitue un précieux produit d'appel. La photo est en effet extraite de l'exposition qu'il présente à Rouen, à quelques centaines de mètres de la cathédrale, et qui a pour thème la boutonnière du pays de Bray, région située à l'extrémité est de la Normandie.

Thibaut Cuisset est un des grands photographes français du moment. Il est notre meilleur paysagiste, un genre vivace aux Etats-Unis, mais qui reste peu en vogue en France. Il fonctionne par campagnes, comme il dit. Auparavant, il a opéré en Suisse, en Italie, en Espagne, en Islande, en Namibie... Ses photos, qu'il réalise en marchant, sont reconnaissables par leur clarté, leur précision, leur absence de contrastes, les tonalités pastel, qui aimantent l'oeil, donnent envie d'entrer dans le paysage, sans que ce dernier ne soit pure décoration.

Dans cette campagne domestiquée, agricole, on voit encore plus qu'avant ce qui intéresse Cuisset : non pas la nature, qui se fabrique toute seule et qui est hostile. Non le jardin, qui est une violente construction humaine. Pas plus la banlieue pavillonnaire ou la périphérie industrielle. Encore moins le site remarquable qui figure sur les cartes postales.

Le risque du pittoresque

L'affaire de Cuisset, c'est le paysage dans son aspect le plus commun et remarquable à la fois. Ce lieu hybride, à la fois façonné par l'homme, et qui donne l'apparence de ne pas avoir bougé depuis des siècles. Dans le texte d'introduction au livre Une campagne photographique signé par Thibaut Cuisset, Gilles Tiberghien, en spécialiste du paysage, explique très bien comment, alors que les 28 images sont vides de signes traditionnels humains (paysans, fermes, vaches, tracteurs, etc.), le "travail des hommes" transpire partout.

Ce désir de montrer comment l'homme "bouge" le paysage sans avoir l'air d'y toucher est condensé en deux photographies, réalisées depuis le même point de vue, à des moments différents. Seul le spécialiste comprendra la substitution des agricultures. Le spectateur se contentera, et c'est l'essentiel, de sites qui changent de couleur tout en conservant leur beauté.

Jusqu'ici, la couleur dominante chez Cuisset était l'ocre, la terre des pays chauds du Sud. Avec ces images paisibles, il s'est mis au vert. Le vert pour la Normandie, quoi de plus naturel. Quoi de plus périlleux, aussi, pour le photographe qui, immanquablement, tutoie le pittoresque.

joutons que c'est une institution locale qui a passé la commande, et que l'habitant retrouvera sur les photos avec bonheur ses "coins" - Fontaine, Mesnières ou Roncherolles. Tout cela pourrait enfermer les images dans un intérêt local. Et pourtant, on peut ne rien entendre à la Normandie et trouver les images captivantes. C'est à cela que l'on distingue les grands photographes.

"Une campagne photographique, la boutonnière du pays de Bray" - Galerie photo du Pôle image Haute-Normandie, 15, rue de la Chaîne, Rouen (Seine-Maritime).
Tél. : 02-35-89-36-96. Entrée libre du mardi au samedi, de 14 heures à 18 heures. Jusqu'au 25 juillet.

"Une campagne photographique" de Thibaut Cuisset, texte de Gilles Tiberghien, Filigranes Editions, 62 p., 27 €.

Voir aussi l'exposition :
"La Normandie contemporaine" avec des photos de Thibaut Cuisset. Musée des beaux arts de Caen, Le Château, 14000 Caen.
Tél.: 02-31-86-85-84. Tous les jours, de 9h30 à 18 heures; fermé le mardi. 5,20€ et 3,20€. Jusqu'au 30 août.

Michel Guerrin

avril 20, 2009 12:01 PM

avril 20, 2009 10:47 AM

Martin Parr
The Guardian | 15.04.09 |
Article history

Pop star Madonna holds the child named Mercy, whom she hopes to adopt, in an undated sepia publicity photo taken in Malawi. Photograph: Publicity handout/Reuters

Madonna has released an image of herself holding Mercy, the Malawian baby she hopes to adopt. It's in sepia. Why?

Choosing sepia is all to do with trying to make the image look romantic and idealistic. It's sort of a soft version of propaganda. Remember when the colour supplements used to run black-and-white pictures of famine and hardship? Some still do. They do that because they want to make it look more authentic. But it's a fabrication. You can't shoot in sepia, so converting into black and white and then into brown makes everything feel less real.

Madonna is a clever person and this image is all part of a rigorous attempt to persuade the Malawian courts that her adoption should be allowed to go ahead.

As well as the photo being sepia, there appears to be a subtle soft pink hue on Madonna herself. I guess this is the colour of reassuring, concerned maternity. You can imagine Madonna and her team thinking this through in the same way an advertising campaign is orchestrated.

This predilection for sepia is all part of the baggage we have about photography. Despite all the above people seem to think it looks more real. Only 30 years ago, if you were a serious photographer, part of the art world, you had to work in black and white. You were almost scorned as commercial if you shot only in colour. When I first started doing colour in 1982/83 there had only been one serious exhibition in colour (that was Peter Mitchell at the Impressions gallery in York in 1979, with an exhibition entitled A New Refutation of the Viking IV Space Mission). It was a scandal in the world of photography. But it convinced me that colour wasn't the domain of the commercial and snapshot photographer.

Some, however, still harbour the notion of a black and white humanist photographer. Sepia in particular tends to make everything look a bit romantic and almost sentimental, hence the fact that it remains such a popular choice for wedding photographs.

It suggests old values, and in our days of modernisation, we hanker after that.

avril 18, 2009 10:45 AM

Using human tragedy as an artistic readymade has definite pros and cons.

Relevance is usually guaranteed; the heartstrings are likely to be pulled.

But the art may be overshadowed by the story, which may in turn be trivialized and exploited by the art.

“The Sound of Silence,” Alfredo Jaar’s film installation at Galerie Lelong in Chelsea, accomplishes all of the above. It leaves you moved yet irked, feeling raw yet manipulated. You may wonder whether Mr. Jaar is an artist or just some finely tuned hybrid of set designer, art director, editorial writer and graphic designer.

The piece dates from 1995 and has been shown in the United States twice before. As is often the case with the work of the Chilean-born Mr. Jaar, it presents journalism’s basic components — images, information and narrative — placing them in slick, imposing Minimalist contexts.

This installation centers on an unforgettable photograph taken in Sudan during a famine in 1993 by the South African photojournalist Kevin Carter. The image shows a small, starving girl, crouched over in the bush, her forehead almost touching the ground. She might be praying. Behind her stands a vulture, watching and waiting.

The image set off a furor when it appeared on Page 3 of The New York Times on March 26, 1993, and then in other publications worldwide. Most of it was directed at Mr. Carter. Hundreds of readers called or wrote editors wanting to know what had happened to the little girl and asking why the photographer had not helped her instead of taking her picture. Mr. Jaar’s combinations of words and images usually tackle big subjects: the Rwandan massacres, the oppressed gold-mine workers of the Amazon. But this piece isolates a single image to examine the reverberations of news photographs and the ways they exploit their subjects, implicate their makers and often inform yet buffer the public.

While such images may capture instants of time, the most powerful also have significant preludes and aftermaths. Each is a nanosecond in an arc leading up to and then away from its own creation, a tipping point between cause and effect.

Mr. Jaar’s piece recounts this arc in a stripped-down way that is both sensationalizing and understated. Spoiler alert: it is hard to describe the piece without giving away some of the jolts and surprises that are essential (maybe a little too essential) to its effect.

“The Sound of Silence” begins by aggressively blanching our vision: to enter the piece you must first confront a triple bank of blazing white fluorescent lights, like those that frequently illuminate light-box images in Mr. Jaar’s work. The lights cover one side of a room-size box otherwise sheathed in aluminum. At the opposite end of this shiny structure something quite different awaits: a dark opening. The box is a small theater.

The austerity continues inside. The eight-minute film (more like a slide show, really), consisting of text about Mr. Carter and this photograph, unfolds in silence. On a black screen, short phrases fade in and out, in small white lower-case letters reminiscent of those from an old typewriter. The terse narrative sketches Mr. Carter’s background, which included a natural hatred of apartheid that made him go AWOL from his mandatory South African military service.

It recounts the taking of the photograph, the details of which exemplify the inherent, maybe necessary, opportunism of photojournalism. Mr. Carter was about to photograph the little girl, who was slowing making her way to a feeding center; noticing the vulture, he waited another 20 minutes, hoping the creature would spread its wings, which it did not.

Finally, he took the picture and shooed the bird away. The little girl continued her journey; then, in Mr. Jaar’s words, he “sat under a tree and lit a cigarette/talked to god/and cried.”

The text proceeds to recount the aftermath of publication: the ensuing hue and cry; how the image received the Pulitzer Prize for photography in April 1994; and how, in July of that year, Mr. Carter killed himself at 33. During his brief professional career he had been one of four South African photojournalists who became known as the Bang Bang Club: they endured arrests and physical danger to document the murderous cruelties of the anti-apartheid struggle. In a suicide note he said that he had seen too much death and suffering.

Suddenly, the photograph at the center of the tale is seen for an instant on the screen, followed by a single flash discharged by four strobe lights that echo the introductory glare of the fluorescents. Two rather theatrical things have happened: Mr. Jaar has refused to exploit the image by not allowing us to dwell on it and re-enact our disengaged horror. We have experienced the camera’s flash, as in the taking of a photograph — whose subject is us.

The words continue: Mr. Carter was survived by his young daughter, who owns the rights to the image, which are managed by the Corbis photo agency, owned by Bill Gates.

Thus we are led to the idea that Mr. Carter, who abandoned the starving girl, was pushed, by the weight of his experiences, to abandon his own child. But reality is not quite so simple. The text itself points out that Mr. Carter had attempted suicide once before. Yet it omits another part of the story: Mr. Carter’s obituary in The New York Times noted that a few days after his Pulitzer was announced, Mr. Carter was “nearby” when Ken Oosterbroek, another member of the Bang Bang Club, “was shot dead photographing a gun battle in Tokoza township.”

So the photographer’s history becomes the artist’s to frame in his own way. In the end Mr. Jaar does exploit a sensational story, and in shaping it, he manipulates us. Except for its savvy presentation, the piece is like shooting fish in a barrel.

Yet it works. When I first encountered “The Sound of Silence,” I thought its point was largely conceptual; seen once, it would never have to be seen again. But it sustained repeated visits. The words may be nothing but the facts, but they fade in and out rhythmically, at an elegiac pace. Mr. Carter’s first name is repeated, like a lament — either alone or “Kevin. Kevin Carter” — creating a sense of foreboding from the onset.

After a while the words, which you have only read, not heard, start reverberating in your head.

One implication is that silence is impossible; thought is its own kind of noise. Another is that the real silence is passivity, humanity’s acquiescence to inhumanity. And a third is that the silence is the little girl, the absence at the center of the tale. She is gone forever, yet to focus on her and her image is to miss Mr. Jaar’s point, and Mr. Carter’s too.

“Alfredo Jaar: The Sound of Silence” remains on view through May 2 at Galerie Lelong, 528 West 26th Street, Chelsea; (212) 315-0470 or galerielelong.com.

The New York Times | 15.04.09 |

mars 6, 2009 10:03 AM

Photo District News | 02.03.09 |

From its inception, our editors and creative director have seen PDN's 30 as an opportunity to get to know the work of photographers we look forward to writing for and about for many years to come—and this certainly isn't limited to the 30 photographers we select for each issue. This year, for example, we made our selection from more than 300 nominees.

These days, the role of photographers in our culture seems to shift constantly thanks to a never-ending stream of technological, conceptual and economic influences. Additionally, the hurdles to creating and distributing photographic images continue to disappear, inviting some worthy new voices into the conversation, but also creating a din that makes it increasingly difficult for talented photographers to be heard (and to build sustainable careers). The emerging photographers on our list this year are not cockeyed optimists; they know and have experienced the challenges, and yet they're eager to commit their lives to photography anyway.

Those of us who've been a part of PDN's 30 from the beginning never tire of hearing honorees tell us how much their selection means to them—we're both grateful for and humbled by our role in encouraging the careers of emerging photographers. For the two new editors this year, our involvement in PDN's 30 has brought into clearer focus our collective mission as a publication devoted to helping photographers succeed. And the view is pretty damn exciting.

Without further ado….

—Conor Risch

février 24, 2009 9:54 AM

By Michael Kimmelman|International Herald Tribune | 20.02.09 |

An exhibition in Paris and a partial ban by the president have brought a focus on television commercials in France. In an iconic ad from 1968 - the first year France allowed TV ads - a man eats a late-night snack of Boursin cheese. (Agence Publicis)

PARIS: It's still famous here: a black-and-white advertisement from 1968 - the Lascaux cave drawing of French television commercials, you might call it - featuring a young man in his pajamas sitting bolt upright in bed, shouting, "Boursin!" over and over, then madly dashing for his kitchen to devour said cheese.

Lately Parisians have been congregating in a gallery of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs to watch that bygone commercial along with a slew of others made here since the late 1960s. "Forty Years of Ads on TV" includes dozens of sexy Dim lingerie ads - directed by William Klein, Luc Besson, Tony Scott and Hal Hartley, among others - whose Lalo Schiffrin theme music has become embedded in the French psyche, an equivalent of America's "plop, plop, fizz, fizz."

The exhibition happens to have arrived at a curious moment, when several major purveyors of television commercials have suddenly had their ads pulled from the air. Ostensibly to improve programming, President Nicolas Sarkozy last month banned commercials from four major stations during evening hours.

This still leaves France with dozens of outlets on which to see Maurice Lamy, an actor dressed as a crazed, chainsaw-wielding Orangina Rouge soda bottle, screaming "Because!" Don't ask why; it doesn't matter. Or Bruno Aveillan's digital extravaganza for Paco Rabanne's XS perfume, in which a naked couple languidly copulate in midair like an X-rated version of the Flying Wallendas in slow motion.

Vive la France. French liberalism also accounts for Wilfrid Brimo's public service announcement about AIDS, a cheery animation of graphic gay sex, unfolding to the soundtrack of "Sugar Baby Love." Dick Cheney will ask for French citizenship before that one is broadcast in the United States.

Clearly, French commercials speak to French culture no less than French literature or music does. Long on sensuality, style and poetry, they are notably lean on facts and nearly allergic to the rough-and-tumble of commerce. It's forbidden here to denigrate your competitors in a television advertisement or to instruct viewers to call a certain number now to buy a product, save for exceptional cases. Hard-sell tactics, standard in America, just don't wash in France.

"That's because we have always had a very unhealthy relationship to money," explained Jacques Séguela, chief creative officer for Havas, the second-biggest advertising agency in France after Publicis Groupe. He spoke the other day in his sunny office, an all-glass affair with panoramic views of the city. A television, with flickering advertisements for automobiles and Perrier interrupting a bicycle race, played silently behind him.

"To us, money implies corruption, and moreover, because we consider ourselves the inventors of freedom, never mind if that's not true, we still consider advertising as a kind of manipulation," Séguela said. "This explains why television commercials started so late here - essentially because leftist opposition saw ads as corrupting the soul."

France did take a long time before it broadcast commercials on TV.

Years after the United States, Britain, Italy and other countries were making a new art form out of 30-second promotions for detergents and toothpastes, France still prohibited private advertising. Only in 1968, despite strong opposition from newspaper companies and the political left, did the government finally permit two minutes of commercials a day on a single television station. All the stations in France were public back then.

In retrospect, the same climate that led Boursin to invent the catchy new slogan "Du pain, du vin, du Boursin" - "Some bread, some wine, some Boursin" - also produced political sloganeering from students on the barricades, a kind of advertising, too. By the early 1980s, notwithstanding what Séguela just said about leftists being opposed to advertising, his appointment to oversee the public relations campaign of a leftist presidential candidate, François Mitterand, became a first for France.

It was no doubt partly to play on the country's historic ambivalence about television commercials that Sarkozy the other day reversed the policy of the last 40 years and barred advertisements from French public television stations (France 2, France 3, France 4, France 5, with RFO to come) during evening hours.

Opponents were left to grumble about a plot to gain further presidential control over the media. So far, though, programming hasn't changed. It remains to be seen whether fees paid by people who own television sets here will have to go up to compensate for ad income lost by the government-owned stations. Meanwhile the move was a public-relations coup for the president.

Which is not to say that the French dislike commercials. They actually love their TV ads. They just prefer not to admit it.

"We're not a Protestant culture," said Stéphane Martin, director of the French union for television advertisements. "So we have difficulty accepting successful people and embracing advertising as a means of selling. And there has always been such a strong sense that the state should be responsible for public services, like television."

But the government argued back in 1968 that commercials would help French companies and - this from the land of Descartes and Tocqueville - help further democracy, in that television had become a democratic medium. Some 60 percent of French households owned TV sets by then.

Before that, French stations broadcast only a few public-service spots carrying messages like "Change the tie, the tie will change you," "Eat apples for beautiful teeth" and "Beans at your place" (to promote French legumes). Such earnest ditties yielded by the 1980s to what Amélie Gastaut, the curator of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs show, likened the other day to a renaissance of French television advertising.

That decade was the Golden Age, she said, when directors like Jean-Paul Goude and Étienne Chatiliez produced smart, sleek productions for Peugeot, Cooper Jeans and Eram, the French discount shoe purveyor. They were succeeded by a generation weaned on electronic music and digital animation, by directors like Michel Gondry and Antoine Bardou-Jacquet, who ushered in the current era of lush, phantasmagoric effects.

Gérard Pirès, director of more than 400 commercials, the first in 1968, lamented the other evening that French television advertising today takes fewer risks, "in terms of fighting with clients for creative freedom."

"Digital technology also means that instead of spending a few days mixing a dozen sound tracks, which was the case 25 years ago, we have an entire team that spends more than a month mixing more than 120 tracks," he said.

Pirès shrugged, and added: "So everything is more difficult now, but for us what remains most important is still the image of a product, not the product itself."

Or as Séguela formulated the situation: American commercials go from the head to the wallet, British ones from the head to the heart, French from the heart to the head.

That accounts for why, as in a classic French commercial for Canal Plus, the French pay-television station, a man describes a movie about emperor penguins in Antarctica to a woman who pictures hundreds of Napoleons sliding around the ice.

One recent morning, a cluster of young women sat rapt before a commercial by Aveillan of a buxom robot in a skintight suit caressing a naked man. It's a razor ad. Across the room, a mix of older Parisians smiled at the sight of a tight-lipped, elderly woman wrapping a sheet around herself, then belly surfing across a long, dusty table. It's for furniture wax.

"We stress sex and wit in our ads because that's our culture," Martin, the union chief, said. "Advertising is about presenting an idealized view of its audience. And this is who we would like to think we are."

février 23, 2009 4:09 PM

By Daryl Lang|PDNONLINE | 13.01.09 |

© ANTHONY SUAU FOR TIME / VIA WORLD PRESS PHOTO
Suau's photograph of a sheriff's detective in Cleveland, Ohio, never ran in Time magazine but became the The World Press Photo of the Year for 2008.

Last spring Anthony Suau pleaded with Time magazine – where he's been a contract photographer for 20 years – to publish his photo essay on the economic crisis in Cleveland, Ohio.

"When I arrived there I was in shock," Suau recalls. "There was almost not a single street in Cleveland that didn't have a house that was boarded up because of a foreclosure." He compared the scene to the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Time decided not to print the story, and Suau's pictures ran only on Time.com, where it drew little attention in the U.S. – until today, when one of Suau's Cleveland pictures won the World Press Photo of the Year award.

(Clarification, February 15, 2009: Suau's photo essay from Cleveland was published as a "Web Exclusive" in connection with Time's May 26, 2008 issue. However, some of Suau's images also ran in the print edition. The picture that would be named World Press Photo of the Year ran online only.)

In an interview shortly after the award was announced, Suau said he worries the economic crisis may leave him having to find another job or leave the home he just purchased for his family.

The last two months have been especially bad, Suau says. He hasn't had a single assignment except for covering the presidential inauguration for a Japanese book publisher.

"If the situation continues like it has in the last two months, down the road I would be in danger," Suau says. "Do I have to get another job to do something? I don't know. I may have to do something else besides photography."

Suau has covered conflicts and human crises around the world and has won two World Press Photo of the Year awards, the 1984 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography, and numerous other recognitions.

He shot the Cleveland story in March, a few months before the devastating impact of the mortgage crisis was fully understood. It would take until September, when investment banks began to fail and financial markets to begin to fall, for most Americans to take notice.

Last year Suau took one trip to Cleveland for three days, then requested that Time send him back for a longer return trip. On the second trip he arranged a two-day ride-along with a sheriff's detective who was handling evictions.

"I wanted so badly for that series of pictures to be published in the magazine, and everywhere people could see it," Suau says. The project had luck with secondary sales in Europe, where several magazines published it.

Suau says he was busy with assignment work last year and saw his archive sales go up in the fall as magazines turned to stock as a less-expensive alternative to assignments. Then business dried up.

At least three of the editors Suau worked with at Time have since left the magazine, some taking buyout packages, he says. (Time director of photography MaryAnne Golon was one of them; she is also the jury chair of this year's World Press Photo competition.)

Suau says he and other documentary photographers want to work on stories about the human impact of the economic crisis, but the decline in newspapers and magazines has made it hard to find funding. "It's incredibly frustrating for photographers in America," he says. "We need to be working."

Suau recently purchased a home in the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn, N.Y., where he lives with his wife and eight-year-old daughter. "We live in a nice area," Suau says, adding, "I know what's happening to me, but what's happening to other people is worse."

Suau shot his World Press Photo of the Year on March 26, near the end of his two-day ride-along with a sheriff's officer. He used a Leica film camera loaded with Kodak TRI-X black-and-white film.

In the picture, Detective Robert Cole of the Cuyahoga County Sheriff's Department aims a gun into a room as he clears a house for eviction. An elderly couple had lived there and the husband had apparently died, Suau says.

There were no people in the house at the time, and the destruction seen in the photo was from vandals, who loot abandoned homes for valuable property.

Suau says there was evidence vandals had taken a weapon from this home; ammunition and a holster were left behind.

"Every second I was there [in Cleveland], I was walking into another moment of human tragedy," Suau says. "I worked from morning to night in that place and there was never a moment's rest."

Suau said the project "shook me to my core" and reminded him of the destruction he witnessed in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

"Inner city Cleveland is pretty much at this point closed down," he says. "If that was the future of other cities in the United States on a large scale, then where are we going?"