We're pleased to continue presenting Exposures: An Aperture Blog, where fine-art photography enthusiasts around the world can interact with some of the most engaged professionals in the field. We welcome your comments.

11 October 2007

"Exposures" Has Moved!

It has been our pleasure to test the concept of an Aperture blog via Blogger this summer season. As the weather cools and the season in photography heats up, we've decided to move affairs over to a more robust location.

Please find the new Exposures at http://exposures.aperture.org. Upcoming features include an interview with Larry Fink, co-curator of the current Aperture exhibition "Lisette Model And Her Successors," as well as notes and clips from "The Passionate Eye II: Conversations Between Collectors, Curators, and Critics," taking place at Aperture on October 14.

This site will remain up for a number of weeks, but all new posts will be made on the new site. We thank you for your understanding, and welcome your comments and suggestions on the new space!

08 October 2007

Richard Ross/John R. MacArthur Lecture, Part 4

The following is the final installment of a conversation between Richard Ross and John R. (Rick) MacArthur, regarding Ross's work and his book Architecture of Authority, published by Aperture this fall.

To read opening remarks made by Diana Edkins of Aperture Foundation, click here.

To read the first installment of the conversation between Ross and MacArthur, click here.

To read the second installment of the conversation between Ross and MacArthur, click
here.

To read the third installment of the conversation between Ross and MacArthur, click
here.


JRM: …I say in the essay that there would be no point in trying to do the Abu Ghraib photos in any other context. As if, in a perfect photographer’s world, Richard… [snuck] back into Abu Ghraib and took photographs of the guys with the hoods on, and in what I call the tableau vivant of the torture victims, with [Army Specialists] Lynndie [England] and Charles [Graner] and their persecutors torturing them, but doing it from an artist’s perspective. Or a photojournalist’s perspective. Because you know the pictures we’ve seen of Abu Ghraib are mostly cellular phone pictures. Right?

RR: Or digital cameras. Small cameras.

JRM: Right. …They’re not set-up shots. They’re not done by professional photographers. But my feeling when I saw his empty spaces was that it’s just as well. You couldn’t reproduce the shock value of those amateur photographs. And just for the hell of it, I wonder if you think if such a thing is reproducible. I mean is that something you’re interested in? Because all the pictures you see, they’re all empty, you rarely see a person. The minute I saw the Abu Ghraib shots, and the Guantánamo shots, my thoughts turned to the amateur shots of Charles and Lynndie torturing the prisoners.

RR: Well, one of the images that isn’t in the book or the exhibition was that same space where Lynndie England was one of those who was torturing. It had almost souvenir value—a perverse souvenir of Iraq. Like going to Minnesota and photographing a men’s stall, which has become one of the big tourist attractions at that airport. [Laughter.] But it couldn’t be reproduced. In other words, in creating these, I don’t want to be falsely flattering. But I wanted to make beautiful spaces that seduced you into them. That made you think, “This is very beautiful; I’d love to be there,” but then realizing the horror of some of these spaces.

In some cases, I certainly couldn’t go to photograph that; the timing was off, and just in going to Iraq, I couldn’t have gone earlier, and I certainly wouldn’t go today. It becomes irrelevant. When you’re there in a particular spot, you photograph what you’ve got.


Photograph from Architecture Of Authority, published by Aperture, Fall 2007.

You go and anticipate what it’s going to be, but you find whatever happens to be there. I do have to say that the most difficult part about going to Iraq was convincing my wife and kids that I was somewhat sane and that I would have a marriage to come home to and a family to come home to. That was much harder, truly, than convincing the military to let me in there. My wife made some comment that if you were embedded in the military, you’re not embedded with me. [Laughter.]

04 October 2007

Richard Ross/John R. MacArthur Lecture, Part 3

The following is the third installment of a conversation between Richard Ross and John R. (Rick) MacArthur, regarding Ross's work and his book Architecture of Authority, published by Aperture this fall.

To read opening remarks made by Diana Edkins of Aperture Foundation, click here.

To read the first installment of the conversation between Ross and MacArthur, click here.

To read the second installment of the conversation between Ross and MacArthur, click
here.


JRM: I wish I’d asked you [why the subjects were so cooperative] when we first met, because the key phrase is “THEY don’t understand the power of the camera.” That’s crucial in understanding why you were able to get away with it.


RR: I did one singular image of a chair which I thought was pure Josef K. Kafka, and they approved it digitally at Guantánamo. And I happened to be there when the military was accused of flushing Qur’ans down the toilet. It wasn’t proven positively or negatively, I think. But the image went to AP, it was picked up by Time, and a great art director there took the image and desaturated it, made it black and white, and had it as the opening spread to the special issue in Time of [Detainee 063] at Guantánamo.


Photograph from Architecture Of Authority, published by Aperture, Fall 2007.

[See the image as it appears at Time’s website by clicking here.—ed.]

And it became one of those rare events in my world, where I had a visual idea of what I wanted, I was able to convince someone to give me access to it, and I got the image that I wanted and it appeared in print, probably, ten days later. It rarely happens like that. It’s always post-justification or some miracle if something like that actually comes to be.

But they did not understand the power of the photograph. They were too concerned with not wanting two landmarks on a hilltop that would compromise fort security and tell some foreign power where this building is versus that building. And I didn’t say to them, ‘Well, pardon me, but this base has been here since the Spanish Civil War. I could go to Google Earth and look at it.” [Laughter.] “If you think it’s gonna compromise something…” Psychologically, they didn’t get that this was a more dangerous photograph for them.


JRM: I just have one thought, which I had before, but has come back to me, that the American military is not obviously monolithic any more than any other big bureaucracy is. And I don’t want to suggest that the Army which Americans, I’m sad to say, …believe is the only redeemable institution left in American society. “It’s the only place you’re gonna find straight shooters.”

But that being said, it has been my experience, in my limited reporting with the military—because I was never a war correspondent—but also in speaking at WestPoint, that the military intellectuals that I’ve met over the years—and this doesn’t necessarily filter down into the lower ranks—are much more intellectually curious and open-minded than a lot of university intellectuals that I’ve met, or rank and file journalists. And I am supported in this thesis by Marjane Satrapi, the author of Persepolis, who had precisely the same experience at WestPoint. She was shocked at how open-minded and interested, conversational, up for any kind of discussion were the teachers and the cadets.

So I’m not suggesting that we pin our hopes on the U.S. Army, but there are elements in the military—in the Marines, too—who are more democratically inclined than you might think. However, I’m still amazed that you got away with what you got away with. Especially with all the bad publicity.

03 October 2007

Richard Ross/John R. MacArthur Lecture, Part 2

The following is the second installment of a conversation between Richard Ross and John R. (Rick) MacArthur, regarding Ross's work and his book Architecture of Authority, published by Aperture this fall.

To read opening remarks made by Diana Edkins of Aperture Foundation, click here.

To read the first installment of the conversation between Ross and MacArthur, click here.


JRM: Probably the emblematic photograph in this context is the one of the 70th precinct… Does anyone have an association with the 70th precinct in Brooklyn? What happened there? [No response.] It’s the Abner Louima precinct.


Photograph from Architecture Of Authority, published by Aperture, Fall 2007.

[In 1997, Abner Louima, a Haitian immigrant to the United States, was arrested by officers from the 70th precinct. He was brutally assaulted by the arresting officers at the precinct, and an attempt at a cover-up was made. Several officers were eventually indicted and found guilty of various crimes; the longest sentence issued was 30 years and almost $280,000 as restitution. New York City also settled a civil lawsuit for $8.75 million. –ed.]

…[Richard’s] father worked in that same precinct, what, fifty years earlier. And I suggest that, even in those days, such a thing could not have taken place. Now, I don’t know for a fact that nothing like that ever happened, and I stipulate in the essay that, after all, lynching was going on unpunished in the South into the early ‘50s. But it’s still really different. The 70th precinct is the same building, but it’s a different world. And [Richard] is bridging it.

RR: Well, fifty years ago… history kind of repeats. The scene of one of the more notorious police scandals in New York City history… The claim to fame was when I sit there with my wife and watch Serpico. [Al Pacino’s] Serpico says, “This is so big, this is so corrupt, it’s bigger than the Gross bookmaking scandal!” And it’s something that took place in the ‘50s.

[Harry Gross was a Brooklyn bookmaker who hit his prime in the 1940s, employing public servants, like police officers, in a successful attempt to hide his growing illegal profile. He was eventually charged, tried, and convicted in 1950 and spent eight years in jail.—ed.]


When I found out about what went on and why, a million bits of family history that were well-buried—I did some research in the Times archives and the Herald-Tribune, the World Telegram and Sun—this all bubbled to the surface. I found out more about white collar crime and the ‘50s. Which was all very benign, theoretically, but then repeated itself with crime that was not so white-collar in the ‘80s.

RM: The other thing I wanted Richard to talk a little bit about is what it’s like dealing with the American military, and authorities like the Secret Service and various police organizations. Because—and you picked up on it when [Richard] was talking, probably—there’s a kind of a strange cooperation between authority and our photographer here, which I don’t understand. As a reporter over the years, I’ve bullshitted my wan into dozens of places I wasn’t supposed to be in. But you’re only carrying a notebook. You don’t look threatening in the least. You can convince the person that the stuff you’re scrawling into your notebook isn’t gonna do them any harm; they shouldn’t feel threatened by it. You show up with a camera, it changes the relationship immensely. I’ve had it myself, when I’m shooting pictures myself…when I was in Africa, for example, in Uganda, I’ve had that experience of the guards grabbing for your camera and trying to pull the film out. So I know that cameras are threatening to authority.


So why in the hell were these people so cooperative? There’s that tense moment where they’re almost not gonna let you do it, but then they do let you take pictures of the isolation cells, the outdoor cells.

RR: Forty percent of the military force in Iraq, when I was there, were reservists or National Guard. And these are just absolutely normal people that are caught up in something they didn’t necessarily want to be in. And as long as you treat them with respect, and as long as you tell them absolutely everything that you’re doing and trying to figure out, and don’t bullshit them, they’re fine. They don’t understand the power of the camera. They don’t understand the power of a photograph. And it’s a batting average. You don’t get to everywhere that you want to go to, but if you’re persistent, you get a lot.


Going to Guantánamo took nine moths of persistence, and my hero is always James Garner on The Rockford Files. [Laughter.] Where he would have an offset printing press in his glove compartment and he would be Jim Anderson, insurance investigator. And he would make up a card and go into whatever situation he needed. So I wear the hat of a university professor, I wear the hat of a photojournalist, I work for a European journal, I can work for an American publication… it doesn’t matter.


Photograph from Architecture Of Authority, published by Aperture, Fall 2007.

And also, the nice thing about growing up in New York was that “no” was always a starting point. So if somebody says to me, “No,” that just means I have to figure out some other way of doing it. But I said to Rick earlier, in looking at conversation and interview/interrogation, I was trying to deal with people at Fort Huachuca, in Arizona. And originally they said, “You can come and photograph,” and later they said, “We did some research on who you are, and who you’re working for, and we don’t feel that your photographs will be complimentary.”

So the first day they say, “You can come,” and the next day they say—and this is in an email—not complimentary. And I’m looking at their website and their mission statement from the Pentagon, and it says that the public information office is to make [the fort] apparent, transparent and information accessible, to the U.S. military and the American public. And somehow, it doesn’t say “complimentary.”

Yet this is the relationship that the media has evolved into, where it has to be adversarial. And there are people in the military, and a lot of people in the bureaucracy that feel comfortable, and people that DON’T. And you have to seek out the people that want to help, and seek out the people hat want to tell a story that they feel will be honest. And people that don’t want to be used. And I think the book is pretty honest. It’s drawing some conclusions visually, that are maybe surprising to some people, but I’m not lying or fabricating, and there’s nothing Photoshopped in there.

So it’s an ongoing battle, but it does come back to the idea that is that I’m not a good artist, but I’m a good photojournalist. No matter what Rick says. And I have a hard time accepting no as an answer.

02 October 2007

The Padre, And Cathedrals

A very important figure in the south of Italy is the holy Padre Pino. You will find his image all over the place and in every house there is a picture of him on the wall.A resemblance above, perhaps.Being a very Catholic country, the churches and cathedrals are true pieces of art and richness.Old graves of important priests can be found with the most impressive sizes and decorations.