[I'm still on ultra-slow dial-up. The first time I tried to get online this morning, I got a 4 Kbps connection. I didn't know it could go that slow.]
Today’s quotes are taken from an interview between Alex Webb (interviewee — AW) and Max Kozloff (interviewer — MK) found in the book, Conversations with Contemporary Photographers by Umbrage Editions (2005):
MK: You don’t actually make judgments about the state of affairs, but you absolutely take note of them.
AW: I’m not into making judgments. I’m really more into asking questions and, as you say, taking note. That’s a key issue for my photography. I may have, I certainly do have, moral stances about things, and I have sympathies with certain people. But I’m also intensely aware of the fact that the world is a very complicated place. For instance, in Haiti, during the period of time from 1986 to 1988, the people whom I was sympathetic to were the people of the streets, the peasants and poorer people in the cities, who were being killed by the army of paramilitary organizations. But I was also very aware of the fact that when these people had a chance to retaliate against their oppressors they would mutilate the body of their enemies. They learned to act like monsters from their enemy. I sadly and reluctantly accept that as sometimes the way of the world. Despite my sympathies, I’m not going to hide that. The most graphically violent image in my Haiti book is of a mutilated hand, an act committed by the people I’m sympathetic to. Even more disturbing is that there was uncertainty whether the man depicted in this image was in fact a collaborator with the enemy. The world is a complex place and there are great dangers when you start looking at everything in terms purely black and white.
[ ... ]
MK: … I have the idea that color in your work operates, not as a distracting but as a deliberately misleading element [laughter] because it is so magnetic, seductive, powerfully sensual that it’s very difficult for the eye to resist its invitation. And as that happens, it is often only gradually revealed that the scenes you’re describing are often radically unhappy ones. So there’s a dissonance in your work., I think a conscious dissonance, if not an outright strategy, that keeps the work not only resonating in your consciousness, but also unresolved as a way you can figure out your own reactions, yes? Now, I wondered if that wasn’t at the same time a contrast with the work of some rather famous photojournalists. To name some names, Eugene Smith earlier, and Sebastião Salgado now. Their work strikes me as very operatic finally, with the sense they give of huge epics and grand themes and powerful momentum. Massed figures. Magnified sorrow. All of which seems editorialized in a way designed to lead the viewer to very specific conclusions about, let us say, the miseries of the world, or the pressures of injustice. I don’t sense that pressure in your work, but it seems that, around the edges, a comparable force is implied.
AW: I’m not sure I entirely understand what you mean by comparable forces. I do believe that these places I photograph are important to photograph. Important, as you put it, to note. We should be aware of them and not just sit in our North American cocoon. And I agree with you absolutely that there is often a specific editorial point or stance to Gene Smith’s work, or Sebastião Salgado’s work. I think the best of their work goes somewhere else and takes us beyond the editorial point to something more mysterious and complex. But through a lot of their work, as is true of much photojournalism, points are being made, evident stances are taken. What I do is quite different: I see myself as going out and exploring, and finding, and discovering. I go back to this notion of asking questions about the nature of things: how can this and this and this and this all exist, and in the same frame? I don’t think that most of Gene Smith’s pictures are asking questions. They’re announcing: this is pain, this is misery. They are defining. The approach is distinct.
MK: This is a permanent order of things. There’s a constancy.
AW: Right. For example, I didn’t go to Haiti because I wanted to photograph the poor, or show that Haiti was poor, the way a number of photojournalists might. I went to Haiti to explore an interesting and complicated society, poor and desperately tragic, yes, but at the same time full of life and vibrancy. In that sense I wanted to explore the totality of that world. Running through a lot of traditional photojournalism there is an overwhelming sense of … pictures that say something, that define something. And I’m not doing that. I’m not trying to define things, I’m trying to explore things. I’m trying to ask questions.
[ ... ]
AW. … I do think that probably one of the reasons I have gone to the places I’ve gone is that there is something that I need to deal with that is somehow unsettled. Is it that I have to go somewhere unsettled to get my photographic juices running? I don’t know. But I am drawn to places where there is uncertainty, a mixture of cultures. Does this need of mine reflect a larger awareness, a kind of social anthropological awareness, of the ongoing mutating nature of the cultures of our modern world — that this is the state of the modern world? Probably not on a very rational level. Maybe on a more intuitive level. All my major projects suggest this notion in some way or another. But they suggest, they don’t define. Whatever ideas emerge out of my photographs emerges out of the streets, out [of] what I am finding, out of the process of responding photographically in the street.
MK: There’s a kind of electrifying enigma that runs through some of this approach, which is not necessarily a contradiction of terms, but an order of dissimilar things put together in a surprising way. To look at good examples of street photography or, let’s go further, such examples in color, is to be confronted with a certain problem. How could I phrase it? The viewer is unconvinced that anything of lasting value has ben established in a fragmentary glimpse, with a powerful, sensual, and material presence. But at the same time, absorbed into this view, coming to realize that whatever is imagined has a constancy to it, whatever is miscellaneous can repeat itself. That the possibility of one particular photographer’s pictures lying around the corner is never realized until the photographer is there. It’s one of the enigmas of photography.
Sorry I can’t provide reference links for Alex Webb — my connection speed is so slow, it would take me all day. Google him; he’s interesting.
-Julie
