The image in conflict

The trialogue is coming to an end. It has been a pleasure and a privilege to share with you, Ignacio and Clemente, during these two months of open correspondence. I celebrate your wisdom and thank you for your commitment — I have enjoyed myself as much as I have learned.

Now I understand more clearly the wistful tone of Joan, Christian and Radu final contributions to their excellent discussion last year: this format is addictive, you find yourself wishing the stimulus of engaging with the words of the other participants and pursuing the concept and the terms of your own interventions would never end. It is a form of writing that directs itself particularly at someone, just the opposite of Umberto Eco’s suggestion of directing oneself potentially at all humanity, and this gives modesty of theory change offers the compensation of knowing that the communication will be attentive and intense.

So congratulations to all of those who have created this space, to everyone at SCAN and KRTU, to the magnificent translators, to the people who have followed the blog and especially to Mariona and Joana, who have coordinated us with such efficiency and elegance.

Fortunately, we still have the session live. Until May 13th in Tarragona!

The SCAN Dialogue 08 addressed the question of the ubiquity of images, which is precisely where the conflicts in which these are debated today are contextualized, including those images that still maintain a coherent documentary discourse. Given the situation of full-blown visual intoxication in which we live, photographers are obliged to undertake the dual task of engaging appropriately with the difficult situations they want to tell us about—thus shouldering a great responsibility—and of trying to prevent their discourse from being diluted in a confused visual soup saturated with images and dominated by vapid, superficial entertainment.

I believe it should be possible for a well-grounded and powerful documentary discourse to present itself in any medium, circumstance and context, without exclusion or censorship, in the full knowledge that it will often have to compete at a disadvantage with other, more popular, more attractive, more commercial and more successful discourses.

The lowly status of documentary images today is due to many factors, one of which is a progressive and compliant decrease in their quality, so much so that I see a real need for a serious effort to recover or even to discover quality. We need documentary images that move us, disturb us and make us think; that do not take their own beauty too seriously and that have a way of telling things that makes them different, sincere and committed. We need images that are good for something that are useful, that do not let us rest easy.

Finally, I want to thank all of the people who have made this dialogue possible, especially Ignacio and Pepe, for sharing your fertile ideas in this fertile free and open space. 

Ignacio’s and Clemente’s reflections on surveillance have a bearing on the most sensitive aspects of the photojournalist’s work: responsibility — without doubt the aspect that demands a well-informed and well-intentioned sense of reality. Ignacio warns us against the imputations that can be made by way of photographs that fall a long way short of guaranteeing the meaning attributed to them. Clemente refers to the use of photographs as a means of identifying people, even against the photographer’s intentions.

We could add plenty more cases, and the versatility and the paradox that surrounds the photography would be present in every one. For example, Agustí Centelles carried his negatives of the Civil War over the border at La Jonquera to prevent them falling into the hands of Franco’s police and thus protect the people who appeared in them from reprisals. Conversely, the photographs that Francisco Boix, a Republican prisoner in Mauthausen concentration camp, covertly took of the guards there were used as very effective evidence to convict leading Nazis of war crimes at the Nuremberg trials. Llorenç Soler’s superb television documentary ‘A Photographer in Hell’ (2000) gives a detailed account of the case.

We have to recognize that photography lends itself to the worst uses, but also to the best, and that the role of those who articulate its communicational rules on the basis of collective responsibility is to keep it on the side of worthwhile values, starting with the truth, however relative it may be. If photography can be used to control, it can also serve as democratic testimony.

To endorse position, there is no doubt that reporters must not be accomplices in any kind of surveillance and their professional activities must be guided by a strict code of ethics that, paradoxically, can only be applied with flexibility and intelligence. We will never establish a checklist of requirements for being entitled to a reporter’s ‘card’, even if in the long run we can distinguish, by their careers, the good ones from those who contribute nothing good.

At the same time, we mustn’t forget that the Internet is permanently subject to surveillance, as demonstrated by the recent revelations from Canada of online espionage against supporters of the Dalai Lama being run from China — and quite clearly that can’t be the only case. This being so, the dematerialization of the image and its inclusion in IT networks should lead professionals to redouble their commitment to safeguarding their most sensitive material: nowadays photographs are no longer stolen from the hotel room as a special correspondent in a far-off country but lifted from any computer targeted by any would-be panoptic power, according to its capabilities.

Another interesting issue is that visual reporters are increasingly being obliged to produce photos and video footage simultaneously. Indeed, more and more these days where a reporter’s work ends up is in digital publications of a wide variety of kinds. For example, www.mediastorm.org, sponsored by the Washington Post, is a paradigm of this new type of documentary format that incorporates direct sound, photos, videos, interviews, music and so on. Similarly, the latest generation of digital SLR cameras, with high-quality video built in, can be interpreted as a warning to the profession of where the designs of the large media groups are leading. If we can take stock somewhat prematurely, it certainly seems that the objective is not just the pure marketing goal of providing a new incentive for advanced amateurs but to arrive at a new employment scenario in which photographers’ ‘productivity’ will eventually be doubled.

But here too free thinking will strive to transfer to video some of the social and legal status that attaches to a photograph as an authored work. The visibility of the subject behind the camera (much more precarious in the case of information on television than in photography, as a result of their respective material and symbolic histories) is the optimistic objective we must set ourselves if we are positively to reverse the process. Here again authorship has to emerge from the nature of the testimony rather than from the thematic and stylistic precepts of the technology market or of the art of photography/video.

So we must also reject a numerus clausus of A-list authors such as is being imposed on the profession at the global level: a few dozen sacred cows of the most exquisite documentalism whose ultimate goal is to exhibit and sell their work using the media as a platform, while at the other extreme—and with nothing in between—Reuters, AP and AFP monopolize the image of what is going on in the world.

We need many more photographers in many parts of the world, in many more conflicts (in the broadest sense). We need the public and private organizations that support them and give them a channel. We need the support of that free thinking that knows how to use words but is not so good with images. For example, to take a reference made by Ignacio, we need Rebelión to use images like MediaStorm does — but in a different way, of course.

Photographs—all photographs—are not at all eloquent, and therefore appreciate a context that can supply them with information, without which they are more naked and more vulnerable, and even more savage. Without a context, their interpretation is dependent on how skilled we are at reading them — on what each of us has in our particular cultural, aesthetic, historical, visual or political baggage, but also on certain conventions we have adopted for interpreting them. It’s true that the controversial photograph by Kevin Carter that Ignacio mentioned is read in a certain way because our visual education and our prejudices direct relate the vulture to the little girl and set all our cultural and ethical alarm bells ringing, but prior to the moment of ‘using’ an image—which may be the decisive moment—there are other moments that primarily concern the producers of the image and those who put into circulation, the responsibility for which they cannot shirk. With regard to this I would like to mark off various degrees of involvement in the phenomenon of documentary photography, all different. The first degree is that of the person who takes the photograph, and has to face the enormous, difficult and urgent task of deciding what to photograph and how to photograph it, knowing that their decision, whatever it may be, will be fixed, will not be innocent and will have repercussions. Setting aside other considerations of no real relevance here, about the Kevin Carter photo, he chose—as thousands of other photographers do every day—a particular combination of factors in order to get his picture, and it could be determined whether these factors accord with the scene we are shown and whether there was an added moral intention.

There are other kinds of responsibility which attach more to the subsequent use of the photograph than to the photographer’s work, and absolutely condition its readability. By way of illustration let me propose two well-known photographs: both won a World Press Photo award, one in 2006 and the other in 2007. The first was taken in Beirut in 2006 by Spencer Platt (http://www.worldpressphoto.org/index.php?option=com_photogallery&task=view&id=899&Itemid=115&bandwidth=high) and the other in the Korengal Valley in Afghanistan in 2007 by Tim Hetherington (http://www.worldpressphoto.org/index.php?option=com_photogallery&task=view&id=1167&Itemid=115&bandwidth=high). I don’t want to say too much about these pictures, but in my opinion the first one shows that the stereotypes are in the eye of the photographer, at the moment both of taking the picture and of selecting it, effectively imposing on us a limited, simplified version of events that is not true to what really happened. The problem is that these stereotypes fit perfectly with the ones that most of us carry around with us as readers to images, so we immediately recognize what we are being shown, which in this case is exposed as false when additional information is supplied.

The case of the photograph by Tim Hetherington is very different. What it shows is faithful to the course of the events it sets out to depict, without fuss or imposture. The problem here is the claim by the World Press Photo jury chairman that this image ‘represents the exhaustion of a man — and the exhaustion of a nation,’ imposing an interpretation of the photograph that is as gratuitous as it is loaded, because it all too clearly reveals an interest in putting forward a particular version of history. We see a similar distortion in the picture of King Juan Carlos with Adolfo Suárez that Ignacio discussed, but really is a sly propaganda operation, designed down to the last detail, the object of which is openly declared in the photographer’s own blog (http://adolfosuarezillana.com/la-foto-del-toison/).

I think one of the conflicts that concern us is rooted in the assumption that documentary images cannot be in the service of preconceived ideas or adulterate the representation of reality, as Abel Salinas observed so pertinently in on one of the comments in this open dialogue, where he describes the face masks being distributed in Mexico to prevent the spread of swine flu as ‘the most perfect metaphor of the situation’. I entirely agree with him that our inability to represent this epidemic visually is so great that we can only do so through symbols. But documentary images should not be freighted with more symbols than are needed to ensure a minimum of intelligibility, beyond which point that the symbols simplify and pervert the discourse to the extent that everyone uses the same ones, as we can easily see in the case of the eloquent face mask that appears in almost all of the photographs dealing with the swine flu — a face mask that are ultimately a comfortable blindfold.

The people we photograph are not actors playing roles written by a team of scriptwriters but individuals whose behaviour is unpredictable, and we have no right to force them into a mould that conforms to our expectations as photographers or editors; instead we have to assume both the difficulty of showing their lives in images and the risk that the result may not be logical, aesthetic, coherent or easy to consume.

I would like to carry on the last intervention by Clemente Bernad, who, among other very relevant considerations, reminded us of the importance of the painter Gustave Courbet in the definition of modern realism, and of the Paris Commune as a moment in which photography, thirty years after its invention—underwent an explosion of experiences in which most of the issues we debate today are already implicit.

In a similar vein, I have just been to the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris to see a fascinating photography exhibition entitled Controversies — an exhibition that could easily have been called, like this trialogue with Baeza and Bernad, ‘Images in Conflict’; and in this particular case, ‘legal conflict’, because the show consists of images that have given rise, down through the history of photography, to lawsuits, legal actions and court cases, and have thus created jurisprudence.

One of the images on show concerns, precisely, Courbet and the Commune.

It’s by the photographer Bruno Braquehais, and was used at the trial of Courbet as a prominent member of the Commune. At the start of the 1871 insurrection the painter, pacifist and libertarian had called for the removal of the Vendôme column, erected by Napoleon, whose toppled statue can be seen in the photo, as a ‘monument to the glory of war and of violence’. The column was indeed taken down by the Communards. After the bloody repression of the Commune, the State accused Courbet (one of the most celebrated painters of his time) of being responsible for this act of destruction, not just intellectually, but also of having personally taken part in the demolition. Courbet denied the charge. There was a trial, and the State produced this picture as definitive proof of the painter’s involvement. According to the prosecutor it shows Courbet (the ninth figure from the right, in the second row, with an imposing beard and a peaked cap) at the scene of the crime. Though the painter continued to deny the charge, and though there is no other graphic evidence of his presence there, and though the fact of being present at the scene is not a proof of guilt, Courbet was ordered to pay the cost of reconstructing the column, which ruined him; he had to go into exile in Switzerland, where he died soon after.

It could be said, then, that this photographic image—used as evidence of the crime, as authentic testimony, as clear proof—killed the inventor of realism in painting.

Another of Clemente Bernad’s reflection concerned the Ortega y Gasset journalism prize awarded by the newspaper El País. He was referring to Pablo Torres Guerrero’s shot of one of the trains that were blown up in Madrid on March 11, but I would like to talk about the picture that was awarded the prize for ‘best graphic information’ a few days ago: a photo by Adolfo Suárez Illana of his father walking with King Juan Carlos. 

The awarding of the prize to this picture is generating controversy. We might say that it confirms a number of the hypotheses that have emerged in our trialogue. For example, that the media are attaching more and more value to photographs by amateurs, simply because they happened to ‘be there’ in the right place at the right time.

In this particular case the rules have been bent, because we know that professional photographers were not permitted to be present at that time (the king was awarding an important decoration to Suárez in his own home).

On the other hand, without the addition of an essential semantic complement this image in itself signifies very little. For someone in Tasmania who doesn’t know that the personage on the left is the king of Spain and that the one on the right is a former Conservative Prime Minister who is now suffering from senile dementia, the picture doesn’t say much. It is a mere family snap, taken by the son of one of the people in the picture one sunny day in the garden.

In other words, the person looking at the photograph needs to be in possession of the crucial information, because it is not supplied by the image itself. And that is a problem, even if not many people see it that way; for example, one commentator has written that its ‘informative-documentary importance goes beyond that. These two leaders effected the transition to democracy in Spain. As old men, years later, they are strolling together, Adolfo Suárez now with Alzheimer’s, a disease that prevents you from remembering… An historic document which captures the moment at the end of the road of a politician, a decisive figure in the Spain of the twentieth century.’ (http://blogs.publico.es/mesadeluz/772/suarez-y-los-premios-ortega-y-gasset).

But if I need the props of a lengthy title and a detailed commentary to understand what I am looking at, the image is very poor in information and its meaning will quickly be extinguished. Compare, for example, this photo by Kevin Carter, a picture whose signifying power is so great (without us needing to know what the girl is called, or where this is, or when, or why) that it too stirred up a lot of controversy, and the photographer ended up committing suicide.

Both of these images—the one by Suárez Illana and the one by Carter—communicate compassion. But while the second one engages it to mobilize the viewer in support of campaigns against hunger, the first tries to play it down, because nothing in the image lets on that the person being protected, sheltered by the protective arm of the other, taller person that dominates him is suffering from Alzheimer’s. This photograph thus lends support to the idea (increasingly denounced as outrageous) that Alzheimer’s is a shameful defect, a stigma, a cross to be borne in silence, a fated punishment for some hidden fault, a family secret. In short, an embarrassment or an obscenity that decency and dignity prohibit us from showing face on. That is why the photographer does not face up to the problem and represents the character from behind.

The fact that so insignificant a photograph should have won an award gives some idea of the prevailing mental confusion with regard to images. And if justifies—if justification were needed—our reflections and our trialogue.

Well, this seems to be getting lively. Pepe, I would like to add a few notes to your last intervention before moving on. Of course the photographic part of the FSA project was propagandistic, because it was a project run from Washington to back up the New Deal visually. Roy Striker led the group of photographers with an iron hand to ensure they got pictures that fitted in with the philosophy of the project: he even picked out locations and scenarios in which the shots were to be taken, something that is also done systematically today by the communications media when they are considering publishing a report, and even more when they produce it. But it’s not only the media: anyone who intends to show and disseminate photographs in public—institutions, NGOs, companies, political parties, etc—is interested in putting forward their own version of things, and they don’t hesitate to model the images in whatever way they like and use them to their own advantage, while packaging them with an aura of rigour and fidelity. The particular aesthetic of documentary photography often helps to make the fraud more plausible, because it appeals to a visual tradition it isn’t easy to renounce. In any case, there will always be interests to be taken into account, tolls to be paid, editorial lines to be toed and servitudes to be endured, and though these things are hard to reconcile with freedom or independence they are part of the normal landscape. To ignore them or bury our heads in the sand would be childish.

But you use a word I particularly like: cracks. It may seem naive, perhaps, or even touching, to go around looking for cracks and little chinks in the juggernaut of the communication business so as to slip through them a less sequestered kind of vision, but they certainly do exist. It is even possible, as you suggest, that there are cracks that are not unknown to us, like the positing of a ‘photographic mission’, a concept that is no newcomer in the history of photography. It may seem strange to propose a great follow-up project today in the manner of a photographic mission, but I think there are reasons that make it attractive and timely. In the first place because it ties in directly with the spirit that inspired the first and undoubtedly the most committed photographic practice, which really set out to show the world with a radically innovative intention. And also because the new technologies have revived the custom of working together, in a network, in a group, in a collective, something that in the last decades of the last century seemed to have been ousted completely by a far more individualistic gaze and way of life. The FSA was a government project, but there were other collectives such as the Photo League and the European experiences of the nineteen-twenties, and so on, which better anticipated and embodied that spirit. The circumstances are different today, but it would be interesting to see if it is possible to construct small stories—coordinated but free—and relate them to one another in order to create a useful and dynamic network, not to develop a monochrome ‘grand story’ that would impose a single version but precisely to the contrary.

Another and no less important issue is how each photographer approaches the subject, the political distance they take, their formal decisions, their point of view. We must not forget that quite apart from what you look at and why you look at it, how you look is crucial. And there, at that precise moment, whether you’re with the FSA or the Photo League, with Getty Images or Magnum Photos or your local newspaper, whomever you work for, whatever you do, you are always on your own. 

Ignacio and Clemente, before you go on with your reflections, I’d like to add another comment to my last intervention.

I’m doing so in relation to Clemente’s mention of my reference to the current crisis (the general recession, not the particular press crisis) as an example of the challenge involved in tackling a documentary project when many of the key aspects are not tangible. At the press conference for the launch of the book of last year’s SCAN dialogue and the presentation of this year’s I raised the possibility of a republishing a project monitoring the crisis based on the basis of the FSA (Farm Security Administration) project set up after the Crash of ‘29. Joan Fontcuberta pointed out that this was a propaganda project, which is doubly true. First of all because it is always difficult to disengage the results of an action from the intentions of the people who planned and financed it, and secondly, because in that case the structure of the organization and publication was particularly strict with regard to the meaning that the project was to put across. And yet, in spite of everything, through a few little cracks another meaning escaped, deeper than the one intended by the organizers, who were only concerned with displaying the vitality and effectiveness of their aid programme and thus how unnecessary it was to dream up any alternative economic model. In FSA, which is not a big project (though it is a great project), there is a wide-open possibility of radical critique. Not as strong or as aware as in some other smaller projects, but much larger in spirit, as is the coverage of the exploitation of child labour in mines and factories by Lewis Hine twenty years earlier. Against all odds, photographs and their eyewitness authors found the cracks — cracks that no longer exist in the current crisis, in which the juggernaut of television orchestrates, from the adoption of the regenerative fiction of Obama, the staging of the latest version of Lampedusa’s dictum that ‘everything must change so that everything can remain the same’.

If we renounce the image in the short term and create a strongly contextualized visual project monitoring the crisis from a selection of significant spread of its tangible aspects (which, as Ignacio has reminded us, are also symbolic) we may still have a chance to influence the social valuation of questions such as: a greater understanding of the keys to the economic model; an approximation to the social consequences of deregulation and greed, and an investigative review of some of the financial operators responsible for the plunder… In other words, a long-term project, conceived in terms of a rigorous process of documentation, with a plan of work developed under the guidance of vitally committed experts such as economists, sociologists and specialists from other disciplines involved. Also, of course, with the collaboration of the best documentary photographers, those for whom the photograph goes beyond the photographic medium itself and are not afraid of not inventing a whole new style every time. I think it would work if we could find the means of funding it and of achieving a strong social presence, which would necessarily entail once again the participation of a public authority that would control without directing. It is not easy, but there are not many options for the survival of the most essential photography.

I agree with what Ignacio says about the ‘anecdotizing’ and the general cheapening that the communications media practice in their treatment of images. That said, I prefer not to think that the media, whose current structures are already obsolete, are not the only way of saying things and of constructing diverse and relevant narratives. In fact, I believe that the media have definitively dug their own grave as the bearers of documentary discourses and as legitimate platforms for what we understand as major reporting.

For a long time now the media have engaged in a complacent discourse that ignores vital issues, turning their backs when it comes to funding documentary projects or serious reporting and turning out paltry, stereotyped in-house productions marred by haste and a lack of flexibility, leaving themselves with no alternative but to rely on material funded by others, whether it be agencies, cultural institutions, the photographers themselves or, of course, ultimately, public and private entities linked to the art world. Yet they nonetheless claim in all earnestness that their pages are still the natural home of documentalism. 

There is no denying that they sowed the seed, and that getting wide distribution in the right format is the best thing that can happen to a good story. But they have lost their moral authority, becoming mired in an intractable schizophrenia that places the photographic image in conflict with its own context and its travelling companions, one of which—and one of the most prized—is undoubtedly ‘independence’, about which we are hearing less and less.

I think, as Ignacio does, that the media love surveillance images because in a sense they embody the supreme eye that sees everything. They also love the images supplied by the police or by people who simply photograph organizations or structures ‘from the inside’ and come up with pictures that it would be impossible for an ordinary working journalist to obtain — images to which they then accord the status of hard news.

And it is equally true that the police and other strata of power love the pictures taken by photojournalists, and frequently try to get their hands on them in order to identify people or to obtain evidence for a prosecution, ignoring the fact that press photographers are not agents infiltrated inside a group or event, and are not mere producers of documentary evidence but journalists who take a lot of different elements into consideration in carrying out their work.

And to give another turn to the screw, it is no less true that the media often use images obtained using police techniques such as hidden cameras, in breach of their code of ethics and submerging us all in a state of permanent fear and suspicion. Conversely, they react with aseptic coolness when a relevant, timely and committed photograph such as the one by Pablo Torres Guerrero of one of the trains blown up in Madrid on March 11, 2004, makes a big impact. Almost all media that published the picture manipulated it in order to deactivate it. Even El País, which ran it on the front page and gave Torres Guerrero the Ortega y Gasset journalism prize, consigned it to the sleep of the just in an unusual act of journalistic contrition, acceding to the unexpected request by the victims’ associations not to show bloody pictures of the attacks. When a photograph presents with no evasions something that is not easy to look at, it is not easy to accept. Finally, the media, in a double somersault, emulate the most aestheticized and least ideological art spaces and show only what is least likely to upset their readers. It is not the case that we are saturated with and anaesthetized by bloody and violent images, as the dominant litany keeps telling us; on the contrary, the indispensable images are kept from us. Where are they?

We have here a classic dilemma. Ever since photographs taken during the months of the Paris Commune in 1871 were used to identify its members, who were duly convicted and executed, the photograph has not ceased to be treated as evidence. The photographic experience that can be drawn from the Paris Commune is truly enormous, ranging from documentary and narrative functions to police and propaganda uses, not forgetting photomontage and manipulation for ideological purposes, treatments of the image that the recent advances in technology have merely refined. And it might be out of place to recall at this point Gustave Courbet, a prominent Communard in whose theories and approach to life and realism we find many of the keys to the defence of a documentary discourse that is rigorous and committed and, above all, useful.  

This ‘trialogue’ is proving to be really exciting—at least it is for me—thanks to the timely and creative interventions (especially the latest ones) by Pepe Baeza and Clemente Bernad. Regarding the concept of image-testimony, about which both have spoken, I’d like to make the following observation, based on the analysis of certain events that have taken place in the last week.

Take, for example, the earthquake at L’Aquila in Italy, which has received so much media coverage on account of the scale of the human tragedy. Paradoxically, and contradicting the idea that I myself put forward in my last intervention, in this case the fact that nowadays everyone—or almost everyone—has a camera in their mobile phone was to no avail: no-one managed to photograph the earthquake at the moment it actually happened. There are thousands of images of the consequences of the earthquake (ruined houses, mountains of rubble, the rescue of survivors, etc) but not one picture taken live of the earthquake occurring. Of course: it happened at 3:45 in the morning, when mobile phones are being recharged and people are sleeping. So the media coverage of the event has to some extent saturated our eyes with thousands of images of the tragedy in the hope of distracting us from the lack of the main thing, the missing image, the one most promised by the contemporary photojournalism, the event that takes place live before our very eyes, or is at least caught by the cameras as it happens.

So this journalistic frenzy to capture the ‘replicas’ or aftershocks* (as a substitute, a copy of the original event definitively lost) and to find eye-witnesses to the tragedy able to describe in words what they experienced and saw, or what the camera of their eyes shot and developed in their brain, but this can only be an account of an image, not a pure image.

This invisibility of the earthquake in L’Aquila is the proof that, as Pepe Baeza says, the event resists and does not let itself be apprehended easily grasp even when thousands of photographic lenses are present.

The same week as the Italian earthquake, in France, the most controversial image—in this case captured live and broadcast on the main 8:00 p.m. television news on the highest-ratings state channel—was a violent assault on a French boy travelling on a night bus by four other youths, two of them teenagers, apparently of immigrant origin, which can be seen on the following website:

http://observers.france24.com/fr/content/20090408-agression-bus-parisien-une-video-polemique-ratp-noctilien

If there is controversy here it is because these images are not denouncing racism against immigrants but the reverse: they aim to denounce immigrants’ racism against the French (it seems that the boy’s assailants called him ‘French pig!’). And also because they were made public, against the guidelines of his superiors, by a policeman, who has been officially reprimanded as a result.

While the story is by no means unimportant in itself, in this case—and in the context of our ‘trialogue’—I find it less interesting than the nature of the images captured by surveillance cameras concealed on buses. One of the unconscious reasons why the scene has had such a strong impact in France is that this is the first time images filmed on a bus have been publicly broadcast. Though the buses in Britain have been carrying surveillance cameras (see the poster) for more than six years now, they were introduced in France only a few months ago.

The news media love these surveillance images, captured by robots and usually terrible in terms of their technical quality. And, in essence, they love them for one reason: because they capture real events live. Because they seem to realize the phantasmagorical dream of the most basic conventional photojournalism: to be everywhere so that nothing escapes the eye of the camera — a demiurgic ambition to witness and document that ends up very close to the totalitarian desire to monitor the behaviour of every citizen aspired to by George Orwell’s ever vigilant Big Brother:

Similarly, in the very same week we saw how the vigilance of a number of reporters, combined with what Antonioni would have called the ‘blowup’ effect, managed to topple Bob Quick, the head of the UK’s anti-terrorism force, who was careless enough to get out of his car in front of the Prime Minister’s house—and in front of dozens of photographers—with a confidential document exposed to view. Mr Quick must have thought the respectable distance between him and the press photographers would have prevented them from focusing on the papers he was carrying.

This grave oversight has forced him to resign, because the media were able to read with perfect clarity the confidential document outlining a supposed terrorist plot. Bob Quick was clearly not aware that today’s telephoto lenses can cope with incredible distances. And there also are imaging techniques that allow us to take a vertiginous leap into the abyss using a seamless zoom capable of capturing the magnified image in truly amazing sharpness, as this photograph of Barack Obama’s inauguration in Washington on January 20 last shows:

http://gigapan.org/viewGigapanFullscreen.php?auth=033ef14483ee899496648c2b4b06233c

As Carlos Martínez said in a recent article in Rebelión, ‘this picture was taken with a 1,474 pixel robot camera, and if we enlarge the image we can identify clearly a lot of the people who attended the event. And if we add facial recognition applications to digitized photographs of this kind, we can conclude that governments and big corporations have no difficulty identifying all of the people who attend demonstrations and major spectacles.’ Will photojournalists be willing to collude in this process of collective monitoring?

* TN: The Castilian for ‘aftershock’ is réplica.

Don’t stop opening up new fronts — I think it’s great: let’s have the maximum number of questions in the air, and even if we don’t manage to resolve them all, we will have provided a service.

Your interventions suggest a number of comments. With regard to the dematerialization of photography that Ignacio talks about: I believe it leads it to realize its historic destiny of being an image with a high potential for circulation rather than a singular object (or one deliberately limited in its run). Benjamin pointed in that direction long ago, and even felt, somewhat idealistically, that socialism was also achieved through the same process. I think I’m being true to the spirit of the SCAN 08 documentary photography panel—comprising Claudi Carreras, Sandra Balsells, Consuelo Bautista, Héctor Mediavilla, Silvia Omedes and myself—when I say that this is what we were referring to when we said that the gallery (as a place of commercial transaction related to collecting) is not the ideal destination for documentary photography. It seems to me, Clemente, that you were saying the same thing when you invoked the place in the sun that awaits some examples of this kind of photography when, voluntarily or forcibly, they fall outside of the commercial media. The other instances of documentalism, the more combative ones, simply has no place, really, either hot or cold. And I think we should add, once again in line with your last intervention, that the worst thing that can happen to documentary photography is for it to let itself be bound by the criteria of collectionism instead of looking to social analysis for the issues that ought to be addressed and for a style that is appropriate in each case to the characteristics of the subject and the preferences of the photographer, grounded in the principle of not problematizing access to what is represented.

I also and unconditionally support the dismantling once and for all of the convention that Ignacio challenged which claims that without a picture there is no information. I believe that those of us who have faith in the image as an essential form of thinking are the first to grind our teeth when we see the amount of meaningless images that fill the pages of the print media: paradoxically, a press with fewer photos would treat the photograph with far more respect. As Ignacio says, the image should not serve as a distraction for the eye, and—I would add—still less as a stopgap or a vase of flowers: in other words, as a predictable and recurring element in the production of a page layout. The creation of models of print media that don’t ‘need’ images yet nonetheless incorporate them in their full value where appropriate is still a challenge for designers, photographers, pictures editors and journalists — with the permission of the companies, of course.

On the other hand, I think it is positive that there should be a certain amount of non-informative visual content, always provided it is responsible and intelligent and helps teach us to see better, which is a way of making the world better. Readers need to have access to a good selection of images of different kinds, which should in turn be clear in their strategies and their aims.

I am also looking forward to seeing Ignacio’s contribution on the image in surveillance and the continuation of Clemente’s reflections on specific cases like the one he mentioned. Incidentally, I think that the basic shortcoming with the winning photo in this year’s WPP competition is its removal from a context that is surely much larger than that was shown, and would ideally go back to the whole situation of the family that couldn’t pay the rent. Otherwise it comes down, in effect, to a limited version of police operational procedures. These reflections also take us into the other area referred to in the title of the present dialogue: the representation of conflicts through photography. While there is no need for us to take this path just yet, I would like to mark out as a starting point a widely held idea that I’m not sure if you will agree with: ‘The process of strangulation of visual information started with Vietnam.’