In reading more last week about Tim Hetherington and subsequently following an endless train of links down the internet rabbit hole, I ran across a photographer Damon Winter, who was embedded with the First Battalion, 87th Infantry of the 10th Mountain Division in Kunduz Province, northern Afghanistan last year. Damon’s photographs, shot with the Hipstamatic app, on his iPhone, accompanied the Nov 21, 2010 NY Times article Between Firefights, Jokes, Sweat and Tedium and were also the centerpiece for the NY Times Lens Blog post Finding the Right Tool to Tell a War Story that same day. Here’s one shot from the series:
Internet criticism and outrage over the series began almost immediately, escalating to something of a cataclysm in subsequent months when Winter won third place for the series in the Pictures of the Year International competition. Complaints generally centered around photojournalistic arguments on the fact that Hipstamatic does not portray a scene as it really appears, that Winter violated the competition rules, and that somehow today’s notion of creativity is becoming increasingly diluted, skewed, and bastardized from some gold standard of the days of yore. I won’t deny any of those things outright – I think they’re valid arguments in some regard, but I especially like Winter’s response Through My Eye, Not Hipstamatic’s, also posted on the Lens Blog on February 11, 2011. He does a pretty good job summarizing the feverish outcries and responding in a humble, measured manner.
It’s funny to me that all of these things are connected – the technology wave that’s promoting a more social, connected world (on an unprecedented scale that enables us to share information like never before) is also at the heart of both the ability to blog (and thus complain incessantly about new things) AND the rise of apps like Hipstamatic. They’re fundamentally inseparable. This argument that’s out there that Hipstamatic is “destroying photography” is flat out ridiculous. New art forms, whether they’re worthy of the dubious title of “art” or not, have been destroying (ie, changing) the existing, accepted art forms for as long as such things have existed. These same blogs are “destroying” “reputable” news sources as we speak. Hey look, it’s the mid-1800s and photography is ruining oil painting. Oh my god, it’s 1913 and Nijinsky is ruining ballet, let’s all start a riot! Hide the kids and flush the birth control, dubstep is destroying music – what deaf A-hole made that awful remix? I do appreciate the dialogue, but blah blah blah, it’s all the same thing.
Anyway, I guess that ranting about someone else’s rant is just as ridiculous in my mind as the original rant, but that’s where nihilism sets in and it seems like none of it matters. And that’s just not true. I just watched The Devil Came on Horseback, and holy shit, it’s about as gnarly and real and horrifying as it gets. Maybe my nihilism is justified. I mean, as documented in The Devil Came on Horseback, Brian Steidle spends a full year in Darfur, Sudan, witnessing and photographing hideously evil, malicious violence, and another full year or so touring America, speaking out and trying to rally popular support for intervention in Darfur. And yet the conflict – and systematic violence by the Sudanese government – is still ongoing AND has spilled over into Chad. Our government isn’t doing much of anything to stop it, and despite thousands of Steidle’s tragic, horrifying photos (all shot on a normal, traditional, acceptable camera), Darfur is largely forgotten in the public conscience.
So you know what? Who gives a damn about how Damon Winter’s photos were created – what matters is the fact that photojournalism, in its “purest” form (as in Steidle’s photos, that critics of Winter would argue in favor of) may have lost the ability to move us as humans, or our government, into tangible action to do the right thing – perhaps again as a result of the media overload and instantaneous sharing that’s enabling it all in the first place. Remember the days when photos could make a government do something like set aside HUGE tracts of land for public preservation, for the good of the people? Nope, we don’t remember.
Arguably, Winter’s photos are that much MORE effective, because how many other times do you see people steaming over photos from Afghanistan? What difference does the method make if the intended outcome is no longer possible, if photos just fill another few column inches? That’s what we should be crying about.
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Here’s another link to Damon Winter’s original photographs, and also his subsequent statement in defense of his photos. Also, the post wouldn’t be complete without a link to Save Darfur. Click, read, share, and make a change.
