The Last Page
Linfield, Susie
WHEN I HEAR professional critics, or my students, bemoan the commodification of art, a wave of irritation engulfs me. Yes, yes, I think, we live in a capitalist society where art, like other...
...his eyes are wide with alarm and horror...
...What does it mean to have the political atrocities of our time hanging on the wall of a home or business or institution...
...Who can afford good taste when it comes to barbarism...
...Is this a way to keep the world's suffering close at hand—or to tame it...
...Yes, yes, I think, we live in a capitalist society where art, like other things, is bought and sold...
...One is James Nachtwey's portrait of a Rwandan man, in profile, whose face and skull were intricately, horribly carved up with machetes during the 1994 genocide...
...Reproduced in newspapers and popular magazines, photographs thrive not just in the marketplace of ideas but also in the real, grubby one...
...The buying of such images intrigues me...
...Both had been sold...
...In the days since seeing these shows I have tried, without success, to imagine the purchasers of these photographs, and their motives...
...Yet it was not the power of the photographs that struck me, but their presentation...
...Walking into the gallery, I was met—assaulted, really—by huge color blowups of two iconic photos...
...Of course, one could argue that such photos should be glaring and massive, as are the outrages they depict: Why not confront the viewer aggressively rather than tiptoe around her sensitivities...
...the soldier gracefully holds a cigarette in his left hand...
...Yet here, too, I couldn't help noticing a set of five photographs that had been put on hold, indicating a potential buyer...
...My intuitions on this matter were shaken, however, by a winter show of work, held in New York at Hasted Hunt, by the photo collective VII...
...They were taken in Cambodia, in 1973, by the acclaimed British photographer Philip Jones Griffiths...
...These images, all black and white, were presented in a more restrained, indeed classical, way: approximately the size of a piece of copy paper, they were matted in creamy white and framed in simple black...
...No, it was not the makers of these photos but their potential buyers whom I couldn't help wondering about...
...First, the color saturation of the photos (Haviv's original image was shot in color, but Nachtwey's has usually been printed in black and white), combined with their size, made them look garish, almost boastful—akin, I thought, to billboards...
...I've tried to envision, too, the places where they might hang the hacked-up Rwandan, the unbearably light Serb soldier, and the Cambodian corpses...
...This is especially true of documentary photographs, which, almost from their inception, offered information to the masses and were never intended as pure art...
...This group represents photojournalists producing some of the most gutsy, powerful, disturbing work being seen today...
...What about all this was so strange and uncomfortable...
...It would be misplaced moralism to object to the sale of such images...
...Yet the ambitious scale of these photos, along with their vibrant colors, made me suspect they were trying to flee from their essence as presumably expendable news images and become closer to art photographs or paintings: attempting, that is, to be "real" art rather than "mere" documents...
...Four of them are titled "Dead Khmer Rouge Soldiers," and they show just that: graphically so...
...I felt the same curiosity a month later, at a show of vintage Magnum photographs at Chelsea's Steven Kasher Gallery...
...The other is Ron Haviv's image, taken during the Bosnian War, of a young Serb soldier kicking a middle-aged Muslim woman who has just been shot...
...Each photograph measured more than three feet across and was for sale at the comparatively modest sum of several thousand dollars...
...why shouldn't photographers, especially those as highly skilled and committed as Haviv and Nachtwey, make a living, and a good one...
Vol. 53 • April 2006 • No. 2
