Robert Farber: I’m here in New York City with a great photographer, Eddie Adams. I first became familiar as many millions and millions of people did by Pulitzer Prize winning photograph that was taken in Vietnam of the Vietnamese Colonel executing a prisoner. That’s when I first started–how long did your career start before that?

Eddie Adams: That’s a very good question. I’m one of those people that started taking pictures at the age of about 12. So up until the time that picture was taken I thought I wasn’t a bad photographer, and probably what that picture did is brought more attention to my other pictures than anything else.

Robert Farber: When that photograph was taken, who were you on assignment for and how far into your career, how old were you at that time?

Eddie Adams: I think I was in my late 20s actually. That was in 1968.

Robert Farber: Who was the magazine?

Eddie Adams: No, actually I was working on staff with the Associated Press based in Vietnam.

Robert Farber: How did that image come about? What preceded that moment?

Eddie Adams: Basically what happened is the Associated Press office and NBC were right next to each other in an old German embassy building in Saigon. We used to tip each other off if we’d hear about something happening or a little battle. An NBC film crew and myself went to an area of… which is a Chinese section of Saigon – there was a small battle taking place between the South Vietnamese and Vietcong guerillas right in Saigon. And we went there and found that there was not really much to do, so we spent a few minutes there and started walking back towards our cars. We’re just snipers, more or less, which doesn’t make good pictures. We head back towards the car, and we saw them pull a guy out of a building. We followed the guy, the police grabbed him, and we walked up to the corner and out of nowhere to my left – I was about five feet away – this guy, we didn’t know who he was, reached for his pistol and I thought he was going to threaten a prisoner. I had a 35 mm lens on the camera and it was a full frame. He reached for his pistol, and as he reached for his pistol I took the picture. It turns out that was the instant he pulled the trigger, and the U.S. Army asked for the photograph, they got a hold of his pistol, figured out the speed of the bullet, the shutter speed was like 500th of a second. And they said, according the U.S. Army, was that the bullet had not left the Vietcong Lieutant’s head when the picture was taken.

Robert Farber: Amazing story. Such a powerful image. And when that happened, what went through your mind at that point?

Eddie Adams: Absolutely nothing. Because there was one man killing another man, but that’s what war’s about, and so…it’s good guys and bad guys. That’s basically what war is all about.

Robert Farber: So with this photograph, was it a help to your career?

Eddie Adams: I think, more than anything else, believe it or not I think it hurt me because what happens, you know as a photographer, we’re all labeled for certain things like an actor for a television series–we’ll take for example, Robin Williams. Robin Williams was a comedian and it took him a long time to break out of that mold, and now all of a sudden he’s a serious actor. I mean, he was pretty good then, but nobody took him serious because he was a comedian. And I think he’s got an Academy Award, and that’s terrific. I’m just using that as an example, and the same holds true for photographers. Maybe the picture of the General executing the Vietcong Lieutenant drew a lot of attention to me, but it also labelled me as a war photographer.

Robert Farber: So that labelling and that pigeon holing of a photographer and their style and their career and everything else–I understand what you’re saying.

Eddie Adams: Well basically, what I said what happens is that when you’re labeled like that nobody’s going to call unless they got a war. So, you know, go take pictures of another war. Well, just a little background, the Gulf War was probably my 13th war. The biggest problem is magazines don’t run war pictures every day. So I was fighting this battle to get away from the war. I’ve done a lot of essays, and the past 15 years I guess, a lot of celebrities.

Robert Farber: What’s your favorite type of assignment? Celebrities, essays…?

Eddie Adams: There isn’t any favorite type. I enjoy everything. And this, I think photojournalist is a very bad name. It wasn’t that many years ago that the word photojournalist was created. The only reason it was created, as a photographers were always second class citizens on a newspaper or on a magazine. It was the word people, the writers that were the stars, the photographers were never really stars, even at LIFE magazine, when you come right down to it. For lack of a better word, the word photojournalist because the photographers were aways called, from a reporter, “my photographer,” and so they came up with photojournalist. I think photojournalist is a very bad word, because if you’re a good photographer, you’re a good photographer, whether you’re taking a picture of a war, a still life, a model…fashion. You’re either good or your bad, and I don’t like this division of someone who is a portrait photographer, an art photographer. Maybe that’s that a photojournalist is, because he has to do a little bit of everything. You have to accept new challenges, and I did some stuff for Penthouse. I’ve done a little bit of everything. The main reason I did it is I have to tell people that I’m not a bad photographer, just give me the assignment, we’ll produce it, and you’ll be happy. And so I think this is what it’s all about because it’s full of challenges.

Robert Farber: Which assignments made you happy? More than others…

Eddie Adams: It’s really true. That’s my problem, I don’t know. I really enjoy everything. One thing I’ll tell you honestly, I say one thing I don’t like–I don’t think I have the personality or anything to do still-lifes. Basically, other than that, as long as people are involved, see because you have to remember they have architectural photography, but I think the picture of a beautiful building but…somebody made that building. That’s the person who created the picture, not the photographer, the person who made that building. And then you have the light from the sun…God created that light, not the photographer, but the photographer went there and just took a snap of it, and all of a sudden he’s an architectural photographer.

Robert Farber: But unless a photographer really composed it in a way that no one else sees it…

Eddie Adams: Yes, but also one other thing, I think that picture, even of a building, is not that great unless a person was in it. I like to take pictures of ladies, and I think I’m pretty good. I’d really like to be Robert Farber:, Jeff Dunas and Doug Kirkwood because I think you guys have really cool assignments, and I think I can stand up against all three of you.

Robert Farber: Let’s have a shootout. But you know what I really wanted to say–the grass is always greener and I see some of your images of the Pope and Fidel Castro and I say those are important images, and this makes me say I want to be Eddie Adams.

Eddie Adams: You know, but I think that’s true almost in anything. We always want to be somebody else. I never wanted to be me. Okay, let me tell you an interesting story: it was a few years ago, there was a guy when I was a really young guy that I always admired as a photographer, and I’ve always respected him. We finally met, and we’re actually pretty close to the same age, but he was always one of my big heroes, Pete Turner, and when I finally met him, I says “You know, I’ve always wanted to meet you,” and he turns to me and says, “I always wanted to meet you. I’ve always admired your work.”

Robert Farber: The internet workshop has many people doing portraits, nudes, still-lives, landscapes, but we have photojournalists, and the people that are photojournalists–I don’t want to use that term because I know what we’ve gone through with it–for those out there who have career interests in going into this–can you tell us something about the Eddie Adams workshop?

Eddie Adams: The workshop is–a lot of people don’t know–this is actually our 12th years coming–and it’s free. It doesn’t cost a penny–I mean for the students;we have sponsors who take care of that. But the workshop, in order to apply, you have to be either–we don’t care if you’re 98 years old, if you’re going to change your career and prove to us that you are a student at a university, you’re eligible. And same with a working professional, with only two years or less of experience. You apply, and you join about 1,000 people who apply every year from all over the world. We select 100, and it’s a 4-day intensive course.

Robert Farber: From what period of time during the season?

Eddie Adams: It actually takes place during Columbus Day weekend every year.

Robert Farber: How can they apply? Do you have an address on the internet that they can look at? Or what do you suggest?

Eddie Adams: Yes we do. The workshop is sponsored by Nikon. The best way to get in touch with us at the workshop is…

Robert Farber: Email you I believe, I think that’s the way I always get in touch with you too. And it’s at eaworkshop@aol.com. Just to change face a little bit, I’ve seen some of the spectacular and dramatic portraits you’ve done of such great leaders and so forth–let me ask you, what are some of the favorite portraits you’ve done or who you’ve worked with.

Eddie Adams: Probably my favorite was done several years–it was of Fidel Castro. I had spent a few days with him, and also went duck hunting with him.

Robert Farber: And I saw the photographs of you duck hunting with him with like 400 ducks sitting in front of you. Did you use a machine gun or…

Eddie Adams: Actually, he’s a pretty good guy. The interesting thing about Castro that a lot of people don’t know that he speaks perfect English. He had gone to Columbia University which a lot of people don’t realize, it was a long time ago. He’s a real likable, funny, funny guy with a great sense of humor.

Robert Farber: So you’ve had a lot of experience and time with Castro it sounds like.

Eddie Adams: Well, I just thought a lot of him, you know, he’s a dictator, so what–he’s a pretty cool guy. But when I was with him actually we went duck hunting and he killed 76 ducks in three hours. He only missed one, he was really upset. But what happened at the very end, we had duck for dinner actually, and during dinner he asked me in perfect English, he said (this is taken during the Reagan administration) and he leaned over to me and he said, “Did you ever deal with President Reagan?” and I said, “Well, once in awhile.” He’s shaking his head, he said, “Well, does he have a sense of humor?” And I said, “WEll, I think so.” He started stroking his beard, and he said very serious, “The next time you see him, will you please tell him that I really do respect him.” Then he leaned back, starts stroking his beard some more, and then he said, “For having a sense of humor,” and bust out laughing again. But anyway, it was fun working with him.

Robert Farber: Any other stories of great people that you could share with us?

Eddie Adams: One of the other people, just a couple years ago, I had some time with the Pope at the Vatican. It was private session, I was told that I was one of the second photographers to have private time, so I was kind of excited. A little nervous too. And what happened is, the monsignor who handles all the press people gave me 35 minutes with him. I don’t know many other Popes, but with somebody with such high stature, you usually get like 15 minutes, it’s a big deal. So I said, “Wow, 35 minutes.” He said, “No, no no, you misunderstood me, you have 5 minutes with him.” And this is after waiting in a hotel room for a week in order to do this, and it turned out to be 5 minutes. We got less than one roll of film, and at that time I think I shot him on 120, so it’s like less than 12 frames, and half of them were a little screwed up because the writer was there and I had all my lights set up and I was shooting very slow to mix daylight with strobe, and as soon as the writer would ask him a question he would turn his head, so I”d have a nice blur. So we had like half of a half of a roll of pictures of the Pope.

Robert Farber: That leads into me asking some questions for our students who want to find out–first of all, do you shoot with negative film or transparency film when you shooting in color.

Eddie Adams: I use almost all transparency film only because I don’t know how to shoot negative color. I haven’t done it. So the only time I use negative color is if I’m doing point and shoot or just play pictures, but I hear negative color is very good.

Robert Farber: So you don’t use your disposable camera any more?

Eddie Adams: Well…if you’re really unsure, then use that, and I’m sure you’ll get a good picture out of it.

Robert Farber: As far as you book projects, what’s going on with it now?

Eddie Adams: I have actually two books that started, but I’ve never done a book in my life because there’s never enough time. And I hate these people who do these books because they want their past.

Robert Farber: You’re doing pictures of the future…

Eddie Adams: Right. But anyway, I’m working on two books. One is black and white portrait book on human rights leaders all over the world. A lot of them are being done in New York and Washington, but we will start on the road to South Africa and India and various countries to do the black and white portraits and Random House is publishing that and it’s done with Carrie Kennedy Cuomo who’s in charge of Robert Kennedy Human Rights Award every year. She’s doing the interviews and I’m doing the pictures. That’s one of them. The other book we’re just starting to repair is done with Pierre Matisse who is the grandson of Matisse the painter. We are recreating, honoring Matisse’s paintings in photographs. And we’re starting on the project as soon as we get settled with my new place.

Robert Farber: You’ve mentioned about your place, your studio. I must tell you that last week for the first time I walked into the studio, and I’d never seen such a spectacular photograhic space, or for that matter, structure for sound stage that I’ve ever seen. It really is. I mean I’m excited about it. Tell me something about where we are…

Eddie Adams: Thank you. This is a, it’s sort of live/work situation and it takes place in an old New York City public bathhouse which was built in 1904, and the city of New York, that was when there wasn’t a lot of plumbing in the neighborhood, and immigrants would come here, so the city of New York would give everybody a free bath. It was used as a warehouse when I bought it, it was a gutted building, and for the past few years actually, we’ve been doing some work with major construction started little over a year ago, and we’re just about complete. It’s decorated, everything, and all the pieces, some of the architectural pieces come from old movie theatres, 90 years old, one chandelier is from a 42nd street movie theater, it was just torn down for Disney. Light is from a movie theater in LA, doors from a bank in 1870, we tried to build in some artifacts. But basically what it is– after we’re building all this it seems we might have to rent out some space here to pay for it, but it’s just 11,500 sq ft.

Robert Farber: You are making it available as rental sometimes.

Eddie Adams: Well, we’re just going to be particular who we let in here.

Robert Farber: Can I try to shoot something here?

Eddie Adams: We’re thinking about it.

Robert Farber: I must tell you that with all of these different elements you’re mentioning, the overall architecture from the original outside looks like the J.P. Morgan library on the outside, and then when you walk in the architecture and the design elements are really incredible. I’m excited by it. I wish it was mine.

Eddie Adams: It’s pretty cool.

Robert Farber: Let me get to a couple of questions some of our members would really like to find out from you. First of all, when you’re about to shoot a subject, do you try, if you can of course, do you try to spend time with them before you’re shooting?

Eddie Adams: That would be ideal to spend time because I think if you do spend time with a person–and you’ll notice most people’s, their best pictures are generally their family because they catch them a little bit off guard or their unaware of the camera.

Robert Farber: Not according to my family.

Eddie Adams: But the ideal situation is to be invisible. If you were invisible, and you had a film built in the back of your head or little disk from a digital camera, you could take great pictures. Because everybody wants to be look good in a photograph, and they prepare themselves for you and when you get them, they have a different suit on or a different dress, because they want to look good and it’s forced. It’s a very terrible terrible thing. But if you can spend some time with them, get them relaxed ahead of time, it’s always better.

Robert Farber: What advice would you give to someone starting out in photography from your point of view?

Eddie Adams: I’m not one to give up negative advice like a lot of picture editors do. I think that there’s a lot of room, for anyone who’s really serious about this and who first of all to be successful in anything–and in photography it’s gonna hurt. You’re gonna cry, you’re gonna have your heart ripped out, but just don’t give up. If you have the will and the time and are really serious about this, the most important thing is you have to want it bad enough. If you want it bad enough, you’ll get good, and get to where you want to go.

Robert Farber: Well, I want to thank you for the time and the images that you shared with us over the years. It’s really great to be able to sit down and talk to you. Is there any other…

Eddie Adams: There’s just one other thing: if you’re beautiful and your pictures aren’t that good, don’t give up. Send us a headshot of yourself, and there is a possibility–we’re looking for models for the Matisse book, so send us a picture, so don’t give up hope.

Robert Farber: Hey, who said you could find models through our interview here?

Eddie Adams: How do you get yours?

Robert Farber: Well, you’ll have to join my workshop to find out. Thanks Eddie.

Eddie Adams photographed 13 wars, including Vietnam. He won a Pulitzer Prize for his 1968 photograph of Gen. Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing a Viet Cong prisoner in Saigon. The prisoner had just murdered eight South Vietnamese. The photograph turned some Americans against the war and haunted Loan for the rest of his life. Eddie Adams died in September, 2004.

(All images © copyright the photographer and/or publisher)

Eddie Adams, Saigon Execution, Vietnam, 1968

A Little History of Photography Criticism; or, Why Do Photography Critics Hate Photography?

(An excerpt from The Cruel Radiance, Photography and Political Violence)

By Susie Linfield

In 1846, Charles Baudelaire wrote a short essay called “What Is the Good of Criticism?” This is something that virtually every critic asks herself at some point, and that many have had trouble answering; it has been known to evoke hopelessness, despair, even self-loathing. Baudelaire didn’t think that criticism would save the world, but he didn’t think it was a worthless pursuit, either. For Baudelaire, criticism was the synthesis of thought and feeling: in criticism, he wrote, “passion… raises reason to new heights,” and he urged his fellow critics to eschew antiseptic writing that “deliberately rids itself of any trace of feeling.” A few years later he returned to the subject, explaining that through criticism he sought “to transform my pleasure into knowledge”: a pithy, excellent description of what criticism should be. Baudelaire’s American contemporary, Margaret Fuller, held similar views: she urged her colleagues to reject dogma—“external consistency,” she called it—in favor of “genuine emotion.” The critic, she wrote, should create an I-thou relationship between herself and her readers and guide them “to love wisely what we before loved well.”

By “pleasure” and “love” Baudelaire and Fuller didn’t mean that critics should write only about things that make them happy or that they can praise. What they meant is that the critic’s emotional connection to an artist, or to a work of art, or to a genre, is the sine qua non, the ground zero, of criticism. Who can doubt that Edmund Wilson loved literature—and that, to him, it simply mattered more than most other things in life? Who can doubt that Pauline Kael found the world most challenging, most meaningful, most vivid when she sat in a dark movie theater, or that Kenneth Tynan felt the same way at a play? This same sort of intuitive connection was at the heart of James Agee’s approach to writing about the movies. Introducing himself to the readers of the Nation in 1942, he wrote that he had been lovingly immersed in movies since childhood and yet—just like his readers—was “an amateur” who knew little about them; he must, therefore, “simultaneously recognize my own ignorance and feel no apology for what my eyes tell me as I watch any given screen.” A similar emotional affinity led a young woman named Arlene Croce, who knew nothing about dance, to begin writing criticism after a life-changing evening at the New York City Ballet in 1957; that performance, she said, “made an addict out of me.” Croce, who developed an uncannily astute understanding of Balanchine’s modernism, would go on to become the best dance critic of the twentieth century. “All I can tell you is, dance is the thing that hit me the hardest,” she explained.

Eugene Richards, from Cocaine True, Cocaine Blue, 2004

For these critics and others—those I would consider at the center of the modern tradition—cultivating this sense of lived experience was at the heart of writing good criticism. Their starting point was, always, their subjective, immediate experience, which meant that they had to be honest with themselves. Randall Jarrell wrote that “criticism demands of the critic a terrible nakedness… All he has to go by, finally, is his own response, the self that makes and is made up of such responses.” Alfred Kazin agreed; the critic’s skill, he argued, “begins by noticing his intuitive reactions and building up from them; he responds to the matter in hand with perception at the pitch of passion.” For such critics, emotional reactions and critical faculties weren’t synonomous, but they weren’t opposites, either. These critics sought, and achieved, a fertile dialectic between ideas and emotions: they were able to think and feel at the same time, or at least within the same essay.

The great exception to this approach is photography criticism. There, you will hear precious little talk of love, or terrible nakedness, or passion’s pitch. There, critics view emotional responses—if they have any—not as something to be experienced and understood but, rather, as an enemy to be vigilantly guarded against. For these writers, criticism is a prophylactic against the virus of sentiment, and pleasure is denounced as self-indulgent. They approach photography—not particular photographs, or particular photographers, or particular genres, but photography itself—with suspicion, mistrust, anger, and fear. Rather than enter into what Kazin called a “community of interest” with their chosen subject, these critics come armed to the teeth against it. For them, photography is a powerful, duplicitous force to defang rather than an experience to embrace and engage. It’s hard to resist the thought that a very large number of photography critics—including the most influential ones—don’t really like photographs, or the act of looking at them, at all.

Susan Sontag’s On Photography was published in 1977, though the individual essays that comprise the book began appearing, and making an impact, in 1973. The book remains astonishingly incisive, and has been immensely influential on the thinking of other photography critics—and immensely influential, too, in setting a certain tone of photography criticism. Look, for instance, at Sontag’s description of photography in the book’s first chapter, which establishes a voice, an attitude, and an approach, all of which she maintains throughout. Sontag describes photography as “grandiose,” “treacherous,” “imperial,” “voyeuristic,” “predatory,” “addictive,” and “reductive.” Photographs, we learn, simultaneously embody “seductiveness” and “didacticism,” “passivity” and “aggression.” Sontag’s coolness is unfaltering, as is her unfriendliness: photographs are described as “a sublimated murder—a soft murder” and as “the most irresistible form of mental pollution.” A typical Sontag sentence reads, “The camera doesn’t rape, or even possess, though it may presume, intrude, trespass, distort, exploit, and, at the farthest reach of metaphor, assassinate—all activities that, unlike the sexual push and shove, can be conducted from a distance, and with some detachment.” Metaphor indeed!

Antonin Kratochvil, from Zambia

Three years later came Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida. This book, delicate and playful, is a love letter to the photograph (and to Barthes’s dead mother). Barthes celebrates the quirky, spontaneous reactions that photographs can inspire—or at least the quirky, spontaneous reactions they inspire in him: “A photograph’s punctum is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me).” Still, Camera Lucida is a very odd valentine, and it shares an intellectual approach, if not a literary style, with Sontag. Barthes describes photographers as “agents of Death” and the photograph as “flat,” “platitudinous,” “stupid,” “without culture,” a “catastrophe,” and—the cruelest cut—“undialectical.” The photograph “teaches me nothing,” Barthes insists, for it “completely de-realizes the human world of conflicts and desires.”

Continuing this tradition of photography criticism is John Berger, the most morally cogent and emotionally perceptive critic that photography has produced. “My first interest in photography was passionate,” Berger has written; and when you read his work, you know this is so. (As a young man, Berger dreamed of composing a book of love poems illustrated with photographs.) Berger has frequently included photographs in his books. More important, he has argued that photographs represent an “opposition to history” by which ordinary people affirm the subjective experiences that modernity, science, and industrial capitalism have done so much to crush: “And so, hundreds of millions of photographs, fragile images, often carried next to the heart or placed by the side of the bed, are used to refer to that which historical time has no right to destroy.” Like Sontag, Berger is acutely aware of the central place that photography occupies in modern life; unlike Sontag, he respects the prosaic yet meaningful ways in which people throughout the world use photographs.

Yet in Berger’s canonical essays he, too, took a decidedly dark view of photography, and he was especially critical of photographs that document political violence. Such images, he insisted, were at best useless and at worst narcissistic, leading the viewer to a sense of self-conscious helplessness rather than to enlightenment, outrage, or action. Thinking about photographs by Don McCullin of the then-ongoing Vietnam War, Berger observed that “McCullin’s most typical photographs record sudden moments of agony—a terror, a wounding, a death, a cry of grief.” He continued:

These moments are in reality utterly discontinuous with normal time.… But the reader who has been arrested by the photograph may tend to feel this discontinuity as his own personal moral inadequacy. And as soon as this happens even his sense of shock is dispersed: his own moral inadequacy may now shock him as much as the crimes being committed in the war.… The issue of the war which has caused that moment is effectively depoliticised.

More generally, drawing on a metaphor clearly derived from the atomic bomb, Berger described the photograph—all photographs—as a “fission whereby appearances are separated by the camera from their function.” Yet the particular instance of the Vietnam War that Berger cited undermines rather than supports his thesis. Photographs of that conflict—such as the one taken by Eddie Adams of a streetside execution or by Nick Ut of a naked, napalmed girl—didn’t foster feelings of moral inadequacy. (Neither did McCullin’s.) On the contrary, they mobilized political opposition to the war.

Gilles Peress, As the shooting stops on Bloody Sunday, Bernard McGuigan lies in a pool of blood. Derry, Northern Ireland, January 30, 1972

Barthes, too, held no brief for photographs of violence. Writing about an exhibit of “Shock-Photos” in Paris, Barthes argued that “most of the photographs exhibited to shock us have no effect at all.” Such images are too finished, too complete—“overconstructed” is Barthes’s word. As such, they deprive us of our freedom of response: “We are in each case dispossessed of our judgment: someone has shuddered for us, reflected for us, judged for us; the photographer has left us nothing.” (Walter Benjamin, as we’ll see, also feared that photography impairs independent judgment.)

Sontag’s objections went further. Because photographs present us with scenes of catastrophe but can do nothing to explain their histories or causes, she was highly skeptical of the photograph’s ability to be either politically or ethically potent; photographs, she argued, present archetypical abstractions, whereas “moral feelings are embedded in history, whose personae are concrete, whose situations are always specific.” And she insisted—an insistence that has now become the conventional wisdom—that the cumulative effect of such photographs is to create a society of moral dullards: “The shock of photographed atrocities wears off with repeated viewings… In these last decades, ‘concerned’ photography has done at least as much to deaden conscience as to arouse it.”

Starting in the mid-1970s, the postmodern and poststructuralist children of Sontag, Berger, and Barthes transformed their predecessors’ skepticism about the photograph into outright venom; in an influential essay written in 1981, for instance, Allan Sekula decried photography as “primitive, infantile, aggressive.” Indeed, for the postmoderns, a relentless hostility to modernist photography—and to any belief in the photographer’s authenticity, creativity, or unique subjectivity—was an ethical stance, though I see it as more of a pathological one. At the same time, the postmoderns were attracted to photography precisely because they saw the medium—with its infinite capacity for mechanical reproduction—as the worm in the modernist apple. In assaulting photography, the postmoderns hoped to undermine modernist “claims to originality, showing those claims for the fiction they are,” as Douglas Crimp wrote; the aim, he continued, was “to use the apparent veracity of photography against itself” and to expose “the supposed autonomous and unitary self” as “nothing other than a discontinuous series of representations, copies, fakes.”

These critics weren’t really alive to photographs per se, much less to the world they reveal; what attracted them to photography—especially the postmodern photography of appropriation—was, as Rosalind Krauss wrote, “photography’s travesty of the ideas of originality, or subjective expressiveness, or formal singularity,” its ability to “undermine the very distinction between original and copy,” and its “refusal to understand the artist as a source of originality.” The assault on photography was, in short, a servant to the larger postmodern “project of deconstruction in which art is distanced and separated from itself.” To attack photography, especially high-modern and documentary photography, was to storm the bastions of modernism itself.

In the view of the postmoderns, one of photography’s original sins was its supposedly supine relationship to capitalism. In particular, photography’s admittedly maddening (and obviously false) claims to objective truths—truths divorced from class and culture—made it a particularly dangerous ideological tool that could hinder critical thinking about the prevailing class system. The postmodern refusal of the fiction of objectivity—and of its close cousin, neutrality—was a genuine intellectual accomplishment.

James Nachtwey, Nachtwey pleads for a man’s life and photographs his last moments.

But whereas Sontag had written that advanced industrial capitalism requires a ceaseless production of images, the critics who followed her were far more reductive. For the postmoderns, photographs were not just an integral part of capitalism but its obedient slave. Abigail Solomon-Godeau, for instance, charged that the documentary photograph commits a “double act of subjugation” in which the hapless subject is victimized first by oppressive social forces, then by the “regime of the image.” John Tagg went further, describing photography as “ultimately a function of the state” that is deeply implicated in the ruling class’s “apparatus of ideological control” and its “reproduction of… submissive labour power”; he added, in a particularly inapt metaphor, that photography is a “mode of production… consuming the world of sight as its raw material.” Martha Rosler proclaimed that “imperialism breeds an imperialist sensibility in all phases of cultural life”; and photographs, it turned out, were the most imperialist of all.

Photographers are usually drawn to, and excited by, the new. In contrast, a deep sense of fatigue permeated postmodern photography and the criticism that praised it. In 1986, the critic Andy Grundberg observed that postmodern photography “implies the exhaustion of the image universe: it suggests that a photographer can find more than enough images already existing in the world without the bother of making new ones.” Fredric Jameson described this enervated worldview:

In a world in which stylistic innovation is no longer possible, all that is left is to imitate dead styles… Contemporary or postmodernist art… will involve the necessary failure of art and the aesthetic, the failure of the new, the imprisonment in the past.

Postmodern criticism and photography became notable for embodying, indeed celebrating, this sense of weary repetition; as the artist Richard Prince wrote, the way to make it new was to “make it again.”

The postmoderns declared war on the formalism of high-modernist critics like John Szarkowski who, they charged, isolated photography from its social and political context. (They reviled Szarkowski as a cold mandarin, yet failed to notice that he wrote about photographs with more empathy and insight than they.) But they were equally hostile to documentary photography that rooted itself in the social and political. Sneering at liberal, socially conscious photojournalists who clung to old-fashioned ideas such as progress and truth became common, if not mandatory; Rosler, for instance, charged that the “liberal documentary assuages any stirrings of conscience in its viewers the way scratching relieves an itch.… Documentary is a little like horror movies, putting a face on fear and transforming threat into fantasy.” Similarly, Sekula assailed the photographer Paul Strand’s belief in “human values,” “social ideals,” “decency,” and “truth” as “the enemy”—a statement that, I admit, I have always found shocking.

The depiction of powerless, vulnerable people is a fraught enterprise that can easily veer into condescension. But from these critics it evoked a tsunami of too-easy scorn. Carol Squiers dismissed photojournalism’s depictions of suffering as the “tableaux of profound abjection.” Rosler, in a rising tide of fury against social documentarians, castigated images of “pathetic, helpless, dispirited victimhood,” “victims-turned-freaks,” “the marginal and pathetic”—enough! She went on to describe contemporary photojournalism as “the petted darling of the monied, a shiver-provoking, slyly decadent, lip-smacking appreciation of alien vitality.” There are, I suppose, some documentary photographs that fit this description; but it’s odd that Rosler and her colleagues ignored the challenging work then being done by, among others, Gilles Peress and Abbas (in Iran), Susan Meiselas (in Nicaragua), David Goldblatt (in South Africa), Eugene Richards (in the U.S.), and Don McCullin (everywhere). One could react in various ways to their difficult, unsettling photographs, but it is doubtful that their images relieved any itches or provoked a proliferation of smacked lips.

Don McCullin, Untitled [Vietnam], 1968

It is no accident that many of the postmodern critics were women: the fear of sentimentality is particularly potent for female intellectuals, especially those who address a primarily leftwing audience and who write about popular rather than high culture. (Pauline Kael was an invigorating exception: she could write about movies with girlish enthusiasm without losing her edge or seeming too girlish.) Along with this anxiety—this fear of frivolity—comes the mistaken idea that chronic negativity equals fearless intelligence. Mary McCarthy, looking back on her days as the theater critic for Partisan Review, addressed the problem:

Aesthetic puritanism… has, like all puritanism, a tendency to hypocrisy—based on a denial of one’s own natural tastes and instincts. I remember how uneasy I felt when I found myself liking Thornton Wilder’s Our Town; I was almost afraid to praise it in the magazine, lest the boys conclude that I was starting to sell out.

Far worse than the postmoderns’ rigid negativity, though, was their utter denial of freedom. They insisted that even a scintilla of autonomy, for either photographer or viewer, was impossible; insisted, that is, that the photographer could never offer, and the viewer could never find, a moment of surprise, originality, or insight when looking at a photograph. To invest a photograph with meaning is always a sad delusion: “The wholeness, coherence, identity, which we attribute to the depicted scene is a projection, a refusal of an impoverished reality in favour of an imaginary plenitude,” Victor Burgin wrote. In the view of these critics, it is impossible to see the world anew, for we are all helpless, brainwashed spiders caught in capitalism’s ideological web, which is spun, apparently, of unbreakable iron. Indeed, Burgin condemned the activity of looking itself—an odd stance, one would think, for a photography critic: “Our conviction that we are free to choose what we make of a photograph hides the complicity to which we are recruited in the very act of looking.” Photography, he claimed, can offer only a grim Sophie’s choice between “narcissistic identification” and “voyeurism.” In short, the postmodern critics viewed photography as a generally nasty business—the photograph is a prison, the act of looking, a crime—which may be why reading their work often feels like trudging through mud.

There are fine contemporary photography critics who have rejected the congenital animus of the postmoderns—I think particularly of Max Kozloff, who began writing regularly in the early 1960s, and of younger critics like Rebecca Solnit, David Levi Strauss, and Geoff Dyer, who have responded to the postmodern critique without succumbing to it. Indeed, it may seem as though the “corrosive, hermeneutic irony about pictures” fostered by postmodernism is no longer in fashion. But if fewer essays like Sekula’s and Rosler’s are written now, it is in part because their ideas have been absorbed and accepted by so many in the academy, the art journals, the museums, and the galleries; as theorist W. J. T. Mitchell has written, “reflexive critical iconoclasm… governs intellectual discourse today.” Thus, in more recent publications, one bumps up against casual phrases like “the now-discredited authenticity once attributed to photography,” as if the question of photography’s truth-value has been tossed without regret into the dustbin of history. Even worse are the ways that these ideas have seeped into the general public, encouraging a careless contempt toward documentary photographs. Since such images are cesspools of manipulation and exploitation: why look? It has become all too easy to avert one’s eyes; indeed, to do so is considered a virtue.

It is interesting to compare all this—the postmoderns’ obsession with victimization, their refusal of freedom, their congenital crabbiness—to the opening pages of Pauline Kael’s essay “Trash, Art, and the Movies,” written in 1969. Kael, too, set a certain tone, both for her readers and other critics. Here it is:

A good movie can take you out of your dull funk and the hopelessness that so often goes with slipping into a theatre; a good movie can make you feel alive again… make you care, make you believe in possibilities again.… The movie doesn’t have to be great; it can be stupid and empty and you can still have the joy of a good performance, or the joy in just a good line. An actor’s scowl, a small subversive gesture, a dirty remark that someone tosses off with a mock-innocent face, and the world makes a little bit of sense.

If On Photography was written by a brilliant skeptic, “Trash, Art, and the Movies” is the work of a smitten lover. And what Kael showed is that the lover can see just as clearly, and be just as smart, as the skeptic.

Kael had two great insights in “Trash, Art, and the Movies.” One was that trash, far from contaminating judgment, can help the viewer develop an autonomous aesthetic that will lead her to art. Second, she argued that the only truly capacious, truly mature way to experience movies is to combine our deepest emotional reactions, which should never be disowned, with a probing analysis of them. She did not, as some have mistakenly thought, champion unadulterated emotion or unexamined fandom; on the contrary, she insisted that the viewer who approaches movies in such unthinking ways “does not respond more freely but less freely and less fully than the person… who uses all his senses in reacting, not just his emotional vulnerabilities.” Kael urged her readers to reclaim their emotions as a key part of their aesthetic, intellectual, and moral lives: feeling could enhance rather than undermine critical thinking.

Yet this, after all, is the same insight that Baudelaire had when he wrote of seeking “the why of his pleasure”; it was the view of Randall Jarrell when he explained that the good critic combines the “sense of fact” with the “personal truth”; it was what Alfred Kazin meant when he claimed that “the unity of thinking and feeling actually exists in the passionate operation of the critic’s intelligence.” This quest for the synthesis of thought and feeling—and the essentially comradely, or at least open, approach to art that it suggests—was the central project for generations of critics, especially American critics in the twentieth century. Yet it is just this project that photography critics reject. The question is: why?

The Cruel Radiance.
Photography and Political Violence.
By Susie Linfield.
University Of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2010. 344 pp., 20 halftone illustrations, 6×9″.

Copyright notice: Excerpted from pages 1–15 of The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence by Susie Linfield, published by the University of Chicago Press. ©2010 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of U.S. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that this entire notice, including copyright information, is carried and provided that the University of Chicago Press is notified and no fee is charged for access. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the University of Chicago Press. (Footnotes and other references included in the book may have been removed from this online version of the text.)

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