Dennis Dunleavy

Making Connections with Pictures: Are traumatic events embedded in the collective conscious?

An abandoned boy sniffs glue near the central cathedral in San Salvador, El Salvador (1993).

Pictures help make sense of the past while we live in the present.

When we recall an image that conveys meaning for us, the picture will often hold a certain power over how we think and act in the world. In other words, pictures help shape or construct what we know of as reality.

It has been argued that memory is actually a form of energy. Asha Clinton (2006) in a journal article concerning transpersonal psychotherapy   suggests "The memories, cognitions, emotions, sensations, and intuitions human beings experience are themselves composed of energy."

Many of this nation's iconic imagery, from the 20th century at least, such as the flag raising on Iwo Jima, Nick Ut's picture of a young girl fleeing the bombing of her village in Vietnam, or the shooting of college students at Kent State University by National Guard troops, are images that signify traumatic events in society. These are pictures in which symbolic meaning extends beyond the actual occurrence.  If we consider the number of prizes given to pictures displaying trauma and conflict each year in professional photojournalism competitions, we may begin to realize just how insatiable our appetite is for the sensational. This is not a criticism of the value of providing people with quality on-the-spot reportage of significant events. Instead, the point here is that our culture has become numb to the suffering these images represent. In our collective conscious every image we see in today's press is compared with other images representing similar events -- war, famine, natural disasters. We are a culture continuously awash in images of violence and devastation.   

Recalling such images may rekindle for some negative feelings, while for others, pictures may hold little or no significance. Do pictures influence how we interpret and remember our world from one generation to the next?

Pictures can evoke difficult emotions and give rise to negative beliefs and fantasies. Pictures can also bring about healing. Pictures can rebuke or challenge prevailing negative attitudes as well as reinforce them. 

In this way, the power of the image is undeniable. We live with our past, because we are constantly reminded of it  through the images we care to remember.

Collecting Dust and Memories

Young boys play soccer in the shadow of the Guzapa volcano in the countryside of El Salvador (1991).

Every once in a while it is important to take stock of the histories we share. The photograph marks time in our collective memories as we remember a place or moment. 

Looking over the dozen or so binders filled with negatives and slides from another time in my life reminds me of how fleeting our existence here really is.  Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, I documented peoples and communities from Central America displaced by civil conflict. Now, this history seems so distant and remote.

Motivated by a commitment to capture what I believed were the day-to-day struggles for dignity and integrity of the poor, it has been hard to put the past behind.

Our focus today turns elsewhere. That's the way we are -- turning from one crisis to another. Today's Darfur or Bagdad is yesterday's Managua or El Salvador. Sometimes I wonder at how images influence the human capacity for compassion, caring and action. Perhaps because we are so inundated with emotionally charged reminders of injustice and deprivation in the world, that we allow ourselves to become anesthetized to the pain and suffering images can represent.

 

 

Seeing and Looking

I am standing on the back deck of our home looking out across the valley. The sky towers over the foothills of the Cascades in Southern Oregon. No matter how many times I look out at this scene each day, I see something new and different.

The light embraces the landscape -- never ending.

As I get older I see this world in new ways. My focus is no longer cast downward toward the earth, but skywards - into the clouds. There is a delicate yet complex relationship between the land and the sky. I have always looked at the earth and the sky as somehow separate -- one heavy and one light -- one cool and one warm -- one down and one up. Know I have begun to realize how coexistence becomes important in how I see the world.

Is there a difference between seeing and looking at something?

Lots of people think semantics is important. In this case it gives us a chance to understand how visual perception can be applied in our daily lives. Bates Lowry in the introduction to his book, "The Visual Experience" notes: "Looking and seeing are as different as babbling and speaking. To look means that our eyes operate only to the extent that they keep us from being hit by a car, assist us in learning the news, or amuse us through television.....Most people only look and do not see."

Frederick Franck in "Zen Seeing/Zen Drawing" argues:

"The glaring contrast between seeing and looking-at the world around us is immense; it is fateful. Everything in our society seems to conspire against our inborn human gift of seeing. We have become addicted to merely looking-at things and beings. The more we regress from seeing to looking at the world -- through the ever-more-perfected machinery of viewfinders, TV tubes, VCRs, microscopes, spectroscopes -- the less we see. The less we see, the more numbed we become to the joy and the pain of being alive, and the further estranged we become from ourselves and all others."

Learning to see means that when we begin to see we start to notice shapes and forms in the world. Architect O'Neil Ford observes that we must learn to compare and analyze the things we see so that we can form opinions about what's good and what's bad. We when learn to see, our brain acts to process visual information based on knowledge gained from prior experiences.

According to Arthur Koestler in his book, The Act of Creation:

"Awareness is a matter of degrees….Conscious and unconscious experiences do not belong to different compartments of the mind; they form a continuous scale of gradations, of degrees of awareness."

At the same time, John Berger contends, “It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it.”

So it is that we can distinguish between merely looking at things and seeing the relationships and contexts in which things become meaningful to us.

Serious summer fun

Sometimes  everything -- all the elements of visual information -- seems to be present or come together in a more complete way. In this case, the intensity of Sophie's expression tells a lot about the child's personality.

What's interesting about working with digital cameras today, in comparison to film cameras, is that we need no longer concern ourselves with burning bricks of film. With digital we make dozens of pictures of Sophie getting her face painted and worry about changing film, or going overboard. In years past, I know that it would be unlikely for me for have shot two rolls of film on the same scene.

Does having the ability to make as many pictures as we want make us better photographers?

I don't think so, but it does make us feel less constrained in the type of picture making we engage in. With digital photography we are free to experiment more than we were with film, an in a way, we are afforded greater latitude with our storytelling.

The now and then of photojournalistic routines

Aaron Johnson's latest "What the Duck" cartoon demonstrates how far we have come in thinking about and accepting technology's  impact on photojournalistic routines and rituals.  In the past years, there seems to have been a fairly universal shift in the benefits digital technology offers photographers.

There is no question that  digital technologies have leveled the playing field for many users. Today there appears to be a perception that because picture making is easier and faster, the need for specialized knowledge once requisite in the field is no longer valid. In other words, the distinction between what it means to be a professional seems no longer to hold true, or, it is at least changing.

The bottom line impact on photojournalism is that news organizations as businesses can now try to cut corners around hiring professional photographers. There is nothing new about this trend, in fact, the writing has been on the wall for a long time now. The bigger question is how will photojournalists respond to the challenges forced upon them?

 

Baltimore Photojournalists Challenge Corporate Policty

In a symbolic gesture aimed at drawing attention to a corporate decision to place cameras in the hands of reporters, photojournalists at the Baltimore Sun are staging a four-day byline strike. The Sun's parent company, the Tribune Company wants to cut costs by requiring reporters to take photographs and video of news event. 

Jim Romenesko reports, "Eighteen Baltimore Sun photojournalists launched a byline strike today protesting Tribune Co.'s move to force reporters to become photographers and videographers as a way to cut costs."

For more than a decade, declining newspaper circulations, corporate downsizing, and media consolidation, have continued to impact quality journalism in a negative way. 

The byline strike now brings to light the reality how fragile photojournalism, as an occupation, really is. Photojournalism, from a penny-pinching corporate perspective, is looked upon as an option in the news-gathering process. The corporate mindset seems to be that with all the latest and greatest digital technology, photojournalists have made themselves expendable.

In fact, some may even argue that photojournalism has always played second-fiddle to the word side when it comes down to editorial decision-making. When push comes to shove, after all, the history of the newspaper industry has been built on words, not pictures.

Even though photojournalism has made enormous and  important contribution to the newspaper industry, the field has never truly received the respect it deserves.  One of the reasons for photojournalism remains in a vulnerable position on the food chain of the corporate media culture is the fact that we are a sentimentally literate society -- we are a culture still clinging to the nostalgic idea that reading something in a newspaper has more veracity or merit than looking at news as images on the television or on the web. 

It is impossible not to feel sympathy for the men and women who work so hard to capture the news in images, especially at time when our entire culture of news consumption appears to be radically altered by the Internet. At times, it seems as though everything is driven by the capacity to make money at the cost of quality. 

Look at the way houses are built today as compared with those built 50 or 100 years ago. Gone are the days when pride and craftsmanship were a builder's prize asset. Today, a house is thrown up as quickly as possible, with seemingly little regard to detail.

The same can be said, then, of the newspaper industry as it appears determined to cut corners by all means possible. What appears most  glaringly obvious about  the Tribune demand to have reporters take on the role of photojournalist is the lack of corporate integrity in understanding how quality reportage is achieved in this country. Yes, people have been able to do more with less, but the strategy is not sustainable.