By Stephen Wolgast
It’s always been true that the world changes. The last few years have shown us that it doesn’t always change for the better, at least not in the short term. Lately, when journalists aren’t reporting on dysfunction globally, they’ve been the subject of breakdowns in business models and trust.
Seeing the Nobel Peace Prize handed to two journalists in countries where journalism is a dangerous occupation was a bright spot, but three recent books demonstrate the challenges faced by journalists and everyone else.
Let’s start with the big question: What’s the price of freedom of speech — and of the press — today?
For American businesses operating in China, the answer may come down to revenue.
When Kodak posted to its Instagram account photographs by Patrick Wack of Xinjiang Province, in China, supporters of Beijing’s policies that suppress Uygher culture called foul.
Kodak had promoted Wack’s photos, which were shot on Kodak film, for their aesthetics. After removing the photos, the company blamed the posts on a “supervision loophole,” according to The New York Times.
Getting caught up in a disagreement about politics isn’t unusual for journalists, and getting a smack-down from the Chinese government can’t be surprising for Wack. One of the points he makes in his book, “Dust,” is the growing surveillance of Uyghers in Xinjiang.
The government uses tools that big data makes possible, including facial recognition, cellphone monitoring, DNA harvesting and video surveillance, writes Dru Gladney, an anthropology professor at Pomona College, in an essay in the book. Wack’s photographs, taken over three years, show how the Muslims’ domes and crescents, and women’s veils, went from ordinary sights on the streets to total absence, replaced by Chinese flags and banners bearing Communist Party slogans.
Like most controversies, this one has an effect opposite of the Chinese government’s intent. Published in Marseille, France, “Dust” is now known worldwide. Readers may be drawn to it because Beijing dislikes it, but the photographs are revealing for other reasons.
Wack started his project in Xinjian in 2016 working in the 4 by 5 format. The proportions, roomy compared to a 35 mm frame, give the eye more space to explore and review the faces, plains and architecture in Wack’s compositions.
The images take their time revealing their individual stories. Most of them are taken from a comfortable distance, delivering views of the scene around his subjects instead of zooming in for a quick emotional payoff. Then there’s the lighting. In the outdoor photos, daylight seems to fill every crook and crevasse evenly, minimizing the darkness of shadows and bringing details to the viewer’s eye.
By the end of his time in Xinjian, his compositions take on some urgency and feel more purposeful. He switched to the more energetic proportions typical of a 35 mm frame, helpful at a time when he had to elude Chinese authorities.
After Kodak removed Wack’s photos, the company said its Instagram page is used to promote film, not to be a “platform for political speech,” raising questions. When is a photograph political, and can a photo be nothing more than pretty? Even sunsets make statements about the environment.
Whatever they point their cameras toward, photographers document change every day. What some call progress, others call an affront.
Free speech advocates would also point out that Kodak’s decision to forbid political topics is itself a political one: Kodak has five businesses registered in China, The Times reports, suggesting that its use of Instagram is not simply about “promoting the medium of film.”
Wack, like the best photojournalists, promotes the dignity of the individual. That’s a political idea too, one thousands of years old but still unwelcome to some authorities.
Dust
By Patrick Wack
176 pp., €47, André Frère Éditions, 2021
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Reporting on politics can get American journalists called out by Americans for being political. That’s a tautology, one we’ve all been caught up in because it’s what we do: When something out of the ordinary happens, a journalist’s job is to make sense of it. Making order out of chaos is our job.
Making order out of the Trump presidency became the job for David Butow. A Dallas native who made Los Angeles his home, Butow moved to Washington, D.C., after covering the closing weeks of the 2016 presidential campaigns of Hillary Clinton and the candidate few expected to win.
Before he could know that he would publish his work in “Brink,” he photographed rallies in the Upper Midwest. Towns like Benton Harbor, Michigan, became a focal point for him. Across Lake Michigan from Chicago, Benton Harbor lies a 100-mile drive from the city and is one of the places media critics say the media never covers.
Yet before the critics spoke, Butow was there. A town of 10,000, Benton Harbor has seen two riots ignited by race, in 1966 and 2003, and in the last decade had had to cope with the tainted drinking water of nearby Flint. During the presidential campaign, Butow came across one of the town’s motels, and it struck him.
“A lot of the people staying there were from the town, which is notoriously segregated, but the motel was a melting pot of American economic despair,” he writes. “Their personal stories were complicated and defied stereotypical categorizations.”
He couldn’t have realized it, but the tired main street, the churches and the preponderance of camouflage were telegraphing support for a politician pitching a return to the past instead of the one promising the future.
His reporting from the region makes up the first portion of his book, demonstrating how people who had lost in the gambit of globalization become, in Clinton’s infamous description, the deplorables.
Moving to Washington, Butow covered Capitol Hill and the White House for the first time. He looked for the scenes that happened outside the frames of television and came away with the kind of images that were once a staple of legislative photojournalism across the country: small rooms packed with politicians trying to convince a holdout to see it their way.
Further behind the scenes were the actions of the administration. Butow’s pictures remain scrupulously disinterested politically, but his own feelings are clear in his writing. “While I expected the incompetence, I underestimated the treachery.” Eight of President Donald Trump’s close associates and aides have been convicted of felonies, including his national security adviser.
Then came Jan. 6.
He was on the west side of the Capitol, where the building was breached, witnessing the destruction of combat. Covering the attack, he found himself lowering his camera and, through his gas mask, just watched.
“I knew I was seeing something terrible and historic, and I had a job to do, but for a few seconds, or maybe it was a few minutes, I gazed at the scene with total, wide-eyed disbelief.”
Sometimes the chaos is so great that making sense of it is too big an ask. Reporting from the early expectations of the Trump candidacy to the wreckage of a democratic institution, “Brink” makes the connection from the Trump base, through politics way outside normal, all the way to their expression of distress, rage and fury.
Brink
By David Butow
152 pp, $45, Punctum Press, 2021
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Accompanying exhibitions open at UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism on Jan. 31, 2022, and RIT City Art Space in Rochester, New York on Feb. 4, 2022
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As topsy-turvy as our world has become, millions of people are still dying to get to the West. Economic migrants and war refugees, they leave home in developing countries and dangerous cities to find more accommodating places to find jobs and raise families.
Jacob Ehrbahn spent six years taking 19 trips to follow these populations on the move. A photojournalist for Politiken, a Danish newspaper, and Photojournalist of the Year in NPPA’s Best of Photojournalism 2021, Ehrbahn has photographed refugees and migrants as they crossed borders on foot and seas in dinghies, documenting their lives in refugee camps where the conditions are so unsafe and unsanitary that they’re called jungles.
His photographs show more than the challenges migrants face and the gumption to overcome them, along with the frequent disappointment when they don’t reach their goal. His book, “A Dream of Europe,” includes few close-ups or detail shots.
Instead, being close to people while using wide framing reliably gives the viewer a broader view of the situation before him than we are accustomed to seeing. While tightly cropped news photos highlight emotion and drama, Ehrbahn’s careful eye shows the Sudanese and Afghans and Eritreans step from one harrowing condition into another, often within view of border guards whose job is to repel them.
Ehrbahn succeeds in revealing just how alone the migrants are. Even in groups of dozens or hundreds, as newcomers in strange lands they often receive no help at first, and that’s if they make it past the fences, razor wire, batons and harsh border enforcement enacted by nationalist politicians.
Yet despite the hostile reception they continue coming. The hope of the West outshines the reality of their homes. One message in the book is that even if we Westerners continue to pretend there’s no immigration problem, the migrants will keep coming. It’s time to recognize reality and help them instead of hindering them.
Another message is in the faces of his subjects. No matter where they come from, no matter how poor they are or how different their cultures are from ours, they are part of the family of man. The title of that 1955 exhibit sounds outdated to us, but the work of those 273 photographers made the case, albeit sentimentally, that we are all related.
The migrants in Ehrbahn’s photos are our sisters and brothers. Instead of treating them as outsiders trying to take what’s ours, aiding them in their time of need would make people everywhere a little more welcoming and a little more accommodating.
A Dream of Europe
By Jacob Ehrbahn
296 pp., incl. 3 gatefolds, $79, Dewi Lewis, 2021
164 color & 4 black and images
295mm x 295mm
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Stephen Wolgast holds the Knight Chair in audience and community engagement news at the University of Kansas. His email is [email protected]. He has been an NPPA member since 1994.
