marc vallée

Today we hand over the Blog to award winning photographer Sion Touhig who has worked for UK and international newspapers and magazines since 1991, covering stories such as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and strife in the Balkans and Palestine. Sion gives us his views on this years World Press Photo Award and related issues.

WORLD PRESS PHOTO of the Year 2007. Tim Hetherington, UK, for Vanity Fair. American soldier resting at bunker, Korengal Valley, Afghanistan, 16 September. Published here by kind permission of World Press Photo.

Through a Glass, Darkly…
by Sion Touhig.

It’s World Press Photo award time again, and like nearly every year, the winning image (this time by Tim Hetherington ) has caused all kinds of ructions around and about.

To be honest, the only decent response is to congratulate all the winners, but it’s worth remembering the contest is called not the ‘World Photo Award’, but the World Press Photo award (WPP). It’s ultimately pointless elevating one image to encapsulate a whole years news, but some of the criticisms do have some validity, in that journalism seems to have been often displaced in favour of aesthetic concerns at the WPP.

Aesthetics needn’t outweigh journalistic enquiry, you can have both – but Paul Melchers blog argument is that in a competition which is concerned with press photography, you’d assume the judges would be looking for an image that satisfied both pictorial and journalistic concerns.

I think the winning image is intriguing, but it doesn’t really tell me anything I don’t already know – and perhaps even tells me less about whats going on.

The blurred image clearly shows a US soldier at the end of his tether…but because of what? In Afghanistan, the largest military power in history is putting huge efforts into bending one of the poorest nations on Earth to it’s will.

Yet by viewing this image I’m supposed to empathise with the more powerful party and to shrug off the growing and largely unaccounted civilian casualties caused by their activities.

Pictures like these (and the story its taken from) construct a developing consensus narrative about Afghanistan and Iraq, in the same way a media/popular culture consensus was constructed about Vietnam…that it was a tragedy for the US only, instead of what it really was – the military might of the Worlds most powerful nation, laying waste to a poor country and slaughtering its civilian population, for ultimately futile strategic aims.

Perhaps that sounds familiar? It probably will to average Afghans, as they endure the consequences of yet another superpowers ‘boots on the ground‘.

With neither present UK or future US political leaders talking about military withdrawal, I don’t think its acceptable any longer to uncritically look at military images taken in Afghanistan or Iraq, and celebrate them simply on the sole aesthetic grounds that they carry on the pictorial legacy of Robert Capa.

The D-Day troops depicted by Capa on Omaha Beach were doing something markedly different to what US troops did in Vietnam, and are doing now in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Robert Capa’s blurred photographs of soldiers at their tethers end, shoulder-deep in seawater amidst withering gunfire, were arguably images of liberators, and Capa had recognised and documented anti-Fascist struggle a damn sight earlier than most. His lover, Gerda Taro, died recording it.

As repugnant as Qutbism is, it simply does not present the same dire existential threat that Nazism posed in June 1944, and whatever threat of Islamic militancy that exists now, has been increased, not lessened, by the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.

The context of these current conflicts and WWII is very different, but the photographic depiction often, is not.
In many examples of contemporary photojournalism from Afghanistan and Iraq, deeply embedded (excuse the pun) pictorial motifs of liberation and sacrifice are being used to either endorse, ignore or excuse economic and military imperialism.

AN AFGHAN woman passes through a Northern Alliance frontline position. The woman and other refugees are fleeing US aerial bombing of Taliban fighters around Khanabad and Kunduz. Northern Afghanistan, 18th Nov 2001. Photo by Sion Touhig. Published here by kind permission of Sion Touhig.