Abstract
‘A new generation of photographer has directed the documentary approach towards a more personal end. Their aim has not been to reform life, but to now it. Their work betrays sympathy- almost affection- for the imperfections and frailties of society. They like the real world, in spite of it terrors……’ [‘(Re) Defining Documentary Photography- Then and Now,’], these are the words of John Szarkowski, which he spoke in 1967 during an art gallery in New York about documentary photography, and its meaning to the world of art. Documentary photography has indeed earned its title as art despite numerous challenges from critics and artists. A number of photographers have gone to extended lengths to prove that photography is an art. With the help of their cameras and printing tools, such artists have been able to come up with images and sentimental genre scenes that have a notable painterly softness previously associated with to painted art.
Introduction
Sally Man, Tomaszewski and Simon Norfolk are some of the photographers who are famous for this kind of photography. This paper however is going to focus mainly on Simon Norfolk and his work. The purpose of this paper therefore, is to look at some of his works and analyze it critically in context to the relationship between documentary photography and art. Ironically, Simon’s work has not completely been accepted into the world of art yet, and particularly because of the subject matter of his photography. Simon is a very talented photography whose main aim in photography seems to be to examine some of the big questions in life with intensity and focus that is more defined (Casper).
He studies war for example, and the effects it has on our world; like the natural environments, the physical state of our cities, psychology of the society, social memory, among others. Further, Norfolk examines imperialism, genocide, military space, war interconnectedness, methods and tools of war like supercomputers, satellites, as well as the affected populations including the people on the ground, the manipulated and manipulating media. Norfolk is accomplishing all this through his beautiful photography, with its stunning details and clarity, and care to deliver the message without the typical trauma and shock that one would expect in the subject matter he has undertaken. It is clear from his pictures that his work is based on research, inquisitive intelligence, and supporting figures and facts (Casper).
Photography as a Form of Art
Through one and half century, photography has struggled to place itself in the class of fine art. To many critics, photography is merely the reproductive system of art and not art in itself. In considering photography as so, the role of a photographer as an artist was not so clear. To many, a photographer therefore, was just a technician whose work was to operate the medium and come up with a photograph. The question became; could the resulting photograph be constructed in such a manner that it could be considered as a piece of work? So as to validate photography as a fine art, many photographers of the 19th and early twentieth century produced images that imitated the contemporary images of art by softly focusing the images (Newhall, 1982).
Simon against other Contemporary Documentary Photographers
To date, some photographers like Simon Norfolk have not completely been absorbed into the art world mainly because of the context of his work. His work focuses mush more on war torn sceneries other than the common beautiful mountainous scenery other photographers concentrate on. Simon Roberts is one such photographer whose work has been widely accepted as art unlike Norfolk’s work. Roberts produces photographs of ordinary people engaged in a number of ordinary leisure activities. The likeness of his work to several other photographs and images of the British landscapes has been another reason why his work has been considered to be more related to art that Norfolk’s. He is also inspired and borrows ideas from a number of paint- produced compositions and images. For example he took a photograph of a scene of families relaxing at the beach side; work that was inspired by an 1884 composition by Georges Seurat. He has also been influenced by a number of painters such as L. S. Lowry (Roberts).
Norfolk’s photography as Art
Unlike Roberts, Norfolk does not borrow ideas from other artists or painters; his work is based on real- life events, of a devastated and invaded country. What results are a photographs displaying a number of artistic contradictions; the lyrical beauty of a mountainous landscape and deserts illuminated by sunlight, with gentle golden and rosy hints of light tracing out the textures of the many cracks and fissures, fallen buildings, broken bricks, while illuminating the clouds softly. With such detail, only comparable to paintings, it cannot be easy to refute that the work that Simon Norfolk produces is short of artistry techniques and design (The Photographers' Gallery’, 2003).
Afghanistan Chronotopia is an example of the artistic work this photographer can come up with (Bakhtin, 1981). It contains a series of images that creates in the mind of the viewer, the conflict between the beauty of the scenery and the terrible truth, and reality of the suffering that took place in the same landscapes (Spencer, 2002). In such images, photojournalism is brought up and compared against the considered large scale naturalism of museum photography, which imposes on a scene a spectacular and hyper- real air that can only be experienced in a real piece of work; through its presentation and reflection of the landscape’s detailed visual field.
Just like any other form of art, places and scenery that insinuate passing of time are very attractive to many photographers, especially the kind of dense palimpsests commonly found in old cities. For Norfolk, it is not different; varying types of weaponry and fighting reflect their own certain signs on the landscape and buildings, marks that can be picked out and identified as archeological indicators of the captured phases of the history of the conflict (Norfolk, 2002). Such details as street fighting within the cities using firearms that has taken place in the region over the years are well documented in the pictures by the fine details of the images, just as the modern kind of fighting using bombs and missiles is well accounted for in the photographs, by the pulverized buildings and building remnants captured by the photographer (Norfolk, 1998).
Documentary photographers like Norfolk are attracted to war ruins with an intensity only comparable to the one commanded by scars; as they mark an area that once held something that is absent by the time the photographer is photographing the scene. Determining the history of the conflict is however, a daunting task because of the prolonged war continually ages the structures by collapsing the time frames so that all of the structures, the modern ones, the classical palaces, as well as the historical buildings, almost look similar, midway to going back to the initial landscape from where they stood upon. Maybe it is the captured destruction of both modernity and ancient structures over 2 decades that make the pictures by Simon Norfolk so beautiful and plausible (The Photographers' Gallery’, 2003).
The tedious and monotonous vernacular apparatus of the common modern life is absent from these images; the cities here are stripped of the bus fleets, the common plane noises at the sky, the electricity poles are not what is to be expected as they are all decapitated, the roads are empty like the ones one would find in a ghost town, and the concrete floors and walls sag and lean against each other in a manner that speculates their non- functionality. The result of such a detailed photograph is a negative image a structural connectedness of two contemporary urban environments of the developed world; one city being made in the war so as to make sure of the others continued existence.
Just like his other previous works, like the photographs recording the genocide sites, Simon’s Chronotopia is meant to act as a kind of memoir, also as a forensic retrieval of history in the context of today’s mode of presentation of the victims of war by the media, which only registers them as statistics and not as war victims. Certain other artists have undertaken the same objective as well. Take for example, the horrific and refined monochrome images of Gilles Peress, which came as a result of a careful picking through of the remains of the genocides that took place in Bosnia and Rwanda (Peress, 1995). Richard Misrach is also another artist who has adopted a similar technique and genre like Norfolk. He displayed in documented photography, the nuclear secrets of the desert of Nevada. He also came up with commendable and similarly plausible colored images of the pits and ranges that had been abandoned by the military, only to later be used as dumping sites for the killed farm animals, which could have possibly died from radiation poisoning (Misrach, 1992).
During his career, Norfolk has photographed some bizarre and weird scenes, probably to cut an eccentric figure for himself. An example of such bizarre pictures is a photograph he took of a balloon seller holding balloons of bright colors against a background of a concrete skeleton of what looks like a ruined house.
In another picture, Norfolk takes a photograph of a bus terminal that has been reinforced by three concrete arches photographed against a sky at dusk background. The collapsing structure ironically makes a logo of the McDonald’s food chain restaurant. This is a very good refutation of the arguments that Norfolk’s photography should not be considered as art. Art must display creativity among other things, and these absurd photographs by Norfolk reflect that; something that strongly shows that his work is indeed art (Griffiths, 1971).
Norfolk uses his photography to remind his audience of particular aspects of war. For example, his photograph of the Bamyian Buddhas remains, which was destroyed and reduced into ruins by the Taliban, and the triumphal arch put up by the triumphal US dubious allies, the Northern Alliance, reminds the viewers of the image of the two sided enmity of the war’s particular memories. With all of their contradictions in clear and refined details of ruin and the homogenous novelty and beauty of the photographed landscape, Norfolk is without a doubt a spectacular documentary photographer (The Photographers' Gallery’, 2003).
One of the main characteristics that can be used to describe Norfolk’s photographs is the extraordinary attention commanding beauty of the landscape pictures usually taken at dawn, with some hint of light, and often with a veil of bluish mist cast over the already breathtaking landscape.
In all of these pictures, colors are heightened; the pictures also give a hint of a stillness that is disquieting. In addition to this, the images also impose on a viewer, the sense of timelessness, such features are evident in Norfolk’s photographs even when the images are of a mere pizza shack, a security guard booth with bars resembling those of a prison, a stack or an arrangement of boxes, or a wheel of a ferry (The Photographers' Gallery’, 2003). His large scale photographs, however, command the most attention from the audience; for example, a desolate cemetery covered in snow and covered with an assortment of huts that are underutilized; or a panoramic vista, one that has been photographed from a heightened position, and filled and covered with that veil of misty blue. In all of his work, it is clear that his photographs have been taken with a sharp execution of varying patterns, rhythm, and repetition. For example, in the picture above, the viewer is able to follow a snaking line of police troops in the desert, with their undulating metal helmets disappearing into the desert like some notes in a musical composition. This has been understood as a tactic the photographers uses to make people really listen to what he has to say in his images, because they are beautiful and easy to condone. Just like in any other form of art, an exhibition of Norfolk’s work comes out or can be understood as a conversation between two or more artists, with differing languages. Such an arrested dialogue only serves to further and bring out the singular, sharp talent of the photographer into relief (The Photographers' Gallery’, 2003).
Conclusion
The purpose of this paper was to look at Simon Norfolk as a documentary photographer and critically analyze his work in the context of art. As evidenced above, the photographer has earned his title as an artist with his wide array of photographs mainly on war and genocide. Norfolk has not taken a common path, that of photographing ordinary scenes of beautiful scenery and normal people out about their daily and leisure activities. His work is largely characterized by images with fine and refined details of a scenery filled with light, and a cast of bluish mist, with heightened colors; characteristics that impose on most of his photographs an attribute of stillness and timelessness. These are features that help him produce art in the form of documented photographs that many have refuted to consider as art because of the context in which they are presented; the context of war. His pictures are however, presented in such a manner that softens and hides the terror of war with the beautiful sceneries and landscapes, colors and lightening. The only hint of disorder is the ruins and the damage he captures within such a serene background.
References
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