The Cruel Radiance

As a preface, this book sucks of professional journalism; you can always tell, too many words and verges on non-stop ranting, an extended newspaper article.

I am disappointed when the author seemingly has to justify this book, that relegates photojournalism to the bane of human kind, by claiming a link to Jewry, by ancestor, in the introduction, and I cannot say that I think it adds anything, especially in a world of six degrees of separation and the internet, not least because she was definitely not there. My qualifications for objecting to this claim of irrelevant experience is my grandfather came from East London - so what - and my belief that most of us are a concoction of much more than our own xenophobia.

I was also discouraged with American, desperately wrong, grammar of quotation marks from pp4, which clearly shows nobody in US has ever thought about the logic - how can a sentence refer to a quotation with the full-stop inside the end quote, before the sentence has finished? The quote is not finished if the quote mark is outside the full-stop, is it!

After these irrelevancies, I found this book is very much after my own mind, and I am relieved to find it so, not least because of my discomfort with some of the wilder assertions of post-moderns who actually are rather boring, haven't done very much except comment on everyone else in perfect rhetorical English and hopelessly demonstrate lack of worldly experience. It is hopeful that Linfield suggests that these malicious gnome-like spiteful critics come out from under their oaken desks and 'integrate emotion into the experience of looking' (30). I agree.

These people hate the work of Salgado, because it all looks too good, of Africa, perfect poverty, and some think this should not be so perfect, but they revel in their baseless superiority. Because they lack experience, these people do not know that it takes considerable discipline to work in remote African places, with most of the diseases, which he has not only suffered but also he took photographs at the same time. I know that is the case because I was doing just that in 1976 and later, with dysentery for several months at a time, with malaria every year. Second, a level-framed picture is not a function of the camera but of processing; the active decision for the print to be cock-eyed is fake. So the question is, are these commenting postmodernists actually more fake than the picture? When the pictures really is cock-eyed, out-of-focus and blurred, and the blood is still wet from the photographers ears from the gunshot shock-wave, then we know it is real, but if it has been faked, then you are a liar and screw you. Is lying justified as a photojournalist? Never. "Vacuous universality .... of misery" (43) - 'here's an American who has never got out of his [f*cking] Cadillac' and never experienced any misery. (I notice Linfield does not rate it a lot of this, either.) And Jim Lewis must be an inveterate liar, 'I really don't think that a picture of an atrocity should be a good picture' (44); anyone intelligent considered just how stupid this statement is? If this man is responsible for editing, then we can be sure that no photograph contains anything.

I am not going to give a rundown on what the book is about: it is necessary and, like the author wondering why she has to look at atrocity photographs, one has to wonder why it was necessary to publish. We all know it had to be, even if most prefer not to read it. I am also not sure that this represents independent, non-emotional, professional photojournalism; I suspect it has more to do with making statements about atrocities, and it is easy to see that such photographs will be adopted and shoved in the faces of the innocent to demand sympathy. Not all the people in the examples are like that. I have been in several countries where this type of history exists and there is something very distinctive about them that Linfield does not capture, which is much more ghastly than the photographs.

I do have a problem with this however: there are in this world professional victims, who like to suffer, not too much, and complain endlessly, even when the story was over many years ago: optimists always look forward and see no evil from their past, even if it was there; then there is the rest, and Zambians are professional victims at the drop of a hat, to some degree created by swimming-pooled donors. the faked grimace from a Zambian can only be fake because they do not know how to pull a face.

Photographs are definitely imperialist; an African's fear of having his soul stolen by a camera is very real, and you can never know who he is, so is the frown of a man being photographed without consent. This is not however exclusively African.

If photographs cannot show anything and deny the use of explanatory text, which is probably roughly right, then the answer for the photographer is to photograph subjects that really do have nothing to show, like refugees, people going to their deaths, people without rights. Unfortunately, one might say this is over-published, Nazis and the Jews, and the other subjects in this book. I agree with the discomfort of the author and with the need to publish the material, even if it is horrible. A drawback is there are not so many such activities and the press rarely wants to published them anymore, it is not nice for the simulacrum and serial spectacle; the real problem with this is such images also become unbelievable, and we have seen them too many times before. Anyway we seem to like watch people being killed and maimed, it makes really good reality television, and Syria is an example. It is almost as if the UN contributes to maintaining conflict so that there is something to watch on television; in effect, keeping people employed by war.

I certainly agree that photographs of the third world are 'patronising, imperialist, and racist', and with the concept of them somehow being 'pornographic' (40). It is interesting that, apparently, atrocity photographs are often taken by the perpetrators, who are of course patronising, imperialist and racist, not least because it  might be said that poverty is an atrocity and  is imposed by the West, which duly photographs it. And, anyway, as Linfield says, photographers are always obscene.

I do not agree with Sontag that atrocity photographs are normal, but think that nobody of sensitivity is prepared to look at them (45), but this may be West-centric. In the Iraq, Iran war, the television in Iraq routinely showed people in bits and nobody noticed, and this is also in newspapers around the world.

It is easy to write a book about something that is comfortable; it is not easy to write a book that is a documentary on atrocity, so this is a good contribution to the necessary but mostly unread books of the world.