Photojournalism and Art — Where is the dividing line?

What is real in photography? More specifically, when we look at a photo, what in it is real? Some of us think about these questions often, but even if we don’t, every once in a while we see a photograph that leaves us without an escape route. We simply have to ask.

Consider Philippe Halsman’s “Dali Atomicus,” a surreal photograph that is made up entirely of real, tangible things: cats, water, paintings, chairs, and a smiling Salvador Dali. Yet the moment we look at it, we know something’s not right. Cats are flying, water is suspended in mid-air, a chair is floating and Dali is levitating as he’s painting. Because these things don’t happen in real life, we know right away that everything in the photo has been manipulated. We just don’t know how.

Well, it’s simple, really. On the count of “four,” Dali jumped up, the photographer’s wife held up the chair, and his assistants threw three cats and a bucket of water into the air. After a few hours and several dozen tries, Halsman probably decided that he had enough material to work with. (And the cats most likely got tired of being airborne and wet.)

In the end, Halsman made a work of art—or at least that’s what we determine it to be. Do we consider it a work of art because it’s not communicating any single or conspicuous truth? Or, do we not look for such a truth because we prejudge it as a work of art? As the latter question gnaws on the tail of the former, we can skip that semantic cannibalism by acknowledging something about our own feelings toward “Dali Atomicus”: The fact that everything in the photo has been made to defy logic and gravity doesn’t bother us. We actually enjoy the product. And if we don’t enjoy it, we at least have no ethical objection to the blatant manipulation of people and things.

But when it comes to journalism, we do not have such a relaxed ethic. Is there anyone who would consider “Dali Atomicus” a work of journalism? I doubt it. Well, why not? Whether it’s because we think the photo is art and art only or because it purposely manipulates us—this cannibalistic python is similar to the one in the above paragraph—matters much less than our view of journalism. Photojournalism is supposed to answer the question “What happened?” with a picture (and maybe a short caption). A simple example would be a New York Times photo of President Bush during an important speech. Yes, there were probably dozens of photos taken and The Times ended up using just one. But most people are aware that a photograph is a moment in time. The photograph may also have been cropped. Again, people are aware of that. Selecting a good photograph and cropping are not the same as manipulation.

There is, however, a long, slippery spectrum between artistic and journalistic photography. Picking out one photo of Bush from a dozen nearly identical ones doesn’t compare to picking out one Iraq War photo out of hundreds to put on the front page. In the latter case, the process of selection itself can arguably entail manipulation—whether it’s intentional or not is another question. Whatever the case, there is at least an attempt to point out what happened. But doesn’t artistic photography sometimes point that out as well? It does. Yet it doesn’t have to.

The Halsman photograph and the hypothetical one of Bush are obviously on the opposite ends of the art-journalism spectrum. For every unique characteristic that’s exclusive to one side, there are probably dozens that are important and indispensable to both. There are also countless journalistic photographs with artistic aspects, and there are countless artistic photographs with journalistic aspects. And some photographs simply put all these concepts in a blender and leave us with a soggy mess. Yet, it is important to keep the spectrum in mind when discussing photography, because what a given photo says is undeniably connected to the language that was involved in its creation.

Harvard Students and Larry Summers: What did they see in that guy?

Reading The Harvard Crimson to find out exactly why so many Harvard students supported then-University President Lawrence H. Summers was like trying to squeeze water from a rock. Both opinion and news stories covered a lot of ground but offered little analysis.

With the recent news that Drew Gilpin Faust, a Civil War historian and Harvard University dean, will be the next Harvard president, let’s hope that the campus newspaper will do a better job in analyzing her record after her term starts June 1. The Crimson should look back at its coverage of Summers’ popularity with the students, and learn from it. The most frequently cited reason for his popularity with the students was his commitment to the quality of undergraduate life and education. In a Feb. 22, 2006, opinion piece in The Crimson titled “The Economist,” a student columnist—in an attempt to elaborate on the above-mentioned reason—pointed out that Summers’ office has paid for renovations of a student pub, café and recreation center; initiated to increase participation in study-abroad programs; decided to make “Harvard’s financial aid the most generous in the world”; and “crafted an enduring vision for Harvard’s expansion into Allson,” a nearby Boston neighborhood. What’s missing from this long laundry list is a close, detailed inspection.

Admittedly, The Crimson is a campus publication, and some could argue that anyone living on or around campus is familiar with the details. However, if that is the case, why list reasons for Summers’ popularity at all? Aren’t the students and faculty who are aware of the specifics also aware of the laundry list? What service is performed by simply reminding them what they already know?

An analysis of the success or failure of Summers’ programs would help explain his popularity with the students. If he was popular despite the failure of his programs, then perhaps his attitude and approach were deemed more important. However, if his programs were successful, that may be the reason for his popularity. Of course, the connection between a program’s success or failure and the students’ approval or disapproval of him is not necessarily a causal one. Furthermore, the success of a five-year term would be more accurately measured in hindsight. But without a serious analysis of Summers’ programs, this back-and-forth rope-tugging is done with an invisible rope.

A news article that appeared in The Crimson on Feb. 22, 2006, titled “To Students, a Rock Star President,” quoted one student who emphasized Summers’ initiative to encourage education abroad. Did more students study abroad or at least express an interest in doing so in the future as a result of Summers’ initiative? The authors don’t say. The article also pointed out that Summers taught undergraduate courses, held regular office hours and attended campus events. But the reader is left to wonder as to why this is relevant. How was his teaching technique different? What went on during the office hours? Surely not everyone attended.

The article refers to a Crimson poll published on Feb. 21 that concluded “57 percent of 424 undergraduates surveyed said that Summers should not resign.” Three days after the poll results were published, an opinion piece written by an Economics Professor David Laibson, “Summers and the Students,” argued that the core reason students supported Summers was that he was “passionately interested in their ideas and their experiences.” Laibson does answer some of the questions I raised in the previous paragraph—e.g. Summers “argued with his students about every conceivable topic, from curricular reform to the ethics of stem cell research”—but, much like the rest of the coverage in The Crimson, he doesn’t examine the success of Summers’ programs, which would help explain, or at least set the discussion for, why Summers was popular with the majority of the students.

In the end, we are not only left in the dark—with the irony of having veritas as part of Harvard’s symbol—but also left wondering if the students are in there with us.

A New Generation of Swine — why Hunter S. Thompson still matters

“Political gibberish is not a purely American art form, like jazz and safety blitz. But in only 200 years we have raised it to a level of eloquence beyond anything since the time of the Caesars or even Genghis Khan.” This is from Hunter S. Thompson’s “Generation of Swine: Tales of Shame and Degradation in the ’80s.” The book is a collection of essays Thompson wrote for the San Francisco Examiner between 1985 and 1988. I’m almost finished with it, and I must say, the parallels between that time and ours are both sobering and depressing.

An increasingly unpopular Republican president was in his second term. The White house not only had an intuitive antipathy toward sex and drugs, but its approach to the issue was clouded by a narrow-minded religiosity. And let’s not forget the looming threats from “terrorists” in Asia, Africa and the Middle East. This may be surprising to the younger generation, but the concept “terrorist” existed before Sept. 11, 2001, and even before the 1990s.

Thompson’s essays—fearless and funny first-person accounts of everything from his reckless gambling and arbitrary acts of violence to critical analyses of the White House and TV evangelists—are as much about Thompson as the subjects he covers. Such a high level of post-modern self-awareness usually takes away from the subject, distracts the reader, and leads him to become lost in the hall of mirrors.

But Thompson makes it work. Some of his best writing—and this has been the case since “Hell’s Angels”—is his beautiful, angry analysis of the media. “Nature’s abhorrence of a vacuum,” he writes, “is nothing compared with the way the editors of The New York Times feel about the need for a major front-page political story on Thanksgiving Day.” What? Journalists need news in the same way doctors need patients? In an essay written a few months prior, he makes a similar point when he compares journalists’ constant expectations for big, wild news to “joining the Navy and expecting to fly gold-plated jets off the deck of a new aircraft carrier that costs more than Egypt and shoot Tomahawk missiles that cost $2 million apiece at crazed communist Arabs in places like Beirut and Tripoli.” Writing as a journalist, Thompson was all to familiar with how the media—especially of the 24-hour cable TV variety—is always waiting for news to come out, sort of like Elmer Fudd waits for Bugs Bunny, only to have him come from behind and casually tap him on the shoulder. Behind you, stupid.

Thompson’s essays are only several pages long, but he rarely sticks to one topic. One of the literary delights of the book is the feeling of a fast-paced treasure hunt for unique descriptions that beg to be stolen like “truffle-eating wine-sucking anarchists” and “the long screw of history” and “trying to rip souvenir teeth out of living sharks.” In his must-read essay “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell offers six rules—“break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous” is the sixth rule—in an attempt to save the English language from abstraction and meaninglessness. The first rule states: Never use a metaphor or any other figure of speech that you are used to seeing in print. Earlier in the essay, Orwell points out, “The whole tendency of modern prose is away from concreteness.” Using original metaphors, similes and other figures of speech while expressing yourself clearly is therefore the ideal. Thompson would make Orwell proud.

Perhaps it is surprising to us that someone who smoked cigarettes, drank whiskey, shot guns, rode motorcycles and consumed almost every drug known to man can write such thought-provoking metaphors. But we shouldn’t be surprised. That’s what Thompson does consistently. He provokes us—as much, if not more, than the people in his stories. But for some reason we can’t get enough of his abrasiveness. Why is that? Because behind the madness and metaphors stand honest, straightforward personal truths that don’t belong to any political party or dogma. And if you find yourself disagreeing with him, as you certainly will, then you should at least be grateful that there existed a writer who wrote about politics without using—i.e. accepting—political language.