Aric Mayer Studios

Discovery and Planning: The Essential Tension of Innovation

noreply@blogger.com (Aric Mayer) — Wed, 30 May 2012 22:15:00 +0000

In my previous two posts I wrote about an intersection between the arts and an emergent form of business innovation that is not yet fully defined. In this space a kind of venture model is possible that draws on the strengths of both paradigms, maximizing creative possibilities while minimizing uncertainty and risk. I affectionately and irreverently call it the Cake Machine. Cake being profit, of course.

The process is abstract, combining the best of several powerful frameworks--Stanford d.school's design thinking, emergent strategy and Rita McGrath and Ian MacMillan's discovery driven growth.

First some definitions.

Discovery: what you practice when you don't have the data to do anything else. The process of going where there isn't a lot of information to guide the way. It is often led by hunches, intuition and incremental discoveries.The process is uncertain or leads to uncertain outcomes.

Planning: the process of making decisions and strategies that yield desired results over time. The process is predictable.

There is an essential tension between these two. Discovery wants to be an open ended process to maximize its ability to explore and make amazing things. Planning wants to reduce uncertainty to measurable risk, producing desired results next month, next quarter, next year.

The process of creating innovative companies and brands is structured as a cycle that utilizes this tension between discovery and planning. To give this rigor and structure, design thinking is formally articulated as a problem solving tool while discovery driven planning is used to model the business and define the design parameters.

This process throws off creative energy by considering design as a critical component of the entire business ecosystem and by defining design parameters using sustainable business models. It is more of an engine than an incubator. The design, discovery and planning processes are in play simultaneously.

Design thinking, emergent strategy and discovery driven growth are generally formulated as linear processes. By reconstructing them into an iterative loop, I create a cycle which holds at its center a fully formed venture whose final form is, at the start, something of a mystery. As we circle the center, considering it from all angles, we continually refine the entire business and design ecosystems using what we find there to define our design parameters.

Design thinking engages in a process that has been organized by the d.school as follows:

1. Empathy

2. Define (focus): create a clearly defined problem statement

3. Ideate (flare): generate as many solutions as possible to the problem as defined above

4. Prototype

5. Test

In this engine, design thinking is used as an essential framework for problem solving once the problems are defined more clearly by the financials. Reverse financials bring problems to light early in the process, generating clear problem statements and then flaring to generate previously unrecognized solutions. This process of focus and flare, using the business financials as a way of setting design focus early in the process, maximizes innovation within the entire business ecosystem, from the design of the user experience through the supply chain to the overall finances of the organization.

Here is a rough step by step pass through the first cycle.

Start with any basic concept for a product or service offering.
Define the basic unit of business and any alternative units. The unit of business must differentiate.
Build a set of reverse financials--an income statement and balance sheet--that makes the venture worthwhile.
Back out of the financials as many of the assumptions that you can that have to hold true for this venture to succeed.
Rank assumptions by order of importance, with the most critical assumptions, the ones where everything falls apart if you get it wrong, at the top.
Design tests to discover the accuracy of your assumptions.

By now you have made a circular pass around the loop with basic definitions of everything that has to hold true for your venture to succeed. You have a sketch of your variable and fixed costs in place, a required income, a sense of return on assets which gives you an allowable amount of fixed assets, and a basic model of how your entire supply chain and marketing efforts have to behave for this to work.

With these inputs you go back to your design concept and refine it based on the cost and price information that your financials have modeled. You calculate your break-even point and evaluate your offering in terms of its potential market. Using design thinking you maximize your creative input into the design within the parameters defined by the financials.

How does this work? The process can be adapted to any venture. Here is one example.

Imagine a designer who believes she can build a disruptive product to fill a perceived hole in the market at a price point of $800. The product is disruptive and differentiated because it will bring a level of quality to that price point that currently only exists in products offered by competitors at a much higher price. How will she go forward?

Her business unit is defined as a product purchased by the consumer for $800. We start with the assumptions that to make this worth the effort, the company should generate $1,000,000 in net income with a contribution margin ratio of 45% and a return on assets of 25%. To start, she believes manufacturing can be achieved with fixed costs of $600,000 per year. Now we work the income statement backwards.

Net Income	$1,000,000.00
Taxes (40%)	$666,666.67
Income	$1,666,666.67
Fixed Costs	$600,000.00
Contribution Margin	$2,266,666.67
Variable Costs (55%)	$2,770,370.37
Sales	$5,037,037.04

At an $800 price point with $600,000 in fixed costs and a contribution margin ratio of 45%, the venture must sell just over $5 million in sales or 6,250 units to make the desired net income. For this to happen, each unit must have $440 or less in direct labor and materials.

Now that we have used the basic financials (backwards) to define our design parameters, we come back to the design to ask the question, what amazing things can be done in this product space for $440 per unit? How can we disrupt and capitalize in this space? Is there an innovation in manufacturing or distribution that would allow us to disrupt the competition? What does our potential market look like? How could we sell 6,250 units a year? We have nothing so far invested in fixed assets, but our basic balance sheet will allow us up to $4,000,000 in property, plant and equipment. Can we come in under this? What is possible for that amount? How much can be outsourced? How can those investments be delayed while we refine the design?

If the initial pass around the loop is successful, then the project enters the next level in the cycle, making more detailed financial documents, more specific designs and prototypes, while testing assumptions and doing everything possible to delay major investments and keep real options open so that you can refine and discover along the way.

So why are discovery based processes and design so critical to this next wave of profitable ventures in the United States? It has to do with an understanding of how money is created by firms. So much press has been focused on the amount of money made by banking and investment firms of late. What is missed in that is just how narrow the margins are in those transactions. Contribution margins for banking firms can run as low as 3%, which means that to make $3 million they have to move $100 million. That is an amount of capital that is unavailable and those are returns that are unreasonable for most business ventures.

A well designed venture can produce contribution margins of 50% or more. With lean business plans this can be hugely profitable. It outperforms the financial markets by orders of magnitude. In our above example, the company is represented by $4,000,000 in fixed assets and let's give it another $1,000,000 in net working capital. With $5,000,000 tied up in capital, the company spends $440 to receive $800 in income for a contribution of $360 per sale. That is a return of 80% on money invested in direct materials and labor. If this were successfully implemented it would produce $1,000,000 in net income with $5,000,000 in total assets. Of course you can't just wave a magic wand and make that happen. But you can make it happen if you structure it by design. Or at least you can work through potential projects, avoiding the ones that don't make the cake until you find the ones that do.

What cake machine does is structure the modeling of innovative ventures in ways that focus and maximize the creative input to the process while minimizing uncertainty and risk. You want to quickly discover your major problems and hurdles so you can focus your problem solving and design energy on them first, either solving them to overcome barriers to entry or stopping the process before you spend in other areas.

Giving the process rigor and structure provides discipline for the transfer back and forth between discovery and planning. If we imagine it the way the brain works, this activates both sides, giving equal weight to analysis and innovation throughout. This system is like the corpus callosum, connecting both sides of the brain at the center, with directed and disciplined discovery on the creative side and open ended financials and planning on the other.

By iterating in this way an organization can cycle through any number of ideas at a time, learning from each and focusing on the projects that have the most likelihood for success. Most importantly, the design parameters are set up in sync with the operating and financial goals of the enterprise which focuses creative activity in ways that increase the likelihood of success. To succeed, the process needs leaders who can design the entire business models and drive superb design within the financial parameters. It is a rare breed who can do both, but that is where the cake gets made.

The Avant Garde and Finance

noreply@blogger.com (Aric Mayer) — Thu, 10 May 2012 13:28:00 +0000

These two disciplines seemingly couldn't be farther apart both in methods and in orientation to the world. But consider what they both seek to achieve. Finance attempts to look ahead into the future to determine the likely outcomes of investments that are dependent on the future performance of a host of variables including entire markets. Art makers attempt to make culture, which is a similar process of working towards a future encounter with a wider audience, attempting to interpret the impact of works that are also dependent on a host of variables, also attempting to create something of value. Each navigates exceedingly complex terrain using dramatically different tools.

The essential functions of finance are to determine what are, and what are not, worthwhile investments of money over time. The essential functions of design are to produce a superior user experience that also extends itself out over time, past the point of purchase and into the life of the product, process or service. The essential functions of art, or at least a major current problem being explored, is how to produce better culture and possibly better outcomes for everyone involved.

Over the past months I worked to build an iterative model that would give structure to innovation while maximizing realizable options. It is possible, with the right conditions and tolerances for innovation, to create teams that combine the strengths of all three disciplines. Bringing discovery driven planning in at the early focus stage of the design thinking process will apply profitable parameters early on. This focuses the idea generation by ruling out as many unprofitable avenues as you can, before you invest in exploring them.

Let me try and explain how this works in plain English. First you assemble a design team to address a problem or need. At the earliest stages in the design process, you create a set of financial statements that build on your ideas, only you build them in reverse. And this is the key. You in effect take your idea and create a ghost company or business unit entirely on paper, working backwards through all the calculations to arrive at a sense of what that idea would have to look like in order to be profitable. Within these reverse calculations will be a host of assumptions that must prove to be true in order for your idea to work profitably. With them laid out on paper, you can begin to test these assumptions upfront, working from the most consequential to the least consequential.

Testing concepts in this way has two significant benefits over implementing first and testing as you go. First it minimizes the cost of exploring a concept or idea by increasing the speed and accuracy of initially evaluating its viability. And second, by minimizing the cost and reducing the risk, it increases the number of ideas that can be explored without the expectation that every idea will be a success. By providing something of a safety net for your innovation efforts, this encourages your design teams to be more innovative, to push out to the edges of their own abilities and beyond.

This already happens in some combination in every successful venture, but it tends to happen latently and over time. There is a kind of Darwinian weening out of the weaker concepts as they are implemented. In this other model we are able to create a kind of three dimensional virtual model of an idea and back out it the assumptions that have to hold true in order for it to be a success. We are looking for the problems before they become problems.

Here we get finance and design working together at the very beginning. What happens is a very quick cycling of ideas that allows for the generation of the most possible solutions you can come up with the least possible cost in exploring how viable they are. What is absolutely critical for maximum success is to have someone in the middle who speaks both finance and design and can translate the concepts across disciplines.

Design thinking is an extremely powerful tool for innovating. Its weakness though is that every step is very dependent on the outcomes of the previous steps. The end result is very dependent on the questions asked or problems raised at the start. Discovery driven finance adds the capability of focusing the early stages of the design thinking process to produce a greater likelihood of a profitable outcome.

All innovators push the boundaries of their fields. By focusing design activity we actually encourage MORE innovation. When you have those kinds of people at work on your project, they are going to push the limits. Steering them in that activity increases the likelihood of smash hits and radical disruptive moves forward.

Next week I will post one more time with a more concise how step by step description of how this works.

Where I've Been, New Avenues, and a Major Discovery

noreply@blogger.com (Aric Mayer) — Wed, 09 May 2012 18:56:00 +0000

In 2009 I read a paper at a conference at Northwestern University's Department of Communication Studies. In it I sought to build a global model that would describe everything I knew about how images operate in the world, from conception and creation, through editing and distribution, to their impact on far flung audiences throughout the world.

In the end I succeeded in sketching out my understanding of how mass media, business, psychoanalytic theory, aesthetics, and so on interact in ways that define a process. It is a sort of model of how change can be made through media. This model was informed by a broad range of professional experiences from my work at Time Inc in a critical production role at a billion dollar magazine to independent and freelance image making for a wide range of clients, to my own personal work that answers to more personally defined terms of making and audience engagement.

As I was working through this paper, I intuitively sensed that something was happening along the intersection between art making and business. I was hearing about it in a broad range of terms, from evolutions in social media, to user interface design, to changes in audience engagement strategies, to instability in the global economy, to predictions that the US economy itself needs to and is transforming itself into an innovation based economy that will be able to generate profitable innovations in a turbulent world market.

As we passed through the recession and continue to transition into the new economies made possible by computers and the internet, it was becoming increasingly clear that the possibilities for cultural innovation were almost entirely dependent on the funding sources and business models that quite literally define and shape their outcomes.

You cannot innovate outside of the business models and ecosystems in which you operate. They are designed to protect their own success and survival. Your efforts to disrupt them will be defeated unless you can address the business on its own formal terms.

On a deep ontological level this is reminiscent of the problems that painting encountered as it transitioned into abstraction in the early parts of the last century. It, along with all the arts, to evolve out of the avant garde, first faced itself on its own formal terms. Something similar is happening in business.

My conclusion in my paper at Northwestern was that one cannot innovate on a large scale in ways that significantly escape the business models that you are dependent on. I had not yet read Clayton Christensen's book, the Innovator's Dilemma, in which he explores this problem for large corporations that succeed wildly, growing to dominate their industry only to find themselves irrelevant or losing to competitors that are more innovative and nimble. But I had already lived inside or around that cycle of innovation through my decade in publishing in New York City. My intuitive understanding of the problem led me to confront it on stage at Northwestern.

Plain and simple. You cannot innovate beyond the restrictions of your business model. Therefore, you must design new business models if you want to innovate. A simple, logical conclusion.

I chewed on that conclusion for almost a year, looking for ways to work around it. There wasn't any way around it. If you can't work with the finance and the accounting, you can't build innovative organizations.

At this point I quietly enrolled in a Master's of Business Administration program at Western Washington University with the intention of studying accounting and finance. The first year I just put my head down and worked hard on the quantitative skills. As an artist with an MFA, I was an unusual addition to the mix, but I brought significant personal experience and was able to quickly translate concepts into my own real world experiences.

About nine months ago I began an independent study on innovation and the arts. At that point there were 20 or so Master's of Arts Administration programs throughout the United States. I pulled all their curricula and worked through what it was that they were teaching. Almost without exception, they were extremely light on the hard quantitative business skills like accounting, operations and finance.

By now I had worked through substantial portions of all three and could recognize what a loss this was to the entire field. The weakness of the whole field was summed up in the introduction to one of the leading textbooks on arts administration. It a field that is an amalgamation of ideas where no one key differentiating point or strength has emerged. The potential weakness was that you could get light versions of an MFA and an MBA without getting the full strengths of either.

I asked myself the following question--was there something happening at the nexus of art making and business that was uniquely powerful and strong, in which the best of both worlds would come forward and new and valuable models would emerge that would contribute to both fields?

From there began nine months of research that yielded the following answer; Yes, and the possibilities are incredibly exciting. They also are not restricted to non-profit or for-profit equations. And as more and more states in the US start to adopt the formation of social purpose corporations, the possibilities only continue to grow.

I wasn't the only person asking these questions. The entire field of arts education had been shifting towards audience engagement and the recognition that art making is a conversation with the public, with broader implications and consequences. The field of social entrepreneurship emerges out the interactions between art making and current evolutions in development and social innovation. This fall the School of Visual Arts is offering the first MFA in Social Entrepreneurship. There is a clear recognition that art making is not restricted to a material or image making event.

Concurrently the business world is experiencing escalating levels of uncertainty and a need to innovate disruptively as an almost normal condition in the markets.

By combining models of design thinking, emergent strategy and discover driven planning that have been developed at Stanford, Harvard, Wharton and Columbia, and tested at places like IBM, Apple, IDEO, and Ashoka, it is possible to integrate art, accounting, finance and design in powerful ways.

Tomorrow I will post on what this space is starting to look like from my perspective, how it works, and why you need someone who speaks art, design, accounting and finance on your team, no matter what it is you are trying to do in the world.

The Coming Wave of Change for US Non-Profits

noreply@blogger.com (Aric Mayer) — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 22:10:00 +0000

In the next five years US based non-profits are going to be faced with a wave of leadership transitions as baby-boomer executive directors retire. For the smaller and more innovative organizations, this is going to be an absolutely critical set of transitions. At the same time as the mantles are being passed, organizations are going to be faced with an increased need to increase efficiencies and run leaner. This will require the use of partnerships and contract relationships as organizations downsize and operations go online and into the cloud. There are many risks ahead, but the single largest risk for visionary and innovative organizations is that the core visions and values that the executive teams have nurtured over their tenure will be lost or diluted in the upcoming turmoil.

To increase the challenges, there are fewer qualified people to inherit these positions than there are people who are going to be retiring. The good news is that universities have recognized this deficit and are launching extremely innovative programs in social entrepreneurship, human driven design and social change that are graduating people with the raw skills and the creative methods to start to fill the void. Their entry into the work place will increase innovation, with all the problems that disruptive change brings.

The next wave of innovative non-profits will need to run extremely lean, be highly creative, work in partnerships as well as independently, and contract out critical portions of their operations. At the same time, they will have to be rapidly scalable as large influxes of money come their way in pulses.
As executive teams head into retirement, they need to set up their successors with a core set of strategies that are designed to embrace this more turbulent environment and still carry the core visions and values forward.

These next wave non-profits will be able to receive highly evolved strategic input and move it forward. A critical problem is communicating to those partners in ways that carry the vision to them. The best thing that an executive team can do to prepare for this is to engage in a strategic distillation of their expertise into a set of core documents that can communicate their vision in terms of internal accounting, internal and external communications strategies, and scalable growth plans. Without that strategic distillation, those core components discovered through years of work will at the very least be transformed if not lost altogether.

Further Thoughts on the Times' Paywall

noreply@blogger.com (Aric Mayer) — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 12:00:00 +0000

There is an inescapable and very simple formula that describes the financial activity of all organizations that do business. It is the income statement for a given period of time:

Revenue - Expenses = Net Income

Most income generated in a given period fits under revenue, and most of the money spent for that same period fits under expenses. Complete the formula and you have a sense of the general capacity for an organization to create income. If net income is negative, then the organization obviously can't sustain that business model. If it is positive, then possibilities exist for growth.

Much has been made about notions of 'free' in the new internet economy, and it is certainly an important marketing component that plays to the strengths of digital distribution, but it cannot and should not in the long run be taken out of its context in a process that ultimately has to deliver a reliable revenue stream--a business model in which revenue ultimately exceeds expenses.

Anything given away for free costs money to create and distribute. Those costs go directly to the expense side of the formula. But they don't merely offset an equal amount of revenue. The cost of free comes directly out of the net profit of the company on a one to one basis. Here is how that works.

Let's say hypothetically that the New York Times has a net profit margin of 10% (for 2010 it's actually about 4.5%). That means that for every $100 it spends, it takes in $110 to make a profit of $10. Or we can say that every $110 worth of news sold by the New York Times cost it $100 to make.

Now let's say that the New York Times decides to give away $100 in product. So they make $100 worth of news and give it away for free. Conventional logic says that the Times now has to make $100 in sales to make back that $100 loss. But because zero revenue comes in to offset that $100 expense, the New York Times is actually in the hole for $1000. Here's why. To get the money to make the $100 unit it gave away for free, the Times had to make and sell $1000 worth of news, bringing in with the 10% profit margin $100 in profit. So the $1000 dollars in operating expense brings in $1100 in revenue, and the profit, the $100 balance left over goes to pay for the $100 gift.

Now, the above theoretical example is based on the idea that the Times has a relatively stable operating business model. In this climate that is not the case, and technological advances in digital distribution have destabilized the model to the extent that there is little precedent to demonstrate the actual market value of the content recently being distributed for free.

What does all this have to do with the rollout of the New York Times paywall?

Here is where it starts to get interesting.

Net income for the New York Times Company for the past five years is as follows:

2010: $108 million
2009: $20 million
2008: ($58 million)
2007: $209 million
2006: ($543 million)

Despite the recession that started in 2008, the Times' worst year was in 2006. If the recession bottomed out in mid 2008, then the Times has been making slow gains in its overall operating profitability, with a net income of $108 million in 2010.

What this is telling us is that its operations without the paywall are narrowly in the black, returning a modest net income in 2010 of $108 million on revenues of $2.4 billion, or a net profit margin of 4.5%. That is for the entire New York Times Company. The New York Times Media Group, publishers of the New York Times newspaper and NYTimes.com, makes up about 65% of that revenue.

According to the Times this improvement in profitability results from increasing online ad sales and cost cutting and increased efficiency in the print division.

Here's where I think the explanation for the current paywall system may reside. The Times is in the black, but barely. The industry is in flux. Change is already happening. Growth will happen online. The print division is cost cutting, but there are limits to how fast and how far that can go. The opportunity for an increase in net income comes mostly from NYTimes.com. But, whatever happens with NYTimes.com, online advertising needs to be sustained. Loss can come too. Make the paywall too tight and online advertising will drop off as readers fall away. Surges of readership through social media sharing will be constrained.

The middle spot? Make a paywall that is more of a nuisance than a real deterrent. This will keep advertising rates as high as possible through free readership and will begin to migrate concerned and conscientious readers over to a paying online model. Gradually the tightness of the paywall can be adjusted as its financial impacts become more known.

If print revenues can be kept stable, the move to a loose paywall produces a powerful effect. Once the approximately $40 million invested in the paywall's implementation, plus the paywall operational costs are recovered, and any loss in online advertising is offset, online subscription revenues go nearly straight to net profit. Remember, NYTimes.com is already giving the news away for free. Their operations don't have to change for the paywall to take effect. They already produce and distribute the news. All things being equal, production costs don't rise.

It is one of the most unusual rollouts in business history. A company that is in full operational flow suddenly and somewhat loosely begins to charge for a product that it has been giving away for free.

A Little Bit of Free

noreply@blogger.com (Aric Mayer) — Fri, 18 Mar 2011 17:46:00 +0000

In 2009 I made a series of predictions for the year, starting with the prediction that the New York Times would start to charge for it's online access. I was a little short on my time frame, but anyone who understands even the basics of the business of publishing could see the day coming. On March 28, the Times will initiate a pay for use system where users can access 20 pages per four week period for free and then have to pay, starting at $15.00/month.

The outcry against it indicates that the Times online is indeed worth paying for. People are upset because they recognize the value of the content and recognize the cost of being cut off from it. That right there says this will succeed at some level. If the announcement had been met with a collective yawn, it would have been a terrifying signal to the Times' executive team.

To demonstrate the value of the New York Times you can engage in a very simple experiment. Try life without the New York Times online. If it is worth the price, pay for it. If it isn't worth the price, don't.

Journalists and Photojournalists should be applauding this move. It signals an effort by the New York Times to uncouple content creation from direct dependence on online advertising. Without online subscription prices or online newsstand sales, there simply is no other way of generating a predictable online revenue stream. For online pieces there has been a direct one to one expense to advertising income ratio. That means that for every dollar spent on creating and distributing content one dollar has to come in from advertising to break even.

The publishing business model has always depended on three main sources of revenue; subscriptions, newsstand sales, and advertising. This created a more balanced and diverse method of allowing the readership to pay for content. Subscribers built a steady stream of predictable revenue, newsstand sales were driven by the content of individual issues, with sales surging for more popular--or valuable--content, and advertisers paying to pair advertising with the content. Subscription and newsstand sales provide a way for content creation to be recognized as both valuable and sustainable. It is a thing worth paying for, and requiring the audience to pay for it demonstrates its value.

If advertising is the only reliable mechanism for generating revenue, then the real value of content falls through the floor. The inevitable business conclusion in an online advertising only model is that content that is more conducive to advertising gets more lubricant in the system. A truly free model could only sustain itself over time if the content shaped itself around the advertising. In that case the reader is her or himself a product delivered by the publication to the advertisers. By paying for the content, the reader becomes the client again, shifting the scales back towards a balance between serving both the readers and the advertisers.

For that, just a little bit of free sounds about right.

Update: With early reports from the Times subscription rollout in Canada coming in, it seems that there are some very large holes in the paywall. Whether they are intentional or not, this certainly is not shaping up to be a black and white pay-or-don't-access situation. There's a good piece on Nieman Journalism Lab about how four lines of code are all that are needed to disable the content blocking system.

Warscape

noreply@blogger.com (Aric Mayer) — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 19:37:00 +0000

Reporting on armed conflicts invariably relies on one or more basic storylines that impart sense to the unfolding of events and the roles of actors. Such a narrative usually casts some in the role of victims and others as perpetrators. The most prevalent storyline of violence in the reporting on the warscape of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) has been rape. Indeed, the DRC has become infamous globally through the reports on the massive scale of sexual violence. While other forms of violence and abuse have also been committed on a massive scale, it is sexual violence that has attracted the lion's share of attention, especially among "outside" observers... Arguably "SGBV (Sexual and Gender Based Violence) tourism" has been added to what has come to be known as "war zone tourism."

From the opening paragraph of The Complexity of Violence: A critical analysis of sexual violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC)

Nestled in the middle of that dense and important paragraph is a word of real significance to any efforts in communicating the reality of distant conflicts--warscape.

The word itself does not appear frequently enough to yet merit a definition in wikipedia or any other major online source that I could find, but I think it deserves a significant amount of examination before it does. When used in a social or political context, the authors here and in one other study I could find seem to think of it as denoting the realities of a war, of describing the existence of things beyond the scope of communication. But within word itself lies a key to its own interpretation.

-scape |skeɪp|
combining form
denoting a specified type of scene : moonscape.

Critical to understanding depiction and its effects we need to have a clear sense of how removed the authors and the audience might be from the war. To experience a war as a warscape we must approach it from a distance. There can be little warscape for the war fought over and around us. That is too traumatic and chaotic to be combined into form, or any specified type of scene. With enough distance in place, all kinds of influences determine what final form the war might take, and what those media depictions might achieve in the world. As I have said time and again, those influences almost always align themselves along the interests and perspectives of the media makers.

We know from the history of the genre of landscape painting and photography in the west that the media are formed as much by the needs and wants of the audience as they are by any intrinsic truth of the land itself. Ansel Adams' work achieves iconic status in the branding of the western landscape because there is an audience that is highly receptive to his particular vision.

Does it not hold true as well then that the stories of distant wars are not then shaped as much by the needs, desires, and fantasies of the audience as they are the complex realities of distant conflicts? Are we not able to pick and choose the telling of the war that best suits the marketing and dissemination of the news itself? In this way, the warscape becomes the companion to the landscape. It is a vision rooted in distant events and places, but prepared, shaped, packaged, and distributed with the specific intent to meet local needs.

And if warscapes have been formed to respond to market needs, could they not also be formed to achieve results other than popular reception and market share? Could they not be formed to exert influence on political outcomes, on public figures, on groups with power to direct aid and partnerships, negotiate settlements, support solutions? Absolutely they can.

Aesthetics of Catastrophe, the Short Film

noreply@blogger.com (Aric Mayer) — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 22:44:00 +0000

Aesthetics of Catastrophe from Aric Mayer on Vimeo.

This is best watched full screen.

Obama v BP: the Anatomy of a Magazine Cover

noreply@blogger.com (Aric Mayer) — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 17:37:00 +0000

Original Photo: Larry Downing/Reuters

On July 5th, in the wee hours of the morning, the New York Times blog Media Decoder ran a post on the editorial retouching of a cover of the June 19 issue of The Economist in which a figure was retouched out of an image to isolate Obama in the frame. By early afternoon, Emma Duncan, the Economist's deputy editor in charge of that specific issue, wrote a response by email that was published to the post. Thanks to the Times and to Duncan for giving us a greater chance to examine the editorial effect of the decisions that led up to the cover. It's an illuminating process.

In her response to the Times, Duncan says, "We removed her not to make a political point, but because the presence of an unknown woman would have been puzzling to readers." Let's examine that closely.

In the original photograph, Obama is framed against the offshore oil rigs with two figures, Charlotte Randolph and Admiral Allen. Obama stands a full foot taller than Randolph, and appears actively engaged in conversation with her. His hands are on his hips, his head is turned downward to catch her words. Her body language indicates that she is making a point or argument. She is looking up, leaning slightly to the right and forward, towards his line of sight, actively engaging him while he listens and looks at something brightly colored on the beach. The image as a whole details an interaction between two people, within the context of the beach and the oil rig.

In the version run by the Economist, Admiral Allen is cropped out. This has little net effect on either Obama or the overall picture. But the removal of Randolph and the beach changes the context of the image entirely. It removes the purpose for Obama's downward gaze, replacing Randolph and the objects on the beach with the oil rig as the reason for his posture. Rather than actively engaging in a conversation, listening and looking, Obama is framed in isolation, surrounded by water and the image of the oil rig. His gaze is downward, defeated, or at least worn out and alone. Above the image runs the headline "Obama v BP." Next to him runs the text, "The Damage Beyond the Spill." There is nothing to indicate that the damage referred to belongs to anything or anyone else.

The removal of Randolph from the image thoroughly changes the context in which we can interpret Obama's posture and association with the oil rig. In the original, the two are actors on a stage with the subject of their interaction, the oil spill, looming in the background. The exchange in the image occurs in a triangle--Obama and Randolph interacting in the foreground with the oil rig receding to the top of the frame. Their exchange creates a foreground drama that establishes the distance between them and the offshore rig on the horizon. With Randolph removed, Obama is cast into a direct one to one relationship with the rig, his posture directly motivated by its now looming presence. Perhaps most significant is that his fellow actor in this diorama has been erased, leaving his body language to be attributed directly to the rig. It is a complete restructuring of the meaning of the image.

Photography and Sexual Violence

noreply@blogger.com (Aric Mayer) — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 14:00:00 +0000

This spring I wrote a media policy document for HEAL Africa, a Congolese led program based in Goma, Democratic Republic of Congo, that provides evidence-based holistic medical and psychosocial healing for the survivors of a decade of war in Eastern Congo. HEAL Africa's Heal My People program is achieving incredible results in treating survivors of the systematic sexual violence that has been waged on the local population. Heal My People works to walk survivors through a process of physical and psychological recovery and then integrate them into communities where they are welcomed and embraced as equal and valued members. Below is an adapted version of that text.

Ethics, Issues and Responsibilities in Depicting Survivors of Sexual Violence

By Aric Mayer
June 2010

Survivors of rape and gender-based violence contribute their names, faces and stories to media productions at considerable personal risk. Rape is a trauma with a high potential for stigmatization that is easily facilitated with internet based mass media. Media producers have an obligation to do everything possible to do no harm, while minimizing potential for harm and maximizing the potential for good.

With the recent revolutions in media technology, humanitarian agencies are finding themselves in positions with increased pressure to publish their own stories and produce their own content. Producers of documentary and journalism media are also increasingly relying on the same humanitarian agencies both for access and information. These opportunities and responsibilities are creating new possibilities for agencies to integrate their media strategies into their overall organizational goals.

What follows is an introductory examination of the principal issues and problems that must be addressed from the perspective of an agency whose primary mission is to heal survivors of sexual violence within it’s care, and with an understanding that photography and video are highly evocative media with strong potentials both towards helping and towards exploitation. In each case the potential for harm is explored with the hope of avoiding it in practice. In situations where helping is the goal, the specific outcomes should be carefully targeted and all media strategies built into their service.

Sexual Violence and Identity Disclosure

"Rape is best characterized as torture that uses sex as a weapon. Like a torturer, the rapist uses sexual acts to dominate, humiliate, and terrorize the victim. To deny the role of sexual humiliation in rape is to deny victims the horror of what they have been through. As long as people have any sense of privacy about sexual acts and the human body, rape will, therefore, carry a stigma, not necessarily a stigma that blames the victim for what happened to her, but a stigma that links her name irrevocably with an act of intimate humiliation.

To name [or picture] a rape victim is to guarantee that whenever somebody hears her name [or sees her picture], that somebody will picture her in the act of being sexually tortured. To expose a rape victim to this without her consent is nothing short of punitive."

--Helen Benedict [1]

The issues brought up in photographing rape survivors are complex and potentially harmful to the subjects. The ways that photography, video and film function as representative media, and the economies and markets within which they are funded, produced, distributed, achieve recognition and ultimately widespread public exposure can mirror in some ways the trauma of sexual violence.

The possibilities for increasing the trauma are significant. There is the imposition of another person’s vision upon one’s personage, the loss of control over one’s likeness, the potential for permanent and public association with one’s trauma, the problem of consent when one is asked for it by someone in a position of power, and the commodification of one’s own suffering. This is an effort to address these potentials and mitigate the possibilities for harm.

The Belmont Report

Created and published by the National Institute of Health in the United States, the Belmont Report, in it’s own words, “…is a statement of basic ethical principles and guidelines that should assist in resolving the ethical problems that surround the conduct of research with human subjects.”

The Belmont report offers a set of ethical guidelines that are particularly relevant to media depictions of rape survivors within the context of sexual violence. Because rape is a trauma that carries a high potential for public stigmatization and exploitation, ethical guidelines for research in the behavioral sciences are particularly relevant to any journalistic process of depiction.

Since potential subjects are approached specifically because of their trauma, and media depiction is potentially linked to a permanent and public future association with their trauma, I recommend the application of best practices for behavioral science research to journalistic and documentary research. Below are selected quotes from the report.

Basic Ethical Principles:

Respect for Persons. -- Respect for persons incorporates at least two ethical convictions: first, that individuals should be treated as autonomous agents, and second, that persons with diminished autonomy are entitled to protection. The principle of respect for persons thus divides into two separate moral requirements: the requirement to acknowledge autonomy and the requirement to protect those with diminished autonomy.

Beneficence. -- Persons are treated in an ethical manner not only by respecting their decisions and protecting them from harm, but also by making efforts to secure their well-being. Such treatment falls under the principle of beneficence. The term ”beneficence” is often understood to cover acts of kindness or charity that go beyond strict obligation. In this document, beneficence is understood in a stronger sense, as an obligation. Two general rules have been formulated as complementary expressions of beneficent actions in this sense: (1) do not harm and (2) maximize possible benefits and minimize possible harms.

Justice. -- Who ought to receive the benefits of research and bear its burdens? This is a question of justice, in the sense of ”fairness in distribution” or ”what is deserved.” An injustice occurs when some benefit to which a person is entitled is denied without good reason or when some burden is imposed unduly. Another way of conceiving the principle of justice is that equals ought to be treated equally. However, this statement requires explication. Who is equal and who is unequal? What considerations justify departure from equal distribution? Almost all commentators allow that distinctions based on experience, age, deprivation, competence, merit and position do sometimes constitute criteria justifying differential treatment for certain purposes… the selection of research subjects needs to be scrutinized in order to determine whether some classes (e.g., welfare patients, particular racial and ethnic minorities, or persons confined to institutions) are being systematically selected simply because of their easy availability, their compromised position, or their manipulability, rather than for reasons directly related to the problem being studied.

Informed Consent. -- Respect for persons requires that subjects, to the degree that they are capable, be given the opportunity to choose what shall or shall not happen to them. This opportunity is provided when adequate standards for informed consent are satisfied.

While the importance of informed consent is unquestioned, controversy prevails over the nature and possibility of an informed consent. Nonetheless, there is widespread agreement that the consent process can be analyzed as containing three elements: information, comprehension and voluntariness.

[and in conclusion]:

One special instance of injustice results from the involvement of vulnerable subjects. Certain groups, such as racial minorities, the economically disadvantaged, the very sick, and the institutionalized may continually be sought as research subjects, owing to their ready availability in settings where research is conducted. Given their dependent status and their frequently compromised capacity for free consent, they should be protected against the danger of being involved in research solely for administrative convenience, or because they are easy to manipulate as a result of their illness or socioeconomic condition.

The full text of the Belmont Report can be read here.

Informed Consent

Central to the informed consent process is the necessity for the individual who is considering revealing their identity to understand that there is potential that it may cause them personal harm while hopefully contributing to the overall public good.

One potential for personal harm is immediately clear. Participating increases risk of stigmatization and retaliation. Media should offer a reasonable hope of a benefit that offsets this risk.

Not so clear is how the media may provide that benefit. The basic logic is that if a person contributes their story, their face, their name to a project, they increase the overall level of personal engagement for the story with the broader international audience. The promise is that the story will bring international aid, awareness, political pressure etc. to help the problem, and so the potential for personal stigmatization is offset by the promise of increasing the overall means of addressing the problem. In the best case, that is what should happen.

Unfortunately, in many cases, media serve to reinforce and reproduce western stereotypes and perceptions that Africa and other parts of the world are barbaric, hopeless places that generate horrific human rights problems whose solutions only lie in Western intervention. In this case, one has to wonder if the contributions of the participants have not been in vain. If they take the personal risk to contribute their stories and identities, then the media should drive some sense of good that might come to bear on the problem itself. Notions of how good might be achieved should be incorporated into the very process and form of the media itself, not merely into hoped for or perceived future aid, assistance, rescue or political change. Media strategy is not separate from the overall structural efforts to address the problem.

It is a completely fair question to ask any media producer what their sense of the public good is in each situation and how they will frame the story in light of western prejudices about that part of the world in general. If survivors decide to take the personal risk of participating in media then there should be an understanding of how the media being created will deliver on that promise. And media makers should have a clear sense of responsibility to use these stories in ways the promise the best outcomes for the subjects--who will have to live with the possibility of a lifelong association with the media that are being created.

Ease of Access

Survivors of sexual violence who are being treated in a hospital or program are singularly easy to locate. They exist as a potential representative population that stands in for a wider population that exists in more remote and dangerous areas. This makes them a desirable starting point for journalists and media makers. Care must be taken to keep those who have sought and are receiving medical help from bearing too much of an undue burden in telling their stories, where the intrusion of media makers may interfere with the process of healing.

Protection vs Paternalization

A balanced media policy must take into account the full range of potential benefits and harm from participating in media about sexual violence and war. Anyone who participates in a media project in which their stories are used or their identities are disclosed should have a full understanding of the potential that creates, both for healing and for harm. Patients should be protected, but not paternalized. If they have a clear understanding of what the implications are for disclosing their identities within the context of sexual violence, then they should be free to choose whether or not to participate.

Over-protection can be a form of paternalizing, which is also a form of subjugation. Empowerment means giving subjects the tools to make their own decisions within their capabilities to do so with full awareness of the potential consequences. Key to that are: an understanding of the issues of depiction within the context of sexual violence, a process of assessing an individual’s capacity to make an informed autonomous decision, protection for those with diminished autonomy, and a clear process of generating informed consent.

The Internet and the Developing World

As we have already seen, the fastest way to bring communication to rural parts of the world is through cell phone services. Remote parts of China, Africa, Asia, the Middle East all rapidly transitioned from near complete isolation to cell phone coverage in a very short period of time. The next wave of access will likely include an internet that can be accessed via cell phone. While we can’t predict exactly how and when it will happen, it is likely that it will happen faster than we expect. A future where nearly everyone with a cell phone has some kind of internet access is imminent.

With it will come a range of new business and social opportunities. Also will come the need to manage one’s internet presence in the face of a whole new platform for disseminating stigmatizing information. Services such as Facebook and Twitter function very well on cell phones, bringing the social web to a much larger group of participants.

Publication on the web is permanent and ubiquitous. It is very hard to undo. Survivors who believe that they are sharing their stories through Western media to remote audiences may find in the near future that they have permanently broadcast their stories throughout their own neighborhoods.

Currently, each woman named a high profile photo essay on rape in Eastern Congo is somewhat permanently fixed in a state of online identity associating her with her trauma. A Google search for all the names included in the essay returns at the top of the search results the articles in which their identities are disclosed as rape victims. This includes minors and children. Because major publications online dominate search rankings, it is possible that this will not change over the course of the lifetimes of these women. So long as those websites and their archives are available online, in the top results returned for their names will be these articles.

As the internets become more essential to the functions of daily life in more rural communities, this may have significant impact on their lives. Should survivors wish to have an online life separate from those associations, it will be very hard to change their online identities. When the social web comes to the rest of the world, and it will definitely come, it will come with all the information ever published online included.

In the West, social media have come to dominate the social structures of upcoming generations, and the evidence is that this will only increase in its sophistication and permanence. It is becoming more and more common that every employer does a simple Google search before hiring a prospective employee. People vet their friends, potential love interests, colleagues, enemies, and virtually anyone they have an interest in by searching for information on them on the web. There is no reason to believe that this will not eventually be a social norm throughout the world.

This raises a serious problem with informed consent. Media makers are protected by signed release forms that in the West are legal protection and indication that a subject has given full consent. And these same release forms are signed and gathered throughout the world as a matter of practice. But how is informed consent possible for a person living in a rural area with limited access to the internet and therefore very little capacity to understand what it is that they are agreeing to? If you ask a rape survivor in the United States, who already participates in the social web, to speak publicly about their trauma, the implications for them are more clear. How do you facilitate an informed consent with someone who has yet to be introduced to the social web, and yet for whom the internet may well be a significant influence in the near future?

Photography and Survivors of Rape

The very act of permanently recording someone's image within the context of being a rape victim can itself be experienced to be a loss of control not unlike the experience of rape. The photographer now owns their images and has the capacity to further contribute to their stigmatization and exploitation.

The key issue here for photography is written right into the language of the medium. We “take” a photograph. There is the understanding that something is fixed and then removed from the situation. For traumatized subjects, this can be a reanimation of their trauma. It can even be a participation in or a reactivation of some of the principle aspects of the trauma: loss of power, loss of control, loss of identity, and becoming the property of another person.

In the United States standard journalism practice is to never show the faces or disclose the names of a rape survivor. If either of those identifying aspects are to be disclosed, the argument must be made that the public’s right to that specific information supercedes the individual need for privacy. That would be an extremely rare occurrence.

Within the ethics of journalism, that is the standard for victim protection. Journalism is a public service that produces a public commodity, and decisions about disclosure are made based on an idea of the public good as well as the popularity and marketability of the information. This allows for a weighing of the issues. How does the individual right to privacy balance against the need for the public to know? Decisions are made with the understanding that public disclosure can do private harm.

For hospitals and public health initiatives, the boundaries and purposes of depiction are different and so the decision process must be handled differently. Since their primary mission is to heal people, the care and concern must be first for the patient and program participant. Only after all the questions regarding their protection are answered can strategies for public disclosure be made. There is no weighing process balancing disclosure versus public good. The rights of the patient must always come first. Only after those rights have been satisfactorily protected can media strategies be created.

For media makers, this is a difficult problem. If you remove depiction of the survivor from the possibilities of telling the story, you remove the very elements that make the story popular. Pressure from media producers will almost always be in the direction of more disclosure. Without it, there is much less chance for award winning work in a market that rewards the commodification of suffering.

Consent, Coercion and Undue Influence

Ariella Azoulay, in The Civil Contract of Photography, questions the ability of someone recently the victim of war and physical violation to give consent to have their photograph taken. For her, even the asking is tantamount to a repeated rape.

With recently and severely traumatized survivors of violence, it is questionable as to how much informed consent is possible. Those who are so close to their trauma as to be unable to talk about it are at a significantly increased risk being unable to give a proper informed consent. They will, however, possibly recognize and experience the loss of control that goes with it. The act of asking for consent can be interpreted as an endorsement of their experience of continued exploitation.

How many women who are so recently severely traumatized and who are now in a program that may be their only hope for safety and healing, have the strength to say 'no' when asked permission by someone in such authority over them? And how many might say 'yes' out of fear or lack of power?

Their right to privacy is intimately connected to their ability to heal. In the case of Congo, where rape is a too common experience, it might be thought that the increased frequency of rape would lessen the potential stigma. Instead it would seem that the opposite is true, and that survivors, rather than being more accepted, are in fact more likely to be thrown out of their homes, villages, and communities into a life of perpetual stigma. The potential stigma is greater. The very act of permanently recording someone's image within the context of being a rape victim could itself be experienced to be a loss of control not unlike the experience of rape.

Likewise, we could also say that a survivor’s right to publicly tell their story may also be connected to their ability to heal. If a survivor actively seeks a voice and platform and a stage on which to tell her story, then it can be built to best serve her needs. That stage should be created based on the terms of her involvement, not on the terms of those who want to use her picture. It is a balancing act.

The Promise of Empowerment

It has been a common sentiment in humanitarian photography and photojournalism that photographing the suffering, dispossessed, and powerless gives them a voice by exposing their condition to the world. To deny them the opportunity to be photographed is to silence their voice and to keep them in the shadows of obscurity. The logic behind this argument makes perfect sense from within a celebrity and advertising saturated culture, and ensures that the media makers continue to have access and control.

In actuality there is little evidence to show that media exposure is intrinsically empowering. If anything it raises risk on the part of the subjects who may have little or no access to a functioning judicial system, police protection, or even basic physical safety.

What is clear though is that compassion and suffering are media commodities that are bought and sold within economies and markets. The currency of exchange can be money (both in the form of for-profit and non-profit support), status, and/or recognition for the makers within our advertising driven media economies.

Whatever the outcome for the subjects, it is certain that the media produced will serve the purposes of the producers. Photographers, filmmakers, and media producers all have intended outcomes in mind, whether they state them up front or not. This is true from the award winning photojournalist to the most casual visitor who just wants a photo souvenir to show friends back home.

With the promise for empowerment, photojournalism and documentary media frequently cross the line into exploitation, leaving the subject fixed permanently in the broader public arena as a victim while the producers of the media are rewarded.

With that said, media can drive or facilitate realized empowering results. But to do so the media strategies must be in service to specific goals. Actual empowerment should be an observable outcome in which the subjects achieve greater influence and control over their own circumstances while having their own rights protected. These are ultimately systemic or political solutions with emotional components. Insofar as media are empowering, they should drive targeted lasting systemic improvement. Media that focus purely on the emotional content of the subject may elicit a strong reaction from the audience but achieve little for the subjects.

When the needs of the photographer or publication supercede the needs and rights of the subject, then the boundary into exploitation has been crossed.

Justice for All Survivors

There is no situation in which a media maker’s ethical obligations to their subjects in the remote parts of the world differ from their ethical obligations to American or Western subjects. When there are any deviations in the ethics of depicting non-Western survivors of sexual violence from Western survivors, the burden is on the creators and the publishers of such work to demonstrate that it is necessary and just. In so far as they cannot, then the non-Western subjects should be afforded the same rights and protections as Western subjects. This is particularly significant in the revealing of identities of minors and children of rape, whose depictions would be protected and prohibited in most western countries, regardless of consent.

Rights Ownership and Repeat Trauma

For all survivors of gender-based violence, a principle function of the trauma was to remove control and ownership of their bodies. For anyone who was taken or kept in any kind of slavery or subjugation this has even greater consequence in the issues of healing. When they are photographed in the context of the trauma another loss of ownership takes place--their image becomes the property of another person. The impact of that will depend on the individual.

The simple act of that exchange--their image being taken and the loss of control that goes with it--can be an extension of the original trauma. This effect will multiply as the social web becomes more and more prevalent throughout the world.

Photography and Healing

Many claims are made about photography’s ability to heal, empower, recontextualize, and otherwise change the circumstances and inner lives of suffering individuals for the better. In each case we have to ask the question, to what end, and how?

From a clinical perspective, many of these claims are suspect at best and are founded on market influences and logics that many of the makers aren’t aware that they are participating in. If the goal in making pictures is to heal trauma survivors specifically, then there have to be systemic goals based on clinical evidence that drives actual realized internal change. The language of empowerment is not enough.

A critical stage in healing from trauma is the metabolization of the trauma within the psyche of the survivor. This occurs through a process and in a protected space within which the survivor is able to explore the trauma in a way that results in ownership and integration. In order for this to happen, many survivors will need to have control of their own story. To have it fixed in the public arena creates risk of loss of control and re-exploitation within the context of the rape. That risk must be balance with the need to speak out against injustice and systemic violence.

Conclusion

Contributing stories and identities to media productions about sexual violence has the potential to be both helpful and harmful. Key to mitigating the potential for harm is a clear process of informed consent, combined with a goal driven media strategy that is in full support of a survivor’s rights and needs as a whole person.

Survivors of gender based violence break down into two basic groups: autonomous individuals who are capable of informed consent, and those with diminished autonomy due to the recency and/or severity of the trauma who need special protection.

Informed consent for autonomous individuals contains three elements; information, comprehension and voluntariness. When the requirements for a fully informed consent are met, media makers have an obligation to mitigate any and all potential harm wherever possible.

Whenever the needs of the makers or the distributors of such media productions supercede the rights and needs of the subjects, the line into exploitation has been crossed.

Publishing names, faces and stories increases the overall reader/viewer engagement with the story. Therefore media pressure will frequently be in the direction of increased disclosure. It also permanently associates a survivor with their trauma in a world where the internet is increasingly available.

Throughout the process, there is never a situation in which the ethical obligations of media makers towards their subjects in the West differ from their subjects elsewhere in the world. Whenever differences emerge, the burden is on the media makers to demonstrate that they are necessary and just.

[1] Virgin or Vamp: How the Press Covers Sex Crimes, by Helen Benedict via Poynter Institute.

[2] The Civil Contract of Photography, by Ariella Azoulay.

On Post-Photography

noreply@blogger.com (Aric Mayer) — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 06:12:00 +0000

Twenty years ago, at the very end of the analog age, to become a working professional photographer meant that you were positioning yourself to be the tip of a creative spear whose length carried somewhat invisibly back into the mysteries of the publishing world. There were hundreds of editors, publishers, and business people who made the determinations of how photographs were shaped and packaged for consumption. This process remained largely out of sight while the romantic vision of the photographer as an interpreter of reality, the daring individual who could shape culture and perception, carried the weight of the public understanding of the medium. The photographer made pictures that could move people to experience the world in special ways.

From war to fashion to food, our visual culture was created by these gifted individuals who could enter a battle or a crowded room with nothing but a camera and emerge with an iconic image that might resonate with the public in profound ways. All of those romantic associations are true, and it takes a great deal of talent, hard work and dedication, along with a particular kind of personality, to be able to make the images that make the culture. But it is only a piece of the entire equation. This mystique, however, benefited nearly everyone involved. Photographers could trade on the romantic myth while the editors and publishers of the work remained in large part out of sight, their own motivations and rationales unseen and therefore beyond critique. These are big and complex systems and industries that answer to no one person and do not bend to anyone's will. They have their own internal logics that cannot easily be re-written.

Out of this emerged an entire system of photographic education and interpretation that focused (and continues to focus) almost exclusively on the image itself, as if it came to exist on its own terms throughout the process. The chief problem, though, was that the image never did come into being on its own. It always required an army of support to gain iconic status, and that army of editors, publishers, galleries, museums, collectors, imaging specialists, paper buyers, sales people, printers, truck drivers, and sales venues all cost a lot of money. Which meant that the canon that we understand to be the history of photography was largely shaped by these structural and economic forces, and continue to be shaped by them today.

Last week, Tim Hetherington gave an excellent interview on the New York Times Lens Blog about his film, Restrepo, which he shot and co-directed with Sebastian Junger. In the interview he made the comment that we are living in a post-photography world.

I'm naturally inclined to be suspicious of any movement that describes itself as 'post' anything. By doing so, it defines itself based on what comes before it, by what it stands against, which is a way of reasoning that is set up in opposition to something. With that said, 'post' anything seems to come in quite useful when the precursor had set itself up to be a global, all-encompassing truth that could not be be escaped and therefore defined the working method and process for everyone who participates in it. In this case, the industries that have commissioned, paid for, edited, published and generally packaged the current sense of photographic history and practice fit nicely into that category.

Hetherington's use of the term post-photography deserves some unpacking because it is incredibly relevant to the transitions we are experiencing today. We have not arrived at a world in which photography is irrelevant or replaceable by another medium. In fact quite the opposite, photography seems to be expanding in its use and influence. Where we have arrived is a new place in which that old model that focused its energy on the image itself while the rest of the mechanisms of its life remained outside of the control of any one person has now been replaced by technological advances that bring much more of the entire spear under the control of the creators. Restrepo got made because it is now possible to make such a film with a camera and a laptop. 20 years ago it would have taken a small army of people and millions of dollars of equipment.

What exciting times these are. We are part of this incredible experiment. The greater the number of people required to create a project, the greater the pressure for it to perform in predictable ways that make money, achieve recognition and justify the participation of such a large team. The more control the individual has over the entire process, from concept to distribution, the more likely for unpredictably diverse expressions to emerge.

We are moving into terrain well past that vision of photography as it was, focused exclusively on the image, and now we must see it for what it has always been, the image within the flows and exchanges that give the images access, meaning, and context. It is Post-Photography in the same way that Post-Modernism took Modernism itself out of its position of monolithic dominance and began to examine what it meant for Modernism to exist as a pluralism. We are no longer concerned only with the image, but also with its place in the flow that gives it possibilities for a life, for human meaning. It is an exciting time indeed.

Tim Hetherington on NYT Lens

Some Further Thoughts on Vernaschi's Sacrifice Photos

noreply@blogger.com (Aric Mayer) — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 22:48:00 +0000

On April 16 the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting published writings and photographs by Marco Vernaschi in a self described effort to uncover the hidden horror of child exorcism and sacrifice in Uganda. What seems clear is that Vernaschi, while making the images, asked the parents of a girl who had been murdered to exhume her body so that he could photograph her remains. This ignited a strong backlash and a sustained ethical debate throughout the photojournalism blogging community, with important contributions from Benjamin Chesterton [1], Asim Rafiqui [2], A. J. Somerset [3], Joerg Colberg [4], Anne Holmes [5], Tewfic El-Sawy [6], and a very long running thread on Lightstalkers[7].

The critique of his work has largely been made along the lines of examining the ethics of this act, which is an important aspect of the story and well worth the reading.

There is also a broader set of aesthetic issues involved, and a series of questions rising from something we can all examine directly, the photographs themselves and their support from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

The children in this work inhabit a nightmare world of perpetual darkness, where time and space are frequently distorted as if in a Francis Bacon painting. Frozen, stretched, and blurry skull-like faces with socket eyes emerge from pools of black. Low light effects add to the sense of the macabre. A snap zoom applied to a graffiti skull gives it a 3D appearance, as if it rises up out of the picture plane. Here children are preyed upon, tortured, exorcised, and presumably killed, all depicted in a highly internally consistent visual language.

The photographs build on a wide range of contemporary Western cultural products, including American and Japanese horror films [see addendum below]. There are flashes of "The Ring", with its sense of compressed and distorted time. Hints of German Expressionism. Even Edvard Munch's "The Scream". All presented without explanation or context. The images are highly evocative and they play on well established Western cultural productions based on the real experiences of suffering and pain, as well as fantasies about the occult as an agency that preys on children, both as victims and as perpetrators.

The latent question is how much of this is reporting and how much is derived from existing Western cultural productions and fascinations already saturated with ritualized child murder or sacrifice?

Were this work to have remained in Vernaschi's photoshelter gallery, it would exist somewhat on its own terms. However, its publication and support by the Pulitzer Center gives it credit, not as a cultural product, but as photojournalism that is important, necessary, and that we should strive to emulate or carry further.

This begs another series of questions which reflect back on the maker and the publishers. To what extent is the visual language of photojournalism dependent on cultural forms of expression that are heavily entertainment based? And where these influences exist--and they do exist--should we not be as equally interested in exploring their impact on the world as we are in 'exposing' hidden horrors such as these?

The two issues are not independent of each other. When we go to make images, we make images that reflect on us. One cannot make a consistent body of work that is independent of this dynamic. The more unique and individuated the body of work, the more the images reflect back on the creators themselves. Vernaschi's photographs draw heavily on pre-existing visual culture, almost all of which exists outside the conventions of journalism. So, it's a fair question to ask. To what extent is this actually reporting? And to the extent that it is not, what is it? For it clearly has value within the economy of the Pulitzer organization.

Photographs are made and published in an economy of exchange that involves money, status, recognition and power within the industry. That is the particular economy within which these images should be seen. The question should always be; to what end are these images in distribution? Which masters do they serve?

We also should examine how culturally close we in the West might be to participating in these depictions of ritualized child sacrifice, and how close their metaphors might resonate here at home. From reading Vernaschi's captions, the sacrifices are made in an effort to extract some of the essences of the child and transfer them to another, preserving or enhancing in some way the innocence and youth of another person, an endeavor, a building.

Do we not also perform a similar ritual? How many Western child actors/actresses and models have had their youth extracted and disseminated as the products of popular culture, only to find themselves discarded at the end of the process? We have entire industries built on that very exchange, the sale of youth through pictures, film, fashion, advertising and popular culture. We may not physically dismember their bodies, but the psychological, social, and psychic effects are just as real.

There has also emerged a highly stylized public fascination with the infliction of pain on children or the innocent. Just tonight, as I am writing, an entire hour of broadcast television is being devoted to a popular crime drama in which children are kidnapped, tortured and murdered. Which is to say that we have a sufficient public fascination with the subject that, if presented properly, it can be an effective means of selling advertising.

Vernaschi's photographs create a pictorial horror show out of an otherwise poorly articulated set of practices in Uganda. And in doing so reflect in a mirror back to the West its own cultural productions, fears, and fantasies about ritualized child abuse and the dark continent. In doing so they say more about Western cultural productions than they do about anything I know of Africa.

For a more informative read about spirit possession and how it is practiced within African societies, I highly recommend Spirit Possession, Modernity and Power in Africa, Heike Behrend and Ute Luig, Editors. Of special value to this conversation are Power to Heal, Power to Kill: Spirit possession & war in Northern Uganda (1986-1994) by Heike Behrend, and Linda L. Giles' nuanced work on the complexity and personality of the spirits doing the possessing in Spirit Possession & the Symbolic Construction of Swahili Society.

Spirit possession provides an ideal medium for the creation of cultural texts. It creates powerful metaphorical dramas that are enacted in human form but attributed to the spirit world. The human actors are not actors in the conventional sense but a stage--the human body becomes a vehicle for the spirits to communicate with and interact with the human world. Some scholars have noted that the human vehicles often occupy a structural position that makes them culturally appropriate to play this role (Nicholas 1972; Lambeck 1981; Kapferer 1983; Giles 1987). Hence participation in spirit possession can be seen as a positive social role rather than an indication of their social deprivation and possession itself as an 'integral part of the whole culture' rather than an isolated 'subculture' (Lambek 1981:63).

from Spirit Possession & the Symbolic Construction of Swahili Society, p 143

The practice of spirit possession in African societies is something much more complex and multidimensional than the horror tinged aura of Vernaschi's photographs would lead us to understand.

I think we can all agree that ritualized child sacrifice is wrong, and where it exists, it should be stopped. The questions here are: do Vernaschi's photographs provide evidence and support towards that conclusion, or do they perform a different function--feeding another cultural need to metaphorically extract and consume the essences of youth as cultural products while simultaneously expressing our horror at the practice? I suspect the answer is located more in the latter than the former.

Addendum: In the horror film connection I am referring to the visual effect in which demonically possessed or influenced characters become physically elastic and perform acts and distortions that are otherworldly and for the normal person physically impossible. This is a visual marker that establishes the character as exhibiting supernatural influence. It is common throughout the genre because it tends to activate a deeply rooted fear in all of us. If the paranormal is capable of manipulating or distorting the physical world, then it is capable of harming or killing in ways for which we have little or no defense. (Thanks, Joerg).

Home and Wildness

noreply@blogger.com (Aric Mayer) — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 04:57:00 +0000

For the past three years I have been working on an intimate body of photographs made within walking distance of my home and studio. Our property is in the middle of an orchard, parts of which have been left to go feral, the trees growing towards their natural grizzled tangle, while other parts have been bulldozed and prepared for development, only to be left for the weeds and the thistle.

For a time it has been a place grounded between categories, neither kempt nor wild. I have come to see it as a kind of crucible within which local tensions are played out in ways with global significance.

Probably the most significant issue of our lifetimes will be the emergence of global climate change as a consequence of human development. How we picture living with nature has everything to do with what we can imagine as a response to looming catastrophe.

There have been sets of parallel visual expectations that emerged over the last 50 or so years, on the one side there is a vision of nature as pristine ala Eliot Porter's The Color of Wildness, and on the other side a vision of the American suburb that is bulldozed flat, gridded off and built up in a completely controlled fashion. Over the last few years, that American vision of the huge housing development has become quickly associated with decay and entropy as so many sit unfinished and empty, partially built and partially ruined. Suburbia and wildness developed mutually exclusive visions where neither had room for the other, and yet both have to exist.

A successful city is generally imagined as completely counter-entropic. It is permanent progress. Fully realized. In contrast, nature is understood to be cyclical. It is a system where the counter-entropy/entropy tension is contained and fully resolved within a system that is sustainable. An organism is generated, feeds, grows, dies and decays, returning its components completely to the ecosystem.

There is a dialectical tension between the constant effort required to sustain a counter-entropic city and the tendency of nature to absorb everything into a cyclical rhythm of growth and decay. As Carl Jung said in his essay Alchemical Studies, ‘Nature must not win the game, but she cannot lose.’

This interaction between home and wildness has profound psychological implications for it mirrors the evolution of human consciousness itself. A similar and analogous set of tensions is played out in the interaction between consciousness and unconsciousness, the first being the creator of technology and home, and the second being a product of nature, emerging from millions of years of evolution. These exist in dynamic tension, in constant movement to dominate or subsume the other. In fact, the history of development is in a sense the history of human consciousness, with many of the same tensions and contradictions.

Trauma and Representation

noreply@blogger.com (Aric Mayer) — Sun, 04 Apr 2010 03:26:00 +0000

For the past few years I have been increasingly engaged in an investigation into how depictions of traumatic events such as war, disaster, poverty and disease operate within market economies and exert influence on the audience and the subjects. This has led to increasingly complex models of how such depictions work, what specific outcomes can be targeted and how we might take this forward with a balance between theory and practice, or creation and critique. Concurrently I have been serving on the Board of Directors for the Seattle Psychoanalytic Society and Institute.

On Saturday, April 10, psychoanalysts Sue Radant, Ph.D, Rebecca Meredith, MA, and I will present at the Northwest Psychoanalytic Forum.

Questions that we will explore include: In what ways can visual representations of traumatic events facilitate the movement from dissociative responses towards increased metabolization and integration within those directly affected? In what ways can those desired outcomes be defeated or impeded by media representation? What are the differences and issues between working for those who have primary experience of the trauma and those who have secondary experiences through other media? To what degree do clinical models, which focus on a carefully established and protected space in which clinician and patient can work, apply to media models in which work is broadcast to the general public?

The Future of Haiti as an International Success Story

noreply@blogger.com (Aric Mayer) — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 16:22:00 +0000

The immediate and mid-term future of Haiti after the massive destruction in Port-au-Prince will largely be dependent on the aid that flows in from outside sources. That aid will in turn be heavily dependent on the narrative within which it flows. Already the news is full of descriptions of what a mess Haitian infrastructure was before the devastation, along with descriptions of Haiti as being the US's poorest neighbor, the most squalid and so on. Aid that is generated out of those descriptions can only follow the logic of pity for a nation that is incapable of caring for itself.

But there is a completely different historical perspective on Haiti that has been kept largely invisible in western media, one in which Haiti is a remarkable success story, for whom success came ahead of the rest of the hemisphere and for which it was severely punished by the international community.

In the Winter 2005 issue of Bomb Magazine, there is a conversation between Gina Ulysse and Sibylle Fischer about Fischer's book, Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, in which Fischer explores the influence of Haiti on Modernism.

The Haitian Revolution in 1804 was an uprising where black slaves forcibly took control of the country, wrested it out of the control of its French colonial masters and created their own country. At this time a black state in the Americas was the nightmare of every neighbor, most of whose economies ran on slavery. The birth of Haiti forecast the emancipation of slaves throughout the hemisphere, but in itself was severely punished.

Haiti was immediately censured and ostracized by the international community and was allowed into international relations only after they agreed to pay massive fines to France for which they took out usurious loans from the French themselves. Haiti started from the ground up with no outside help--a nation of slaves who freed themselves and attempted to form a nation far from their countries and cultures of origin, in a part of the world where a black state was a symbol of some of the greatest fears of its neighbors. Haiti is formed as a country by "the only successful slave revolution in Western history."

Although Modernism doesn't come together in the West for almost another century, many of its principles and problems are present in the birth of Haiti as a nation. In the words of Fischer:

But I don’t think we can explain the current situation without also talking about the isolation of Haiti in the Western hemisphere. To give just one of the more egregious examples: in his recent Clash of Civilizations Samuel Huntington argues that Haiti belongs to the category of countries that are not part of any of the world’s great civilizations; and I really have to quote this to you: “Haiti, ‘the neighbor nobody wants,’ is truly a kinless country.” And there are other factors that need to be considered to explain the current disaster, especially the history of U.S. interventions on the island, the half-hearted actions of the UN, and so on...

...To me the Haitian dilemma is how to make the telling of the past visceral to inveigle a sort of awakening. It’s like being awake and everyone else is in a dream world. It is precisely because of that state of unawareness that January 2004 [the bicentennial celebration of the revolution] came and went, most newspaper articles questioned just what did Haiti have to celebrate given its 200 years of turmoil.

We need to rapidly appreciate Haiti for the success that it was, for the fact that it exists in the first place. The massive destruction in Haiti today is catastrophic on a level rarely seen in the Americas. In the next weeks and months, huge amounts of money and aid will amass, with organizations springing up to raise it, channel it and distribute it. The aid will be distributed along lines heavily influenced by a narrative understanding of Haiti's past. To what extent was it a failure and to what extent is it a revolutionary success? The answer to that question in western media will have a great deal of influence on the local futures of Haitian themselves, for it will direct the nature and character of foreign initiatives to help them build again. How the world perceives the possibilities of Haiti's future will depend on it's sense of value for its past.

Update: CJR has a post this morning detailing recent successes in Haiti. It counters the tone of the New York Times piece this morning that basically details Haiti as an ongoing hopeless situation.

A Look Back at Writings Over the Past Three Years

noreply@blogger.com (Aric Mayer) — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 20:02:00 +0000

Representing the Unrepresentable: Photographs are conceived of, created, distributed and consumed within technological and business structures that are designed to achieve political impact. Those structures, which are largely invisible to the consumer, shape the viewer experience and it is only by reverse engineering the economies within which the images flow that we can change their political outcomes. (Nine posts.)

Modernism and Esotericism: Modernism is at its root a spiritual event that requires an intellectual response, not an intellectual movement with spiritual implications.

Towards a New Aesthetics of Democracy: In the US we have a picture of democracy as a winner take all event. We need to introduce disappointment and compromise as a key aesthetic ingredient to our depictions of democracy since they are essential to true democratic process in a pluralistic culture.

Photography and the Unconscious Panopticon: Mass media have always been organized in ways that control the flow of information and separate viewers. Now with the advent of social media, users are choosing to seek out media that only reinforces their own perceptions and beliefs. This effectively decreases diversity and variety of opinion and increases idealism. (Four posts.)

Aesthetics of Catastrophe: An analysis of my experience and process shooting in post-Katrina New Orleans.

The Self and the Other: Language shapes the root options available to anyone's perceptions of the world. Communicating across language barriers is incredibly difficult because each language forms a different picture of what the world actually is. We may live on the same planet, but effectively inhabit and believe in different worlds entirely.

Obama, Aesthetics and the Way Forward: A call for a grittier depiction of the presidency in the face of such financial crisis.

Confessions of a Bone Saw Artist: An in-depth analysis of photo retouching and how powerful tools have contributed to an increasing erosion of visual norms in popular culture, especially in the fashion and beauty industries. Editorial publications should publish retouching disclosure statements that detail their internal retouching policies so the viewers can interpret the visuals that they are presented with.

A Brief, Incomplete and Slightly Revisionist, History of the Publishing Crisis: A look at how the magazine world came to rely on advertisers as it's key consumers, and why that business model is failing.

The World in Miniature: An examination of how computer based editing tools are changing the ways we ultimately see and understand photographs.

On John Cage and Seeing the World: Artistic practice can be spiritual practice as well. John Cage sought to break open the performer/audience relationship and point the listener away or through himself and out into the world.

A Constellation of Thoughts

noreply@blogger.com (Aric Mayer) — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I maintain this blog primarily because I learn through doing, and writing in this format is a way to follow ideas and concepts forward. By focusing on the urgencies of the day over time we find bigger patterns and pictures. It is very much as if we are poking around in a massive unlit warehouse with a flashlight. Each post is focused on what is pressing and visible in that moment, and as they accumulate, a much larger picture starts to emerge.

You will have picked up on the warehouse/unconscious metaphor by now. Experience tells that production across the cultural spectrum is driven largely by unconscious pressures, and the great work of our time is in finding ways to relate to these unseen areas of our individual and collective psyches. For the past three years these posts have generally been circling around and exploring the entire process by which images are desired, conceived, created, marketed, distributed and consumed.

In that spirit, coming next is a recap of the highlights of three years of writing on this blog, each post or series of posts exploring a piece of a puzzle that contributes to an overall picture that is starting to emerge. It is a picture of a world passing through an incredible technological revolution that is creating tensions that have the capacity either to generate entirely new paradigms or to cement and reify the status quo. We are in flux, and as such the outcome is yet undetermined. But our success in imagining new economies, new political models, new communities and cultures, will in large part be determined by our ability to tolerate the dialectical tensions that permeate the process of leaving behind the old and moving towards the new.

The cultural production engines of late capitalism have created products and systems that need dismantling if we are to re-engineer them for the future. And this is not merely a technical dismantling but an aesthetic one as well. I'm working here in service to that last goal, pulling together a picture from my own diverse set of experiences across the culture making spectrum.

The kind of solutions we need arise out of the awful tensions created in cultural dialectics, where we must hold on to broken and competing realities while we synthesize new solutions. The tensions are manifest in the time that takes place between recognizing the unresolved dialectic and the emergence of a new reality that can bring some new thing from it. Most of what I am going to detail in this next series is a constellation of problems for which I have few answers. My hope is that we can live with the tensions until answers emerge, along with their associated paradoxes and contradictions.

Some Thoughts on Chimping

noreply@blogger.com (Aric Mayer) — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 18:37:00 +0000

Chimping is the derogatory term used by some professional photojournalists to describe the act of looking at your digital photographs on the back of your camera while you are still in the situation you are photographing. The gist it is that you are so impressed with the photographs that you are making that you have to stop and oooh and ahhh over them, missing the action that is still unfolding around you. And it is true that it is hard to make good pictures while looking at the back of your camera, so for that time you are effectively removed from the act of composing and exposing. But reviewing work as it is being made isn't entirely a bad thing and it is worth looking back at how photojournalism evolved technically to see why the word 'chimping' might have such derogatory connotations and the new opportunities that this derogatory attitude is overlooking.

To understand it better we need to understand the separate and reciprocal relationship between picture making and picture editing. Most workaday photojournalism has been done in search of the one hero image that stands out from the rest on the contact sheet or on the screen and is selected to run alone in a newspaper or on the wire. If you are looking to make that image, you shoot a lot, and constantly, and then when the action is over, you sit down to go through the images, culling out the strongest frames and eventually arriving at the best images. Best meaning most marketable or most likely to be published.

In the analog world, editing and photographing are two related but separate practices. Photographing takes place out in the action where events are taking place in real time. Images are recorded on film, but only exist as potential pictures in the camera, still waiting to be processed and realized as actual visual realities. In the field they are simply stored away in darkness and it is up to the photographer to remember and record sequences and images, building on what she or he thinks exists in the exposed but undeveloped film.

Once the images are processed, they can be reviewed together in their entirety and the editing process begins. With all the images present, the most useful images are selected and sequenced. But, since the process has taken the editing away from the action in both time and place, there is much less opportunity to fill in holes.

Frequently images are remembered as stronger than they are, or images that were not impressive immediately upon the making come out in the editing process as being major events in the body of work. In either case, there is little that can be done to build on or correct these unexpected turns in the photographs.

In the analog world the editing is a strong learning process, one that photographers should have to go through to refine their working method. Separating photo making and photo editing has great benefits for developing a strong eye and a consistent vision. It gives time for the images to sink in, for the photographer to learn from them, to digest the lessons and think about what to do next. Within the immediacy of the digital process, much of this reflection can be easily lost. That immediacy does however offer some new advantages going forward.

Digital cameras have collapsed the distance between making and editing to the point that they can occur in tandem. This is of real value for the photographer who has a strong sense of both editing and field work. If you are simply looking to make the hero image, then this editing process is perhaps less relevant. But digital publishing has opened up the distribution possibilities for larger bodies of work, and photo essays of 1 image or of 10 images or even 100 images have roughly the same media barriers to dissemination. In other words, the market is ready and able to publish a lot more images for a massively reduced cost in distribution. The larger essay has much more value today because it shows so much more than the single image. Photographers need to be thinking in these terms.

Every body of work when it is done has weak points, areas where the photographer wishes she or he had added something, included more of a particular aspect or explored more deeply a part of the work. By reviewing work as it is being made, those weak points can be potentially identified and filled in or strengthened as the work is being developed--so long as the photographer has a clear idea of how to build a larger scale essay and is able to keep the distinction clear between editing and photographing, even while doing both at the same time.

That skill has a significant learning curve to it, one that I think is best explored by carefully practicing the image making and the editing at separate times, learning from each. But the realities are that we need also to make the best use of our technology as it works for us. Editing as part of the process is the best evolution of digital technology and it offers the most possibility for the photographer who has both editing and picture making skills. If done well in the field, the final work is stronger and more complete, building on itself rather than exclusively on the memory of the photographer in the moment. Finding a working balance between making and editing in camera is both the challenge and the way of the future.

HEAL Africa Safe Motherhood Program

noreply@blogger.com (Aric Mayer) — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 22:06:00 +0000

This holiday season I produced this short piece for HEAL Africa's Safe Motherhood program. It is an incredible initiative to support and protect pregnant women in Eastern Congo, one of the most vulnerable populations in one of the most difficult places in Africa.

HEAL Africa Safe Motherhood Program from HEAL Africa on Vimeo.

Read more on the HEAL Africa website here.

Truth and Manipulation in Photojournalism

noreply@blogger.com (Aric Mayer) — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 05:53:00 +0000

There currently is a lot of attention directed at preserving a notion of photography as 'truth' that is unmanipulated. The basic argument behind all of this is that retouching is untruthful and therefore must be regulated. If we can regulate it, then we can trust photography and photojournalism again. And that is basically where the argument stops, for reasons I will explain.

The latest addition to the long line of photo manipulation guidelines is World Press Photo's recent "rule" in their 2010 call for entries. It reads:

"The content of an image must not be altered. Only retouching which conforms to currently accepted standards in the industry is allowed. The jury is the ultimate arbiter of these standards and may at its discretion request the original, unretouched file as recorded by the camera or an untoned scan of the negative or slide."
(via PDN and Jim Johnson)

The problem of course is that the rule is as arbitrary as the notion of truth in photography itself. You can, and many will, drive a truck through the holes in that system. The "rule" does not address the evolving nature of currently accepted standards or deal with their arbitrary nature and roots in the marketplace. What was practiced routinely by Life Magazine would never fly today, and what we are capable of doing in-camera today was beyond imagination in 1950's.

It is however entirely possible to create a straight forward, enforceable and universally consistent set of allowable digital post-processing practices for photojournalism. Here is what that could look like:

Images must be shot in camera raw format, and a version of the camera raw file must always be preserved as a baseline. Not a single pixel can be added, moved or removed from within the frame. Post-processing is limited to adjusting levels for white point/black point as well as overall tone distribution. Curves use is limited to minor contrast and tonal corrections. Overall color adjustments are to correct casts only. Local masking and color corrections are limited to balancing the image and opening shadows or correcting thin highlights.

The reason that a flat, limiting standard like this would add value to photojournalism exists in its implied function as evidence gathering. This would set up an important understanding with the audience as to how these photographs perform in an evidentiary capacity and what the rules are for how they are processed.

A straight forward set of rules such as the one I have laid out above does not in any way, though, address the main problem that underlies the whole kerfuffle, which is the fact that photographs can easily and skillfully be manipulated to serve a wide variety of purposes, even within such tight constrictions as I have outlined above. There are no rules that can control the medium's capacity to do just that, and once you start down the slope of trying to control it, each restriction points to successive manipulations that are possible and practicable.

Let me explain in real world working terms.

Let's say that I am sent to photograph a woman who is in the middle of a high profile legal battle. When I walk into her house, I can see that her living room is neat, with a mess of paperwork spread out on the table. She is average height, 5'7" (I am 6'2"). I take pictures using available light and I never ask to her move or pose in any way. I photograph her sitting at the table looking at me over a pile of paperwork. She looks a little harried and disheveled in context with the mess on the table. I also photograph her standing by her fireplace. I shoot in a vertical format crouching down slightly so that the camera is looking at her from mid torso height. She looks strong and powerful in the frame, looking down at the viewer. Next I photograph her from my full height looking down at her, she is looking up. Her head is slightly increased in size in relation to her body by the angle. She looks brainy, but smaller. Then I photograph her looking out her window in soft natural light. She appears winsome and romantic.

The shoot is done. I leave. The pictures are processed and delivered, and the editors have a wide range of images to chose from, all which make different arguments about who this person is in relation to her story. Each is a manipulation of sorts, and the image that most suits the position of the story will be selected to run.

Within the body of images that I made, one publication who is against her legal position might pick an image where she looks harried, while another in support of her might pick an image where she looks powerful. Both are shot within the accepted constraints of photojournalism, and both are representations of her that make very different arguments.

The Feral Exoticism of Photojournalism

noreply@blogger.com (Aric Mayer) — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 00:12:00 +0000

Is it unreasonable to conceive of an image-consuming public responding with similar detached aesthetic appreciation to a photo-journalistic style deriving not only from the "anomic" street-photo tradition but also from the feral exoticism of fashion photography? Even the most committed photographer, such as Meiselas, is so far hostage to the interests of editors and publishers and their products, which in the main have little to do with "truth" but which willingly merchandise a nihilistic fascination with death, death, and more death, to help us steer a course between intolerable personal anxiety and its alternative numbness.

Martha Rosler, Decoys and Disruptions, p. 258.

The Self and the Other

noreply@blogger.com (Aric Mayer) — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 21:55:00 +0000

At the start of awareness of the self lies the presence of you, and perhaps even the presence of a more general we. Only in dialogue, in argument, in opposition, and also in aspiring towards a new community is awareness of my self created, as a self-contained being, separate from another. I know that I am, because I know that another is.

Father Jozef Tischner, The Philosophy of Drama

[...]The world has always been a great Tower of Babel. However, it is a tower in which God has mixed not just the languages but also the cultures and customs, passions and interests, and whose inhabitant He has made into an ambivalent creature combining the Self and non-Self, himself and the Other, his own and the alien.

[...]The dialogue with Others has never been and will never be easy, especially today, when everything is on such an enormous scale and is so complicated that it is hard to take in and control, and when many forces are working to obstruct this dialogue, or even to make it impossible. But even without these short-term political, ideological or economically motivated interests and aims there are other, substantial, fundamental problems.

One of them is the focus of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of so-called linguistic relativity. In the simplest terms, it says that thinking is formed on the basis of language, and as we speak in different languages, each of us creates his own image of the world, unlike any other. These images are not compatible and are not replaceable. For this reason dialogue, though not impossible, demands a serious effort, patience, and the will of its participants to understand and communicate. Being aware of the fact that in conversing with the Other I am communing with someone who at the same time sees the world differently from me and understands it in another way is important in creating a positive atmosphere for dialogue.

Ryszard Kapuscinski, The Other

The Hole in the New Journalism Economy

noreply@blogger.com (Aric Mayer) — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 17:48:00 +0000

For those of us who are interested in the future and potential futures of humanitarian and accountability journalism, there are three current must-read pieces online by Clay Shirky, Brent Cunningham and David Campbell. Each piece gives a different perspective on a shared and painful truth that faces journalism in the near and medium range future--the lack of a sustainable economic model for professional reporting.

Clay Shirky gives an excellent talk over at the Nieman Journalism Lab where he lays out how monolithic organizations like the New York Times were able to fund accountability journalism through advertisers. The nut of it is this: advertisers don't really want to be a part of accountability journalism but there simply weren't enough outlets for them to reach the audience and so they had to buy into newspapers. By buying ads in one section they supported the whole organization. The same was true for readers. One might want the sports section, the other the crossword puzzle, another the arts section and so on, but each had to pay for the whole thing.

That monolithic package kept the newsroom open. Now with newer efficiencies and many more options, the erosion of the monolithic news organization is leaving the newsroom with fewer and fewer options for income. The result? The demise of accountability journalism on a medium scale, ie state and federal reporting. Crowd sourcing can handle the hyper-local and the few remaining news organizations can handle the global, but state and federal reporting is severely diminished. Corruption goes up and accountability drops.

In the second piece, Brent Cunningham in the Columbia Journalism Review calls for journalism to step up to its role as citizen advocate and to renounce its recent functions as a mouthpiece for those with power and influence. This is an excellent and lengthy read on what hasn't been done well and what journalism could offer as a fourth estate that monitors and challenges public discourse to keep it honest and fair.

And finally, David Campbell has a thorough and thought provoking series on his blog that examines the new media strategies that are available or are being considered for journalism as it transitions into the internet. There are many new options for multimedia storytelling and rethinking the arrangement of information away from linear to nodal and matrixed forms.

To oversimplify things a bit, Shirky demonstrates why there is no current sustainable economic model for accountability journalism, Cunningham lays out in detail what journalism could offer that is of direct value to citizen consumers, and Campbell gives a look at the tools and strategies that will be employed in the new journalism of tomorrow.

If Shirky is right and the last century of accountability journalism was coincidentally funded by advertising, then the increasing and more targeted options available to advertisers are only going to continue to move them away from it. Without advertising, the current economic options for reporting dwindle. Since the only revenue sources available online are advertising related, there is no sustainable economic model going forward. And that is the hole at the center of all three of these discussions.

Cunningham's piece in CJR offers a good picture of the kind of journalism that would provide real value to consumers in our democracy, value that is worth supporting financially in some way. That is something to aim for.

In the meantime, the market has gotten so used to the idea of accountability journalism being invisibly bundled with other ad funded media that it has little or no market presence. That has to change. For the market to recognize the value of a fourth estate, even as flawed as it has been, it may have to experience its absence.

What will emerge will likely be a new economy of some kind. To put it in venture capital parlance, the pain of the market will make a new solution somewhere down the road. But there is a significant gap between where we are today and the time in the future when consumers are brought to a position where the pain is tangibly real and paying money for accountability journalism in some fashion is better than enduring a world without it.

Addendum: It's worth noting that this is primarily an American narrative. Other countries such as the UK have decided that journalism is a public good that is worth state funding. In my market in the US, local budget cuts at NPR have led to significant cuts in programming which have been replaced by the BBC World News. So, a big thank you goes out to the citizens of the UK who pay through their taxes to keep the BBC functioning. And you can already see how the shift is taking place toward the split between the global and the hyper-local.

Clay Shirky and CJR

noreply@blogger.com (Aric Mayer) — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 15:22:00 +0000

The rhetoric of American journalism describes an adversarial fourth estate, a redoubt for professional skeptics who scrutinize authority in the name of the public and help keep the public discourse honest. As long as our newspapers enjoyed quasi-monopolies and the evening newscasts were a national touchstone, the moth-eaten reality of this self-image was easily ignored. But the hard truth is that the press mostly amplifies the agendas of others—the prominent and the powerful—and tends to aggressively assume its adversarial role only when someone or something—a president, a CEO, an institution—is wounded and vulnerable. (Even some of the most important journalistic work of recent years—the exposures of warrant-less wiretaps and CIA ghost prisons—came after the Bush White House had begun its precipitous slide in the polls.)

[...] If ever there were a moment for our press to begin to change this dynamic, to embrace a mission more in keeping with the ideals of public service and an adversarial fourth estate, it is now. America is at a perilous juncture in its history, but one that is ripe with opportunity, too. The mythology of the nation—exceptional, above the taint of history—has been undercut by a terror attack, two botched wars, the reality of torture, a flooded city, a wounded economy, staggering inequality, a shameful health-care system . . . the list is long. It has been undercut, too, by the emerging realities of the twenty-first century: a multipolar world, transglobal problems that no amount of debt-funded escapism can keep at bay, a realization that America must lead, but cannot dictate. America has created systems—legal, political, educational—that have much to admire, but they are not sacrosanct. In short, many of the ideas that we take for granted are not the only good ideas, or necessarily the ones best suited for every set of circumstances. On many fronts, the circumstances are decidedly different from those that allowed this notion of American exceptionalism to persist, fundamentally unchallenged, for so long.
Take a Stand: CJR

[...]dated from some time between the rise of the penny press and the end of the Second World War, we had a very unusual circumstance — and I think especially in the United States — where we had commercial entities producing critical public goods. We had ad-supported newspapers producing accountability journalism.
Now, it’s unusual to have that degree of focus on essentially both missions — both making a profit and producing this kind of public value. But that was the historic circumstance, and it lasted for decades. But it was an accident. There was a set of forces that made that possible. And they weren’t deep truths — the commercial success of newspapers and their linking of that to accountability journalism wasn’t a deep truth about reality. Best Buy was not willing to support the Baghdad bureau because Best Buy cared about news from Baghdad. They just didn’t have any other good choices.
Clay Shirky: Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom

Confessions of a Bone Saw Artist

noreply@blogger.com (Aric Mayer) — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 16:22:00 +0000

For the better part of a decade I made the bulk of my living from photo retouching. I worked on tens of thousands of images that, with a conservative estimate, were printed on over 30 billion individual magazine pages. If those pages were laid out flat from top to bottom, they would create a line over 2.7 million miles long, enough paper to stretch to the moon and back 5.5 times, or to circle the entire earth in a double sided 80-foot-wide superhighway of completely disposable full color culture.

In that time I retouched across the spectrum of the magazine industry, from documentary/photojournalism and fine art all the way to fashion and beauty. On the one end working on "straight" photographs with tight restrictions on the retouching, and far on the other end of the spectrum doing major alterations of the female figure, the kind that in real life could only be achieved in Dr. Frankenstein's laboratory.

This latter kind of retouching I grew to call "bone saw work" for it required reshaping the models in ways that could only be achieved by reforming their skeletons. This included moving eye sockets, raising cheek bones, stretching limbs, lowering foreheads, raising foreheads, narrowing shoulders, shrinking ears, lengthening necks, straightening fingers and toes, reshaping shins and calves, narrowing pelvises and waistlines, shrinking and straightening noses, re-contouring brows and chins, squeezing ribcages, reducing knee caps, and straightening teeth. After that came the retouching to flesh and skin.

For a major project on that end of the retouching spectrum, I might receive an image of a gorgeous young woman that at first glance appeared near perfect. Then, with scrutiny, the flaws begin to emerge. These are not really flaws at all, but are the things that make her an actual living person like the rest of us; nostril hair, a dangling eyelash, a thin spot in her eyebrows, a slight asymetry in the arrangement of her eye sockets, a cleft in her chin, veins in her eyeballs, pores, chin hair, ear lobes, a slight shine from natural oils on her skin, deep clavical indentations, boney shoulders, ligaments in her neck, wrinkled knuckles, chapped lips, chewed fingernails, and so on. In the course of the retouching process the image is slowly, carefully, reshaped into something else entirely.

That original image of a remarkably beautiful young woman will look like a mangled mess once it is compared to the final retouched version. Through the process the image is transformed from a photograph of an actual person with a human body, a name, and a history, into an idealized picture of her that speaks to an unachievable perfection, out of the reach of any but the rarest of individuals.

Bone saw work became possible only in the past decade and is becoming more and more prolific throughout the industry. When I started working with Photoshop in 1992, much of the retouching was very surface level and happened pixel by pixel. With each iteration of the program since, powerful new tools have been introduced into the profession and the speed of their introduction has outstripped the industry's ability to stay in control. Reshaping a nose in 1992 was painstaking work that could take hours or even days. Now with liquification tools, if you don't like the shape of a nose, you can pick a brush and push it around. In a few seconds the whole character of a face can be altered. The implications of this are profound.

Any serious artist studying the human form must be keenly aware of how the internal structures of the body fill out and influence the figure. A simple and accurate drawing by Rembrandt, for example, depicts the surface features of the body--its skin, hair and so on--but the line accounts also for the location and accuracy of the internal structures as well. Bones, organs, muscle, and fat all combine, each performing their own function, to create the volume of the overall person. Part of what makes the work of the masters so incredible is that we recognize the authenticity of the overall volume of the figures they draw and paint.

Photography quickly allows us to skip this entire body of anatomical knowledge and go straight to mechanized accurate depictions of the body which can be captured in any state of rest or motion, dress or undress, exactly as it appears. No understanding of the body as a whole is required to adequately represent the human body. And generally speaking, the raw photographs start with anatomically accurate information, even if the models being photographed represent a tiny fraction of the body types that make up the human race.

In the retouching though, complete alterations of the figure are routinely practiced, creating an evolving abnormal vision of the body. This results in the ongoing erosion of our visual sense of what is natural. We understand photographs to be depictions of the real, and they are dependent on the real for their source, and yet we are bombarded with images that are retouched in ways that defy nature and establish unachievable visual norms for the human figure.

Much has been written about the negative effects of such retouching. It normalizes perfection and sets standards of comparison that no individual viewer can achieve. Only a tiny fraction of women wear a size two or zero, but by looking at the pages of some magazines, you'd think that was the norm. Presenting the exceptional as the norm puts the average viewer in a position of constant failure to compare to this artificial and synthetic vision of a person floating in front of us. a ghost of what might be possible if only we could find the formula for breaking our own bodies down or apart and reassembling them in this other vision of self. This plays perfectly into the overall business strategies at work in the fashion and beauty industries.

Professor Jeremy Kees at the Villanova School of Business ran a study demonstrating how the skewing of body norms increases the effectiveness of advertising. In his study women were presented with images of skinny models in a commercial setting and were then tested as to how they would respond. The women exposed to the images of overly thin models tested as feeling worse about themselves, but tested with more positive attitudes about the products being sold. Women exposed to normal sized models had no diminished sense of self, but tested with less favorable attitudes to the products being sold. See the logic at work here?

This constant beating down has real consequences for many viewers. One of the most remarkable examples of this can be seen in an image from a recent issue of Glamour Magazine that defeats this process. Many of you will have already seen this image, photographed by Walter Chin. On page 194 of the September issue, in a three inch by three inch photograph, 20 year-old model Lizzi Miller sits on an apple crate in a thong. She leans forward slightly, her arm covering her breasts, a confident and radiant smile on her face. There is a small roll on her belly and actual curves on her legs and arms. At size 12, Lizzi is the size of the average American woman.

That little belly roll is pure rebellion in the fashion and beauty industry, and it's everything as to why this image has had such an incredible effect. Images of Lizzi have been published before, and in each (that I have seen) she is doing what models do, tucking in, tightening, lifting up. Here she appears relaxed and unguarded, and is all the more beautiful for it. Relief and appreciation poured out from readers and can be read in the 1000+ responses posted on Glamour's website.

Equally significant to the reader response is the extreme rarity of a photograph like this in the context of a fashion magazine. To be clear, this image was intentionally created to have this impact on its viewers. As Glamour Editor in Chief Cindi Leiv says, "We'd commissioned it for a story on feeling comfortable in your skin, and wanted a model who looked like she was." The image isn't rare because it can't be done. It is rare because it is selling something outside of the consumer logic of the fashion and beauty industry.

The stereotypically thin model image serves a very pragmatic purpose in generating an overall climate of desire and consumption that serves the fashion industry at the personal expense of the audience. Lizzi Miller, as she appears on p. 194, defeats this basic exchange between the readers and the advertisers, and the reader responses are permeated with an atmosphere of relief from the pressures to conform and consume. It is also significant to note how far the difference is between talking about body norms and actually showing them.

Here is where it gets really interesting and exciting if you would like to see more of this kind of work. Judging from the comments on the Glamour site, thousands upon thousands of you do.

The magazine publishing industry is in a state of suspension. Trapped between increasing online competition and falling ad dollars due to the recession, many publications are scrambling to figure out what the future holds. If you like, you can read here how a lot of the industry has gotten itself into a serious financial pickle catering to advertisers at your expense. The short of it is this--more than ever, you, the reader, have the power.

You have the power to talk back to the magazines through social media. And you have the one thing that they absolutely must have to survive--your attention. That attention is a commodity that is traded by magazines with advertisers and converted into real dollars. If you withhold your attention, magazines fail. If you lavish it, they thrive.

Two things need to happen soon, and they need to be reader generated.

First, there needs to be a reader generated movement to request magazines to give an honest and full disclosure of their internal retouching policies. The audience has a right to know how the images are being manipulated. Every image receives some form of digital manipulation. Retouching disclosure statements would simply explain in broad terms what a magazine allows and doesn't allow in their image processing.

A reader would be able then to appreciate a magazine with a more clear understanding of what they are looking at. It would also be a commitment from the magazine to its readers to work within a set of self described limits. If even just a few major magazines made a point of communicating their limits to their readers, it would set a precedent in the industry with far reaching implications.

The second thing that needs to happen is going to sound crazy. There needs to be a reader generated campaign to raise subscription rates. Imagine what would happen if the subscribers of a magazine said that they would voluntarily pay more for the magazine if it would give them more quality content of the kind that they want. The publishers would fall off their chairs.

I realize that this seems counter-intuitive, but here is how it works. If you are buying subscriptions on the cheap, the only hope magazines have to make money is from advertisers by selling your attention as a commodity. After all, you aren't really paying for the magazine. But if you are willing to pay more, suddenly you, the reader are starting to pay for the content and the magazine has to work for you, not the advertisers. Remember Kees' study? If you aren't going to pay for those pages, advertisers will, and it will serve their purposes, not yours.

Disclosure: I have never worked for Glamour Magazine. I only identify them by name because they published such an exemplary photograph.