The Assassination of Photography: The Plot to Hack Reality (c)
PDF of interview - includes photos
… Robert Pledge of Contact Press Images made innumerable appeals to his friends at Magnum, but was unable to convince anyone else to sign on for A Day in the Life of America. Pledge believes he can talk a snail out of its shell, so this resistance drove him crazy.
He wouldn’t quit. When Magnum members tired of his relentless campaigning and decided to call their non-participation a boycott he went into overdrive, hectoring me two or three times a day. To hear his pitch, you’d have thought he was promoting the International Workers of the World, and we were scabs to break ranks with the One Big Photography Family Reunion.
Pledge’s furious proselytizing suggested other motives, however. More than likely, Rick Smolan and David Cohen, heading up the project, had sold their corporate sponsors on the participation of famed Magnum photographers. Now, except for Elliott Erwitt, they couldn’t deliver the big names. (Steve McCurry, Eli Reed, and Sebastião Salgado, all of whom had signed on, were still relatively unknown.)
With reputations for producing classic American pictures and spectacular group projects, Magnum photographers like Eve Arnold, Dennis Stock, and Bruce Davidson would have conferred not only commercial legitimacy but, equally, the cachet of serious photography. In other words, A Day in the Life of America had made unwarranted representations to the same firms who regularly assigned Magnum photographers to shoot their annual reports at rates of at least $2500 per day.
In this instance, Day in the Life of America was offering these same Magnum clients five years of open access to a custom image library, in exchange for in-kind services from hotels, air travel, rental cars, cameras, film, etc. Not a bad deal for the sponsors if the Magnum corporate-report crowd — Burt Glinn, Erich Hartmann, Philip Jones Griffiths, Paul Fusco, and a few others — accepted the token honoraria for their premium work.
Yet, notwithstanding their love for group projects, Magnum photographers refused to be dragooned into an editorially questionable crowd-sourcing venture. Even today, nothing unites Magnum more than external forces trying to exploit their brand, emblematic of professional achievement as judged by peers.
Their judgment was not just idle speculation. Proof of (mis)concept had materialized in print two years earlier. Smolan and Cohen had advertised Day in the Life of Hawaii with similar guarantees, emphasizing that it was “not just another book of pretty Hawaiian picture postcards … not a public-relations exercise or a tourist promotion.” They also promised the photographers total editorial control. (Click here for a pdf file of Smolan’s letter of invitation to prospective participants in this project.) Indeed, the results were not pretty and well below the standards of tourism photography.
As for editorial control, Salgado’s picture of a naked baby exemplified the clichés professionals strive to avoid at all costs.
Sebastião Salgado, Jr., beach scene from “A Day in the Life of Hawaii” (1984), detail
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With similar tasteless images and more gratuitous editing, A Day in the Life of America quickly metastasized from benign to malignant. One double-page layout suffices to illustrate the miscarriage of journalism characteristic of the entire Day in the Life enterprise. On pages 164-5 the reader sees a six-frame Americana pastiche centered on Gerrit Fokkema’s image of a Ku Klux Klan gathering in Georgia.
This staged picture is squeezed between Flip Schulke’s shot of an ethnic German band in New Ulm, MN, and Gianni Giansanti’s photo of young ballerinas in Eugene, OR. The facing page includes, from to top to bottom: Dana Fineman’s portrait of wholesome square dancers in Reno, NV (better known for its legal houses of prostitution, a perennial subject for photographers), Gerd Ludwig’s photo of an African-American church choir (directly facing Fokkema’s Klansmen), and Luc Choquer’s assembly of professional cooks in New Orleans.
A mere sixty pages later, Fokkema’s KKK story resurfaces. From the same take, we see a staged cross-burning, followed by a portrait of a middle-aged Klanswoman kissing her infant grandchild (pages 224/5). This positioning exemplified the twisted principles underlying the project. Let the photographers shoot (or let the editors produce) anything possible, but suppress all critical regard. The images depicting Reagan’s white-supremacist base were mashed together with the ballerinas, churchgoers, square-dancers, kitchen workers, and musicians to produce an incomprehensible mélange that reduces the KKK to an instance of pure kitsch.
Because they are subordinated to an event residing outside the framework of serious journalism, the images not only fail to inform but lend themselves to improbable juxtapositions and false social equivalencies of the sort recently promulgated by Donald Trump in his assertion that there “were some very fine people” among the Klan members and neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, VA on August 12, 2017.[1] Lacking spontaneity, decontextualized, and bordering on puffery, the artless Day in the Life of America remains arguably the most embarrassing collection of images in the annals of photography.
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Bad coffee table books come and go, yet thanks to its powerful sponsors this mutation was shoved onto the mass-media stage. The assassins, Cohen and Smolan, appeared on television chat shows (NBC’s Today, for example), proposing to reintroduce photography to an audience susceptible to historical distortion. No mention was made of the decisive role played by photographers during the civil rights movement, or the important counterbalance offered by their pictures to negative depictions of the Sixties counterculture and antiwar movements.
In the light of today’s nonstop coverage devoted to Donald Trump’s outrageous behavior, we tend to forget the Reagan administration’s bare-knuckled propaganda operations on behalf of its low-intensity military campaigns against helpless nations, the manipulation of images during its murderous subjugation of Grenada, and the anti-communist delirium of a clinically demented president marshalled to proclaim a “cure” for the so-called Vietnam Syndrome, an affliction characterized by the popular rejection of imperialist warfare.
Photographers? They were happy campers hoping to frame the sunrise while “morning in America” dawned over a landscape of poisoned rivers and carcinogenic soils.
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For its time, A Day in the Life of America was a classic bait-and-switch maneuver, directing the public gaze toward nonsense images while the Reagan administration savagely attacked ordinary working people. Photographers boarded that train too, and were invited to ignore the assault on a disempowered electorate by politicians who blamed air pollution on trees; social policies vilifying immigrants, minorities, and the poor; “broken windows” policing and mass incarceration; the overturning of reproductive rights; and total war against organized labor. In this latter instance, the photographers themselves were targets, because in signing the DITLO contract they surrendered decades of hard-won ownership of copyrights and subsidiary-rights licensing options to the corporate diktat.
Perhaps the most astounding role in this Waterloo of photography was played by the agents, who collaborated in a two-pronged attack: on artistic and journalistic standards, on the one hand, and against fees and rights on the other. Theoretically, agencies are supposed to defend their photographers, who are collectively shackled by an unjust legal precedent that outlaws collective bargaining. This particular misfortune resulted from years of successful lobbying by magazine publishers that persuaded judges to view voluntary photographers’ associations as trusts seeking to restrain their trade. Imagine the legal acrobatics necessary to lump photographers in the same bag as the 19th-century robber barons! (The American Society of Magazine Photographers, ASMP, now renamed the American Society of Media Photographers, went right along with it, and still does.)
In this case, the picture agencies Sygma, Contact, and Black Star were not only abdicating their responsibility to protect photographers but actively collaborating with a scheme to keep photographers on the bottom. What worked as an ideological exercise to avoid newsworthy reality functioned simultaneously to screw professionals out of a decent livelihood. Small wonder that Murdoch’s News Corp International became interested in purchasing Day in the Life publisher Collins, the ultimate source of this formula so close to News Corp’s own reactionary, union-busting journalism.
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In retrospect, the whole enterprise appears like a rehearsal for the Fox infotainment broadcast model: a fusion of corporate sponsorship, soft news, cross-platform tie-ins, and party favors. The bottom line was determined by the sponsors’ positive reaction to the project’s concrete deliverables: open access to nearly all pictures generated.
If the publishing industry envisioned this as a profitable series on the bookstore shelves, the sponsoring corporations saw it as an unlimited resource, to be mined for their many advertising and promotional needs. It made sense to continue building this archive by expanding the project to places with mass-market potential — Europe certainly, but also Russia and China, where government wariness of foreign broadcast media could be mitigated by a relatively harmless book. By including a handful of local photographers and scheduling foreign-language editions, Day in the Life represented a model for American companies to use in order to make landfall where previously they were unable to venture. …
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[1] “Mainstreaming hate by casting it in a softer light” is how Michael Shaw, the publisher and founder of Reading the Pictures, a site that analyzes news photos and media images, characterizes the depiction of neo-Nazis and Klan members as just ordinary folks (Lois Beckett, “The year in Nazi propaganda: images of white supremacy in Trump’s America,” Guardian, 27 December 27, 2017).
