Modern Leadership

There was a time ... when princes taking their countries to war were supposed to risk their lives in battle - you know, lead by example. Now they travel around in bomb-proof cars with armed bodyguards and make fortunes three thousand miles away, while the rest of us are stuck with the consequences of their actions.
Robert Harris: The Ghost

Pattaya, Thailand

In my hotel room in Central Pattaya, Thailand, there are two lists on the table: one is called "menu room service", the other "price list of lost and broken". The latter lists 25 items, among them: glass 50 Baht, mirror 1'500 Baht, wardrobe 5'000 Baht, burnt 200 - 1'500 Baht, T.V. 10'000 - 7'000 Baht, sheets dirty (can remove) 200 Baht, and sheets dirty (can't remove) 500 Baht. Since I could not make much sense of the latter two - why shouldn't one be able to remove a dirty sheet? I wondered - I asked at the reception and learned that the "can remove" and "can't remove" did not refer to the sheets but to stains left on them.

A White Bushman

I think, in a way, one of the links I had with Zen-Buddhists in Japan was the shared sense that you do what is necessary at a given moment with all your heart and all your soul. You do not wait and say, well, there will be something better tomorrow. You do it, you accept it.
Laurens van der Post: A Walk with a White Bushman

The eyes of the artist

Business likes to finance competitions in the arts, as it is even readier to pour money into competitive sport. But, unlike sportspeople, artists know that the competition is not the real thing, is only a publicity show. The eyes of the artist are, finally, not on the competition but on the true, the good, and the beautiful.
J.M. Coetzee: Diary of a Bad Year

Photography & Recovery

When Emma Westerlund’s father was diagnosed with cancer, he was hospitalised in Jakobstad, a town of about 25'000, in Western Finland. On her visits to the hospital, Emma, a lecturer at the Department of Fine Art Photography at Novia University of Applied Sciences in nearby Nykarleby, thought that the greyish painted corridors through which she accompanied her father were certainly not conducive to uplift the patients' mood. At the same time she felt that her father, given the state he was in, wasn’t much concerned with questions of interior design.

In any case, Emma, interested in questions of photography and aesthetics, decided to do some internet searching on how the environment influences patients' recovery and came across the research of Britt-Maj Wikström, a senior lecturer at Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, that revealed the beneficiary effects of art and art-related discussions on both the physical and mental functions of patients.

Copyright @ Charlotta Öjersson

Apart from the occasional painting on the wall, hospitals rarely seem to invest in their aesthetic environment. As Emma states: „Often there is a visible lack of careful planning, holistic thinking and a pedagogical structure that would create an atmosphere that could make us feel better. Professor Wikström has researched the beneficiary effects of art on health for over 20 years, but according to her the research results are seldom put into practice. Both the health care and media industry have expressed a large interest, but so far no concrete projects exist.“

When Emma learned of renovation plans for the hospital in Jakobstad, she managed to convince the representatives of the health care unit to create, together with the Department of Fine Art Photography at Novia University of Applied Sciences, a hospital environment where aesthetics and art would figure prominently and thus allow for art to have the beneficiary effect that Britt-Maj Wikström had documented in her research.

Actually, one doesn’t really need research to prove that, common sense would do. However, since common sense isn’t all that common, and since authorities are usually unduly impressed by representatives of science (the application of methodology, that is), Professor Wikström’s credentials surely helped to convince the people in charge at the hospital to go along with the project.

Let’s get practical, here’s an example: people who visit patients in hospitals often do not know what to talk about, and neither do the patients. Now think of a well-selected picture on the wall. It seems rather obvious that such a picture could inspire a conversation. In fact, when Emma showed me around the hospital, what happened was just that: an elderly couple wandering through the corridors stopped in front of a photograph that showed a horse and the woman said: „Remember the stubborn horse we once had?“

Copyright @ Max Nyberg

However, the aim of the project was not simply to inspire art-related discussions, it was much more. In the words, of Emma:
„1. Use art to create a better working environment for hospital personnel. This environment would stimulate positive thinking among patients and their relatives and visitors.
2. Visualise the role of the artist in similar projects. Professional artists, employees within health service and decision-makers need to be better informed about the potentially beneficial effects art has on our health condition.
3. Reach a broader intersectional understanding between culture and health care as a result of collaboration.
4. In the long-term, strive for preparing and forming a model regarding the undertaking of similar projects, which would be important for the region. The purpose of this project is/was the provision of information on the positive aspects of aesthetics and art in hospitals in general. This project is not just targeting one specific hospital, but we rather hope that it will motivate similar undertakings in other hospitals in the Nordic countries. A Nordic network on the topic is already forming as we speak.
5. Initiate a discussion on how we can help art students to see and take the opportunity to create a working situation for themselves. Artists can not expect full-time employment, but rather have to learn to realize their own potentials in combination with the needs of their surroundings.“

Needless to say, quite some planning was needed to carry out this project. Again in the words of Emma:
„Choosing a suitable art form was the difficult part since taste varies greatly in art contexts depending on the on-lookers’ experience with art. One of Maj-Britt Wikströms research results testifies that the individual’s personal choice of art is important for the positive impact art has on health. However, this was a practical problem. Our solution was a turning device that had double-sided pictures on it, and by presenting a number of different photographs on it we provided each patient the opportunity to somewhat choose the art presented in the room. The turning device was easily manageable in order to avoid putting an unreasonable work load on the nursing staff.
During the month prior to the closing of the ward for renovation, the staff distributed a picture questionnaire to about 100 patients and their relatives. The purpose of this poll was to give the people in the ward the opportunity to express what kind of art they would appreciate in the hospital environment. The questionnaire included 11 pictures representing different styles of photography. The respondents only filled out their age and their picture of preference.“

The project was eventually carried out in autumn 2008. One of my personal highlights, when I visited the ward in February 2009, together with Emma, were three photos in blue that showed (I didn’t see it until I was told) the sea and some trees. When one approached the photo, its shapes and forms started to take on different forms and shapes – and the nurses in the hospital were not only aware of it but enjoyed it. I asked the photographer if he had done it on purpose. No, he said, because most of the work was done in the computer, he only realised this effect later on, when the photos were hung. It goes without saying that this is one of the nicer things that a photograph can do: to show the photographer what he had not seen.

Copyright @ Timo Annanpalo

PS: As much as Emma Westerlund was the initiator and driving force, together with Britt-Maj Wikström, of all this, she sees it as the students´ project: „They took a lot of responsibility, I just assisted them a little... Through the process I wanted to keep my personal involvement of subordinate importance. Of course I told the students and sometimes also the media where the idea first came from, but at some point the idea of what art can do and how important it is that artists realize their own potentials grew larger than my first, entirely personal, feelings when my dad was ill.“

What Matters

It rarely happens that I can’t put down a book. And, this especially goes for photo books. That, however, was very different with this tome. Even my default mechanism – I tend to scoff at claims such as „the world’s preeminent photojournalists and thinkers“, how would one measure that anyway? – I for once managed to control. How come?

In general terms, because the book does what it intends to do: it teaches stuff that indeed matters: global warming, environmental degradation, AIDS, malaria, the global jihad, genocide in Darfur, the inequitabel distribution of global wealth and other issues. And, it does so in generally well-written, well-argued texts (by, among others, Bill McKibben, Jeffrey D. Sachs or Samantha Power) that come with mostly impressive photographs (quite some of these were already published in other books) by such well-known photographers as Sebastião Salgado, James Nachtwey, Gilles Peress or Stephanie Sinclair.

The reason, however, that I consider this book one of the best photojournalism tomes that I’ve ever come across is that it is, for the most part, real photojournalism, which means that pictures and words are actually related to each other. And, that is rare for most photo books (and that includes the ones that sail under the photojournalism-label) that come with texts give the impression that either an author needed some pics to make the page not look too boring, or a photographer thought, well, why not add some captions, and, while we’re at it, maybe also an introduction. The introduction of „What Matters“ (by David Elliot Cohen) is different, and exceptional in the sense that it is an instructive text that addresses issues in photojournalism that are seldom written about:

„In an undertaking this ambitious, it is important to understand what the medium does best, and what it doesn’t do very well at all. For some very important issues, photojournalism is not the best way to tell a story. Despite our best efforts, and excellent guidance from a dozen top photo editors from major publications, we could not find a great photo-essay about the institutionalized corruption of America’s campaign finance system. It is a crucial meta-issue that affects many other issues, but it doesn’t lend itself to pictorial exposition. Then there are other big stories – such as the digital divide between information „haves“ and „have-nots“ – about which we felt sure we’d find great pictures. But we couldn’t identify ten or twelve strong images to convey the story. The point is, we believe that all the stories in this book are essential, but we also realize there are other stories, just as important, that are best told in other media. Basically, photojournalism works best when it is personal and specific but still conveys a universal concept.“

Indeed. Let me illustrate this with the text of the first photo-essay of this work, „Meltdown, A Global Warming Travelogue“ by Bill McKibben. Here is how it begins:

„For a long time – the first fifteen years that we knew about global warming and did nothing – there were no pictures. That was one of the reasons for inaction. Climate change was still „theoretical,“ the word that people in power use to dismiss anything for which pictures do not exist.

It is the reason we don’t see shots of coffins coming back from Iraq; it’s the reason the only prison abuse we really know about was at Abu Ghraib. Without pictures, no uproar; not in a visual age.

But now the pictures have started to come, and they will not cease. Some show people: airlifted off the roofs of their houses in New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward in the mad wake of Katrina, staring at their houses crumbling into the sea on the Alaskan coast, watching their graveyards flood on South Sea islands …“

Powerful, isn’t it? And so are the accompanying photographs by Gary Braasch.

Photojournalism stands for pictures with words (or for words with pictures), and never is this more apparent than when one is looking at a photo and cannot really understand (only guess) what one sees. Brent Stirton’s shot of a young African filling water, taken from a swamp, into a jerry can held by a woman while a man standing next to her is balancing a bucket of (presumably) water on his head, for instance. I examined the photo for quite a while before I read the caption: „An eleven-year-old girl in Ghana helps her blind mother and brother fetch water from a swamp. She has cared for them for six years, since they both lost their sight to trachoma, a bacterial infection of the eyelids linked to dirty water.“ This information made me see what a picture alone cannot show me – blindness. But this information did more: it triggered lots of other pictures in my head for these words made me see more than a thousand pictures. It goes without saying that I now look at the same picture with very different eyes.

Another very powerful essay is by Gary Kamiya with moving photographs by Paul Fusco. „Bitter Fruit. Behind the Scenes, America buries its Iraq War Dead“:

„War is nothing until you see it. Iraq is barely real, just something that keeps happening to other people very far away. Only stark, clear, undeniable images can make us realize what’s happening.But there are only a few images out there. Photographs of the war’s horrible reality – the corpses, the mangled bodies, the dreadfully wounded victims – rarely appear in the US media. The war is largely invisible.“

Despite the fact that this wasn’t really new to me, I followed this text and the pictures with great interest, and felt deeply moved.

„These faces make us weep. But they should also make us think. One thing they should make us think about ist he Iraqis. Take all the heartbreak in Fusco’s photographs and multiply it exponentially, and you wouldn’t tuch what the war has done to the Iraqi people. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have died; hundreds of thousands more have been wounded; and millions have been forced into exile.“

And then there are the „Images of Genocide“ by Magnum Photos, accompanied by reflections of Omer Bartov about (among other things) what photography can do and what not.

„Photographs of horror can mobilize political and social action, especially when they evoke other, already familiar contexts that remind of the consequences of inaction and the horror lurking behind still images. During the war in Bosnia a single shot of emaciated men behind the barbed wire of a makeshift camp evoked world-wide recollections of Nazi concentration camps and triggered an outpouring of public outrage. Action did not follow right away, but public opinion began to build, putting pressure on governments. Yet photographs can have precisely the opposite effect …“

But let me stop here, I do not want to copy the full text of this impressive tome in which, without exception, all of the essays and photos are worth spending time with. Read and see for yourself, you will very likely come away like I did: enriched and troubled.

WHAT MATTERS
The world’s preeminent photojournalists and thinkers

depict essential issues of our time
Created by David Elliot Cohen
Sterling Publishing New York / London 2008

Südafrikas Küste

Man kann Fotobücher auf ganz verschiedene Arten angehen. Man kann, zum Beispiel, mit dem Vorwort anfangen, oder man kann das Buch einfach irgendwo öffnen, blättern, und sich dann den Bildern überlassen, oder man kann sich von den Kapitelüberschriften leiten lassen, oder …. Wer Letzteres tut und mit Kwazulu-Natal beginnt, weil er (Frauen sind mitgemeint) schon mal vor Ort war, wird sich vielleicht wundern, dass er „sein Kwazulu-Natal“ nur selten wieder findet, wenn er sich dann aber ganz einfach diesen eindrücklichen Aufnahmen von Jörn Vanhöfen, die mehr an Gemälde als an Fotografien erinnern, überlässt, wird er eine ganz wunderbare Horizonterweiterung erfahren, in Herz und Hirn.

Copyright @ Jörn Vanhöfen

Es ist ein sehr schön gestalteter, ja edler und eleganter Band, den der Mare Verlag hier vorlegt: Aufnahmen, Bildqualität, Layout, der differenzierte, kluge, und informative Text von Zora del Buono, alles stimmt, nur das Vorwort des Herausgebers fällt etwas ab. Zugegeben, man erfährt Interessantes (etwa, dass es seine Idee war „Eine Reise entlang den Küsten Südafrikas – 2500 Kilometer Wüste, Felsen, Städte und Urwälder am Meer“ ins Bild zu setzen), doch Sätze wie „Besonders Kapstadt und die Badestrände ziehen jedes Jahr Hunderttausende an. Aber die hohe Kriminalität und die himmelschreienden Unterschiede zwischen schwarzer und weisser Bevölkerung begleiten die grandiosen Kulissen“ sind dann doch etwas arg platt: es gibt mittlerweile nämlich auch sehr reiche Schwarze und recht arme Weisse (die gab es übrigens immer schon in diesem Land, verhältnismässig wenige, sicher, aber trotzdem). Zora del Buonos Text ist da näher an der Realität: „Seit 1707 nennen sie sich selbst Afrikaaner, ihre Sprache, das Afrikaans, ist eine Art ältliches Niederländisch, kehlig und dunkel. Was einst die Sprache der Mächtigen war, ist heute auch die Sprache der Abhängigen, die sich aus ihrer wirtschaftlichen Bedrängnis herauszulösen bemühen, ein Versuch, der oft auf Widerstand stösst, aber immer häufiger auch glückt.“

In einem Interview mit Spiegel Online erläuterte Jörn Vanhöfen sein fotografisches Selbstverständnis wie folgt: Spiegel Online: In Ihrem Bildband "Südafrikas Küsten" ist nicht das Südafrika der sattsam bekannten Klischees, sondern stille Landschaften und öde Städte zu sehen. Vanhöfen: Ich bin ein politischer Landschaftsfotograf, und mein Verleger Nikolaus Gelpke wollte das politische, kulturelle, gesellschaftliche Leben nach der Apartheid zeigen. Er wusste, dass ich immer versuche, mehrdeutige Bilder zu schaffen. Ich will den Betrachter damit zwingen, die Bilder nicht nur zu konsumieren, sondern wirklich zu lesen.

Sind denn Bilder nicht sowieso mehrdeutig? fragt man sich da, eingedenk des russischen Sprichworts „Er lügt wie eine Augenzeuge“ unwillkürlich. Zudem: was der Fotograf will, ist das Eine, ob jedoch die Bilder dann auch tun, was er will, dass sie tun sollen, ist hingegen … na ja, wer will das schon wissen?

Copyright @ Jörn Vanhöfen

Wer den Band einige Male durchgeht und den Versuch macht, die Bilder, wie das der Fotograf will, wirklich zu lesen (und dies meint: genau hingucken, was das Bild zeigt; sich überlegen, was man ins Bild hineinliest; das Bild zu spüren versuchen etc), der wird zweifellos emotional bereichert werden. Und er wird weiter denken, und weiter empfinden, über diese inspirierenden Fotos hinaus. Ob der Band es jedoch schafft, „das politische, kulturelle, gesellschaftliche Leben nach der Apartheid“ zu zeigen, ist schwer zu sagen – können Fotos das überhaupt? Gehört es denn nicht zum Wesen der Fotografie, dass sie Abstraktes (Politisches, Kulturelles, Gesellschaftliches) gar nicht abbilden (höchstens zuschreiben) kann? Zudem: Was soll das eigentlich sein, politische Landschaftsfotografie, ausser einer weiteren, für den Betrachter wenig hilfreichen Abgrenzung? Möge uns die politische Weltraumfotografie erspart bleiben!

Jörn Vanhöfen
Südafrikas Küste
Mare, Hamburg 2008