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The further denuding of photography

Gilbert Duclos, "Celebre inconnue, Montreal 1987" plus "Off Limits" poster

Green Cine Daily points us towards the 2005 documentary Off Limits (La Rue: Zone Interdite) by Montreal photographer Gilbert Duclos. In the late 80’s, Duclos was sued by a young woman who had appeared in one of Duclos’ street photos. The woman claimed that her right to her own likeness had been violated. She eventually won.

Off Limits looks at the issue of photographers being increasing hemmed in by laws designed to protect a person’s supposed right to their own image, and particularly droit de l’image laws in place in France. Duclos interviews William Klein, Marc Riboud, and Willy Ronis for his film, and these elder statesmen of the street or reportage photography tradition are not surprisingly pessimistic about the chilling effect such laws can have on photography as well as journalism.

French photojournalism now removes the faces of people in the street or in any other public setting, or pictures are simply staged. Editors at major magazines tell Duclos that they simply avoid publishing pictures that might trigger lawsuits, which means publishing far fewer pictures, which means that the street photography which has documented much of the 20th century has nowhere near the vitality in the country where it once seemed strongest.

The review notes that it is the United States that Duclos and others look to to protect the freedom of photographers to shoot and publish non-commercial candid images, though given the current climate one wonders how long it will continue to be the beacon in this regard.

RELATED: See my post from a couple of years ago on how “the right to one’s own likeness” comes up occasionally in Japan, mainly spearheaded by the entertainment industry out to protect their “assets.”

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Guy Kawasaki, Class of ’72

Guy Kawasaki photo from Iolani yearbook, 1972

I retrieved some of my old school yearbooks when I visited my father last month, including a couple when I was an elementary student at Iolani, a Honolulu private school. As I was thumbing through them, remembering very little of the students there and only a little more of the teachers, I came across a certain Guy Kawasaki in the graduating Seniors section. I started to wonder if perhaps it was that Guy Kawasaki, and indeed it was.

I think it’s safe to say that Kawasaki and I never crossed paths, me being a puny 1st grader who got to take naps in the classroom after lunch. Ironically though, there was another senior in Kawasaki’s class that I did know, and who even signed my yearbook, he being Muliufi “Mufi” Hannemann. Hannemann was a star athlete and student and part of the big, well-known Hannemann family. My father knew them through his job as a sports writer for the Star-Bulletin, and we used to go out to their place in Waianae for luaus and stuff. Mufi is now Mayor of Honolulu.

I only went to Iolani for two years. When my younger brother Kimo became of age to enter the school, my parents were unable to get assistance from the school to make that happen financially, and we both went elsewhere. For reasons I’ve never quite known, my mother loved Iolani and it was always her dream that I would return there. I did try to return there for Junior High School, but my test scores weren’t good enough and even doing a special Summer School session there was not enough to get me enrolled. The truth is, I didn’t really want to go there myself, probably because I correctly suspected it would be a difficult academic ride, and I did my best to not make it in. Of course in hindsight I regret that now. Kawasaki writes on his “About” page that:

Iolani is not as well known as its rival, Punahou, but I got a fantastic and formative education there.

(Click on the above photo for the full yearbook page.)

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My Country, My Country: A personal recommendation

Poster for "My Country, My Country", film by Laura Poitras (2006)

With utter predictability, the recent Lancet study (.pdf file) proclaiming that America’s invasion and occupation of Iraq has resulted in nearly 655,000 Iraqi deaths, has now become a political football. Though certainly well-intentioned, this infallibly researched and thoroughly peer-reviewed study and the reaction it has engendered still shows that when it comes to death, torture, killing, suffering, and incomprehensible loss, most sides with something to say on the issue fall back on abstractions, on numbers bereft of anything but soulless data points. Just as war has been rendered by the aggressors as a video game of sorties and smart bombs, so too have the death tallies become the “top score” everyone is trying to best. Spinning the tallies this way and that only serves to highlight how far away we have removed ourselves from the incontrovertible fact that people — people, not statistics — are being killed.

Can not anyone anymore say simply, one death is one too many?

~

Next week PBS in America will be showing the film My Country, My Country as part of their P.O.V. series. It airs Wednesday, October 25, at 9 p.m. (check your local listings). I strongly urge anyone with access to the network to watch it, or to set the TIVO/DVD recorder/VCR to record it.

I’m going to recommend this film to you not because of its politics or because of its merits, but based solely on the person who made it. This is something I’m normally not wont to do, but here I will make an exception. That is because I know Laura Poitras, the person behind this film. She is a friend of mine. There are few people in my life I have more respect for than Laura. There are few people I know who embody the concepts of commitment and integrity with more clarity than Laura.

Laura spent eight months in Iraq (from June 2004 to February 2005), working by herself, to shoot and record the material for this film. To state the obvious, she did this at great personal risk not only to herself but to those Iraqis who agreed to let her into their lives, their homes, their stories. While on one hand this level of personal risk is simply unfathomable to me, on the other hand I’m not at all surprised. It is the Laura I know.

Explaining her reasons for going to Iraq and making this film, Laura says:

I risked my life to make this film because I felt that I had a certain skill set that could be brought to bear on understanding this war in terms of being able to tell the story of the war in images, through people. The news was never going to do it; the news would always be headlines about statistics and bombs going off, and I knew I could be patient and tell a story with the subtlety of things unfolding, which I believe has a greater impact in creating understanding. Hopefully, that’s one of the things the film accomplishes.

Laura Poitras and I were both students in the SFAI film department in the late 80’s/early 90’s. I didn’t know her at first, she having gotten there ahead of me, but she was one of those like myself who seemed to be at every film screening of the San Francisco Cinematheque or the PFA and therefore I took notice. I gathered from observation and from others that she was opinionated, didn’t mince words, took no prisoners. While that ultimately turned out not to be true, for she was always asking, What do you think?, she nevertheless cut such a forthright and assured figure. She intimidated the hell out of me.

We eventually did meet, become friends, and ended up collaborating on several levels, at school and at the Cinematheque. We had many intense discussions, and not a few differences of opinion. But I never stopped being in awe of her. In awe not of her opinions, but by the passion behind them; not of her actions, but by the clearness of purpose that informed them. I can’t even begin to quantify how much I learned from her.

The other day while cleaning out some boxes, I came across a copy of a note I had written to her while were both collaborating on a publication for the Cinematheque. There had been a disagreement about the cover design. I had to laugh at how inflamed we could get in those days about what now all these years later can only be seen as the most trivial of things.

For various reasons owing all to me I fell out of touch with Laura in recent years until earlier this year when another friend of mine passed on word about this film. It was a shot out of the blue. But then again, the trajectory her career has taken to bring her to this film is hardly surprising. That arc was already starting to be written back then, 15-plus years ago, and while the brainstorming and the opinions and the discussions were no doubt trivial, it is clear the passion, commitment, and integrity that defined her back then have not only remained, but grown and matured, giving us an artist who can tell us a story about that which can never be regarded as trivial.

~

I don’t mean to imply that the Lancet study trivializes death. However, while the study should be applauded if it somehow helps America recover from the collective and wilful blind eye it has been turning, it has still unfortunately been played into a meaningless numbers game: overestimates, underestimates, How much is enough?, When does the number become too high?, or shudderingly, The toll will surely continue to rise.

Contrary to received wisdom, we mustn’t lose sight of the smaller picture. Therefore, I have a different tally to propose, infinitely simpler to comprehend, more difficult to abstract, and ultimately much more illuminating. One. As in one human being, one story. One by one, let us get back to something more basic, more concrete, more grounded in humanity than body counts and news tickers.

Laura’s film is one such attempt to stem the tide, to return to one person, one story. I hope you will make an effort to see it.

(There is a wealth of information about the film, how it was made, and why it was made, at PBS’s website for the film. There you will find a trailer for the film, interviews with Laura, a production journal, as well as an mp3 of the film’s haunting theme music (written for the film by world-renowned Iraqi singer and composer Kadhum Al Sahir), and a podcast of a conversation between Laura and George Packer, who wrote the original New Yorker piece that provided the inspiration for the film project.)