Note 7 – It's not easy to make history
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Note 1 – I and we
Hilde, the first author, is an active visual artist, and also an associate professor of photography at the University of South-Eastern Norway. The second author, Jon, is an associate professor with a sociology degree. Through other collaborations, we have experienced the challenges of communicating the first-person narrator in text, especially when parts of the text are the foundations for reflections based on the personal practice and experience of one of us, while the discussion, analysis, and elaboration is based on a collaborative process.
In traditional research papers, research quality is assessed on the successful split between subject and object, that bias is removed. In art, it is quite the opposite, where ‘artistic practice is not only the result of the research, but also its methodological vehicle, when the research unfolds in and through the acts of creating and performing. This is a distinguishing feature of this research type within the whole of academic research’ (Borgdorff 2011: 46).
In texts relating to issues based less on experience and process, where the argument is traditionally scientific, the ‘I’ can in our experience mostly be circumscribed or omitted. In this text, where the artistic process is at the essence, it is in our opinion misleading to omit the ‘I’, despite the collaborative process, as the artistic process essentially involves the artist as a subject.
Fractured Photography: Notes
This page is an expanded footnotes section, including notes, elaborations, and parallel exhibitions that either relate to the main exposition or add meaning to it. In a way, it can be seen as the chaotic backstage of the process towards the main exposition. Each headline heading links back to the main text at the relevant section.
Figuring out how to work in parallel with art and social science has, it would appear, been a long and cumbersome process. At the start it was vividly clear that we had to establish a form that eliminated hierarchies: for the sociologist to avoid ‘just producing some nice text’, for the artist to avoid ‘mere illustrations’. It was probably necessary to move through an entire project in which we constructed an almost dogmatic form, where we did things separately, still observing and taking part.
Media coverage of the evaluation of reception centres; for the original report in Norwegian, see Gram and others (2019). The front cover here is not the report Jon was part of, but an illustration chosen by a business organisation (NHO) news page. Observe how the news site chose to illustrate work-life integration through former refugees mowing a lawn.
Baghramian, Nairy. 2009. ‘The Walker’s Day Off’, in Solveig Øvstebø and Steinar Sekkingstad (eds), Looking Is Political: Nairy Baghramian, Ane Hjort Guttu, and Bojan Sarcevic (Bergen: Bergen Kunsthall), pp. 46–47.
Picture 1: Majid and Sayad on the beach, my instructed composition.
Picture 2: Majid’s suggested and preferred composition.
Picture 3–4: T-shirts designed by 10/10 Studios.
Picture 5: Majid’'s Instagram self- presentation on his Instagram account.
Pictures 1 and 2 have been exhibited (one or both) at Buskerud Art Center, Atelier 7×7, Bærum Kunsthall, Melk, and as part of the photobook GYM.
This was in many ways a liberating process: For the photographer, the social science approach in parallel emphasised the lack of need to document, as it was in a way taken care of. For the sociologist, it created an additional space for interpretation. For both, the parallel activities were a source of inspiration. In the next project, this dogmatic distinction was removed, and it was all about creating robust knowledge and deeper understanding, in a way that was not immediately visible in either outcome but was clearly relevant for us.
It’s not easy to make history (2016). Exhibited at Kongsberg Kunstforening (2016), Deichmannske bibliotek, Nydalen (2017), Galleri KiT (2019), Nordic Light International Festival of Photography (2018), Cyan Oslo (2017), Uncertain States Scandinavia, issue 5 (2016), and as a permanent exhibition at Kongsberg Municipal Library.
Yasser’s Facebook profile.
Yasser, on the telephone with Jon, 14 June 2021, five years later:
The feelings I have – When I saw the image the first time. It is the same feeling. Not to kiss up, but I really love that picture.
I believe every picture carries a piece of your personality, becomes a part of your personality, but this picture was special – it was a time in my life with much change. Moved to a new culture, I understood nothing about the country. I was motivated, excited, to get to know the country. At the same time, I was afraid. Always afraid of something new.
. . .
I never kept a profile image that long. I didn’t want to change, I have this habit of looking back. But there was this period of very little change [in my life], and I started thinking. You know, life as a refugee has many challenges, hard to get a job, education. So, I thought, let’s start with a new profile picture.
What do you want to be when you grow up? Solo exhibitions: Galleri BOA (2010), Goethe Institute, Palestine (2009), Kongsberg Cinema (2014). Group exhibition: City Hall Gallery, Oslo (2009), Stenersenmuseet (2010), Buskerud kunstsenter (2015). Temnikova and Kasela Gallery, Tallinn (2011), Fishfabrique (within Pushkinskaya-10), St Petersburg (2011) (KORO/Kunst i Offentlig Rom).
The images show Palestinian children on the outskirts of Ramallah, but as much as being rooted in a specific historical and geopolitical context, these images convey something more general and universal about being human and coping with a life situation despite difficulties. Children remain children no matter what. The images help to nuance the representation of war in a way that is uplifting and points positively forward. In this way, they offer us a new look at a conflict we usually see documented in all its hopelessness. (KORO 2010, our translation)
In a related project, ‘The World of Stories’, I recorded children in Ramallah who made fairytales for the children of Gaza.
This exposition is something else. Here, not only the context but also the meaning of images and the social and political concepts they are part of have been part of the conversation. This is a very different form of collaboration, as it implies intervening professions, and it takes quite a lot of trust. We believe this has been important, and is why we see this as a collaborative exposition, despite the wide use of ‘I’ relating to the creation of images.
GYM, published by Heavy Books (2021), designed by Christian Tunge. This is an art book, with additional texts by curator Susanne Østby Sæther and YSR founder Estelle Jean.
The book is sold as a hardcover at normal price, and as a special edition, including a limited edition print, where all sales revenue is given to YSR for their work.
© Nick Ut, ‘Napalm Girl’ (1972). Phan Thi Kim Phúc as a nine-year-old, running for relief in her hometown, Trảng Bàng.
Every Sunset Counts (2016), Exhibited at Bærum kunsthall (2016) and BOA (2016)
#sunset was at the time of the exhibition on the top-twenty list of the most popular hashtags on Instagram, with about one hundred million pictures to date. Sissel Lie-Karlsen has been taking photos of sunsets and sunrises in her home in Kongsberg for a number of years. The ones she likes the most, she shares on Facebook.
Of my photographs with Mustafa, only pictures composed by me would become part of my exhibitions, because although the composition Mustafa liked best (the one in the sky) is no doubt an aesthetically appealing picture, the symbolism and religious references wouldn’t work in an exhibition, as the interpretations would be so rich, it would be imposing.
Picture 1–2: Essa photographing me with Mustafa, their idea. Never exhibited.
Picture 3: Essa photographing Mustafa, never exhibited.
Picture 4: My composition and idea, part of exhibition and photo book.
Picture 5: Mustafa and Essa’s idea, my photography. Never exhibited.
It is a light that objectifies everything and confirms noting, part two
Exhibition at Buskerud Art Center (2019).
Picture 1: Jon doing research interviews.
Picture 2: Refugees drawing and illustrating how they came to Norway.
Interview with Sissel Lie-Karlsen in her home. In Norwegian, she reflects upon what it is about sunsets and why she shares the pictures.
Excerpt from the interview (our translation):
I see the shapes in the skies, the shape of each sky, and the light around it. It is really about the light, the light is different from season to season, month to month. I remember once I saw the neighbour’s farm, it turned all yellow. I guess it has just been a rain shower, so that there was a refraction of the light into this beautiful colour. I liked that.
It’s for me, really. It is fun to share, making others aware of things you like. Many don’t really look, at least not up into the sky. I know many, like ‘I never thought of that’, and get a small epiphany. To raise the gaze and . . . and look around. But of course it’s mostly about me sharing something I like. But why I want to do that? That is a tricky question. I don’t think it is about [being] a show off for me, for my sake. I think it is an urge to share with people. Momentary things, that are just in that moment and maybe only you saw it.
I think it is the sharing, inviting people into what you saw. I don’t think it is an ego trip, like, look how clever I am sharing all these photos. I don’t think it is like that. Say, maybe it is only this little glimpse of colour high in the sky; I enjoy sharing what others do not see. But it is very impulsive, all of it.
’By directing her camera not at the dramatic events – border crossings, overloaded boats, bodies drifting ashore – but towards their material traces, this first part of Honerud’s work in Moria can be conceived as part of the move towards what has been called ‘aftermath photography’. Photographers working in this more recent mode of documentary have, as Charlotte Cotton has stated, frequently taken an ‘anti-reportage stance: slowing down image-making, remaining out of the hub of action, and arriving after the decisive moment’. Spurred in part by the destabilization of the documentary power of photography following trenchant critique of the genre’s claim to deliver ‘truths’ and ‘authenticity’, the emergence of aftermath photography has been explained as a move towards ‘practices that utilize art strategies to maintain the social relevance of the photograph’. (Sæther 2021: 111–112)
The bent and warped body parts that feature in several of the full-figure shots as well as closer images also associates to depictions of the human body frequently found in Surrealist photography, albeit in a muted register. One example is the series of close-ups of confusingly entwined, hands, legs and feet set off against the clear-blue wrestling mats. A similar interest in the contorted and twisted body can currently be found across the work of several other contemporary art photographers not working in a documentary mode. Some of these artists are Ingrid Eggen, Joanna Piotrowska, Viviane Sassen, Ingrid B. Olson, and Paul Mpagi Sepuya, who, all in their own distinct ways, use the warped human body as a site for explorations of issues such as sexuality, power dynamics, the estrangement of the human body in an increasingly automated society, or as an entryway to explore the margins of the socialized body, where muscle reflexes and more instinctive forces play out.
. . .
In Honerud’s work, however, the stretched, entangled and bent bodies that we see in full and up-close are anchored in the everyday realities of the camp, as they are at once concrete documents of the flexible capacities of the human body under pressure, a sublimated expression of the ambivalence of the enforced intimacy that the camp entails, and metaphors of human adaptability more generally. (Sæther 2021: 109–110)
Video, press to play.
3 September, I was breastfeeding our youngest son watching the 7 p.m. news, while our four-year-old son was preparing to go to bed, when the image of Alan appeared; photographer Morten Krogvoll was invited to talk about it on a later news show.
Boy: ‘Is that boy dead?’
Hilde: ‘Hm? Jon!! I don’t know I’m sure he’s just sleeping. It was nothing.’
Boy (looking at the screen Jon had turned off seconds ago): ‘You sure? I think he was dead.’
I corrected the error soon afterwards, we sat down and talked about refugees and that it is a very long time since there was a war in Norway. It is not really the lie that catches my attention in retrospect. But it is the gut reaction that made me lie, that I was unprepared; it is an image that penetrates immediate barriers.
’Operating between the porous genre confines of documentary and art photography, Honerud’s practice, too, is fuelled by this very fundamental question: How does one represent the human condition, when this condition is at its most precarious? However, in GYM the visual and formal means Honerud deploys to engage with it departs from the codified styles of any of the various movements that shaped the canonized genealogy of 20th century ‘concerned’ documentary and photojournalism. As such, her work partakes in an ongoing reformulation of the documentary genre that has taken place more widely over the last few decades, whereby the heavily attacked, yet stubbornly resistant beliefs in a photograph’s transparency and ability to deliver objective truth is undermined’. (Sæther 2021: 106)
To produce these images, Honerud has been experimenting with digital image editing tools, such as Photoshop’s clone stamp function, which copies one area of an image onto another. While the procedure is designed to mask discrepancies and produce flawless and unnoticeable results, this is not the case here. In employing these tools against the grain, Honerud’s practice relates to contemporary art photographers such as Lucas Blalock. Blalock has long utilized photo-editing software in manners that break with the polished, seamless images these tools are designed to produce. He shoots portraits or meticulously assembled still lives in his studio with a large format camera before scanning them and reworking them in Photoshop. (Sæther 2021: 113)
© Hilde Honerud and Nina Toft.
Exhibited at Fotogalleriet (2011) and the Norwegian Embassy in Germany (2015). Click arrows at the lower side to scroll images.
[The project] explores visual content of news reports from the hypothesis that news images are increasingly being emptied of content as reporters search for ways to communicate presence and authenticity.
The context of Rough Seas refers back to the work of the artist J.M.W. Turner, in particular one of Turner’s most representative works, the painting entitled Rough Sea (1840–45), which expresses the formidable power of Nature in a sublime and romantic way. Many art historians have pointed out that Turner’s work is also a reflection and expression of human feelings. This is where the work of TOFT/HONERUD in this exhibition finds its proper context: A personal experience and rendition, and the subsequent public exposure of images from natural catastrophes which are simultaneously an expression for our fear of and attraction to Nature. TOFT/HONERUD have abstracted and beautified images of several catastrophes taken off the internet and news programmes such as CNN iReport and other programmes that promote citizen journalism.
. . . The presentation at the video gallery communicates a feeling of being out-of-control by altering the volume of the recordings and looping images to put the viewer out of balance. This is counterbalanced by the aesthetic way in which the photographs are presented in still images taken from the same media sources, which confront the visitors to the gallery with a romanticized image of incidents that until now seemed ruthless and intangible. (Spreter 2011, our translation.)
It is a light that objectifies everything and confirms nothing:
Picture 1–6: Exhibition at RAKE Visningsrom, 2019.
Picture 7: Fotogalleriet ‘Spring Exhibition’, 2020.
Picture 8: Annual national exhibition (‘Høstutstillingen’), 2020.
Screenshots from CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) coverage of Bendiksen’s book The Book of Veles. The book was published as a documentary on ‘troll factories’ (where fake news stories are produced and distributed on social media) in Northern Macedonia. Only after six months and much publicity did he announce that the images were crude manipulations made at home, and the project was to see whether this was noticed. He said in interviews that he wanted to show how we do not notice.
The reason this shows nothing is that he is a photojournalist; he has left himself out of the equation. We trust the image because it is from a renowned documentary photographer. Photojournalists are expected to ‘insist on the objectivity of their pictures at the same time that they attempt to demonstrate their mastery of the craft’ (Schwartz 1992: 96-7). This work tells us nothing new, other than emphasising the role of the photographer.
Video, press to play. News interview with Morten Krogvold, reflecting in Norwegian on why the picture feels important:
It is a punch to the stomach, and I’m thinking, my grandchildren sleep like that. It is almost like I think I can lift this child, that it is alive. For me, it is my child, it is the audience’s child, it is the whole world’s child. And I think, maybe someone is sitting on the web thinking we want a budget autumn vacation, let’s go to Turkey, and teach our kids to swim. And that could have been there, where the little boy lies. And I think it is hard for politicians, to have this picture up on a screen, in a packed auditorium, and say ‘Send them back,’ when you see it like this. (Our translation.)
On the first trip to Lesbos, it was only Hilde, hence ‘I’. In the following years, sometimes we both travelled, sometimes only Hilde.
The front page of the LA Times, 31 March 2003, with the faked image by Brian Walski. Originally, in the first picture, the soldier motioned with his hand, while in the second, the man with the child looked at the soldier; the combined image shows a stronger interaction between the two than in the original. The join is easy to see if one looks at the man in white in the left corner, whose back reappears to the right of the soldier’s leg.
