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Notes to follow these campaigns

highsnobiety.com: Nike “It’s Just A T-Shirt” Campaign by Terry Richardson

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The recent series of events have been both disturbing and interesting for variety of reasons. But first here is a an interview with Henson from EGO magazine to give better insight into the complexity of his art.

EGO Magazine: Bill Henson

2005

These are a few points that I have come up with in regards to this situation.

• Bill Henson should not be targeted as a pornographic photographer nor as a pedophile. His work carries complex themes and messages and should not be read out of context as has happened in this case. Modern Art requires a language for it to be correctly understood and appreciated. However, I do believe an ethical line has been crossed by Bill Henson with some of his photographs.
• There should be far more anger directed at the exploitation and sexualisation of children in marketing and advertising. Their only premise is to sell and they are using children to do that.
• This debate simply NEEDS to extent beyond Bill Henson and the art world!
• This event shows how quick Australians are to criticize things we don’t know about or understand. Australians’ need to develop their critical skills by researching the issue before drawing such ignorant conclusions. Such blunt criticism perpetuates misinformed hysteria.
• This intolerance has shown how much society has changed and a new paradigm has been established as to what is considered acceptable and unacceptable.  Bill Henson amongst many other artist have been photographing pubescent children for many years. The work of Sally Mann in particular is of interest here as she photographed her children naked right through their childhood and teenage years. What is Art? What is an Artist? Photograph by Sally Mann
• Our concept of ‘photography’ has changed. We have moved far from the innocence of photographing everyday life of people and places. Photography now has the phenomena of a prying evil eye used to ‘capture’ and ‘destroy’ its subjects. This paranoia has been predicated with the advent of the internet. The negative aspects of photography however were highly theorized by Susan Sontag in the 1970s. http://www.susansontag.com/onphotographyexcrpt.htm

http://suburbanjournals.stltoday.com/articles/2007/11/13/news/sj2tn20071110-1111stc_pokin_1.ii1.txt

Another form of documentary imaging is participatory photography projects which are a grassroots approach to documentary photography. Such projects allow members of the community, who have often been the subjects of documentary photography, to experience individual and collective empowerment by engaging in the creation of their own photo stories, that depict their life from their own point of view.

Participatory Photography was first used by the worker-photography movement in Europe and America in the 1920s and 1930s ‘to promote international relief for Russia’s famine’ document the rise a fascism in Germany and record the working conditions of the factory, railway, dockland and countryside workers in America. (Braden, 1983 p. 9) The idea is to put the camera into the hands of those who were traditionally the subjects of the photographer, and let them record their own predicament. This form of documentary photography has mostly been used for the benefit of an oppressed or disadvantaged group of people.

YAK and Family Planning Victoria was funded by the City of Melbourne to create a photographic arts project. The YAK members took photos and created a series of images that expressed what it is like to be young and same sex-attracted in Melbourne in 2007. As professional photographer, I worked with the young people to develop the theme, teach photography skills and produce a documentary slide show of their work.

One of the issues of documenting people in other countries is the way we ‘capture’ other people for ourselves like ‘trophies’. Photography critic Susan Sontag writes ‘Photographs document sequences of consumption carried on outside the view of family, friends and neighbors’. She believes its ‘A way of certifying experience’ and continues by arguing that ‘travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs’. (Sontag, 1977).

This is a film of people who live on Phuc Tan Street in Hanoi, Vietnam. It is a very simple short film put to music showing a memory of my time living there. Is it a trophy? Did I travel there to satisfy a need to accumulate photographs or did I simply document my time there? Does it even matter? A short blurb about the footage or images provides a context as to why the film has been made and what is being said about subjects ‘captured’. This is my reflection:

‘Life in Hanoi happens on the street and this is very evident on Phuc Tan Street. It is a vibrant place on the Red River with an amazing sense of community and is where people from the countryside come and live to find work in the city. The work they predominantly do is street selling and are known as the traveling sellers. My friend Le Van Do, also from the countryside, lives in a boarding house on Phuc Tan Street. When I lived in Vietnam I often spent the evenings eating, drinking and playing pool ON the street with Do and his friends. With his help we created this little video which we later took back and showed to them’.

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