“Hell is truth seen too late.”
by Michael Kennedy
These are two letters that Michael sent me after his photograph was banned by some street photography groups.
P, Batsceba
P:
I seem to offend people without any serious effort. Perhaps it is a talent.
Today’s example is from a FB group I thought was a natural fit for me. I was wrong.
A few months ago, I posted the image labelled New York City - 2018. See attachment.
This generated over 100 comments - the majority not favorable. I was denounced for showing “Poverty Porn,” with several other choice words and phrases in the mix.
Not long afterwards, I posted the image labeled Old Delhi - 2019. See attachment. This barely registered any comments.
The different reactions require no serious explanation. A white person - or at least a Westerner, should not be depicted suffering or struggling with everyday circumstances. Someone from a Third World country, however, was acceptable to be shown this way, as if somehow they deserved their plight.
Today I posted the same photo I posted to P-S the other day - the man on the street with his dog in Times Square, of New York City. The knives were out within minutes. One person asked me to stop referencing politics. Another person told me that if I didn’t appreciate Trump, then I was insane. I assumed these were primarily Americans - based on stereotypical names. I told myself that I would not engage in any replies. Yet the photo was stripped off the page within 20-minutes after I posted it.
So, enough is enough - and that was too gutless for me … “chickenshit,” as Americans say. Yet I could not resist sharing my opinion with one of the administrators.
Naturally, I quit the group after I sent him my thoughts via messenger.
If the essence of the Romantic Movement is spontaneity and emotions in response to The Age of Reason, I’m all in. Yet I require a modicum of order as a social creature, and this explains why I value language as a way to control the narrative of my existence.
Whoever tells the story best attracts an audience.
Photography enraptured me in my early 20s as another way to impose order on the chaos all around me, while trying to capture the fragile beauty of the human experience.
Yet control of the narrative is often illusionary, especially as the COVID-19 pandemic upends everything
The British political philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) said: “Hell is truth seen too late.”
That’s one way to view life, yet truth in the rearview mirror is cold comfort. We must do better than resign ourselves to Une saison en enfer - the title of wunderkind Arthur Rimbaud’s (1854-1891) massively influential prose poem, written when he was 19, before he took up a life as a gunrunner in Ethiopia.
“Alex, let’s skip 19th century French gunrunners in Ethiopia, and go for late-20th century photojournalists for $800.
Answer: Daily Double.
Here is the clue: Who is regarded as the finest war photographer of the post-World War II era?
Answer: Who is Sir Don McCullin?”
McCullin (b. 1935) has experienced his share of hell many times over, both in the rearview mirror and straight ahead. One of his most quotable quotes is: “Photography for me is not looking, it’s feeling. If you can’t feel what you’re looking at, then you’re never going to get others to feel anything when they look at your pictures.”
The importance of feelings in photography makes McCullin a Romantic; not to be confused with Morris Albert’s nauseatingly sappy song about “feelings” from the mid-1970s, covered by every lounge singer from Las Vegas to the geriatric crowd on the Love Boat.
If you value masterful documentary photography, photojournalism, street photography - or simply those extraordinary insights about both our uniqueness and our commonality, which deserves to rightfully be called art … McCullin is the real deal.
We are at war now and whether the enemy is labeled the Wuhan virus, the Chinese Corona, the Trump virus, or more acceptably: COVID-19, our fundamental way of life and all important social institutions are under attack, on the ropes or ready for The Last Rites.
I’m losing count of how many times other photographers have condemned me for posting photos of homeless people, the down-and-out, the defeated to FB street photography groups. And I’ve lost count of how many FB street groups have stripped my photos of homeless people off their respective pages for being #PovertyPorn … and, in effect, telling me to get lost.
At the height of his distinguished career, did McCullin merely produce #WarPorn?
If I pursue selective reality and ignore the heartbreaking aspects of life in favor of happy, idealized images of the new Ward and June Cleaver with Wally and young Theodore, the Beaver (what the hell kind of name is that for a kid?) is this going to be dismissed as #HappyPorn.
And what does all this say about my obligation as a photographer to try and capture the human experience in all its many uplifting and soul-crushing dimensions?
Is street photography going to shy away from truths we hold to be self-evident because they are uncomfortable, inconvenient and politically incorrect?
If this applies to street photography than how long before this extends to journalists, novelists, film directors, musicians and artists producing valuable work in other mediums?
The irony is that we have all become enslaved by our technology and are on camera every day - all damn day, everywhere we go. Issues about what is appropriate for street photographers to document and to post or publish become moot when faceless clerks and bureaucrats spy on us round the clock - and not simply in public, but in schools, stores, the workplace, airports, subways and on nearly every major street corner in the world.
To degenerate into schoolyard posturing over photographs of homeless people, Wall Street racketeers, Bangkok ladyboys, couples strolling hand-in-hand along Kuta Bay in Bali, the winos of Paris, the Chinese knock-off hustlers on Nathan Road in Hong Kong is pointless and only serves as a vivid reminder of how we divide-and-conquer ourselves better than any government censorship.
We are at war now and in my country - the United States, there are 166,878 people dead already from COVID-19, with the death rate at 1,000-per day. To assign blame to Donald Trump, is quite proper. “Everyone knows the captain lied.”
Yet the boat is sinking and so this is not the time for blame; another day, another time.
The unemployment rate in America is now at 12%. This is a recipe for disaster. The worst ever was 25% in 1933, when Franklin Roosevelt took over from Herbert Hoover, a vastly better educated and vastly more decent man than Trump - who still thought government should not help provide a safety net for Americans during the Great Depression.
In America, there is no national health insurance and so most people have coverage through their employer for the benefit of a group rate, which still results in high premiums and hefty monthly salary deductions. Yet no job, no health insurance. For hospitals, this means you must pay-to-play, and no payment means you lose in the Beat the Reaper Game.
The U.S. Congress can provide tax cuts for the white ruling class - known as white collar welfare, and can earmark money for the Pentagon to have new weapons, but cannot agree on how to provide a safety net for both the middle and lower classes.
Ivanka Trump, channeling Marie Antoinette, advocates beleaguered and busted Americans: “Find something new.”
For starters, a new President with the ability to think rationally with at least some empathy for others.
In the months ahead, more and more Americans will be out of work, out of luck, out of hope and will be sleeping in cars, in parks, in subway stations … on the streets from New York City-to-Seattle, Trump’s heavy handed enforcers be damned.
Yet America is hardly alone in this horror show. There is no escape from this plague. The ships are sinking everywhere.
The importance of documentary photography, photojournalism and street photography is to provide a record of our existence so that our time on this mortal coil stands for something meaningful.
To trivialize the plight of the homeless with terms like #PovertyPorn is a cheapshot to sidestep the inconvenient reality of our responsibility toward each other. It is a cop-out.
The photographers who first opened new worlds for me were Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans and Arthur Rothstein - from FDR’s Farm Security Administration (FSA) during the height of the American Dust Bowl in the mid-1930s. This was no #DustBowlPorn or #GreatDepressionPorn.
This body of work by 11 FSA photographers in all remains monumentally important, an indelible reminder of how the hand of fate can upend our world almost overnight, how we must never lose hope even when the light seems extinguished, how the ability to regain moral courage and physical strength and overcome hardships is always possible.
Equally important, Americans had a President who encouraged this photography project without censorship of any kind because he was not afraid of the truth - which was that America had fallen from a First World country-to-a Third World country - just as Europe gave way to fear and embraced fascist dictators in Italy, Germany and Spain.
What the FSA photographers achieved was a strong reminder that a true reckoning of what was happening in America was not some damn fake news, but real and traumatizing, and liberating at the same time because Americans can overcome so much adversity when united. This is true of all people. And this was no #PoliticalPorn.
A universal trait that is deeply embedded in our character is the belief that the blessed should give back - that the fortunate have a debt. This view graces all five major religions - and goes beyond any faith-based philosophy.
Street photographers must do what they do best, and that’s produce visual documents that add to a better understanding of our times - and without the censorship of FB page administrators acting as the arbiters of politically correct standards.
NYC
In the role of street photographer, I do not deliberately look for anything - except slices of life. Since I do have standards, everything is not “fair game.”
Off limits for me are children - not simply because it is too easy for a photograph by an older man to be misconstrued as something tawdry, but because children deserve their innocence and any visual documents for posterity should be rendered by parents or close family members. As an extension of childhood, a person under the age of 10 is damn hard to photograph because the face seldom offers any sense of character. But life takes care of this soon enough.
Off limits for me are people using drugs, or having sex in public - or doing both.
If you want to know about the life of a drug addict, read Junky by William Burroughs.
If you want photographs of people shooting up, check out the work of American photographers Mary Ellen Mark and Larry Clark.
If you want to see people shooting up drugs and having sex, there is Nan Goldin and The Ballad of Sexual Dependency - though most of this occurs behind closed doors. It is no surprise that Larry Clark is a significant influence on Goldin’s photography.
It is a surprise that Goldin collaborated on a photography book with Tokyo’s bad boy, Araki Nobuyoshi, called … Tokyo Love (1994).
Off limits for me are people involved in physical or verbal violence toward each other, and the surrounding environment.
Everything else is fair game for me as a street photographer.
NYC
With the exception of some material from New York City in 2018, everything else is really from Paris and Madrid, with a few examples from Barcelona and Lisbon.
I didn’t go looking for any of these photographs. These circumstances were simply in front of me. If I were inclined to being political correct - a self-censoring trait … self-neutering, really … that spares a tyrant the hard work of controlling the masses … I might get in line with so many other people and say 2+2=5, which is what O’Brien finally gets Winston Smith to do by the end of 1984.
I have resisted Winston Smith’s capitulation to the party line, and it has cost me more than one career, a lot of money and numerous friends who told me I could count on them … before they fled the scene to save themselves from being a cautionary tale like me. Given a second chance, my life would still be no different.
What I dislike most about myself are the fleeting self-delusions that help propel me through life. Whenever possible, I know it’s important to face inconvenient truths - and some times a camera provides a passport into worlds that offer insights that make me better as a result. Every photograph is a self-portrait.
The down-and-out, the homeless, the dispossessed, the wretched of the Earth are an inconvenient truth. I have no remedy for their plight. I have no words of quick-fix encouragement for these people. I just know that my fortunes have changed for the worst more than once, and I could easily be with them on the train to nowhere.
I can’t be like the current American President who reacts to the deaths of 166,878 people in the United States with an off-hand nonchalance: “It is what it is.” All lives matter.
The majority of these photographs were taken with a Nikon D5300, my camera of choice until mid-2017. The acquisition of a Ricoh GR II - and then a Fuji X100F changed my approach to street photography. I could travel light and fast, and no one could see me coming.
These photographs were all taken in late spring and summer conditions. The fact that many of the subjects are wearing winter clothing must speak of a lack of nutrition, and the need for warmth.
It is glaringly obvious that women are largely absent from this portfolio. I did not avoid them. They just were not visible. As an armchair sociologist, I assume that women living in the margins experience more protection from their families than men - who are expected to toughen up, figure it out, get a job … or get lost.
There is a small army of homeless men outside Seoul Station, the largest in the city where I live. Yet there are very few women.
The main subway station is a natural for the down-and-out crowd: access to public bathrooms, shelter from the cold and the rain - and enough shadows along the walls to take comfort for the night. The Korean police take a humane view of all this, and tolerate this small world within the larger world. Even with a language barrier, it’s possible to tell that among the bums and derelicts there is an alpha male, and the police confer some respect on this man, and let him take charge. There is a hierarchy in every world. But women are not really part of this scene.
Madrid
Barcelona
Lisbon
Paris