“There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera,” Susan Sontag wrote. Whether the shooter is pushing a situation around to fit an idea for a picture or simply ordering and stealing and multiplying the world, the aggression of the picture-making enterprise is especially pronounced when a disaster hits and the photographers descend.
For every terrible thing there must be photographs. Photographers go in as warriors, the aggression of their cameras directed in opposing force to the disasters. The photographer Joel Meyerowitz proceeded from a moral conviction about the value of documentation when he falsified entry tags to get into the Ground Zero site and shot the first nine months of cleanup, taking workers’ pictures even when they were glaring in blatant disapproval. Meyerowitz promised he would deliver these to “the people of New York,” declaring himself not just an artist but a public servant, and in his amazing new book, Everything That Rises, Lawrence Weschler treats those photographs with the utmost seriousness, revealing their remarkable resonances (intended and unintended) with historic works of art from Vermeer to Jasper Johns.
When photographers descended after Hurricane Katrina, it was in the spirit of accountability with an eye toward redress, toward the places where racism, poverty, and indifferent governance might be caught and dragged before a public tribunal. The New Orleans photographs by Seattle’s Chris Jordan are like a compilation of evidential facts. They’re detailed and close-up, and, judging by the essays in the new book In Katrina’s Wake (Princeton Architectural Press), intended as stern warnings for the future. They are also poetic and formal. A phone book spread open on a bed of dried, cracked mud is photographed so lovingly that you still can read the information that all at once became obsolete. A garish dollar store in ruins functions as the “after” picture to Andreas Gursky’s famed 99 Cent mega-photo.
Jordan is one of four photographers in Katrina-land at G. Gibson Gallery. Where he is a miniaturist, Debbie Fleming Caffery is a memorialist and a priest, performing last rites in black and white: a puzzling body-shaped imprint in the cracked earth of a slave cemetery; the scrawled message “Dorothy Holloman, Drowned August 29, 2005, He called my name” on house siding, turning home into self-made tombstone. Wyatt Gallery is a painter’s photographer whose recovery effort is finding redemptive beauty. He frames an empty chair facing an abandoned casino boat with a skeletal stern as the sun goes down on the tired, tranquil Biloxi coast. Water, on the other hand, is a fearsome villain in New Yorker Will Steacy’s photographs of found, water-damaged photos. One, of a father and daughter, is reduced to horrible green and white blisters.
What’s missing at G. Gibson are pictures of survivors. Objects can’t glower when they sense exploitation. But all disaster photographs have problems. The most important thing about them—something this welcome show hints at—is that no one agrees on how exactly they should look.
