By Luisa Grigoletto
All images Giorgio Di Noto, 'The Arab Revolt', 2012
Thirty framed sepia-toned Polaroids form a continuous flow on the walls of the tiny Roman photography gallery Senza Titolo. The shots show a catalogue of subjects varying from fighters bracing weapons to streets and minarets overshadowed by the fumes of severe explosions, to individuals and crowds caught in indistinct activities. No labels accompany the display, so it’s hard to identify whether people are celebrating, protesting, marching or otherwise. The images look ambiguously familiar, so similar to scenes we have seen already, yet blatantly unknown.
In a short paper pinned close-by, curator Fabio Severo explains that what we’re looking at are screen shots of images extrapolated from on-line videos of the so-called ‘Arab Spring’, the multiple uprisings that burst out in North Africa and the Middle East in late 2010 and 2011. The project, by Roman photographer Giorgio di Noto, 22, is called ‘The Arab Revolt’ and, to great controversy, it won Italy’s esteemed Premio Pesaresi Prize for photojournalism.
Giorgio Di Noto, ‘The Arab Revolt’, 2012
After reviewing 68 portfolios, an international jury was split in a four-to-three vote in favour of Di Noto’s work, for its ‘intrinsic capability of displaying photography’s sense of contemporaneity’ and ‘the excellent editing and selection’, concluding that the project, in its ‘homogeneity and coherence’, has used ‘photographic language to the best of its current technological potential’.
Many in the Italian photography establishment raised eyebrows and voices at this decision, arguing that, unlike in traditional photojournalism, Di Noto wasn’t physically present during the uprisings to snap any of these images. Thus, awarding such a project – they say – implies a devaluation of the photographer’s role as witness to history and of photography as a tool to record truth. Criticism lit up the Italian photography blogosphere, ranging from fierce disagreement with the jury’s decision – ‘awarding such a project is a moral defeat’ – to vehement direct attacks on the photographer’s riskless work ethic – ‘this is not modern reportage’, and ‘the only risks he ran were maybe drinking too much coffee and losing sleep’. Although the prize’s rules don’t include any methodology specifications, several lamented how this project dismisses the aesthetic credo of the late Marco Pesaresi, the prize’s namesake, rooted – as his friend and photoeditor Renata Ferri described it – in ‘street photography and the magic of the real’. And of course, there was no shortage of those bemoaning ‘the death of photojournalism’.
Others instead are slow to condemn. Rather, they see the award as a refreshing encouragement to find new ways of working in a challenging field. Arguably photojournalism, like journalism, is undergoing a renovation process – some might call it a crisis – in which new ways of reporting, producing and distributing images have surfaced. The key constituents seem to be new actors on the scene (like citizen photographers), cheap and accessible technology, and social media.
As recently as 2011, the World Press Photo Award proved it was embracing the trend by giving an honourable mention to German artist and photographer Michael Wolf for his work ‘A Series of Unfortunate Events’ based on Google Street View images. Two years earlier, curators Carles Guerra and Thomas Keenan held a seminar at Bard College in New York (followed by a 2010 exhibit in Barcelona) titled ‘Antiphotojournalism’, analyzing how some news photography has moved on un-stereotyped paths from the 1960s to the present day. The duo broadened the original meaning of the name invented by photographer Allan Sekula in 1999, and widely applied it against the clichés of conventional photojournalism, such as beautifully-composed yet dramatically-violent iconic images, predilection and closeness to the major dynamic actions, and faithfulness to the mission of reporting the real truth. While mixing practices, attitudes and intents, it calls for a critical perspective on the images’ meaning and the photographer’s role.
Hence, Di Noto’s stills of low-res, crowd-sourced videos can be seen as a meta-photojournalistic interrogation of the communication system, its language, functioning and methods of representation: the revolts – here indistinguishable from one another – become a pretext for a broader discourse on the way meaning is produced. While the project’s premises reside between reality and virtuality, the use of the manipulated and unstable Polaroid film assigns an objectual and somehow fetishist consistency.
This award doesn’t assess – as one incensed photography journalist remarked – that ‘the only “contemporary” thing you can do with images of historical, social and political events is editing those that already exist’. Instead, it recognizes the validity of Di Noto’s work as a viable option within the realm of narrative photojournalism, as an opening rather than a restriction.