Fractured Photography

Hilde Hovland Honerud and Jon Hovland Honerud

At a time when images are everywhere, and depictions of catastrophic events are commonly available through the media, an urgent question arises: how can we communicate about serious incidents and human distress through photography? Strangely perhaps, the answer for us was anonymous portraits and formalistic manipulations. We want to share the artistic development that led to this, and also how this process relates to social science. Through this we hope to shed light on both how to use formal aesthetics in documentary settings and the space art can inhibit within both experience and communication when representations are at stake.

Part One: Introduction

This exposition is the result of a long-term collaboration between the first author, who is an active visual artist, and the second author, who is a sociologist. The first-person narrator of this exposition is therefore partly ‘we’, but when it relates specifically to the creation of images, the narrator is singular ‘I’, referring to the first author, Hilde (see note 1 and also note 5, on our experiences with art and social science collaboration).

This exposition consists of two core elements, the main presentation, which is logically constructed as one narrative to scroll down, and the notes, where images, videos, additional reflections, and associations are gathered. If the main article can be seen as the output, the notes can be seen as a reflection of the process leading up to the exposition. Each note links back to the relevant section of the main article.

In my (Hilde’s) photographs, I have long worked to connect daily life and the socially critical together into one narrative, hoping to convey tales that embody precarious political and social conditions through the commonplace and mundane. The works are close to a journalistic, documentary style, but the motifs are far from classic disaster photography. In my latest work, addressing refugees on Lesbos, clearly manipulated images are put together with images that appear real. 

This outcome invites a number of well-known issues concerning the taking and making of images. This theme relates to real and urgent issues; thus, I needed to develop and clarify the role of politics and social activism in art. As this exposition illustrates, the social commitment was an outcome of the commitment necessary for the artistic process, rather than the reverse.

Although photography has been associated with activism, the issue of representation is fragile, and therefore we will even revisit classic discussions of image as representation. A starting point for me was working with the dramatic imagery of news and crisis as a context of images. We know that most of us are massively exposed to online images of war, famine, crime, and crisis, and we believe this can strengthen both stigma and othering in reading of images and a possible fatigue or numbness, which are barriers to our ability to take in the life of others through images (note 3).

For us, as white and comparatively wealthy Scandinavians working with refugees, there are additional and sensitive issues relating to both representation in images and the process of interaction. Images of people in distress made by people of better fortune could easily turn out as colonialist othering, a common mechanism that has been much studied and debated, increasingly so in recent years (Azoulay 2008). Furthermore, in the onsite process of interacting with people photographed, power differences could easily have interfered in communication and practical issues, such as figuring out what people find acceptable.

Is it even possible to communicate through photography about people in distress?

In the first part of this exposition, we will show how our understanding of photography developed through different approaches to images of refugees. First, as a hometown encounter, and then with refugees in Lesbos in Greece. We then discuss the image as representation, and discuss the potentials of the image in representation, the ethics of taking photos, and how we worked with roles and identities.

We hope to shed light on some alternative strategies to represent people photographed through significant encounters, visual communication, and visually and emotionally motivated manipulations. Through this we wish to share site- and time-specific examples of methods to engage artistically and socially, to make possible a sensitive gaze at dramatic events through reciprocal encounters that become part of both the formal and the expositional conversation.

Part Two: How my photography developed through refugee encounters

In 2015, following the initial refugee crises and massive mobility across Europe, a reception centre was established in our hometown, Kongsberg. There was the predictable local debate, where refugees were seen very much as one body, homogenous and without identities. All the public attention and stark oppositions, both locally and nationally, made us want to work with this, and we made arrangements with the reception centre management to stay around the centre for an extended time. Spending time there, getting to know people, and using sociological methods for observation, interviews, and analysis, revealed that our initial ideas were painfully naïve. It was the emotional upheaval of experience, the fear of other refugees and of spies, the unknown and waiting for something else that made them out of touch with who they were themselves, or at least who they were to become. This is what they told us. What also struck us was the non-character of the place; it was an emotionally cold place, it had nothing to it, it was nowhere.

We were not new to bringing together art and social science. In an earlier project (Øvelser i Norsk, note 4) on skilled worker mobility (Honerud and Hovland 2016), we tried working in parallel, using sociology and art as aligned but disconnected approaches, not unlike toddlers playing alone, side by side. Our intention was that neither approach should be a supporting nor dominating structure, both should be developed and displayed simultaneously. In the collaboration at the refugee centre this was different; we worked with separate outputs, where Hilde worked artistically and Jon worked with an evaluative approach. The nexus of connections between sociology and art were now instead related to examining, and developing understanding of context and subjectivities. In the final stages of the project, we observed how the collaboration nexus shifted from context to concepts, essentially a turn towards a collaborative idea-oriented examination of the relation between realities, images, and contexts of representation (note 5).

Through twenty years of art photography in the documentary domain (note 6), I have developed a methodology for how to approach new issues. I would sum it up in four parts. Time: I always spend a long time, to get a slower experience of being in the situation, being social and talkative, becoming part of it. Deep knowledge: I use both classic research and background information but also conduct active research on the situation, to enable my preconceptions to be scrapped and refined. Delay camera: I don’t start photographing before a few days in; when I walk around with my camera, it is only to get people used to that this is what I do. Genre as tool: I don’t plan a specific genre, but rather try to see genre, just like compositions and approaches, as a part of my aim to represent.

It took time to work out how to picture what I conceived as a presence and context that was almost not there. Finally, I set up a mobile studio at the reception centre, and worked in black and white. I used a long shutter speed and flash while they were moving their head side to side, which created the blurry area around the eyes. In most of my earlier works I used typological approaches, heavily inspired by Düsseldorf School photographers, and the formal approach was a visible inspiration in the works as exhibited. (See exhibitions and background in note 7.)

A few years later, I got a phone call from France. One of the women I had photographed, living with her family in the south, came across the portrait of her at the reception centre and could not stop crying, she told me. She had forgotten that this was also her, and she did not want to forget.

This was the first time I used my experience and interpretation of human encounters to actively manipulate an image so that I felt it would convey what was there to be seen. Therefore, the reactions from those portrayed were fundamentally important for me. Did they see in themselves what I put on display? Was I still representing them through the manipulation? The title of the project was a quotation from a car dealer from Damascus at the reception centre, who said ‘it’s not easy to make history, you know’.

I was also intrigued by the physical attributes of the reception centre, so my next work was to further study the architecture and physical surroundings of refuge, and I started making arrangements with reception centres in the area. However, as we all know, Europe’s borders were more or less shut down due to an agreement between Turkey and the EU. The refugee crisis moved away from countries in central and northern Europe towards the crossing points. Nobody came to Kongsberg, and close to no one to Norway at all, so the reception centres were by and large closed. The issue disappeared from the centre of news headlines and politics. But, of course, the situation was still the same: the border had moved away from Norway to the borders of Europe.

I noticed people exercising around Moria. I was immediately impressed; how could anyone focus on exercise under these conditions? On second thought, I realised that this is just what a resourceful and self-aware person would do to keep afloat under conditions like this. This is how I got in contact with Yoga and Sports with Refugees (YSR), an NGO that I would continue collaborating with. The project moved on, returning to portraits, but portraits that were anonymous. This was partly to avoid people searching for a suffering gaze. Also, it was in a way a solution to practical and ethical concerns.

I talked with and photographed hundreds of people, and I didn’t want to make a distinction between those who needed to be kept anonymous and those who didn’t. Also, we wanted to avoid putting too much emphasis on the meaning of an approval to participate. We could not avoid being associated with aid organisations or, for that matter, authority. Given this experience of power difference, it is easy to imagine that people might give their approval to participate in any kind of project out of fear or desperation, or even a form of respect based on possessions rather than actions. Furthermore, quite real possessions, such as passports and money, could be seen as possibilities. We had to establish a form of social reciprocity to build the participation on, and to leave the responsibility for anonymity with us, rather than to risk guiding participants into situations where they potentially could feel a pressure to participate or expose themselves that we might be blind to.

Put simply, I had two approaches to recording images. One, an in-the-moment documentary approach from in and around the gym (see images above and below), and, second, images based on photoshoots (note 11). Participation was voluntary, though, as already mentioned, the degree of volunteering is questionable – even the information about the project came through the NGO YSR, and people enjoyed being there and wanted to give something back. However, it was in these photoshoots that I experienced the strongest reciprocity of interactions.

In the photoshoots I would invite two or three people to join me, mostly people I met at the gym who seemed interested or I noticed, shooting either just outside the gym or in the city or other spots. Something happened during the photoshoots, where the conversations became part of the images. Most participants were active on social media; many of them were highly skilled in their sports, and accordingly interested in sports imagery they would see online. They would often have an idea of how they would like to see themselves in athletic images online. As they saw the images I was taking, and the ones they suggested, they also become part of figuring out what could be possible, for both my images and the images they’d like for themselves to post online.

This element of co-creation of images is obviously always present in the act of photography, but turned into a quite specific attribute. For example, a series of images with Muay Thai boxers on the beach was the result of a long process of discussing how to make in-the-air images. The image of one on top of the other is an idea I brought in, while the image of a boxer flying in the air is the idea of the subject of the photograph – this is the image he wanted (note 12).

On a different shoot with two teens doing parkour, a sport that is very visual, and often associated with pictures with a simultaneously laidback and dramatic feel, the same thing happened. They would sometimes fall into a discussion between themselves on different ways of shooting, discussing how it would look, and then instructing me. As happened when one of the teens took my camera and asked me to sit in a particular way and hold my hand like so; his friend then came flying through the air from the side and touched my hand, but only when I saw the photo, did I figure out what they had in mind for the picture (note 13).

In some of the first exhibitions showing people doing sports, I named the exhibitions ‘It is a light which objectifies everything and confirms nothing, part two’; however, I sensed that some of the audience seemed to feel relief. This worried me, as it appeared to me that the price of representing those photographed as strong and active might be that some of the audience somehow forget that what they are seeing is the same world that they see on the news. They might believe that my images are a refining comment on the truthfulness of verified news images of crowded camps, dangerous ocean crossings, violence, and death; and mistakenly forget that my images can exist and be legitimate only because there are dramatic news images, not despite it.

I have for a long time experimented with abstract, formalistic photography. I felt that the way forward in this project was to get the audience to question what they were seeing. With this as a vantage point, I began  tearing apart some of the images through digital manipulations, to create new, formal structures. My hope was that the audience then would question the photoshopped images, as well as those that appear not manipulated. The image below is one that many believe is a manipulation. It is not. To further remind the audience to question their reaction, I named the next exhibition ‘The contrast between the photographed moment and all others’. 

The exposition of the work is to me an important part of my composition, be it in a gallery, public space, or books. In an exposition, I can access the body of the viewer (see notes 15, 16, 17, 18, and 19). Mounting images low to the floor, in large and small sizes, or compiled together, in intensive areas and open areas, I can hope to make the body movement a part of the experience. Working with exhibitions, I will build miniature models of the exhibition space, make miniature prints to scale, reselect and rearrange again and again while observing the model and imagining how people move in the room. With a book (note 20) I can access the hands, the arms, the tilt of the head and gaze; and although I can’t model it, working with book dummies is a very similar process of composing through rhythms of impact and pause, and also tactile elements such as cover textiles and paper qualities.

Part Three: The imaged world

As a photographer, I believe that the politics of my images are not only mine, but that they also relate to those represented. Photography has always been a vessel for socially engaged representation, making issues visible. However, this relation to displaying reality has been fused with controversy since the publication of the classics of theorising photography. Berger, in a discussion of photography as a form of violence, and a capitalistic surrogate for memory, claims that ‘for the photographer this means thinking of her or himself not so much as a reporter to the rest of the world but, rather, as a recorder for those involved in the events photographed. The distinction is crucial’ (2008: 62). In other words, the risk of photography is that the image only relates the photographer to the viewers, and that the disconnection towards those being represented can be seen as a form of violence – a representational violence. In a post-print society flooded with imagery and interpretive connotations, this distinction is not easy. In his writing about uses of photography, Berger further states, ‘the aim must be to construct a context for a photograph, to construct it with words, to construct it with other photographs, to construct it with its place in an ongoing text of photographs and images’ (2008: 64).

Through late modernism, at least in Scandinavian contemporary art, it seemed that this disconnection between the political and representation played out to become a schism between traditions of formal aspects of art, on one side, and political and socially motivated art, on the other. Øvstebø and Sekkingstad (2009) observe that self-labelled political movements in art through a negating of aesthetics, material, and form have in effect contributed to a form of iconographic platform in itself. This distinction is based on an interpretation of early modernism as non-political, which is an obvious misreading. The freeing from representative art was a story about art display and to create experience of radical differentness in observation – a sphere freed from structures. Nairy Baghramain’s mirror installations (note 21) are a useful example, where aesthetic installations of mirrors in the exhibition rooms clearly also draw attention to how architecture forms looking – what is seen and what is not. The formal aspects are immediate, but the political and critical motivations are also very present.

Imagery is everywhere, and the intertextuality of images is moving faster and with more layers of meaning than ever. We live in a time of ubiquitous photography (Hand 2012). The observation that we are flooded with images, and the consequences of this, is nothing new. Flusser (1984: 26) argues: ‘It is true that one can, in theory, take a photograph over and over again in the same or a very similar way, but this is not important for the process of taking photographs. Such images are “redundant”: They carry no new information and are superfluous.’ He goes on to argue that these redundant images come to serve as a truth in themselves, that ‘we [become] sick and tired of explanations and prefer to stick to the photograph that releases us from the necessity for conceptual, explanatory thought and absolves us from the bother of going into the causes and consequences, . . . The reality of [the war in Lebanon], as all reality in general, is in the image. The vector of significance has been reversed; reality has slipped into being a symbol’ (1984: 62). (Every sunset counts, note 22.)

With the onset and widespread availability of low-quality mobile phone cameras in the early 2000s, there was a growth in photography where ‘in the situation’ authenticity with very little informative content would sometimes become part of news coverage and the symbolism of events. This was particularly striking in coverage of natural disasters, phenomena that are difficult to capture visually in the first place. Together with Nina Toft, I created an art series where we used online imagery as formative art, to emphasise the formal character of this imagery (note 23). We wanted to see what happened when we took this formal character at face value and spun it further into aestheticisation. Cramerotti (2009) was an important inspiration, in his claims that traditional photojournalism relates to conventions of representation as if it were reality, and with this, an orientation towards an image’s aesthetics could potentially spark reflection on the distinction between systems of representation and what it represents (note 24).

One conclusion from all this is that today it is probably not possible to make an image with an impact such as Nick Ut’s ‘Napalm Girl’. Take Nilüfer Demirthe’s photo of three-year-old Alan Kurdi dead on the beach in Bodrum, which many hoped would have a similar impact to Ut’s photograph (note 25 and note 26). But it did not. Put simply, it is harder to get through to people. In a way, the photograph of Alan is illustrative of this: it emerged and went viral on Instagram before being picked up by the news, and it was the instantaneous and authentic quality that got through.

Looking at its photographic qualities and composition, it is quite a blunt image, and does not compare well with ‘Napalm Girl’ (note 27). According to Mattus (2020) in her analysis of the image of Alan and other humanitarian images, it is not the aesthetic but the authenticity and emotional triggers that made this image go viral: ‘high aesthetic quality is not necessary, but in some respects the images of Alan had potentials, . . . the images of Alan came to balance between hope and despair – at first glimpse, he was the boy that could be saved. Galip [his brother] was already dead – “too” dead to be saved.’ Sohlberg, Esaiasson, and Martinsson tested this empirically (2019), showing people the image and testing political opinions. When surveyed immediately after viewing, policy preferences changed towards immigration liberalism, but after a fairly short time, this effect disappeared as the images were translated through the preferences the participants already held. We believe this is because we are now used to being shocked, and most of us have ways of creating interpretive barriers.

If this interpretive barrier is that efficient, then what is the essence of photography? Brett and Lusty (2019) ask the same question: what is the ontology of photography when it can be variously and simultaneously evidence, communication, provocation, monitoring, art, identity, and more? They argue its ontology rests in the capacity to be concurrently objective and conditioned. To us, this is still an observation of the indexicality of images, the direct relation to an external reality that early photo and film philosophy emphasised (Wollen 1976, 123–24; Bazin 1967). With its indexicality comes what Barthes called ‘analogical perfection’ (Barthes 1977: 17), a direct link that makes images possible to read without knowledge. Many have argued that the onset of digital imagery changes this (e.g., May 2019), since the tangible link of analogue photography is replaced by digital reproduction. To us this makes little sense: given that the reading of images in almost all instances is immediate and visual, systematic theorising and analysis is the exception.

Still, our common knowledge of the image as a construction is wider. Two out of three Americans think that ‘fake news’ is causing confusion (Barthel, Mitchell, and Holcomb 2016); 40 per cent of Swedes experience fake news on a weekly basis (Ahlin and Benzer 2017); journalists find they have to return to traditional journalism, away from the internet, to check stories (Xu and Gutsche 2021). But images are more important than ever, even though we do not believe in them.

An illustration of this, which is very much to the point for us, is the infamously faked cover photo of the LA Times on 31 March 2003 by Brian Walski (note 28). The image was a blunt combination of two photos taken seconds apart. He was fired and universally condemned; he never claimed this had anything to do with art, he had been under massive pressure and ‘fucked up’ (Carlson 2009). However, if we see the image in isolation, can we really say that the manipulation is more or less true of what it represents than the original? After all, photography has always been a manipulation, through either the photographers’ choices, technological bias (Lewis 2019), or the tendency to cement colonial relations (Campt 2017). No, the reason why Walski’s fake is something else is that the image is not what it pretends to be, and this changes the image. The image is not alone, and it is not the image in itself that breaks the indexical link or residue of reality (Barthes 1981), it is the photographer and the act of creating the image.

Ariella Azoulay (2008) has influentially captured and developed the meaning of photography when its meaning oscillates between objective and conditioned, showing how participating in photography is deeply embedded in existing structures of power and violence. The immediate risk is that the taking of a photograph creates a subject, which is specifically problematic when it comes to people experiencing structural violence and discrimination. Our experience is that this leads many to conclude that it is impossible to take photographs of the other in distress. But that is in many ways too easy a solution, as at all times silence is also a form of violence. But it points to the important realisation that the act of creating images is not an anonymous craft. It takes commitment on a personal level, where the participation of the photographer also implies experiencing something significant.

This is not all. Something else, which is also substantive, has happened since the 1980s. We may use the same phrases towards the effect of limitless numbers of images (although the numbers have obviously multiplied), but the transition to mobile devices changes the relationship to the image in two distinct ways. First, revisiting: if it is a ‘viral’ image, you’ll see it a few times in a couple of days, and then it will mostly be gone. Thus, as a consumer of social media and images, one will usually not see the image again, will not revisit it. We do not have access to revisiting the image as we did. Second, with mobile devices the photographer doesn’t have access to the full body of the viewer, the body that picks up a newspaper or magazine, holds it, and leaves it lying around for kids to draw moustaches on it. I think this makes communicating with images different, and part of why iconic images don’t have the same impact anymore.

One could hope that the death of the click-bait era in marketing could be a promising development. But we fear the opposite. According to Espen Rasmussen, an image editor at Norway’s most widely distributed newspaper, VG, the aim is attention, because reading time and engagement is what ads are measured by (Rasmussen and others 2021). Hence, clickable headlines are less commercially valuable than long and engaging articles. While this sounds good, it probably implies that news outlets will compete for in-the-moment engagement, and then a new commitment, and then another; the risk is that our commitment fatigue and blasé attitude will also reach a new level. There are only so many things we have the capacity to care about.

To show photography is to take part in both a conversation and a context. Therefore, it is essential to also understand the visuality of the current conversation, both the conversations specific to the art world and the conversations relating to the images we as citizens are exposed to every day. Thus, we do make assumptions, such as to assume that the audience will have heard of refugees and the Mediterranean, and to assume that people are accustomed to the news genre of dramatic imagery (note 3). Any communication will depend on both the sender and the receiver’s world, so it is only commonsense, and in our view legitimate, to make assumptions about the receiver’s world.

Understanding the references of an image entails understanding imagery in context, a context that is more than ever a confused juggernaut of scale and speed. Finally, this sheer volume of images not only creates visual competencies but also, most of all, creates mass consumption of images – more images seen faster.

Our communicational doxa is more visual than ever; however, it is infused with complexities. Most people know that images, and also videos, can easily be manipulated beyond recognition; as Cramerotti and Mele (2021) argue (note 29), objectivity is futile as the context of mediation is removed from the larger context – the world it is part of and is observed in. This was most recently put on display in Jonas Bendiksen’s The Book of Veles (2021) (note 30), where he intentionally manipulated people into a docu-photo project about trolling factories in North Macedonia, only revealing the manipulation when it was clear that no one had noticed. Bendiksen claimed this shows how we are fooled by imagery. Our take is that it is all about who shows the image, and why.

Thus, this is the challenge when starting from a documentary position: relating images to the real world, how to communicate a lifeworld that represents those imaged, their lives, their identities, their experienced selfs, in a world flooded with images, make-believe, objectivity, drama, and competition for attention.

Part Four - Significant encounters and fractured photography
Although exhibition work is visual and emotional, a description of the artistic process would include the time spent, the research, the encounters, and the commitment that rises from significant encounters. To some extent, I’m destroying the image and seemingly claiming it is someone’s experience. But most of all I aim to challenge an experience of that encounter, by removing expectations of representation. It has taken me a long time to develop this space, to free myself to approach a documentary setting in a way that revokes expectations of representation. In this regard, it is telling that it is only the most recent work in this process to which I have given a descriptive title, GYM, without philosophically spelling out the concepts I had approached. I feel quite certain that I could not have made these images in the first place without the deep knowledge of the situation through our qualitative research, the commitment to those represented that rises from significant encounters, or the visual collaboration and communication with those I photograph.

However, it is impossible for an encounter to be of significance for me if some form of commitment does not come out of it. It was a very natural consequence of this work that I used some of the attention my art gained as a platform for social engagement, by creating awareness and raising funds. Through this engagement, at one point I was asked to become a board member of Yoga and Sports with Refugees (YSR), the NGO I collaborated with, where my role is both to use my knowledge of visual communication to help YSR communicate with a broader public and as a general advisor on public opinion. It is a completely different role, where what I do has little to do with art. This role would not have appeared before the project; it is a product of the artistic process and the commitment that is experienced through it. My artistic approach has created a commitment that has turned into a specific social engagement.

As we see it then, art relating to the social and political can have a more iterative or two-way direction, where the process of practising art through significant encounters can shape a very specific commitment. I believe that it is possible to communicate through photography about people in distress, despite barriers of alternative contexts and interpretation. I believe that representation may be extended even through conspicuous manipulation and abstraction, given that it is part of a context where the dramatic events are available elsewhere, not as an alternative but as a comment to representation. I’m not sure whether this model is generic; but as I continue my work with YSR, I will attempt to work in a similar mode in different topics, to see whether what happened in this project has a formative or conceptual nature or was specific to the refugee situation.