Photography

BEAUTIFUL SUFFERING:
PHOTOGRAPHY AND THE
TRAFFIC IN PAIN
mark reinhardt, holly edwards,
and erina duganne (eds)
University of Chicago Press, 2007 d16.00 $25.00 (P)
188 pp. Illustrated in mono and colour
isbn 978-0-226-70950-5

he authors of Beautiful Suffering:

Photography and the Traffic in Pain
place in historical and critical context the production and reception of
images of suffering, adding precision
and clarity to a divisive debate of visual
culture. In their own words, they ask their
reader to contemplate how images of
suffering are made, how they should be
made, how they circulate, the effects they
have, and the dilemmas they pose for
thoughtful producers and spectators. Begun as an exhibition for Williams College
Museum of Art in early 2006, professors
Mark Reinhardt, Holly Edwards and Erina
Duganne complete their project with a
book that offers a larger audience a
reasoned approach to an emotionally
charged subject. Five essays, along with
reproductions of all works exhibited,
provide a significant contribution to an
excruciating subject.
The books subtitle, Photography and the
Traffic in Pain, refers not only to the current
proliferation of images representing the
impact of atrocity, genocide, war, starvation, violence, disease and abuse on the
individual human being, it also pays
homage to two critical essays fundamental
to the ethical debate on the re-presentation of trauma and its relation to a political
economy of human relations. These are
Allan Sekulas The traffic in photographs
(1975) and Gayle Rubins The traffic in
women: Notes on the political economy
of sex (1975). Any current treatment of
the topic also owes a great deal to
Susan Sontags Regarding the Pain of Others
(2003), quoted frequently in the text, and
Theodore Adornos philosophical essays
on the dialectic between culture and
barbarism.
The essays in this volume both give an
historical perspective to the production of
images featuring human suffering as a

primary, discursive subject and cogently

elucidate a critique that has an enormous
impact on our position as spectators and
potential activists responding to pain.
Mark Reinhardt challenges the traditional
critique of beauty as an anaesthetising
force by shifting the question from
aestheticisation to apprehension. Why do
we feel, in his words, anxiety about the
relationship among vision, aesthetics, and
understanding? John Stomberg locates
the origin of a debate as to whether
documentary or art is the more ethical
representation of suffering to the rivalry
between Walker Evans and Margaret
Bourke-White at the end of the 1930s.
Erina Duganne addresses photographys
contested relation to the real, arguing
that authenticity has not been compromised by digital media but has always
been problematic owing to the compromise of context.
In her essay Cover to cover, Holly
Edwards uses the case study of one vastly
famous image the 1985 National Geographic cover of an Afghan refugee girl
to show that our relationship to images is
not one of concerned empathy but is a
complex interweaving of economic, political and sociological forces. Mieke Bal
takes on the crux of the matter: whose
pain are we addressing the subjects or
our own? Her essay The pain of images,
leaves no one off the hook: curator, artist,
or viewer. While her argument on exhibitionary politics is the hardest to unpack, it
is well worth the time as she covers many
of the current issues relevant to representation voyeurism, exploitation, sentimentality, and ideological framing.
More than the other four authors,
Holly Edwards goes on the attack. Her
selection of Steve McCurrys Afghan girl
is a case study of one of the twentieth
centurys photograph icons. Edwards
takes us from McCurrys initial exposure
of his film in a refugee tent as Afghans fled
the conflict with the Soviet army in the
mid-1980s, through its various re-incarnations on the cover of National Geographic, as
promotional material for McCurrys own
career, as poster girl for aid efforts, as a
greeting card swept up in a Taliban raid
against a proselytising NGO, and finally in

a documentary coverage of the search for

the original woman, 17 years after the
image was taken. Edwards questions the
relationships between the woman, Sharbat Gula, and the image taken of her,
asking what we owe the subject. What
Edwards never asks, however, is to whom
do images belong? The question is begged
by the very cover of the book, on which is
reproduced a portion of a New York Times
page held by a reader. The book design,
featuring an image of a captured Iraqi
from 2004 is layered first by our awareness
of the submissive posture of the Iraqi,
hooded by his own shirt, then by the
shadow of the soldier, holding a gun, cast
on the wall behind him, again by the
context of the printed page, and finally by
the thumb and its own shadow cast on
the paper.
We are aware of our own looking
through the indication of touch. Tengo en
los ojos los dedos, y lo que miro tiento (Sor
Juana Ine`s de la Cruz). I hold my fingers in
my eyes and what I see I touch. The
opening design feature of each successive
chapter is a silhouette of 4  5 sheet film:
an image unseen, blackened by overexposure. The implication is that we take
for granted our right to see. Reinhardt
understands that there is a certain anxiety
in looking but Edwards implies that we
have no right to look in the first place for
looking carries a responsibility we are
unlikely to understand. She compares
McCurrys image of the young Afghan
woman to an image taken by Philip-Lorca
diCorcia, the later subject of a lawsuit
questioning the artists right to the image.
Edwards asks if the Afghan woman should
not have the same right of contestation.
Perhaps the better comparison would be
to W Eugene Smiths portrait of Tomoko
Eumura in her bath (1975), an image
whose rights to publication were returned
by Smiths widow to the Eumura family,
ending its re-presentation after 20 years of
existence. Tomoko is that blackened sheet
of film, over-exposed and rendered opaque and unknowable.
Our relation to images is horrifically
shadowed but is not the greater horror to
render their effectiveness obsolete? Jim
Hughes, Smiths biographer, suggests

66 The ArtBook volume 14 issue 4 november 2007 r 2007 the authors. journal compilation r 2007 bpl/aah

Photography
that we do a disservice when we
eliminate an image that speaks. The
authors of Beautiful Suffering effectively
complicate that speech but readers must
be careful not to condemn images, by
virtue of their misuse, from our field of
vision and touch. Images are spectacle
but, if we place our fingers to our eyes,
there is as much to feel as there is to see
and that initiates knowing.
kathleen macqueen
Brooklyn, New York

HARRY CALLAHAN: THE

PHOTOGRAPHER AT WORK
britt salvesen et al.
The Center for Creative Photography/Yale
University Press 2006 d30.00$50.00
192 pp.12 col/213 duotone illus
isbn 0-300-11332-3
Dist. in Europe by Yale University Press

his large hardback catalogue is

the official companion for the
travelling exhibition dedicated to
photographer Harry Callahan (1912
99), which was organised in 2006 by
the Center for Creative Photography in
Tucson, Arizona. Born in Detroit, Michigan, Harry M Callahan was a selftaught artist, active from the early 1940s
until the mid-1990s. During his most
productive period, in the early 1950s, he
made famous photographs of Detroit, the
Michigan countryside, and countless portraits of his beloved wife, Eleanor.
Four authors have contributed to Harry
Callahan: The Photographer at Work, although
most of the research and editing work was
done by curator Britt Salvesen, from the
University of Arizona in Tucson. First, in
his short preface, the director of the Center
for Creative Photography, Douglas Nickel,
focuses on the symbolic dimensions and
the refined style of Callahans photographs, acknowledging the fact that here:
the images in Callahans world have an
undeniable mythic quality: the things and
events of his everyday life are distilled to an
essence, in a manner that lends many of his
photographs the extraordinary acuity of a
dream or a memory.

Then, in the Foreword, Callahans friend

John Szarkowski recalls their first meeting
back in 1953, and then tells of the unusual
way Callahan used to ask for funding for
his work, whenever he met potential
donators. In Callahans mind, the future
donations should serve to photograph as I

felt and desired; to regulate a pleasant

form of living; to get up in the morning
free, to feel the trees, the grass, the water,
sky or buildings, people everything that
affects us (Callahan, as quoted by Szarkowski). Boy! If searches for funding could
be that easy nowadays!
Following the prefatory pages, in the
most detailed text from the book Dr. Britt
Salvesen focuses on the various techniques used by Callahan, but she also refers
to his debut, early influences (such as
Ansel Adams) and experiences, and to
Callahans parallel work as an educator,
first at the Institute of Design in Chicago
(until 1961), and later for the Rhode Island
School of Design, in Providence, until
1977. These numerous pages are basically
more biographical, with some quotes
from Callahan taken from various sources.
Visually, the catalogue contains many
types of image, mostly monochrome:
realistic, abstract, nudes, urban scenes,
nature and deserts, which are reproduced
here in various forms: full size photographs, negatives, photographs made
with multiple exposures, and even proof

Harry Callahan,Chicago, 1949. Gelatin silver print,

I; R-214, Harry Callahan Archive. From Harry
Callahan:The Photographer at Work by Britt
Salvesen et al.

prints, contact sheets, and slides. There

are a few selected images that seem unique
or never seen before, mostly taken from
the Harry Callahan Estate, such as Callahans wedding announcement (with Eleanor Knapp), which was taken from a
newspaper advert published in 1934. In
fact, one can find at the end of the book a
whole section written by Amy Rule about
The archive of Harry Callahan, with a
detailed description of his many boxes of
photographs, magazine covers, brochures
and correspondence, which will be a treat
for art historians and archivists alike. I do
not think any previous book on Callahan
had ever explored these personal archives
with so much detail and relevance.
I liked the book. The only drawback
for me is the small size of many of the
reproductions: for instance, there are
three small photographs of women on
the same page followed by one or more
pages devoid of text or images. This

r 2007 the authors. journal compilation r 2007 bpl/aah volume 14 issue 4 november 2007 The ArtBook 67