A small boy in a dirty Spiderman shirt, tears streaming down his face, puts a toy gun to his head.
A smiling man carries a sewing machine through floodwaters that come up to his chin.
A turbaned man covered in green powder is borne by a large group of turbaned men covered in red powder.
These are some of the photographs on view at Penn State’s Palmer Museum of Art through Sept. 18. They’re the work of Steve McCurry, a Penn State graduate best known for a riveting portrait of a green-eyed Afghan girl – later identified as Sharbat Gula — that appeared on the cover of National Geographic in 1985.
That image, along with another portrait of Gula that McCurry made 17 years later, is also at the Palmer.
McCurry’s photographs are gorgeous. Maybe too much so. Teju Cole, writing in the New York Times Magazine last spring, accuses McCurry of feeding the Western appetite for romanticized images of the Third World.
It’s an old argument. George Orwell made it in an essay titled “Marrakech,” published in 1939.
To an Englishman, Orwell writes, Morocco means “camels, castles, palm-trees, Foreign Legionnaires, brass trays and bandits. One could probably live here for years without noticing that for nine-tenths of the people the reality of life is an
endless, back-breaking struggle to wring a little food out of an eroded soil.”
Cole isn’t claiming that McCurry supplied the toy gun or the turbans. Nor is he saying that McCurry coaxed the child to point the gun at his head, or the sewing machine owner to say cheese as he waded through the flood.
Individually, Cole says, each of McCurry’s images may be a true depiction of life in contemporary India, Afghanistan, Nepal or wherever. Collectively, though, they falsify contemporary reality in these places by ignoring “laptops, wireless printers, escalators” and such-like trappings of modernity.
Cole is commenting specifically on McCurry’s 2015 book “India,” which I haven’t seen. But among the images at the Palmer are young monks in orange robes and white running shoes, and younger monks in red robes who are using handheld electronics. Indeed, such juxtapositions of the traditional and the modern are themselves photographic and journalistic clichés.
Lurking behind Cole’s anticolonial critique are larger doubts about documentary photography. Strictly speaking, so the argument runs, all photos are partial, aestheticized versions of reality. They show only what the photographer chose to include in the frame. They show only the people and places the photographer ran across at a particular moment. They are inherently decontextualized.
The honest documentary photographer concedes the point and makes a good-faith effort to circulate images that are representative of a local reality. Part of that good-faith effort is a promise not to arrange a scene or pose a subject or use digital technology to add or subtract from the image after it has been shot.
Alas, only days after Teju Cole’s critique appeared in The Times, a visitor to a gallery show of McCurry’s work in Italy noticed a photo that had been carelessly, blatantly photoshopped: The bottom of a road sign appears where a man’s leg should be, creating a peg-leg effect. The entire sign seems to have floated off to the right. Busted!
McCurry has apologized, sort of. He blamed an underling for the leg/sign screw-up, while acknowledging that the ultimate responsibility is his. But he also claims that he’s now a “visual storyteller” rather than a photojournalist, the implication being that his more recent work should not be held to the same ethical standards that govern the work of news photographers.
This argument is almost identical to one storyteller Mike Daisey made in his own defense when a purportedly true story he told about conditions in Apple’s manufacturing plants in China in 2012 turned out to have some fictional elements.
With both McCurry’s visual storytelling and Daisey’s oral storytelling some kind of disclosure is called for so we know just what kind of a story we are being “told.”
All this uproar over McCurry’s ethics might sound like it came along at an awkward moment for the Palmer Museum’s big McCurry show, except if there’s one thing Donald Trump’s campaign for the presidency has proved once and for all, it’s that there’s no such thing as bad publicity.
The Palmer has wisely chosen to address the McCurry controversy with a panel discussion planned for 4:30 p.m. on Sept. 7. The title: “Documentary Photography in a Photoshop World.”
If listening to artsy types and media types debate visual ethics isn’t your idea of a good time, I suggest you at least take in the McCurry exhibition. Teju Cole thinks McCurry’s photos are boring. Ethics issues aside, I’d gladly hang any number of them on the walls of my house (if I could afford them).
See what you think.
