\"On Colour Photography in an Extra-Moral Sense\"

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On Colour Photography in an Extra-Moral Sense Jennifer Bajorek To cite this article: Jennifer Bajorek (2015) On Colour Photography in an Extra-Moral Sense, Third Text, 29:3, 221-235, DOI: 10.1080/09528822.2015.1106136 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09528822.2015.1106136

Published online: 25 Nov 2015.

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Date: 10 December 2015, At: 18:11

Third Text, 2015 Vol. 29, No. 3, 221– 235, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09528822.2015.1106136

On Colour Photography in an Extra-Moral Sense Downloaded by [Jennifer Bajorek] at 18:11 10 December 2015

Jennifer Bajorek

1 Jean-Franc¸ois Lyotard, Sam Francis: Lessons of Darkness, Geoffrey Bennington, trans, Lapis Press, Venice, California, 1993 2 Key writings on documentary include Susan Sontag, On Photography, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 1977, and Regarding the Pain of Others, Picador, New York, 2003. On the specific nexus of photography and human rights discourse see Ariella Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography, Zone Books, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2008; Thomas Keenan, ‘Mobilizing Shame’, South Atlantic Quarterly, vol 103, no 2/3, spring/summer 2004, pp 435 –449; and Sharon Sliwinski, Human Rights in Camera, University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 2011. On documentary in an artworld context, see TJ Demos, The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary during Global Crisis, Duke University Press, Durham, North Carolina, 2013. 3 Many of these pressures are connected with the uses to which photography has been put in twenty-firstcentury wars, which have pushed conventional

We must have colors. . . in order to complain of their vanity, just as Jeremiah needs a lot of words in order to say that they have nothing to say. Jean-Franc¸ois Lyotard1

We are living in a time when documentary images are subject to heightened critical scrutiny – for social, political and geopolitical reasons, as well as for material and technical ones. Thanks to photography’s ever more explicitly distributed and networked incarnation, and the subsequent expansion of a wide array of photographic practices (digital, satellite-based, forensic etc), simultaneously, into specialised fora (war crimes tribunals, courts of human rights) and ever deeper into everyday experience, new life has been breathed into the claims of an earlier era of documentary practice: to expose injustice, to mobilise public opinion and to motivate an ethical or political response.2 At the same time, old philosophical debates about the relationship between the medium and the message are being reinvigorated, thanks to new aesthetic and ideological pressures.3 This article calls attention to a question that has often been ambiguous in contemporary debates about documentary images: the question of colour. Specifically, I examine assertions regarding colour’s moral qualities, and (what is not quite the same thing) its role in the production of political actions and effects, through the work of two contemporary photographers – David Goldblatt and Richard Mosse. Goldblatt’s work presents an interesting test case for a moral discourse about colour because the photographer, who is South African, famously made a decision to work in colour only after the end of apartheid. Mosse’s work, by contrast, shot in the Democratic Republic of Congo using infrared film, deliberately toys with widely received but ill-founded ideas about the inappropriateness of a particular colour (pink) to the depiction of conflict. I ask what happens when colour is actually read rather than taken for granted as a ‘purely’ aesthetic element in both photographers’ work, and I argue that it is only once colour is read within the context of a particular image that more interesting questions can emerge. I also # 2015 Third Text

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definitions of documentary to breaking point. See Judith Butler, ‘Photography, War, Outrage’, Publications of the Modern Language Association, vol 120, no 3, May 2005, pp 822 –827, and Forensic Architecture, ed, Forensis: The Architecture of Public Truth, Sternberg Press, Berlin, 2014. 4 I use the term ‘ethicopolitical’ broadly, to refer to ideas of politics without ground or guarantee and of political actions or events predicated on responsibility for the other. 5 David Goldblatt and Nadine Gordimer, On the Mines, revised edition, Steidl, Go¨ttingen, 2012; David Goldblatt, Some Afrikaners Photographed, Murray Crawford, Johannesburg, 1975 and South Africa: The Structure of Things Then, Monacelli Press, New York, 1998 6 Critics who have discussed colour in Goldblatt’s postapartheid work include Okwui Enwezor in ‘The Indeterminate Structure of Things Now: Notes on Contemporary South African Photography’, Tamar Garb, ed, Home Lands/Land Marks: Contemporary Art from South Africa, Haunch of Venison, London, 2008, pp 28 –39; Michael Godby, ‘David Goldblatt: A Life in Photography’, in David Goldblatt: Hasselblad Award 2006, Hatje Cantz, Ostfildern, 2006, pp 9 –15; and Michael Stevenson, ‘Markers of Presence: David Goldblatt’s Intersections with the South African Landscape’, in David Goldblatt, Intersections, Prestel, Munich, Berlin, London, New York, 2005, pp 100 –115. 7 Stevenson, who is Goldblatt’s gallerist, states that the photographer views all of his new colour work ‘as part of his Intersections series’. Ibid, p 100.

suggest that, despite the fact that contemporary theoretical discourse has dispensed with a didactic approach in favour of a focus on the ethicopolitical dimensions of images,4 this shift has not generally been reflected in contemporary critical discourse concerning documentary photography.

DEMOCRACY 1: RED RIBBONS FADE TO BLACK David Goldblatt, one of South Africa’s most distinguished living photographers, spent the first thirty-five years of his career working in black and white. These years coincided roughly with the years of official apartheid. Throughout this period, Goldblatt’s commercial work, commissioned for magazines and corporate publications, was shot in colour, but the photographs that he took for himself and, later, for international audiences, were black and white: documentary photographs of Afrikaner farmers, the descendants of settler colonialists in the Western part of the country, and images of the landscape and built structures for which, today, the photographer is best known. These black-and-white photographs were seen by international audiences primarily in the form of publications, from Goldblatt’s first two photobooks, On the Mines (1973) and Some Afrikaners Photographed (1975), to South Africa: The Structure of Things Then (1998).5 Starting in the late 1990s, the photographer’s post-apartheid work has been shot mainly in colour.6 Goldblatt’s turn to colour was immediately, and widely, noted by critics and others with the advent of Intersections, a project that was exhibited internationally in high-profile museums and galleries, starting in the mid 2000s.7 Shooting with a custom 4×5 view camera, Goldblatt produced a large-format colour negative, which was then scanned; working with master printer Tony Meintjes, he edited the digitised image; the process ended in the production of a digital print by Meintjes.8 Goldblatt explains that the Intersections project began when he decided to travel to the 122 intersections of latitude and longitude that fall within South Africa’s territorial boundaries and photograph what he found there.9 He soon retreated from this idea, and the illusion of serendipity produced by using a geographic coordinate system to select one’s subject matter is, in any case, belied by the photographer’s systematic approach, evident in discrete series within Intersections, such as ‘Municipal People’, and ‘. . . in the time of AIDS’. The latter consists mainly of landscapes, conveying, on the one hand, a sense of the territorial vastness of South Africa and, on the other, a sense of claustrophobia, echoing, perhaps, the oppressive nature of the quest for national identity in the ‘new’ democratic South Africa. Intersections also conveys, like the photographer’s earlier landscapes, the impression of a history written on the landscape through sedimentation and accretion. Okwui Enwezor has been a particularly eloquent proponent of this interpretation, and he has argued that Goldblatt’s most powerful photographs are not those that document the apartheid system unfolding in real-time, but rather those that reveal the traces of events that led to that system’s creation.10 In his colour work, the photographer effectively expands his arsenal for

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Photograph by David Goldblatt, Entrance to Lategan’s Truck Inn, Laingsburg, Western Cape, 14 November 2004, #David Goldblatt, courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, Paris, and Goodman Gallery, South Africa

8 Godby, ‘David Goldblatt’, op cit, p 15. See also Amy Halliday, ‘David Goldblatt’, Artthrob, no date, http://artthrob.co.za/ Artbio/David_Goldblatt_ by_Amy_Halliday.aspx, accessed 1 August 2014. 9 Stevenson, op cit, p 100 10 Enwezor, op cit, p 34 11 Ibid, p 33 12 ‘Somewhere in each photograph the red ribbon can be found. . .’ George Stoltz, ‘David Goldblatt: In the Time of AIDS (Galeria Elba Benı´tez, Madrid)’, Art Review 33, summer 2009, p 145

visualising these traces to encompass new instances of inequality and injustice that have arisen in the post-apartheid era, such that his work apprehends, as Enwezor puts it, ‘a constantly shifting, evolving landscape’ while reminding the viewer, at the same time, that ‘landscape has memory’.11 One way that Goldblatt’s work creates this sense of memory and accretion is through its long, narrative captions. The captions to ‘. . . in the time of AIDS’ underscore what would otherwise risk remaining invisible: that the lived experience of the AIDS pandemic in South Africa has, today, become another layer of experience inscribed in the landscape. ‘BHJ, Richtersveld, in the time of AIDS, Northern Cape. 25 December 2003’, ‘Entrance to Lategan’s Truck Inn on the N1 in the time of AIDS, Laingsburg, Western Cape. 14 November 2004’, ‘Grahamstown, Eastern Cape, in the time of AIDS. 13 October 2004’. The captions also encourage the hunt for the red ribbons that are the photographs’ central visual motif.12 These ‘red’ ribbons (here, the ribbon is white) appear in a painting on a rock, a memorial, in the Richtersveld, an area where the

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Photograph by David Goldblatt, The cashier and her counter in the municipal offices, Suurbraak, Western Cape. 22 July 2004, #David Goldblatt, courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, Paris, and Goodman Gallery, South Africa

13 I heard Goldblatt discuss colour in a public conversation with Enwezor, at the Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley, California, 8 July 2007, held in connection with the Intersections exhibition. The description of the exhibition posted on the museum’s website reprises that discussion almost verbatim. See ‘David Goldblatt: Intersections’, 8 July –26 August 2007. http://www.bampfa. berkeley.edu/exhibition/ goldblatt, accessed 1 August 2014.

rights of indigenous people to land title have recently been reasserted after decades of violent dispossession and eviction. The memorial inscription on the rock, together with the inscription of the place-name ‘Richtersveld’ in the caption, reminds us that the photograph effectively superimposes two different phases of historical dispossession (colonial-era and apartheid-era) in a single image. But the ribbons can also be observed in more mundane places: at a truck stop, along roadside vistas that are otherwise unremarkable, at a public plaza in a provincial business district. Other ribbons are glimpsed only as they vanish: in the corners of billboards at the margins of perception, or on a notice hanging in a municipal worker’s service window. In the latter case, we are looking at a colour photograph, but the notice is black and white. As previously noted, Goldblatt’s transition from black and white to colour has been a favourite theme among critics, and the photographer himself has often discussed this transition in public statements about his work.13 In a 2005 interview with Mark Haworth-Booth, Goldblatt makes a clear distinction between his commercial and his personal

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work on the grounds that, when working for a client, he was always willing to manipulate both his images and ‘the reality with which they confront us’.14 In his personal work, by contrast, Goldblatt says that has always refrained from this kind of ‘manipulation’. This distinction is interesting, in part because it leads the photographer to dismiss ideas about a digital revolution, in part because it leads him to the question of colour:

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In my personal work. . . I take reality as given. Its existence, the given-ness of it is precisely why I am stirred to photograph it. However I think a lot of humbug surrounds the notion of a reality unsullied by photographic intervention. The fact is, I together with my cumbersome camera on its tripod are part of reality and I can’t pretend that quite often my presence does not in some way alter or influence the outcome and that I don’t take this into account in my taking of the photograph.15

Goldblatt goes on to say that digital technology did not fundamentally alter the potential for photography to intervene in reality. Rather, he emphasises: ‘Digital technology made it simpler, easier, faster’.16 In his description of how his own practice has changed in the digital era, Goldblatt explicitly emphasises the enhanced capacity for colour: While I had used colour photography extensively in professional work for some 40 years I had very rarely used it for personal work. There were two principal reasons: (1) During those years color seemed too sweet a medium [author’s emphasis] to express the anger, disgust, and fear that apartheid inspired. (2) Color photography was quite limited in its possibilities. Color transparency materials had very little latitude. Color negative materials had more latitude but frequently had a tendency towards color casts. I did not make my own color prints and I found it extremely difficult to get satisfying prints from laboratories. . . In the late 90s I began to use a new generation of color negative emulsions that had considerable latitude and a very even-handed palette. When I felt the sweet breath of the end of apartheid [author’s emphasis] and the wish to become somewhat more expansive in my photography, it was natural to put the two together: the new color emulsions and photographic printing through digital technology on non-plastic papers that I like.17

14 Mark Haworth-Booth, ‘Interview with David Goldblatt’, in Intersections, pp 94 –99 15 Ibid, p 94 16 Ibid, Goldblatt is punning on the advertising slogan of a South African bank. 17 Ibid, pp 94 –95

Despite Goldblatt’s reference, here, to the ‘sweetness’ of colour, the passage is significant for its emphasis on technological over social and political factors. The choice ‘for’ or ‘against’ colour was for the photographer guided by a desire for technical precision and not by a desire to change the frames of social and political analysis in his work. This emphasis on technical concerns has nonetheless been overlooked by the majority of critics, who have preferred to interpret Goldblatt’s transition to colour as motivated by a desire to match the aesthetic qualities of his images to their subject matter, which had ostensibly changed after the ‘sweet breath of the end of apartheid’. David L Krantz voices this interpretation in his

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essay, ‘Politics and Photography in Apartheid South Africa’, when he writes:

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As Goldblatt has observed, the use of colour during apartheid would have been inappropriate. It would have enhanced the beautiful and the personal, whereas black and white photographs more effectively documented the external dramatic contradictions that defined this earlier [apartheid] period.18

18 David L Krantz, ‘Politics and Photography in Apartheid South Africa’, History of Photography, vol 32, no 4, winter 2008, p 299

Everyone likes a felicitous correspondence between the aesthetic qualities of an image and its theme or subject matter. Such a correspondence is, however, in the case of Goldblatt’s colour work, false. Interpretations of Goldblatt’s post-apartheid work that confuse the ‘sweetness’ of colour with that of the end of apartheid fail to engage with its most interesting interpretive challenges, which are, I would venture, connected with its probing reflection on the nature of democracy. What happens if we actually read the ways that colour works in Goldblatt’s photographs? What, for example, are we to make of all these black (or white) ribbons among the red? We may find ourselves wishing that they were louder, more stigmatic, like the scarlet letter a diagnosis of HIV all too often is. Or we may see in them a commentary on the limited resources and inadequate budget of a given HIV/AIDS awareness campaign: eg, the red ribbons are black because they appear to have been photocopied, or printed without colour ink. These budgets have remained inadequate ever since the notorious failure of the South African government to address, early enough and aggressively enough, the AIDS pandemic. In still other photographs from the same series, the dialectical interchange between these two colours, red and black, seems to amplify the ambiguity and apocalyptic language of the slogans. ‘ARE YOU MASTER. . . ?’, reads the motto barely discernible in one photograph. This apocalyptic language translates the question underwriting all others in South Africa ‘in the time of AIDS’: ‘Do you know your HIV status?’ In another photograph, the signage for a public health campaign – ‘I want to take our relationship to the next level. Let’s get tested for HIV’ – appears alongside an advertisement for Valvoline. In this particular image, visual and formal as well as conceptual relationships emerge amongst the various signs – signs located, literally, at an intersection – launching a dizzying chain of references and re-significations. The advertisement says: ‘PEOPLE WHO KNOW USE VALVOLINE’, with the red ribbon sketched in the bottom right-hand corner of the ‘Let’s get tested’ sign reflecting, in miniature, the shape of the ‘V’ in ‘Valvoline’. The ‘V’ in ‘Valvoline’ is, itself, half red, and painted to produce the illusion of a fold, also echoing a ribbon, in much the same way that the initial capital echoes the last letter (always capitalised) in the acronym, ‘HIV’. Out of this appearance of serendipity a complex set of relationships emerges – amongst knowledge, mastery, love, access to resources (to medical testing as well as to consumer goods) and the calculation of risk. Even the fact that these relationships unfold, in this photograph, at a physical intersection (the directional arrows on the traffic signs are also red and also echo the ‘V’ in ‘Valvoline’, this time rotated at ninety

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Photograph by David Goldblatt, MB Fast Food & Takeaway, Alexandra Township, Johannesburg, Gauteng. 14 September 2006, #David Goldblatt, courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, Paris, and Goodman Gallery, South Africa

19 Intersections have also figured prominently in the work of another wellknown South African photographer, Santu Mofokeng.

degrees), seems to point us to a deeper logic and set of conditions – as if to suggest that the structural inequalities that were deliberately and violently codified under the apartheid system endure, in the ‘new’ South Africa, in the form of risk factors. In a sense, the very idea of risk seems both to reflect and distort the harmonious image of a democratic society as epitomised by the chance encounter, in public, between anonymous citizens on an equal footing – the image of democracy behind the ubiquity of the intersection as a feature of the urban landscape to which much attention has been paid in contemporary art.19 To focus our interpretation of all of these red (or black) ribbons on questions of poverty, or a lack of public health resources alone, is to confine our analysis, in a more or less straightforward way, to the ongoing social inequality and economic disparities that are the legacy of apartheid. To take colour as a kind of cue, however, to the deeper epistemological questions that are subtly yet unmistakably inscribed within Goldblatt’s photographs – ‘Do you know?’, ‘Are you master?’, ‘PEOPLE WHO KNOW USE VALVOLINE’ – is to confront a series

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Photograph by David Goldblatt, In the time of Aids – Are you Master. Kilometre 4 on R74 between Harrismith and Bergville, Free State. 25 August 2005, #David Goldblatt, courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, Paris, and Goodman Gallery, South Africa

of more probing questions about the relationship between knowledge and action, intersection (relation, exchange, traffic) and inequality, and the responsibility of a democratic government actually to address inequality, in its root causes. Paradoxically, these and other urgent questions have gone unasked by the critics, even as they have made a point of singling out the use of colour in Goldblatt’s post-apartheid photographs, for it is not only through their captions but also through their use of colour that these photographs are able to reveal, in all of their multi-layered complexity, contemporary challenges to democracy.

TOWARDS A NEW PARTISANSHIP OF COLOUR The perils of colour seem to present a special problem for documentary photography, whose interpretation has long been organised by the conviction that photographic images can, and that documentary images

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20 On the relationship between cognition and action that is thought to be mediated by documentary see, again, Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography, op cit; Keenan, ‘Mobilizing Shame’, op cit; and Sliwinski, Human Rights in Camera, op cit. 21 Sontag, On Photography, op cit, p 57 and p 105 22 Jean Paulhan, On Poetry and Politics, Jennifer Bajorek, Charlotte Mandell and Eric Trudel, trans, University of Illinois Press, Urbana and Champaign, 2008, p 48. Paulhan’s use of the term, le parti pris, is inflected by his experience as a member of the French Resistance. 23 I explore the interactions between photography and decolonisation in francophone West Africa in my forthcoming book, How to Write a Visual History of Liberation: Photography and Decolonial Imagination in Africa, Duke University Press, Durham, North Carolina. 24 Natalia Brizuela treats photographs of slavery in imperial Brazil in her unpublished book chapter, ‘Souvenirs of Race: Christiano Junior’s cartesde-visite’.

should, represent ‘difficult truths’. The principal aim of documentary is, within this interpretive framework, to communicate these truths to the spectator as effectively as possible, in hopes that they will prompt her/ him to act.20 Perhaps no one has plumbed the depths of this interpretation more thoroughly than Susan Sontag, who posited a complex (if, by her own admission, sometimes problematic) moral project for documentary. In her later writings, about images of atrocity, she goes so far as to say that documentary photographs should have ‘moral authority’ or ‘moral force’.21 This framework, by now, needs no explication, although it bears repeating that the presumed moral quality of documentary images is undergirded by the presupposition that these ‘difficult truths’ themselves present moral dilemmas, with morality here understood as the application of a pre-determined principle to judgements about right and wrong with respect to an individual’s or a community’s actions in the world. Colour’s place in this project is ambiguous at best. Colour may be implicated in the communication of moral dilemmas, but it seems in itself not to be something moral, and we will never arrive at a decision about colour through the application of moral principles. (Colour: is it wrong or is it right?) Colour is, perhaps, a medium, a supposedly transparent or neutral substance or mechanism that is, however, never quite transparent or neutral enough. At the same time, we cannot embrace or refuse colour’s truth or its legitimacy in the same way that we would a statement of fact. Rather, it seems that colour requires us to take a position, even to take a stand. And so we may say of colour with regard to photography what Jean Paulhan once said of rhetoric with regard to literature: that the decision for or against it calls for a kind of partisanship: a kind of commitment or a taking of sides (le parti pris).22 I first noticed the paradoxical nature of the critical discourse about colour in Goldblatt’s post-apartheid work at a moment when I was already preoccupied with a series of other photographic ‘befores’ and ‘afters’. In francophone West Africa, for example, where I have been doing research on photography history, various distinctions have emerged in the critical discourse about photography ‘before’ and ‘after’ colonialism.23 A similar syntax can be found in the description of photographic images and practices ‘before’ and ‘after’ slavery in other parts of the world.24 I do not want to suggest that we can reduce these phenomena – colonialism, slavery, apartheid – to the same thing, yet there seems to be an equivalent pressure placed on photography in each of these cases, and whenever it is charged with documenting certain forms of violence and oppression in order to change them. For whenever some progress is made – when apartheid ends and democracy comes – the specific nature of the injustice to be documented changes, and new analytics, lexicons and even optics are called for. If we understand colour as requiring a kind of partisanship – a commitment made without principles to guide us – a richer and messier set of problems emerges from this particular photographic ‘before’ and ‘after’, and from the search for a new, post-apartheid optics. Colour has no intrinsic meaning, still less any intrinsic moral valence or ‘moral authority’, and it can only be read within a given context, in a given image

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25 For a particularly exciting elaboration of what a ‘politics of the performative’ is or might be, see Judith Butler, Excitable Speech, New York and London, Routledge, 1997. 26 I use the terms ‘material’ and ‘materiality’ to invoke dimensions of the photographic image that may enter into aesthetic economies yet are not exhausted by them. I hope that the reader will also hear echoes of deconstructive uses of this term, such as those connoting undecidability, incalculability etc. 27 See Alberto Toscano and Jeff Kinkle, Cartographies of the Absolute, Zero Books, London, 2015. 28 See the special journal issue, Marie Muracciole and Benjamin J Young, eds, ‘Allan Sekula and the Traffic in Photographs’, Grey Room 55, spring 2014, pp 6 –15. 29 Mosse, quoted in Sola Agustsson, ‘DRC in CandyColored Infrared’, Whitewall Magazine, 18 March 2014, http:// whitewallmag.com/art/ richard-mosse-capturesthe-drc-in-candy-coloredinfrared, accessed 1 August 2014. 30 Mosse also uses infrared technologies in ‘Enclave’, for which he was awarded the Deutsche Bo¨rse photography prize last year. 31 On Afro-pessimism, see Okwui Enwezor, ‘The Uses of Afro-Pessimism’, in Snap Judgments: New Positions in Contemporary African Photography, Steidl and International Center of Photography, Go¨ttingen and New York, 2006, pp 11 –19.

or series of images, as I have attempted to show. The interpretation of a given photograph cannot depend on whether colour is ‘appropriate’ to its message, and no photograph can be judged on the basis of moral or aesthetic criteria alone. Particularly in the case of documentary, the photograph must be judged in the sphere of its effects. This is the sphere, familiar to us in theories of language and of literature, of rhetoric, which must be judged neither purely on the basis of aesthetic criteria (beauty), nor purely on the basis of epistemological truth claims, but in terms of effectiveness, and calling to mind the success or failure of performative language, or of speech acts. My intention, here, is not to explore further the common ground between photography and theories of performativity – although such an exploration is long overdue and would have the merit of privileging undecidability, responsibility and risk over the application of norms, rules and principles – but rather to open up a reading, and a space for engaging with documentary,25 in which colour is treated as a substantive, significant or material element of the photograph.26 Above all, my intention is to caution against the theoretical reduction of colour to a ‘purely’ aesthetic element of a photographic image, thought to distract us from its effect in the world.

DEMOCRACY 2: INFRARED Recently, there has been a marked shift in the critical discourse about photography, away from the familiar ‘moral authority’ arguments, towards interpretations emphasising the ideologies and iconographies of globalisation, and the putative role played by photography in obscuring and masking (or, alternatively, revealing and exposing) the workings of the global capitalist system. This has been the case, particularly, amongst a younger generation of critics.27 As befits their formation in the crucible of post-Marxism and their debt to a certain strand of materialist photography theory that has dominated in the Anglo-American academy, associated with Allan Sekula,28 these interpretations have been orientated by the so-called limits of representation, and what ‘lies beneath the image’s surface’. This orientation has been in evidence in recent critical interpretations of photographer Richard Mosse’s ‘Infra’, consisting of photographs shot in the war-torn North Kivu province of the war-torn Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The photographer himself has professed a belief that photography can ‘see into the unseen, reveal the hidden and make visible the invisible’.29 His recent project, ‘Infra’, literally makes ‘the invisible’ visible using infrared film, a military surveillance technology that was first developed for use in the jungles of Vietnam.30 These images seem, on the one hand, immediately familiar. Given the DRC’s violent and war-torn history, first as Belgian Congo, later as Zaire, the site is a veritable factory for the production of photographs of conflict, atrocity and civil war. It is also a minefield for accusations about the traffic in objectionable stereotypes, sometimes called Afro-pessimism or poverty pornography.31 So what, more precisely, needs to be made

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visible here? The photographer has said that he went to the DRC because he wanted to shed light on a ‘forgotten’ conflict, whose causes were inscrutable:

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I originally chose the Congo because I wished to find a place in the world, and in my imagination, where every step I took I would be reminded of the limits of my own articulation, of my inadequate capacity for representation. I wished for this to happen in a place of hard realities, whose narratives urgently needed telling, but cannot be easily described. Congo is just such a place.32

32 Mosse quoted in Phil Coomes, ‘Conflict recorded on the Infrared Spectrum’, BBC News, 3 April 2012, http://www.bbc.com/news/ in-pictures-17560579, accessed 1 August 2014. 33 Renzo Martens, Episode III, 2009; Harwood, Wright and Yokokoji, ‘Tantalum Memorial’, 2008; Guy Tillim, Congo Democratic, Michael Stevenson Gallery, Cape Town, 2006 34 Blackburn in Mary Walling Blackburn and A B Huber, ‘The Flash Made Flesh’, Triple Canopy 11, 16 March 2011, http:// canopycanopycanopy.com/ contents/the_flash_made_ flesh, accessed 1 August 2014. 35 Sola Agustsson, ‘Richard Mosse Captures the DRC in Candy-Colored Infrared’, Whitewall Magazine, 18 March 2014, http://whitewallmag.com/ art/richard-mossecaptures-the-drc-in-candycolored-infrared, no page numbers 36 Blackburn, in Blackburn and Huber, no page numbers 37 Ibid 38 Agustsson, ‘Richard Mosse Captures the DRC in Candy-Colored Infrared’, op cit

Although the photographer does not mention coltan mining, or the militarisation of resource extraction in postcolonial Africa, a large number of contemporary artists, including photographers, have made work about the role of international actors, including both governments and citizens/consumers, in the civil wars currently being fought in the DRC. (For instance: recent work on the DRC by Guy Tillim, Renzo Martens and Harwood, Wright, Yokokoji.)33 It is, in other words, not unreasonable to assume that even the most general contemporary art audience will have at least some inkling of what is so difficult to describe in this place of ‘hard realities’. Despite the familiarity, however, of these photographs’ subject matter and of their larger ideological and iconographic lexicon, the critics have found elements of Mosse’s images to be unpredictable, even volatile. The most controversial element has been their colour. One critic, Mary Walling Blackburn, writes: There is something mad and maddening about the gaiety throughout Mosse’s ‘Infra’ series. His photographs are terribly seductive tableaux vivants – all that fantastic color and sensuous surface, with the soldiers garbed in pink and posing.34

Another critic, Sola Agustsson calls the work ‘candy-colored’.35 Colour in general seems to be a problem here, but the colour pink, in particular, seems to amplify the critics’ anxieties, given its association with artifice, non-seriousness and the threat of seduction (the word ‘sweetness’ even appears in one article).36 Blackburn concludes that Mosse’s work on the DRC ‘disorders the aesthetics of conflict’.37 Agustsson suggests that it contradicts ‘the traditional political photography aesthetics’.38 The pink we see in ‘Infra’ is distinctive to Mosse’s use of infrared film, a false-colour technology that captures what, in the spectrum of visible light, is perceived as green and shows (or reinscribes) it as another colour: in this case, pink. Infrared film was developed and first used by the American military in the Vietnam War, to detect camouflage installations during aerial reconnaissance: foliage is reflective of infrared light waves; camouflage is not. The specific film Mosse used, Aerochrome, was made in the USA by Kodak. In sum, in ‘Infra’, a military technology developed in one part of the world is used half-century later to visualise a military conflict in another. I would underscore that the idea that there is a ‘traditional aesthetics’ of political photography that is disordered by Mosse’s photography hearkens back to the long-established antinomy of aesthetics and politics,

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Photograph by Richard Mosse, General Fe´vrier (Infra series), 2010, digital c-print, dimensions variable, #Richard Mosse, courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

which have seemed, at least since the Frankfurt School, to exist in aporetic tension. Blackburn perfectly expresses this tension when she voices a fear that beauty is, or risks becoming, anti-political: The heightened sense of artifice and stylisation that Mosse relies on here is not the same as beauty, but perhaps his photos display that too. And so I worry some: Camp and the sublime can be modes of political disengagement – the risk is that the style of the photograph triumphs over its content.39

39 Mary Walling Blackburn and A B Huber, op cit

The idea here is that certain rules must be followed if the aesthetic elements of the photograph are not to overwhelm its political message. It is not a question of applying an exact formula but rather, it is implied, of finding the proper relation or proportion between these elements: as Walter Benjamin puts it in his famous gnomon about the aestheticisation of politics in fascist art, ‘bad’ (totalitarian) politics strives to aestheticise the political, whereas ‘good’ (leftist, Marxist, emancipatory) politics strives to politicise art.

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Photograph by Richard Mosse, Men of Good Fortune (Infra series), 2011, digital c-print, dimensions variable, #Richard Mosse, courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

40 Ariella Azoulay, [‘Getting Rid of the Distinction Between the Aesthetic and the Political’,] Theory, Culture & Society, vol 27, nos 7/8, December 2010, pp 239 – 262 41 Ibid, p 251 42 This definition is uncontroversial and is based on a reading of the political philosophy of Hannah Arendt.

Writing about Benjamin’s gnomon, Ariella Azoulay has pointed out that a properly politicised art is sometimes thought to be an antidote to fascism.40 But the only antidote to fascism is anti-fascist politics, and, as Azoulay suggests, the alleged antinomy between aesthetics and politics depends on fallacies both about the nature of photographic images and about the nature of politics. In the case of contemporary photography, this antinomial interpretation of the aesthetics –politics relation obscures the fact that politics does not inhere in images or in representations, but rather unfolds in the sphere of human relations. Azoulay writes: Contrary to the presupposition that the ‘political’ is a trait of a certain image and absent from another, I say that the political is but a space of human relations exposed to each other in public and that photography is one of the realizations of this space.41

If we can accept Azoulay’s definition of the political,42 then we must also accept her more general conclusion: that all photographs are equally political (to the extent that they belong to the sphere in which human actions

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Photograph by Richard Mosse, Colonel Soleil’s Boys (Infra series), 2010, digital c-print, dimensions variable, #Richard Mosse, courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

and relations appear), just as all photographs are equally aesthetic (to the extent that they exist in the sphere of images). The colour photograph is not somehow more, or less, aesthetic than the black-and-white one, just as the black-and-white photograph is not somehow more, or less, political, or more or less effective at conveying a political message or content. Colour, it turns out, belongs neither to a moral nor to a political discourse. The questions we should be asking are not whether colour is too sweet or too seductive, or whether it distracts us from passively receiving a political message, or from engaging as political actors with ‘hard realities’, but whether and when it allows us to visualise these realities differently or to ask new questions about them? When and where, in what images, does colour allow us to ask, to think, to see or to do something new? Goldblatt’s photographs, in Intersections, not only ask but actively extend and re-frame questions about the nature of inequality and injustice in a democratic South Africa. One way that they do this is, I have suggested, precisely through their use of colour, which is not, as many

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43 The description of ‘Infra’ on Jack Shainman’s website calls the conflict in the DRC ‘ineffable’ and ‘tragic’ and likens the photographer to Joseph Conrad. http:// www.jackshainman.com/ exhibitions/past/2011/ richard-mosse/, accessed 1 August 2014.

critics have assumed, a softening either of the photographer’s palette or of his subject matter. Rather, colour is one element in an arsenal used to visualise the nature of contemporary democracy and its many historical constraints. Mosse’s critics have been anxious to ask whether his beautiful images depart from the ‘traditional aesthetics’ of political photography. But they have not seemed particularly interested in asking whether these photographs are using infrared film – and, by extension, their colour – to make anything visible or to ask anything new at all. After all, the premise of this work – that conflict in the DRC is unrepresentable, ineffable, tragic – seems beholden to the ‘traditional aesthetics’ of African inscrutability, which many of the images seem to enjoy, Heart-ofDarkness style.43 More than when we ask about the colour pink, it seems that the more interesting questions emerge here when we ask about the quaintly retro context of Aerochrome’s development: the fact that it dates from an era when the point of military surveillance was to find out where in the jungle the enemy is hiding. If there is no enemy to see here, it is because, today, we are all implicated in these wars, whose causes are not really so ineffable at all. Yet our involvement and the questions that our involvement raises about the nature of democracy in the era of global capital, or on a global scale, do not appear to be hiding anywhere in ‘Infra’, even behind the camouflage. This article began life as a paper I gave at a symposium on ‘Colour: Philosophies of Painting/Philosophies of Photography’, organised by the Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths’ College, University of London, in 2008. I am grateful to Nilu Izadi for provoking me to think about colour in the first place, and to Tom Keenan for his comments on an earlier version of this text.