Fred Ritchin Redefines Digital Photography

• BY PETE BROOK

“We all go at 90 mph looking in the rear-view mirror.”

Fred Ritchin says that we are obsessed with ourselves and images of the unreal. That we are escaping from very real photos of destruction into visions of idyllic fantasies, and that this escapism is being branded by governments and corporations for their own ends. We are being sold products and social scenarios that appeal to our fantasies but ultimately fail us.

Unlike many critics of capitalism, however, Ritchin offers solutions. And he has a long history of putting his sophisticated theories of imagery into practice.

This article is part of a series of interviews with movers and shakers in the photography industry.

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During the ’80s, he was picture editor of The New York Times Magazine, executive editor of Camera Arts magazine and founding director of the Photojournalism and Documentary Photography Program at the International Center of Photography. He founded and directsPixelPress, an award-winning organization that champions new documentary and human rights through the creation of innovative web sites, books and exhibitions.

Ritchin also created the first multimedia version of the daily New York Times. In 1997, Ritchin was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in Public Service by The New York Times for the website, Bosnia: Uncertain Paths to Peace, and in 1999, awarded the Hasselblad Foundation grant for the future web project Witnessing and the Web: An Experiment in Documentary Photography.

In his books After Photography (1999) and In Our Own Image: The Coming Revolution in Photography (1990) he has argued that images today are manipulable and as such are political territories for governments and corporations.

Over the past 30 years, he has also curated over a dozen photography exhibitions and is organizing the upcoming What Matters Now? show at Aperture which will attempt to propose new ways of interaction with images and information in the post 9/11 era.

He’s currently professor of Photography and Imaging at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.

Wired.com: Consistently you’ve called for honest labeling of images in media, increased engagement between media and citizens and a rejection of consumer interests. Is our media landscape broken?

Fred Ritchin: Media has always needed correction. I always use a quote by Paul Stookey [of the singing group Peter, Paul and Mary] about popular magazines. They used to be called Life (about life), then it was People (not about life, but just about people), then it was Us (not even about all people, but just about us), then it was Self (not even about us). It’s a question of how we extend ourselves into the world.

The consumer capitalist society has elevated the individual and by that I mean the individual’s buying power. The individual merits the fulcrum of fantasy, only it’s the branding of fantasy. With cars, you don’t buy them because of what they do, you buy them because of what they mean.

Now, people photograph themselves obsessively until they get that perfect shot. We’ve divorced ourselves from reality.

The celebration of the branding of desire, yes, it’s all hype, but it’s our love of the unreal. We look at landscapes of idyllic and unlikely places, but we don’t look at landscapes of environmental destruction.

Wired.com: You’ve called for individuals to undermine the image and therefore to undermine power.

Fred Ritchin: When I suggest undermining photography today, it is because the distortions of the powerful must be undermined. What a government or a corporation want you to think is in imagery. There’s not one truth, there’s multiple truths, we know this, and we know there’s no bedtime story.

I argued in In Our Own Image, that vision became malleable, it became possible for us to reject the painful parts; photography could be manipulated to exclude the pain.

On the other hand, during the Vietnam War there was no out for the viewers. If someone was being napalmed, they were being napalmed. [...] Photography in the Vietnam War was useful, but now we’ve been co-opted.

Our agreement with media is an act of self-preservation. It’s you buying into a society; and it’s a society that doesn’t work. As a consumer, the products fail and as a human, the social scenarios fail.

The merging of the real and unreal, it could be said, began with Ronald Reagan; the Teflon president. He was the first actor to attain a serious politician position. The fictions are what people listen to today, to the point that Jon Stewart is the filter. Thirty years ago, it would have seemed ludicrous to have a comedian telling us what was worthwhile and what was lies.

Photo: Bryan Derballa

Wired.com: Do these distortions apply even to local media?

Fred Ritchin: The deceit cannot exist as much on a local level. Media cannot manipulate as easily the things we live close to.

Wired.com: You are suggesting that the rules changed a long time ago, that what we’re dealing with today has little to do with the “guarantees” of yesteryear photography. Does digital image making have any relationship to photography?

Fred Ritchin: When the automobile was first invented it was called the horseless carriage. Whenever we experience technological change we look for the terms that are familiar to us. It’s why we have windows and tabs and other terms to describe our computers. We still talk about horsepower, but that term doesn’t describe the pollution automobiles do, it doesn’t reference global warming.

We know it’s different, but we still want terms that are familiar. Once you’ve bought into it, the manufacturers have won.

We must accept that photography is a post-production medium. It is used for multimedia, a still image might be from a video. We can embed, geotag. We’re dealing with computer data.

We’ve handed digital image making all the aura of analog photography and it’s a camouflage. We know digital image making is not photography as it has been in the past; it has been made for other [new] uses.

Wired.com: We’re using the wrong language?

Fred Ritchin: I’ve always spoken in the digital age of “digital image making,” mainly because it is a manipulable medium. I suggested in 1994, that newspapers began terming their images as “photo opportunities,” so it is clear to the reader and viewer they’re looking at a staged event. The hope was that media would stage less, but it doesn’t work. The power of publications rely on access to scenes, so they don’t want to give them up. It’s one of the big secrets they protect.

We have to tell people how images are made. And, the first step is to abandon the idea we’re looking at photographs. We’re looking at entry points to information and to the world in which the image was made.

We need to embrace non-linearity, interactivity and parallel voices. Walker Evans and James Agee in ‘Let Us Now Praise Famous Men’ did not always agree. They amplified and contradicted one another. This is good; we’re not looking for a single voice.

For example, if a subject sees the back of an image-maker’s camera, they offer instant feedback and it might change the image-maker’s actions; those sorts of feedback are available all the time during the publication of images.

We need to develop a syntax of information, not so that the meaning necessarily solidifies, but so that we have a starting point for discussion and at least know we’re asking the right questions.

We’re shy and timid of new possibilities because the photographer’s assumed connection to truth. By using old terms and old expectations we’re actually being very conservative.

Wired.com: Presumably, the web allows us new possibilities?

Fred Ritchin: The linked image can be a menu and part of a multimedia environment. The internet does non-linear very well. We should leverage the internet for more complex and nuanced views of the globe. We’ll learn more about the world and more about us.

Wired.com: Do you feel you’re alone calling for this radical rethinking?

Fred Ritchin: Change is a difficult thing to see and judge. People talk a lot about the digital revolution, but they don’t actually consider it a revolution. I do. I see the way networks and technologies are changing us. [Admittedly] we are seeing some studies in neuroscience on how technologies are changing brain patterns, but incremental change is difficult for people to see.

When the Gutenberg press came along, everybody recognized the new formats and made use of its products, books and printed materials, but they didn’t see the long-term consequences: nationalism, democracies, entitlements. Some say the web will bring about as much disruption; I go further and say the web will bring about more.

I foresee religion, governments, sex, biology, human evolution all changing radically because of the web. To me those things are clear but it’s not easy to describe to others.

The leaps of imagination are difficult to envision. We all go at 90mph looking in the rear-view mirror.

When I left the New York Times after three-and-a-half years, it was then I realized what journalism was.¹ It is hardest to see the essentials and necessity of change when you’re inside of something.

The implications of digital technologies are cumulative. It’s even frustrating that the way the media reports on these changes is so conservative.

Twenty years ago, I proposed a system of labeling images so as to maintain their feasibility. The media said, “We don’t need it.” They wanted to think people were savvy enough know what was real and what wasn’t. They were wrong. If we’d done something like that, we would not be having a debate about the release of pictures of Osama bin Laden’s corpse. It could’ve been released and people would’ve thought it credible, but people don’t think images are credible today.

When the automobile first came into production, there could have been a discussion about manufacturing only small engines. Environmental destruction could’ve been lessened; it’s possible, but not likely.

In 1984, I wrote a piece for the New York Times Magazine and warned that we’d no longer treat images in the same way and that we needed to prepare. 27 years later, we’re talking about credibility.

Wired.com: If people stop believing images, might they not turn inward and away from global messages and toward local preoccupations? Could a pushback have its advantages?

Fred Ritchin: I agree we should talk to our neighbors, know how they’re doing. But many people have better relationships through email than they do in person with people in their communities or family.

So skepticism [toward the image] is good, but images don’t only refer to the image, they refer to power. If people, corporations and governments, wish to remain in power, then people’s refusal to engage with images of atrocity or injustice on the other side of the globe is very good for them.

The same can be said within the same city. Skepticism can exist between rich and poor neighborhoods of a city.

We need to ask, how has a society, that labels itself democratic, become so radically misinformed about the way the world is. How does a misinformed society interact with the world and how does it shape the world?

The recent debt-ceiling crisis was a complete abnegation of fact. That’s not healthy when we’re trying to run a country. Why allow misconceptions? It’s not a good way to live.

Photography is part of that puzzle. It brings to our living rooms and our handheld devices wars, famine, environmental destruction … and these are things that can be avoided.

Wired.com: Your upcoming show is an experiment in how we interact with images and information. Might it have some answers for us?

Fred Ritchin: I’m working on an exhibition with Aperture to mark September 11th. It is a concretization of many of my ideas over the years. Six hosts will each get a table and a wall and they’ll moderate the material and the contributions; decide what matters and what we should be looking at.

There will be a seventh wall for the public to curate.

It’s a hybrid; not top-down or bottom-up but a community response to information.

This might be a starting point. We can develop a platform on the internet and discuss in depth other important issues. I don’t know a lot about cloning or the North Pole, but I can quickly access those that do. It’s about how communities can use their power instead of complaining all the time.

We have so much power as people, but we don’t use the resources we have. I know people who know a lot more about issues than mainstream media does, and most people are in similar situations yet they still rely on mainstream media for information.

We need to get used to the idea that we can rely on each other.

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