Stepan Rudik, the kids, and the Institute…
or ‘For a fistful of pixels’.
[caption id="attachment_1092" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="World Press website"]
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This post is also an attempt to apologise to the unknown photographer for the previous comments I made on the Facebook forum promoted by The British Journal of Photography on the matter. In that circumstance, in fact, I suggested that the disqualified photo (from being 3rd winner at the World Press 2010 for Sport Features stories) was cropped so much that would put the whole representation out-of-context, the context of a story called “Street fighting, Kiev, Ukraine”, ‘while the original picture seems taken out of a rather innocent sport event’, as I unhappily commented.
[caption id="attachment_1073" align="alignleft" width="224" caption="disqualified photo © Stepan Rudik"]
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[caption id="attachment_1074" align="alignright" width="300" caption="original raw photo © Stepan Rudik"]
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I was terribly wrong. When in fact the first blogs started coming out with the whole series of pictures from the World Press Competition, it became immediately clear to me that not just the photo in question was well-within the context of the event narrated, but also, and crucially, that the series is a terrific reportage of a practice of street fighting. The photographs entered the competition as story (Sports Features: 3rd prize stories), not as single shot as I originally thought. This misunderstanding is even more recurrent in the articles and posts around the web, as they all focus on the manipulated photo, treating the competition entry as ‘single’ and not as a ‘story’. Therefore the jury – made of very experienced photographers and people working in the media industry – should have fully understood that, and acknowledged the photographer’s effort to be there, his relationship with ‘gatekeepers’, and his ability at documenting this dramatic practice, rather than rehearsing the fable of ‘authenticity’ and the chimera of photographic ‘truth’.
I decided to copy and publish the photographs in question, as: a) they have already been published on the Net; b) full credits are given to the author, who in fact only gets more deserved notoriety from this, and; c) the link to the original source is provided.
So, first and foremost I think we need to give credits to this photographer to have done a terrific job out there (however disputable his choice of dramatically cropping the photograph presented might be), and secondly we need to ask what are the “currently accepted standards in the industry” according to which the World Press jury disqualified the picture of the hand? In the name of the ‘integrity of our organization’ [hmmm?] and ‘high standards in photojournalism’ [sic! sic! sic!] they had to disqualify Mr. Rudik from the competition. It was the covering of a half foot behind the hand to have trigger the decision of the jury….that is frankly a disputable decision, in my modest opinion: it does not move by a bit the ‘content’ of the photo, it just corrects a slightly white dot under the blackish band. How many times, in fact, we crop, edit, and desaturate photographs in order to enhance details, to hide imperfections, or to tell a slightly different story? And, isn’t the moment of ‘shooting’ a choice in itself? Too many variables come into place before we can only think about ‘truth’ in photography, especially in the era of the digital output. The photographs in the series below, on the other hand, are so terribly ‘real’, and their attachment to the trace (of flesh and blood, literally) of the ‘real’ is far too deep to be dismissed by a few manipulated pixels. Finally speaking to the British Journal of Photography, the young free-lance photographer explains: “There are about 150-200 such groups in Kiev. It’s a closed event, where only friends are allowed. They meet in the outskirts of the city. They call it a ‘fair play’, each group fields equal amount of fighters for a fight, they don’t beat those who are already lying on the ground, and they fight until all the fighters of one of the groups are brought low”.
My impression is rather that the ‘Institute’ is striving at protecting an increasingly nervous ‘profession’, by drawing strict boundaries to the ‘discipline’, right during a dramatic and unstoppable technological change in the practice. It is almost impossible to find Rudik’s photographs submitted for the competition. On the other hand, most of the web around professional photography is focusing only on the singular photo and the presumed violation, and they are all getting quite hysterical in dismissing this guy and re-claiming the ‘truth’ violated: all for a fistful of pixels…. Is/should be there a ‘digital ethics’, as some of these discussions seem to imply? Or is it a ‘generational’ conflict between the old guard of BW film processing specialists and the new wave of Photoshop enthusiasts? And who created that aesthetic cliché for photojournalism that’s got to be BW, grainy, ‘film effect’, burned margins, dramatic cropping in order to stake a chance?
And would Stepan have left the photographs in colour, then we might have had a chance to ‘relax’ a bit more about the context in which the story unfolds? We might have had an opportunity to move away from these clichés and instead appreciate the festive climate of ‘sportive’ event in which the confrontation effectively seems to have taken place: teasing, smiling and unwritten rules of the game are here as equally important as the moral judgement of the viewers.
You can now see more work from Stepan Rudik here: I am particularly impressed by his work on migrants and the station in Moscow.
