The New York Times sets the standard for Web photojournalism
By JOE GIOIA
Gilles Peress' Sarajevo photo essay, now up at www.NYTimes.com, is not only a spectacular piece of reportage, of picture taking and writing, it advances photography further into the new media than any other single project before it. If photography is to have a distinct and successful presence on the Web, it will owe a profound debt to the principles of taste, style and execution now on display at this site.
The pictures, which cover Sarajevo and its suburbs during the Serb withdrawal, are the centerpiece of an impressive, and typically exhaustive, Times online project detailing news and views of the Bosnian war. Peress and his editorial advisor, the photo critic Fred Ritchen, have designed an exhibition where understanding does not come through a comprehension of events so much as a vision of experiences.
The story is deftly outlined in the idiom of low-res black-and-white pictures. Because the images have only a fraction of the resolution of standard photographs (the average file size is 10k while screen size is generally no bigger than three inches, and often much smaller), viewers are allowed only a sketchy view of their content. Far from a hindrance, the relative insubstantiality of the photos not only makes them easier to consider together as a body of work, but also lends an unexpected force to their perspective. They seem barely more permanent than the moments they presume to record. Quick to load, the photos present themselves with the ease and weight of dreams.
In forsaking smaller details in the images, Peress lets larger graphic elements impose themselves: ruined buildings, devastated streets, abject faces. The intersections of vertical and horizontal lines are laced throughout the work, either as overt Christian iconography (the photographer is drawn to bare, ruined choirs) or as submerged compositional elements. His human subjects are never allowed to define their own space but are victims instead of enclosing walls or the mad horizons of a blasted landscape.
Peress spends a great deal of attention on a degraded material world, of holes gouged in walls, trenches carved across streets, pits dug in the ground. In his pictures, things can always represent something else: a demolished doorway has the outlines of a head, chimneys are cannon, discarded dolls stand in for their scattered children. He reminds us that a cross is the intersection of two very different worlds, and that the resulting traffic in symbols there is fierce.
Though the site offers a linear telling of events, it is best experienced intuitively. It is divided into two sections with a grid of thumbnail images at the top of each. Clicking on any thumbnail allows access to that image. Inside the story, each picture is a link to another. Photos load singly or several to a page, stacked vertically, horizontally, laid in collage and, in two instances, unreel in layered montages. Sound files, though not integral to the story, allow Peress to speak about certain elements in detail. One of the associated forums allows feedback specifically on the photo work and lets Peress and Ritchen reply to various comments.
The forum notes are the usual editorial ones of access and responsibility and deal little with the extended implications of this latest use of photography. No one, it seems, has considered at length the implications of the photographic idiom on the Web, the McLuhanesque consequences of photography freed from the confines of material reproduction.
The great power of photography has been traditionally controlled by print media. Photographs are by nature ambiguous samplings of reality, easily taken out of context. (A picture is really worth a thousand interpretations.) Released from the explanatory boundaries of the page, of captions and articles, the larger power of pictures to inform -- as well as to confuse -- is let loose.
This power is that of a particular view over the general consensus, individual voice overcoming corporate policy. Pressure to make online photography conform to the old expectations of print, an aesthetic of sharp focus, clear meanings and copyright protection, comes from many photographers themselves -- there are no greater advocates of protected use on the Web -- and those companies interested in an official flow of information. (One notes Microsoft's recent purchase of the Bettmann image archive, and wonders if the software megalith is in the market for others.)
The pressure has been ably deflected by Peress and Ritchen. The Sarajevo project, while conforming to one media company's greater needs of covering a big story, attends as well to the new medium's capacity for the fast transmission of an individual vision. Where the Times uses the new medium to give us more -- of archived material, ongoing policy debates and constant updates -- the photographer wisely realized he must give us less. In refining the flow of picture information to its basics, Peress increases their impact. His punches are, so to speak, telegraphed rather than delivered as freight.
In considering the digital life of a photograph, one must now count ease of transmission as its most important component -- the ability to send a nuanced message in a quick, concise way. In this regard, pictures are now best considered more like music than printing, things to be tuned in, enjoyed and then allowed to disappear like a song on the radio. The challenge offered by the Web, one ably taken up by Peress and Ritchen, is to appreciate photographs less like signs and more like sonatas.
Joe Gioia, former Camera Columnist for the New York Times, has written for Modern Photography and American Photo. He maintains his own Web site of photo work. He can be reached at jag101a@winternet.com
