Asim Rafiqui’s “The Spinning Head” blog remains one of my favorite places for analysis of contemporary photojournalism. One of his latest pieces, “Offering Silence To The Oppressed Or How Photography Can Become A Weapon Of Repression,” offers up an important counterpoint to the praise lately heaped on the recently opened London exhibition of Israeli and Palestinian photographers, Beware the Cost of War (more at 100eyes). The exhibition presents images of conflict without captions or credits. Rafiqui’s central points, buoyed by John Barger’s visual-philosophical framework, are that:

• The exhibition removes context, so that we never know who is the occupier, and who the occupied…
• The exhibition removes chronology, so that we never know whether the act occurred this year…
• The exhibition removes history, so that we never know what it is that violence represents…
• The exhibition removes the ugliest of constant and material facts…

Well worth a read.

Edit: To be clear, both 100eyes and Lens’ presentations of the work include captions of the pictures. The captions remain separate from the pictures, but exist nonetheless. Also, Conscientious Redux continues the conversation.

Just hitting the airwaves, the Noorderlicht Photography Festival, one of the great photojournalism events of the year, has been forced to remove an essay curated by Magnum’s Stuart Franklin. The festival’s press release (warning: pdf) states, in part,

The Associated Press does not object to the exhibition as such, but to the content of Franklin’s accompanying essay. This essay acknowledged that criminal acts were committed by both sides [Palestinian and Israeli], but assigned the principle responsibility for the extent of the bloodshed to Israel. Both Franklin and Noorderlicht believe this conclusion is justified by the critical reports [regarding the matter] from Amnesty International and the United Nations…”

The AP believed Franklin’s text expressed a political statement, and further that having AP photos in the exhibition, the essay associated a political statement with AP’s photos, which violates Associated Press guidelines. Whatever the case, this is the first time in Noorderlicht’s twenty years that an essay has been removed due to potential legal threats.

(via Conscientious)