Galway Advertiser 2002/2002_07_04/GA_04072002_E1_022.pdf 

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Letters

Sept 11 has not dampened enthusiasm for warplanes Photography and its discontents
T h e a n n u a l World Press P h o t o exhibition, b r o u g h t to Galway each y e a r with the s u p p o r t of the Eyre S q u a r e C e n t r e , contains m o r e t h a n 200 photographs taken over the past year by m a n y of the best p h o t o g r a p h e r s in the world. Among them are images of spectacular natural beauty - landscapes flooded with light, deserts in which the sand looks like gold dust - as well as sensitive portrait photography of women and men from different cultures around the world. But by far the majority of the photographs show scenes of tragedy, disaster, war, and human suffering. You don't have to be a card-carrying cynic to realise that photojournalism thrives - and has always thrived - on the shocking and the terrible. The World Press Photo exhibition validates this. The visual assault on the view er is unremitting; the effect can be - and was in my case - very upsetting. Images of starving children, wailing mothers, corpses strewn about like broken dolls, are aimed directly at the observer's sensitivities; they are meant to provoke, to arouse emotions like anger, indignation, pity and horror. But there is something else about many of these photos, a disturbing 'doubling' of beauty and suffering, two things we don't normally associate. In some of the most memorable photos, they have a habit of coming together when the larger sig nificance of photography is raised. Many of the photographs in the current exhibi tion display this uneasy conjunction and raise disturbing questions. Critic and novelist Susan Sontag, draws a distinction between the photographer as moralist - usually associated with war, poverty, natural disasters - and the pho tographer as scientist, who "make an inventory of the world", by which she means they simply "record' and 'reproduce' what is seen through the eye of the camera. Like most distinctions, it does really hold up; some very fine photographers have allowed the camera to 'record' but in the interests of a social or political com mitment. Sontag writes: "The immensely gifted members of the Farm Security Administration project of the late 1930s (among them Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, Russell Lee) would take dozens of frontal pictures of one of their sharecropper subjects until satisfied they had got just the right look on film the precise expression on the subject's face that supported their own notions about poverty, light, dignity, texture, exploitation, and geometry. In deciding how a pic ture should look, in preferring one exposure to another, photographers are always imposing standards on their subjects." It is not accidental that many of the photographs taken by Evans, Lange, and the others are very beautiful as images, despite the fact that the subjects are them selves usually poverty stricken and homeless. There is a tradition that anything can be beautiful if you take a photograph of it, that beauty can be discovered every where, even in horror and suffering. Two images in the World Press Organisation exhibition sharply raise this issue. Both are photographs taken on September 11 and show workers in World Trade Centre leaping to their deaths to escape the inferno of the burning building. One, by David Surowieki, shows three people, who have leaped from their office win dows within seconds of each other. The 'poses' of the two lower figures have a a grace about them that is almost balletic; it pulls you up sharp when you remind yourself that, of course, the 'grace' is simply a trick of the image, which has cap tured the last seconds of life of these three individuals whose agony and panic we cannot even begin to imagine. Yet there is a strange beauty about this image that both disturbs us and yet pleases the eye. It is the second photograph, however, that - for me at least - crosses the line. Taken by Richard Drew, it too shows a man falling to his death. But there is no 'grace' here; the man is upside down, his head aimed directly at the unforgiving ground below. His 'pose' has nothing to do with ballet; it is more foetal than any thing else, as if this man, in the final moments of his life, is seeking the security of the womb. What is disturbing about this photograph is its sharpness of detail. With very lit tle difficulty the identity of this man could be established. He is someone's son, or father, or husband, or brother, or friend. Here, as he falls to certain death, is an image you won't forget. From probably dozens of photos taken on that awful day (but such a 'gift' to photographers) this one has been selected; it has been blown up, cropped for maximum impact, and submitted to a prestigious international competition, which has awarded it a prize. Certainly I have no answer to the moral dilemma raised by such photographs, and I looked at them with the same fascination as, presumably, everyone else has done. But I am not happy about it afterwards. I feel like a voyeur, an aesthetic voyeur. Dear Editor, The Salthill Air Show, not a year after September 11 and its hideous consequences, we are astonished that anyone would want to look up at a sky filled with roaring military aircraft and think "what great entertainment".Of course the US Air Force will be only to glad to confirm our acquiescence in its (illegal) activities at Shannon, and the German air force will happily display its contemptuous indifference to our newly-fabricated "declaration of neu trality". And of course this most costly air show is a visible and audible mani festation of the G8 conference which allow billions and billions of dollars to be spent on security while constantly on TV we see women and children throughout two-thirds of the world struggling to keep alive on a diet of grass and tree roots, and being bombed into the bargain. If we were to organise a Salthill Drug, Alcohol and Pornography Show, the nation would be outraged. The glo rification, however, of murder from the sky to say nothing of the resultant airpollution is deemed a fit occasion for us all to bring our children and grand children. Some of us will be on Salthill prom enade on Sunday to express our feel ings. II you want to join us, we will be gathering at 2 P M at 1- St Bridget's Place Lower, Woodquay. Contact me at (091)565430. Yours, Margaretta D'Arcy. signed on behalf of Women in Media and Entertainment, St B r i d g e t ' s s e n i o r Citizens, The G l o b a l W o m e n ' s S t r i k e (Ireland; Globalise Resistance (Galway) and the Atlantic Ecological Community.)

Transparency and Shelving of Galway| accountability in RTE roads good for rail option
Dear Editor, Dear Editor. It is surely an ill financial wind that blows nobody! good; yet every cloud has a silver lining. So the 'news'| that some major grandiose Co Galway road projects will now have to be "parked", is not at all bad, if it wak ens up to the positive alternatives available. Roadl 'improvements' never solve 'traffic gridlock', they onlyl move the car congestion on a bit further down the road.L The people of Ireland were sold a pup when t h e y | allowed Dr Beeching to destroy their marvellous rail ways over four decades ago. Poor Ireland is still paying| the price of that vicious rape. At a cost of only a fraction of the millions that the! NRA was proposing to spend on the 'new' NI7, t h e | 'revised' N6, not to mention the fifth C o m b crossing! Ithe powers that be might now seriously and swiftlyl undertake the immediate re-opening of the Sligo t o | Limerick railway. . Never mind the Nice 2 referendum, the newl Government's true top priority must be the economic| well-being of all its citizens, not the comfortable con-, venience of some of its politicians. The sign of a mature! civilisation and measure of European economic wellbeing is the public provision of a modern up-to-date,L safe and efficient public transport s y s t e m . F o r i Connacht, re-awakening the Sligo-Limerick railway i s | the way ahead. Re-opening this vital rail link, whose 'right-of-way' lis, thankfully, still in the public domain and whose tracks need only minimal maintenance to be instantly re-usable, would, at a stroke, link Sligo through Knock, Claremorris, Tuam, Athenry, Gort, Ennis and Shannon to Limerick (and onwards to Cork, Dublin, Waterford and Rosslare), thus taking Ireland-wide commuter traf-| fie, freight, tourists and leisure travel onto a more effi cient, economic and effective public transportation sys tem, sustainable, safe and speedier than any hypotheti cal motorway system that could ever be economically built. The NRA is a busted flush. The sooner this wretched [Government cuts its cloth to suit its means, the better the long suffering Irish people will be served. Yours, Herb Meyer, Dublin Road, Tuam. It is interesting to sec that after eight years of demanding from the public, RTE has finally released the salaries that its top broadcasters earn, although in doing so have refrained from telling the licence paying public who cams what, but only that certain unnamed individuals cam certain amounts. And while there may be certain vague commercial reasons for RTE not clearly staling who gets paid what, it is inexcus able that RTE (which this year will receive almost EI20 from the licence paying public) has never explained on what public service programming it spends the licence fee. A fundamental question that should be asked of RTE is whether it is acceptable, in an era where public bodies and even private institutions (such as the Catholic Church) are bound to act with greater transparency and openness, that RTE continually fails to show any concept of public account ability. It also should be noted that under European Union compe tition regulations RTE is required to furnish details of where the licence fee is spent. Its ongoing failure leaves the national broadcaster open to the accusation that it is simply using licence payers money to subsidise inefficiencies in the organisation rather than invest ing in quality home produced Irish programming. With the increasing array of British and US sitcoms now dominating RTE's television schedule I would suggest that the former is in fact the case. Yours faithfully, Mairtin O Maolruaidh, Tuam Road, Galway.

One euro = one sausage
Dear Editor, I want to voice my anger at the ridiculous prices being charged by a lot of the establishments around Galway city. I stopped at a Galway service station to buy myself a small cooked sausage at the hot food counter. The price they tried to charge me was 95 cents! This is a measure of how low we have stooped in this country that our base currency is now worth one sausage. After the euro changeover I have been consistently ripped off by retail outlets. Where are the inspectors that we were promised would check out the price hikes? Who are they? Who have they investigated? Another thing, before the changeover a game of pool in a bar cost me 50p, now it costs me 1 euro, 1 used to get 3 plays on a jukebox for 50p now I get 2 plays for I euro. I'll let you work out the per centages yourself. Yours Niall Farrelly, Galway

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