Trigger

In reading newspapers, journals and websites in my Parisian confinement, what strikes me is how fast our coronavirus codes have developed: instead of panic buyers, we see empty shelves; instead of frenzied crowds rushing to reach the safety of home, we see masked pedestrians; instead of a dying economy, we’re asked to look at deserted streets as if they’re abandoned movie sets. The war against an invisible enemy is shown not through its exceptionality but its new normality: an ordered, confined daily life, far from the chaos often portrayed when epidemics hit other regions of the world, such as Ebola in Sierra Leone, Liberia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. So far, the visualising of the coronavirus crisis seems cinematic rather than photographic. The crisis, caused by the global movement of people, seems to beg for stirring images. Heart-breaking videos of doctors and nurses in understaffed and overcrowded hospitals on the verge of collapse have marked our consciousness, not because they show the object of horror but, bowing to a cinematic trope, the reaction of the witness.

In Scene, last year’s exposition at Le Bal, Paris, he showed his often large prints in his trademark grey-infused black-and-white. Brazil, Congo, Paris: through Majoli’s lens, all life in public spaces seems staged. In his newest series, the best work plays with our mistrust and makes us wonder if we’re looking at staged photographs (we’re not). He got close to people in intensive care, healthcare workers in hospitals and police guarding checkpoints, but most impressively, he showed numerous pictures of life on the streets, which culminated in an image of two people passing by a camera crew, adding to the surrealistic aura of his work. In fact, this image exemplifies an entire oeuvre: Majoli constantly crosses the thresholds between documentary, theatrical mise-en-scene and reflection on the production of images, all without ever fixing himself securely on one side.

The production and circulation of crisis photography is deeply steeped in the logic of the market that many photographers and artists honestly try to fight. This production and circulation are under scrutiny in an important exhibition at Jeu de Paume, Paris: Le Supermarché des Images – curated by Peter Szendy, who coined the term ‘iconomie’ in Le Supermarché du visible: Essai d’iconomie – critically unties the inextricable knot of commerce and image making. Image making is complicit in labour abuses, pollution,^{See the statement by Italian Vogue on publishing an issue without photographs.} stocking, circulation and speculation, and it perpetuates similar conditions of production, even if it purports to criticise them. As Renzo Martens showed in Enjoy Poverty, his brilliant documentary on the perversity and complicity of photography in humanitarian crisis, the circulation of soldiers, welfare, products and images all use the same routes. From Le Supermarché des Images, it seems as if this iconomy cannot be criticised outside a self-referential loop.^{Marie-José Mondzain and Hans Belting already discussed the links between icons and political/financial power in their respective works. The clearest example of this link is the fact that many early portraits are those of emperors and rulers on the obverse sides of coins.} Images can only be critical of image production if they engage in similar practices in a similar system. This is not unlike any all-encompassing ideology. As Martens has also shown, those who a enjoy and profit from misery are designated by institutions and imbued with the aura of honest witness, whereas locals doing the same job are considered parasites. It seems this market logic prevents documentary photography from playing the role it’s most comfortable playing: providing excruciating, close-to-the-bone visuals of conflict and crisis.

The reason so few photographs capture the coronavirus crisis isn’t only just one of limits imposed on citizens during the lockdown – it’s equally due to our inability to imagine ourselves at the receiving end of a lengthy health crisis, the sort of catastrophe we all thought belonged to countries considered unhygienic or unstable. As mentioned, our entire society is aimed at limiting the visibility of our own suffering, whereas our visual culture is deeply engaged with suffering far from home. Another reason emerges from reading interventions on the current crisis by the usual suspects of leftist political discourse. From Judith Butler to Jean-Luc Nancy to Yuval Noah Harari, champion of easy-to-digest and all-encompassing histories, these thinkers seem to frame the current health crisis as an opportunity, an invitation to make the world anew: the post-crisis world will be rooted, they seem to agree, in today’s responses, reactions, discoveries and errors. Photography, however, by definition cannot imagine a post-crisis world. Despite calls for a photography of peace instead of war (photography, in other words, that aids in reconstruction instead of perpetuating strife by stocking an impressive but divisive and ever-available archive of images), the latter is still common currency; despite repeated calls to re-politicise photography in a world that calls for critical interventions, unpolitical documentary – a.k.a. visual storytelling practices – reigns supreme and, more often than not, safely engages with the pet peeves of middling liberalism, including humanitarian interventions in nations considered failed.