Why do we have cameras?

[Oddmund Garvik <garvik@i-t.fr>]

The television drowns us with images, the magazines is full of stories
and pictures from the privacy of stars and princesses. What about the
informative/documentary photo? Is is dead? How can we invent another way
of seeing, another point of view, making pictures which have not been
shown by the television?

The Vietnam war is over. Young photographers seldom claims being engaged
photographers any more. A picture cannot stop a war, but it can at least
change the public opinion. Today the editors are not interested in war

photography, with some rare exceptions (Bosnia, Gaza, Afghanistan...).
War does not sell. That is the the magazine managers and editors way of
thinking.

I was around for a while, in the Middle East and in Africa. I am not
doing war pictures any more. I am walking in the streets now, trying to
record other miseries, these quagmires in which mankind is falling,
these harbingers of ultimate chaos. It is even our duty to record them,
at least in the annals of History where these images will tell how our
century ended. For most people who look at them every day in the papers,
in books or at exhibitions, they are but quickly forgotten moments of
sickeningly sweet emotions, excerpts of the world's show. And though
very few "spectators" will become genuinely aware of this, just for
those few we must continue to show and tell what others would prefer to
forget. As is often the case in this field, perseverance is synonymous
with a one-man battle.

It is interesting and useful to exchange ideas about cameras and
technical problems, but it becomes rather reducing to keep it *only* at
that level.

I have abandonned my aesthetic preoccupations in order to reach a state
of unsophistication. I think this gives the subject all its strength,
and hopefully at the same time bring some light to contemporaries on
tragedies taking place at their very doorsteps.

I am not alone doing or having done this, I am just a part of a
tradition. A brick in a wall which shall fall one day and hopefully
eradicate injustice. 

Good pictures are pictures with plenty of pathos, in the original
meaning of the word, which is "pain" in Greek.

All the best

Oddmund