Louie Palu: On the Border between Atrocity and Commodity
As an assignment for her Art History Class, Bean and I attended a talk by photographer Louie Palu at the Center for Creative Photography this past Tuesday. The talk was titled “Image Control in the Age of Terror” and covered the entire history of Palu’s photographic work, from documenting miners north or Toronto where he grew up in a lower working class Italian home to his stints in Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay, and in the heart of the Mexican Drug Wars.
Palu is not just an artist. He is a photojournalist, and his work documents the real human casualties of war and all that war entails - the bullets, the money, the bodies, the faces. What Palu made very clear in his talk is that all war and the mechanisms of capital that support it are interconnected. The miners he photographed extract the metals from which ammunition is made. As many miners die from casualties (cave-ins, explosions) as soldiers die on the frontlines. They are all casualties of the same system. Likewise the Mexican drug cartels are a multi-billion dollar business, so in the end, the drug wars are about money and power which is at the heart of all wars.
Palu comes from a long tradition of photojournalism that depicts the economically bereft as well as casualties of violence . Depression era photographers to Eugene Smith’s crime photos and Robert Frank’s The Americans - these all impacted Palu. In fact, Palu said that both Smith and Frank were two of his biggest influence. While Smith’s crime photos showed violence in the streets of America, Frank showed the violence of economic cannibalism. It’s all interconnected, and that comes through in Palu’s work.
Palu doesn’t draw his vision or inspiration out of the academic void of art history and political theory. Rather, he grew up in the midst of the mafia in an Italian American neighborhood in Toronto. His mother was a seamstress, and his father was a day laborer. The mafia held a reign of terror over his neighborhood, and it was not out of the ordinary for Palu to see dead bodies in the street. His family also indoctrinated him with the legacy of violence within Italian political sects. He understood the inherent violence of money from the frontlines, and that authenticity, that personal vision resonates in his work and the respect he gives to his subjects.
When he told his father that he was going to go to art school, Palu’s dad replied with: “Why don’t you get a real job?” After Palu graduated art school, his father said, “Now you can get a real job.” When Palu announced he was going to be a photographer, his father suggested that his son travel to the mines where he was working and photograph “People with real jobs.” And so Palu’s career documenting the casualties of labor, capitalism, class and war began with his series on miners. He spent years on that project. He often was shooting in the depths of the mines where it was completely dark.
His descent into the mines is a perfect metaphor for how Palu approaches his work. He immerses himself completely. As a general rule he spends long durations of time with his work, getting to know the people, their environment, and the dire facts of their daily lives and deaths. He doesn’t go in and out with an elite team, snap a few photos, and exhibit them in galleries for a high profit. The mine project took him years to complete. He did multiple tours in Afghanistan living with and following soldiers on the frontlines. Though journalist visits and photos of Guantanamo are highly controlled, he has visited the prison more than any other photographer. All photographers passing through Guantanamo have to turn in their memory cards to security for screening and deleting. Palu projected the pages and pages and pages of jpeg numbers of his hundreds of deleted photos over his years at Guantanamo.
Palu also spent years photographing the Mexican drug wars. This was particularly interesting to me since I live in the midst of it here on the Arizona/Mexican border. As Palu stated, the drugs come through Tucson and then are distributed in Phoenix which is the central hub of drug distribution in America because it reaches to all directions in the country. He said that you can tell how glutted the market is with drugs by the price on the street. I know in Tucson you can buy a bag of heroin for five bucks. That same bag would have cost me twenty in the 1970s. But that’s not because no one is getting rich. The drug trade is a multi-billion dollar business. Palu’s theory is that pot smuggling is the Trojan Horse that occupies the Feds so the cocaine and heroin (where the real huge dollars are made) can sneak in the back door. In other words, he gives a shit about understanding the connection between people, product, profit and violence.
In his warzone locations (Mexico and Afghanistan), Palu spent a lot of time getting to know the people while also putting himself at tremendous risk. White man on the frontlines could be gunned down in a heartbeat. But somehow he makes it work. He had plenty of stories to go along with the photos. In some instances, he spent over a year getting to know someone before he photographed them. That is the case in the man in this photo from Mexico who worked as a mule who had spent his life illegally crossing the US/Mexican border only to be deported over and over again. The man finally asked Palu to take his photo, and it is a photo of tremendous compassion.
In other words, Palu is not an “atrocity and poverty tourist”. He came from the middle of the shit, and he dedicates the time necessary to not exploit his subjects, whether dead or alive. To avoid aestheticizing war and to help erase the barrier between gallery and reality, Palu opened his talk with cell phone video footage of the frontlines in Afghanistan because he wanted us to know what war sounds like. He said, what you don’t hear in photography or is that war is loud. So we were given a shootout with bullets flying. Then he cut to footage of a young man whose foot and bottom half of his leg had been blown off when he stepped on a landmine. Exposed bone. Flapping skin. Dripping blood. There was no escaping the ugly reality of war, and the reality that we do not see in the media.
There are two places where Palu prefers to show his work. In journalism, he’ll take the middle ground over the far left or the far right. His work has appeared in the New York Times, Newsweek, Time Magazine and the likes. He says he reads far left and far right journalism because it is important to know what’s going on, but the place to affect real change and open eyes and inspire discussion is in the middle ground. I can’t agree with him more. When you stick to the fringes, you are preaching to the choir. I always remember this old lefty I heard talking on the radio once who said the greatest activism you can engage in is talking in line at the grocery store. Infiltrating the middle ground can be radical activism. Palu is getting his images shown where they can make a difference, and people have to stop, open their eyes, swallow what they are seeing and hopefully respond to it. For his media work, the journals almost always choose to show Palu’s images in color. Palu, on the other hand, traditionally produces black and white prints, not for the art value, but he says to depict how “war turns people to stone.”
The other place Palu frequently shows his work is on the streets, creating public galleries out of newspapers he makes of his photographs. He cuts them out and pastes them to the walls of buildings where everyone and anyone can have access to the work. They serve as testimonies, memorials, and witness all at once.
Palu spent some time showing how images appear in media. Frequently a photo depicting an act of tremendous violence will be sandwiched between ads for cars and cellphone service, showing the non-discriminate use of images to promote the mechanisms of capital. Women and children dead in the street? That’s okay. Buy a new car and make a phone call. But let’s not forget where the oil is coming to fuel that car or the copper to keep that phone alive . . .
Palu doesn’t spend a lot of time proselytizing or politically grandstanding on his soapbox. He has used his craft to show a reality that media has censored from our view. He is an artist, a journalist and a witness. Through his work we are asked to witness with him and to no longer turn a blind eye even when we are looking at blinded eyes.
One woman in the audience questioned whether Palu’s work promotes war. Palu was very direct. He talked about the months he spent in a VA burn unit and the photos he took there. He spoke of the piles of dead bodies he has documented. He said, “Do you think anyone seeing the photos from the burn unit really want to rush down to the Marine recruiting center?”
A professor in the audience asked about Susan Sontag. Palu noted that Susan Sontag has written interesting and important work. Then he said that it has little to do with reality. He said (paraphrased), “When I’m standing in the middle of the street in Afghanistan and there is a severed head in the gutter, I’m not thinking about Susan Sontag. Do you know what I think about when I think about war? The smell. War stinks. All that death, it stinks.” Amen. It’s easy to philosophize about photography and the role of the spectator for the ivory tower, but it is not the same as putting your own life at risk to give the lives of others a chance to be recognized even if they are dead by the time they get the recognition for being casualties of an entire interconnected system of war and capital.
I have frequently taken issue with photographers who turn human suffering into art and then make a “killing” on the work. What happens when atrocity becomes commodity? I asked Palu that question. He said he wouldn’t mind making some extra bucks off his work, but I did not walk away from the Palu talk with a sense that profit is his motivation. He says he makes the standard $200 per photo to appear in a journal. He’s not getting rich. He has received grant funding and has sold some of his photos, but mostly he scrapes enough together to keep going. He is a man of compassion and passion who is giving his vision to document a side of the 21st century that has largely been left at the sidelines.
Check out all of Louis Palu’s photos on his website. It is well worth the time.