The double-edged sword of controversy

Is there such a thing as bad publicity? The events of the last week have made me wonder. A video I shot has been widely watched but has three times as many 'dislikes' as 'likes'. Naturally I have to wonder, how did this happen?

Banksy mural 'Stop and Search' cut down and sat in a Bethlehem back-yard.

Late last year, I embarked on a project to document the journey of two Banksy murals from The West Bank to the UK and then to an exhibition in Long Island, New York.  They had been bought from Palestinian entrepreneurs by a partnership of two galleries, Keszler Gallery NY and London's Bankrobber, both of whom have previous experience of dealing with Banksy's uncertified street work.

Removing pieces of street art from original locations is something that infuriates their creators and I can completely understand why. Context is so much of this art form and not everything travels well. This is probably particularly true of Banksy's work and the removal of these two pieces from Bethlehem, and their subsequent exhibition for sale in Southampton, NY, has upset lots of people who would rather they had stayed where they were sprayed.

As a result, a short edit, that was used in the exhibition catalogue to give a sense of the journey the pieces had taken, is now being viewed by thousands of people every day. Which is good, I guess, but the small percentage who have expressed a view either way (173 out of 29,000+ views) have been nearly three times more likely to hate it!

Some of these votes will undoubtably be a protest at the act of removing the walls, some will be because they don't like the way I've filmed it.

The two gallery owners, who allowed me the access, have been widely vilified on the internet and come in for some pretty stern questioning in the international media.

However there are several important points which the critics of Keszler and Bankrobber have either overlooked or, perhaps, are unaware of.  And as an impartial observer I find it strange.

Firstly, the works had already been cut down long before either Bankrobber or Keszler had been offered them. Several attempts had been made by their owners to sell them. Approaches by dealers and galleries, and even an attempt to sell on eBay, had all run into the problem of how they could be physically moved. The larger piece 'Stop And Search' weighs 2.5 tons. 'Wet Dog' is 1.8 tons. They're not exactly the kind of things you FedEx.

Even the word 'entrepreneur' conjures entirely the wrong impression of those that sold the pieces. Palestine is under severe restrictions in what can and cannot be moved across the security wall, leaving the territory effectively annexed. My experience of the Middle East means that I understand a little of the economic hardship that everyday hard-working Palestinians have to confront in order to do business. Can anyone who lives in comfort and freedom really criticize those who sought to earn some money from selling these works? Well, of course not, which is why the hate is turned toward the dealers.

Secondly, though Banksy himself may not like this fact, his work consistently transcends that of his peers. It is sharper, better observed and more subversive than pretty much all of his contemporaries. Because of this, his contribution to art history is going to be very important, I suspect. His prints, whilst often extremely good and highly collectable, nonetheless, do not have the visceral edge of the street works. The very fact that he so frequently risks arrest to make these pieces imbues them with extra presence. The two Bethlehem works that had been cut down were hidden from public view for years, in very unsuitable conditions. When I first saw them, they had rudimentary protection from the elements, and certainly one of them was deteriorating rapidly. The other, though more solidly constructed, was clearly fading all the same despite being covered with a plastic sheet.

Thirdly, and maybe most importantly, the people of Palestine, and particularly Bethlehem, are much more ambivalent about Banksy's works than you might expect. His politically-aware pieces on the dividing wall itself were extremely well timed visual barbs that helped to draw international attention to the controversy about the wall's construction. Most especially, amongst a section of the Western population, who might have had little knowledge or understanding of the issue, he brought awareness and curiosity, both of which are very good things. Several years later, few of these pieces survive, they have been painted over by Palestinian graffiti artists and political activists who have replaced them with their own authentic vision of what it is really like to live in a territory that is in enforced isolation. The taxi drivers who ferry tourists to and from the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem for massively inflated prices are only too happy to take the long route in order to show you a couple of Banksy works. For them, the visitor's interest means extra money. But for pretty much everyone else they are yet another sign of someone who came, admittedly in good faith and with the very best of intentions, and then left again while they for the most part cannot leave, cannot freely seek work, in many cases cannot even see their families who live only hundreds of yards away.

At a cafe in Bethlehem I asked about the general feeling towards Banksy's artworks around the West Bank. A polite, serious and well-educated man replied in perfect, heavily-accented English: "For him, I think it was good maybe to come and do these things.

"For us," he shrugged, "It's no difference."

This should not have been as illuminating for me as it was. Palestinian culture is complex, much more than the sum total of stone throwers, funeral processions, mourning mothers and burning flags that has become the newsreel shorthand for their struggle for a self-determining nation. I suspect Banksy himself might well have understood this when he made his paintings, but I think many of those who are angry about their removal are not quite as well versed in the subtleties of the region.

If Banksy was a Palestinian artist then it would be unthinkable for the works to be anywhere outside Palestine. But he is not. Those that chose to sell them certainly didn't feel as though they were parting with pieces of the national cultural heritage. 

So now what? They have been stablised, presented for exhibition, shipped to America and put on show. They have been danced around at a party, examined and, much to the chagrin of the gallery owners, touched. More people saw them in the opening weekend of the exhibition than in the last three or four years when they were living under plastic sheeting in a back yard.

Inevitably they will be sold, although when is anyone's guess. The person or institution that buys them will need to be well funded because you can't just put a two-ton piece of masonry in your average house!

It may seem a shame that they have not remained in their original context, but let us be as unsentimental about this as the people who lived with them. In one case, the building owner planned to cut a door though the middle of the work. In another, the wall, part of a disused bus shelter on wasteground, was crumbling even before the work was put up. 

Meanwhile, the video that I produced from some of the footage, has been used as part of the exhibition catalogue and subsequently to promote the exhibition. This will hopefully help me on the road to making the project into a more substantial documentary than it is currently. So yes, I hope to gain something too.

Banksy gifted the people of Palestine several of his artworks. Some remain, most do not. 

It is not for us to dictate what Palestinians choose to do with those gifts. 

•  •  •

Here is the catalogue video from my own hosting last week (a relatively paltry 582 hits!)

West Banksy (part 1) from Justin Sutcliffe on Vimeo.

The original hosting (29,000 and counting) at Bankrobber's channel is here.

Fireman v Corespondent

A fortnight ago I posted about Eid in Jerusalem and received a very interesting comment from Dominic Tyler about the way in which different kinds of photographers approach photojournalism.

To those uninitiated with the British journalistic slang, a Fireman is someone who travels to foreign countries to cover stories, often at short notice and in response to a breaking news story or emerging issue. A Corespondent is someone who moves to a foreign country (usually temporarily - but not always) in order to cover the news from that region in depth for an extended period of time.

In the course of my work I have been both. Initially I was a Corespondent based in New York for the better part of the Nineties and covering US news and features. Of course the US is vast and a Corespondent often travels within the country but essentially my introduction to working abroad was here.

During the best part of that decade, my friends and colleagues would occasionally visit and I was always surprised (and sometimes envious) at how they made great pictures of the things I overlooked. Familiarity can breed contempt and I think I was guilty of taking the everyday things for granted in New York.

Sometimes I would kid myself that these were tourist pictures and therefor not the kind of thing I would visit. In fact I used to pride myself on having done all my tourism in one day when I first arrived in NY and then set about the business of really knowing the city as a resident rather than an interloper.

Wow, what a trick I missed! Looking back, I wish that I had not striven for nonchalance. I shot several good news pictures in those years, some of them within shouting distance of iconic even. But my library of daily life in New York could be easily surpassed by a moderately talented photographer with a spare 48 hours in the city.

For seven years or so after 2000 I found myself in the Fireman role, flying at short notice to cover stories (both breaking and simmering) in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Central Asia. In these places I tried to correct what I had come to see as the lost opportunity. Photographing the whole time, almost compulsively, determined to collect the strange, fleeting worlds I was seeing. Inevitably perhaps, it was too far in the other direction.

In 2002 I spent several weeks in Kabul on the anniversary of the fall of the Taliban. While there I met Steve Connors a British photojournalist living there for a few years who kindly took the time to point out the middle path. Learning how to have patience and to resist the temptation to immediately photograph everything one sees is about the hardest trick I have ever attempted.

Patience reveals the hidden facets. Only once people have grown accustomed to you without the camera are they likely to be candid and comfortable when it finally appears. Patience leads to atmosphere in pictures which in turn, gives them a lasting quality. Moments are like speaking a foreign language from a phrasebook, atmosphere is like speaking that language fluently.

Of course, the life of a Fireman is rush, rush, rush. Hard to show that level of patience on an assignment where you often have only a week or less to do a complex story. But Steve's advice did serve me well a year later when I spent several weeks in Baghdad. There were the usual hurry-ups on daily stories but whenever possible I went out and looked at things patiently and waited till I had a better understanding of the rhythms of daily life around me before trying to photograph it.

So what have I learnt from approaching things in these distinct ways? Not enough.. you can never know enough, but I am now more open to subtleties and nuance. I have learnt to re-examine what I might have previously dismissed as obvious, or overlooked as banal. So now its a question of constantly trying to blend the best of the different approaches to each situation.

A group of girls walking around old Jerusalem. Laughing and chatting, one of them carrying an assault rifle with double clips taped end to end for quick reloading in a fire-fight. Looks completely alien to me but it's absolutely normal behavior for them. If I lived in Jerusalem would I ever get to the stage where I just filtered-out this kind of thing? Don't think so, but maybe that's the fireman talking!

Eid Al Adha

The photographic language of the middle east is so often tied up in the most dramatic incidents and extreme behavior. On both sides of the political and ideological divide photographers have inevitably been seduced both by the horror of violence and the mawkish romance of suffering.

I have been guilty of this too. My first assignment in Israel and the West Bank in late 2000 was filled with trips to refugee camps, desperate hospitals, besieged settlements and the fighting at the Ayosh Junction in Ramallah (where the violent clashes happened with a horrible kind of predictable regularity that would make a swiss railway timetable look slapdash!) It was a terrifying, awful cocktail of tragedy and as journalists we were all (completely legitimately) committed to fearlessly, unflinchingly and repeatedly reporting the dreadfulness that was unfolding.

The intervening decade between my last visit has not seen a great deal of improvement and many aspects are much worse.

But as I stepped out in the first light of dawn yesterday to photograph the celebration of Eid Al Adha I was overtaken by the uneasy feeling that I had missed something important about the essential nature of life by ceaselessly pursuing the headline moment. The impetus to re-examine my persona approach came from conversations with my friend and colleague Geert Van Kesteren who has been producing extraordinary and insightful photojournalism from this corner of the world for many years and has gained a deeper understanding than most about what effect the international media coverage is actually having.

We walked up the hill through Silwan towards the Dome of the Rock. As we progressed, the numbers swelled, all heading to the mosque and afterwards to the graves of their relatives to offer prayers and honour their departed family. The atmosphere was one of understated, dignified observance. Neither solemn (although many were quietly tearful) nor really celebratory. Children sat respectfully talking and showing one another their Eid gifts but there was no boisterousness or sudden movement. Some were dressed conservatively others more casually. Amongst the pictures I made, this one seems to illustrate best what I experienced.

The men of the family; silently reflective, modern in appearance yet traditional in values. They had about them, a certain contentment in fraternal contemplation and occasional conversation. Reading the Quran or even the newspaper, but at all times this unspoken comfort in their duty and respect for the occasion. It is the first time I feel as though I've captured something more subtle and relevant to everyday life in my photography of this particular issue. Perhaps it was the first time I've had the necessary understanding to even be able to aspire to that.