This work reminded me a lot of the real experience of travelling far abroad. There’s the expected foreign-ness you’ve seen too often from afar, broken up by surreally familiar normalness.

What you say about the critics reminds me of what Piotr Zbierski (2012 Oskar-Barnack Newcomer Award winner) said in his interview for Leica: it’s the honesty that pushes you forward. I have a fantastic guy on my team at work who asks to be judged very hard. He’s fond of saying, ‘I’m not going to get better from people telling me I’m awesome, am I?’ The best encouragement isn’t always praise.

I’m with Andy Gray on this way of thinking and that’s what I liked best about this essay as well. I know David is adamant against any need for balance in an essay, but I don’t think it’s a question of balance (journalistic balance is most often a joke); for me it’s a question of depth. Too often and an essay will be about one thing and one thing only, which will lead to it being flat, if not superficial. A well told story needs depth. It needs contradiction. It needs some kind of tension.

Harking back to comments I made about the Serbian work, I’m uneasy when an essay shows me (sans irony) what I expect to see; when it mirrors the stereotype, the collective unconscious, the flotsam and jetsam of the media mire that’s somehow found it’s way into my head — angry Serbs, drunk Indians, mentally handicapped sisters, third world victims, the rural poor, and so on. This essay does not do that. For Iraq, I’ve been conditioned to see images of carnage, of suffering, of religious fanaticism. This essay shows those things, it would be dishonest not to, but it shows so much more. Things we’re not conditioned to expect like the 3D moviegoers and the shoppers in the bright and shiny grocery store. Scenes like these are just as real as the carnage and fanaticism. It’s not necessarily dishonest to omit them in a story about Iraq, but the omission of these kinds of counter-stereotypical images makes for a much less effective essay.

That critique applies to all too much documentary photography and advocacy journalism in general. Too many people feel a need to edit out the contradictions when it’s the contradictions that tell the tale most powerfully. Filmmakers have known this since Eisenstein promulgated his theory of intellectual montage. We become numb to endless images of violence, poverty and degradation, but when they are juxtaposed with images of those who benefit from these horrors, the human reaction is likely to be much stronger.

Which brings me to Jukka’s comment in the richland thread. If I read it correctly, he’s criticizing people who are critical. I’ve just never understood that attitude. How can one possibly grow without receiving and giving careful consideration to criticism? How can one possibly grow without considering and criticizing the work of others? Perhaps it’s possible for a few, but for most of us that kind of negative attitude toward criticism is bound to be limiting. Of course there are caveats. One shouldn’t blindly accept the critic’s viewpoint and as a critic one should at least be impersonal, if not constructive. But in general, criticism is a good thing for both the criticized and the critic. A very good thing.

Actually, I liked this essay best when I watched it without reading the captions, which I think is a good thing.

I regret that I didn’t say this right away. I’m often one of the first to comment, due to my time zone, but there are many people who write with more credibility than me. So sometimes I want to wait and let them have the first words.