Q: You've been at the New York Times how long now?

A: I worked at the Times from 1978 to 1982, and was picture editor for the Sunday magazine. And then I've been consulting, in a variety of capacities since then, at different times, I've written for them, and so on.

What other photography experience do you have?

I started professionally in photography in 1973, working at Time-Life Books for a couple of years. I was a photo researcher doing a series of books on human behavior, and some books on the Old West. I was a photographer after that, and freelance writer, picture editor for Horizon magazine, which is a monthly culture magazine, or was at the time, published by American Heritage. Then I became picture editor for the New York Times Sunday Magazine. I was at Time Magazine, actually, for a very short time in between, doing the Pictures of the Year, in 1978 -- you know, a big portfolio they do with the events of the year, in pictures. Then I became Executive Editor of Camera Arts magazine, until 1983. And then I founded the photojournalism and documentary photography program at the International Center for Photography, where I was Director for three years.

Then I started curating a bunch of shows on Latin American photography, and Magnum, the photo agency; Sebastio Salgado, the photographer; for a variety of museums in this country and Europe, and Mexico.

And I started doing more multimedia things, writing a lot about digital photography, the issues and the ethics of manipulation in the press. Now I do consulting on interactive newspapers, like the New York Times, and photo agencies who want to enter the digital age, and so on.

I started writing books in the last five or six years. [see In Our Own Image.]

[...]

So you've seen photography go through a lot of changes over the years. Let's talk about the manipulation a little bit. There have always been types of manipulation -- analog types. What's fundamentally different about digital kinds?

A: I think that society is different, and the perception of photographs, the perception of events, our relationship to events, is different. And I think that the change in digital techniques, versus analog, has a lot to do with those differences.

How is the relationship to events different?

I think that, previously, photography implicated people and events, and people had a feeling that what was going on out there was of importance to them in a variety of ways. One is, could they be helpful, if it was a disaster? Did they feel threatened? Did they feel they needed to be informed as citizens? There was a kind of a documentary function that the photographs served, as a quasi-official document, letting people know what was going on, because of the mythology that the camera never lies, because they are contextualized by the press, which people had a greater belief in; because the sense of democracy was, to some extent, the need to get involved in, whether it's the civil rights movement domestically, whether it's foreign involvements like Vietnam, or whether it was World War II. There was some sense that we were part of the world and we had to act in the world, within our own world domestically, and internationally.

I think that changed in the sense that we feel very much disconnected from the world, disconnected from the ability to act in the world. We feel much more anxiety about events, a disbelief about events, kind of a sense that events are virtual, in that they never affect us really, that somehow we're protected. And that the anxiety level, the shock level is so high in the media -- the screeching, noisy sense of what's going on out there -- that it's become more and more like a spectacle, where we're not involved.

I think that publications, instead of becoming ways or conduits to act in the world, or to know about the world, become rather more entertainment vehicles. Kind of a perverse kind of entertainment, where they make you so nervous and scared about the world that then you see advertising, you buy things, you see the celebrities and you buy into the mythology. But the world itself, in terms of Rwanda, and what's happened in south central Los Angeles, becomes sort of like the Persian Gulf War, they become virtual events. It's like, Baudrillard wrote -- the war in the war in the Gulf never took place. And I think that the world never takes place for us anymore in those ways; it's sort of out there and it looms and it scares us. But what I think we've effectively done is to create the world as an outside source of some animosity, an almost quasi-enemy, so that we have to bond together in our market economy, and keep ourselves going.

Photography's place in all this is really not the eyewitness account anymore, because we're not interested in the eyewitness, because if we hear from the eyewitness, what are we going to do anyway at this point? I think we almost resent the eyewitness now, unless we can make the eyewitness into a star -- then we kind of like them, because they become one of our system, and eventually we'll shoot them down as a star, because that's what we intend to do. But it'll be a kind of inflation of the messenger over the message, and then finally a destruction of the messenger. And the message itself is almost irrelevant.

Is commercialism a part of that -- the commercialism of news, news becoming more like entertainment?

I think that in a market economy without standards, basically you work to the denominator that sells. I was thinking today, looking at the Unabomber's letter that was published in the New York Times -- it was published right at the top of the newspaper. And I was thinking, "Why did they do that?" Usually, the Times would try to defend itself against giving a point of view of some guy who's killing people with bombs. They'd put it inside the newspaper, and they'd say that the letter was received, as a headline. But they wouldn't just show it out there, and showing it above the fold, which sells the paper (because you see above the fold in the newsstand), struck me as their way of saying, "This is going to sell." And the Times itself, which is a bit above the fray, to some extent anyway, needs to sell as well.

You don't sell with authority anymore, you sell with almost a kind of pandering, in a Puritanical society, to these sort of, sometimes perverse desires of people, because a lot of things are unhealthy in this society, so you do it in rather covert ways, you get to people. So you have the "Long Island Lolita," you have all these kinds of dramas that work well in a kind of Hester Prinn, Puritanical society, but don't necessarily play in a Catholic country, for example. You don't have scandals in France because Mitterand has a mistress -- that's not a scandal, that's just the way life is, it's his business, it's doesn't affect his foreign policy judgement. But here, that's what we focus on -- the O.J. Simpson trial, for example, takes everything off the news.

So I think that's what the medium has become, in large part. And I think, then, photography as a malleable medium is better for this sense of what society is about, because you can change the photograph to suit the whim, the desire of the audience, or the editor in between. The old analog photograph -- you know, "This is my document, this is my witness." For instance, the Benetton ads -- almost nothing is sacred anymore; you can take any image and sell sweaters. You couldn't do that during the Vietnam war, it would have been a horribly stupid advertising idea. Now it works well, because there are no roots to the image, the image doesn't connect to anything anymore.

There have been these so-called scandals of digital manipulation -- National Geographic moved the pyramids, Tom Cruise and Dustin Hoffman were put together [on a magazine cover] when they weren't really together. This seems analagous, to me, to Frank Sinatra recording his Duets album over a phone line. It seems to be the way the world is becoming now -- that you don't have to be in a certain place. Maybe that's manipulative in a sense. What is it, specifially, about computers that alters what we believe? Why are they so powerful in changing our beliefs?

I think if we didn't believe the things that we believe, the computers would be powerless, for the most part, to do anything. A submachinegun is powerless unless you want to kill; if it's just a museum object, it doesn't do very much at all. Or if it's something you keep under your bed and never load and never look at, it doesn't have a lot of power. But if you're somebody who needs violence, for whatever reason, then it's much more powerful than a pistol would be.

I think the computer can do lots of things. I'm going to extend your argument -- it's not only that you don't have to be in the same place, you don't have to be alive. You don't ever have to have been alive to exist as much as anybody else exists. Elizabeth Taylor does better not acting in films than acting. You don't need an activity or a function to make you important. It's not the mechanical age where you're defined by your role. You know, "He's a really good downhill skier," "she's a fantastic architect." You don't have to build anymore, you don't have to fit in, in that sense of a role. It's almost, if you do that, you're a peasant in this society. In the avatar sense, in Neil Stephenson's Snow Crash, you'd be one of those black and white figures out there, you wouldn't have any colors. If you want colors, you have to transcend the roles, you have to use the role for a few minutes, perhaps, just to make your imprint, and then transcend it immediately or else you're typecast as somebody dependent upon a society that no longer works for your own identity. It's no good anymore to be a good schoolteacher, to be a good doctor. In the 1940s it was very important to be those things. This individual hero in this society who, just like in World War II, the G.I. had a certain glamour because of the ability to fit in the society and help the society. We don't believe in our society, our society doesn't have a moral core, we don't have a set of values in this society that are more important than the market values of the society, for example, or the individual values of the society.

So I think, in that sense, then, the computer is helpful because it's not dependent upon gravity, it's not dependent upon physical laws of spacetime issues that are the conventional senses of spacetime. It's not dependent upon the proximity of photography in time and in space, for example. It's capable of using the techniques of painting in a photographic way, but to go beyond that, and to use other senses of what it is to be human, at this point.

I don't think we're interested in the old sense of what it was to be human, which was to be wise, to be profound, to be a person in a more fulfilled sense. I think we're interested in the person who transcends their own personhood and makes it into image, which is the currency of the republic at this point. And if your image is a strong image, than that's all it's about. If Clinton had a good image, it wouldn't matter what his policy would be. The image, like with Reagan, would carry the day. If you can do that, you're fine. Everybody's in search of the magic photo shots. Everybody wants the way to turn themselves away from somebody dependednt upon gravity, light, texture, into something else that's much more flexible. So the Teflon President, Reagan, is the Image President. The ability to become whatever was necessary was a very helpful thing for Reagan.

Do you agree with Neil Postman, say, who believes [in Technopoly, Vintage Books, 1993] that it's our technology that is shaping our lives?

No, I think it's us shaping our lives. To me, we have a cowardice that we don't want to face what we are doing to our lives. We're the ones doing it. Whether you believe that the government is out of our control, or whatever, there are local issues, national issues, international issues. And I think we've been quite acquiescent in part because the anxiety levels of the media have scared us so much that we can't take action, we can't express ourselves....

If you did that on an individual level, you would never grow, you would never progress, you would stay in a kind of adolescent way, "I don't want to take responsibility, I don't want to confront the society, I don't want to make decisions, I don't want to do any of those things. And I think that's what we've done as a society.

So then we say that the computers are doing it. It's like an adolescent saying, you know, "My Buick is doing it," or something. It's not doing it; we're using the computers in those ways.

When I, for example, proposed this icon with graduate students, to label manipulated photographs in the press... Wired magazine, in the January issue and May issue, have knocked it, because they believe that the press is already so manipulated, they have such a cynical attitude about the press that even trying to propose a small measure to let the reader know what's going on in a photogrph is viewed as kind of a quixotic notion, as something romantic, something almost 19th century; that you should have standards, you tell people what they're reading, when in fact it's all kind of a manipulation.

If you fall into that mode, that everything is a manipulation, then you're passive, you have no ability to affect the society, you don't believe anything, and, you know, when American Photo was doing this poll last fall for their readership, as to whether the icon was a good idea or bad, I asked my graduate photo students, Are they participating? Because it affects them directly. 95 percent of them said no, because they thought it was a setup -- that responding to a poll was just a setup and that they would actually have no effect. It turns out, I found out last week, overwhelmingly, the readership responded positively to the icon....

But if you feel already that you're being manipulated by being asked something, you know, do you want the corner table or the middle table, that's a manipulation. I can't respond to you. Then there's a paralysis of the population, not to take any sort of stance. And I think that's the problem with blaming the computers.

Part of the Wired argument, I think it was Jacques Leslie, is that if this was a standard, it would have to be adopted by every publication, otherwise publications could just not use it at all and you would think that their photographs were all real -- you still wouldn't know whether photos were being manipulated or not. If they used it, that was just reinforcing the perception that they're not to be believed.

If you take a quotation mark in text -- publications use it to say that "This is a direct quote." If it's not a direct quote, you're not supposed to use it. Does everybody follow that? No. The New Yorker/Janet Malcolm case was all about that, which started basically the same time as the digital photo manipulation controversy. We don't say, "Give up the quotation marks in text" because there are abuses. We still want something out of it. And I think the problem is that we believe that text has a syntax, text has a logic to it, text has intellectual backing, and pictures are kind of fluff. Pictures don't have an inherent complexity and linguistic subtlties; they're just pictures. So what's the big deal? It's like marking candy as having artificial ingredients or not -- it's just a fluffy issue.

I think it's right that respected publications will have to use it for it to become a standard. They could all change in five minutes and say that they're all using it; that's not a big deal. It's not a revolution to put a little icon next to a few pictures per issue. That's not a big deal. I mean, they change from black and white to color, just changing presses, changing typefaces. They're redefining themselves all the time, redesigning themselves. So that's not such a big deal to do.

I don't think they really want to do it. I think that publications are scared. They want to be liked by the readership, and they'll do anything to be liked, within some bounds.

And there are the advertisers...

Right. But it's like going out on a date, you know? You're not going to say to the person, "Hey, do you know that my tie is not real silk?" or something like that. You don't want to give yourself away. I don't think that there's a conversation between the media and the people who read it.... When you're sitting in a room with somebody, you can't get away with a lot of stuff, because the person feels by your bodily gestures, by tone of voice, by your refusal to answer something, the indirect quality of your response, whatever it is.

I've found that, personally, when I've done projects, and you have to show a person what it's about, it's incredibly difficult and different than a publication, which just tells people what their lives are about. I think that's what publications do -- they tell people what their lives are about. And if they want to be in complicity with the reader, then they have to put an icon, or some way of saying that we manipulated this photograph for our own reasons. They don't want to have to say that, in an easily recognizable way.

Do you think that so-called interactivity will change the media's relationship to the public -- that there will be a dialogue between readers/viewers and the media?

I don't know. I think that, in large part, interactivity, in the forseeable future, will be like an ATM, where you get $100 if you press that, and you get $150 if you press that.

I think that what is important is that a publication can take a stand, and say, "Based upon our best reporting, the situation in so-and-so place is so-and-so. It's not just because we want it to be that way, but that's what we feel being in this situation."

I think a lot of what happens on the chat boards, and so on, is that people say things that confirm their own expectations -- the government is wrong, the government is right, because that's the way they started. So I think it's important that there be institutional points of view that are overt, that are acknowledged. "We believe, based upon three months of reporting, that this is what's going on," and so on.

Like Barlett and Steele [America: What Went Wrong, Andrews and McMeel, 1992]

Or the Pentagon Papers, any of those issues where you make your stand, and you say, "This is what it's based on, this is how we feel." National Public Radio does it quite a bit. And I think that's important, because then there's kind of a check and balance for the government. There's a way to say that the government says this, but we know that's not true, we know that is true, whatever we feel.

And I think that the sense of just being popular with the readership is wrong. It's just like being popular with the electorate is wrong, if all your trying to do is wear a nice suit. If you feel that you have to be in Rwanda, get out of Rwanda, as a leader, you make your judgements and you pay the price.

The same with the media. You report it. You run the difficult photographs of what happens in war, because it happens in war. You don't exclude them because you're afraid of offending the readership, of having the readership think you're anti-patriotic. That to me is like interactivity in the worst sense -- you're trying to be interactive with the reader by catering to their expectations in the consumer sense. That's generally what we mean by interactivity, is a consumer sense. "If you want bananas, we've got bananas. If you want oranges, we've got oranges. If you want bigger ones, we'll make them bigger for you. Whatever you want, we've got it." I think that's really great for supermarket shopping in some ways, and really terrible in other ways, because if you have a real orange, it's not inflatable. It's better just to settle for what they have; it'll taste better than one that's synthetically made at the moment. In that sense, the synthetic news -- the catering to the public in that sense -- is a lot of what interactivity is about. So I'm not optimistic at all that just by calling it interactive and putting people on chat boards, they're going to make a big difference.

I think it's interesting that when the O.J. Simpson cover photograph was changed by Time, they got thousands of responses -- negative for the most part. That's interesting. They know that. That's great. But I must say that, reading through this thing, it was interesting to read what people had to say. it wasn't enlightening, what people had to say, for the most part. You can see when your readership likes you or doesn't like you, and what the reasons are. Ok, fine. But I think that what has happened is that the general media have descended to a kind of catering business where the readers want whatever they want, we'll give it to them, more or less. So they're very close to being, already, interactive, in the consumer sense.

But I think they're all very far from being interactive in the more refined, sophisticated sense of, I really want to understand the inner thinking on why we did or did not invade Bosnia, for example. I would really want to know, from the foreign policy people, what their decisions were based on. What are the key points? What did they compare it to? What are the models? Are there simulation models that we can try out ourselves to see how it works? What's really going on at that level of thinking? That I'd like to know, personally. I'd really like to know, and be able to engage the people if I could get to the place they're at, and figure out what they're doing. That I think would be really interesting. But there's virtually no attempt to do that, at that level. And that's much more difficult to do. But I think it's much more profitable to do, because you could finally figure out from these experts what they thought, versus this unilateral decision from the top -- "We're not going to invade," which you have a sense that it's a manipulation, because it's not for the electorate, it's for political reasons.

You teach two classes at ITP, "E-Merging Media," which seems to be about, as media are merging together, they're more than the sum of their parts. There seems to be a kind of evolutionary theme -- that they're evolving into something else. And that seems to correlate with artificial life, evolutionary theories, biological computing. What's emerging from the merging of media?

I think it's the synergies among media that are interesting. My sense is that, in the Industrial Age, you're a bricklayer or a carpenter, whatever you are. In the Computer Age, those individual roles are less important than the idea that you're in construction. The way that McLuhan said that it's not the railroad business that's important, it's the transportation business. It's McLuhanism, anyway, if he didn't say it. If the railroads thought more about being in the transportation business and less of the railroad business, they would be better.

I think that, from the artist's point of view, whether you're a painter or a musician or whatever you are, those are Industrial Age -- or pre-Industrial Age -- roles. What's more important is what comes out of those processes, for the people who experience it, and how they experience it. So I think that's one series of issues there.

But I think that, perhaps, a greater issue at this point is, going again back to the Industrial Age, the idea of production doesn't make a lot of sense, because you used to produce a painting, produce an opera, whatever you do. And now, with this idea that the viewer, the reader, the person out there experiencing it in ways that they're not just passive, in terms of the experience. They have something to give back, and they have some way to meet it. So it's more like a conversation model of sorts, than a speech model.

Is the author, then, going away? is the author the creator? Are the roles being messed with because of this?

I think the roles are being modified. I think that there will still be authors in the sense we have authors, and I think there should be. But I think there will be other types of authoring, authoring systems, where, this conversation, for example, we're having, you're not authoring and I'm not authoring; it's a collaboration. And I think it's interesting that way. What it lacks is a prestige in this society, because neither you nor I are getting star credit and copyright, and all those sorts of things. Something else is happening between us which is another dimension. I think when you're doing an opera that way, it's more of a conversation, for example. That's one authoring idea -- the computer allows more of that to happen, and that's of interest.

Yes, and I think it's evolving, and I think part of it is the difference between machine and human is much less distinct. You know, your violin and you, people will wax romantic about the way their arm moves into the violin, the violin into them, and so forth, it's an extension of them, which is very nice. But still, the violin is wood, and you are flesh. On a physical level there are real, significant diffferences. I think with the computer, the differences are less significant, certainly in the physical sense, so other things happen as well, which are less distinct.

And I think in a certain sense the dialectical issue is perhaps the key issue, because you can be in a dilectical experience with your violin, music being produced, going back and forth. And that's interesting because it gave you a sense of kind of a discipline, of boundaries, a back-and-forth support. Now, with the computer, it's less clear who's doing what. So the dialectical relationship is different. To me, that's really the very, very interesting change, and a very frightening change. It has a fantastic potential in that change. But that's really where I think we haven't thought about it very much -- what that difference is. And to me, that may be one of the major, significant differences. Which is why it's easy to blame the computer for what's happening in society, whereas you can't blame the submachinegun, because that would be more like the violin. The computer is more integral to us, and we're not so sure of the boundaries anymore. I think, in that sense, we make some errors.

So you're saying that computers are going to start to disappear --

Or become DNA. And we start to disappear.

The premise of your other class, "The Self and the Other," seems to be that multimedia, digital works are always about the other, never about selves. What do you mean?

I think it's two things. One is, the person who produces it, people who produce it, take either dead artists, animals, encyclopedias, whatever, and then just say, "OK, I'll put it in more accessible form." There's kind of a paternalism/maternalism in this, in that they don't say who they are in that process. Artists normally -- you know, Van Gogh makes a painting, it's not like saying, "I'm going to take somebody else's colors and put them together." They become his colors; he takes responsibility for the painting. So I thought that in multimedia work, people don't take responsibility, or they hide behind it.

The whole premise of interactivity is flawed, and the user can make choices and have a sense that they're being liberated. But you yourself are pulling the strings of the puppet behind the scenes; you're not giving away what the strings are. It's like somebody looking down at a rat in a maze -- you're looking down at it, you're not part of the maze itself. So once you start to express yourself, you become part of the maze. You have to find yourself in the maze, you have to express yourself in the maze, and the Other in this case becomes the viewer, the person who comes for the experience. How do you then incorporate them into that experience with you? Which is different than the traditional arts, where you don't worry so much about them; you make your painting and you show it somewhere. You're not thinking of the collaboration of the viewer in the same way that a lot of more contemporary hypertext/hypermedia artists have to think about that. That's one of the differences.

Have you seen works that break out of that, that are starting to be more of a dialogue?

I think the big problem is that if we start to call them conversational artists, let say, just to pick some term quickly, then it might be easier. But right now the artist, for the most part, it's still pretty much her or his dominion, and the other person kind of enters for the experience. Then the issue is, "Well it's just software, if you do it differently, you're just enabling the person to do something." I think there are lots of other possibilities at this point, but it's still very early.

Jaron Lanier's "post-symbolic communication" -- do you agree with him that what we need is some kind of communication besides words? Do you think that words are too limiting, and computers can help?

I think, certainly, words are limiting, but I also think that words are also expanding. He made the point that music happens between the notes; communication happens between the words. We live in a rather concrete language system -- English -- or at least it has become a rather concrete language system. It's very direct, it's the international language of science, and so on. It doesn't have some of the nuance in direction as other languages. But I think that part of that is biased upon a lowest common denominator sense of what English is, to some extent.

What's interesting about any verbal language system is that in its limitations, what's obvious is when you exceed the limitations, you've actually said something. When you stay within the limitations, you haven't really said anything profound. You've said something practical, but not profound. That's one series of issues. I think we've stopped pushing the language, for the most part.

The screen mentality is a very good reason to stop pushing the language because verbal stuff on the screen is not as quick and attractive and seductive as image and music or sound is, for example. But yes, I think that it would be interesting to work in nonverbal systems. A lot of theater and dance are nonverbal systems. The body exists, the body is important; you can work out of your body. You're not so concerned with verbiage. But I don't see virtual reality systems as this post-symbolic language. It's such a breakthrough in so many ways, I think it's an obfuscation and a way of avoiding many of the issues. I don't feel that if I was a lobster in virtual reality, I would be a lobster in virtual reality. I would look like a lobster, I would move like a lobster, but essentially I would not be a lobster.

You know, "I am a camera." [Walt Whitman] I think it's the essence of the camera that's important. Yesterday in my class somebody was talking about the lectern and how he as a writer immediately transcribes it into words in his head as a series of descriptions. To me, it's the lectern-ness of the lectern that's interesting. And then, different ways of describing and reacting to it, you would have. But I really don't see how, in virtual reality, I would become a lobster.

What interesting multimedia works have you seen that you like?

I really see things in terms of potential, in terms of ideas at this point. There's almost nothing that I've seen that has knocked me out and made me say, "Wow, this really changed the way I see the world and myself and life."

I think that artificial life systems knock me out in terms of what they attempt to do. The Rokeby system for interactive music knocks me out because it's space becoming music, or the camera itself being expressed in terms of music, so that one medium becomes another medium easily, and so on. I think Total Recall and Running Man and Schwarzenegger films knock me out because of the sense of what the human being is becoming -- kind of a cyborg sense, which may be the real post-post modern.

A piece where you speak to a person on a screen by picking questions you want to ask, and the person responds to you, is interesting. I think those sorts of things are interesting. And in many senses I think what we're trying to do is simulate what we don't have anymore -- you know, the simulation of the simulacrum, the sense of relationship to humans, the sense of knowing people on a deep level, the sense of knowing our bodies, the sense of feeling ourselves having a dominion over ourselves and over our small territories in the world, we don't have. And so we look for that in a new space, in a virtual space.