On the memorable January 8, 1959, Fidel triumphantly entered Havana. He had won his "revolutión." I didn't get to talk to him the first time, but I did manage to have a few words with Raul Castro, Fidel's brother. Raul told me that in the city of Camaguey they would be trying and dismembering counter-revolutionaries and would I be willing to witness these events? I very politely declined such a kind invitation.
The above words of Tor Eigeland come from his latest book "Stuff Happens," in which he describes his more than 50 years of experience as a photojournalist, working all over the world. Tor has photographed for major titles such as Life Magazine and National Geographic, but most of all he has explored my favorite Middle East. This is how my acquaintance with this amazing Norwegian began.
I discovered Tor's photographs while searching for photographs from Iraq and Oman. I quickly found a contact for Tor and asked him about the possibility of purchasing his latest publication, complete with autograph. A week later I took the sizable book out of the mailbox. After reading the first chapter, I sank into the reading completely....
"Stuff Happens" is incredibly engaging. Written in a rich, journalistic style, it is somewhat reminiscent of the reportages of Ryszard Kapuscinski. This is not surprising, since both men worked in the same times and visited the same parts of the world. Today, as I write these words, Tor is already 91 years old and spends his time archiving his own photos and writing down his memories. He began his work as a photographer right after World War II, and did his last assignment for the press in 2015 in Tangier, Morocco, at the age of 84! He had so many adventures that he could bestow them on more than one human life. But the same can be told about Kapuscinski.
Tor's adventures also fascinate me for another reason - they are a sentimental journey to the times, that I call the "golden days" for press or travel photography. Back then, thoroughbred photographers had the time and resources to create complex stories that were later read many times in opinion magazines. Tor Eigeland worked at a time when he was free to photograph a spontaneously smiling Husain bin Talal - King of Jordan. Today, the chance of such a session would be dramatically small, if possible at all, given the current procedures, armies of lawyers and pervasive distrust.
Reading his book made me reflect on contemporary photography, its functioning in the media and the condition of photographers themselves, in a world of quick information, a flurry of facts or a permanent decline in quality, in an endless race against time and speed of transmission.
How do you evaluate the difference of working in press photography before the internet era and now?
- The biggest difference is that technology and the Internet have greatly accelerated everything in just a few years. We take the instant transmission of photos and text for granted. As a photojournalist since the 1960s, I remember well the days when I would send packages of undeveloped rolls of film with handwritten captions to editors around the world. DHL and FedEx were crucial to my international work, sometimes even the regular postal system. Then came digital cameras and the Internet, changing everything and making it necessary to spend much more time at the computer. Newspapers were the first to take advantage of the technology, as they require quick publication of articles, and the quality of photos was less important. The color magazine I worked with had to wait longer until digital photography improved. Online media didn't exist at all until relatively recently, but it certainly didn't kill print media as some predicted.I consider myself lucky that most of my career was a time when things were slower. Social media is also a very different world, and while it is necessary - over time you feel the burnout. It will be interesting to see where it goes next.
Do you have an impression that the quality and scrupulousness of modern internet media are much worse than it was years ago?
In my opinion, as a follower of world news, one has to be very careful with internet information and only choose reliable media sources. There is so much 'news' out there now, and we have all become wary of how images can be manipulated to distort facts. Fake news is another serious problem and it certainly is worrying that so many young adults get their information from unreliable sources such as Facebook and TikTok. Propaganda is flooding cyber space. Media now relies to a certain extent on 'citizen journalists' with a mobile phone; someone there, on the spot, to cover a news story as it unfolds, probably with a much greater understanding of the local language and culture than a journalist who might fly in from elsewhere. Professional, trustworthy news media are now more important than ever.
There is something else special about his photos - the absence of the ubiquitous plastic, garbage, plastic bags and logos of globalized products that are flooding the world these days. Looking at the photo of the Pyramid of Cheops in Egypt, I especially noticed the lack of traces of mass tourism, buses with tourists going one after another, stopping mainly next to stalls with Chinese plastic trash. This is what I really envy the photographers working in the Middle East a few decades before me. I still have before my eyes the Syrian interior or the bazaar in Sudan's Omdurman swamped with plastic.
One of his projects Tor considers particularly important. It's a story about the Marsh Arabs of southern Iraq. This is how he recalls the reportage:
"Although I didn't realise at the time, history has proven that my Marsh Arab assignment in Iraq in 1967 for a Time-Life book titled The Cradle of Civilization has turned out to be of the most value. It was a very special trip for me. I was transported back in time to a totally different world where all aspects of life took place, as they had for thousands of years, on the water and among the marshes. It was due to the draining and destruction of this region by Saddam Hussein that made my record of their world, some 25 years earlier, so important. An account of my trip is in my latest book but I produced a separate book, a photo essay, in 2014 titled When All the Lands Were Sea with many more photos of my time with the Marsh Arabs. My images have become of anthropological and historical interest in, what many call, a lost civilization."
This is the first article and publication about Tor Eigeland in Polish, which made the hero of this story very happy. For those who would like to learn more about how photojournalists worked in the heyday of traditional media, I refer you to the website -. www.toreigeland.com.
I also highly recommend his latest book "Stuff Happens. The Far from Humdrum Life of a Photojournalist"..
Poznan, August 13, 2022
