Temporary Discomfort:
the photos of Jules Spinatsch

essay by Martin Jaeggi

Back in the age of the cold war, when the world still seemed simple and politics were an apocalyptic fight of good versus evil, photographers who wanted to show historical reality often understood themselves as heroic enlighteners in the service of humanism and considered their camera a weapon in the fight at the front. Their images showed grave statesmen, rugged freedom fighters, callous mass murderers, powerless victims, silently suffering masses — straightforward and memorable images, political icons that provoked horror or admiration, inciting the viewer to take sides and to act.

Since the end of the cold war, however, the world has become more complex and entangled. Politics and its images no longer offer a distinct and clear-cut overview like they used to. Politicians know about the power of images and manipulate them cleverly or try to suppress them, knowing that an unfavorable image may sway public opinion.

Photographers have become cameramen for cleverly staged events, and politics have turned into a war of images. Political and economic developments, on the other hand, no longer follow simple formulas; ideological master narratives and their handy visual cliches no longer seem convincing. Spellbound and often helpless we follow political and economic developments as if they were unpredictable natural catastrophes, vaguely explaining them as effects of "globalization" without really knowing what this means nor what it will bring about in the future.

But how can a photographer show historical reality under these increasingly difficult circumstances? Jules Spinatsch's work Temporary Discomfort gives one possible answer. Since the WTO summit in Seattle in 1999, a colorfully diverse alliance of anti-globalization activists has organized demonstrations at summits of the WTO, the IMF, and the WEF, that ended up in riots with an almost ritual certainty.

The media images of these conferences and riots are familiar and predictable. They continue the iconography of protest that has evolved since the Vietnam war and the civil unrest of the late 60s, or they show the staple imagery of statesmanship that has remained the same ever since the inter-war period and the end of WW II. We merely get to see washed-out copies of images we're always and already familiar with, stimuli for Pavlovian dogs.

Jules Spinatsch's photographs also talk about these events. But instead of street fighting and handshakes, he shows winter nights in Davos, complete with floodlighted barbed-wire labyrinths.He shows Genova, a fortress empty as the Mediterranean noonday sky. We see freight containers, symbols for world trade, that are used as barricades against its foes. He invites us to scrutinize the streets in New York at night: road blocks, tents, and mobile transmission units: that seem surreally empty. He photographs the sleepy waking of the security guards. Spinatsch examines the waiting for the big event that appears as meticulously planned, down to the last detail.

Whatever will happen, is already inscribed in its security architecture. The choreography of power and resistance is laid out right from the beginning. It's a titillating and violent ritualistic clash, a bullfight for the age of CNN: intense, emotional, and almost completely predictable. The images that we will see tomorrow have already been determined today. Security measures in the age of total media are not least devices to create or prevent images as the image has become a hazard in the manipulation of public opinion.

Jules Spinatsch creates landscapes that could serve as the antithesis to Romantic tradition of this genre. He shows landscapes and citiscapes as they appear under cold, strategic gaze of security planners — a terrain where every movement must be controlled and contained. Instead of mountaintops glowing in the evening sun and the romance of the asphalt jungle, we see blocked inroads and cut-off escape routes, a world that could only be described in military prose. Spinatsch mimicries the gaze of power, power as a gaze that sees the world only as a security hazard to be contained. At the heart of the security architecture that Spinatsch shows us, we find a hermetically sealed vacuum in which politicians and managers meet to organize world trade in the name of liberal democracy, while they smile at TV cameras, remote and untouchable. The mobile transmission units in the photographs remind us that the citizen, the citoyen, has become a television viewer, and that the agora has evaporated in virtual flickering.

Spinatsch's images are a subdued manifesto against the tradition of heroic photojournalism that I mentioned in the beginning. Spinatsch does not want to be hero. He rather is a spy behind the enemy lines. He cunningly combines the condensed and motionless photographs with video images as if to remind us with this contrast that, after all, he shows us images, but that there is a reality behind the images that the viewer has to piece together.

Spinatsch's anti-heroic stance also colors his other work. But maybe only a clever anti-strategist can show the cold and imperious glance of power so clearly and hauntingly.

Text © 2004 Martin Jaeggi. Photos © 2001-2003 Jules Spinatsch.