The first film in Marc Karlin’s four-part series on the Nicaraguan revolution that brought down President Somoza’s regime in 1979, Voyages is composed of five tracking shots, gliding over blown-up photographs that Susan Meiselas took during the insurrection. The film takes the form of an imagined correspondence, which interrogates the responsibilities of the war photographer, the line between observer and participant, and the political significance of the photographic image. “Photographs are in a way far ahead of our ability to deal with them - we have not yet found a way of dealing, living with them. We have appropriated them in a channel - ‘language’, ‘papers’, ‘magazines’, ‘books’ - all of which seem the only tools by which we can give them an earthbound gravity. We brush past them, flick them, demand of them things they cannot give... Liberate photographs from its priests and jujumen - including myself. We do not need interpreters. We need looks - and thus the task is up to the photographer to renew his or her contract i.e. what can photographs and their arrangement do to defy the prison house interpretation à la John Berger - and make us think of ourselves in relationship to Nicaragua.” (MK)
