notes.husk.org/likes images.

THE (UN)DAILY PIC is Alex Webb’s 1979 photo of “Mexicans arrested while trying to cross the border to the United States. San Ysidro, California,” from The Hazlitt Collection currently on view at the Florida Museum of Photographic Arts in Tampa.

The image could so easily have been taken any day this year—how heartbreaking to think that nothing has really improved in almost 50 years. The very fact that desperate people feel the need to cross a dangerous border points to some kind of larger, world-wide systemic injustice that needs correction—as almost never seems to be pointed out even in so-called “liberal” publications.

But looking at this image, I’m reminded of how photojournalism of that era was always trying to rival the stylish effects of composition and color typical of modern “fine art.”

I’m not sure the situation has changed that much, except that the “documentary turn” in (post)modern fine art has freed photojournalism to go back to its earliest, ostensional model. “Just the facts, ma'am,” is as stylish a position as one could hope for, in the 21st century.

But I’m actually not sure it does a better job of communicating the facts than the earlier model did.