In her final publication before her death, Susan Sontag revisited her earlier (1973) deeply observant, but darkly negative, stance on photography, this time locating some virtues in the medium. At one point in Regarding the Pain of Others, when commenting on the relationship between photographs and meaning, she states that photographs “are not much help if the task is to understand. Narratives can make us understand. Photographs do something else: they haunt us” (Sontag 2003: 89). While she is referring here in particular to harrowing photographs of an atrocity type, all sorts of photographs can have this haunting quality. If a photograph challenges a spectator’s worldview, and a resolution is not ready to hand, the picture can linger in the mind like a ghost, exhibiting features similar to trauma. By watching a photograph, the action I focus on in the exhibit Watch This Space,” the haunting aspect of a photograph can be confronted. In making her claim, Sontag accepted that photographs are hollow objects. It is only through the attribution of meaning that they become anything other than an apparition. But this idea of photographs haunting, of photographs not having an inherent meaning, goes against the grain of the everyday encounters people have with photographs.[1] In fact, when coming across photographs, viewers would be more apt to say that they locate meaning in them rather immediately. The saying, “A photographs can speak a thousand words” suggests that photographs absolutely have meaning, that it comes straight out of the pictures, that it is built-in, and what’s more, that meaning emits itself from the picture. An anthropologist point out how that saying gestures toward the process of photographic meaning making that is so seamlessly connected to human predilections for cultural inscription, for finding meaning in the things that populate our world, that we don’t even realize we are turning something that is essentially just a thing, into something meaningful in our lives.
Sontag, in attributing a haunting quality to photographs, references a rich intellectual field on audience reception and media theory. Also, she can only make her claim by acknowledging photography as an inherently social phenomenon. Media technology, practices, engagements are human creations and thus shaped and infused from their very foundations with ideas, ideals, judgments, beliefs, and philosophies of their creators. The meaning of a photograph is not inherent in the picture. Rather, it is created through the cultural, social, political; through frameworks of understanding, that are shared and exchanged across space and time…and that are challenged and disrupted too (Hall 1980). From the moment we are born we are exposed to these frameworks, we are enculturated, to accept them with little or no reflection. Photographs (one medium among many) are deeply imbedded in this process. And by extension—in a dialectical relationship—culture informs the creation and mobilization of photography. Consequently, photographs gain meaning through use: circulated or stored for family use, printed in newspapers or magazines, posted on blogs, billboards or t-shirts. The captions below them or the texts that surround them, the words associated with them, whether spoken, written or thought, are the ways in which meaning is ascribed to photographs. All too often, in the practice of using photographs, pictures tell only a very narrow and superficial story; or more precisely, they are mobilized to tell only a stunted tale. In order to catch people’s attention, or to send a quick message, photographers (and art directors, etc.) use stereotypes, metaphors and symbols to generate meaning. This visual shorthand is intimately connected to culture, to shared frameworks of understanding. In many instances, that visual language, those tropes and conventions stretch far back in the history of western civilization. Photography is a medium that did not appear out of nowhere. It developed out of a long history of western religious iconography and artistic genres that have been endlessly reproduced and adapted with different media, for instance the recognizable Pieta (Madonna and child imagery), or Laocoön Group. Over the last 150+ years, along with the introduction of photography, the narrowing of the field of visual language/shorthand represents a distilling or amplification of certain ideas and beliefs that coincide with the changing political, economic and ideological landscape.[2] For instance, there is a narrowing of visual referencing, with photographs now referring to other photographs rather than to more ancient visual representations. Other tropes have come to replace older ones, for instance the Iwo Jima Flag Raising or Robert Capa photographs.[3] All too often the result of combining photographs with a limited set of cultural inscriptions is misrepresentations and misconceptions. These misrepresentations and misconceptions are often tied to lingering legacies of colonialism, imperialism, racism, and age, gender and class discriminations. In the case of Africa, western representations tend to associate the continent of dependence, infantilism, corruption and endemic violence. Within recent scholarship on histories of photography, Africa unlike other continents, has been overrepresented in humanitarian, anthropological/science, and tropical/infectious disease medicine and it is often treated as a unified whole unlike other countries or continents). Africa has been centrally featured as a curiosity for at least the past 200 years by dominant world powers (Europe & North America). The photographs that make up the Watch this space exhibit are unconventional photographs from Rwanda, and—in response to homogenizing representations of the continent—they are unconventional photographs of Africa more generally. For a large proportion of people in the world who have grown accustomed to images of ‘Africa the violent,’ ‘Africa the starving,’ ‘Africa the corrupt or diseased,’ seeing these photographs would challenge their worldview. These photographs, if encountered elsewhere with no sources of understanding, might be haunting. This is where watching a photograph becomes most useful. Let me explain this action, which began as an experience, by relating my own encounter or, more precisely, my realization of it. I am pretty sure I have always been watching pictures. I was always drawn to the illustrations and images in books from the time I was a child. My imagination would make the pictures come alive in my mind as stories were being read to me, and later as I read on my own. As I got older and became more interested in world events, it was still trough the photographs that my interest in things beyond my front door was peaked. Later, during art history lessons in CEGEP, I got a much deeper appreciation of the way in which images were infused with cultural meaning. How painters, printmakers or sculptors made images with internal referents, cultural codes, sometimes even personal inside jokes. These lessons also exposed how meanings change over time, as cultures and societies change. Ancient paintings, prints, sculpture, even architecture thus become points of entry into learning about the culture and politics of a place or time. In his text The Order of Things, Michel Foucault (1970) adeptly explores this in his reading of Diego Velazques’ 1656 painting Las Menisas. He take his analysis beyond visual arts, conducting a deep archeology of the connection between the eye, the mind, and the meaning humans make of their world through our processes of classifying and compartmentalizing along various sociopolitical and philosophical lines. It is this deep-rooted and intensely intimate connection between dominant ideas, beliefs, and accepted interpretations of the world that get infused in the meaning of visual creations (including performances). Photography comes out of earlier visual traditions. In fact, early photographers expressly adapted photography to fit the flexibility and customization of pre-existing (and then co-existing) visual media, particularly painting styles. Building from thinkers such as Foucault, MTJ Mitchell refers to visual images as “metapictures” (2005; 1995). This concept makes plain that ideas, thoughts, the words used (written, spoken or thought) to make sense of pictures, are in a dialectical relationship, and are equally influenced and shaped by our cultural and social surroundings. Ariella Azoulay is a visual theorist who has also long been watching photographs. According to Azoulay: “The verb ‘to watch’ is usually used for regarding phenomena or moving pictures. It entails dimensions of time and movement that need to be reinscribed in the interpretation of the still photographic image (2008:14).” With the reinscription of time and movement, the pictures can be placed into their historical moments; the events from them can be traced from then to now. In so doing, the trajectory and impact of the attendant socio-cultural and material phenomenon that come to shape the meanings of the pictures come to the fore. She goes on to say that this is a civic skill, a skill she presents with urgency as she is concerned with ongoing human suffering through state sponsored regimes of violence on the part of the state of Israel. In the case of photographs encounter in the foreign press, the skill of watching photographs can also be urgent. It can impact political discourses that will have material consequences on all those associated with the image and the topic, take, for example, recent images of migrants and refugees. The urgency about photographs from Rwanda in Watch This Space that were taken last year at this time, is overdue: it is about changing decades (if not 150+ years) of superficial readings, misinterpretations of Africa in general and this tiny country in its heart. In recognizing their ability to haunt (disrupt worldviews), to be manufactured products of culture, and to be watched instead of seen, scanned, or passed-over, photographs become inherently objects to think with. It takes a different approach to encounters with photographs—this active watching—for reaching meanings that are much deeper than the simple messages they are predominantly mobilized to represent. I invite you now to look at the photographs on display with the accompanying text panels in order to Watch This Space. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT This project was inspired through my years of continuously growing interest in theories of photography, visual culture and social-political life. I want to thank my friends and family for supporting the development of this exhibition. Thank you to AranAwards for facilitating the printing of the photographs. And special thank you to HPL, and Paul Lisson, for providing me with the opportunity to explore these ideas about photography. www.aranawards.com, Email: [email protected], Telephone: 1-877-228-5588, Local Telephone: 905-388-8679 WORKS CITED Azoulay, A. (2008). The Civil Contract of Photography. Zone. Foucault, M. (1994 [1970]). The Order of Things. Vintage Books. Hall, S. (1993). Encoding/Decoding. In S. During (Ed.), The Cultural Studies Reader. London: Routledge. Mitchell, W. J. T. (1995). Metapictures. In Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sontag, S. (1977). On Photography. Picador. Sontag, S. (2003). Regarding the Pain of Others. Picador. ENDNOTES [1] Recent estimates range around 15,000 images a day, a large proportion of them being photographs. [2] One that is of extremes: extreme capitalism, extreme individualism, extreme polarization of beliefs, particularly the belief that a small number of individuals are entitled to wield great powers over people (and this is executed through religious or commercial means)= late capitalism…which is a term I like because it indicates that it is not the natural order of the world, and that it is not the only system humans have lived under, and won’t be the last one. [3] Despite what some may say, digital photography and so-called new media are not revolutionary, and most certainly have not been revolutionizing.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Blogroll...Good sites....Categories
All
Archives
November 2023
|