It’s a privilege to see how we all behave
Welcome to the 61th edition of this newsletter!
With each email I'm sharing material that has inspired me recently. I'm hoping it will inspire you, too. If you want to support my work, you can sign up for my Patreon. This will get you access to exclusive material every week.
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I love a good piece of writing, even if it centers on something that I couldn't care less about. In that sense, writing isn't any different than taking pictures: get me interested in something I don't know anything about, something I hadn't considered before, and we're in business.
(Of course, the problem with very good writing is that it reminds me of my own deficiencies as a writer. Alas...)
Here's Andrew O'Hagan writing about The Death Spectacle: not the fact that (as you might or might not have heard) the British Queen died but the country going through the ritual of dealing with the funeral, all the while a clearly emotionally stunted man is now the new King. At the BBC, they have special correspondents for the royal family, and this is their time to shine. O'Hagan's is having none of the whole spectacle:
Modern journalism loves the idea that a nation has a heart and that a heart can break, as if there were a requirement to confect a sort of togetherness out of national torpor, the quivering lip having long since replaced the stiff upper one as a symbol of our essential nature.
Meanwhile, Alice Zoo started writing on Substack. Her first piece centers on portraits, more specifically on a defense of portraits (so I figured I might as well share one the portraits I took above). I was very surprised by the beginning. Speaking about Vanessa Winship's latest book, she notes that "Winship told me that her decision to exclude portraits was the direct result of a contemporary anxiety in the photography industry about the ethical status of portraiture." Say what? If there is one photographer I could think of who should be the absolutely last person to worry about this, it would be Vanessa Winship. Her work is infused with a sensitivity that all the rest of us can only dream of.
"This discourse — which is not new, but which has been amplified by social media and the proliferation of university photography courses," Zoo writes, "centres around questions like: what do photographers owe the subjects of their pictures? Can a person meaningfully consent to the use of their image, not knowing exactly how, and how far, that image might be transmitted? To what extent is portraiture out-and-out exploitation?" This might not surprise you: I'm very much in favour of asking and discussing these questions.
I'm also thinking that avoiding portraiture in order not even to get drawn into such a discussion is not a very good idea for a photographer. Wielding a camera comes with a privilege, and you need to be prepared to get challenged. That said, I do think that the very first person who is doing the challenging has to be you, the photographer. Maybe it's the critic in me writing this (or the educator), but understanding one's own work and ideas and motivations is absolutely essential for a photographer.
Zoo dives into a lot more details in her piece. There are a few things that I don't agree with, in particular concerning Robert Bergman's photographs. The aesthetic response to these pictures that is outlined by Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa is fine. But such a response does not actually exclude feeling conflicted by the work at the same time. I think we have got much too used to the idea that things can only be this or that, leading us to be confused when things are this and that at the same time.
Especially when it comes to class (the economy of things: the fact that some people are a lot less unfortunate), the larger world of photography would prefer to pretend that the topic either doesn't exist or that you can explain it away with elegant verbiage. You can't.
Discussions around portraiture must not remain photographic abstractions. That's too convenient. That's too insistent on the supposed purity of the medium, on its innocence (despite its horrible history). Photographs are taken from the world, and discussions around them ought to incorporate that world's real concerns as well -- even if that means that we, as photographers, have to challenge ourselves or get challenged by others.
Perhaps not unrelated to the above, here's an article I came across some time ago that centers on a TikTok video: "The video shows TikTok creator Harrison Pawluk approaching the woman, Maree, in a public shopping centre. He asked her to hold a bouquet of flowers while he put on a jacket. Before Maree could return the bouquet, Pawluk wished her a good day and walked away. Maree’s shocked reaction was caught on camera." This sounds innocent enough, doesn't it? Maybe you might even think this is the kind of random act of kindness that makes our lives better.
However, that's not how the recipient of the flowers saw this: "He interrupted my quiet time, filmed and uploaded a video without my consent, turning it into something it wasn’t … I feel he is making quite a lot of money through it. It’s the patronising assumption that … older women will be thrilled by some random stranger giving them flowers."
Obviously, a TikTok video isn't the same as photographs produced by an artist. But the two different situations are not that dissimilar at all. The idea that photographing a stranger ennobles them contains the same seeds of being patronising as a random act of kindness produced for effect (namely for a video shared on a very popular social-media account).
Pawluk might have held the sincere belief that he was performing a random act of kindness while he was producing content for his account. These two things are not mutually exclusive -- even if it is convenient to insist it can only be one, and not the other. I see this approach a lot when people discuss social media: well, you're filming yourself so what you're doing is fake (made for effect). But I do think that's too convenient an approach (even if obviously it might be correct in some cases). The real discussion should be around the assumption that the recipient of the flowers would feel the same.
In the same fashion, a portrait of a person can be visually arresting, leading us to all kinds of feelings and realizations concerning another person, while also taking advantage of the person at the same time. If anything, this terrible problem sits at the core of photography. But that's what makes photography so interesting: when you see someone navigating it, you learn a lot about the real core of an artist.
With that I'm going to conclude for today. There is a major grant application to be submitted.
Until next time and as always thank you for reading!
-- Jörg