I Can See it For You Wholesale

I sincerely believe that a subjective experience can be understood by others; and it would give me no pleasure to announce that the black problem is mine alone and that it is up to me to study it. But it does seem to me that M. Mannoni has not tried to feel himself into the despair of the man of color confronting the white man. In this work I have made it a point to convey the misery of the black man. Physically and affectively. I have not wished to be objective. Besides, that would be dishonest: It is not possible for me to be objective.

– Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 86 (My emphasis)

I think that everyone who does documentary photography (or its cousins), and anyone who views such photography, should be familiar with this passage.

Set aside the specific context (racism and colonialism) and consider the principle: I sincerely believe that a subjective experience can be understood by others…But it does seem to me that M. Mannoni has not tried to feel himself into the despair…

When dealing with any attempt, in any medium, of one person to authoritatively represent another person’s experience to a third party, there are always two temptations: on the one hand, to despair of the possibility of anyone having insight into experiences they do not share, and privileging primary experience and group membership above all else, and on the other hand, to avoid ever acknowledging that there may be a problem with allowing someone who is outside a problem to form our understanding of it. There is also a third temptation that should be mentioned: the temptation to retreat away from experience into the realm of “objective” facts.

These three temptations are major barriers to useful communication on subjects like race, class, gender, and sexuality, but they also rear their heads in many other areas.

The reason these temptations exist is that all of them free us from the burden of having to exercise personal judgment in evaluating the reliability of another person’s account of a given situation. Judgment is not a problem that can be referred to the realm of facts, or to automatic principles of exclusion or inclusion, and it is also not something that can be replaced with an appeal to credentials granted by some authorizing institution.

We have to actually decide whether we believe in someone’s sincerity, their insight, and their eloquence — or whether we think they fall short in some or all of those areas. That judgment is inescapably subjective, but it is not merely a matter of opinion, and it cannot be ignored or set aside without crippling our ability to deal with realities.

This is a terrifying realization for a lot of folks — myself included. It frightens us because we know that our judgment is not 100% reliable, especially when operating on limited information, as is usually the case when we’re applying it to, say, a photo essay or a book. And given that fact, we can be absolutely certain that some of the time, we are going to be seriously wrong. However, that fact is by no means adequate justification for giving in to one of the three temptations enumerated above.

One of the perennial questions in photography is how to explain the relationship between a photograph and the world — or between the photograph and some specific part of the world (the subject). It is understood that the photograph is in some respect like a copy but is not actually a copy as such; no photograph is either as pure or as boring as a perfect copy would be.

Here’s my suggestion, for today anyway, for how to explain the difference:

To make a photograph is not to copy the world, but to abridge it, or to edit it. We read the world, and when we achieve a moment of recognition in response to some part of the world, we use the camera to excerpt it, to underline it — or to angrily strike it through.

Unfortunately, these marks are relatively unlikely to be incorporated into a new draft of the manuscript, so the photographer is much more like a critic marking up a review copy — or a reader making private notes for himself — than like an editor working in collaboration with the author to refine the work itself.

Of course, that proposed metaphor only covers certain kinds of photography — straight photography, more or less, as opposed to constructed photographs and photographs which are intended to be statements about photography…

I’m going to plagiarize myself here. This is reposted from the body of a reply I made to a comment over at 1/125.

In theory, I respect the principle that an image should stand on its own, without a title or a caption or any information at all — just itself.

In practice, however, I almost always associate the lack of caption with “picture puzzles” and “fuzzygrams” — photographs that are basically about hiding something from the viewer and daring them to figure it out. If I show someone a photograph, I usually don’t want them wondering what it is, or where it is, or whether I shot it on film or digital, or analyzing the lighting — all the things I do when I look at an image that doesn’t have any information associated with it. That wondering gets in the way of just looking, and just looking is what I want the viewer to be able to do.

In other words, even though putting in a bunch of data makes for visual clutter and complications, it (in my experience as a viewer) makes the experience of seeing the photograph simpler.