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.

There was a short but provactive post recently on Street Reverb:

“Candid street photography and military aerial reconnaissance may seem to have little in common, but they’re both examples of how the camera has made us more distant from each other and from the world around us, according to Sandra Phillips of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, who is the exhibition’s curator.”

If you’re in London between now and October 3rd be sure to check out Tate Modern’s Exposed – Voyeurism, Surveillance and the Camera. I’m not sure many street photographers would agree with the quote above. I know many people that would maintain that working on the street brings them closer to the world around them.

via New Scientist: How the camera has made us all voyeurs | Street Reverb Magazine.

I think it would be equally incorrect to say either that photographing on the street brings one closer to the world or distances one from the world.

What the introduction of a camera into any situation does do is to place something between the photographer and the subject. The question is, what is the nature of that something. Is it a wall or a window or a door, or something else entirely?

In some of my work, I have made reference to a line from Simone Weil — “every separation is a connection.” That part of Weil’s theology is to do with how she reconciles her spirituality with the manifest absence of god from the realm of human affairs, and more personally, it is to do with how she understands the physical and psychological suffering she experienced in life. Absence or distance is not simply a negation of presence or immediacy; it establishes a relationship between the separated parties, and that relationship must be considered as such.

While I don’t share Weil’s religious outlook, I think this particular observation is richly applicable to many other contexts, and particularly to relationships between human beings. If we sit down at a table, does the table separate us or bring us together? It has the power to do either, or both simultaneously. A camera has the same power.

Unless the subject flees, the camera does not introduce distance between myself and the subject. What it does is to record the distance that already existed and to infuse that distance with meaning. That meaning is not predefined merely by the fact that it comes by way of the camera; its content depends on the intent with which I wield the camera and also on the way in which the subject and, later, viewers perceive that intent. It may make friends and allies, or it may make enemies and victims, and in many cases it may be a non-trivial task to ascertain which is the case.

I was stunned to read in a comment to my last column that, “…photographers who hand their images to someone else for printing are abdicating part of their artistic responsibility.” Oh man, I can’t let something that wrong pass*….

Failing the absolutism test is sufficient reason to damn it, as I’ve already argued in 2.5 columns. But worse, I think it’s specifically bad advice. Printing takes a lot of time, money, and energy. No photographer is given an unlimited supply of any of those. Resources you devote to printing are ones you cannot devote to making more photographs, making more timely photographs (which may matter), learning and practicing how to make better photographs (which definitely matters), even traveling to more interesting locales to make photographs (travel being another one of those things that consumes time, money, and energy).

The Online Photographer: Do ‘Real’ Photographers Print?

Ctein makes a really good point here. It’s a subject I’ve been thinking about a lot more as I’ve spent more and more time in the darkroom printing. (Note: I’m not doing anything unusual or interesting in that department — just standard black and white.)

Printing is a lot of fun, and I greatly enjoy doing it. And it’s also, at times, been a source of incredible frustration for me when I hit a technical wall with a particular negative or a particular technique…and in both cases, I need to occasionally remind myself that I don’t want to be a great printer who occasionally makes photographs; I want to be a photographer who sometimes prints his work.

This is also why I have avoided — like the plague — getting into doing my own prints from digital sources. The cost in time and money is simply not worth it to me. That may change at some point, of course, but for now, I think it’s a wise decision.