In preparation for a discussion with a charity I have been working with, I compiled a small selection of notes gathered since 2015. It might be quite useful to have them here too.
Dana Lixemberg – Won Deutsche award but received criticism for her ‘white gaze’ and for perpetuating tropes, and the competition itself was criticized. Notes and a quote from my blog included below :
“A blog post for online magazine titled, The Telling of Black Stories: The Importance of Controlling Our Own Narratives (2017) echoes concerns I recently discussed with a friend who faces a debilitating illness and her own mortality. Removing control from someone (anyone) and assuming one has the right to create their narrative through a lens that is invariably imbued with ‘otherness’ risks diminishing protagonists and places narrators in a position of assumed power. With reference to Imperial Court, Ginacarlo Valentine says, “The project also adds to the larger problem of Black exploitation. In some of the videos that capture the everyday lives of the housing project’s residents, there is a slimy and uncomfortable feeling of voyeurism. The imagery often feels distant, more like surveillance than genuine interaction, as if Blackness is on display; as if to say, “look at how they live” or “they’re just like you and me.”” (Valentine, 2017)
Valentine, G. 2017. The telling of Black Stories: The Importance of Our Own Narratives Available at : https://zine.philaprint.com/2017/05/18/the-telling-of-black-stories-the-importance-of-black-people-controlling-our-own-narratives/ [Accessed 19/05/2017]
https://ocasjf.wordpress.com/2017/05/19/reflection-thoughts-about-imperial-court/
Tobias Zielony
Nominated for the same award (different year) – Did not receive the same criticism, perhaps because his work attempts to do things differently,
I wrote the following after hearing him speak at The Photographer’s Gallery in 2016
“Both speakers were concerned about stepping back from the usual and predictable view, and one which I am guilty of, that the refugees we see in the press are ‘victims’. Yes, they are victims in one sense of course, and often in order to receive support they need to allow themselves to be cast in the role of victim when arriving in European countries, as suggested by Sriskandarajah. But it’s too easy for us to romantacise our perception, believing the people portrayed by media are defenseless, weak souls, in need if our ‘superior’ western help. That way of viewing the situation feeds into an assumption that the people coming here will be a burden on an already overstretched system. When in fact, often the people who have escaped dangerous and oppressive regimes are doing so because they are resourceful, strong, expressive individuals forced to leave their homes because they questioned the status quo, stood up for themselves and refused to be victims, and at enormous risk. Additionally, they may have gone to great lengths to escape bad situations and travelled under precarious circumstances, and it might be that such individuals are really the kind of people who have much to offer any community they arrive in. I really thought that that narrative turned the one we usually succumb to on its head and was very interested in it, especially when thinking about the work I started in Calais but have left for a while, not really knowing where best to go with it. [or if to at all]”
https://www.berlinartlink.com/2018/04/04/tobias-zielony/
Sarah Stacke
Recommended by John Edwin Mason as someone positive to consider
Some useful reading:
Re Taylor Wessing portrait prize: NB https://hyperallergic.com/466560/discerning-photographys-white-gaze/
“John Edwin Mason, a professor of African history and the history of photography with and expertise in the legacy of Gordon Parks, took to Twitter to express the ways the prize, and the demographics of its winners, speak to photography’s greater shortcomings.
“So, let me get this straight … ” he wrote. “All four prize winners in this year’s Taylor Wessing competition are portraits of black or brown people made by white photographers. That’s fucked up.” (2018)
Re ethics and photography:
“The risk here is that photographers, often inexperienced, working solo, disconnected from experienced editors, operating often on their own dime, or on a grant with no ethical oversight, are willing to cross ethical lines in order to make a name for themselves, or do whatever it takes because they feel that their story is so crucially important, and the ends justify the means. Or they end up doing this mishmash of work—part journalism and part something else—yet want the work to live on all platforms, even though the rules of those platforms vary.” (2017)
Re ‘white gaze’
From Daniel C Blight – http://www.1000wordsmag.com/michelle-dizon-viet-le/?fbclid=IwAR3SPYmMPUrVlatT0S9QlICk1g_LvSWsnUYS9KC_Mau5FhFNMyKgOX85O-U
“Here, whiteness takes power as a form of European knowledge, the all-seeing and knowing eye of white sight manifest in the gestures of the white body and the utterances of the white mind. Here the white gaze offers – incognizantly, tediously, repetitively – its intellectual fruits to people of colour on their own land. In a different form of education-as-violence than the colonist Sir Thomas Dale promoted when starting a college along the Powhatan River to ‘educate the natives’ in early 17th century British America, this anonymous white woman professes her ‘unsurpassable’ knowledge to those she deems to be below her cultural imperialism. Criticised directly in Lê and Dizon’s image/poem intersection, the elite British university system is the network of institutions that socialised and educated elites who paved the way for the formation of the earliest inventors of whiteness – a group of governing individuals named the House of Burgesses (a word which is aptly derived from ‘bourgeois’) who, in 1619, forced the first group of twenty African slaves into servitude in the British colony of Jamestown, Virginia.
Across multiple images and texts, and spanning various periods of colonial rule by different nations, Lê and Dizon’s White Gaze reveals page-by-page the way in which those socialised white often unconsciously experience – and therefore gaze upon – the world around us. Named after both a philosophical theory and the practice of one of the most violent forms of seeing, this book stands as a potent visual and poetic affront to whiteness.
Central to the idea of the gaze is the notion of desire. ‘In the beginning… desire is always competitive,’ writes Peter Wollen in his essay On Gaze Theory, which traces the genealogy of human desire in the form of looking and wanting from G.W.F. Hegel to Laura Mulvey. The desire of one human portends to the desire of another: I may want what you desire, I may shadow or mimic your desires, and it’s in this kind of relationship that human history might be thought as the ‘history of desired desires’, remarked Alexandre Kojève in a 1947 lecture on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. In this way, you and I are constituted as truly human only when we focus our desire on the desire of an “other”, and, that in this instance, according to Wollen in his reading of Kojève, becoming human is somehow about being self-consciously in competition with an “other” via the gaze as a form of shared desire (because I desire what you desire above all else). I want not exactly what you want, but more precisely I yearn to be within the throes of that which you desire.”
How Not To Photograph The Rohingya Genocide In The Making…
https://www.suchitravijayan.com/archives/984
“Yesterday Guardian Published its photo-essay “Documenting the Rohingya refugee crisis – in pictures.” There is so much wrong with these images — especially its aesthetics. These images evoke the past, but not the urgency of the present or its politics, and bear an uncanny resemblance to Salgado’s project on human migration. Almost 30 years after the pictures of cold war’s proxy wars, genocides and massacres caused by imperial exercises abroad, we are still relying on the visual language alien to the crimes these people have endured and the genocide in the making to tell its story.
The first thing that hits you is the highly texturised nature of the images, their artificial grain, and human pain captured and rendered in high definition. The pain is photographed in all its flamboyance, that it is almost kitsch in its sensibilities. The aesthetics here completely reduces the politics of Rohingya exodus to “captivating” theatre.” (2017)
Finally – David Lammy posted this clip after trying to get his point across to Comic Relief and it’s worth watching. The critical thing about this is that there is a conversation being had.
I should have added Ariella Azoulay’s recent blog posts which I’ve discussed at length here and in my DI&C A3 assignment (essay). But I think this gives enough for the group to be along with.
Added 3/3/2019
My eleven-year-old son and I were looking through previous Taylor Wessing NPG Mags. We noted how the covers of the last three years’ magazines were pictures of people with black skin all taken by white photographers. We discussed Mason’s comments about the fetishisation of black skin by white photographic institutions.
(He also pointed out how he has noticed lots of children with very little clothing on in my many BJP and other photography magazines. We talked about that too and what it might be about.)
And one more article worth including here: https://www.scotsman.com/news/opinion/dani-garavelli-celebrities-like-stacey-dooley-should-think-twice-about-comic-relief-1-4882380
“In reality, no-one was suggesting the £1bn-plus Comic Relief has raised was unnecessary or unwelcome; just that there are ways to help developing countries that do not involve fetishising human suffering or ignoring our country’s complicity in their plight.” I really hope my own work which aims to do this will eventually show very clearly how it is framed within this the issue of Western culpability.