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Abstract
In this paper, it is argued that it is given not only to artists but also to citizen-photographers, both professional and non-professional, to make a new world order. Rather than being unreflective and unpolitical snappers on autopilot, citizen-photographers help create what Jacques Rancière calls a “new landscape of the possible.” Instead of rehearsing standard criticisms of photography, especially criticisms of representations of people in pain, the paper suggests looking at such representations in search for new ways through which subjects of photography may exert political influence. The paper emphasizes that in the digital age the paradigmatic subject position is being alone together—being spatially apart from but virtually a part of a larger community. It is through visual/virtual networks and in communication with others that the individual may exert political influence. Digital technologies, it is argued, offer an ever-growing number of people the chance to become agents of their own photography rather than being subjects of the photography of others. Such photography may help to disclose and denaturalize established positions as well as to change and diversify discursive patterns.
Notes
1 Alex Danchev, On Art and War and Terror (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), p. 59.
2 W.J.T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 2.
Thoughtful comments by two anonymous referees and the journal's editors are gratefully acknowledged.
3 See Fred Ritchin, After Photography (New York: W.W. Norton, 2009).
4 The absence of such a discussion is not meant to indicate the irrelevance of these criticisms. For an introduction into the literature, see Mark Reinhardt, Holly Edwards, and Erina Duganne (eds), Beautiful Suffering: Photography and the Traffic in Pain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). See also Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), Michael J. Shapiro, “Slow Looking: The Ethics and Politics of Aesthetics,” Millennium 37:1 (2008), pp. 181–197, Frank Möller, “The Looking/Not Looking Dilemma,” Review of International Studies 35:4 (2009), pp. 781–794, and the section “Oppression/Emancipation” below.
5 Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites, No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2007), p. 42.
6 See, for example, Sontag's celebration of Life magazine's “revelatory pictures of war and of art” in Regarding the Pain of Others, p. 38. See also the prominent role assigned to Life in George H. Roeder, Jr., The Censored War: American Visual Experience during World War Two (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1993).
7 Hariman and Lucaites, No Caption Needed, p. 3.
8 See Frank Möller, “Photography and the Approximate,” Redescriptions: Yearbook of Political Thought, Conceptual History, and Feminist Theory 13 (2009), pp. 169–192.
9 John Tagg, The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), p. 2.
10 See, for example, Marc Vallée, “We're Photographers, Not Terrorists,” Guardian, December 11, 2009, < http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/libertycentral/2009/dec/11/photographers-section-44-terrorism-act> (accessed December 11, 2009).
11 See Nick Couldry, Inside Culture: Re-imagining the Method of Cultural Studies (London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi: Sage, 2000).
12 For a discussion of the pros and cons, see A Report on the Surveillance Society. For the Information Commissioner by the Surveillance Studies Network, September 2006, < http://www.ico.gov.uk>.
13 Jane Blocker, Seeing Witness: Visuality and the Ethics of Testimony (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), p. xvi.
14 Michael J. Shapiro, The Politics of Representation: Writing Practices in Biography, Photography, and Policy Analysis (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), p. 130. See also Tagg, Burden of Representation, and Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Photography at the Dock: Essays on Photographic History, Institutions, and Practices (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991).
15 David Levi Strauss, Between the Eyes: Essays on Photography and Politics (New York: Aperture, 2003), pp. 79–89.
16 Shapiro, Politics of Representation, p. 126.
17 Shapiro, Politics of Representation, 130.
18 Shapiro, Politics of Representation
19 See Peter Burke, Eyewitnessing: The Uses of Images as Historical Evidence (London: Reaktion Books, 2001), p. 123.
20 Henry Porter, “Protecting the Media from the Police,” Guardian, January 7, 2010, < http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/henryporter/2010/jan/07/police-photography-public-space> (accessed January 7, 2010).
21 See < http://www.strictlynophotography.com>, a website dedicated to photographs that were not supposed to be taken.
22 Stuart Jeffries, “The Rise of the Camera-Phone,” Guardian, January 8, 2010, < http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/jan/08/stuart-jeffries-camera-phones> (accessed January 8, 2010).
23 The term sousveillance (derived from the French words “sous” = below and “veiller” = to watch) is used to describe devices “offering panoptic technologies to help [individuals] to observe those in authority.” See Steve Mann, Jason Nolan, and Barry Wellman, “Sousveillance: Inventing and Using Wearable Computing Devices for Data Collection in Surveillance Environments,” Surveillance & Society 1:3 (2003), p. 332.
24 David Birch, “The Age of Sousveillance,” Guardian, July 14, 2005, < http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2005/jul/14/comment.comment> (accessed January 7, 2010).
25 Mann, Nolan, and Wellman, “Sousveillance,” p. 347.
26 Mann, Nolan and Wellman, “Sousveillance,”, 333.
27 Ritchin, After Photography, p. 171.
28 Günther Anders, Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen 1. Über die Seele im Zeitalter der zweiten industriellen Revolution (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1956); Anders, Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen 2. Über die Zerstörung des Lebens im Zeitalter der dritten industriellen Revolution (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1980).
29 Blocker, Seeing Witness, pp. xiii–xxiii.
30 Mann, Nolan, and Wellman, “Sousveillance,” p. 338.
31 Mann, Nolan and Wellman, “Sousveillance,”, 347.
32 See note 4.
33 Stephen F. Eisenman, The Abu Ghraib Effect (London: Reaktion Books, 2007), p. 99.
34 See the discussion in Hariman and Lucaites, No Caption Needed, pp. 49–92, and Linda Gordon, Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits (New York: W.W. Norton, 2009).
35 See Hariman and Lucaites, No Caption Needed, pp. 171–207.
36 Alfredo Jaar, Let There Be Light: The Rwanda Project 1994–1998 (Barcelona: ACTAR, 1998).
37 Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator (London and New York: Verso, 2009), pp. 97–98. Gutete Emerita's eyes are the eyes of someone who witnessed the murder of her husband and sons during the 1994 Tutsi genocide in Rwanda.
38 See Robert Tait and Matthew Weaver, “How Neda Soltani Became the Face of Iran's Struggle,” Guardian, June 22, 2009, < http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jun/22/ne> (accessed June 24, 2009).
39 Hariman and Lucaites, No Caption Needed, p. 62.
40 Jenny Edkins, “Exposed Singularity,” Journal for Cultural Research 9:4 (2005), p. 363. The photographs do not tell the viewers that they were “commissioned.”
41 Jonathan Torgovnik, Intended Consequences: Rwandan Children Born of Rape (New York: Aperture, 2009).
42 For a longer discussion of Torgovnik's work, see Frank Möller, “Rwanda Revisualized: Genocide, Photography, and the Era of the Witness,” Alternatives 35:2 (2010), pp. 128–131.
43 Ritchin, After Photography, p. 141.
44 < http://www.foundationrwanda.org> (accessed February 24, 2010).
45 See Gordon, Dorothea Lange, and Andy Grundberg, Crisis of the Real: Writings on Photography (New York: Aperture, 1999), pp. 53–56.
46 < http://www.burnmagazine.org> and < http://www.lensculture.com>.
47 < http://www.demotix.com/page/about-us> (accessed February 25, 2010). The agency claims to represent more than 8,300 photographers worldwide.
48 See < http://www.photovoice.org/html/whoarewe> (accessed February 26, 2010).
49 Ritchin, After Photography, p. 127.
50 Rancière, Emancipated Spectator, p. 103.
51 See < http://www.rwandaproject.org>.
52 On official efforts to control the Internet, see Richard Waters and Joseph Menn, “Closing the Frontier,” Financial Times, March 29, 2010, p. 7.
53 Elizabeth Edwards, Chris Gosden, and Ruth B. Phillips, “Introduction,” in Elizabeth Edwards, Chris Gosden, and Ruth B. Phillips (eds), Sensible Objects: Colonialism, Museums and Material Culture (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2006), pp. 18–19.
54 See, for example, the discussion of the National Rifle Association's use of modern communications methods in Clifford Bob, Jonathan Haynes, Victor Pickard, Thomas Keenan, and Nick Couldry, “Media Spaces: Innovation and Activism,” in Martin Albrow, Helmut Anheier, Marlies Glasius, Monroe E. Price, and Mary Kaldor (eds), Global Civil Society 2007/2008: Communicative Power and Democracy (London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi and Singapore: Sage, 2008), pp. 198–203.