The photo-monologue: critical device and activist practice

Abstract

This article defines the photo-monologue: a combination of documentary portraits of subjects in a state of marginalisation, silencing, discrimination, or victimhood with their own verbal reflections. It describes and discusses the phenomenology of the photo-monologue as a critical rhetorical device as well as humanistic political practice. In addition, it addresses how the dialogic potential of photo-monologues is realised under certain conditions but less so in others. The first section defines and establishes the photo-monologue as a critical device of visual culture, including its history and its ethical and aesthetical aspects. The second examines its activist potential by discussing its arenas of display and dialogue. In addition, it proposes the photo-monologue as a practice in visual education for activism – where its dialogic potential may be realised most productively – and offers examples for this potential as applied in student projects.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

[1] For an article that elaborates on the photo-monologue concept in critical pedagogy, see Gil-Glazer (2019).

[2] I refer to ‘The Photographic Message’ (Barthes [1961] 1996) and to ‘Rhetoric of the Image’ (Barthes [1964] 2003). Subsequent texts addressing this issue include Sekula (1975), Tagg (1988), and Nochlin (1997).

[3] Note that whereas Barthes’ theories on the photographic message were constructed around press and advertisement images, they are relevant to every type of photograph found in a given society or culture.

[4] Trachtenberg (Trachtenberg 1979, xxv) also warns against an uncontrolled interpretation of photographs, and suggests the need to place reasonable boundaries on their examination. Cara Finnegan (Finnegan 1999, 31) also refers to the common tendency of interpreting photographs too freely, as images devoid of a historical and cultural context, and mentions other historians and theoreticians who have addressed this problem in recent decades.

[5] Although Sekula (1978) referred in these words to contemporary documentary works, some of his arguments may certainly be applied to the analysis of critical documentary.

[6] Mitchell’s “The Photographic Essay: Four Case Studies “ (In Picture Theory, 1994) examines four documentary photobooks from different periods.

[7] Government exhibitions focused on the FSA’s assistance and the construction of ‘deserving poor’. This construction was contrasted to the traditional stereotype that relied on the American individualistic ethos, whereby economic success and failure are the responsibility of the individual, not social structures.

[8] The texts by Levi Strauss, Azoulay and Linfield referred to in this article, for example, counterbalance texts by critical theoreticians who have taken the discourse about the medium to a direction that blocks the possibility of discussing it in a humanist context that touches the emotional aspect, and have generalised based on particular examples. According to Linfield, ‘postmodern critics [such as Martha Rosler, Douglas Crimp and Victor Burgin] viewed photography as a generally nasty business – the photograph is a prison, the act of looking, a crime’ (Linfield 2010, 10-11).

[9] This citation appears only in the Hebrew version of Azoulay’s book.

[10] Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin, Archive: Ghetto (http://www.broombergchanarin.com/ghetto).

[11] Out of a total population of more than 90,000 Bedouin citizens living under similar circumstances countrywide, about 3000 live in the Galilee without any amenities or basic infrastructure such as running water, sewage or electricity, in 30 so-called ‘unrecognised villages’. The tiny metal shacks or huts in which they live are considered illegal and are therefore impossible to expand or renovate. Officially, these places do not exist.

[12] Interview with Adi Segal, July 2018.

[13] Fazal Sheikh (2008). Beloved daughters. https://www.fazalsheikh.org/fileadmin/user_upload/projects/Beloved_Daughters/fazal_sheikh_poster.pdf

[14] The advent of genetic testing has not ended the former inmates’ nightmare, however. Simon’s subjects still suffer from the trauma of arrest and lack recognition, as well prejudices against them.

[15] Ronald Cotton. With victim Jennifer Thompson, Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Served 10.5 years of a life sentence. Taryn Simon, The Innocents (Simon 2003): https://www.artsy.net/artwork/taryn-simon-ronald-cotton-with-victim-jennifer-thompson-winston-salem-north-carolina-served-10-dot-5-years-of-a-life-sentence-for-rape

[16] https://law.acri.org.il/he/29581; https://www.acri.org.il/he/30811. See also Szeintuch (2017).

[17] http://www.american-pictures.com/english/intro/index.html

[18] http://www.american-pictures.com/english/intro/photography.htm

[19] ActiveVision: Identity Document – A Project by ActiveVision with Children of Immigrant Workers in Israel. http://www.active-vision.org/id/gallery/index.htm

[20] http://www.active-vision.org/id/gallery/statements.html

[21] See: http://active-vision.org/index.html

[22] See: https://shootingback.net/

[23] Sara’s final project, July 2018.

[24] Rotem’s final project exhibition, 2010.

[25] Conversation with Rotem, November 2017.

[26] Ibid.

[27] Ibid.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ya’ara Gil-Glazer

Dr. Ya’ara Gil-Glazer is the Head of the Education through Art Program, Department of Education, Tel-Hai Academic College, Israel. Gil-Glazer researches and teaches courses in photography, visual culture and art education. Her research interests include modern and contemporary visual culture and its educational integration into social-critical contexts. In 2013, she published The Documentary Photobook: Social-Cultural Criticism in the U.S. during the Great Depression and the New Deal in 2013 (Hebrew). She received her PhD (summa cum laude) from the University of Haifa, Israel, in 2010.