Representing the Unrepresentable: Locating the Viewer in a Position of Power

This is part eight in series of posts adapted from a paper titled Representing the Unrepresentable: Locating the Political in the Viewer-Image Exchange that I read at the Aesthetics of Catastrophe symposium at Northwestern University. Each post stands alone, but the series is best read as a whole starting here.

In an interview with World Press Photo Evelien Shotsman, the picture editor of Oxfam Novib, lays out her basic strategy in establishing a means of framing her subject, the world’s poor.

For a photojournalist it is not effective anymore just to try and capture the facts of life or tell an untold story. The media won't pay, the people won't buy.

We are spoilt: seen it, been there, done it.

It is getting more difficult for NGO's to convince the general public of the moral obligation people have in the rich parts of the world to support the less fortunate living in the poor parts.

But I still think photography is a strong tool in advocating a world without poverty.

Not by trying to capture the big contemporary issues, like climate change and food crises in a general way. But by telling small stories of people trying to live a small but happy life. Not by trying to show "the truth" but by showing that the truth has many faces.

For people to become interested, they need to be moved in an emotional and esthetical way.

So all techniques, manipulations and enhancements are allowed to highlight the emotional quality of the photo. In this sense I see a need for the photojournalist to become a photo artist of reality.

The photojournalist has always been a photo artist of reality. There never was any other alternative. What Shotsman is recognizing is that direct political visual interactions with world poverty are not welcome either by the broad viewing public or the media. What she is calling for are new forms of depicting world poverty that are marketable within media business models that are increasingly dependent on advertising for their viability.

The interaction between the “people in the rich parts of the world” and the images she describes is a profoundly political exchange in itself, for it directs the affluent viewer away from the systemic roots of poverty towards an emotional experience that subtly reinforces his or her affluence and privilege. In our neighborhoods and jobs we may be of somewhat unremarkable status, but when faced with someone whose entire annual income measures around $100.00, suddenly we become immensely powerful. The $28,000.00 price tag on the average American car becomes a symbol of 280 years of labor by another. In these terms the cost of the average American house represents 2,000 years of labor. If that person is living a small but happy life, then we must be near gods in our own economic might.

Representing the Unrepresentable: Rupturing the Viewer's Sense of Self

This is part seven in series of posts adapted from a paper titled Representing the Unrepresentable: Locating the Political in the Viewer-Image Exchange that I read at the Aesthetics of Catastrophe symposium at Northwestern University. Each post stands alone, but the series is best read as a whole starting here.

Photographs of suffering can be consumed latently as a reinforcement of status and power in the viewer, effectively achieving two internal goals. First, the viewer is reminded of his or her general compassion and good nature by feeling the associated affect that goes along with caring or pity, and second the viewer, who is located by the photograph in a nonspecific relationship with the subject is generally absolved of personal responsibility and therefore can simultaneously experience an affirmation of power and privilege. The sale of luxury items is then entirely compatible with this exchange.

However, this audience exchange is severely disrupted when the suffering points directly back to the audience members themselves. On September 11, 2001, following the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, People Magazine did what seemed impossible by creating in 18 hours 87 pages of edit focusing on the attacks. Prominently featured were images taken throughout that day. By Wednesday morning, the 12th, the magazine was on press and was entering distribution by Thursday night. There had been no time to contact advertisers and give them the opportunity to pull their ads, and they were run alongside the emerging news pictures of the attacks. Immediately there was a backlash from both the readers and the advertisers. Readers complained that juxtaposing the typical consumer advertising with the September 11 images and stories was disrespectful and distasteful. In the next issue then People President Nora McAniff was compelled to write a letter explaining the presence of advertising.

What is so significant here are not the specific images of the attacks of September 11. They were no more graphic or inherently troubling than other war and disaster images that are in circulation. The chief difference is that these are images that the readers identify with directly. This was an attack aimed directly at the readership and at their symbols and not on some remote constituency.

The effects this had on advertising were significant. Advertisers across the industry and in many publications quickly responded with complex instructions on how their ads should be placed. Many demonstrated a clear aversion to association with coverage of the attacks and their related issues and requested that their ads be run at a minimum distance away from any stories and subject that they wished to avoid.

In the case of the September 11 coverage, the images ruptured the expectations of the readers’ senses of self by showing them their vulnerability and thereby created a commodity that was incompatible with advertising. There is no greater consumer buzzkill than to remind the viewer that they too are mortal and subject to the same entropic laws as everyone else, and that world events, time and decay will eventually lead to their own physical deaths and to the end of their symbols and culture.

Further evidence of this rupture in the audience’s expectations from the publication can be seen in the basic way an audience is created. Publications are cyclical and predictable. Any publication’s audience loyalty is created and sustained through a subtle reinforcement of the audience’s own perceptions and beliefs over time. While the events depicted may be new, the attitudes, beliefs and conceptions that the audience has towards them are not. These are reinforced repeatedly over time, giving the viewer an inner sense that the publication is in sync with their own ways of organizing experience and belief. The rule is to show the reader what they already know to be true. The facts can be new, but the experience of them is not.

Representing the Unrepresentable: Suffering and Viewer Status

This is part six in series of posts adapted from a paper titled Representing the Unrepresentable: Locating the Political in the Viewer-Image Exchange that I read at the Aesthetics of Catastrophe symposium at Northwestern University. Each post stands alone, but the series is best read as a whole starting here.

When a photograph of human suffering speaks to the mythic, to the general and to the poetic it activates affect within the viewer that has no obvious connection to any effective action or remedy. This can work to insulate the viewer from the trauma. It is entirely possible to simultaneously feel compassion for the subjects of rendered accounts of humanitarian suffering while behaving politically in opposition to them.

There is a kind of political equivalent of Newton’s Law of Motion at work. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. When viewing images of death, suffering and deprivation from places, cultures, and classes that are removed or remote from the audience, we are looking into the lives of the ‘other.’ By seeing them as poor, deprived and/or suffering, we, the viewers, are placed in a position of privilege and power. The work reciprocally points back to our own relative affluence, health and security.

For the western audience, exposure to these images creates two effects simultaneously. While they potentially evoke compassion, they also reciprocally reaffirm our relative economic and physical security in relationship to the subjects. The logic of this exchange is written right into their distribution strategy. The images are not made for the edification of the subjects themselves, or for the makers of the photographs, as would be the case in tourist photography, but are made specifically to be sent to an audience that has a significant advantage over the subjects in terms of wealth, power and security.

The net political impact of these images on that audience is determined by a complex interaction between how much empathy or compassion is evoked in the viewer and where the viewer is located by the photograph in a political relationship with the subject. Images that emphasize the mythic over the political, while they may evoke compassion, tend to avoid the specific viewer/subject relationship and, by emphasizing the general and poetic, steer the audience away from the real world political realities and towards an inner unspecific experience of trauma or suffering, one that has the potential to dislocate the images from their sources/subjects and use them as a kind of entertainment. The mythic serves to steer the audience away from the systemic roots of these problems towards a general aesthetic experience that, while moving, has no obligation to generate any political pressure that drives realized political change on a level that has a hope of impacting and improving the conditions of the subjects in a specific way.

Representing the Unrepresentable: Viewer Experience as Commodity

This is part five in series of posts adapted from a paper titled Representing the Unrepresentable: Locating the Political in the Viewer-Image Exchange that I read at the Aesthetics of Catastrophe symposium at Northwestern University. Each post stands alone, but the series is best read as a whole starting here.

At the base of all magazine and newspaper templates exists a relationship that the publication has with its demographic. Each publication has a foundational formula that seeks to target their demographic and increase readership by speaking in their voice and reinforcing their worldview. Generally the publication seeks to generate an experience of self in the reader that is affirming and consistent with the reader’s perception of themselves as they are or as they would like to be. This is a consistent but subtle exchange. “When I read ‘X’ publication I feel empowered, knowledgeable, compassionate, generous, successful, actualized, rugged, self reliant, beautiful, popular, esteemed etc. The degree to which this exchange with the reader is a commodity worth paying for determines the likely success of the publication.

The generation of this basic reader experience is what determines the boundaries of the field within which the publication will operate. There is also a formal predictability involved in the exchange. The reader not only has a desirable experience of self but also encounters a familiar form in the publication. This will almost always be in accordance with the advertising that is targeted to the publications demographic. The inner and formal expectations in the readership must be maintained and updated to maximize the desirability of the publication both to readers and advertisers. The edit can only operate within the boundaries established by the advertisers’ need to achieve their goals.

Within the genres of lifestyle, pop culture, fashion and beauty, this would seem obvious. Content and advertising nearly are the same. But when the subject of the edit turns to humanitarian issues, images that convey war, disaster, famine, poverty, crisis, disease and so on have evolved a visual language that is compatible with advertising on a more subtle level. This relationship needs to be more fully understood in an examination of the effect the images have on the audience. To be effective, advertising must maintain its internal logic that consumption of a specific product is the answer to an implied problem, with the desired political outcome being increasing consumer demand.

Magazine Death Spiral

Yesterday a door to door salesman came to my house to try and get me to 'sponsor' him in a magazine selling contest. Should he be able to accrue 5,000 points by selling magazine subscriptions, he will receive a trip to Europe. Had I been to Europe? How was it? It sure must be nice.

The pitch had nothing to do with the magazines and everything to do with helping this young gentleman achieve his dream of wooing the continental ladies (I'm paraphrasing here, but that was the exact gist of it.)

The list of magazines to choose from showed about 120 middle-tier magazines, each marked with points rather than a price. Should I choose one title, it would get him 350 points closer to his dream. Another gets him only 200, and so on. The value in making the purchase had nothing to do with what the value of magazine might be to me and everything to do with helping this young man get out and see the world. In other words, the magazines had become mere props for a tax deductible donation.

What really happens to the money and to the points is beyond my ability to know, but I do know exactly what the purpose of his visit was. It existed simply as an effort to bait me into subscriptions to bolster the rate base of a series of publications that can't get the boost they need any other way.

To demonstrate just how fubar this exchange is, let's imagine the conversation went in a completely different way.

"Hello sir, I'm a young entrepreneur and I am here to convince you to buy one or more of these fine publications, that will, on their own merits, enrich your life and be worth every penny that you spend."

Yeah, hilarious.

No, the purpose of this exchange was to eke out a bump in subscriptions by any means necessary so these magazines could continue to justify to their dwindling advertisers the value of advertising with them.

But let's look more closely at that. Let's say for instance, that I had decided to take three subscriptions, one for me, one for my wife and one for a gift. Even though I am constantly bombarded with exposure to these titles, I haven't so far subscribed to them. I see them on magazine stands, in airport book stores, in doctors offices, but so far I have felt no need to spend the nearly nothing they are charging for the privilege of having them delivered to me.

In other words, I don't really want them. But I buy them anyway. And thousands others like me buy them too. And the kid gets his trip to Europe. And in large part the magazines are a waste of effort and resources. They sit in my car unread. My wife barely opens hers. I send the gift to my mother, who already subscribes to her favorite titles. The net result here is an utter waste of time. The magazines get made but we're not reading them. At least not in any way that is significant.

But, there was a small success here, right? The publications got that bump in subscriptions that kept them alive another season. Is that a success? I don't care for the publication. I don't read it loyally so I don't see the advertising. The advertisers don't get what they are paying for which is exposure to me. The edit keeps getting watered down to try and keep subscribers like me. And when it comes time to renew, I won't re-up and I won't ever subscribe to them again.

In fact, under one of my car seats right now is a copy of the February 2008 issue of a magazine that I subscribed to on a lark. It was free and it still hasn't been read. But it keeps at least one of my two-year-old children happy as they slowly shred it or stick the pages together with milk and raisins.

The real crime here is in the damage it does to entire industry. I love magazine publishing. It is an amazing thing to be a part of an incredible publication with devoted and loyal readers. Standing next to a massive web offset press as the paper flies through a process almost the length of a football field at a pace that can produce a million books in a 24 hour period has to be one of the marvels of the world. When it is your team that made the book, it is even more incredible. Working all night on an issue to get on a plane in the next few days and find a copy of it in a distant airport... beautiful. Color theory. Design. Market research. Audience loyalty. Good editing. Great photographs. The tactile quality of a well designed product in tune with its readers. All are amazing things.

But dumping your subscriptions masked in a charity case does nothing useful for anyone in the industry. If the kid gets the European vacation, I hope it changes his life. At least some good might come out of it. What I really dream is that he might come back and try and sell me something from a list of 120 magazines that are worth buying outright, just because they are so important to have.

Representing the Unrepresentable: Advertising and Edit Integrated

This is part four in series of posts adapted from a paper titled Representing the Unrepresentable: Locating the Political in the Viewer-Image Exchange that I read at the Aesthetics of Catastrophe symposium at Northwestern University. Each post stands alone, but the series is best read as a whole starting here.

In the complete process of making and distributing traditional documentary photography and photojournalism, there is a series of exchanges that, each building on the previous, culminate in the performance of the images in front of a broader audience. There is first the recognition of an issue, condition or event, then the interaction between the photographer and the subject being depicted (photographs are made in specific times and in specific places), followed by the exchanges between photographer and publication in the editing and selecting of images for release, and then finally the interaction between the audience and the images themselves within the context of a publication. This final exchange is the culmination of all the previous interactions and has the most political impact. Here the image meets the audience, and the exchange determines the net political action of the images in the world.

The primary means of viewing photographs for the public has been through magazine publications first, then newspapers and now online. It is the magazine industry that has most refined its use of photography and lessons learned there can be applied to new models going forward.

To do this let us first establish a means of looking at a magazine as a whole. Any publication can be seen as an aesthetic object; complete, integrated and interrelated, with each page contributing to the overall effect on the reader. We must accept the magazine, newspaper or book in its entirety as an integrated object where advertising and edit are bound together and interrelated. How could it be otherwise, when the editorial and the advertising are interspersed, interlocked, and following similar visual rules? Even though you can flip through a magazine and separate the advertising from the editorial, you are still “reading” it all, and both influence you simultaneously.

The basic purpose of the advertising is to create, identify or amplify perceived deficiencies in the audience that the product or service being advertised can supposedly repair or complete.

Through a series of seemingly pragmatic business decisions, newspaper and magazine publishers have come to rely heavily on advertising for revenue. In a publicly traded publishing company requiring profitability for stock holders, growth targets are set by the corporate leadership, and the cost of missing your quarterly revenue goals can be significant, starting with job cuts and ending with magazine closures. Subscription sales generate very little net revenue, newsstand sales generate slightly more, but the majority of income comes from advertising sales. Magazines have increased this reliance on advertising by offering subscriptions at such low rates that they barely cover production costs, with the goal of increasing readership and thereby raising the advertising rates. With reduced subscription prices come market devaluations of the edit itself, and a need for broader appeal to try and retain casual subscribers who picked up the subscription on impulse. To put it bluntly, the editorial pages exist as a kind of bait, to bring in readers in numbers that generate a profitable advertising rate base.

Representing the Unrepresentable: Compassion and Empathy

This is part three in series of posts adapted from a paper titled Representing the Unrepresentable: Locating the Political in the Viewer-Image Exchange that I read at the Aesthetics of Catastrophe symposium at Northwestern University. Each post stands alone, but the series is best read as a whole starting here.

Throughout the history of the human race, empathy has served a complex and difficult to articulate role in helping one person to assess, evaluate, or understand the nature of another's existence. Empathy has evolved to operate between people who are in physical proximity and therefore are capable of processing the huge volume of cues, both rational and irrational, that culminate in an overall sense of the condition of the other. When we are physically present with another person, a relationship is possible and empathy can serve a number of purposes in establishing and enhancing that interaction. Empathy evolved as a function of person-to-person contact.

We photographers frequently see ourselves as standing in for that physical interaction. If we insert ourselves relationally into the physical space of the subjects, we can carry the viewer with us and thus give the subject visibility and a public voice. However, when the subject is connected to the viewer through a photograph, the audience response becomes problematic. The empathic cues within a photograph are limited. There is not enough information to form a more complete perception of another person or group. Photographs also vary widely in their emotional content, and in a single series of photographs made in a short period of time of the same subject in the same location, it is possible to make images that vary widely in terms of the data that they communicate empathically to the viewer. Even within the relatively narrow constraints of straight photojournalism and documentary photography it is possible to make work that achieves a wide variety of emotional outcomes and it is frequently in the editing of the images where the specific emotional tone and argument of the image series is refined or clarified.

Through photographs we are not relating to whole people or places but to fragmented depictions of them, dislocated in time and space. These fragments of self, presented as photographic evidence of the human condition, perform for the audience on a spectrum ranging from the specific political to the general mythic. In this case the word ‘political’ is synonymous with the word ‘real’, it being a descriptor of actual events, people and places that exist in real time and are interconnected in real, if not easily depicted or understood ways.

Again, it is the nature of empathy itself that is the problem here. Evoking compassion is something that should be done with specific care for the political interaction between the image and the viewing audience.

Empathy as practiced from person to person offers the potential for human relationship, interaction and intervention, all under the influence of the empathic person. Empathy that is mediated through a photograph requires no avenue for action, and in fact the images may obscure the political realities, or point the viewer in the wrong direction, creating an environment where the viewing public is bombarded with empathic information in a media environment where meaningful actionable political responses are unavailable or obscured.

Most humanitarian documentary photographers and photojournalists will say that their intent is to reduce social injustices. The conventional wisdom is that by exposing audiences to photographs of injustice and inequity, they will be motivated towards compassion and will act to direct material or political aid towards those in need. The chief flaw in this strategy exists not in the audience or in the plight of the subjects but rather in the evidence and accuracy of actionable response to the images.

Events and problems of a global nature are created and sustained by complex human systems that resist easy interrogation. Solutions are pushed forward by specifically targeted political pressure. Merely raising awareness offers only the hope that the audience will find and create that pressure on its own, or that outrage will fuel further investment into inquiry and response. While these do occasionally happen, they are not reliable or even likely outcomes for many if not most of the problems that we face.