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.

Continue reading with Part Nine.

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.

Continue reading with Part Eight.

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 too frequently 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.

Continue reading with Part Seven.

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.

Continue reading with Part Six.