"Migrant Mother", California,1936. Wikicommons/ Dorothea Lange.In a
world where the selfie has become ubiquitous and where images constantly drift
past our line of vision, it seems reasonable to wonder if photographs matter. Thanks
to the advent of the smartphone, we can all be photographers. This technological
dexterity serves to remove whatever trace of the magical there remained in
photography against the grain of modernity’s emphasis on rationality. There was
a time when a photograph was an event. When the sitter surrendered to
timelessness for an instant and when the photographer, in a representative act
that sought to capture experience, demonstrated the alchemy of time and place. All
that has long since changed.
Photography
in the digital era exemplifies modernity’s narcissism and unstable fluidity. In
entering the muddy waters of the ordinary and the everyday, it risks anonymity,
even irrelevance. This may fundamentally alter the place of photography in our
world, but it does not in any way lessen it. Against the grain of a surfeit of
the visual and in the face of a surplus that threatens to obscure it, the photograph
has shifted to assuming a vernacular that speaks of, and to, the world around
us. In so doing, we constitute ourselves via the image as much as through
experience. With the ambiguity and ambivalence that has always been part of
this medium, images both make up the everyday as much as human subjects do and,
simultaneously, announce the uniqueness of the everyday. Yes, most images
sorely lack punctum – that ability to
pierce the viewer and leave an imprint that Barthes wrote about – but to
imagine the world devoid of images is also to imagine the world halved through
the loss of its reflection in the mirror. It is to imagine the world halved
again by the closing in of horizons of memory and possibility, and halved yet
again by the loss of the face of the other. It is to imagine a world unable to progress
due to the breakdown of a vital medium that helps us make sense of reality, or
even just glimpse it perhaps, through representation.
When
photography was first invented in the nineteenth century, it was hailed as a
revolution in man’s relationship with time and place. The power to intervene in
the passage of time, to rupture the latter in the closing of a shutter, saw
photography become a vital tool for intervening in the world. Its documentary
power made the camera a companion of travellers, early anthropologists and
explorers. Documentary photography became a medium through which inequalities
or injustices were exposed, a witness to suffering that drew the viewer in. In
bringing into focus those who might otherwise have been relegated to obscurity,
photography mediated inequalities and opened a space where otherness could be
framed and engaged with. The result was often pedagogical, if not charitable,
as in the case of Dorothea Lange’s iconic image of the Migrant Mother, a photograph that did more to raise funds for those
affected by the Depression than many newspaper reports on the same topic.
Images
today still retain something of that aura that made the topic, if not the
subject, memorable. More to the point, the visual has become a key instrument
in mediating the world around us. It is as vital as language itself, and
equally potent in symbolic significance. Furthermore, in the same way as the
self now engages with the selfie and evolves through and around it, so do
images provide us with a means to navigate social contexts and engage with them.
We, as photographers, are also our own subjects. We have become the other who occupies
the space of the frame – the other whom we cannot distinguish ourselves from,
but whose image spurs us on to negotiate the complexities of time and place.
The Women of the World: Home and Work in
Barcelona project is conceived within this context where alterity features
in the everyday, and in the here and now. Few figures can match that of the
migrant in signaling the presence of the other in our midst. The Women of the World project sought to
trace the paths of subjects who are otherized in numerous ways, on account of immigration,
gender and ethnicity. The oral narratives of their trajectories that were
collected would have been incomplete without the visual, that other vernacular
that empowers the scattered subjects of globalization to give meaning to their
world.
A
fundamental method that the project rested on was to ensure that the subjects
determined how and where they were photographed. Their approval was also sought
in the final selection of images, turning these into collaborative acts that
echoed the narrative act of engaging in interviews. In this sense, it is no
longer the extraordinariness of the image, but rather its familiarity, indeed
its necessity, that lends credibility to the representation of how these
immigrant women have remade home, found work and made new lives in the city.
The visual and the oral act as two media that complement one another, in an
effort to map the voice onto the face, and so also give a face to the voice, of
the subject.
"Migrant Mother" alternative version. Wikicommons/ Dorothea Lange. Some rights reserved.If
photography matters today, it is not because it heralds big revolutions or
because it marks the extraordinary. On the contrary, it is because it marks the
ordinary, the everyday, the transient subjects of modernity, seen most
emblematically in the context of migration. The French photographer Henri
Cartier-Bresson, a master of the everyday, once said that ‘it is an illusion
that photos are made with the camera… They are made with the eye, heart and
head.’ He might have added that it is not the photographer alone who makes the
image, but the viewer too. To see and to listen is to know and to feel. It is
to engage in the adventures of alterity and to enter into the imaginative
realms of the familiar unfamiliar. This, then, must be why photography matters.