The assertion that the photo constituted a form of power for African-Americans to construct their own reality, in opposition to the images that white supremacy has created for them, certainly contains some validity. I could understand how the photograph was not only powerful in this sense, but also particularly revelant given that antiblack racism has historically consisted largely of images, a great deal of it in the figurative sense--images created by politicians, the media, and era which formed an indelibe picture in the eyes of white americans.
However, the limitations of this thesis were more apparent to me than its strengths. While an act empowerment, which the photograph indeed provides in a personal way, for those who have been subjected to racism is clearly a positive development, the unchanged political and economic position of Americans renders the prospects of challenging the larger, collective racist image of white society basically hopeless. It is not that this should necessarily be a reasonable expectation for one technology to achieve, because it isn't. Perhaps it was just the basic tone and impression I received from the article. Those who control images, who have the power to disseminate them through the means of communication that they control or can purchase with their economic advantage, continue to construct images as they see fit. It seems to me to challenge racism on a personal level, it is necessary to challenge those images that assault one's dignity and humanity and it is imperative to dispel false notions in the eyes of others, as the way others see us can reinforce certain views of ourselves.
posted by Anonymous at 9:37 PM

I want to comment on the Bell Hooks essay and some connections I found between it and the Sekula article. Sekula writes, “Photography subverted the privileges inherent in portraiture...Honorific conventions were thus able to proliferate downward” (64). Bell Hooks describes how during apartheid black folks in the south, a group that would typically not have access to expensive forms of portraiture, were able to attain family photographs and display them in “honorific ways,” ways that brought great personal pride to those families. Sekula makes the argument that photography served a more utilitarian purpose in the US, that “family photographs sustained sentimental ties in a nation of migrants... ‘articulating a nineteenth-century familialism that would survive and become an essential ideological feature of American mass culture’” (66-7). In other words, photography had the power to tie families together, especially in a country made of migrants, of folks whose ties to family were often severed. This relates once again to Hooks’ discussion, though she takes it to another level, of photography in black families as she discusses the countering of loss: “When the psychohistory of a people is marked by ongoing loss, when entire histories are denied, hidden, erased, documentation may become an obsession” (48).

This desire to document the family, to overcome the loss and erasure of identity (as discussed in the Spiller’s article) produced by slavery, found its home in photography. “Creating pictorial genealogies was the means by which one could ensure against the losses of the past” (51). I wonder, however, what exactly it means to “ensure against the losses of the past”— whether she means for black folks to not again experience the complete familial-pictorial erasure of slavery, to not again be imaged within racist hierarchies, or otherwise to protect themselves through this archival practice. It seems that these pictorial archives, as in our discussion Tuesday, would do work in determining not only the past, but the future as well. Through their archival photographic self-representation, African-Americans may create new forms of lived experience that wouldn’t otherwise have been possible, which is Bell Hooks' basic argument. "Using these images, we connect ourselves to a recuperative, redemptive memory that enables us to construct radical identities, images of ourselves that transcend the limits of the colonizing eye" (53).

posted by Jackie at 9:10 PM

from Caroline:

Tagg argues that the transparency of the power is its most powerful rhetorical device. The notion that the portrait is a natural cast of reality is an ideological construction. Although being visual in its essence, the photograph hides its workings intricately, which constitutes its power in forming the new social formations. This goes back to the break up of liberalism that Tagg mentions. Instead of a unified whole, there arouse now disintegrated, independent working class movements, which were a threat to state power and control. The photograph is a fusing power of the institutions, keeping all subjects in check by archiving everything, by mediating the relations between the different parts of the masses in the way the state wanted them to be.
The portrait was an inscription of personal and social identity and could be retrieved by anyone, theoretically to view and analyze. Here all the different movements, the different figurations in the social terrain of modernity contended in the production of signification. But it is exactly this claiming presence in representation, in inserting themselves into this visual structure of power, that fortifies this structure and makes it one of constant control and incessant surveillance. By categorizing the masses, the diverse groups of people under one archive, the political axis of representation was altered, as Tagg argues. Instead of neutral representations, the new visual culture gave rise to coded views. The camera does not simply record but filters through a new standardized vocabulary of classification. The new strategy of power knowledge was to archive all deviations in relation to an ideal. By means of photography then, the state could control social deviance and ensu!
re conformity of the masses. Thus arouse the gaze of the law.
The photograph metaphorized a new currency of the modern capitalist economy. By establishing spatial barriers, the photograph transformed individuals into simulacra, which became the new universal equivalent. The individual’s body became a transportable image, able to be ripped from its context and applied to a proliferation of different ones. This new visual technology embodied the complex realignment of practices of the social.
In Bell Hooks’ text, the snapshot is portrayed as a desired image of the self, even an illusory escape from reality. In the beginning of her argument, she wistfully hangs on to her childhood snapshot as a security and an ideal identity fixation. In her political treatment of the photograph, she argues that the field of representation has always been a site of struggle. Identity is constituted through the visual. Thus, there must appear a shift from the white perception of blackness in representation, as she puts it, to a new perception of self, where the subject does not wear the colonialized, oppressed mask, but is herself. Hence, the new visual representation she argues for is a reconstructive force, putting the disintegrated identity back together and overcoming the loss of self that the colonizers had brought upon the colonized.
posted by whkc at 7:49 PM

From Nazli:

Firstly, I would like to state that I really was interested in Bell Hooks’s essay “In our Glory: Photography and Black Life”. One of the things that really strike me was the fact that she sees snapshots, or photographs as one’s private life, emotions or feelings that are displayed to public through the walls of a house. “ Her possession of the snapshot confirms this, in an acknowledgement that she is allowed to know-yes even to possess-that private life he had always kept to himself”(pg 43). One can enter into another’s private life through a gaze to the photograph and intervene to that past moment by his/her own interpretations. That look differs among people as everyone has a different “reading” of the snapshot basing on their personal experiences and relations with the subject.
She also refers to an image on a photograph as “secure” maybe because nobody sees it the way she does. She can look at it and see her dreams coming true, maybe it revealed her unconscious desires and enabled her to ‘remember’ lost or repressed memories. “ Losing that snapshot, I lost the proof of my worthiness- that I had ever been a bright-eyed child capable of wonder, the proof that there was a ‘me of me.’”
Black people also saw photography as a tool to re-define history as well re-formulating their misrepresented identities. It was a rebellion against how they are viewed by white power and a struggle to obtain their power that was never given to them.
In John Tagg’s essay I was interested in the notion of “photography’s transparent power”. I think it means that it is open to all, it declares power to anyone, from varieties of social classes and enables them to discover their inner truth. Also it makes lower classes feel like they getting higher in status, which shows photography’s relation to social structure. He makes a point concerning the mass production of photography and I guess he means that as it got more common and easily produced it in a way started losing its “aura” and became more of an everyday experience. When he talks about the religious critic that states that photography becomes a sin since man is a reflection of God and God cannot be pictures I saw a resemblance with Islam since it also forbids picturing the profits. Does photography really lose its real value by becoming “ You Press the button and We Do The Rest”? and is it really a special gift to see the light and the subject in a certain way different than the average person? Lastly, his point of photography becoming a burden of being under surveillance I thought was really strong.

posted by whkc at 7:23 PM