USC student Kristina Lee explores the controversies surrounding participant–photography:
Pluralist photography intends to give a voice to would-be subjects of documentation. Opposing the more traditional forms of photography – naturalist, which, through photos, portrays a seemingly neutral and value-free world, and humanist, which asserts that images of suffering can be a mode for social change, pluralist photography provides people “with the power to decide for themselves what kind of information and representation is most appropriate to capture the social, political, ethical, and psychological challenges they face” (Bleiker and Kay 151). Also known as participatory photography, self representation, citizen photojournalism, and photo empowerment, all of which encompass a wide genre of photojournalism, this essay will refer to pluralist photography as that which is the product of the impoverished and mainly the youth: the marginalized of the marginalized.
As demonstrated by the numerous classifications of photography, the ability to capture absolute truth through a single photograph is unobtainable. Objectivity is nonexistent in photography, for a picture is, as Roland Barthe affirms, “a message without a code” (Bleiker and Kay 142). Thus, any and all attempts of representation through photography are “inherently incomplete, and inevitably political” (Bleiker and Kay 141). Due to this controversial nature of representation, pluralist photography deserves to be scrutinized to the same extent as it is befittingly acclaimed.
As well-intended and inherently altruistic as the proponents for citizen photography may be, the act of handing cameras to impoverished people, who are most often youth, and allowing them to photograph their proposed realities, does not automatically erase the politics that lie behind their photographs; arguably, pluralist photography does more to obscure it. This is not to say that all pluralist photography is universally ill-intended, for many such projects have ensued with educational, activist, and rewarding results. However, to truly appreciate pluralist photography, viewers must understand that this assumed act of representing one’s own reality is a mislead notion, for there are still many other people involved in this process of self-depiction. On its website, for example, Venice Arts writes that “When you give a child a camera, you give a child a voice.” As a founding nonprofit organization that endorses participatory photography, Venice Arts’ beacon of a statement does little to recognize the caveats of such photography. In order to qualify the impact of the pictures, viewers and photographers alike should ask after reading such a statement: but who gives the child a camera? Who teaches the child how to use the camera – and what do they teach them? Of what subject matter does the child have a voice through such benevolence?
While pluralistic photography highlights self-empowerment and self-depiction, it must be understood that there are leaders of such projects who always have agendas. Of course, such motives are not usually ill-intended; for the most part, they befit the most opposite and charitable of objectives, such as using participatory photography as a way to bring awareness and thus, change, to a hard-pressed social issue such as homelessness. Though many of these projects mean well, there have been many an occasion where – knowingly or not – a lead photographer’s vision questionably goes awry and disrupts the schema beyond that of the project. A prime example of such potential power that this person (or team or NGO) has is the aftershock of the documentary “Born into Brothels,” directed by the British photojournalist, Zana Briski. Briski teaches photography to a group of children in India’s red-light district. As a result of her bond with the children and desire to give back to the community and children with whom she works, Briski takes her project one step further and attempts to enroll these children of sex workers into boarding schools. Describing “the children as ‘doomed’ in their home environment” (Michel), “Born into Brothels” and Briski came under fire for its lack of cultural relativity and insensitivity towards Sonagachi’s accepted norm.
Briski and her fellow supporters of pluralist photography have been called “neo-colonialists, do-gooders, white saviors…exploiters”, white knights, and those having a “missionary zeal” (Hubbard 12) because of such ignorant and invasive actions. Briski’s goal in her project was to empower these children and let them represent their reality through their eyes, but it was not in her jurisdiction to then interpret their voices and compare them to the western world from which she found to be normative. In her hasty attempts to show to the world the lives of these impoverished children, Briski actually positively reinforced the power struggle between the assisting and the assisted, the rich and the poor by trying to help their situations. While well-intended, Briski’s social experiment was masked by her pluralist photographic project, leaving one to question whether the term ‘pluralist photography’ is a mere scapegoat for humanist photography’s faults. It is no wonder why Julia Ballerini criticizes pluralist photography as a “charitable weapon” (Hubbard 12).
Ballerini’s oxymoron is evident in that while pluralist photography masquerades as an autonomous and self-empowering initiative, many times the would-be subjects are taught the basic techniques of shooting pictures and are guided as to what they should be taking photos of, proving the importance of a mentor (leader of the project) to the consequential outcome of the photographs, including their saleablity and global outreach. In short, assuming that one of the main goals of a project is to reach a larger audience and gain support for a cause, the purity of pluralist photography will always be tainted with the opinions of a professional photographer, be it in the beginning stages of the project or in the post stages. For example, in a 2007 Venice Arts project in Mozambique, Africa, orphans with HIV/AIDS produced more than 13,000 images, 12,000 of which were eliminated in preparing for its exhibition. The deletion of the majority of these images was “not difficult…as they…did not adequately tell the story about the everyday lives of kids orphaned by HIV” (Hubbard 20). Obviously space was a constraint for the exhibit, but it is interesting to note how the professional photographers, in the end, got the final say in defining the childrens’ lives through their selection and editing powers.
Pluralist photography has many good intentions, and it should continue to be in practice. While there is a plethora of other points that address the controversy behind self empowerment, viewers need to be cognizant and aware that hierarchies behind such seemingly raw and untouched exhibits exist. They should not be passive in accepting the motives behind pluralist projects without question, nor should they be blind to its necessary but impactful molding by professionals. Pluralist photography, in its rawest of forms, is the exertion of a subjective power over the subjective voice.
Works Cited:
Bleiker, Roland, and Amy Kay. “Representing HIV/AIDS in Africa: Pluralist
Photography and Local Empowerment.” International Studies Association (2007).
Hubbard, James. “Shooting Back: Photographic Empowerment and Participatory
Photography .” 2007. 5 Mar 2009 .
Michel, Frann. “”Born into Brothels” Controversy.” Solidarity ATC 117July – August
2005 5 Mar 2009 .
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