Photography for sadness, photography for politics
Stopping is surely fundamental to art. That one should pause to consider, however briefly, is central to art, whether it be to admire, to despise, to question, to contextualise, to recognise, or to appraise. That art should carry the potential to make one think seems therefore logically to follow, for if art can arrest one's progress in space, then its effects on the conscious mind are indubitable, however apparently brief. So, with stopping and thinking we might conjecture that the capacity for action is augmented by the presence of art thus defined; that, indeed, art is the stimulus for directed action in the world towards a goal motivated by artist, curator-editor, and the subject who stops and thinks because of the artistic product.
To what extent is photography a peculiarly political and sad genre in art production? This question and the introductory paragraph have been motivated by recent exhibitions, Richard Mosse The Enclave at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art at Humlebæk in Denmark and Zanele Muholi's selection at the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize 2015 at the Photographers' Gallery in London.
Both are deeply affecting multimedia series: Mosse uses photographs and videos to document and describe the narrative and effects of interethnic enmity in the Democratic Republic of Congo, while Muholi presents black-and-white photographs, documentary videos, and the written word to highlight the unthreatening presence of LGBT women in South Africa and expose local sentiments of hate towards them. Ostensibly, they both shine light on issues in the African continent, yet the overwhelming sense of their work concerns something grander and universal: they are both using their artistic production to write a human story, telling the global through the local, harnessing particular contexts to speak of the general.
So when we regard the series of large portraits of LGBT women looking out from the wall of Muholi's exhibition we stop seeing after a while that they are women defined as such and instead recognise their individualities and diversity, negating the descriptor which, when considered, is a label to end labels. En masse, the subjects who stop and think recognise the normality of the people in the photographs and thereby acknowledge a mutuality between themselves and the people on the wall. So then when they turn to consider the documentary Difficult Love (2010) this feeling is only stronger, and the absurdity of any enmity towards those whom one might define as different because they belong--according to one definition--to a minority, or who apparently run in the face of traditional or natural notions of being, becomes sorrowfully plain. And the opposite way around works, too, if you were to watch and listen to the documentary before considering the photographs, though, arguably, the presence of the photographic wall will inevitably be the first overwhelming impression upon entering Muholi's space.
It is in this sort of interaction and its productive effects that the political potential of the photographic genre becomes most palpably germane. As the power to make hitherto private matters into public concerns and to generate action surrounding them, politics must then be at the heart of such powerful images, so obviously directed as they are to reflecting honestly on the experience of South African LGBT women. Muholi's self-designation as a visual activist would concord with such an opinion, which some of the commentators and activists in Difficult Love would also presumably subscribe to when they make reference to the gentleness and intimacy of Muholi's portraits of couples, so much at odds with the proliferation of nudity available in manifold forms across the world, live and recorded, private and public, human and virtual. These images, which when shown in South Africa in 2010 incurred the displeasure of a government minister as 'immoral' and 'against nation-building', are, Muholi says, intended as a corrective for the silence surrounding homosexuality in South Africa and the popular ignorance of what being LGBT means, which inevitably leads to homophobia. That she chose to use photography cannot solely have been due to her familiarity with the genre, but also because of the realistic potential of the photographic image, the undeniably present, real possibility of the photographic subject. Her art in this show runs against the theoretical discussions purporting to explore the veracious capacity of image-making and documents these women as existent, unstaged, present and identifiable. That they are artificial is a given, but that the artifice is predicated on the real is an essential refraction in any such thinking.
The photographic is the political, then, or at least that's the beginning of an idea. And the political, concerned as it should be with the management and amelioration of mundane affairs, is necessarily inclined towards the sad, for change must confront reality, and worthwhile change is for the better, necessitating confrontation with what logically must be comparably worse. As a buttress for this way of thinking, one would do well to remember the Tate Modern's exhibition Conflict Time Photography.
To what extent is photography a peculiarly political and sad genre in art production? This question and the introductory paragraph have been motivated by recent exhibitions, Richard Mosse The Enclave at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art at Humlebæk in Denmark and Zanele Muholi's selection at the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize 2015 at the Photographers' Gallery in London.
Both are deeply affecting multimedia series: Mosse uses photographs and videos to document and describe the narrative and effects of interethnic enmity in the Democratic Republic of Congo, while Muholi presents black-and-white photographs, documentary videos, and the written word to highlight the unthreatening presence of LGBT women in South Africa and expose local sentiments of hate towards them. Ostensibly, they both shine light on issues in the African continent, yet the overwhelming sense of their work concerns something grander and universal: they are both using their artistic production to write a human story, telling the global through the local, harnessing particular contexts to speak of the general.
So when we regard the series of large portraits of LGBT women looking out from the wall of Muholi's exhibition we stop seeing after a while that they are women defined as such and instead recognise their individualities and diversity, negating the descriptor which, when considered, is a label to end labels. En masse, the subjects who stop and think recognise the normality of the people in the photographs and thereby acknowledge a mutuality between themselves and the people on the wall. So then when they turn to consider the documentary Difficult Love (2010) this feeling is only stronger, and the absurdity of any enmity towards those whom one might define as different because they belong--according to one definition--to a minority, or who apparently run in the face of traditional or natural notions of being, becomes sorrowfully plain. And the opposite way around works, too, if you were to watch and listen to the documentary before considering the photographs, though, arguably, the presence of the photographic wall will inevitably be the first overwhelming impression upon entering Muholi's space.
It is in this sort of interaction and its productive effects that the political potential of the photographic genre becomes most palpably germane. As the power to make hitherto private matters into public concerns and to generate action surrounding them, politics must then be at the heart of such powerful images, so obviously directed as they are to reflecting honestly on the experience of South African LGBT women. Muholi's self-designation as a visual activist would concord with such an opinion, which some of the commentators and activists in Difficult Love would also presumably subscribe to when they make reference to the gentleness and intimacy of Muholi's portraits of couples, so much at odds with the proliferation of nudity available in manifold forms across the world, live and recorded, private and public, human and virtual. These images, which when shown in South Africa in 2010 incurred the displeasure of a government minister as 'immoral' and 'against nation-building', are, Muholi says, intended as a corrective for the silence surrounding homosexuality in South Africa and the popular ignorance of what being LGBT means, which inevitably leads to homophobia. That she chose to use photography cannot solely have been due to her familiarity with the genre, but also because of the realistic potential of the photographic image, the undeniably present, real possibility of the photographic subject. Her art in this show runs against the theoretical discussions purporting to explore the veracious capacity of image-making and documents these women as existent, unstaged, present and identifiable. That they are artificial is a given, but that the artifice is predicated on the real is an essential refraction in any such thinking.
The photographic is the political, then, or at least that's the beginning of an idea. And the political, concerned as it should be with the management and amelioration of mundane affairs, is necessarily inclined towards the sad, for change must confront reality, and worthwhile change is for the better, necessitating confrontation with what logically must be comparably worse. As a buttress for this way of thinking, one would do well to remember the Tate Modern's exhibition Conflict Time Photography.
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