Intersubjectivity in Photography and Oral History: Toward Ethical Creation and Presentation
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Thesis for Master of Arts in Oral History, Columbia University
ABSTRACT:
The 2008 opening of “Other Sides: An Investigation of Boundaries” was atypical for the Botswana National Museum and Art Gallery. That evening, the affluent, ‘cultured’ residents of Gaborone were joined by the guys who are rumored to spend their entire lives drinking homebrew under trees. Some of the latter were actually there twice: both in person, and in a photographic print hung on the museum wall.
Using the milieu of the exhibition opening to elucidate relations of power1 and invoke the discourse of otherness in society and the arts2, I attempted to create an opportunity for the subjects of fetishistic viewing3 to feel just as welcome in the process of high art reproduction as those who curate, collect, and criticize. The hierarchy of narrativization was made more equitable: the individuals pictured—Sontag4 would write, raped—were able to narrativize on their own terms, drinking homebrew inside the National Gallery while they engaged with people who were looking at them (twice).
By the end of the night, many of my friends had tried homebrew for the first time. For other friends, it was their first time inside the National Gallery. One of the latter, Gregory, whose image hung near to where he was drinking, came up to me and said, “Phil. I saw the photos. Tonight, I am proud. I am proud. Thank you.”
The next day, he and the others were back under the tree.
Like photography, oral history provides a discursive space for inclusivity that affords dialogic interrogation of “the dynamics of power as the process of understanding takes place, not simply as an afterthought.”5 By problematizing the intersubjective6 exchange, oral historians and photographers can “use the fact itself of the interview [or image creation] as an opportunity to stimulate others, as well as ourselves, to a higher degree of self-awareness….”7 By continuing the exchange beyond what is typically considered the ‘product’ of both fields (the photograph and the transcript), the photographer/interviewer can foster a much deeper understanding with much more important results. That understanding, though, is not without its difficulties. A black South African once said, “I’m sick of telling my story. …They don’t really want to change things and what good does telling our stories over and over and over do?”8
Probing the problematics9 of two personal projects (“Other Sides” from photography and “The Story of John – Part 1”10 from oral history) unearths complications inherent in any attempt to decentralize the narrativization of visual or oral memory. Particular attention is paid to dynamic concepts—especially community and identity.
“The turn toward indifference in our culture, heightened by the overload of images of suffering and violence, is the single greatest threat to our survival as a species and as individuals.”11 By understanding the ethical and methodological issues shared by these two fields, photographers and oral historians would possess better tools for thoughtful engagement, and an increased capacity to “combat indifference” through a “commitment to presence, to knowledge, and to shared pain.”12
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1 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, translated by A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1972), 224-5.
2 Pierre Bourdieu, Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996).
3 Christian Metz, “Photography and Fetish,” October 34 (1985).
4 Susan Sontag, “In Plato’s Cave,” in her On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1977), 24.
5 Geyla Frank, Venus on Wheels: Two Decades of Dialogue on Disability, Biography, and Being Female in America (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000), 20.
6 Luisa Passerini, Memory and Utopia: The Primacy of Inter-Subjectivity (New York: David Brown Book Co, 2007).
7 Alessandro Portelli, “Research as an Experiment in Equality” in his The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories, (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), 44. (his emphasis).
8 As quoted in Christopher J. Colvin, “‘Brothers and Sisters, Do Not Be Afraid of Me’: Trauma, history, and the therapeutic imagination in the new South Africa,” in Contested Pasts, edited by Katharine Hodgkin and Susannah Radstone (New York, London: Routledge, 2003).
9 Both the substantive adjective and the “structural problematic” from Jacques Derrida, “‘Genesis and Structure’ and Phenomenology,” in his Writing and Difference, translated by Alan Bass (London & New York: Routledge, 1978), 194-6.
10 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H3NWpCPeOgs
11 Mary Marshall Clark, “Holocaust Video Testimony, Oral History, and Narrative Medicine: The Struggle against Indifference,” Literature and Medicine 24, no. 2 (Fall 2005), 271.
12 Mary Marshall Clark, “Holocaust Video Testimony, Oral History, and Narrative Medicine: The Struggle against Indifference,” Literature and Medicine 24, no. 2 (Fall 2005), 280-1.
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