~Part of Your World~

A THOUSAND WORDS

Today I thought about what Dr. Sharon said. Just because we own a camera, does that make it okay to shoot someone else's life? Self portraits of family and friends aside, what about all those times we have taken pictures of natives because they were interesting, or those times we photographed models at those car-shows. Looking at those pictures, we don't know who these people are, how they lived, what their problems are, their thoughts, feelings...emotions...we don't know anything about the complex hivestructure of things that make them people. Looking at those pictures, we see instead images, static and two dimensional that we can ingest at our pleasure. We can take it and intepret it and impose our own desires and values upon it. So when they say that a picture says a thousand words, whose words are actually being spoken here? Is it really the subject's, or simply our own, so discreetly and subconciously imposed upon the image. Whose context is it really, that we are viewing these subjects, whose stories are being told? So then it all becomes almost pornographic. Pornographic because we are consuming these images for our own pleasure. Pornographic because the subjects are removed out of context for us to impose our imaginations on. Pornographic because we have turned people - living, breathing, people - into mere images.

But the question is, is it okay then to take pictures of unknown subjects? When is it okay for us to take them? Should we take pictures only when we've been given consent? Or can it not be said, that the action of people leaving their houses and dressing up already constitute a form of presentation and that it is therefore, ethical to capture their lives and turn them into images? Does public presentation of the physical self thereby constitute an unwritten and unspoken agreement that anyone and everyone is allowed to capture one's image? And then taking the matter further, what about people who claim to photograph to document the truth? What about anthropologists who capture images of natives to present in Human Studies textbooks all around the world? This becomes especially problematic because there is the ethical issue of transforming the native subject into an image which can, really, be intepreted in any ammount of ways -negative or positive-. In that sense, how truthful can a picture be when I can show the very same one to about ten people and come back with about the same ammount of stories as to what the context of the picture taken really is?

Of course, Dr. Sharon never offers me any answers to such questions. She only requests that I think about them and, seeing as to how we, as bloggers are also usually complicit to this, it is also what I would like to ask of all of you - if you please- the next time you decide to snap a picture.