On a typical day, I read one article from AlterNet. Titles get my hopes up, but content almost invariably leaves me disappointed. Today was an atypical day.

AlterNet posted an article by Ben Bush, from bitch magazine (which probably explains its unusual quality) on photojournalist Mimi Chakarova. Chakarova’s work focuses on suffering, but instead of seeking an ever-more-distant shock value, Chakarova attempts to provoke thought:

Feeling that viewers are already inundated with violent images, Chakarova prefers images that raise questions instead of the short-lived attention gained through shock value. Instead of titling her photos, Chakarova captions them with descriptions of the conflict’s history and excerpts of interviews. A man clasps the head of his tortured brother, perhaps dead; beneath the image is his, rather than Chakarova’s, explanation of what has happened. “They blindfolded him, poured salt and pepper in his wounds and electrocuted him.”

From Chakarova’s own site:

The fragments are just as vital as the complete human story. They allow us to form our own interpretation of a place unknown. These glimpses of one’s existence shake us up. We ask questions. We seek explanations. And WHY leads to an understanding of politics, history, culture, and origin. If there were one thing I would like to show through my work it is the ever-present dignity and will of the people who allow me to photograph them. Courage and strength know no race, class, or nationality. They are simply human traits that help us stay alive when the odds are against us.

I was thrown by the wording in the above quote, at first: “They allow us to form our own interpretation of a place unknown.” However, reading on, I don’t think that Chakarova means so much the ability to appropriate these images and imbue them with our own meanings so much as that they provoke us to learn for ourselves what they might mean to their subjects. This sounds fantastic, and as Chakarova’s a neighbour, I’ll have to keep an eye out for her work.

There are things that make me wonder, though… “Courage and strength know no race, class, or nationality.” No doubt. But it’s very easy for those of us who are privileged to make the unfortunate into noble savages. Cowardice and spineless are equally democratic. But who wants to hear about the frailty of the human spirit?

What struck me more, though, when visiting Chakarova’s site, were her choice to shoot in black and white (the binary contrast of light and shadow; the simplicity of her photographic objects), and the limiting borders of her photographs. I looked first at her photographs of Ghana — a place I know fairly well. I was immediately struck by the foreignness of her pictures. This didn’t look like the Ghana I knew: It looked like Africa — a generic imaginary land that doesn’t really exist. Despite Chakarova’s brief descriptions, these photos are stripped of context. They lack voices. they lack the 360°-360° of lived experience.

Now, to qualify: These are first impressions. Chakarova’s work is stripped, here, of the context in which it would usually appear. Further, she doesn’t seek to give the full context that I feel is missing: She doesn’t want to tell stories; she wants to provoke questions. And are her photographs any more incomplete than our ethnographies? In The Social Role of Draughts in an Asante Village, I sought to tell humanising stories of the men of Adwafo. But every word that appears in that document is mediated through my brain in a more determining way than can be achieved through any photograph. This is not to say that the photographer doesn’t play an active role in determining how an image will be read. (If you doubt this, just give BAGNewsNotes an hour to disabuse you of your notions.) But, whatever’s going on beyond the edges of the photograph, whatever airbrushing the photographer may have applied through PhotoShop, the events of a photograph are ontologically very real in a way that the ephemeral memories that constitute our fieldnotes can’t be. But aren’t these intangibles — time, voice, narrative — just as important in understanding humans and human events?

How best do we witness?

This entry was posted on Saturday, 18 June 2005 at 21:52 and is filed under Miscellanea. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.