Letting Go of the Shutter: The Social Aesthetic of Contemporary Photography

Mark Strandquist // 2013 SECAC Conference Greensboro, NC

November 2nd, 2013

“Why don’t we have a more developed photography that explores in some depth the move from pain to

its resolution, creating reference points for those striving to move forward, rather than continually

searching for, and dwelling on, the cataclysm­­reminding us of traumatic moments for the sake of the

visceral shock?” Fred Ritchin

“To represent is to aestheticize; that is, to transform. It presents a vast field of choices but it does not

include the choice not to transform, not to change or alter whatever is being represented.” David Levi

Strauss

I love these quotes for so many reasons. When I read them together I can’t help but view them as call

to action, as a blueprint for so much of the work that resonates with me. Together they beckon forth

projects that go beyond witnessing the world. Together one can imagine and recognize project’s whose

images embody and make visible the social processes that go into their creation. Together one can

imagine and recognize the social performances that go into producing and consuming any image, and

how this expanded notion of aesthetics could be used to transform the way in which we interact with

each other, with those in power, and with the world around us. This paper reveals an incomplete yet

comprehensive archive of contemporary image­making possibilities that, if nothing else, share the notion

and display the importance of 'letting go of the shutter.' Whether through a machine like set of

pre­determined limitations that produce an image or an entire body of work, a focus on archiving not

producing images, or a variety of collaborative processes, or a combination of all three and more, many

contemporary image­makers champion what will be referred to as a 'social aesthetic’; one that brings to

the foreground and embodies the social processes that went into the production of the image, as well as

those social interactions that its exhibition produces and inspires. Spanning decades, and increasingly

prevalent, these photographic methods present challenging alternatives to the production, exhibition, and

distribution of images. After identifying those projects and ideas I see as unique and genre­challenging,

the paper will utilize my own practice as a case­study to show how these alternative modes of

image­making can play out, fail, and move in ways that continue to surprise and excite me.

To be sure, every image is created, published, and viewed through a social interaction. I don’t assert

otherwise. Instead, moving beyond the pedantic, this paper sources projects that make interactions

material, that present alternatives and seek, if not answers, to offer alternatives to the questions many of

us are asking; amidst an exhausting number of images produced and consumed each day, amidst

decades of war, poverty, famine, mass incarceration, climate change, slavery, and rampant

socio­economic inequality (all of which have been endlessly and extensively documented by

photojournalists and published in countless publications) what role can photography play as a challenge

to the status quo? What can it teach us? How has socially engaged photography evolved and what

new forms and functions are being realized and imagined?

Even beyond these questions, if every photograph is created and distributed through social interactions,

projects that make those interactions tantamount to their process pave the way for a more critical and

reflexive practice. In other words, the more we think about the process...the more we consider the

how, who, where an image is created, distributed and exhibited, the more one can understand both the

potential and limitations of socially engaged photography. By championing these practices we can view

each part of the process as an exciting staging ground for transforming the world around us.

I’ll begin with four examples which I believe encapsulate the ideas that inspired the ethics, methods, and

aesthetics found in projects often referred to as: Photography as Social Practice, or contemporary

Socially Engaged Photography.

All dealing with with war, each example seeks in unique ways to “bring the war home..”

War Against War (1924) may be the first example of photography being utilized through an explicitly

anti­war lens. The book, writes Craig Ritchie, seeked to “illustrate not only the tragic human

consequences of war, but also the lies and hypocrisy of the social, political, and economic forces that

produced and promoted it.” Ernst Friedrich, outraged by the first World War, compiled the vast

collection of images from German military and medical archives. Due to cross­european governmental

suppression of media, the vast majority of these images had never been seen by the general public...so

for the book, no new images were created. Think wikileaks in the 1920’s.... Heavy with idealist

underpinnings, the book sought to reach an international audience through the the purported universality

of its images and by printing captions in a multitude of languages. So the project proffered two ideas:

that there is objective truth (that war is barbaric) and that images can activate viewers in universal

ways...thus while the function of the images fits within an assortment of utopian photo projects such as

Steichen’s Family of Man exhibit, the role of text within the book, and the corresponding ‘Anti­war

Museum’ Friedrich opened the following year (1925) took the project a step further. Thus even then,

there is an acknowledgement that images are powerful, but they are not enough. Like Lewis Hine,

Walter Benjamin, and many others, Friedrich believed that images could provide a universal entry point

to these issues, but that text and public engagement were necessary to inspire communities to fight for

peace.

Martha Rosler’s Home Beautiful: Bringing the War Home

If Friedrich believed in the power of photography to reveal the awful ‘truth’ of war, pushing the notion

that, to borrow a phrase, ‘the truth is out there’ we just need to capture and present it, if he believed in

the power of war photography to inspire peace, then Martha Rosler’s project Home Beautiful from

1967 muddies that sentiment. Her collages appropriate photographs made by journalists during the

Vietnam War and pairs them with images from the pages of Home magazine. To Rosler, photo

journalists are unable as her subtitle states, to “bring the war home.” She writes, that the work stemmed

from “a frustration with the images we saw in television and print media, even with anti­war flyers and

posters...that the images we saw were always very far away, in a place we couldn't imagine." To Rosler

the images made in Vietnam failed twice. They failed in bringing the violence and atrocities of war into

our everyday consciousness (through this cultural and geographical distancing mentioned above), and

they failed to acknowledge the inherent violence of the everyday. Thus the objects we consume

(whether images of war or domestic products) are embodied with a violence that is both inherent and

invisible. For Rosler, images of war, capitalism, poverty...are as oppressive, and keen to alienate

products, or current realities from their source. In home beautiful, the camera is viewed as a cleaver,

one that separates instead of connects. One that distances source from symptom, soldier from civilian,

consumption from oppression. Thus to Rosler, no image or form of documentation reveals an adequate

truth. The war is already home. We are direct participants, but fail to see it.

That notion of personal/collective participation in violence is explored further and in more complex and

polyvocal ways in The American War, 2005, by Harrell Fletcher

Visiting Vietnam during an artist retreat, Fletcher was continually drawn to The War Remnants Museum

in Ho Chi Minh City. Before leaving, he documented, with a point and shoot camera, every object and

corresponding text plate within the museum. He then re­printed these images and exhibited them across

the United States. At each exhibition, programming included community discussions where anyone

affected by the War (soldiers, politicians, protesters, family and friends) were invited to share their

experiences. After creating the images Fletcher wrote, “I started researching the war in an attempt to

understand why it happened and what its effects were on the region and on U.S. policy. The museum

and my re­presentations of it are only showing one perspective, there are many others.”

Like much of Fletcher’s work, the project is technically simple, but creates space for an immersive,

polyvocal, and challenging notion of photographic truth. The war to Fletcher both ‘never came home’

and has, at the same time, always been around us. The images will never do the experience justice.

This marks to me a huge turning point. Photography in the American War is not viewed as capturing a

rigid or objective truth, nor as form or vehicle for alienation, but as an affecting, yet inadequate tool for

documenting or transforming the world. Images within the project are understood through

performance...that of the photographer, and those, who by participating in the exhibit, add to their

meaning. For Fletcher it took going to Vietnam to gain a better understanding of what Vietnamese refer

to as the American War (one can imagine what other similar museums across the world would feel like

to experience). Those images were obviously transformative and challenged Fletcher’s knowledge of

the sixteen year war, but they were not enough for him, nor he believes, for his audience. Fletcher

states, “Even though many of the images were familiar to me, seeing them all together and presented

from the Vietnamese perspective was very striking. It made me realize that I didn't know much about

the details of the war that had consumed the U.S. for most of my early childhood.”

So the ‘frame’ extends. The images don’t define history nor is their meaning fixed. Truth is elusive and

requires many voices, many perspectives. The images we encounter are not representations of reality,

but re­presentations of representations. His photos attempt to bring an entire War Museum home. But

importantly, for a project that seeks to create space for other photographic and textual interpretations of

the Vietnam War, the additional programming, where community members shared their experiences of

the conflict, showcase a more dynamic notion of truth...where the images embody not only the

experiences of those they represent, but all of our experiences with the war. This evolving, additive, and

human history adds meaning and oral captions to these images that we are still trying to understand.

Soldiers Stories, Jennifer Karrady

For the past six years, Jennifer Karady has worked with American veterans returning from

the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to create staged narrative photographs that depict their

individual stories and address their difficulties in adjusting to civilian life...Karady

collaborates with the veteran to restage a chosen moment from war within the safe space of

their everyday environment, often surrounded by family and friends (from the artist’s

website).

While it may be the most technically impressive of those mentioned so far, it is the social interactions that

go into creating the images, the process behind the stunning, unnerving, and at times awkward

photographs that presents a site and staging ground for so much more. Here to me is where some of the

most exciting work is beginning to emerge. Like Wendy Ewald and many photographers that work

collaboratively with communities, Karrady seems to view the process of creating an image as a social

performance that has the potential to transform the photographer, the subject, and those around them.

Karady realizes the images through a series of interactions, dialogues, brainstorming, and community

actions. Spending at least a month with each veteran before the image is created, the project brings

families and friends together to design the image, and thus gains insight into how the war has come home

with each veteran and how it affects their everyday. Here we see photography in a more radical form.

As a stand in, and a vehicle for building more open, empathetic, and supportive relationships. Where the

outcome is fluid and less­mediated, where the process, the image, and the exhibition all have the

potential to have impacts on individuals, families, and our notions of trauma.

Bringing the ideas of Fred Ritchin and David Levi Strauss back into the fold one can see how these

projects support and create visual signposts for various discourses on the power and limitations of

photography. Images can have an incredible impact. We produce and consume enormous quantities

every day...continually re­ifying, beckoning, and transforming the world as we know, or dream of. But

they are inherently limited, can create distance where bridges are needed and possible. I will never call

for the ‘end of photography,’ or at least not for the end of image­making, but my hope is that there

becomes an acknowledgment that every issue is too complex, that all issues are in dire need of multiple

sources of context, representation, and accountability. Thus the answer is not more media.

Multi­media documents of systemic issues will only dig so deep and often exchange ideas in traditional

and disempowering methods. Brazilian educational theorist, Paulo Friere referred to this mode of

information exchange as “the banking model” where recipients of knowledge are viewed as empty

vessels for experts to fill, and by proxy...to form. Likewise we don’t need better tools...but new ways

to utilize them. New forums and modes of exchanging. It is the process through which the media is

created, how ideas are shared, and what interactions its ‘exhibition’ inspires that is of most excitement

to me. Fred Ritchin calls for projects that propose visual models for a way forward, not simply an index

of the past or reductive truths......likewise, artist and educator Tania Bruguera writing about education

(which I believe can stand in for any practice of sharing knowledge) views the classroom as “a site for

creating collectively and developing human and social potential, not simply acquiring or depositing

information.”

But how can photography do this? A practice that has traditionally championed single authorship,

objectivity, and problematic notions of truth would seem to be the unlikely tool for the job. But if

viewing and creating images is a social performance….and any performance requires a script, actors,

audience, stage, lighting, even the most minimal of each, then that script can be rewritten: its roles

reimagined, its stage expanded, its audience included, all allowing new outcomes to reveal themselves;

allowing for the process of aesthetization to transform not only our representations of the world, but

how we exist within it.

Bringing the social aesthetic to the forefront will only ask more from photography...be more critical

about its production and exhibition. Will demand more intentionality. Where the how, who, and where

are the message…where the camera becomes a tool for testing and performing new ways of seeing

and being within the world...And like any negative awaiting the unique touch of the printer, each new

social or artistic model these projects create can be transposed and adapted to work within any local

context. Thus focusing on the social aesthetic doesn’t nullify photography’s power of replication (the

ability to endlessly re­print an image). Wendy Ewald has done projects in countless countries...in fact

Duke University institutionalized her methods, where though she worked within the same geographical

area year after year, her process, one that is deeply informed and driven by its participants, continued to

realize powerful and surprising results. So if we shift the function of art to mirror Bruguera’s notion of

education...where “art” is viewed as a site for exploring new social roles and realities, then the camera

not only provides ‘evidence’ of the experience, but is the tool through which the performance is made,

and through which the performer, and those around them, are transformed.

While there is no recipe for what methods will work best in any given circumstance, a practice that

meaningfully involves those it seeks to represent, that is informed by the needs and desires of its

subjects, will necessarily move in ways that reflect local contexts in hopes of being an empowering and

transformative force for its participants. Artist Lucy Lippard has a mantra: “Anything about us, without

us, is against us.” And also...less relevant but equally awesome...”let’s save pessimism for better times.”

So, as the ‘social aesthetic’ of an image (the social interactions that led to its production, exhibition,

distribution) are forefronted what new problems arise? What process of valuation can be used to

address these less or intangible aspects of contemporary image making? How do we critique it? Is a

project simply a success if it meaningfully includes others within the process? As an artist exploring these

ideas, these and many other questions continually arize.

For Some Other Places We’ve Missed: Windows from Prison, each version of the project becomes a

personal testing ground for many of the methods discussed in this paper. It was incredibly important

that the project strive to generate a new kind of prison photography and to create an exhibits that are

not culminations, but starting points for dialogue, exchange, and community action. In this instance, to

create new prison photography required that no images of prisoners, detention facilities, police cars,

court rooms, or execution chambers were necessary. Nor sought after. The project stems from a

continual belief that photography, as stated before, is an incredibly powerful, yet completely inadequate

tool for social change.

There are already too many images of prisons and prisoners. Often photographs are not stating

anything new nor dealing with the distance from subject and viewer, or the reification of stereotype and

social causality that images can unintentionally create.

So if I couldn’t get cameras into prisons for prisoners to use, and creating another documentary project

was not of interest, but I still wanted to work with prisoners to create their own photographs, it only

made sense to use limitations, directives, prompts, etc...to work with prisoners to think

photographically. To write photographically. To request with words what they wish they could see if

they were only able. Thus, each participant responds to the prompt; “If you had a window in your cell,

what place from your past would it look out to?” Participants include the specific address (if it has one)

and describes exactly how to create the image, where to stand, what to include in the frame,

occasionally what the sky should look like or what time of day the exposure should be made at.

The images (sometimes photographed by me, sometimes through community collaboration) are created,

printed, and mailed or given back to the incarcerated participant.

Limitations surface again in the exhibition. The images are printed at the same size that I am allowed to

mail or give back to the incarcerated participants. This choice of scale strives to reinforce the micro and

macro ways that incarceration constantly strips away a prisoner’s humanity as well as to create an

exhibition experience that runs counter to contemporary trends. I used a 6x7 camera to create this set

of images in hopes of sharing the highest quality that I could afford to make. But it made no sense to

print huge. I was only allowed to send individuals 4x6 prints...why should viewers have it larger? I

wanted instead to present an experience that individuals could either engage with or not. If you want to

see the image there is no standing back or keeping one’s distance...of course this made sense within a

gallery context...within a less defined public space it might make sense to create something in a larger

scale, that alters or dominates space in hopes of creating a new environment altogether.

Whenever the project is exhibited, the images and corresponding writing always become a staging

ground, what I hope becomes a humanistic entry point for a set of public events to expand the dialogue,

to fill the gaps left by any photographic project, and to instigate community action. Programming has

included film screenings, poetry readings from prison, letter writing workshops, protests, and teach­ins

led by community members affected by incarceration.

For a recent exhibit of the project we printed a newspaper and placed them in bright orange newspaper

boxes across the city. Expanding the exhibit beyond the gallery, the newspaper reached out to

community members to fulfill additional photo requests from locally incarcerated prisoners. The

newspaper had information on the exhibit, public programing, an editorial written by writer/curator Pete

Brook on the history of photography workshops within prisons, and a “housing wanted” advertisement

for a local group working with women through the reentry process that were in need of a permanent

location. During the exhibit this group began meeting at the gallery and while no permanent location has

been found they continue to hold events there.

By the end of the exhibit we had facilitated an extensive set of public programing that engaged with

hundreds of participants. Still, it is easy to look back and pick things apart. To see what was incredible

and what was verging on the participatory art world’s version of an expressionistic paint stroke. A little

interactive component here, a film screening there...and so on. Any act is a gesture but it is evident to

all, which events, moments, interactions seemed too mediated, reductive, or even superficial.

In similar ways that the ‘answer’ may not simply be more media the same can, and should be said for

photography as social practice...simply adding modes of community engagement is not the answer.

Token avenues for participation will expand projects only so much and participants will know whether

they are able to participate in a meaningful way. As these fields of practice continue to expand and

participants have an increasing amount of agency and power to determine the form and function of a

project, new modes of critiquing will be necessary. If art historians are to do the critiquing, then

perhaps they too must expand their knowledge and expertise within the social realms.

If photography as social practice can create models for how we engage with each other and the world

around us, forms of image making such as meta­photography and a focus on archiving or revealing

images already in existence have the potential to radically transform political and civic institutions.

Wikileaks, anonymous, and other groups belonging to what has been described as the ‘5th estate’ have

certainly challenged who, how, where, and why information is disseminated. Likewise, the emphasis on

citizen journalism during the Arab Spring, the Occupy Movement, 9­11 and many others suggest an

evolving and increasingly horizontal means of exchanging ideas. It can be certain that images will play an

incredibly important role in our future. Viewing photography as a social performance, on a micro and

macro scale, will equip us with not only a better understanding of the source of imagery, but offer

blueprints for image based projects that can help instigate lasting social change.

If Rosler’s work showcased the violence embodied within the images and objects we consume each

day, many contemporary artists are seeking to expand and move beyond that critique. By viewing the

photograph as a performative act, where as Levi Strauss suggests, one is inherently transforming the

subject, object, and photographer, then that object can embody a different script, take on new

functions, propose new personal, social, and political forms. Fred Ritchin asked for “visual reference

points.” For artists to present ways ‘forward’ not simply an index of past struggles. As images embody

and bring to the forefront the social interactions that went into the photograph, we can begin to see how

those reference points could be created. By championing and further investigating the ‘social aesthetic of

photography,’ by viewing the image as a staging ground for interaction, and it’s exhibition as an equally

exciting and challenging realm for dialogue, exchange, and community action…as image makers become

increasingly aware that every creative choice can be a socio­political statement, then our images can

begin to create these reference points, can propose and realize new ways of seeing, understanding, and

being within the world.