This is what Hans Rosling says of global development in the documentary I linked to earlier. I want to dig a little deeper into this issue.
I’d say that most of the photo world has done a fairly terrible job of making this point. All the images of development are somehow read as “look at all this massive expansion and urbanization and how factory life is terrible.” But where is the visual representation of people in developing countries as equals rather than Those Who Suffer. There’s a lot of activist talk about how terrible it is that people live in poverty all over the world, yet when a solution more broad than individual donations is employed (ie development), the reaction is still often that these countries are doing terrible things to the environment, that they want more than they should have.
This attitudes remind me of Robert Lyons’ talk at PhotoAlliance about Intimate Enemy, his work in Rwanda. He framed the project as a attempt to get past our tendency to view those who do what we consider immoral things as an entirely different type of creature. In other words, he was trying to say there is no such thing as The Other and that ultimately, on average we are all the same in terms of what we’re capable of. By believing that it takes a special type of monster to perform certain atrocious acts, we mentally cast the perpetrators in the same light as the perpetrators would cast their victims – they are a different type of person, a type not as worthy as us and therefore killable.
One woman in the audience because incensed at these assertions and repeatedly demanded to know what the ratio of genocidiers and victims was in the body of work. Who is this that we’re looking at? Is it a Bad Guy or a Good Guy? Why isn’t this work titled Sympathy for the Devil? How can you make such beautiful, sympathetic portraits of heinous people? The same complaints that we hear over and over again about photography cast as art when the subject matter involves suffering, poverty or devastation.
What is really going on here? Why is an aesthetically pleasing photo of a terrible thing so inflammatory? I’ve written a bit about this before, but Lyons’ angle adds an important point. By showing abject suffering directly, by showing corpses and devastated cities, we are distancing ourselves from the victims. You look out the window, you don’t see corpses or devastation, therefore it must be happening someplace else. Whether we empathize with the victims or not, we know on some level that it is not us. We are saying, “those poor people.”
Which is of course not a bad thing to say. I understand where the woman in the audience is coming from. She is anti-genocide, which is not a bad thing to be, but she missed the point. She still considers genocide something that could only be performed by a certain type of depraved person. But as with many things, until it happens to you, you can’t imagine that it could ever happen to you, or to the place you call home. You can’t imagine in fact that you could be the person doing it.
And that’s what’s wrong with a lot of photojournalism on global development. Even if you sympathize with the people across the world, that is not the same as actually imagining yourself in their shoes, living their lives. So it’s very easy to make judgments about “them” out of the context of which you are a part.
The argument for Lyons’ way of treating the subject as opposed to Nachtwey’s is that there is less distance in Lyons’ work. He tries exactly to bridge that gap of imagination and place the genocidiers as equals, shooting them in the same way that you might want to shoot your closest friends and family. If we stop thinking of the problems of the developing world as someone else’s problems, we might come to a better solution. After all, we would never argue that whole swaths of the US population should not be allowed to have a car. Somehow we take it for granted that of course, in such a forward thinking and civilized place, everyone should have a right to pursue what they want. Yet somehow this thinking doesn’t get applied to people in developing nations.
Rosling’s washing machine talk appeals to me because it casts the resource issues raised by development in the light of a communal sharing problem rather than a who gets what problem. Maybe we should think collectively about how we can produce and allocate energy for a certain standard of living across the board rather than just arresting development. That involves a certain amount of lowering energy use here as well as raising use there. In other words, it really is a problem of how we can share equitably, which it seems we are still not very good at. It’s always a bit difficult to look long and hard at what you can give up yourself. I am guilty, aren’t we all, isn’t that the point.
One final caveat. The Lyons approach works to eliminate The Other in a Western context because it is targeted toward a specific audience. Would it have the same effect in another context? I’m not talking specifically about his work, but more broadly about what we perceive to be effective or dignified and empathetic documentary work. I think it is wise to be very clear about who your audience is. I’m not sure what a farmer in Southeast Asia would say about Robert Lyons’ portfolio. I can only guess at the Western reading.
