Lionel Batoba: Participant vs. Professional Photography
October 26, 2011
In a unique class, Visual Communication and Social Change, 4th-year students explore and contrast the images of professional and “participant” photographers; try to discern the impact of various forms of visual media on its target audiences; and read authors who promote participant-photography and those who are critical of it, as they attempt to answer questions such as, “Do media professionals distort the stories of the poor and dispossessed? Can participant-photography make a meaningful impact given the amateur photographer’s lack of training and experience?” Read their initial analyses and join the conversation.
Participant vs. Professional Photography by Lionel Batoba
Participatory Photography projects such as those by Shooting Back and Venice Arts have demonstrated the incredible insight gained by providing members of certain communities the means of documenting their lives. The greatest benefit of participatory photography seems to be the authenticity of emotions people are able to capture when their subject are familiar to them rather than strangers. With this type of photography it seems to be a bit of a gamble, that hopefully these novice photographers will be able to capture something that is interesting and visually relevant; of course this depends on who is viewing the photographs. Professional photography while it may not always get the raw emotions, it has a better understanding of what it is looking for, of the message it is trying to convey with certain photographs.
A big difference that I have noticed between the two types of photography is that participatory photography is not as one sided as professional photography can sometimes be. By that I mean, the participatory photographs we have seen depicts people in all sorts of different states, and a lot of them are happy and smiling. This is a different aspect of certain communities that professional photography does not always capture; it seems that professional photographers feel that they can obtain a stronger response to their work by pulling at our heartstrings in a melancholic manner. I feel in the world of photography there is room for both and that should always be the case, with the ubiquitousness of cameras lately, it seems that everyone is photographer, but a lot of them don’t really have anything interesting to say. I think participatory photography is most beneficial when it demonstrates a community where photography is perhaps a novelty, where certain people need a voice and a real accurate representation of the good as well the bad.
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I agree wholeheartedly with Mr. Batoba, one of the most valuable and essential qualities of participant photography is the photographer’s proximity to the subject. This allows the subject to feel adequately at ease, as the photographer is seen as an equal (or perhaps even invisible, part of the very fabric of the landscape), often resulting in images that an outsider professional could not possibly render. The capturing of such images, I am sure, facilitate the documentation of situations and unique emotions that otherwise would go unnoticed and unappreciated.
To this end, I also concur that there has been a trend in professional photography towards believing that a successful photograph is a sorrowful one. Not only is does this lead to many a depressing photograph (so many, in fact, that certain photographs now border on cliché), but an overall inaccurate view of the world. It is an injustice to the complexity of a subject’s humanity to show only one dimension of their lives.
An interesting point made here is the issue of authenticity. Coming from a DJ background I have encountered this issue a lot in that songs being played may not be created by the DJ and it is very difficult for audiences to tell how much manipulation is done live. The fear is that DJs pre plan an entire set and have no authenticity in their performance. I feel that this point can also be applied to photography and professional photographers. Those who do not live in the environment in which they live do not have the same authenticity to depict that environment than those who actually live there and are directly effected by that environment. Regardless, authenticity is an issue that is very prevalent in art and social culture. It is worth further analyzing what contributes to authenticity, various types of authenticity, who is more authentic, and what people may do to appear to be more authentic than they actually are. Participatory may also suffer from lack of authenticity as all photographers do, but can at least say that they lived in the environment they are photographing.
Ian