Blog Post: Carla Guerrero 5/4/2008

The camera is a powerful and masterful tool. It captures much more than images; it captures the past and creates artifacts, as Susan Sontag writes. My camera however, was less than powerful or masterful. A Canon Powershot bought about three years ago, it has suffered my less than gentle care in my trips to Mexico, Peru and Bolivia. It sucks batteries dry in an hour, sometimes it doesn’t turn on, and when you click to take a picture it takes about a full 10 seconds before it reacts so the desired scene is never the one captured. However, this rinky dink camera was able to capture 15 decent pictures of the swap-meet.
The project was to take 15 images of the swap-meet in order to portray a subculture where families eek out an existence. Some fare well, others don’t. The reason why I chose this topic and not another, was that I knew this world very well. I belonged to it as it did to me. I didn’t think it would be challenging in the least, after all, I’m at this place every week and what’s so hard about taking a couple of shots, right?
Taking pictures however, requires a bit of courage. You need to be willing to expose yourself to people who don’t want to be exposed themselves. But anyone can go out and take pictures of anything. The secret, I think, lies in being able to contextualize them. Be able to give each image its back story and therefore make the image more powerful and fair. It is similar to what Robert Coles dealt with in his early research work. He is in a way, intruding in someone else’s life. He is there to do his work-which might or might not help his subject. As Coles went about his work, he began forming a discussion. A consciousness of what he was doing as a privileged, educated, white man in the segregated South or in Appalachia. Having a sensitivity when dealing with others who don’t share your background is difficult, but the road is made clearer once you start to ask the questions.
But how fair can one be when you are taking pictures of someone else’s reality? I was taking pictures of my reality, but even then, my reality of the swap-meet is very different to someone else’s. Participatory photography, as Roland Bleiker and Amy Kay discuss, in “Representing HIV/AIDS in Africa: Pluralist Photography and Local Empowerment,” is a different type of photography than the traditional naturalist and humanist approaches. Going into pluralist photography, you know you are not dealing with an objective image. It is an image completely subjective to the experiences of the child taking it. Humanist and naturalist photography claim to be objective—both have an agenda: to represent the truth of a situation. However, they are not completely objective; they are just as subjective as those taken by the children who participate in empowerment photography. Professional photographers make snap decisions when choosing what kind of image to take, how to compose it, where to take it from, etc. Decisions formed from their experiences, their education, and their upbringing.
Pluralist photography is defined by the authors as “a practice of mediation whereby the represented person takes an active role in the process of inscribing social meaning, but does so without attaching to it an exclusive claim that silences other positions and experiences.” The images taken by a set of children don’t claim to be the universal, objective truth as does the traditional naturalist photography. It claims to be one truth of many. It portrays the complexities and the complications that exist in any one issue affecting the poor, the underprivileged, and the hungry. It doesn’t read: “take me at face value.” It reads, look closer and study this issue on your own in order to form your own judgment-one influenced by as many perspectives as possible.
My 15 pictures of the swap-meet are obviously my form of participatory and pluralist photography. They form a picture of one reality. They are images I see from my view. Not from the shopper’s perspective, or the single mother working, or the elderly couple, or the owner of the property. These are unique images taken by a 23-year-old graduate student who has worked weekend after weekend since she was 9. They are taken by a hand that is already slightly roughened by the Santa Ana winds and the handling of rusty metals, splintered wooden tables and cheap, Santee alley merchandise. I have my own agenda when I take these images. I am sensitive to the struggles of immigrant families, because I am part of the struggle in my own immigrant family.
However, as much as I form a part of this community, I still feel odd holding the camera. Susan Sontag explains it well in On Photography, “The photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes (Sontag, 55).” I think it goes farther than that, and it dwells in the issues Coles raises in Doing Documentary Work. There is an uncomfortable issue of privilege whether it stems from class or race or education. The camera signifies a certain status symbol in my hand. I’m taking pictures for my photography class at USC, a class taught by Pulitzer prize winning photographer Jim Hubbard. That’s a special privilege that I am able to experience because of my education. Hopefully, most doing this type of work will gain a social consciousness or sensitivity due in part from the nature of the work. As Coles elucidates, “…we are asking for a kind of forbearance from the people who are often considerably more burdened than we are, hence our obligation to think carefully about how we approach such people and how we are with them, not to mention how we take leave of them (Coles, 79).”
That is why in a sense, “parachute” journalists, photographers and volunteers or X-type of person doing similar work, don’t do justice to a story or an issue. Parachuting into a zone of conflict is usually a cost-effective way to cover a story for a newspaper or television program. Also, sending a well-known familiar figure to cover a story gives the reader or viewer a sense that comfort, and trust. However, for as long as the story is “hot,” the coverage will continue but as soon as the infotainment world catches a whiff of a hotter story, the attention is gone. People’s attention rates are short. Too much suffering is boring to people or people feel helpless and would rather not see it. Out of sight, out of mind. Maybe it’s a type of survival mechanism.
Not that parachuting into a story, doing the research and reporting on it is wrong. It provides information and bares certain facts. However, what is important is that this isn’t the sole truth out there. You can’t take it at face value. It is just one reality of many. It is just one perspective in what constitutes a truth. The people living that reality may have a dissimilar way of looking at things. They are after all, the ones directly affected. A collection of all perspectives would create a closer view of what the truth is, if there is a one general “truth.”
Photographs are not one reality either. Give two different people a camera and tell them to take pictures of the same event. Both will take different images, unlike each other, coming at it from different angles. Some things that capture one person’s interest will not capture the other’s.
Sontag writes that photographs are artifacts of the past “They are clouds of fantasy and pellets of information. Photography has become the quintessential art of affluent, wasteful, restless societies-an indispensable tool of the new mass culture that took shape here after the Civil War… (Sontag, 69).”
I think it is safe to say that today, photography is reaching the hands of those who live in the shadows that affluent, wasteful and restless society. Photography, like the rest of mass communication, is changing rapidly with the advances of technology. Today, hundreds and thousands of pictures can be taken by hundreds and thousands of amateur photographs and each represent the same yet different world. The nature of the artifact is changing as millions of voices now clamor for their own truths. No longer will the most privileged, wealthy societies be the ones writing the world’s histories.
As U.S. based journalism and media lag behind their fourth estate ideals, and infotainment takes over, it forces the rest of the world to produce their versions of the truth as infotainment distorts realities. “The fusion of information and entertainment, and the commercial need for recognizable headlines and simple stories, inevitably favors stereotypical representations over some complex ways of representing sociopolitical issues, such as HIV/AIDS (Bleiker and Kay, 143).” As such stereotypes and simplifications abound, other methods are explored to combat them. Pluralist photography, for example, explores the realities of children who have been affected by HIV and AIDS in Africa, dispelling myths and skewed images of what living with AIDS is.
In my project on the swap-meet, one of the things I wanted to explore was the issue of Latino immigrants in this country. As xenophobia has taken over various parts of the country, racist stereotypes abound about the people crossing the border. The majority of them are coming to this country to work, having been forced to migrate because of economic reasons. The swap-meet is NOT an easy job. It’s physically taxing, it’s stressful and challenging. It is at the mercy of the goings on the local economy and political situations. When the news talks about recessions and mortgage crisis, people making a living off of their ten by eight foot business begin to feel it in their pockets.
I am using these subjective images to present my reality, my version of the truth. I am continually undergoing my own personal discussions about privilege and the power of images. I believe participatory photography can help dismantle the idea of the objective truth and give importance to the realities of those who are living it. Engaging children in projects of photographic empowerment helps move away from the insensitive documentarians and Vista volunteers who visited the Appalachian families. My project was a combination of participatory photography as explored in Bleiker and Kay as well as a journey through my own consciousness as Robert Coles discusses.

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