Can photography provoke change?
I would say that photography is unable to significantly provoke change or inspire action in the physical world, whilst able to provide anyone with a look into a catastrophic or horrific Other such as a natural disaster or conflict fallout, it is only a look.
Where there are some who are sensitive enough to the material to change their lives there will never be anything that is able to speak to an audience large enough for a long enough duration to do anything significant. The issue is that the photograph allows the viewer to look at something catastrophic or horrific from an entirely safe and therefore detached point of view and a constructed one at that.
‘What the viewer sees… is a set of signs formed according to an artist’s intention. (Ranciere, 2010 p135) Ranciere asks whether the audience reading these signs ought to be angered with the photographer for turning grief and pain into an aesthetic matter or perhaps by reducing the subjects merely to victims. Of course, to follow this line of thinking to the end would be problematic in that you could simply write off all political art as evil, however what Ranciere surmises is that the problem with representation is that it allows separation between the audience and the subject and between doing and seeing.
Not only that, there are so many images pushed into circulation all the time that it can be all too easy to forget what you have seen because of the images you have viewed since are in the way. ‘We just consume images at a such a pace that we don’t even look at them properly anymore’ (Kessels in Falconer, Roberts 2016) As a way of demonstrating this Erik Kessels installation ’24 Hours is an exhibition which features a million photos that were uploaded to Flickr, Facebook and Google over a 24 hour period. How can it be possible to elicit change with one photograph when there are so many other distractions being presented so quickly and consistently.
It is rare that a photograph breaks through the noise and resonates with a large audience simultaneously but unless it is in constant circulation to remind us of a cause or usually to evoke change by parting with money, it soon gets swept away into the sea of images. What is interesting now that if an image does remain buoyant for a long enough period of time it is often subject to being turned into a meme.
I am inclined to think that the more exposed we are to atrocity the more we accept it as common place. In Slavoj Žižek’s ‘First as Tragedy, Then as Farce’ Žižek cites Guy Sorman’s description of the cycle of creative destruction is relevant here to overexposure of shocking subject materials.
‘If one is looking for a clinically pure, laboratory-distilled version of contemporary capitalist ideology, one need only turn to Guy Sorman. The very title of an interview he recently gave in Argentina-“This Crisis Will Be Short Enough”IO-signals that Sorman fulfils the basic demand liberal ideology has to satisfy with regard to the financial meltdown, namely, to renormalize the situation: “things may appear harsh, but the crisis will be short, it is just part of the normal cycle of creative destruction through which capitalism progresses:'(Sorman in Žižek, 2009, p.22)
Although discussing how capitalism thrives through normalisation, it seems that the same thing is happening with images of shocking subject material and this is most likely to capitalism – not that I am anti-capitalist. However instead of the crisis being short, the images are just replaced with something new – which is how consumption drives western economy.
Ranciere (Dissensus On Politics and Aesthetics, P135 Continum International Publishing Group, London 2010)
“Esta crisis sera bastante breve,” interview with a Guy Sorman, Perfil (Buenos Aires). November 2, 2008, pp. 38 43.
Slavoj Žižek (First as Tradgedy Then as Farce, 2009, Verso: UK: 6 Meard Street, London WIF oEG
CRJ 