Conclusion

Abstract

The book’s conclusion summarises the key paradigms of contemporary slum representation on screen and relates them to their historical predecessors – a strategy that reverses the chronological approach applied throughout the book. It then looks at Susan Sontag’s assessment of social documentary photography as a form of social voyeurism, or ‘slumming’ through cameras, as well as to the changing notions of documentary and realism by interrogating what role cameras together with still or moving images play in our digital era today. The author concludes with a final argument which is that our ‘planet of slums’ has, for better or worse, become a hypermediated topos, an ‘archaeological’ media site of global dimensions, to which many filmmakers of the digital era respond in a palimpsestic way, re-writing or remediating our cities’ stored stories and images in sometimes highly imaginative, sometimes provocative ways. These filmmakers are not necessarily (re)turning to slums in order to look voyeuristically at the world’s ‘Other Half’ with fascination, pity or disgust, and neither with a reformist or socialist agenda in mind, but rather, the author agues, to challenge our ways of looking at life on our planet of slums.