The Uneven Citizenry of Photography: Reading The “Political Ontology” of Photography from Southern Africa

Abstract

The Uneven Citizenry of PhotographyReading The “Political Ontology” of Photography from Southern Africa Patricia Hayes (bio) Nothing is more timely than the argument that we should revisit the relationship between the viewer and the photographed event (Azoulay 2012). It signals that theorization and critique around photography is entering new ground. It is a long time since Sontag virtually paralyzed readers with the violence of her language around the taking of pictures (“shooting and shooting”), followed by her meditations “regarding the pain of others” (1977; 2003). Solomon Godeau’s more subtle and considered essay on documentary photography also highlighted the problem of a double distance: the distance between the photographed and the photographer, and the distance between the photographed and the viewer (180). One understands that these distances could reflect socioeconomic difference of class, national or global positionings of privilege or militarism, or lack of affinities arising from race, gender, religion, or age. It is therefore enormously attractive to consider the possibility that the viewer’s distance from the scene in an image might actually hold the potential of something positive instead of negative. Writing from the southern parts of Africa, and burdened by the formulations around the multiple historical disempowerments of Africans in the face of the camera, Azoulay’s argument on first reading seems to augur an exciting new opening for reading photographs. My purpose in this essay is modest. Prompted by a set of large propositions put forward by Ariella Azoulay in Civil Imagination: A Political Ontology of Photography, I hope to initiate a conversation regarding new claims around photography and to explore their implications based on layers of alternative research from southern Africa. I should start by saying that the prospects of shifting the discussion [End Page 173] from the confines of the art disciplines are potentially very liberating. Specifically, debates on South African photography have been very deeply affected by a move away from “documentary” as part of a transition away from the apartheid and anti-apartheid movements. Part of the problem is the ongoing belief and investment in the very notion of genre, and the need for artists and art historians to define new work against what is often a straw man constructed out of reductive examples of anti-apartheid photojournalism as “documentary” (Garb; Van Robbroeck). In South Africa this has produced a gulf between “then and now” that has left a massive imprint on ongoing aesthetic and political dynamics, and often creates the impression that politics was something in the anti-apartheid then, and a more aesthetic regime is of the post-apartheid now.1 A period of post-apartheid denigration of documentary has meant the dismissal of large bodies of complex and subtle extant work to the extent that many photographers for many years did not even develop films from the politicized 1980s because of a prevailing discourse against “bad” or “repetitious” photographs of historical passages, such as mass funerals. One of the virtues of Azoulay’s book, therefore, is that it points to the really critical potential lying in neglected archives of historical photographs and now-unfashionable bodies of overlooked work that cannot even find a home. Thus in the first instance, the very fact that Azoulay uses a wide range of photographs without prejudice and without genuflecting to genre is invigorating. New ideas can then gather around them, it seems, instead of anxiously conformist and disciplinary ones. In Civil Imagination Azoulay emphasizes the need to get away from a prevailing focus on the image narrowly linked to the photographer or producer. In brief, and at risk of reducing the intricacy and cohesion of these interlinked arguments, the author proposes that the situation around the taking of the photograph (the event of photography) should be rethought to consider what lies beyond the immediate frame of the image. Photography is much more than the pressing of the shutter button on a scene: all those participating in the scene enter a new world, even if the photograph is not taken. This world does not end when the photograph is taken. Azoulay then argues that a “civil imagination” can be triggered or activated for all those who view the image thereafter in response to...