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Created: July 26, 2003
Latest Update: July 26, 2003
jeannecurran@habermas.org
takata@uwp.edu

Beyond the Photo-Essay in Visual Sociology

Site Copyright: Jeanne Curran and Susan R. Takata and Individual Authors, July 2003.
"Fair use" encouraged.

This essay springs from a Summer 2003 exhibit: Fieldworks: Dialogues between art and anthropology An international symposium at Tate Modern, London. Backup I realize that we can't be there. But the description of the symposium and its principal speakers gives us lots of information.

First of all none of the main speakers limit themselves to photography and the simple capturing of the "real." All focus on aesthetics, in some sense, and on a variety of media: films, painting, sculpture, performance art, and photography. And their symposium focuses on what the artists can learn from the anthropologists and vice versa. Another thing I picked up was the focus, rather natural since anthropology is parth of their theme, on indigenous peoples.

In this essay I want to address the issue of aesthetics as a process in the creation of interpersonal transactions and communities, and I would like us to broaden our perspective beyond indigenous groups. This will be different from what they are discussing today in the Tate symposium, but it will give us a springboard from which to hopefully engage some of them, and certainly the International Visual Sociology Association, in further exploration. One thing that I picked up from the announcement at the Tate of the symposium is that it seems to be aimed at two sets of professionals: artists and anthropologists. I would like us to consider the issues from a broader standpoint. I think the lesson of aesthetics and sociology today speaks primarily to inclusion, inclusion of ordinary folks, not just professionals, as they focus on building the skills of shared governance.

We're talking about art that professionals make. I think we need also to talk about art that we make, for the aesthetic process that leads to community and self-for-other as well as I-for-self is one that is present in every interpersonal transaction and utterance.

Perhaps a new book will help explain the approach I am suggesting: Participatory Video: Images that Transform and Empower Edited by Shirley A. White, Cornell University, Ithaca. Video is a tool that we can comfortably put in the hands of ordinary folks. Almost everyone either has an cam recorder around, or has a friend who'll share. I am suggesting that each of us, real folks included, need to look about us, with an eye to seeing what we are used to not seeing, to looking past. Our visual world is near limitless. But we tend still to take posed pictures that reflect the norminative roles that fulfill our dominant discourse expectations. The child is pictured with a toy, not contemplative as a child, at least some children, are wont to be. Child playing doesn't make me wonder about what that child is thinking? How does that child see the world? And yet, there are thousands of pictures, both still and video, that could provoke me into an aesthetic and open exchange with the child I see in that picture. That's what Bahktin would term an answerable utterance. And that answerable utterance is the catalyst to every creative act between us.

A kitten is pictured curled on a bed, not roaming twixt the huge barriers of tubular folding chairs. But when I am shown that kitten, tiny creature, pushing his way through that maze of tubes, I wonder about what's going through his mind. I focus on "him." Not on "a kitten" in a routinized and categorized normative expectation for "cat," but I see a real living creature, and in that sight lies the possibility of a creative exchange, an aesthetic process of sympathy that adds to my humanity.

Some of the theory on which I am drawing here is in Bakhtin's Aesthetics of Answerability. But in the meanwhile, I would ask you to visit the Tate Modern's exhibit and think about the breadth of creative opportunities open to us for a different perspective of a world that desperately needs peace and social justice.

Discussion Questions

1. What does this symposium suggest about the limited approach of photo-essays in visual sociology?

   Consider the broad array of media mentioned in the symposium, and consider the number of representatives included on the panel from fine art, including the fine art of photography. This would seem to me to suggest that aesthetics and anthropology and sociology have a great deal more to contribute to one another than photo-essays. That would, of course, depend on the aesthetics of the photo essay itself and the extent to which it served some social science purpose.

2. Are we talking here about "art" or "aesthetics?"

   Sticky wicket question. Do you know what a sticky wicket is?

   Merriam-Webster Dictionary Search:

   Consider that our answer depends on our definitions of "art" and "aesthetics." We could conceivably define art as an uterance or act through some physical media (visual or sound or movement) that is answerable by those Others in whose presence the act or utterance becomes knowable or heard or seen or whatever. We could call all such acts or utterance that allow answerability dialogics through which an aesthetic process operates to alter both originator and receivers in a way that meets or does not meet our definition of aesthetics. If our definition of aesthetics is "beauty" or "goodness" or some such category, we have now defined an aesthetic process through which humans (and even non-humans who share some forms of communication with us) create interpersonal relations in furtherance of that aesthetic. If our aesthetic is peace and social justice, ultimately the creation of many such interpersonal aesthetic responses ought to make possible a community that reflects the aesthetic. See Bakhtin: The Aesthetics of Answerability for further explanation.

3. How do such concerns fit into social theory?

   Consider that if the concept of aesthetic process in interpersonal relations suggest a possibility for illocutionary understanding that it could have a revolutionary effect in the growth and development of community as we know it.