Power/photos

Why should anyone believe human rights claims? What are the qualities we look to in other people to establish our common humanity that create human rights claims?

I think there are consistent themes in the way human rights photos in particular work to create a sense of commonality (when successful). Most of the meaning created in them comes from the relationship of people to their surrounding as much as the physical conditions of the people in them. The image of ‘Tank Man’ provides one example - http://www.worldpressphoto.org/index.php?option=com_photogallery&task=view&id=191&Itemid=115&bandwidth=high because it shows one person in relationship to a much greater force than he. He doesn’t seem to be in any obvious pain, but the environment, clearly laid out as a battle of small versus little, gives a reference point for a feeling of commonality – the human figure versus something much larger than it. It lays out an empowering model for politics (defined roughly as the mediation of relationships between the interests of an individual with a group) which sees the person (any person in the grainy outlook of the photo) as someone able to stop or transform the forces which oppose them.

I think this picture http://www.worldpressphoto.org/index.php?option=com_photogallery&task=view&id=845&Itemid=146&bandwidth=high is analogous, with an even clearer division marking off dis/empowerd, as well as a sense of chaos surrounding the photo (black smoke, movement of other people). The best thing about the photo is its liminality. Not only does the woman stand on a barrier between herself and the anonymous police force, but the momentum implied by the police coming down the hill puts her at a liminal temporal point – the ‘dam’ she holds back seems to be near bursting. The surrounding chaos, represented by the black smoke and movement around the photo draws out even further the clarity of her relationship to the people she resists. (The Iwo Jima Flag photo http://www.georgiasouthern.edu/~mah/methods/iwo-jima-flag.jpg also has echoes here – the sense of creating order in a ‘war zone of sorts). So, both of these photos give a sense of being ordered, with an active agent with which a viewer can identify.

A second sort of photo also concerns agency. A good example of these – the photo of a Vietnamese man being shot in the street http://www.worldpressphoto.org/index.php?option=com_photogallery&task=view&id=165&Itemid=115&bandwidth=high or, the photo of Lynndie England holding a man on a leash at Abu Ghraib – these photos have a sense of abjectness to them that suggests a clear sense of power for the viewer. They show a relationship where one person clearly has power over another, and the subjugated person has no recourse to respond.

To the degree that viewers identify with the subjects in a photo, the lines of power delineated in these photos emphasizes a form of power with which a few people identify – the represented bodies picture an abject subject, and a subject empowered. The power of the empowered subject is exercised by a relatively narrow section of humanity, and so there is empathy for the abject subject.

Perhaps photographs create meaning and action be contrasts. They don’t shrink the world perse but draw together certain points to construct meaning by contrasting particular otherwise distant parts to create judgment.

Duncan