ArtSeen
Escaping the Missionary Position
Once upon a time, so we heard, the white male photographer would arrive and set up base at the Hotel Sheraton. In the afternoon, he would snap the slum conveniently located near the hotel. The next day he would take a flight back home (the city had little to offer in terms of nightlife or alcohol). A week later, the New York Times would run a photo of that slum, the country’s image would be “ruined,” and so forth. However, standing at the edge of 2013, even the hardened pity party protagonist has to grudgingly admit that we have won the battle. White photographers no longer dare to follow that Sheraton-slum-airport map. Instead they stay with someone local, they eat at our table (with their hands), and then take photos under our watch. Now no one should think we want to return to that old Sheraton paradigm. Never! But the question remains—even after all this time, why do the wheels of history only start turning with the arrival of the Western photographer or curator? If it is truly an indigenous, local movement, why does it need external blessing (award, festival, curator, magazine) to gain local traction?
One more question: say that slum photo is taken by a Bengali, and then published by The Times. Have we broken any paradigms, or just replaced the foreigner with ourselves? And if it is Bengalis who are marketing those photographs, then why that “victim” tone of “the Westerners are coming”? If you are going to talk disparity, start with the fact that the amount of expensive camera equipment in Dhaka indicates a powerful new economic circuit, for which the main buyers are western agencies.
Everything has an end state, and signs of exhaustion are now visible in social realist photography. Funding promises freedom, but instead traps work in the foundation cage. Take for example that award-winning feature on the gay cruising scene, which projects a new liberal climate. On the net however, aggressive comments posted under the photo hint that many minds are still closed odd. Hiding behind that award is the very real possibility of death at night. What is needed then are photographers who engage with the movement, not just document it. Actually, put down the camera for sometime will you? Maybe even for a few years. Break apart to birth the new.
Contributor
Naeem MohaiemenNAEEM MOHAIEMEN is a writer and visual artist (shobak.org). This excerpt is translated from the essay "Social Realism's Truth Quest."
RECOMMENDED ARTICLES
Glitching Time and Time-Based Media
By Charlotte KentOCT 2022 | Art and Technology
Time is a socio-technological system with profound organizing qualities that feels, these days, exceedingly oppressive. There’s never enough time! For anything. Calendars are the earliest containing device with the purpose of determining a social order; the history of the Roman calendar reveals the role of international and national politics that play out across each new temporal infrastructure. Our temporal orders have been designed through the global proclamation of Greenwich Mean Time in 1884 by colonial empires, the apocalyptic anxiety provocations of the doomsday clock established in 1947, the insistent instant-ness of digital time since the 1970s exacerbated by strings of video chat meetings of the last couple years, and the frenetic branding of our social/professional lives demanded by transnational corporate technology’s mediation of everyone and everything, all the time. It’s a mess.
Pamela Sneed: ABOUT time
By Jillian McManeminJUL-AUG 2022 | ArtSeen
If you have any interest in poetry, you probably know Pamela Sneed—Black, lesbian, radical poet, and one of the infamous Grand Dames of the downtown scene. Her stage presence is formidable and her voice, revolutionary. Her 2020 book Funeral Diva published by City Lights Books looks back on her experiences during the AIDS Crisis while making correlations to COVID-19, and the ongoing layered impacts of racism, homophobia, and political brutality. In ABOUT time at Laurel Gitlen, Sneed’s visual practice merges with her poetic one, creating an exhibition that is fiercely outspoken, experimental, and personal.
Spencer Longo’s TIME
By Josh SchneidermanSEPT 2022 | Art Books
The book uses unstapled pages from Time magazine as the bases of its collages. It shows what it feels like to live in a crumbling empire, in an era widely regarded as “the end of history.”
88. A Hotel (now demolished) at Fifth Avenue and Eighth Street
By Raphael RubinsteinFEB 2022 | The Miraculous
A husband and wife, both artists, both Mexican, are living in an apartment at the Hotel Brevoort in Greenwich Village. Following the politically motivated censorship of a mural commission the husband has been working on at 30 Rockefeller Center, he is frustrated to learn that two other major U.S. commissions have been cancelled.
