A Bad Image

Hello!

Thank you for the loan of your attention and time taken to share in thoughts on art and culture and life, and anything else I find worthy of mention.

I have been concerned with the power of the arts to motivate cultural change, for quite some time; with focus in particular on the power of photography. We live in an environment that is over flowing with images, in any one day we come into contact with hundreds of them- perhaps our first sight when we wake up in the morning is a picture of a loved one, we pick up the morning paper to read over breakfast, stories about our communities and about the wider world are made real by the photographs that accompany them. On our way to work we will pass bill boards and posters most of which are carrying images working for a particular cause or product, and ofcorse those of us that are lucky enough to have the internet at our finger tips have access to an endless pool of images- a few of which we choose to bathe in, many, however, we are thrown into through adverts and the like. It is clear that images are a powerful tool for transferring messages, provoking thought and reinforcing ways of thinking about, and seeing the world.

The relationship between the photograph and the depiction of human suffering was established not long after the adaptation of the camera to its portable and 'user friendly' form, and the American Civil War was really the first war to be played out in front of the camera’s gaze, reporting on the grotesque massacres of war. Before this time messages of war, whether in the form of paintings, illustrations, poetry or prose were always subject to a selection of words, and angles that provided a romanticised heroic vision of a battle fought on legendary frontiers and perhaps not even by real human beings- but by saint like heroes. Since this time images of the world we live in and the suffering that takes place here have increased tenfold and the effects of photography on motivating social change have been felt in a number of ways; It was partly America’s response to the flood of images of the Vietnam War, being faced with an uncomfortably real image of a soldier being shot in the head at point blank range, that aided in loss of support for the war and eventually its end. And as technology has advanced and become more accessible, so the images of the world have increased in number, and scope; we are able to experience places and happenings that would otherwise remain alien to us, we are able to meet the eyes of complete strangers from the reach of our coffee table. The power invested in photographs does not come from the notion that they are simple and exact replicas, or omniscient representations of an event or person, but in the fact that they has been subject to the same process, and if not a more detailed one, of selection and choice as the more ‘natural’, non technical forms of art.

A danger arises when the power of the photograph is used, not as a tool to put an end to the needless suffering of war, but as a weapon to entrap the subjects into a dominant ideology. The power of photography becomes dangerous when images are selected because they reinforce a certain biased belief, where the process of selection omits fundamental elements of the story. This is the weapon currently being used by the majority of mainstream Western media against the majority of Eastern countries, it is a weapon that developed countries are using against developing ones to maintain the status quo- and it is habitually used against Africa (and I speak of Africa in general here, because that it how it is predominantly viewed by the rest of the world- as a singular entity, a general landscape).

There is a set formula for images of 'Africa' that the Western media feels comfortable with- that of brutal conflict, natural disaster and disease, and 'primitive' un-developed rural dwellings or slum cities. These are the images that serve to uphold Orienalist views of the 'Other' in comparison to the clinical, advancement of the West, creating a collective imagination (- and it is just that, a fictitious image) in the West of Africa as a far away, disaster stricken, dark continent where only bad things happen to inhabitants who are still in need of some form of 'Missionary' style saviour from themselves.

This extract taken from BBC News is a gleaming example of stereotypical writing about Africa. (Note the journalist’s use of the words 'swamped' and 'stalked'- poetic rhetoric that is far from objective).

"Economic growth gave way to debt repayments; the pioneering efforts to improve public health were swamped by Aids, wars were unending and famine stalked the land.
The people lost faith in governments and governments lost interest in the people."
BBCNews

The West's unquenchable thirst for such images is far from motivating a change in collective consciousness and imaginations about Africa but adversely, it is stifling it. We are now in a situation where Africa’s development- through artistic and cultural recognition, tourism potential and other forms of economic growth, is being held back because it has 'a bad image'. Interestingly, in a conversation a Ugandan colleague of mine had with a German lady in Dresden last week, she discovered to her surprise that it was a wonder she had survived to such a ripe age because Africa is full of killer mosquitoes that bombard you every second of the day, biting with intent to kill, and if that doesn't get you another disease will because there's no medicine in Africa- but Egypt and South Africa are O.K, there aren't so may mosquitoes there... hmmm? Or it just that these two countries in Africa are perhaps the most Westernised and have a tourism industry of sorts that is able to counter some of the stereotypical views of the continent and so somehow can be given an exception?

Some food for thought...

My next post will examine these notions through a look at a somewhat transgressive experience- and consideration of the ‘African gaze’ (if such a thing exists?)- as myself and thirteen of my colleagues from all over Africa attended the exhibition 'Stagings made in Namibia: Post-Colonial photography’, I will continue shedding some objective and, perhaps even for the purpose of balance, Afro-biased light on the thriving, intricate, innovative and resilient arts and cultural landscape of Africa and the Diaspora.