User:Luisa Moura/graduation seminar/thesis/process/draft 01
The Aesthetics of Ethics (Draft / Notes in process)
PHOTOGRAPHIC TYPOLOGIES AND IDENTITY
If in the last decades of the nineteenth century the squalid slums displace the country seat and the 'abnormal' physiognomies of patient and prisoner displace the pedigreed features of the aristocracy, then their presence in representation is no longer a mark of celebration but a burden of subjection. A vast and repetitive archive of images is accumulated in which the smallest deviations may be noted, classified and filed (Tagg, John)
Photography, or the mechanical reproduction of one’s image, grew side by side with the increased attention on individual identity for governmental control. The Disciplinary Society that Foucault writes about relies on the depth of nuclear categorization, based on the scrutiny of human particularities, impossible without the help of objective means of visual documentation (Bertillon face parts). The individual value attributed to each member of society appeared as part of a general institutional effort of documenting, archiving and categorizing individuals for the most various purposes, from criminal control to medical research. In the process of rendering visual an increased world of phenomenological complexity and allow comparison between what is believed to be similar or opposed, photography relied in the use of simplified typologies of record. This chapter attempts to approach the connection between modes of representation and the way it shapes the very identity of contents portrayed.
Social documentary photography appeared in the late XIX century with the works of Henry Mayhew (1851), John Thomson (1877) and Jacob Riis (1890) (give references), and it portrayed the lower classes living conditions. Documentary photography allowed a new field of subject analysis that the single portrait couldn’t give: the social identity. Photographs would be taken concerning both subjects and their surroundings, capturing information on their home, belongings, hygiene, activities or family.
Jacob Riis was the first to portray people in their deep intimacy. The novel use of a flash light allowed Riis to photograph barely lit interiors, to work during the night and to capture scenes informally. His photographs are not about individuals in particular, but about the way they live, interact, aggregate. His pictures display a whole new reality to public scrutiny that was not available before; that was never objectified enough to be considered as a subject of analysis. And if the pictures and the theme of the book “How the Other Half Lives” could claim some sort of humanist concern, the text points out the poor as both source and consequence of their decadent situation, which seems like a paradox.
(…) The causes that operate to obstruct efforts to better the lot of the tenement population are, in our day, largely found among the tenants themselves. This is true particularly of the poorest. They are shiftless, destructive and stupid (…) (Riis, Jacob, p.273)
Social documentary genre was broadly used by eugenicists in order to illustrate the subtlety of evil among defective groups of people. The detection of error among families demanded an eye on their habits and domesticity; their outlook wouldn’t be enough to exemplify their level of deviation. Feeble mindedness among poor families would be considered by eugenicists to be a neglected serious problem. Low intellect, criminal behavior and social decadence would be considered by eugenicists to be the source of poverty and not the other way around. Eugenicists provided solutions for poverty that didn’t engage with welfare mechanisms; the source of severe social problems was believed to be related with hereditary traits. The welfare system would only keep alive those that were defective.
Eugenicists used this genre to expose what they considered to be scandalous abuses of the welfare system and to frame the problems of crime, poverty and disease so that the only solution appeared to be elimination or forced sterilization (Maxwell, Anne)
In the late XIX century and early XX century, awareness on social decay was deeply intertwined with the categorization of individuals and increasing mechanisms of exclusion. How can we possibly detach the portrait of social decay from an ideology in which race and facial features determined one inclination for crime, illness or evolutionary inferiority? The way Eugenicists used documentary photography only rendered visible its power to objectify exclusion.
SOCIAL DOCUMENTARY AND THE OBJECTIVE APPROACH
Documentary photography implies a certain number of formal characteristics that illustrate its authentic nature and suggest objectivity. The composition is dynamic, the setting is informal; the people portrayed are submitted to a broader context and are often not aware of the camera. The fact that light cannot be prepared for an optimal result may confer a blurred, dark or over exposed look to the images. The display of intimacy and private objects are ingredients that demonstrate the authenticity of the capture, dragging the photograph away from the realm of common portraiture. Individuals have no chance to stage their own image.
The rhetorical strength of documentary is imagined to reside in the unequivocal character of the camera’s evidence, in an essential realism. The theory of photographical realism emerges historically as both product and handmaiden of positivism. Vision, itself un-implicated in the world it encounters, is subjected to a mechanical idealization. Paradoxically, the camera serves to ideologically naturalize the eye of the observer. Photography, according with this belief, reproduces the visual world: the camera is an engine of fact, the generator of a duplicate world of fetish zed appearances, independent of human practice (Sekula, Allan)
Documentary photography has in principle an informative agenda that is rendered explicit and transparent; it implies a sequence of photographs, not a single point of view; it doesn’t interfere with the scene it witnesses; it involves an ethical concern. The very choice to document, determines the urgency of the topic in society’s consciousness. It renders a given context as something that must be seen, considered and ultimately acted upon. The material displayed in this chapter relates to social documentary photography and photojournalism; including both contemporary and historical references. The selection stays within the field of social conflict, living or working conditions and leaves out situations of war, famine or natural catastrophes.
It is in the illustration of everyday ordinary issues that the analysis of these photographs seems relevant. Documentary photography encloses subjects into an objectified condition, into a condition that invites observation. When the coverage refers to contexts that are distant, violent or enormously tragic, the theme in itself already packs the content of the photographs into the realm of the exotic. But what happens when the theme is ordinary, close and familiar? One can photograph in documentary manner, while doing no documentary at all. What is the meaning for the identity of a given context or individual to be photographed in documentary form? One single photograph can be charged with the objective authority of the genre, without having any intention to unfold it. To understand the political meaning of documentary photography and its casual use in alien circumstances is therefore fundamental. The use of its visual grammar changes deeply the way a photograph and its contents get to be perceived. Documentary form not only shapes an aesthetic way of looking at, but also delimits the field of issues that the collective opinion ‘shall’ be concerned about.
De Volkskrant 2 January 2014
“Brussels sust angst over migranten” | Photography: Daniel Rosenthal
The picture represents two spaces and two subjects separated by a door frame; the photograph was taken on the threshold between one room and the other. The image is tilted, there are no vertical lines, as if the snapshot was made in a rush and the camera couldn't be held straight. The inclination of the photograph is the formal detail that determines its dynamic nature. The other elements, room one, threshold, room two, are individual static contexts. The viewer, the photographer, is the one in fast movement. This dynamic character of the image, introduced by the tilted lines and its suggestion of fast tempo, seems to justify the power of the viewer to grasp all these different settings at once. There is clearly a different action rhythm between the ones portrayed and the one portraying.
In one side of the door frame there is an adult woman with an empty stare, cooking in a dark kitchen. On the other side there is a bright bathroom with a child leaning on a toilet. It is unclear what the child is doing. Throwing up? Spitting? Checking out something that might have felt inside? The tilting of the photograph allows the alignment of the food bowl in the kitchen with the toilet bowl in the bathroom. These two ‘bowls’ become leveled into one same horizontal line. The threshold between the rooms becomes the ax of a compositional scale, binding food and dejection strangely together.
The colors and the light of both rooms are contrasting in a way that deepens the separation between them, beyond the physical barrier of the door threshold. The graphical polarization of the two sides seems to illustrate a disrupted domestic environment; the child leaning on the toilet makes also one wonders if she is left alone often, wondering in places that might not be appropriated for her. The voyeuristic feeling we get from seeing all this at the same time addresses its content as somehow private. The photographer is showing a reality that he is not supposed to be looking at. The subjects look both unaware that they are being photographed and both are busy with something resembling private activities.
The photographer in the end is probably not rushing inside somebody’s house, he couldn’t just simply do so; the photograph was built up deliberately. Why were so many ingredients, typical of documentary photography, included in this formal depiction? Why the introduction of so many visual ingredients in order to render a regular domestic environment exotic? The Romanian gipsy family, illustrating the immigration problem in Europe, is turned into an object of analysis, of blunt contemplation. It is clear that the photograph is not about them, but about something broader than them; but their intimacy stands as a symbol of how a viewer shall relate to them: intimacy of immigrants shall be open for public control and judgment; when it comes to problem analysis, they have no right to privacy.
Documentary photography as a genre should be suitable to portray any topic or social class, but its permanent application to the most vulnerable layers of society seems to reshape its purpose. The intrusive nature of the genre legitimates the exposure of individuals that are powerless to escape it. Only the most vulnerable allow themselves to sit under its scrutiny. The documentary photography, by defining a field of what shall be looked at, must rely in a given public that doesn’t make part of the photographed matter. It’s a form of social awareness that relies in the asymmetry between the ones who can see and the ones that must be seen. The objectivity of the genre links fatally individuals with the context in which they are portrayed.
In contemporary media, images of asylum seekers, immigrants, people on benefits, unemployed, display very often a high level of exposure. People are often lying down on their beds or doing private activities. This form of portraying looks like an objective illustration of reality and attempts to inform about a given social problem, but the reason why and how privacy has to be exposed is less clear. The exposure of privacy in news items determines the level of public judgment that might be made upon it. In a certain manner, it clarifies immediately the position of the observer: about this topic you are invited to look through, analyze and judge. The privacy of these people belongs to Public Concern.
(...) their visibility assures the hold of the power that is exercised over them. It is the fact of being constantly seen, of being able always to be seen, that maintains the disciplined individual in his subjection (...) examination (...) holds them in a mechanism of objectification (Foucault) The definition and purpose of documentary photography changed throughout History, since its early use in the XIX century, but it’s authority as a genre that unveils truth appears to be its backbone, common to all different streams of documentary form. It is this display of truth that can be permanently adopted for different ideological purposes; it can be seen as a spectacle but also as ethically informative.
The book “Photography/Politics: One” published in 1979 gathers a broad spectrum of critical essays regarding the political role of photography. The essays of Allan Sekura and Nick Hedges, mentioned further in this text, refer more precisely to the documentary genre. The fact that its authority has been for long questioned appears to bring no easier understanding of its meaning in contemporary media. Quite the opposite, the exposure of people’s intimacy is still perceived as an objective illustration of reality; the fact that only certain layers of society are object of this form of representation seems hard to acknowledge.
JACOB RIIS
In this photograph a group of men is portrayed, lying down or sitting on mattresses, very close together, in a corner of a room. They are surrounded by domestic objects, which diversity suggests the multifunctional nature of the place. Kitchen ware is to be found in the vicinity of clothes, shoes, boxes, bags. The objects look old, dirty and the ceiling of the room shows traces of humidity.
The men are so close together and so indistinctively involved in cloths, that it is hard to tell how many are present in the picture. Far on the back and right on the front, the presence of two individuals is spotted only after a short observation of the scene. They are not detectable by the exposure of their face, but by the visibility of a body part, bare or just as a volume underneath the cloth.
It is a photograph that unveils slowly what it exposes by guiding the gaze through different depths of field. What appears to be an overview scene of a domestic setting gets unexpectedly closer to the camera, suggesting an almost physical implication of the observer in the reality portrayed.
The volumes in the first plane seem an indistinct mass of meaningless information. Only later, when one is already aware about the amount of people cramped in the back of the room, the presence of an individual, right next to the camera, is detected. The reality in front of the camera grows towards it, involving it in a way that is not perceptible at first.
There is something threatening about this photograph; it is not only a distant portrait of poverty, it also communicates that poor people can get close by and that they are hard to see. Poverty comes next to the observer and one can intuit that it might even surround him. There could be a mass of individuals behind the camera that one cannot see, count, observe and that transmits a sense of unease.
Despite the fact that so much overview information is given about the living conditions of these men, the observer knows that not everything is visible. The photograph directly suggests that this reality might be closer to the observer than one might have thought at first; the photographs get a sensationalist nature, a threatening aura.
Jacob Riis book had no charitable intentions; it works as an eye opener for the middle and upper classes in New York about the extension and nature of poverty. In order to do so, he exposed the living conditions of the poor, in a manner that was everything but flattering. The harsh description of poverty seems to render the situation urgent; as an urgent problem to solve, which doesn’t mean that it should implicate any sense of empathy with the people involved. The nasty nature of poor people’s habits doesn’t create something that one would be willing to relate to. In one hand Riis makes clear that bad housing conditions stimulate a vicious life and threatens human dignity, in other he characterizes the inhabitants in such a way, that one wonders in how far a better housing would be able to change them:
“He was a large owner of tenement property, and once undertook to fit onto his houses with stationary tubs, sanitary plumbing, wood-closets, and all the latest improvements. He introduced his rough tenants to all this magnificence without taking the precaution of providing a competent housekeeper, to see that the new acquaintances got on together. He felt that his tenants ought to be grateful for the interest he took in them. They were. They found the boards in the wood-closets fine kindling wood, while the pipes and faucets were as good as cash at the junk shop. In three months the owner had to remove what was left of his improvements”
Jacob Riis’s descriptions of the hopeless bad nature of the poor in New York slums, seems to point them out directly as a source of the problem; prior to housing scarcity or insufficient living conditions, which seems paradoxical regarding Jacob Riis sense of social engagement (he was an immigrant that experienced poverty and knew the slums very well). In 1890, when Riis book was published, Eugenics started to be taken seriously in the US as a way of perceiving and dealing with urban conflict, immigration and social decay. Middle and Upper classes were terrified with the increase of immigration, criminality and social pressure and Eugenics offered a scientific approach to the problem. Photography played a major role illustrating the degeneration that the Eugenicists were talking about.
FSA – Farm Security Administration
Later in the 30’s FSA photographers consolidated the looks of rural poverty in the USA. Its role was to document the misery of American rural areas under the impact of the Great Depression and document visually what the New Deal (economical restructuring program) partly stood for. (…) This is one way of representing their motives, but on another level you could say that their motives were concerned with preserving the status-quo. As William Stott, in his book Documentary Expression and Thirties America writes; “the central motive for the new deal was the preservation of the American socio-economic system by reforming it” (…) it afforded the middle class the illusion that they were contributing to the reform of our society without ever questioning the reason for the need to reform (Hedges, Nick) FSA photographs (1935-44) frame poverty as a subject enclosed in the limits of the image; the reality portrayed doesn’t seem to involve the camera in the way Riis’s photographs did. There is always some distance between the subjects portrayed and the camera.
FSA photographs were not supposed to be threatening; they were supposed to portray ‘tamed’ poverty: poverty that was being taken care of by the New Deal policies. It portrayed the way people were living prior or after getting loans or other form of support from the government. The photographs were portraying, not a back door reality, but a transparent state of affairs. SHELTER photographs were not supposed to be threatening either; charity feelings get triggered by the sight of pitiful conditions; that one must be superior to. If we compare FSA photographs with the ‘script’ given to SHELTER photographers in the 60’s we see plenty of similarities: the depressed group family, the victimized child, the mother with the baby (get reference)
LEWIS HINE
Lewis Hine’s photographs of “children at work” played an important role changing labor policies (get reference); the photographs managed to awaken public empathy on the subject. Considering the use of documentary photography by Eugenics (get reference) and its role generating social detachment, can we see Lewis Hine’s photographs as something formally different? Lewis Hine also used Galton’s photographic techniques, the composite portraits (get reference), to process and display photographs of children. I don’t know in how far did Hine relate with the Eugenic ideology, but curiosity about photography’s potential to summarize reality appeared to be shared. Lewis Hine would also gather as much information as possible about these children making archives about them with anthropometric data (get reference)
Most photographs that Lewis Hine took of children though, have something peculiar within the documentary format. They are above all a dignifying portrait; the kids appear to master their environment, despite their exploited condition. Lewis Hine was able to introduce in these series a point of view that was novel in the documentary genre of the time. He takes most of the photographs at eye level, children return the gaze to the camera on a balanced relationship. They look beautiful despite their rags and misery; the look on their eyes makes one believe that they indeed don’t belong to that place (…)
Between 1968 and 1972 Nick Hedges worked as a photographer for SHELTER (UK), a charity institution concerned with the living conditions of the poor. The photographs attempted to engage the middle and upper classes in the struggle against poverty. The visual code of these photographs is pretty similar with the ones of Jacob Riis and the FSA photographers. The photographs appeared to become emotionally stronger with time, but not essentially different. Nick Edges wrote an essay about his experience at SHELTER and describes the mode in which the ‘realism’ of photographs was actually ‘induced’ in order to comply with its charitable purpose. It was necessary to invoke a traditional language of pity in order to stimulate donations.
When I first started taking photographs for SHELTER I was required to use models from a model agency to enact the stereotype that the advertising agency had designed. I was horrified at this perversion of the truth and won what I thought at the time a major battle by getting the director to use only real life situations in future. But what happened to the truth, instead of being manufactured (using models) it was selected and edited in a very singular fashion. (Hedges, Nick)
In 1968 there was an exhibition at MOMA that marked a shift in the perception of documentary photography. There was an artistic reframing of what it stood for; its activist purpose was considered to be secondary and its aesthetics recognized as autonomous. The Director of MOMA, John Szarkowski, wrote then:
Most of those who were called documentary photographers a generation ago, when the label was new, made their pictures in the service of a social cause. It was their aim to show what was wrong with the world, and to persuade their fellows to take action and make it right. In the past decade a new generation of photographers has directed the documentary approach toward more personal ends. Their aim has been not to reform life, but to know it. Their work betrays sympathy – almost affection – for the imperfections and the frailties of society. They like the real world, in spite of its terrors, as the source of all wonder and fascination and value – no less precious for being irrational.
The way of perceiving pictures of misery as aesthetical commodity appears to be in line with its contemporary broad consumption, but it says little on what happened with its ethical aura. It is impossible to deny that this ethical past still imbues these pictures, despite its eventual artistic value, with a broader ideological meaning. They still inform, with a powerful mixture of emotion and objectivity. It is still the genre per Excellency that allows the emotional ‘reading’ of reality through still image. The fact that its aesthetic value is recognized as autonomous strips it out of any responsibility within the realm of informative imagery. When is the exposure of the vulnerable considered to be an essential way to inform, or when is it an aesthetical transcendency?
In 1978 Allan Sekula wrote about the work of Martha Rosler and some others artists that tried to challenge the format of documentary photography. How to expose socially relevant matters without victimizing and objectifying individuals? How to photograph without categorizing and how to detach feelings of pity from matters that demand political consciousness?
In “The Bowery in two inadequate descriptive systems 1975” Martha Rosler displayed a series of photographs with store fronts and walls in the Bowery, with no people included.
(…) The cool, dead pan mannerism works against the often expressionist liberalism of the find-a-bum school of concerned photography. This anti-‘humanist’ distance is reinforced by the text, which consists of a series of lists of words and phrases, an immense slang lexicon of alcoholism (…)”
NRC Next 15 November 2012
“Geen geld, geen aandacht” | Photography: Niels Blekemolen
This article was selected from the NRC Next and is an example on how social matters may be addressed without the literal objectification of individuals. The readers of the newspaper might find themselves too close to the reality portrayed to enjoy the exposure of privacy of their peers; it would be inconvenient to expose the vulnerability of Dutch elderly to public scrutiny. It appears to be important here to offer space for direct empathy with the individuals involved in the story. The language of realistic capture that documentary photography represents was not considered appropriated. We can see this set of photographs as an opposite approach to the one described in the beginning of this chapter. There is in this case the deliberate intention of NOT rendering these individuals exotic, of not enclosing them as a case study that invites observation.
The article covers the testimonies of people that live and work in an elderly care home in the city of Bunnik, the Netherlands. It points out the several difficulties experienced upon forced socialization, bullying among inhabitants and the limited resources for a proper support. The portraying in this article chooses for a fragmentation of a global image into different small frames. The identity and broad intimate context of the elderly must be intuited, because it is not given. The reportage is an example on how intimacy can be displayed without endangering the power and dignity of the people involved. The reality in which these people are in is felt as very strong, even dramatic, but is never dominant once is broken into pieces. The viewer of the photographs is perfectly aware that he sees much less than the people in it, the public is not allowed a spatial overview. This empowers the portrayed and keeps the observer in a state of respectful exclusion. The public is invited to have a glimpse into a narrative that he / she is not really part of and therefore shouldn’t know too much about.
NRC Weekend 6 October 2012 “Dit had ik ook kunnen zijn” | Photography: David van Dam
The newspaper spread of this article presents photographs of volunteers helping out asylum seekers in a camp in Amsterdam. It is important to notice the point of view objectified in this choice. The article doesn’t focus on the people in need, neither in their situation nor in the interaction between them and the volunteers. Each testimony attests the engagement of the volunteers toward the reality of the asylum seekers, but the people they are supposed to be concerned about are not portrayed. The reader of the article is invited to feel empathy toward peers that act upon a certain reality, but the reality itself is a neglected subject. We are invited to feel empathy towards the volunteers and not towards the asylum seekers. In the digital version of this article we can find more photographs. Indeed half of the pictures are close ups of the volunteers and other half overview pictures of the camp. The volunteers are portrayed individually, in focus, with a blurred background. They pose for the picture with a resolute look, with spotless posture. Every picture attests the strength of their will and their superior attitude towards the reality they are involved with. The asylum seekers, in other hand, appear to have no individual identity. They are a crowd of more or less absent subjects. Except for a couple of exceptions, we can barely see their face. Some of them are lying down; two are portrayed lying inside the tent, in their sleeping bags. In one of the camp view we can see somebody getting out of the temporary toilet.
The asylum seekers are the ones that are exposed in their intimacy and unawareness in order to illustrate the realism of the situation. The volunteers in their turn assume the ideological role of the narrative, giving their face to a heroic intention. The visual grammar of documentary photography was applied to the asylum seekers only, whereas the volunteers were portrayed in a classical manner. The fact that this grammar has a historical authority in our perception prevents us for a moment to question the strangeness of this representational asymmetry. The nature of the article lies in the choice for a certain journalistic mode of reportage and not in the variation of content regarding a single mode of representation.
Photojournalism ethics and the pursuit of truth
The ethical rules of photojournalism, that one shall never manipulate or stage a photograph, are based on the assumption that it is possible to photograph objectively. It is only legitimate to protect the Public from such tricks when the Public relies on the photographs as a source of truth. If photographs would be taken as a form of fiction, which they greatly are, such precautions wouldn’t be necessary.
Giovanni Troilo won this year the World Press Photo first prize for Contemporary Issues; he made a series about Charleroi in Belgium. The reportage shows the city under a gloomy, obscure light and the locals were not happy about it. A research on the origin and legitimacy of the pictures was undertaken and led to the withdrawal of the prize. It was concluded, and assumed by the photographer, that the photographs were staged and taken elsewhere. The pictures don’t look that peculiar though; their message goes beyond a local context, they have a transcendent human nature. The pictures could have been taken in any urban context with similar light and building typologies. If the photographer would have had the chance or time to find the pictures he had in his mind in Charleroi, the reportage would have been taken as a truthful portrait of reality. What feels wrong about this situation is that the truthfulness of the pictures relies on place and method and not on their message. The message, which is the strongest issue at hand with these photographs, is considered as an unavoidable result of objective capture. Charleroi was lucky with Giovanni’s mistake.
John Berger held a talk in 1968 in a BSA conference in which he described “The seventh man” (…) one of the photographs: Portuguese and Yugoslavian men living in wooden barracks, covered in porn or erotic pictures. In order to prevent the reader to see them as sex maniacs, other pictures were added in order to reframe the female role in a broader manner. The fundamental thing was to illustrate their vulnerability as lonely workers without the sexist prejudice attached to it. Added photographs: an old woman in a small room (room ‘bigger’ than her, she is positioned in the center, down part of the frame, and we can see loose private or symbolic domestic objects around her); a reproduction of Perugino’s painting ‘Madonna’; a portrait of a young peasant girl (see scan) A reference to motherhood, religion and matrimony was added, rendering the erotic pictures only a sad substitute for their higher longings. The photographs become the symbol of their poor resources and not of their inner drive. Fake pictures were needed to actually stay close to truth. A context had to be manufactured in order to dismantle the ‘realism’ of the photograph.
EMPATHY OR DETACHMENT AND THE LEGITIMACY OF EXPOSURE
CHAPTER-03: reflecting on the political effects of objective information
In this chapter the connection between the ethical legitimacy of the social reportage and its aesthetics is reflected upon. What do the aesthetics of this form of photography, of this typology of looking at, says about the social concerns that support it? This chapter reflects on what appears to be a paradox between the legitimacy of exposure in the social reportage and its apparent inefficiency on generating engagement or political consciousness. In order to pursuit objectivity and a sense of realism, the social reportage puts at play an intrusive way of photographing that finds its legitimacy in the ethical need to inform. But people seem to engage into imitating models they feel identified with; this is the phenomena that unleash greater consumption levels or consistent collective movements. Social reportage plays neither with factors of identification, once it focuses on the portraying of error, misery or despair, neither in the illustration of something that people might be willing to re-enact themselves. The exposure to this visual grammar is commonly understood as the truth that one must be confronted with in order to be politically conscious, but it is frequently unknown how to act upon it. This leads to a great amount of guilt that finds mainly two outputs: the acritical tolerance regarding this kind of imagery and the vulnerability towards donation-based action.
EMPATHY
The documentary mode held in such esteem by certain section of the left - call it 'real reportage' or what you will - cannot achieve this because it is already implicated in the historically developed techniques of observation-domination and because it remains imprisoned within an historical form of the régime of truth and sense. Both these bind it fundamentally to the very order which it seeks to subvert (TAGG, John)