Ana, thanks for your important texts and Cecilia
Parsberg's images. Such practices make me wonder about
Buergel's indication that "absolute exposure is
intricately connected with infinite pleasure." How is
this pleasure figured among desires to look at
unpleasant occurrences, comfort in knowing such
occurrences didn't happen to the individual and a
belief that they could never happen "here," the desire
to look away or be "blind" to such events,
individuals' needs to tell or show their stories, and
resistance to being imaged in bare life and pain? When
we view images of catastrophe and torture, what should
our position be as viewers? Certainly there has been
important critical writing on the ways that the bare
life of subjects can be further compromised by being
imaged. As photographers, writers, critics, … how do
we keep the desires of our subjects and the need for
critical conversation ethically in tension?
I was struck by the following passage in your essay
and the process through which the image is taken: "An
older woman wearing a white scarf on her head and
dressed in typical Palestinian dress, with a beautiful
ochre colour, talks to us in Arabic. She wants to tell
her story. Her house has been destroyed; her pots and
pans smashed. The soldiers destroyed cabinets, which
she was still paying off. At first, she does not want
to be photographed. She says she has not been able to
wash herself for twenty days. We compare our dusty
clothes, and find that hers are cleaner than ours are.
At last, she agrees to have her photo taken."
During a visit to The Ogden Museum of Southern art
this summer, I briefly viewed Thomas Neff's "Come Hell
and High Water: Portraits of Hurricane Katrina
Survivors." However, I had to run out of the gallery
because the stories of people's actions during the
flooding (and maybe the images) were overwhelming. I
am a "trained art historian" but I couldn't see, let
along evaluate, the images. I couldn't view the show
because it made me deeply sad, physically sick, and
panicked in a way that was already woven into New
Orleans life. Personally, I wasn't ready to perform
these feeling in front of the museum's opening crowd.
I know that such a show needs to be shown elsewhere
but I have begun to doubt the political purpose of the
many many artistic representations and shows of New
Orleans flooding and losses, which appear in the city.
Are there other or more global ways of working
through our feelings? And given the reactions to
questions about New Orleans, I wonder if anyone wants
to hear and see these images. My feeling is that this
disinterest in other truths makes their showing in
other areas and a concomitant resistance to the
pleasures of exposure even more imperative.
Since moving back to New Orleans, I have wanted to
take pictures of the strange occurrences, tableaux,
and visceral mess that frames our everyday lives.
However, I have never managed to even carry my camera.
When contemplating the possible images, I have been
stymied by the real use of such images, how would
quality (resolution and "good" shots) figure into
these images, and where would they justly be
displayed? Yet each time that I drive to work, an old
1950s kitchenette table that sits and rusts on the
side of the road strikes me. To me, it represents the
loss of things and places that continue in the area.
It also stands for the huge piles of trash and former
lives that sit constantly in some areas and seemingly
will never be fully thrown away. The table has also
become a sign for me because intentionally or not, its
arrangement and series of things that sit on it change
from day to day. One day there is a dead plant on it
and then a 1950s ice bucket--hip but stained and these
objects are rearranged, disappear, and are replaced by
other things. Last week, I was thrilled and saddened
on my drive back from work when the table was not
there. Then I noticed that someone had just turned it
upside down.
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