Photography [section in progress]

Though an event has come to mean, precisely, something worth photographing, it is still ideology (in the broadest sense) that determines what constitutes an event.¹

The act of reaching for a lighter or a spoon is familiar routine, yet we hardly know what really goes on between hand and metal, not to mention how this fluctuates with our moods. Here the camera intervenes with the resources of its lowerings and liftings, its interruptions and isolations, its extensions and accelerations, its enlargements and reductions. The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.²

      This section will consider a photography exhibition by Pirkle Jones and Ruth-Marion Baruch entitled Black Power * Flower Power that will be coming to Earlham College in the fall of 2014. The exhibition will be read against the theories of Judith Butler, Stuart Hall, and Susan Sontag. What are the implications of juxtaposing these respectively overdetermined movements with one another? What are the politics of representation at play? What is the significance of this exhibition when read against the identity politics here at Earlham? In what ways does photography interpellate the viewer?

      In the preface to Black Power * Flower Power, Ruth-Marion Baruch begins:

It all started the day I met with Jack McGregor, director of the de Young Museum in San Francisco. 

       “You know,” I said to him, “the next thing I really want to photograph is the Black Panthers, to present the feeling of the people.” Then, I added in a discouraged tone, “But who would show it?”

       “We would!” Responded Mr. McGregor. 

       Or was that really the beginning? Perhaps it all came about because I am Jewish and have experienced prejudice myself. Forbidden housing, as a student at the University of Missouri, and evicted from several, only because I was Jewish, made me feel deeply about being treated unjustly. 

There are two significant moments in Baruch’s disclosure, the first being the motivation and desire to represent the Black Panthers, and the second being the idea that experiencing prejudice allows one to speak to (and grants one the right to represent) prejudice experienced by other subjectivities/communities/cultures. These two instances might very well be deeply interrelated, and in this sense we are reminded of Judith Butler’s essay Imitation and Gender Insubordination when she says, “What if anything, can lesbians be said to share? And who will decide this question, and in the name of whom?” (309). Thus, it is just as problematic for Baruch to consider her personal (‘Jewish’ or 'Female') experience of prejudice as translatable to that of the Black Panther’s experience of prejudice; as it is to suggest that the signifier Black Panther is a coherent identity unto itself, and can therefore be understood to share a common experience of prejudice 'within' itself. This becomes the basis for Baruch’s justification to shoot, while for her husband Pirkle Jones, the justification comes from ‘first-hand’ experience -- Baruch says, “My husband Pirkle came from a Southern family. His father witnessed lynchings and would come home and talk about them, and how they had, ‘cut the niggers thumbs off.’ Years later, Pirkle still cries when he speaks of it.” This becomes a much more emotionally powerful justification, but we should still question whether such an empathy should serve as the justifying basis for taking photographs. 

This is not to say that Baruch and Jones‘ whiteness/jewishness or cultural background disqualify them from shooting, but it nonetheless becomes important to recognize a certain reductionist privilege in their own stated justifications. 

At the end of the preface Baruch is careful to mention, "We do not claim to have photographed all aspects of the Black Panther Party, but we can tell you: this is what we saw, this is what we felt, and these are the people."

...

Butler, Judith. "Torture and the Ethics of Photography." Comp. Julian Stallabrass. Documentary. London : Whitechapel Gallery: MIT, 2013. Print.

Hall, Stuart. Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. Culture, media, and identities. London: Sage in association with the Open University, 1997.

Sontag, Susan. On Photography. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977. Print.

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^{1. [Sontag, Susan. On Photography. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977. Print.]↩}

^{2. [Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” 1936.]↩}