Category Archives: photography

The look of love

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In the first paragraph of The Right to Look, I wrote:

The right to look is not about seeing. It begins at the personal level with the look into someone else’s eyes to express friendship, solidarity, or love. That look must be mutual, each person inventing the other or it fails. As such it is unrepresentable. The right to look claims autonomy, not individualism or voyeurism, but the claim to a political subjectivity and collectivity: “the right to look. The invention of the other.”

I didn’t say much more about love in the book, partly because I wanted to avoid the imputation of voyeurism and all the other issues to do with the gaze. It was also hard to configure the narrative around the politics of autonomy with the questions raised by the look of love.

While the difficulty of narrative remains, I now think it was a mistake to underplay the power of the exchange of looks that is love. It resonates with audiences when I give this as a talk because it is something with which many are familiar and it makes sense of the difficulties of representing that exchange.

With the hindsight of Occupy, two further ways of expressing the right to look in and as love should have been developed: the hierarchies of patriarchy that prevent visualized expression of love; and the interface of poverty and love that produces the desire for democracy.

The phrase “the right to look” is my translation of Derrida’s droit de regards, often (oddly) translated as “rights of inspection.” Derrida was responding to the complex relations of looking at work in the photographs of Marie-Françoise Plissart.

Droit de regards

The cover shown here is from a recent reissue. Plissart’s images show two women in pursuit of each other, making love, escaping from men. Derrida’s suggestion is perhaps that in the context of 1983, eight years after Laura Mulvey had first published “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” it was between women that it might be possible to allude to the right to look. For a man looking at a woman would too easily become the other translation: the law of the gaze. The photographs seem a little dated now. Would that we could say the same about patriarchy.

Both Jacques Rancière and Antonio Negri develop the relationship of democracy to desire. For Rancière, the palpable “hatred of democracy,” which he describes in his book of the same name, in Western culture is motivated above all by the detesting of “the limitless desire of individuals in modern society.” By contrast, “good” democracy is about controlling and restraining both the extent of democracy and the passions of the individual. Thus the revisionist interpretation of the 1968 revolution is that it “really” expressed a desire for consumption. One could push this to it conclusion: a revolution is the love for democracy, a direct democracy between people that does not defer to representation.

This is precisely the move made by Negri in his poetic and philosophical text Kairos, Alma Venus, Multitude (translated in a volume called Time for Revolution). This is not the kind of writing one can easily summarize, building layer upon layer and allusion to allusion. The kairos, the instant, is something like the time of the right to look: always now, always predicated to the future to come. The “poor,”  or “those most exposed to the immeasurable” are the “biopolitical subject.” For unlike the emphasis on population or bare life in other readings of biopoltics, Negri stresses that it is “poverty that has always represented the common name of the human.”

The Kairos of the poor is love:

so what is “politics” today? It is the activity of production of the common name between poverty and love.

Happy Valentine’s Day.

Jan 24: In the Cairo Streets

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Watching the Egyptian revolution for the past year has been an extraordinary experience. First we watched live online via al-Jazeera, when the feed held. We saw photographs posted to websites, blogs, Flickr and elsewhere. We read all we could of the blogs. And we learned about the dynamic forms of Cairo street art. From this distance I can’t pretend to any expertise but I am moved and inspired by this work.

It’s clear from what we can see online and what information there is in English on blogs like ArabStand that street work by artists like Keizer, Sad Panda and Ganzeer is strongly interfaced with that of well-known Anglo-American artists like Banksy or Shephard Fairey. In the Egyptian street art community these references are clearly appreciated. For all the real difficulties that the Western tagger confronts, the Egyptian context has nonetheless vastly more dangers and hazards. It’s clear too that the end of the dictatorship made it briefly far more feasible to work outdoors. How the recent crackdown by SCAF will impact their projects is less clear.

When we look at the streetscape of Mahmoud Street, Cairo, that leads from Tahrir to the Interior Ministry today, there’s a palpable sense of the change:

Mahmoud St. Credit: Suzeeinthecity

This isn’t graffiti in the derogatory sense: it’s a street gallery and a reclamation of space that says: “Whose streets? Our streets!” In this crucible of countervisualization, a number of artists have become prominent.

"Chess Game" by El Teneen

"Kill TV" by Keiser

Tahrir represented in the street

El Teneen’s visualization of the revolution as a chess game and Keiser’s Situationist reference might be seen in other cities, albeit with different references. Tahrir is a new way for the anonymous to visualize their history, a place that so few outside Cairo had heard about a year ago.

Keiser’s work has a sharp political edge, as in his détournement of Disney’s Snow White:

Keiser "Snow White"

In more allusive fashion, he visualizes the people as ants, not as pests but as determined and energetic collaborators working for the collective good:

Keizer "Ants"

On one wall in the Zamalek district of Cairo, there’s an interesting confrontation between two very distinct styles of work.

Ganzeer (left) and Sad Panda (right)

Left is Ganzeer’s work, clearly learning from Banksy, with a witty sense of how the new city is being carried by the person in the street. At right is Sad Panda, the work of an artist known only as Hatem. Before January 25 2011, Sad Panda worked in secret.

Sad Panda from the revolutionary period

Today his work is widespread and he shared with the blogger who posts as Suzee in the City how he makes his work by creating stencils:

Stencil in action

 

Stencil under construction

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sad Panda is a multiply-repeated icon whose presence calls attention to the places where it appears and that which it looks at. By dint of repetition and familiarity, the Sad Panda reterritorializes the city. The Panda has become known by the metonym of its eyes, as if to say, you may be watching us but we can and do watch you back.

Sad Panda's eyes watch Suzanne Mubarak and warns "danger"

In this complex cityscape, an image of the former dictator’s wife, Suzanne Mubarak, is watched by the Panda at bottom right and a text warns of “danger.” It’s up to you to associate the pieces in this visualization in the same way that any city dweller constantly interprets and reinterprets the built and socialized environment. This metonym serves as a means to represent the claim of the right to look, which works precisely because it requires us to notice it, decipher its look and the relation to the other it invents and the one it refuses.

More on Egypt and countervisuality tomorrow, the anniversary.

 

 

 

 

Working Out Autonomy in the Street

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The emergence of Photography 2.0 is itself now in process. Its “darkroom” is not in a studio but on the street. Its transitional form is so-called “street art,” aka graffiti. Like that precursor, street art may be just a transition to a marketable art form. For the time being, it helps think through the paradox that autonomy eludes representation.

In Tunisia, the French “artivist” (artist/activist) who calls himself JR realized a transformation of photography was happening.  He organized an “inside out” visualization of the people as portrait photographs of random individuals, printed in poster size and posted as graffiti.

A JR poster replaces the portrait of Ben Ali

The project was called “artocracy.” This photographic commons turns hierarchy inside out and visualizes the present as prologue to a differently visualized future, rather than as the repetition of the past. Working in conjunction with Tunisian bloggers and using all local interlocutors and photographers, the goal was to create a series of one hundred portraits of people who had participated in the revolution.

The photographs were the large-scale head-and-shoulder closeups in black-and-white that have become JR’s signature style. Printed as 90x120cm posters, they were flyposted across four cities in Tunisia, including startling examples in the former secret police commissariat (below)

JR in the Police Commissariat

oron the façade of one of Ben Ali’s former houses (below).

Yet as the documentary posted on JR’s own website indicates, even this open access project was subject to intense criticism in Tunisia. “Why only a hundred?” was the common refrain. For the revolution is widely held to have been the work of the people, not a sub-set of heroes. No-one wants to replace autocracy with artocracy, even as a joke.

In Cairo, the contingency artist Ganzeer—his self-definition—who produced a widely-used PDF pamphlet on how to conduct a protest during the revolution, is now attempting the marathon project of street portraits of all 847 people who died in the revolution, the martyrs.

Ganzeer, "Martyr Portrait"

However, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, who are running Egypt, persist in painting over these memorials so Ganzeer, and his fellow street artists like Keizer  and Sad Panda [more on them tomorrow] are using the Internet as an archive of their work. A Google maps mash-up indicates where and when the work was posted. Users are invited to “like” the link on Twitpic and Flickr but not Facebook, which is now too carefully under surveillance. Ganzeer had only accomplished three of these portraits as of last summer, making it unlikely that his martyrology will ever be accomplished.

The street art process centered on the individual, even when decentred and distributed, taken out of the gallery into the street, is not yet equal to the visualization of autonomy. I have argued that one person cannot convey the right to look: the interface between two or more people as they look at each other and allow the other to invent them even as they invent the other. In his essay that coined the phrase droit de regards, which I translate as “the right to look,” Jacques Derrida, the Algerian, insisted on precisely this incapacity of photography to convey the look into another’s eyes, whether literal or metaphorical. For the autocrat the answer is the same as it has ever been: “they cannot represent themselves: they must be represented.” So SCAF is as determined to push through a “representative” parliamentary democracy as it is to retain effective power.

The nub of the issue, then, is how, once autonomy has been claimed by the anonymous, they might visualize that autonomy as something that goes beyond transition. Street art has some components right–the value of the project is judged by the “street,” the anonymous. It perhaps overvalues the secrecy of its means of production as an end in itself–“how did s/he tag there?” is a great question under autocracy, less so as a means to autonomy. Its capacity to spontaneously generate new forms, however, is a striking way to think through how these issues are being worked out and worked over.

Continued tomorrow with the work of Sad Panda, Keizer and Ganzeer,

 

Photography 2.0

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The revolutions in North Africa and the global Occupy movement have seen the emergence of what I call Photography 2.0 in which people and “the people” envisage and visualize themselves as having a name, a place and the right to look. This photography uses phones, graffiti, the Internet, the demonstration and Occupy as its means of self-manifestation. Sometimes it uses cameras as well.

In the moment of the general crash of 1929, Walter Benjamin suggested in his essay on Surrealism

For to organize pessimism means nothing other than to expel moral metaphor from politics and to discover in the space of political action the one hundred percent image space

“Organized pessimism” was Benjamin’s response to a series of failures by the Social Democrats in 1920s Germany. In the so-called Great Recession, it has been Occupy’s response to the failures of the entire political class: because there is nothing to hope for from them, we must organize ourselves. By (re)claiming space, a newly affirmed self-image is placed in the street, in the square, in the place of occupation. It challenges the idea that all there is to do is circulate, to pass by and to continue as if commodity fetishism can still save us.

Organized pessimism: 400,000 “likes” on the “We Are All Khaled Said” page in 2011.

Mural of Khaled Said on a piece of the Berlin Wall by Case

Khaled Said was a blogger, arrested and tortured to death by Egyptian police in 2010. The mural above was painted by Andreas von Chrzanowski aka Case, on a remaining segment of the Berlin Wall in 2011. The texts say: above,”Khaled’s rights are Egypt’s rights” written by Zahraa Kassem and below “We are all Khaled Said”, calligraphy by Mohamed Gaber (photo: Joel Sames/From Here To Fame). It has been proposed by the revolutionaries that Mahmoud Street, which leads from Tahrir to the Interior Ministry, should be renamed for Khaled Said: in their usage it already has been occupied by this revisualized naming.

The image space in the place of political action: “The people want the regime to fall.”

In this famous slogan, now almost a year old, a self-image has formed where there was none before. It organized a collective political subject with desires: not demands. The new general will forced the dictator to yield. In the US, it was the move from posting on “We Are the 99 Percent” to occupying.

In short, there’s a new kind of “photography” taking place. It is a countervisuality to the concept of history in which autocracy, whether the Egyptian dictator or the military-industrial complex, is the only entity capable of visualizing the social and its flows. In Thomas Carlyle’s exaltation of the Great Man or the Hero, the “camera obscura of tradition” that reinforced and supported that visuality.  This “photography” aspired to create a Medusa-effect for the modern, immobilizing change and fixing the social hierarchy as it already was. Photography 2.0, by contrast, is an apparatus to name and organize the anonymous.

It is first an extension of the body, whose signature gesture is the young woman photographing herself using her phone at arm’s length. This self-portrait is the counter to the ubiquitous surveillance of the age of Closed Circuit Television (CCTV). It asserts a presence and autonomy, from which can be derived the right to be seen and the right to look. Photography is becoming newly democratic, a literally direct democracy, beyond its first democratization of the means of mechanical visual reproduction in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to a democracy of the self (image).

In Alexis. A Greek Tragedy, the Antigone character makes considerable use of the Mac PhotoBooth program to take pictures of herself and other characters as the play is taking place. Using the self-timer, she took a picture of herself jumping away from the computer’s camera, which, when rendered in the foreshortened view of the little lens in the MacBook, appeared to show her jumping headlong into the audience. In the same way, Photography 2.0 resolutely breaks the fourth wall and all the distancing apparatus of the Camera Obscura/Lucida. J25 is coming. There is more to follow.

Silvia Calderoni using the computer as a camera and projector

J17: The History of the Anonymous, part 1

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For the history of the anonymous to be written, it must first be visualized as something other than an absence. Since Mrs. Thatcher famously declared “there is no alternative” in 1980, neo-liberalism has been devoted to making this task impossible. Such a visualization is neither a history from below or a particular set of images but a reconfiguration of the “cognitive mapping” of the social. More precisely, it is the possibility of such a mapping, the ground against which it would be made and the techniques to be used in its formulation. A year ago this week that process began with the revolution in Tunisia.

From Port-Bou to Tunisia

On a climate-changing rainy day last August, I stood on a Spanish clifftop by the “Passages” memorial to Walter Benjamin, outside the cemetery where he was buried in 1940. It was not far to Barcelona with its neighborhood assemblies and a half-day on the train to Madrid and the indignados. But from the cliffs, you look out to sea, southwest, towards Tunisia, where a fruit-seller named Mohammed Bouazizi immolated himself into history as the person in whose name the Tunisian revolution of 2011 was enacted a year ago this week.  The force of that revolution changed the way that I understood the monument.

From Port-Bou to sea from the "Passages" monument

Designed by Israeli artist Dani Karavan and opened in 1994, “Passages” encloses a flight of stone steps running down towards the sea in a rectangular iron frame that encloses the entrance but opens up further down. Towards the bottom, there is a sheet of glass engraved with a shortened version of Benjamin’s aphorism from On the Concept of History (1940):

It is more difficult to honor the memory of the anonymous than it is to honor the memory of the famous, the celebrated, not excluding poets and thinkers. The historical construction is dedicated to the memory of the anonymous.

The construction of the iron sleeve acts as a projector so that the visitor also sees his or her own image projected, as it were, onto the open sea.

The projection at Port-Bou

In order to visualize a history of the anonymous, then, one has to superimpose Benjamin’s aphoristic writing on this phantasmatic projection of the self. The result of the contact between these layers is the new historical construction.

For a long time, it was hard to see oneself against the imagined background of European fascism, the imperative to never forget overwriting all other presents and futures, turning the projection into a spectre, erased on the always moving waters below. Michael Taussig’s fine essay on the memorial is haunted in this way, overwritten with the memory of 9-11. Like the photograph, always already about death as the Barthes-Sontag tradition has it, the memorial is held to be memento mori. Such is the posture of the angel of history, condemned to look back at the past.

History itself, Benjamin liked to remind us, is Janus-faced: it looks both ways. So if there are the anonymous of the past to be remembered, there are also the anonymous of the present to be named, projected by the very memorial itself into a different history than the history of great men. This transitory seawriting is not so much photography as photograffiti, a writing of the self by light that claims the privilege accorded to the name.

In his last preserved writing in 1940, Benjamin noted that in order to preserve the memory of the anonymous, it was necessary that “the epic moment will always be blown apart.” The epic is the account of gods and great men, once memorialized in portraits, now depicted in the ceremonial photograph such as that of Ben Ali, the only portrait photograph seen in public in Tunisia for the past forty years.

Zine El Abidine Ben Ali

Blown apart, which is not the same as blown up in either the photographic or military sense, photograffiti allows for a photographic common that turns hierarchy inside out and visualizes the present as prologue to a differently visualized future, rather than as the repetition of the past.

[part one of a series: this was originally given as a talk called ‘Occupy Visuality.’ It’s gradually evolving into an essay for a collection called ‘After the Global Turn’ edited by Aruna da Souza and Jill Casid.]