The Power Of The Photo

The usual suspects are rambling on, on twitter, about how reprehensible and wicked it is to photograph someone without getting that person's consent. They have no argument, of course, it's simply received wisdom that it's wrong. And, look, it's not a trivial problem. There are issues here. But it's a lot more complicated than either side of that debate ("street photographers" versus "academics" let's say, or "type 1 assholes" versus "type 2 assholes" if you prefer) See, for instance my brilliant analysis here.

I diagnose this, based on not very much, as rooted in the conceit that photographs are Terribly Powerful. This is a notion held, to nobody's surprise, by a lot of people who have devoted themselves to photography — either doing it, or bloviating about it, or both. If you dig through the archives of this very blog, you'll probably find some dumb shit I said. Consistency is for the weak.

Since photographs are Terribly Powerful, it follows that one needs to be Terrible Careful with them, and everyone except the bloviating-elite has been (obviously) insufficiently careful, and so colonialism and so on. Then there ensues much hand-wringing and pearl-clutching on twitter about How Awful It Is.

It all reminds me rather of a Wired article I read years ago about containerized shipping. In the piece, the author waxed lyrical about the amount of data that surrounds a shipping container, basically: what's in it, and where it is. The author proposed that some day the data about a container might some day be worth more than the contents, which sounds very high tech and shit, but is obviously stupid. I will pay, it turns out, absolutely no more than $20 for information about a $20 bill. That is a hard limit.

Photographs run into the same problem: there is always the hard limit of reality, against which the photograph competes.

Why are there very few black sailors in the USA? Because black people in the USA generally don't swim. Why don't black people in the USA swim? Because there are no black lifeguards. There is, I am pretty sure, actual research backing this up. Good research? I dunno, but it's just an example, so let's go forward anyways.

This is a classic "representation" problem. If you don't see anyone who looks like you doing a thing, you're less likely to feel like it's a thing you could do, or should do, or want to do. Nobody wants to be the only black kid in the pool. It's not an impenetrable wall, obviously, but it's a barrier of sorts.

This gets translated, by a sort of sleight of hand, into a story about media. The conceit is that media is pretty much the same thing as life, so if you see (or don't see) yourself represented in media in a certain way, they you react in certain ways. It sounds logical, and maybe it even is.

The thing is, media is not real life. You can see all the black lifeguards you like in magazines and on TV, but when you get to the pool, you're still the only black kid in this here pool in real life. There has been no spike, or even noticeable increase, in black kids playing golf over the career of Tiger Woods. Media's power is always less than the power of real life.

This shows us one boundary on the power of media in general, and photography specifically.

Let's consider propaganda. It absolutely works. Advertising and propaganda are well worked out and successful strategies. They absolutely alter perception and behavior, and they are, fundamentally, media. So... uh? What gives?

Well, first of all, ads and propaganda work when you're talking about organized and well funded campaigns. Message discipline and saturation are both necessary. So, if you want to sell cake mixes, or cars, what definitely does not work is a random assemblage of bullshit thrown together by amateurs across the world, all with their own personal takes on the matter.

There is a world of difference between a whole bunch of pictures of Tiger holding up trophies, and a propaganda/ad campaign aimed to get black kids to play golf.

Ads and propaganda also work best when they're working an already established trend. Goebbels wasn't trying to turn Battleship Germany around, he was just trying to steer it a little to the right and whip already existing sentiment up to a fever pitch. You can sell people stuff mainly if they're already ready to buy.

Partly, this is the campaign: you prepare the ground for, potentially, years. Partly, it is simply taking advantage of conditions on the ground. These two blend in to one another.

So, we have another bound on the power of media: scattershot jumbles have very low impact, organized campaigns can have real juice. 1000 dolts posting pictures on flickr is, we can be pretty sure, going to have exactly zero impact on the world. 30 dolts posting news photos on the front page of the NYT probably don't do much either. One dolt with a budget and a coherent plan? Now we're cooking with gas.

Photographs, being but one form of media, and a limited one at that, cannot possibly have the power claimed. Photographs do certain things, they have certain effects, but the power of the photograph to alter the world, whether for good or ill, is extremely limited.

If you're worrying about some dipshit's book project because you don't approve of his methods, maybe you should stop being such a goddamned princess and start worrying about things that actually matter.

There are days when it appears that much of "photoland" is devoted primarily to scolding. They seem to have an entire theory of photography which, while disconnected almost completely from reality, is optimized to provide material and rationalization for scolding, because scolding is their favorite thing.