I presented this at Historical Materialism Toronto on Saturday May 15, 2010. Comments, criticism, and so on all welcome. Some rights reserved: cc by-nc-sa 2010 Kris Erickson.

The abstract follows immediately; the full text is after the jump.

Processing Photographs: Challenging the Legible Image

Abstract: This paper will consider the critical possibilities offered by treating images as more than simply a variety of text. By addressing photographic production as a crucial example of a contemporary image-making mode and not simply another decodable symbolic form, I intend to demonstrate how the purported legibility of imagery masks the decisive relations of production and consumption by which such images are constituted and circulated. More importantly, I intend to discuss how the dominant tendency to privilege images as meaningful – that is, rather than as spurious or ambiguous statements or gestures, as inextricably relative to the conditions under which they were constituted – obscures a version of history in which image-making is a fundamentally constitutive rather than simply reactionary practice. By briefly exploring the practices and images of worker-photographer collectives and war photographers during the 20th Century, I would like to demonstrate how photography is a particularly compelling communications technology with which to challenge the hegemony of textual meaning in contemporary social relations. This is not simply because photography is so ubiquitous in contemporary society, but also because its productive technologies are so widely accessible as means of symbolic production.

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I presented this at Making Media Public in Toronto on Saturday, May 8, 2010. Comments, criticism, and so on all welcome. Some rights reserved: cc by-nc-sa 2010 Kris Erickson.

The abstract follows below; full text after the jump.

What “Public Photography”? Towards a New Vision of Democracy

This paper is about a public photography: a set of practices to give people – all people – the skills and tools necessary to communicate in photovisual media. The idea of a public training in photography has been so absent from policy discussions around culture and education that the idea sounds absurd. Yet as representations in visual media continue increasingly to define and shape our understandings and assumptions about the world and its inhabitants, and as visualizing technologies become more available for people to use (and, possibly, abuse), perhaps a basic training in how to construct, see, and make public visual imagery should not be so readily dismissed. Indeed, given the recent history of misinformation perpetrated by corporate and state power alike – from the tacit complicity of American media during the Bush administration, to the unsettling manipulation of the media exercised by the Harper regime, to the mainstream silence on the continuing aftermath of the elections in Iran (or of the fate of Tamils in Sri Lanka, or of the crisis in Darfur, and so on) – it may be that now is the time that a public image education joins universal adult suffrage and universal primary education as hallmarks of a truly democratic society, one that claims its democracy is founded inextricably in the public interest.

Even if from the margins, photography is currently playing an important role in certain successful policy initiatives: from “photovoice” in healthcare and social work research, to digital photography in media literacy education, to photojournalism in community media practices, among others. Yet prior to these practices, still images of our worlds – local and global – have acted powerfully and iconically to galvanize public opinion and contribute to real-world change through their ability to symbolize meanings beyond spoken language and conventional experience. Utilizing the strengths of these and other vital photographic practices, this presentation will outline a theoretical justification of a public photography practice, and offer up suggestions for an implementation that will simultaneously address local and national concerns, existing institutions and emerging possibilities, state educational institutions and informal community training, as well as the participation of photographic professionals and the general public. By attempting to reconcile opposing forces, this paper will remain responsive to state-controlled educational and cultural policy while offering suggestions that tap into the grassroots of a creative and concerned public.

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