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.

This paper is concerned with addressing what a “public photography” might include, and broadly describes steps that might be taken to make it a reality. It’s author acknowledges a certain utopianism to the idea – even a certain naïveté – but I hope you’ll go along with me all the same. The utopianism, at least, is in part what motivates community radio, community television, and other community media projects. Even though contemporary photographic practice doesn’t resemble a broadcast model – it’s far too diverse a set of industries and uses – there is still much that can be learned from the organizing principles and counterhegemonic motivations of community media practices in formulating a public photography.

But before I look at some of the photography-based movements that prefigure this idea of a public photography, I want to first suggest that photography is both verb and noun: a process as much as an object or product. Photography’s most obvious form is as an object – photographs rather than photographies; indeed, the latter sounds somehow off, and only really gets spoken in specialized academic discourse. Yet as a photograph, each image is only ever an object in multiple senses: the products – plural – of a number of interconnected processes, each of which carries that image into various future or past configurations. It is in consideration of these processes – and to the very idea that any photograph is really only an instant within such diverse processes – it is with this in mind that a public photography can exist. To see what I mean, try examining a newspaper photo without its caption; or, alternatively, try reading a caption without its image in front of you. A bit of self-consciousness and reflexivity will indicate various processes of aestheticization, politicization, commodification, mythologizing, and the like, at play within one and the same form that shifts when the context changes.

The second point I’d like to make about photography is that it originated as an act of publicity as much as one of invention. As Geoffrey Batchen has importantly shown, within a brief historical window around 1839, more than a dozen inventors from around the world quite legitimately laid claim to variations of what has become photography. That Fox Talbot and Daguerre get invoked as non-collaborating inventors in the official narrative is only partly instructive: the two didn’t know each other and certainly never worked together, making the claim that both invented it – simultaneously – somewhat ridiculous. It is an assertion more appropriate to the practice of conventional historiography – to the idea of a pristine starting point within a narrative of progress – than to the story of photography.

More importantly than its invention, then, the daguerreotype was announced to the French Academy by François Arago in an orchestrated and highly public event – Fox Talbot’s invention came as a response to this publicity – itself a series of exchanges and assertions made in public forums. In a careful reading of the French scientist and statesman’s letters and writings, John Tresch shows how Arago’s vision was for photography to become a tool to aid democracy. As Tresch asserts, kindling the medium in such a formal, public way was an attempt by Arago to ensure it a crucial place in the realm of public life. This vision of photography as a tool for democracy – rather than simply as a technique for science – should not be ignored: it exists as a subtext to all subsequent photographic practice, from amateur snapshooting to corporate advertising, conceptual art to photojournalism, criminal mugshots to taggable photos on Flickr or Facebook. I want to assert that this democratic potential in photography remains regardless of whether or to what extent the medium’s potential for participatory action is denied or otherwise suppressed in the uses to which it is routinely put. Since it was invented, in short, photography has been available to everyone, in at least some forms and practices; ubiquitous enough, in any case, for Walter Benjamin to suggest that photography aligns the masses with reality, and vice versa, and that new discourses have emerged as a result. Such new ways of seeing, thinking, and knowing have become increasingly intertwined with modern life, even if in the process certain of its various users and agents have sought to put controls and constraints on how others utilize photography’s tools and techniques, privileging certain of these ways of thinking, seeing and knowing while denigrating others.

A public photography, then, would aim to restore this initial imperative of access to photographic production, and assert the right of everyone to communicate through such means. It would consist of establishing and maintaining access to settings in which any person might gain instruction and experience in photographic practice. In this sense, public photography might also be called community photography or popular photography in order to emphasize the inclusive, collaborative, and participatory dimensions these signifiers might lend to such practices. This is important, because it lends an imperative political force to such practices – potentially connecting public photography with existing fields like community arts or community media and popular education. This political charge and grounded-ness in community would help challenge any attempts at homogenization or universalization, and would help articulate a practice that is rooted in the everyday lives of the participants rather than in more reified understandings of society, culture, politics, or photography.

Indeed, if we look at some of the practices that prefigure this idea of a public photography – such as worker photography movements during the Weimar Republic or embodied in the Photo League, as well as in the practice of community photography in 1970’s Britain – we might get a sense of what a public photography should include. This would mean, for one, a pedagogical component – teaching and learning, broadly put – both training in technical skills, and experience in planning and implementing strategies for publicizing, exhibiting, or more generally circulating the outcomes of such practice, whether as pictures, archives, or workshops. At least as early as 1983 – with the publication of Su Braden’s compelling monograph Committing Photography – the emancipatory literacy work of Paulo Freire was declared important to such a critical, counterhegemonic photographic practice. Freire’s legacy, as well as his influence on the popular education and critical pedagogy movements, might continue to inform the orientations a public photography might take; seeking, for instance, to position people as subjects in a creative and collaborative image-making practice – not simply as objects in a process of representation being imposed upon them.

Secondly, a public photography would also mean recognizing the importance of dedicated space conducive to such practices – this is certainly made simpler with the move to digital technologies. Again, looking to past and present models would help – for example, the cooperatively-run gallery and darkroom space of Toronto’s own Gallery 44; the East 21st Street, New York loft that was for some time the Photo League’s classroom and darkroom space; or the Side Gallery in Newcastle upon Tyne. Each suggest different ways of configuring space for different purposes, identifying resources to be purchased and maintained, indicating people to be hired or commissioned. Through their respective histories, each offers instruction on how such spaces might be strategically developed and sustained over time. In addition to this question of space, the Internet is becoming important as a virtual space that will increasingly come to co-exist alongside physical space as a means to develop and enhance practices. The rapidity with which textual and visual material can be published on the Net, and the relatively low cost of this form of publication, gives local organizations unprecedented national and even international reach, and the capacity for innovation not possible in conventional forms. However, this comes at a cost as more and more organizations emerge to try to claim legitimacy and visibility within this realm. With this in mind, coalition-building and partnering with prominent organizations becomes almost a necessity. The recent GDP project organized by the NFB is one example of an innovative and timely photo project: it uses photography and video to document the effects of the economic downturn on individuals and communities, but uses digital technologies to share and interconnect these images and stories with one another. Finally, merging with hybrid spaces and organizations would be another possibility. I’m thinking here of the amazing work being done locally at Regent Park Focus, The Toronto Free Gallery, or Manifesto.

Thirdly, a public photography might take the lead from the worker photography movements mentioned previously and consider work and labour as a primary motivating theme, topic, and context. As a means of unifying public photographic practice, the topic of labour in all its forms – such as waged and unwaged; blue-collar, pink-collar, or white-collar; manual or intellectual; and so forth – might provide a way of addressing other markers of identity with an already established common ground. Photos made in the work place about the work place, in public school and university classrooms about classroom practice, or in domestic settings about domestic work are strangely rare, given the amount of time we spend in these settings. A public photography which doesn’t consider labour and work as central to what is communicable through images is bound to be problematic as a truly public practice. At the very least, infusing a photographic practice with questions around labour or identity politics would ensure a vital praxis in the Freirean sense.

I’ve tried to spell out what I feel is important to consider in this idea of a public photography. However, much still needs to be done to make this a reality: for example, even though photographic technology is relatively inexpensive next to other media technologies, it still costs money. Questions of who will raise this money or how it might otherwise be secured through local, regional, or national agencies – state-based or private – is a crucial one. Whether such money will impact the nature of what gets communicated – in other words, whether money will or will not come “with strings attached” – is an equally important question. While I am confident that answers and innovative strategies can be found by examining past and present practices and engaging in coalition-building, this is only a potential. Dedicated individuals and groups need to step up and engage in this kind of work – a kind of creative and pedagogical work aimed at doing the linking and research others are unwilling or unable to; Michael Apple’s term “critical secretary” is a useful descriptor here in terms of describing the kind of role that needs to be filled. In any case, in building towards a public photography – some might argue in trying to bring a public photography back on the rails – I think it’s important to maintain a certain utopianism: both as a force to drive a changing public photographic practice, and as a way to maintain a sense of “the big picture” – whatever that might include.