● ● ● Manifesto for an encountered photography

SEEING IS A MORAL INQUIRY

Histories of repeated actions have resulted in habits that we are told are innate. One of such repetitions is the conceptualisation of photography as a neutral tool of representation

We refuse the idea that a photograph simply shows us what is already there.

We reject the fantasy of photographic transparency.

Seeing does not imply knowing, and knowing does not imply understanding.

We reject the acceptance of photography as a tool of representation.

A photograph can bring something closer while keeping it profoundly distant.

We will labour against those repeated actions which result in:

Some bodies being repeatedly placed at the centre of social attention.

Some lives becoming become familiar images over others.

Some forms of suffering becoming instantly recognisable over others.

Other lives being pushed into the background.

We accept that:

What becomes visible becomes knowable.

What becomes knowable becomes believable.

What becomes believable can become socially real.

We refuse those practices of image taking that erase the voice, histories, labour, agency and contradiction of the lives engaged its coming aboutness.

We recognise a the value of a Seeing situated in morality.

We will labour for Seeing that goes beyond looking, and towards an understanding of the conditions that enable use to see.

We refuse the reduction of embodied lives into easily consumed images of suffering, difference, beauty, crisis, identity or otherness.

We refuse the photograph that claims to tell the whole story while removing the conditions that made the story possible.

We will not erase for the sake of clarity, as we do not labour for the sake of clarity.

Every act of seeing carries consequences.

To see is not simply to receive what is already there.

To see is to be directed.

Every image asks us to look somewhere, to notice something, to overlook something else.

What enters the frame is never separate from what remains outside it.

We must always ask:

What are we being asked to see?
What are we being asked not to see?
What becomes visible?
What remains invisible?

To see, then, is a moral and political enquiry and we will not seperate worldly entanglements with a squared frame.

AN ENGAGEMENT IN PHOTOGRAPHY IS ENGAGEMENT IN POLITICS.

Attention is politics.

The curation of attention is politcal.

All types of photography act within the curation of attention.

All Photography is political.

Every photograph has a before.

Every photograph has an after.

Every photograph has a history.

Every photograph has a social life.

We will attend to what exists outside the frame, not because context simply completes an otherwise neutral image, but because the photograph itself participates in organising the world.

The actions of a photograph does not end once the flash goes off.

The actions of a photograph does not end once the ink has dried

The actions of a photograph does not end once the image has uploaded.

The Image is forever.

This nature is not static, but forever engaging with the world and systems that led to its arrival.

Images circulate through institutions, archives, newspapers, courts, galleries, screens, families and intimate spaces.

They accumulate authority.

They further repeated habits and acts.

They maintain and sustain bodily acts and mental engagements.

They teach us:

What a body should look like.

What a home looks like.

What intimacy looks like.

What belongs.

What does not.

Through repetition, these ways of seeing become paths, walked upon over and over again through history, until those paths appear to have always been and always will be.

The familiar path becomes easier to walk.

The unfamiliar path becomes difficult to find.

WE WANT LIVES, NOT SYMBOLS

We reject all those practices within photography can make a person visible while making them unknowable.

A person is not a symbol.

A face is not a testimony.

Visibility is not voice.

Empathy is not understanding.

Feeling is not accountability.

Visibility is not justice.

When a person becomes a symbol, personhood is swallowed by cateogrisation.

The refugee, the victim, the migrant, the suffering subject, has their particularity replaced by generalisation.

Their history is compressed into an image.

The voice of the subject becomes secondary to meanings imposed by the Other.

We recognise the image and mistake recognition for understanding.

We see a face and believe we have encountered a life.

The photograph appears to provide access while withholding the histories, structures and conditions that make that life intelligible.

Such modes generate epistemic disorientation and harms to all involved:

We believe we are gaining knowledge while our knowledge has already been organised for us.

The photograph directs our attention towards what is visible and away from what has been excluded.

Such modes choke the voice of the subject, whilst parading them for all the world to see:

A person can become globally recognisable and remain absent from the story told about them.

Their image circulates and acquires value, while their own account of themselves is unheard, and treated as unnecessary.

A photograph cannot testify on behalf of a person simply because it shows them.

When photographs repeatedly present people through vulnerability and deprivation, they can invite pity without producing responsibility.

The viewer encounters an individual as an abstraction, not an embodied being situated and affected by the world around them.

We must question an image that asks us to feel something while giving us no way to understand what produced the situation we are witnessing.

No image do not exist outside the systems that produce and distribute them.

A photograph can be used to stabilise categories, justify narratives, naturalise inequality, and make historically produced conditions appear inevitable.

The anonymous body can become evidence of a problem without the structures responsible for that problem ever entering the frame.

The person becomes the image of the problem.

The photograph travels.
The subject remains behind.

We therefore refuse the idea that the ethical question is simply whether a photograph is accurate.

An accurate photograph can still organise attention unjustly.

An accurate photograph can still silence.

An accurate photograph can still reduce.

An accurate photograph can still make a person into a symbol.

We reject the notion of accuracy as truth.

ENCOUNTERED PHOTOGRAPHY IS LABOUR

An understanding of an encountered photography as orientational will result from questioning:

What does this image allow us to know?

What does it prevent us from knowing?

Whose voice does it make authoritative?

Whose voice does it make unnecessary?

What histories disappear when this person becomes a symbol?

What forms of attention does the image demand?

What relations does it produce between the viewer and the viewed?

And what structures become invisible when the person becomes the evidence?

Photography must become accountable not only to what it shows, but to the orientations it produces.

We do not need images that simply make people visible.

We need images that allow people to remain people.

We choose all those forms of labour rendered in invisible.

We engage with a multiplicity of possiblities and not the cementation of harmful habits.
To engage with a multiplicity of possiblities is to walk down unformed paths.

It is through the labour of repetition, that we develop newly formed paths.

Labouring in a new mode of photography that situates orientation over representation or transparency is a conceptual shift with bodily engagement.

It does not simply provide more images.

It does not simply add context.

It does not assume that representation becomes ethical by becoming more accurate.

It asks us to change the conditions through which seeing happens.

We photograph against the automatic and the clearly defined.

We interrupt the image that arrives too easily.

We resist the symbol that replaces the person.

We slow down recognition.

We complicate certainty.

We allow contradiction.

We make room for opacity.

We attend to what has been backgrounded.

We photograph the spaces around the subject, the histories behind the subject, the relationships between subjects, and the labour that sustains what becomes visible.

We engage with images that do not ask to be consumed immediately.

We make images that require movement.

We make images that requires labour and not consumption on the part of the Other.

We make images that require attention, and gives attention to such requirements.

We make images that allow more than one way of looking.

It does not tell the viewer exactly where to stand.

It opens paths.

It creates friction between what is seen and what is assumed.

It asks the viewer to recognise their own position within the act of looking.

The photographer is not outside the image.

The viewer is not outside the image.

The subject is not simply an object within it.

WE RECOGNISE REFUSAL AS A PHOTOGRAPHIC PRACTICE

Photography is a relating in an embodied world.

And relationships carry responsibility.

We recognise refusal as a photographic practice.

Not everything needs to be photographed.

Not everything that can be photographed should circulate.

Sometimes the ethical image is the image withheld.

To care may often mean to step back.

Sometimes the most responsible act is to stop looking.

We reject the idea that photographic access is photographic entitlement.

We make space for agency.

We photograph with, not simply of.

We make room for subjects to participate in decisions about what is shown, how it is framed and where it travels.

We understand collaboration not as a decorative addition to photographic practice, but as a redistribution of its conditions.

We remain attentive to the possibility that even collaboration can reproduce unequal relations.

WE HAVE THE ABILITY TO FORM NEW PATHS

A new mode of photography is not the removal of harm done.

There is and will be no innocent image.
There is only a continued practice of questioning.

This practice is a constant unlearning the habit of devaluing agency.

It requires the subject to be more than what the image wants them to be.

The image wants to be easily consumed .

The image wants to be eaten by the Other.

It requires the viewer to follow unfamiliar lines.

It requires patience.

It requires accountability.

It requires us to notice what our habits of looking have made invisible.

We do not promise a photograph that reveals the truth.

We seek photographs that make the conditions of seeing harder to ignore.

We do not photograph to close down meaning.

We photograph to open it.

We photograph to disturb certainty.

We photograph to make room for lives that exceed their representation.

We photograph to return complexity to what has been simplified.

We photograph to bring histories into the foreground.

We photograph to make visible the labour behind the visible.

We photograph to interrupt the paths we have inherited.

We photograph to do things within the world.

We do not want a better photograph that further cements the same the same world.

We engage with the photograph to change the world.

Let the Other choke on these photographs we take.