Appropriation
My photography’s an expression of my guilt, my inability to make a protest in any other way. It’s an expression of something in front of me that doesn’t look too good.
–Don McCullin
We’ve had many discussions round this house about a writer’s “right” to appropriate someone else’s drama for their own creative source or benefit. Agreed on the offence of those who suck the blood out of a public tragedy to push a political agenda, but aware of the power, and no doubt necessity, of personal tales to instruct the heart.
A little while back, the question was rekindled when I discovered that a, let’s say, close friend of the family had taken an episode from our past and turned it into a piece of published fiction (complete with healthy advance).
The initial chill up my spine dissolved to indifference as I reasoned that the writer had not sought to see all sides, wanting only to render a biased conclusion because it was far tidier and sexy, plot-wise. (Though I confess that I did say, What a slut, once or twice before getting over it.)
But the chill gave me a fleeting taste of what must be gut-deep writhing for those who, without forewarning, find their intimate conversations – and perhaps details of their darkest times – made available to all for the price of a newspaper, tawdry paperback or access to the web.
And realized, once again, that each time the subject comes up, I have more questions than answers.
I suppose whether or not it is ethical to appropriate the lives of others to tell a story in your image or take their picture as they writhe in pain is, ultimately, moot. It will continue to happen, and we will continue to gawk.
And it’s true that the victims themselves are sometimes eager to cash in on their tragedy, but I wonder if that’s innate or a product of our all-consuming and stardom-hungry society.
But in cases where the victims’ sole desire is to be left alone with their grief, is there not a moral imperative to respectful silence or, if they cannot resist talking about it, the naïve in me demands that chroniclers be required to more carefully examine their motives, and admit to their need for personal drama and visibility (and maybe a quick buck) by association.
Much more comfortable with barroom diatribes than with careful analysis, we confuse the right to be curious with the right to know.
The same conundrums arise with photographs.
Taking the obvious example of pictures of starving children: how do most of us react when viewing them? We all squirm and are probably momentarily glad for what we’ve got. Some of us may even cut a cheque to Oxfam, but few of us will be driven to petition our government to change their foreign aid policy, thus perpetuating the cycle of reliance on (sometimes questionable) charities, and the established imbalance of power.
We allow these images to grace the pages of our large circulation news magazines – we tisk and moan, and feel we’ve somehow informed ourselves and done a good deed by not averting our eyes. But, in fact, we rarely view the subjects as anything more than that, thus robbing them of their full dimension, and ourselves of taking any useful action.
In these same publications, we refuse to include certain images of wars that we’re involved in. Do we not have the right to know how our tax euros are being spent? Who we are killing today?
I like the idea that photos of horror should be in colour – black and white glossing the scene and placing it in the realm of art.
Speaking of war photography, Susan Sontag reviles this form of innocence-making, saying: “No one after a certain age has the right to this kind of innocence, of superficiality, to this degree of ignorance, or amnesia.”
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- Ms Joan Didion is famous for (amongst other things) a quote which I shall attempt to paraphrase as I’m certain to miss the mark, as it were, accuracy-wise):
“A writer is always selling someone out.”
I like to believe that isn’t true. I try very hard in my fiction to see to it that it isn’t so… or to see to it that if someone is being sold out, it is most assuredly me.
The universe gives some of us utterly desperate (early) lives so that we may live in warmth and comfort during our declining years, sitting by the fire, playing with words and waiting upon royalty checks.
The trick of it is, all of our interesting episodes involve other people we have to strive not to hurt. Even if some of them are right bastards.
— V. Mar 13, 5:30pm # - It’s a progression. It goes from tactile-radius perceptual subjectivity to mediated reality. People live online, on-screen, in the music. We, me and some others, you and some others, not necessarily in the same spot on the line, inhabit our positions grasping for permanency, but that’s the least likely state of all. Unavailable.-I used to have trouble imagining my nomadic existence, in a yurt, in a teepee, in a cave with adults and kids all stuffed in for weeks in cold cold winter. I don’t like having sex in front of other people. But the choice is that or die so hey. The ones who can’t stand it go away.
In this version the ones who can’t live their lives on camera 24/7 go away. Or mad. Or into the funk of disgruntlement.
I live right now doing this with a clot of at least four or five people reading what I write as I write it. That I know this is not near the same as being able to prove it.
I would often gladly trade that, for being written about however salaciously and no matter how much to my disparagement, or for something more like non-existence. – The redeeming aspect is it’s way short-term. The infrastructure to support the technology won’t hold, isn’t holding. Not at the spectator-driven volume it now runs.
Again that cloud of bodiless cherubim floats through, pudgy little hands gripping celestial remotes, rosy-cheeks glowing with the dangerlessness of their participation in this very dangerous play. – Sontag nails absolutely what’s depraved and obscene about Oprah-consensus morality. We were in the midst of inheriting, processing and disseminating, long branches of traditional experience and experience-modified morality. That were systematically severed and scorned into historical cuteness.
Now we have morality by the infantilized. The baby’s rejection of negative stimulus. War is bad because it scares us. Terrorism is bad because we don’t like pictures of people suffering, except we do. NASCAR excitement isn’t about seeing the winner take his victory lap.
The conflict is pornographic – the degradation of the unattainable object of desire.
The right to be curious ellides into the right to know, and the right to feel confident about knowing.
A God made entirely out of human prayer.
People’s souls disappearing like smoke into the TV screen. Kids staring into the street-cameras from the backs of GPS-monitored SUV’s.
Living well is still the best revenge.
— msg Mar 13, 9:07pm # - But writing, isn’t it a lie anyway? Our memories are the lies we tell ourselves, and the writers’ memories, well they’re most certainly lies. And then, if you’re ever worried about someone making a connection, well they’d have to see through their own lies first, and even then your hasty denial would surely dash the possibility of connection (read: scandal).
Photographs though, they’re only lies once removed. At least they were before Photoshop. (Then again, the dancing faeries photo happened quite before Photoshop.)
Speaking of photos, did you see (or witness) the movie War Photographer? Quite soul-depleting, and therefore effective. Most enlightening is the revelation that news magazines are routinely forced to limit access to this imagery for fear that it might offend or frighten their advertisers. Consumerism drives war and natural resource exploitation, while crass consumers are presented with safe and approved full color ads.
— scamper Mar 14, 4:42am # - This is a difficult subject. You want to take the high road, be more ethically pure than what you really know you are… Although, many of the persons I associate with, have befriended or even admire, came to be in their professions and harbor their passion for the work they do precisely because of photos/stories they were exposed to.
Yet, I shake my head and close my eyes too many times to count, knowing that no end justifies the means that I’ve seen people use to get that story or photograph I’ve stumbled across… And I know too many people that could give two thoughts one way or another about it.
— roggey Mar 15, 8:37am # - “A writer is always selling someone out.”
I thought that was Janet Malcolm rather than Joan Didion. On the other hand, The Crime Beat (http://www.justicejournalism.org/ crimeguide/chapter01/chapter01_pg09.html) says “as the adage goes, ‘The writer always betrays.’” Whoever gets credit, I agree with it, and I think attempts to wish it away are sentimentalism. There’s a reason so many writers turn out to be shits to their nearest and dearest when you make the mistake of reading their biographies; being a writer, like being a surgeon or cop, requires a certain hard-heartedness in the excercise of one’s profession. If you can’t stand the sight of blood (real or metaphorical), best to try your hand at something else. The fact is that every story is somebody’s story, and we either steal them from other writers (likely to produce staleness and/or plagiarism charges) or from our nearest and dearest.
I used to hang out with a young woman who admired Nelson Algren (an admirable choice for a twentysomething in these times) and wanted to be a writer. I shared with her some honest and potentially embarrassing stories from my checkered past, knowing that they might end up in print but more interested in encouraging her writing than protecting my sacred memories; I was disappointed when she wound up going to library school instead, and yet a tad relieved as well. Life is full of tradeoffs.
— language hat Mar 15, 6:39pm # - There’s a kind of immortality in the observing of bits of imagery and narrative from hot-spots and breaking-story events. A-mortality.
A sense we won’t change much as we learn what happened.
There’s an image of a man crawling on his hands and knees; or what used to be a man. He has literally no flesh, just ligaments and bone covered over in dark parchment skin. There’s a thatched hut in the background, he’s naked, there’s no concrete in evidence, no steel. The narrative is stark, essential. His body still moves. But toward what? Why?
The caption says something terse about Africa and AIDS. My imagination says there’s a memory back there in my own family tree of some plague-empty village, the sound of it, the smell, the deadening emptiness.
It changed me to see that.
So OK, I can go without that kind of change, it’s too deep and it’s too shallow both.
The real one, the lived experience, makes its fictions real; the shallow one, the brought image, makes our reality fake, it mediates everything.
Coming at it again, obliquely, Sontag nails it.
We don’t need that level of experience handed to us on a clean platter, unless we’re apprenticing to the divine.
Unless we’re going to become gods, with the terrible responsibilities that brings.
A friend of mine backed over her kid’s cat. They were poor, broke, the cat had had kittens, the mom was relieved more than anything, the kid picked that up, and the grief she felt at 10 years old was immeasurable.
I ended up being the woodsman, the huntsman, the dad figure trying to explain that if they all lived they’d all die. That we were like gods to them and so had to be like gods to them. Being responsible for the hard parts as well as the fun parts.
It’s a more logical and accessible version of what I meant above by Oprah-consensus reality.
And a vortical correspondence in there, of being accused by the mom in question of using our intense dialogs in my fiction, how she felt a third presence in the room, some scribbling other, and the echo of the time-delay making everything she said, though it was honest and passionately felt, portentous and hollow-sounding.
But me, in those days, I couldn’t even say you know, babe it’s true, but not that way, everything I do gets written down,by someone else, like it was theirs, only I never get to see it.
— msg Mar 15, 10:20pm # - I remember Don McCullin in a very old documentary saying that he always asked permission to take a shot. We saw him move around a veteran’s parade and, sure enough, he stopped and asked before snapping each furrowed face and patch of medals.
Asked about what happened in the height of battle, he had to become mystical, if not ingenuous. He claimed that he felt a “yes” from everyone in whatever moment of extremity, that they called out for a witness, to show the world what was going on.
I believed him, for he wore his heart on his sleeve.
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