A Mind Spread Out on the Ground

by Alicia Elliott

  Despite my tendency to avoid pictures, when I was eighteen I realized the more I tried to avoid being photographed, the more people tried to photograph me. It was like a game to them. It didn’t matter that I didn’t like being photographed. It didn’t matter that they were my friends. They were going to get a picture of me. They were going to prove to me that getting my picture taken wasn’t so bad. These people would eventually get their picture, but they never proved anything to me about photos. All they proved to me was that their desire to have an image of me was more important to them than what I wanted. This was their ethics of seeing me. I had no power over it.

  I stopped resisting photos after that. I wouldn’t pose, I wouldn’t smile. I’d make an intentionally ugly face in a half-hearted attempt to get the jump on people who might criticize my unintentionally ugly face. I’d make an intentionally ugly face to stop myself from criticizing what I thought of as my unintentionally ugly face.

  “[Photographs] give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads….To collect photographs is to collect the world.”

  The idea of “owning” the world is hardly new. In fact, the desire to own or collect the world is behind the colonialism that has overtaken every corner of this planet. Photography itself has had an interesting role in colonialism, one that can be traced back to famous painter George Catlin. The story goes that in 1805, when he was nine, Catlin encountered an Oneida man from the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. This man didn’t kill, kidnap or harm Catlin, which were all things that “savage Indians” were apparently supposed to do back then. The man simply raised his hand in acknowledgement.

  This act was enough to shatter the stereotype Catlin had grown up believing. Unfortunately, Catlin took that knowledge and invested his energies into memorializing another stereotype: that of the vanishing Indian. Catlin believed that it was inevitable that Indigenous peoples would die out—either from illnesses like smallpox or from war. Instead of petitioning his government to stop slaughtering us, though, Catlin resigned himself to our extinction and took it upon himself to preserve “the looks and customs of the vanishing races of native man in America.” He even wrote, “Nothing short of the loss of my life, shall prevent me from visiting their country, and of becoming their historian.” Not even Indigenous peoples’ consent, it would seem.

  Despite his presumably friendly intentions, Catlin painted without knowing what ceremonies he was observing or concerning himself with how those he painted felt about his work. The paintings he created were his truth, but they were presented as if they were the truth.

  A little over a hundred years after Catlin’s life-changing encounter with a Haudenosaunee man, Edward S. Curtis published the first volume in his The North American Indian project. Like Catlin before him, Curtis travelled to different Indigenous nations for his project—but unlike Catlin, Curtis used photography to capture his versions of “an Indian character…[at] some vital phase in his existence.” Curtis produced thousands of photos and twenty volumes of those photos. But when I look at those photos, I don’t see the person the way I think they want to be seen. I see them the way Curtis wanted them to be seen: frozen in time, relics of the past, beautifully tragic vanishing Indians.

  The (white, often male) idea that preserving Indigenous peoples’ images is somehow more important than us preserving our own traditions and lives is just as intoxicating for non-Indigenous people today as it was in Catlin’s day. In 2013, British photographer Jimmy Nelson published his series “Before They Pass Away,” which—you guessed it—is another attempt by a white man to deem himself the official historian of nations he does not know, and to preserve specific, staged images of the people within them. Writer and photographer Teju Cole writes that Nelson “is sentimental about those he photographs and often proclaims their beauty, but having invested himself so deeply in the idea of their ‘disappearance,’ he is unable to believe that they are not going anywhere, that they are simply adapting to the modern world.” How many non-Indigenous people are just as deeply invested as Nelson and Curtis and Catlin in the idea that we are vanishing Indians? How many have looked at these men’s images of us, thought that we were beautiful, bought photos or paintings of us, collected those images, but never once spoken to any of us in person? Never once considered what our lives today are like, or how they personally contribute to our ongoing dispossession and disappearance?

  This “beauty” of ours that they claim to admire rarely translates to their seeing us in our fullness—as unique, sovereign peoples who deserve the right to control our own destinies. It does nothing to advance our rights or interests because, quite simply, these people don’t see human beings. They see an ideology, an aesthetic; a story that reinforces their self-proclaimed right to occupy Indigenous lands without making them feel bad for how they got that “right.” If they were to see us as anything more than an aesthetic, they would have to acknowledge their own complicity in upholding the exact systems that have been trying to disappear us for centuries.

  In 2015 I was at a writing residency for emerging Indigenous writers at a national arts institution. When they were looking to photograph a few of the participants to feature on their website, I knew they wouldn’t choose me. I didn’t look like the vanishing Indians Nelson, Curtis and Catlin loved so much. I didn’t look Indian© at all. Sure enough, they picked writers with long black hair and high cheekbones and beautiful, tawny skin. They knew exactly what they were looking for to get the visual diversity points they so clearly craved. The writers they chose didn’t have their traditional regalia with them for the pictures, but I can only imagine the boundless enthusiasm the literary officer of the program would have had if they did. They could have collected their perfect Indian© image to add to their collection, an image they knew to look for because of Nelson, Curtis and Catlin.

  “Photographs furnish evidence….The camera record incriminates.”

  When Black Lives Matter started mobilizing around police violence against Black people in the wake of the murders of Eric Garner and Michael Brown, many people thought that the solution was body cameras. If photographs furnish evidence, went their logic, surely camera footage could furnish all the evidence needed to prove, or disprove, charges of racist police violence. Of course many Black people, Indigenous people and people of colour suspected that this wouldn’t be the case, but white people—people who had never had reason to fear police—were adamant.

  There are instances where anti-Black police violence caught on film has been used as evidence. Twenty-seven-year-old Philip Alafe was taken into the Brantford police station on July 3, 2015, after an arrest. He told the booking officer he had depression and anxiety, though he wasn’t suicidal, and that he had sickle cell anemia, thus requiring regular medication to help alleviate his ongoing pain. Alafe is, it’s important to note, a Black man.

  Staff Sergeant Cheney Venn, a white police officer, came on duty at 10:30 p.m. (I feel obliged to disclose that Venn was the police officer at my high school when I went there from 2002 until 2006, though I never interacted with him personally.) Alafe, hoping for more medication, began throwing wet toilet paper at the camera around 11 p.m. to get the attention of the officers on duty. Venn yelled at him to stop. When Alafe wouldn’t stop, Venn removed Alafe’s mattress and blanket from his cell, telling him he’d get them back when he behaved. He gave Alafe one pill, though Alafe was allowed up to three if needed. Still in pain, and wanting his mattress and blanket back, Alafe tied his jumpsuit and shirt to the bars of his cell over the next few hours. Venn came back twice and told him not to do that. He didn’t return his mattress or blanket.

  At 3 a.m., Venn came back to Alafe’s cell and punched him three times, then he took his jumpsuit and all other clothing from him except for his socks, leaving him naked and cold in his cell. (Alafe’s doctor has described his pain as “unbearable”—and, unfortunately, made even worse by cold, dehydration and stress.) Meanwhile, Venn, who admitted in court he hadn’t tried to determine
what Alafe’s medical conditions were, decided Alafe did not need medical attention or more medication. He thought Alafe’s claiming to have a chronic condition was simply an attempt “to get out of the cells in order to go to a more comfortable setting.”

  After Alafe spent three hours in pain, shivering naked on the floor, his depression got the better of him and he tried to fashion a noose out of his socks. It took two minutes for Venn to stop Alafe’s suicide attempt, after which he took his socks and still refused to get him medical attention.

  At 7:30 a.m., when a new officer took over from Venn, he returned Alafe’s jumpsuit and, shortly after, his mattress and blanket. Unsurprisingly, once Alafe finally had clothes, a blanket and a mattress, he fell asleep.

  The reason I can relay all of this in detail—and the reason Ontario Court Justice Ken Lenz stayed the charges against Alafe, finding Alafe’s rights were violated under sections 7 and 12 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms—is because the incident was caught on camera. Justice Lenz admitted that without the cell videos he probably would have believed Officer Venn’s version of events. He needed proof. He needed the camera record.

  And yet even though Lenz thoroughly rebuked Venn’s behaviour, calling it “degrading to human dignity,” and claimed that Alafe’s perception that he could no longer trust police was “a perception I’m beginning to share,” Venn, his abuser, remained on regular duty as a police officer. Brantford police chief Geoffrey Nelson has said there is an ongoing investigation into “potential professional misconduct,” but there is no guarantee that Venn’s abusing a Black, disabled man will cost him his job, or even lead to a few weeks of paid leave. After all, the officers who killed Eric Garner on camera were not indicted. The officer who shot Philando Castile while his girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds, live-streamed the encounter to Facebook was not indicted. The officer who shot twelve-year-old Tamir Rice on camera was not indicted. So few of the white police officers who beat or kill Black people are ever indicted, or even punished.

  The systems responsible for creating an environment where Officer Venn could abuse Alafe without worrying about the consequences, the systems that created Alafe’s story in the first place, continue—unchanged and unchecked. No matter how incriminating certain photos may be, and no matter how much people who have never experienced anti-Black racism claim otherwise, there is no photographic record that can change these systems. Not on its own.

  “In deciding how a picture should look, in preferring one exposure to another, photographers are always imposing standards on their subjects.”

  The agency of photographers and lack of agency of their subjects often gets overlooked, mainly because photographs are usually seen as facts rather than crafted images. It’s assumed that photography, and therefore photographers, are passive, merely showing the world as it is. Sontag refers to the passive nature of photography as “its aggression,” arguing that even idealizing subjects or making a “virtue of [their] plainness” is an aggressive act. The popularity of certain types of photographs of poor folk, racialized folk, disabled folk and so on would seem to argue against the charge of aggression—at first. I’m thinking of the work of people like Diane Arbus, who photographed “freaks,” or Jacob Riis, who photographed the poor, or Adam Clark Vroman, who photographed Indigenous people, or perhaps even Robert Mapplethorpe, who photographed naked Black men for his Black Book. Aren’t these photographs trying to educate those of us who don’t have access to those people, those spaces? Aren’t they trying to encourage understanding, education, empathy?

  Perhaps. But how can understanding, education or empathy exist when all you have is the photograph? When you have no context to educate you on what, exactly, you’re seeing and what, exactly, it means? Without that, viewers must rely on their own assumptions and their own often limited knowledge. If you’re looking at a photo in National Geographic, for instance, and you see an “exotic” African man from an unspecified tribe, you have the illusion of being educated. You now know that that person, that way of living, exists. But you don’t know what his clothing or tattoos or facial piercings mean to him or his people, what his people have survived, what they care about or who they are. You know only what that person looked like at that exact second, in that exact light.

  So how, then, is the photo operating? Is it telling you what that man wants you to know, or is it allowing you to act as a voyeur, smuggling you into his space without his consent—a space you wouldn’t otherwise have access to? Is it giving you the option of looking at this man from a “safe distance,” maybe curled up on your couch, or sitting in the waiting room of your dental office, all the while not giving the man you’re looking at the opportunity to speak back to you or correct your assumptions about him?

  This may be why, in March 2018, National Geographic‘s newest editor-in-chief, Susan Goldberg, penned an editorial about the magazine’s historical depiction of race. I could go into detail about Goldberg’s arguments and examples, but the title really says it all: “For Decades, Our Coverage Was Racist. To Rise Above Our Past, We Must Acknowledge It.” The most telling part of the article was when John Edwin Mason, who teaches the history of photography at the University of Virginia, pointed out that National Geographic came “into existence at the height of colonialism, [when] the world was divided into the colonizers and the colonized.” Mason argued that the magazine didn’t teach so much as reinforce ideas readers already had, while giving them photographic “proof” that these racist ideas were, in fact, correct. This has always been the danger of not taking into consideration who the photographer is and what standards they are trying to impose.

  This is also why there seems to be such a stark contrast between the types of photos taken by photographers who have no understanding of who or what they’re photographing and photos taken by photographers who do. Anishinaabe/Ojibway photographer Nadya Kwandibens, from the Animakee Wa Zhing First Nation, asks, in her series “Concrete Indians,” “Who are you as a Native person living in the city?” Kwandibens contrasts her subjects—Indigenous people wearing their traditional regalia or “modern” clothes or some combination of the two—with the heavily urban, concrete spaces around them. If that juxtaposition feels unusual or wrong to you, her photos seem to say, that’s not our problem. That’s your problem. Do you think Indigenous people are relics? That they don’t belong in cities? Do you think they should only be wearing “modern” clothing in these spaces? Do you think they should just assimilate already?

  2Spirit/Queer Métis/Saulteaux/Polish visual artist Dayna Danger uses BDSM, beaded fetish masks and the strategic placement of antlers in huge-scale photos that, in Danger’s own words, question “the line between empowerment and objectification” and explore “the complicated dynamics of sexuality, gender, and power in a consensual and feminist manner.” Her photos demand your attention, demand you to look in the eyes of the Black or Indigenous woman you might otherwise dismiss or demean and see the power of choice. She is choosing to show you her body, to show you her desire, to look you in the eye, to not be ashamed. That is the pinnacle of decolonization: an empowered, unashamed Black woman beside an empowered, unashamed Indigenous woman.

  British artist Alison Lapper, who was born without arms and with shortened legs, a condition called phocomelia, turns her photographic eye on herself, interrogating ideas of beauty and physical normality in pictures that are sometimes bold and sexy, sometimes soft and sensual. The very idea that a disabled woman is worthy of the sort of love and attention art requires is radical; the idea that she can make that art herself is revolutionary. Lapper’s work questions the notion that disabled people are objects to pity or use for inspiration. Instead of seeing them as “sad” or “inspirational,” see them as sexual, see them as beautiful, see them as human.

  There are many photographers who have used cameras to craft images of their own communities on their own terms. These photographers are intimately aware of how the wrong people imposing the wrong standards can push harmful n
arratives about their communities—narratives that can result in real-life negative repercussions for their family and friends. These photographers have a stake in accurately representing their communities, so with every photograph they take, they’re aware of the responsibility they carry. After all, if they do a bad job portraying their own communities, they’ll have to clean up the mess, too.

  However, when a person enters another community as a tourist, bringing their own set of unexamined, perhaps problematic assumptions with them, they’re not necessarily going to be held accountable for how their photographs uphold those assumptions. No matter how long they’re in that space taking pictures, they’re going to leave when they’re done. They don’t have to look any of their subjects in the eye and explain to them why they removed certain things from the image and added others. They don’t have to deal with any negative repercussions that could arise as a result of their inaccuracies. The most they have to confront is the possibility that their photographic subjects will later contact them and express discontent with their work. Since it’s still ultimately the photographer’s choice whether to listen to the critique and make changes, that’s not exactly a heavy burden to bear.

  I don’t believe you necessarily have to be part of a community to take their concerns about representation seriously. Aaron Huey is a white photographer living in Seattle. When he went to photograph the Oglala Lakota tribe on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota back in 2005, he was looking to photograph poverty in America. That was the standard he was imposing on his subjects. It didn’t take long for him to realize the flaw with his approach. “People there were telling me the most epic stories I’d ever heard,” Huey told Slate, “and people were talking about a history of genocide. I knew that word would never be used in the mainstream press. I knew right away I wasn’t OK with that, that I wanted a bigger piece of the truth than just more statistics and more pictures of poverty.”