Huey spent four years at Pine Ridge, becoming part of the community, falling in love with the families that invited him in. Even though what he saw on that reserve was “the saddest and scariest thing I’d seen on the face of the Earth,” he knew that “objective” journalism wasn’t the right way to approach this. He had to learn the history of oppression he represented as a white man, as well as protocols for ceremonies he didn’t understand. For example, he learned he was allowed to photograph before and after ceremonies, but not during. The Lakota people themselves also challenged his intentions: according to a Time article, “When they thought he wasn’t capturing the reality of it all, they’d say: ‘Why are you doing this?’ He would ask himself ‘Why am I doing this?’ and recalibrate.” It took every one of those four years before he felt he had “learned how to hear [the Lakota people],” and moved from a passive observer to an actual advocate, collaborating on street art projects, storytelling projects, non-profit work that funds Indigenous artists, and a cover story with none other than National Geographic.
When Huey published Mitakuye Oyasin, a book of his photography of Pine Ridge, he had spent over seven years there. He described the book as “more like a prayer or a poem than a documentary. It was like a ceremony, and I didn’t realize it until the end.” Through his experience with the Lakota people, Huey realized how unsatisfying it was acting as an “impartial witness” to the events he was photographing, and subsequently changed his entire approach to photography. In order to understand and honour his responsibility to the Lakota community, Huey had to acknowledge and take accountability for the shallow standards he wanted to impose, and choose to impose entirely different ones instead.
When you look at the photos of Nadya Kwandibens, Dayna Danger, Alison Lapper and Aaron Huey, you can feel the respect that has shaped each frame. It’s a completely different viewing experience. Each photographer respected and understood the communities they were photographing before they snapped their shutter closed. They knew their photos bore a responsibility, so their work was created with more care and intention than if they worked under the rather colonial assumption that they had the “right” to photograph whatever they wanted, however they wanted. The bare minimum standard we should expect photographers to impose on their subjects is respect.
“From its start, photography implied the capture of the largest possible number of subjects. Painting never had so imperial a scope.”
The magnitude of photography, the way it aims to capture everything, does indeed seem to have an imperial scope. It’s even more pervasive now than when Sontag wrote her book. Technology has absolutely infiltrated our lives with cameras, allowing us every opportunity to take thousands of pictures of ourselves and others whenever the desire strikes. Sontag claimed back in 1973 that photography’s popularity meant it was “not practiced by most people as art,” but one has only to look at the popularity of Instagram, photo-editing apps and cell phones with high-quality cameras to see that this assertion holds little weight today. People not only want to take pictures of their everyday lives; they want to craft and manipulate them until they look like they were taken by professionals.
The term “selfie” was coined by an Australian man in 2002, yet perhaps unsurprisingly the cultural stigma surrounding selfies seems proportional to how popular they are with women. It’s an interesting bit of bullshit: Women can be the subject of millions of paintings hung in galleries, often painted by men. Women can be in varying states of undress in photos used for advertisements, often photographed by men. Women can appear in films, TV shows, fashion spreads, porn—often shot, directed and edited by men. Women’s bodies can be posed and prodded and digitally manipulated until they look nothing like the real women who stood in front of the camera. That’s all fine. But if a woman puts on makeup, takes a picture of herself, for herself, adds a filter or two and posts it on Instagram, men comment that this is why you can’t trust women, that women are engaging in “false advertising,” that all men should take women swimming on the first date to see how they really look under all the makeup and photoshop.
Of course, it’s not just men who hate women who post selfies. I used to be a selfie-hater, too. I would scroll through social media, resentment and indignation welling in my chest as picture after picture of smiling women or sexy women or serious women or goofy women came up on my screen. I was always the most annoyed at women who were trying to look sexy or beautiful in their selfies. What narcissists, I thought, choking down my own insecurity.
It was only when I decided I didn’t have to see myself as ugly that I actively interrogated this impulse. Why was I tearing down these women—many of whom were my coworkers, my acquaintances, my friends? What was so wrong with them feeling good about the way they looked? For exerting control over their own image in a world that insisted control should never belong to them? For getting validation that they were, in the words of Rachel Syme, “worthy of being seen”?
I started taking photos of myself. It did make me feel beautiful. It did make me see myself as worthy of being seen. But I still wouldn’t share my selfies with anyone else.
In her brilliant essay “Selfie: The Revolutionary Potential of Your Own Face, in Seven Chapters,” Rachel Syme defines a selfie as having to be shared in order to be considered a selfie. I balked at this initially. Weren’t my selfies selfies? Why did I have to share pictures of myself when I was taking them solely for my own satisfaction?
Then I remembered the shame, the ugliness that I felt back when I was a kid who refused to have my picture taken. How I was convinced no one would want to see a picture of me. How I hated seeing pictures of myself. Even though I was almost two decades older and had embarked on a project to see myself as beautiful, very little had changed. I still thought keeping pictures of myself from others was, in a sense, sparing them.
If photography has a scope we could call “imperial,” what would we call the scope of something as ingrained and unavoidable as shame? Perhaps we should also call it “imperial.” After all, haven’t the Western, white-centric beauty standards that have made us feel inadequate and shameful in the first place been spread through imperialism? Though Britain can no longer claim most of the world as its empire, the colonialism it introduced—the beauty standards it introduced—linger. Skin-lightening creams are enthusiastically bought and sold on every single continent to those who don’t have the “right” (read: white) skin tone. A painful, hours-long process exists for Black women to chemically straighten their hair so it looks more “professional” (read: white). Plastic surgeries are available to change the eyelids of East Asian women from monolids to “beautiful” (read: Western, white) eyelids. Even among white women there are standards to be upheld: large breasts, no cellulite, thin waists, straight teeth, clear skin, bleached assholes.
These standards didn’t appear out of thin air. Someone, somewhere decided that they would hire a Black actress with Eurocentric features and light skin over a Black actress with wide hips and dark skin. And then another someone, somewhere did the same. And another, and another, and another. This has happened ad nauseam across every other possible category one can think of: race, gender, age, sexuality, body size, physical ability. This is how beauty becomes an imperial project: those who are considered “beautiful” according to these standards are also considered inherently more valuable than those who aren’t. When a thin, pretty white girl like JonBenét Ramsey is found dead, it ignites fury and indignation that spans decades, still important enough to warrant cover stories in 2018 tabloids. When a gorgeous, award-nominated Indigenous actress just breaking it big in Hollywood named Misty Upham goes missing, the local police don’t even look for her. Her family have to organize the search party themselves, eventually finding her body ten days after they file the missing person report. In a world where beauty equals worth, not being the right kind of beautiful has material consequences on the quality of your life—and your death.
That’s what’s so revolutionary ab
out the rise of platforms like YouTube, Twitter and Instagram: the old gatekeepers are becoming obsolete. The only person that can decide who deserves to be seen and valued now is the person who is uploading content. This means that communities that were once considered below appealing to are visible in a way they never were before, which also means they can make their interests known in ways they never could before. And this increased visibility seems to be working.
Rihanna’s beauty line Fenty Beauty launched in 2017 with a nearly unheard-of forty foundation shades, then proceeded to sell out of many of the darkest shades for months, sending an immediate message to the rest of the beauty industry: appeal to all skin tones—value all skin tones—or get left behind. Black Panther, which was written and directed by Ryan Coogler, a Black man, and featured an almost entirely Black cast, took in a box office total of $242.1 million on opening weekend, then sustained its success to become the third film in history to pass the $700-million mark in the U.S. This went against everything film executives claimed about the drawing power of Black directors and Black stars. It was no surprise to Black people, though, as they’d been anticipating the film for months, sharing photos and memes on Twitter and Instagram of themselves getting ready to see the film opening night. Conversely, the social media reaction to Hollywood films that have whitewashed characters of colour—casting Scarlett Johansson as a Japanese woman in The Ghost in the Shell, Emma Stone as a Hawaiian and Asian woman in Aloha, and Christian Bale as an Egyptian prince in Exodus, for example—coincided with poor domestic box-office performances. It would seem, then, that since social media is controlled by everyday people, allowing diverse viewpoints and representations to have a platform every second of every day, people no longer have to accept the discrimination of mainstream media and big industry.
It’s important to remember that appealing to capitalism to fix the problems of racism, sexism, ageism, ableism, transphobia and homophobia is problematic in its own way. Capitalism always relies upon exploitation to create profit, and therefore it must always rely upon differing valuations of people’s humanity. Still, every time I click on a #Native hashtag and see pride reflected back instead of shame, I know that we have a good start.
I recently came across a passage in Leo Tolstoy’s essay “What Is Art?”:
Art is not, as the metaphysicians say, the manifestation of some mysterious idea of beauty or God; it is not, as the aesthetical physiologists say, a game in which man lets off his excess of stored-up energy; it is not the expression of man’s emotions by external signs; it is not the production of pleasing objects; and, above all, it is not pleasure; but it is a means of union among men, joining them together in the same feelings, and indispensable for the life and progress toward well-being of individuals and of humanity.
Selfies do that. Each person who posts a photo of themself online pushes back against imperial beauty standards and profit-driven gatekeepers, joining online communities that are built on our mutual understandings of how shame has impacted us. If posting selfies online means that we temporarily feel good about ourselves in a society that requires us to feel bad to make money; if it encourages us to refuse the idea that we need to change ourselves to fit impossible moulds, isn’t that indispensable for our progress? Isn’t it indispensable for our collective well-being?
“Through photographs, each family constructs a portrait-chronicle of itself—a portable kit of images that bears witness to its connectedness.”
Photographs are a family-building exercise. Sontag notes that children who are well photographed are assumed to be well loved. This is probably why my sister is still indignant that our parents took so few photos of her as a baby.
Recently, though, when going through a grey grocery bag of photographs my father’s new wife salvaged from our old trailer, I saw a picture I’d never seen before—one that I didn’t know existed, of a person I’d only learned existed the year before. The photo showed my mother holding a strange baby and smiling. Her smile wouldn’t last. That strange baby was my half-sister, whom Mom had named Angelica. Soon after this picture was taken that baby would be pulled from her arms and carried away by adoption agents. My mother would never hold her again. She didn’t want to be giving up Angelica. She was already a single mother of two when she had her, and she knew she couldn’t care for Linnie, her first child, who had cerebral palsy and used a wheelchair, while also mothering both Teena and a newborn. She had to make a choice. She chose to give up her new baby.
My family had thick photo albums, full of relatives I’d known my whole life, sprinkled with others I’d never met. We had hundreds of photos of our family smiling and laughing, still nestled inside the flimsy envelopes the one-hour-photo gave us. These were the moments my parents chose to memorialize. This was the family my parents chose to memorialize. By keeping that photo of Angelica from us, my parents denied us memories. They denied us family. Our kit of images bore witness not only to our connectedness but also to our disconnectedness.
“As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people to take possession of space in which they are insecure. Thus, photography develops in tandem with one of the most characteristic of modern activities: tourism.”
Every tourist has taken pictures of the places they’ve travelled. I remember taking my camera to Niagara Falls for a trip with my husband and kid. All I wanted was to take pictures of them in this different space, candidly enjoying one another’s company. I couldn’t, because my kid was trained from infancy to pose for a camera and they’ve perfected posing to a fine art, but still. I need to remember this, I told myself, and memory is unreliable, so I need photos. It worked. I have those photos to bring myself back to specific points in time and space. There we are in one photo, our clothes protected by translucent, bright blue ponchos, our ponchos covered with water drops that shimmer in the sun as we stand on the Maid of the Mist’s lower deck. There’s the Horseshoe Falls, where Lelawala, the Seneca woman considered the original Maid of the Mist, was saved by the god of thunder, then went on to save her village from a giant snake. There are all the other blue-clad families scrambling to get the perfect photo of the perfect falls. We’re all trying to take home a piece of this natural beauty, even if it’s just a picture.
I didn’t take pictures of the homeless people panhandling. I didn’t take pictures of the throngs of people, each street so full I was terrified my kid would get lost in the crowd, causing me to clutch their hand tighter. I didn’t take pictures of the impoverished area surrounding the Greyhound bus terminal, which looked completely abandoned. I didn’t take pictures of the cheap motel we were staying in. I was using photos to curate my ideal space, my ideal way of remembering this trip. Sontag refers to this use of photography as “a way of refusing [experience]—by limiting experience to a search for the photogenic, by converting experience into an image, a souvenir.” In other words, photography and tourism work in tandem to make natural beauty a commodity, an experience that in a very real sense must be purchased to be enjoyed, then converted into a product, a photo.
So many people simply have no idea how to appreciate natural beauty without turning it into a picture. I felt this acutely the last time I was in Banff, Alberta. Banff National Park is the oldest national park in Canada—and it just so happens to be situated on Treaty 7 territory, the traditional homelands of the Stoney Nakoda, Blackfoot and Tsuut’ina Nations. I finally understood what the word “sublime” meant when I beheld its mountains, forests and lakes for the first time.
Realistically, the Rocky Mountains are stunning not only from the vantage point of Banff. They’re stunning everywhere. But just like with Niagara Falls, capitalism has tied itself to the natural beauty of Banff National Park, giving them reason to remain beautiful. Because this space can be turned into profit—people will pay for entry to the park, hotel rooms in Banff, food and drink along the strip—the space is taken care of so that people will want to take pictures. After all, what els
e can they do with the space? It’s not like most of the people who come put down tobacco at the water’s edge, or give thanks to every element of creation within the space, the way we Haudenosaunee do with our Thanksgiving address.
None of the camera-clutching tourists seemed to wonder why this part of the Rocky Mountains is considered worth protecting while another part of the same mountain range, in B.C., as well as the Columbia Mountains and the Coast Mountains, which are all just as stunning, are currently being plundered to make room for the Kinder Morgan pipeline. None of them seem to find it unusual that they’re allowed, even encouraged, to preserve the memory of the mountains with photographs, while those fighting to preserve the actual mountains for future generations are arrested and jailed. Now that the government of Canada has purchased the Kinder Morgan pipeline with $4.5 billion of taxpayers’ money without consulting Canadians, the completion of this pipeline is a national project. The government can officially use whatever means necessary to ensure that these beautiful mountains are destroyed, the picturesque water around them is polluted, and the oil of a dying industry gets to wherever they want it to go.
In this age, the natural world is spared only if it can be photographed; if its beauty can be sold; if it doesn’t get in the way of more pipelines and more profit.
“Like sexual voyeurism, [photographing] is a way of at least tacitly, often explicitly, encouraging whatever is going on to keep happening. To take a picture is to have an interest in things as they are, in the status quo remaining unchanged (at least for as long as it takes to get a ‘good’ picture)…including, when that is the interest, another person’s pain or misfortune.”
A Mind Spread Out on the Ground Page 16
