Introduction
"The problem is one of staying out of Left politics and still avoiding Establishment patterns. I would not politicize my mind or work... The apostles can't have me. I don't think an artist is directly able to alleviate the human condition" wrote Walker Evans (cited by Mellow 1999: 308) in his personal papers after carrying out photographic work on tenant farming in the American Deep South during the depression era. Hired for the New Deal agency the Farm Security Administration, it was the biggest U.S. government photography project to date, formed with the intent of combatting rural poverty. Evans' words herald longstanding debates and criticisms surrounding art, politics, photography and the contentious ways these intersect when it comes to motive, creation, dissemination and reception.
Susan Sontag writes that "photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are," (2013 [1977]: 6) a notion Evans is aligned with. He self-asserts a "selfishness" (Mellow citing Evans 1999: 312) that simply wanted to use a camera, that wanted to make pictures not with 'humanist' intention but with a desire to fill out an artistic "personal survey." But in carrying out this extensive "personal survey", that more than often looked towards the impoverished American in "puritanically economical, precisely measured, frontal, unemotional, dryly textured, insistently factual qualities that seemed more appropriate to a book keeper's ledger than to art," (Kramer citing Szarkowski 1999: 14) Evans pioneered a way of looking that not only altered American visual culture but pioneered a mode of documentation that was supposedly solely driven by artistic intention. This same photographic work would redraw "the map of American visual culture in this century, and thus permanently altered the way we see ourselves and the world we inhabit" (Kramer 1999: 13). Clearly, his 'art' has come to be deeply imbricated with politics and culture: I question why his eye did not, or rather could not, look towards the political? Could 'art' and 'humanism' not intertwine?
These are questions I found myself asking in 2021 as I directed my own photographic eye specifically towards the streets local to me in the London borough of Camden and the people who live and work there. Visually attending to the geographies of Camden Town I engaged in a contemporary form of photography known as 'street photography:' essentially both an approach to documentation and an artistic endeavour. Street photography seeks to "capture an instant of city life - itself a stream of moments, interactions, and exchanges" (Hunt 2014: 163) and this "stream" for a long time has been complex in Camden Town. Hailing a longstanding history of culture and arts, in the last twenty years the area has fallen into the "rubric of urban renaissance" (Lees 2008: 2451) in which gentrification and regeneration are the proposed answers to segregation and poverty. Some urban theorists argue that gentrification actually accentuates inequality (Campkin 2013; Lees 2008). After twenty-one years of living on Camden Road I am part of an inner-city area that is stuck in paradox - simultaneously a site of intense gentrification and a site suffering the long-term effects of austerity. The contradiction necessitates an "instant of city life" that is grounded in juxtaposition and contrast.
The changing physical and social landscape of Camden has always been explicit to me. Living on the fourth floor of a 1930s built block, our view south towards the city of London has slowly been obscured from view by the sprawling mass of Kings Cross that grows by the day. I find the site to metaphorically and literally embody this paradox of simultaneous regeneration and deprivation. Once able to see Canary Wharf in the east to the London Eye in the west, our view now is dominated entirely by huge blocks of corporate offices with cranes that emerge from their tops like a sea of antenna, broadcasting the news that they aren't done yet. The Kings Cross development has been said to 'address the needs of the population' by offering unaffordable 'luxury' flats, restaurants, shops, gyms and offices in one space. The sprawl creeps closer to Camden Road and slices, both of space and of people; of what I once called home 'disappears' into this neoliberal charged 'regenerative' hole. Therefore the "stream" that I captured, in part as an artistic endeavour but also in part for preserving a sense of place I felt was rapidly changing required that I explore the possibility of politicising my work for the benefit of the area. I began to think about the ways in which I could utilise my photography to serve as a socio-political mode of documentation, a metaphorical vehicle, that could achieve social change in my local area without voyeuristically aestheticizing the people and place.
Photography: dichotomy of aestheticization and realism
At the crux, inherent to photography is the aestheticization, through manipulation (Burgin 1999), of a world and culture that lays itself before the camera free to be frozen. It is through this very manipulation that the mode of documentary photography, and street photography as a subsect, has manifested. John Grierson, the founder of documentary film, defines it as the "creative treatment of actuality" (Bate 2016: 67) which recalls Sontag's link of the photograph to paintings and drawings as interpretations of the world or "treatment[s] of actuality." She argues that to interpret is "essentially an act of non-intervention" (2013[1977]: 8). Yet Raymond Williams argues for a sociological account for the production of art that can serve societal purposes through understanding these interpretations "as "recognitions" (both new and confirming marks) of people and kinds of people in places and kinds of places" (Bate citing Williams 2016: 167). Hence art offers a "space for social recognitions and thus also identifications, offering a vital space for negotiations of types of social and aesthetic power" (Bate 2016: 167). The recognition of people and place offers a space for the negotiation of power. But considering the manipulation, interpretation and aestheticization that is inherent to photography, the grounds for voyeurism and misrepresentation, regarding stereotyping and othering, become evident, especially in street photography which looks mostly towards human action and expression. When Sontag critically writes, "to photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge and, therefore, like power" (2013[1977]: 4) the meaningfulness and ethics of photography, and specifically this sub-genre, is questioned.
Importantly though, as Walter Benjamin asked the critical question of whether the very invention of photography ha[d] not transformed the entire nature of 'art' (2008[1935) the discussion of photography as an 'art' was shifted to note the role photography played in 'art'. The role it played was revolutionary, becoming "the new pictorial paradigm for realism" (Bate 2016: 170). The realist ambition to achieve mimetic "likenesses" could now be accomplished far faster and far more accurately with the camera. The recognition of people and place became clearer with the photograph and asserted a level of truth or fact that is intrinsic to the negotiation of powers. This is where the photograph firms its political ground up, for it is the ability to "stabilize the referent, to arrange it according to a point of view which endows it with a recognisable meaning, to [be able to] reproduce the syntax and vocabulary which enable the addressee to decipher images and sequences quickly" (David Bate citing Jean-Francois Lyotard 2016: 169). Lyotard attests to the mechanical capabilities of the camera and offers quite plainly the foundations on which photography as a form of 'art' and as a mode of socio-political documentation stands. It is in the ability to very quickly achieve a certain mimetic of humanity that imbues the photograph with political meaning and a decisive edge in calling for social action. As Frosh states: "photography is a 'performance of representation', in which both the act and the material product of the act, the photographic image, generate multiple and inter-related meanings" (2001: 43).
The ability to generate a level of actuality or truth is important. In fact, photography has been integral to several social movements throughout the twentieth century and it is hard to come across a social movement that doesn't have a visual language (Telemaque 2024). Photographic practices have been highly imperative to the mobilisation of social movements for without these photographic representations we wouldn't have the visual language to see these events. The photograph provides meanings by which the viewer can ascertain a certain level of know or knowledge. It is the ability to manipulate a treatment of reality that allowed the documentarian to see something recognised as reality and insist on a sense of the political because the photograph "contributes to, and forms, how and what we see as reality" (Bate 2016: 76). Joel Meyerowitz has commented on the idea that to photograph is "a way of learning to read your culture" (2013) which talks to an interesting paradigm: the photograph and culture dialectically reinforce one another for culture shapes photographic representation and subject choice, while at the same time, photographic representation and subject choice shape culture. But through the interrelation of the two, our understanding of the world is bettered, despite its "pleonastic treatment;" despite the representation of an already represented society. Photography, then, was and still is intrinsically linked to the broader movement of social change and humanist attitudes. By showing a representation or a drawing of reality, the audience could be informed of a reality hidden and thus asked to confront itself as a collective for "viewing is also an action that entails consequences, responsibility, and the distribution of (ontological) positions" (Choi 2018:100). We must question then, what does the street photograph "reveal" and what action does it ask to entail?
Street photography: urban space, the decisive moment, and Garry Winogrand
This photographic 'sub-genre' that was pioneered in America post-World War Two remains contested, dubiously general and an arguably useless term of categorisation, for photographic "bodies of work share [... a] unique way of seeing, which is as layered and complicated and confounding and, at times, contradictory as the world [... the photographer] is looking at through the lens of [their] camera" (Risch, Walker, and Hughs citing Webb 2018: 26). Yet general claims can be made about the method, form and subject that may encompass the photographic mode. Lisa Hostetler comments on the generality of street photography, noting that it is "neither the locale nor the subject-matter [that] defines street photography; it is the photographer's approach to the medium and movement through public space that differentiate street photography from related forms of photography" (2014). Similarly, Wigoder Meir airs Some Thoughts about Street Photography and the Everyday (2015) writing that street photography "has become a generalised term to define both the subject (the street, the people in the street, the shops, the neighbourhood and urban photography in general) and the activity of the photographer, acting either as a social documentarist or a free-roaming spirit projecting his/her own artistic inclinations on any movement in the street that stimulates his/her associative mind" (ibid: 368).
Importantly though, Meir denotes the key facets of this mode of photography: it is intrinsically tied to the urban (in relating to the characteristics of a town or city or street) and the role of documentation and/or art gives it a raison d'etre: the street photographer is driven either by social consciousness and/or by artistic desire, but will nonetheless land on, or form a bridge (Blumenkrantz 2009) between, both sides of the coin. As Alex Webb states "street photography may be a kind of borderland between the two" (Risch, Walker, and Hughes citing Webb 2018: 26).
Noting street photography's practical basis as the movement through "built environment[s] and the experience of those who perceive the human traffic around it by means of the camera" (Gleason citing Kozloff 2022: 155) is important because it explains why the creative output leans towards a more subjective mode of photography. The flow of energy and human traffic in the urban landscape forces the photographer to remain detached and 'shoot from the hip' or 'blind' and privilege "the iconographic codes of a subjective style (e.g. blur, cut-off framing, and sense of movement, indicating speed) of "instantaneity,"" (Bate 2016: 61) but asks that the energy of action and movement is "organized and composed into professional compositional values" (ibid). Henri Cartier-Bresson coins this organisation into compositional values as the decisive moment. In fact, further linking movement through urban space to the expressive mode, Dr Brogden has referred to walking as being the decisive moment, "each step coincid[ing] with the ironic reference to the potential 'click' of the camera shutter" (2019: 13). The decisive moment suggests that a story can be told within a single picture for its "composition possess such vigour and richness" its "content so radiates outward" (Bate citing Cartier-Bresson 2016: 69). For example, in Garry Winogrand's essential photographs in New York City, the subjects often gaze back towards Winogrand and we can read smaller narratives within the overall picture: photographs within photographs. In New York World's Fair, 1964, "a row of animated people on a park bench could easily be broken down into three distinct images about intimacy, fatigue and human curiosity" (O'Hagan 2014). Here the decisive moment frozen becomes a metaphor for life in the city and provides a representation open to be read by a wider audience.
Sean O'Hagan lyrically describes Winogrand's work: "Around them, the world tilts - the horizon line is seldom level - but there is always what might be called a Winograndian logic to his compositions, an instinctive grasp of the geometry of a good photograph. His interest was the rhythm of the streets and the people who created it. There is a melancholy visual poetry in all these anonymous passing souls with their sad, strained, beleaguered or beautiful faces as they go about their daily business" (2014). The notion of rhythm and energy in the street that requires negotiation to find the decisive moment is explored in my own photographic work. Similarly working with 35mm photographic film the wider frame captured faces going about their daily business and locates them on Camden High Street and Camden Road. It is in this subjective, expressive approach to photography in the urban space that conveys notions of vigour and richness that radiates outward from the decisive moment. These expressive notions and the ability to radiate outwards denotes that the photograph can poignantly affect the viewer as Barthes argued in Camera Lucida (1980). His ontological discussion of affect suggests that in the street photograph's presentation of the decisive moment, a level of punctum radiates outward upon viewing and thus provides the grounds on which the audiences consciousness may be pricked and triggered into action.
Reflection: aesthetic and practice, ambiguous texts, and dissemination
Having considered the way photographs can manifest meaning and possess a power to affect I look towards three photographs from my photographic series, Camden Town: From Mecca to The World's End, to understand the ways in which street photography can be utilised positively and impactfully. I sought to photograph two streets, Camden Road and Camden High St, because they are central to the area and require navigation every day. They become incubators that exemplify the social makeup of Camden Town hence are essential places to direct the photographic eye that seeks to recognise the community and locals. Made solely on an analogue camera I've had complete autonomy over the photographic process, from the decision to use monochrome (predominantly Ilford HP5 and XP2) 35mm photographic film, to using a 35mm lens and engaging in the process of developing, scanning and printing myself. I purposely engage this analogue process because I seek a slower solo pace that sees me spend more time walking the streets of Camden Town at different times and seasons. Although expensive, I become more conscious of the traces I am making when photographing in this mode. The use of black and white photographic film notes my desire to emulate my key inspirations of the FSA photographers, Garry Winogrand et al, Bert Hardy and Johnny Pitts but also notes its lower cost and ease in developing and controlling in the darkroom.
Making photographs in this way I could capture the social, the architectural and the geographical makeup of the street itself, and completely solidify my photographic presence within the locale and space. I aimed to dip in and out of the scene, to capture the light in a direct and unmediated way to protrude an accurate indexical character of the analogue photograph that provided a representation of the culture I am part of. By engaging this analogue process, utilising a distanced practice and approaching a subjective, monochrome aesthetic I provide a representation of that person, that time, and that place, which directs the viewer to concentrate on the subject's specific physical and structural characteristics (Biro 2012: 354). Although it should be noted, these are not definitive representations, but certain representations of life within dimensions that cannot be accessed by all.
These three photographs were all made within a few hundred metres of one another as I negotiated the traffic and energy on Camden High St. The photographic work aims to locate the people firmly within place, within the geographical context. By using a deep depth of field, both the people and the place become the 'subjects' in this photographic series. The top and bottom photographs are taken from a distance of two metres and centres the persons with the gentle rise of Camden High St stretching off from the bottom left of the frame towards the top of the frame. The upper image shows a boy atop a mans shoulders, most likely his father. Something seems to have caught the boys eye, he stares, as in Winogrand's photographs, out of the frame with slight melancholy. We, the audience, are not sure what it is that has caught his eye. Why is his gaze melancholic, we might wonder? The people in the bottom photograph look back towards me, then the photographer, now us the audience. I cropped this photograph because too much of the street was present below the hunched woman and the other shopper. They seemed distant in the original and I sought to make their physical and emotional presence visible. The central image is different in form to the other two. Portrait-like, the subject is framed on the right of the image close up. He releases a slight grin as he answers the phone and looks to the left of the frame, as though expecting someone to walk into the image and join him. His loose mohawk recalls Camden Towns punk history. My methods differed for making this photograph than the other two. I asked him if I could take his photograph as we both waited for the bus, he almost without hesitation agreed: "Yeah go on," I recall he said smiling.
The difference in approach garners two different styles of images that offer two different readings. The more distant approach of the top and bottom, perhaps more typical of the street photographic style, offers more of the place and locates the person firmly within it. The central image could have been made anywhere but with emphasis on the close up, we can potentially read the landscape within the portrait - the Camden mohawk. These photographs ask: where is this?; what does the boy look towards?; who is the man on the phone to?; why is this woman's back acutely hunched?; why was this photograph taken?; what does it mean? Yet this is the ultimate paradox and flaw of the photograph: while it can accurately represent what appears in front of the lens, while it can "stabilize the referent, to arrange it according to a point of view which endows it with a recognisable meaning" (see p.3: Bate 2016: 169), its recognisable meaning can tell us nothing significant of the represented subjects existence. While the photograph can poignantly affect us and urge us into action, it does not tell us what action. If they cannot explain to us anything significant, how can we expect them to motivate change? Like Rorty asks Is "Cultural Recognition" a Useful Notion for Leftist Politics? (2008).
John Berger understands that "all photographs are ambiguous. All photographs have been taken out of a continuity [... and] discontinuity produces ambiguity" which is the erasure to meaning, because "meaning is discovered in what connects, and cannot exist without development" (2013[1982]: 64). Here Berger critically writes of the relation between a photograph and words that "together the two become very powerful; an open question appears to have been fully answered" (ibid: 66) and certain ambiguity is negated. Although the people, appearances, and place photographed may tell us very little, they are unquestionable. Our response to those photographed can poignantly affect us (Barthes 1980), hence the photograph continually attracts our attention. If we then "provide words, an effect of certainty, even of dogmatic assertion" (Berger 2013 [1982]: 66) is procured.
Roland Barthes asserts similar notions in his theories of anchorage and relay, relay the means by which "the image and the linguistic text are in a relationship of complementarity: the linguistic message explains, develops, expands the significance of the image" (Burgin 1999: 48). We might say that photographs provide the vehicle, not in and of themselves for motivating social change, but provide the vehicle for text to be written, that together then manifests the possibility for motivating social change. In attestation, FSA photographer Dorothea Lange wrote "long, informative captions for [her] photographs" because she believed that "photographs usually remained ambiguous if not accompanied by words" (Gordon 2006: 720). The London born photojournalist Bert Hardy concurs when he writes in How I Photograph People for Picture Post, that his way of working does not procure "the single picture that sums up a whole situation" (1949: 11). No single picture can sum up the whole situation because it manipulates and simplifies on the values of "focus, tonality, depth, framing, supersession (what is photographed does not change), texture, colour, scale, the other sense (their influence on sight is excluded), the play of light" (Berger 2013[1982]: 89). Hence the photograph becomes a quote, a disconnected slice of the whole. But it is in this simplifying slice that it is why every social movement has a visual language: the slice can be immensely powerful and punctuating alone. Thus, by presenting the photographic referent alongside text, Berger's theory of "dogmatic assertion" is firmed up which Walter Benjamin believes saves the photograph from capitalist modishness and promotes revolution instead because it offers depth rather than surface meaninglessness (2008[1935]).
Meeting with Nathaniel Telemaque, a lecturer in Geography and Social Justice and a self-proclaimed Peter Parker (visual artist, writer and researcher), for a discussion/informal interview towards the end of March (2024), he agreed with these theories of communication. He believed that photography in a pedagogical/educational manner is extremely useful and has the potential to act as a conscious means of socio-political documentation when it is disseminated correctly. Digital media practices have been highly imperative to the mobilisation of social movements recently from the BLM movement to the call for a ceasefire in Palestine. His own photobook Everyday Things White City Generations 88-97 (2023) utilises the complementary relationship between photograph and text to explore "the history of the White City locale and engages with the reflections and perceptions of young Black adults living there today." Archival material combines with contemporary photographs and extended captions to raise consciousness and understanding of the impact of White City's past as former imperial and colonial exhibitions grounds, and its more recent histories as an interwar utopian council estate.
Interestingly Dr Telemaque also discussed how photographic metaphors/allegories are used in academia: "Seeing through these 'eyes', the conceptual 'lens', and 'developing' this idea" (2024). These phrases attest to power of the photographic. They attest to how the "the subsequent history of realism in the genres, once so dominated by painting, is fascinating to see as they became "photographic"" (Bate 2016: 169). With this in consideration, I engaged in an analogue based practice of making images principally because I enjoy the process of seeing, forgetting and reseeing. More critically though, the analogue process lets me think conceptually while at the same time doing the physical work so I, and only I, have complete control of the photographic process which gives me the ability to flex my intentions and desire to motivate change. My desire to motivate change emerges with humanist concern of an area that is changing without regard for its local/resident community.
Having done this visual attendance through street photography, I seek to disseminate the photographic work in a physical book. Alongside captions that describe who, what and where the photograph is and a longer piece of text, I urge the street photograph to represent locals and motivate the reclamation of community space. Camden Town and its immediate surroundings is polarised, a mix of the affluent and the homeless, Starbucks and street markets, tourists and lifelong locals. Interestingly as Gornostaeva and Campbell notes "Camden High Street divides the area into the more affluent gentrified west (including Primrose Hill) with high proportions of highly educated managers and professionals and mainly private accommodation, and the less affluent, cheap, and liminal east with greater concentrations of the unemployed, unskilled, less educated, and students, and of council and rented accommodation and privately owned flats (CC, 2010a)" (2012: 170). The polarisation of these areas is created by the "in-movement of middle-class people into poor, marginal areas of the inner city" which has been suggested as the "desegregating answer to lives that are lived in parallel or in isolation along class, income, ethnic and tenurial fault lines" (Lees 2008: 2463). The recent inflation crisis has only made things worse.
Kings Cross has been the site of immense corporate gentrification over the last decades, Camden Market has been refurbished and HS2 has upturned Euston and the surrounding Regents Park estate. Local newspaper The Camden New Journal released an article commenting that "campaigner says that 'gentrifiers' have turned vibrant and hip Camden 'sterile' (Foot 2024). Recently activists have squatted Gordon Ramsay's York and Albany Hotel in Camden who aim "to open our doors regularly to anyone and everyone, particularly the people of Camden who have been victims of gentrification and parasitic projects like HS2 [...] Camden is a borough with one of the biggest wealth disparities in London, so it seems only fitting that £13 million properties that most locals would never be able to afford to visit should be opened up to all" (2024). The Camden New Journal and the actions of those in the York and Albany Hotel closely relates to Paul Hirst's talk ""Modernism's fear of dirt' in 2001. He asked: 'in attempting to remove grime and disorder from urban environment, did modernist planners and architects also inadvertently wash away the spirit of the city?" (Campkin 2013: 1) "Cleanliness and order, the argument went, can be taken to excess in a certain ideal of civilisation, at the expense of risk, sociability, imagination and creativity" (ibid). The aim is not to bring back dirt and grime, but to bring back the people, the creativity and the imagination that once populated Camden Town, now so 'cleansed' and washed away. My photographic series seeks to find and represent those local to Camden and with text alongside hope to reveal the polarised conditions of Camden Town. The photographic series' title alludes to this very polarisation: From Mecca (urban gentrification) to The Worlds End (social polarisation and segregation). By distributing the book in and around Camden, in libraries, charities, and local shops I hope people are drawn visually to the book, and are then triggered into action upon reading and viewing the whole series. Action may involve donations to local charities, volunteering and the reclamation of "church halls, community centres" as Ms Shalmy (cited by Foot 2024) calls for.
Criticism of the photograph: inherent manipulation and misrepresentation
However, it is important to return to the issues of photographic representation. When Hector Garcia posited "street photography as central to the medium itself by stating that 'the world of the photographer is the street, for it is there that one that one finds the element essential for good photographs: the human factor" (Lerner 2013: 191), we must question what it is about the human condition that 'pricks us' upon viewing. The discussion surrounding power dynamics, the gaze and the politics of representation and othering must be brought to the forefront.
In the introduction, I referenced the British artist and writer Victor Burgin on the inherency of manipulation to photography. This manipulation with which we, the photographers, interpret and represent the world with regard to the relation between things and ourselves (Berger 1979; Sontag 1977), is simultaneously photography's most viable criticism. Critics "have repeatedly mentioned that photography, despite its inherent mechanical objectivity, manipulates, distorts, and thus re-victimizes the subject in its pitiless formal attention [...] This sceptical view of photography's aesthetic venture suggests that the desire to see and to show inherent to the medium can lead its operators to an inappropriate aesthetic indulgence that may spawn "exoticism, tourism, voyeurism, trophy hunting, and careerism" (Rosler 306)" (Choi 2018: 99). These terms tourism, voyeurism, and hunting, link to others I have used throughout the essay to describe the practical nature of photography - the act of shooting, capturing, and freezing. Street photography comes under specific fire for having a "detached objectified gaze" (Sontag 2013[1977]) that remains distant from and superior to what the images show (Rose 2001: 22). Mia Hunt states that street photography can be aggressive and reductive, clear when "Howarth and Mclaren (2010, p. 9) delight in Walker Evans' advice to other street photographers, encouraging them to "stare, pry, listen, eavesdrop"" (2014: 163). These terms connote a theoretical masculinisation of photography while the practical act has also been historically masculinised, relating to a "patriarchal way of looking" (ibid: 161) and lacking in women. Considering these gender-, identity-, and representation-based critiques of photography, it is here that the photograph ironically ties itself up. In the photographs adventure in realism and to present the world before the lens as it is, at the same time the photograph misrepresents the world through relations of power and consequently lacks any ground on which to mean, communicate and mobilise action. On these terms, I wonder whether my photographic work with all the potential text alongside, actually accentuates the issues it seeks to negate?
Conclusion
Critically though, while the photographic process of capturing light as it appears in the world at a certain moment in time and so re-presents that moment, frozen, we should note the paradoxical nature of photography. While that very specific, momentary slice is frozen, the moment goes on. In that freezing of the moment there is an inherent manipulation at play. Hence, that CO singular photograph is not an accurate representation but a singular representation of life within those dimensions that is not definitive nor closed. Perhaps Walker Evans is right, the artists "can not directly alleviate the human condition" for the question of misrepresentation and consequence of othering, cannot be avoided. But perhaps in the freezing of a singular decisive moment, it is up to the photographers integrity to understand the representation captured and for them to seek its positivist humanist use, for the photograph can assist the alleviation of the human condition. The question of othering simultaneously contradicts Evans, for to say that his mind was not politicised is wrong. By making the work or art he did, he inherited a certain navigation of politics. Regardless, to actively choose not to politicise your mind, is a political act. And what better way to engage the political than through photographs?; "What better way to assert the primacy of the visual, produce a 'true' representation of the place in question and establish presence than through the use of photography?" (Brogden citing Duncan 2019: 36). It is in the understanding that the photograph as one type of representation, not the representation of life, can aid a certain humanist reading of this moment and ask for action to follow. It is the act of photographing in context and time that is important. Paradoxically, incomplete even, what better way of communicating than the photograph?
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Telemaque, N. 2024. Interview with R. d'Avoine. 25 March, London.
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Image references:
Frank, R. 1951. London. [35mm Photograph].
Lange, D. 1935. Imperial Valley, California. Old Mexican laborer saying "I have worked all my life and all I have now is my broken body". [4x5 Photograph].
Maier, V. 1953, New York. [6x6 Photograph].
Meyerowitz, J. 1971. New York. [35mm Photograph].
Telemaque, N. 2020. White City. [35mm Photograph].
Telemaque, N. 2020. White City. [35mm Photograph].
Winogrand, G. 1964. New York World's Fair, 1964. [35mm Photograph].
Winogrand, G. 1969. New York City, 1969. [35mm Photograph].
Reynard d'Avoine Photograph Captions:
Camden Eye, 2024
Hairrollers, 2024
Jesus, 2024
Junction, 2024
Roy, Rodney and Clyde, 2024
Crossing, 2024
Punk, 2024
"Removal of tenants was unlawful", 2024
Boy atop his fathers shoulders, 2024
Twins, 2024