How does the meaning of an image change
when viewed from different cultural perspectives?
a case study of two photographs from East Timor
by Alice Wesley-Smith
contents
1. introduction
2. the photographic message
3. the power of the photographic message
4. aspects of the culture of Western society
5. aspects of the culture of East Timorese society
6. the photographers speak ...
7. conclusion
8. bibliography
appendix 1
appendix 2
footnotes
1. introduction
This study had its genesis during a multimedia concert tour of East Timor in July 2002.
The author accompanied a group of musicians [1] presenting multimedia pieces in four different centres: Dili, Laga, Lospalos and Same. After the first concert, in Dili, the East Timor-based Australian organisers of the tour said that they would not allow other East Timorese audiences, at this delicate stage of their recovery from twenty four years of brutal treatment at the hands of the Indonesian army, to view pieces that included photographs of East Timorese victims of violence and torture. It would be too traumatic for them, they said.
One such photograph was "Santa Cruz face". It came from a video made by English documentary film-maker Max Stahl [2] as Indonesian troops gunned down hundreds of innocent civilians in Santa Cruz Cemetery, Dili, East Timor, on November 12 1991:
The musicians, while deploring the cultural superiority displayed, agreed to drop two pieces [3] from their program and substitute other pieces, including one hastily thrown-together that used a Midnight Oil song [4] and photographs taken in East Timor by Australian photographer Jon Lewis [5]. One of these, "Suai Loro Boys", shows a group of naked boys on a beach near Suai, East Timor, in 2000:
To the surprise of the touring party, several East Timorese audience members expressed their disapproval of what is to the Western eyes of the touring party a wonderfully happy shot. It was, of course, the boys' nakedness that provoked this disapproval (and embarrassed laughter).
When the tour reached the town of Same, the local East Timorese Catholic priest insisted that the two offending pieces be put back into the program. He was adamant that the audience would not be traumatised by the torture shots, and he believed that it was essential for them to see and deal with such images in their recovery from the trauma of the Indonesian occupation.
This raised the question of cultural interpretation of photographic messages (specifically Western (see chapter 4) versus East Timorese (see chapter 5)). Empirical and literary (including internet) research, plus face-to-face interviews with both Jon Lewis and Max Stahl, led to, and formed the basis of, this inquiry.
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2. the photographic message
contents
"The press photograph is a message", writes French semiologist Roland Barthes in his essay The Photographic Message [6]. Although he is dealing specifically with the press photograph, most of what he says applies also to the photographs under discussion here.
In looking at the structural analysis of the photographic message, Barthes writes that a (press) photograph "is not the reality but at least it is its perfect analogon ... ["7]. In other words, it is perfectly analogous to, or corresponds to, the scene it has captured. It is a "message without a code", a "denoted message". And it is a "continuous message" (it is not broken up into sections).
Any message can be characterised as a source of emission, a channel of transmission, and a point of reception. More simply:
source - channel - receiver
Looking at a linguistic message, the source (the person transmitting the message i.e. speaking) must encode her/his thoughts into spoken language i.e. into sound waves. These sound waves travel through the channel, which is in this case air. The listener (the receiver) must then de-code the message i.e. turn the sound waves back into language. Clearly the decoder must work accurately in reverse to the encoder for the message to be faithfully, and therefore successfully, transmitted. Our communication system now looks like this:
source - encoder - channel - decoder - receiver
In more detail:
source
encoder
channel
decoder
receiver
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the person talking
translation of thought into air waves via language English, say
air
translation of air waves back into the English language and thus into thought
the person listening
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If the receiver here speaks French and doesn't understand English, then the decoding process fails to reverse the encoding process. Transmission of the linguistic message fails. Thus the culture of the person transmitting and the culture of the person receiving are important factors in human communications.
A person speaking on the telephone involves a more complicated system:
source
encoder 1
channel 1
encoder 2
channel 2
decoder 2
decoder 1
receiver
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the person talking
translation of thought into air waves
air
translation of air waves into electrical signals
electrical cable
translation of electrical signals back into air waves
translation of air waves back into thought
the person listening
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The reception of a visual message (someone looking at a realistic painting of a tree on a hill, for example) involves no encoding-decoding process. The painting "denotes" ("indicates", "is a mark or sign of") its subject matter: a hill is a hill, a tree is a tree. No code needed. Everyone, pretty much regardless of culture, can see and recognise hill and tree. Thus at one level the painting acts like a photograph (Barthes' "message without a code"). But the painting's denoted message "develops ... a supplementary message ... whose signifier" (aesthetic or ideological) "is a certain 'treatment' of the image (result of the action of the creator)" and which "refers to a certain 'culture' of the society receiving the message." [8] In other words, the style of the reproduction carries a message which will be interpreted differently depending on the cultural background of the person viewing it. For example, an Aboriginal dot painting might seem to a European to be an attractive, stylised representation of hill and tree. An Aboriginal, however, steeped in tradition, might see a particular hill and a particular tree telling a particular story that carries meaning far beyond what the 'whitefella' sees. This is what Barthes calls its connoted message (a second meaning in addition to the primary meaning).
Barthes goes on to wonder if indeed a (press) photograph really IS "a message without a code": "... there is a strong probability that the photographic message too - at least in the press - is connoted" [9]. There is a paradox here, he says: the denoted message (which does not have a code) gives rise to a connoted message (which does): "The photographic paradox ... is that ... the connoted (or coded) message develops on the basis of a message without a code." He continues: "This structural paradox coincides with an ethical paradox: when one wants to be 'neutral', 'objective', one strives to copy reality meticulously", trying not to imbue the photograph with any meaning other than what it denotes (i.e. give it a connoted message). But a connoted message seems inevitable. The ethical paradox, therefore, is that a photograph is simultaneously 'objective' and 'invested'.
While some photographs contain an intentionally invested message, others do not (although they will still have a connoted message). Barthes mentions various photographic procedures specifically designed to add a particular connoted message to the denoted one, one such procedure being the design of a particular pose e.g. a photo of President Kennedy with "eyes looking upwards, hands joined together", connoting "youthfulness, spirituality, purity" [10]. But does every viewer everywhere receive the same message? Many will see the photograph as intended by the photographer, but others, believing President Kennedy to be a deceitful, hypocritical womaniser, will read it as another example of Kennedy deceit, or of propaganda and therefore not to be believed. In fact, the message might be the exact opposite of the one intended. Someone with no idea who the subject is - someone from another culture, perhaps - will read yet another message. The decoder here is not a faithful reproduction, in reverse, of the encoder, and hence the message is, at best, garbled. Thus aspects of the following claim by Helmut Gernsheim's must be questioned:
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"Photography is the only 'language' understood in all parts of the world, and bridging all nations and cultures, it links the family of man. Independent of political influence - where people are free - it reflects truthfully life and events, allows us to share in the hopes and despair of others, and illuminates political and social conditions. We become the eye-witness of the humanity and inhumanity of man-kind ..." [11]
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When photographer and viewer are from the same socio-economic and political group within a particular culture, realist photography functions, in most cases, as a kind of language even though it lacks the vocabulary, syntax and grammar of normal language. It communicates its denoted message - and perhaps even its connoted message - clearly. Its denoted message will be clear to most people from other cultures, too, but its connoted message might be read quite differently. And it may not be a truthful reflection of life and events at all: the widespread official use of propaganda, doublespeak and lies is seen not just in words but also in images, still and moving. But the essence of Gernsheim's claim - that photography can be a very powerful medium - cannot be disputed.
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3. the power of the photographic message
contents
see http://www.newyorker.com/images/online/040510onslpo_prison_01_p350.jpg (photographer unknown)
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"Rumsfeld then explained, 'You read it, as I say, it's one thing. You see these photographs and it's just unbelievable ... It wasn't three-dimensional. It wasn't video. It wasn't color. It was quite a different thing.' But the report also described atrocities never photographed or taped that were, often, even worse than the pictures ..." [12]
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A picture is worth a thousand words. Or, as Josef von Sternberg put it, "the camera is a diabolical instrument that conveys ideas with lightning speed. Each picture transliterates a thousand words." [13] The American government - especially Donald Rumsfeld - must be ruing the day that digital cameras became a reality. "The digital camera will haunt the future career of George W. Bush the way the tape recorder sealed the fate of Richard Nixon" [14]. Just a few images from Abu Ghraib have made a fundamental difference to the world's attitude to the Coalition of the Willing's invasion of Iraq. As Susan Sontag writes, "it now seems likely that the defining association of people everywhere with the rotten war that the Americans launched preemptively in Iraq last year will be photographs of the torture of Iraqi prisoners in the most infamous of Saddam Hussein's prisons, Abu Ghraib" [15]. Harlan Ullman, a Senior Advisor of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, USA, compares the Abu Ghraib photos to photos of the twin towers of the World Trade Centre as they came down on 9/11 and to the defining images of the Vietnam War: the naked girl screaming from the pain of napalm as she ran towards the camera, and the South Vietnamese officer shooting a Viet Cong suspect in the head. The Abu Ghraib photos "will have tremendous impact on the Arab and Muslim psyches and they will do us a huge amount of political and psychological damage." [16]
see http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/images/TPX1.gif (photographer unknown)
The camera, which in all its current manifestations is more popular now than ever before, is "a microscope. It penetrates. It goes into people and you see their most private and concealed thoughts" [17]. We don't see Lynndie England's most private and concealed thoughts in the photo above, but this image must surely have provoked them in most people who have seen it. It has already become a symbol, a representation of something far more profound than its immediate reality. The photo shows Private England treating an Iraqi prisoner like a dog. That's the denoted message. What we see, however - the connoted message we receive - is America, or the West, treating Iraq - even the entire Middle East - like a dog. This image transcends its subject, and its symbolic meaning will continue to grow. No amount of talking will undo the lasting damage that this image has done to American imperialism. A thousand words? Not even a thousand million would wipe this image from our memory.
On November 12 1991, several thousand people in East Timor marched to Santa Cruz cemetery in Dili to bury a student, Sebastaio Gomes Rangel, who had been shot dead by Indonesian troops in the city's Church of St Antonio de Motael [18]. After the ceremony, as the crowd dwindled, several truck-loads of Indonesian soldiers arrived and began shooting indiscriminately into the crowd. A final count revealed that 370 or so people died on that dreadful day. But this was nothing out of the ordinary: the Santa Cruz massacre "was relatively minor when compared with the massacres that occurred between the (Indonesian) invasion (of 1975) and the Creras massacre of 1983" [19]. At Lacluta in 1981 about 400 people were killed. At Creras in 1983, the figure was over 1000. Yet the international community made no protest. The reason that the Santa Cruz massacre achieved world-wide attention and condemnation was that Max Stahl was there with a video camcorder:
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"Max Stahl was in the cemetery, inside the cemetery, when the Indonesians began shooting. He took pictures, film, and as the Indonesians approached him, he was incredibly ... with sangfroid - you know, with enormous serenity - he pulled out the tape, buried it in the sand in the cemetery, and, uh, the Indonesians took him, rough him up, but then release him. At night, with incredible courage, he came back to the cemetery, jumped the wall and undug the tape, recovered it and then managed to smuggle it out." [20]
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Jon Lewis believes that that "was the time when people took a huge step in the eventual liberation of that country. For me it's fascinating ... it just sort of shows me just how imagery can change the world, and indeed the world of the East Timorese." [21] Max Stahl: "The Timorese wanted (the footage) to be seen because at that moment of the massacre they knew instantly that this was absolutely crucial evidence of what the Indonesians were doing to them and they had to get it out." [22] Stahl's images (and the still shots by English photographer Steve Cox) did more for the East Timor cause than the hundreds of thousands of protests, letters, demonstrations etc of the international peace movement. It took another eight years, but eventually the East Timorese won their freedom.
Ironically, at a time when technical advances in computer technology are making visual fakery and deception easy, and there is ever-increasing sophistication in government marketing and propaganda, images seem to hold more authority than ever before. Western society is controlled more and more by commercial media (newspapers, radio, free-to-air and pay television, film, music, even, to some extent, the internet) concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer proprietors whose interests, and therefore politics, are solely to do with the bottom line. They are experts at manipulating images - fixing their connoted messages - in order to manipulate the people.
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4. aspects of the culture of Western society
contents
As the world shrinks, and cultural globalisation gathers pace, Australian culture - which conditions our reception of an image's connoted message - and that of other Western countries become increasingly similar. The West generally is affluent, more so than ever before, enabling us to live in great comfort divorced from the harsh realities of life faced by most people in Third World countries. We live in sanitised reality, where horror is rarely seen and thus, when it is, has greater shock value than it does for, say, people living in East Timor. We don't have to witness the actuality of disease, famine and war - these things happen in far-away places, where information may be difficult to come by. And if the information is known, the only way the public will know about it - if at all - is through the lens of strictly controlled media, where censorship, usually subtle, is rife.
Australia, like America, is a "democracy", yet our citizens are to a large degree - probably larger than we think - protected by our governments and media from images and information judged to be too far from our comfort zone. Or, more likely, too far from theirs. Censorship. We are not, for example, allowed to see the second collection of images from Abu Ghraib, which are apparently worst than the first, although we were allowed to see in graphic detail the mutilated faces of Saddam Hussein's sons. Even the first collection, we're told, was cropped to protect our - and America's - sensibilities. Americans are not allowed to see their soldiers' coffins returning from Iraq - too gruesome. But we see violence every day - sanitised violence, glorified violence, on television. For most of us its reality - the blood, the pain, the broken bones - is not part of our experience, which is essentially voyeuristic. We censor the violence of our reality, yet glorify it in the fantasy - hypocrisy! Saturated by violent images, we learn to become inured to them, and to the suffering of the victims portrayed, simply in order to cope. We see a surfeit of them, in newspapers, on the television news, on the internet - even on our mobile phones. Our response is to develop an underlying sense of powerlessness. What can we do? Can we make a difference? Usually, no:
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"It is because a war, any war, doesn't seem as if it can be stopped that people become less responsive to horrors." [23]
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Every day, news content disguised as truth is censored unremittingly. The most relevant example of this can be seen in the images streaming in from the current Iraq crisis. The American government ensured, before the war had even started, that strict censorship was enforced, certifying (within their capabilities) that the images of the casualties being airlifted home would never reach the American public. "Today it is impossible to wage war unless - long before the go-ahead by parliament - the whole political apparatus of the press has been won over to the operative goal. It all boils down to information and misinformation." [24]
Through official misinformation, and official disinformation, we are starting to lose, in the name of the so-called "War on Terrorism", basic democratic freedoms:
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"Within a month of President Bush officially declaring an end to hostilities, London, Canberra and Washington were proposing legislation to relax media ownership laws that would allow certain media owners, the most loyal supporters of the war, the possibility of even greater control over what the citizens of the West saw, heard and thought." [25]
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We have the liberty and the privilege to protect ourselves from horror and suffering - to engage in a form of self-censorship. We have the freedom and the choice not to face uncomfortable facts - to turn over the page or switch off the programme. We don't have to buy in: "No-one is going to buy an East Timorese photograph and put it on their wall in Double Bay - why would you want to be reminded of such a horror?", says Jon Lewis [26]. Indeed. We are, afterall, only human. We all try to cope with life as best we can, and when confronted with the suffering of others, it seems normal to turn away, especially from images - unlike words, which are easily forgotten, images have unavoidable potency.
Self-censorship, where we choose to protect ourselves from knowing too much about the harshness of life - about war and its effects, for example - is a privilege afforded people of affluence, one not available to poor people in the Third World. East Timorese people can't turn the page: it stares them in the face, every day of their lives.
We are talked to in euphemisms, or doublespeak, where the truth hides behind innocuous terms like "collateral damage" (meaning the maiming and killing of innocent civilians). Images of damage caused by a successful army can be a form of visual doublespeak - when we see the rubble of a bombed-out apartment block, for example, but not the twisted bodies that lie within. In short,
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"It is the image that matters, and be damned of the truth." [27]
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It is not difficult to imagine visual equivalents for the following examples of linguistic doublespeak:
defence:
removal with extreme prejudice:
energetic disassembly:
take positive measures:
an incomplete success:
Hitler's final solution of the Jewish problem:
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active invasion
assassination
nuclear explosion
act with unrestrained savagery
catastrophic strategic blunder
extermination
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Melbourne barrister and human rights activist Julian Burnside writes: [28]
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"The victims of protective reaction air strikes, or incontinent ordnance, or active defence, or fraternal internationalist assistance often flee for safety. A small number of them arrive in Australia asking for help. They commit no offence under Australian or international law by arriving here, without invitation and without papers, in order to seek protection. Nonetheless the Australian Government refers to them as 'illegals' ... Like all doublespeak, 'illegals' is used for a purpose: these people are immediately locked up without trial. No doubt it seems less offensive to lock up 'illegals' than to lock up innocent, traumatised human beings. They are also disparaged as 'queue jumpers': a neat device which falsely suggests two things. First that there is a queue, and second that it is in some way appropriate to stand in line when your life is at risk. When the 'illegals/queue jumpers' arrive, they are 'detained' in 'Immigration Reception and Processing Centres'. This description is false in every detail. They are locked up without trial, for an indefinite period - typically months or years - in desert camps which are as remote from civilisation as it is possible to be. They are held behind razor wire, they are addressed not by name but by number, and they slowly sink into hopelessness and despair."
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The photos of "illegals" struggling in the sea - conveniently just before the 2002 Australian government elections in Australia - are a fine example of images that, especially when combined with suitable captions, transmit a connoted message that is a direct and cynical lie. Known colloquially as "The Children Overboard Affair", its official description is the sanitised "a certain maritime incident".
Why do we in western societies feel compelled to defend ourselves from images of violence, especially those that our policies create? One reason is the effective and sophisticated marketing of the political agenda: news editors are under constant pressure from governments not to publish content that could undermine their interest. Another is the effective and sophisticated marketing of the commercial agenda: the violence we see is often airbrushed in accordance with commercial interests. All this encourages, as it is meant to, our growing acceptance of brutality - by individuals and, by extension, by the state. Journalism, supposedly "centered on a set of essentially ethical concepts: freedom, democracy, truth, objectivity, honesty ..." [29], lets us down here. But journalists know that where an ethical approach conflicts with the interests of their employer, the latter must win. A journalist's employment depends on it. We, the audience, are participants, as Hanno Hardt and Bonnie Brennen explain:
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"Audiences have become sophisticated participants in the mediated realities of the press, whose photographic coverage occupies a central position in explaining the world, while media have gained significantly in political power and cultural status with their complex technological capabilities of disseminating knowledge and information." [30]
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We see here that contemporary Western democracy's use of censorship, propaganda, marketing etc strives to shape the public's interpretation of images' connoted meanings.
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5. aspects of the culture of East Timorese society
contents
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"We have nothing left to lose. We are human beings and they have treated us like insects. We will never accept them here. Even if we have to die resisting, we will resist. We have our dignity and our own identity. And God is with us." [31]
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"God is with us". While there are "small Protestant, Muslim, Hindu and Buddhist communities" [32] in Dili, roughly 90% of East Timor's population is Catholic. In 1975, that proportion was about 30% [33]. The increase is hardly surprising given that the Catholic Church provided the only refuge that the East Timorese people had during the 24-year Indonesian occupation.
The Church treasures the safety and respects the culture of the East Timorese people:
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"... we are witnessing an upheaval of gigantic and tragic proportions in the social and cultural fabric of the East Timorese people and their identity is threatened with death ... There is a Timorese culture that is made up of words, attitudes, emotions, reactions, behaviours, ways of being and ways of relating to the world. It is in these things that the people recognise their own culture and in it their own identity ... An attempt to Indonesianise the Timorese people through vigorous campaigns to promote pancasila, through schools or the media, by alienating people from their world view, means the gradual murder of Timorese culture. To kill the culture is to kill the people." [34]
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The Church has allowed "many also (to) practise ancestor and spirit worship (animism)." [35] Thus "(The practice of animism) has largely been absorbed by Catholicism - a religion that has changed to accommodate indigenous beliefs." [36] In other words, "Catholicism is syncretized with aspects of the traditional religions (mainly animism)." [37] This was partly because Indonesian law, imposed on the people between 1975 and 1999, demanded that everyone declare allegiance to a monotheistic religion. Since traditional Timorese animism was not monotheistic, it did not qualify; hence it became absorbed into the official monotheism of Catholicism. [38] Such absorption was also seen in the Dark Ages, when the Catholic Church in Europe absorbed pagan culture. [39]
The following photograph (buffalo horns outside the Community Church of Maubisse, East Timor) [40] illustrates how Christianity and animism can blend harmoniously together:
"Animism refers to the belief that personalized, supernatural beings (or souls) inhabit ordinary objects and govern their existence ..." [41]. It encourages people to respect these objects as well as the entire natural world: "(It) is the best example of integration between man and environment." [42] The animism-Catholicism mix in East Timor provided a strong base for the remarkable resilience of the East Timorese people during the horrors of the Indonesian occupation.
"Resistir é vencer!" ("To resist is to win!") exhorted the resistance leader (now President of East Timor) Kay Rala Xanana Gusmão. The people resisted, and - eventually - they won, despite Falintil (the military wing of the clandestine political party Fretilin) facing massive odds. In the process, and as a result, at least 200,000 people - possibly 300,000 or more - died. Abandoned by the outside world, the people had no choice but to be stoic, and patient.
For most people, life in East Timor is tough: the scorched brown landscape of the dry season often threatens famine while the wet season produces raging torrents that make roads impassable. Desperately poor, the people are often plagued by famine and disease: malaria and dengue fever are common, and children die from conditions - intestinal parasites, for example - that, for a few cents, could be fixed (e.g. twelve-year-old Jalmira Babo recently died of asphyxiation caused by "hundreds of large worms that had travelled from her stomach up her oesophagus and into her mouth, blocking her trachea." [43] Enduring such harsh conditions, it is much easier for people to view photos of torture victims, say, than it is for soft Westerners whose cocoons of comfortable affluence are rarely pricked.
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6. the photographers speak ...
contents
Max Stahl, when asked what motivates him as an image-maker in places of conflict such as East Timor, replied:
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"Curiosity ... I think the consistent theme that motivates me is curiosity ... in situations of crisis people's real motivations are revealed ... trying to use the camera to get behind the image ... the image is like a symptom of something, the stories therefore become the principle tool, because as any filmmaker will tell you ... one picture is a study, two pictures are a film because they are edited ... and one picture which you put on the other picture qualifies the first one, and in that way stories, visual stories, can be very revealing, and of course they can be revealing of the filmmaker as well as the subject"
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Jon Lewis, when asked the same question, replied:
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"... I suppose I have a vision of a big picture ... the big picture would be the acceptance and the understanding and the curiosity and the discovery of neighbours ... and what that concept of neighbours is, and I mean neighbours to Australia ... so I have a big picture ... I'd love to think that maybe in a decade that I could have a whole a series of images that dealt with the near neighbours of Australia, be they East Timorese, or Soloman Islanders, or Papua New Guineans ... one of the reasons I like that idea is because basically they're completely neglected, basically people don't want to know ... I get an enormous amount out of people that are different"
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Stahl:
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"I'm a big admirer of the ability of an image ... some people, practitioners of still photography, to extract from an image a kind of ... symbol or reverberation, which sometimes is harder to do from a film, if only because you're not contemplating the image in quite the same way ... different relationships ... It's not a question of being a good photographer, as far as I've observed it, is not so much a question of setting up a picture, or taking a good picture, it's a question of a constant relationship with your subject, with which you take many pictures ... and so I think there isn't such a big difference between movie-making and still photography ..."
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Lewis on why he photographs, and on his role as a photographer:
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"... to be humbled by people that I meet ... I try to let people know that I'm photographing them, I try to get some engage, the French would say. I'm not very good at stealing the photograph. I like the interaction ... I believe in photographs ... I believe that they help or change things ... The work that I do with people in Melanesia, East Timor and Bouganville specifically ... it's work that I'm trying to bring a sense of what our neighbours are, who they are through photography ... I'm trying to bring them to Australia as people, through the medium of photography ... I'm trying to give, with my work, a sense of interaction, a sense of understanding, a sense of perhaps love ... it's a bridging-the-gap role ..."
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Clearly, these two photographers are deeply moral men with a keen sense of the ethics behind what they do. They strive to use their cameras to report honestly with as clear a denoted message as possible. Neither wants to invest his work with a skewed connoted message but to leave that as open as possible so that the viewer can make her/his own interpretation.
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7. conclusion
contents
Looking at Lewis's "Suai Loro Boys" and Stahl's "Santa Cruz Face" with Barthes' denotation/connotation analysis in mind, and appreciating the different cultural background of, on the one hand, Australian viewers and, on the other, East Timorese viewers, we can see why these images have been received so differently. Their connoted messages say different things to each group (and, no doubt, to different individuals within each group).
If the photographers had wanted to "invest" their work with a particular meaning, as did the photographer of the Kennedy image ("eyes looking upwards, hands joined together"), then there would be an encoding/decoding process going on, its fidelity dependent on the viewer's cultural background, general knowledge, politics etc. The following schematic would have applied:
source
encoder
channel
decoder
receiver
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the photographer
translation of intended message into image
light
translation of image back into original message
the viewer
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Perhaps Lewis's "Suai Loro Boys" - clearly a posed photograph - could also be seen in this light, the fidelity of the decoding process here being affected by the cultural sensibility of the viewer. Stahl's "Santa Cruz Face", however, could not have been posed. There was no time for that. In this case the schematic looks like this:
source
encoder
channel
decoder
receiver
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Max Stahl
capture of scene into electronic form
light
translation of electronic image back into original scene
the viewer
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We see what the camera saw. We receive the denoted message. But the connoted message differs from viewer to viewer.
Let Max Stahl have the last word:
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"To some extent when you ... try to communicate with an audience that has no direct interest in that subject, they're not part of it, you have to find a means to make a link that's a straightforward story-telling fact. If you don't make any link with the audience, they're not going to be paying very much attention to you, and as a story-teller that's your job to make a link, in order to get them to pay attention, in order to communicate. Pity, compassion, suffering ... these are powerful ... common, human emotions. And yes, as a story-teller you will focus on those, precisely because they are there, and because they are powerful human emotions they will communicate, and if you are a story-teller with integrity you will do so with care and attention to the reason that lies behind that - you won't simply cut it off as if it were a sort of emotional pornography ... it would be divorced from the human, the reality, that's the difference ... an exploitation of those powerful emotions to sell something ... It's not a question of saying should you or should you not show somebody in extremeness, the question isn't that. The question is what do you mean? And do you make that meaning visible, do you make it credible, do you show the proper respect for that human being, would that human being afterwards, in a moment of calm, want to thank you? or not ..." [44]
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