We are all sinners. Lest you wonder, I have not had a religious epiphany. However, organized religion can offer surprising insights into the human condition. For a while now, I have been fascinated by the Catholic concept of Indulgence, in particular by abuses in the Middle Ages: People were promised they could buy themselves out of all kinds of sins if they only paid enough money. It's a bit of a stretch, but an entertaining exercise nonetheless, to ask to what extent looking at - and buying - photography in effect is a contemporary version of just that. (more)

We should be concerned about all of these issues, and the photographers deserve credit for making us face the results of the fact that for the most part we aren't so concerned about them at all. Because, let's face it, if we were more concerned about, say, our wasteful society we would do much more to reduce waste.

However, we are not completely unconcerned. Deep down, we do feel guilt, at least to some extent. One of the things we seem to be doing to deal with that guilt is to go to an exhibition of photography like Permanent Error or Running The Numbers, to look at photography that makes us face our, well, sins. If we have the money, we buy a print or at least a book.

Here's the thing, though: Unless we change at least some of our behaviour after seeing these photographs, we've done little more than being engaged in a contemporary version of temporarily buying ourselves out of a sin. For the photographers to really have achieved their actual goals we would have to change our life style. Of course, this asks for a bit more than the simple act of looking at a photography exhibition or buying a book.

I have spent a lot of time thinking about the role of photography in this process. Photography is a curious thing: It has the power to confront us with the most gruesome events, yet it seems to have very little actual power to make us change our behaviour. I've argued elsewhere on this site that we can't really blame photography for the fact that so little is changing: After all, photographs don't make decisions, we make them. And we might decide not to do anything (which seems to be the most common decision).

But there seems to be a little more to this. I think we often take the process of looking at photographs as a replacement for doing something that could potentially help solve a problem depicted in them. It's almost as if we think that if we look at a photograph of, say, waste and then feel bad about it, that's enough to solve the problem. Clearly, it's not.

A variant of this is provided each time a major newspaper decides to put a gruesome photograph on its front page. Here is a recent example, involving The New York Times. Am I the only one disturbed about how much media coverage was not about the actual problem, but about the fact that the photo was on the front page? (just as an aside, the amount of condescension contained in the executive editor's phrase "Readers can follow more than one important story at a time" is absolutely mind blowing [follow the link for the context it was used in])

Photographs are not entirely powerless: They can make us feel bad (or good). But they cannot change the world. We can change the world. For that to happen, we must be open to what photographs tell us. Looking at photographs can be part of us changing the world. But only looking is never enough.

Illustration: Woodcut of the pope selling indulgences, from Passionary of the Christ and Antichrist by Lucas Cranach the Elder, source

The makers of the duckrabbit blog could probably explain this much better than I can. You only need to head over to that blog and look at many of the topics raised there to see what I mean when I talked about how we still have a huge problem with how non-white people are portrayed photographically, at least in the Western media.

Of course, one could now argue that this problem is due to the fact that most of the photographs we see are produced by white (mostly male - another dimension) people. But I can't escape the feeling that for us to find ways to approach Stan's question we need to expand the focus. Let's face it, Stan's question is not new, and we have been unable to come up with an answer so far. That's why I think that when we talk about representation we need to talk about all types of representation. And visual representation plays a huge part.

The tokenism that Stan mentioned can be found in many areas. Just think of advertizing in the US. Advertizing, when presenting groups of people, always manages to show a mix of skin colours that, let's face it, we are not so familiar with from real life. In principle, this is great: Advertizing - the great equalizer. But - and this is a big but - we all know that ads basically present us a big, fat lie. We all know very well that what we see in advertizing is not true. Nobody believes that, for example, using some toothpaste will do what the ad says it does. That is what makes the use of those perfect groups of people in ads so insidious.

Advertizing is a particularly tricky case because it uses tokenism in the most shameless way. Tokenism is bad enough, but there are many ways race is being treated that are even worse. Just watch the so-called "local news" and have a close look at their stories about crime...

I do think that for us to make progress with the question Stan asked we need to not only look at tokenism in the actual representation of photographers, gallerists, etc., we also need to deal with tokenism like the one we find in advertizing, and we need to deal with the many ways race is dealt with in front of the camera. Of course, this has to go hand in hand with more direct efforts, many of which are mentioned in this post over at dvafoto, for example.

I also think we might want to slightly rephrase Stan's original question. How about the following: "What can we do so that will we finally see people of color not only in front of the lens serving as ample, year round subject matter, but also as: photographers, judges, editors, gallery owners, workshop presenters and festival organizers in some representative proportion beyond mere tokenism?"

As I said, I don't think I have a good answer. But I want to propose to expand what we're looking at, to realize that race enters photography in many different ways, and there might be very strong connections between them. It's important to tackle all those different aspects.

Regardless of whether I'm right or wrong here, one thing is certain, though: Unless we try, this elephant is not going to go away.

Yet all this attention being given to his methods rather than the content of those images he is so often accused of stealing conceals the rather inconvenient fact that his best work issues a daring set of challenges to our understanding of photography as a social currency. In dealing variously with cowboys, girlfriends and celebrities Prince reaches into the most profound archetypes of American culture, seeing how the proliferation of such images, their endless reproduction, effects how we might build a particular vision of ourselves - and how that vision inevitably becomes a commodity understood in photographic terms.

Needless to say, once you talk about physical objects - as I did - people will inevitably say that of course taking a physical object is not the same as taking something intangible, in particular since intangible stuff often can be reproduced in an infinite number without taking away anything from the original (in fact the idea of an "original" even is flawed). Donn Zaretsky went straight for it and asked:

What if, after I took your wallet, you still had your wallet?

This had Sérgio Muñoz Sarmiento respond:

The rabbit in the hat to this argument is this. If I photocopy or rephotograph a copyrighted image exactly as it is, or with little to no transformative change, and use it to make paintings, t-shirts, mugs, postcards, or heck, even three-dimensional sculptures, then what harm is there to the copyright holder of that image? Presumably, none. The original copyright holder still has the image. True, but not so fast.

The problem with the above hypothetical is that makes property law and intellectual property law synonymous, while simultaneously eviscerating copyright doctrine and its mandatory "fair use" analysis.

That is really where my little analogy - stealing a wallet versus stealing an image - breaks down. Sérgio Muñoz Sarmiento (emphases in the original):

Still assuming we're not in a Star Trek episode, we don't use property law to dissect the above scenario; we use intellectual property law (with the term intellectual being key, meaning that it is, unlike real property, intangible), and thus, we apply copyright's "fair use" schema and its four non-exclusive factors.

As Donn Zaretsky notes in a follow-up post:

That's quite right, and there is no analogous schema when it comes to personal property: we don't ask whether taking someone's wallet was educational, or a parody, etc.

Michael Rushton responded to the exchange of posts writing (my emphasis)

it is not an all-or-nothing problem, since some appropriation, some fair use, increases creators' abilities to make new and interesting work. The optimal fair use provisions establish a balance between maintaining incentives for new work and for the ability to build upon existing work.

In a nutshell, that's exactly what I was after when I wrote my original post, that "balance between maintaining incentives for new work and for the ability to build upon existing work."

You cannot claim that taking someone else's image(s) is always fine, just like you cannot claim that taking someone else's image(s) should never be allowed. It's all about the balance.

If I find other comments/reactions to my original post, I'll add updates here.

Update (5 May 2011): This is a very worthwhile read.