Close Comparison -- Compare and Contrast Comparison

Close Comparison -- Compare and Contrast

Comparison of Solomon-Godeau and Williams

Photography is an ethically complex art: unlike a painting which purports to be the work of an individual artist and reaffirm his or her 'true self,' a photograph at least superficially suggests that it has encapsulated 'the real.' The impression of reality conveyed by photography is so persuasive that the fact that a photograph is still one interpretation amongst many may be forgotten. "For Solomon-Godeau, looking at social subjects is voyeuristic, creating contradictions that course through the entire history of documentary photography. In its parasitism on the real and self-justification in the name of consciousness-raising, the genre always risks reducing the 'objective' record of human misery to aesthetic spectacle" (Apter 1992: 693). An excellent example of such reduction are the infamous photographs of Walter Evans of the 'Okies' during the Dust Bowl era of the America 1930s or modern photography today of war zones. The individual becomes reduced to a symbol of the tragedy of humanity. Thus, according to Solomon-Godeau, photography "seductively promises to show what is there, a promise that implicitly inducts the viewer into an ideologically blinding regime of scopic mastery. Thus she endeavors to work out a somewhat perverse counter-strategy of 'not to show,' or 'not to read'" (Apter 1992: 693). For African-Americans, this is a particularly important question, given that images of 'blackness' are often used to represent 'the race' in a schematic fashion, as seen through the white gaze.

However, the collection of African-American photography by Debra Willis, rather than attempting 'not to show' or 'not to read' offers a different view of photography and its tendency to objectify. Willis and the contributors to her volume Picturing Us: African-American Identity in Photography instead explores the ability to 'reread' photographs from the past. Rather than distilling photographs of their assigned meanings and questioning the value of the visual to render 'the real,' Willis asked contributors to her volume to instead reinterpret famous photographs from the African-American past, such as those of anonymous lynched men and famous activists such as Marcus Garvey, in a manner in which they had not been previously.

In the essay, "The Erotic Image is Naked and Dark," essayist Carla Williams actively seeks to reclaim the body of the hyper-sexualized Black woman into the realm of humanity: rather than seeing black female sexuality as exotic, she makes a claim for ownership. The implication of such exercises is that it is impossible to detach photographs from the symbolic language which produced them and see them purely as images. The images have entered in the lexicon and they are a part of how people see the world and see themselves. Only through re-interpretation and re-configuration of such images in a positive and affirmative light by the community can they take on an empowering status.