This January, The New York Times was widely panned for including in its coverage of a terrorist attack in Kenya photos that some saw as “callous” and “disrespectful.” Time Magazine similarly came under attack for putting on its cover a photograph by celebrated American photojournalist Lynsey Addario of a practically naked, pregnant Sudanese woman who was the victim of rape. The Daily Mirror was criticized for its “angelic boy” portrayal of the alleged terrorist behind the Christchurch, New Zealand terrorist attack.
Then there was National Geographic’s 2018 mea culpa: “For Decades, Our Coverage Was Racist. To Rise Above Our Past, We Must Acknowledge It.”
There is a relatively small group of photographers and editors at large media houses, mostly white and male. For far too long, they held the power to shape our visual understanding of some of the biggest stories in the world.
But that era is coming to an end. Our ultra-connected, quick-to-respond age of social media has at last given people of color, especially in the global south, the instant ability to critique, challenge, and hold to account some of the most powerful media outlets in the world.
The Polis Project, a research and journalism cooperative based in New York, recently published a lengthy report titled, “Misogyny and Racism as Spectacle and Performance: A Critique of Mahesh Shantaram’s ‘The African Portraits’ and ‘Forbidden Love.’” It deconstructs images by the well-known Indian photographer Mahesh Shantaram.
I recently spoke with the author of the report and founder of The Polis Project, Suchitra Vijayan, about the state of photojournalism, representation, the privileging of certain voices over others, and ultimately who has the power to tell the stories to shape our collective perception of the world.
Regarding Shantaram’s work, Vijayan writes, “I was immediately struck by the aesthetic — the lighting, the rendering in these images of Africans living in India, and the texturization done to make their skin appear darker…There was no context, history, engagement, or articulation of how their presence in this space affected their lives. The images portrayed members of the African diaspora in India in poses with distant empty gazes.”
Here is my conversation with her, which has been edited for length and readability.
Hassan Ghedi Santur: Your recent report explores, among other things, the ethics of representation and who gets to shape narratives. What was the genesis of this project? What do you hope to achieve with it?
Suchitra Vijayan: This story is a chance for us to talk about how toxic misogyny and race and representation work. I am not a reporter, I am a lawyer by training and a writer. This [report] was not something that we wanted to take on, but given that the mainstream publications we reached out to refused to write or talk about it, that’s when The Polis Project decided that now was the time for us to do a paper.
But it cannot be about just this one man. That’s why we also talk about The New York Times photos of the Nigerian girls who were abducted by the Boko Haram. We also talk about Lynsey Addario, who is one of the most celebrated female photographers of our generation who still continues to produce [problematic] work.
These are all concerns that many people, especially brown, black, and other photographers and writers have been thinking about for a really long time. It doesn’t cover everything, but I think that it starts a conversation.
HGS: It had been said that social media has had a democratizing effect on our world. We can engage with and challenge people who hold positions of power in the media in a way that we never did before. Do you think that is the case?
SV: For the first time in history, the people who hold power when it comes to representation are beginning to get challenged. And it’s not just a white/brown issue or white/black issue; in this case, the person photographing the black diaspora in India was a brown man. But then this brown man came from a place of privilege, in terms of caste and class. But it’s still surprising that nobody challenged his problematic work from the get go.
Lynsey Addario hasn’t been challenged in any real sense by anybody in her own clique. For example, nobody in The New Yorker or The New York Times or any art magazines, has ever critically gauged any kind of critique against her, not personally, but against the body of work she’s produced. These people are getting challenged more and more now. The New York Times is no longer the institution that goes unchallenged. They are now able to say, “I do not agree with you,” and I think that is phenomenal.
But now the question is, “Why do they not change?” I think that’s because the power centers are still predominantly headed by people who are white, Eurocentric, or come with a certain Anglo-Saxon idea of how the world works. And I think we still need to challenge those power structures.
The best response to [the current power structures] is smaller magazines that produce phenomenal work, that question and challenge. We need to support them more and we need to find a way to get more audience for them and make sure that there is a home for critical, thoughtful, engaged ideas to spread.
HGS: How do we deal with storytellers with good intentions who want to tell the stories of others?
SV: I think storytelling is what makes us human. How do I teach my 2-year-old about the world without stories?
The capacity to tell stories, and relate to another person’s story, is the most human thing we can do. For example, there is a book in India [“Invisible Men: Inside India’s Transmasculine Networks”] about trans men, and it [inspired] a very fascinating conversation because all the trans men that the author interviewed have come out since the book has been published and said, “You misrepresented us, and you created a story that was not there.” So the people whose stories she claims to tell have all now come out and said, this is not their story. And yet this author continues to be invited to festivals and speak. And in this day and age, this is appalling to me.
This is where we really need to just make sure that we keep asking the same questions: Who is telling the story? Is there another voice? Why do we privilege this voice and not the other? Because stories don’t have to be final. There are millions of stories. And having millions of them only makes our lives richer and our politics better.
HGS: One thing that has drawn me to storytelling is the belief that because I’m a human being, I have the capacity to tell stories about the lives of others. If we believe in the logic that people should only tell their own stories, is there a risk of losing faith in the humanity of storytellers who are different from us?
SV: I think they can co-exist. And that’s why I said the most human thing one can do is to be a storyteller. When I say that people should tell their own stories, it’s in relation to the fact that even people who want to tell their own stories are often not given the opportunity. When James Baldwin writes about his people, he writes about them in a way that is powerful. The problem is that the James Baldwins of the world are often erased in order to make way for others.
For me, it comes down to the fundamental question of who owns knowledge, who produces knowledge, who enables other people to produce knowledge. And that’s why it’s important that knowledge should not belong to one person or group, neither should the profits of that knowledge belong to one corporation, whether it’s The Washington Post or The New York Times, and the Amazons and Jeff Bezoses of the world. It’s absolutely important that all of us, whether we are brown or black, have the capacity to produce knowledge and own that knowledge. It’s important that we build institutions of power so that in 50 years time there are [media outlets] as influential as The New York Times or The Washington Post in the global south.
HGS: One of the sentences that jumped at me while reading your report gets at the idea of “the banality of bearing witness as an excuse to produce extractive work.” Talk to me about this notion, especially in the context of photographers who travel to faraway places with the intention to bear witness.
The idea of bearing witness is often very problematic as a concept, as a rhetorical tool, and as a literary device. We no longer need James Nachtwey to fly to war-torn Bosnia. Everyone is a photographer now, so we are all witnesses. We live in a surveillance economy where we are constantly just bearing witness. Which means that the capacity to see does not automatically become the capacity for action. What is the function of seeing something, and saying something, if it doesn’t lead to concrete action or change?
Is photographing a woman who was gang raped by the Sudanese army and put on the cover of Time Magazine practically naked able to stop the war? Do we know what happened? Can any of the Time Magazine subscribers who loved that cover tell us now what’s happening in South Sudan? Does the function of Lynsey Addario photographing this girl fundamentally change the nature of the conflict or how we relate to it?
That for me is banality. I think there’s a certain consciousness among a lot of brown and black writers and thinkers who are asking: What does this function mean? I don’t see this so much with writers, journalists, photographers who tend to come from a certain level of privilege; who still see themselves as certain saviors; and who believe that the very act of them being there somehow changes things.
