Thinking About Photography
Dedicated to expanding our ideas about photography
Photography and Resistance
January 6th - March 20th
Immigrants at Ellis Island, George Grantham Bain Collection
I am the great-great-granddaughter and granddaughter of immigrants. On my mother’s side, it’s hard to imagine how desperate they must have felt when they left Ireland - the home of everyone they knew. On my father’s side, my Puerto Rican grandmother was barely out of her teens - already with several children, when she came here. In both cases, I believe these were journeys of desperation - to leave behind everything you know and go to a very different land where they might not understand you. How hard is it to make a life from scratch? The history of immigration is also a road map for where/when life was most desperate throughout the world. I often think about their lives and how hard it must have been to come here for a better life - what courage it took. That was part of my inspiration for this showcase. However, even as I write this, I am aware that the land we came to already had vibrant people and cultures living there for millennia. Real life is complex and messy - and that's a big part of why resistance is essential.
“Our Existence is Political” - Mickalene Thomas
There are so many ways to interpret resistance - for me, it’s about the power structure. Who writes history and who decides that the narrative will be. I see resistance as a refusal to stay forgotten, to stay lost, to stay silent. It’s about having a voice in where the light will be shown - what becomes illuminated and is deserving of our attention. It’s about countering the narrative that we’ve been handed by adding our stories.
Art has a long history of being part of the resistance, Goya’s etchings of war and abuse, Picasso’s Guernica which lays bare the brutality of war. Even something as simple as Van Gogh painting his shoes was revolutionary in its time - painting was to elevate, not lay bare the realities of life. Artists resist by enlarging the accepted narratives, by showing what has been ignored, forgotten or buried. Art can bring reminders of what’s important and why - it becomes that extra voice at the table that refuses to stay silent and re-centers the dialog.
Photography is often on both sides of an issue - part of the problem as well as the solution. Living in California, we are part of the border experience and I was impressed by several artists and organizations exploring that space. The AMBOS project was founded by artist Tanya Aguiñiga, it's a bi-national collective that works with communities on both sides of the border. They record "what life looks like along the length of the US/Mexico border for those who are unfamiliar with the realities that take place there." The Wall is another interesting project by photographer Griselda San Martin that "focuses on the experiences of people at Friendship Park, a bi-national park located in the border region of San Diego, United States, and Tijuana, Mexico." In a related field - I highly recommend the film Kneecap, based on a true story about the first native-language Irish/Gaelic rap band. You might not be aware that the English criminalized the language and this film hits on both areas of censorship - rap and their language.
The photographers in this showcase are giving voice to those who have been silenced. They celebrate lives and cultures that persist despite outside forces to conform. They document changes to our fragile environment and the impact it has on the land and those that inhabit that land. From PhotoBook Journal we have a collection of six book reviews that remind us of the human cost and impact of world events.
