The Outsider Advantage – First Text
For the purpose of my dissertation, I wish to discuss the photographer’s role as an outsider. As the proposed working title for this text already suggests, I wish to explore the possibility that making images from the ‘outside’ comes with its advantages. At first sight, this seems top be a paradox as the outsider is generally thought of being disadvantaged. A major part of this paper however, will argue that the status of the outsider allows for a clearer perception and possibly also a less spoilt vision. The outsider status therefore has a direct relationship with the creative practice of individuals who chose to work culturally, socially even emotionally from the ‘outside’.
In order to elaborate on this topic, one must distinguish between different aspects that would constitute an outsider. The following anecdotal and factual examples from the history of the medium are establishing a platform for discussion that I intend to use for the dissertation. Also, one must also think of different instances where the photographer, or the artist for that matter, is an insider. Clearly though, this dissertation is not going to discuss the phenomena of so-called outsider art.
Practically speaking, there is a significant moment where one can experience the photographer as outsider. As I am a photographer myself, it happened to me on many occasions that when there is a family group shot to be taken, someone in the crowd suggests: “Why not let the professional take the picture?” What seems funny at first actually raises a crucial point for the discussion of this topic. If the photographer in the family is the one who usually takes the picture – and therefore is usually outside of the picture – he is, in terms of visual representation of the family, an outsider.
Moving away from the micro dynamics of the family portrait into the wider world of photography, the question can be raised if the photographer doesn’t always constitute an outsider for two main reasons: the subject is in a certain distance to the camera and rarely is the subject the photographer himself. Culturally, socially and economically speaking this distance usually bridges the gap between three worlds; the subject’s, the photographer’s and most certainly the viewer’s. Only in rare cases such as Nan Goldin, Corinne Day or Larry Clark can it be argued that the distance is reduced to two worlds as the photographers had the lived experienced of the depicted. Ironically, these three photographers have experimented with self-portraiture – where the subject becomes oneself.
Goldin, Day and Clark had access to a marginalized and therefore also exclusive world. The subsequent photographs of transsexuals, drug consumption, acts of love and hate are proof of the photographer being a clear insider to a world unknown to most of us. Larry Clark himself was a long time Heroin addict which would make him, as well as his friends he photographed, outsiders to society by in large. Yet, by photographing his friends Larry removed himself from the sometimes-gruesome scenes that unfolded in front of him. Even though photographers such as Clark might be participants in the dangerous games they document, they become non-participants in the act of photographing. The camera then acts as a device that distances and removes oneself from the moments the camera records.
This particular genre of documentary photography and the notion of the photographer of ‘the fly on the wall’ is usually in reference to a humanist approach to the medium that tries to depict reality as truthfully as possible without the photographers’ intervention. However, it also reduces the presence of the photographer to something transparent as if we are looking straight through him. In some cases the photographers’ presence in the act of photographing is forgotten or just simply not recognized. The photographs of Muzi Quawson exemplify this point as her subjects live their lives without ever paying attention to the omnipresent camera. These desired effects however, constitute once more the photographer as an outsider – someone who is possibly also ignored or even wishes to be ignored (most evident in pictures where the subject turns his back towards the camera).
In the act of taking a picture however, the photographer’s body is turned towards his subject. The body mimics the direction of the lens, which would suggest an engagement with the image’s content. Nevertheless, the photographer looks through a lens to frame the image and the very fact that the sight is interrupted by a tool must be interpreted as a form of distancing oneself. With certain types of cameras, the view is at a ninety percent angle, mirrored or upside down. Especially the latter, makes the photographer consciously or subconsciously look more at the formal aspects of an image. This decontextualisation might even be necessary to produce images that are as aesthetically pleasing as they are emotionally engaging.
The photographer then, already the quintessential outsider by the very tool he chose to work with, is more than often also a cultural outsider as it is the case with Thomas Struth who traveled extensively throughout his career. His images from China are depictions of the distance between the three worlds I was discussing earlier. Yet a completely different body of work, his series of family portraits are proof of friendships Struth has established over the years without ever showing himself. It is as if the family members view into the camera, is also the acknowledgement of the cultural possibly even the emotional distance that is in between them and Struth.
To return back to my first example, the family portrait therefore functions on a variety of planes of implications: the returned look into Struth’s camera manifests his position as an outsider but it also adds a surprising element of self-portraiture as his sitters are modeled by his directions. Their facial expressions, their posture even the locations are then representations of the photographers’ vision of a good ‘image’. Maybe the ignored and never depicted photographer isn’t as much an outsider as I thought, as his presence can be felt in the returned gaze of his sitters.
To furthermore discuss the artist as an outsider, it is to be noticed that one also has to discuss his distance to the subject. Therefore the question: what subject the photographer wishes to photograph will also dictate his distance to that subject. Mostly speaking, there is a fascination for an object, a landscape, a person to take an image of it or him. This “fascinated distance” also suggests that the photographer is in that sense a fascinated outsider. Noticeably, the negative connotation of being an outsider might have to be erased to further explore this topic also because most artists clearly chose to produces images that existentially locates them on the ‘outside’.
Marco Bohr, 2006
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