Crossing the River
It is said about images, by critics, instructors of photography, and repeated by photographers themselves, that a good image, one with the quality of art, tells a story. It’s not generally mentioned whose story is told.
We might agree, a story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. It suggests sequence, development, another place to which one arrives by the end. And I think we can agree that a story always is an interpretation. An image we see appears in our imagination, becomes something for us, some part of our self-talk. The image, funneled through our perspective, becomes our unique judgement of the world out there; becomes who we are in the world out there; and how we are in the world. It’s never just the image but what we judge of it, how our particular brain and life experience sees it.
Should we agree on this for now, the written context for this October PhotoBox image, begins with a general proposal that the experience of a single image will only tell the story of the viewer, cannot tell a story of the maker of the image.
Whose Story is Told in a Single, Uncontextualized Image
While many single images with aesthetic value can move one emotionally, can challenge and inspire, the context for the image comes from the imagination of the viewer. Less commonly does a single image convey within it the time, place and occasion following a story line. While certainly a good image can present many layers of interpretation, can show interesting juxtapositions, can appeal to our attraction or repulsion instinct, I suggest that a single image does not provide the back story, the next frame, or the resolution of a story. That I suggest would have to come from the viewer’s imagination, is in the viewer’s domain. The viewer expands on the image, gives it a context, using one’s memories, hopes, dreams, desires, all at work within one’s imagination.
Further at stake in viewing an artist’s work is the discussion in the June PhotoBox that the evolutionary structure of our brains, each of our brains unique to each of us, selectively imposes an expectation on the incoming data. This means that the viewing of an image – how we perceive the image – has little to do with objectively recording data from our senses, and has a lot to do with seeing what we want to see.
This is not to diminish the work of the visual artist for the visual artist is inspired in choice of tones, textures, shapes, frames, colours to indicate a mood, emotion, perspective… and a single image can have deep affect on one. It is the inspiration of the visual artist that carries us through our imagination to the story told. It’s just that for a single image, I feel, the story is very much our story.
The Nature of the Story We Tell Ourselves
The story one tells oneself is generally favourable to oneself. To take again from the discussion of the June PhotoBox, based on the revolutionary work of neuroscientists and evolutionary biologists, by nature human beings will concoct all kinds of rationalizations and believe anything, even if contradicted by evidence, in order to avoid that black existential abyss of not feeling right-minded about what one believes or does. Of course, we will admit to being wrong, but it’s only to the extent that it suits our self-interest or is forced on us. Admitting to be wrong, when equivalent to feeling duped, to being shown a fool, undermines one’s sense of self-competence and integrity. It undermines one’s standing in one’s world, and even disturbs the sense of being who we are. This undermining of our personal integrity, feeling at a loss, what the evolutionary brain is designed to avoid at all costs, manifests as various degrees of despair. Human despair is illness. A healthy brain avoids the experience of being wrong-minded, being thought a fool, not being in their own mind a good person.
Protecting our sense of self in the world is what we defend at all costs. Being competent and right-minded in our choices is integral to the stories we tell ourselves about our selves. The June PhotoBox described the many ways scientists find that we circumvent a truth that is not self-affirming. And so it is, that we work hard to preserve our status quo, (providing we benefit by that status quo). If we don’t benefit from the status quo, then the story we tekll of ourselves still is self-affirming; the story becomes one of the martyr standing up to the evil world, the victim beaten down by the bad world, the heroic truth-teller showing up the world, the virtuous noble spirit rising above the world. Even though our lives might not be in the mainstream, we find a way todd account for that securing our integrity, that we are right by ourself.
Guarding the status quo we benefit from or justifying our exclusion from the status quo, is held fast at all costs. We are reluctant to let go of those stories affirming us, reluctant to change our minds, to say we got it all wrong, were the fool. Any significant change comes to us only by the way that adults learn, through shock or repetition. Just ask any marketer working hard to convince us to choose their product or service. Ask them about their strategy and effort to change someone’s mind. What do they say? ‘Get them while they’re young, and you’ll have them for life.’ Otherwise, the marketer is stuck with the hard work of repetition or creating a strong emotional impact to push their message.
Even the radical modification of behaviour we are now witnessing with the design of social media platforms comes only by way of intense isolation, repetition, and continuous delivery to us of targeted and increasingly exaggerated fears and threats. Shock and repetition.
Once any of us becomes committed to a belief, it is very hard to be convinced by anyone to abandon that belief, even in the face of contradicting evidence, and even with the force of logic. Generally, only with shock and repetition – a forced inevitability – can humans be moved to make personal or collective changes to fundamentally held beliefs and perceptions of self, or moved to effect changes to behaviour. Any kind of change is slow and over time, reasons for the belief fade perhaps; as is said, the transition needs to ‘save face.’
Interestingly though, some kind of appeal to our base humanity, our base sense of our being human, can lower the resistance of ego self-defence, can move one to see differently. Marketers know that as well. Using images of children, for example, is an effective tool to encourage people to donate money to a cause. This too though is self-affirming. Only in a kind of giving up, a despair, a disconnection, a feeling of being lost, does one abandon their felt integrity, that thing in their head that says this is who I am. We work hard to hold on to it, to that feeling that I am right-minded. I am competent. My life has meaning and value. I have reason to believe and be who I am. We fight for that and hold on to that at all cost.
The Story the Artist Wants to Tell
That is the viewer’s writing of the story. For the viewer to be taken into the artist’s story, experience the world seen by the artist, I’m suggesting, requires more context for the viewing of an image. The artist’s telling of a story requires more sense of time, place and occasion. For example, a title gives a context for an image, narrows down the options for the viewer to consider. The title points the viewer’s appreciation for the image in a particular direction. A caption, a short description, a book, makes the viewing of a work more focussed on the artist’s story, brings the viewer along a path. An artist surrounds the artwork with reference to a setting , a plot, more of a story for the viewer to take in, not so easy for the viewer to be off on the viewer’s own story. A contextualized is not so open-ended as the single uncontextualized image, not so subject to the viewer’s accounting alone. A context for an image carries the viewer more to the artist’s story.
Context doesn’t have to be words. A context might be given with a sequence of images or a photo essay, might be understood within a body of the artist’s work, or in the context of a time in history, or belonging to an artistic movement.
The Artist Telling a Self-Affirming Story for the Viewer
An artist’s story can be reassuring and encouraging for a viewer. The images that stand out to the viewer when scrolling a screen, or strolling through a gallery, are the images the viewer likes, that is, images that speak to the viewer. As an image might appeal to one, so might an artist’s story. The story of the artist is reassuring to us, to our identity. And there is great value in that. And we value those stories and those artists, follow their work, hang the work on our walls even. The artist story inspires us, encourages us in our dreams and hopes, affirms us in our ways to be the person we want to be.
But What if the Artist’s Story is Unpleasant
Sometimes an artist has a story the artist feels needs to be seen and heard. The story is more prophetic, calling for a different world, telling of negative consequence if we continue in our practices and our beliefs and expectations. A prophetic story tells us that our ways are wrong-minded. Not what the audience wants to hear. What the audience will resist hearing. How does the artist tell that story? have the audience weigh that story, even act on that story, when the story is not self-affirming but rather suggests a radical pivot from the values by which one has constructed one’s life? How does the artist get one to see that one is wrong-minded.
As pointed out above, letting go of the status quo – that is changing one’s outlook, behaviour and belief – is avoided at all costs. It’s how our brain works. For us to admit to having gotten something quite wrong, to being wrong-minded is what we defend ourselves against. At all costs. Letting go of beliefs and behaviour by which we define ourselves would undermine our integrity, our sense of self in the world. This undermining of our sense of self we call mental illness. That’s what happens when we are deemed mentally ill. Our world collapsing. Our ability to function in the world. Loss of self as it expands, becomes a mental breakdown. What our brain avoids any way it can. It’s so hard to say I need to change because I have misjudged reality.
Examples were given in the June PhotoBox for how hard change is. We have only to consider the decades and decades and decades that indigenous people have spoken about the abuse in the residential schools. What? Religious teachers and priests treating people that way? Religious teachers and priests represent the higher values of our society. Surely they were doing good, had noble motivations. How hard it was for the established society to acknowledge how cruel the schools were for many, how hard to admit that our good society sanctioned the abuse.
It took years of the Indigenous people speaking up, over and over, time and again, repeating that description of abuse, not even evidence could convince the established order to take the claims seriously. It took a shock as well. And quite a shock, too, to shift the opinion of the established order, shift the attention even a little bit, backing up the words, quite a shock: discovery of mass graves of indigenous children on school grounds. Took that before a whiff of change was possible.
OK. We do pay attention to lots of disturbing stories. But consider how that is. TV Soap Operas might be a good illustration. Lots of horrible things go on in people’s lives in the telling of a soap opera. We pay attention but the psychology behind the story viewing is self-affirming. Even though we vicariously participate through the stories in unpleasant situations that the characters representing ourselves go through, our response is gratefulness at the end of the show, that we don’t have it so bad as the soap opera characters. We feel good about that. Something like that. It’s actually a little more subtle than that. Again, the marketers are smart. The problems of the soap opera script are answered by the advertised products interlaced with the story. The commercials become the solution to problems, the products seen to make life better. For example, those persistent dirty rings on shirt collars are taken care of with a product. The world is alright. All the problems made to go away. Again, this is but one example where unpleasant stories are for us self-affirming and reassuring.
Is watching the news on TV or on a newsfeed any different to the design of soap operas? Horrible atrocities often are on the news. Think of the civil war in Sudan and the 13 million displaced people who are on the brink of famine and mass death. Then an ad. Then the end of the story. Click off. Well, it’s them, not us. We go on as we are.
It’s not those self-affirming stories, even the ones with difficult subject matter, not those that this discussion is examining.
What Comes of the Artist’s Telling of a Story We Don’t Want to Hear
The question for this discussion is how is the telling of stories, the ones we don’t want to hear, the stories that are not self-affirming, how do they get heard? When the story is how we have it wrong and need to change, how is that story told? What happens when the story asks the viewer to consider changing perspective, actions, and values because the current values, beliefs and attitudes are wrong-minded? In other words, what happens when the story to be told threatens the status quo of the viewer, in fact, suggests the viewer has it all wrong? That’s a hard story for the artist to tell and keep an audience.
Does the artist calling for change have to curtail the harshness of the story? It’s the same question activists wrestle with. For example, advice for communicating about the climate emergency states ‘don’t make the message too unpleasant (too much the truth); that will only turn people off.’
Playwright George Bernard Shaw learned from poet T. S. Elliott who said, give your audience something attractive to draw them in, then wham them with the hard story you wish them to hear. Shaw as a committed Fabian spent hundreds of hours in the cold and late into the night speaking on street corners and in auditoriums. He was a beautiful speaker, urging his society to change, but little came of it. Yes he was celebrated by those sharing his ideas. But those in the society he felt should change, paid no attention. He followed Elliott’s advice and turned to humour in his playwrighting. The theatres filled with an eager audience to see Shaw’s plays. At one time Shaw had three productions running on Broadway and the West End. He was the most dominant artist of his time. Always, Shaw was challenging the assumptions of his society, showing up its hypocrisy. For all of Shaw’s effort, did society change? Did people come to the plays for the story or for the exquisite drama?
The British playwright, Edward Bond, abandoned the West End. He was fed up with his audience, despite them filling the house every night. He was writing plays critical of bourgeois values and attitudes. The audience, the very people he was critical of, applauded his plays, loved going out to the theatre to see his plays. They took in nothing of the critique his plays were presenting. They the theatre pleased with the evening to carry on their same ways. Can the artist make a difference with an unwelcome story or is it all to naught, the deep evolutionary brain too strong a force resisting change?
Maybe Bond and Shaw’s work added to others’ stories, and eventually with time and repetition, society changes. What historians seem to say is change comes because the reason for the beliefs fade away. Of course, there’s always shock, but then Bond was quite shocking. But shock that changes things comes with consequences, consequences of disruption. Suffering.
As the June PhotoBox recorded, a survey of the primary climate scientists by The Guardian showed them to be in despair, some giving up their life-long work. For decades they have warned of serious consequences to our continued use of fossil fuels. And no one paid attention. Not really. The consequences as predicted are upon us. Homes on floodplains and on coastal exposures are costing billions to replace. More damage and cost of life and money is ahead with extreme weather becoming normal. The cycle of seasons that our food production and quality of life counted on in the past is now unpredictable. Our lives now unsettled. No one had wanted to hear the environmental story. Even today, some political leaders are bold to say there is no climate crisis. Shocking consequences eventually force change comes forcing change. Only when the consequences are dire and forcing themselves on us will we admit to the need to stop using fossil fuels.
Unfortunately, by then, it’s too late to do much about it except learn to live with those dire consequences. Or collapse. For interest, you might read the book 1177: The Year Civilization Collapsed. Not to get too gloomy!
The October PhotoBox Story: A Hard Story to Tell
As you might guess from the lead-up just presented, the context I offer for this month’s image may not be one you want to hear. The Photobox is an experiment. It asks questions. This gift of the photo is with the aim to spark a conversation. This month’s question is how I am to tell you a story you don’t want to hear, that everything in you will resist hearing. If we both share the same story, then we are fine. But if not, if this is a new story, unpleasant as it is, how will you hear the story?
I’m not patient, skilled enough or smart enough to do a good job with slowly drawing in an audience, laying out an alternative reality to the status quo, convincing another to listen, allowing one to safely consider an alternative perspective. I don’t know how to point out hypocrisy and not offend the viewer. I implicate myself in the hypocrisy, but still I ask, how might that story be shared? Essentially, this PhotoBox experiment is me crying out for help. Here’s what I see, I am trying to say; here’s what is challenging my sense of self. What do I do? My presenting this context for the October PhotoBox story is really to keep my sanity, is a cry out for help, to have a conversation about what is a painful account of ourselves. Help!
The Story
If you are reading this, I expect you like the image ‘Crossing the River’. You might say it is a lovely image, perhaps affirms you in a feeling of seeing a beautiful image full of soft tones depicting a gentle moment of idyllic ease.
That could be my story, but the image, what is behind it, what I know of the situation, asked a different story of me. It is not a story you or I want to hear, and especially, to ponder. I feel compelled to speak it, but I don’t know how to present it without you resisting. Good luck then, reading on.
First are background facts about the image, safe enough for you to read. The image is the crossing of a river in Nepal. A ferry-driver transports people from one side of the river to the other. The river is within a conservation area. One side of the river is a road taking one through the conservation area. The other side of the river is a village, and a road somewhere else. The villagers cross the river in the morning to head down the road to their daily work and then return back home in the evening. The top image is the villagers returning from a long day of labour, crossing back to their village. They are tired from hard, physical work. They earn about a dollar for their day’s labour.
The bottom photo is another crossing, quite different you’ll notice. One passenger. Four ferry-drivers in attendance. The passenger you might surmise from the camera, is a tourist. The camera cost as much as three years income for any of the local people.
The last sentence of the previous paragraph likely raised your defenses, put your brain on guard. Knowing we Canadians identify with the bottom image, the mention of unequal wealth threatens our sense of self being right-minded. As the June PhotoBox described at length, we have our ways around this: we might tell ourselves that they are happy with their lives, or we tell ourselves we work hard and deserve what we have, or, well, we admit that’s the way of the world, even the luck of the draw.
Let us continue with a context for the image, with some other facts that seem relevant to the image. The U.N. reported a decade or so ago (likely more skewered now) that twenty percent of the world’s population (us) uses eighty percent of the world’s resources to indulge our lifestyles. On the other side, eighty percent of the world’s peoples live on only twenty percent of the world’s resources.
So…. it’s not as if we, our countries, possess eighty percent of the world’s resources. No, we go out and get resources from other sovereign territories. Have done this for some time. Is the reason for the expansive wealth we enjoy.
There’s a history of this. The ancient Greeks, making for themselves an affluent civilization, had no home-based resources. They went out and conquered the world. The Macedonian, Alexander the Great – and this is not how he is taught in school, but what the historians tell us now – was a brutal, brutal warrior. And this brutal man did well for Greek culture spreading it throughout the world; and did well enriching his own society. In the same measure, the British did well for British culture and British wealth. Just think what built all those “Downton Abbeys.”
And what about ourselves in our turn? How have we done well for ourselves in the world? We enjoy richly affluent lives in the west, a lot of us, not all of us, of course. We enjoy affluence because, yes, we do have resources of wealth and education, but also, let’s face it, we do because at our core is a military-industrial complex that exceeds in its military power above all. We get what we want. We use our power to get resources from elsewhere, from around the world, as we desire it, to pad our lives.
Europeans built ships and became excellent at navigation. The Portuguese and Dutch showed the way. The Dutch, a small country bare of resources, became the richest nation in Europe, massive wealth pouring in from their seafaring exploration of the world. Britain and others were quick to follow the Dutch strategy, sailing the wide and distant seas. The British East India Company, a private company of shareholders, run by nine men in London, had a larger standing army than the British Crown. The Brits took all they wanted with the tip of their musket and canon. The British people didn’t have colour-fast cotton, spices, tea, opium, rare jewels lying in the ground. The East Indian continent did. Yes, the Brits were nice and polite when they first arrived in the east; bore gifts from the King. These polite, smart-looking sailors from foreign parts were welcomed in as traders and guests by the Mughals. Soon enough the British had made puppets of them all.
With pressure after decades of protest, our society has come to some honesty admitting to the wiles of our forebears’ Colonialism and Empire. Historically, that is. Those bad people in the past, whom we are increasingly willing to condemn. And by default, in condemning the colonial leadership, we hold to account the citizens of the realm who benefitted from colonialism and supported their leaders’ empire building, a colonialism that gave them colour-fast cotton, tea, spices and all things nice.
Now the hard part of this story arrives, what the evolutionary biology of your brain will defend you against, the story you or I don’t want to hear, that may well stop you reading. The story I don’t know how to present to you otherwise. I fear it is the same self-righteous hypocrisy George Bernard Shaw was after.
We are removing the record of the former Colonialists and Empire builders who were honoured in our public spaces with bronze statues and names of institutions that were meant to honour them forever – for in their day they did do well for Queen and country, making their beneficiaries rich and affluent. Now, we remove those colonialists’ names once honoured. We change the name of a university, a road, a park; we remove a statue. Our museums, some more than others, are returning historic artifacts to the people or places from which they were taken.
Making amends for the abusive colonialism of the past is a good thing. No question. But it’s not the hard part, as hard as some want to make it. No. Not the hard part. It should be that we study history so as not to repeat it. That we learn from history. The hard part of this story being told you now is that we haven’t learned much. Call it hypocrisy.
While our society points to colonialism as an immoral abuse of sovereign peoples and while those enabling colonialism in the past are now condemned, the hard story told us from those outside our little developed world circle of twenty percent is that we aren’t any better than the colonists and colonial beneficiaries of the past. No better than the ones we condemn. That’s hard to take. What? Canadians. Us? Exploiters? I can hear the indignation and rage already. As I said, the really hard part of the story to accept.
Thing is we’re still the tourist with the camera. Still parading through other sovereign territories, taking what we can for our indulgence.
One example: our cell phones require cobalt or they won’t work as they do. Cobalt is very rare in the world. Abundant in the Congo, little anywhere else. We want our phones. At competitive pricing. Just like our forebears, we the privileged first world take the cobalt because we want it, take it from a sovereign country as we will, with our fist. We force the children of the Congo to go into holes to get the cobalt for us, children who should be in school. We wouldn’t send our children into highly dangerous mines instead of sending them to school, but we’ll send in Congolese children to get our cobalt for us, children of another nation. Us good Canadians do that today. Young men mine cobalt, young men trying to support a family, just like we Canadians do, but these Congolese young men, unlike our young men, are dying young from health complications caused by them getting our cobalt for us, by them bound to us by slavery and indenture.
Roger Casement (1864-1916), British diplomat, reported on human rights abuses committed by his fellow citizens, colonists, in the Congo no less, and later with the rubber extraction in Peru. Casement was executed for treason. He was quite possibly, as some historians argue, set up by a fraudulent smear campaign run by the British state. Even so, he did go off the rails, turning to fight for independence of his Irish homeland. Truth is, I feel, to give him some credit against the case accusing him of treason, some credit to him in hindsight, might be that he had reason to give up on the society that had honoured him with a knighthood; that he despaired of a public that had applauded and rewarded him for his reporting human rights abuse, but in the end, a nation that cared little for his story of British oppression in other sovereign states. Nothing really changed despite all his efforts. It didn’t suit the citizens to change, all of them loving the benefits of the colonialism. No moral appeal by Casement could sway them from their status quo.
Siddharth Kara, author of the book Cobalt Red: How the blood of the Congo powers our lives, is today the voice of our generation as Roger Casement was for his, a voice for change, a voice like Casement’s, left to the margins. Dr. Kara is associate professor at Nottingham University; fellow with the Carr Centre for Human Rights Policy, Harvard University; Pulitzer Prize finalist; and for this book, winner of the Frederick Douglass Book Prize. We honour him, but nothing much else. Apple, Tesla, all of them, know of the exploitation of sovereign peoples in the Congo – we, you and I, we now know, too- but the exploitation carries on, our society no different than that of our colonist forebears who knowingly did nothing over the abuses of rubber extraction.
If the assembly line at Apple broke down it would be attended to immediately, no cost too great to get it up and running. Children suffering and dying getting Apple’s raw materials, well, a different story. A lot of promises. We let the companies representing us, let them off the hook, year after year. You see, we like the benefits of our colonialism, love our phones, love competitive pricing.
The British public knew of the horrors of the slave trade, the abuse of human dignity and the daily, unwarranted death of other human beings of other sovereign states. The trade of human beings as if animals contributed to the wealth of the nation. For years did the British debate the issue of slavery in parliament. For years public discourse went on, even while knowing people were dying every single day. How many years was it of speeches decrying slavery, delivered by some of the greatest orators in British history, on and on, year after year, doing nothing for years while thousands of human beings suffered great hardship and indignity. What Apple and Tesla and governments are doing now, actually … and we’re indulging them, doing nothing in protest, afraid to be without our phones. A lot of talk and promise, the companies saying how much they are doing and then doing nothing, as Dr. Kara reveals, yet we are relieved that we have that excuse to carry on. All of us complicit. Not the story we want to know of ourselves.
Not a pretty story. Do we remove Apple’s name and all the other tech companies’ names, dishonour them for getting our cobalt for as cheap as possible, at the cost of human lives, knowingly doing that? Or just let them talk on and on, their corporate symbols emblazoned everywhere. Just like our forebears did putting up bronze statues, naming streets and universities after the enablers. Promise and promise. For years. They tell us they are doing something. Satisfies us, our need to be right-minded.
Truth is, hard truth, we don’t want to hear the story, let alone take action…just like our forebears. Something about our brain, how we can’t be in the wrong. Something about our need to defend the status quo. We can’t be the fools; no, just those colonialists in the past were fools. We like our phones too much.
It’s there in our heads, our perception. See what we want to see -something like that. Can’t be in the wrong, not us -something like that. How can change come about? Justice done? The exploitation of other human beings set right?
Let’s leave this PhotoBox story there. It could go on with talk about the climate crisis responsibility, or the fashion production industry, or Canadian mining company policies throughout the world where half the world’s mining companies are Canadian-owned, or continue with the recent report of firm Price Waterhouse Coopers on the high environmental cost of AI and where all the huge profits are going to go. This context could go on with talk of hope for change. Could go on with talk of the human spirit, the phoenix rising.
Let’s leave it there. ‘Crossing The River.’ Another pretty picture. Or….Story to be told? Conversation to be had?