Twelfth International Conference on The Image

Abstract

Normal travel circumstances did not exist in 2020. Unable to travel far or deeply as I would as a photojournalist, I set off to explore Indiana where nearly 150 cities, towns, and even some lonely crossroads are named for foreign places. I could not enter them as I normally would. I was masked. I did not want to become a virus vector. I stood back and photographed quietly and at a distance. I stood outside of my subject, gazing downward at a quiet surface. This inevitably began to feel predatory, presumptuous, and bias confirming. The venerable dogma of photojournalism was summed up by The Family of Man curator Edward Steichen on his 90th birthday: “The mission of photography is to explain man to man and each man to himself,” he said. However, Susan Sontag and many after her observed that it could also be a predatory “sustained look downward” by outsiders obsessed with the exotic. “…essentially the camera makes everyone a tourist in other people’s reality, and eventually in one’s own,” she argued. I balked for decades at this criticism; my photojournalism work was intimate, empathetic, and a net social good. This paper describes and illustrates how an innocent exploration of Indiana landed me on philosophically foreign shores, how I returned with a deeper understanding of criticisms that had for decades failed to convince me, and how I might teach young photojournalists to constructively critique their own beliefs and actions.