For this exercise I have to reflect on how marginalised or under-represented people or groups in society can be badly or unhelpfully portratyed and whether being an insider might help combat this.
Marginalisation can be defined as:
Marginalisation – sometimes also called social exclusion – refers to the relegation to the fringes of society due to a lack of access to rights, resources, and opportunities. It is a major cause of vulnerability, which refers to exposure to a range of possible harms, and being unable to deal with them adequately.
Groups or people that can be thought of as marginal or under-represented include but are not limited to:
- Poor
- Homeless
- Problematic substance use (alcohol and drugs)
- Prison/offending
- Mental health problems
- Immigrants
In thinking about how these groups are represented it is necessary to consider their representation within art/photography and more widely in society, particularly the media.
Towards the end of the 19th century in the United States, books and sterographs were produced that documented the poor and immigrant communities in major US cities. Street Types of Great American Cities (1896) by Chicago photographer Sigmund Krausz ‘reinforced ethnic stereoptypes and cliches about urban workers and the poor’ (Marien, 2014). This demonstrates how marginalised groups can be ill-served by their portrayal in photography as images of them were used to reinforce stereotypes rather than dispell them.
However, around the same time photography was used in a more positive way to high-light the plight of the poor living in tenements in New York. Jacob Riis’ book How the Other Half Lives, published in 1890 exposed the living conditions of the poor in New York and contributed to the reform of tenament housing in the city.
Like Jacob Riis, Lewis Hine also produced work that brought into the public domain the plight of a marginalised group in the US, namely child workers. Working for the National Child Labour Committee between 1907 and 1918 (Marien, 2014), Hine took arond 5,000 photographs of child labour. His photographs supported the lobbying of the NCLC which saw the creation of the Children’s Bureau in 1912 and Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 which brought about the end of child labour in the United Sates. The idea of photography being used to high-light the plight of marginalised groups can also be seen in the work of photographer Dorthea Lange and Walker Evans Whilst working for the Farm Security Administration (FSA) in the 1930s.
Is work produced by insiders more likely to portray marginalised mebers of groups in society more positively? Nan Goldin’s work The Ballad of Sexual Dependency is an autobiographical series photographed by Goldin between 1979 and 1986. Although Goldin was raised in a middle-class suburb of Boston, her childhood was deeply impacted by the suicide of her sister when Goldin was 11 years old. By the age of fourteen she had left home.
The Ballad of Secual Dependency is an uncompromising but at the same time tender visual diary of her social circle. The work was first presented as a slide show and later published. Writing in The Guardian in 2014 the critic Sean O’Hagan wrote:
it portrayed her friends – many of them part of the hard-drugs subculture on New York’s lower east side – as they partied, got high, fought and had sex.
Sean O’Hagan, The Guardian, 23rd March 2014
Explicit and at times shocking, the work does is primarily documentary and does not seek to seek to justify the behaviour being photographed, or moralise about but merely to record it.
Ray’s a Laugh by British photographer and artist Richard Billingham is another work produced by an insider. The series was shot by Billingham over a six year period between 1990 and 1996, and series documents the life of Ray, Billingham’s unemployed, alcohloic father; Liz his over-weight, heavy smoking mother and Jason, his drug using younger brother. Like Goldin the work is uncompromising and at times uncomfortable to look at. Although it is easy as a viewer to make judgements about the characters in Billingham’s photographs, Billing himself insists that he was not seek to make any sort of poltical point about poverty or the workings of society, but rather he took the iamges as reference material for paintings whilst he was studying for his Fine Art degree.
I think the main issue that marginalised groups or people face when they are portrayed is their lack of a voice, they are reliant on others to tell of their plight or story. Because of this they lose control of their narrative and become part of someone else’s. This can be viewed as being benign, as in the case of work by Riis, Hine and Lange whose images were all used to try and bring about social reforms and improved conditions for the social groups they photographed, but less so in the case Krausz.
Work produced by insiders can present marginalised figures in a different light as there is a shared narrative. Whilst this does not stop the photographers being uncompromising in what they shoot and show, their motivations are different and I think that does mean that the individuals are portrayed without the agenda that oursiders, even well intentioned outsiders, approach their work.
Sources
Inworkproject.eu. n.d. Marginalised And Vulnerable Groups. [online] Available at: <http://inworkproject.eu/toolbox/index.php/glossary-resources/glossary/marginalised-and-vulnerable-groups> [Accessed 1 April 2020].
Encyclopedia Britannica. n.d. Jacob Riis | Biography, Accomplishments, & Facts. [online] Available at: <https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jacob-Riis> [Accessed 1 April 2020].
Marien, M., 2014. Photography. 4th ed. London: King, p.202.
Remes, O., 2007. Reinterpreting Unconventional Family Photographs: Returning To Richard Billingham’s ‘Ray’s A Laugh’ Series” (2007). [online] AMERICAN SUBURB X. Available at: <https://americansuburbx.com/2010/04/theory-reinterpreting-unconventional.html> [Accessed 12 April 2020].
O’Hagan, S., 2014. Nan Goldin: ‘I Wanted To Get High From A Really Early Age’. [online] the Guardian. Available at: <https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/mar/23/nan-goldin-photographer-wanted-get-high-early-age> [Accessed 12 April 2020].
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