Restoring Vision -

How The Camera Can (Still) Be An Instrument Of Social Change

By Oliver McKenzie

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Once upon a time, we were arrested by the novelty of the sight and the medium. That was when photographic images still moved us. The Migrant Mother, The Burning Monk, The Man Before The Tank – all of these images (and indeed, the world’s reaction to them) epitomised photography’s then-radically-new power of bringing faraway realities into the direct experience of equally faraway audiences. 

Nowadays, photography’s once-radical newness is neither radical nor new. In fact, it could hardly be appreciated less. Those same images, which once could provoke the most profound moral and emotional responses in their audiences, now glide over dull eyes, forgotten in the same instant they are observed. Photographs in our culture today enjoy the same status, perhaps as air particles: objects consumed, produced and exchanged in unconscious constancy.

Once upon a time, the photograph really had the power to effect change. Examples abound “from the commune of Paris in 1871, the first political uprising to be captured by a camera, to the 1990s anti-globalisation movement.” In its rare and dramatic occurrence, the virtues of the photograph could take effect, conferring upon actual events the qualities both of the real and the symbolic, producing an artistic document with a universal effect.

It is sad to say that such a characterisation of photography as an agent of change no longer rings true. If, in their scarcity, photographs assumed significance, now in their hyper-abundance, they seem to have lost all value entirely. Not only this, as our culture moves further and further into the realm of post-truth, with new computational technologies conferring upon photography the newfound ability for fabrication, its once close association with reality is becoming all the more dubious.

If the image is beyond salvation, I want to know if this precious art form of ours, once indispensable in furthering the goals of our progressive social movements, has any role yet to play in addressing the environmental crisis. As the following lines will attempt to argue, the answer, I believe, lies in returning to the photographic process itself. In this world of photographic abundance and possibility, how estranged from this process can we really be? 

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Everyone, except the writer, takes language for granted. The only practices more ubiquitous than photography in our modern world are, for now, the written and the spoken word. Language may not have fallen into the same diabolical abyss as photography, but the two are at least comparable as things we are raised to possess in a kind of unqualified way. We all have language without being linguists; we all have (phone) cameras without being photographers. 

A certain paradox exists in this current state of affairs, in which “at the moment of photography’s technical replacement by the screen, algorithm and data flow, photographic cultures proliferate like never before.” In other words, we are so close yet so far: never more attached to cameras but never more detached from their function as relational tools with the power to capture, express and transform the way reality is perceived and not perceived.

Still, I found cause for optimism last year in a series of photography workshops I delivered with a creative-health charity, to participants whose mental health could be said to negatively affect their relationship with their environment. It turned out that all that was required for these participants to develop a more inspired and positive relationship with reality was the slightest of mental shifts – made possible by the simple assignment to consider the world as a photographic subject. 

The idea was to capitalise on the well-known potential of photography to realise the aesthetic value in the mundane, thereby aiding participants in (re)imagining their environment in aesthetic terms and consequently dispelling feelings of alienation created by an anxious or depressive mindset. In effect, the photographic process was instrumental in participants’ rediscovery of a personal connection with the world, one expressible using the photographic apparatus available to them.

What can be taken from this? It’s evident that, at large, our society experiences a generalised kind of alienation from nature and the world, reinforced by a modern photographic culture in which the self (and the selfie) is supreme, and the world is subordinate. We ought to recognise the potential of engaging in photographic processes to help us as individuals to develop vision and awareness of a natural world that sorely needs this.

It follows that the environmental crisis has also been described as a crisis of imagination. Our attentive, creative and reflective energies in photography are constrained, appropriated and redirected in such a way that we forget the world along with our place within it. If nothing else, a mindful photographic practice should expand one's imaginative field while making us more impressionable to the world that we privilege as a photographic subject.

The success of the program’s participants in creating meaningful, expressive and original photography was remarkable. What this would suggest is that we’re also all in possession of a latent potential in photography, conditioned by a visual culture that endows us with a significant degree of visual literacy together with a basic aptitude in photography (albeit undermined by factors of technological automation and the limited cultural function photography has come to serve).

Needless to say, photography is not a solution to the environmental crisis. Instead, I imagine it as being the most promising starting point. What better device exists to reconnect us to the world than the one that each and every one of us already lives our life permanently attached to? The reality is that environmental consciousness is, for most of us, not a starting point but an end goal that can be arrived at through incremental steps of cultivating concern. 

Photography once gave ultimate strength to these social movements because it promised to overcome their foremost obstacle: that of the apathy of the general population, creating an emotional and imaginative connection between a detached person and an issue of importance. I’ve tried to argue that, with the demise of the image, what is left is for individuals to engage in the photographic process in order to cultivate this connection for themselves.

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In no art form is the connection between the individual and the world more inextricable than in photography. In this connection, the photograph becomes the meeting point of the ideal and the real, and the photographic process, a trajectory for the progressive imagination. We start by observing our world, then we find visual expression for our relationship to it, and finally, hopefully, we take action. Lights, camera, action.