Decolonise Your Gaze How Colonial Are Your Travel Pictures?
Who is chatting?
Hengameh Yaghoobifarah (journalist), Vitjitua Ndjiharine (visual artist) and Lucia Halder (curator) chat with you about the continuities of the colonial gaze in contemporary travel photography.Concept and further authors: Regine Hader, Elisa Jochum
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Hey everybody! Travel culture – especially white Europeans travelling to the global South as backpackers or humanitarians – is criticised for being neocolonial. Both in orientalist and colonialist history as well as in contemporary travel culture, the documentation of travel via text and image has played a significant part. Classic motives are the “white saviour” and grateful poor Black or Brown children as well as random snapshots taken without the consent of locals who are displayed on the pictures.
New technologies provide all that is needed to spread the footage from private albums or camera rolls on the World Wide Web: the snapshots become part of social media feeds, blogs or art projects (of which the people depicted on the pictures are rarely aware); group photographs tend to become profile pictures on Tinder or Facebook. There is even a blog project on this phenomenon that shows how widespread the practice is:
https://humanitariansoftinder.com/
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Dear Hengameh, thanks for these inspiring words! I would first like to draw attention to the historical dimension of this phenomenon.
In the middle of the 19th century, three phenomena developed almost simultaneously and were very closely intertwined:
1. Colonial expansion from Europe
2. The invention of photography
3. The emergence of ethnology
As the world grew bigger from a European point of view, the West’s hunger for images from the „unknown” became ever greater. Photography promised objectivity and authenticity. That was very much in keeping with the efforts of the time to capture, document, map and classify the world and its inhabitants. So today’s visual patterns of depicting “the other” go way back.
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Most European travellers try to justify themselves by denying the existence of power structures and colonial continuities, when confronted with the criticism about white gaze, the reproduction of stereotypical images, the practice of romanticising poverty as well as the lack of privacy and of respect for locals. These travellers use their freedom of movement as a right to be ignorant. But even without the layers on race and class, power structures are already manifested in photography as a medium: according to Roland Barthes, there is an analogy between taking a picture and shooting a person. The photographer has always power over the photographed objects. At the same time, all people like documenting their lives and memories. So my question is: how to deal with this difficult phenomenon?
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In my opinion, questioning stereotypes is questioning inequalities. The first ethnological image archives collected strictly formalised, so-called “type” images and highly problematic images of physical anthropology – the degradation of an individual to a type on the basis of physical characteristics. These stereotypes still have an effect today.
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Hi. This is an interesting topic in many different ways. Apart from the historical implications mentioned above, there’s also the aspect of social media and contemporary communicative technology, and how they can shape the conversation for future contexts.
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Do you all agree with Barthes’ quote?
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Yes, I do. There is power in photography and whoever takes the picture has the power!
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The consequence of Barthes’ theory also means: when you take a selfie, you take back the power of the gaze and break the paradigm of power dynamics in photography.
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When I look at the “Humanitarians of Tinder”, it’s easy to see the power structures at play.
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Interestingly, the only selfies of the genre above that are widespread are taken by Western or white people, never by locals.
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Yes, and on this “Humanitarians of Tinder” site, I see these power structures built in: 1. A European tourist whose presence represents economic activity 2. The owner or holder of a photographic device 3. The keeper of the photograph (to gaze at it later or to use it for other purposes).
It would be interesting to see if, comparatively, any Black people living in, and being from, the Western world (e.g., Afro-Europeans or African-Americans) take such pictures.
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There are also Black and Brown Westerners doing humanitarian work in the global South, but the highest percentage is white Westerners.
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So we are talking about the power structures inscribed in the photographic processes of production, distribution and reception. But what about the people being depicted (if the images are not only selfies)?
There’s a quote from Susan Sontag, similar to the one mentioned by Hengameh: “Still there is something predatory in the act of taking a picture. To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed.”
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Thank you for this quote, Lucia. The aspect of objectification brings us back to the power structures and the dichotomies inscribed in this practice: white saviour vs Black/Brown victim, rich vs poor, superior vs inferior, etc. So, what should the consequence be?
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So such images always get taken when a Western tourist goes to the “non-Western world” – it doesn’t matter if the photographer is white or Black.
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Images of the Black/Brown victims are inscribed in many Westerners’ minds. Such images also provide numerous Westerners with a constructed concept of what the “developing world” and its people look like. When we bring in the aspect of social media, we see how these images are normalised and reproduced by everyone.
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So it takes both: on the one hand individual awareness as suggested here: https://www.radiaid.com/social-media-guide on the other hand, awareness on a structural level, that is, among institutions and media of collective visual memory.
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This means: we need counterimages!
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What would this mean for institutions like ethnological institutes at universities or museums and galleries?
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The production of images, whether physical or mental, is always an active process. For a museum such as the one I work for, this means: 1. Opening up the photo archives and engaging with the historical images without merely reproducing them 2. Actively putting counterimages on display
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I agree that individual awareness is important. In addition to the necessary self-awareness on the individual level, it is very important that museums open up the archives and produce counterimages.
While I do agree that there is a white saviour complex involved here, I cannot begin to give an answer about how to deal with this complex. It’s not something with which I am familiar. I think there is work that white people need to do on themselves. Critical reflection, etc.
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I agree. That’s probably the difficult part. But I do believe in the power of the arts to dismantle hegemonic narratives. You, too?
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Yes, I agree. The problem is also binary.
What @Hengameh wrote here is what I mean by binary. So it’s important to approach the issue from two different perspectives. Maybe even more. As we question old modes of representation and the power structures embedded in them, we also have to create new modes of representation – by producing counternarratives and amplifying diverse voices.
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Yes, definitely! That’s what I meant by “institutions and media of collective visual memory”. Like photo agencies, etc.
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While also addressing problems like the white saviour complex and white superiority (which is based on myths).
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There are approaches to multiperspectivity. To give only a few examples:
www.nativeagency.org/
https://www.reclaimphoto.com/
http://femalephotographers.org/
https://www.romarchive.eu/de/
http://www.gesellschaftsbilder.de/
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I’m just quickly going through these.
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Still, there is the question of how to decolonise one’s touristic gaze...
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This is my answer: Take a picture of yourself instead.
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I really like Hengameh’s thoughts on the selfie. Make a picture yourself! Photography as a visual tool for empowerment.
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@Dear readers,
what do you think? Do we need to decolonise our travel pictures and how can we do it? What would you like to talk about in the upcoming weeks? Send us a message with your suggestion!
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I think of Nayyirah Waheed’s provocation in her book Salt: “would you still want to travel to that country if you could not take a camera with you? – A question of appropriation”
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This quote is very interesting…perhaps not only a camera but even your smartphone? For me, it would be difficult to travel without a smartphone as I have no sense of orientation and need my maps. It would be a pity if I was not able to take pictures by which to remember the trip. But it would not have any effect on whether or not I would travel to a certain place. That being said, I never take pictures, when I travel, which display people without their consent.
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There’s truth in this...When a person takes a photograph, this picture depicts the photographed object exactly as this person perceives it. The media of painting and drawing use various hand techniques and the chemical properties of paint made from soil and plants to create images, and this based on models available to the artists. Today, photography, even when using the right equipment, still needs extensive work to achieve desired results. But a photo taken in the 19th century would not be that different from a photo taken by a digital device because the principles of this technology have remained unchanged. Any photographic object is still dependent on the specific definition of the photographer.
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Hey everyone! Exciting input...I'm wondering just now to what extent filters and representational practices on Instagram incorporate neocolonial patterns?! For example, via a “neo”-explorative mode of staging the self...by means of filters that virtually curate the background through the separation between the subject and the respective exotic holiday background as the object. (Voice from the “off”) Yes...admittedly, every selfie places the subject in the foreground and degrades everything else to a background – including tourism’s “distant landscapes”. The practice thus expresses a dichotomous power relationship as well.
