seeing white

text from the catalogue

"There is something at stake in looking at, or continuing to ignore white racial imagery. As long as race is something only applied to non-white peoples, as long as white people are not racially seen and named, they/we function as a human norm. Other people are raced, we are just people."
(Richard Dyer 1997, p. 1)

In this work I want to confront whiteness as "normal" in South Africa, which continues to be an abnormal society. Whiteness - as a system of power relations - remains invisible to those who are white and consequently white privilege is largely taken for granted.

White people need to be aware of their whiteness - not in the sense of being overwhelmed by guilt or of feeling powerless because they are trapped by forces of history bigger than themselves, but aware in the sense that they can take responsibility for the future and not get stuck as victims of the past.

This is difficult because the flip side of the victim mentality of being white is to take advantage of the privilege that whiteness bestows and call it normal, choosing not to see that this is a construct of power which "makes its presence felt in black life, most often as a terrorising imposition, as power that wounds, hurts, tortures" (bell hooks 1992, p. 169).

It is also difficult because even white liberals are so often angry and defensive when attention is drawn to their whiteness or when they are accused of being racist. "Often their rage erupts because they believe that all ways of looking that highlight difference subvert the liberal belief in a universal subjectivity (we are all just people) that they think will make racism disappear. They have a deep emotional investment in the myth of 'sameness', even as their actions reflect the primacy of whiteness as a sign informing who they are and how they think" (bell hooks 1992, p. 167).

The photographic images are not portraits nor are they intended to be representative of white life, in a documentary sense. It is an attempt to turn "the critical gaze from the racial object to the racial subject" (Toni Morrison 1992, p. 90), to look afresh at what appears to be normal, ordinary, insignificant moments of being white in South Africa and to recognise what Richard Dyer calls "their particularity" He suggests that "whiteness needs to be made strange" (Richard Dyer 1997, p. 10).

We must be willing to face ourselves as others know us. We must begin to imagine what it must be like to be the "other" for a black someone. Penny Siopis (1999, p. 255) talks about the "paradox" of otherness as "the need to have categories or binaries that construct the solidarity required to effect political change on the one hand, yet the need to dismantle the selfsame binaries to challenge the power relations that structure "woman", "native", "other" and so on, as lesser." In the context of whiteness, this irony - the need for binaries as a means towards achieving the end of living without their harmful effects - can be expressed in a different way: we have to make whiteness explicit in order to strip it of its power to construct itself as the un-interrogated norm.

Melissa Steyn speaks about this explicit awareness - raising in a different way. She says that "by becoming conscious of the narratives that inform our identities, we empower ourselves not to continue acting them out" (1999, p. 266).

In a way I want to "objectify" whiteness. This is why these images are not portraits. I am not interested in the individual that I have photographed. They just happen to appear at that place at that time. These individual whites have become signifiers of white people.

An implication of using white individuals as signifiers is that they loose their personal characteristics, their histories, relationships and choices. We can no longer "locate racism within the individual and not think institutionally or culturally about racism" (Alice McIntyre 1997, p. 87). In this sense I want to depersonalise racism.

At the same time I am also interested in debunking the myth of individualism - that at some level we can just be individuals, that we can imagine ourselves as separate from the broader social construct in which we find ourselves and which has shaped our racial identities. Individualism allows us to narrowly focus on ourselves without recognising the web of privilege in which we are tangled up. This "(i)ndividualism lies at the very core of a white patriarchal class-based culture that prides itself on pursuing individual rights and gaining material and political resources in order to maintain power and advantage" (Alice McIntyre 1997, p. 100) and it allows us to not take responsibility for how that power and advantage was gained and sustained.

I have deliberately not chosen images that also include black people - I want people to see white people as raced without the presence of the Other. I don't want to use the "non-white subject ...as a means for knowing the white self" (Richard Dyer 1996, p. 13). I want white people to be the object and not to have the attention drawn away by the inevitable focus on the relation between black and white. I don't want to perpetuate an "impression that whiteness is only white or only matters, when it is explicitly set against non-white" (ibid).

The deliberate use of a plastic camera with very limited technical capabilities is an attempt to further suggest the ordinariness of the images and to remove as much as possible the intervention of myself as photographer. I wanted images that portrayed the deliberate normality of scenes, which do not appear to have been interpreted by the artist.

In writing about Jo Ractliffe's body of work re Shooting Diana, Brenda Atkinson (1999, p. 33) suggests that the plastic camera "stripped control from the artist-as-author-of-reality, by constraining the degree to which the 'quality' of the image could be manipulated and contrived." In other words, there is less of a sense that these images have been constructed intentionally. The images could technically fall "within the modest genre of the snapshot" (ibid).

In a way this makes them images that anyone could have taken and everyone has seen and suggests a mundane familiarity. I want to present a familiar version of reality and then challenge it. My intention is to question the 'reality', the set of assumptions of white South Africans. The use then of black and white film mimics a documentary approach in order to be taken seriously.

However, I also do not believe that images are adequate to communicate fully by themselves. "The image (photo) essentially provides an ambiguous, and therefore vague framework of associations" (A Hapkemeyer 1996, p. 10). Images themselves do not necessarily challenge stereotypical responses. They do not necessarily ask the viewer to look at a familiar situation differently. "The image defines an object in its visual manifestation without ambiguity but cannot make reliable statements about the possible meanings or implications of that object" (ibid). An image is "affected by the intentions of those who record it" (Peter Weiermair 1996, p. 34) as well as by those who view it. I do not want my work to be understood as just another interesting look at white life in South Africa. I do not want viewers to walk past an image and think, "yes, here is white life described - we have seen this before" and walk on.

The use of words then can direct the intention of the viewer. As Duane Michals (1984) explains: "writing helps me to tighten the odds by structuring more of what the person is experiencing". Indeed, "(l)anguage can indeed precisely specify emotional or intellectual content and provoke questions" (A Hapkemeyer 1996, p. 10).

Duane Michals (1996, p. 139) suggests that language can enhance photography in a symbiotic relationship where language complements the image "as a form of suggestion into what cannot be seen within two dimensional space". Significantly, he does not see this as "an abandonment of the image but an expansion of the possibilities of expression" (ibid).

I am using text to invite another reading of the images. On the one hand the images seem inconsequential, to be given a cursory glance, but interpreted through the words, they become meaningful. I am inviting the viewer to read the image, and in this case, the photograph must be literally read through the words.

The text is not part of the image however, although it might appear so at first glance. The formal separation of the image from the text is significant for two reasons. Firstly, it enables "the photograph to generate a text of its own that is both related to and very different from the text provided" (Peter Weiermair 1996, p. 35). In some cases words already exist in the image, which then resonate with the text provided and create further layers of meaning. In addition, the text often produces its own image in the mind of the reader/viewer, which has to be correlated with the given image.

Secondly, the text is part of the framing of the image - how we view and understand the image. The words are embedded in the glass, a transparent medium that is made opaque by the words. Therefore the words serve to obstruct the transparency of the viewing, they serve to obstruct a reflexive understanding of the image. They serve to make unclear what before might have seemed clear or taken for granted.

The size and placement of the text ensures that the viewer cannot avoid the words and therefore cannot avoid the viewing the image in the context that I have created.