The Passive Gaze

I got into a heated debate over a photograph a few years ago. Posted on Facebook, the photo – rendered in sepia – was a close-up of a woman who, based on the creases on her scrawny face, looked like she was in her sixties. With her dishevelled hair, skewed left eye and an overall forlorn expression, one could tell – at least at the time the photo was taken – that she didn’t live a comfortable life.

Something was unsettling about how the woman appeared as though she wasn’t ready to have her picture taken – let alone posted on social media – with the photographer’s signature in the lower-right corner and a title as caption: ‘persona ambrosia’. The feeling it produced in me led me to ask the photographer in the comments –in a passive-aggressive tone reminiscent of my youth – what separated this photo from those that make art out of the lives of the poor. Perhaps this was my way of bringing to attention what could be an unconscious exploitation of the subject.

Comments came in before the photographer could respond. One was from a close friend who, in the photographer’s defence, argued that beautiful people weren’t the only ones who deserve to be photographed, and that perhaps I was the one projecting malice onto the photo. This brought to mind the question: what does it really mean to be seen?

In ‘Freak Show’ (1973), a critique of Diane Arbus’ photography published in The New Yorker, Susan Sontag argued that merely photographing people marginalised by society – nudists, circus performers, odd looking people, people with dwarfism and other developmental disabilities – does not necessarily make them any more visible than it makes them a spectacle: ‘Arbus’s work shows people who are pathetic, pitiable, as well as horrible, repulsive, but it does not arouse any compassionate feelings.’⁰¹

Compassion – associated with socially committed artmaking – is most often absent in the regime of autonomous art predicated on a universalist bias. For those whose practice of criticism is limited only to classifying works as either art or non-art – as though this classification is all there is to artmaking – humans all seem to suffer more or less equally, regardless of material conditions. It is a view that renders compassion – which they mistake for pity – irrelevant. Defending Arbus from Sontag, art critic Sebastian Smee concluded an article in the Washington Post: ‘We needn’t pity them any more than we pity ourselves.’⁰²

But the claim that we all stand on equal ground falters before the realities of the gaze. When framing a subject, the photographer does not merely capture an image but also shapes the conditions of its reception by the spectator. Most often an intellectual too, the viewer – as the bearer of the gaze – also holds power over the subject.

Posted without context,⁰³ the woman’s portrait was framed to be contemplated aesthetically,  revealing nothing about her aside from what appeared to be a difficult life. Photography, in this case, eclipsed the subject so entirely that no one in the comments thread, myself included, asked who she was.⁰⁴ Instead, one commenter even remarked that the photo was on par with that of National Geographic’s Afghan Girl (1985), the infamous portrait of a 12-year old refugee, whose shot by photographer Steve McCurry and circulation was later exposed and criticised by photographer Tony Northrup as exploitative.⁰⁵

The comparison between the two photographs is unsurprising. Much like the nameless old woman in the photo in question, Sharbat Gula – the name of the Afghan girl – remained unknown until she was located again decades later. And as with Gula’s portrait for which, in Northrup’s words, McCurry posed her ‘like an 80’s glamour shot’,⁰⁶ the woman’s picture was taken as though it was a part of an oeuvre. By so doing, it treated her only as a means to showcase the photographer to an audience who could only admire or ignore the subject – an other – but not feel anything, let alone compassion. Sontag called this a ‘self-willed test of hardness.’ Writing further on Arbus, for Sontag ‘The point is not to be upset, to be able to confront the horrible with cheerfulness. But this look that is not compassionate is a special, modern ethical construction: not hard-hearted, certainly not cynical, but simply (or falsely) naïve.’⁰⁷

All this is, however applies within the confines of the art world. Photography as and in journalism has a higher problem. I was once in the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City with two friends looking at photos of Phan Thị Kim Phúc – known as the ‘Napalm Girl’ – and victims of Agent Orange. We exited the gallery only after a few minutes as the photos exhibited became increasingly disturbing. In ‘Photographs of Agony’, John Berger wrote: ‘As we look at them [war photographs], the moment of the other’s suffering engulfs us. We are filled with either despair or indignation. Despair takes on some of the other’s suffering to no purpose. Indignation demands action.’⁰⁸ Although the images certainly deepened our anti-war position, as viewers in the present confronting images of the past, we felt powerless to act on behalf of the subjects depicted.

In recent years, photos of thousands of victims of former Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte’s ‘War on Drugs’ have flooded media platforms. These pictures, taken by ‘nightcrawlers’ – photojournalists who closely tracked stories of extrajudicial killings – were crucial in exposing the anti-poor framework of Duterte’s war. Yet, the emotional impact they had on people largely remained a subject of speculation. Warning about these kinds of photos in The Emancipated Spectator, Jacques Rancière wrote: ‘If horror is banalized, it is not because we see too many images of it. But we do see too many nameless bodies, too many bodies incapable of returning the gaze that we direct at them, too many bodies that are an object of speech without themselves having a chance to speak.’⁰⁹

Should we, then, simply look away? But so much of contemporary life is built on the act of looking – primarily with aim to incite us to consume. Cities are saturated with images that promise convenience, beauty, belonging, a better life overall if we choose a certain brand over another. The same is true of our communication platforms. Our interactions are constantly interrupted by images designed to persuade us. Seemingly happy, content people whom we think we aspire to be, but most likely never will. Looking – and in this age of surveillance, being looked at – is almost inescapable.

This kind of visual field, I believe, has been designed to restrict our gaze to consumables, conditioning us to become blind to conditions behind what is shown. We are being shaped into passive gazers. The passive gaze readily accepts what it sees as truth and submits to its demands. Everything outside the frame becomes invisible. It does not question; it remains blind to power dynamics. The passive gaze sees beauty in suffering.

In John Carpenter’s film They Live (1988), the protagonist John Nada stumbles upon a box of sunglasses and reveals the ideology behind the texts and images that make up modern life. Desperate for his friend to see what he becomes able to see, Nada forces his friend to put on the glasses. Even after a bloody brawl, the friend refuses.

I believe that deep down, we do want to put on the glasses – or in Slavoj Žižek’s reading, to put down the invisible ones we’ve been unconsciously wearing for so long. As producers and spectators of images, it is worth thinking with Rancière once again: ‘[…] we need images of action, images of the true reality or images that can immediately be inverted into their true reality, in order to show us that the mere fact of being a spectator, the mere fact of viewing images, is a bad thing.’¹⁰