by Jingshan Wu
For when a ship is floating calmly along, the sailors see its motion mirrored in everything outside, while on the other hand they suppose that they are stationary, together with everything on board.
— Nicolaus Copernicus, On the Revolutions of Heavenly Spheres
The Sahel, 1985. Years of severe drought, poor harvests, and ongoing political conflicts have ignited a devastating famine from Ethiopia to West Africa. Hundreds of thousands of lives are lost, and millions are forced to leave their villages and migrate elsewhere (U.S Agency for International Development).
Near the shores of Lake Faguibine in Mali, a mother leads two young children through the desert. Up ahead in the white abyss, an older daughter looks back, as if to confirm, to wait, to urge. In this black-and-white photograph, a unified whiteness of the sky and the ground both blurs the boundary of space and encapsulates the subjects within. The family is confined in a sandy inferno, enduring the burning sunlight. The wind blows away their footprints, leaving only shrinking shadows wailing in agony. But before the children’s skinny limbs and swollen bellies drag the viewer into a trough of sorrow, the fluttering cloth behind the mother’s head halts our descent into despair. The visual grace that cloth exhibits as it catches the air and billows outward with liveliness demands that we acknowledge and appreciate the image from an angle that is both artistic and aesthetically pleasing. Faced with a landscape this symbolic, the mind might make an aesthetic move, perhaps reaching toward Dante to imagine souls journeying to the river Lethe, “where the spirits go to wash themselves…” (Alighieri 79). The photo captures the scene of a family searching for water and food on the deserted Lake Faguibine, but it tells a deeper story of a family struggling to find belonging and renewal in the land that nurtured their ancestors.
Devastating, yet beautiful—perhaps too beautiful. The dual effect of beauty and devastation is typical of Brazilian-born photographer Sebastião Salgado and exemplified in his collection Sahel: The End of the Road, which follows refugees in the Sahel region of Africa during the famine of the mid-’80s. Salgado’s other work continues to tell the story of humanity in movement and migration. He spent six years shuttling along the margins of human society for his collection Exodus, capturing landless farmers in Brazil, overcrowded trains in Bombay, and refugee camps in Rwanda (“Stories of Global Migration”).
Though Salgado’s work consistently juxtaposes beauty and devastation, this tension is not exclusive to him. There is a long-running debate about whether the aestheticization of documentary images undermines their political effectiveness and authenticity. In his essay “The Documentary Debate: Aesthetic or Anaesthetic?”, David Levi Strauss reviews and evaluates both sides of the debate by juxtaposing the arguments of New Yorker art critic Ingrid Sischy with those of Latin American critic Eduardo Galeano. On one side, Sischy proposes that “Beauty is a call to admiration, not to action,” and worries that such “beautification of tragedy” as Salgado exhibits in his documentary photography can desensitize people to others’ misery and lead to political inaction (qtd. in Strauss 5). On the contrary, Galeano claims Sischy’s critique is misused in assessing Salgado’s work. Unlike “consumer-society photographers” who “approach but do not enter” and “look without seeing” to make easy money off society’s fetish for poverty images, Salgado “photographs from inside, in solidarity” (qtd. in Strauss 6-7). In fact, Strauss contends that it is Sischy’s anti-aesthetic tendency that leads to political inaction and numbness, since “look[ing] right into the face of hunger, and then [representing] it in a way that compels other to look right in it as well” is turned into an “ideological crime” in Sischy’s line of argument (Strauss 8). Strauss questions the theory of aesthetics that views aestheticization as supplementary and asks: “Why can’t beauty be a call to action?” (9). Having established that “to represent is to aestheticize; that is, to transform,” Strauss raises what seems to be a more intellectually demanding and politically serious question: “What right have I to represent you?” (Strauss 9, 8).
Though Strauss does not provide a straightforward answer to his question, he ultimately seems to make the argument that the right of ‘I’ to represent ‘you’ lies in the attempt, no matter how difficult the process or how remote the chance of success, to pass through the distance between “disparate people” and reach out and understand the authentic ‘you’ (10). But whether there is a ‘you’ that is really separate from an ‘I’ becomes questionable when we think about how we come to understand the notions of ‘I’ and ‘you’ in the first place.
To retrieve the origins of ‘I’ and ‘You’, psychology studies provide a great starting point. When a newborn cries, surrounding newborns cry too (Simner 136). But this is a fleeting moment. As Lacan observes in his book Écrits: A Selection, most babies can identify their own reflection in the mirror by one year old (Lacan). Soon later, they will notice the physical disjunction between themselves and others and grasps the categorization of gender, race, and social class. The rules of social relations urge us to separate an ‘I’ from ‘you,’ but they do not justify why this is. The power of differentiation sets everything apart from everything else, yet it is in the mind where differentiation takes place. Thus, as everything else gets anchored into categories, the sense of self progressively dominates the unconscious mind, until the threshold where we recognize the uniqueness of an ‘I’ and cannot let it go.
The ontologically limited binary opposition of ‘I’ and ‘you,’ as a specific cultural categorization, illuminates the problematic tendency of Strauss’s question. To ask ‘What right have I to represent you?’ is to assume an intrinsic difference between people. As one takes the dualistic distinction between self and other for granted, the balance in between can be easily disturbed. Because ‘I’ think at the center of my mind, I quickly become supreme, the only subject while everything else is downgraded to objects. In this hierarchical subject-object relationship, the purity of differentiation quickly gives way to a sense of superiority, in which the purpose of comparison is not to understand but to exploit. Capitalism reinforces the solidified classification of ‘I’ and ‘you,’ pushing it into the deepest recesses of our subconscious so that we may treat others as means of production without guilt. This is what commercial or ‘consumer-society’ photographers are guilty of. They fly to the third world dreaming of capturing authentic faces, yet their cameras end up forcing their subjects into a consumer-friendly display.
Salgado seems different. He enters to see, not to use. His uniqueness is not only because he spent time among marginalized people, but because he allowed himself to be looked at. He is brave enough to penetrate the entrenched ‘I-you’ binary concept and recognize his reflection in his subject. Strauss ends his essay, and its discussion of the politics inherent in photography, with this thought from Marx: “Let us suppose that we had carried out our production as human beings . . . . Our products would be so many mirrors in which we saw reflected our essential nature” (Marx qtd. in Strauss 10). Salgado can show us authentic images because his work reflects an ‘essential nature’ that is shared with his subjects.
To align with a perspective like Salgado’s is to allow ourselves into a space of instability: a place that blurs ground and sky. Such a choice is as sublime as it is dangerous and terrifying. It means to face the instability between subjects; to accept it; to acknowledge the instability as part of ourselves, to acknowledge that we are instability. It is to realize that we are the victims who are suffering and marginalized, and, at the same time, the murderer who caused such tragedy.
Salgado’s photograph deconstructs our center of subjectivity the way astronomers have deconstructed the center of the universe. Humans observed the periodic rotation of the sun and the moon long before we recognized a broader cosmic order. In the Middle Ages, it was believed that God created us at the center of the universe; the Earth remains stationary, revolved around by all other heavenly bodies. This conceptual framework was visualized in Claudius Ptolemy’s subtle geocentric model, but eventually refuted by Nicolaus Copernicus’s elegant heliocentric model. As technology advances and our understanding continues to be refined, we have concluded that there is no center in the universe. We are just a random planet in a random solar system of some random galaxy, inside a universe expanding out of every point within it. Such discovery is exciting and terrifying, but does it hinder our existence? The answer is hardly yes. In everyday life, we still see the sun rise and the moon set, we still feel our ‘self’ at the center of our mind. Realizing that the world is ontologically inseparable and epistemologically relative dissolves our identity as an ‘I’ or a ‘you’ and undermines whatever we have built upon it. However, such destruction is inherently constructive. To enter unstable space, to expand our understandings of ‘I’ and ‘you,’ ‘self’ and ‘other’, ‘subject’ and ‘object’ flexibly, is to enter reality.
Works Cited
Alighieri, Dante. The Divine Comedy. Translated by John A. Carlyle and Philip H. Wicksteed, Modern Library, 1932.
Copernicus, Nicolaus. De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium Libri VI. Translated by Edward Rosen, Octavo, 2003.
Salgado, Sebastião. “Mali, 1985.” Artnet, www.artnet.com/artists/sebasti%C3%A3o-salgado/mali-a-5eNP6i9RVie3y1cD84hQrQ2
“Sebastião Salgado’s Exodus — The Stories of Global Migration.” Public Delivery, 17 June 2022, publicdelivery.org/sebastiao-salgado-exodus/#About_Sebastiao_Salgado.
Strauss, David Levi. “The Documentary Debate: Aesthetic or Anaesthetic?.” Between the Eyes: Essays on Photography and Politics, Aperture, 2003.
United States, U.S. Agency for International Development, Disaster Case Report: Ethiopia — Drought/Famine. Office of U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance, 1987.