Reflections on the First Person and Consent

            Since my last blog post that explored Nan Goldin’s idea of who has the rights to tell the stories of whom, and the obvious questions of consent when making images, I have been doing a lot of thinking about these concepts in regard to my own, work.  As a practitioner, I always work with subjects close to my heart, chosen family, and people explicitly in my sphere, though that doesn’t diminish the questions that are raised by Nan Goldin, as well as her critique of Diane Arbus’s work who she viewed as an outsider, someone who didn’t have the backstage pass to be photographing her subjects.  I chose to get deeper with these concepts as I have been pining over them in relation to my proposed thesis project; these questions have been deepening for me since my critique on Wednesday, as I realized I have a lot more to consider and think about before jumping into a project of such magnitude.  These are questions of ethics that I imagine should come up at some capacity in any documentary class, and tend to be controversial as the reading and class discussion suggest. 

            I am working in collaboration with a man who is serving a life sentence.  He was my former student at a prison re-entry center, and someone I believed was on the “right track” after serving 25 years starting at age 16 and coming out at 42 when I met him.  Joseph Woods.  When he came out after all of those years, he didn’t know how to make-it in the free world, even though he fooled us all into thinking he was thriving.  I helped him get a job and navigate the subway system, in between teaching him how to use technology.  Joseph began blogging.  He wrote everyday like his life depended on it, telling stories as a survivor of abuse from childhood; he wrote like his life depended on it.  What I didn’t know is that something else was happening at the same time.  Some days, he would leave my class and follow women off the subway and violently and sexually assault them.  I found out that he was “wanted” by the police when a coworker pulled me aside and showed me a news story on youtube where there was surveillance footage of him as the suspect of these horrific crimes.  It has been over a year since he was sentenced to life in prison, and only now am I able to sit with the story that has been haunting me too much to look at. 

            This is a story about state sanctioned violence and the systems it ultimately creates, cycles of trauma that are clearly not rehabilitation, but the punitive marginalization of specific populations.  This is a story about me grappling with the complexities of Joseph’s different parts, and still trying to believe in his humanity after he committed such heinous crimes.  I see this as an important piece as it is about larger structural issues as told through the lens of our relationship.  This is a story that only I can tell, only WE can tell.  Though it raises all of the questions about consent that we have been discussing, though in pretty different terms.

            As an educator at an HIV/ AIDS service organization’s prison re-entry center I have, for the last several years, been working with a population that is not my own, but still I am obviously participating in my own life, and therefore am present/ implicated in the story.  As the only white person in most spaces of my days there, I obviously had a lot of time to reflect on my anti-racist politics, validating all of the discourse around the Prison Industrial Complex, and how it primarily serves to keep young black men in cages, perpetuating structures of poverty and violence.  I did a lot of thinking then about my role as an anti-racist white person in those classrooms, and what that means for me now as someone with access to create media and art reflective of those experiences.  I am writing this blog post as I ask big questions about what it means to be neither Nan Goldin or Diane Arbus, to hold the complexities of my own set of identity politics and carry such a complicated relationship to my subject and collaborator, myself being the other subject in the story.  I believed Joseph to be mentally sound, as sound as one can be after spending their entire life in the system, from foster care to prison.  However, I have questions, big questions about what it means to represent this story from my perspective.  His sentencing is over, so this piece will not impact the time he is serving.  I have to ask based on the crimes he committed if he is mentally sound enough to know what it means to make a piece like this that will live in the world.  

            This is a time of large questions for me as I embark on this project however large or small it might be.  Originally I imagined this as my thesis work, though at this point I am questioning that based on the complexities at hand.  I continue to think about someone in the cohort ahead of mine not being able to present their thesis work based on consent issues.  Though what I am doing is vastly different and the “consent” is there, it has still been a provocative and eye-opening experience to consider the complexities who’s stories we are allowed to tell and how.  

           

             

Questions of Representation

            It was an honor to have the opportunity to present in class on works in the first person, and as a result get to talk about Nan Goldin and subsequently her critique of Diane Arbus’s approach to representation in photography.  I did a lot of thinking about the ways she was critical of Arbus and her “outsider view” of her subjects, and wondered what was truly different about the ways Goldin represented similar populations with the added claim that her subjects were her community.  I absolutely agree with Goldin’s terms of consent, and I know as a result, I am a minority in the program, though I studied the pictures Goldin made of drag queens and the ones that Arbus made, and tried to see if I could capture the discrepancies of  their different approaches as an outsider.  I am very interested in these concepts as a practitioner engaged in creating culture that I feel affinity towards, representing my people as a queer woman and someone engaged in movements for social justice. 

            I believe in work coming from a place of authenticity, telling stories from the inside, exposing stories that are buried, with the consent of those affected by the repercussions of such silences.  I came into this program with a toolkit of experiences and stories, many from people who will age in prison, pass on behind bars, and never be on the radar of society.  I spent the last decade as a community educator, working with underrepresented populations who are erased by culture at large, and unthought of when it comes to decisions being made in this country.  So many black and brown men are rotting away behind bars, and I find myself pulled to tell their stories with them, because who else will?  I have been in correspondence with a former student who is serving a life sentence.  I hold the complications of what he did, and what has been done to him, and how do we tell his story together, especially when I am the gate keeper in this relationship.  I have white privilege and education privilege with the tools to tell his story, and he only sometimes has access to a pen and paper to write me.  It is clear, however, that telling his story will save his life.  I know as I reflect on this story how different it would be if he were a stranger to me, and we didn’t have the trust and history embedded in the relationship to tell make something together.  I know it feels different as a practitioner to tell a story about someone not only with consent, but it turns into our story, not just his. 

            I looked over and over again at Nan Goldin’s pictures of drag queens and then Diane Arbus’.  They were different, though Arbus didn’t have the opportunity to plead her case and talk about her connection to her subjects.  The things I noticed were more distance in Arbus’ work, less intimacy, though I didn’t gather a lack of consent in the images she made in of themselves.  Goldin certainly got closer and was very clear she was not using a lens that zoomed tightly, but was that close to her subjects, implying an intimacy, but would they agree that they shared community in the way she suggested?  I still felt a distance there, upon many looks, I felt a heartbeat missing specifically with her photos of drag queens, even though she suggested that these subjects are her people, what was it that I couldn’t find there?  Her claim is that her genius is not in her images themselves, but in her slideshows, and the way the body of work lives together, so maybe on an individual basis they didn’t read in the same way? 

I went back and looked at the show that has been up at the Center for Documentary Studies, in light of the conversation about representation and drag queens: The Legendary Ballroom Scene by Gerard H. Gaskin, and saw something that was missing from both Arbus’ and Goldin’s work, a true insider making photos of a world that is home for him.  It read differently then the other photographers discussed in this post, like someone taking family photos that just happened to be beautiful; we were transported into his world.  This body of work made me understand how different it is when one photographs from a place of home and authenticity, as it read so differently then the other works highlighting a gender transgressive culture.  This revelation clarified some things about my work, and how I want to continue with the stories that I came here to tell. 

I think there is value in viewing a world from the outside, and making photos and moving image from that perspective, especially if it is consensual, though after really considering the work discussed in this post, I am going to argue that there is a much deeper power that comes from work that is an extension of ones own story.  This in itself is not uncomplicated, as our own people don’t necessarily want to be subjects as a result of their connection to a cultural producer, and therefore this discourse is not black-and-white, but I do believe there is a much deeper power in working from ones own experience and place in the world.