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.
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