Photography After Capitalism by Ben Burbridge

Author:Ben Burbridge
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2020-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

Documentation of the making of Assisted Self-Portrait Fred Clarke, from Assembly by Anthony Luvera, 2013–14.

The field of participatory photography is by no means identical to Martens’ critical experiment. The majority of projects encourage those involved to explore their immediate and personal experiences, particularly those involving their friends, family and close community. Martens’ project, by contrast, involved Congolese photographers who occupied a different socio-economic position to the majority of people they photographed. While subjects existed at the extreme peripheries of society, the clothes Martens’ collaborators wear, the fact they already own SLR cameras, and the manner in which they interact with the people they photograph attest to their relative affluence. It is extremely complex to determine decisively who constitutes ‘us’ and ‘them’ in such a scenario, due to the ways in which national, economic, social and professional identities overlap, undermine, and operate in relation to one another. And yet the characteristics shared by participatory photography and Martens’ satirical model remain striking. Each relies on an outside ‘facilitator’ to create the circumstances in which members from some other community produce and publish images of a world to which they exist in much closer proximity than funders and facilitators. The resulting pictures are almost always consumed by those in more privileged positions.

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