3 Feelings: Receptive, Distressed, Interested
Darkroom: a memoir in black & white, delivers what the title connotes: a linear, heavily image-based graphic memoir that functions as a didactic text. By "didactic," I am using the definition "intending to teach." Much of the information or plot is contained within photographs, which are multifaceted in their function. Photographs are at once object (held, exchanged, printed, framed), information, and record.
Darkroom is conveyed through implied/illustrated photographs which presses me to consider the function of the camera in relation to race politics/racism. The camera has long been used as a tool to capture information with the photographer actively adjusting themselves, the camera, and the subject(s) to frame the moment. These choices convey an intent, concept, and/or emotion to the viewer, providing a lens through which the subjects are viewed. Photography is a medium of the privileged and can be used oppressively: National Geographic, the news etc.
At the same time, photography can be used as a form of resistance. Quintero's father is driven to capture every moment, at times risking his safety and equipment to do so. While we only get a sliver of the conversation between the mother and father on page 148, we can deduce that the father's decision to photograph the march is more complicated than "an interesting experimentation in low-lighting photography." The conversation is prefaced in the two prior pages where Lila goes to lengths to show how extreme racist sentiments in the law enforcement officers are mounting and lead to a frenzied, fear-driven lynch mob. In a large black bubble on page 146, we see "word spread" followed by arrows connecting more bubbles filled with white men, modes of communication, and the white house. This cyclical structure diagrams mounting pressure/fear/anger in white racists, causing anticipatory feelings of violence and danger for the reader. The march is in fact violent and dangerous for people of color, journalists, and bystanders. The mob "vandalized photographic equipment," proving the power of the photograph.
The father's and journalist's decision to attend the protest and to stay after finding "law enforcement officers from city, county, and state agencies," is an active form of resistance that emphasizes the power of photography. Ironically, photographers refer to taking photographs as "shooting," and while photography does not kill people, a photograph can elicit extreme responses which can in turn engender change. The idiom, "a picture is worth a thousand words," may be a understatement.
Your blog makes me think of Susan Sontag's writing on photography as something sometimes staged (war photos are some of her examples) and a medium accessed via some level of privilege (including anything from access to materials/equipment to the privilege to witness someone being killed while not being killed). As you elaborate, it's a double-edged sword (medium/tool of oppression and resistance).
ReplyDeleteI really appreciate this post Anna. Something I was considering as I was reading Darkroom in relationship to the role photography in moments of profound social change is what gets documented and canonized as the official visual history and memory of particular events, what is excised, and what is the cost. This memoir works to illuminate events that underwent attempted erasure by Whites in the South, AND other realities that were subsumed in the movement against segregation - namely the experiences of those who were neither Black nor white but whose unique truths from that liminal space also profoundly illuminate the dynamics of the time. As she writes on page 19, "In 1961, Marion was a charming town of 3,200, neatly divided between black and white. Until we arrived. We introduced a sliver of gray into the demographic pie." Only someone from Quintero Weaver's particular position could have remembered and recounted this moment in time for us in the way she did.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you entirely about how the text felt educational. And not in an overbearing or polemical way- more like it was setting the record straight. I could sense her need to accomplish this- as if she felt guilty about and somehow complicit in the lies that were fed to her and her classmates by "Know Alabama." Speaking of Susan Sontag, isn't she also a film critic? I felt like Darkroom was very filmic, and I seem to remember something Sontag said in an essay about how film is the most exciting medium, because it has the highest capacity for representing the contemporary consciousness, or something like that.
ReplyDeletei'm definitely feeling your interrogation/analysis of what it means to photograph and how photography in itself is enmeshed with subjectivity and acts as a frame for whatever is being captured. the camera in itself and the act of taking a photograph is, on its own, seemingly innocent, but, like you said, so much is happening behind it-- privilege, potential for resistance, potential for oppression. she is definitely engaging photography as an artform and also as a means for communication-- images are so integral to how we make sense of the world and acquire information about it, and it's important to think of the role of photography and media images in connection to how we perceive race and racism and how both are solidified in culture. what images get circulated and to whom? at what cost? etc
ReplyDeleteI had these thoughts about Mr. Quintero's photography:
ReplyDeleteWas he only allowed to get away with it because he was not black or white? His "color" allowed him to literally be the medium--between black and white.
The issues of documentation from a personal point of view is apt. I wonder what happen to the father's pictures--were they archived, become part of history. The family has an agency no one else has and although it's a risk, more than he admits, as you say, it's also a connection between them and the events of the time
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